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Laramie River

Division 1 · Water District 48 · As of 2026-08-26 11:06 MDT · 10 days ago
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Laramie River on the ground — the ditches, wells, reservoirs and gages of Water District 48 · clicktap anything for its record

Browse this district’s ditches, gages, reservoirs, wells and springs as a list.

7% of normal flow, week of 2026-08-10
24 calls active on it right now

The Laramie River is critically low for early August -- 7% of normal flow, its 7th-driest such week in 104 years of record. 24 calls stand against it right now; the most senior right calling dates to 1860.

108 well permits on file — not decreed rights
72% household or domestic use
150 ft median depth, 58 wells reporting

43% are constructed wells; 8% are tied to a decreed structure. A permit is the State Engineer's permission to drill and use a well, not a water right; most here are exempt household wells that sit outside the priority line and never needed a decree — three things called “well”. Turn on the Well permits chip on the map above to see where they are.

The Driller’s Atlas · Plate 2 A cross-section nobody surveyed

Every permitted well within a few miles of the line, drawn from the ground to its drilled depth as the driller filed it. The bright part of each stroke is the perforated casing — where the well actually takes water — coloured by the aquifer named on the permit. Nobody arranged these; the aquifers arrange themselves.

Hover or arrow through the strokes to read a well.

The same corridor as a table
Miles from AWells drawn Median depth (ft)With a screen Most-named aquiferNo depth filed

Bins run from end A to end B of the line. “Most-named aquifer” is the family most often named on permits in the bin, with its count; permits naming no aquifer are the majority of the file and are not a family.

Drought

Right now

This is the 7th-driest week 33 in 104 years of record at LARAMIE RIVER NEAR GLENDEVEY, CO. (as of 2026-08-10; this week’s flow sits at the 7th percentile for the date). On this week’s US Drought Monitor, Larimer County is 49% in D3 extreme drought (2026-09-01).

Every year since 1904, week by week

Each thin row is a year at LARAMIE RIVER NEAR GLENDEVEY, CO.; each cell is one week’s flow ranked against the same calendar week of every other year — warm means dry for the date, blue wet, so seasonality cancels and droughts appear as warm bands. Gaps are missing record, never a dry river. Click a year to reconstruct it on the Historical tab.

The Drought Monitor’s view since 2000

Mean share of area in each class across Larimer county — the counties this district’s gages sit in, which overlap the district imperfectly. The Drought Monitor weighs soils, vegetation and local reports; it is CONTEXT beside the river’s own record above, not the water-rights picture.

This basin’s droughts, by its own record

DroughtSpanWeeks Trough percentileRecovery
the 2018 drought 2019-02-04 → 2019-09-02 30 4th (2019-04-22) 0 weeks
the 2018 drought 2017-12-25 → 2018-09-17 38 4th (2018-04-02) 1 week
unnamed dry spell 2015-12-07 → 2017-09-04 91 4th (2016-06-06) 4 weeks
unnamed dry spell 2015-02-23 → 2015-08-17 25 4th (2015-04-20) 111 weeks
the 2012-13 drought 2014-02-10 → 2014-08-18 27 4th (2014-03-31) 0 weeks
the 2012-13 drought 2012-10-29 → 2013-10-07 49 4th (2013-04-29) 0 weeks
the 2002 drought 2001-08-27 → 2003-09-08 106 5th (2002-10-28) 0 weeks
the 1981 drought 1981-07-27 → 1982-01-25 26 22nd (1981-09-28) 2 weeks
the 1977 drought 1977-02-28 → 1978-03-06 53 13th (1977-10-31) 4 weeks
unnamed dry spell 1966-09-26 → 1967-03-06 23 21st (1966-11-14) 18 weeks
the 1950s drought 1954-09-06 → 1955-02-14 23 24th (1954-11-15) 40 weeks
unnamed dry spell 1943-12-06 → 1944-09-25 42 20th (1944-06-26) 45 weeks
unnamed dry spell 1942-05-11 → 1943-03-29 46 24th (1942-05-18) 4 weeks
the 1930s Dust Bowl drought 1939-09-25 → 1940-09-02 49 14th (1939-12-18) 5 weeks

Detected mechanically: the 26-week smoothed percentile below the 30th for at least 20 weeks; recovered on regaining the 50th. The knobs are stated because the episode list depends on them — a different reasonable choice merges or splits episodes at the edges. Names are attached where an episode overlaps a drought Colorado already talks about.

What drought has cost here

Since 1991, federal crop insurance has paid $194,432 in drought-caused claims across Larimer county — 0.8% of all insured crop losses there. The worst year was 2017 ($39,168).

USDA crop-insurance indemnities where the recorded cause of loss is drought, summed over the counties this district's gages sit in. Counties overlap water districts imperfectly, and insured-crop claims are a floor on drought damage, not a total. Source: USDA RMA cause-of-loss files.

When this basin claimed its water

Every bar is a year’s new appropriations (62 rights across 107 years of shared record), colored by that year’s wetness from the barcode above. Here the correlation is +0.02 — essentially no wet-dry pattern; here, law and settlement set the pace, not the weather. Across the state both behaviors exist: ephemeral southwest basins file after wet demonstrations, transbasin-source basins under drought — and the biggest statewide filing waves sat in the 1950s drought and after 2002, not in the wet 1980s–90s.

Appropriation dates are the CLAIMED initiation of a right, not the courthouse filing date; the record is survivor-biased (abandoned claims are absent, so failed dry-era scrambles are undercounted); and the big 1960s and 2000s spikes sit on legal events — the pre-1969-Act adjudication era and 2000s legislation — not on weather. A correlation here is a description, never a cause.

New to how a dry winter becomes a call on the river? Anatomy of a drought walks the chain in four minutes — snow to rivers to reservoirs to calls to the water table.

Snowpack — no snow on the ground at 2 SNOTEL sites — normal for the date; the snow year begins in October and typically peaks around May 5. Full snow & runoff picture — charts, forecast history and how the forecasts have verified →

Sites, exceedance bands and sources
SNOTEL siteElev (ft)SWE (in)Median (in)% of medianTypical peak
Joe Wright10140 0.10.0 May 5 (24.0 in)
Roach9710 0.00.0 April 25 (17.5 in)

Snow-water equivalent and medians (1991–2020) from NRCS SNOTEL; seasonal volume forecasts from the NRCS National Water and Climate Center. Sites and forecast points are assigned to the district whose boundary contains them — snowpack that feeds this district can also sit in a neighboring headwater district. Toggle the Snow chip on the map above to see the sites.

Topology cross-check: 0 parent disagreements, 10 sizable streams not on this network (vs DWR's route framework — under review)

This flow network was built mechanically; DWR's Source Water Route Framework disagrees with it in the places below. Each row is a question a human reviewer has not yet answered — not an error verdict. Checked 8 streams, 8 agree. Know this water? Tell us →

Sizable streams DWR maps here that this network does not carry:

Stuck Creek (12 mi) · Nunn Creek (11 mi) · Jimmy Creek (10 mi) · La Garde Creek (9 mi) · Stub Creek (7 mi) · Link Creek (6 mi) · Porter Creek (5 mi) · Drink Creek (4 mi)

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