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Show NATURAL CHANNELS AND RESERVOIRS 609 most intricate system of exchanging water among mutual irrigation companies under local administrative supervision, made possible the storage of waters in reservoirs located below the canals of companies that owned them, for eventual delivery to downstream canals in return for late-season use by the upper canals of direct streamflow to which the lower canals were entitled by virtue of their direct-flow rights. It was studied and reported upon in a Bulletin of the United States Department of Agriculture published in 1922.78 According to this account, 12 reservoirs in Cache la Poudre Valley, with an aggregate capacity of about 50,000 acre-feet, were built by the several companies below their distributing canals, and "in 1916, an average year, the operation of the exchange system made available for use on higher land about 55,000 acre-feet of water stored in low reservoirs, or 14 percent of the total supply used by all the canals of the valley." In a case decided in 1918, the Colorado Supreme Court observed, with respect to the Cache la Poudre Valley, that: "It appears * * * that by reason of the exchange of water for irrigation among various appropriators, the rights of water users are unusually complicated and interrelated."79 Ten years earlier it was held that the question of exchanges of water between the same or different owners of ditches or reservoirs was a matter wholly foreign to the object of a statutory adjudication proceeding, and should be determined in some other appropriate proceeding brought for that specific purpose; but that no such system of exchange that necessarily converts a junior into a senior right can be sanctioned by a court of equity.80 Insofar as Cache la Poudre Valley is concerned, the major direct-flow rights were fixed by court decree in 1882 and storage rights in 1909.81 Another Colorado statute, originally enacted in 1899 and still in effect82 provides that for the purpose of saving crops, and under the supervision of the water commissioner, appropriators of water from the same stream may exchange with and loan to each other, for a limited time, the water to which they are entitled. The supreme court promptly took a rather critical view of this statute by holding, in Fort Lyon Canal Company v. Chew, that if it is operative at all, it must be with due regard to the rights of other appropriators who may be affected; that such exchanges or loans should not be permitted, "if at all," without a clear showing that the vested rights of others are not injured.83 Two years later, the court appeared to relent a little. In answer to a "Hemphill, Robert G., "Irrigation in Northern Colorado," U.S. Dept. Agr. Bull. 1026, at pp. 12-13 and 80-81 (1922). "Water Supply & Storage Co. v. Larimer & Weld Res. Co., 65 Colo. 504, 505, 179 Pac. 870 (1918). *°Windsor Res. & Canal Co. v. Lake Supply Ditch Co., 44 Colo. 214, 226, 98 Pac. 729 (1908). 81Hemphill, supra note 78, at 81. "Colo. Laws 1899, p. 236, Rev. Stat. Ann. § 148-6-5 (1963). "Fort Lyon Canal Co. v. Chew, 33 Colo. 392,400-405, 81 Pac. 37 (1905). 450-486 O - 72 - 41 |