GUIRAUD 3T DITCH ☆ My Water

Current administration

● Fully called out — call at SOUTH PLATTE RIVER AT WATERTON (SOUTH PLATTE RIVER, priority 1863-12-30).

Which of its rights are out of priority?

Under today's controlling call (SOUTH PLATTE RIVER AT WATERTON, priority 1863-12-30): 1 of this structure's 1 rights are out of priority now. (7 call(s) state no district and sit outside this one — not judged, not assumed.) In the 5 past years most like this one (2023, 2024, 2018, 2025, 2022), 1 of the rights shown below were out at least one week in at least one analog year.

Where it sits in line

Priority 1867-07-01 — 222nd most senior of the 21886 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: GRANT WELL NO 16255F (1867-06-30)☆. Immediately behind: GUIRAUD DITCH (1867-07-01)☆.

On MIDDLE FORK SOUTH PLATTE at river mile -17.0, it is 67th of 86 down the reach. Immediately upstream: ARROWHEAD SPRING☆. Immediately downstream: GUIRAUD 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 (1)

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.

How much of this decree was in priority, by day

A right is in priority on a day when it is senior to every call administering this structure. Of its 1.193 cfs decreed rate, the average day over the last 6 year(s) had 1.187 cfs in priority (99% of the decree). No call in effect is a free river — that was 6.4% of days.

On 8 days some rights were in priority and others were not — seniority splits a decree rather than switching it off. Calls are set and released at a time of day, not at midnight, so a day is counted by the hour: a call setting at 4pm costs that day a third of its rate, not all of it. A call began or ended mid-day on 33 of these days.

This is paper water. It is the decreed rate that was in priority — not water that was physically in the stream, and not water this structure diverted. A ditch can be in priority for 50 cfs on a day the creek carries five. What that distinction means →

Legal record & documents

97 decreed actions on record across 78 court cases: W9358, W8668, W8648, W8574, W8389, W8345, W8259, W8109, W8107, W7785 and 68 more below.

569 imaged documents on DWR’s shelf for this structure — 443 water-court documents across 90 cases, including 90 decrees. Every row opens the scanned PDF at DWR. Listing as of 2026-09-17.

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 2300679 ↗ (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 →

How often is it out of priority?

Across the 11 seasons whose call record is complete enough to judge this structure (2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026), week by week from April.

Structures it shares court cases with

This structure was a party to 74 court cases that also touched 131 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.

62 further shared cases not shown — the most specific are listed first, since a case binding two structures says more than one binding a dozen.

Also a party to 3 omnibus adjudications (W6355, 33 structures; 92CW0074, 31 structures; W8345, 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 15 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 1,578 AF. Its most recent year on record, 1978, came in at 0 AF — 0% of that, and 1st lowest of the 14 years with a recorded volume.

This structure records both diversions and reservoir releases — they are separate water movements and are accounted separately below.

Trends for this structure

Recorded use shows no clear trend over its last 14 recorded years — which is itself worth knowing.

Its reference gage, Middle Fork South Platte at Prince: 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.