Aspen Journalism: Protecting the peak on the Crystal

Over three, sunny-but-cool October days, a team of scientists and volunteers dug up and hauled away the root crowns of trees along the Crystal River, a first step toward a potential strategy to protect flows on one of the last free-flowing rivers in Colorado.

David Cooper, a senior researcher on wetland and riparian ecology at Colorado State University, studies how spring floods affect riparian vegetation. His van was full of the tree samples that he would take back to the lab in Fort Collins to study their rings. 

“We want to know the year the plant was established because once we know the year the plant was established, then we could relate that to the flow record that’s recorded by gauges,” Cooper said. “Then we can speak to the role of floods, which is important for the public to understand and for river managers to understand.”

The banks of the Crystal just upstream from Redstone are lined with narrowleaf cottonwood and blue spruce. Cottonwoods in particular need the rushing flows of spring runoff for their seeds to germinate and have evolved to disperse their seeds just after the high point of snowmelt each year. The seeds, carried along the wind by a bit of fluff, land in the bare, wet, mineral soil of streambanks where some of them take root. 

“Ninety-nine percent of them die, but some of them live,” Cooper said. “The goal here is to understand the role of large floods and river dynamics on the vegetation of this river.”

That understanding could also be key to unlocking a protection strategy for the river that would claim a certain amount of spring runoff in high water years for the benefit of the environment. In order to do so, advocates must document how those peak flows support the riparian ecosystem in the river reach in question.

Cooper’s work, which is estimated to cost $26,300, was commissioned by a subcommittee of the Crystal River Wild and Scenic and Other Alternatives Feasibility Steering Committee, which is looking at different tools that could be used to protect the river. The Crystal, which flows about 40 miles from its headwaters in the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness through the towns of Marble, Redstone, and Carbondale before its confluence with the Roaring Fork, is one Colorado’s last undammed major rivers.

Environmental and recreation advocates and local municipalities, as well as many residents of the Crystal River Valley, have long sought to protect the river from future dams and diversions — infrastructure projects that have left many other Western Slope rivers depleted. 

Those who want to protect the Crystal River have for the past few years been exploring the best ways to do that. Although proponents say a federal Wild and Scenic designation would do the best job of protecting the river, that has been met with resistance from some property owners, leading the steering committee to explore other options, in addition to pursuing Wild and Scenic. 

Instream-flow subcommittee

After a year’s worth of meetings with a facilitator, the steering committee chose to pursue three potential ways forward: a “peaking” instream-flow water right; an intergovernmental agreement; and a federal Wild and Scenic designation. None of the methods would preclude the others; there could eventually be layers of protections for the Crystal. 

The instream-flow subcommittee, which includes representatives from American Whitewater, and local governments and residents, is exploring how to keep water in the river by using the Colorado Water Conservation Board’s instream-flow program. 

The CWCB is the only entity allowed to hold water rights that keep water in rivers and are designed to preserve the natural environment to a reasonable degree. A “peaking” instream-flow water right would keep in the stream all of the water not claimed by someone else during years with high spring runoff, thereby maintaining these periodic floods, which are essential for growing new cottonwoods.

The idea is that if these peak spring flows are already spoken for by the environment, they can’t be claimed by future reservoir projects, which also tend to capture water at the height of spring runoff and store it for use later in the year. 

“If you want to be a little more objective about it, it’s an argument for or against floods and natural river processes,” said David Merritt, a riparian ecologist and former instream flow coordinator for the U.S. Forest Service who has worked on other instream-flow projects around the state. “The dam goes in, it’s going to interrupt that, and you’ll end up with a different ecosystem.”

If there is less water available to develop, it could make a particular river less attractive for building a reservoir, said Laura Belanger, a senior policy adviser with Western Resource Advocates. The environmental nonprofit has worked on these types of peak instream-flow projects in the Gunnison River basin.

“Infrastructure is expensive, so you need to get a certain yield out of it,” Belanger said. “That could potentially make a project not be cost effective and not have sufficient yield to be pursued. … Around the state, so much water is already claimed, and so, for a lot of new reservoir projects, the peak is the only thing that’s available.”

So far, this tool for protecting the peak is little used, but there are three recent examples on streams that drain the Uncompahgre Plateau: Cottonwood Creek, Monitor Creek, and Potter Creek. In 2024, these three creeks secured an instream-flow water right for their spring peak flows in years with high runoff. All three still allow for some amount of future water development. 

“They don’t kick in every year; they’re definitely unique,” Belanger said. “It doesn’t kick in until you hit a certain high flow, and then it protects the hydrograph all the way up and then back down to a certain value.”

Subcommittee still looking at Wild and Scenic

The steering committee’s work, including the tree-ring study, is funded by Pitkin County Healthy Rivers, by the Mighty Arrow Family Foundation, and in-kind donations from Western Resource Advocates and American Whitewater. But the majority of the funding — $99,699 according to Hattie Johnson, southern Rockies restoration director with American Whitewater and member of the instream flow and Wild and Scenic subcommittees — is through the state’s Wild and Scenic Rivers Fund.

The CWCB generally advocates for using state mechanisms such as the instream-flow program to protect rivers because it would rather avoid a federal Wild and Scenic designation. With increasing competition for dwindling water supplies, the state has been reluctant to support Wild and Scenic designations, which could lock up water and prevent it from being developed in the future. 

The U.S. Forest Service determined in the 1980s that portions of the Crystal River were eligible for designation under the Wild & Scenic River Act, which seeks to preserve, in a free-flowing condition, rivers with outstandingly remarkable scenic, recreational, geologic, fish and wildlife, historic, and cultural values. Wild and Scenic experts say the “teeth” of the designation comes from an outright prohibition on federal funding or licensing of any new Federal Energy Regulatory Commission-permitted dam. A designation would also require review of federally assisted water resource projects.

Any designation would take place upstream from the big agricultural diversions on the lower portion of the river near Carbondale. 

The subcommittee that is still looking at a Wild and Scenic designation has hired a facilitator team from the Keystone Policy Center to help the group produce a report of its findings at a cost of about $45,000. And the instream-flow subcommittee has also hired Ecological Resource Consultants to do a sediment-impacts study, which is set to begin before winter and is estimated to cost about $30,000.

Wild and Scenic subcommittee chair Michael Gorman said members have taken a deep dive into policy as well as legislation and have learned a lot from stakeholders along the river. 

“We’ve got more work to do and we’re excited to have the skilled facilitators at Keystone to help us compile what we’ve learned about how Wild and Scenic legislation ties into our specific priorities on the Crystal River,” Gorman said in a prepared statement. “We look forward to having a report that we can share with our community and inform future discussions.” 

Aspen Journalism is a nonprofit, investigative news organization covering water, environment, social justice, and more. Visit aspenjournalism.org.