It is Spring 1975. It is just coming on dawn at Crow Dog’s place on the White River. I am trying to get some sleep after being up for the last two nights. I am laying on the frosty grass half tucked in under my Chevrolet Vega wrapped in a sleeping bag – but the […]

This year’s wet spring sent as much water down the Platte River in two months as usually passes through in an average year.

Ann Bleed came to Nebraska from New York in 1972. Her views on water were shaped during her more than 20 year tenure with the Nebraska Department of Natural Resources, holding positions including director and state hydrologist, and by her participation on negotiations for two interstate litigation cases.

Lake McConaughy is nearly full. The giant reservoir on the North Platte River has been receiving lots of inflows from heavy snows and continued rainfall in the headwaters in Colorado and Wyoming. Formed by the Kingsley Dam, Lake McConaughy is one of the largest reservoirs on the North Platte River. Built as a hydro-irrigation project […]

In the early 1900s in the arid West, C. W. McConaughy recognized the discontinuity between high river flows in the spring and low flows in the middle of summer, when farmers needed water most. McConaughy, a grain merchant and mayor of Holdrege, Nebraska, developed the idea of supplemental irrigation.