Colorado's rafting industry hit a dry spell last year as wildfires and drought combined to keep rafters away, The Denver Post reports, citing a report from the Colorado River Outfitters Association. The association said visits were down 17.1 percent last year, with the number of user days dropping to 411,100. That's the lowest number recorded since 2002.

Speaker after speaker at a Thursday rally in support of a regional water storage project made references to the obvious. They pointed out that the nearly 4 inches of rain that has fallen in Northern Colorado in the past week is all headed for Nebraska and Kansas. “We don’t get thank-you notes from Kansas and Nebraska,” state Rep.

The Western Slope's leading advocacy group has tentatively endorsed a controversial water-storage project that critics say would destroy the Cache La Poudre River. Club 20 executive director Reeves Brown said that at first glance, the $490 million Northern Integrated Supply Project — which calls for the construction of two new reservoirs in northern Colorado — appears reasonable.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has reached an agreement with Bucklen Equipment Company to resolve alleged violations of the Clean Water Act in Weld County. Under the agreement, the company will pay a penalty of $16,000 and remove any remaining gravel piles from wetlands along the Cache la Poudre River within the city of Greeley.