Vail Drains Children’s Fountain and Cuts Irrigation 50% Amid Historic Low Snowpack

The snowpack in Vail hit a historic low, the lowest in recorded history, and now the town is asking neighbors to stop watering the grass. It sounds like a standard conservation plea, but the scale of the cut is aggressive. The Eagle River Water and Sanitation District has asked for a one-third reduction in water use this summer. The town’s plan? Go further. They are aiming for a fifty percent cut in outdoor irrigation, a move that will strip the color from public parks and silence some of the town’s most recognizable water features.

Picture the Children’s Fountain in Lionshead. Usually, it’s a splash zone for kids and a cooling spot for tourists. Under the new plan, it’s going dry. Not just turned off for the night, but drained and left as a stagnant pool because running it isn't worth the evaporation loss.

“First, non-functional areas get turned off, then we will move to some of our pocket parks and start reducing that down to one day or zero days per week,” Town Landscape Architect Gregg Barrie told the Town Council on Tuesday.

Barrie laid out the specifics. The plan targets the turf. Intermountain, Willow, and the Gore Creek Promenade won’t get new sod or irrigation. Staub Park will see reduced watering. And then there are the neighborhood parks — Ellefson, Buffehr Creek, Red Sandstone, Sunbird, Booth Creek, and Pirateship. These areas will lose their daily drink. The town hopes to keep some off-leash dog areas open a bit longer, but that window is closing fast.

“we’d like to try to keep some of those off-leash areas open as best we can to allow people a place to walk their dogs, but that’s going to have to shrink as time goes on,” Barrie said.

The ball fields at Ford Park and Donovan will be the last holdouts, the second-to-last areas to stop receiving outdoor irrigation. The Betty Ford Alpine Gardens, with their high-priority plants, will keep their water. But if the water district issues a total ban on outdoor watering, the town will do its best to keep the athletic fields functional.

“We’re going to do our best to keep (the Ford Park and Donovan ball fields) open and functional during the drought by working with our partners, and I think we can do that,” Barrie said.

It’s a calculated triage. The town isn’t just turning off the spigot; they’re prioritizing assets. The annual flower program, which normally guzzles about 18,000 gallons a week, will be scaled back to under 3,000 gallons. That’s a massive reduction in the visual appeal of the town center, but a necessary one.

The splash pad at Sunbird Park in Lionshead emerges as the unlikely hero of this water-saving exercise. It only loses 100 to 150 gallons a day when operating full time. It doesn’t require refilling when not in use. So, while the fountain sits dry, the splash pad might run Friday, Saturday, and Sunday afternoons. It’s a compromise that keeps kids wet while the rest of the town goes dry.

This isn't just about saving water. It’s about managing expectations. The town is preparing residents for a summer where the green spaces will look more like the surrounding foothills — brown, dormant, and quiet. The water district’s request was the trigger, but the town’s response is a full-scale retreat from the lush landscapes that define Vail’s appeal. And that matters because when the snowpack is this low, the difference between a third and a half cut is the difference between a manageable summer and a crisis.

The plan moves from the high-priority Alpine Gardens down to the smallest pocket parks, leaving the ball fields as the final battleground. It’s a summer of brown grass and silent fountains, a visual reminder that the water in the pipes isn't infinite.