This has certainly been a dry winter by any standard. It may be very similar, however, to the winter and summer of 1944.

The ground was so dry that my brother and I got big nails from the shop and dropped them into the cracks and listened to see how far they dropped. We also carried water from the ditch for Grandpa to put in the holes as he dug post holes. There were only pools of water in the ditch. When it came time to cut hay, I remember going with my father to check out the lower 50 acres. There were narrow strips of alfalfa where water had made it into that acreage. My father shook his head and said, "It's not good son. We're going to have to sell off some of the cattle to have enough feed this winter."

We did put up hay on the upper 50 acres and were able to get one cutting of a grassy hay on the lake 40. The lake 40 was below Webber Lake, which at that time was kept in water by the irrigation on the numerous fields above it. The lake 40 disappeared over the years, and the only sign of it is the swampy ground close to the Root and Ratliff Ditch. As more and more farmers have irrigated by sprinklers there has been less and less ground that could be called swampy.

Our savior now is that we have the Jackson Gulch Reservoir. Even as dry it is now, there will be plenty of water for the town, rural water and for Mesa Verde.

Could we possibly go into another year with even less snowpack in the mountains? I've been unable to find any mention of extremely dry years since The Mancos Times was first printed. That doesn't mean there haven't been a few, but if there had been two or more dry years in a row, it would have made headlines.

We do know that the climate became dry enough in the 1200s to force the early Puebloan peoples to leave this area and never come back. Global climate change may not bring something as desperate, but it is certainly not in our favor. The climate will become erratic in coming decades, and there will be even drier years. The Northeastern states have to feel there is nothing to global warming. This has been a record cold and snowy winter in many places. It now appears that global climate change can be erratic and the El Niño warm current in the Pacific Ocean isn't going to help us here for at least two years.

In the 1890s, Muldoon Kelly, publisher of The Mancos Times, tried his best to have a dam built that would supply the Mancos Valley with summer water. Some of his efforts decades later were built upon and became the springboard for the efforts to have the Jackson Gulch Dam built.

Ira Kelly was chairman of the Mancos Water Conservancy District from its beginning until 1969 and was instrumental in gaining appropriations for the completion of the Jackson Gulch Dam and the inlet and the outgoing canal.

Darrel Ellis is a longtime historian of the Mancos Valley. Email him at [email protected].