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Disappointment Creek Basin

Division 7 · Water District 69
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Disappointment Creek Basin on the ground — the ditches, wells, reservoirs and gages of Water District 69 · clicktap anything for its record

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

97% of normal flow, week of 1986-09-22
17 calls active on it right now

The Disappointment Creek is near normal for late September -- 97% of normal flow, its 2nd-wettest such week in 30 years of record. 17 calls stand against it right now; the most senior right calling dates to 1876.

Full diagnostic snapshot pending — this district's weekly-style report (system status, active calls, hydrographs, anomaly flags) is produced by the nightly rotation and appears here after its first run. The tabs above are live now.

Drought

Right now

This is the 29th-driest week 39 in 30 years of record at DISAPPOINTMENT CREEK NEAR DOVE CREEK, CO. (as of 1986-09-22; this week’s flow sits at the 97th percentile for the date). On this week’s US Drought Monitor, San Miguel County is 64% in D2 severe drought (2026-09-01).

Every year since 1957, week by week

Each thin row is a year at DISAPPOINTMENT CREEK NEAR DOVE CREEK, 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 Dolores, San Miguel counties — 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
unnamed dry spell 1978-11-20 → 1979-04-30 23 15th (1979-01-08) 0 weeks
the 1977 drought 1977-01-17 → 1977-12-19 48 3rd (1977-05-30) 27 weeks
unnamed dry spell 1972-07-24 → 1972-12-11 20 23rd (1972-09-11) 0 weeks
unnamed dry spell 1969-01-27 → 1969-06-23 21 17th (1969-03-10) 8 weeks
unnamed dry spell 1968-02-05 → 1968-07-22 24 23rd (1968-03-18) 56 weeks
the 1963-64 drought 1964-01-20 → 1964-09-21 35 15th (1964-03-23) 38 weeks
unnamed dry spell 1960-10-24 → 1961-09-25 48 24th (1961-02-06) 5 weeks
unnamed dry spell 1959-05-18 → 1959-12-07 29 23rd (1959-07-20) 99 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 $4,167,411 in drought-caused claims across Dolores, San Miguel counties — 24.2% of all insured crop losses there. The worst year was 2002 ($542,259).

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.

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.

Topology cross-check: 0 parent disagreements, 8 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 1 streams, 1 agree. Know this water? Tell us →

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

Spring Creek (17 mi) · Ryman Creek (12 mi) · Hunt Creek (8 mi) · McKinney Draw (7 mi) · Pine Arroyo (6 mi) · Rabbit Creek (6 mi) · Bear Creek (5 mi) · Dugout Wash (4 mi)

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