Florida River

About

Lemon Dam and the Florida Project. The Florida River runs 61.7 miles from its source at Lillie Lake in the Weminuche Wilderness to the Animas River south of Durango, of which it is the only major tributary (Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_River). About 14 miles northeast of Durango the river is impounded by Lemon Dam — a 284-foot earthen dam the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation completed in December 1963 as the centerpiece of the Florida Project, a participating project of the Colorado River Storage Project — which forms the 622-acre, 40,145-acre-foot Lemon Reservoir (Source: usbr.gov Florida Project history, Autobee 1995; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_Dam). Below the dam the Florida is a regulated tailwater, and its flow is published not by USGS but by Colorado DWR: station FLOBLECO has gauged the river below Lemon Reservoir since 1972, and over the 30 days to 2026-11-06 its discharge swung from a held baseflow near 12 cfs to release peaks above 600 cfs around a median of 13 and a mean of 177 (Source: Colorado DWR CDSS API — telemetrystations/telemetrytimeseriesraw, abbrev FLOBLECO, parameter dischrg). FLOBLECO is the only live discharge gauge on the river: all five USGS sites on the Florida — including 09362900 at the same location below Lemon Reservoir — publish no current discharge (Source: Colorado DWR CDSS API, station FLOBLECO; waterservices.usgs.gov instantaneous-values service, sites 09362750 / 09362900 / 09363000 / 09363050 / 09363200). The reach below the dam is a cold trout tailwater whose access is largely private (Source: thesanjuanangler.com).