President's Award

Our annual reception was a lot of fun and a great success! Over 100 supporters joined the Foundation to honor Russell George with the President's Award and Eric Hecox with the Emerging Leader Award. 

Special award presentations were made by Governor Bill Owens and Senator Mary Hodge.

CFWE's awards pay tribute to those who have significantly contributed to advancing the understanding of Colorado's water resources and to support CFWE's mission for balanced and accurate water education & information.  See the event flyer for additional details.

Dick Bratton—Gunnison Water Wheel

by Justice Greg Hobbs

This is the water conference all of Colorado comes to. Dick Bratton and Duane Vandenbusche started it up in the mid-1970s, hoping to center Coloradans on the virtues of Gunnison, Western State College and water. Vandenbusche, historian, teacher and writer; Bratton, lawyer, entrepreneur and member of the college board of trustees; both seeing an opportunity for open dialogue with other people engaged with water.

A multitude of water topics have been discussed and debated at the workshop during the past four decades. State and federal legislators, county commissioners, city councilpersons, water utility directors, lawyers, Indians, environmentalists, representatives of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and other federal agencies, paleo-hydrologists and other citizens interested in their neighboring watersheds all confabulating inside the meeting hall and outside on the courtyard for after-hours barbeques, beers in hand. The idea, said Bratton, ‘all responsible positions fairly represented.’

Bratton, 2009's recipient of the Colorado Foundation for Water Education's President's Award, in recognition of his leadership and contribution to water education in Colorado, grew up in Salida, on the opposite side of the pass from Gunnison. His mother, Mary, was teaching in a one-room schoolhouse on the east side of Marshall Pass, in Monarch, when the Great Depression hit in 1930. Lyle Bratton, Dick's father, was working as a miner at the Colorado Fuel and Iron limestone quarry at Monarch. His parents met, married in 1931, and welcomed Dick in 1932.

During summer vacation from Western State College in the early 1950s, Bratton worked as a miner in the same Monarch quarry his Dad had. During the school year, he played football, wrestled, ran track, and majored in accounting and economics, graduating in 1954. Prior to graduating, he married Donna Howard, daughter of a third generation ranching family from outside Lake City. Now they have two daughters, Susan and Sara, and three grandchildren. They have a beautiful home overlooking Tomichi Creek, where Bratton loves to fish.

Read more: Dick Bratton, 2009 President's Award Winner

The Colorado Foundation for Water Education is honored to announce that Kenneth and Ruth Wright of Boulder are the recipients of the 2008 President's Award in recognition of their unparalleled legacy of personal and professional contributions to advancing the greater understanding of Colorado water resources science and management.

Their extraordinary individual and shared endeavors over their storied careers--Ken as a professional engineer and Ruth as an attorney and former Colorado lawmaker--to explore and explain the nature of this arid land's most precious natural resource have been unmatched in filling the reservoir of Western water wisdom that now informs citizens from schoolchildren to members of the Colorado Water Bar's Ancient and Honorable Order of the Water Buffalo, to which Ken will soon be inducted.

No strangers to honors and awards at home and abroad, Ken and Ruth Wright have literally gone to the ends of the earth in passionate pursuit of answers to how the rapidly expanding populations of Colorado and neighboring arid states can most wisely use the region's scarce water resources in ways that sustain both human communities and natural ecosystems.

Never content to constrain their quests to the here and now, the two have traveled to distant lands and times to find possible answers for the future by examining how the ancients engineered water supply solutions.

Through the resources of Wright Water Engineers Inc., the respected consulting engineering firm Ken founded in 1961; the Colorado Historical Society; and the Wright Paleohydrologic Institute codirected by the couple, Ken and Ruth Wright have led the groundbreaking scientific examination of water management practices among the first inhabitants of Machu Picchu and other ancient Inca communities in the peaks of Peru.

Their interest in the water supply ingenuity of the hemisphere's earliest civilizations also led them to research the water collection, storage and utilization practices of the ancestral Pueblans who dwelt among the high canyons of Mesa Verde.

These research projects, as well as earlier investigations by Ken of Colorado's disastrous Big Thompson Flood of 1976, have produced an invaluable body of archived and published resources generously offered in the interest of public service and charitable programs.

Among them are extensive Wright Water Engineers records on the flood donated by the company to the Colorado State University Libraries; books authored and illustrated by Ken and Ruth titled Water Mysteries of Mesa Verde, Machu Picchu: A Civil Engineering Marvel and The Machu Picchu Guidebook; and annual Machu Picchu calendars featuring photographs by Ruth Wright that have generated revenues donated in the World Bank's name to support a Washington, D.C.-based health care clinic for Latino immigrants.

Both Ken and Ruth also continue to lecture throughout the Americas, most recently at a 2007 workshop in Costa Rica on sustainable development, after which they traveled again to Peru to lecture at major universities and to receive that nation's Order of Merit for Distinguished Services from President Alan Garcia Perez for their water management research.

Ken and Ruth Wright have set the standard in Colorado for practicing water engineering and law as community service, driven by an avid interest in the sustainable use of the water resources that have and will continue to define the region and its inhabitants as they cautiously consider the possible local impacts of global warming. They have evidenced the courage and commitment that not only led them down the path to furthering the knowledge of water resources in the public interest but inspired many others to follow.