Hydrohistorian
Lesson C3 · The Ledger · records & administration
Anatomy of a call
A callA senior water right demanding its water, which requires everyone junior on that stream to stop diverting until it is satisfied. is the priority system switching on. It is also, concretely, a small administrative record with a handful of fields — and once you can read one, the abstract machinery of lessons A1–A4 becomes something that happened last Tuesday.
The lifecycle
A senior user short of water contacts the water commissioner; the division engineer’s office sets the call, recording who called, from which structure, and — the operative field — the controlling priority: an admin number (lesson A5). While the call stands, rights junior to that number on the administered reach owe curtailment, subject to everything in lesson A4. When the river recovers or the season ends, the call is released. The controlling priority moves with conditions — a hot August tightens it, a storm relaxes it — and watching that number through a season is watching the river’s scarcity priced in dates.
The district’s real record: recent calls
| Set | Released | Calling structure | Source | Controlling priority |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-08-27 | standing | PIONEER UNION DITCH | BEAR CREEK | 1861-12-10 (4362.00000) |
| 2026-08-27 | standing | LOWER LATHAM DITCH | SOUTH PLATTE RIVER | 1885-11-20 (13108.00000) |
| 2026-08-26 | standing | OGILVY DITCH | CACHE LA POUDRE RIVER | 1884-04-11 (12520.11505) |
| 2026-08-26 | standing | LOWER PLATTE BEAVER D | SOUTH PLATTE RIVER | 1888-04-15 (13985.00000) |
| 2026-08-25 | 2026-08-27 | HARRIMAN DITCH | BEAR CREEK | 1861-12-01 (4353.00000) |
| 2026-08-24 | standing | WANNAMAKER DITCH | CLEAR CREEK | 1860-07-01 (3835.00000) |
| 2026-08-23 | 2026-08-26 | STERLING IRR CO DITCH 1 | SOUTH PLATTE RIVER | 1888-04-15 (13985.00000) |
| 2026-08-22 | 2026-08-27 | WESTERN MUTUAL DITCH | SOUTH PLATTE RIVER | 1871-08-10 (7892.00000) |
Calls from the cached Division 1 record that can lawfully reach Clear Creek (WD7): calls naming only other districts are dropped; calls stating no district are kept, because unstated means unknown, never “affects nothing” — and DWR only began stating affected districts around 2015. “Standing” means no release is recorded in our snapshot — check DWR for current status.
What this does not let you conclude
The call record says what was set, not everything that was administered: reach scoping, futile-call judgment and plan operations happen around these rows, and our snapshot lags DWR’s live feed by design. Advisory reading aid on public data — never an administrative or legal conclusion, and never a substitute for DWR administration or an engineer’s analysis. Our methodology has not yet had outside expert review: how this is built.
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