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Local photo guild event features John Fielder show

Renowned nature photographer will be on hand in Gypsum today to judge a Vail Valley Art Guild Photographers competition. He's also doing a slide show to promote his new book about the Yampa RIver, the last free-flowing river in the Colorado River Basin.
John Fielder|Special to the Daily |

If You Go

What: John Fielder photo show and slide show, and Vail Valley Art Guild Photographers show

When 5 p.m. Saturday

Where: Gypsum library

Cost: Admission is free

Information: Vail Valley Art Guild Photographers (VVAGP) participated in a competition called “Ten Days on the Colorado!” Their best photos, judged by photographer John Fielder, will be on display. Fielder will also present a slide show and signs books and calendars.

GYPSUM — Renowned photographer John Fielder will present the best photos from a competition, 10 Days on the Colorado.

The Vail Valley Art Guild Photographers participated in the competition that spanned 10 days, July 3-12.

Fielder judged the competition, and all the prints will be displayed at the Gypsum Public Library during August.



Along with the competition photos, Fielder will present a slide show with music featuring his new project about the upper Colorado and Yampa rivers.

The Yampa is the last free-flowing river in the entire Colorado River basin. It runs for 249 miles from 11,500 feet in the Flattops wilderness area near Steamboat Springs, and descends more than 6,000 feet to parched desert. Along the way it bisects local, state and national parks, is enclosed in a 2,500-feet-deep canyon and morphs from a cold trout stream to a warm water haven for endangered fish.

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Fielder calls the Yampa “a wonderful anomaly in an otherwise river-enslaved Colorado River basin.”

Under Attack

However, the Yampa is under attack.

“There are proposals to undo this evolutionary masterpiece, all in a matter of 10 years, to support unsustainable population growth on the east slope of Colorado,” Fielder said.

Potential proposals include building billion dollar pipelines to transport the waters of the Yampa and Green rivers to Denver and its neighbors.

“I want this river ecosystem preserved. Water does not flow downhill … it flows to money, as Gov. John Love said in the 1970s,” Fielder said. “It’s my hope that this project and book gets inserted into Colorado’s water planning discussions and that diversion of Yampa River water to Colorado’s Front Range never happens.”

Staff Writer Randy Wyrick can be reached at 970-748-2935 and rwyrick@vaildaily.com.


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