The United States Drought Monitor classifies the Crystal Valley in a state of exceptional drought. Even though River Valley Ranch is within this exceptional drought zone, diners on the deck of the Homestead Restaurant can enjoy the magnificent, luscious green view to the south. They will not see the slightest hint of drought and could easily imagine themselves in Scotland, with a distant mirage of Mt. Sopris. 

But this comforting illusion would be shattered if the diners could see the stretch of the Crystal River, a few miles away, just upstream from the fish hatchery. The poor Crystal River has been reduced to a paltry trickle, between small pools of very warm water. In the 1970s, the Water Court in Glenwood Springs determined and decreed that the minimum instream flow to protect the health of this stretch of the Crystal River was 100 cubic feet per second (cfs). That flow today appears less than 1 cfs, leaving most of the bed of the river bone dry.

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night and spring after the winter.

Rachel Carson