Dry wells and low flows
Overpumping, legislative inaction threaten Verde River
PAULDEN — At the bottom of a rugged canyon, Gary Beverly walked among cottonwood and ash trees beside a clear stream. Dragonflies hovered over the stream, and birds warbled in the trees. The water flowed knee-deep through reeds and reflected the vegetation, which swayed in the breeze.
Verde Springs is one of Beverly’s favorite places, a place where a river is born.
Water gushes from cracks in the ground and forms the Verde River, a green artery that teems with life and flows for about 190 miles, winding through Arizona canyons, grasslands and the Sonoran Desert.
The first stretch of the river depends on water that emerges at the springs, and Beverly is deeply concerned about its future.
“This river is really important and it’s endangered,” said Beverly, who has advocated for the Verde for 15 years and has walked or kayaked nearly its entire length several times.
“Human impacts have already reduced the flow of the river,” Beverly said.
“It is diminished. The historical base flow on the river was probably twice what it is now.”
While many stretches of Arizona’s rivers have dried up due to diversions, dams and groundwater pumping, much of the Verde has continued to flow yearround, nourishing a rich ecosystem in the heart of the desert Southwest.
Yet there is nothing in Arizona law that protects the river’s flows.
Across the watershed, thousands of wells draw groundwater from the same aquifers, supplying growing towns like Prescott Valley and Chino Valley. State records show groundwater levels have been declining. Already, some families in communities near the river have watched wells dry up and have turned to relying on plastic storage tanks and paying to have water hauled by truck.
Beverly and other conservation activists have warned that the upper Verde is increasingly threatened and that if pumping continues unchecked, wells will capture more of the water that would otherwise feed the springs. They point to measurements from stream gages showing the upper Verde’s flows have declined dramatically during the driest times of the year, and they say protecting what remains of the base flow will be critical as climate change continues to intensify dry spells across the West.
Beverly is the local chair of the Sierra Club in Yavapai County and president of an organization called Citizens Water Advocacy Group. He lives in Chino Valley and regularly measures the flow of the river with other Sierra Club volunteers who are trained as “water sentinels.”
It was especially alarming this summer, he said, watching the measurements at the U.S. Geological Survey’s gage in Paulden, which showed the Verde’s flow dropped to new lows.
Before the monsoon rains came in July, he said, the river’s lowest-flow seven-day period of the year reached a record low level. The stream gauge’s measurements go back to the 1960s, and this June the river fell below a record set in 2018.
“Its future is really concerning. We’re trying to raise hell about it because once it’s degraded, it’s too late to fix it,” Beverly said. “You can’t fix it after it’s killed. So this is the time to be concerned.”
For years, Beverly and other activists have fought a proposal for Prescott and Prescott Valley to build a pipeline that would bring water from wells on a farm property called the Big Chino Water Ranch. The proposal, which faced lawsuits that were subsequently settled, is on hold pending a groundwater study. If the project eventually goes forward, water would be pumped from the aquifer about 20 miles away from Verde Springs.
Beverly views the pipeline as one of several potential threats. He also fears that if large farming operations move into the Big Chino Valley, as they have with dairies and pistachio orchards elsewhere in the state, they could pump vast quantities of groundwater from the same aquifer that supplies much of the upper Verde’s flow.
“The law permits it. And historically, if there’s water there, somebody is going to try and get it,” Beverly said.
He’s also concerned that more subdivisions and new homes sprawling across open land would consume vital water. He has written to state water officials to warn that plans for new development in the Little Chino Valley will worsen the situation of groundwater overdraft.
Several years ago, Beverly helped produce a documentary titled “Viva La Verde” about threats facing the river. He has worked for years on a proposal for the federal government to declare the upper Verde a Wild and Scenic River.
Beverly is 76 and became an activist after retiring in 2006. He previously taught chemistry at the University of California and Yavapai College, was a solar contractor and owned a retail computer store in Prescott.
In his current work, he enjoys leading groups of people on hikes along the Verde.
“Getting people’s feet wet in the river is the most powerful thing you can do,” he said. “They love it and they’re sold.”
Beverly has honed his arguments for ensuring the Verde’s survival. In one article, Beverly laid out 10 reasons for protecting the Verde, from its natural beauty to its recreational value for hiking, hunting, fishing, camping, kayaking and birdwatching.
The Verde River watershed comprises only 5.8% of Arizona, he wrote, but supports about three-fourths of the wildlife species found in the state, making it one of the major biodiversity hotspots in the Southwest. There are at least 18 species in the watershed that are listed as threatened or endangered, including eight native fish species, such as loach minnows and razorback suckers.
And the Verde is unique among Arizona’s major rivers, he wrote, because much of the Gila, Salt and Santa Cruz have been consumed by dams and groundwater pumping, the Colorado River is heavily used and no longer
reaches Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, and the San Pedro River is “struggling for life.” (All of Arizona’s rivers are tributaries of the Colorado, but while the Little Colorado still flows into the main-stem Colorado, the others join the Gila, which disappears and becomes a dry riverbed in the desert among farm fields in central Arizona, long before its confluence with the Colorado.)
“The Verde River is the longest surviving living river in Arizona,” Beverly wrote in the article. “To protect the Verde, we need to use less water and reduce groundwater pumping.”
Offering ideas of what people can do, he suggested conserving water, relying on drought-tolerant landscaping and voting for candidates “that care and have a clue” so that rivers become an election issue.
“We must modernize Arizona water law,” he said.
To explain what’s at stake, Beverly showed a map of the river. Its lower portion fills reservoirs at Horseshoe Dam and Bartlett Dam, which store drinking water for the Phoenix area, and the river meets the Salt River near Scottsdale.
The part that’s especially at risk is the upper Verde, Beverly said. A 25-mile stretch starting at Verde Springs was highlighted in yellow on the map, next to another upstream section in red that has already dried up.
“That’s what we’re really worried about, losing the upper part of the river,” Beverly said. “Losing these springs would devastate the upper Verde.”
His activism has put him at odds with local officials and others who favor more development and who suggest their plans for groundwater pumping likely won’t harm the river.
“That’s a battle. There is a fundamental conflict over this resource,” he said. And it’s this tough fight, he said, that energizes him to work harder.
“We’re losing big time because the deck is stacked against us,” he said. “Arizona water law is designed to facilitate economic development and growth. It doesn’t even mention environment. It has no concern for rivers at all.”
‘A life-sustaining river’
People have been relying on water from the Verde River, and the bounty of its ecosystem, for thousands of years.
Rocks in parts of the Verde Valley are adorned with thousands of petroglyphs and pictographs made long ago by Indigenous people.
Archaeologist Peter J. Pilles Jr. has written that the earliest rock art in the valley dates to between 9500 and 7000 B.C., and includes lines, grids and asterisks scratched into the rock. Later, between 600 and 1400 A.D., the Southern Sinagua people scratched and drew petroglyphs and pictographs containing human figures, birds, snakes, flute players, footprints, handprints and hunting scenes.
The remnants of dwellings where people lived centuries ago are preserved at Montezuma Castle and Tuzigoot national monuments. The Tuzigoot pueblo was built on a limestone ridge overlooking the floodplains of the Verde, where the inhabitants found water year-round and irrigated crops like corn, beans, squash and cotton.
The river continues to hold deep cultural significance for members of the Yavapai-Apache Nation. The Verde runs through their reservation lands, and over the decades, its declining flows have been apparent to tribal elders.
“I’ve seen quite a change in the Verde River from when I was growing up and swimming in the river. It was deep and wide,” said Vincent Randall, the 81year-old manager of the Apache Cultural Preservation Department. “In some places today, you could practically jump across it.”
Randall, a former Yavapai-Apache tribal chairman, has been speaking out about the condition of the river for years, saying most springs are drying up due to the drilling of more wells and increasing pumping. He said the uncontrolled extraction of groundwater in the upper Chino Valley poses a big threat.
“It could dry the river up,” Randall said. “I think the well-drilling is what’s going to do us in. Because at this point in time, there’s really no control and just about anybody can go out there and drill a well. And towns want to grow.”
The Yavapai-Apache are one in a list of tribal nations in Arizona that still have unresolved water rights claims. Randall said he and other tribal leaders hope that if they secure a settlement of their water rights, that would help the river — because with a settlement, “Water has to be delivered.”
“We look at it as an entire settlement for the Verde Valley, that if we get our water settlement, the river hopefully will continue to run,” Randall said. “The intent of the whole thing is so that not only do we survive but the communities along with us will be able to survive.”
“Water is life,” Randall said. He recalled the words of Yavapai tribal elder Mary Sine, who in the 1930s told a grandson: “As long as the river flows, life will be good.”
“It’s a life-sustaining river,” Randall said.
“Water is very important to us on the Apache cultural side because we believe that water was one of the first things that was created by the Creator and put on this Earth,” Randall said. “And in our philosophy of life, we believe that because the Creator is a living entity, that anything that he creates, he puts himself into it and it has life. Just like a painter. A painter paints a picture and there’s something about him or her that’s represented in the painting.”
“So in a way, we look at all things as a living entity,” he said. “The river is a living entity, and we look at it that it deserves to live its life, so to say, just like us; that we should honor it, keep it clean and be thankful for it in giving us life.”
Randall said he thinks regulations should be put in place to control welldrilling and pumping, and to protect the river.
“Hopefully we don’t suck the aquifer dry. That’s the threat,” he said.
One option, he suggested, would be something like what New Zealand did in giving legal protection to a river. The country’s Parliament in 2017, after many years of calls for action by Maori tribes, passed legislation declaring the Whanganui River has the rights of a legal person.
Other initiatives elsewhere have similarly focused on enshrining legal rights for nature. In Colorado, the town of Nederland recently passed a resolution to protect Boulder Creek and its watershed by granting them rights.
In Arizona, less transformational proposals have foundered. One bill that died without a hearing in the state Legislature this year focused on protecting flowing streams and rivers. The measure, introduced by Sen. Kirsten Engel, D-Tucson, would have written into state law the concept of “ecological water needs” and recognized the purpose of maintaining watershed health as a “beneficial use” alongside other uses of water.
Engel’s proposal has been introduced in its current or similar form for four years and has failed to move forward. Other proposals that have yet to gain traction at the Legislature would strengthen groundwater rules and oversight in unregulated rural areas where water levels are dropping.
The state’s 1980 groundwater law regulates pumping and well-drilling in “active-management areas” around Phoenix, Prescott, Tucson, and Santa Cruz and Pinal counties. But groundwater levels have continued to decline in large portions of these areas. And outside these and a few other semi-managed zones, there are no rules limiting how much water can be pumped or how many wells can be drilled.
In much of the state, including a large portion of the Verde watershed, groundwater remains unmanaged and unregulated.
“Definitely something should be done,” Randall said. “We’re not talking 30, 40, 50 years. We’re talking 10 years. You know, what’s going to happen here in 10 years? Is the Verde still going to
flow?”
He fears the worst.
“I suspect one of these days, the Verde is going to dry up, in the near future here, at the rate we’re going,” Randall said. “It would be a wasteland.”
Dry wells near the river
On a sweltering afternoon in July, Beverly drove through a neighborhood outside Chino Valley where the roads are unpaved and homes sit on large lots. Next to some houses stood dark plastic tanks.
He soon passed more than a dozen homes with water tanks.
“All that is dry wells,” Beverly said as he drove. “The groundwater overdraft is affecting the lives of many families.”
People who haul water for a living have been busy. One by one, they park tanker trucks at an automated water station next to a Walgreens in Chino Valley, where they put a large hose in the tank and fill up.
Stan Bindell lives nearby and pays $75 every two weeks to get water delivered to his home. When he bought the house in 1999, there was a working well and flowing faucets.
But in 2013, the well went dry. “One day you have water, and now all of a sudden you don’t. It was really upsetting,” said Bindell, a freelance writer who regularly publishes articles about hiking in Arizona.
By the time his well failed, many of his neighbors already had dry wells due to the declining groundwater. Standing on his front porch, he motioned to other houses all around.
“They’re dry. They’re dry. They’re dry. They all have water tanks,” Bindell said. “We’re talking many homes.”
He has a 2,500-gallon water tank. He and his wife carefully watch their water use.
“We mostly use paper plates because of this. And if we do have dishes, just hand-wash them quickly,” Bindell said. “It’s inconvenient. Well, and the other thing is, from what we’ve been told from realtors, it also decreases the value of the home.”
He has thought about paying to have a new well drilled, but it would cost thousands of dollars and there would be no guarantee of accessing water. One neighbor hired a well-driller a couple of years ago, he said, and even though the driller went deeper underground, he came up dry.
“It could cost you a ton of money, and you could still get nothing,” Bindell said.
Officials at the Arizona Department of Water Resources don’t have a complete count of how many wells have gone dry in recent years because they collect information only when employees encounter dry wells while visiting an area to measure water levels, or when a resident reports a well that has gone dry. But a map produced by the department shows 340 wells statewide were dry when checked during visits between 2010 and 2020.
The red dots on the map are scattered across the state, from Kingman to Douglas, and one cluster of red dots appears in the upper Verde watershed.
In addition to the inconvenience and cost of relying on trucked water, Bindell said he’s troubled by what the water shortage means for the streams he enjoys hiking along.
“It’s a water problem throughout the state and throughout the West,” he said. “And I know the Verde River is going down.”
The reasons include more people moving to the area, which is leading to increased groundwater pumping, Bindell said.
“Construction, from my point of view, is out of control here,” he said. “I’m not anti-development, but I am for planned development and slower development.”
Bindell said he’s considering moving to Prescott, where he would have access to the city’s water system.
About a mile from his home, the water level in one well that is regularly
measured has declined 46 feet since the early 1990s, according to state data, dropping an average of 1.7 feet per year.
Bindell said he blames government officials at the state and local levels who have allowed the drawdown to occur.
“We need more people in elected office who are concerned about the water situation,” he said.
Growing calls for change
Across much of Arizona, groundwater levels are dropping. The largest declines have occurred in rural areas where there are no limits on pumping, and where large corporate farming operations have moved in and drilled new wells.
Vast megafarms have proliferated in the desert, irrigating tens of thousands of acres of alfalfa, corn, pistachios and other crops.
Where hay farms have expanded in La Paz County, some families have seen their wells suddenly dry up. And in farming areas around Willcox, where the arrival of a giant dairy operation and other new farms have added to the uncontrolled well-drilling and pumping, some people have been left with dry wells and others are increasingly worried about the future.
There have been several locally driven attempts to limit groundwater pumping in three counties — Cochise, La Paz and Mohave — but all have been unsuccessful, in large part due to provisions of the state’s current law that hinder such steps.
During the past two years, state legislators proposed more than a dozen bills focusing on groundwater in rural areas, seeking to establish rules and strengthen oversight where water levels are falling.
The proposals were introduced following a 2019 investigation by The Arizona Republic that revealed how unchecked pumping by farms has been draining groundwater in much of the state. An analysis by The Republic showed water levels in nearly a fourth of the wells in Arizona’s monitoring program dropped more than 100 feet since they were drilled. The investigation detailed how large farms have been dramatically expanding their operations, in places drilling wells up to 2,500 feet deep, and how the largest water-level declines have occurred in areas where there are no limits on pumping.
Thus far, the proposed groundwater bills in the Legislature have failed to move forward. But lately, there have been signs of momentum building for measures targeting parts of Arizona where groundwater is unregulated.
In the Kingman area, local officials have called for state action to address the problems of declining groundwater.
In the Willcox area, concerned residents have begun organizing and meeting to discuss potential solutions. Some formed a group called Arizona Water Defenders and plan to begin gathering signatures to petition for a vote on creating new active-management areas in the Willcox and Douglas groundwater basins in the Sulphur Springs Valley.
“A lot of people’s wells are running dry,” said Beau Hodai, a campaign manager and spokesperson for the group. “My motivation stems from concerns for the longevity of our community.”
If residents vote to approve the creation of new managed areas, Hodai said, there would be a permanent freeze on new irrigation. He said the rise of industrial-scale agriculture has occurred as out-of-state growers have bought land to take advantage of the lack of restrictions on pumping. He called it a water “free-for-all.”
In addition to the dry wells, Hodai said, people are alarmed about other consequences of overpumping, such as sinking ground.
In parts of the Sulphur Springs Valley in Cochise County, satellite measurements show the ground has sunk as much as 15 inches since 2010. Gaping fissures have appeared in the earth on both sides of what state officials describe as a “subsidence bowl” caused by groundwater depletion. The fissures have left large cracks in roads that have had to be repaired.
“We just have to put the brakes on it if any of us are going to be able to live here in 10, 20 years,” Hodai said.
There also have been growing calls for measures to protect the flowing rivers that remain. Environmental activists have warned that the San Pedro River is in danger of drying up due to heavy water use. And members of the Hopi Tribe have voiced fears about the effects of groundwater pumping on the shrinking flows of the Little Colorado River and springs they consider sacred.
Rep. Regina Cobb, R-Kingman, said during legislative committee meetings in August that she will again introduce two groundwater proposals that died without being heard during the last two sessions.
One of the bills would enable county supervisors to create a new “rural management area” if they determine overpumping puts water supplies at risk.
“What this does is it allows our local officials, the county supervisors, the people within the community, to be able to be involved in an aquifer that’s at risk. And if the aquifer is at risk, then they can say, these are some mitigation
things that we can do to help with the aquifer,” Cobb said during an Aug. 11 meeting. She noted that Arizona’s 1980 groundwater law left out rural areas, and said these communities are overdue to have ways of managing their water.
“Now I think people are looking at, ‘Let’s do something,’” Cobb said. She added that a rural management area wouldn’t bring the type of regulation that applies to urban areas. “This is kind of a halfway in-between. It gives us another tool in the toolbox.”
Supporters of Cobb’s legislation include the Environmental Defense Fund, National Audubon Society and other groups that belong to the Water For Arizona Coalition.
Jocelyn Gibbon, a water policy consultant, recently helped prepare a detailed document for the coalition laying out a list of potential approaches for local groundwater management that could be adopted in rural areas. The document includes a variety of potential “tools,” such as passing conservation ordinances, adopting local water management plans, establishing groundwater protection zones, limiting the expansion of irrigated farmland and limiting the amount of water that can be pumped from a well annually.
These types of approaches can help throughout the state, Gibbon said, and in the Verde River’s watershed.
“The number one threat to a flowing Verde River in the future is our inability under current state law to protect the groundwater that feeds the river,” Gibbon said.
“We don’t have time to waste,” she said. “The amount of groundwater that’s been used in the Verde watershed as a whole and in the upper Verde has been increasing over time. And right now, there is every reason to expect that our groundwater use will continue to increase unless we deliberately do something to change how we’re managing and using water.”
Last year, when two conservation groups produced a “report card” on the health of the Verde watershed, they gave it a C-plus. One factor lowering the grade, according to the Nature Conservancy and Friends of the Verde River, was the significant decline in the river’s base flow during the driest time of the year over the past 30 years.
Gibbon previously helped develop the Verde River Exchange, a voluntary water offset program in which some well owners can buy “credits” to continue pumping, while others — such as farmers or homeowners — temporarily reduce their use of surface water from the Verde or its tributaries. She said this program, which began in 2016, represents a step toward “a different type of relationship with water” along the Verde.
Officials in cities, towns and the Yavapai County government also have roles to play, Gibbon said, “in helping to ensure that development is as watersmart as possible and encouraging low water-use development.”
And yet, local officials’ hands are still tied, she said, by the lack of avenues in state law for managing groundwater. Cobb’s proposal for rural management areas is promising, Gibbon said, because it would allow people to develop local plans to sustain their water supplies — and also help rivers like the Verde survive.
“If you want to keep rivers and streams in Arizona flowing, you need to protect groundwater,” Gibbon said. With climate change unleashing hotter and drier conditions, she said, “it just makes it all the more important.”
In the headwaters, a spring fades
In the Verde River watershed, state data shows that the amount of water pumped from wells far exceeds the amount of water that seeps into the ground each year to replenish aquifers.
Unlike other parts of Arizona, there is no canal bringing imported water from elsewhere, so the area’s towns and scattered farms rely on groundwater, which
is slowly replenished with runoff from rain and snow in the surrounding mountains.
Part of the watershed lies in the Prescott active-management area, but even in this regulated area the Arizona Department of Water Resources acknowledges there isn’t a long-term balance. In one presentation, state officials listed the area’s estimated overdraft at 12,154 acre-feet in a single year, nearly 4 billion gallons, equivalent to the water use of approximately 36,000 single-family homes in the Phoenix area.
In a recent report examining declines in groundwater levels and the “myth of safe-yield” in the state’s managed areas, researchers Kathleen Ferris and Sarah Porter of Arizona State University noted that Prescott is one of the areas with a significant overdraft problem. They recommended state officials move quickly to curb unsustainable overpumping in Arizona’s urban areas and prevent aquifers from continuing to drop.
In the Prescott active-management area, state data from 47 wells showed widespread water-level declines between 2008 and 2018. The median change was a 7.8-foot decline, while one well dropped 65.7 feet.
The trends are similar in the other parts of the watershed where pumping isn’t regulated. In the same 10-year period, 42 wells that were measured in the Big Chino subbasin had a median decline of 2.5 feet, while the biggest drop in one well was 13.5 feet.
While these declines in the water table have occurred largely out of sight, other changes have been visible above ground. To show some of these changes, Beverly pulled over his truck on the side of a gravel road.
Standing by a barbed-wire fence, he pointed to what remains of Del Rio Springs, which historically was the headwaters of the Verde. Nearby on private property, cottonwoods and willows grew. Cows grazed in a green pasture.
In this area of the Chino Valley, groundwater once welled up and emerged in the flat grassland, forming an oasis. Beverly said the spring was a lovely place to visit when he first started coming in the 1970s.
“When I moved here, we could have picnics and go swimming here. And now it’s basically dry,” Beverly said. “It’s almost completely dry because of groundwater pumping.”
Del Rio Springs played a role in Arizona’s history. Shortly after President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill in 1863 creating the Arizona Territory, troops established a military post near the springs. According to the Chino Valley Historical Society, the first issue of the Arizona Miner newspaper in 1864 reported that the fort was located “on the banks of Cienega Creek, a never failing stream of clear, sweet water.”
Years later, in 1901, the city of Prescott began using a boiler and pumping equipment to send water from the springs through a pipeline to a city reservoir. And in the early 1900s, water from Del Rio Springs also was used to fill tank-cars on the Santa Fe Railroad, which carried the water to water-scarce towns such as Seligman, Williams and Winslow, and later to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.
More than a century later, a small flow still emerges at the spring but it’s dwindling, Beverly said.
“We know what’s causing it. It’s due to groundwater pumping,” he said.
The stream that once flowed from Del Rio Springs to Verde Springs has disappeared. Now, portions of the dry creek bed have flowing water only occasionally when rains bring runoff.
This summer’s monsoon storms brought floods that coursed through the watershed in pulses of muddy, brown water. But Beverly said these periodic big flows don’t change his concerns about losing the upper Verde’s yearround base flow, “the thing that keeps a river alive.”
“We’ve already lost 6 miles of the Verde to groundwater pumping, from Del Rio Springs to Verde Springs,” Beverly
said. “I feel badly that humanity takes such a huge toll on nature. And I think that we could live with a much lighter touch on the land.”
As he spoke, trucks passed on the road, billowing clouds of dust.
“What’s happened here is a vision into the future of Verde Springs and the Verde River,” he said. “The river is in such a sensitive, precarious position.”
Beverly drove through the grasslands and crossed train tracks, then headed along a dirt road through juniper trees. Some of the trees were brown, apparently dying in the extreme drought.
“They’re really hurting, aren’t they?” Beverly said.
He parked and headed off on foot down a steep trail into the canyon, where he stopped to talk with a couple who were trudging uphill, lugging a cooler. They had been swimming.
“I think this is the cleanest water we’ve been in. It’s nice and clear,” Jacob Aguilar told Beverly.
As they chatted, Beverly told him that groundwater pumping threatens the river, and that it’s not adequately protected.
“It would suck to see it go. That’s crazy,” Aguilar said. “What can you do?”
“Well, you can vote for people that will change the laws to protect the river,” Beverly said. “Ultimately, it’s a political issue. And personally, you can watch your water. You can do personal water conservation. It’s minuscule help. But it’s a help and it’s the right thing.”
They said goodbye and Beverly continued downhill.
The lush ribbon of riparian forest spread out in a meandering path through the canyon, evoking the river’s name — verde, green in Spanish.
Reaching the shady riverbank, Beverly stopped and stood by the clear water.
He pointed to a stump that had been gnawed by beavers and resembled a rough-hewn pencil, an example of their expertise, he said, as “habitat engineers.” Other animals that live along the upper Verde include badgers, foxes, coyotes, elk, deer and mountain lions.
This stretch of the river, and for miles downstream, is “some of the finest surviving riparian habitat” in Arizona, Beverly said, and it all depends on the springs.
“My fundamental purpose is protecting this river,” Beverly said.
Looking to the future, he said, people will need to keep working to protect the river for many years to come.
Walking downstream along the bank, Beverly met a large family who were sitting in folding chairs and having a picnic. Their children splashed in the water, shrieking and whooping.
One girl dangled from a rope-swing. Another sat in the current and slid down a concrete weir as if it were a waterslide.
Brian Porcayo, an uncle of the children and a tile worker, said all the new housing construction that’s occurring in the area makes him wonder about the water situation. His family gets tap water from a well at their home in Chino Valley, but he knows many others must rely on tanks.
“I am concerned that our well’s going to run out, too,” Porcayo said. “I am concerned that at some point, the water’s just going to be gone.”
As for the spring, Porcayo said he hopes it stays the way it is.
“It’s a wonderful place,” he said, watching the kids in the stream.
Beverly said he felt happy seeing people enjoying the water like this, because when people truly appreciate the Verde, and understand the threats it faces, they may become its defenders.
Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust. Follow The Republic environmental reporting team at environment.azcentral.com and @azcenvironment on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.