re: #53 Anymouse 🌹🏡😷

I was raised on Michigan mosquitos and black flies.

Mosquitos in the Panhandle tend to be near the North Platte River, Pumpkin Creek, or irrigation canals, since everything else here is Sandhills desert.

Irrigation canals generally run alongside the North Platte River, built since the area was settled by ranchers and farmers to expand watered land more than a few feet from the river.

My town however has the Beerline Canal running through it (and right by my house) into the Sandhills, so we have nice close stagnant water to breed mosquitos.

For whatever it’s worth though, my house abstract and deed note we have perpetual unlimited drawing rights from the Beerline Canal “for drinking and other purposes.”

I’ll pass on drinking from the canal, but who knows, perhaps those water rights might be worth something some day.

Tricky thing with those water rights is that a larger force further down the priority list might well decide to lawyer you into oblivion if you decided to press those rights. (My brother-in-law’s former ranch on the Yampa River upstream from Steamboat Springs had an irrigation canal (usually with the gate closed) that had a very high priority for water if desired. He said that he really didn’t need it and the neighbors further along the canal were apparently not interested in drawing from it either. And he said that during the drought in the 2000s where the Yampa’s level was of concern that trying to use it might well draw unwelcome attention from users further downstream. (His two pastures close to the canal and river stayed pretty green and one was downright wet at one end due to a dike on the river that leaked slightly. Plus he had a spring on the bluff that kept a couple of water troughs full. And he wasn’t going to pump water uphill and attempt to irrigate any of the upper pastures.)