Heather Sackett, Aspen Journalism
-
In 2020, a group of nine flood irrigators in the Kremmling area, scientists and conservation groups began a multiyear research project to find out what happens when irrigation water is withheld from high-elevation fields for a full season and a half-season.
-
Representatives from two lower basin states on the Colorado River have said they would finally address something that the upper basin states, including Colorado, have long pressed them to do: Fix the supply/demand imbalance sometimes called the “structural deficit.”
-
The state will have to decide how to protect the wetlands that now fall outside the purview of the Clean Water Act, which water policy experts are calling “gap waters.”
-
If the bill passes next year, it would prohibit local and state governments and unit owners associations from allowing the planting nonfunctional turf or nonnative plants, or installing artificial turf in commercial, institutional or industrial properties, beginning in 2025.
-
The System Conservation Program is paying water users in the four upper basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming and Utah — to cut back. Although water users from all sectors can participate, all of the projects in Colorado involved agricultural water users on the Western Slope.
-
Pitkin County is hoping to make 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.
-
For the past three years, PHS student scientists have been raising the fish in a hatchery, feeding and weighing them, testing the water, cleaning their tanks and inserting a transponder tag so that biologists can track their movement once released each season as part of the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program.
-
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. Water samples are being collected on upper reaches of Woody, Hunter, Avalanche and Thompson creeks in the Roaring Fork basin.
-
Eighty percent of survey respondents said they support new regulations requiring that mobile home parks provide their residents with clean drinking water. Tawny Peyton, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Home Association, said the mobile home park industry has been bombarded with sweeping law changes in recent years, causing confusion and additional operation and legal costs.