GUNNISON, Utah — Central Utah got hit harder by the drought in recent years than any other part of our state. And now, thanks to unprecedented snowpack from this past winter, they're starting to make up for it.
"It's so nice to see green fields. It's been a long time since everything's been green," Allen Dyreng said Tuesday.
Dyreng said it's good to see the irrigation sprinklers on throughout the valley watering the fields, helping use the water that's already come down from the low snowpack. They await more snow from the high snowpack, which he says will fill up their reservoir three times over.
Dyreng is a lifeline resident of Gunnison, where he farmed for 50 years. He has been the president of the Gunnison Irrigation Company for the past two decades and is passionate about water, giving FOX 13 News a tour Tuesday of some of the waterways that help bring it down from the mountain, into the fields and filling up the Gunnison Reservoir, which hasn't seen this much water in years.
"This is 12 Mile Creek. It’s a major tributary to the Sanpitch River. You can see the water has been a lot higher this year. But low snow has melted and we’re waiting for high snow to melt," he said.
Dyreng says that's something he believes they'll be able to handle this year after lots of work getting ready for the runoff.
"This goes into our irrigation system. The excess goes into the Sanpitch River," he said, showing how the system in this area works.
The water funnels in through one section and then along a much quieter path across farmland and through the valley to where it then goes into the reservoir.
"We’ve had anywhere from 16-30 percent of our normal flows," Dyreng said, adding that all the water this year doesn't take us out of the drought but certainly has been good to see. "It’ll help, but I think it’ll take several years to build the ground water up."
The tracking of the water flow in rivers, canals and reservoirs across central Utah can be viewed at sevierriver.org.
