SYLVAN RESERVOIR ☆ My Water

The record and the river

Where this structure is measured

A green link is DWR's own: either its telemetry inventory maps this WDID to that station, or the station is named for this WDID (0700553 → 0700553A). An amber one is ours — the station sits within 250 m and shares a distinctive word with this structure's name, which is a strong hint rather than a DWR statement that this gage meters this structure. Wrong? Tell us.

In short

SYLVAN RESERVOIR holds 1 decreed right on LITTLE MUDDY CREEK. No call currently reaches it that we can lawfully attribute, so none of its rights are being curtailed by one. 25 further calls state no district and sit outside this one, so they are counted here rather than assumed either way. In a median year over its last 11 recorded years it diverts 1,004 acre-feet.

Assembled from the figures on this page — every number above is checked against them before it is shown (4 checked). The detail, with its method, is in the cards below.

Dam safety

Source: DWR Dam Safety’s jurisdictional-dam inventory (damsafety/damsafetydaminfojd), refreshed weekly. DWR’s record for this dam carries no WDID and no matched NID id, so it is joined by name and position: “SYLVAN” 0.129 mi away. More than half of Colorado’s jurisdictional dams can be reached no other way; judge the match before relying on it. Hazard class describes the consequence of failure, not the likelihood of it. DWR’s dam record.

Current administration

● In priority — no active call senior to this structure's rights affects its district (30 active call(s) checked).

25 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?

No active call verifiably reaches this structure (30 active call(s) checked), so none of its 1 rights is administratively curtailed today. (25 call(s) state no district and sit outside this one — not judged, not assumed.) In the 4 past years most like this one (2011, 2010, 2009, 2008), 0 of the rights shown below were out at least one week in at least one analog year.

Where it sits in line

Priority 1907-11-03 — 242nd most senior of the 2208 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: SYLVAN DITCH (1907-11-03)☆. Immediately behind: CAIRNS PIPELINE NO 1 (1907-11-26)☆.

On LITTLE MUDDY CREEK at river mile 54.1, it is 3rd of 16 down the reach. Immediately upstream: MORTON DITCH☆. Immediately downstream: WOOD NO 2 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.

Legal record & documents

6 decreed actions on record across 4 court cases: 98CW0292, 17CW3129, W0676, CA0183.

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 5103701 ↗ (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.

Structures it shares court cases with

Also a party to 3 omnibus adjudications (CA0183, 117 structures; 98CW0292, 26 structures; 17CW3129, 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 14 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 1,004 AF. Its most recent year on record, 2024, came in at 1,499 AF — 149% of that, and 10th lowest of the 11 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 11 recorded years — which is itself worth knowing.

Its reference gage, Colorado River at Hot Sulphur Springs: 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.