A beloved and scenic pond in a popular Colorado mountain town will remain dry after state water officials found that the channel feeding it is an illegal, manmade ditch with no water rights.

The pond on the outskirts of Twin Lakes became the center of a contentious fight between some town residents and a luxury real estate developer hoping to develop a residential community east of the tiny town in central Colorado. Photos of the pond, known locally as the “Barn Pond,” adorned postcards and tourism websites. When filled, the pond reflected an old barn and the snowcapped peaks of the Sawatch Range.

Some town residents were outraged when the pond went dry earlier this year after construction by the developer.

The development company, AngelView at Twin Lakes, this spring deepened the streambed where the two channels split, sending all the water to the channel that flows southeast and drying the channel flowing southwest to the pond. The developer, Alan Elias, said the deepening was necessary to comply with a legal obligation to measure water flow farther downstream.

Elias, his water engineer and water lawyer said the company had no obligation to send water down the channel to the Barn Pond because that channel was an illegal ditch.

The Colorado Division of Water Resources’ engineers agreed. The state’s top water allocation officials on Monday issued a memo finding the channel and pond were manmade and that there is no obligation to send water down the stream to the pond.

The basin surrounding Twin Lakes is over-appropriated, which means that every drop of water belongs to a water rights holder. The opportunity to divert water without a water right occurs only when there is a surplus of water, which happens in the basin on average less than once every 30 years, according to the memo.

State water officials investigated issues along Bartlett Gulch between July 9 and 11, including the issues surrounding the water supply to Barn Pond.

Rachel Zancanella, division engineer, determined the channel that brought the water to the Barn Pond was a manmade ditch because of how it flowed across the landscape and its shape. Natural streams flow downhill along the path of least resistance, but the channel to the Barn Pond in some sections flows across slopes instead of down them, the engineers found. The channel bed is also U-shaped, indicating it was created by a tool — not nature.

State officials also inspected an 1891 map of the town, which showed a water channel labeled “Water Supply Ditch” that generally follows the path of the channel that fed the Barn Pond, the memo states. Investigators also found evidence that the pond was made by creating a dam of tires and scrap metal between 1990 and 1995. Beavers then built on top of and around the artificial dam.

Because the ditch does not have any water rights, the water flowing down Bartlett Gulch must remain in the natural channel until and unless a water right is obtained for the ditch and a plan is created to make up for water lost to evaporation, Zancanella wrote.

That’s exactly what Twin Lakes residents hope to do, said Rick Akin, one of the people pushing for the restoration of the pond. The stream that fed the Barn Pond ran along Akin’s property before it dried.

He and others filed paperwork to create a nonprofit to manage the pond’s water supply and bought a headgate to control flow down the creek, should flow be allowed to return.

By the end of the year, residents hope to lease water to cover the evaporative losses from the pond and, in the coming years, hope to obtain a permanent water right for the creek and the pond. The nonprofit will fundraise to pay for the leased water, which should cost about $4,000 a year, Akin said.

Akin and other residents hope the state engineer’s office will work with them to allow water to the pond before a water right is obtained, since water rights can take years to wind through court.

“The question is do we have to go this process with the pond dry, or with water in the pond,” he said.

While Elias, the developer, previously talked of wanting to help restore the pond, he rolled back the commitment Thursday. He didn’t know until reading Zancanella’s memo that the pond was manmade in the 1990s.

“Even though we’ve already spent more than a year and considerable efforts in identifying ways to save Barn Pond, we cannot commit to undertaking any restoration efforts on land that we don’t own,” he said.

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Originally Published: August 8, 2024 at 6:00 a.m.