The big, big story this chart tells

“Holy moly,” said the staff at Big Pivots when this slide was shown at the River District meeting in Glenwood Springs

The staff at the Colorado River District showed this slide during a session on Colorado River hydrology at the district’s board of director meeting in Glenwood Springs this past Tuesday afternoon.

Here in metro Denver, the staff of Big Pivots said something profound like “holy moly!”

With moisture coming into Colorado during the next two weeks, it’s possible that the runoff into Lake Powell may surpass that of 2002. This slide says that right now, at Cameo, the gaging station on the Colorado River, east of Palisade, it looks like the spring runoff peaked in late March. The usual is in early June.

Another takeaway from the River District meeting was about Green Mountain Reservoir. The dam that creates the reservoir was built from 1938 to 1943, giving the Western Slope a way to store water as part of the Colorado-Big Thompson diversion that came after World War II. The normal allotment of the reservoir storage for downstream irrigators, mostly in the Grand Junction area, is 66,000 acre-feet.

For the first time in the history of Green Mountain, said Andy Mueller, the River District’s general manager, the water is unavailable. Instead, the river district is tapping various pools of water over which it has control to come up with a thimbleful here, a cup there. A creative solution, Mueller called it. Irrigators won’t become whole, but they will get some help.

“We’ll survive, and we will continue to survive,” said Mike Ritschard, a director from the Kremmling area and a fourth-generation rancher there, said during a roundup of reports from board members.

Created in 1937, one of the ramifications of the Colorado-Big Thompson water diversion, the River District has primary responsibility for water matters across 15 of the 20 Western Slope counties.