Two new Colorado River reservoirs are rising on the Front Range, are they the last of their kind?
As two major new water storage projects designed to capture the flows of the drought-strapped Colorado River are rising on Colorado’s urban Front Range, observers say they represent the end of an era on the river. The projects, Northern Water’s Chimney Hollow Reservoir west of Berthoud, and Denver Water’s Gross Reservoir Expansion, in Western Boulder County, both more than 20 years in the making, will store an additional 167,000 acre-feet of water, the majority from the Colorado River. That’s enough water for more than 320,000 new homes.