WHISKY'S FOR DRINKING, WATER'S FOR FIGHTING

Grand County Water Information Network. GCWIN works to build a network of informed Grand County stakeholders. We manage and consolidate water quality data while partnering with many local, state and national organizations and agencies to ensure that good data and information is available for good decision-making. Click here to go to their web site.

National Trout Unlimited is involved in conservation of our natural resources everywhere. To get to TU's extensive information on conservation, click here. For TU's science information, click here.

The Colorado River Water Conservation District has a very thoughtful mission statement: To lead in the protection, conservation, use, and development of the water resources of the Colorado River basin for the welfare of the District, and to safeguard for Colorado all waters of the Colorado River to which the state is entitled. Here's a link to their website which has lots of information about water agreements, links to stream gauges, weather reports, snowpack information and much more.

Audubon 's Western Rivers Action Network is an excellent organization. Their focus skews to birds while ours skews to fish, but we share the same fundamental goals. They are wonderfully action-oriented and provide information about water-oriented meetings, timely petitions, forms for letter writing and much more. Click here for their website. To sign up for their excellent newsletter, click here.

Interested in the conservation credentials of a particular politician? TU does not support any politicians or candidates. To find information about a particular candidate's conservation record, go to the League of Conservation Voters web site.

Looking for general background information about water issues in the Colorado Basin? As a freshman in college during the Lincoln administration, your webmaster read a book that still presents an excellent "big picture" perspective of the difficulty and importance of water-related issues in the west. The book is "Water and Choice in the Colorado Basin". It's very readable and quite brief at just over 100 pages. The book is available at no charge on line here. I highly recommend it. Be sure to check out the similar books that show up when you Google "water and choice in the Colorado basin".

The US Government's National Weather Service/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) provides information about snow pack, stream flow, weather projections and much more. This link will take you to the official Colorado River Basin Forecast page which has a tremendous amount of regional information and will serve as a springboard to even more information.

Grand County's Official Water Information
Our County government is very aware of the challenges our rivers and environment face. Follow this link to the County's official water information.

Water Law Links

For those of you who REALLY want to learn about water law in Colorado, here are a few useful links:
University of Denver
A brief history of water in Colorado
The BLM “Western State’s Water Laws” fact sheet
If this hasn't quenched your thirst for more information about how we deal with water in the west, simply Google "water law and Colorado".

International Water Issues
Scientific American's June 2012 issue had a brief article about water consumption by nation. China used the most, but the US consumes almost 2.6 times as much water per person. Click here to see the brief article and chart. Click here for an article in the same issue had an article about water use by nations.