Here’s an in-depth look at Ruedi Reservoir administration from Hannah Holm writing for the Glenwood Springs Post Independent. Click through and read the whole thing. Here’s an excerpt:
Take, for example, a few water molecules that begin their terrestrial journey as snow in the mountains just East of Aspen. In the spring, they melt and flow into the Frying Pan River, a tributary to the Roaring Fork.
Some of these molecules are captured early and flow east into a tunnel bound for the Arkansas River Valley. Once across the Divide, they may help float a raft or two on their way to a cantaloupe field in Rocky Ford. Other molecules keep flowing west, until they are captured a little ways downstream in Ruedi Reservoir.
Even though these two sets of water molecules are separated soon after birth, their fates remain closely tied.
The molecules in Ruedi Reservoir will stay there, helping provide a pleasant boating and fishing environment, until they are released to flow down to the Roaring Fork and then the Colorado River en route to a Palisade peach orchard that has been relying on water out of the Colorado River since long before any of those tunnels to the Arkansas were drilled.
The ability to store and release water from Ruedi is what permits those other molecules to keep flowing across the Divide, even when water is needed downstream by users with more senior, and therefore higher priority, water rights.