River Stakeholders
Colorado's Colorado River Water Use Highlights:
Colorado's Colorado River Water Use:
Behind every water policy decision in the American West is one deceptively simple question: How much water is actually available?
In Colorado, that question has fueled conversation and conflict for over a century. Since European settlers first tried to make a living in this semi-arid state, measuring and managing water has driven innovation. Today, a complex legal and technical system guides water use from Denver to Durango.
As Colorado grew, the prior appropriation doctrine provided a legal backbone for managing water and supporting development. Technical advances enabled storage, transport, and measurement of water across rugged terrain and unpredictable conditions. Because annually variable snowpack makes up so much of the state’s water supply, snow telemetry (SNOTEL) sites were set up across many basins to give water managers key data on how much they might expect to end up in streams and reservoirs.
For decades, these sites have offered vital snapshots and long-term trends to guide policy and planning. But most SNOTEL stations sit below 11,000 feet and are sparse across Colorado’s vast landscape. In recent years, snowpack and streamflow patterns have grown more unpredictable, widening the gap between forecasts and actual water availability.
To improve our snowpack understanding, water managers have turned from the ground to the sky. Airborne Snow Observatories Inc. (ASO), building on a legacy with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab expertise, uses LiDAR-based technology to scan snowpack at a basin-wide scale from aircrafts, offering a detailed snapshot of the snowpack and how much water might be available each season.
In 2020, the Colorado Airborne Snowpack Measurement (CASM) Program was founded. It is a partnership of multiple local, state, and federal water partners committed to expanding access to state-of-the-art snowpack monitoring data to improve decision making across all water sectors. Agencies like Northern Water, Denver Water, the Colorado Water Conservation Board, and the Colorado River District have partnered with ASO to fly over high-altitude basins, helping build a clearer picture of Colorado’s water availability year to year.
Recognizing the importance of this work, the Colorado General Assembly passed legislation in 2025 to establish a statewide Water Supply Measurement and Forecasting Program. Building a shared, science-based understanding of snowpack will be essential to help protect and manage Colorado’s water for generations to come.
In 2025, efforts continued to convert historic nonconsumptive water rights on the Colorado River into a permanent instream flow.
In May, the Colorado River Water Conservation District, on behalf of the broadbased Shoshone Water Right Preservation Coalition, offered the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) a perpetual interest in the Shoshone water rights for use as an instream flow.
The River District had previously reached a purchase and sale agreement with Public Service Company of Colorado, a subsidiary of Xcel Energy, which operates the Shoshone Power Plant near Glenwood Springs. With funding from the district, local and county governments, water agencies, the state of Colorado, and anticipated federal support, the project’s fundraising is nearly complete. Once CWCB accepts the rights, the process will move to Colorado’s water court for determination of the right’s historical consumptive use and to ensure no injury to other water users.
Work continued in 2025 on the Arkansas Valley Conduit (AVC), which will bring clean drinking water to 39 water systems along the Arkansas River east of Pueblo. The AVC is being constructed by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District as the final piece of Fryingpan-Arkansas Project, which brings water from the Roaring Fork basin of the Colorado River into the Arkansas River basin.
The Fry-Ark Project provides supplemental water to cities and farms in the Arkansas River basin, and this year brought in 37,200 acre-feet. The project also contributes compensatory storage for the Western Slope with Ruedi Reservoir, a key facility for flood control, recreation, endangered fish recovery and electric power for the Roaring Fork basin. Under the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project Operating Principles, the project also maintains minimum stream flows on the Western Slope.
On the North Front Range of Colorado, Chimney Hollow Reservoir was completed in late 2025 by Barnard Construction Co. Inc. of Bozeman, Montana. The new reservoir will start to accept water through the end of 2025, but initial testing shows it will initially have mineralized uranium within it, which will require additional problem-solving measures to be applied in the coming few years.
The 90,000-acre-foot reservoir is part of the Windy Gap Project, a storage project built by Northern Water’s Municipal Subdistrict, which supplies municipal water for 12 municipal utilities, water districts and one electrical utility.