Jacobson farms on Lamborn Mesa, perched above Paonia, population 1,500. He keeps his orchard of peaches, nectarines and cherries alive thanks to the Minnesota Canal that serves 170 customers.

The ditch is nine miles long and carries water from the snowpack that’s accumulated around 12,725-foot-high Mt. Gunnison. This mountain of many ridges used to hold water like a sponge, but snowfall has been light year after year, and the ground sucks up a lot of the melting snow.

“Back in the 1970s it was different,” says Jacobson, who moved from New York where he started his career as a cameraman on film shoots. “Paonia was snow-covered in winter, and when the melt came, the river tore at its banks. One of my first jobs was using machinery to stuff boulders into junked cars and then cabling them to the riverbank. Now it’s scary because of water that isn’t there.”

This summer, Jacobson’s ditch rider told him irrigation water would run out by the end of June. “That would have been unthinkable decades ago,” Jacobson says. But the canal’s two reservoirs have filled only one year out of the last four. “In the old days, daily highs in summers were in the 80s,” Jacobson says. “Last May it got really warm, and in June this year the temperature is hitting 100 degrees.”

So it’s not surprising that his orchard is suffering. “My trees are stressed, and some I’ve had to let go. I’ve lost a great deal,” he says flatly.

But Jacobson, 75, remains resilient and upbeat, though he was diagnosed with arthritis at age 10 and has suffered from back pain all his life. He even underwent a kidney transplant from a friend three years ago.

Now getting around in a wheelchair, he still hopes to fly in his ultralight — equipped with a parachute. During the 1970s, he enjoyed a moment of fame when he turned 20,000 gallons of spoiled apple cider into alcohol that substituted for gasoline.

“Coal company execs visiting their mines around Paonia all wanted to try out my alcohol-fueled car,” he recalls. “We had some great joyrides on moonshine.”

Jacobson’s ditch company was founded in 1893 by farmers and ranchers who knew they had to import water to make the semi-desert land valuable.

“They dug those ditches with hand labor and mule scrapers and built the canals incrementally,” says Western historian George Sibley. “You either bought in with money or sweat equity, enlarging the canals as neighbors down the ditch bought in.” It’s a similar story throughout the Western states, moving water from mountains through a system of prior appropriation – first to put water to work, first to claim it.

For example, Southern Idaho, in the grip of extreme drought, is braced for prior appropriation cutbacks. Junior water users in the Magic River Valley who pump water from wells have been notified that their water will be shut off early this summer. Meanwhile New Mexico’s ancient system utilizes a water master or mayordomo to administer cutbacks. And if one state knows drought, it’s Nevada, where Las Vegas sends most of its sewage-treated water back to where it came from – Lake Mead.

The water flowing through piped canals or open ditches into Paonia and its mesas was never meant to stick around. Farmers who flood-irrigate use roughly 20 percent of the water on their land. Eventually, that water may be reused by farmers and homeowners as much as seven times before crossing into Utah as part of the Colorado River.

These days, a lot less water ever gets there. The river’s two big reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, are only about 35 percent full, and river managers in the seven states that rely on the Colorado are trying to figure out how to cope. It’s a daunting prospect, squeezing out water in the midst of a drying climate.

Meanwhile, Jacobson looks at his diminished orchard and hopes he’ll have enough fruit for the people who came last summer. They brought their own baskets and wandered the orchard to pick what they wanted.

“People had a good time, and at $1.50 per pound we sold out the crop last year,” Jacobson says. “If we go down this year, we’ll do it in style.”

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He owns land with shares in Minnesota Canal.

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But HCN contributor John McBride contributed $34,000 to give the opinion service liftoff, and staffer Paul Larmer, who would go on to become executive director at HCN, was picked in 1998 to cultivate grassroots Westerners to write about Western issues.

Within a year Larmer had 12 subscribing newspapers. He says it was a bootstrap effort, and that convincing newspapers to sign on wasn’t easy, even though the syndication cost was tiny.

Writers on the Range caught a break late that first year when Steve Mandell took over as development director. Mandell was relentless, combing mastheads to see when a new editor was in or when an old one was out, learning what editors needed and what might provoke letters to the editor. Then he’d send a sample opinion he thought would pique an editor’s interest, following that up with a phone call. He also read as many local papers in the West as he could to give him a sense of what was hot on their home ground.

A pivotal time came when my father, Ed Marston, then publisher of HCN, retired in 2002 after 19 years on the job. Then some internal changes as Betsy Marston stopped as editor to take on Writers on the Range from Paul Larmer, who became publisher, and Greg Hanscom, now executive director of HCN, took over Betsy’s job as editor.

When Ed Marston died suddenly in 2018, Betsy stepped back, fully expecting to segue with a replacement. But in a surprise to many, Brian Calvert, editor of HCN at the time, shuttered the service. There was no notice or story in HCN; it was as if Writers on the Range had quietly slipped out the back door. But though the service ceased, like most weeds this one refused to die.

It sprouted again during a fall hike in 2019. Betsy, Steve Mandell, his wife, Terri, and I, agreed that Writers on the Range deserved to live again, though this time as an independent nonprofit. That was our goal; we wondered if we could make it happen.

Yet only a few months later, when I told Mandell, a determined workaholic, that I’d gotten High Country News to lease the Writers on the Range name to us, and we were in business, he said, “Oh, no, we’re really doing this?” Still, he was game, and though he agreed to help only for free and for only one year, Betsy and I were thrilled. All of us were in it with sweat equity.

We are now a stand-alone nonprofit. Mandell worked the first year as development director, growing the one-column weekly service so that over 140 subscribing publications can print our opinions. And Mandell is not completely gone; he serves is on our advisory board, along with Paul Larmer and writers Florence Williams and Elizabeth Hightower Allen.

The service is in demand. We support writers by paying them and we support newspapers by providing columns for free. By focusing on one column (occasionally two) every Monday, we focus on solid editing and sourcing facts. We average 25 newspapers printing our columns each week with an average of 500,000 print subscribers reached on a weekly basis. From January 2021-June 2021, our columns had appeared over 600 times throughout the West. We also send out a newsletter and eventually we’ll figure out how to do a fundraising drive. Meanwhile, we think we are succeeding in our mission of providing lively conversation about important issues facing the West. We’re also having the times of our lives.

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