Howdy! For those who don’t know me, my name is Blake Mamich. I live outside Ignacio, Colorado, and I am a Water Resources Specialist for the Colorado Water Trust. In my role at the Water Trust, I manage our “Request for Water Process”, which entails intake and screening of potential streamflow restoration projects, and I steward our reservoir release program on the Yampa River. Over the last five years, the Colorado Water Trust returned from the pandemic work from home period, and experienced a staffing transition that brought with it a shift in how we view the organization geographically. Whi ..read more

As the Stewardship Manager for Colorado Water Trust, I am lucky to have several interesting jobs outside of developing new projects. I write a monthly forecasting memo that helps our staff plan for the upcoming season’s operations. I travel around the state and visit our projects to ensure they are still operating as designed. I collect streamflow and water temperature data to inform project design. It’s all great work but there is one job that is arguably the most important; I maintain and update (read the next words in an important sounding voice) The Master Dashboard Accounting Spreadsheet ..read more

Hello! My name is Annie Lalonde and I’m thrilled to be working as a Legal Extern for the Colorado Water Trust this semester. Before moving to Denver, I grew up in the Chicago suburbs and later attended Miami University of Ohio (not the warm one in Florida), where I majored in both of my passions: International Studies and Sustainability. These became my passions back in 2016 when my high school took us on a trip to Guatemala. On this trip I became very close to the family of eight that we were helping build a new home. They collected rainwater in a tarp and yet were still willing to share ever ..read more

Sarah Klahn is a member of the Water Trust Board of Directors and a shareholder in Somach Simmons & Dunn. Sarah represents farmers and ranchers, as well as institutional clients, on water rights matters in four western states.  It is a bitterly cold December morning and I am tooling up Boulder Canyon to do some backcountry skiing above Nederland. As I slow down for a hairpin turn, the sun makes its way over the edge of the canyon and I notice some movement in the creek. It’s a little bird known as a Dipper, bobbing up and down on a rock in the creek—and now diving into a pool below a ..read more

Ray Kennedy works with Trek Bicycle Corporation supporting their retail stores throughout Colorado and the Midwest, and volunteers on the Colorado Water Trust’s Outreach Committee. I grew up in Minnesota, living on a pond in a suburb of the Twin Cities. Minnesota was an easy state to find a connection to water. Most weekends its locals could be found fishing, ice-fishing, or playing pond hockey on one of the 11,182 lakes across the state. Many mornings our alarm clock was the honking of 500 geese in our backyard, and at night we often would look out at turtles catching the sunset on a stump, o ..read more

Tributaries Appreciation Month Last month, we had a blast celebrating our community of monthly supporters, including many of you! As a small non-profit, monthly support makes a big difference to us and allows us to more accurately budget and plan throughout the year. Tributaries by the Numbers 73 Tributaries $1,668 / Month $20,016 / Year That’s over 26.6 million gallons of water per year that we can restore to rivers and streams because of you! November Events We had two Tributaries Happy Hours in Denver and Boulder last month, with over 40 people in attendance. These events are a gr ..read more

I’ve spent the majority of my career working in the field of affordable housing, trying to provide safe and decent homes for the rapidly increasing percentage of our population who cannot afford it, especially here in Colorado. In what I thought was an unrelated move, I have spent the last few years serving on the Board of the Colorado Water Trust, a nonprofit devoted to utilizing market-based tools to restore water to Colorado’s streams and rivers in need. And while I still know a whole lot less about the landscape and economics of water than I do housing, what has become clear to me are the ..read more

During this season of thanks, we are grateful for the community of supporters who help make our work possible! Project partners, donors, family foundations, other non-profits, businesses, and local and state government agencies are all among the long list of folks that we are proud to call our community. In 2023, the Water Trust helped bring flows to the Yampa and Fraser Rivers, as well as to our permanent projects throughout the state. In total, we restored 1.9 billion gallons of water to Colorado rivers and streams this year. Increasing river flows bolster local ecosystems, communities, and ..read more

Colorado’s prior appropriation system of water rights—“first in time, first in right”—has served our state well for over 150 years. But it allows senior rights to completely dry up our rivers and streams to meet the agricultural, municipal, commercial, or industrial needs of water users. Because water rights are private property, there is just so much the government can or should do to offset these impacts and preserve streamflows. There have been a number of meaningful steps in this direction. Since the 1970s, the Colorado Water Conservation Board has been appropriating instream flows and lak ..read more

When two bodies of water, or tributaries, join together, they transform into something bigger and stronger. This is why we call our monthly donors Tributaries—people who come together to make our rivers stronger. Why donate monthly? Smaller, monthly donations have just as big an impact on the Water Trust as a larger, year-end gift! Consistent donations help us to better budget and plan throughout the year, and help even out the lumpy, seasonal nature of typical non-profit funding. It’s easier for you! Setting up a monthly recurring donation means you don’t have to remember to make your donati ..read more