The river as machine

The Grand Tetons tower above Jackson Dam, one of the earliest dams built on the river and the highest in elevation at about 6,700 feet. It holds back 847,000 acre-feet of water for irrigators on top of a large natural lake.

For everyone, it all begins here

The Snake wanders out of Yellowstone and into Grand Teton National Park, running red with the reflection of the setting sun. This is the journey's end - here where the bark-and-leaf raft sails into the darkening distance.

We've traveled 1,484 miles of road.

If the toy boat keeps going, it will hit Jackson Lake by morning and eventually be sucked toward Jackson Dam where Larry Robinson is operating the floodgates.

Should it pass through there, it will meander through the valley's glacial rock to the canyon where Dave Hansen is waiting for high water.

Beyond that, perhaps it will sail out of Wyoming toward Dell Raybould's irrigation diversions for Idaho potatoes.

And one day when Steve Bouffard is looking for molting ducks on Lake Walcott, maybe he'll notice the small craft float past.

From Minidoka, it's not far to Mark Croghan's brick office in Burley where he controls the massive river system that carries the boat.

Perhaps the operator of Swan Falls Dam will phone Craig Jones in his corporate office to note the passage of an unmanned vessel.

With a bit of luck, Reed Burkholder will spot it on a camping trip with his son, and Monte Richards will wonder where it came from when he puts in for a day of fishing.

Maybe the boat will snag Ira Stutzman's fly line some still morning as mist rises from Hells Canyon. If it makes it that far, maybe it will get the attention of a barge captain as he eases his load of wheat away from the Almota terminal.

Should it be protected by the river gods, the product of some child's imagination might someday reach the big water of the Columbia headed for the open sea.

JACKSON LAKE JUNCTION, Wyo. - Each spring when the winter seems like it will hang forever on the Rocky Mountains, Larry Robinson steps outside his house and scans the Wildcat Range with binoculars.

When the mountain flanks begin to clear, Jackson Lake starts to fill with snow melt. And when that happens, the man who manages the Snake River's uppermost dam 6,700 feet high in the Tetons is about to get busy.

He's about to turn on the Snake.

"I am just a little cog in a big wheel," said Robinson, 52, in his pleasant drawl.

In the old days, dam tenders would open the gates by hand crank to release one of the West's great rivers.

The gates are electrified now and only in one emergency has Robinson needed to resort to manual control. But for effect, he pulls the crank out of a lock box and spreads his feet wide on the deck of the dam.

Straining slightly, he pulls open a gate below him and listens for the splash of water becoming the Snake River.

The Snake actually begins a few miles northeast of Robinson in the forested wilds of Yellowstone National Park, near where wolves were reintroduced five years ago.

Then it flows into Jackson Lake, where Robinson and the Bureau of Reclamation have their way with it.

As Robinson talks about the river-machine, water is flowing from his dam at about 1,750 cubic feet per second - a late summer trickle, but it still creates a roar almost too loud to be heard above.

The first Jackson Dam was built of wood in 1906. After several upgrades, today's dam stores 847,000 acre-feet above the natural lake.

It's part of the Bureau of Reclamation's Minidoka Project, which services 1.2 million acres and protects towns from floods along the "Mad River."

When it comes to river management, Robinson said, "There's a lot of fingers in the pie."

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Most of the time, Robinson gets his orders from hydrologists like Mark Croghan in his cubicle at the bureau's office in Burley, Idaho, several hundred miles downstream.

Croghan's team decides when and where to release waters of the Snake - waters that are coveted by irrigators, power producers, reservoir boaters, river rafters, anglers and campers.

And salmon managers.

"It's getting more and more complex, mostly because of environmental issues," said Croghan. "The salmon flows have complicated things dramatically."

In general, the river runs like this:

Each January, the bureau makes room for the spring freshet in its upstream reservoirs, Jackson Lake and Palisades a few miles downstream in Wyoming. Those "holes" in the lakes are what the melt will fill.

The size of the reservoir holes depends on the snowpack that Robinson measures in the Tetons.

By May 1, the reservoirs are down as low as possible to accept the coming water. They then will be operated for the next two months to keep Jackson and Idaho Falls from flooding.

After flood threats end, irrigation becomes the primary responsibility and river managers try to keep water as high in the system as possible because upstream reservoirs are the hardest to refill.

Virtually every drop in the reservoirs is spoken for by irrigation interests.

"At the end of the flood control season, our goal is to have all the reservoirs filled at the same time," Croghan said. "Some years, like this year, it's pretty tough to do."

Among the important facts river operators work with: It takes water three days to get from Palisades Dam to American Falls Dam. To keep track of the water, dozens of river gauging stations send measurements by satellite to a computer database that records them every 15 minutes.

"Every morning, we sit down and we run through graphs of the system to see what's happening," Croghan said. "You've kind of got to think ahead and look at what the trends are and weather conditions."

The tricky dance is made more complex by the farm cycle.

American Falls irrigators in the south-central part of Idaho need water in April before runoff has started. Those kinds of demands led to the creation of an accounting system to track water use.

But the complications don't end there. Based on dictates of the National Marine Fisheries Service, the bureau must try to buy water from irrigators to help flush salmon downstream, then release it when fish managers demand.

If it weren't for the fish flows - about 1,500 cubic feet per second at present - the bureau would be hoarding all that water in its reservoirs this summer because of how dry the basin is.

"We don't want to dry up the river because of fish issues, but we don't want to put too much water down here" past where it can be used, Croghan said.

By the time late fall rolls around again, the bureau's attentions turn to protection of the prized cutthroat, rainbow and brown trout whose young reside below Palisades.

Through it all, power is essentially a byproduct of the river's other functions.

Despite Idaho Power's extensive string of turbines up and down the river, the company owns very little water. In addition, "They have virtually no control over the upper Snake," Croghan said. "We tell them what needs to be done and they cooperate with us."

The same can be said for boaters in the Snake River Canyon, where raft company owners bemoan the late-summer shallows. But recreation has virtually no pull, a source of some frustration.

"It's a very political system that many people say is very, very broken," said David Cernicek, who manages rafting in the Snake River Canyon for the Bridger-Teton National Forest.

"Supposedly, it's public water - but we have no control over it."

To make things worse, the river doesn't always comply with complex attempts to keep it under control.

In 1997, for instance, Jackson Lake swelled fast with rain falling on a heavy snowpack.

"We had 1 million more acre-feet coming down the system than what we had forecast," Croghan said of the largest flood on record. Palisades Dam was forced to pass 40,000 cubic feet per second, twice the target level for flood control.

"It just overwhelmed the system."

The bureau took heat for not lowering reservoirs enough to contain the melt, but, "We didn't want to create a flood to prevent a potential flood," Croghan said.

No threats of floods this year.

Croghan warns about looming water shortages.

A dry fall last year and a dry winter meant spring stream flows were just 75 percent of average at the upper Snake gauging station.

As he talked, the 1.7 million-acre-foot American Falls Reservoir was drained to 37 percent of capacity - and it will likely end up at about 6 percent of capacity at the end of the season.

Some private water systems were running out of water and starting to curtail late-summer deliveries.

"If we have a dry winter ... it's going to be a bad year" in 2001, Croghan said.

All of which means much depends on what Robinson finds early next spring when he rides his snowmobile to a dozen remote sites in the upper Snake River Basin, checking snow depths to get an idea how much water will be coming down.

"It may sound like a lot of fun," he said, "but I have people who go out with me and they fall asleep in their plate at night. It's hard work."

But Robinson isn't complaining. He quietly admits his is the best job in the agency.

He lives on nature's doorstep, perhaps 150 yards from the Snake, and is one of the few who stay year-round in the national park. Among his associates are moose and bear, both of which have nosed up to his porch looking for food in the winter.

And at any point he is just a few minutes from grabbing his fly rod, throwing out his line and "listening to the quiet."

"I have seen and lived in the best of the best," said Robinson, the son of a National Park Service employee in Yellowstone. "I plan on retiring up here - or dying up here. I will stay until they boot me out."