Wolf Creek Pass, Colorado

Highway 160, which runs across the bottom of Colorado from one end to the other, crosses the Continental Divide at Wolf Creek Pass. A turnout at the pass has one of the grandest interpretive panels on the Divide. It depicts and describes the Continental Divide, and how it “sends water to every part of the Continent.” The sign proclaims “With a foot on each side of the bronze line below, you are symbolically straddling the spine of the Western hemisphere.” Behind the sign is the Treasure Pass Diversion Ditch, which captures water from the western slope and carries it over the Divide. The ditch was built in 1922, to help irrigate the San Luis Valley, on the eastern slope. It’s a small ditch, diverting around 125 acre feet a year, as measured by a Parshall flume, on its way out of the pass. It is the last of a half dozen small trans-divide ditches along the Divide between here and Spring Creek Pass, that supplement the flow of the upper Rio Grande. And it’s the southernmost of the 40 or so large and small trans-divide water diversions within Colorado.