Water wars: Snake Valley issue is not as simple as David vs. Goliath

SNAKE VALLEY — Jerald Bates climbs into his dusty Ford truck, drives a quarter mile up a winding dirt road, gets out and points to his lifeblood.

The water bubbles up from the ground, surrounded by lush grass as it courses over rocks.

An overhang sprouts moss, maidenhair ferns and multiple waterfalls, concealing a pseudo-cave from the casual visitor.

This is Warm Springs, in the desert of Snake Valley, and its water temperature averages 80 degrees as it flows at 17 cubic feet per second.

Bates owns rights to a third of this spring, but he fears the water will dry up and blow away with the desert dust if a controversial pipeline taps an aquifer in the valley, which straddles the border of Utah and Nevada.

At 67, Bates has never lived anywhere but Snake Valley absent a two-year stint in the Army.

He says he's been to Salt Lake City, of course, and in his words, "decided it's a good place to be from, far away from. I really didn't enjoy city life."

The aquifer supplies the water to the well at his home, which is 30 miles north off a dirt road that cuts away from U.S. 6/50. It also sustains the 100 or so head of Gelbvieh cattle that he runs and gives life to the monstrous Lombardy poplar trees on both sides of the dirt "driveway" to his house.

"If you drop the water table out here," as residents fear the pipeline will do, "nothing will grow," Bates said.

The saga of the Las Vegas pipeline over the last 20 years has taken as many turns as the underground water it proposes to tap.

From 1989 — when the Southern Nevada Water Authority first applied for water rights — to 2009, when a Nevada judge turned off the tap on some of that water, the battle has been epic in this sparsely populated area little known to most Utahns.

Encompassing more than 500 miles, Snake Valley is an eclectic blend of contrasts in topography — Deep Creek and Snake mountain ranges rise from the desert floor on the Nevada side, and high desert country in Utah is dotted with multiple varieties of sagebrush, Mormon tea and Indian ricegrass.

The precipitation that falls in the mountains feeds streams and a reservoir, seeping underground to the aquifer and giving life to multiple springs.

The U.S. Geological Survey says that 260,000 acres in Snake Valley are groundwater dependent. Close to 85 percent of that land is in Utah.

It's easy to paint caricatures, putting the pugilists into their respective corners of the ring.

On one side are the greedy Nevada would-be water purveyors who want to slip into Utah's already parched west desert and use big bucks and slick lawyers to steal precious water from the aquifer.