Tour of Yamcolo and Stagecoach Reservoirs

The tour gathers at nine in the morning at Stagecoach Reservoir, southeast of Steamboat Springs, and breaks up at eleven. In between, staff of the Upper Yampa Water Conservancy District take the group inside Stagecoach Dam and the John R. Fetcher Hydroelectric Power Plant at its base. They talk about water management and the district’s current projects in the upper Yampa basin. Attendance is free, registration is required, and everyone drives their own car. The district scheduled three tours for the summer of 2026: June 25, July 17, and August 14. A district post of July 28 reported that “our last dam tour was cancelled due to fire activity.” The August 14 tour was announced as the last public dam tour of the season.

Inside Stagecoach Dam

The dam stands 145 feet high, on Precambrian gneiss at the damsite. It is made of roller compacted concrete, which the district calls a “new” method at the time it was used. By the district’s account, Stagecoach was only the tenth dam of its kind in North America. Behind it lies a reservoir of 819 acres by the district’s count, about three miles long. The district has installed a $275,000 multi-outlet intake structure that draws water from different depths so releases reach the river at temperatures suited to trout.

The power plant at the foot of the dam can generate up to 800 kilowatts. Yampa Valley Electric Association buys the power for its grid. The district says the output is enough for about 100 homes a year. A 2002 Steamboat Pilot article put it at 5 million kilowatt-hours a year, enough for an estimated 500 homes. The same article called it Northwest Colorado’s first hydroelectric power plant. Andy Rossi, the district’s general manager, recorded a video tour of the plant for a local fourth-grade class. On September 3, 2026, the district gave fourth graders from South Routt Elementary a tour of the dam in person.

The 2026 tours took place during a dry summer. District posts that season spoke of record high temperatures and record low water levels, warned visitors to stay away from algal blooms, and reported that the main stem of the Yampa was “on call,” with water users being curtailed. Colorado Parks and Wildlife closed the tailwaters below the dam to fishing for the full day because of reduced flow from the reservoir. By late September, rain was raising the river, and the district reported reservoir operations winding down for the year.

Around the water is Stagecoach State Park, which Colorado Parks and Wildlife runs under a lease from the district. The name comes from the stagecoaches that once crossed Yellow Jacket Pass, now County Road 14, toward Oak Creek or Steamboat Springs. Many of the campgrounds and picnic areas are named for early coal mines and mining camps. More than 200 species of birds are known in the area, among them osprey, goshawk, and mountain bluebird. West of the reservoir is an 80-acre wetland refuge. The Pilot listed sage grouse and sandhill cranes there.

Headwaters at Yamcolo

A longer tour was held on June 28, 2024. It ran from nine to one and began at Yamcolo Reservoir in the Flat Tops. The district described it as a tour of the Upper Yampa River Basin “starting at the headwaters and moving downstream to the basin’s largest reservoir.” The tour ended at Stagecoach. The district’s 2026 public schedule listed only the Stagecoach tours. In August 2026, district staff took Colorado State University watershed students on a similar trip through the basin, beginning at the headwaters.

Yamcolo lies on Routt National Forest, twelve miles southwest of the town of Yampa. From Yampa, County Road 7 leaves from behind Montgomery’s General Store. After 7 miles it turns to gravel and becomes Forest Service Road 900, and Yamcolo is the first of three reservoirs along that road. The dam is 1,920 feet long and 109 feet high, and the reservoir covers at most 175 acres. The Forest Service manages recreation there, with ten designated campsites, a boat ramp, and free day-use fishing. Trailheads for Mandall Lakes, Smith Lake, and Stillwater are a short drive away. Yamcolo is the only reservoir on the Yampa Ranger District where combustion engines are allowed. The Forest Service notes that the ramp becomes unusable as water is drawn down for irrigation. On September 8, 2026, the district recorded 1,998 acre-feet in a reservoir with a capacity of 9,621.

Ranchers, a petition, and a power company

Yamcolo began with the ranchers of the Upper Yampa Valley and the Toponas Basin, who often ran short of irrigation water. The Forest Service dates their idea to the early 1960s. The district’s timeline gives September 1963, and its narrative says the early to mid 1960s. On December 21, 1965, a petition was filed with the Routt District Court under Colorado’s Water Conservancy Act. In March 1966 the judge seated the first board of directors: Loy Ardrey, Eve Chesney, John R. Fetcher, Jim Funk, Charles Gregory, Kelly Klumber, Sumner Hockett, Bob Lyons, Wes Signs, and Elvis Starbuck. Ardrey became the first president.

More than a decade passed before a reservoir could be built. In February 1977 the district secured a commitment from Colorado Ute Electric Company to buy water every year, which both district and Forest Service accounts call the key to starting the project. Western Engineers of Grand Junction designed the dam, and in 1978 Jasper Construction Company of Minneapolis won the construction contract. Financing came through the Colorado Water Conservation Fund, the Farmers Home Administration, and a public bond issue by Boettcher & Co. The district lists the total cost in 1975 as $3,156,000. The dam was completed in October 1980, and the reservoir was dedicated on July 11, 1981. In 2002 Fetcher recalled that Yamcolo had required eight permits.

A Harvard engineer on the upper Yampa

Fetcher was general manager and secretary of the district from its start in 1966 until shortly before his death in 2009. He was born in Winnetka, Illinois, on January 1, 1912, and took degrees in electrical engineering and business at Harvard in 1935. His first job was with Babcock and Wilcox, which had been hired to build the penstocks for Hoover Dam. In the 1930s he built stainless-steel railway cars in Europe. He then searched the West for a ranch, and in 1949 he and his wife, Clarissa, settled in the Yampa basin. The district’s history says he was surprised to see the upper river drop to a trickle by July once the snowmelt was gone, and he concluded that storing runoff was the only answer for agriculture in the valley.

He also co-founded the Steamboat Ski Area and developed Steamboat Lake on his own land in 1967. The district’s history says that in the mid-1970s, when President Jimmy Carter was vetoing reservoir projects in the Midwest, Fetcher met with him and was quoted as saying, “Mr. Carter, it is hard to conserve water if you don’t have it.”

Thirty-seven days of concrete

Before Stagecoach was a reservoir, it was meant to be a resort. According to Colorado Parks and Wildlife, the Woodmore Corporation planned residential lots, skiing, a golf course, trails, and a marina there in the early 1970s, but went bankrupt in 1974. In June 1983 the district board conceived Stagecoach Reservoir as a reliable source of water for Northwest Colorado’s growing population and economy. “It took 61 permits,” Fetcher told the Pilot in 2002. ASI-RCC, Inc. of Buena Vista finished the dam in August 1988, working around the clock for 37 days. Fetcher pushed to build the power plant together with the dam. He “wanted to see the wheels turn,” he said. The dam and reservoir were dedicated on August 12, 1989, and the state park opened the same year. In March 2001, according to the Pilot, the district became the first in the United States to be certified as a Low Impact Hydropower Facility.

In June 2007 the board began work to raise the dam by four feet. The district gives September 2011 as the date construction was completed. Colorado Parks and Wildlife says the spillway crest was raised in the summer of 2010, lifting the maximum pool from 7,200 to 7,204 feet.

Water for the river

In July 2012 the district and the Colorado Water Trust carried out the first short-term lease of water to the state’s Instream Flow Program, which the district describes as the first in Colorado history. By 2021 the Trust had released 14,500 acre-feet from Stagecoach to keep the Yampa cooler and flowing through Steamboat Springs in summer. That July, flows in town had dropped to 40 cubic feet per second and water temperatures had passed 80 degrees. Earlier rules required a new agreement every year. On November 17, 2021, after a 2020 state law changed those rules, the board approved a ten-year contract. “Developing longer-term solutions frees up time and money for all our partners to be even more innovative in their collaboration to keep the river flowing,” Rossi said.

In July 2026 the district wrote that the releases had helped keep the Yampa flowing since 2012, “but this year we’re facing unprecedented challenges.” On September 15, 2026, Stagecoach held 22,516 acre-feet of its 36,439-acre-foot capacity, with 14 cubic feet per second flowing in and 30 flowing out.