Colorado Rivers Update: Save The Dolores River!

Hi Friends of Colorado’s Rivers,

For years we have watched the saga playing out on the Dolores River in Southwest Colorado and we’ve been wanting to engage in a way that forces the various water agencies to leave more water in the river. As you may know, the nail in the coffin for the Dolores is McPhee Dam — one the last big dam projects in Colorado — that was built and filled between 1983 and 1987. After that time, and especially into the

year 2000 and after, the Dolores River below the dam rarely flowed enough to provide for the ecological health of the river and its fish, let alone for recreational use by rafts and kayaks.

All of that COULD change.

In 2025, the management plans for the river are expiring and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has to create a process to extend or change those plans. We’ve argued for over a decade that Reclamation has already violated the current management plans, and so any new plan must be not only be “new” but dramatically different. Over the last 20 years, more diversions have occurred and the ongoing drought has ravaged the health of the watershed and the river. Times have changed and the management of the river must change with it.

For these reasons, and more, we will be aggressively petitioning Reclamation to launch a National Environmental Policy Act process to create a new management plan for the dam and river. Your voice will make a difference in that process, and we appreciate you speaking out.

Our colleagues at the San Juan Citizens Alliance in nearby Durango have created a Call2Action that sends an email to Reclamation which you can use now (click here). In addition, stay tuned for the opportunity to stand up and speak out with our own more aggressive Call2Action in the near future.

The Dolores River deserves to live, and Flows For Nature must be in the new plan.

We hope you are enjoying your summer out on the waterways of the Southwest U.S.