American Ground Water Trust 2015 Colorado Groundwater Issues Meeting
David M. Abbott, Jr., CPG-4570
I’m a mining geologist and also a 4th generation Coloradan. In the West, water is for fighting over. Colorado is noted for being the source of major riv- ers: the Platte (North and South), the Arkansas, the Rio Grande, and the major Colorado River tribu- taries: the San Juan, Animas, Delores, Gunnison, Colorado, White, and Yampa. The Green does flow through northwestern Colorado but doesn’t cur- rently affect Colorado’s water supplies unlike its major tributary, the Yampa. Most of Colorado’s surface water falls as snow and rain in the greater Colorado River drainage area known as the Western Slope, while most of the population is on the Eastern Slope, particularly in the Front Range Corridor between Colorado Springs and Wellington (almost to Wyoming).
Trans-mountain diversion of water across the Continental Divide begins with the Grand Ditch along the Never Summer Range on the north- west boundary of Rocky Mountain National Park that flows across the Continental Divide at La Poudre Pass, 10,182 feet, and into the Cache La Poudre River drainage. This is followed by the large Colorado-Big Thompson Project (C-BT) that connects Grand Lake, the source of the Colorado River prior to the C-BT in southwestern Rocky Mountain National Park, with Estes Park and the Big Thompson River on the east side of the Park, the Pioneer Bore of the Moffat Tunnel from the Fraser River sources near Winter Park into South Boulder Creek, the Roberts Tunnel from Dillon Reservoir to the North Fork of the South Platte, and the Frying Pan-Arkansas Project in central Colorado. But these surface water diversions fill only part of Colorado’s water needs along the Front Range Corridor. The rest comes from groundwater sources both shallow and deep. As a Coloradan, water is an important topic.
Top and bottom photo show the several attendees at the one-day conference.
The American Ground Water Trust of Concord, NH holds an annual groundwater conferences in Colorado and elsewhere around the country. These conferences bring together the hydrologists, water engineers, water supply companies, well drillers, regulators, NGOs interested in water issues, County Commissioners, state Legislators, and interested folks such as me for day-long sessions on the groundwater issues of the particular region. I attended the conference in Denver on December 4th. AIPG was a “cooperating organization,” one of those interested NGOs, which provided a reduced registration rate to mem-
bers. It was an interesting day. The focus was on northeastern Colorado and I’ll include details in a longer article for The Colorado Professional Geologist’s Winter 2016 issue.
I came away from the meeting with two main impressions. First, the water side, particularly the water sources side, of the geoscience business is healthy and growing, unlike most of the rest of the geoscience specialties. And second, American Ground Water Trust’s conferences are worth attending for any- one interested in water supply issues, which should be all of us.
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