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  Home Page » News » Earth » Making It Flow

Making it flow

Western Hardrock Watershed Team helps with Animas project

by Dale Rodebaugh
Herald Staff Writer

After lodging their canoe against a rock at the Weaselskin Bridge south of Durango, members of the Animas Watershed Partnership, clad in waders, stepped into the low-flowing Animas River to sample water quality.

What they recorded – temperature, conductivity, total dissolved solids, turbidity, dissolved oxygen, acidity, the presence of algae and micro-invertebrates – and the GPS readings they took will establish a baseline for a detailed study of water-pollution sour-ces next summer on the Animas from Bakers Bridge to the New Mexico line.

One member of the recent group tour was Mike Barber, a volunteer from the Western Hardrock Watershed Team. The team’s long-term goal is to clean up – in cooperation with local environmental groups – the pollution associated with the state’s 150 years of mining history and connect communities with their mining past.

Overall, the organization has 28 volunteers working in 23 locations in Colorado and two volunteers out of Pecos, N.M. Four volunteers work in Durango, Cortez and Silverton.

“We have volunteers in 19 other locations in Colorado, mostly across the mineral belt,” said Miriam Gillow-Wiles, who is half of the Western Hardrock support-office staff in Durango. “The locations run from Durango northeast to the Boulder area.”

AmeriCorps/VISTA sponsors the Western Hardrock Water Team, and it is funded by the sponsor and the federal Office of Surface Mining, the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety, and grants.

The team’s Durango office – Katrina Dahlman is the other employee – reports to Washington, D.C. Founded in 2006, the western office is an offshoot of the Appalachian Coal Country Watershed Team created in Virginia in 2002 to remediate environmental harm caused by coal mining.

All Western Hardrock volunteers – they’re college graduates – sign on for a year, with an option to extend their service for an additional year. They are not salaried employees but receive a stipend of $10,000 a year. At the end of their service, AmeriCorps/VISTA gives them $4,700 to pay off student loans.

Gillow-Wiles and Dahlman are themselves AmeriCorps/VISTA volunteers.

b Gillow-Wiles, 30, received a degree in geology from the University of Oregon. She ended up at Western Hardrock when she became dissatisfied with her job at a biotech firm in Eugene. In Durango since June, she does outreach – writing grant applications and looking for new community partners and volunteers.

b Dahlman, 28, earned a degree in economy and international relations at the Davis campus of the University of California and a master’s degree in environmental management at the Université de Bordeaux.

“I decided I wanted to fix things after hearing Europeans bash Yanks for trashing the environment,” Dahlman said.

In Durango, Dahlman is the liaison to the 23 project sites and funding agencies.

The other volunteers in Southwest Colorado are:
b Mike Barber, 25, who earned a degree in environmental studies and forest biology at the State University of New York. He had been in Montana doing biological control of noxious weeds when the job with AmeriCorps/VISTA opened
up.

Barber was assigned to the Animas Watershed Partnership, which is looking to improve water quality in the river. Team members have floated the Animas from Bakers Bridge to the New Mexico line. Part of the goal is to contribute to establishing standards for nutrients (phosphorus and nitrogen). New Mexico already has approved standards.

b Katy  Rende, 26, who
received a degree in biology from the University of Illinois. She was unhappy with her
job at a biodiesel company
in Boston and wanted a change of scene.

Rende landed at the Mountain Studies Institute in Silverton. She writes grant applications and works on presentations to the town and San Juan County in search of financial backing to help the institute purchase 10 acres just outside town formerly occupied by Outward Bound. MSI wants to create a field station there for international researchers involved in biological and geological projects in the San
Juan Mountains.

b Brooke Childrey, 22, a graduate of Tennessee Tech University with a degree in environmental agriscience. She learned of AmericaCorps/
VISTA through a woman on campus whose daughter had been a volunteer. Familiar with Colorado from working at a ski resort in Summit County, she put two and two together.

Childrey works in Cortez with the Lower Dolores River Dialogue. The organization, which has broad membership, is trying to improve the quality of water in the Dolores River – which has concentrations of acid mine waste and aluminosilicate.

b Mike Costello, 22, graduated from Castleton State College in Vermont with a degree in natural science and concentration in biology. He was hired by the Mountain Studies Institute and then learned the job was through AmericaCorps/VISTA.

Costello helped a University of Colorado graduate student with research on the pika, a rabbit relative that is losing terrain because of global warming.

Now he is designing citizen-science information to educate people about the pika and water quality and enlist their help in collecting data.

daler@durangoherald.com