Kestrel Pond is the small, non-motorized swim pond in the Rock Canyon area of Lake Pueblo State Park, managed by Colorado Parks and Wildlife. It sits below Pueblo Dam off Rock Canyon Road, down in the Arkansas River bottomland, and it is a separate body of water from the 5,671-acre reservoir upstream.

For decades this was the Rock Canyon Day Use Area and Swim Beach, the one place at Lake Pueblo the park signed for swimming. Use fell off after the Parks and Wildlife Commission loosened its swimming rules in 2022, and in late May 2024 CPW reopened the site as Kestrel Pond, built around quiet water rather than a guarded beach. Paddleboards, kayaks and canoes are welcome. Motorized craft are banned, gas and electric alike, and no fishing is allowed in the pond.

Dropping the swim beach designation ended both lifeguard coverage and routine bacteria testing. Colorado's health department only requires monitoring at fee-charging areas used exclusively for swimming, bathing or wading, so once paddling was added the pond fell outside that rule. Nobody samples this water for E. coli. Park manager Joe Stadterman has said plainly that visitors are on their own judgment here, the same as at any unmonitored mountain lake.

The park's own brochure describes the Rock Canyon area as a sand beach with a grass picnic area, tables, grills and restrooms. The large covered shelters and charcoal grills carried over to Kestrel Pond and the restrooms stayed open, but the showers did not. That printed brochure is out of date on two counts: it still lists showers, and it still states that swimming is permitted only here, which CPW says is no longer the rule.

There is no separate charge for the pond, but you pay to enter the park. A daily vehicle pass runs $10 to $12 on Colorado plates and $15 to $17 out of state, and a walk-in or bike-in individual daily pass is $4. Annual options include the $80 affixed vehicle pass, the $120 family pass, the $70 Aspen Leaf pass for ages 64 and up, and the $29 Keep Colorado Wild pass added at vehicle registration. The park gate is open 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily and the office 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. The old swim beach ran Memorial Day through Labor Day, and the pond's operating season has shifted since the change, so call the park at 719-561-9320 before driving out.

This setting is engineered. Pueblo Dam is a concrete buttress structure 250 feet tall and 10,230 feet long, built between 1970 and 1975 by the Bureau of Reclamation as the centerpiece of the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project, and a 7.5-megawatt hydropower plant was added at its base in 2019. Everything downstream of that wall, Rock Canyon included, exists on the dam's terms. The surrounding park cuts through layered Cretaceous shale and limestone that shows up as banded bluffs above the water. Anticline Pond, a short way off in the same Rock Canyon area, does allow fishing and has an accessible dock and a paved path around it, so do not confuse the two. The Arkansas River multi-use trail runs past Kestrel Pond and ties into roughly 15 miles of park trail.