How high is the water at Vallecito?
Live streamflow readings
Two creeks flow into the lake and one river runs out below the dam. Live readings for all three are below, each set against its own record.
What the three gauges read right now
Readings as of checking… live provisional — published, not yet checked
Vallecito Creek
—cfs river level — ft
Checking which way it is moving…
Checking — comparing it with every year on this date.
USGS 09352900 · no flood category is published for this gauge.
Pine River above the reservoir
—cfs river level — ft
Checking which way it is moving…
No normal to compare it with — this gauge has only been running since 2018.
USGS 09352800 · no flood category is published for this gauge.
Below the dam
—ft
Trend: n/a (single reading)1
Checking the level against the Weather Service’s flood categories for this gauge…
NWS gauge LPVC2 · flood levels are published in feet only; no flow value is published for any of them. See today’s level against flood stage
1 Rising or falling cannot be told from one reading, and one reading is all the feed carries for this gauge.
We do not tell you whether the water is safe. For a warning, a closure or an evacuation: National Weather Service, Grand Junction · NOAA river forecast for this gauge · La Plata County Emergency Management. In an emergency, call 911.
Vallecito Creek
Gauged by USGS at 09352900 above the reservoir since 1 October 1962 — sixty-three years of daily means, the only water here with a real sense of “normal”. Normal means the middle half of years for that calendar day.
Flow against the same calendar day, 1963–2025
How to read this chart worked example · glossary
How to read the chart above
One worked example, frozen at the twelve months ending 24 September 2026. The live chart above works exactly the same way.
- 1One point is one day. Every point on the solid line is the average flow for that whole day, in cubic feet per second — not the highest moment of the day, which is usually a good deal larger.
- 2The shaded middle half is “normal”. For each calendar day, half of the sixty-three years on record ran inside that band. Which also means half of all days in the record were not normal — the band is where the middle of the pack sits, not a safe range.
- 3The dashed line is the middle year. Line up the years for one calendar day, and this is the one in the middle: half ran higher, half ran lower.
- 4The hatched window is 9–31 October, and the statistics under it are the wrong vintage. They contain only data USGS has checked, which stops before the October 2025 flood. For 11 October they say the highest flow ever measured was 371 cfs. The measured figure that day was 3,690. That is why the window is hatched wherever it appears on this page instead of being footnoted.
- Daily mean
- The average flow over one whole day. One published number per day per gauge.
- Percentile
- Where a number sits once you line up every year for the same calendar day. The 25th percentile has a quarter of years below it; the 90th has nine tenths below it.
- Normal
- On this page, the middle half of years for that calendar day — the 25th to the 75th percentile. Nothing more than that.
- Provisional
- Published but not yet checked, and able to change. Every current reading on this page is provisional; so is everything after 8 October 2025.
- Crest
- The highest the water got in one flood, as the Weather Service records it. A crest is an instant, so it is always higher than that day's daily mean.
This creek runs from 16 cfs in late summer to 3,690 cfs on the worst day of October 2025 — a 230-fold range. On the linear scale the whole winter disappears into the baseline; on the logarithmic one every doubling takes the same vertical distance, so low water is readable, but the flood no longer looks 230 times bigger. Both are honest about different things, so the page ships both and says which is showing. Short windows are always linear — there is nothing to compress.
How unusual is today?
Where a flow sits among every year since 1963 on the same calendar day. It opens on today; pick another day to see what that date has done.
Today against the creek’s biggest days
One log scale, so a tenfold jump takes the same width anywhere on it. Numbered marks are explained underneath.
USGS’s at-site flood-frequency figures, in full table · WRIR 99-4190
FEMA’s mapped 10-, 50-, 100- and 500-year discharges, in full table · FIS 08067CV001A
In October 2025 the creek channel was “completely reshaped” into something “more shallow and broad” — the words are Todd Boldt’s, the NRCS assistant state conservationist for Colorado, to the Colorado Sun on 16 November 2025. A resident on the creek, Barney Miller, reports water already reaching his yard at about 900 cfs. No agency has published a capacity for the new channel, and the 2026 snowmelt crested at only 503 cfs, well short of an ordinary spring peak. That, not a percentage, is what we can honestly tell you about capacity.
— Colorado Sun, 16 Nov 2025; USGS/NWS crest recordsPine River above the reservoir
The Los Pinos River, gauged by USGS at 09352800 just above the reservoir — the lake’s other inflow, draining 130 square miles.
The last 35 days
This is the same chart as the creek’s, minus the sixty-three years. All values are provisional.
Below the dam
The Los Pinos River below Vallecito Dam, at the Weather Service’s LPVC2 gauge near Bayfield — the only water here with published flood levels.
“the Vallecito Reservoir can regulate flow along Los Pinos River, although it was designed solely for irrigation purposes. It does provide some protection from minor flooding.”
“No specific flood protection works have been undertaken in La Plata County, the City of Durango, or the Town of Bayfield.”
FEMA Flood Insurance Study 08067CV001A, Volume 1 §2.4, p.13That is the honest frame for everything below. The dam damps small floods on this reach because a full reservoir has somewhere to put the water, not because anyone built it to. It is an irrigation structure with a 3,000 cfs outlet, and FEMA says in as many words that there are no flood protection works here at all.
How high the river is, and what happens at each level
Feet above this gauge’s own zero. On the left, the Weather Service’s four flood categories; on the right, its own statements of what happens — which sit at their own heights, not at the category lines.
Does the dam protect Bayfield?
At the reservoir outlet, FEMA maps the 10-, 50-, 100- and 500-year flood as the same number: 3,100 cfs. That is not a mistake — it is what a controlled outlet looks like. Fifteen river miles downstream at Bayfield, the mapped 100-year flood is 11,500 cfs. Everything above 3,100 joined the river below the dam.
The rest of the record
Tables, methods and the full history behind every chart above. Nothing you need before driving up is in here.
The last day, 72 hours, week and 30 days, for all three waters 2 tables · cfs and feet, kept apart
The two inflows, in cubic feet per second
Daily mean flow. Today has no daily mean yet.
| Window | Vallecito Creek (cfs) | Pine River (cfs) |
|---|---|---|
| The daily means load with the page | — | — |
Every value on this page is provisional.
Below the dam, over the same windows
| Window | River level (ft) |
|---|---|
| Now | — |
| Last day, 72 hours, week, 30 days | not in this site’s feed |
| Next 7 days, as forecast | on NOAA’s page |
Feet, not cfs, and in its own table: this gauge is published in feet and mixing the two units in one table would invite reading one as the other. This site’s feed carries the current reading only, so no history is shown rather than something stale. The Weather Service’s own page for LPVC2 carries this gauge’s observed history and its forecast; the forecast is not charted here, because a line drawn from someone else’s model would look like this page’s prediction.
Vallecito Creek — data & methods 6 panels
The table behind the main chart — every plotted day, its median and its percentiles table
October 2025, hour by hour, against what the statistics for those dates claim chart + 10 daily means
The remnants of Hurricane Priscilla put about 4 inches of rain in 48 hours on this basin. Atmospheric moisture over the region reached 300% of normal, and October precipitation across south-west Colorado finished at 512% of normal. The reservoir rose from 28,000 to roughly 56,000 acre-feet — about 15 feet. Around 390 homes were evacuated, 90 were damaged and 2 were total losses; there were 11 high-water rescues; county damage passed $7.5 million. Levees were breached on Grimes Creek and on the west side of Vallecito Creek.
No official recurrence interval has ever been published for this event, and this page does not assign one.
The two crest figures disagree, and we are not picking one quietly 6,980 vs 7,220 cfs
The Weather Service’s crest record for this gauge says 5.99 ft / 6,980 cfs at 13:45 on 11 October 2025. Read at native 15-minute resolution, the USGS provisional series for the same minute says 7,220 cfs / 6.07 ft. Both are marked provisional or preliminary. We cite the Weather Service’s 6,980 cfs as the crest, because it is the number in the official crest history, and we print USGS’s 7,220 beside it rather than choosing silently.
A 7,220 cfs reading is far above this gauge’s rated range, and provisional extremes like it commonly move 10–20% when USGS finalises the rating. That is also why the page does not call October 2025 a new record: the official annual peak record for 09352900 ends at 2025-05-30, October 2025 falls in water year 2026, and a 1% margin between a provisional number and an approved one is not a record.
Every crest the Weather Service lists for Vallecito Creek — the typical spring peak is 1,000–2,300 cfs 13 crests · sortable
How the comparison is built, and why nothing here is a percentage method
The 1970 record crest (7,050 cfs) and October 2025 (6,980 cfs) both landed within 3% of FEMA’s mapped 100-year discharge at the National Forest boundary (7,175 cfs). Two near-100-year floods in 55 years of record is not what a correct 100-year estimate looks like, so this page never divides by it — and USGS’s at-site study puts the 100-year at 3,620 cfs anyway, which would make both of those floods rarer than a 500-year event. A percentage would have to pick one of those answers silently.
So the comparison is a ladder: named flows, smallest to largest, each bar scaled to the largest rung and each figure carrying the source and the location it came from. There is no denominator, no dial and no gauge face anywhere on this page. The inflow gauges get no flood stage because the Weather Service publishes none for either of them, and the reach below the dam gets a level scale in feet only, because feet is the only unit its thresholds exist in.
What “provisional” means for the numbers on this page data status
USGS marks each value with a qualifier. For Vallecito Creek, daily means are approved through 8 October 2025; every value from 9 October 2025 onward, and every instantaneous reading, is provisional (P) and subject to revision. The Weather Service marks its October 2025 and May 2026 crests preliminary. Provisional is not a warning that the number is wrong — it means nobody has checked it yet.
Three consequences this page is built around:
- The percentile statistics exclude the flood. USGS’s day-of-year statistics ingest approved data only, so nothing after 8 October 2025 is in them. For 9–31 October the “highest ever” they report is 371 cfs; the measured daily mean on 11 October 2025 was 3,690. Every chart hatches that window.
- Early October’s statistics are a slightly different vintage. USGS reports 1 – 8 October as 1963–2026 with 64 years, and 9 – 31 October as 1963–2025 with 63. Both cannot describe the same approved record, and October 2026 has not happened. We report it as USGS does rather than correcting it.
- 29 February is built from 16 years, not 63. Its percentiles are much noisier than every other day’s. It is left in the data unsmoothed, and flagged here.
Pine River — data & methods 2 panels
The table behind the chart — 35 daily means table
Why the three gauges are never drawn on one shared scale datums
Vallecito Creek and the Pine River report elevation against NAVD88. The discontinued gauge below the dam, 09353500, used NGVD29. The Weather Service’s LPVC2 is published as “MSL” at 7,421 ft with no NAVD88 equivalent given. There is no shared vertical datum across these three gauges, so a river level here is only meaningful against that gauge’s own zero — never as an elevation you can compare with another gauge’s. That is why this page has no single elevation axis anywhere, and why the below-dam gauge has its own separate table in feet.
Flow in cfs is comparable between the two inflow gauges, which is why the summary table puts them side by side. Drainage areas differ (72.5 vs 130 sq mi), so equal flows do not mean equal runoff per square mile.
Below the dam — data & methods 4 panels
Every crest this gauge has recorded — only 1957 ever passed major flood stage all 36, 1932–2021 · sortable
What the dam can let through, figure by figure 5 figures · USBR, FEMA, NWS
- 3,000 cfsOutlet-works capacity of Vallecito Dam (USBR project 258) — what the dam can release through its gates.
- 3,100 cfsFEMA’s mapped discharge at the reservoir outlet for the 10-, 50-, 100- and 500-year events alike, footnoted “Discharges controlled by Vallecito Reservoir Dam”. The recurrence interval stops mattering once the dam is the control.
- 5.67 ft / 3,000 cfsThe 12 June 2015 crest — the closest this gauge has come to minor flood stage (5.6 ft) in forty years, and the one modern level-to-flow pair near the outlet capacity.
- 33,000 cfsSpillway capacity, three radial gates. Above the outlet-works capacity the water goes over the spillway, and the dam is no longer buffering what reaches Bayfield.
- 12.2 ft / 13,800 cfsThe gauge’s record. The crest record dates it 27 June 1957; FEMA’s study describes the same event as July 1957. Neither date is picked over the other. More than four feet above major flood stage, and before the current gauge configuration.
Reading levels and flows together, carefully what this page will not convert
The four flood categories for this gauge — action 4.95, minor 5.6, moderate 6.2 and major 8.0 ft — are published only in feet. The Weather Service returns no flow value at all for any of them. So on this page:
- The below-dam chart is in feet, and carries no flow threshold line. There is nothing to draw.
- The flow figures in the expander above come from the dam’s engineering and FEMA’s study, not from the flood categories, and are never plotted against them.
- This gauge’s rating shifted between eras. Only level-to-flow pairs from after 1999 can be read together; older pairings in the crest table are historical, which is what the “1999 onward” filter on that table is for.
- Neither inflow gauge has a flood category of any kind. The Weather Service returns
-9999— not published — for all of them, and this page invents none.
What this page cannot tell you about the dam the gap that matters most
The three gauges on this page are two inflows and one downstream reading. None of them is the reservoir. Pool elevation, storage and the actual release schedule are Bureau of Reclamation and Pine River Irrigation District data, not gauge data — so nothing here closes the water balance, and nothing here tells you what the dam is about to do, which is the real control on flood risk at Bayfield.
For the reservoir itself, see the lake-level record and the live lake reading . For the release schedule, the Pine River Irrigation District.
What is missing, and why we left it missing retrieval notes
- Annual peak flowsUSGS’s complete year-by-year peak series for all three gauges is behind a robots rule and needs a registered API key. We did not reconstruct peaks from daily data, and we did not use a third-party mirror: a fabricated peak of record is exactly the wrong error here.
- The 1970 crest of 7,050 cfsUnconfirmed at source, because it lives only in that unreachable peak file. What we did verify independently: water year 1970’s highest daily mean was 3,020 cfs on 6 September 1970, corroborated twice. A ~7,050 cfs instantaneous peak against a 3,020 cfs daily mean is a plausible ratio for a flashy 72.5 sq mi basin — consistent with the figure, not proof of it.
- The below-dam level historyThe Weather Service’s observed series truncated mid-response; the readable portion was 26 days stale. We show the single current reading and no history.
- October 2025 at full resolutionThe 8–17 October series here is every fourth 15-minute point — the :00 sample of each hour, with no averaging and no smoothing. Its own maximum is 7,140 cfs, which misses the crest, so the crest window is carried separately at full 15-minute resolution.
- A USGS partner for the below-dam gaugeUSGS 09353500 on the same reach was discontinued on 29 September 1986; every below-dam observation on this page comes from
api.water.noaa.govalone. - A post-flood channel capacityNot published by any agency. See the capacity section.
- Eight FEMA rows for Vallecito CreekThey exist in the study, but their location labels are unreadable in the scan served to the public. A discharge without a location is useless, so they are not here.
How every number on this page was obtained provenance
Gauge readings, daily means and day-of-year statistics come from USGS water services for sites 09352900 and 09352800. Flood categories, impact statements, crest histories and the below-dam observation come from NOAA NWPS (api.water.noaa.gov) for gauges LPVC2 and VNBC2. Mapped discharges come from FEMA Flood Insurance Study 08067CV001A, cross-checked against La Plata County’s 2018 Multi-Jurisdictional Hazard Mitigation Plan, Table 4-20. Dam capacities come from USBR project 258. The channel-change quotations are from the Colorado Sun, 16 November 2025. The ENSO figures are from the CPC ENSO Diagnostic Discussion of 10 September 2026 and the Colorado Climate Center.
Gauge details the cards deliberately do not carry. Vallecito Creek, USGS 09352900: drainage area 72.5 sq mi as USGS’s own site record gives it — note that USGS WRIR 99-4190 gives 72.1 sq mi for the same gauge, and this page shows the site record’s figure with its source rather than averaging the two. Mean basin elevation 11,400 ft, mean annual precipitation 46.0 in (WRIR 99-4190) — which is why this creek behaves the way it does. Los Pinos above the reservoir, USGS 09352800: drainage area 130 sq mi. Below the dam, NWS LPVC2: gauge datum 7,421 ft MSL as published, with no NAVD88 equivalent given.
Current readings come from this site’s own conditions feed, refreshed every 15 minutes. The reference record — the day-of-year statistics, the recent daily means and the flood tables — is rebuilt from USGS with every site update and committed with the page. Numbers keep USGS’s published precision rather than being rounded to integers; rounding happens only when a value is displayed. How we verify
Related: eighty-five years of lake level · today’s conditions, everything at once · USGS 09352900 at the source · NOAA river forecast for LPVC2