There’s a thin, winding thread holding all of Northern Colorado together: the Cache la Poudre River. It carries snowmelt from the foothills to the plains and has enabled life along the Northern Front Range for centuries.
Today, it’s a workhorse for the people, businesses, and wildlife that depend on it. It carries water to thousands of kitchen faucets. It irrigates farm fields that send produce around the country.
But now, the way we use the Poudre is changing. I set out to see those changes firsthand by biking alongside it for nearly fifty miles.
The Poudre River trail is something of a recreational marvel. It stretches from the foothills north of Fort Collins to the heart of Greeley, letting walkers, runners, bikers, and horseback riders traverse the fields, farms and neighborhoods of Northern Colorado on a paved trail. I figured there was no better way to learn about the Poudre and the people who rely on it than riding every inch of that trail in a single day.
Humble beginnings
The journey started on a drizzly summer morning, right at the base of the foothills.
For such a long and well-loved trail, it starts rather unassumingly in a small, unmarked dirt lot on the side of the road in Bellevue. Our three-man crew, only slightly daunted by the unexpected slick conditions, assembled right there on the Poudre’s banks.
I’d spend the day reporting — one hand on the handlebars and another on the microphone. I was joined by Lucas Boland, a Fort Collins-raised photographer who would snap pictures along the way. Recognizing my limited knowledge of bikes and my fear that a popped tire could derail the whole endeavor, I also invited Tim Ohlert, a friend and cycling enthusiast. Armed with a backpack full of snacks, repair tools and a heavy dose of morale-boosting cheer, Ohlert said cyclists on the Tour de France have a word for his role.
“I’m the team domestique,” he said. “I’m having fun and taking care of the bikes.”
Mere seconds after we first put our feet to the pedals, we saw the river. A short bridge crossed its water, gently whooshing downstream and beckoning us to follow.
Further up the canyon where it begins, the Poudre can be a thundering churn of whitewater. In the spring, it surges with enough force to make you think twice about going for a swim. On this day, though, it looked humble – tame enough to walk across without losing your footing. It seemed surprisingly small for a river that fuels the life and economies of a whole region.
As we rolled alongside it, I couldn’t help but think about where that water actually came from. Much of the water in the Poudre River is not, technically, Poudre River water.
Titanic efforts to reengineer Mother Nature’s design have literally defied gravity, bringing water from one side of the continental divide to the other. The Colorado River is piped across the mountains and into reservoirs along the Front Range. Water from the west side of Rocky Mountain National Park is ferried underneath the mountains and into Horsetooth Reservoir in the foothills above Fort Collins.
Through a complicated web of decades-old laws and contracts, that water gets doled out to the farms and cities of Larimer and Weld Counties. The easiest way to transport it, in some cases, is in the Poudre River. For many stretches of the Poudre, the amount of water in the river has little to do with how much it has snowed or rained, and everything to do with which people want it delivered downstream at a certain time.
For a river that has been so effectively wrangled by humans and their infrastructure, it can still feel deeply natural in some places. One of those places marked the first stop along our ride.
'So many amazing things'
We pulled off the trail near Shields Street in Fort Collins to meet up with someone who knows a lot about the plants and animals that depend on the river.
“I don't know what we're going to see today,” said Katie Donahue, director of natural areas for the city of Fort Collins. “I'll be straight, animals see us before we see them. So we may not see very many at all because we're chatting. But if folks come here and they choose to be quiet along the river corridor, there's so many amazing things.”
Donahue and I walked along a narrow dirt path through the grasses and bushes that line the Poudre. She explained that this area is home to small species — insects, fish, birds, and bobcats — and big ones too. Bears and elk will travel along the Poudre. Just a few days before our interview, someone even spotted a moose.
Donahue said the Poudre is a “working river,” and it has been since homesteading farmers first diverted it to irrigate their fields in the 1800s.
“The Poudre River system has to work really hard to meet all of those needs, and then also the needs of the other non-human entities that are here — the plants that we're walking through, the animals that live along this corridor and migrate through here.”
As we meandered along the river, its babbling waters poking along under a verdant canopy of trees, Donahue said it takes a lot of work to keep these “natural areas” feeling so natural.
“We are definitely trying to reestablish the diversity that's been lost here,” she said. “Because the more diverse plants and animals you have, the healthier the overall system will be, and the more it will function on its own, without our interference.”
Donahue said, in spite of the challenges, the agencies that shape the Poudre’s future are investing in improvements and making it easier for those plants and animals to thrive.
“A decade from now,” she said, “This river will look different and it will function better.”
On that optimistic note, we said goodbye to Donahue and turned back onto the trail. Our next stop, in Timnath, was about a dozen miles away.
Along the way, the morning rain started to taper off, leaving the greenery along the riverbanks looking lush and full of life. We sped up to a good clip, but not fast enough to miss the sights along the way — a sign about nearby nesting owls, a family playing near the shallow edge of the river, a steady stream of people on their morning runs.
We zipped through the golden grass of protected meadows, then past wide, flat reservoirs. The trail ducked underneath I-25, then past a Costco and a Wal-Mart.
A changing landscape
Then, we saw our next stop. For the first time, the trail was in the middle of a neighborhood. Instead of a long, flowing path through the trees, it was now a series of right-angle turns on sidewalks through a shiny new housing development. And here, in the appropriately-named Trailside subdivision, we could see Northern Colorado’s water use changing in real time.
On one side of the trail, clusters of homes stood in neat, uniform rows. On the other, bales of hay were stacked along a sprawling green field of crops.
In the planning phase of this trip, I plotted our bike route on Google Maps. Trailside, a community of more than 800 homes, was so new that it didn’t even show up in the satellite view. Instead, I saw farm fields.
At the center of this neighborhood is a reminder of what was here before -– a historic red barn that once stood in the middle of a working farm. That’s where we met Pat McMeekin, president of land for Hartford Homes, which is building the subdivision.
McMeekin, our jovial and quick-witted tour guide, said the barn was built before Colorado became a state. Now, it’s the centerpiece of a park with grassy fields, picnic tables and a playground. Building a new community and preserving the past lives of the land, McMeekin said, is “an interesting balance.”
“We talk to farmers a lot when we are pursuing acquiring their property,” he said, “and one of the common themes we hear from them is they just don't have a second generation who's coming up, or third or fourth generation who are farmers.”
McMeekin and I walked out of the park and through the neighborhood, passing homes in various stages of completion. Some were already housing families. Other plots emitted the clanking and whirring of construction through exposed plywood walls.
As farmers are looking to sell, McMeekin said, there is a big group of people looking to buy.
“We are providing a need,” he said, “A community need. I mean, housing is most people's largest expenditure. Right now we have an affordability crisis in Colorado. We have not built enough housing to meet up with demand. "This biggest amenity of this community, McMeekin said, is affordability.
I asked him if Colorado had enough water to sustain this type of growth.
“I never say that we're running out of water in Colorado,” he responded. “I think we're running out of water that has been the traditional source of use. There is plenty of water in the state, however, it's converting from [agricultural] use. What's the best use there, I think, is the question that we need to ask ourselves?”
That question lingered in our minds as we strapped on our helmets and made our way back to the trail, which would have been in the middle of a wheat field just a few years ago.
Not long after we left Trailside, we hit a hitch.
This 47-mile ride comes with a catch. The Poudre Trail is not yet entirely contiguous. Just like Northern Colorado, it’s a work in progress. That visual metaphor comes in the shape of a red-and-white-striped reflective sign at the end of a sidewalk. There are plans to connect this section to the rest of the Poudre Trail, which resumes a few miles away. For now, our ride required a detour.
After a short ride on the shoulder of the county road, with traffic whizzing by a little too close for comfort, we rejoined the trail and found the river by our side once again.
The next few miles are a patchwork of subdivisions and farms until the homes start to give way to crop fields alone. Sprinklers were ticking away as we neared our next stop, an interview at the edge of Greeley.
'It's hard for a farmer to compete'
Keith Amen is the third generation to work his family’s farm in Weld County. He said water has been “kind of [his] passion” for the past 40 or 50 years. He’s also the president of the Water Supply and Storage Company, which has owned and operated a canal and reservoir system since the late 1800s.
Amen is a farmer straight out of Central Casting. He speaks in a gruff Sam Elliott baritone and shakes your hand with a muscular firmness that you don’t get from sitting at a computer all day.
I opened our conversation by asking him why it’s worth it to grow crops here at all.
“Well, do you like to eat?” he rebutted with a chuckle.
For all of the crops grown here — vegetables, corn, wheat, sugar beets — Amen said he has seen a steady decline in the amount of land used for farming. That land typically gets covered with houses.
“People want to move to a beautiful region like we live in here,” he said. “I don't blame anyone for wanting to do that. Apparently, my family, generations ago, wanted to do the same thing.”
Amen said he might have to sell his own farm, since his kids and grandkids “would rather do something else.”
“They look at me, I generally get up at four in the morning, go to bed at nine, ten o'clock, and haven't taken my wife on a vacation for quite some time,” he said. “I don't think they want to follow that lifestyle.”
Amen knows what might happen after that.
“There's a saying that water flows to money,” he said. “That's most likely where the water will go. It's hard for a farmer to compete with a municipal when it comes to buying water today. They can spread that cost out over so many taps that agriculture just cannot.”
But Amen said he knows the Poudre River has a lot of uses, and as demand for homes and businesses goes up, farmers can’t bury their heads in the sand. “We're gonna have to work together,” he said. “Agriculture is not just gonna be able to say, ‘Hell no, we're not gonna do that.’ We're gonna have to work with others, or it's not gonna work at all.”
We bid farewell to Amen and got back on our bikes. The sun was low in the sky. It had been about eight hours since we saddled up in Bellevue. It was time for the final stretch of the ride.
A stiff headwind greeted us in Greeley, making the last few miles a little tougher on our already-sore muscles. Then, the city’s rodeo grounds came into focus and the trail veered into a parking lot.
There, we learned, the end of the Poudre Trail is just as unceremonious as its beginning. We had to pore over the map just to confirm that we had actually reached the terminus.
“Is this it?” I pondered aloud. “I think we finished the trail.”
“No,” Boland, the photographer, exclaimed with an exhausted smile, “Give me ten more miles!”
Along this ride, we saw a little bit of everything that makes Northern Colorado, Northern Colorado. The way this region uses water is incredibly diverse, and taking a bike through it lays that bare in a way you just don’t get from inside a car. You notice the temperature change as you get closer and farther away from the river, you find yourself in the middle of farm fields and on the edge of people’s backyards.
This strikingly intimate ride through Northern Colorado will surely look different in a decade or two, and I might just have to try it again to find out how.
This story is part of ongoing coverage of water in the West, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
