…when it finally freezes, [Ruedi Reservoir’s] surface becomes an ephemeral world all to itself. Al Beyer, an Old Snowmass-based architect who has been skating Ruedi’s winter surface since the 1990s, sees the ice as dynamic and complicated. Beyer said a person can even notice the ice forming its own kind of tectonic plates, which press and warp one another in a slow drama.
“It has tension and compression to it,” Beyer said.
The lake chatters, whistles and peals as vibrations run for miles across the lake. The sound of the ice is almost entirely unique — something between the sound of wind against high-tension bridge cables and a whale’s song.
“The whole thing starts moving and creaking with these really crazy sounds when you’re out on it. It’s a sound show,” Beyer said.
An image of the Crystal River Valley from an EcoFlight mission in August 2022. The view is downvalley, toward Mount Sopris. A group is exploring a federal designation of wild and scenic for the Crystal River in Gunnison and Pitkin counties.
Courtesy of Ecoflight
In Colorado, there are several ways to protect rivers, which vary depending on the goals.
To maintain water quality, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment offers an Outstanding Waters designation. If boosting the flows for boating is the goal, municipalities can get a Recreational In-Channel Diversion (RICD) water right. And to protect the environment, the state water board acquires instream-flow water rights, designed to maintain minimum flows.
But if the goal is preventing dams and transbasin diversions, and guaranteeing a free-flowing river, experts say a federal Wild & Scenic designation is the gold standard. That was the message from some presenters at a community summit on the Crystal River on Thursday at Roaring Fork High School in Carbondale.
“It’s the strongest, most robust form of river protection,” said Jennifer Back, a retired employee of the National Park Service and former member of the Interagency Wild & Scenic Rivers Coordinating Council. “If you like what’s out there right now, Wild & Scenic River designation does a really good job of protecting what’s there.”
Back was one of eight presenters at Thursday’s [October 26, 2023] open house, organized by a steering committee that is exploring the feasibility of Wild & Scenic designation and other management and protection alternatives. The committee is chaired by representatives from the town of Marble, Gunnison County, Pitkin County and the Colorado River Water Conservation District.
The meeting, which drew about 130 people, was the second community summit of a public stakeholder process aimed at evaluating local interest in pursuing protections for the Crystal River, which flows about 40 miles from its headwaters, in the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness, and through the towns of Marble, Redstone and Carbondale before its confluence with the Roaring Fork River.
Some residents of the Crystal Valley, along with Pitkin County, have long been proponents of a Wild & Scenic designation. But others, wary of any federal involvement, have balked at the idea.
Manette Anderson, one of just a handful of residents of Crystal, a tiny historic hamlet named for the river, is a member of the steering committee. She said she’s still learning and that it’s too early in the process for her to yet be in favor of, or dismiss, any of the options.
“Going into all this, I thought Wild & Scenic would probably not be an option I would be interested in, generally speaking, because of anecdotal concerns that other people in other areas of the country have had with Wild & Scenic experiences,” she said. “But I’m open to learning about it.”
The U.S. Forest Service determined in the 1980s that portions of the Crystal River were eligible for designation under the Wild & Scenic River Act, which seeks to preserve in a free-flowing condition, rivers with outstandingly remarkable scenic, recreational, geologic, fish and wildlife, historic and cultural values.
There are three categories under a designation: wild, which describes sections inaccessible except by trail, with shorelines that are primitive; scenic, which describes shorelines largely undeveloped but accessible by roads in some places; and recreational, which describe places readily accessible by road or railroad and that have development along the shoreline.
The initial Forest Service proposal for the Crystal included all three designations: wild in the upper reaches of the river’s wilderness headwaters; scenic in the middle stretches; and recreational from Marble to the Sweet Jessup canal headgate. Each river with a Wild & Scenic designation has unique legislation written for it that can be customized to address local stakeholders’ values and concerns.
Any designation would take place upstream from the big agricultural diversions on the lower portion of the river near Carbondale.
According to Back, the management framework for a Wild & Scenic River can be as unique as the river itself, and involve cooperative agreements between federal, state and local agencies. The “teeth” of the designation, she said, comes from an outright prohibition on federal funding or licensing of any new Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)-permitted dam. A designation would also require review of federally assisted water resource projects.
“What we mean by that is a project that basically is in the waterway below the ordinary high-water mark,” she said. “It could be a bridge; it could be a road; it could be power lines. It’s not an outright prohibition, but they do have to be reviewed before the project goes forward.”
Back said there are 228 rivers in the country with a Wild & Scenic designation. Many of them are in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. But with water managers historically unwilling to tie up potential future water development, Colorado has just 76 miles of one river — the Cache la Poudre — designated as Wild & Scenic.
Jennifer Back, a retired National Park Service employee and former member of the Interagency Wild and Scenic Rivers Coordinating Council talks with Crystal River valley resident Larry Darien at Thursday’s community summit on the Crystal River. Darien, who is on the steering committee exploring management options, has said he is in favor of protecting the Crystal but not in the form of a federal Wild & Scenic designation.
Protection options
In addition to Outstanding Waters, instream-flow water rights and RICDs, other potential river protections detailed at Thursday’s meeting include creating a National Conservation Area or Special Management Area (environmentalists are pursuing this on the Dolores River after determining that Wild & Scenic isn’t politically feasible there); 1041 regulations, which allow counties to maintain control over certain development; and local options such as riparian restoration projects and leasing agreements where water users can loan some of their water for the benefit of the environment.
Another option would be to create a management plan that doesn’t carry the same restrictions as Wild & Scenic but is still aimed at protecting ORVs, much like a stakeholder group on the upper Colorado River completed in 2020. This alternative management plan took more than 12 years to come to fruition, and participation of the stakeholders is voluntary.
Pitkin County Commissioner Kelly McNicholas-Kury, a member of the steering committee, said she continues to think that a Wild & Scenic designation is the best option for river protection that meets the criteria laid out by the stakeholder process: prevention of dams and out-of-basin diversions; sustainable recreation and tourism; support of local agriculture, water rights and property rights; limiting future development; and maintaining a healthy river corridor.
After Thursday’s presentations, attendees were asked to fill out a survey that ranked how well each option met these criteria.
A Wild & Scenic designation would not preclude any of the other protection options; multiple approaches could take place at the same time.
“Wild & Scenic would never get in the way of (Outstanding Waters), but Outstanding Waters is not going to give us what a Wild & Scenic River designation might,” McNicholas-Kury said.
According to McNicholas-Kury, the steering committee is striving for consensus among its members before it makes a recommendation to the public about a path forward for Crystal River protections. But if consensus cannot be reached, they can go to a super-majority vote that would require agreement of at least 75% of committee members.
“Folks have really come in with a desire to learn and a desire to keep an open mind,” she said. “I think there is a ton of consensus around wanting to protect the river, so I’m hopeful that we’ll get there.”
Lincoln Creek was yellow as it flowed into Grizzly Reservoir in September 2022. A report from the Environmental Protection Agency says metals contamination in the creek and reservoir is a result of natural causes, not a nearby mine. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
The results of water quality testing on Lincoln Creek show that the waterway is toxic to fish and that metals concentrations have been increasing in recent years. But because the main source of the contamination is a nearby tributary — and not a mine — it is unclear who should take responsibility for cleaning it up.
A report released this week by the Environmental Protection Agency shows that Lincoln Creek in the four miles between the Ruby Mine and Grizzly Reservoir exceeds state water quality standards for aquatic life for aluminum, cadmium, copper, iron, lead, manganese and zinc. Aluminum and copper concentrations were higher than standards set by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment in multiple locations: in Lincoln Creek downstream of Ruby Mine, in Grizzly Reservoir and in Lincoln Creek downstream of the reservoir.
“The high concentrations of these metals are toxic to aquatic life and make Lincoln Creek uninhabitable for fish,” the report says.
The report is based on water quality sampling data from 2022.
Karin Teague, executive director of the Independence Pass Foundation, said she is glad the report is finally out so that the community can talk about what to do about the contamination. The foundation’s mission is to restore and protect the ecological integrity of the pass corridor.
“We have a dead creek on our hands,” Teague said. “It’s a hard thing to see, and it’s a disaster for the living things that used to call the creek home. It’s bad for the wildlife and has human health implications.”
But those human health implications remain unclear.
In addition to exceeding standards for aquatic life, the report says cadmium, copper, iron and nickel were present in concentrations exceeding the state standards for domestic water supply.
Lincoln Creek feeds into the Twin Lakes Reservoir and Canal Company’s transmountain diversion system, in which Grizzly Reservoir is used as a collection pond before sending water through the Twin Lakes Tunnel to the Front Range, where it is used primarily in Front Range cities, including for drinking water. Colorado Springs Utilities owns the majority of the water in the Twin Lakes system.
The report says there is a slight potential that the metals are contaminating drinking water, but the substantial mixing, the distance that the water travels and the filtration limit these impacts. Lincoln Creek is a tributary of the Roaring Fork River, but Aspen’s domestic water supply is not affected; the city’s drinking water comes primarily from Castle Creek.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife stocks Grizzly Reservoir with fish each year, making it a popular and scenic spot for summer alpine fishing and camping. There have been fish die-offs in the reservoir in recent years, including 2021. But CPW aquatic biologist Kendall Bakich said that since Grizzly Reservoir is diluted with water from several surrounding cleaner drainages, fish can still survive there and CPW plans to continue stocking.
CPW stocks the reservoir with “catchable trout,” meaning anglers can take them out and eat them. Since the trout have been raised in hatcheries with clean water and food, and have probably lived in the reservoir for only a short time (most trout that aren’t caught by anglers during the summer don’t survive the harsh winter in Grizzly), Bakich said they are not likely to pose a risk to human health. But CPW tested the tissue anyway of some of the few fish that made it through the winter since they would have the most exposure to the toxic metals.
“We haven’t gotten the results back on those tissue samples,” Bakich said. “At this point, what we know about copper and how it resides in a fish’s body, it resides in the organs and people don’t eat the organs. If you are harvesting fish in the summer, they have just been put in there.”
Grizzly Reservoir was a bright shade of turquoise in September 2022. The man-made alpine lake has high concentrations of metals that are toxic to fish, according to a report from the Environmental Protection Agency.
CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Natural source of contamination
The report points to natural sources as the culprit for creek contamination, referring to a “mineralized tributary.” The mineralized tributary in question is a drainage in a steep slope above Ruby Mine, which flows into Lincoln Creek just below the discharge from the Ruby Mine portal. Prospectors dug for gold, silver, lead and copper at now-defunct Ruby Mine in the early 1900s.
The report says that the mine discharge and the mineralized tributary have very different water chemistry and that the contamination has been traced back to the tributary, not the mine. The report estimates that the mineralized tributary contributes 98.5% of the copper contamination to Lincoln Creek.
“While historical mining does appear to play a role in some of the impacts to Lincoln Creek, all of the data and observations point to natural sources as the major component of metals loading into Lincoln Creek,” the report reads. “Therefore, cleanup or removal activities associated with Ruby Mine would have minimal benefits to improve the overall quality of Lincoln Creek.”
The EPA is authorized to address elevated metals concentrations only from human-caused sources, not contamination from natural sources.
Yellow and white sediment settled on the streambed of Lincoln Creek in September 2022, prompting concerns from residents and local organizations, and water quality testing. A report from the EPA found that the creek has metals concentrations that are toxic to fish.
CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Climate change a cause?
Water quality issues on Lincoln Creek have been a concern for years, with the creek above the reservoir often running a yellowish color, and Grizzly Reservoir often a bright turquoise. In September 2022, Lincoln Creek below the reservoir turned a milky-green color, and white and yellow sediment settled on the streambed, prompting water quality testing in the fall of 2022 and the EPA report. These conditions in 2022 could be seen downstream at the confluence with the Roaring Fork River, sparking concern for local residents and organizations.
Although water quality issues on Lincoln Creek are not new, according to the report, the metals concentrations — especially copper — have increased over the past 20 years. And climate change may be to blame.
“While the exact cause for observed trends is not known, it is suspected that climate change may be altering hydrologic cycles and thawing once-frozen rock deep in the mountain,” the report reads. “These processes could expose more metals-bearing rock to oxygen, thereby increasing potential to generate acidic drainage and dissolution of metals.”
Now that the findings have been released, the next step is figuring out what to do about the contamination and which agencies should be involved. Pitkin County Environmental Health Manager Kurt Dahl said a meeting has been scheduled for Thursday with representatives from Pitkin County, CDPHE, the U.S. Forest Service, CPW, the Roaring Fork Conservancy, EPA, and the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety.
“Being a natural source, (EPA) is not going to deal with it,” Dahl said. “Is there another agency that will deal with it? The question of what are the next steps is one of the more important pieces to answer.”
Teague hopes to learn more about the potential health risks of the contamination and that the community can figure out a solution to clean it up.
“This is a community that cares a lot about its backyard, the health of its wild places,” she said. “If we can talk about building $50 million trails, maybe we can talk about millions of dollars to bring a creek back to life.”
Aspen Journalism is a nonprofit, investigative news organization covering water, environment, social justice and more. Visit http://aspenjournalism.org.
Pitkin County supports Aspen Journalism with a grant from the Healthy Community Fund. Aspen Journalism is solely responsible for its editorial content.
From left, Turnabout Ranch owner Brendan Doran, ranch hand Eric Tarala, engineer with Lotic Hydrological Jessica Mason and Roaring Fork Conservancy ecologist Andrea Tupy talk about the project site at the ranch. The ranch is one of four test sites that will receive soil treatments like aeration and biochar. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Local ranchers are hoping a soil health experiment will reveal clues about how they can better manage their land under dry conditions as the Colorado River basin continues to struggle under the effects of climate change and historic drought.
Four sites are participating in the project, which is being administered by the Roaring Fork Conservancy. Each of the participating grass and alfalfa fields will have six test plots: Two are controls that get no special soil treatments; two will be mechanically aerated, which involves perforating the soil with small holes so that plant roots can better receive water and nutrients; and two will receive aeration plus a layer of carbon-rich organic matter known as biochar.
Then, one plot from each treatment category will receive a normal amount of irrigation water and the other three will be watered only in the beginning of the irrigation season to mimic drought conditions.
The goal is to see if the soil treatments can maintain crop yield even when fields receive less water. Scientists and engineers from the conservancy and Carbondale-based engineering firm Lotic Hydrological took grass and soil baseline samples this season and will do so again next season after the treatments and compare them. If the soil treatment techniques work and are able to be scaled up, they could be part of the solution for drought-stressed crops and ranchers throughout the state.
Carbondale’s Turnabout Ranch, which gets its water from Prince Creek via the Mount Sopris Ditch, is participating in the project. Owner Brendan Doran, a ski pro at Aspen Skiing Co., says that bad snowpack conditions carry over from the winter.
“Being in skiing in the wintertime and having hard snow years, we have the same thing in agriculture,” he said. “And there’s a way to prepare ourselves for it. … Moving forward, we can have a better idea of how to manage things and keep the yield the same.”
Mike Spayd — another skier-turned-first-generation-rancher who works at Aspen Highlands — is participating in the project on ground he leases near his home in Missouri Heights. Junior water rights from the Spring Park Reservoir and Mountain Meadow Ditch irrigate the 90 acres of grass and alfalfa that gets a single cutting a year.
“We are dependent on a good runoff every year to fill that water right, and drought resiliency is an important part of farming no matter what your water rights are,” Spayd said. “Being able to make the most out of any water we have and develop drought resiliency is pretty important to me.”
Doran and Spayd use sprinkler systems to irrigate and say they want to improve the soil health of their land. The other two projects are on a Pitkin County-owned, 36-acre parcel in Emma known as the Shippee Open Space and a ranch near Basalt.
Mike Spayd points out the soil health project area on ground he leases in Missouri Heights. The project is aimed at exploring ways ranchers can maintain crop yields with less water.
CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
More state funding scales up program
Conservancy staff are overseeing the project, which is one of 31 drought-resiliency projects across the state under the umbrella of the Colorado Ag Water Alliance (CAWA) and partially funded with a grant from the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB). In addition to soil health, other projects around the state focus on growing more drought-resistant forage crops, irrigation efficiency and livestock.
The CWCB granted $183,700 in funding for the initial statewide program in 2022. The Pitkin County soil treatments project received $18,862, plus additional funding from The Nature Conservancy and Atlantic Aviation. The state grant money is funneled through CAWA to the conservancy and other local entities around the state that carry out the projects.
The Roaring Fork Conservancy is a Basalt-based nonprofit that focuses on watershed science and education programs, policy, stream management and restoration. Heather Lewin, conservancy director of watershed science and policy, said water is inextricably tied to agriculture — and that’s why the conservancy decided to do this project.
“We think agriculture brings value to our community,” she said. “There’s local food production, economic value, open space, wildlife passage, migration corridors, stewardship. … As you look at the future with less water available, are there ways for a water organization like ours to partner with people on the ground to see if agriculture can stay productive and continue to provide the benefits to the community.”
CAWA is expanding the drought-resiliency projects for next year and is accepting applications for the 2024 season. In September, the CWCB awarded nearly $1 million in funding to scale up the program. CAWA Executive Director Greg Peterson said next year’s program funding is also coming from Front Range water providers Denver Water, Aurora Water, Northern Water, Colorado Springs Utilities and the Walton Family Foundation.
The program is intended for projects that are small, innovative and unproven. Projects that can be scaled up and could have relevant findings for a lot of agricultural producers will be given top priority, Peterson said.
“There’s a lot of need to experiment and try out new ideas,” Peterson said. “You have to be able to make sure it’s not as risky financially for a farmer or rancher to try one of these projects.”
Doran and his wife, Sarah Willeman Doran, bought the Turnabout Ranch (formerly the Tybar Ranch) in 2021. The land needs a lot of love, he said, after years of drought and cattle grazing. His family’s vision for the 450 acres doesn’t include herds of cows, but they do plan on an equestrian facility for healing work with horses, in addition to growing hay.
“Once we get the test results back, we will be able to take the fields and make them more productive, more sustainable,” Doran said. “I think we’re just excited to participate and keep evolving the way that our environment is evolving.”
This alfalfa field is irrigated with water from the Crystal River via the East Mesa Ditch. Sinkholes have caused the ditch to collapse, cutting water to about one-third of the acres irrigated with ditch water. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
A Carbondale ditch company is looking for sources of funding after 30-foot-deep sinkholes caused the ditch to collapse in early September, cutting off water to downstream irrigators.
The East Mesa Ditch pulls water from the Crystal River mostly to irrigate about 740 acres of hay and alfalfa south of Carbondale. The ditch operator, East Mesa Water Co., received approval Sept. 20 for an emergency loan up to $418,140 from the Colorado Water Conservation Board to pipe the ditch and relocate it away from the area prone to sinkholes. The piped section will include a siphon and be about 1,500 feet long.
According to the CWCB memo, about 34% of the acres irrigated by the East Mesa Ditch are currently without water. The ditch is able to pull 41.8 cubic feet per second from the Crystal River using two water rights, the oldest of which dates to 1902.
East Mesa Water Co.’s secretary and treasurer, Richard McIntyre, said at the Pitkin County Healthy Rivers board meeting in September that the company would like to repair the ditch as soon as possible — definitely before next irrigation season — but first, they have to do a geophysical investigation so that they can avoid more sinkhole issues in the future. The ditch company, which has 12 shareholders, also plans to ask for grant money from the Colorado River Water Conservation District’s Community Funding Partnership as well as the Healthy Rivers program.
McIntyre and water company president Tim Nieslanik gave a presentation during the Healthy Rivers board meeting, held Sept. 21, but declined to speak further with Aspen Journalism. They have not yet asked Healthy Rivers for a specific amount of money.
“That is really going to depend on what the geophysicist discovers in this mesa and where the stable ground is,” McIntyre said. “You guys know water is kind of the lifeline for the ranchers here. Without it, we’re washed up, so to speak.”
Some Pitkin County Healthy Rivers board members see the East Mesa Ditch repair project as not only an opportunity to help local agricultural producers but a chance to potentially benefit the Crystal River.
“We are excited about opportunities where we can both help out the ranchers and farmers that are being hurt by this damage to the canal but also set ourselves up for a partnership in the future where we can look at opportunities for water savings that can potentially be returned to the environment or ways to manage the ditch in a way that benefits the Crystal River more so than it has in its current state,” Healthy Rivers board vice chair Kirstin Neff said.
On the Western Slope, agriculture efficiency infrastructure projects — such as upgrading headgates and diversion structures, lining and piping ditches, and replacing flood-irrigated meadows with sprinkler systems — are often funded with grants from public entities and environmental organizations. Pitkin County Healthy Rivers also helped to fund repairs to the East Mesa Ditch in 2016.
The idea is that when irrigators have more-efficient systems, they don’t need to take as much water from the river, leaving more for the benefit of the environment and recreation. But whether these agricultural efficiency projects actually result in more water in the river is unclear. Some say it’s likely that if irrigators can more easily access their full water right, they will use more — unless they are paid not to do so.
At the Sept. 21 meeting, Neff asked how the project would support Healthy Rivers’ mission, which is to improve the water quality and quantity in the Roaring Fork River watershed.
Nieslanik responded that the East Mesa Water Company is interested in leasing some of their water for the benefit of the environment. An example of this is a program that allows irrigators to temporarily loan water to the state’s instream flow program. Colorado water law was tweaked in 2020 to make it more attractive to water-rights holders and effective as a conservation tool, and ranchers in the Gunnison River basin are leasing their water through this program.
“We’d actually like to lease water to help pay back these loans,” Nieslanik said. “We have water at certain periods of time in the year after second cutting. … We would like to consider the ways that our additional water could be a monetary source for us, as well as maybe a safety net for municipalities.”
Representatives of the East Mesa Water Co. have said in the past they would be open to leaving water in the river. Also, they have let other water users borrow some of the ditch’s flow in the past. During an August 2018 first-ever call on the Crystal River, the East Mesa Ditch loaned 1 cfs to the town of Carbondale under an emergency substitute water supply plan.
“We bailed them out. They kindly sent us a check six months later for $10,000,” Nieslanik said. “We would love to do something the same way with you guys if you can help us fund this somehow.”
Nieslanik added that the company would like to get more irrigators to use sprinkler systems, which are more efficient than flood irrigation.
Finding creative arrangements with irrigators to boost streamflows on the Crystal during dry periods has long been a desire of some Healthy Rivers board members. So far, there has been just one such nondiversion agreement between rancher Bill Fales and the Colorado Water Trust that aims to leave more water in the Crystal River that he would usually divert using the Helms Ditch late in the irrigation season of dry years.
At the Sept. 21 meeting, Pitkin County Attorney John Ely voiced his approval for the county’s funding the East Mesa Ditch piping project. With agricultural water users laying claim to 86% of the water used in Colorado, many water managers who are focused on the environment agree that working with them instead of against them is the best way forward.
“The question is: How can we stay true to our charter of maintaining streamflow while helping somebody divert water from the river?,” Ely said. “You simply can’t preserve water in the river at all without someone you can work with and someone who holds a relatively senior water right. … You can’t solve the riddle of how to protect streamflow without working with agriculture.”
Arkansas Valley Conduit map via the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District (Chris Woodka) June 2021.
Click the link to read the article on the Reclamation website (Anna Perea and Darryl Asher):
President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law supporting major water infrastructure project to provide clean, reliable drinking water to 39 communities in southeastern Colorado
Sep 15, 2023
LOVELAND, Colo. – The Bureau of Reclamation has awarded a contract for the second segment of trunkline of the Arkansas Valley Conduit to Pate Construction Co., Inc. for $27,216,950.00. This contract, partially funded by President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, funds construction of Boone Reach 2, which includes a 5.4 mile stretch of water pipeline and 7.4 miles of fiber conduit. Construction will follow Colorado State Highway 96 from North Avondale to Boone, Colorado.
President Biden’s Investing in America agenda represents the largest investment in climate resilience in the nation’s history and is providing much-needed resources to enhance Western communities’ resilience to drought and climate change. Through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Reclamation is investing a total of $8.3 billion over five years for water infrastructure projects, including water purification and reuse, water storage and conveyance, desalination and dam safety. An overall $160 million has been allocated so far from the Law to complete the Arkansas Valley Conduit project.
This is a major infrastructure project that, upon completion, will provide reliable municipal and industrial water to 39 communities in southeastern Colorado. The pipeline will bring water from Pueblo Reservoir to Bent, Crowley, Kiowa, Otero, Prowers, and Pueblo counties. It is projected to serve up to 50,000 people in the future; equivalent to 7,500 acre-feet of water per year.
“We’re looking forward to this next project milestone,” said Jeff Rieker, Eastern Colorado area manager. “Today’s contract award allows the project to maintain the momentum we’ve built over the past year and helps us achieve the ultimate goal of bringing clean and reliable water supplies to the people of southeastern Colorado.”
“The Arkansas Valley Conduit is vitally important to the people of the Lower Arkansas Valley, so it is very rewarding to see the Bureau of Reclamation moving ahead,” said Bill Long, president of the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District, local sponsors of the Arkansas Valley Conduit. “The Southeastern District also is working to complete this project as quickly as possible to provide a better quality of water for the people of the valley.”
Work on the first segment of trunk line began in spring of 2023 with completion anticipated in 2024. Reclamation expects work on the second segment, Boone Reach 2, to begin in late 2023 with completion slated for late summer 2025.
As the Arkansas Valley Conduit project moves forward, under existing agreements, Reclamation plans to construct the trunkline, water tanks, and related components, while the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District coordinates with communities to fund and build the project’s water delivery pipelines. Eventually, the Arkansas Valley Conduit will connect 39 water systems along the 103-mile route to Lamar, Colorado.
The project will use Pueblo Water’s existing infrastructure to treat and deliver Arkansas Valley Conduit water from Pueblo Reservoir to a connection point east of the city of Pueblo along U.S. Highway 50. The project will use water from either the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project or from a participant’s water portfolio, but not from Pueblo Water’s resources.
Congress authorized Arkansas Valley Conduit in the original Fryingpan-Arkansas Project legislation in 1962 (Public Law 87-590). This project does not increase Fryingpan-Arkansas Project water diversions from the western slope of Colorado; rather, it is intended to improve drinking water quality.
Currently, many people in the areas that will be served by the Arkansas Valley Conduit rely on groundwater supplies that contain naturally occurring radionuclides, such as radium and uranium, or use shallow wells that contain harmful microorganisms and pollutants. Alternatives for these communities consist of expensive options such as reverse-osmosis, ion exchange, filtration, and bottled water.
If you have questions or need more information, please contact Anna Perea, public affairs specialist at the Bureau of Reclamation’s Eastern Colorado Area Office, at (970) 290-1185 or aperea@usbr.gov. If you are deaf, hard of hearing or have a speech disability, please dial 7-1-1 to access telecommunications relay services.
Pueblo Dam. Photo courtesy of Colorado Parks and Wildlife
Beavers have constructed a network of dams and lodges on this Woody Creek property. Pitkin County is betting big on beavers, funding projects that may eventually reintroduce the animals to suitable habitat on public lands. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
During the summer of 2020, Woody Creek landowner Jennifer Craig noticed that beavers had taken up residence on her property, building a dam across the channel and creating a pool.
The network of dams, pools and lodges has continued to grow over the past few seasons, creating a lush, muddy wetland thick with willows. And despite what Craig characterized as complaints about flooded land from downstream neighbors and calls for her to clear out the beaver handiwork she says the beavers are beneficial because they keep water on the landscape.
“As an upstream landowner, the best thing I can do is nothing,” she said. “Flooding from a beaver dam is natural, but people don’t like the chaos. Beavers provide habitat for so many other creatures, and they are keeping water in that whole corridor down there.”
Pitkin County is hoping that other landowners see things the way Craig does as it makes beavers a top priority, funding measures that may eventually restore North America’s largest rodent to areas it once lived in the Roaring Fork watershed.
Prized among early trappers for their fur that made fashionable hats, beavers were also seen as a nuisance to farmers and ranchers — perspectives used to justify killing them. But there has been a growing recognition over the past few years that beavers play a crucial role in the health of ecosystems. By building dams that pool water, the engineers of the forest can transform channelized streams into sprawling, soggy floodplains that recharge groundwater, create habitat for other species, improve water quality, and create areas resistant to wildfires and climate change.
The growing popularity of the animal caught the attention of Healthy Rivers board members, a group whose mission includes improving water quality and quantity. They are hoping to teach landowners how to coexist peacefully with beavers, correct beaver misconceptions and maybe even reintroduce them onto carefully chosen areas of the watershed. The Pitkin County Healthy Rivers board has spent just over $70,000 to date, with another $50,000 planned toward bringing back beavers, according to Healthy Rivers staff.
“They are so important for our environment and, in particular, our water environments,” said Wendy Huber, chair of the Healthy Rivers board. “How do we shift people’s perception of them from being destructive rodents to being our partners in protecting the environment?”
Woody Creek landowner Jennifer Craig points out the network of beaver dams, ponds and lodges on her property. She first noticed the animals had moved in during the summer of 2020 and the beaver dam complex has been growing each season. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Forest Service inventory
Healthy Rivers has, so far, come up with two ways to do that.
One is a public-awareness campaign called Bring Back Beavers that features cute yet edgy beaver characters and catchphrases (“It’s About Dam Time,” for example), with plans to put the slogans on T-shirts and stickers. A new website presents beaver facts (their teeth never stop growing) and busts beaver myths (they don’t eat fish).
The other part of the strategy is to fund a program with the U.S. Forest Service for a beaver survey that aims to document more than 200 randomly selected riparian sites on public land in the headwaters over two years to find where beavers are thriving and identify locations where they could be successfully relocated in the future. Healthy Rivers has spent $50,000 on the project, which paid for two Forest Service technicians to carry out the work and has earmarked another $50,000 for next season.
Clay Ramey, a fisheries biologist with White River National Forest, is leading the effort, along with two technicians in the field, Samantha Alford and Stephanie Lewis, who are spending the summer chasing beavers. Ramey said that for a watershed-scale project such as this, it is important to analyze data collected from around the entire region, not just in places where beavers live.
“Beavers come and go, so measuring known sites is not helpful,” he said. “We are in the habitat business, so we want to know the big-picture questions like where do we have beavers, where do we not have beavers and what is the habitat like at the places where we do have beavers and what is the habitat like at the places where we do not have beavers.”
To that end, Alford and Lewis have been heading into sometimes-remote sites on streams throughout the watershed — North Thompson Creek, Fryingpan River, Conundrum Creek, Hunter Creek, Snowmass Creek and others — to measure the width of waterways, the slope of streams, the types of vegetation present and any signs of beaver activity, past or present, such as dams, lodges or chewed sticks.
Beavers generally like slow-moving streams that are not too steep and have plenty of nearby willows, aspens, cottonwoods and alders, which they can use for food and building materials.
“We know slope is relevant to where a beaver can prosper,” Ramey said. “Aspen, cottonwood, alder — a site that has none of those is not a place a beaver is going to do well because it doesn’t have any food.”
Ramey hopes the information collected by the inventory project will be incorporated into revisions for the updated forest-management plan, which is in progress.
Samantha Alford, right, and Stephanie Lewis, technicians with the U.S. Forest Service, measure the slope and width of Conundrum Creek. Pitkin County has spent $50,000 on this summer’s beaver habitat survey and has earmarked another $50,000 for next season.
CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Beaver relocation
Tom Cardamone, executive director of the Watershed Biodiversity Initiative and former longtime director of the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies, is one of several beaver boosters who have been quietly meeting over the past few months, plotting how to communicate with the public about beaver restoration.
With permission from Colorado Parks & Wildlife, Cardamone has relocated nuisance beavers on Nicholson Creek, which is a tributary of Capitol Creek, but he realized that a more formal protocol will be needed if rehoming them becomes more frequent. An eventual outcome of Pitkin County’s campaign may be relocating troublemaking beavers on private land to sites identified by the Forest Service survey as prime habitat on public land.
“You need to catch a whole group and move them to get them to stick,” Cardamone said. “It takes a few days to catch them and you have to hold them someplace that’s protected and secure, so no predators. You have to clean them and make sure they are healthy and then move them all as a group. That’s a bit of a lift.”
But there may be a looming legal question about new ponds created by relocated beavers. This year, Colorado lawmakers rejected a version of a bill that would have made it easier for environmental groups to do stream-restoration projects that mimic beaver activities because of potential unknown impacts to downstream water rights holders. Engineers from the Division of Water Resources last year told groups proposing projects on Eagle County Open Space that would have included beaver dam analogues that they must get an augmentation plan — which are costly, require the work of attorneys and engineers, and involve a lengthy water court process — to replace the water lost to evaporation by the creation of small ponds.
Could the same thing happen if the ponds were created by actual beavers on Forest Service land?
“We have not seen any indication that there’s a substantial legal concern,” said Pitkin County Assistant Attorney Laura Makar.
That’s good news for Huber, who has such an affection for the creatures that she once tried but failed to carry a favorite stick she found on a Montana fishing trip — its ends chewed and denuded of bark by beaver incisors — through airport security.
“Let’s bring them back,” she said. “They were here first. It’s a no-brainer.”
Aspen Journalism is a nonprofit, investigative news organization covering water, environment, social justice and more. Visit http://aspenjournalism.org. Aspen Journalism is supported by a grant from the Pitkin County Healthy Community Fund. Jennifer Craig is the daughter of Carol Craig, a long-time Aspen Journalism supporter.
American beaver, he was happily sitting back and munching on something. and munching, and munching. By Steve from washington, dc, usa – American Beaver, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3963858
The U.S. Forest Service-owned parcel known as Janeway is adjacent to the Crystal River. A potential nature-based aquifer recharge project could reconnect the historic floodplain to the river and retime spring flows as part of a water supply replacement plan. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Two studies have shown that a large meadow on the east side of the Crystal River known as Janeway shows promise as a potential site for a water-replacement project. But at least one Pitkin County official is questioning the need for a basin-wide water replacement plan at all.
Engineers say the 50-acre, 1,000-foot-wide historic floodplain just downstream of the Crystal’s confluence with Avalanche Creek could work as a location for a project to help junior water users solve shortages in dry years. One study looked at inundating that floodplain with water from the Crystal River during spring runoff, which would percolate through layers of earth and be stored as groundwater before seeping back to the river days, weeks or even months later.
This type of nature-based aquifer recharge project that retimes water from spring runoff could also have added benefits for the riparian ecosystem by reconnecting the floodplain to the river, which has been channelized by decades of development in the Crystal River Valley including the construction of Highway 133 and the railroad before that. The historic Janeway townsite is marked by the ruins of a log structure and old railroad grade, but the U.S. Forest Service parcel is now dominated by native grass, potato cactus, mountain mahogany, sagebrush and juniper.
“I think the Janeway is of particular interest given its location,” said Fay Hartman, southwest regional program conservation director with environmental group American Rivers, who worked on the nature-based solutions study. “It’s a pretty good-sized floodplain, which is obviously important. In the initial analysis it seems like it’s the best fit.”
Janeway was also one of the sites considered by Colorado River Engineering, which is the engineering firm that conducted an analysis for the West Divide Water Conservancy District and the Colorado River Water Conservation District of potential water-supply replacement options. This draft study considered more traditional water-replacement methods that are not natural-process based. If the nature-based concept does not move forward at Janeway, West Divide may explore the construction of a recharge pond at the same location.
“It is a similar concept with a more simplified approach,” the study reads. “It would not provide the riparian floodplain benefits that the nature-based solutions project does, but would have reduced costs for construction, operation and maintenance.”
The Crystal River flowing in late June just downstream of Janeway. Studies have identified the historic floodplain as a potential site for aquifer recharge as part of a valley-wide augmentation plan.
CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Historic call spurs studies
The two studies aimed at finding replacement water came at the direction nearly five years ago of engineers from Division 5 of Colorado’s Division of Water Resources. During the hot, dry summer of 2018, the Ella Ditch, which pulls water from the Crystal River and irrigates hayfields south of Carbondale, placed a call on the river for the first time. That means the Ella Ditch wasn’t getting the full amount to which it is entitled and upstream junior water users had to stop taking water so that the Ella could get its full amount.
The Ella Ditch, which irrigates agricultural land south of Carbondale, placed a call on the Crystal River for the first time ever in 2018. Photo credit: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
The Ella Ditch has water rights that date to 1902, and any water rights younger than that — including those held by the town of Carbondale, the Marble Water Company and several residential subdivisions along the Crystal River — were subject to being shut off under a strict administration of the river by DWR. Under Colorado’s system of water law known as prior appropriation, those with the oldest water rights have first use of the river.
Most junior water rights holders have what’s known as an augmentation plan, which allows them to continue using water during a call by releasing water from a backup source, such as a nearby reservoir. The problem is that some of the in-home water users on the Crystal don’t have an augmentation plan.
The goal of the two studies, which were largely funded by grants from the state of Colorado and the River District, was to find potential sources of augmentation water. The initial study by Colorado River Engineering looked at traditional sources of replacement water like off-channel storage ponds.
A second study by American Rivers and others looked at nature-based solutions like aquifer recharge. That study looked at four potential project sites — Thompson Creek Open Space, Avalanche Creek confluence, Coal Creek and Janeway — with the Janeway site being the most promising. To address environmental concerns from Pitkin County and others, the River District has promised that any storage constructed as part of an augmentation plan will not happen on the main stem of the Crystal River.
Finding potential augmentation supply sites in the Crystal River Valley has been difficult, said Brendon Langenhuizen, director of technical advocacy at the River District.
“It’s a really tight basin. It’s really narrow with lots of steep tributaries, which means there’s not a lot of off-channel reservoir sites,” he said. “There’s not a lot of valley bottom where we could develop something.”
Source: Crystal River Augmentation Plan Feasibility Study. Credit: Laurine Lassalle – Aspen Journalism
Amount of water needed
Although Janeway is the most promising area for a nature-based solution and the one overlapping potential project site of the two studies, it still has drawbacks. The aquifer recharge project with additional environmental benefits is estimated to cost $1.5 million. The project could include a 765-foot excavated channel at the south end of the floodplain so it could be hydrologically connected to the river. Small porous wood structures across the floodplain would aid in ponding and water retention and revegetation efforts could include willows, cottonwoods and wetland sedges.
But this project wouldn’t meet all of the augmentation needs. And there are also still unanswered questions about the retiming of flows: The lagged natural return flows may not align with when water is needed. According to the Colorado River Engineering study modeling, the Janeway project site could provide up to 60 acre-feet of lagged return flows to the river over the course of the summer, with the most occurring in June. But the highest water demands are in July and the most likely months for a call are July, August and September, so the Janeway site is estimated to only provide 10 to 20 acre-feet toward solving a shortage.
Engineers are applying to the U.S. Forest Service for permits to install measurement devices known as piezometers to gather more information about the groundwater on the site.
“We have a request in to run some localized tests on the aquifer to see how fast water could move back to the Crystal River,” Langenhuizen said. “What we are looking for is some delay. Our peak demands are in July and if we could get two to three months delay that would be really helpful.”
According to the study, the total replacement water needed is 105 acre-feet. An acre-foot is the amount of water needed to cover an acre of land to a depth of one foot and could supply one to two families a year. July’s potential requirement is 34 acre-feet.
Other sources of augmentation water could be up to 38 acre-feet from Beaver Lake, which is located in Marble and managed by Colorado Parks and Wildlife; 10-15 acre-feet from Upper Basin Pond, a small, off-channel pond on private land upstream of Marble; and about 10 acre-feet from Rapid Creek Pond, a small off-channel parcel on private land downstream of Marble.
Other sites like the Orlosky Reservoirs in Marble, upper Coal Creek and lower Avalanche Creek were deemed not workable for a variety of reasons. The study also says that irrigators were approached about an agreement where they could temporarily cease irrigation to make water available to other users, but there was limited interest.
All four identified supplies would need to be built at their maximum capacities to meet a potential 20% future increase in demand of 11 acre-feet, according to the study.
This illustration from the study from Colorado River Engineering shows four potential sources of augmentation water and their general location in the Crystal River basin. The Janeway site would involve an aquifer recharge project that supplies 10 to 20 acre-feet of replacement water during the time it’s needed most.
Pitkin County concerns
Assistant Pitkin County Attorney Laura Makar is skeptical that an expensive, complicated augmentation plan for junior water users on the Crystal is necessary.
“We are talking about such a small amount of water that is needed so it still seems to me there is a pretty substantial flaw in not looking to see if there is any use of water on the Crystal that shouldn’t be occurring or isn’t occurring legally right now,” Makar said.
Like most places on the Western Slope, agriculture is king on the Crystal, with ranches on the lower reaches using far more water to grow hay and alfalfa than what’s needed to keep residential taps flowing.
Making sure all water users on the Crystal are held to the same standard should be the first step toward finding water to meet demands, Makar said.
“Why would we not want to look at low-hanging fruit that might be politically difficult but is actually engineering-wise and physically easy?” Makar said. “Instead we are looking at very difficult physical engineering solutions because we aren’t looking at what exists in the system.”
According to Division 5 Engineer James Heath, the wells for indoor water use that triggered the augmentation plan studies use less than 1% of the water used by agriculture on the Crystal. He said he has never shut off wells for in-home domestic use due to them using water out of priority, and probably would not in the future. His office has said it will not shut off indoor use as long as water users are working toward finding a solution, although outdoor watering of lawns, gardens and landscaping may be curtailed.
“Generally, what we try to do is limit the outdoor use and allow for indoor use to continue,” he said. “We can get the biggest bang for the buck by curtailing the outdoor use, which is where most of the consumption happens.”
The Crystal River at the fish hatchery just south of Carbondale was running at about 10 cubic feet per second on Oct. 13, 2020, much lower than the state’s instream flow standard of 60 cfs. Rivers in the Roaring Fork watershed have seen below-average streamflows in water year 2020, which ended Oct. 1, despite a slightly above-average snowpack. Dry soil conditions threaten to bring a similar scenario in water year 2021. Photo credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
Heath said in general agricultural water users are not wasting water on the Crystal. The problem, he said, is that there is sometimes not enough water in the river to meet demands, especially in late summer of dry years. He said during the summers of 2020, 2021 and 2022, some irrigators were not getting their full share and could have placed a call, but chose not to.
But waste has occurred at least once in recent years. In 2018 — the same year as the first-ever call on the Crystal — a water commissioner from the Division of Water Resources turned down the headgate of the Lowline Ditch for what he said was waste, based on state guidelines.
During the 2018 call, the East Mesa Ditch loaned 1 cubic foot per second of water to the town of Carbondale — under an emergency substitute water-supply plan that allowed a temporary change in water use from agriculture to municipal — so it could continue to legally supply about 50 homes on the Nettle Creek pipeline with water. Makar said there’s no legal reason water users couldn’t craft a similar more permanent agreement, which could be activated if a call ever comes on again.
“It certainly has been done and done successfully,” she said.
At the confluence of the Roaring Fork and the Colorado River in Glenwood Springs, it’s clear that a big, snowy winter has turned into a big spring and summer for local streamflows, too. On June 23, the water was 50 percent higher than it was at the same time last year, flowing twice as fast, according to a sensor monitored by the U.S. Geological Survey. Provisional data shows the water was colder, too, by a few degrees Celsius. That’s all good news for the fish that call these waters home — at least for now.
“My impression is that it’s a good year in a bad pattern,” said Clay Ramey, a fisheries biologist with the White River National Forest, in an interview in the U.S. Forest Service office in Aspen…
…streamflows in the Upper Basin were nearly 20% lower than the last century’s average, the worst 15-year drought on record. Researchers from the Colorado River Research Group in Boulder estimate that between one-sixth and half of that loss was due to warmer temperatures — nearly one degree Celsius hotter than averages in the 20th century. Their study reported that those higher temperatures were tied to human-caused climate change and increased greenhouse gas emissions, and that “future climate change impacts on the Colorado River will be greater than currently assumed.”
Data from the Western Water Assessment through the University of Colorado Boulder shows similar patterns on the Roaring Fork River. Since the year 2000, streamflows have been 13% lower on average than the 20th century — even though the amount of rain or snow falling didn’t change that much. Wildlife managers have seen the impacts firsthand, throughout an interconnected river system. In 2019, Ramey was counting cutthroat trout in West Divide Creek, which flows into the Colorado River near Silt. In a 100-meter stretch of stream, where fish-counters used to find 30 to 40 adult fish, Ramey said they found just one during that count. Another coldwater species, the mountain whitefish, is struggling too. They’re native to other Northwest Colorado rivers and were introduced to the Roaring Fork in the 1940s. And their populations here have plummeted in the past 15 years or so, which researchers attribute to warmer temperatures in the Roaring Fork River, along with increased sediment flushes from monsoon rain events. One of those researchers is Kendall Bakich, an aquatic biologist for Colorado Parks and Wildlife.
About 600 cfs of water from the Roaring Fork River basin flowing out of the east end of the Twin Lakes Independence Pass Tunnel on June 7, 2017. Photo credit: Aspen Journalism/Brent Gardner-Smith
The upper Roaring Fork River will likely see its highest flows of the season beginning early next week as the transbasin diversion from its headwaters to the other side of the Continental Divide is shut off.
Twin Lakes Reservoir and Canal Co. is expecting to stop diverting from the headwaters of the Roaring Fork, which will result in an additional 350 to 450 cubic feet per second flow downstream through Aspen. Local officials say that amount of water is welcome, doesn’t pose flooding concerns and is a chance to see what natural spring runoff would look like without a transmountain diversion.
“The river is flowing really low right now, particularly for this time of year,” said April Long, an engineer and stormwater manager at the city of Aspen. “We welcome the additional flow and do not believe we have any concern for flooding at this point.”
According to the stream gauge just above Aspen at Stillwater, the Roaring Fork was flowing at 257 cfs on Wednesday — about 62% of average — and the Twin Lakes diversion was taking 344 cfs through the tunnel on Wednesday and up to 437 cfs on Thursday. That means the river could be flowing as high as nearly 700 cfs at Stillwater by early next week. That’s still well below the “action stage” for flooding of 1,048 cfs, as defined by the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center.
Interim General Manager of the Twin Lakes Reservoir and Canal Co. Matt Heimerich said the company’s space in Twin Lakes Reservoir is nearing capacity and the Colorado Canal that brings water to farmers in Crowley County is also full. When those two things happen, Twin Lakes is required to shut off the Independence Pass diversion.
“It’s a little bit of a moving target,” Heimerich said. “It’s dependent on the two conditions and they have to happen in a simultaneous fashion.”
Heimerich said they are projecting to reach the storage condition on Monday, June 19, which means they will start to ramp down diversions on Sunday, June 18. Diversions will resume once water levels drop in the Arkansas River basin and the Colorado Canal can no longer be filled with water on the east side of the divide.
Transmountain Diversion system
The Independence Pass Transmountain Diversion System, operated by Twin Lakes Reservoir and Canal Co., collects runoff from 45 square miles of high alpine terrain, including the New York, Brooklyn, Tabor, Lincoln, Grizzly and Lost Man creek drainages, dumping those flows into Grizzly Reservoir, which can hold 570 acre-feet of water.
From there the water runs through the 4-mile-long Twin Lakes Tunnel under the Continental Divide and into Lake Creek, a tributary of the Arkansas River. Twelve miles later the water arrives at the Twin Lakes Reservoir where it is stored before being sent down the Arkansas River, eventually reaching Front Range cities and Eastern Plains farms with the help of a network of pipelines, pumps and canals.
Four municipalities own 95% of the shares of Twin Lakes water: Colorado Springs Utilities owns 55%; the Board of Water Works of Pueblo has 23%; Pueblo West Metropolitan District owns 12% and the City of Aurora has 5%. It’s Colorado Springs’ largest source of Western Slope water and represents about 21% of the utility’s total water supply.
Twin Lakes collection system
Because of cool temperatures and cloudy skies, this year’s runoff has been slow and steady so far.
“That’s definitely what we’ve been seeing: a fairly long, extended period of high flows versus a single, well-defined peak,” said Cody Moser, a senior hydrologist with CBRFC.
Prior to the added flows, the Fork near Aspen peaked on May 30 at 417 cfs.
Christina Medved, director of community outreach at the Basalt-based Roaring Fork Conservancy, said the additional flow is great news for the river ecosystem. The group has a planned educational float next week through the North Star Nature Preserve upstream of Aspen, which will look more like the true wetland that it is because of the extra water. Water managers and river lovers in the Roaring Fork Valley like when the Twin Lakes diversion pauses — which often happens in late summer when senior water users in the Grand Valley place the Cameo call, shutting off upstream junior users — because it means more water flowing through local communities.
“What could be exciting is for people to go look at the river,” Medved said. “This is as close as we get to seeing it as if there wasn’t a transbasin diversion.”
Even though officials don’t expect flooding in the Aspen area, they are still urging caution, especially for kids and pets, around high-flowing rivers.
Matthew Anderson, left, a water quality technician with Roaring Fork Conservancy, takes water samples while Chad Rudow, the water quality program manager, records the numbers on Avalanche Creek during the late-May runoff season. RFC is trying to get an Outstanding Waters designation on several local tributaries, which would protect water quality at the time of designation. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Environmental groups in western Colorado are working to designate more reaches of high-elevation tributaries as Outstanding Waters, the state health department’s highest water-quality rating.
The Outstanding Waters designation can be awarded to streams with high water quality and exceptional recreational or ecological attributes, and the intent is to protect the water quality from future degradation. The program, established as part of the federal Clean Water Act, is administered through the state’s water quality control commission.
To get the OW designation, a steam’s water quality must meet 12 different standards for pH, dissolved oxygen, nitrate, E. coli and ammonia, and be under a threshold for seven dissolved metals: cadmium, copper, lead, manganese, selenium, silver and zinc. The designation is the highest level of three anti-degradation classifications awarded by the state. The OW designation does not affect current uses on streams; it only protects against activities with new or increased water quality impacts.
The Roaring Fork Conservancy is working to get an OW designation on potential candidate stream reaches in the watershed, including on tributaries and segments of Woody Creek and Hunter Creek, both tributaries of the Roaring Fork River; and on Bulldog Creek, a tributary of Avalanche Creek, and tributaries of Middle Thompson Creek, which all flow into the Crystal River. Chad Rudow, the conservancy’s water quality program manager, is leading the effort to collect baseline water samples on the streams in all four seasons and submit them for testing. Sometimes that requires skiing or snowmobiling into remote areas to access the streams in winter.
“As part of the water quality requirements for an Outstanding Waters designation, you want to establish that the stream has healthy characteristics and healthy water quality throughout all the major flow seasons,” Rudow said. “So we are trying to establish the water quality is consistently high across all the seasonal variation.”
After taking samples last month, staff whisked them to the lab at the Snowmass Water and Sanitation District, which tests for E. coli, and packed in ice other samples bound for a lab in Durango.
“So far, our results that have been coming back are high quality, and pollutants are coming back in really low quantities, which is what we are looking for,” Rudow said.
Roaring Fork Conservancy staff will do seven rounds of sampling over two years. So far, they have done four rounds in all four seasons, with three rounds to go. In addition to the water sampling, the potential candidate stream reaches go through a rule-making process with three public hearings — the first of which occurred in November — before CDPHE makes a final decision about whether to add them to the Outstanding Waters list.
The effort at designating more streams as Outstanding Waters is happening across the state. In the southwest corner, environmental group American Rivers and others worked to get more than 20 segments of streams designated. The Eagle River Watershed Coalition is working to get Big Alkali Creek, East Brush Creek and West Brush Creek on the list. And in the northwest part of the state, the nonprofit group Friends of the Yampa is working on getting 14 tributaries designated.
“It is a really fulfilling and rewarding thing I feel proud we are a part of,” said Lindsey Marlow, executive director of Friends of the Yampa. “When we were asked to identify which would be great, we shot for the sky and we did 14.”
According to Aimee Konowal, watershed section manager for CDPHE’s water quality control division, there are 88 stream segments and water bodies with an OW designation in Colorado; 57 are streams, which represent 7,600 miles of waterways.
Spring runoff boosted flows on a segment of Avalanche Creek during May 2023 where the Roaring Fork Conservancy is working to get an Outstanding Waters designation. The upper reaches of the creek already have the designation, which is awarded by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.
How does OW protect water quality?
There are two main ways an OW designation can keep streams pristine, according to Konowal.
The first is through CDPHE-issued permits for point-source dischargers such as a wastewater treatment plant. If a future-project proponent proposed discharging to a stream with an Outstanding Waters designation, they would have to ensure — by adding conditions to the permit — that the project wouldn’t degrade the water quality. The second is through projects that need a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which also require a water quality certification from CDPHE (excluding smaller projects applying under a general or nationwide Army Corps of Engineers permit).
But it’s unclear what practical effect that the designation has had on streams, because these mechanisms remain untested.
“In my time here, we have not seen one of these larger federal permits impact Outstanding Waters,” Konowal said. “We have not been in that scenario where that has happened.”
There are also no instances of a wastewater treatment plant requiring a state permit discharging into Outstanding Waters, she said.
That is probably because most of the streams both seeking designation and those previously designated are in high-alpine wilderness areas, national parks or national forest land, which means there are already limits on some development that could affect water quality.
“Streams that are generally looked at as potential candidate reaches for Outstanding Waters, they are traditionally in areas that are pretty high up in the watershed,” said Fay Hartman, southwest region conservation director for American Rivers. “I think there usually is not as much development that would go on there.”
American Rivers is helping to lead the effort and outreach for OW designations throughout the state and Hartman said it’s an excellent way to help preserve high-water-quality streams in the future.
Existing activities such as grazing are compatible with the OW designation, since the high level of water quality required would be attained with these uses in place. Grazing is also a nonpoint source of water contamination, which is not subject to any Water Quality Control Commission regulations, Hartman said.
There is an open question of how or if the federal agencies would consider OW when managing their lands, but according to David Boyd, public affairs specialist with the White River National Forest, a state designation would not directly affect the Forest Service’s management of these areas.
One of the major issues affecting streams in western Colorado is the dwindling quantity of water, a problem not addressed by an OW designation. Transmountain diversions that take flows from some Western Slope headwaters to the Front Range, as well as diversions for agriculture and cities, leave less water in rivers for ecosystems and recreation. Drought and increased temperatures from climate change decrease flows even more, driving shortages. An Outstanding Waters designation does nothing to ensure there is enough water in rivers.
“It’s not intended to protect flows, which is what the majority of people in the Western U.S. are most concerned about, especially in the headwaters tributaries,” said Matt Rice, southwest regional director with American Rivers.
Still, Rudow and others say the Outstanding Waters designation on local streams is worthwhile, especially in light of the uncertainties that come with a hotter, drier future. Pitkin County Healthy Rivers board agreed last month to write a letter of support for the effort.
“If we can get these protections applied to these streams, it covers things we don’t even know are on our radar,” he said. “We are looking at the unknown and trying to provide a level of protection for the future and for things we might not even be able to anticipate.”
Streamflows in the Roaring Fork basin are down from last week.
Aspen Journalism is now compiling real time streamflow data. At Stillwater, located upstream of Aspen, the Fork ran at 39.7 cfs on April 24 at 1:30 pm. In terms of trends, the Fork ran at 40.1 cfs or 65.7% of average on April 23 after reaching 65.6 cfs on April 19. That’s down from 55.2 cfs and 117.4% of average, on April 16.
You can find all the featured stations from the dashboard with their real-time streamflow on this webpage.
Credit: Laurine Lassalle/Aspen Journalism
The USGS sensor on the Roaring Fork river below Maroon Creek recorded the Fork running at 138 cfs on April 23, or 98.6% of average. That’s down from 164 cfs on April 16.
At Emma, below the confluence with the dam-controlled Fryingpan, the April 23 streamflow of 364 cfs represented about 78.3% of average. That’s down from 412 cfs, and 101.7% of average, on April 16.
The transbasin diversion that sends Roaring Fork basin headwaters to Front Range cities was flowing at 13.7 cfs on April 23, up from 5.9 cfs on April 16.
Meanwhile, the Crystal River above Avalanche Creek, which is not impacted by dams or transbasin diversions, flowed at 195 cfs, or 70.1% of average, on April 23. Last week, the river ran at 244 cfs, or 123.9% of average.
Spring runoff is just beginning in the Crystal River Valley (April 2023). A group of nearly 140 people gathered in Marble Thursday to voice their values and concerns as part of a stakeholder process aimed at exploring protections for the river. Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Journalism website (Heather Sackett):
Keeping the Crystal River free-flowing with no dams and preserving its scenic qualities, ecosystems and water rights for agriculture were values that nearly all the attendees of a Thursday community summit at the Marble Firehouse agreed on. How best to achieve those goals is another matter.
The summit was organized by the Wild & Scenic Feasibility Collaborative, which is made up of representatives from the town of Marble, Gunnison County, Pitkin County, the Colorado River Water Conservation District and American Whitewater, and was facilitated by staffers from Wellstone Collaborative Strategies and P2 Solutions. The meeting drew nearly 140 people — more than double the number expected — and sent organizers scrambling for more chairs.
The summit kicked off a much-anticipated public stakeholder process aimed at evaluating community interest in pursuing protections for the Crystal River, which flows through the towns of Marble and Redstone, as well as Gunnison and Pitkin counties. In small groups, attendees outlined their most important values, long-term aspirations, biggest concerns and criteria for evaluating management options.
A faction of residents and conservationists, including Pitkin County, is pushing for a federal Wild & Scenic designation, which it says would carry the strongest protections for preserving the river in its current state. Pitkin County, through its Healthy Rivers program, has funded a grassroots campaign by Carbondale-based conservation group Wilderness Workshop to drum up support for Wild & Scenic, and has secured a resolution of support for Wild & Scenic from Carbondale Town Council.
But some say that approach is jumping the gun and that the stakeholder process should include other options for protection without the federal government’s oversight.
Representatives from Pitkin County spoke about threats to the Crystal and the need for Wild & Scenic at a Gunnison Board of County Commissioners work session Tuesday.
“One of the concerns we are having is that the only foregone conclusion is that Wild & Scenic is the only tool,” Gunnison County Commissioner Jonathan Houck told them. “It’s going to be tough if people feel like the foregone conclusion is Wild & Scenic.”
Although there may not be imminent, specific threats of dams or diversions on the Crystal, Wild & Scenic proponents say that doesn’t mean there won’t be threats at some point. A hotter, drier future under climate change could push Front Range cities or downstream water users to look to one of the last rivers without a dam or transmountain diversion — a rarity in western Colorado — as a means to quench their thirst.
“Today, there is nobody trying to take water out of the Crystal River basin,” Pitkin County Commissioner Francie Jacober told Gunnison County commissioners at Tuesday’s meeting. “But I don’t have faith the Crystal River or the Roaring Fork or the Gunnison won’t be targeted. I want to do everything we can to protect the Crystal River before the threat is at our doorstep.”
One of the biggest threats of a dam on the Crystal was removed a decade ago when, after a legal battle with Pitkin County, the River District and Rifle-based West Divide Water Conservancy District relinquished water rights tied to a potential reservoir at Placita, just below McClure Pass. In 2012, the River District walked away from rights tied to a second reservoir, Osgood, that would have inundated the town of Redstone.
Pitkin County Healthy Rivers administrator Lisa Tasker, left, and Matt Annabel of Back 40 Stories, write down their most important values about the Crystal River at a community summit in Marble on Thursday. The summit was the kickoff event in a stakeholder process aimed at exploring protections for the river. Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
Designation details
The U.S. Forest Service determined in the 1980s that 39 miles of the Crystal River was eligible for designation under the Wild & Scenic River Act, which seeks to preserve rivers with outstandingly remarkable scenic, recreational, geologic, fish and wildlife, historic, and cultural values in a free-flowing condition.
According to the National Wild & Scenic Rivers System Guide for Riverfront Property Owners, one of most important provisions of the act protects rivers “from the harmful effects of project proposals within the river’s bed or banks” and projects that need a federal permit or loan are subject to review under the act.
Any designation would take place upstream of the big agricultural diversions on the lower portion of the river.
There are three categories under a designation: wild, which are sections that are inaccessible except by trail, with shorelines that are primitive; scenic, with shorelines that are largely undeveloped but are accessible by roads in some places; and recreational, which are readily accessible by road or railroad and have development along the shoreline.
The initial Forest Service proposal for the Crystal included all three designations: wild in the upper reaches of the river’s wilderness headwaters; scenic in the middle stretches; and recreational from the town of Marble to the Sweet Jessup canal headgate. Each river with a Wild & Scenic designation has unique legislation written for it that can be customized to address local stakeholders’ values and concerns.
A first attempt at a Wild & Scenic designation around 2012 couldn’t get buy-in from Marble residents or Gunnison County. Suspicions of the federal government still run high for some residents, even as they say they want to see the Crystal protected.
Larry Darien, who owns a ranch on County Road 3, which borders the river, has long been an opponent of Wild & Scenic. But he said he would be in favor of alternate protections. He does not want to see the river dammed or its waters transferred out of the basin and said the summit was a good start at working toward solutions.
“It seems to me like there’s a consensus on what we want and there’s more than one way to get there,” Darien said. “There are other options [besides Wild & Scenic]. I’m not in favor of the federal government helping me with my property.”
Facilitators will bring people together again in September to evaluate what those alternative management options might be. In the meantime, they plan to form a steering committee — on which Darien plans to serve as a representative of private-property owners — to collect input and lead the process.
In addition to county officials and residents, the summit drew people from a wide range of water interests, including influential Boulder water attorney Glenn Porzak; managers from Crystal River Ranch, which has the largest agricultural diversion on the river; representatives of U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, and U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Republican; local business owners; a representative from Colorado Stone Quarries, which operates the Pride of America Mine above Marble; environmentalists; and anglers and kayakers.
Pitkin County Commissioner Kelly McNicholas Kury was pleased with the high turnout.
“[Wild & Scenic] is what we feel like our constituents have wanted for a long time, but we know that we don’t own the solution by ourselves,” she said. “That’s why we have been willing participants in this process to evaluate what’s going to work best for the community. … There feels like a shared love for the river in this room tonight, and I think that is the most important thing to inspire the good conversations ahead.”
Editor’s note: Aspen Journalism is supported in part by a grant from the Pitkin County Healthy Community Fund.
The outflow of the Bousted Tunnel just above Turquoise Reservoir near Leadville. The tunnel moves water from tributaries of the Roaring Fork and Fryingpan rivers under the Continental Divide for use by Front Range cities, and Pitkin County officials have concerns that more water will someday be sent through it.
Major water infrastructure project funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to provide clean, reliable drinking water to 50,000 Coloradans once completed
PUEBLO, Colo. – The Bureau of Reclamation today broke ground on the Boone Reach trunk line of the Arkansas Valley Conduit (AVC), a major infrastructure project under President Biden’s Investing in America agenda that will bring clean, reliable drinking water to 39 communities in southeastern Colorado.
Deputy Assistant Secretary for Water and Science Gary Gold and Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton joined local and Federal leaders at the groundbreaking ceremony where they highlighted the $60 million investment provided through President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for the project. When completed, the project’s 230 miles of pipeline will deliver as much as 7,500 acre-feet of water annually from Pueblo to Lamar, where water providers in Bent, Crowley, Kiowa, Otero, Prowers and Pueblo counties will serve a projected future population of 50,000.
“The results of the historic investment from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law are evident here today as we see this project moving forward,” said Deputy Assistant Secretary for Water and Science Gary Gold. “This project will bring a long-term, clean water supply to so many communities in southeastern Colorado.”
“Through the President’s Investing in America agenda, Reclamation is now well positioned to help advance these important water projects that have been paused for decades,” said Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton. “Our investment in this project, dedicated by President Kennedy more than 60 years ago, will provide the path forward for safe drinking water to so many residents of this area.”
“This long-awaited project is a vital step forward for the Arkansas Valley and shows what can be accomplished through a strong coalition of federal, state, and local partnerships,” said Jeff Rieker, Eastern Colorado Area Manager.
“Generations of people of the Lower Arkansas Valley have waited for the AVC for more than 60 years, and now with construction starting, we are seeing the realization of that dream,” said Bill Long, President of the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District. “This is the culmination of years of determination on the part of Reclamation, the District and the AVC participants to get this job done.”
“This is a truly monumental achievement and marks the culmination of decades of hard work, dedication, and collaboration by those who have devoted their lives to the business of water,” said Seth Clayton, executive director of Pueblo Water. “Pueblo Water is proud to be an integral participant in this important time in history.”
The Arkansas Valley Conduit was part of the 1962 Fryingpan-Arkansas Project Act, and its construction represents the completion of the project. Once complete the project will replace current groundwater sources contaminated with radionuclides and help communities comply with Environmental Protection Act drinking water regulations. The connection point for AVC is at the east end of Pueblo Water’s system, at 36th Lane and U.S. Highway 50, and follows the Arkansas River corridor from Pueblo to Lamar, with spurs to Eads and Crowley County. Reclamation is building the trunk line, while the Southeastern District will build the spur and delivery lines. Estimated total cost is about $600 million.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law allocates $8.3 billion for Bureau of Reclamation water infrastructure projects over five years to advance drought resilience and expand access to clean water for families, farmers, and wildlife. The investment will repair aging water delivery systems, secure dams, and complete rural water projects, and protect aquatic ecosystems. The funding for this project is part of the $1.05 billion in Water Storage, Groundwater Storage and Conveyance Projects provided by the Law.
Michael Bennet, Colorado Senator; Bill Long, Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District; Camille Calimlim Touton, Reclamation Commissioner; Rebecca Mitchell, Director Colorado Water Conservation Board stand with pipe for the construction of the Arkansas Valley Conduit. Photo credit: Reclamation
Click the link to read “Arkansas Valley Conduit project breaks ground” on The Pueblo Chieftain website (JamesBartolo/USA Today). Here’s an excerpt:
Advocates of the Arkansas Valley Conduit celebrated the groundbreaking of the conduit’s Boone Reach 1 trunk line, which will connect Pueblo’s water system to Boone, on Friday, April 28, at Martin Marietta Rich Sand & Gravel east of Pueblo. The trunk line is the first 6-mile piece of the conduit’s planned 230mile project stretching from Pueblo to Lamar and Eads. Once completed, the conduit will send up to 7,500 acrefeet of Pueblo Reservoir water to about 50,000 southeastern Colorado residents. WCA Construction LLC., a Towaoc, Colorado-based company owned by the Ute Tribe, was awarded a $42.9 million contract from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in September 2022 to complete construction of the Boone Reach 1 trunk line.
Communities benefitting from the conduit include communities in eastern Pueblo, Crowley, Otero, Bent, Kiowa and Prowers counties. Drinking water in many of these communities currently contains contaminants like radionuclides and selenium, according to Bill Long, board president of the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District…
Estimates for the total cost of the project are between $600 and $700 million, Long said. Project leaders hope to receive upward of $500 million more from the federal government. After receiving $60 million from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Package, the Arkansas Valley Conduit continues to be a competitive project in the fight for future federal funding, according to U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camile Touton.
Arkansas Valley Conduit map via the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District (Chris Woodka) June 2021.
Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Daily News website (Scott Condon). Here’s an excerpt:
Snowmass ski area reaped another 36 inches of snow before it closed last weekend, boosting its 2022-23 season total to 409 inches, according to Aspen Skiing Co. Snowmass was at 143% of its season average for October through March, based on records back to the 1994-95 season…The season started with a bang and never let up. There were 35 inches of snow in October, or 137% of the average of 28 inches. The 53 inches in November were 121% of the average of 44 inches…December brought 66 inches of snowfall to Snowmass, or 136% of the average of 49 inches. Another 72 inches of snow fell in January, or 141% of the average of 51 inches. In February there was 60 inches, or 110% of the average of 54 inches. March was the big winner with 87 inches of snowfall, or 151% of the average of 57.5 inches, according to data shared by SkiCo. For those five months, Snowmass collected 372 inches of snow compared to the average of 260.5 inches.
Meanwhile, the snow keeps falling. Aspen Mountain was prepped for closing weekend with 9 inches of fresh snow on Wednesday and Wednesday night. More snow is forecast for the closing weekend.
This season, snowpack peaked on April 7 with 23.2 inches of snow-water equivalent, about five inches above average, according to the USDA. Consistent snowfall throughout the season contributed to the 35% above-average count – the highest snowpack for the second week of April since 2019. Experts said it is still too soon to tell exactly what the snowmelt pattern will look like. Factors like temperature, wind, and dust will play into that rate…
If temperatures continue to rise and wind storms blow away top layers of snow or carry in dirt — the most detrimental to snowpack — rivers could swell and lead to strong flow or even flooding. Or if cold weather like Friday continues, the snowmelt could come at a more even pace all the way into July. Normal peak runoff season in the Roaring Fork watershed is mid-May through mid-June. [Erin] Walter said elevation also plays a huge role in the rate of snowmelt. The highest elevations hold out the longest. Another factor in extending the runoff season is better soil moisture at the beginning of winter than in seasons past.
“This winter, we’re heading in with better soil moisture. And so the hope is that then that water finds its way into the river rather than into the ground,” said Roaring Fork Conservancy water quality technician Matthew Anderson.
An aerial view from the Airborne Snow Observatories’ survey aircraft during mapping of the Roaring Fork Watershed last week. The extensive dust-on-snow coverage is strikingly evident. Photo by Dan Berisford/Airborne Snow Observatories
Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Daily News website (Austin Corona). Here’s an excerpt:
Last week, geospatial technology company Airborne Snow Observatories completed its first survey of the Roaring Fork River Basin. Flying at 25,000 feet, a Beechcraft King Air B200 roved over the headwaters of the Roaring Fork River and its tributaries like a high-altitude lawn mower for a total of six hours. Meanwhile, an onboard LiDar system scanned the mountains below, capturing a three-dimensional image of the landscape, and spectrometers measured light reflecting off the snow’s surface. The data from this survey will provide western Colorado water managers with unprecedented information about spring snowmelt and runoff in the watershed. ASO operated these flights through contracts with eight public entities, including the Colorado River District, the city of Aspen and Pitkin County. After flying the watershed, ASO compared the data they collected with data taken last summer, when the mountains were snow-free. The difference in the two scans represents how much snow is lying on the landscape and provides insight into how much runoff will flow into the Roaring Fork River and its tributaries this spring and summer.
In total, ASO found that there are a little less than 600,000 acre feet of water stored in snowpack within their measurement area. For perspective, that’s three times the amount of Colorado River water used by the state of Nevada last year, according to data from the Bureau of Reclamation. And it doesn’t even include snowpack above the Crystal River, which adds significantly to the Roaring Fork’s total flow. While some of that water will be absorbed into the soil, much of it will ultimately become river water, sustaining riparian habitats and human communities in the valley and beyond. Using data on snow “albedo,” or the light that reflects off the snow’s surface, ASO also examined the impact that dust deposited by high winds have on snowmelt in the basin…
Colorado water managers say ASO’s technology is a major step forward from existing snowpack measurement tools in the Roaring Fork Watershed. First developed as a project under NASA, ASO says the technology is superior to both ground and satellite-based snow measurement methods. Dave Kanzer, Director of Science and Interstate Matters at the Colorado River Water Conservation District, said it wouldn’t be inappropriate to call the tech “revolutionary” for Colorado snowpack measurement.
Note: Local snowpack readings and chart are now using the percent of median instead of percent of average.
Snowpack in the Roaring Fork basin, which is exceeding the basin-wide median seasonal snow-water equivalent peak of 17.1 inches that typically occurs in mid-April, reached an average of 21.9 inches of snow-water equivalent per site on March 26 or 145% of median according to NRCS. Snowpack gained about three inches of SWE since last week on average per site after recent snow storms.
SNOTEL sites that monitor snowfall throughout the winter measured the snowpack at Independence Pass at 106.6% of median on March 26 with a “snow water equivalent” (SWE) of 16.2 inches, up from 15 inches on March 19. Last year on March 26, the SNOTEL station up the pass (located at elevation 10,600 feet) recorded an SWE of 13.2 inches.
The monitoring station at McClure Pass located at elevation 8,770 feet recorded a SWE of 27.5 inches on March 26, or 181% of median. That’s up from a SWE of 24.1 inches on March 19. Snowpack has gained three inches of SWE since March 21. Last year, on March 26, the station measured a snowpack holding 16.6 inches of water.
On the northeast side of the Roaring Fork Basin, snowpack at Ivanhoe, which sits at an elevation of 10,400 feet, reached 16.9 inches of SWE on March 26, or 125.2% of median.
Snowpack at Schofield Pass, which boasts some of the largest SWE accumulations in the basin, reached 46 inches on March 26, which represents 160.8% of median. Snowpack at this site gained six inches of SWE last week, the largest increase of SWE among these five Roaring Fork basin stations over the past week. Schofield Pass sits at an elevation of 10,700 feet between Marble and Crested Butte.
Snowpack at that site has been exceeding its median seasonal peak of 35.1 inches since March 11, which typically doesn’t come until mid April. McClure Pass, which as we reported earlier in March is seeing especially high snowpack readings this winter like other mid elevations stations, topped its median seasonal peak of 16.6 inches on Feb. 14 this year.
Snow water equivalent — the metric used to track snowpack — is the amount of water contained within the snowpack, which will become our future water supply running in local rivers and streams.
Ruedi Reservoir on the Fryingpan River as seen on March 24, 2022 The reservoir was at its lowest level in nearly two decades. Reclamation is confident it will fill in 2023. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Daily News website (Scott Condon). Here’s an excerpt:
Hydrologist Tim Miller said the current snowpack levels make him confident Ruedi Reservoir can be filled in the first week of July without releasing extraordinary amounts of water…The Colorado Basin River Forecast Center is forecasting runoff into Ruedi at 104% of median. In 2019, when the region was hit with an ongoing storm cycle in March that triggered numerous destructive avalanches, the forecasted runoff volume was 144% of median, he noted.
The Fryingpan Valley snowpack is currently ranging between 120% to 159% of median at three automated stations called Snotel sites operated by the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service. Miller said the sites provide a good gauge of snowpack at lower and middle elevation ranges. He checks the Independence Pass Snotel site east of Aspen as well. Although it is out of the Fryingpan River basin, its close proximity provides a good clue about upper elevation snowpack. The cumulative snowpack at Kiln, Ivanhoe and Independence sites is 126% of median, he said. There isn’t a one-to-one relationship between snowpack levels and runoff forecasts, according to Miller. Runoff projections consider factors such as soil moisture levels, which were low coming into this winter because of drought. Drier soils capture some of the water before it reaches rivers and streams…
“We should be able to fill that without a problem,” Miller said. “It generally fills the first week of July, almost always.”
Following last weekend's storm, snowpack in the Roaring Fork basin is averaging 18.5" of SWE, and now exceeds the basin-wide median seasonal SWE peak of 17.1", which typically occurs in mid-April.https://t.co/papx13glUL
The first novel item on the [Carbondale Board of Trustees] agenda was a proposal from the Ruedi Water and Power Authority (RWAPA) for regional baseline watering standards. The proposition was developed through a grant from the WaterNow Alliance and stakeholder meetings with water suppliers in the Valley. RWAPA Executive Director April Long joined via Zoom to explain that the desire for comprehensive and regional education is complicated by disparate restrictions between jurisdictions in the watershed. “The entire point of baseline watering standards is just to give us initial footing … for an education and outreach campaign,” she stated.
An extensive memo provided by Public Works Director Kevin Schorzman explained that the town code currently recognizes few scenarios for restrictions: a water shortage or a water crisis. Conservation restrictions may be enacted during periods of peak demand, from May 15 to Oct. 15.
The proposed Valley-wide standards would make permanent no watering between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. year-round, with odd addresses and even addresses alternating days and no watering on Mondays — with some exceptions.
Crystal River rancher Bill Fales stands at the headgate for the Helms Ditch, with Mount Sopris in the background. As part of an agreement with the Colorado Water Trust, Fales could be paid to reduce his diversions from the ditch when the river is low. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Schorzman’s memo also explained that Carbondale’s system is unique, with treated water as well as an extensive ditch system supplying raw water for irrigation. The memo noted that Carbondale’s indoor water use per capita has trended downward in recent years and approximately 58% of “consumed” domestic water returns to the river as wastewater return flows. Long stated that ditch water should follow the same standards as treated water.
An image of the Crystal River Valley from an EcoFlight mission in August 2022. The view is downvalley, toward Mount Sopris. A group is exploring a federal designation of wild and scenic for the Crystal River in Gunnison and Pitkin counties.
Courtesy of Ecoflight
The effort to explore getting a federal designation of wild and scenic for the Crystal River is about to get turned up a notch. The Wild and Scenic Feasibility Collaborative announced Monday it has selected Wellstone Collaborative Strategies and P2 Solutions to facilitate and lead a community engagement and stakeholder process. American Whitewater, a national nonprofit that advocates for the preservation and protection of whitewater rivers, will support Wellstone in the administration of its outreach efforts…
Denver-based Wellstone Collaborative Strategies and Loveland-based P2 Solutions were selected for their experience and competence in facilitation and community engagement. Both Jacob Bornstein, founder and principal of Wellstone Collaborative Strategies, and Wendy Lowe, owner of P2 Solutions, have demonstrated exceptional facilitation skills and experience shepherding broad community conversations to successful outcomes, according to a statement from the selection committee, according to an announcement. The principals in the businesses have strong backgrounds in natural resource issues and direct knowledge of the Crystal River…
With a goal of identifying long-lasting river protection, the collaborative envisions the creation of a stakeholder group that would engage in fact finding, identification of overlapping interests and concerns, and a robust discussion of shared goals and strategies. The initial phase of the stakeholder process will bring together a representative cross section of interested individuals to provide informed input; examine, explore and investigate river protection; access and rely on experts in river and riparian health; engage experts to provide factual information relevant to protective designations; agree upon rules of engagement; be a process grounded in the highest integrity and inclusiveness; and result in identification of shared principles for protection of the Crystal River.
Map of the Roaring Fork River drainage basin in western Colorado, USA. Made using USGS data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69290878The Crystal River just below Avalanche Creek on June 3. Streamflows near this location peaked on May 19 at 1,840 cfs according to data from the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISMProtecting continued public access to these waterfalls along Yule Creek, just over the property line from a parcel set to be donated to a land conservation agency, is an ongoing priority for the CVEPA.
CREDIT: COURTESY PHOTO BY JOHN ARMSTRONGThe view looking upstream on the Crystal River below Avalanche Creek. A Pitkin County group wants to designate this section of the Crystal as Wild & Scenic.
CREDIT: CURTIS WACKERLE/ASPEN JOURNALISMThe Crystal River flows through the town of Marble just after its confluence with Yule Creek. Gunnison County, Pitkin County and local environmental groups want to see a marble mining company mitigate its illegal relocation of a creek by improving downstream riparian habitat. Photo credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism These marble blocks stamped with quarry owner’s name, Red Graniti, and operator’s initials, CSQ, line the banks of the Crystal River near the company’s load-out area in the town of Marble. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is considering whether to issue the operator a retroactive permit to allow it to move a stream. Photo credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen JournalismThe narrows on the Crystal River just below Placita where a dam big enough to store 62,009 acre-feet of water was once planned by the Colorado River District and the West Divide Water Conservancy District. The Pitkin County BOCC passed a resolution opposing the River District’s proposed tax increase. Photo credit: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen JournalismLooking upstream toward the confluence of the Roaring Fork River, left, and the Crystal River, right, just below Carbondale. More information about these and other rivers will be made available to the public with the help of a recent $37,000 state grant to the Roaring Fork Conservancy. Photo credit: Brent Gardner-SmithCrystal River near Redstone via Wikipedia CommonsCrystal River via Aspen JournalismCrystal River
Today [January 23, 2023], Colorado U.S. Senators Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper urged the Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) to consider allocating additional funding from the recent omnibus funding bill for Fiscal Year 2023 (FY23) or the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) for the Arkansas Valley Conduit (AVC).
The AVC is a planned 130-mile water-delivery system from the Pueblo Reservoir to communities in Bent, Crowley, Kiowa, Otero, Prowers, and Pueblo counties. The Conduit is the final phase of the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project, which Congress authorized in 1962.
“[T]he Conduit has been one of Colorado’s top priorities for nearly six decades,” wrote the senators. “Continuing to invest in this project will allow the project’s stakeholders to plan for more effective construction and delivery of clean drinking water throughout Southeast Colorado.”
In the letter, the senators highlight the $60 million allocated for the construction of the AVC from the BIL last fall, and ask BOR to allocate additional funds, which could be immediately applied to help advance different components of the AVC.
“For years, this project languished due to insufficient funding and a prohibitive cost-share agreement,” continued the senators. “Congressional appropriations over the past decade coupled with BOR’s recent $60 million award will finally enable the construction of this long-promised project. More investment, from the FY23 omnibus or future BIL awards, would accelerate the construction timeline and improve planning efficiency.”
Bennet and Hickenlooper have consistently advocated for increased funding for the AVC. The FY23 omnibus spending bill, which was signed into law in December, included $10.1 million for the Conduit after Bennet and Hickenlooper urged the Senate Appropriations Committee to continue to fund the project last May. In October, the senators visited Pueblo to celebrate the announcement of $60 million in BIL funds for the Conduit. The senators and U.S. Representative Ken Buck (R-Colo.) urged the OMB and BOR in July to allocate these funds. In March, Bennet and Hickenlooper secured $12 million for the Conduit from the FY22 omnibus bill. Prior to FY22, Bennet helped secure more than $70 million for the AVC. Bennet and Hickenlooper will continue working in Washington to ensure Colorado has the resources needed to complete this vital project for the region.
In 2009, Congress passed legislation Bennet worked on with former U.S. Senator Mark Udall (D-Colo.) to authorize a federal cost share for the construction of the Arkansas Valley Conduit. In 2013, Bennet and his colleagues sent a letter to the BOR to quickly approve the Conduit’s Environmental Impact Study (EIS) in order to expedite the project’s pre-construction process. In 2014, following Bennet and Udall’s efforts to urge the BOR to quickly approve the Conduit’s EIS, the Record of Decision was signed in February. Bennet joined the groundbreaking for the project in October 2020.
The text of the letter is available HERE and below.
Waterfalls along Yule Creek. CREDIT: COURTESY PHOTO BY JOHN ARMSTRONG
Click the link to read the guest column on the Aspen Times website (Stacy Standley). Here’s an excerpt:
Now is the time to take a giant step into the future with revolutionary ideas that transcend the parochial local interests of the Roaring Fork River Valley by recognizing that climate/weather change, along with population growth, has erased the boundaries of the Colorado River Basin…Aspen is now the pivotal headwaters of the Colorado River Basin, which has become a small, compacted irrigation canal instead of a great river system and has shrunk many hundreds of miles into but a few feet…
1. There should be 100% metering and billing of every drop of water: 7% of the Aspen distribution is unmetered and/or unbilled and unmetered, and this should be eliminated.
2. You can not distribute or control what you do not measure: Metering and billing should be by constant recorded, instantaneous, wifi-linked electronic services on all distribution points and reported to every customer and the Water Department on a instantaneous daily basis, with auto shutoffs for an aberration of usage by 1% or more.
3. All wastewater and storm water must be a fully-integrated part of the treated water-supply system by municipal recycling and/or irrigation and municipal water usage.
4. Downstream water flows that exceed minimum stream flow must be acquired and piped back into the upstream Aspen intake.
5. Aspen and Pitkin County must negotiate with Twin Lakes Canal and Reservoir Co. and the Fry-Ark project to create water savings for their service area and water that can be allowed to stay in the Roaring Fork River Valley.
6. Salvation Ditch, Red Mountain Ditch, and all other local irrigation systems should become a part of the Aspen water conservation and re-use ethic.
7. 100% of all leaks and water waste must be ended immediately.
8. Every tree, plant, and natural out-of-house improvement must be identified and the water usage calculated by Lysimeter and/or other instantaneous soil moisture storage measurement system and then a local research and development lab created to test, grow, and install water conserving plants and systems for out-of-house water management and control.
9. All local streets should be coated with bright reflective surfaces to maintain a cooler urban-heat island and, thus, improve out-of-house water usage.
10. Aspen should create its own bottled (no plastic) water supply for individual use from a high-quality spring and distribute at least 2 gallons per person per day inside of the city service area for drinking water usage at cost to increase the Aspen water supply.
11. Aspen should divert into vertically oriented pipeline coils (24 to 48 inch) in all area streams to capture water runoff that exceeds minimum stream flows and keep the vertical-coiled pipelines at or above the city base elevation for instantaneous “pipeline coil reservoir storage.”
12. Every new or remodeled home and business must have installed an on-site water-storage tank for at least three months of driest in-house water usage.
13. Aspen should participate individually and/or with other Colorado River Basin water users in regional ocean, salt flats, and poor quality oil field wastewater/produced water (i.e., Rangely Field and Utah Basin) purification desalination and urban wastewater recycling for earning water-use credits.
14. Aspen should negotiate with Colorado River Basin Native American tribes to create constructive water savings and water-credit system for the benefit of reservation and also Aspen water usage.
15. Aspen should negotiate to replace Colorado River Basin hydroelectric-power generation with renewable energy to earn water storage credits for regional reservoir.
Volunteers learn how to measure how much water is contained in the snowpack, known as snow-water equivalent (SWE) at the SNOTEL site at the top of McClure Pass in March 2018. Water managers are gaining a better understanding that what happens in the weeks after peak snowpack in the spring can have an outsize influence on the year’s water supply. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Water managers in the Colorado River basin are gaining a better understanding that what happens in the weeks after peak snowpack — not just how much snow accumulated over the winter — can have an outsize influence on the year’s water supply.
Water year 2021 was historically bad, with an upper basin snowpack that peaked around 90% of average but translated to only 36% of average runoff into Lake Powell, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. It was the second-worst runoff on record after 2002. One of the culprits was exceptionally thirsty soils from 2020’s hot and dry summer and fall, which soaked up snowmelt before runoff made it to streams. But those dry soils are only part of the story.
A new paper from the Desert Research Institute, a nonprofit science arm of the Nevada university system, found that heat waves in April 2021 drove record snowmelt rates at about 25% of snow-telemetry (SNOTEL) sites looked at across the West. SNOTEL is a network of remote sensing stations throughout the West’s mountainous watersheds that collect weather and snowpack information.
A heat wave that was concentrated over the Rocky Mountains on April 1-7 contributed to record snowmelt at 74 stations, including areas that feed the Colorado River.
A few different agencies release monthly water-supply forecasts for April through July, including the National Resource Conservation Service, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center. The April forecast is the first prediction of how streamflows will shape up for the year.
But according to the paper, in 2021, “rates of snowmelt throughout April were alarming and quickly worsened summer runoff outlooks which underscores that 1 April may no longer be a reliable benchmark for western water supply.”
The paper did not quantify what exactly the record melt speed meant for water supply, but paper author and associate research professor of climatology Dan McEvoy said it definitely contributed to the poor inflow into the nation’s second-largest reservoir in 2021. It also shows there are many more factors relevant to predicting the water supply than just how much water is in the snowpack, a metric known as snow-water equivalent (SWE), which is measured by SNOTEL sites.
“There was a combination of things that was contributing to this really low runoff in places like the Colorado River basin,” McEvoy said.
Some of these other factors include very little April precipitation and warm nighttime temperatures, which didn’t allow the snowpack to get into the daily freeze-thaw cycle that’s common in the spring. Persistent high pressure kept skies clear and sunny, which meant that more of the snowpack sublimated, evaporating instead of turning into liquid.
“When it’s sunnier and warmer, you can lose some of that water directly to the atmosphere,” McEvoy said. “It doesn’t even get to melt and go into the runoff.”
These rapid melting events could also help set up prime conditions for wildfires, he said, something he wants to continue studying.
“When you have the snow disappear earlier there’s more time with the ground exposed, which contributes to drying out the vegetation in the spring and summer and an earlier onset to wildfire season,” McEvoy said.
After peak snowpack
Climatologists at Colorado State University are working on a similar study that looks at how factors such as precipitation after peak snowpack affect spring runoff. Their findings underscore how important the conditions of the six to eight weeks after peak snowpack are for predicting streamflows.
“One of the things we found that was crystal clear from the study was that one of the major sources of water-supply forecast error is what happens after peak snowpack,” said Peter Bennett Goble, a climatologist at CSU who is working on the study. “Just knowing how much uncertainty is still out there on April 1 or even April 15 probably allows water managers to be a little more cautious, maybe hold a little bit more back, especially if it looks like it’s going to be an early runoff.”
Predicting whether reservoirs will fill — and therefore how much water to release to make room for the inflow — can be tricky. Some municipal water providers use the Colorado Airborne Snow Measurement Program — with its lidar-equipped planes — to more accurately measure snowpack. For example, Denver Water has used CASM to see how much snow is in the headwaters of the Blue River basin, which feeds Dillon Reservoir, its largest storage bucket.
But aside from this technology, which is expensive and not yet available everywhere, water managers rely heavily on data from the SNOTEL sites to make streamflow forecasts. This method has limitations, providing just a snapshot of conditions at one location.
These limitations can be seen in recent years’ forecasts for Ruedi Reservoir, on the Fryingpan River. Initial forecasts in April 2021 projected Ruedi could probably fill to its entire 102,373-acre-foot capacity, but the reservoir ended up only about 80% full that year. In 2020, each of the three main forecasting agencies also overpredicted Ruedi inflow for the months of April, May and June. (An acre-foot covers 1 acre to a depth of 1 foot.)
Tim Miller, a hydrologist with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation who manages operations at Ruedi, said his models predicted a 2021 Ruedi inflow of 111,000 acre-feet, but only 77,000 acre-feet actually flowed in. That the models are based on historical SNOTEL data from past decades is a drawback as climate change progresses, but it’s the best we have, Miller said.
“It makes the assumption that what we have seen in the past is what we will see in the future, which is a really poor assumption when you’re in the middle of a change in the climate,” Miller said. “We will probably see events like we haven’t seen in the future and we are using what we’ve seen to predict them.”
Dave Kanzer, director of science and interstate matters for the Glenwood Springs-based Colorado River Water Conservation District, said people often look for a single explanation when streamflows don’t match predictions. The River District owns and operates Wolford Mountain Reservoir, near Kremmling, and stores water in Ruedi Reservoir. But there is often a whole host of compounding factors that water managers will have to begin weighing more heavily as the climate warms.
“It’s not just about soil moisture, it’s not just about solar radiation, it’s not just about temperatures, it’s not just about the winds — it’s everything,” Kanzer said. “In some cases, like 2021, you get what some people like to call the perfect storm.”
Aspen Journalism covers water and rivers in collaboration with The Aspen Times.
Colorado Springs with the Front Range in background. Photo credit Wikipedia.
Click the link to read the article on the KOAA website (Bill Folsom), Here’s an excerpt:
The ongoing drought in the west motivated a request from Colorado Springs Utilities for an update to city ordinances on annexing new developments into the city. With five in favor and four against, City Council approved the change saying for any development annexations to be considered, the city’s water supply has to be at 130% of what is needed for existing residents. Mayor John Suthers supported the change saying tough decisions are being forced by the current water crisis along the Colorado River Basin.
“Our citizens are asking a simple question, ‘Can you ensure we’ll have enough water?’ This ordinance acts in the public interest and answers that question loud and clear,” said Suthers…
Many developers from the community spoke against the change saying it will make large developments outside the city almost impossible.
Suthers Tweeted, “If we do nothing to maintain a buffer between our water supply and our water usage, and the city suffers a major curtailment of our Colorado River water, further drought will put us in an untenable situation, and we will be responsible for a failure of public policy.”
Colorado Springs Utilities (CSU) recommended the 130% number following an in-depth review of the organization’s capacity and ability to provide water to the city’s citizens. Utilities maintain that the city’s 30% margin buffer allows CSU to consistently provide water year in and year out.
Aspen Journalism is compiling a data dashboard highlighting metrics of local public interest, updated weekly.
Snowpack at McClure Pass roughly 150% of average
Snowpack in the Roaring Fork basin reached 126% of average for Jan. 8 with 9.7 inches of snow-water equivalent, according to NOAA. Recent snowfall has increased the basin snowpack by 43% in the past two weeks.
SNOTEL sites that monitor snowfall throughout the winter measured the snowpack at Independence Pass at 94.9% of average on Jan. 8, with a “snow water equivalent” (SWE) of 7.4 inches, up from 6.81 inches on Jan. 8. Last year on Jan. 8, the SNOTEL station up the pass (located at elevation 10,600 feet) recorded an SWE of 8.58 inches, or 110% of average.
The monitoring station at McClure Pass located at elevation 9,500 feet recorded a SWE of 11.18 inches on Jan. 8, or 149.1% of average. That’s up from a SWE of 9.09 inches on Jan. 1. Last year, on Jan. 8, the station also measured a snowpack holding 8.39 inches of water.
On the northeast side of the Roaring Fork Basin, snowpack at Ivanhoe, which sits at an elevation of 10,400 feet, reached 8.5 inches on Jan. 8, or 123.2% of average.
Snowpack at Schofield Pass reached 18.11 inches on Jan. 8, which represents 123.2% of average. Schofield Pass sits at an elevation of 10,700 feet between Marble and Crested Butte.
Snow water equivalent — the metric used to track snowpack — is the amount of water contained within the snowpack, which will become our future water supply running in local rivers and streams.
Colorado snowpack basin-filled map January 12, 2023 via the NRCS.
Ruedi Reservoir, near the headwaters of the Fryingpan River, was still frozen in early April 2021. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
From email from the Colorado Water Trust (Kate Ryan, Rick Lofaro, Brendon Langenhuizen, and Rob Viehl):
Colorado Water Trust and Roaring Fork Conservancy have teamed up with the Colorado River Water Conservation District (Colorado River District) and the Colorado Water Conservation Board to purchase and release water from Ruedi Reservoir to mitigate the impacts of anchor ice on the Fryingpan River. On Friday, December 16, the first release of water from Ruedi Reservoir will begin. The project aims to release 1.26 billion gallons of water (or 3,866 acre-feet) between December 16, 2022, and March 1, 2023, to the Fryingpan River, maintaining flows around 65 cubic-feet-per-second (cfs) in order to diminish ice buildup.
Anchor ice is a natural occurrence, but can have serious consequences on the hydrology of the river and the health of the ecosystem within. When there are low flows in the river during the cold winter months, large amounts of anchor ice can form on the bottom of the river, negatively impacting fish and macroinvertebrate function and diversity. Maintaining minimum winter flows between 60 to 70 cfs increases ecological resilience in the river through mitigating the formation of the anchor ice, and improving recovery from previous anchor ice impacts.
The partners will monitor the flow levels in the Fryingpan River, water temperature, air temperature, and anchor ice presence, from December through March. Anchor ice survey results will be compared to previous two years to continue to observe trends and build a long- term data set. “Roaring Fork Conservancy’s unique anchor ice monitoring program will allow us to objectively document anchor ice over time. This allows us to continue to promote management of Ruedi Reservoir with local benefits in mind” says Rick Lofaro, Executive Director of Roaring Fork Conservancy.
Snowpack in the Roaring Fork basin reached 120.5% of average for Dec. 4 with 4.7 inches of snow-water equivalent, according to NOAA.
SNOTEL sites that monitor snowfall throughout the winter measured the snowpack at Independence Pass at 93.6% of average on Dec. 4, with a “snow water equivalent” (SWE) of 4.21 inches, up from 2.91 inches on Nov. 27. Last year on Dec. 4, the SNOTEL station up the pass (located at elevation 10,600 feet) recorded an SWE of 3.19 inches, or 70.9% of average.
The monitoring station at McClure Pass located at elevation 9,500 feet recorded a SWE of 4.29 inches on Dec. 4, or 130% of average. That’s up from a SWE of 3.5 inches on Nov. 27. Last year, on Dec. 4, the station also measured a snowpack holding 0.39 inches of water.
On the northeast side of the Roaring Fork Basin, snowpack at Ivanhoe, which sits at an elevation of 10,400 feet, reached 4.8 inches on Dec. 4, or 126.1% of average.
Snowpack at Schofield Pass reached 8.31 inches on Dec. 4, which represents 109.3% of average. Schofield Pass sits at an elevation of 10,700 feet between Marble and Crested Butte.
Snow water equivalent — the metric used to track snowpack — is the amount of water contained within the snowpack, which will become our future water supply running in local rivers and streams.
Most streams keep running close to the average
The Roaring Fork River below Maroon Creek flowed at 95 cfs on Dec. 4, or 93.3% of average, according to the USGS gauge. That’s down from Nov. 27, when the river was flowing at 101 cfs, or 103.1% of average.
At Stillwater, located upstream of Aspen, the Fork on Dec. 4 ran at 15.2 cfs or 52.4% of average, down from 15.4 cfs but up from 51.3% of average on Nov. 27.
The upper Fork’s flow is impacted by the Independence Pass transbasin diversion system that sends Roaring Fork headwaters to Front Range cities. Water flowing through the tunnel under the Continental Divide between Grizzly Reservoir on Lincoln Creek and the South Fork of Lake Creek measured 12.2 cfs on Dec. 4.
The Roaring Fork at Emma, below the confluence with the dam-controlled Fryingpan, saw on Dec. 4 streamflow of 263 cfs, or about 96% of average. That’s down from 270 cfs, but up from 94.4% of average, on Nov. 27.
Meanwhile, the Crystal River above Avalanche Creek, which is not impacted by dams or transbasin diversions, flowed at 65 cfs, or 110.7% of average, on Dec. 4. Last week, the river ran at 66 cfs, or 104.6% of average.
Snowpack at Indy Pass has increased by 45% since last week
Snowpack in the Roaring Fork basin reached 120.5% of average for Dec. 4 with 4.7 inches of snow-water equivalent, according to NOAA.
SNOTEL sites that monitor snowfall throughout the winter measured the snowpack at Independence Pass at 93.6% of average on Dec. 4, with a “snow water equivalent” (SWE) of 4.21 inches, up from 2.91 inches on Nov. 27. Last year on Dec. 4, the SNOTEL station up the pass (located at elevation 10,600 feet) recorded an SWE of 3.19 inches, or 70.9% of average.
The monitoring station at McClure Pass located at elevation 9,500 feet recorded a SWE of 4.29 inches on Dec. 4, or 130% of average. That’s up from a SWE of 3.5 inches on Nov. 27. Last year, on Dec. 4, the station also measured a snowpack holding 0.39 inches of water.
On the northeast side of the Roaring Fork Basin, snowpack at Ivanhoe, which sits at an elevation of 10,400 feet, reached 4.8 inches on Dec. 4, or 126.1% of average.
Snowpack at Schofield Pass reached 8.31 inches on Dec. 4, which represents 109.3% of average. Schofield Pass sits at an elevation of 10,700 feet between Marble and Crested Butte.
Snow water equivalent — the metric used to track snowpack — is the amount of water contained within the snowpack, which will become our future water supply running in local rivers and streams…
Most streams keep running close to the average
The Roaring Fork River below Maroon Creek flowed at 95 cfs on Dec. 4, or 93.3% of average, according to the USGS gauge. That’s down from Nov. 27, when the river was flowing at 101 cfs, or 103.1% of average.
At Stillwater, located upstream of Aspen, the Fork on Dec. 4 ran at 15.2 cfs or 52.4% of average, down from 15.4 cfs but up from 51.3% of average on Nov. 27.
The upper Fork’s flow is impacted by the Independence Pass transbasin diversion system that sends Roaring Fork headwaters to Front Range cities. Water flowing through the tunnel under the Continental Divide between Grizzly Reservoir on Lincoln Creek and the South Fork of Lake Creek measured 12.2 cfs on Dec. 4.
The Roaring Fork at Emma, below the confluence with the dam-controlled Fryingpan, saw on Dec. 4 streamflow of 263 cfs, or about 96% of average. That’s down from 270 cfs, but up from 94.4% of average, on Nov. 27.
Meanwhile, the Crystal River above Avalanche Creek, which is not impacted by dams or transbasin diversions, flowed at 65 cfs, or 110.7% of average, on Dec. 4. Last week, the river ran at 66 cfs, or 104.6% of average.
The Crystal River runs low outside of Carbondale on September 1, 2020. With average temperatures warming in summer months by as much as 3.5 degrees since the 1950s in Garfield County, streamflows are trending down as peak runoff comes earlier and more water is sucked up by evaporation and dry soils, stressing available water supplies in late summer and fall. Photo credit: Dan Bayer/Aspen Journalism
A study of a water replacement plan on the Crystal River is looking at nature-based solutions, but experts say some type of storage will also probably need to be built to solve shortages in dry years.
Wendy Ryan, an engineer with Colorado River Engineering who is heading up an analysis of a basin-wide backup water-supply plan, gave a progress update at the Colorado Basin Roundtable meeting this week. The study was funded largely by a state grant and undertaken by the Colorado River Water Conservation District and the West Divide Conservancy District.
“We have a couple landowners near Marble we are working with to see if we can put storage supplies on their properties,” Ryan said in response to a question asking her what solutions she had found. “We don’t have any shovel-ready projects. We did a lot of work upfront, and now it’s simply trying to find what we can build.”
During the hot, dry summer of 2018, the Ella Ditch, which pulls water from the Crystal River and irrigates hayfields south of Carbondale, placed a call for the first time. That means the Ella Ditch wasn’t getting the full amount to which it is entitled and upstream junior water users had to stop taking water so that the Ella could get its full amount.
The Ella Ditch has water rights that date to 1902, and any water rights younger than that — including those held by the town of Carbondale, the Marble Water Company and several residential subdivisions along the Crystal River — were technically supposed to be shut off under a strict administration of the river by the state Division of Water Resources. Under Colorado’s system of water law known as prior appropriation, those with the oldest water rights have first use of the river.
Most junior water rights holders have what’s known as an augmentation plan, which allows them to continue using water during a call by releasing water from a backup source, such as a nearby reservoir. The problem on the Crystal is that several of these residential subdivisions don’t have an augmentation plan.
Engineers from Division 5 of the Colorado Division of Water Resources have said that if water users work together to find solutions and come up with an augmentation plan, they won’t shut off indoor residential water use if the call happens again. Outdoor watering could still be shut off.
The first phase of the study, which River District representatives presented to Pitkin County commissioners in June 2021, was a demand quantification, which put numbers on the amount of water needed at different times of year.
Engineers found 90 structures — many of them wells for in-house water use — that take water from the river system and which would need to be included in the augmentation plan. These structures deliver water to 197 homes; 80 service connections in Marble; about 23 irrigated acres; Beaver Lake and Orlosky Reservoir in Marble; 16,925 square-feet of commercial space; and livestock.
In order for these water users to keep taking water during a downstream call by an irrigator, they would have to replace about 113 acre-feet in the Crystal River per year. (An acre-foot is the amount of water needed to cover an acre of land to a depth of 1 foot and can typically meet the annual needs of one or two families.) The amount of extra flow that would need to be added to the river is small — just .58 cubic feet per second during July, the peak replacement month.
The Ella Ditch, in the Crystal River Valley, placed a call for the first time ever during the drought-stricken summer of 2018. That meant the Town of Carbondale had to borrow water from the East Mesa Ditch under an emergency water supply plan. Photo credit: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Wild & Scenic jeopardized?
Ryan and staff from the River District have said they are not considering storage on the mainstem of the Crystal River, which could jeopardize a federal Wild & Scenic designation, a long-sought-after goal of Pitkin County, local environmental groups and some residents. A Wild & Scenic standing would mean no dams or out-of-basin diversions.
“We were never going to consider any mainstem storage on the Crystal River,” Ryan said. “We don’t want to do anything to jeopardize that potential designation on the Crystal, and what we are looking at shouldn’t.”
But Pitkin County Commissioner Kelly McNicholas Kury said it’s hard to see how upstream storage and a Wild & Scenic designation won’t conflict.
“It troubles me to hear the engineers say it’s hard to envision a solution that doesn’t involve storage,” she said. “So that’s just a red flag. It’s always been a red flag for Pitkin County.”
McNicholas Kury and two other roundtable members voted in 2019 against funding the study unless storage was off the table.
The Crystal River at the fish hatchery just south of Carbondale was running at about 10 cubic feet per second on Oct. 13, 2020, much lower than the state’s instream flow standard of 60 cfs. Rivers in the Roaring Fork watershed have seen below-average streamflows in water year 2020, which ended Oct. 1, despite a slightly above-average snowpack. Dry soil conditions threaten to bring a similar scenario in water year 2021. Photo credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
Nature-based solutions
A parallel study, undertaken by the River District and environmental-and-recreation advocacy group American Rivers, is looking at nature-based solutions. The idea is that by keeping water on the landscape higher in the basin, it could recharge aquifers and boost river flows in late summer.
“We have been analyzing whether the reconnection of floodplains can assist with aquifer recharge and natural water storage while also improving the resilience of watersheds and potentially contributing to later-season flows,” said Fay Hartman, American Rivers conservation director for the Southwest region.
According to Zane Kessler, the River District’s director of government relations, there are four potential areas for nature-based projects: the Coal Basin area; Avalanche Creek upstream of its confluence with the Crystal; the Janeway area, downstream of the confluence of Avalanche Creek and the Crystal; and the confluence of Thompson Creek and the Crystal. But none of the sites are perfect, Kessler said.
“The River District and American Rivers are partners in this effort investigating whether turning back the clock on past alterations that have degraded the Crystal River can help recapture some of the climate resilience we have lost,” he said. “Improving the storage in floodplains and wetlands I think we see as an innovative and lower-impact approach to meeting late-season water needs than dams or storage in the headwaters.”
Findings and recommendations from the nature-based solutions analysis are expected by the end of the month. But Ryan said some kind of storage is still needed because nature-based solutions will still not be enough to meet the supply-demand gap in dry years, according to her analysis.
“It might meet a portion of our demands, but it’s not going to meet all our demands,” she said.
The Weaver Ditch as it winds through Sopris Park in Carbondale. While the ditch is an amenity for the community, the water in the ditch comes directly out of the Crystal River, which is often stressed from lack of water. Some Carbondale residents irrigate their lawns and landscaping with the town’s ditches, like the Weaver Ditch, that flow through town. A new unified outdoor watering standard would not apply to those who use ditch water, but they still are encouraged to comply. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
In an effort to unify the Roaring Fork watershed, a local agency has developed valley-wide outdoor watering standards that its board members hope will be adopted by municipal water providers.
Last week the Ruedi Water and Power Authority board, which is made up of representatives from local towns and counties, gave its unanimous support to a set of unified permanent watering standards. The standards are focused on time of day and day of week for outdoor watering and would apply to any residential or commercial customer receiving municipal water from the city of Aspen, town of Basalt, town of Carbondale, city of Glenwood Springs, Snowmass Water & Sanitation District and Mid-Valley Metropolitan District.
The proposed schedule would limit outdoor watering to between 6 p.m. and 9 a.m. three days a week. Properties with odd-numbered addresses could irrigate on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays; even-numbered properties could water on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. No outdoor watering would be allowed on Mondays. Water providers could still enact more stringent restrictions depending on local conditions in their areas; the standards are intended to be a new baseline.
“If we can make this change, the idea that (watering restrictions) change from year to year to year will go away,” said Rachel Richards, Aspen City Council and RWAPA board member. “It’s going to be much easier and less expensive than having to tell people every year what the rules are this summer.”
The new watering standards were developed with the help of a project accelerator grant from WaterNow Alliance, which according to its website is a network of water leaders advancing climate resilient water strategies, and Boulder-based environmental advocacy group Western Resource Advocates. Outdoor watering of lawns and landscaping is often the largest water use category for local water providers; for the city of Aspen, outdoor irrigation represents about 70% of total water use.
The proposed schedule would result in water savings because watering would happen during the coolest periods of the day, peak demands would be reduced and one day a week of no watering would allow storage to be refilled, according to a memo from WaterNow Alliance and WRA.
“The three-day-per-week schedule is relatively easy to communicate to residents and other water users and it can be easily programmed into all types of irrigation controllers,” the memo reads.
The valley-wide watering standards were an outgrowth of the regional water efficiency plan, said RWAPA Executive Director April Long.
“We learned from the providers that were part of that plan that they still really needed some unified messaging about outdoor water use,” Long said. “We realized we don’t even have common ground to tell people exactly what to do because we have so many drought stages, and restrictions implemented in different ways. We actually need some baseline standards so we can provide a common message that’s not confusing for all of our residents.”
There are some exceptions to the standards. Outdoor watering can still occur any time of day with a handheld hose or drip irrigation. And those who irrigate with water from a ditch, like many residents in the town of Carbondale, are not subject to the standards, but are encouraged to comply.
The standards lay out penalties for violation, including a written warning for a first violation, and fines increasing to $500 for a fourth violation. But proponents will focus solely on an education campaign for the first season before issuing warnings or fines.
The next step is for Long to present the watering standards to each of the participating municipalities and get them approved by elected officials.
Residents and visitors spend time in Aspen’s Wagner Park on Sept. 28, 2020. Visitation and lodging unit occupancy rates are two variables that influence Aspen’s demand for treated water, 70% of which is used to water outdoor spaces such as parks and gardens, according to city officials. CREDIT: NATALIE KELTNER-MCNEIL / ASPEN JOURNALISM.
Since 2017, the city of Aspen’s water use has remained steady, illustrating the difficulty of reducing consumption through voluntary conservation measures amid continued growth and the effects of climate change.
According to numbers provided by city staff, total metered accounts for water use between 2017 and 2021 hovered between 800 million and 900 million gallons per year coming from the city’s treated-water system. Aspen’s system serves about 3,960 customer connections in the city’s urban-growth boundary.
2019 — a wet year — saw the lowest use in the data set, down to 828,650,350 gallons, or about 2,543 acre-feet. (An acre-foot is the amount of water needed to cover an acre of land to a depth of 1 foot and can typically meet the annual needs of one or two families.)
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, which closed or limited many businesses, stores, restaurants and government facilities, the year 2020 saw water use rise 7.7% from 2019 to about 2,739 acre-feet. Water use then dropped 4.7% in 2021 to about 2,612 acre-feet.
Water use is very seasonal in Aspen as outdoor watering represents about 70% of the city’s total annual water use, according to Tyler Christoff, the city’s director of utilities.
In July and August 2021, residential use was seven times as much as in the offseason month of April. And residential use in the summer months was five times greater than that in January.
2022’s June-September irrigation season recorded the second-lowest total water use since 2017, with about 1,546 acre-feet, after 2019’s 1,523 acre-feet. Summer residential use dropped by 3.3% from last year.
Each year, about half of Aspen’s treated-water use is residential, which includes both indoor water use and outdoor lawn and landscaping watering, and one-fourth of the total water consumption is commercial. Multifamily units, irrigation and city facilities account for the rest.
Aspen’s water use also tracks closely with local drought conditions, with drier years seeing more water use. For example, water use was down in 2019, when Pitkin County did not experience drought conditions during the irrigation season until September, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Water use was up the following year, when Pitkin County experienced increasingly severe drought conditions as the summer went on, reaching extreme drought by mid-August. With more rain over the past two summers, water use was lower than in 2020.
The past several years of steady water use have shown that despite a much-praised water-efficient landscape ordinance designed to limit water use in redevelopment, smart meters, a tiered rate system that charges big water users more and year-round Stage 2 water restrictions, getting some customers to change their behavior, especially when it comes to outdoor watering, is challenging.
“I think (outdoor use) is not as well understood from a conservation perspective,” Christoff said. “It’s not a water use that you are directly interacting with on a daily basis. Most irrigation is automated. It just kind of occurs, and that creates an inherent kind of disconnection.”
But Christoff said the fact that Aspen’s water use has remained mostly flat while the number of taps and fixtures has increased is a win. According to numbers in Aspen’s 2015 Water Efficiency Plan and numbers provided by Christoff, Aspen’s equivalent capacity units (ECUs) have gone from 17,300 in 2014 to 17,853 in 2021, about a 3.2% increase, creating more demand on the system. One ECU is equivalent to a one-bedroom, one-bathroom home with a fully equipped kitchen.
“I really think it’s a positive thing that we have stayed relatively steady despite more fixtures, more use, more visitation, more building, all of those things,” Christoff said. “That’s really a credit to our conservation program and our community understanding that the resource is finite and wise use of it is really important.”
Aspen aims to use enhanced conservation to address some of its projected water shortages in the future. According to Aspen’s Integrated Water Resource Plan, enhanced conservation could be used to decrease indoor water use by 12% and outdoor use by 25% by the end of 2070. But it also said the yield from enhanced conservation is uncertain because it depends on customers’ behavioral changes. Hotter temperatures from climate change are also predicted to increase outdoor watering demand.
Aspen’s IWRP, which was completed last November by consultant Carollo Engineers, lays out Aspen’s projected water shortages for 50 years under future climate change and growth scenarios. Under the worst-case scenario — where climate change increased outdoor watering by 25% and a 1.8% growth rate that pushed Aspen’s total population (including seasonal residents) to almost 68,000 people, with only modest conservation — Aspen’s total water demand could be 9,281 acre-feet by 2070. The worst shortfalls under those conditions could occur in two consecutive dry years and be about 2,300 acre-feet total over the course of both years, according to the IWRP. The report offers six portfolios of water-source combinations to make up the shortfall, including a potential 5,820-acre-foot reservoir that was estimated to cost $400 million in 2021 dollars.
Christoff said that although the 25% figure is aggressive, he believes it’s attainable and pointed to the city’s water-efficient landscaping ordinance as one path to getting there. Aspen’s landscaping standards, enacted in 2017, set an upper limit for water use for any project — including landscaping, grading and construction — that disturbs 1,000 square feet and more than 25% of a property. (The ordinance is also triggered by a redevelopment of 50% or more of an existing structure.) That limit is set at no more than 7.5 gallons per square foot per season. Redevelopment and new development must meet certain criteria for soil, plant material and irrigation systems, and must submit a report from a third-party certified landscape-irrigation auditor.
Christoff said there have been 87 projects permitted so far under the water-efficient landscape ordinance. The city’s goal is to save 37 acre-feet each year with the ordinance by 2050. Christoff said of the 87 projects permitted, only about 10 are complete and have passed final inspection, so he could not put a number on how much water had been saved so far.
“We still need a few more years of projects working through the process to start being able to really quantify these savings,” he said in an email.
Aspen’s 2015 Water Efficiency Plan had a goal of reducing demand in 2035 by almost 600 acre-feet per year relative to what demands were projected to be without implementation of the water-efficiency program. Christoff said city staff feels like they are on track to meet this conservation goal.
“Our Water Efficiency Plan provides an outline and roadmap for these efforts,” he said in an email. “If we are able to successfully follow our plan and continue to see community support, we believe we will hit our targets.”
Some Western Slope cities have focused in recent years on getting a handle on outdoor watering because it is what is known as “consumptive” use. For residents on a municipal water system, with indoor water use such as showering, washing dishes and flushing toilets, the water goes down the drain and to the wastewater-treatment plant, where it’s cleaned and released back to the river. The vast majority of indoor water use is “non-consumptive.”
But with outdoor watering, lawns, shrubs, trees and soil absorb most of the water; it depletes the waterway from which it comes.
Since 2012, the Eagle River Water & Sanitation District, which provides water to the Vail area, has focused its conservation efforts solely on outdoor use.
“We don’t need to worry about indoor water; it goes back to the river,” said Diane Johnson, communications and public affairs manager for the district. “We just need to concentrate on outdoor water use, so that’s what we’ve done. Lawn watering is our first target.”
As climate change increases temperatures and lengthens the growing season, some of the water savings through efficiency and conservation programs may be wiped out. Water use during drought years, such as 2020, remained stubbornly high in Aspen. And a review of Bureau of Reclamation data by Colorado River experts suggests that water use throughout the upper basin is greater in dry years and less in wet years. If the water isn’t falling from the sky, people tend to take more from the rivers.
Residences among largest water users
If Aspen wants to reduce overall water use, it will have to address the largest water users, including residences with lots of outdoor watering.
“Conservation from the highest water users could have the largest impact on overall water use reductions,” the IWRP reads.
According to the IWRP, two single-family residences were in the top 10 individual water users in 2018, alongside Aspen’s biggest hotels, apartment complexes and city facilities. The two residences — which the city does not identify — were the seventh- and eighth-biggest water users, using 6.5 million gallons (nearly 20 acre-feet) and 5.8 million gallons (nearly 18 acre-feet) of water, respectively. The seventh-biggest water user used 1.4 million gallons (about 4.3 acre-feet) per ECU.
According to the IWRP, much of this high water use may be attributed to outdoor use. About 70 of more than 2,500 single-family residential accounts show water use of more than 1 acre-foot per year per ECU.
Christoff said city staff reach out to these large users with the offer of a free irrigation audit to assess their water use. Smart metering that lets staff and residents check their water use in real time also helps people better understand where they may be wasting water or have a problem such as a leak. But reducing use among Aspen’s biggest users, especially single-family homes, has been challenging.
Since 2005, Aspen has had a four-tiered billing structure in which properties that use more water pay a higher rate. But this doesn’t result in a reduction in water use for some customers, particularly those wealthy Aspenites who can afford to pay more.
“There are customers within our service territory where a financial disincentive is not a disincentive to them,” Christoff said. “Some customers, regardless of how high that third and fourth tier rates are, they are still going to use that amount.”
This concept is known as price inelasticity, where demand stays the same, despite fluctuating prices, said Lindsay Rogers, a water policy analyst with Western Resource Advocates who has worked with the city of Aspen on water projects.
“Customers who receive a pricey water bill, it might not motivate them to reduce outdoor water demand,” Rogers said. “That’s a challenge because that’s one of the biggest tools that municipal utilities have to encourage water conservation.”
Participants in a working group who helped shape Aspen’s IWRP said the city may be leaning too much on pricing to drive water conservation and cautioned that it may have a disproportionate impact on lower-income residents, while not creating a sufficient disincentive for other residents to reduce water use. The same group also ranked outdoor watering of lawns and landscaping as among the lowest priorities during a drought.
Aspen’s municipal code allows for fines or a municipal summons for chronic water-wasters who violate water restrictions. Stage 2 water restrictions, which have been in effect since September 2020, include the following: an even/odd day outdoor watering schedule depending on address; no watering between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. except from a handheld hose or drip irrigation system; no outdoor watering of sidewalks, driveways or patios; and other restrictions.
But, according to Christoff, city staffers have never issued a fine or summons, although they have contacted property owners by email or letter. Aspen prefers education over enforcement, Christoff said.
“We talk to a number of water providers around Colorado, and across the board for the most part, folks either don’t have the staff capacity or inclination to enforce it,” Rogers said. “A lot of people just don’t want to be water cops.”
Other cities have had success
Several municipalities in the Colorado River basin have been able in recent years to decouple water use from population growth. That means that water use decreases even as population increases. The Eagle River Water & Sanitation District and Upper Eagle Regional Water Authority have decreased overall water use by 6% while the number of single-family equivalent units increased by 25% since 2002.
Although water use has seen years of ups and downs, Aspen’s IWRP shows that since 1995, overall demand is generally increasing and is projected to continue increasing.
Some Front Range cities, which take a portion of the water from the Colorado River basin through transmountain diversions, have also seen some success with their conservation programs. Aurora, for example, has seen its population rise by 46% over the past two decades, but the amount of water it has distributed has decreased by 9%, according to numbers provided by the city.
But it hasn’t been easy, according to Aurora Water General Manager Marshall Brown. There is a limit to voluntary measures. Developers didn’t take advantage of a program that offered a credit for tap fees for water-efficient landscaping. And not many customers signed up for a $3,000 turf-replacement rebate.
“Going into this year, we said we’ve really got to ramp this up,” Brown said. “We’ve got to tie economics more directly to what we are doing is one of the lessons we learned. And we’ve got to come up with literally code restrictions because we couldn’t get much progress with voluntary stuff.”
Aurora was among a group of municipalities that signed a memorandum of understanding in August committing to reducing nonfunctional turf grass by 30%. Aurora City Council last month passed an ordinance that prohibits turf for aesthetic purposes in all new development and redevelopment, and in front yards. Turf in backyards is limited to 45% of the space or to 500 square feet, whichever is smaller.
“We know we will see results from that,” Brown said.
This home is part of the City of Aurora’s water-wise landscape rebate program. Aurora City Council last month passed an ordinance that prohibits turf for aesthetic purposes in all new development and redevelopment, and front yards. Photo credit: The City of Aurora
A draconian approach
Las Virgenes Municipal Water District provides water to several exclusive and gated enclaves of Southern California such as Calabasas and Hidden Hills. Like Aspen, the area is home to many wealthy residents who may not be as sensitive to water price hikes. The district made headlines this year when it began installing flow-restrictor devices on the homes of water wasters — those who used 150% or more of their monthly water budget four or more times.
The flow restrictors make it so that if more than one person in the home or more than one appliance is using water at the same time, it will come out as an annoying trickle. But the real goal of the restrictors is to stop the functioning of outdoor irrigation systems, which account for about 70% of residents’ water use, according Michael McNutt, the water district’s public affairs and communications manager.
“It’s a great way to get a wake-up call to those individuals who just consistently abuse how much water they use,” McNutt said. “People have got to get the message. We provide the water and we educate and we provide tools, and if they are not going to control how much water they use, we will do it for them until they get the point.”
Water managers say increasing conservation can be challenging, in part, because residents are resistant to change. Thirsty green lawns have been part of American culture and an aesthetically pleasing symbol of prosperity for a long time. But as climate change and drought continue to rob the West of water, that attitude needs to change, McNutt said.
“The barrier I’m seeing is evolving that mindset into something where I can have climate-appropriate landscaping throughout my property and I’m going to look at that and find that just as aesthetically beautiful as a green lawn,” he said. “Green lawns are going to be a thing of the past.”
Although Christoff said there is currently little appetite among Aspen’s elected officials for more-aggressive monitoring of residents’ water use, tools such as the flow restrictor could be part of the city’s future, especially as climate change pushes water utilities to do more with less.
“I think stuff like that is absolutely on the plate,” he said. “That’s not, as a water manager, where I’m looking to go, but as the resource becomes more in demand or more scarce, those drastic-type measures might come more to the forefront.”
Aspen Journalism is supported by the city of Aspen’s community nonprofit grants program.
Aspen Journalism covers water and rivers in collaboration with The Aspen Times. For more information, go to http://www.aspenjournalism.org.
During the Fourth Quarterly General and Enterprise Meeting of 2022, the Board of Directors approved $195,293 for four new Community Funding Partnership projects. In less than two years of operation, the Community Funding Partnership has supported over 60 projects and awarded over $5.6 million to benefit West Slope water, according to Amy Moyer, Director of Strategic Partnerships.
Two of the most recent board-approved projects represent critical steps forward in accurately forecasting water supplies in the Colorado River Basin.
The Airborne Snow Observatory (ASO) Snow Mapping in the Roaring Fork and Fryingpan Watersheds, and the Roaring Fork Basin – Evaluation of Soil Moisture for Water Planning will increase the precision, reliability, and understanding of snowpack and soil moisture measurements, respectively.
According to the project summary provided by the Aspen Global Change Institute (AGCI) in its application, “In the Colorado River Headwaters Basin in 2021, a March snowpack of around 91% of average translated into only 54% of average streamflow by end of June (data from NRCS), contributing to severe deficits in the water supply and creating challenges for water managers.”
Devices such as SNOTel (snow telemetry) sites have been used for decades to measure snowpack levels. The data gathered from SNOTEL sites combined with 30-year climate averages predict how much water will likely end up in the river after the snow melts. While the sites accurately reflect snow conditions in a localized area, they are limited in scope and struggle to account for variability between drainages within the same river basin. Soil moisture measurement stations are even more sporadic across the River District’s fifteen counties. The data and analyses gathered by ASO and AGCI will create a more comprehensive picture of the overall health of the snowpack and its transition to streamflow by leveraging new technology and real time measurements.
A large part mission of the Colorado River District is to ensure that policymakers and water managers have accurate and up-to-date data and modeling. Over 65% of the Colorado River’s natural flow originates within the District’s fifteen counties making decision-support tools a critical need for water managers across the West.
Funded Projects
Airborne Snow Observatory Snow Mapping in the Roaring Fork and Fryingpan Watersheds – Water Year 2023
Project Applicant: Airborne Snow Observatory, Inc. Approved Amount: $75,000 Location: Eagle, Pitkin Counties
Initially a program within NASA, Airborne Snow Observatory, Inc. (ASO) is a Colorado Public Benefit Corporation that combines state-of-the-art remote sensing tools with snowpack modeling and fast data processing to deliver snow measurements of high accuracy, high resolution, and full-watershed coverage. The proposed project will support ASO snow mapping flights during winter/spring 2023 in the Upper Fryingpan and Roaring Fork watersheds. This project will provide an unparalleled inventory of the mountain snowpack that supplies the majority of runoff in the Roaring Fork River system.
Roaring Fork Basin – Evaluation of Soil Moisture for Water Planning
Project Applicant: Aspen Global Change Institute Approved Amount: $60,293 Location: Garfield, Pitkin Counties
The Aspen Global Change Institute manages the Roaring Fork Observation Network (also known as iRON) to collect and share data on soil moisture, climate, and ecology in the Colorado River headwaters basin. The iRON program centers around data collected by ten stations at different elevations and ecosystem types across the Roaring Fork Watershed. This project responds to a community need to better understand how soil moisture data can be effectively leveraged to better understand the relationship between snowpack, soil moisture, and streamflow in Western Colorado and beyond.
GVIC ML 260 Lateral Piping Project
Project Applicant: Grand Valley Irrigation Company Approved Amount: $40,000 Location: Mesa County
The Grand Valley Irrigation Company owns and operates the ML 260 lateral, which includes a 3,540-foot stretch that remains an open, trapezoidal ditch comprised of aging concrete. The project will pipe the remaining portion of the lateral resulting in a completely enclosed system. Piping will greatly reduce maintenance, such as monthly silt and root removal and concrete work to patch the ditch, while improving flows by eliminating silt deposition. Additionally, piping will prevent approximately 153 tons of salt from entering the Colorado River and reduce seepage losses that are currently estimated at 45 AF per year.
Increased pressure on the Fryingpan River due to growing population, recreation, and climate change has led to the need for strategic management of Ruedi Reservoir to ensure long-term ecological health and viability of the fishery. Maintaining minimum winter flows at 60-70 cfs increases ecological resiliency through mitigating the formation of anchor ice, which can negatively impact macroinvertebrate community function and diversity. Roaring Fork Conservancy, along with Colorado Water Trust, will partner with the Colorado Water Conservation Board and local entities to fund the release of 25 cfs from Ruedi Reservoir to supplement winter flows on the Fryingpan River. The Fryingpan River, a Gold Medal Stream, hosts thousands of anglers a year. Based on a 2015 Economic Impact study, the river accounts for over $3 million in economic output.
An aerial view of Assignation Ridge in the Thompson Divide area of Colorado. (Courtesy of EcoFlight)
Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Newsline website (Sammy Herdman):
On Oct. 12, Coloradans were given a reason to celebrate: President Joe Biden designated the Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument in Colorado. That same morning, before Air Force One touched down in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, the Department of the Interior received a proposal for a 20-year administrative mineral withdrawal for the Thompson Divide area. If approved, the withdrawal would conserve nearly 225,000 acres in Western Colorado for 20 years by prohibiting new mining and oil and gas drilling projects.
Named a “crown jewel” by U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper of Colorado and “great, wild country” by former President Theodore Roosevelt, the Thompson Divide is more than just wildlife habitat. Anglers come to fish and outdoor enthusiasts come to bike, hike and cross country ski. Each year, Colorado Parks and Wilderness sells 20,000 regional big game licenses to hunters. These visitors stay in hotels and patronize bait shops, grocery stores and restaurants in the nearby towns of Carbondale and Glenwood Springs. Ranchers, some of whom descended from the area’s namesake, Myron Thompson, graze their cattle in the Thompson Divide’s abundant grasses and shrubs, then sell high quality, grass-fed beef throughout the Western Slope and Front Range.
The Thompson Divide is the economic, recreational and ecological soul of the region. Yet, in the 2000s, the Thompson Divide was riddled with new leases for oil and gas extraction. Locals feared a future in which short-term extraction would strip the landscape of large forests, big game and clean streams. One study found that a community near an oil and gas development north of the Thompson Divide had elevated levels of toxic chemicals in the air and benzene (a known carcinogen) leaks in residential water wells.
An enormous amount of effort and infrastructure is required to develop land leased for oil and gas extraction: tearing down forests to build roads, importing heavy machinery and initiating a steady stream of trucks to carry in millions of gallons of water and fracking fluid. All of these activities present an existential threat to the natural characteristics that make the Thompson Divide special.
By 2017, the Thompson Divide was no longer in imminent peril. However, because the Thompson Divide sits atop pockets of natural gas it has retained the attention of oil and gas proponents — including the Colorado Oil and Gas Association — who are resistant to prohibiting drilling there. That’s one of the reasons this region hasn’t received permanent protection.
State leaders, such as Democrats U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet and U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse, have attempted to permanently protect the area by passing the Thompson Divide Withdrawal and Protection Act, which was later incorporated into the Colorado Outdoor Recreation and Economy — or CORE — Act. Unfortunately, the CORE Act has not yet passed, leaving the Thompson Divide vulnerable to future oil and gas extraction.
That is, until the CORE Act’s champions, including Bennet, Hickenlooper, Neguse and Gov. Jared Polis, urged the Biden administration to advance needed protections for some areas included in the bill. The designation of the Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument is monumental. The proposed 20-year mineral withdrawal from the Thompson Divide is no less significant.
The proposal doesn’t have the permanence that passing the CORE Act would, but it does offer a temporary solution. Through a public comment period and an upcoming environmental impact analysis, the Biden administration will determine whether the 20-year mineral withdrawal proposal should be accepted. At the end of the day, the future of the Thompson Divide should be determined by local communities that rely on it for their livelihoods — not the bottom line of oil and gas companies.
The outfall of the Bousted Tunnel, which delivers water from the Roaring Fork and Fryingpan rivers to the East Slope.
Click the link to read the article on the Ark Valley Voice website (Jan Wondra). Here’s an excerpt:
The Bureau of Reclamation (BoR) announced on Monday that it will direct $60 million in federal funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) towards advancing the construction of the Arkansas Valley Conduit (AVC), a 130-mile pipeline project from Pueblo Reservoir east to Eads, Colorado that will deliver safe, clean drinking water to 50,000 people in 40 communities. The Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) has supported this project with $100 million in grants and loans. The Arkansas Valley Conduit project is the final element of the larger Fryingpan-Arkansas Project, which Congress authorized in 1962. The project has literally been decades in the making.
“The SECWCD is thrilled with the announcement by the Bureau of Reclamation that $60 million from the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act has been allocated for construction of the Arkansas Valley Conduit. This follows on the heels of the award of the first construction contract for the Boone reach,” said Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District Senior Policy and Issues Manager Chris Woodka.
“This commitment from BoR is a clear indication of their intent to move this project forward to completion, and to direct resources to it so that clean drinking water will be delivered sooner than originally planned,” he added. “We thank each and every one of you for your patience, and your ongoing support.”
The 5.5 mile Boustead Tunnel transports water from the Fryingpan River drainage into the Arkansas by way of Turquoise Lake (pictured here).
A nearly $43 million contract was awarded to a Colorado construction company marking the “first giant step” in the Arkansas Valley Conduit project designed to bring clean drinking water to eastern Pueblo County and southeastern Colorado. The federal Bureau of Reclamation awarded the inaugural contract for the conduit to WCA Construction LLC, for $42.9 million to cover construction of the first 6-mile section of the 30-inch trunk line that extends from the eastern end of Pueblo Water’s system toward Boone. Located in Towaoc, the construction company is owned by the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and as a tribal enterprise the company employs a workforce that is 70% indigenous…
Since 2020 the federal government has appropriated $51 million toward the project, with those funds paying for the trunk line construction. Pueblo County has awarded $1.2 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding to connect the communities of Avondale and Boone to the trunk line, Woodka said. Work under the initial contract will begin in the spring of 2023 and is expected to be completed in 2024. “We are now in the process of designing those connection lines, then we will be putting those lines in. We hope everything is connected to Boone and Avondale by the end of 2024,” [Chris] Woodka said. That will bring water to about 1,600 Avondale residents and 230 Boone residents. Currently, many people in the areas that will be served by the conduit rely on groundwater supplies that may be contaminated by naturally occurring radionuclides, such as radium and uranium, or use shallow wells that contain harmful microorganisms and pollutants.
A photo from August 2022 shows the streambank stabilization project area near the Marble airstrip. The Army Corps of Engineers sent a letter of non-compliance to the property manager because they determined the work falls outside of what’s allowed under the project’s permit. CREDIT: COURTESY PHOTO via Aspen Journalism
A streambank stabilization project on the Crystal River just west of Marble is on hold after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers determined that the work undertaken this past summer fell outside what is allowed by the project’s permit.
The corps sent a letter of noncompliance, dated Sept. 27, to Susan Blue, longtime manager of the Marble airstrip, regarding work on the Crystal River as it runs through the property. Corps staff determined that the activities did not fall within the parameters of the project’s Nationwide Permit 3, which covers maintenance, according to Tucker Feyder, a regulatory project manager for the corps who signed the letter.
“If they were just doing maintenance on that section that was previously authorized, it could have fit a Nationwide Permit 3,” Feyder said. “The current project went a little above and beyond that.”
A Nationwide Permit 3 authorizes streambank restoration work covering up to 450 linear feet, but the current project “appears to extend significantly beyond what was previously authorized,” the letter reads.
Feyder said the noncompliance did not rise to the level of a violation of the Clean Water Act. A Clean Water Act violation would typically occur when a project has no permit at all from the corps, he said.
“They made a good-faith effort to work under a nationwide permit, and unfortunately, it got away from the intent of Permit 3,” Feyder said. “So we are viewing it as a noncompliance at the moment.”
ERO, a natural resources consultant with an office in Hotchkiss, is leading the project for the property owner, Marble Airfield LLC.
Marble Airfield LLC was, until Sept. 8, registered to the same post office box in Bentonville, Ark., as Walton Enterprises LLC. According to its LinkedIn page, “Walton Enterprises is a family-led, private family office supporting the personal, philanthropic and business activity for multiple generations of Sam & Helen Walton’s family.” Sam Walton was the founder of Walmart. (Aspen Journalism’s water desk is supported by a grant from Catena Foundation, a Carbondale-based philanthropic organization tied to Sam R. Walton, a grandson of Sam and Helen Walton’s.) On Sept. 8, the address to which Marble Airfield LLC was registered was changed to a location in Medford, Ore., according to the Colorado secretary of state website.
The letter says Marble Airfield has 30 days to provide a plan on how to bring the project into compliance. There are three options: They can argue that the work does fall under the Nationwide Permit 3 classification; they can apply for a different permit; or they could voluntarily restore the site. In addition, the property owners must provide information on the work that has been completed; information on the work that still needs to be completed; an updated map of the work site; and a description of any proposed mitigation.
This past summer, ERO contractors began work to restore the streambank along the Crystal River near the airstrip, which is about 1 mile long and was installed in the 1950s and ’60s. Annual maintenance of the riverbank has been required to prevent damage to the airstrip, according to ERO.
“Extreme weather events during the 2021 monsoon season and ongoing spring runoff have resulted in extensive erosion of the adjacent (eastern) riverbank and opposite (western) riverbank, causing many large conifer trees to topple into the river, ponding water and pushing river flows toward the airstrip,” ERO president Aleta Powers wrote in a memo to Gunnison County officials on Aug. 26.
This past summer, contractors began the work, which the corps had said in December was covered under the Nationwide Permit 3. But heavy machinery along the river attracted the attention of neighbors who contacted local environmental group Crystal Valley Environmental Protection Association. CVEPA alerted Gunnison County, which issued a stop-work order on Aug. 12.
“We really believed at first report and as the information came in that this far exceeded the Nationwide Permit 3 for bank stabilization,” said CVEPA president John Armstrong. “We are happy the corps is taking action, but we are not necessarily pleased with the consequences.”
A photo from August shows the streambank stabilization project area near the Marble airstrip. The Army Corps of Engineers sent a letter of non-compliance to the property manager because they determined the work falls outside of what’s allowed under the project’s permit. CREDIT: COURTESY PHOTO via Aspen Journalsim
County violation
ERO is also working to resolve violations of the Gunnison County Land Use Resolution that led the county to issue the stop-work order. The county said the project violated its restrictive buffer for protection of water quality and standards for development in sensitive wildlife-habitat areas. The county also said the project needed a floodplain development permit.
In response to the stop-work order, ERO on Aug. 26 submitted a memo and reclamation plan to the county. In the memo, ERO said the project was exempt from county regulations because it had a federal permit from the corps and because there are exemptions from county regulations for projects designed primarily for enhancement, protections, and/or restoration of water body banks or channels.
ERO said the project includes removal of fallen timber caused by bank erosion, reestablishment of the deepest part of the river, revegetation of the bank, and reshaping native river cobble into jetties, all of which they say is exempt from the county’s standards for protecting water quality. ERO also asserted the project is in compliance with the county’s standards for development in sensitive wildlife-habitat areas.
This map shows the streambank stabilization work along the Crystal River near the Marble airstrip. The project managers are working to resolve violations of the Gunnison County land use code.
CREDIT: MAP BY ERO via Aspen Journalism
“ERO is committed to assist Marble Airfield LLC in demonstrating full compliance with the Gunnison County LUR, and to assist Marble Airfield LLC with ensuring the protection and preservation of the natural environment and wildlife,” the memo reads.
Gunnison County has requested additional information from the property owners, including a wetlands delineation and the floodplain-development application.
“We need additional information from the property owners in order to figure out next steps and determine a path towards compliance,” Gunnison County Building and Environmental Health official Crystal Lambert said in an email. “I imagine that this will take a lot more time, at least weeks, if not months.”
To comply with Gunnison County, Powers from ERO said they will submit a floodplain-development permit application and have already submitted a reclamation permit application. She said they will also submit a preconstruction notification for a new permit from the corps per their requirement.
Here’s the release from the Colorado Water Trust (Dana Dallavalle Hatlelid):
Responding to drought and summer long low-flow conditions on the Colorado River, a coalition of groups and funders led by Colorado Water Trust is restoring water to the river. Colorado Water Trust deliveries began 9/25/22 and continue at a 150 cfs (cubic feet per second) rate. That rate will drop to 100 cfs over the weekend and continue through 10/20/22, most likely tapering to 50 cfs on 10/11. Division of Water Resources confirmed they will administer Colorado Water Trust’s water to the 15-Mile Reach based on average monthly flows being below the Upper Colorado Endangered Fish Recovery Program’s 810 cfs target. Total water restored will be 4500 acre-feet (1.46 billion gallons). The hard work and generosity of our partners enabled us to provide the needed water supply just in time to keep the river flowing at healthier levels in designated critical habitat, including the 15-Mile Reach just east of Grand Junction.
Philanthropic and funding partners include Western Colorado Community Foundation, Lyda Hill Philanthropies, Intel Corporation, Bonneville Environmental Foundation, Nite Ize, and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.
Fryingpan River downstream of Ruedi Reservoir. Photo credit Greg Hobbs
Colorado Water Trust and the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program have arranged for a release of water from Ruedi Reservoir to the Fryingpan, Roaring Fork, and Colorado rivers. The water will be designated for improving flow conditions for endangered fish in the 15-Mile Reach. The flows will support four species of endangered and threatened fish, including the Colorado pikeminnow, humpback chub, bonytail, and razorback sucker, as well as indirectly supporting agricultural water deliveries and the regional recreational economy.
“The corporations and individuals that stepped up to allow us to make these large additions to theColorado’s flow are the community-minded heroes of this drought year. In the future, ever more creativeways will have to be found to share the water that Nature gives us, with each other and with Natureitself,” says Andy Schultheiss, Executive Director of Colorado Water Trust. “As we continue to experiencethe impacts of a changing climate, we will have to find ways to adapt to the new paradigm.”
Colorado River in Grand Junction. Photo credit: Allen Best
Between 2019 and 2021, Colorado Water Trust delivered over 6028 acre-feet of water to the Colorado River (nearly 2 billion gallons). In a typical year, Colorado Water Trust works closely with Grand Valley Water Users Association and Orchard Mesa Irrigation District to identify when there is available capacity in the Grand Valley Power Plant for hydropower generation. This year, thanks to partial support from Colorado Water Trust, the Grand Valley Power Plant is undergoing much needed reconstruction. Until the new plant is complete, Colorado Water Trust will designate the water released for endangered fish protection and not hydropower generation at the Power Plant. Colorado Water Trust also works closely with the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program to determine when the 15-Mile Reach needs supplemental water most to support the fish.
“Orchard Mesa Irrigation District and Grand Valley Water Users Association have been collaborating with the Colorado Water Trust and their contributing partners for the last several years. Our partnership helps those of us in the Grand Valley and 2200 other water diverters maintain the Endangered Species Act compliance. We look forward to our continued collaboration with the Colorado Water Trust,” says Mark Harris of Grand Valley Water Users Association.
“Intel commends the Colorado Water Trust for their important work to support the health of the Colorado River,” says Fawn Bergen, Intel’s Corporate Sustainability Manager. ”Intel’s support for this project brings us closer to our goal of reaching net positive water by 2030, and we are proud to help sustain this vital habitat; a healthy river supports healthy communities.”
“We are extremely grateful to the Colorado Water Trust for providing releases to support endangered fishduring another challenging water year. These releases will improve habitat in the 15-Mile Reach during an especially stressful time of year,” says David Graf, Instream Flow Coordinator for the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program. “The Recovery Program has shown that collaborative conservation can enhance populations of endangered fish while also meeting water user needs. These efforts by theColorado Water Trust, Orchard Mesa Irrigation District, and Grand Valley Water Users demonstrate thatwith creative thinking and hard work, partnerships can find solutions that support humans and theenvironment.”
The Roaring Fork Conservancy also helps to inform Colorado Water Trust of conditions on the Fryingpan and Roaring Fork Rivers so that releases will complement flows on the stream sections between Ruedi Reservoir and the Colorado River. This year, the water released from Ruedi Reservoir will serve a few purposes before it supports the health of endangered, native fish in the Colorado River in the 15-Mile Reach. The water will bring flows in the Fryingpan River closer to their average, and will cool water temperatures on the Roaring Fork River.
ABOUT COLORADO WATER TRUST: Colorado Water Trust is a statewide nonprofit organization that works collaboratively with partners all across Colorado on restoring flow to Colorado’s rivers in need using solutions that benefit both the people we work with and our rivers. Since 2001, we’ve restored 16.8 billion gallons of water to 588 miles of Colorado’s rivers and streams.
Arkansas Valley Conduit map via the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District (Chris Woodka) June 2021.
From email from Reclamation (Elizabeth Smith):
The Bureau of Reclamation awarded the inaugural contract of the Arkansas Valley Conduit (AVC) to WCA Construction LLC, for $42,988,099.79. This contract funds construction of the first Boone Reach trunk line section, a 6-mile stretch of pipeline that extends from the eastern end of Pueblo Water’s system toward Boone, Colorado.
The AVC project will use Pueblo Water’s existing infrastructure to treat and deliver AVC water from Pueblo Reservoir to a connection point east of the City of Pueblo along U.S. Highway 50. The water will be either Fryingpan-Arkansas Project water or from participants’ water portfolios, not from Pueblo Water’s resources. Work under this contract will begin in spring of 2023. This section is expected to be completed in 2024.
“Now more than ever, people in the Arkansas River Valley understand the immense value of the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project and the Arkansas Valley Conduit,” said Jeff Rieker, Eastern Colorado Area Manager. “We look forward to the day when these residents can open the faucet and know that their drinking water is safe and healthy.” As the AVC project moves forward, under existing agreements, Reclamation will construct the trunkline, a treatment plant and water tanks while the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District will coordinate with communities to fund and build AVC delivery pipelines. Eventually, the AVC will connect 39 water systems along the 130-mile route to Lamar, Colorado.
The AVC is a major infrastructure project that, upon completion, will provide reliable municipal and industrial water to 39 communities in Southeastern Colorado. The pipelines will bring water from Pueblo Reservoir to Bent, Crowley, Kiowa, Otero, Prowers, and Pueblo counties. It is projected to serve up to 50,000 people in the future (equivalent to 7,500 acre-feet per year).
John F. Kennedy at Commemoration of Fryingpan Arkansas Project in Pueblo, circa 1962.
The AVC was authorized in the original Fryingpan-Arkansas Project legislation in 1962 (Public Law 87-590). The AVC would not increase Fry-Ark Project water diversions from the Western Slope of Colorado; rather, it was intended to improve drinking water quality.
Currently, many people in the areas that will be served by the AVC rely on groundwater supplies that may be contaminated by naturally occurring radionuclides, such as radium and uranium, or use shallow wells that contain harmful microorganisms and pollutants. Alternatives for these communities consist of expensive options such as reverse-osmosis, ion exchange, filtration, and bottled water.
This contract continues many years of hard work by Reclamation, Southeastern, Pueblo Water and other project partners to improve the lives of residents and provide opportunities for economic development and job creation.
If you have any questions or need more information, please contact Anna Perea, Public Affairs Specialist at the Bureau of Reclamation’s Eastern Colorado Area Office, at (970) 290-1185 or aperea@usbr.gov. If you are deaf, hard of hearing or have a speech disability, please dial 7-1-1 to access telecommunications relay services.
Lincoln Creek is one of several drainages that flow into Grizzly Reservoir, a collection pool for Twin Lakes Reservoir and Canal Company. Drainage from defunct upstream mines may be partly responsible for the water’s yellow color. Photo credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
State, local and federal agencies are working to figure out what is causing changes to the waters and streambed of Lincoln Creek.
In recent days, the water in Lincoln Creek below Grizzly Reservoir has turned a milky green color and a sediment — yellow in some places, white in others — has settled on the streambed. The water flowing into the reservoir from upper Lincoln Creek ran yellow on Saturday.
According to Andrew Wille, a concerned citizen and educator who has done a field study in the area, the discolored stream is not totally unusual.
“I would say (Lincoln Creek above the reservoir) is always like that, but it might be a little worse this year,” said Wille, who is also a member of Pitkin County’s Healthy Rivers board but clarified he was not speaking on the group’s behalf.
What is unusual, Wille said, is that the issue extends below the reservoir to the water flowing down Lincoln Creek to its confluence with the Roaring Fork River.
“I was just kind of concerned and upset it made its way into the Roaring Fork,” he said.
Prior to mining, snowmelt and rain seep into natural cracks and fractures, eventually emerging as a freshwater spring (usually). Graphic credit: Jonathan Thompson
A culprit could be defunct mines in the area, where prospectors mined gold, silver, lead and copper in the early 1900s. It includes the well-known Ruby Mine near the ghost town of the same name.
Bryan Daugherty, an environmental health specialist with Pitkin County, took samples of the water in the creek last week.
“It could be that we have had significant weather up there and it has opened up some of the channels or something that expose more of the mining waste,” Daugherty said. “We just don’t have a great answer as to why it looks different than it has in the past years.”
Officials may have more answers after Tuesday, when a team of water quality experts from different agencies, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Roaring Fork Conservancy and others, are scheduled to test the waters of Lincoln Creek. It is part of an ongoing water quality monitoring program.
Water from the Ruby Mine adit — which is the mine’s opening — mixes with water from Lincoln Creek in late August. Defunct mines in the area could be affecting water quality downstream. CREDIT: ANDRE WILLE
Mines could be a cause
Jeff Graves, program director for the Colorado Inactive Mine Reclamation Program, said the Ruby Mine was brought to his attention last year when there was a fish die-off in Grizzly Reservoir. His agency, the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety, joined other agencies in water quality sampling in early summer. Those results are not back yet.
But Graves said the problem may not be caused solely by the Ruby Mine.
“There’s obviously some legacy mining up there; that includes the Ruby Mine,” he said. “But there’s also a significant geologic component unrelated to mining. So there are a couple different things going on that we need that sampling data back to clarify what the actual cause of any potential problems are downstream.”
Graves estimated there are about 400 mines across Colorado that are discharging into waterways and potentially creating a water quality issue downstream. He said there has not been any reclamation done on the Ruby Mine and that it would not have fallen under any regulatory authority at the time it was mined around the turn of the 20th century.
Grizzly Reservoir will be drained next summer for a rehabilitation project on the dam, tunnel gates and outlet works. The reservoir serves as the collection bucket for water from the surrounding drainages before it’s diverted through the Twin Lakes Tunnel to the Front Range. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Much of the water collected in Grizzly Reservoir from the high mountain drainage of Lincoln Creek is sent through the Twin Lakes Tunnel under the Continental Divide to be used in Front Range cities. Colorado Springs Utilities owns the majority of the water from the Twin Lakes system, which represents the city’s largest source of West Slope water and about 21% of its total supply.
Twin Lakes Reservoir and Canal Company Manager Bruce Hughes said on Monday that the Twin Lakes system was operating normally, which at this time of year means not diverting to the Front Range and instead letting the water from Grizzly Reservoir flow down Lincoln Creek.
Graves said in general, the environmental concerns associated with mines involve aquatic life like fish and the bugs they eat. The orange color of the water and stained streambed is from iron; the white is from aluminum, he said.
“Generally speaking, there is very little human health concerns associated with the sites,” he said. “Most of the time, it is aquatic life concerns and the specific concern is zinc. Fish are very intolerant to high levels of dissolved zinc in the water.”
As of Saturday [September 24, 2022], there were still plenty of fish swimming in Grizzly Reservoir.
Aspen Journalism covers rivers and water in collaboration with The Aspen Times.This story ran in the Sept. 27 edition of The Aspen Times.
Helms Ditch Headgate. Photo credit: Colorado Water Trust
Here’s the release from the Colorado Water Trust (Alyson Meyer Gould, Bill Fales and Marj Perry):
On the 13th of September, 2022, Cold Mountain Ranch, with compensation from Colorado Water Trust, is boosting streamflows in the Crystal River, which is suffering from low flows during this hot and dry summer. This is the first year of implementation in a second pilot program with Colorado Water Trust and Cold Mountain Ranch to add flow to the River during dry years. The agreement compensates the Cold Mountain Ranch owners, Bill Fales and Marj Perry, for leaving their irrigation water in the Crystal River when it needs it most.
The Crystal River drops out of the Elk Mountains near Marble and flows north to its confluence with the Roaring Fork River in Carbondale. The river supports a number of traditional ranching operations as well as towns, recreationalists, and fish populations. Cold Mountain Ranch relies on the Crystal River to irrigate grass meadows that support its cow-calf operation. Under the agreement, the Water Trust monitors flows in the river. When flows fall to 40 cubic feet per second (cfs) in August and September, the ranch may voluntarily decide to cease diversion from the Crystal River in August through October. Colorado Water Trust determines the amount of water left in the natural stream and then pays the ranch $250 per cfs per day for up to 20 days each year. Once streamflows reach 55 cfs in the River (based on a 3-day rolling average), payments cease, but should flow again drop below 55 cfs, diversions can stop again and compensation resume. The pilot agreement can restore up to 6 cfs in the Crystal River.
In 2018, Colorado Water Trust and Cold Mountain Ranch signed a similar three-year pilot agreement that ended in 2020. Unfortunately, within this initial three-year period, Colorado Water Trust and Cold Mountain Ranch were unable to run the project. In 2018, the Crystal River’s flows were too low to implement the agreement – there was not enough water available to result in significant benefits instream. In 2019, the river was high enough to avoid triggering the agreement during the timeframe of the agreement. Although it flirted with the low flow trigger in the late fall, the timing was out of range for the agreement. And in 2020, because of dry and hot conditions and impacts to their hay crop, Colorado Water Trust’s partners at Cold Mountain Ranch needed to use as much water as possible to maximize their late season production and keep their ranching operation sustainable.
Colorado Water Trust and Cold Mountain Ranch’s initial three-year pilot agreement was the first crack at a highly customized, market-based solution that works for agriculture and rivers on the Crystal River, and offered lessons for the renewal and re-tooling of that initial agreement. In this new contract, the partners tried to account for drier years and changing climatic conditions, as well as the economic needs of the Ranch. The changes include a $5,000 signing bonus to support agricultural operations, additional payment and flexibility for coordination, and extending potential coordination into October.
“Although we certainly wish conditions were wetter, we are excited for a chance to run the program. On one hand it enables an active, family-owned ranching operation to use its water rights portfolio in a new and flexible way. On the other hand, it keeps water in the river when it is most in need. It checks the boxes for the definition of a win-win solution,” Alyson Meyer Gould, Staff Attorney, Colorado Water Trust.
The legal and technical framework created by Colorado Water Trust and informed by local interests and support from Lotic Hydrological, has the potential, if successful, to have far-reaching implications. In the end, it brings environmental benefits to the river without affecting enrolled ranches’ long-term sustainability. Thus, the project will support both people and the environment.
The Water Trust would like to thank Cold Mountain Ranch, Public Counsel of the Rockies, the Roaring Fork Conservancy, Lotic Hydrological, WestWater Research, the Colorado River Water Conservation District, Pitkin County, Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust, Bonneville Environmental Foundation, the Aspen Skiing Company Environment Foundation, Catena Foundation, and the stakeholders of the Crystal River Management Plan for making this project possible.
Carbondale rancher Bill Fales says that in 47 years of ranching in the Roaring Fork Valley, he’s never sees hay production as dismal as in 2020. “I used to think that one of the advantages of ranching here is we had a really stable climate,” he says. Photo credit: Laurine Lasalle/Aspen Journalism
In July, Cold Mountain Ranch and the Colorado Water Trust penned an agreement they hope will improve the Crystal River’s streamflow in dry years. The contract compensates the Ranch owners, Bill Fales and Marj Perry, for adjusting the timing of their water diversions when late summer flows dip.
The Crystal River has its headwaters in the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness, but as the river descends through the wide pastures above the Town of Carbondale, more than 30 agricultural diversions, representing around 300 cubic feet per second (cfs) of water rights, pull water from the Crystal and its tributaries to irrigate around 4,800 acres of land. In drought years, which are becoming more frequent, sections of the Crystal River run dry.
Created by Imgur user Fejetlenfej , a geographer and GIS analyst with a ‘lifelong passion for beautiful maps,’ it highlights the massive expanse of river basins across the country – in particular, those which feed the Mississippi River, in pink.
“A river is like a circulatory system,” says Alyson Meyer Gould, staff attorney & policy director for the water trust, “if you have a point where the circulatory system doesn’t work, it can have negative effects both upstream and downstream.”
A 2016 report on the Crystal River found there are specific stretches of the lower Crystal River that are most impaired, primarily after major ditches divert water from the river and before their return flows rejoin the Crystal downstream. This change to the river’s hydrology can impact water temperature, habitat quality and habitat availability, diminishing the ecosystem.
Cold Mountain Ranch is right next to one such beleaguered section of the Crystal River. The property has been in Marj Perry’s family since 1924. A cow-calf operation, the ranch irrigates several hundred acres for pasture and hay, utilizes grazing permits on nearby public lands and leases pasture nearby. In a typical year, Fales flood irrigates from early May through early October, moving water via ditches around his property in a three-week cycle. Fales gets two cuttings of hay, and spring and fall pasture with their water rights.
Under the new six-year agreement with the Colorado Water Trust, when river flows dip to 40 cfs or below, Cold Mountain Ranch will decide whether to enact the diversion coordination agreement. The ranch will be paid a $5,000 signing bonus for entering the updated agreement, an acknowledgment of the time and effort required to negotiate such a contract.
In addition to the bonus, for each cfs per day — up to 20 days total per year in up to five years — that they don’t divert during the contract period, they will be paid $250. The agreement will lift when flows hit 55 cfs. If the ranch is able to enact the agreement for their maximum decreed flow rate for the 100 potential days in the agreement, they could be paid $150,000 over five years.
Says Fales, “It’s the right thing to do. I’m not sure it’s a perfect thing to do, but I try not to let perfect be the enemy of the good. We’ll try it, we’ll see if it works and see what we learn from it.”
This is the second time that Cold Mountain Ranch and the Colorado Water Trust have entered such an agreement. The first ran from 2018 to 2020 but was never implemented. In 2018, flows in the Crystal were so low that “there was not enough water available to result in significant benefits instream,” according to the water trust. In 2019, flows were high enough that the threshold was never met. In 2020, heat and drought meant the ranch couldn’t afford to give up any water and still grow the hay and pasture they needed to feed their cows.
Helms Ditch irrigated acreage. Credit: Colorado Water Trust via Aspen Journalism
The water for this agreement will come from the Helms Ditch, which can divert up to around 6 cfs. In late summer this can be about 30% of the ranch’s available water. About half those rights were adjudicated in 1903 and the other half in 1936, making the diversion significantly more senior than the environmental instream flows on the river, which date to the 1970s. Cold Mountain Ranch uses water from three ditches, but the Helms Ditch is not shared with any neighbors, which makes it an easier candidate for an agreement with the water trust.
Crystal River rancher Bill Fales stands at the headgate for the Helms Ditch, with Mount Sopris in the background. As part of an agreement with the Colorado Water Trust, Fales could be paid to reduce his diversions from the ditch when the river is low. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
One barrier to in-stream water conservation is the fact that water voluntarily left in the river can simply be diverted by another user downstream. In this case, the agreement is designed to alleviate drought stress on a concise stretch of stream, an area that in the dry year of 2012 was completely dewatered. If the water stays in the river for as little as a mile or two, it can make a big difference. As Heather Tattersall Lewin, director of science and policy at the Roaring Fork Conservancy explains, “As little as 6 cfs can make a difference in temperature resiliency, the existence of a cool pool versus a shallow riffle, or the ability for a fish to move from pool to pool or not.”
This agreement with Cold Mountain Ranch is not the only one of its kind for the Colorado Water Trust. In 2012, when much of the state was in a severe drought, there were insufficient laws in place to protect water users who wanted to conserve. In 2013, the Colorado Legislature passed Senate Bill 13-19, allowing some water users to temporarily reduce their water use without jeopardizing their legal rights. Without that protection, a water user who conserved could legally be considered to be abandoning their valuable rights to water, a rule often referred to as “use it or lose it.”
Willow Creek via the USGS
Senate Bill 13-019 was first used by the Colorado Water Trust and a rancher on Willow Creek in 2016. Willow Creek is a tributary of the Colorado River southwest of Rocky Mountain National Park. The rancher had noticed Willow Creek sometimes ran dry during the late summer months and reached out to the water trust. That agreement has been used to restore flows in 2016, 2021 and 2022. According to the water trust, “The project restores a fairly small amount of water to the stream, but because there are no other diverters immediately downstream, that additional water helps to keep Willow Creek connected to the Colorado River.” This style of agreement has since been drawn up by the water trust for four other projects, including Cold Mountain Ranch.
Climate change is impacting both the supply and timing of flows in streams like the Crystal River. Average peak runoff is moving to earlier in the season, extending the amount of time in late summer when streams run low. Warmer temperatures make the soil thirstier, so more snowmelt gets absorbed by the land instead of turning into runoff, even when snowpacks are typical, increasing the frequency of low-flow years.
“The Colorado Water Trust sees diversion agreements as one of many tools in the toolbox to improve flows in Colorado Rivers in the face of climate change,” says Blake Mamich, water transactions coordinator for the water trust.
For some water users, dry years will make changing their diversions more challenging — many agricultural water users on the Crystal River and its tributaries already experience water shortages in dry years. But, continues Mamich, “these agreements may be advantageous to agricultural producers in sub-optimal production years, as a way to diversify income while supporting the health of the river.”
Agriculture represents the majority of water use in Colorado, so ranchers and farmers will need to be part of any major water conservation strategy. But it’s not as simple as just buying agricultural water rights. Farms and ranches around the state are a significant part of the state’s economy and lifestyle — permanently drying them up can have profound negative effects on local communities.
That’s why the water trust is trying these voluntary and temporary agreements, hoping to find a solution that benefits both the environment and agriculture. But, in the quest to improve flows around the state, the water trust uses many statutory tools to get more water in rivers, including purchasing and leasing water rights, creating agreements around the timing of reservoir releases, and more.
The Crystal River widens and becomes shallower just before it passes under the southern bridge into River Valley Ranch. A group of local organizations is working to restore both the stream and the banks. CREDIT: WILL GRANDBOIS / ASPEN JOURNALISM
For the Crystal River, water from Cold Mountain Ranch is just a start. The Crystal River Management Plan cites a need for 25 cfs during severe drought to meet goals for maintaining the ecosystem. The agreement between the water trust and the ranch will, at most, contribute 6 cfs for just 20 days of the year. To continue to build the river’s resilience in the face of climate change, Mamich says it will likely take a combination of various tools, from new infrastructure to additional diversion agreements with more water rights holders in the watershed.
Olivia Emmer is a freelance journalist based in Carbondale, Colorado. She can be reached at olivia@soprissun.com.
Grizzly Reservoir will be drained next summer for a rehabilitation project on the dam, tunnel gates and outlet works. The reservoir serves as the collection bucket for water from the surrounding drainages before it’s diverted through the Twin Lakes Tunnel to the Front Range. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Grizzly Reservoir, the high-mountain lake above Aspen formed by damming Lincoln and Grizzly creeks, will be drained next summer for repairs to the dam, tunnel and outlet works.
After spring runoff next year, Twin Lakes Reservoir and Canal Company will draw down the reservoir so workers can install a membrane over the steel face of the dam, which was constructed in 1932 and is corroded and thinning, according to a May report on the feasibility of the dam rehabilitation.
The report, by RJH Consultants, Inc. of Englewood, included an inspection and evaluation of the infrastructure, and presented different options for rehabilitation. Half the cost of the study — $50,000 — was funded by the Colorado Water Conservation Board.
The project will also replace the gates that control the flow of water into the Twin Lakes Tunnel and repair the outlet works that release water down Lincoln Creek. According to the report, the outlet works have issues with cracks, holes and seepage, and the more-than-80-year-old tunnel gates have problems with leakage, are difficult to operate and require significant maintenance every year.
“The purpose of the rehabilitation of the dam is to address dam safety concerns associated with the corroded and thinning upstream-slope steel facing, uncontrolled seepage, and operational problems with the outlet works,” the report reads.
Twin Lakes officials expect the project to be completed in October 2023. They will also draw down the reservoir this month to weld a small test portion of the dam membrane to see how it fairs through the harsh winter at 10,500 feet. That work is scheduled to begin Aug. 22 and the reservoir will be refilled in October.
“That infrastructure is aging and it’s time to do some rehab work on it,” said Twin Lakes Reservoir and Canal Company Board President Kalsoum Abbasi.
Grizzly Dam is considered a high hazard dam by the Division of Water Resources. That does not mean it’s likely to fail, but it means loss of life would be expected if the dam did fail. The last state inspection in 2021 found the dam satisfactory — the highest rating — and said full storage capacity was safe.
The report estimated a nearly $7 million price tag for the rehabilitation work. Twin Lakes plans to get a CWCB loan for some of the cost and will pay the remainder with money raised from assessments on its water users.
State Highway 133 crosses the Crystal River several times as it flows downstream to its confluence with the Roaring Fork River in Carbondale. Some proponents of a federal Wild & Scenic designation are pushing for a quick timeline while others want a more cautious approach. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
A campaign to protect one of the last free-flowing rivers in Colorado is moving forward, but some proponents say not enough progress has been made over the past year.
Last spring a handful of advocates led by Pitkin County revived an effort to secure a federal Wild & Scenic designation, which would protect the upper Crystal River from future development, dams and diversions. A year into the effort, some say a planned stakeholder process is moving too slowly, while others say a designation can’t be rushed and must be approached carefully and inclusively.
The different philosophies underscore a rift between those who say a cautious and thorough multi-year approach is what’s needed to ensure success and those who say mounting threats to the river, driven by the climate crisis, demand bold and immediate action.
“That difference of opinion concerns me a great deal,” said Kate Hudson, Crystal River Valley resident and western U.S coordinator for Waterkeeper Alliance. “We are at an existential moment both in terms of water and climate and our congressional balance of power that requires we at least try and do this faster. We should at least try to move this as quickly as possible.”
In 2021 Pitkin County Healthy Rivers granted $35,000 to Carbondale-based environmental conservation group Wilderness Workshop to start up a public outreach and education campaign, with the goal of laying a foundation of grassroots support for the effort. The organization has built a website, held events and collected about 1,000 signatures on a petition supporting the designation. The next step will be working with Pitkin County to hire a facilitator for a formal stakeholder process.
At the June Healthy Rivers board meeting, Wilderness Workshop’s Wild & Scenic campaign manager Michael Gorman gave a presentation about progress so far. Board member Wendy Huber asked about the timeline and whether the process should be moving faster. Gorman said a designation could take several more years.
“I’m feeling a little urgency,” she said. “To sort of dilly dally seems to be losing opportunities.”
Grant Stevens, communications director for Wilderness Workshop, said that while he understands the community’s urgency, it’s important to develop a proposal that Colorado’s congressional representatives can get behind. A designation must be approved by Congress and advocates have been in contact with representatives from Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper’s offices.
“We want to make sure we have something that a federal elected official will support, and we need to make sure we go through a community-driven process to get to that point,” Stevens said. “We don’t want to rush that.”
The view looking upstream on the Crystal River below Avalanche Creek. A Pitkin County group wants to designate this section of the Crystal as Wild & Scenic. CREDIT: CURTIS WACKERLE/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Designation details
The U.S. Forest Service first determined in the 1980s that the Crystal River was eligible for designation under the Wild & Scenic River Act, which seeks to preserve rivers with outstandingly remarkable scenic, recreational, geologic, fish and wildlife, historic and cultural values in a free-flowing condition. There are three categories under a designation: wild, which are sections that are inaccessible by trail, with shorelines that are primitive; scenic, with shorelines that are largely undeveloped, but are accessible by roads in some places; and recreational, which are readily accessible by road or railroad and have development along the shoreline.
The potential proposal for the Crystal includes all three types of designation: wild in the upper reaches of the river’s wilderness headwaters, scenic in the middle stretches and recreational from the town of Marble to the Sweet Jessup canal headgate. Each river with a Wild & Scenic designation has unique legislation written for it that can be customized to address local stakeholders’ values and concerns.
Cache la Poudre River from South Trail via Wikimedia Foundation.
Despite its renowned river rafting, fishing and scenic beauty, which contribute to the recreation-based economy of many Western Slope communities, Colorado has just 76 miles of one river — the Cache La Poudre — designated as Wild & Scenic. This underscores the difficulty of trying to preserve free-flowing streams, especially in a water-scarce region where some would like to see rivers remain available for future water development.
This map shows the sections of the Crystal River that could be designated wild, scenic and recreational according to the finding of eligibility by the U.S. Forest Service. CREDIT: COURTESY ROARING FORK CONSERVANCY
Stakeholder participation
Since the Crystal flows through Gunnison County and the town of Marble, advocates say getting those residents and elected representatives on board will be key to moving the effort forward. A first attempt at a Wild & Scenic designation, which sought to prevent the possibility of a future dam and reservoir project, couldn’t get buy-in from some Marble residents or Gunnison County. Advocates shelved the discussion in 2016 with the election of President Donald Trump. This time around, they hope to secure at least the participation if not the support of past opponents.
Marble Town Administrator Ron Leach acknowledged there is still a lot of work to be done as far as gauging public sentiment and building awareness.
Leach has been heavily involved in the town’s multi-year process to address overcrowding on the Lead King loop, a popular off-highway vehicle route near Marble. He said when it comes to these things, slow and methodical is the right strategy and that town officials are totally supportive of the Wild & Scenic stakeholders group, in which he participates as the Marble representative.
“The more process, the better the product,” Leach said. “I’ve learned that the hard way. Take it easy and make sure it’s right.”
Gunnison County Commissioner Roland Mason agreed. He said more conversations need to happen before he could say whether Gunnison County would support a designation.
“I appreciate the fact that they are not trying to rush the timeline,” Mason said. “From my perspective it’s moving at a little bit of a slow pace because of trying to get everyone on board but at the same time, it’s kind of necessary.”
But supporters may never get everyone on board. Larry Darien, who owns a ranch on County Road 3 that borders the river, was one of the early opponents to the designation and still remains opposed to Wild & Scenic because of its potential effect on private property.
While the Wild & Scenic Rivers Act does give the federal government the ability to acquire private land, there are many restrictions on those abilities. Condemnation is a tool that is rarely used, according to a Q&A document compiled by the Interagency Wild and Scenic Rivers Coordinating Council.
“I’m not in favor of a dam on the Crystal River and I’m not in favor of water being taken out and sent someplace else and I’m not in favor of Wild & Scenic designation,” he said. “There are other ways we can manage this besides Wild & Scenic and I think that’s the way we need to go instead of getting the federal government involved.”
The alternate route Darien is referring to is a collaboratively created alternative management plan on the Upper Colorado River, which offers some of the same protections as Wild & Scenic, but still allows for some water development.
Advocates will have to decide whether total consensus is a realistic goal and if they should move forward even though some opposition remains.
he headwaters of the Crystal River include the tributary of Yule Creek, the drainage seen to the left from an Eco-Flight, where Colorado Stone Quarries’ marble quarry is located. Some, including Pitkin County, would like to see the Crystal River designated under the federal Wild & Scenic River Act. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Threats to the Crystal?
While there may be a general feeling of worry about drought and falling reservoir levels in the Colorado River basin overall, it’s unclear what — if any — specific, imminent threats there are to the upper Crystal River. In 2012, conservation group American Rivers deemed the Crystal one of the top 10 most endangered rivers. This was spurred by plans, which have since been scrapped, from the Colorado River Water Conservation District and the West Divide Conservation District to preserve water rights tied to reservoirs near Redstone.
Still, in a place where much of the state’s headwaters are taken across the Continental Divide to thirsty Front Range cities, Wild & Scenic proponents say it could happen on the Crystal, even if those threats are currently hypothetical. Many of Colorado’s rivers have been overly tapped, but there’s still water left to develop on the Crystal.
“To me, the greatest threat to the Crystal isn’t so much the storage facility, it’s that there’s still water in the Crystal,” said Pitkin County Attorney John Ely. “The biggest risk to the Crystal is just taking water out of the drainage. That’s why I think the (Wild & Scenic) effort is still worth doing.”
Aspen Journalism covers water and rivers in collaboration with The Aspen Times.
Crystal River rancher Bill Fales stands at the headgate for the Helms Ditch, with Mount Sopris in the background. As part of an agreement with the Colorado Water Trust, Fales could be paid to reduce his diversions from the ditch when the river is low. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
A Crystal River Valley rancher and a nonprofit organization are teaming up for the second time to try to leave more water in a parched stream.
Cold Mountain Ranch owners Bill Fales and Marj Perry have inked a six-year deal with the Colorado Water Trust to voluntarily retime their irrigation practices to leave water in the Crystal River during the late summer and early fall, when the river often needs it the most. In addition to a $5,000 signing bonus, the ranchers will be paid $250 a day up to 20 days, for each cubic foot per second they don’t divert, for a maximum payment of $30,000.
The water would come from reducing diversions from the Helms Ditch and could result in up to an additional 6 cfs in the river. The agreement would become active in the months of August and September any time streamflows dip below 40 cfs and once becoming active, will extend through October. The agreement will lift if streamflows rise above 55 cfs.
The goal of the program is to use voluntary, market-based approaches to encourage agricultural water users — who often own the biggest and most senior water rights — to put water back into Colorado’s rivers during critical times.
The program has the hallmarks of demand management, a much-discussed concept over the past few years at the state level: it’s temporary, voluntary and compensated. Other pilot programs that focus on agricultural water conservation usually involve full or split-season fallowing of fields, but with this agreement Fales still intends to get his usual two cuttings of hay.
“The idea is to find something that is a flexible way for water rights owners to use their water in years where it makes sense for something different than strictly agricultural practices,” said Alyson Meyer-Gould, director of policy with the Colorado Water Trust. “It’s another way to use their water portfolio.”
Low flows during drought on the Crystal River. Photo credit: Colorado Water Trust
Here’s the release from the Colorado Water Trust and the Cold Mountain Ranch (Alyson Meyer Gould and Bill Fales):
Cold Mountain Ranch and Colorado Water Trust finalized an agreement intended to increase streamflow in the Crystal River in drier years. The six-year agreement will compensate the Cold Mountain Ranch owners, Bill Fales and Marj Perry, for retiming their irrigation practices to leave their irrigation water in the Crystal River when the river needs it most.
The Crystal River, in 2012, was listed as the eighth most endangered river in the country by American Rivers. It is still a struggling river today. Owing to diversions off the river and the impacts of climate change decreasing snowpack, it runs very low or dry in most years. This impacts the fish and wildlife that depend on it. Colorado Water Trust and Cold Mountain Ranch are trying to help. This innovative agreement would provide the ranch the opportunity to add flows to their local river when it needs it most and hopefully contribute to a healthier aquatic and riparian habitat for those that depend on it. Together, we aim to show that agriculture and conservation can go hand in hand.
Cold Mountain Ranch relies on the Crystal River to irrigate pastures and hay fields that support its cow-calf operation. Under the agreement, Colorado Water Trust will monitor flows in the river and if flows fall to 40 cubic feet per second (cfs) in August or September, the ranch may voluntarily decide to shift its irrigation schedule to allow Colorado Water Trust to lease the water for environmental benefit. Colorado Water Trust will monitor and measure the changed practice and pay the ranch a $5,000 bonus for signing the agreement at the outset of the five-year contract and then $250 per cfs per day to encourage that shift. Once streamflows reach 55 cfs, payments would cease. The agreement can restore up to 6 cfs in the Crystal River.
In 2018, Colorado Water Trust and Cold Mountain Ranch signed a similar three-year pilot agreement that ended in 2020. Unfortunately, within this initial three-year period, Colorado Water Trust and Cold Mountain Ranch were unable to run the project. In 2018, the Crystal River’s flows were too low to implement the agreement – there was not enough water available to result in significant benefits instream. In 2019, the river was high enough to avoid triggering the agreement during the timeframe of the agreement. Although it flirted with the low flow trigger in the late fall, the timing was out of range for the agreement. And in 2020, because of dry and hot conditions and impacts to their irrigated crops, Colorado Water Trust’s partners at Cold Mountain Ranch needed to use as much water as possible to maximize their late season production and keep their ranching operation sustainable.
Colorado Water Trust and Cold Mountain Ranch’s initial three-year pilot agreement was the first crack at a highly customized, market-based solution that works for agriculture and rivers on the Crystal River, and offered lessons for the renewal and re-tooling of that initial agreement. In this new six-year contract, the partners tried to account for drier years and changing climatic conditions, as well as the economic needs of the Ranch. The changes include a $5,000 bonus to support agricultural operations, additional payment and flexibility for coordination, and extending potential coordination into October.
One of the most important goals of Colorado Water Trust’s work on the Crystal River was to design a solution that allows water rights owners to maintain healthy agricultural operations – and Colorado Water Trust continues to accomplish that goal.
Our past agreement also shows other ranchers on the Crystal River that when we say our solutions are voluntary and are NOT designed to harm their operations, we mean it. The vision for this project is that other ranchers on the Crystal River will see that Cold Mountain Ranch is fully empowered to make their own decisions in the best interest of their business, and will feel comfortable to sign on to the project as well. The Crystal River needs more water than just that of Cold Mountain Ranch’s and we hope others will get involved to maintain a healthy river.
ABOUT COLORADO WATER TRUST: Colorado Water Trust is a statewide, nonprofit organization that restores water to Colorado’s rivers in need. Colorado Water Trust accomplishes its mission with voluntary, market-based projects.
Click the link to read the article on The Aspen Times website (Carolyn Sackariason). Here’s an excerpt:
For the third year in a row, the city of Aspen will continue to be under stage two water restrictions due to elevated drought conditions in Pitkin County. The U.S. Drought Monitor last month elevated Aspen and Pitkin County from abnormally dry to moderate drought conditions, according to Steve Hunter, the city’s utilities resource manager.
Map credit: The High Plains Regional Climate Center
Not only has the area experienced above-normal temperatures and below normal precipitation, Aspen started this spring with below average soil moisture. What that means is that drier soils will infiltrate snowmelt runoff reducing the amount reaching the streams, according to Hunter…
The city’s drought response committee has recommended in a staff memo to Aspen City Council that the municipality remain in stage two water restrictions, which it has been since the fall of 2020.
The 2021-22 snowpack was average to slightly above average for the Roaring Fork watershed as Western Colorado saw above average temperatures and below average precipitation in April and May, which have accelerated snowmelt, according to Hunter. Stream flows in the Roaring Fork watershed are estimated to be from 45% to 80% of average, and most rivers are predicted to have a smaller and earlier peak than normal.
The Roaring Fork River seen here on May 24 near the Catherine Store Bridge in Carbondale. Downstream at Glenwood Springs, the river peaked for the season on May 20, early and outside the window of what’s considered normal. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Rivers in western Colorado have already peaked for the season, creating challenging conditions for reservoir managers and rafting companies.
Fueled by spring windstorms that deposited snow-devouring dust on the mountain snowpack, most streams saw their peak flows between May 19 and 21 for this year, according to data from the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center.
On May 19, the Crystal River near Avalanche Creek hit its high mark for the spring at about 1,870 cubic feet per second. On that day in the southwest part of the state, the San Miguel River at Placerville peaked at 823 cfs; and the Yampa River in Steamboat Springs hit its high mark of 2,915 cfs..
On May 20, the Roaring Fork River just above its confluence with the Colorado River in Glenwood Springs peaked at 4,450 cfs; the Eagle River at Dotsero peaked at about 4,950 cfs.
On May 21, just upstream of major agriculture diversions to the Grand Valley at a location known as Cameo, the Colorado River peaked at about 10,730 cfs. At the Utah state line, streamflows peaked at 16,130 cfs.
The peak streamflow volumes for these locations were within the range of what’s considered normal.
Although there may be a second, smaller peak in coming days as summer temperatures return, forecasters say most of the snow below 11,000 feet has already melted out, meaning not enough is left to fuel a bigger peak than the one that has already happened.
For several locations — the Roaring Fork at Glenwood, the Crystal, the San Miguel and the Colorado at Cameo — the peak came so early that it was outside the window of what’s considered normal. The rest of the locations — the Yampa, the Eagle and the Colorado at the Utah state line — were inside the normal range, although on the earlier side.
These conditions can be partly attributed to dust on snow, which causes the snowpack to melt earlier and faster.
“Dust on snow has played a pretty big role this year,” said Cody Moser, a senior hydrologist with the CBRFC. “It really allows the energy from the sun to get absorbed into the snowpack much more than if you have this white, clean snow surface.”
According to Jeff Derry, executive director of the Silverton-based Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies, a total of 11 dust events occurred in April and May. A total of six or seven occur during a normal year.
This spring has been unusually windy, which has kicked up dust from northern New Mexico and Arizona and deposited it on Colorado’s snow-capped peaks; the San Juans Mountains, in the southwestern part of the state, were the hardest hit. Each year, the center ranks the severity of the dust storms.
“A number of those were really nasty events,” Derry said. “This is the first time since 2013 that we have said it’s a severe dust year.”
