I spent this week getting the irrigation system turned on for the farm. It’s complicated because unlike turning your lawn sprinklers on there isn’t a pipe with a valve on it. Mine starts a couple of miles up the canyon where the main canal diverts water out of the river.
For most of the time there has been a farming operation here, it was all flood irrigated, with the canal feeding into a spiderweb of ditches and ponds that would hold the flow overnight for distribution the next morning.
We still use most of that, but installed sprinklers several years ago on part of the ground. They save a lot of labor — somebody has to tend all those ditches, moving the plastic dams downstream every few hours to spread the water — and also are supposed to use a lot less water.
The whole thing seems like one improbable engineering decision after another. The canal was hand dug by four brothers named Potts in about 1880. They homesteaded what we call the West Bench. They dug the canal in the winter because they were too busy trying to farm in the summer. It clings to a steep side slope, running almost level, and they had to get a bench trail wide enough for a team of horses to stand on before they could use horsepower and scrapers. They surveyed it with a carpenter’s level, maintaining a slight but consistent grade the whole way.
They spent two years building it. Then they irrigated their first hay crop, expecting to raise enough hay to sustain their cattle through the winter, and expand their herd. It was such a spectacular success that at the end of that first harvest, they sold the land to somebody else and packed off to the Alaska gold rush. After a grim year there, they concluded that the Klondike offered even less potential than farming in Woodland. Three of the four came back and spent their lives working in the Park City mines in a variety of capacities. One stuck it out in Alaska, but didn’t get rich.
The irrigation system seems equally implausible. We have two center pivots, those big contraptions you see from the air that make circles of green across Wyoming and Nebraska. The water is piped to a center hub, and the boom, better than a quarter mile long, drives around in circles all by itself.
It moves slowly, completely unsupervised, for days at time. You don’t want to be in its way. In theory, it should stop if it hits something big, but it will drive over a bale of hay without noticing. There are electric motors at each tower, powered by 480 volts, all constantly sprayed by water. What could possibly go wrong?
I got struck by lightning working on it once — lightning rather than the power in the system. Apparently you can’t engineer around lightning.
The pipe that supplies the water comes out of the canal, into a stilling pond where the silt is supposed to settle out, and then into the pipe. The pipe is three-quarters of a mile long, and 10 inches in diameter.
You can’t just open the valve and let it rip. That would blow the end of the pipe out of the ground. Filling the pipe is a gradual process that also involves flushing the silt out of it. So the turn-on process involves going back and forth between the intake and the various drain/flush points. There are vents that burp along the way as the pipe fills.
A coyote was very interested in the process, and followed me around. He stayed in the brush at the side of the fields, often invisible, and other times sitting there in the open watching me. When I got one task completed and drove back to the other end of the system, the coyote ran along beside me, never far out of sight. It followed me on a couple of laps before either losing interest or finding something for lunch along the way.
When I got ready to turn the pivot on, starting it in motion and the water spraying, several crows were roosting on the overhead boom, one at each of the sprinkler heads. A group of crows is called a murder. The turkey buzzards were playing on the wind. A group of buzzards is a committee. That has to be one of the best collective nouns out there.
There are fittings to grease, and as I learned the hard way, the pump motors like a different flavor of grease than the mechanical parts. For a machine so huge, a surprising portion of the control function is handled by very small switches, and quarter-inch hoses connecting different sensors.
Some critter had gnawed through a couple the control hoses but had the courtesy to do in a way that I could tell which ones were supposed to be connected. There’s always something.
Despite having been in operation for years now, I still have the annual nightmare where I picture the entire machine manically driving down the canyon, dragging hoses, pipes and wires with it. I’ve sometimes gotten out of bed and driven up to the farm in the middle of the night just to be sure it’s all still there, running in circles, instead of making a break for the Alaska gold fields.
Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.