- Joined
- May 4, 2015
- Location
- Boonville, MO.
Western Water Rights--now there's an interesting topic. In Colorado it's against the law to collect the water that falls on your house/property-you don't have any rights to that water. The water rights to the Colorado River, which begins in the Rocky Mountain National Park, is oversubscribed by something like 120-130% by other states, so Colorado can't impound the water that flow through their state as they only "own" a small percentage of it. Farmers on the eastern plains have found that they can make more money by leasing their water rights to cities instead of raising crops.
As i said earlier, so much of the mountain forests have been ravaged by the pine bark beetle that the mountainsides are brown now, due to all the dead trees. During time of high winds, you're warned not to hike in the forests due to all the "widow makers" falling on hikers. During the last two years we've been lucky that we've had a lot of moisture from snowfall and summer rains, but this is causing a lot of grass to grow that will only die and provide even more fuel when we have a dry summer. All it will take is one lightning strike........
The forest does need fire to keep it healthy, and the Gov. will now let that happen on their land if possible, but this is a new philosophy. Their previous thinking was to fight every fire, but this has led to the accumulation of a huge amount of combustible material.
As i said earlier, so much of the mountain forests have been ravaged by the pine bark beetle that the mountainsides are brown now, due to all the dead trees. During time of high winds, you're warned not to hike in the forests due to all the "widow makers" falling on hikers. During the last two years we've been lucky that we've had a lot of moisture from snowfall and summer rains, but this is causing a lot of grass to grow that will only die and provide even more fuel when we have a dry summer. All it will take is one lightning strike........
The forest does need fire to keep it healthy, and the Gov. will now let that happen on their land if possible, but this is a new philosophy. Their previous thinking was to fight every fire, but this has led to the accumulation of a huge amount of combustible material.