With the snip of a ribbon Tuesday, Colorado water managers officially opened a new waterway in Grand County that reconnects a stretch of the Colorado River for the first time in four decades to help fish and aquatic life.
The milelong waterway, called the Colorado River Connectivity Channel, skirts around Windy Gap Reservoir, where a dam has broken the natural flow of the river since 1985. The $33 million project’s goal is to return a stretch of the river to its former health, a river where aquatic life thrived and fish could migrate and spawn. But getting to the dedication ceremony Tuesday took years of negotiations that turned enemies into collaborators and can serve as a model for future water projects, officials say.
“It speaks to the new reality of working on water projects, which is that it doesn’t have to be an us-versus-them situation,” Northern Water spokesperson Jeff Stahla said. “People can get together and identify things that can help not only the water supply, but also help the environment.”
Windy Gap Reservoir and the new channel are just off U.S. 40 near Granby, a few miles southwest of popular recreation areas around Lake Granby and Grand Lake.
The reservoir was designed to deliver an average of 48,000 acre-feet of water per year from Grand County through numerous reservoirs, ditches, canals and pipelines to faucets in homes and sprinklers on farms across northeastern Colorado. One acre-foot roughly equals the annual water use of two to three households.
But soon after construction finished in 1985, locals and fly fishermen started noticing problems — starting with the bugs.
Drivers used to cleaning insects out of their radiators suddenly had one less chore as certain types of mayflies, stoneflies and caddisflies disappeared. In 2011, state biologists calculated a 38% loss in diversity between the early 1980s and 2011.
The dam blocked fish passage, and the reservoir became a breeding ground for whirling disease, a deadly condition for local trout caused by a microscopic parasite.
It choked seasonal high flows. Without the flows to flush the sediment from between small rocks, the habitat for a fundamental food source, small organisms called macroinvertebrates, diminished. The sculpin, a small fish that often serves as an indicator of river health, disappeared entirely.
“The ecosystem started crashing,” said Kirk Klancke, a longtime conservationist in the area. “It didn’t die out completely, but it certainly started crashing. We lost all the sensitive, most important macroinvertebrates.”
The fishery’s gold medal status was threatened, and losing that would have been a blow to the local economy, he said.
The reservoir also couldn’t reliably serve its main purpose: catching water and pumping it 6 miles to Lake Granby to eventually reach the Front Range. When the lake is filled to the brim in wet years, it can’t store Windy Gap’s water, leaving northeastern communities in the lurch, according to Northern Water.
The new channel is the fix.
To create the channel, the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District started work in 2022, draining Windy Gap Reservoir and cutting its size in half. The result is a smaller reservoir and a floodplain through which the channel flows.
Crews built a new diversion headgate — the main focus of the dedication this week — that manages how much water enters the reservoir from the channel. They removed a small, upstream dam crossing the Fraser River that blocked fish passage.
After vegetation is established, the channel will open to fishing and recreation, likely around 2027.
Water has been flowing through the channel for about a year, and officials are already seeing benefits: Colorado Parks and Wildlife said Tuesday that the sculpin has been detected in that stretch for the first time in 20 years.
“Seeing the project come to fruition, and then getting the bonus of having wildlife biologists tell you, ‘Yep, we’re already seeing signs of biological healing,’ was just mind blowing,” said Tony Kay, former president of Trout Unlimited who has been working on connecting the river for 26 years.
It was emotional. Not everyone who started this process was able to see it through to the end, like Bud Isaacs, a downstream landowner who was one of the first to raise the alarm and who passed away in 2022, Kay said.
“We never actually thought that this would happen,” he said.
The channel is also one facet of a sweeping, multimillion-dollar plan to fix multiple problems in one go.
Through the Windy Gap Firming Project, growing Front Range communities will have more reliable water storage in the form of Chimney Hollow Reservoir, which is under construction near Loveland and will work in tandem with Windy Gap to provide water supplies.
The effort to build the connectivity channel has seemed slow moving at times, but officials, environmentalists and urban areas are celebrating it as an example of hard-won collaboration.
“It was a gamble to partner with Front Range water diverters. There were a lot of people who told us you can’t do deals with the devil. You’re going to end up really regretting it,” Klancke said. “The connectivity channel has proved we went down the right road.”
It’s also just one step in addressing chronic low-flow issues along the upper Colorado River caused by drought and massive water diversions to Colorado’s Front Range, Klancke said.
In five years time, Kay hopes to see a healed river through the new channel and farther downstream. He’ll be saying “thank you” every time he drives past that stretch of the river.
“Bud would be over the moon,” he said.
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