Three geese skimmed the creek then veered toward a mass of cattails. A coyote slipped into tamarisk, reappeared upstream, then vanished. Deer prints tracked smears of snow edging the ice. I reached the bridge just after dawn. Along the creek, the forest was faded yellows and shades of gray.

The path runs for miles beside Fountain Creek, just south of Colorado Springs. The sky, a cold blue, pressed against the mountains where clouds crowded the peaks and ridges. A nuthatch called – a nasally wah-wah-wah. I stopped, but couldn’t locate the bird. For several hours I moved north through the creekside forest.

The Fountain trickles from snowpack on 14,115-foot Pikes Peak. The Tabeguache Ute – Nuuchiu in their own language – know the peak as Tavá Kaa-vi, “Sun Mountain,” and its waters flow 74.5 miles to the Arkansas River in my hometown of Pueblo.

We call the Fountain a “creek” because once it was: a thirsty, ephemeral tributary prone to dramatic floods. Today, it runs full and swift year-round – a “new” river.

Over the years, the Fountain has been dammed, diverted, poisoned, rerouted, channelized, filled with debris, blamed and litigated. Humans have altered its very nature, pumping water from Colorado’s Western Slope into the watershed.

Fountain Creek is among the most human-dominated waterways in the American West – and that’s saying something.

One stretch once held a beaver dam that backed up water into a deep pond winding through elms, willows and cottonwoods. Snowy egrets fished there, teals and wood ducks dabbled. I counted sora. Once, even, a white ibis.

One summer afternoon I sat at the pond’s edge, breathing its rich, wet scents. Duckweed blanketed the water, turning the forest a glowing green. The beaver surfaced, her head crowned in duckweed. Another day, midwinter, she pushed through ice, eyes and nose just above the surface before slipping away.

That day, though, the dam was gone. The pond drained. The beaver vanished. Someone had dismantled the dam, drained the pond and likely killed or chased off its builder.

There was no reason I could see. The dam hadn’t threatened road, trail, farm or building. It had filtered sediments, replenished the aquifer and hosted a wetland.

If there’s a word for a natural place harmed by people, I haven’t found it. “Desecration” comes close but doesn’t fit. Lacking such a word suggests we’ve accepted these losses as normal.

I dropped to the ground, poured coffee with a splash of whiskey, and watched snow tumble to the water. Behind me, I-25 roared while a transport plane circled. A drone, a helicopter, then sirens followed. I try not to collapse into anger at the endless wounds to land and water.

Still, I tore off gloves, rolled up sleeves and rebuilt the dam. Water filled my boots. I jammed sticks into the brook, wove willows through, and packed mud.

I knew it was a useless gesture – an act to soothe myself, as if action might matter.

The creek will win. It always has. Water always wins.

In middle school, I biked with my friend Scott Grant to hunt arrowheads in the dry creekbed. In high school, another friend and I fished from a bridge at the confluence, sipping cans of Coors from his father’s cooler. We hunted pheasant and quail in the bottomlands. In winter we dug icy sediments for Pleistocene fossils.

Scott is dead – a bullet at a party. Atencio died in his 40s of a heart attack. For me, the Fountain carries ghosts.

The creek’s alluvial sands glow pink, red and orange. They hold tracks of heron, geese, ducks, fox, coyote, skunk, porcupine, deer, even elk, bear and mountain lion. Nearly a million people live within the watershed.

When the creek rises, it wipes the prints away. When it drops, tracks reappear within hours. Each step adds to that fleeting tapestry.

In June 1965, heavy rains saturated the soil. At midnight on June 17, reporter James Osnowitz left the Pueblo Chieftain to watch the creek rise. He never returned. The Fountain spilled its banks. In Pueblo, 53 blocks went underwater. Twenty-four people died. Five thousand homes washed away.

More than once, the creek has taken lives – and returned them. In 1998, children playing in a dry bed found the skeleton of Ronnie White, missing 32 years. His mother had searched strangers’ faces ever since.

The Fountain holds many ghosts.

I tell myself this story is how we’ve learned everything about a creek – and so little about ourselves. It bears witness, grieves, gives thanks and uncovers something essential about this moment, about us, about the Fountain and the future of water in the West.

I finished the whiskey, shouldered my pack and climbed the embankment. A great V of geese pushed up the Fountain into the storm.

 

About the Author: Jim O’Donnell is an author, conservationist and journalist based in Taos, New Mexico. His work explores the intersections of ecology, memory, place and resilience. This story is adapted exclusively from his book Fountain Creek: Big Lessons from a Little River (Torrey House Press, 2024)