C150033 Application - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

; "covered the bottomlands from bluff to bluff'. The Wade manuscript, currently located in the Paonia Public Library, described the river in 1882 as follows: "The river was very crooked and lessened its fall, therefore did not cut its banks, but spread over a large portion of the valley during high water time, and deposited sand and rich soil from the high country, making the valley soil, in places, very rich. Later on the ranchers began cutting these curves in the river and then the trouble began. Instead of getting it straightened out, it cut out across acres of good land. This had to be done, however, because the valley could not have been cultivated had it not been done." Shortly after the farmers began cutting the meanders out of the river it became apparent that they needed protection from the river in order to maintain a viable farm. Efforts were then made to channelize and "control" the river by building dikes, and excavating the bottom wherever they could. Most of that work involved channelizing the river and armoring the banks with large boulders and trees, cabled tires, car bodies, or whatever they could find. In an effort to protect more agricultural land, Delta County and private landowners began an annual campaign to construct dikes and lower the river channel utilizing the existing "channelization" technology of the time developed by the Army Corps of Engineers and the Soil Conservation Service. In 1948 Delta County received a surplus bulldozer from the War Department and heavy equipment replaced the initial effort of manual labor and teams of horses. 2.3 Recent Events Since its inception in 1996, the North Fork River Improvement Association has begun a campaign of public education and outreach through community meetings, newsletters, local radio interviews, educational brochures, and display exhibits at community events. A series of community meetings were held to solicit local input from all interests associated with the river toward the development of a vision statement for the watershed. Those professionally facilitated meetings produced a surprisingly high degree of consensus among a traditionally contentious group of diverse interests. A watershed restoration action strategy has since been submitted to the EP A Region VIII offices in Denver. The organization is now developing a watershed action plan that all parties with interests in the river can buy into. The Association is reaching further into the community to bring together representatives of Town and County governments along with private landowners, irrigators, gravel and coal miners, environmentalists, and agency representatives from the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. The plan is scheduled to be completed by May 2000. In 1997 NFRIA produced a morphological assessment of the North Fork between Paonia and Hotchkiss. This detailed study was financed with a $30,000 grant from the EPA's Regional Geographic Initiative program, $37,000 from the Bureau of Reclamation and $5,000 from the Colorado State Soil Conservation Board. The report was delivered on time and within budget and included a series of recommendations for resource restoration. This study and others show that unstable streambanks and degraded fish and wildlife habitat along the North Fork are primarily caused by excessive streambank erosion due to channelization. The channelization of this river began approximately 100 years ago as a means to protect agricultural land from spring flooding and to expand crop z