Denver Nonprofit Kick-Starts Management Plan for Clear Creek Watershed

Ashley Giles grew up roaming Colorado’s waters, particularly those near Evergreen, where she lived with her family. After a childhood of fly-fishing and plenty of time spent outdoors, she went on to become a restoration ecologist in Golden, and she's now helping to put together an integrated water management plan for the Clear Creek watershed.

That watershed runs from the western edge of the Continental Divide to the confluence of Clear Creek and the South Platte River in central Denver. Giles ended up helping lead the effort to create a management plan for the Clear Creek watershed after working for years to make local bodies of water more accessible.

“When I was fly-fishing as a younger person, I never really saw a lot of women fly-fishing,” she says. “I got involved with Trout Unlimited really just to kind of cultivate that — getting more diversity and equity and inclusion into Trout Unlimited and to meet more women, frankly, to fly-fish with.”

Trout Unlimited is a nonprofit that works to care for rivers and streams. Giles is the conservation director of the state's West Denver Chapter. She wanted to work with the organization to make a bigger impact on the Clear Creek watershed, and she’s doing just that.

In the 2015 Colorado Water Plan, it was declared that 80 percent of localized streams need to have a stream management plan by 2030. In this year's plan, it doesn’t set a specific date, but there's more flexibility to that timeline.

“It was really actually quite innovative that the governor and the water leaders at the time said, 'This is something that needs to be developed by communities — by stakeholders, the users, the recreationalists — in those watersheds, rather than government coming in and telling you how to use your local water,’” Giles says.

But progress was slow at first, so the Colorado Water Conservation Board and River Network reached out to Trout Unlimited to see if its chapters could help.

For Clear Creek and Trout Unlimited’s West Denver chapter, Giles answered the call. She and other members of West Denver Trout Unlimited began contacting everyone involved in the watershed — no small task.

In fact, the watershed is complicated enough that it graduated from a stream management plan to an integrated water management plan.

“We've already been doing the good work, so it just makes sense to get the ball rolling now," Giles notes. "Ultimately, we're just a stakeholder. We're one of many.”

Others include the mining and skiing industries, recreational groups, conservation groups, government and water users — like the city of Arvada. Unlike many watersheds, Clear Creek only has one individual who uses the water for agricultural purposes. But it still needs to balance a variety of users with what is best for the water itself.

“It very quickly came to the surface that Clear Creek is over-allocated,” Giles says. “There's more calls on the water than there is actual water.”

The group moved to hire a professional facilitator to help navigate the water rights of the area. It now meets once a month to discuss planned projects. One of its next actions will be to hire a consultant to build a basin-wide mapping platform where people can see what's happening in the watershed when it comes to restoration, new state projects and anything else that affects it.

One of its heaviest lifts will be planning for the entire watershed as one system instead of siloing the upper and lower basins, as past planning efforts often have.

“There have been a lot of efforts in the upper watershed over time for water quality and mine cleanup and recreation and Colorado Department of Transportation construction oversight,” Giles says. “Historically, the lower watershed not so much.”

Golden is the dividing line between the upper and lower basins, and the two have different challenges.

The upper basin is what mainly delivers water to users, including water that is stored in Standley Lake and used for drinking and watering lawns in places like Arvada, Westminster, Thornton and Northglenn. The upper watershed also has impacts from CDOT work — like sediment from road deicing efforts — and recreation from rafting to skiing.

As for the lower basin, there are a lot of people experiencing homelessness who live along Clear Creek.

“It's a significant community, and it's growing,” Giles says. “We recognize them as stakeholders. They live there; they're using the water, and they have a voice.”

The integrated water plan group has reached out to homeless coalitions and hopes to coordinate with people who may be living near the water on bank restoration and revegetation projects.

“My dream is that it would work that we all work on that together and it will be something that would give benefit to all of us," Giles says. "Not the stream, but us as an organization trying to put projects on the ground and folks living there."

Despite those differing factors, the group has decided its planning efforts should focus on the watershed as a whole.

“It’s one water,” Giles describes the group’s way of thinking. “Probably some of the historic problems that the watershed has seen is because we keep wanting to section it up and divide the upper from the lower." Giles says the stream planners are also grappling with the changing viewpoint of water.

Before, Colorado looked at it from an industrial-use perspective. Now the mindset has shifted to recreational and environmental needs, too.

“For instance, right here in Golden we have Molson Coors — heavy, heavy industrial — and they're not going away anytime soon. They have some of the most senior water rights on the creek,” Giles says. ”Yet we have zillions of tubers every summer tubing down the creek right in front of Coors. … Everybody's got to give up a little bit of something for the whole thing to work out, and I love that. That's the challenge that excites me.”

As Giles, West Denver Trout Unlimited and all the other stakeholders on the Clear Creek integrated water management plan team build their future, they’re sure to run into more challenges. But Giles isn’t worried.

“The initial writers of the Colorado Water Plan — that's exactly what they were going for,” she says. “We’ve got to do this together. We're very, very challenged, and it's our water, and if we don't get on the same page as best we can, we're in for it.”