Joshua Zaffos

Whiskey is for drinking, and water is for reading about.

High Country News has released two books this year that collect some of the publication’s past stories on Western water issues. The volumes complement each other: I think they offer a very readable recent history of the forces — natural, political, industrial — at play in shaping the development and conservation of the Western landscape around the single most valuable resource. Some respected and admired colleagues are among the contributors, including Matt Jenkins, Michelle Nijhuis, Alan Kesselheim, Laura Paskus, Tony Davis, Jane Braxton Little and Becca Clarren.

Water in the 21st Century West collects stories that address aspects of the region’s limited water supplies and the stories tackle topics such as tribal water rights, pollution and cleanup of rivers and lakes, urban water development and groundwater management. The editors included an opinion essay I wrote in 2004, “The Terrifying Saga of the West’s Last Big Dam,” on the cost overruns and questionable security funds surrounding the Animas-La Plata dam project in southwestern Colorado.

The second collection, titled River Basins of the American West, is organized around several major watersheds, namely the Rio Grande, the Colorado, the Klamath and the Columbia. A last section focused on river restoration stories has two articles that I wrote for HCN. The first, “Catch-22″ was the first longer story I wrote for the publication as an intern in December 2002 about the tough choices between managing for lunker trout and endangered native fish on the San Juan River. I got to go fishing for the story. It was pretty great.

The other piece, “‘Restoration Cowboy’ Goes against the Flow,” is a November 2003 profile of Dave Rosgen, a hydrologist who trains resource managers to evaluate and restore damaged streams using a system he designed and which has its fair share of critics. For that story, I spent a whole week tailing after Rosgen during one of his workshops in Pagosa Springs. It was pretty great.

The books are available through the HCN website.