What is a watershed, you ask?

A watershed is a land area that channels rainfall and snow melt to creeks, streams, and rivers, and eventually to outflow points. A watershed area includes forests, streams, plains, and the communities living within.

The Boulder Creek Watershed is an area of roughly 286,000 acres originating from the headwaters at the Continental Divide to the eastern plains. The upper watershed is a mountainous landscape drained by 3 major tributaries (North Boulder Creek, Middle Boulder Creek, and South Boulder Creek). The lower watershed opens into the plains of the Front Range with both urban and agricultural uses.

Interactive boulder creek watershed map

Take a look at this Boulder Creek Watershed Map. Play around with some of the layers to learn about things like mining history, confluence, and structures in the Boulder Creek Watershed.

About Boulder Watershed Collective

The Boulder Watershed Collective is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization committed to strengthening the resilience, health, and climate adaptability of the Boulder Creek Watershed. Originally founded as the Fourmile Watershed Coalition to support post-flood recovery efforts, we created critical pathways for communities to rebuild stronger—implementing 11 stream restoration and mine reclamation projects, improving more than 13,000 linear feet of stream, removing legacy mine contamination, and planting over 24,000 native plants and trees.

As climate challenges intensified, so did our mission. In 2019, we evolved into the Boulder Watershed Collective and expanded our reach across the larger Boulder Creek watershed. Today, we are a mature, established organization advancing integrated climate adaptation strategies across forests, riverscapes, and communities.

Our work now includes large-scale wildfire mitigation and forest health projects, defensible space and home hardening in high-risk communities, and restoration of wet meadows and healthy riverscapes to improve water storage, ecological function, and natural wildfire buffers. We conduct water quality monitoring and riverscape assessments and partner with landowners to design and implement solutions tailored to their values and site-specific needs.

Central to everything we do is community leadership. We specialize in building trusted relationships, facilitating inclusive engagement, and supporting neighborhoods in co-creating climate-adaptive pathways that reflect local priorities. Our impact is rooted in partnership: a powerful network of communities, researchers, agencies, and organizations who work together to create lasting, landscape-scale resilience.

The Boulder Watershed Collective exists to knit these efforts together—aligning science, stewardship, and community action to help the watershed thrive in a changing climate.

We proudly champion the values to:

• Foster trusted relationships

• Empower environmental stewardship

• Promote intersectional environmentalism

• Cultivate collaboration

• Embody integrity, inspire action