The South Saskatchewan River runs dry   (Page 1 of 4)

The river is the lifeblood of the prairies, but its future flow will be determined by a supply-demand equation — and the math doesn’t look promising

By Allan Casey with photography by Nayan Sthankiya

In silence, we bump along the uneven pavement of a little-used secondary highway, watching the west turn almost to desert. It seems utterly the wrong landscape for a holiday afloat. In the rear-view mirror, the boat on its trailer tugs to and fro like a worried pony being led into danger. My sailing pal Mark and I silently scan the treeless, cactus-sage hills ahead, home to bull snake and burrowing owl. This is the bleach-bone heart of the Palliser Triangle, named for the British government scout who, in 1860, declared the area too dry for settlement. Lewis, my 19-year-old son, is jammed in with the back-seat gear and has come along to ferry the vehicle back to our destination point. He now breaks the spell with a declaration of his own, both on the forbidding landscape and on our middle-aged quest upon it.

“No country for old men,” he says.

Chart the areas of Saskatchewan most susceptible to a warming climate.

And so it would be, were it not for the river. We pass down out of the high-and-dry ranch country into fields where irrigation booms send their beneficial spray ssst-ssst-ssst over verdant crops, to the rim of the great valley. And there is the muddy, green, cool, reliable South Saskatchewan River.

The name, pretty to my ear, is from the Cree for “swift water,” and it is fittingly lent to a whole province where all of us — plants, animals, people — owe our livelihood to the precious flow its two arms carry out to us from the mountains. The river sustains our lawns and our livestock, percolates in our coffee makers, spins electricity out of our turbines, ices our hockey rinks. It flows in the very cells of our children.

The South Saskatchewan has been compared to the Colorado, another Rocky Mountains-born river bringing wealth to dry country. I pray it will not have met that tappedout river’s sad fate by the time my son is an old man. Like the Colorado, the South Saskatchewan is much diminished by humans. Despite our low regional population in the west, we manage to consume about one-third of its flow, which has dropped naturally by 12 percent in the last century. With human-driven climate change expected to hit hard in Palliser’s drought-prone west, we here are taking stock of the one natural resource on which our whole economic future rests.

The true danger is hard to know. A 2009 report by World Wildlife Fund Canada called it the country’s most-threatened river. Yet record rains this year have caused floods and widespread crop damage. Amid such climatic uncertainty, perhaps the real threats to the South Saskatchewan are not drought or flood, but ignorance and confusion. As with every Canadian river and lake, hundreds of government, academic and stewardship agencies at federal, provincial and municipal levels attempt to study and manage the river, directly or indirectly. There is no means to coordinate them. Water is so abundant across most of Canada that we have gotten away with such Byzantine management. When the reckoning comes, it will surely come first to our dryland river. After 150 years of settlement in the mercurial west, we cannot answer the one question most basic to our livelihood: will there always be enough water?

Watch an animation on the prairies and drought.

A good place to begin a search for answers is on the river itself. Mark and I launch our flat-bottom sailboat at Saskatchewan Landing, a historic ford that is now a provincial park. The water under our hull, which has travelled through rugged clay canyons from the river’s birthplace in Alberta, at the confluence of the Bow and Oldman rivers, has already survived its greatest ordeal. Alberta irrigation is the single largest consumer of South Saskatchewan River water. Sixty-five percent of Canada’s irrigated farm acreage is in southern Alberta, and by interprovincial agreement, the province is allowed to consume up to half of the river flow. Circular spray booms have turned the Lethbridge-Medicine Hat corridor into high-value green polka dots of corn, potatoes and beets; the highway is strung with french-fry factories and vast intensive livestock operations.

We turn downstream instead, passing under a highvoltage line into an invented waterworld of another kind. In Saskatchewan, we may envy Alberta’s canals, but by far the most visible exploitation of the river is our own. In 1967, the province finished two dams to trap the river for electrical power and to slake the municipal thirst of Regina and points south. The river is plumbed to roughly half the kitchen taps in the province today. The resulting Lake Diefenbaker sprawls more than 200 kilometres behind the Gardiner and Qu’Appelle dams, an aquatic playground for parched southerners. Swimming, golf and affordable cottaging are perks afforded by the impounded water.

Photographs often fail to capture the vast scale of this time-rounded glacial spillway, and there is much beauty alongshore as we travel. Hawks ride thermals over the baking prickly pear cactus on the south-facing banks. The cooler shore opposite harbours hawthorn and buffalo berry, ash and cottonwood. Mark’s keen eye spots whitetail deer and pronghorn antelope foraging on the bluffs. At night, we camp ashore like cowboys and make fires from driftwood. The coyotes sing, the stars blaze, and it is possible to think the west is still wild.

Yet the valley is unmistakably engineered, oddly lifting our boat up as we go east until we are level with the prairie. The massive reservoir corrals a whole summer’s runoff, to be meted out in doses by the Gardiner Dam the rest of the year. Endangered piping plovers are drawn to nest on the artificially wide sandy beaches but must cope with “managed” water that typically rises six metres. We pass a well-known fish farm using the cold mountain runoff to raise the steelhead salmon often sold as “Lake Diefenbaker trout” on better restaurant menus in Saskatoon and Regina.

The river is odd by nature too. It gains hardly any new water once it leaves Alberta, skirting semi-deserts and many areas of internal drainage that donate hardly a drop to the passing river. Massive side canyons have only tiny rivulets at their bottoms — or none at all — and the river grows a mere two percent in volume on its journey through Saskatchewan. Psychologically, it is fitting that this province chose to build great dams, to literally hold on to our precious share of water in a region defined by a lack of it.