MARIA STEVENS RESERVOIR ☆ My Water

The record and the river

In short

MARIA STEVENS RESERVOIR holds 4 decreed rights on CUCHARAS RIVER. No active call senior to its rights reaches its district today (17 active calls checked), so it is in priority now. 16 further calls state no district and sit outside this one, so they are counted here rather than assumed either way. That is today's position; the weeks ahead cannot be projected for it: no gage record for this year at this date, so there is nothing to find analogs for. In a median year over its last 12 recorded years it diverts 492 acre-feet. That use is falling by about 98.9 acre-feet a year over 12 years (p=0.016393316888809073). It was a party to 1 court cases that also touched 2 other structures.

Assembled from the figures on this page — every number above is checked against them before it is shown (10 checked). The detail, with its method, is in the cards below.

Current administration

● In priority — no active call senior to this structure's rights affects its district (17 active call(s) checked).

16 further calls state no district and sit outside this one, so they are counted here rather than assumed either way.

Which of its rights are out of priority?

The outlook for the weeks ahead is not computable for this structure: no gage record for this year at this date, so there is nothing to find analogs for. Today’s position is a separate question, and it is answered in Current administration above — that screen reads the district’s active calls and needs no reference gage.

Where it sits in line

Priority 1887-08-08 — 109th most senior of the 1045 structures with decreed rights in this water districtDWR's administrative subdivision of a river basin; the unit calls are usually stated in..

Under prior appropriationColorado's rule for sharing water: first in time, first in right. Age decides, not proximity or need., everything ahead of it in this line is satisfied in full before it receives any water. Immediately ahead: MARTIN DITCH NO 1 (1886-04-01)☆. Immediately behind: SOUTH ABEYTA HIGHLAND (1888-02-14)☆.

On MAINSTEM at river mile 46.8, it is 494th of 509 down the reach. Immediately upstream: SANCHEZ DITCH☆. Immediately downstream: OLD TIME DITCH☆.

Position on the modelled network, not a claim about whose water this is — a stream carries water from many rights at once, and diverted water returns to it.

Decreed rights (5)

Amounts marked cfs are flow rates; AF are stored volumes (storage rights are decreed in acre-feet). An absolute amount of 0.0 beside an alt-point amount is not a dead right: the water is decreed at another structure, and that row records permission to divert it here instead (an alternate point or exchange). A case listing several numbers reflects the original decree plus later change cases.

Legal record & documents

14 decreed actions on record across 7 court cases: 17CW3075, W0190-73, W0190, 19CW3045, 11/27/1928, 03CW0097, CA0582.

196 imaged documents on DWR’s shelf for this structure — 186 water-court documents across 15 cases, including 15 decrees. Every row opens the scanned PDF at DWR. Listing as of 2026-10-11.

Imaged documents at DWR. DWR keeps the scanned documents for this structure — decrees, rulings, plats, correspondence — in its Laserfiche archive. Open the list directly: imaged documents for 1603718 ↗ (indexed by structure, not by case — the cases listed above appear within the list).

Other DWR records for this structure: DWR’s page for this structure ↗ — net amounts, water rights, transactions & adjudication history, and diversion records, all on that one page. On this site: the district’s full legal picture →

Water-court filings naming this structure

1 application in the monthly water-court resumes explicitly reference this WDID. The resume is the earliest public notice of a new claim (C.R.S. 37-92-302) — years before anything reaches the decree record below. Most applications name structures by name rather than WDID, so absence here is weak evidence of absence.

Source: Judicial Branch combined monthly resumes (archive), indexed nightly; WDIDs attached only when a 7-digit token in the filing matches DWR’s structure inventory.

How often is it out of priority?

Across the 1 season whose call record is complete enough to judge this structure (2004), week by week from April. Read these as counts, not rates — 1 seasons is a short record.

Structures it shares court cases with

This structure was a party to 1 court case that also touched 2 other structures — changes of water right, augmentation plans, exchanges. Being parties to the same case does not by itself mean water moved between them; which way it ran, and how much, is in the decree.

Also a party to 1 omnibus adjudication (17CW3075, 20 structures). Those settled many rights at once and are listed separately: they say these structures were adjudicated together, not that they deal with each other.

Recorded use (last 12 years on record)

Years far under the decreed amount? That gap has a name — paper water vs. wet water, explained on this structure.

In a median year this structure has a recorded diversion of 492 AF. Its most recent year on record, 2023, came in at 1 AF — 0% of that, and 1st lowest of the 12 years with a recorded volume.

Trends for this structure

Recorded use is falling over its last 12 recorded years (-99 AF/yr, Mann-Kendall p=0.016).

Its reference gage, Cucharas River at Highway 10: no clear flow trend.

Every gage and reach in this district →

How good is our record of it?

Grade B (7/10 points) — the components below are the finding; the letter alone is not.