Fifteen years ago, Prairie Public produced a documentary series called Mother Nature in Charge. It was about the decades-long plight of the Devils Lake Basin, which reached its most dramatic heights in 2011.
What’s happened in the years since is what’s always happened. A couple of years of normal to lower precipitation levels drive the lake level down, and then another year or two of heavier rains and snowfalls erase all that progress. Lather, rinse, repeat.
As many of our listeners may know, I grew up in the Devils Lake region. I spent my childhood watching my grandparents get chased off their farm, and my dad writing letters with aerial pictures to lawmakers asking for help. And we all felt helpless to watch as the lake ate up the basin road by road, acre by acre, farm by farm. The producers of our documentaries wanted me to sit and talk to my dad about it.
"We have about, probably over 5,000 acres that's flooded. Most of the land I own is flooded," my father, Dan Webster, said at the time.
"What do you remember of having to burn the house?" I did not like asking this question.
He paused. "It was emotional," he said. "My dad was not an emotional person. He kept it inside. I can still see him standing there, you know. We just never talked about it, because... everybody knew what they were feeling."
My dad has since handed off the farm to the next generation. My brothers-in-law Evan Schoenfish and Kallen Freeman now own and operate Webster Farms. After some heavy rains inundated the upper basin and began pushing the lake level to more painful brinks once again this summer, I made some calls and did some reporting… but then I drove up to see some of it for myself. Again.
"Hopefully you can do what you can to keep water off the fields, you know... but there's only so much you can do. It's ultimately in God's hands, and you just go with it," Evan says.
I used to drive these roads out to my grandparent’s farm. Evan now takes them to maintain a 50-year-old tractor they’re using to pump water off a section of land they’ve been trying to keep dry as the upper basin drains. What he’s pumping onto went under 15 years ago.
We walk over to the tractor.
"We put a stake in over here, when the big rains came, so we would know how much the lake's gone up or gone down." He shows it to me.
No matter who you talk to about the Devils Lake flood, everyone seems to agree the solution should be simple… but the reality? It’s just not. When you zoom out, you realize… it’s a large basin. And a large problem.
Jeff Frith is Manager of the Devils Lake Basin Joint Water Resource Board.
"All the water from basically the Canadian border, up by St. John area over in the Turtle Mountains, flows downhill into Devils Lake. Gravity brings the water down here and it has nowhere to go. It pools and ponds, until it reaches a maximum elevation of 1458 feet above sea level, and then it flows into the Tolna Coulee into the Sheyenne River."
The Sheyenne River empties into the Red River, which flows north into Canada, emptying into Lake Winnipeg and eventually, the Hudson Bay. And Frith says at just about every point along that route, you can encounter a question that needs to be answered before draining meaningful water off the top of Devils Lake.
There are state laws, questions of water quality and aquatic species, and even an international treaty with Canada that promises we won’t unfairly inundate them with water.
Problems with the water in the Devils Lake Basin can be traced back several generations – with each one facing that question of what to do. Frith has been in his job for about 18 years.
"The Devils Lake Joint Board, before I came on board here, had a plan to clean out the Tolna Coulee. And they were questioned about the legality of it... and they didn't want to be sued. They didn't want to find themselves in a legal battle. And I asked a former state representative about, why something hadn't been done? He simply said, 'the lack of political fortitude.'"
One thing’s for sure: at this point, there’s no going back. And this has meant everyone in the basin has had to make do with what they have.
What they have a lot of right now, of course, is water – and for all the problems the water has caused the agricultural community, it has spurned a strong recreational economy.
Suzie Kenner is executive director for the Devils Lake Department of Commerce and Tourism.
"Our economic direct spending for tourism in Ramsey County is $61 million to $64 million a year. So when you look at it, for us as a community, that direct spending means a lot. It's probably our second largest industry behind agriculture."
Kenner says many farmers who lost agricultural land to the lake were able to pivot and develop campgrounds and resorts. And she says they are enjoyed by local residents as much as anyone who travels from far away.
"There's not a lot of places in the United States, or even in the state of North Dakota, where you can get off work at 5 o'clock, the family meets up at home, and you're having sandwiches and water skiing on the lake on a weeknight at 5:30. Or you can go out and fish, or do whatever you want with those opportunities out on the lake."
Kyle Blanchfield’s grandparents bought their property in the 1940s, making their living farming and ranching. In 1988, he acquired it and took a chance on an idea for a resort. His grandmother’s walkout basement became The Cove restaurant, the pasture became a small campground, and four cabins were available to rent.
In 1993, it started raining, and as Kyle puts it, they “got chased up the hill a couple of times” over the years. The restaurant is currently in its third location, and people travel from all over the country to stay at the Woodland Resort while they hunt and fish.
"You know, I've been in 22 building moves. Some of them were moved more than once, and not one of them was fun... some of them were tough, including my own parents house. That was probably more emotionally difficult than cabins and restaurant buildings. But what do you do? Either you throw in the cards and quit, or tough up and deal with it."
Blanchfield says his Norwegian stubbornness, along with belief and support from their local bank, is what kept his business going all this time. And even though today the resort is built to withstand the lake at its highest possible level, he knows the community could not withstand it.
A dam at the Tolna Coulee, completed in 2012, prevents the floodwater from spilling over into the Sheyenne River – which would spell catastrophe for everyone along that route. Two small outlets on the east and west ends of Devils Lake can pump off water at a combined rate of 600 cubic feet per second, and evaporation is supposed to remove about 30 inches or so of water per year. But just ask any farmer, resort owner, or homeowner near the water – these solutions to mitigate the lake level do not keep up with water flowing into it.
Blanchfield grew up north of Penn, North Dakota – a region where thousands of acres are inundated. And he says he knows how quickly progress can be erased.
"We just had those big rains up in Edmore and north of Cando, five, six inch rains. Mauvais Coulee was traveling at over 1200 cubic feet per second; I mean, that's a massive flow. It's one of the biggest flows I've ever seen, even since the 1997 flood in Grand Forks. That's a ridiculous flow, and it just tells you... flip the switch, we're in a drought. Flip another switch, and we're dealing with too much water."
So what can be done?
"I can't imagine what this area looks like at 1458. There'd be so much gone, it's hard to even imagine that."
Representative Kathy Frelich has represented District 15 in the state legislature, which includes the Devils Lake Basin, since her election in 2022. We met at a local coffee shop in Devils Lake, where I asked her about her efforts to move the needle on more solutions for the community. Like Jeff Frith, she says “political fortitude” is hard to come by in Bismarck. But she does have some ideas.
Landowners, by and large, have no mechanism to be made whole when their farms are taken by the flood. That’s because due to North Dakota’s Sovereign Lands law, despite the land being in their name and a property tax bill they’re expected to pay – that land officially now belongs to the state of North Dakota. It applies to all land under navigable water and below the “ordinary high water mark.” But Frelich says these laws are written with rivers in mind – not closed basin lakes.
"So, the bill I was introducing to our committee excludes patent land that was given prior to statehood from the Sovereign Land Act, which means the state can't lay claim to it. Now that, in itself, is going to be a huge ask. There's already questions because of all the lawsuits that have already occurred. But when you look at those lawsuits, they all concern rivers. Not lakes. So my thought is, yes, if this is going to go to court, let the judges decide and let's see if they believe the state owns this land or not."
Frelich says it’s a heavy lift in the legislature because changing those definitions could open a can of legal worms across the state – but it’s still worth asking the question. Despite the success of the tourism industry – it does not make up for lost revenue due to agriculture sector losses. An economic impact study by NDSU in 2011 found annual losses at that time in the $200 million range – every year.
Frelich and others I spoke with all wished there was more engagement from North Dakota’s executive branch of government. I did reach out to Governor Kelly Armstrong’s office for comment, but did not receive a response before publishing this report.
When I sat down with my dad fifteen years ago for Prairie Public’s documentaries about the flood, he expressed frustration… but also, determination.
"Just by nature, if you're a farmer, you're kind of an optimist and try to look at the bright side of stuff," he said. "I never thought it would get this bad. I always thought that the powers that be would do something before it got this bad. But I'm losing faith."
For now, the only thing they can do is what they’ve been doing. Evan says he plans to do exactly that.
I asked him if he thought they could ever plant on this land they're trying to save ever again.
"Yeah. I think the lake would have to go down about, three to four feet before we could get this back. We'd have to pump it all off, fix that road, make it good enough to hold water... it would take a lot of money. But we've done it before. It could happen again."
