Colorado Water
The snowpack levels are looking good in Southern Colordo compared to the past few years but elsewhere in the state things are a bit more dicey, according to the Rocky Mountain News [March 15, 2003, "Snowfall is up in southern Colorado"].
Here's the link to the Natural Resources Conservation District snowfall records.
Meanwhile, in Denver, the state "Water Quality Control Commission rendered its verdict in Denver concerning downstream Dolores River flows from McPhee Reservoir to Bradfield Bridge. In what can be considered a defeat for Colorado Trout Unlimited and a victory for the Dolores Water Conservancy District, the WQCC chose not to list the 12-mile stretch of the Dolores River as impaired," according to the Cortez Journal.
Here's a story about the men most responsible for some of the big dams of Colorado's past from the Denver Post [March 14, 2004, "'Water buffaloes' left mark on state"]. From the article, "'You just can't do what those guys used to do,' agreed Ed Pokorney, Denver Water's director of planning. 'Today, wherever you turn there is process - stakeholders, environmental groups and dozens of regulations for the environment, endangered species, cultural artifacts. For those guys, the process was to get in a room with two or three powerful people or entities and broker a deal.' One clear sign of the disappearing breed: Not one major reservoir or dam has been built in the state in the last 40 years. Colorado's last two proposals for major dams and reservoirs, the kind that water buffaloes championed years ago across the West, both failed - Two Forks on the South Platte River in 1990 and Union Park on the Gunnison River in 2000. Some feared and criticized the concentration of power in the hands of a small group of men. But the water buffaloes built Colorado, a state once crippled by a geographic handicap of too much water in the western half and not nearly enough to grow cities or farms on the Front Range and Eastern Plains, said Durango- based hydrologist and state historian Rick Glenn."
6:42:27 AM 
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