WILD HORSES IN DROUGHT'S GRIP : COLORADO RANGE SPECIALIST TRIES TO ENLIST FOOD, WATER FOR HERD.

Byline: Electa Draper The Durango Herald

For months Wayne Werkmeister watched storm clouds travel to the north, and to the south, but never over Disappointment Valley, where the wild horses of Spring Creek Basin are toughing out the drought.

When a rare cloudburst would streak the desert floor of far western Colorado, the rain would come too hard, too fast and too briefly to do anything but run away. It couldn't soak through the cement-hard ground or even the powdery soils.

Werkmeister might drive through mud to get to Spring Creek Basin, but as he draws near to where the wild horses are, his truck tires start kicking up big clouds of dust.

``Nothing will let loose on top of us,'' he says.

The always sparse vegetation looks more ghostly and dejected than usual.

``There isn't a quarter of last year's growth,'' says Werkmeister, the Durango-based wild horse and rangeland specialist for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

Last year every plant had a seed head; this year, there are none. The horses' favorite delicacy, Indian rice grass, cannot be found. Their mainstay, galleta, this year grew half as high and half as thick as last year. The galleta's usually grassy blades are like needles.

And all summer, Werkmeister would check the always scant springs and see them slowing to trickles or just disappearing. The best, most reliable water in the valley, Wildcat Creek, has been shrinking.

Werkmeister recently saw signs that basin wildlife - more of the horses, antelopes and others - were showing up at the creek in greater numbers. This crowding means their usual watering holes are failing them.

So Werkmeister spent a lot of this hot, smoky, dusty summer chasing relief for his 50 head of wild horses. He found some.

He borrowed a backhoe from the Montrose office and moved earth around to trap the water of a few springs, including Wildcat, in a pool - keeping more water on the surface instead of seeping back underground.

He also found an artesian well that was unleashed, then capped, during a previous era of mineral exploration in the basin. The well had begun leaking, and although the water is high in salt, Werkmeister dug it out some and let it pool.

``I do have a huge frustration with the interest groups,'' he says. ``It's so easy for them to pick up a phone or a pen . . . and say the horses are in trouble. My response was, `Help me. I have a very limited budget.' ''

So Werkmeister coaxed a sister agency, the U.S. Forest Service, into cleaning out a couple of existing small reservoirs, dry and filled with silt, so, in case of ``a rain event,'' they could actually store water. And he has cleared pads, dug trenches and laid troughs in two sites that now await two 12,600-gallon water tanks Amoco Production Co. agreed to donate.

``I called them up and said, `I'm hurting.' ''

But Werkmeister has no way of getting the tanks from the Durango area to the horses, more than 100 miles away, much of the route being a rutted dirt road. He had lined up a flatbed truck, but resources were diverted to fight the fire at Mesa Verde National Park.

Now he's trying to talk Fort Carson Army Post into helping out - no word yet. If the Army cannot help, Werkmeister faces a hefty tab, and his entire annual budget for the horses is only about $2,000 a year.

Now that Werkmeister is closer to securing water for the horses, he is starting to look at how to feed them. He said while many frown on feeding wild horses and other wildlife, they are hardly in a natural setting.

``Horses wouldn't stay here in years like this if we didn't make them,'' Werkmeister says. ``If they were really natural we wouldn't have designated a fixed boundary for them.''

He is not going to let the horses starve if he can help it.

``These are living, breathing animals,'' he says.