DENVER — Southwestern Colorado residents were hit with another round of destructive flooding Sunday and Monday as rivers and creeks overflowed their banks for the second time in a week, rushing into homes and businesses, sweeping away property and stranding people.

Community leaders and law enforcement officials in La Plata, Archuleta, Rio Grande, Mineral, Conejos and Montezuma counties were still trying to understand the scale of the damage as floodwaters slowly started to recede Monday afternoon, and mandatory evacuation orders and widespread road closures remained active throughout the region.

Sunday’s storm brought similar or slightly less rain than the storm that caused widespread flooding in the area more than a week earlier, but the water had nowhere to go, National Weather Service meteorologist Eric Petersen said.

The ground was still saturated from the previous floods, unable to absorb much more, and reservoirs were already filled to the brink, pushing water downstream, said Petersen, who works in the weather service’s Pueblo office.

Lucas Boyer, a meteorologist with the Grand Junction office, said Archuleta and La Plata counties saw the largest impacts of the estimated 3 to 4 inches of new rainfall, and more rain may have fallen in some areas.

Runoff from smaller creeks was still feeding into basins and larger rivers, keeping water levels high, he said. Two “back-to-back historic rainfalls” will “definitely have widespread impacts,” he said.

Soon after the rain started in earnest Saturday, five roaring waterfalls formed in the mountains above Blue Spruce RV Park and Cabins, a campground northeast of Durango near the Vallecito Reservoir.

The campground is bracketed by at least six creeks, some of which feed into each other before flowing into the reservoir.

Those waterfalls rushed down and into the campground, forming a torrent of fast-moving water that ripped through vacant RV sites and flooded at least one building, said Kosy Cambre, an eight-year campground host.

“We call it the Blue Spruce River that is just going through,” she said.

This year’s flooding seems worse than the floods she witnessed at the campground in October 2025, she said.

“We’ve just had so much rain every weekend, and so the ground is so saturated that there is just nowhere for it to go,” Cambre said.

The floodwaters forced widespread road closures that left a handful of campground guests stranded on the property, she said. Cambre handed out care packages in case the campground lost power, which it didn’t.

She and the stranded guests can still reach the country market and general store, she said, and not all of the campground is flooded.

By Monday it was just a matter of hunkering down and waiting for the flooding to ease.

“Everybody is good,” she said. “As my husband said, ‘We have plenty of beer.’”

About 30 miles southeast of the campground, the San Juan River surged to a near-record high level in Pagosa Springs on Sunday night, with gauges recording 16.8 feet, about a foot shy of the 17.8-foot record high set more than 100 years ago.

Outdoor content creators Matthew and Casey Sue posted videos of the flooding on Facebook on Monday, including the turbulent, muddy-brown water rushing through the San Juan History Museum, where part of the building could be seen teetering over the river. Another video showed floodwaters covering the Pagosa Springs RV Park and Cabins south of the town.

The museum is “barely hanging on,” the pair wrote Monday morning.

Back in Durango, Becky Masterson woke up Monday morning and saw darkness where she usually sees streams of headlights on the highway. An eerie sensation came over her, she said.

“It reminded me of when COVID hit New York and I was living in Long Island,” Masterson said. “It’s like a ghost town, and that’s the scariest part.”

The Animas River, which snakes through the city along U.S. 550, rose from about 4.5 feet Sunday morning to a peak of almost 9 feet on Monday morning, with the flow rate exploding from 1,290 cubic feet per second to 13,000, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s river gauges.

Masterson’s house is higher up on a hillside, so her household has remained largely intact aside from a leaky roof.

“As of right now, we’re lucky,” Masterson said. “It’s hit the town pretty bad. There are areas that are completely washed out. There is lots of debris on streets and the main road.”

Anne Zalbowitz, a real estate agent in Durango, said most of the city’s residents don’t have flood insurance since mortgage lenders don’t require it.

On Sunday, she walked through her flooded neighborhood, watching a couch float down the street in what looked like a Class 2 rapid.

A 95-year-old resident stood at the door to his house, waiting for his family to pick him up. He told Zalbowitz that he hoped to give this house as an inheritance to his children. He smiled and chuckled.

“I guess that’s not how that’s going to turn out,” Zalbowitz said the man told her.

For Masterson, the historic flooding meant a day off work. She and her husband enjoy storm chasing, so the two have been documenting the rushing waters from the overflowing Junction Creek and Hermosa Creek.

With roads closed all around her, Masterson said she’s stuck in Durango.

“There are people staying home and being good and there are people out in it,” Masterson said, noting on Monday afternoon that Durango had blue skies with a few puffy clouds passing by. “Yesterday, I saw a man towing a kayak on his bike.”

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