Battles Over Water Divide Town in Idaho

The snow has already begun to accumulate in the mountains that look over this desert town, stirring talk of another wet year that may again bring relief to a valley where water runs shallow and controversy runs deep.

In Idaho’s highest peaks, fed by the same snowstorms that bring powder to the winter slopes of Sun Valley, the Big Lost River begins its long and often fickle journey through the tree-covered hills into the Mackay Reservoir. There it stores the hopes of lower valley farmers who have settled among the thousands and thousands of acres of dry sagebrush, farmers who have staked their claim in a land many say cannot support the crops they grow.

For the most part, Arco, little more than a turn in the road on the way to Craters of the Moon, is a town full of friendly people. But behind the storefront windows, softball games and celebrations, Arco is a town with a rich history of troubled water. That’s not unheard of in the West, where water problems have plagued communities for years. The river that feeds this town, however, runs a unique course.

The Big Lost is deceptive and shy as no other river can be. It sinks and reappears as it runs along the spongelike surface of the lower valley and eventually fades away altogether somewhere out in the desert, feeding the great Snake River Plain aquifer.

“It’s a different river from what I’ve ever worked on,” said Steve Cote, who moved to the valley two years ago to work for the Natural Resource Conservation Service in Arco.

In his short stay, Cote has seen firsthand how the Big Lost splits the valley between irrigators who depend on the water for their livelihood and townspeople who don’t want to see their city dry up. Emotions run high and accusations are thrown back and forth at water meetings. Some people won’t even go to certain businesses because of conflicts with the owners over the river. Both sides slap insults in the Arco Advertiser with letters to the editor, and some even write to government officials to complain.

“It’s a very complicated issue,” Cote said. “I would hazard to say which side is right and wrong.”

An estimated 80,000 acres of farmland in the lower Lost River Valley called the Carey Act Flats is fed by canals that divert a big portion of the river outside the natural drainage system. That’s fine in wet years like this one, but in drought years, while the pivot lines water the precious potato and wheat fields, the shallow river channel through Arco dries up, leaving a riverless city in its wake.

During an extended drought in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, a drought the Department of Water Resources says is probably the worst ever, the Big Lost remained dry around Arco for seven years, killing hundreds of cottonwoods that lined the riverbed’s banks.

“There are 23 irrigators in the valley who have pumped and diverted the water from the lower Big Lost River into canals to irrigate land outside the valley,” City Councilman Clay Condit wrote in a letter to then Gov. Cecil Andrus in 1992.

“The City of Arco is being seriously damaged by the loss of flow in the lower river. . . . The enduring drought has not been the cause of this. In past droughts the river has still flowed.”

Former Arco resident Ray Willman, who now lives in Oregon, remembers days from his youth when anglers would drive their Model T Fords across the desert from Idaho Falls, Blackfoot and Pocatello to fish in the Big Lost near Arco. Last year he wrote letters to Gov. Phil Batt and Deputy Attorney General Stephen Goddard complaining about what has happened in the valley.

“My brother and I paid a visit to Arco a couple years ago,” wrote Willman. “First off, we were totally surprised to see the sprinklers irrigating the old Carey Act Flats. Then as we approached the town of Arco, we could not believe seeing all those river channels and adjoining farm lands completely dried up. Tears came with such sadness. There was not a single living cottonwood or willow in sight; it was even difficult to tell where the old river channel used to be.”

Condit, Willman and others frustrated about the drought’s effects on the city were upset with irrigators, but placed most of the blame in the lap of the Idaho Department of Water Resources. The issue, they say, was that the agency allowed irrigators to illegally pump water from the valley and into canals, which would then carry not only water from the Big Lost to land outside the drainage system, but ground water as well.

The lower valley protesters say that lowered the water table in the valley so any water remaining in the natural stream channel would sink into the spongelike surface. Protesters claim it was the sinking of the river that left the Big Lost dry in Arco.

The state water agency defended the pumping, saying it does not significantly affect the underground water level. In a 1994 letter to one of the protesters of “illegal” pumping, former director Keith Higginson said 300,000 acre-feet of ground water flows out of the basin every year south of Arco.

As far as dealing with the issue of illegal pumping, Higginson said that issue would be settled by the Snake River Basin Adjudication, a huge government project that is supposed to answer once and for all who has rights to Idaho’s water.

But the so-called illegal pumping is just a small part of a much bigger controversy. Water issues in the valley are a sticky mess with roots buried deep into the early 1900s, when the Carey Act Flats were first opened to irrigation.

Since then, valley residents have dynamited a portion of the Mackay Dam in the 1930s, been visited by former governors and even a Mormon church apostle to work out their differences, and have made accusations over the years of illegal elections to the irrigation district’s board of directors. And there are a lot more water conflicts that plague the valley, too confusing and complex to be dealt with here.

There are no simple fixes to the valley’s problems.

State-funded adjudication is beginning to settle claims in the Big Lost River valley. But the adjudication may still not solve the valley’s troubles.

Officials suggest that it helps to look at how other valleys are solving their problems. The Big Lost isn’t the only river in Idaho with controversy. Water is a hot issue across the West.

The most favorable resolutions appear to involve a watershed council, similar to the one that governs use of the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River near Island Park.

Steve Cote of the Natural Resource Conservation Service said he’s seen a 25-year-old conflict worked out in just one year on Morgan Creek, which runs near Challis.

“I’ve never been involved in something that great before,” Cote said. “We had ranchers shaking hands with environmentalists.”