Skip to main content
Tag

water law

Alpe at Lake Grandby spillway.

Women in Water: Alyssa Alpe

By Events, Stories, Uncategorized

Alyssa Alpe has been a student of history her whole life. It started in her early years where she grew up driving by Windy Gap reservoir, listening to her mother, a former Colorado State University Extension Agent on the North Platte Basin Round table in Jackson County, say that water was THE issue in Colorado.

When she started college, everyone questioned Alpe’s decision to pursue a history degree, unsure of the careers available for historians. But Alpe knew she, “loved researching in the archives to piece together a narrative that interpreted the story of the past,” and that passion would lend itself to her career somehow.

After graduate school, Alpe landed a job at a law firm where she discovered the world of records management, a profession focused on understanding records and making them accessible to others to tell a story or research an issue.

“It’s about being a ‘knowledge keeper’ and finding a way to communicate that knowledge to others,” Alpe said.

In 2015, Alpe was hired as a Records Data Analyst for Northern Water. Alpe has been with Northern Water for eight and a half years now and she has advanced in her career to the Records & Administrative Services Manager.

In the day-to-day, Alpe balances the managerial and Board of Director support roles along with the records and information management program. She can be found figuring out the best way to collect and store records, researching any number of topics like the origins of the Colorado-Big Thompson Project, or making plans for archival projects like digitizing collections to make them accessible. In the future, she hopes to add another job to her plate to work with the communications team to develop the public history components of their website.

“You have to have a bit of background on many issues,” Alpe said. “You don’t have to know everything, but you have to know a little bit about a lot.”

Q&A with Alyssa Alpe

Alpe at Lake Grandby spillway.

Q: What do you enjoy most about working with/studying water?

“The fact that it’s a constant state of learning. I don’t feel that you ever get to a point where you know everything about water because there is so much to learn. You’re constantly learning and that’s my favorite part.”

Q: What is the most challenging aspect of your job?

“It’s a challenge to keep up with the complexities of managing water in the United States and in our region. There’s been a real transition in terms of the institutional knowledge of folks that have retired during COVID-19 and moved onto different spaces of life. Transmitting that knowledge down the line to the next generation is a constant evolution. My hope is that through records and information management, that knowledge is accessible to our future selves 25 years down the line.”

Q: What has your experience so far been like being a woman in this line of work?

“Northern Water has modernized a lot since I started in terms of more diversity and women into this space. That’s been really encouraging to see. And I think further down the road we will have more and more of that. We have women in leadership roles across the organization which has been a shift from when I started 8 years ago. So, there is a legacy being built by women in these spaces that have historically been male dominated, and their voices will be preserved in our records for the future.”

Q: What’s a project you have worked on in this field that you are most proud of?

“When I first started with Northern Water, our former public information officer was working with a historian over at UNC, Michael Welsh, and he was writing a book along with the recently passed, former Colorado Supreme Court Justice, Greg Hobbs, who wrote prolifically about water in the west. They were working on the book Confluence: The Story of Greeley Water. We were able to dig into our records and give Michael these old newspaper clippings. He really appreciated that because we were able to give him pieces of information that contributed to this big project about the story of water in Greeley. I really loved that project because I got to work with Justice Hobbs before he passed and Michael Welsh as a historian.” 

Q: What or who has been an inspiration to you throughout your work experience?

“My number one mentor in all my life has been a former professor of mine, Heather Thiessen-Reily. She is a professor of history at Western Colorado University in Gunnison. She has done a lot of work with the National Park Service, working on public history projects. She has always been my inspiration because she is so driven. I am still connected with her, and she’s been a valuable person that I still go to if I have questions about something.”

Q: What is something you have learned about the water industry that you didn’t know before you started your role?

“It’s been hard for me to fully comprehend the prior appropriation system and how water is allocated because it is very complex. But it is also fundamental because it’s how we get water to our taps. I did not come into my role with Northern Water with a background in water. It’s been an evolution of learning and that’s the system that has been the most complex for me to learn, especially in terms of keeping the records and indexing with the appropriate terminology to be able to track back the history.”

Q: What advice would you give to other women that may want to get into this type of work?

“Be open to anything. You don’t know how that job will evolve. I didn’t think I would get into water when I left grad school and landed at a law firm working in records. I was just trying to navigate life after college. Be open to opportunities because it may not happen overnight, but eventually you do end up navigating your career towards what you want to do. It can get a little discouraging when you are trying to wedge your career into one path, and it’s not working out. But I believe all those experiences come together to make a package that will land you where you need to be, especially if you’re knowledgeable and passionate about things. Ask questions. And always be open to learning.”

“The other part of it is to be engaged with the public agencies, community organizations, your town, and other communities in the region that you may not know anything about. Learn about the region and its many histories, particularly if you are looking to work in the water industry in Northern Colorado.”

Just Add Water: Why is there a National Heritage Area associated with the Cache la Poudre River?

By Stories

The main answer to this question is WATER!  The Poudre River’s water history is not unique in the western U.S. – many western rivers have similar stories about human attempts to survive in arid and semi-arid western river valleys.

What makes the Cache la Poudre River worthy of designation as a National Heritage Area is the manner in which its water history is interwoven into the broader fabric of western water law and technology.  The Poudre River’s history, in many ways, is an illustrative microcosm of western settlement that captures the essence of the struggles people faced in living in the dryness that defines the West and, in particular, how they adapted to survive, and thrive, in the dry landscape.  And further, the Poudre’s history shows how people continue, to this day, to adapt to new challenges, such as improving the ecological health of the river and providing for recreation on, and in, the river.       

As historian David McCullough notes:

History is the story of people. 

Water history in the Poudre River valley is no exception.  The series of stories that follow explains the role of the people of the Poudre in establishing western water law, water development strategies, new water management technology, and initial recognition of the need to create a sustainable relationship with the limited water environment that exists in much of the West.  Again, this need continues today as the population of the Poudre Valley continues to grow rapidly. 

The people did not set out to establish new water law, create new technology to manage water, or determine how to divide the limited waters of western rivers.  They set out to survive in a dry and harsh climate. As the people of the Poudre adapted to the dry climate, their efforts were innovative enough to be of assistance and use to other western States and many foreign countries. 

Organizing and presenting a large sweep of western water history, if even in only one valley, can be daunting if the presentation focuses on each discipline’s (i.e. law, engineering, agriculture, etc.) evolutionary path.  The approach used here will chronologically follow the people of the Poudre, explain the water challenges they faced in their day, and describe the manner in which they solved each challenge.  The solutions they created for each challenge, when combined over time, will help to explain how we arrived, collectively, at the system of western water management in use today and why there is a National Heritage Area associated with the Poudre River. 

Water history in the West is, in very general terms, about subsistence in the 1800s (the frontier was deemed ‘closed’ in 1890), development in the 1900s (the Bureau of Reclamation was created in 1902 and is now managing 180 projects), and sustainability as the 21st Century dawns (as ecosystem health, instream flows and recreational uses are debated, acknowledged, and incorporated into water law).  This overarching framework provides a background against which the people of the Poudre lived their lives and confronted water challenges facing each generation. 

Read the first story.  


References:

‘The Story of People’

National Park Service. 1990. Resource Assessment: Proposed Cache la Poudre River National Heritage Corridor. Prepared by the NPS Rocky Mountain Regional Office at the request of the City of Fort Collins, December  [Appendix B of this report is entitled: Historical Context – The History of Water Law and Water Development in the Cache la Poudre River Basin and the Rocky Mountain West]  Report can be accessed at:  https://archive.org/details/resourceassessme00nati

Information Source: These stories were prepared by Robert C. Ward, a professor and administrator at Colorado State University for 35 years, to assist in training volunteers on the history behind designation of the Poudre River as a National Heritage Area. [In particular, the information permits water history-related sites along the Poudre River to be explained through the lives of people who adapted their use of water to match the semi-arid nature of the landscape.]

Your Water Colorado Blog – 2/12/2018

By News

Water law in Colorado is constantly developing. Check out this new blog post from Your Water Colorado:

Public Access to Water Flowing Through Private Property

“A Denver Post article written by Jason Blevins resurrects a water issue left unresolved in Colorado for nearly 40 years. “Who owns the bottom of the river?” asks a lawsuit brought by a fisherman, Roger Hill, against a landowner, Mark Warsewa, who has blocked Hill’s access to fish on a portion of the Arkansas River near Texas Creek in Fremont County. Warsewa owns the land adjacent to the river and Hill likes to wade there after entering from public property. Warsewa claims his land ownership includes the stream bed; Hill contends the river bottom is public property. A federal district court has been asked to decide.

The basis for the suit is a body of federal law called “navigability for title,” which essentially says that if a river was used for commercial purposes at the time of statehood (Aug. 1, 1876 for Colorado), then the state owns the bed and the public has access to use the river for recreational purposes. The case—Roger Hill v. Mark Everett Warsewa and Linda Joseph—is in the U.S. District Court for Colorado because, as the plaintiff’s complaint asserts, “the question of whether the Arkansas River was navigable for title at the time of Colorado’s statehood is a question of federal law.”

Colorado has no state law defining navigability. A 1979 Colorado Supreme Court decision—People v. Emmert—ruled that a Colorado constitutional provision declaring the waters of every natural stream to be public property subject to appropriation did not grant public access for recreational use when the water flowed through private property. Violators are subject to criminal trespass. A state attorney general’s opinion four years later said that rafters would not be criminally liable, but could be subject to civil trespass. A 2010 legislative attempt to clarify the law would have allowed commercial rafters to float on waters through private property, but not fish; it passed the House but failed in the Senate.

Hill points to newspaper accounts from the 1870s that describe commercial use of the Arkansas River near Texas Creek to float logs and railroad ties. His complaint claims the river “was navigable at the time of statehood because it was regularly used and was susceptible to being used in its ordinary condition at the time of statehood as a highway for commerce, over which trade and travel are or may be conducted.” These are the essential components of the federal “navigability for title” law.”

For the full article by Larry Morandi, click here.

Photo: “Colorado River @ Bond Colorado” by Loco Steve is licensed under CC BY 2.0