Baker, Nev. was the setting for the sixth annual Snake Valley Water Festival, June 20-22, 2014. The Festival is a community gathering to celebrate community and keep water in Snake Valley by raising money for Great Basin Water Network (www.greatbasinwater.net).
A highlight of the weekend is the parade, dubbed the shortest parade near the loneliest highway. It’s so short they go around twice. But this year with hot local elections, the parade stretched to include a slew of White Pine County candidates along with goats, Ely’s brass band, old Jeeps that still run, and giant farm equipment. GBWN’s “Water is Our Future” entry featured some of the Valley’s children atop fresh bales of hay.
The Great Basin Beer Tasting was new this year and featured beers brewed with Great Basin water. The water theme was woven through the festival with parade entries, souvenir water bottles and home-grown Snake Valley calendars for sale, and a massive water fight for kids of all ages.
The east coast-based Trotta Ronstadt band with James Dalton entertained on Friday and Sunday, and conducted workshops throughout the weekend. In the shade outside Baker Hall, musicians and poets entertained an attentive audience, sipping on lavender lemonade, while others perused the books, jewelry and handcrafts.
A community BBQ at the Border Inn preceded the live auction, to continue the fundraising. Sunday’s Snake Valley Slither, a 5 or 10 k run or walk, attracted only locals and visitors, no snakes.
“We are pleased that more people turned out to have fun and support activities to raise money for the water fight,” said GBWN president Abby Johnson. “Local support is crucial to our efforts and we thank everyone for helping the Water Festival succeed.”
The mood at this year’s Snake Valley festival in Baker, Nevada was alsodefinitely be different.
“We have had some very significant victories this year,” Johnson said. “So yes we are feeling very optimistic still I have to keep reminding people that while we have on a couple of battles the war is far from over.”
In a stunningly strong decision, Senior Judge Robert Estes of the Seventh Judicial Court of Nevada declared the State Engineer’s decision “subjective, unscientific, arbitrary and capricious”, and “unfair to following generations of Nevadans” and “not in the public interest”.
Estes resoundingly rejected the Nevada State Engineer’s allocation of some 84,000 acre feet per year of groundwater in four rural valleys that the Southern Nevada Water Authority planned to pump and pipe to Las Vegas.
Estes’ ruling requires the State Engineer to recalculate reassess the water available for appropriation from Spring Valley to assure that “the basin will reach equilibrium between discharge and recharge within a reasonable time”, and to “recalculate the appropriations for Cave, Dry Lake, and Delamar Valleys to avoid over appropriations or conflicts with down-gradient, existing water rights”.
In addition to the Estes decision SNWA opponents scored a political victory of a sorts when Utah governor Gary Herbert In an 11th hour decision reversed himself and said he would not sign a controversial water-sharing agreement with Nevada that was strongly supported by the SNWA and strongly opposed by Utah ranchers and more recently by the LDS church.
“At the end of the day, when it comes down to those people who have the most to lose — it’s their water, their lifestyle, their livelihood — I can’t in good conscience sign the agreement,” he said. “It’s that simple.”
Finally this year and fresh off their big win in court, White Pine County, Great Basin Water Network, the Goshute and Shoshone Tribes, and their allies took the fight to a new level, requesting that the Federal District Court of Nevada “void the validity” of the Bureau of Land Management’s Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and Record of Decision (ROD) and “suspend and enjoin any operation on the right-of-way” pending full compliance with federal environmental laws and trust obligations to the Tribal Plaintiffs.
