SPARKS DITCH ☆ My Water

In short

SPARKS DITCH holds 3 decreed rights on TALAMANTES CREEK. No call currently reaches it that we can lawfully attribute, so none of its rights are being curtailed by one. 1 further call state no district and sit outside this one, so it is counted here rather than assumed either way. In a median year over its last 15 recorded years it diverts 377 acre-feet. That use is falling by about 40.9 acre-feet a year over 15 years (p=0.0010901934763789534). It was a party to 2 court cases that also touched 8 other structures.

Assembled from the figures on this page — every number above is checked against them before it is shown (9 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 (1 active call(s) checked).

1 further call state no district and sit outside this one, so it is counted here rather than assumed either way.

Which of its rights are out of priority?

No active call verifiably reaches this structure (1 active call(s) checked), so none of its 3 rights is administratively curtailed today. (1 call(s) state no district and sit outside this one — not judged, not assumed.) In the 5 past years most like this one (2013, 2019, 2015, 2020, 2025), 2 of the rights shown below were out at least one week in at least one analog year.

Where it sits in line

Priority 1882-04-01 — 3rd most senior of the 909 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: PRESTOPITZ DITCH (1882-04-01)☆. Immediately behind: YARNELL DITCH NO 2 (1882-04-01)☆.

On MAINSTEM at river mile 3.7, it is 42nd of 75 down the reach. Immediately upstream: BLM SPRING 003-51☆. Immediately downstream: ARTHURS SPRING #3☆.

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 (3)

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 6.0 cfs decreed rate, the average day over the last 5 year(s) had 3.48 cfs in priority (58% of the decree). No call in effect is a free river — that was 57.7% of days.

On 10 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 10 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

6 decreed actions on record across 3 court cases: W0472-73, W0470-73, 09/22/1894.

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 5600573 ↗ (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 1 season whose call record is complete enough to judge this structure (2011), 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 2 court cases that also touched 8 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.

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 377 AF. Its most recent year on record, 2025, came in at 263 AF — 70% of that, and 3rd lowest of the 15 years with a recorded volume.

Call-derived yield: senior right divertible 100.0% of a median season / 100.0% dry-year.

Trends for this structure

Recorded use is falling over its last 15 recorded years (-41 AF/yr, Mann-Kendall p=0.001).

Its reference gage, Talamantes Creek: no clear flow trend.

Every gage and reach in this district →

How good is our record of it?

Grade A (9/10 points) — the components below are the finding; the letter alone is not.