Click here to read the assessment. Here’s an excerpt:

Highlights:

A wetter-than-normal April and early May led to a bumpy snowpack trajectory through the peak(s) and into the main melt season, and as of May 11, SWE is above normal in all areas except northwestern Colorado, southeastern Wyoming, and southern Utah. The highest, wettest Snotel sites in the region appear to have just peaked, among them Grand Targhee (WY) and Snowbird (UT), both at about 60″ of SWE, well above normal.

With very large snowpacks and the melt well underway, daily streamflows in northern Utah and western Wyoming rivers are at high (>90th percentile) or record-high values, with yet higher flows and flooding potential on tap with upcoming warm, sunny weather. An elevated risk of flooding in these basins, as well as in the Arkansas basin in Colorado, will persist for several weeks.

The May 1 NRCS spring-summer runoff forecasts changed only slightly from the April 1 forecasts at most points. The regional picture is still tipped towards above-average runoff, though with a clear gradient between the much-above-average (>130%) volumes expected in northern and central Utah and most of Wyoming, and the more variable but closer-to-average volumes elsewhere. Forecasted Lake Powell April-July inflows have slipped again, to 123% of average per NRCS, and 120% of average per NOAA CBRFC.

April saw mostly above-normal precipitation for the region, with central and western Wyoming, far northern Utah, and southeastern Colorado coming out very wet, while central and southern Utah and western Colorado were on the dry side. Statewide, Wyoming yet again was the winner, in the 93rd percentile for precipitation, with Colorado in the 72nd percentile, and Utah in the 53rd percentile.

Drought conditions have markedly improved since early April, so that the region now has less drought coverage than at any time since August 2009. There was reduction of drought in southeastern Colorado and northeastern Wyoming, though some degradation to D0 in southeastern Utah. D1 or D2 conditions now cover only 2% of Colorado (down from 22%), 0.1% of Wyoming (down from 9%), and 0% of Utah.

The tropical Pacific remains on the warm side of ENSO-neutral conditions, though with some cooling in the last few weeks. The ENSO forecast models call for neutral conditions to continue, but with the chances of transition to El Niño conditions rising to ~50% by late summer and fall.

From The Mountain Town News (Allen Best):

It’s edge season in the Rocky Mountains. It can rain or snow on any given day in May. But on the first Friday, when we drove from Denver west on I-70 to Edwards for a business meeting, the Continental Divide sparkled with sunshine dancing off the residual snow of winter. Everywhere it looked like I feel after a good night’s sleep, stretching my way into a new day.

How very different it was in the spring of 1983. I was working in Winter Park that year and living in Granby. Mid-winter had been relatively mild. Then, after the lifts closed in April, the snow came on in earnest. Andy Miller, until recently a reporter for our newspaper, the Winter Park Manifest, had gone to the Arctic Circle with explorer Will Steger. Returning to Fraser late in the month, he reported that he had seen more sunshine in the Arctic than we had seen in the Fraser Valley.

I recall little melting of snow until the second week of June. Then, there were ponds everywhere. A majority of the water in the Colorado River lies in these mountain headwaters, mostly in Colorado, at an elevation of 9,000 to 11,000 feet, or roughly the same band as where ski areas are found.

At Kremmling, where it picks up the Blue, the Colorado River spread widely before thrashing its way down Gore Canyon, which drops more than 300 feet in three miles, the steepest drop of the river’s 1,450-mile journey from Rocky Mountain National Park to its final denouement near Yuma, Arizona, according to a U.S. Geological Survey document I read decades ago. The amount of snow and then runoff took water managers by surprise. The surge of water that summer nearly took out Glen Canyon Dam, just upstream from the Grand Canyon.

This is a very different year. After heavy snows in early winter, March and April were exceptionally mild, even hot. The evidence of heat was all around. The aspen forests on the hillsides above Eagle-Vail, where I used to live, were nearly all leafed out, weeks earlier than I remember. The color of an aspen grove putting on its clothes for summer is sublime. That shade of green upon first leafing is hesitant and delicate, tiptoeing instead of striding, flirtatious rather than a full-on hug. It’s infatuation instead of commitment. In this edge season, aspen groves are the innocence of first love.

We had allocated the afternoon to wandering, but were caught up for awhile in our indecisiveness. We had good cause, including nostalgia, to go in several directions of our earlier lives. “You make a decision,” I told Cathy, but she couldn’t, any more than I could. This indecisiveness can momentarily be maddening, but it’s part of the process, part of the journey. If you know where you’re going, you will only go to where you know. Luckily for me, and perhaps for her, too, Cathy and I dance well when in our vagabond mood. In this way of rambling, unsure of where we want to go, we end up where we want to be.

That proved to be the case on this trip. We drove north with Steamboat vaguely in mind. At McCoy, whimsy led me to leave the paved highway for the graveled River Road. Stopping near Burns, where the great river is joined by Catamount Creek, we watched two stand-up paddleboarders navigate down the river. At the BLM put-in, two guys were drinking beer at the picnic table, remarking upon the providence of agreeable weather. Three young guys drove up and scrambled down the bridge’s rock rip-rap with their fishing poles.

Dropping mydrawers to change from the khaki dress pants of my business meeting into more comfortableblue jeans, I had a sense of being watched. A critter—I think a marmot—was watching me warily from the protection of a plastic discharge tube about 10 feet away. I studied the northern edge of the river, lined by yellow sedges from last year’s growing season and, just a little higher, the red of willows. This is what I had come to see: the mighty Colorado River, not so far from its origins.

Returning to the highway, we followed the route of the explorer John Charles Fremont on one of his four expeditions to the west, topping over a divide to see the broad expanse of Egeria Park.

Egeria Park is a hard place to make a living, hard to get out of your mind once you’ve been bitten. The Yampa River originates here, sandwiched by the Gore Range on the east and the Flat Tops on the west. It’s a place of big ranches, broad meadows, and white-faced cows. From Toponas, I drove a graveled county road through this pastoral heaven, wisps of remnant snow soon appearing along Egeria Creek. I had been on this road once before, 26 years ago, but I wasn’t sure where it would take us. We continued past a few ranch headquarters and then, far up the valley, now getting close to the forested flanks of the Flat Tops, the road veered southwest.

“Shouldn’t we be turning around?” Cathy asked. “It’s 6 o’clock.”

“Just a bit further,” I said, now on a mission.

We stopped just shortof a snowbank lingering in the road. Rounded drifts observed the north-facing hillsides. Leaving the car and the road, we picked our way through the gradual slope below the snowbank. The grasses of last year, now brown, were matted down, but between the stalks were glimmers of yellow, marsh marigolds. This is where I had wanted to go, the edge I wanted to see and hear, mountain snow becoming water. I wanted to smell the air at this edge, feel the wet on my feet, maybe even dip my tongue to taste this spring runoff, this edge between winter and summer.

This and a million other places like it are where the river starts, the massive thing we call the Colorado River. Here the land is merely wet underfoot, but below it becomes a rivulet, and then a stream and, below us, Egeria Creek. Egeria Creek flows into the Yampa River, which takes a sharp left at Steamboat Springs before splashing past the yellow canyon walls of Dinosaur National Park for its rendezvous with the Green River. The Green flows through more canyons and hundreds of miles more before joining the Colorado River downstream from Moab in Canyonlands National Park. That’s where this water underfoot was going.

Unless it got diverted to irrigate a hay meadow. Or maybe cool the boilers in a coal plant.

What we didn’t hear was the sound of motorcycles, their mufflers removed, ostensibly in the interest of safety but more truthfully to satisfy the Narcissistic ego’s drive for affirmation of importance. No planes droned overhead, their passengers oblivious to the wonders below, focused instead on getting to a place. True, we had made noise in our journey to find this place. Our existences are compromises.

In a further compromise, we continued up the road, unobstructed except for the lingering partial snowbank, to the divide. From there we could see across three or four river valleys—the Colorado, the Eagle, the Fryingpan and the Roaring Fork—to Sopris, at the west end of the Elk Range. To the north were mountains of the Park Range near the Wyoming border. The water from this divide flowing southward had the more direct route to Canyonlands National Park. The water flowing north into the Yampa had the longer journey.

Then we turned around and returned down the gravel road, past the white-faced cows and their calves, prancing in the hay meadows, and then onto the highway. We were about three hours from the city, a world away.