About this project
State parks sometimes keep a diorama near the visitor center: a painted relief of the landscape with a ribbon of blue resin showing how water moves through it — over this divide, into that reservoir, out through a canal to somewhere far away. People stand in front of them longer than any signboard. And if you drive across Colorado in a dry year, the reservoirs make the same point without a single label: a bathtub ring of pale rock where the water level normally sits.
This site is an attempt at that diorama for the whole state — with real numbers, updating while you look at it.
Most of Colorado's people live east of the Continental Divide. Most of its water falls to the west. Roughly 80% of the state's precipitation lands on the West Slope, while nearly 90% of the population lives on the Front Range. The gap is closed by plumbing on a heroic scale: tunnels bored under the Divide that pull water from the Colorado River's headwaters and push it east.
When Denver turns on a tap, some of that water started as snow above Winter Park and rode the Moffat Tunnel under James Peak; some was Blue River water lifted from Dillon Reservoir through the 23-mile Roberts Tunnel. Fort Collins and the northern Front Range drink Lake Granby water delivered by the Colorado–Big Thompson Project's Adams Tunnel. Colorado Springs and Pueblo lean on the Fry-Ark Project, which moves Fryingpan headwaters under the Divide into Turquoise Lake and Twin Lakes. On the map, those tunnels are the dashed ribbons crossing the dotted line — and on the flow view you can watch each city's water blend from its true sources.
This is why a dry winter in the Never Summer Range shows up in a Denver lawn-watering schedule. The Divide decides where water falls; the tunnels decide who gets it.
Every reservoir is drawn as a glass of water — wide at the rim, narrow at the base, the cross-section of a canyon filling up. The glass's size is its total capacity. The colour inside is the water's source (each headwater has its own hue, and blends stay traceable). The level is what's actually in it, filled by area, so a glass that looks half-full really holds half its capacity — a detail borrowed from the way a tapering reservoir genuinely stores less water per foot of depth. The bone-coloured tick is where the level would sit in a normal year: the drought is the gap between the tick and the waterline.
The rivers wear the same hues — each stream carries its headwater's colour, and mainstems shade downstream toward the blend of everything they've collected. A small ▼ beside a glass means the reservoir's storage fell over the past week: the glass is being drawn down to keep the river below it flowing. Select any reservoir or gage on the flow view and everything off its downstream path steps back, so you can follow exactly where that water goes.
Two of the metro's most famous lakes get a special label: Cherry Creek and Bear Creek are Army Corps flood-control pools, not water supply. Nobody drinks from them — the pool you sail on is the small permanent one, and the dams' real capacity is deliberately kept empty, waiting for a flood. They're on the map because everyone sees them, and because "the lake you see is not the water you drink" is half the point of this project.
The winter looked survivable on paper and then March turned warm early — by the first of June, 91% of the state's SNOTEL snow-measurement sites were bare, and the melt that should have carried rivers through summer came and went in a spike. By late July statewide streamflow was running around 44% of normal, statewide reservoir storage near 75% of its 30-year median, and the Gunnison basin's glasses — Blue Mesa above all — were visibly draining. Open the timeline and press play: you can watch it happen.
All of it is downloadable as plain CSV, with per-row source and as-of columns. None of it is operational data — for real decisions, go to the primary sources.
Because drought is easy to ignore from a kitchen tap. The water still comes out; the price doesn't change much; the crisis is always somewhere upstream. But every tap in Colorado is at the end of a specific, findable thread — a river, a tunnel, a glass slowly draining in the hills. If you can point at your reservoir on a map and say that one, and it's at 54%, the abstraction gets personal. That's the whole project.
So try it: enter your ZIP code on the map and watch your own reservoirs and tunnels light up. It's a simplified picture — utilities blend sources and trade shares constantly — but the thread it shows you is real, and you can share it: water.myjimmycloud.com#80302 opens the map with that ZIP's water already lit.