The Importance of Water

You don't take water for granted when it isn't piped into your home.  I grew up without running water.  We didn't have an indoor bathroom in our farmhouse in Missouri until I was in the seventh grade, so hauling and carrying water isn't totally foreign to me.  Since this is a one-person household, I don't need a lot of water, but since the water from the creek that runs down the canyon just across the road from the cabin is no longer potable (and that's a long "o" not a short one--one of my pet peeves), which it was the first time I came here when I was nine years old, I have to haul water from a spring in Caribou Canyon, the next canyon north of the one in which the cabin is located.  I don't know the story of this spring and will attempt to find out who installed the pipe.  I do know that my family, along with many other area residents, have collected free water from the spring for years.  A year ago last fall, as I was filling my water jugs, a large black SUV with darkly tinted windows drove up as I was going about my task.  The driver didn't get out and chat like so many people do if they arrive at the spring together.  When I indicated to the unseen driver that I was done, he emerged, and with a very Germanic accent and unpleasant demeanor, said he should start charging for the water, that the spring belonged to him and, although he had drilled a well for his cabin (I suspect it is the very large chateau-like structure I occasionally glimpse further up Caribou), he still had to come to the spring for water because the water from the well was so full of iron it made it unusable.  He wanted to know where I lived.  I told him I was living in a family cabin in Eldora my father had built in 1939 and that, in fact, my Dad had attempted to dig a well by hand on our property, but had thrown in the towel or the shovel when he encountered solid rock, so I really appreciated "his" water.  He didn't seem mollified.


This is the spring.  It looks unsavory, but I and others use the water as our sole source of drinking water and suffer no ill effects.  I understand the Boulder County Health Department occasionally comes out and hangs a warning tag on the pipe indicating the water isn't safe to drink because of possible giardia ("beaver fever") contamination, but most people just ignore it.  I did have a fellow water-gatherer tell me one day, when we converged on the spring simultaneously, that the only time she and her family, including young children, don't use the water is during spring run-off.  I could not determine last spring, after record snowfalls, exactly the duration of spring run-off.  I boiled the water for drinking for about a week when I discovered the water coming out so forcefully that I had to hold my jugs horizontally in order to capture the water, but found it a nuisance and quit. 

Do you give much thought to water as you make your morning coffee, wash the dishes, take a shower or luxuriate in a bubble bath after a long day?  Teddee