(no audio) (crickets chirping) (gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) - [Narrator] The Boulder Valley as we know it was created by Boulder Creek.

A land made from water cutting into the earth, carrying away what it cuts, leaving behind an ever-changing valley.

(energetic music) But the streams that shape the valley are mostly water that is leaving the valley, water the land couldn't find a way to capture and hold, water that doesn't run off but sinks into the land, invites life into the valley, plants first, trees, flowering plants, then the animals that eat the plants and those that eat the eaters of plants.

All of that life is here because the water was here.

(energetic music continues) (ethereal music) Boulder Creek originates from melting snow and ice in the Front Range mountains.

Dozens of small streams flow beneath glaciers and snow pack to make their way through alpine tundra.

Eventually, these streams coalesce into three major tributaries as they thread through the foothills and onto the plains.

(ethereal music continues) (soft music) Humans came into the valley too probably as much as 8 or 10,000 years ago and changed it in many ways, good and bad.

The best changes have come from our creative work with water and land in an often unconscious collaboration with nature.

This is the story of that collaboration here in the land made from water.

(soft ethereal music) A man who knows the full water history of the land is Robert Crifasi.

He accumulated his knowledge in the book titled "A Land Made from Water."

- So we're standing out here in what are some of the remnant short-grass prairie along the front range of Colorado.

So this is a lot like the landscape that Stephen Harriman Long and their expedition saw in 1821.

When they submitted their report to Congress they drew a map of this region and in great bold letters across that map, they said, "Great desert."

And that's where the whole myth of the great American desert originated.

(calm cheerful music) Our native people were living along the Front Range, migrating, hunting, and gathering in this area.

They would burn the grasses, they would set fires in the forest in order to improve forage for the various game that they were hunting.

The Spaniards had moved in to New Mexico and they introduced horses, sheep, cattle.

Many of those horses escaped and were captured by the Indigenous people who then started to raise the horses and construct their famous horse culture of the plains.

So a lot of this country was modified in various ways by first the Indians and then the Spanish indirectly.

So when the Euro-Americans came into here, this land was fundamentally altered.

- [Narrator] But the changes the Native people's wrought on the landscape were insignificant compared to what happened when the Euro-Americans arrived.

First came hunters and trappers who wiped out the beavers to supply skins to the European fashion industry.

With no beaver dams, thousands of western floodplain wetlands turned into dry prairie.

(mellow music) Then came the gold miners who turned streams inside out in search for gold and silver leaving degraded watersheds that persist to the present.

The buffalo were eliminated from the plains for coats and factory belting, and also to undermine the Native people's hunting culture.

The buffalo were hunted almost to extinction.

They were replaced by cattle, and the vegetation that had co-evolved with the bison began adapting to cows.

Following the action everywhere were the railroads to haul the mined wealth of the west back to the industrial cities to feed the Industrial Revolution.

The forests were cut down and hacked into railroad ties.

Soil from the clear-cut slopes washed down into the already degraded streams.

Last to be removed from the land were the Native Americans.

They were either removed to desert reservations or just slaughtered in place.

(subdued music) Following in the wake of the trappers, gold diggers, and old-growth loggers were farmers and ranchers.

Homesteaders with a different, more enduring vision of settling the place, working with the land for a living and a life.

Once they acknowledged that rain would not follow the plow, nor the trains, nor advent of Christian civilization, they began to irrigate low-lying floodplains which individuals could do with community effort.

Howard Ditch was one of the first ditches built on South Boulder Creek.

- So back in 1860 Howard, when they built this ditch the floodplain was quite flat.

South Boulder Creek meandered and almost looked like a little bit of a braided stream.

All they had to do was build a small pile of rocks across the creek in order to move enough water into the ditch for the users to get plenty of water.

The first ditches that were constructed are colloquially known as pioneer ditches and the pioneers, the original colonists, they would dig a ditch often before they built themselves homes or anything else around their farm because they needed food for the winter.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] In just two years, between 1859 and 1861, over five ditches were built on Boulder and South Boulder creeks, including Wellman, Smith and Goss, McGinn, and the Anderson Ditch.

- So here we're coming up to a headgate called the Green Ditch, and nowhere else in the American West are places where nature and society intertwined as in the location of a ditch headgate.

At least for me, I see this as a conceptual divide that is nature controlled and nature uncontrolled.

What we have here is a typical headgate.

To open and close the ditch, turn it on and off, you rotate this wheel, and a big plate below me is raised or lowered, that allows the water to flow into the ditch and down the ditch.

But in order to get the water into the ditch, you also need a diversion dam, and that's this structure over here that back up the water and allows that water to flow down into the ditch.

(water sloshing) - [Narrator] As the floodplains filled up with farmers it became necessary to work out a system for using the water.

An increasingly elaborate system of common law emerged based on first come first served, an appropriation doctrine that ranked users on the stream by their seniority of use.

This body of law had evolved by 1876 to the extent that it was enshrined in the Colorado constitution but most of its evolution was probably at headgates with heated discussion, shovels, and occasionally shotguns.

For a senior user to shoot someone taking his water was considered a form of self-defense, so precious was the water.

(subdued music) The appropriation doctrine tried to be judicious, stating that water users could only appropriate as much water as they could beneficially use, thus avoiding capitalist speculation.

It also granted any user the right to cross another's property with a ditch if necessary to get water to his own land, with land on both sides for maintenance and repair purposes, an easement that stayed with the land as long as the ditch was used.

This has been the source of many misunderstandings and conflicts as farmland has been converted to urban and suburban use.

With homeowners being surprised to see a backhoe drive into their backyard to clean out what they thought was just a little stream.

(gentle music) Most of the pioneer irrigators stayed down on the floodplain, but more entrepreneurial Westerners looked at the land above the floodplains and saw it as potentially valuable.

All that was needed was water.

So they formed ditch companies to finance the excavation of longer conveyance ditches to get a gravity flow of water to the those barren areas.

Dry prairie land suddenly became valuable.

Farmers Reservoir & Irrigation Company on South Boulder Creek and El Dorado Canyon was the site of one of the first corporate ditches.

(water rushing) - As entrepreneurs, what the FRICO folks did back in the late 19th and early 20th century was buy land, develop ditches, and then sell the land and ditch rights to prospective farmers so that they could make a go at farming in Colorado.

So I call them corporate in the sense that they were out there as entrepreneurs not because they themselves wanted to farm, but because they wanted to build the infrastructure that allowed a farming economy to develop.

(subdued music) - [Narrator] Between 1862 and 1890 more ditches were built including : North Boulder Farmers, Butte Mill, the Community, Davidson, Enterprise, Boulder White Rock, Silver Lake, and many others.

Some of these ditches became several miles long as their promoters reached ever higher for cleaner water and ever further into the high plains for land to make valuable through the addition of water.

In the late 1880s, two entrepreneurs, James Maxwell and George Oliver, came up with a plan to build an irrigation ditch to sell farmland in North Boulder.

By 1880, all the ditches had been built at the mouth of Boulder Creek and the water was polluted by the mines along the creek.

So they found a lake beneath Arapahoe Glacier which they excavated naming it Silver Lake Reservoir.

From there, they ran water into North Boulder Creek and Middle Boulder Creek using it as a conveyance vehicle to carry the water down to Boulder.

A mile above Boulder they diverted some of the water into a series of ditches, tunnels, and a flume running along the canyon wall above Boulder Creek.

From there, it entered a ditch running along the foothills west of Boulder to the land which they owned.

The ditch ultimately ran into Wonderland Lake, and finally, to its destination, Mesa Reservoir.

It was an ingenious plan, and at the time, quite profitable.

In 1906, the city bought water rights in the Silver Lake Reservoir and piped some of the water into the Betasso Water Treatment Facility.

(gentle music) Looking at the development and evolution of Boulder's ditch systems, one might question why urban or suburban people would be interested in ditches at all.

Here's why.

The city of Boulder gets 20 to 30% of its municipal water from Boulder's ditches.

The city also operates pipelines, dams, hydroelectric facilities, and oversees water conservation measures to help keep water in the creeks.

Kim Hutton is Boulder's water resource manager.

- We have water rights derived from, I believe, four different ditches that we primarily use for our drinking water supply.

There are other ditches that run through town that maybe provide some irrigation water to our parks facilities, but that is untreated or raw water.

These water rights, which all come from Boulder Creek they're very senior water rights.

They were developed in roughly the 1860s.

So they yield, because they're so senior, they're very reliable.

They yield water most of the season.

So they were originally decreed for irrigation.

The city acquired some of those shares, and then we changed them in court to be used for municipal purposes.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - [Narrator] Canyon and Broadway.

Nowhere else is the overlay of urban culture on agrarian ditch culture quite so dense and busy and so well integrated.

- So what we're looking at here is the big irrigation diversion and there are five ditches that divert from this location in Central Boulder.

Because of the senior water rights on ditches like this, it was very common for creeks like Boulder Creek and other streams along the Front Range to have no water in them at all.

Here, it was very common for every drop of water to go down the irrigation ditch.

But as values changed, society's interest in having water as a natural amenity for the community increased.

So starting in the 1970s and '80s, towns like Boulder started to purchase water rights so that they could have instream flows to benefit fish and wildlife.

For that reason, Boulder Creek today has water in it all year round, when very often for over a hundred years, this would be completely dry.

- [Narrator] The ditches today continue to run through the city.

They require as much management and maintenance as they did 160 years ago.

Elizabeth Avery has been ditch rider on the Silver Lake Ditch for over 15 years.

- I am the ditch rider on the Silver Lake Ditch.

(laughs) In the olden days, they did the ditch riding or the opening and closing of the lateral gates on horseback and they had to follow the ditches along to find out where the water was getting jammed or escaping or being stolen or whatever.

- It's gonna be- - But it has grown into predicting troubles and making sure things are getting done and making sure the ditch is completely ready for water.

And I mean, it's six miles of trouble.

The other thing is people on the ditch, these houses and homes say, the problem of people is growing.

(chuckles) To replace culverts, to replace leaks of different kinds.

So that's a big problem.

That's a change.

- [Shoveler] This is cattail root.

- If you go east and you go into the Mesa reservoir, you'll see how dry it was.

Well, that was the way it was all over.

This ditch has, I mean, it's mind boggling how it has changed the landscape.

(prim cello music) (prim cello music continues) - [Bystander] That's pretty good.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Besides providing water to many properties within the city as well as the traditional farms and ranches throughout the county, there is a growing interest in community-supported agriculture.

Small farms that have sprouted up throughout Boulder County.

- Irrigation water is the soul of a farm, right?

Like it is what allows us in order to grow vegetables here.

Most vegetable crops require two inches of water a week or so, and in Colorado here we get about 14 inches of precipitation annually.

There's no way that we can grow crops to feed our communities in a viable way without supplementing irrigation.

You know, we have, like I mentioned, 500 families each week that come to pick up vegetables.

And then on top of that, we have somewhere between 60 to 100 families that stop in here daily.

- [Narrator] Many young graduates of college agricultural programs find small organic farms with regenerative practices much to their liking.

- I mean, the local food movement is having a real resurgence right now.

I like that.

But I also like, you know, you put in all that hard work and then at the end of it there is so much abundance, and that is something that is a, like food is the thing that brings so many people together and farming is the best place, especially vegetable farming, to be a plant nerd because you are engaged in relationship to all these different plants all day long and you have to pay really close attention to them to care for them, to understand what they need.

So that was a big appeal to me, is just the intimacy of that and the joy that is watching closely and being in close relationship to growing things.

(tender music) - [Narrator] Tim and Kerry Francis' Dharma Farm shares their produce with over 600 members of their farm's CSA.

- And then we got married in 2014 on this land.

We always felt like we kind of got married to the land.

- Part of what inspires us and has sort of guided us and has developed this project and this vision into what it is today is this idea of bringing the human connection to the natural world through agriculture, bringing that back into the heart and center of our communities.

(subdued music) - [Narrator] Ditch water plays a big part in the Open Space program which surrounds Boulder.

Amy Willhite, senior project manager of the city of Boulder Open Space supervises 70 ditches that provide water for 7,000 acres of Open Space lands.

- And we have 281 miles of ditches that traverse Open Space.

It is going to agriculture, it's going to working farms and ranches.

It's also important in keeping Open Space areas green and capturing carbon in that process of irrigation and growth.

If we hadn't acquired the water, these areas would be all developed and blacktop.

So early in the season, we have a group called Ready to Work.

The Ready to Work program is bringing people from being homeless to having jobs and important skills that they can translate into a job eventually.

They get paid, they get housing and payment.

So it's a really exciting program.

They're some of the best skilled workers we have.

(ethereal music) - [Narrator] One interesting area tended by Open Space & Mountain Parks is the South Boulder Creek state natural area.

(gentle music) Most of this land was purchased or leased from farmers and had been under-irrigation and grazed for most of the past century.

But irrigation wetlands on the proposed natural area were found to contain the state's largest plots of the Ute ladies'-tresses orchid, listed as a threatened species.

Following that discovery, the OSMP decided to remove the grazing cattle from the area assuming they would be injurious to the rare orchid.

But with the cattle gone, the area quickly went to Canadian thistle and other plants that threatened the orchid.

So the cattle which eat the thistle were brought back and the orchid again thrived.

This is only one example among many of how nature and human culture have worked together, often unintentionally, to turn the arid great American desert into a far more interesting and ecologically-resilient Boulder Creek Valley.

Natural species, including humans, are opportunists.

What might be unnatural for a species can change to something that fits its nature and it moves right in.

- Coming out here and working along the ditches and seeing how this environment has changed over the years, how it's been modified, really helps drive home how the one constant is change itself.

We've modified the landscape to move the water but things like these cottonwood trees, brachiarian grasses, and other things have grown up around it.

But once these ditches were constructed, water came out onto this high prairie.

It became an artificial oasis.

A place where people could live and grow crops and also where other plants and animals could thrive in what was once a quite arid environment.

(soft otherworldly music) - We have many negative examples of unintended human consequences on the natural world and its systems, climate change, loss of wildlife habitat, and pollution of natural systems.

But there are other examples where we have unintentionally worked in incremental ways with nature, ways that have enriched the diversity and resilience of life on a piece of the earth.

We need to remember this as we move further into what earth scientists are calling the Anthropocene Epoch an age when, like it or not, we have become major agents of change on the planet.

We need to acknowledge this and try more intentionally to do well at it.

(soft otherworldly music continues) (subdued music) (subdued music continues) ♪ Cool, clear water ♪ ♪ Water ♪ ♪ Keep a-movin', Dan, don't you listen to him, Dan ♪ ♪ He's a devil, not a man ♪ ♪ And he spreads the burnin' sand with water ♪ ♪ Water ♪ ♪ Dan, can you see that big, green tree ♪ ♪ Where the water's runnin' free ♪ ♪ And it's waitin' there for you and me ♪♪