Rain continued to bypass the central and southern High Plains, leaving rangeland, pastures, and winter wheat in desperate need of moisture. Farther east, however, showers and thunderstorms continued to ease drought across the eastern Plains, extending into the mid-South and Mississippi Delta. Some of the heaviest rain, accompanied by locally severe thunderstorms, fell from eastern Kansas into the lower Midwest. The remainder of the Midwest also received some precipitation, although some of the region’s wettest areas in the Great Lakes States got a break from the excessive rain that had led to pockets of record flooding earlier in the month. In contrast, much of New England and northern sections of New York were cool and dry. Elsewhere, unsettled, showery weather prevailed in the West, mainly north of a line from central California to the central Rockies, boosting topsoil moisture, delivering high-elevation snow, and reducing irrigation demands. However, any precipitation did not fundamentally change a mostly bleak Western water-supply outlook for the remainder of the spring into the summer of 2026…
Precipitation delivered drought relief to some areas, including parts of southern South Dakota and eastern sections of Nebraska and Kansas. Still, by April 26, topsoil moisture—as reported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture—was rated at least 40% very short to short in all the region’s states, except North Dakota, and led by Colorado (95%). Winter wheat continued to struggle due to drought and recent freezes, with 65% of Nebraska’s crop rated in very poor to poor condition on April 26, along with 54% in Colorado and 41% in Kansas. Drought continued to generally worsen in eastern Colorado and western sections of Kansas and Nebraska…
Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending April 28, 2026.
Any changes in the West were mostly minor and mixed, as cooler weather prevailed and spotty precipitation occurred. In most areas, Western precipitation did not alter bleak water-supply prospects, since most of the mountain snowpack has already melted, except in the northern Rockies. Already in late April, fears of an hydroelectricity generation crisis in the Colorado River Basin have led the Department of Interior to start sending water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir downstream to Lake Powell to help boost water levels. The Department of Interior also indicated that water normally destined for Lake Mead, farther downstream, would be held in Lake Powell. Despite overall lack of impact on Western supplies, any precipitation was largely welcomed, due to positive impacts such as a boost in topsoil moisture and a reduction in irrigation demands. In fact, enough precipitation has recently fallen to warrant a slight reduction in drought intensity in a few areas, including parts of western Colorado, northeastern Oregon, and southeastern Washington…
Late in the drought-monitoring period, significant rain overspread portions of the South, resulting in broad reductions in drought intensity. Some of the heaviest rain fell from eastern sections of Oklahoma and Texas into portions of Arkansas, Mississippi, and northern Louisiana. Still, more rain will be needed to ensure full drought recovery, since many of the hardest-hit areas had slipped into extreme to exceptional drought (D3 to D4) in recent weeks. Meanwhile, western sections of the South—including western Oklahoma and western Texas—remained critically dry, leading to poor rangeland, pasture, and winter wheat conditions, as well as a chronically elevated wildfire threat. Statewide, winter wheat in Texas was rated 56% very poor to poor on April 26, along with 45% in Oklahoma…
Looking Ahead
During the next several days, active weather across the South should lead to 1- to 4-inch rainfall totals from much of Texas to the southern Atlantic States. However, some Southern thunderstorms may produce large hail, damaging winds, and isolated tornadoes. The moisture will have a sharp northern edge, with little or no precipitation expected during the next 5 days across the northern and central Plains and Midwest. Generally dry weather will also cover the West, aside from late-season snow in the central and southern Rockies. Elsewhere, a cool pattern across the nation’s mid-section will strengthen, with frost and freezes possible into the weekend across the northwestern half of the Plains into the upper Midwest. By Saturday morning, scattered frost could extend as far south as the Ohio Valley and the southern High Plains.
The NWS 6- to 10-day outlook for May 5 – 9 calls for the likelihood of cooler-than-normal conditions in most areas east of the Rockies, while warmer-than-normal weather will be confined to an area stretching from the Pacific Coast to the northern Rockies, including the Great Basin and northern Intermountain West. Meanwhile, near- or below-normal precipitation from the Pacific Northwest into the upper Midwest should contrast with the likelihood of wetter-than-normal conditions across the remainder of the Lower 48 States.
Drought Monitor one week change map ending April 28, 2026.
This story was produced by Circle of Blue, in partnership with The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
KEY POINTS
Glen Canyon Dam, completed in 1963, was not designed to be operated at extremely low water levels in Lake Powell.
The decline of Lake Powell is putting hydropower generation and downstream water deliveries at risk.
The Bureau of Reclamation, the federal water manager, is studying options for retrofitting Glen Canyon Dam.
In the span of U.S. history certain years are turning points, milestones in the nation’s story. 1776. 1865. 1929. 1968. Circumstance and consequence conspire to make it so.
For the Colorado River and those who rely on it, 2026 is on the verge of similar prominence. Circumstances in the basin today are that urgent.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
A slow-developing water supply calamity, decades in the making, has boiled over, like a cold war turning hot. Extreme heat in March – triple-digit temperatures never witnessed that early in the year – obliterated a meager snowpack. The basin’s big reservoirs, the supposed buffers against short-term drought, were already uncomfortably low after a quarter-century of declining river flows. They will drop even lower. The amount of water flowing this summer into Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir, will be one of the smallest ever measured, barely a trickle.
“This is unprecedented, but it’s not unpredicted,” said Eric Balken, executive director of the Glen Canyon Institute. “I like to say that this is the most predicted disaster of all time.”
Lake Powell is formed by Glen Canyon Dam, a striking 710-ft tall concrete arch braced against ruddy sandstone walls. It plugs the Colorado just after the river enters Arizona. Meant to ensure water deliveries to the lower basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada, Glen Canyon Dam was finished in 1963 to complement the Colorado River’s audacious engineering that distributes water through mountains and uphill to the largest cities in the Southwest and to the region’s most productive farmland. When full, Lake Powell holds enough water to flood the entire state of Virginia to the depth of one foot.
Climate change and water demand that still exceeds supply have flipped the engineering script. Lake Powell is less than 25 percent full today. Glen Canyon Dam, instead of being a guarantor of water, is now the most significant water chokepoint in the basin. The hard-won asset has become a glaring liability.
The back of Glen Canyon Dam circa 1964, not long after the reservoir had begun filling up. Here the water level is above dead pool, meaning water can be released via the river outlets, but it is below minimum power pool, so water cannot yet enter the penstocks to generate electricity. Bureau of Reclamation photo. Annotations: Jonathan P. Thompson
The reversal of fortune is because of how Glen Canyon Dam was designed. The dam was never meant to be operated at the extremely low water levels that Lake Powell is rapidly approaching. Doing so for extended periods of time could damage the pipes that move water through the dam, according to the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that manages the structure.
Reclamation is now studying its options for retrofitting Glen Canyon Dam to accommodate a lower Lake Powell. It expects to release those findings later this year or in early 2027. As any home remodeler knows, renovating an aging structure is neither quick nor cheap, especially when failure could have disastrous consequences.
In the short term, Reclamation is relying on operational band-aids for Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell. With the consent of the seven states in the basin – Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming – the agency took unprecedented action this month to prop up the reservoir. Releasing more water from upstream reservoirs and holding back more in Powell will delay Glen Canyon’s infrastructure reckoning. But that day will soon come, and Reclamation’s answer to the dam’s engineering problems will have far-reaching implications – not only for the reliability of the basin’s water supply, but also for its power customers, ecology, and recreation economy.
An Assessment Deferred
Dams are difficult to manage under any circumstance. Management is even more troublesome when operators must balance multiple, conflicting objectives. In Glen Canyon’s case those objectives are water supply, flood control, hydropower generation, and releasing water to protect the ecology downstream in the Grand Canyon – namely, beach-building and threatened native fish like the humpback chub. This is in addition to ensuring the safe operation of the dam itself.
How to operate Glen Canyon Dam and Hoover Dam, its larger downstream sibling, is what the seven basin states and Reclamation are attempting to figure out right now. The current agreement covers operations through 2026. Reclamation published a draft environmental impact statement, or EIS, in January that would impose severe cuts on water users in the lower basin, particularly Arizona, in part to protect Glen Canyon Dam’s fragile infrastructure.
For that reason, water users in the lower basin and elsewhere support an engineering fix for Glen Canyon Dam. Many were incredulous that Reclamation did not include an assessment of dam modifications in its draft environmental analysis.
“This EIS could have been a great avenue to look at real changes at Glen Canyon Dam that could solve the water delivery problem and some of the ecological problems, too,” Balken said.
Patrick Dent is the assistant general manager for water policy at the Central Arizona Project (CAP), which delivers Colorado River water to the densely populated center of the state. He said that CAP does not favor any particular fix – only one that provides dam managers with more flexibility.
“Our primary interest is that they could release water at a lower lake level,” Dent said.
The Gila River Indian Community, which receives Colorado River water through CAP, told Reclamation that the agency has a duty to safeguard the tribe’s water rights, which are at risk if the dam cannot release enough water. “The United States must take action to fix Glen Canyon Dam,” Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis wrote in a March 2026 letter.
The Colorado Water Conservation Board, which represents that state’s water interests, said it supports a reevaluation of Glen Canyon Dam, but “in a separate action” from the EIS.
Becki Bryant, a Reclamation spokesperson, said the agency will release an appraisal study assessing three dam modification alternatives at the end of this year or in early 2027. Any action beyond the study, she said, requires congressional authorization and funding.
Illustration from the report, “Antique Plumbing & Leadership Postponed” from the Utah Rivers Council, Glen Canyon Institute and the Great Basin Water Network. Courtesy of Utah Rivers Council
‘Antiquated Plumbing’
The tool for managing the dam’s multiple objectives, which are a legislative requirement as well as a practical necessity, is the water held in Lake Powell, said David Wegner, a scientist who has worked on Glen Canyon policy for more than four decades. But even water has limits when the engineering is inadequate. “Sadly, these dams were not built for multiple objectives,” Wegner said. And Glen Canyon was certainly not built for extremely low water, he added.
The problem with Glen Canyon is what a coalition of environmental groups calls the dam’s “antiquated plumbing.” The groups – Glen Canyon Institute, Great Basin Water Network, and Utah Rivers Council – published a report in August 2022 that outlined these engineering deficiencies.
Water can exit Glen Canyon in only three ways. One is the spillways, a pressure-release valve for flooding, which are located at elevation 3,648 feet, near the top of the dam. They are irrelevant today. Lake Powell rests 122 feet below them.
The main exit point is through the eight penstocks, the 15-foot diameter tubes that move water through the turbines to generate hydroelectricity. The penstocks are incapacitated when Powell drops below 3,490 feet. (The lake today is 36 feet higher than that level.) If the lake falls below what is known as minimum power pool, hydropower generation also ceases.
If that happens, water must be released through four 8-foot diameter pipes called the river outlet works. Smaller than the penstocks, the river outlet works are located at elevation 3,370. Below that elevation water cannot be released from Powell, a status known ominously as “dead pool.” (Functionally, the river outlet works may be useless at elevation 3,394, Reclamation says.)
The environmental groups identified two limitations with the river outlet works. One is that they were not designed to be operated full-time. They are a role player, not the star. The other is that their smaller size means less water can pass through them. That’s a problem because the upper basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming are required to send a set amount of water downstream to the lower basin, according to the 1922 Colorado River Compact that divided the river.
The flow restrictions imposed by the river outlet works, if they had to be used full time, means that the upper basin could violate the compact, which could mean water cutbacks imposed by the lower basin.
“It’s just so counterintuitive that the tool that was designed to meet this delivery obligation” – the construction of Glen Canyon Dam – “is now going to be the roadblock that may prevent the delivery obligation from being met,” said Balken of the Glen Canyon Institute.
The engineering problems are not a new discovery. Wegner, who was with the Bureau of Reclamation at the time as its Grand Canyon environmental studies manager, helped lead a 1987 National Academies report on Glen Canyon. The report recommended that the Interior Department consider the “installation and operation of multiple outlet structures” at Glen Canyon, which would give dam managers more flexibility with water releases.
Glen Canyon’s structural problems were substantiated in 2023, when Reclamation used the river outlet works during an experimental “high-flow” release of water to flush sediment downstream and rebuild eroding Grand Canyon beaches.
The high-volume release caused pitting, or cavitation, within the river outlet works, a risk that was heightened due to the physics of water when Lake Powell is low. Reclamation coated the pipes with epoxy as a temporary fix to prevent more damage, a process that took several months. The agency has since used two small-scale physical models at its Technical Service Center in Denver to test dam operations at low water levels and the effect on infrastructure.
Reclamation acknowledged the limitations of the river outlet works in a technical memopublished in March 2024 by Richard Lafond, director of the agency’s Technical Service Center. The memo’s conclusions were endorsed by the top decision-makers in Reclamation’s Upper Colorado River Office.
“Long term operation of the river outlet works will result in accelerating regular operation and maintenance tasks,” LaFond wrote. Reclamation should “not rely on the river outlet works as the sole means for releasing water from Glen Canyon Dam.”
Wegner put it in starker terms. If the river outlet works had to be relied upon and the pipes began to erode again, then Reclamation could potentially lose control of water flows.
“Potentially that could fail,” Wegner said, meaning an inability to control water releases through the dam if the pipes are structurally compromised. “And if that fails, now you have a catastrophe on your hand and you have limited options to manage that catastrophe.”
In other words, there would be no way to release water downstream into the Grand Canyon and into the lower basin.
Neither Quick Nor Easy
What fixes are possible? Reclamation received $2 million from Congress in the fiscal year 2022 budget for an appraisal study.
Reclamation outlined three engineering possibilities in a 2023 presentation, most of which centered on preserving hydropower generation as Lake Powell declines.
One possibility is a new, lower intake that uses the existing power generation turbines. An intake located deeper in the reservoir would allow Glen Canyon to pass water in what is currently dead pool. But it would entail “increased risk from penetration through the dam.”
The second would connect new power generation equipment to the river outlet works.
The third option is tunneling through the canyon wall and installing a new underground power station. This would also provide more flexibility for water releases.
Reclamation also included three operational or policy changes for power production, including investing in wind and solar to offset hydropower declines.
Other ideas that seemed kooky and fringe just a few years ago – draining Lake Powell and filling Lake Mead first; changing the basin’s water accounting system – are now being discussed throughout the basin with more seriousness and candor.
Beyond that presentation, Reclamation has not said much publicly about dam modification. The agency declined an interview request to discuss Glen Canyon Dam’s engineering problems.
Whatever direction Reclamation chooses – an option outlined above or something new – the process will not be quick or easy. Any change to Glen Canyon must go through an environmental analysis and public comment period. Congress will have to authorize actions and appropriate the funds. Construction alone will take years.
Wegner, who was the staff director for the House Natural Resources Water and Power Subcommittee from 2008 to 2014, knows the difficulty and sees a lack of leadership. “There’s nobody in Washington who has been willing to lead the charge trying to get Congress to provide authorized funding to do this sort of work.”
‘Reservoir Triage’
Because Reclamation is not confident it can operate the river outlet works for an extended run, the agency is focused on keeping Powell above elevation 3,500 feet.
Protecting 3,500 feet comes with all sorts of baggage. It preserves hydropower generation, which power customers appreciate. But in effect the redline at that elevation strands some 4.4 million acre-feet in Lake Powell. (Only 3.7 million acre-feet is technically accessible with the current plumbing.) Some have called this elevation a “de facto” dead pool. Thus, the agitation in the lower basin for a plumbing system within the dam that provides access to this water.
Balken said that downstream water deliveries, not preserving hydropower, should be Reclamation’s biggest concern.
“When these decision makers are talking about Glen Canyon Dam from only a hydropower perspective, I think it’s missing the larger point, which is the dam is about to become the biggest roadblock of water deliveries that the basin has ever seen,” Balken said.
Flaming Gorge Reservoir, on the Green River, straddles the Wyoming-Utah border south of Rock Springs. The Flaming Gorge dam, on the Utah side, was completed in 1964 and is a critical component of the Colorado River water storage system. The Green River, the chief tributary to the Colorado River, originates in the Wind River Range, flows to Flaming Gorge Reservoir, then connects with the Colorado River in Canyonlands National Park in Utah.
To avoid the infrastructure risks of dropping below 3,500 feet, Reclamation has started to take extraordinary action. The agency has two emergency levers it is pulling. One is to hold more water back in Lake Powell. Reclamation cut water releases to the legal minimum this year, something it has never done. The other is releasing more water from Flaming Gorge, a reservoir upstream that is in better shape.
As Balken describes it, “This is reservoir triage.”
These emergency actions have serious side-effects. Upstream, Flaming Gorge is expected to lose 35 feet of elevation by next spring, once the extra water has been released. That will hurt the recreation economy of northeastern Utah and southwestern Wyoming – fewer boat ramps in the water, less fishing access.
These upstream releases have limited utility, Wegner said. “You can do that once or twice. But you got to then depend upon Mother Nature refilling those reservoirs upstream.”
Hoover Dam at low water. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Downstream, Lake Mead will drop quickly and it too will approach a level in which hydropower generation at Hoover Dam severely drops. Algal blooms in a warmer, shallower lake could be a problem. “They’re going to be robbing Mead to pay Powell,” Balken said.
Trying Not to Hit Bottom
The idea of dead pool – when Lake Powell can no longer release water – was almost inconceivable when the reservoir was designed and filled. The official device for measuring Lake Powell’s elevation ends at the top of the penstocks, at elevation 3,477.5 feet. According to Reclamation’s 2024 technical memo, “This is an indication that reservoir elevations below minimum power pool” – 3,490 feet – “were not anticipated.”
Cavitation at the Glen Canyon Dam, the cause of the emergency in 1983 via Flow Science.
Reclamation finished filling the reservoir in 1980. Three years later, after an intense El Niño winter, the dam’s upper limits were tested. Floodwaters in the summer of 1983 nearly broke the dam. Such volumes are almost inconceivable now.
In a typical year, Lake Powell would be rising in late April, flush with the deposits of snowmelt from headwater basins in the Rocky Mountains. Not this year. The snowpack peaked in many basins in late February or early March. What little snow there was has already melted. As of April 28, Lake Powell inflows are projected to be just 16 percent of average. Lake level forecasts from mid-April showed a long downward slope for the next 12 months. Those projections were what triggered the emergency release of water from Flaming Gorge and the reduction in Lake Powell releases.
Scientists have been warning about circumstances like this for years. In a defining period for the basin, all the predictions of water supply shocks in the Colorado River from the past two decades are coming to pass.
“We should have been prepared for this,” Balken said.
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
April 26, 2026
The staff at the Colorado River District showed this slide during a session on Colorado River hydrology at the district’s board of director meeting in Glenwood Springs this past Tuesday afternoon.
Here in metro Denver, the staff of Big Pivots said something profound like “holy moly!”
With moisture coming into Colorado during the next two weeks, it’s possible that the runoff into Lake Powell may surpass that of 2002. This slide says that right now, at Cameo, the gaging station on the Colorado River, east of Palisade, it looks like the spring runoff peaked in late March. The usual is in early June.
Another takeaway from the River District meeting was about Green Mountain Reservoir. The dam that creates the reservoir was built from 1938 to 1943, giving the Western Slope a way to store water as part of the Colorado-Big Thompson diversion that came after World War II. The normal allotment of the reservoir storage for downstream irrigators, mostly in the Grand Junction area, is 66,000 acre-feet.
For the first time in the history of Green Mountain, said Andy Mueller, the River District’s general manager, the water is unavailable. Instead, the river district is tapping various pools of water over which it has control to come up with a thimbleful here, a cup there. A creative solution, Mueller called it. Irrigators won’t become whole, but they will get some help.
“We’ll survive, and we will continue to survive,” said Mike Ritschard, a director from the Kremmling area and a fourth-generation rancher there, said during a roundup of reports from board members.
Created in 1937, one of the ramifications of the Colorado-Big Thompson water diversion, the River District has primary responsibility for water matters across 15 of the 20 Western Slope counties.
The Colorado River Water Conservation District spans 15 Western Slope counties. Colorado River District/Courtesy image
When Donald Trump was elected president for the second time, we all knew what was coming to the nation’s public lands: The administration would favor extractive uses by eviscerating environmental protections, rolling back regulations, and leasing out as much land as possible while handing out drilling permits like Shriners throwing candy at a parade.
Yet there was one realm where I figured the administration couldn’t bestow any more deregulatory gifts, namely public lands grazing. It’s not that I thought Trump would clamp down on the destructive practice, it’s just that I figured the status quo was about as permissive as it could get. Past administrations, be they Democratic or Republican, have generally shied away from updating or reforming public lands grazing policies out of fear of inflaming the West’s cowboy culture — even if it is based largely on myth.
But Trump, his Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins are intrepidly going where previous administrations did not dare: grazing reform. Well, sort of, though maybe not in the way public lands lovers might have hoped. In fact, they are doing their best to make grazing policy even more lax with a goal of getting more cattle out there to trample public lands, cryptobiotic soils, and cultural sites.
Last month, Burgum and Rollins announced an MOU between the two agencies designed to “boost the supply of American born, raised, and harvested beef” by cutting “bureaucratic red tape” and giving the livestock industry more control. The MOU has a goal of “maintaining grazing capacity wherever possible, including no net loss of Animal Unit Months within allotments,” even if those allotments are degraded or in poor health. In Burgum’s words, one goal is to “preserve America’s ranching heritage for generations to come.” Forgive me for getting anxious whenever I see “heritage” used in conjunction with public lands.
“Today’s signing sends a clear message: the Trump administration is putting America’s farmers and ranchers first,” said Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins. Which brings up the question of what message the administration was sending in February when Trump signed an executive order to quadruple beef imports from Argentina in an effort to keep Big Macs affordable.
🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭
To help it carry out its mission, the Bureau of Land Management has released an interactive map aimed at putting more cattle and sheep back on public lands. The “federal grazing lands potentially available” map shows allotments that have been vacated, often as a result of deals brokered by environmentalists, with the intent of peddling the tracts to livestock operators. While there’s no guarantee that the BLM would lease out all of the vacant tracts, the presence on the map of the ones vacated for environmental purposes is enough to set off alarm bells.
Grazing allotments listed as “potentially available” for leasing on the BLM’s new map. The five parcels closest to Silverton were retired in 2023 to protect bighorn sheep. Source: BLM
For example, the map includes 10 allotments in the high country around Silverton, Colorado, totaling about 70,000 acres. In 2023, the National Wildlife Federation paid the Etchart Sheep Ranch to vacate five of these allotments in an effort to give Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep more breathing room and protect them from diseases transmitted by domestic sheep. The deal was made with the hope that the leases would be retired permanently. Yet the inclusion on the map indicates they could see domestic sheep once again, emphasizing the need for legislation that would make such retirements perpetual.
Also on the map are the Flodine Park and Yellowjacket allotments in Canyon of the Ancients National Monument near the Colorado-Utah border. In 2005, a rancher gave up the allotments, north and south of McElmo Canyon, respectively, and sold 4,500 acres of adjacent private land to the BLM to add to the national monument. Both allotments and the private land contain a number of intermittent streams, shallow canyons, and numerous cultural sites. They had been grazed relentlessly for decades prior, and showed the wear and tear—much of the cryptobiotic soil had long before been trampled and destroyed and invasive cheat grass had infiltrated the grazed areas. An archaeological assessment conducted later found grazing had damaged dozens of sensitive and cultural sites in the areas.
The Yellowjacket and Flodine Park allotments in Canyons of the Ancients National Monument. They have been vacant since 2005, and a previous effort to lease them out again was halted. Now it looks like they may be back on the block. Source: BLM
In 2010, the BLM, which manages the monument, issued a new resource management plan, which allowed for continued grazing, but also opened the door to permanently retiring vacant grazing allotments if they fail to meet BLM rangeland health standards or when grazing is negatively impacting cultural sites. Five of the 28 allotments in the most heavily visited areas—including Sand Canyon—were cancelled, but not the Flodine Park and Yellow Jacket allotments, which were still in retirement at the time.
Instead, the local county commissioners and a group of ranchers pressured the BLM to reauthorize grazing on both allotments—to bring them out of retirement, if you will. The BLM acquiesced, but environmentalists and tribes with roots in the area fought back, forcing the agency to do a more thorough environmental analysis of the proposal. The opposition was enough to prompt the agency at least to delay issuing any leases, and the allotments remain in limbo.
Meanwhile, a team of scientists assessed the healing process on the Flodine Park and Yellow Jacket allotments, which by then had been cow-free for 11 years (though feral horses had grazed there). They compared biocrusts on those allotments to a fenced enclosure that hadn’t seen grazing for 53 years and a plot that was being actively grazed. What they found was both predictable and remarkable: The longer a plot went without cows, the healthier it was, as summed up by these graphs.
Source: Grazing, Rest, and Biological Soil Crust in Canyons of the Ancients National Monument Marc Coles-Ritchie, Lior Gross and Mary O’Brien, Grand Canyon Trust.
While the natural landscape can eventually heal itself, livestock’s damage to the cultural landscape is irreversible. BLM surveys identified 266 cultural sites on the two allotments, including 35 with “standing architecture.” At least 43% of those had been damaged by livestock.
Now what’s left may be in danger, too, at least if those allotments’ presence on the new map is any indication. And guess what? Packing these allotments isn’t going to make that steak any cheaper. Only about 1% of American beef is grazed on public lands.
Mt. Blue Sky at 14,130 feet in elevation on April 22, 2026. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
⛈️ Wacky Weather Watch ⚡️
If you were to get all of your information about the West’s climate from daily weather reports and road condition websites, you might think that April snow showers and deep freezes had ended the snow drought and would lead to big May streamflows. After all, it snowed enough in Colorado to turn roads to slip-and-slides and causing a 75-car pileup on I-70 near the Eisenhower Tunnel. The temperatures dropped low enough to wipe out most of the fruit blossoms the March heat wave tricked into blooming early. Only the farmers who used extraordinary measures — starting fires or smudge pots in the orchards, running wind machines, etc. — could save some of their summer harvest.
Sunset over the San Juans. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Sure, the snow that did fall in April helped, but only enough to elevate snowpack levels to, well, the lowest on record (only by a slightly smaller margin than before). And the freeze was deep, which helped extend the spring runoff in the few areas where there was any snow left. But even there, I suspect that peak runoff has already come and gone (though I’m not calling the Predict the Peak contest yet!).
I flew over Colorado’s mountains the other day and was rather shocked at the dearth of snow, even on the highest peaks. Mt. Blue Sky, formerly Mt. Evans, had only a few patches of white left — at 14,130 feet in elevation. Everything below 10,000 feet appeared to be snowless. While the San Juan Mountains appeared to be in slightly better shape, it was still looking pretty dry. The Animas River watershed’s snowpack remains lower than it was on 2002 on this date.
Meteorological records dating back 130 years show a handful of years with winters drier than the 2025-26 winter, said Rebecca Briesmoore, a water resources engineer with the Colorado River District.
“But it has been the warmest by far … that has really been the headline: It wasn’t the driest, but it was the warmest — and that is having a huge impact on hydrology and water resources,” Briesmoore said.
She spoke to a packed room of about 150 attendees at Thursday’s [May 21, 2026] Roaring Fork River: State of the River event hosted by the Colorado River District at the Pitkin County Library…“It’s important for people to know that this year is unprecedented . . . it’s like nothing we have ever seen before,” Briesmoore said. “Every single drop of water really, really matters. We have to think about how we are using it, and what we are going to do with very, very low water resources.”
To a room full of gasps, Briesmoore showed a graph with a star marking the 2026 winter — from October 2025 to March — high above the rest. While years including 1902, 1904, 1977, 2002 and 2018 recorded less precipitation, in terms of temperatures there’s no other year that even came close to 2026.
The Pacific Ocean is a giant climate cauldron, with a powerful heat engine that affects storms, fisheries and rainfall patterns half a world away, and scientists are watching closely to see if it’s about to boil over.
Their projections suggest the tropical Pacific is simmering toward a strong El Niño, the warm phase of an ocean-atmosphere cycle that can intensify and shift those impacts.
In a world already superheated by greenhouse gases, a strong El Niño during the next 12 to 18 months could permanently push the planet’s average annual temperature past the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming threshold enshrined in scientific documents and political agreements as a turning point for potentially irreversible climate impacts.
Climate scientists also recently published a study showing that strong El Niño events can trigger what they called “climate regime shifts,” meaning abrupt, lasting changes in heat, rainfall and drought patterns.
El Niño is one of the planet’s biggest natural release valves for ocean heat. The venting starts with periodic shifts of swirling ocean currents and winds over the Pacific. That causes huge stores of tropical ocean heat to surge eastward from the Western Pacific Warm Pool, roughly between Australia and Indonesia, northward to Japan. Those tropical seas are by far the warmest ocean region on Earth, and span an area four times as large as the continental United States.
When that ocean heat spreads across the equatorial Pacific, it spills into the atmosphere in pulses that tilt weather patterns, reroute powerful high-elevation winds, raise global temperatures, bleach coral reefs and disrupt fisheries and ocean ecosystems. The effects hit continents as well, intensifying rainstorms and flooding in some regions, while amplifying extreme heat, drought and wildfires in others.
In 2015, heat from the tropical Pacific helped raise the global annual average temperature irreversibly past 1 degree Celsius above the pre-industrial baseline. And in 2024, Earth experienced the hottest year recorded in human history, aided by another El Niño boost.
Even a moderately strong El Niño during the next 12 to 18 months could drive the average global temperature to about 1.7 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial level, climate scientist James Hansen told Inside Climate News. Hansen doubts the world will meaningfully cool back down to below the 1.5 degree Celsius mark after the El Niño fades.
Hot El Niño cycles in the tropical Pacific Ocean release so much energy, as heat and moisture, to the atmosphere, that it affects rainfall and drought patterns halfway around the world. Credit: NASA/JPL
Passing that threshold may not be like falling off a climate cliff, but it’s definitely the point when the edge starts crumbling, with rapid changes to relatively stable systems of forests, water, rain and temperatures that have sustained people and ecosystems for millennia.
Even below the 1.5-degree Celsius threshold, California reservoirs no longer fill in some years and overflow with extreme rainfall in others. Coral reefs from Australia to the Caribbean have bleached beyond recovery and vast tracts of forests burned up in megafires. Traditional crop calendars don’t align with seasons. Deadly nighttime heat rises in cities, killing vulnerable people in apartments that never cool.
“Super El Niño” Seen as Game Changer
Climate impacts amplified by strong El Niños keep hitting the same vulnerable regions, may be more widespread than previously thought and can persist long after the tropical Pacific cools, according to an El Niño study published December 2025 in Nature Communications.
The study concluded that “super El Niños” are not just passing weather events, but more like climate shocks that can push parts of the Earth system into new states, co-author Jong-Seong Kug wrote in an email.
The study’s definition of a super El Niño is when the sea surface temperature anomaly in the tropical Pacific “exceeds 2 standard deviations above normal”—not an ordinary fluctuation, but more of a systemic warning sign.
The impacts are clustered in areas known to be sensitive to long-distance climate connections and regions “that are already prone to climate regime shifts,” wrote Kug, a climate researcher at Seoul National University in South Korea.
There are only three super El Niños on record: in 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16. All of them contributed to regime shifts in regional ocean temperatures, leading to unprecedented marine heat waves that destroyed or damaged coral reefs and caused mass die-offs and starvation among many marine organisms, from starfish to seabirds and marine mammals.
Those impacts, as well as changes in drought and extreme heat over land areas, persisted for years and could shift some regional patterns for decades, according to the study.
Kug said the main “regime-shift hotspots” in oceans include the central North Pacific, the southeastern Indian Ocean, the southwestern Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico, areas where globally linked atmospheric connections “can strongly perturb the ocean surface and, in some cases, help anomalies persist.”
Kug said the study identified super El Niño regime shifts in East Africa and the Maritime Continent—the island-rich region between the Indian and Pacific Oceans around Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Click the link to read the article on the Tucson.com website (Tony Davis). Here’s an excerpt:
April 26, 2026
It’s time to bring in a mediator to handle the prolonged dispute over managing the Colorado River between the Upper and Lower Colorado River Basin states, representatives of the four Upper Basin states say.
“The proposal for mediation attempts to address the current deadlock between Upper Basin and Lower Basin approaches and begin to deal with the basin’s dire hydrologic conditions.” said the Upper Colorado River Commission, which represents Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.
“The commissioners believe a structured mediation process can support authentic negotiations and collective action to address the Basin’s operational challenges,” the commission said in a news release last week.
The request for a mediator to handle this dispute follows about two years of fruitless negotiations among the various state representatives. There have been several major sources of dispute, but the biggest one has been over how the two basins should split the cuts in river water use that would be needed to bring human demand in line with shrinking supply…The Upper Basin states’ request comes not long before the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is supposed to announce its plan for managing the river, in the absence of an agreement among the basin states. A new plan is necessary because the river’s current operating guidelines expire Sept. 30…
The request for mediation also comes as the river’s condition continues to deteriorate. Hot, dry weather has held down water flows in the river for most of the year, and there’s a risk that spring-summer runoff into Lake Powell will be the lowest on record since Lake Powell started filling in the 1960s.
China’s rapid rise in science has hit a milestone. The country’s investment in research and development has reached parity with – and by purchasing power measures has surpassed – that of the United States, according to a March 2026 report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Both nations have crossed the US$1 trillion threshold on research spending.
In contrast, China had previously spent little to nothing on research and development. Some estimates show that China was among the lowest research spenders worldwide in 1980.
The most recent reports showing that China is now outspending the U.S. on scientific and technological research is a turning point worth understanding clearly because, historically, global leadership in one sector – including technology and warfare – feeds into others. U.S. dominance is in question.
In 2024, China overtook the United States in total scientific publications – the first time any nation has displaced American dominance since the U.S. itself surpassed the United Kingdom in 1948. Researchers found that China overtook the United States in scientific output even earlier. That same year, China pulled ahead in the Nature Index, which tracks publications in the world’s most selective scientific journals, posting a 17% advantage over the U.S. in outlets long considered the gold standard of scientific excellence.
Given these milestones, it’s possible to argue that China is quickly taking the lead in global science and technology. These are not isolated data points. They mark a structural shift in where the world’s scientific frontier is being built.
More science is good – the problem lies elsewhere
China’s ascent is, in one sense, good news. More knowledge, generated by more researchers across more institutions, expands the global pool of discovery from which everyone can draw. The world benefits when science thrives.
The problem is not that China is investing, but that the U.S. is not.
First, the U.S. is divesting from basic, open science. Federal R&D spending in the U.S. peaked in 2010 at roughly $160 billion and fell by more than 15% over the following five years. Federal investment in research and development has been in a long, slow slide – from a peak of 1.86% of gross domestic product in 1964 to about 0.66% in 2021.
The federal government is no longer the largest spender in R&D: It funded about 40% of basic research in 2022, while the business sector performed roughly 78% of U.S. R&D. While not a problem in itself, industry has simultaneously withdrawn from open scientific publication over the past four decades, shifting from research toward development. The result is a shrinking pool of openly shared scientific knowledge precisely as public investment in it also contracts.
The second is the active restriction of scientific exchange: tightening access to U.S. institutions, scrutinizing international collaborations and raising barriers to foreign-born researchers. These policies, though intended as security measures, work against the openness that has historically made American science productive and attractive to global talent.
I describe this issue as an example of the stockyard paradox, in which securing research assets may weaken the very system these measures aim to protect.
Disinvestment cuts deeper than it appears
The deeper danger for the U.S. economy is that disinvestment and selective engagement in research erodes the capacity to use cutting-edge science regardless of where it is produced.
Absorbing and applying cutting-edge knowledge, whether developed in Boston or Beijing, requires maintaining research institutions and trained workforces, as well as active participation in global networks. This is not a passive process. You cannot free-ride on Chinese science if you have dismantled the institutional and human capital needed to evaluate, translate and apply it.
A nation that hollows out its research base not only falls behind but also progressively loses its ability to benefit from science, including in technologies it is already able to access.
Talent compounds the problem. The U.S. built its scientific dominance partly by being the destination of choice for the world’s most ambitious researchers. The U.S. leads the world in Nobel Prizes, but, notably, 40% of the Nobel Prizes in chemistry, medicine and physics that were awarded to Americans since 2000 were won by immigrants. The flow of foreign talent is not guaranteed. It follows opportunity, funding and openness.
China’s milestone in research funding arrives at a moment when the U.S. is deciding whether to maintain its scientific leadership.
Scientific infrastructure does not decline gradually and recover on demand. Doctoral scientists represent a decade or more of training; tacit laboratory knowledge lives in working research groups, not in documents. Once talented young researchers leave the pipeline – or international talent redirects to other countries – the capacity is very hard to rebuild. Early warning signs are already visible in the U.S. system: thousands of NIH grants terminated, a collapse in international applications and an exodus of early-career scientists.
What is at stake is not a ranking. It is whether the U.S. maintains the institutional capacity – the universities, the federal laboratories, the graduate pipelines, the culture of open inquiry – that made those returns on scientific investment possible in the first place.
China’s rise did not create this decision point, although it brings it into sharp relief. Does the U.S. still want to lead in science? The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonprofit think tank, estimates that a 20% cut in federal research and development starting in fiscal year 2026 would shrink the U.S. economy by nearly $1 trillion over 10 years and reduce tax revenue by around $250 billion. Others point out that the scientific enterprise has contributed at least half of U.S. economic growth.
When I led the Bureau of Land Management under President Biden, the hardest part of my job was reassembling the agency after the first Trump administration had scattered its headquarters from our nation’s capital. The move crippled the agency—as intended.
That experience led me to understand that the current Trump administration’s unpopular plan to move the U.S. Forest Service headquarters will be every bit as destructive. It will hurt forests, wildlife and communities that rely upon our public lands and waters.
In 2020, almost 90% of the BLM employees ordered to move West chose not to, forcing them out the door. With those seasoned employees went years of wisdom and knowledge of how things are supposed to work, of how to deliver for the American people.
Today’s Forest Service plan goes farther, aiming to close regional offices and shutter dozens of the agency’s research centers, as we face what some say will be a horrific wildfire season.
The Forest Service and the BLM combined manage 20% of our country’s lands and waters. These public lands, the places we camp, hike, watch birds, hunt and simply wander in nature, are truly one of America’s best ideas. For Westerners, they are a deep part of our identity.
There is a reason Forest Service headquarters are based in Washington, DC. It’s where our nation’s leaders work. Believe me, I did not want to move to the capital from my home in Montana to run the BLM, but to be able to fight for Western people and places, I had to go to the seat of our nation’s power.
I was often in the Interior Secretary’s offices. I frequently walked to work with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director, talking through thorny problems such as how to protect wildlife while permitting transmission lines. Washington is where people manage relationships with Congress, where budgets get made.
The administration says all their changes are about bringing leadership closer to where the work happens. That’s a political talking point, and it’s false.
If DOGE’s dismantling of government agencies last year provides any lesson, then cruelty and disruption are the real point. These changes aim to create chaos, deliver the administration’s stated goal of traumatizing employees, and imperil the very existence of public lands — lands that belong to all Americans. We improve the management of our forests by giving foresters the resources they need and letting them make decisions based on sound science and collaboration, not by gutting their agency.
Over the course of the last year, the Forest Service forced or coerced roughly a quarter of its approximately 30,000 employees to leave. In this latest round of engineered chaos, thousands of people will be reassigned and ordered to move. If BLM history is any guide, almost all will leave their positions rather than uproot their families. The agency could soon be left with roughly half its former ranks.
Think of your job. Now, think of half of your colleagues gone. Would your organization be able to recover from the loss and demoralization to do its work?
There are inevitable repercussions to this radical attack on our public land management agencies: Campgrounds will close. Trails won’t be maintained. High fuel loads near communities will go unaddressed. Wildfires will become even harder to fight. More sawmills will close. The health of our land, waters and wildlife will decline. With things going wrong on the ground, some will demand that these lands be transferred to states or sold to private industry.
Tracy Stone-Manning. Photo via WritersOnTheRange.org
That’s exactly what the people in power today want. The choice of Utah for the Forest Service headquarters—home to Senator Mike Lee, who leads the charge on public land selloff, as well as to the state that is suing to try to take over millions of your public lands—reveals the administration’s true agenda.
The inevitable does not need to happen. There is one power to stop our public lands from being mismanaged to the point of selloff: It’s the outrage of the American people.
Americans overwhelmingly support public lands and want future generations to enjoy the freedoms found in them. Our public forests, rivers and deserts deserve to be treated better, and the federal land managers who work tirelessly deserve better. It’s up to us to demand it.
Tracy Stone-Manning is president of The Wilderness Society and a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West.
Scott Hummer worked for the Colorado Department of Water Resources for many years so he has witnessed many ups and downs for the rivers in northern Colorado. Here are some low flow photos from a recent road trip. First up Stagecoach Reservoir and the Yampa River.
The confluence of the Blue River (L) and Muddy Creek (R) April 22, 2026. Photo credit: Scott Hummer
Streamgage above Stagecoach Reservoir April 22, 2026. Photo credit: Scott HummerStreamgage above Stagecoach Reservoir April 22, 2026. Photo credit: Scott HummerThe inlet to Stagecoach Reservoir April 22, 2026. Photo credit: Scott HummerStagecoach Reservoir April 22, 2026. Photo credit: Scott HummerYampa River inflow to Stagecoach Reservoir April 22, 2026. Photo credit: Scott Hummer
The North Platte River April 22, 2026. Photo credit: Scott Hummer
The North Platte River April 22, 2026. Photo credit: Scott HummerThe North Platte River April 22, 2026. Photo credit: Scott Hummer
Scott Hummer at the inlet to Stagecoach Reservoir July 22, 2021 when I was bumming up and down the Yampa River.
Yampa River Basin via Wikimedia.
Map of the North Platte River drainage basin, a tributary of the Platte River, in the central US. Made using USGS National Map and NASA SRTM data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79266632
Click the link to read the article on the Summit Daily website (Ali Longwell). Here’s an excerpt:
April 20, 2026
With a historic drought hitting the Colorado River basin, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is making preparations to slow releases from the river’s largest reservoir while increasing withdrawals from an Upper Basin reservoir.
“Given the severity of the risks facing the Colorado River system, it is imperative that we take action quickly to protect a resource that supplies water to 40 million people and supports vital agricultural, hydropower production, tribal, wildlife and recreational uses across the region,” said Andrea Travnice, the Bureau of Reclamation’s assistant secretary of water and science in a Friday, April 17 news release…
As a result, the Bureau of Reclamation is anticipating that inflow to Lake Powell will be 29% of the historical average, which it reports is one of the lowest on record. If water levels fall below a certain elevation — below 3,490 feet or roughly 15% of its capacity — it can impact operations, regional power and water supplies as well as reduce hydroelectric power generation. The Bureau is projecting it could hit this minimum power pool level by August. As of April 19, Lake Powell and Lake Mead were 24% and 32% full, respectively.
View below Flaming Gorge Dam from the Green River, eastern Utah. Photo credit: USGS
Water starts to fill Chimney Hollow Reservoir in Larimer County on Tuesday, April 21. Scott Franz/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Scott Franz):
April 22, 2026
At 8 a.m. Tuesday, there was only silence and the occasional crunch of rocks as a dozen people in orange vests waited in a moonlike landscape beneath a 350-foot-tall dam near Loveland.
“Ninetey seconds,” a worker called out.
Moments later, it sounded like a waterfall suddenly roared to life as Northern Water started filling Colorado’s newest reservoir, Chimney Hollow.
“It’s pretty cool, I mean it’s something we’ve been working on for a long time, so just to see it for real, it’s pretty cool,” Chris Manley, a water quality specialist with Northern Water, said as he watched water gush from a 40-foot-tall concrete tower at the bottom of the reservoir.
By the end of the week, the initial release of 1,500-acre feet of water will rise about 30 feet above the spot Manley and a gaggle of journalists were standing on Tuesday morning.
Engineers will make sure the pipes that will funnel Colorado River water to the reservoir are functioning correctly. It will also give Northern Water a chance to study an issue with the water supply.
The reservoir’s future became murky last year after officials announced that naturally occurring uranium was found in the rock used to build the dam for the reservoir.
Manley said the uranium discovery has set the project back roughly a year. But he said it is an issue Northern Water can manage long term.
Water from Chimney Hollow Reservoir is projected to serve almost a million people on the Front Range. Scott Franz/KUNC
“But we’ve got to really understand the situation a lot better before we can move forward,” he said.
This week’s initial fill will provide Northern Water with a real-world test of the water quality that was only previously done in laboratories.
None of the water coming into the reservoir will be released to taps at this point. The reservoir is only being filled to about 2% of its total capacity in the coming days.
“We’ll be measuring it actually pretty frequently, to see just what is (the water) picking up as it goes up and touches the dam and starts to move some of the sediments around here,” Northern Water spokesperson Jeff Stahla said.
Northern Water officials could not provide a timeline for when water will begin reaching the dozen water suppliers who have signed up to receive it.
Map from Northern Water
The reservoir project cost an estimated $500 million and has been in the planning stages for more than two decades.
Conservation groups have raised concerns about the reservoir.
“You can have a bunch of buckets, and you can build more buckets to put water on the front range,” Pelz said. “But the reality is, if the projected climate change impacts come to fruition — which all indications are, they’re coming to fruition quicker than we even thought — there’s going to be no water to fill those buckets.”
The reservoir is seeing its initial fill during historic drought conditions in the Colorado River basin.
“It’s definitely very ironic that we’re filling the reservoir in these historic drought conditions, but we’re fortunate that we had a little bit of supply left from last year,” Northern Water Operations Director Jerry Gibbens said. “It really showcases why storage is so important for our region.
Northern Water officials say the reservoir is a way to boost water security on the Front Range.
“As we’ve seen this year, water storage is such a key element of our overall water supply in northern Colorado, and this just adds another increment of that supply to a region where our water demands continue to grow,” Stahla said.
The South Platte River Basin is shaded in yellow. Source: Tom Cech, One World One Water Center, Metropolitan State University of Denver.
While much of Southwest Colorado is suffering extreme drought, The Nature Conservancy is offering grants between $25,000 and $100,000 for projects that enhance flood and drought resilience in the region. The funding application is open to state, local, tribal or other public entities – including schools, conservation districts and nonprofits – until 5 p.m. May 22…
Projects eligible for funding could include healthy forest initiatives, watershed resilience improvements and methods for increasing agricultural water use efficiency. A second round of funding opportunities funded by up to $600,000 that The Nature Conservancy expects to provide will open in 2027. Projects in that round must be planned for completion by mid-2028…Eligible entities are encouraged to apply through an online form and can request the form or forward questions to swcofunding@tnc.org. Awardees will be notified by June 15.
The San Juan River has peaked above 8,000 cfs twice in early October 2025, reaching the highest levels seen since the 1927 flood. Source: USGS.
In 2013 Southern California’s San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station was retired eleven years ahead of schedule. This was because of severe, premature wear in the tubes of its replacement steam generators that led to a radioactive leak and made the cost and regulatory uncertainty of a full repair unfeasible for its operators.1 Worse, the closure occurred just after ratepayers in San Diego, Orange, and Riverside Counties had spent $1.88 billion for an overhaul of the plant.2 A year later the California Public Utilities Commission approved a $4.7 billion settlement where ratepayers were made responsible for approximately $3.3 billion of the plant’s closing costs, to be paid over a 10-year period.3
Ratepayers continued to pay for “undepreciated net investments” in the retired nuclear plant—essentially paying off the remaining debt for construction and equipment that had not yet been fully depreciated before the early shutdown. Even after the shutdown, utilities were allowed to collect funds for maintaining safety and security at the retired site.4
The San Onofre debacle illustrates how utilities use regulatory “cost recovery” and “stranded asset” mechanisms to pass billions in losses from failed or retired facilities onto ratepayers. Nationally, this system allows investor-owned utilities to maintain profits even after large projects fail, as seen with coal plant retirements and canceled transmission lines.5
How Ratepayers get Soaked for closed power generation facilities
Utilities nationwide use several key tactics to recover costs from assets that no longer produce power:
Stranded Asset Recovery: When a plant like San Diego’s San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant shuts down prematurely, utilities often seek to recover their remaining “undepreciated investment”. For San Onofre, a controversial settlement originally placed $3.3 billion of the $4.7 billion shutdown cost on ratepayers over 10 years.6
Guaranteed Returns on Failed Investments: Utilities typically enjoy built-in profit margins (often around 9-10%) on their infrastructure investments. Even after a plant is shuttered, they may continue to collect these returns. In the San Onofre case, regulators eventually reduced the shareholder return to less than 3% for the retired assets, which still left customers paying for the principal investment.
Replacement Power Costs: When a major facility goes offline, utilities must buy electricity from elsewhere. Ratepayers often bear these “purchased power” costs. San Diego and Southern California customers saw estimated costs of $350 million to $1.1 billion just for replacement electricity following the San Onofre outage.
Decommissioning Surcharges: Long-term cleanup and waste storage costs are frequently funded through special ratepayer-backed accounts. Decommissioning San Onofre is estimated to cost $4.7 billion, much of which was pre-funded by customers during the plant’s operating years.
The “Uneconomic Dispatch”
This model extends beyond nuclear power to fossil fuels and infrastructure:
Coal Plant “Uneconomic Dispatch”: Utilities nationwide continue to run expensive coal plants that cannot compete with cheaper gas or renewables because they can recover fuel and operation costs from customers. This “uneconomic dispatch” cost U.S. consumers an estimated $24 billion from 2015 to 2024.
Securitization: Some states use “securitization”—issuing low-interest bonds to pay off a utility’s remaining investment in a closed plant. While this can lower customer bills compared to standard utility returns, it still ensures the utility is paid in full for a non-working asset.
Failed Infrastructure: Similar to the faulty steam generators at San Onofre, ratepayers have been held responsible for abandoned projects like PG&E’s scrapped transmission line to Canada ($20 million) and Duke Energy’s retired Crystal River nuclear plant in Florida ($1.3 billion in bonds).
At an April 9 meeting, the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD) Board of Directors approved revisions to the district’s drought management plan. District Engineer Justin Ramsey opened discussion of the plan, which he explained was a complete rewrite of the previous plan and was adopted in 2020 with a stipulation that it be reexamined in 2026. He added that the district also had to implement the plan in 2025 due to dry conditions, which gave additional insights into how the plan functions. He explained that he recently reconvened the committee that drafted the plan, including PAWSD board members, water experts in the community, business owners and other community members. Ramsey stated that, although there were some changes recommended to the plan, it has, overall, been highly successful. He explained that the drought stages outlined in the plan are entered based on triggers, which are different depending on the time of year.
Early in the year, he stated, the triggers are the snowpack in the mountains, measured by the amount of snow water equivalent (SWE) at the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service SNOwpack TELemetry Network (also commonly known as SNOTEL) station on Wolf Creek Pass and the date when the district’s water supply is cut off on Four Mile Creek due to other senior water users diverting water…If specific SWE levels or a call on Four Mile do not occur by specific dates in the spring, the plan shifts to a different set of drought triggers based on water levels in Lake Hatcher (one of PAWSD’s primary reservoirs), water flows in the San Juan River and the drought stage for Archuleta County designated by the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS). He explained that the amount of water in Lake Hatcher is weighted the most heavily, with flows in the San Juan being the next most influential factor and drought designation being the least. He added that the different drought stages come with different drought surcharges and water rate adjustments…He explained that the first drought stage (voluntary drought) aims to cut water use by 10 percent, while the most severe drought stage (stage four) is intended to cut water use by 50 percent.
On April 22, the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD) entered stage one drought under its drought mitigation plan, imposing new restrictions on irrigation and rate multipliers for high water use. The district’s drought plan calls for Conservation Service SNOwpack TELemetry Network (SNOTEL) site reaches zero between April 17 and May 1. SWE fell to zero on April 22, triggering stage one drought, according to PAWSD District Engineer Justin Ramsey. During drought stage one, irrigation is permitted only between 6 p.m. and 9 a.m., and residential customers who use more than 5,000 gallons of water a month will have a 1.25 times rate multiplier applied to their water bills. According to the PAWSD website, the imposition of this multiplier will begin to impact customer bills received in May, although the irrigation restrictions will start immediately. The plan notes that gardens may be hand watered using a hose or drip irrigation.
Drip irrigation graphic via Sonoma County Nurseries Resource
The Colorado River carves through mud left behind from Lake Powell when the reservoir was at full pool, near Hite, Utah in October 2022. (Alexander Heilner/The Water Desk with aerial support from LightHawk)
This year’s historic winter of low snow might feel novel. But recent years give some insight into just how dry the West’s most important river system can get. This season’s scant snowpack is melting rapidly, and turning up memories of other notably dry years.
Prolonged drought conditions and warming temperatures since 2000 have produced severe single-year droughts in 2002, 2012, 2018 and 2020 in the river’s headwaters states of Colorado, Wyoming and Utah. As severe drought years continue to put the Southwest’s water infrastructure to the test, communities in the region are grappling with how best to understand and adapt to a changing climate.
2002 stands as the worst drought on record for the Colorado River, measured as the flow into one of its biggest reservoirs, Lake Powell on the Utah-Arizona border. It’s possible 2026 could break that record. Back then the year acted as a wake-up call to the region’s water leaders, spurred important policy changes, and reshaped attitudes around conservation.
We asked Colorado River experts Eric Kuhn, Jeff Lukas and Jim Lochhead to share five important takeaways from the 2002 drought, and what to know as we enter the warmer, drier months of 2026.
1. Reservoirs have memory
Reservoirs act as batteries for water availability, charged by inputs such as snowmelt, streams, rivers and precipitation.
“What you did two or three years ago can affect your water supply now,” said Eric Kuhn, former general manager for the Colorado River Water Conservation District. “So in a good year, if you are conserving, you are actually helping the system out for the next drought.”
The 2002 drought prompted municipal utilities to rethink their reservoir usage.
“Water managers and agencies have absorbed several lessons from 2002, including holding something back. They’re operating the reservoirs a little differently,” said Jeff Lukas, an independent climate and water researcher who has lived on Colorado’s Front Range for 40 years.
By conserving reservoir water, municipal utilities can maintain water storage for less abundant water years of the future. But as dry conditions have dogged the entire Colorado River basin for more than a quarter-century, the system’s buffer is gone.
“The biggest issue is that Lake Powell and Lake Mead were relatively full in 2002,” Kuhn said. Now, both Lake Powell and Lake Mead are at critically low levels, and the water scarcity is increasing the likelihood of multi-state litigation.
In 2002, drought was dealt with on a local level; water utilities were not thinking about drought in terms of the entire river system, but instead how to regulate municipal water use. This year’s dry conditions are pushing the whole region to the brink.
2. Conservation can make a big difference, if it is mandatory
Individual contributions to water conservation, adhering to local outdoor watering restrictions for example, can make a difference. Prompted by the 2002 drought, a 2004 University of Colorado study aimed to measure the effectiveness of water restrictions put in place by water providers on the state’s populated Front Range.
The study followed municipal water providers Thornton, Aurora, Westminster, Fort Collins, Boulder, Louisville, Lafayette and Denver Water, comparing 2002 usage to average water usage in 2000 and 2001. Researchers determined that water restrictions are most effective when mandatory. Mandatory restrictions in Lafayette reduced water usage by as much as 53%, according to the study.
The same study found that under mandatory restrictions, savings of expected water use per capita was as successful as 56%, while voluntary restrictions only measured up to 12%.
Outdoor watering represents a big slice of a city’s water budget, and 2002 showed utilities that in times of crisis people can rein in their use.
“Everyone should realize that they can make a small contribution to the solution,” Kuhn said. “Even though their individual contribution might be miniscule, when you add up all their neighbors and other people, it’s not miniscule. It’s very, very big.”
Watering a lawn once or twice a week, and not during peak hours, is a practical way to conserve water while keeping grass alive.
3. This is not a one-off year
It’s easy to shrug off a dry year and hope for wet weather’s return. But the long-term trends are concerning.
“This is really the 26th year of extreme drought,” said former Denver Water CEO Jim Lochhead. On a larger scale, the seven Colorado River basin states—Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming—have been preparing for worsening drought conditions since the shock of 2002. But river policy hasn’t kept pace with the aridification, leaving the region’s largest reservoirs at near record lows.
The Colorado River flows through canyons in northern Arizona in October 2020. (Ross Rice/The Water Desk & LightHawk)
“This has been a slow moving train that I think the states have known was coming, and they have frankly failed to do anything about it,” said Lochhead, who also represented the state of Colorado amid interstate Colorado River negotiations in the 1990s and early 2000s.
The Colorado Climate Center anticipates droughts to increase in severity and frequency, a trend that is only expected to continue in Colorado and across the Southwest as warming temperatures upend the water cycle.
“We should be managing and thinking about water, using water, as though it were always a drought,” Lukas said.
4. Communities have more practice dealing with drought, but still struggle
Drought conditions in 2002 led some municipal water utilities to organize and create incentives for conservation, and transformed the urban landscape, swapping grass for more drought-tolerant plants. Those water restrictions allowed municipal water providers to curb water demand while steadily growing in size. However, there is still room for improvement in disproportionately affected communities.
According to Lochhead, urban areas need to prioritize heat reduction in neighborhoods that have fewer trees in order to lessen the impacts of drought and warming temperatures. Using scarce water supplies to encourage tree-planting and increase shade should remain a priority.
“I think we need to work with those communities to enhance some landscaping,” Lochhead said. “Whether it’s the homeless population, whether it’s just kids that are out, whatever it may be, those areas are where they’re pretty hard hit by heat.”
Farmers and ranchers are used to riding the highs and lows of western weather. But extremely dry years like 2002, and now 2026, can push their operations to the limits.
“This is going to be a really tough year,” Lukas said. “You’re going to have a lot of people selling off their herds and taking insurance out because of low crop yields.”
The majority of Colorado’s annual water supply is used for irrigation, so any proposed restrictions can be costly for the agricultural community. “There are going to be a lot of farms and ranches that just can’t operate because they don’t have any water,” Lochhead said. “There are going to be some significant economic consequences.”
5. Stay aware, even if things seem bleak
For Lukas, this year and its predecessors test our expectations about what nature can provide.
Even in periods of prolonged drought, there are wet years. “Judging from history, that tends to put everyone back on their heels, a little complacent,” Lukas said, but maintaining water storage relies on year-to-year vigilance, not complacency.
Another primary concern during drought years is wildfire. With less moisture in the soil, dry vegetation acts as fuel for wildfire, which becomes harder to contain under hot and dry conditions.
“I worry a lot less about municipal water supply than I do about wildfire,” Lukas said. Many of Colorado’s notably dry years have also recorded severe and destructive wildfires.
It comes at no surprise that worsening drought falls in line with worsening wildfires. “Climate change is delivered to people through changes in the hydrologic cycle,” Kuhn said, so being aware of water usage now is just as, if not more important as it was in 2002.
This story was produced and distributed by The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
The federal government ordered Flaming Gorge water released and cuts to Lake Powell releases, to prevent collapse.
Last week, the federal government ordered emergency measures to prevent water levels at Lake Powell from falling so low that Glen Canyon Dam, which created the reservoir, could no longer generate power or deliver water downstream. Without this intervention, models showed that the reservoir could drop below safe operating levels in August, meaning that the river would not have a reliable way to flow past the dam. This would threaten water and power supplies for millions of people across the Southwest, as well as the flow of water through the Grand Canyon.
Westwide SNOTEL basin-filled map April 24, 2026.
Across the Colorado River Basin, an extremely low snowpack combined with a record-shattering March heat wave, have left water managers with few other options. The region’s reservoirs were already depleted from years of relying on wet winters to balance the growing demand with the ongoing drought.
Flaming Gorge Reservoir, on the Green River, straddles the Wyoming-Utah border south of Rock Springs. The Flaming Gorge dam, on the Utah side, was completed in 1964 and is a critical component of the Colorado River water storage system. The Green River, the chief tributary to the Colorado River, originates in the Wind River Range, flows to Flaming Gorge Reservoir, then connects with the Colorado River in Canyonlands National Park in Utah.
“This is a short-term solution,” said Jenny Dumas, water attorney for the Jicarilla Apache Nation, which sits near the border of Colorado and New Mexico. “It’s going to take time to recover these reservoirs before we can do this again. So while we can exhaust our reserves to avoid system collapse this year, it means reserves won’t be there next year.”
This is not the first time water managers have turned to Flaming Gorge to stabilize the larger river system. In 2022, the federal government ordered the reservoir to release 550,000 acre-feet to stabilize the downstream river system, which disrupted recreation and rattled upstream communities. This time, Reclamation has authorized releases of up to 1 million acre-feet. Over the next year, a third of the reservoir’s storage is expected to be gradually released. By September, water levels are projected to drop about 12 feet.
Flaming Gorge Reservoir stores water from the Green River in Wyoming, and is shared by Wyoming and Utah. Ted Wood/The Water Desk
“This is an unprecedented release volume — more than double the last time,” said Amy Haas, executive director of the Colorado River Authority of Utah, who briefed communities bracing for the releases at Flaming Gorge Reservoir. “We really just don’t know the actual impacts of these releases to surrounding communities, and our water users are struggling. My goodness, we are on target to become one of the worst water years on record. The forecasts are stunning to all of us.
The amount of water projected to flow into the river from snowmelt is rapidly declining. Over the first two weeks of April, forecasts for Lake Powell fell by 500,000 acre-feet. The spring forecast is shifting so quickly, some experts believe the releases from Flaming Gorge may need to increase.
“I think it’s a target, and they’re going to have to revise it,” said veteran water manager and researcher Eric Kuhn, who co-authored a paper last September predicting this kind of shortage and calling for action. “It’s many river miles from Flaming Gorge to Lake Powell. What are the transit losses?”
“Also, when March looked like June, what are June and July going to look like?” he added. “I could easily see that 1 million becomes 1.5 million acre-feet by March of 2027.”
Kuhn sees the emergency actions as a sign of broader failure to address the underlying issues that led to the current situation. “The Department of Interior no longer acknowledges that the fundamental problem is climate change. We’re dealing with the symptoms of the disease. We’re not dealing with the underlying problem,” he said. “The law of the river was written for a river that no longer exists from a hydrologic standpoint.”
In a meeting Tuesday, Upper Basin state commissioners acknowledged the need for emergency action but warned that this was not a long-term solution.
“I want to make darn sure people understand … the incredibly difficult, heartbreaking decisions that are having to be made with the lives of generations of cattle production, and farming communities in the Upper Basin states,” particularly in Utah, said Gene Shawcroft, Utah’s Colorado River commissioner.
Wyoming Commissioner Brandon Gebhardt reported that 13,000 acres of agricultural land in the South Piney drainage on the eastern slopes of the Wyoming Range had been cut off from water, adding that even some of the state’s oldest and most senior water rights — some dating to 1898 — will likely be impacted.
“We expect three of the five Flaming Gorge boat ramps in Wyoming will be rendered unusable, and low reservoir levels will have long-lasting negative impacts on reservoir fisheries,” said Gebhardt. “We recognize what we are approving today will have significant negative impacts on our water resources, local economies and recreation.”
Map of the San Juan River, a tributary of the Colorado River, in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, USA. Made using USGS National Map data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47456307
Shortage is affecting more than agriculture and recreation. The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, for example, reported its sacred springs going dry, affecting ceremonies, and the tribal farm will have to operate with just 14% of its normal water supply. Meanwhile, the Jicarilla Apache Nation said it received just 25% to 35% of its contracted water allocation, leaving tribal leaders uncertain about whether they can divert enough water from the Navajo River to meet the community’s domestic needs.
With no sign of long-term agreement on how to manage the river past September, legal tensions among the basin states remain high.
Arizona’s Department of Water Resources released a statement agreeing with plans to order upstream releases to stabilize Lake Powell but also warning that the revised downstream releases were “substantially less than required under the 1922 Colorado River Compact,” referencing the foundational legal document dividing the river. “Failure to comply,” the release stated, “is itself a serious development that Arizona will assess and respond to accordingly.”
Upper Basin state commissioners plan to hold a special meeting to revisit the issue and vote on whether to continue emergency actions past August after assessing water levels and determining whether or not the releases are working.
Regardless of the possible legal battles, the reduced water in the river, infrastructure limits and political gridlock have left basin communities feeling uncertain about their future water security. After the planned releases from Flaming Gorge, if next winter brings another dry year, it is unlikely that upstream reservoirs will have enough water to stabilize Lake Powell.
The basin needs more than emergency actions, Dumas said. “We really want to emphasize the need for serious and permanent changes in how we use and manage the river to adjust to current and future hydrology.”
This story was produced by High Country News, in partnership with The Water Deskat the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
Vertical agriculture using shipping containers that recycle fish water is a method known as containerized aquaponics. This system creates a closed-loop, symbiotic ecosystem where fish and plants mutually benefit one another within a highly controlled environment.1
How the Recirculating System Works
The process mimics natural pond ecosystems through a cycle of nutrient exchange. Fish (typically tilapia, catfish, or trout) are raised in tanks at the base of the container. They produce waste rich in ammonia as they are fed. Beneficial bacteria in the system’s biofilters convert this toxic ammonia into nitrites and then into nitrates, which serve as a natural fertilizer for plants. This nutrient-rich water is pumped upward to irrigate rows of plants stacked vertically in trays or towers. As the plants absorb the nutrients, they act as a natural filter, cleaning the water. This purified water is then gravity-fed or pumped back down to the fish tanks to begin the cycle again.2
Key Components in a Shipping Container Farm
Housed in standard 20-or 40-foot containers, these units include specialized technology to maintain the ecosystem. Climate Control: HVAC systems regulate temperature, humidity, and CO2 levels regardless of external weather. LED Lighting: Tailored light spectrums simulate sunlight and optimize plant growth year-round. Automation & Sensors: Smart systems monitor pH levels, oxygen saturation, and nutrient flow, often allowing for remote management via smartphone. Renewable Energy: Some modular units, like those from FarmPod, use solar panels to power pumps and lights, making them off-grid capable.3
Benefits and Efficiency
Water Conservation: These systems use up to 90–95% less water than traditional soil-based farming because the water is constantly recycled. High Yield in a small footprint: A single container can produce the equivalent of 1 to 4 acres of traditional farmland output. Urban Adaptability: Because they are modular and mobile, they can be placed in parking lots, on rooftops, or in urban “food deserts” to provide hyper-local produce. Chemical-Free: The closed-loop nature eliminates the need for synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, producing organic-quality crops and fish simultaneously.4
A cloud seeding generator is located in Grand Mesa. The Colorado Water Conservation Board administers the state’s weather modification program, which permits cloud seeding operations. Colorado Water Conservation Board/Courtesy photo
At least nine states conduct cloud seeding operations, including California, Nevada, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Texas and North Dakota
Colorado’s weather modification program is seeing an increased interest in cloud-seeding technology after the record-low snowpack this past winter. In the past couple of weeks, Weather Modification Program Manager Andrew Rickert said he’s received inquiries from two major ski resorts hoping to learn more about cloud seeding, which can increase the amount of snowfall a storm drops…
The Colorado Water Conservation Board administers the state’s weather-modification program, which issues permits to contractors who operate seven permitted winter cloud-seeding projects, all of which are located on the Western Slope…Rickert said he believes that dry years like this “are one of the reasons why we need to look into cloud seeding as a measure to get more snow, to get more moisture out of a system.” But he noted that the technology can only do so much when natural snowfall is low.
“Cloud seeding can’t create storms,” he said. “We need storms to be present with the right characteristics — wind speed, wind direction and the presence of super-cooled liquid water — and when all those things are there, then we can seed the storm to get a little bit more out of it.”
The ability of cloud seeding to add to Colorado’s snowpack was limited this year compared to past years due in large part to the lack of suitable storms that rolled through the state, Rickert said. He noted, however, that the technology still likely added small amounts of extra precipitation to the storms it did seed. In Colorado, he said all seven wintertime cloud-seeding programs use ground-based generator systems and operate from Nov. 1 to April 15, with contractors able to get an extension to the end of April if conditions allow…Two of the state’s cloud seeding projects — the Central Colorado Mountains River Basins project, which targets the region from about Winter Park to Aspen, and the San Juan Mountains project — are run by Western Weather Consultants, a Durango-based company. Western Weather Consultants Lead Forecaster and Assistant Manager Mike Hjermstad said that the regions where both of those projects operate saw far fewer storms suitable for cloud seeding this year. In the central mountains, where there are usually 30 to 40 storms that are suitable for cloud seeding, there were only 20 this season, Hjermstad said. In the San Juan Mountains, there were even fewer storms that were suitable to be seeded. Only about 12 storms rolled through all winter long that could be seeded, he said.
Illustration from the report, “Antique Plumbing & Leadership Postponed” from the Utah Rivers Council, Glen Canyon Institute and the Great Basin Water Network. Courtesy of Utah Rivers Council
Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Public Radio website (Caroline Llanes). Here’s an excerpt:
April 21, 2026
The agency announced on April 17 that it would release between 600-thousand and one million acre feet of water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir on the Wyoming-Utah state line over the course of the next year. In addition, Reclamation will reduce the amount of water it sends from Lake Powell through Glen Canyon Dam, decreasing flows downstream through the Grand Canyon and into Lake Mead. Through September 2026, the agency will reduce its annual release volume from about 7.5 million acre feet of water to just 6 million acre feet.
Westwide SNOTEL basin-filled map April 23, 2026.
The drought contingency actions come in response to a water year that has been incredibly dire for the Western United States and the Colorado River Basin. Snowpack has been at record lows for much of the winter, which is bad news for a region that relies on snowmelt for much of its water use. The forecast for runoff into Lake Powell from the entire Upper Basin is forecast to be just 23% of normal. The agency estimates that these combined actions will boost Lake Powell’s elevation by 54 feet over the course of the year, bringing it to 3,500 feet in April 2027. Currently, Lake Powell’s elevation is about 3,528 feet. 3,490 feet is the elevation at which hydropower can no longer be produced at Glen Canyon Dam. Any lower, and water will not be able to enter the hydroelectric turbines. Instead, the water has to go through what’s called “river outlet works,” which are tunnels that bypass the turbines to get the water downstream to the Colorado River.
The back of Glen Canyon Dam circa 1964, not long after the reservoir had begun filling up. Here the water level is above dead pool, meaning water can be released via the river outlets, but it is below minimum power pool, so water cannot yet enter the penstocks to generate electricity. Bureau of Reclamation photo. Annotations: Jonathan P. Thompson
Seth Arens, a hydrologist at the Western Water Assessment, said Glen Canyon Dam was not designed to have the river outlet works as the primary way to get water out of the reservoir.
“When the Bureau of Reclamation has used those river outlet tubes, most of the times they’ve used them, there’ve been some damage to those tubes,” he said. “They’ve had to repair damages after relatively short uses, you know, a scale of weeks dumping water out of those.”
Environmental attorney Chris Winter said it’s clear Reclamation has to take emergency actions to protect its own infrastructure. But, he said the plan leaves a lot of uncertainty and unanswered questions.
“We’re not going to be able to release a whole bunch of water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir (next year) because that water will have been released this year, and it’s not going to refill if we get another dry year,” he said. “Releases of water from Upper Basin storage units, that’s like a one-time thing, unless we happen to get some wet years in the future.”
View below Flaming Gorge Dam from the Green River, eastern Utah. Photo credit: USGS
Flaming Gorge is currently about 82% full. Reclamation estimates that its plan will bring the reservoir down to about 59% of its full capacity over the next year. Other Upper Basin reservoirs are not part of the plan at the moment, due to poor forecasted inflows and low water levels. Blue Mesa Reservoir in Western Colorado is currently 47% full and Navajo Lake on the Colorado-New Mexico state line is 63% full. Winter said reducing flows out of Glen Canyon Dam could also lead to legal issues. The Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico have not reached a deal with the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada on how to allocate water—and take cuts to usage in the midst of a changing climate—over the next 20 years. On top of that, reducing flows this year would mark a fulcrum point: the first year that the amount of water at Lees Ferry, just below Glen Canyon Dam, falls below the averages set by the Colorado River Compact of 1922.
Denver Water’s collection and service areas continue to face severe drought conditions, with historically low snowpack. Denver Water depends on mountain snowpack for its water supply, which serves 1.5 million people in Denver and surrounding suburbs.
As a result, on March 25, 2026, the Denver Board of Water Commissioners declared a Stage 1 drought, seeking a 20% reduction in water use to preserve water levels and avoid even stricter mandatory restrictions later this summer. On April 8, 2026, the board approved the implementation of temporary drought pricing, starting with May water use and reflected in June bills, to signal the premium value of water during droughts and help incentivize customers to save water.
Customers are urged not to turn on automatic sprinkler systems until at least mid- to late-May, or later if possible. It is not necessary to water grass two days per week in April and the beginning of May; keeping automatic systems off will help save water. Occasional hand-watering may be necessary for trees and shrubs during this time. Keep an eye on the weather and let Mother Nature do the watering when she delivers spring rains.
Comment from Nathan Elder, Denver Water’s manager of water supply:
“The snow we saw last week brought marginal improvement to snowpack, but it’s still the worst on record, which is doubly concerning as this week is typically our spring peak when the snow levels are the highest. We need our customers to reduce their water use by 20% and help stretch the water we have stored in our reservoirs. Hopefully, working together, we can save water across our service area and avoid increasing restrictions later this summer.”
In Denver Water’s collection system, snowpack as of April 20, 2026, remained at the lowest levels observed in the past 40 years:
Colorado River Basin: 36% of normal, worst on record.
South Platte River Basin: 7% of normal, worst on record.
Snowpack and melting conditions are unprecedented, with accelerated melting seen since mid-March. Customers need to save water to protect the supply we have right now.
Streamflow forecasts are calling for runoff levels to be 10-40% of normal in 2026.
Reservoir storage conditions are below average; while in reasonably good shape for the time being, far less snowpack is available to help refill them. As of April 20, 2026, reservoirs were 80% full, versus an average of 85% full for this time.
Customers are urged not to turn on automatic sprinkler systems until at least mid- to late-May, or later if possible. When watering season begins, Denver Water will require customers in single-family residential properties to limit watering to no more than two days per week on a set schedule based on their address.
Addresses ending in even numbers: Sunday and Thursday.
Addresses ending in odd numbers: Wednesday and Saturday.
All other customers, including multifamily properties, commercial properties, homeowners associations and government properties, may water only on Tuesdays and Fridays.
Water only during cooler times of the day, between 6 p.m. and 10 a.m.
Do not allow water to pool in gutters, streets and alleys.
Do not waste water by letting it spray on concrete and asphalt.
Repair leaking sprinkler systems within 10 days.
Do not irrigate while it is raining or during high winds.
Use a hose nozzle with a shut-off valve when washing your car.
For its part, Denver Water has proactively reduced its spending, taking steps that include enacting a hiring freeze and reviewing maintenance and other projects to see which ones could be deferred. We are also looking into other ways to increase supply by activating agreements that allow us to capture additional water that is typically unavailable during normal conditions.
This year marks the fifth time since 2000 that Denver Water has issued a Stage 1 drought, and the first since 2013. Prior to 2013, the board declared a Stage 1 drought in 2002, 2003 and 2004.
Denver Water has many resources for homeowners looking for inspiration and information about landscapes that fit naturally into our dry climate. Click here for conservation and efficiency tips for outdoor irrigation and to get more details on ways to ColoradoScape your property, including through rebates for turf removal and a DIY guide for landscape changes, among many other potential water-saving steps.
Updates about Denver Water’s reservoir levels, customer water use and snowpack can be found in the Water Watch Report, which is updated weekly in the spring and summer.
This chart shows the cumulative snowpack on April 20, 2026, in the area of the Colorado River Basin where Denver Water captures its water supply. The snowpack is 36% of normal, which ranks as the lowest on record for April 20. Image credit: Denver Water.
This chart shows the cumulative snowpack on April 20, 2026, in the area of the South Platte River Basin where Denver Water captures its water supply. The snowpack is 7% of normal, which ranks as the lowest on record for April 20. Image credit: Denver Water.
As the Rio Grande dries out months early, water managers look to blessings, prayers and groundwater to save the acequias that have spread water, history and culture to farmers and families since the 16th century.
On a sunny spring morning at the end of March, a woman raised her little girl above an irrigation ditch that runs just west of the Rio Grande in Albuquerque’s South Valley. The toddler, with a braided head piece crowning her long, brown hair and artificial flowers around her neck, enthusiastically tossed an assortment of colored petals into the water below as a small crowd cheered.
It was part of a blessing ceremony at the headwaters of the Atrisco Acequia Madre (Atrisco Mother Ditch)—considered to be the oldest and most important of these irrigation canals in the area—during “Primera Agua,” an annual celebration that commemorates the first water flow of the season.
The day, sponsored by the Center for Social Sustainable Systems (CESSOS), a local advocacy group, was filled with traditional dances, songs, chants, blessings and speeches about community.But it also included acknowledgments of the water challenges that New Mexico faces.
New Mexico snowpack April 23, 2026.
This year, New Mexicans are confronting record-low snowpack, which is essential for supplying an even flow of water into acequia systems. Record heat isn’t helping, as it accelerates evaporation throughout New Mexico waterways and has contributed to an early melt off of the already thin snowpack.
At the March 29 Primera Agua event, temperatures were 14 degrees Fahrenheit above average in Albuquerque, and about a week earlier, the city set a record for the earliest 90-degree day of the year. Like much of the West, the city also experienced its warmest winter on record.
“Every year seems like it’s a new bar in terms of the record low,” Paul Tashjian, director of freshwater conservation for Audubon Southwest, said of the low water levels that were already hitting the state in late March. “But this year is almost like that on steroids…It’s not a pretty picture.”
Santiago Maestas, president of the South Valley Regional Association of Acequias, stands next to the Pajarito acequia in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Visual: Lourdes Medrano for Undark
“It’s in Your Blood”
New Mexico’s acequias date back to the late 16th century, when the Spanish colonized the region. By 1700, what would become New Mexico had around 60 of these community-managed irrigation ditches. Today, there are more than 700 active acequias in the state, many of them concentrated in Northern New Mexico.
The man-made, gravity-fed earthen canals transport snowmelt and river water to fields for flood irrigation. They each have a governing body called a “mayordomo” or “ditch boss” and elected commissioners who oversee maintenance, water distribution and conflict resolution.
Some areas have seen traditional acequias absorbed into larger water conservancy districts. The Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District (MRGCD), for instance, covers a 150-mile stretch of the Rio Grande from Cochiti to Bosque del Apache. Here, MRGCD diverts water from the river to the agency’s irrigation system, which delivers it to acequia headgates, where local groups take over.
Most acequias across the state, however, still operate as individual political subdivisions.
Dawn Nieto Gouy grew up in Albuquerque’s historic Los Duranes, a neighborhood where acequias such as the Duranes Lateral run alongside homes and agricultural fields.
“It’s in your blood. It’s in your soul,” Nieto Gouy said, describing the cultural significance of these waterways. She recalled playing with her best friend alongside an acequia near her home as a child.
“It was like I would spend almost a lifetime in a day getting from our house to the end, meeting at the acequia, running around barefoot and playing and bathing, doing whatever we did there,” she said. “And then the days would just run away from us.”
Despite their long history and cultural importance, acequias—and the people who depend on them—face an urgent threat from climate change. This year, New Mexico’s snowpack hit historic lows in early spring, dropping to around 20 percent of normal as of April 20. That record-low snow collided with warmer-than-usual temperatures—the state experienced its hottest March in recorded history, surpassing the old record by 4.4 degrees Fahrenheit—to produce this outcome.
People cross a bridge over the Atrisco Acequia Madre during the Primera Agua event in Albuquerque. Credit: Tina Deines/Inside Climate News
In Northern New Mexico, water rights holders—known as parciantes—expressed concern that the meager snowpack wouldn’t sustain the many acequias that weave through the region. One Santa Fe New Mexican reportdescribed the dire situation in the village of Truchas, where acequias were already running low at the start of the irrigation season.
Further south, MRGCD announced in late March that there may not be enough water this year to meet the needs of its 11,000 irrigators, including acequia parciantes. And as of March 27, the Rio Grande showed early signs of drying at the San Acacia reach, an area that typically begins to diminish in early summer.
“Historically, we used to talk about May as being a very early time to see that happen,” said Anne Marken, river operations manager for MRGCD, which oversees irrigation, drainage and river control for around 60,000-70,000 acres of farmland. “Last year it happened in April and we were all very shocked by that, but this year it happened in March.”
Praying for Rain
During times of water scarcity, acequia communities have long relied on sharing practices. Users may be assigned specific days or hours when they can access water, for instance. Similarly, MRGCD utilizes rotating water deliveries within its district—delivering water to different irrigators at different times, depending on availability—and is implementing that management strategy this year.
“Water users are strongly encouraged to take water when it is available, future opportunities may be uncertain,” the agency said in a press release.
Other than that, water managers and acequia parciantes across the state are praying for rain to help replenish the system and water fields.
“There’s not a ton of tools in our toolbox right now from a water management perspective,” Marken conceded, explaining her department is currently working in a run-of-the-river system, meaning that the only available water is what is in the river.
Map of the Rio Grande watershed. Graphic credit: WikiMedia
Click the link to read the article on the KJZZ website (Alex Hager). Here’s an excerpt:
April 21, 2026
The nation’s second-largest reservoir will get a boost to keep water levels from dropping too low, but the fix won’t last long…The Bureau of Reclamation will take water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir in Utah and Wyoming and send it downstream to Lake Powell. The agency, which manages major dams and reservoirs across the Western U.S., will also ratchet back the amount of water released from Lake Powell. The efforts are mainly focused at keeping Glen Canyon Dam running smoothly. If water levels drop much further, Lake Powell’s surface will fall below the intakes that pull water into hydropower generators within the dam…Water levels had been forecast to drop below the hydropower intakes level as soon as this summer…
Illustration from the report, “Antique Plumbing & Leadership Postponed” from the Utah Rivers Council, Glen Canyon Institute and the Great Basin Water Network. Courtesy of Utah Rivers Council
Reclamation’s plan will likely stave off catastrophe at Glen Canyon Dam, but it will do little to solve the problem that imperiled it in the first place. Climate change has left the river with less supply, and humans have not been able to adequately rein in demand.
“This action that’s being taken is a band-aid solution for a gaping wound,” said Eric Balken, executive director of the nonprofit Glen Canyon Institute. “It’s a short-term measure that does not get at the root of the problem, which is over consumption of water.”
In 2022, University of California Davis published the results of a three-year study on covers crops, which was carried out on ten commercial farms and research sites in California’s Central Valley. The study examined the impact of winter cover cropping on soil health and water retention in irrigated agricultural systems with a focus on almond and tomato crops, which are two of the most common crops grown in the region.1
Three cover crop systems were included in the study and then compared with adjacent control fields that were left bare, at the same site. The systems included: 1) a cover crop in processing tomato fields; 2) a cover crop planted in between rows of almond trees; and 3) allowing whatever native vegetation was available to grow in between the almond tree rows. The planted cover crops were a mix of legumes, grasses, and brassicas.
The results were impressive. Researchers found that the cover crop fields had higher levels of soil organic matter, soil nitrogen, and microbial activity, indicating improved soil health. In addition, the cover crop fields had higher levels of water infiltration and retention, meaning that they were better able to hold onto water during periods of drought or water stress. The researchers found that the cover crops did not compete with cash crops for water, and that the same amount of water used in the control fields without cover crops was able to support the same amount of crop yield in the cover crop fields. In one case in Davis, there was heavy rainfall at one point during the study. The water loss via evapotranspiration was greater in the bare control plot, showing that use of cover crops improved water retention.
The study provided important evidence of the benefits of winter cover cropping in California’s Central Valley, particularly for improving soil health and reducing water usage in agricultural systems. The findings suggest that cover crops can help farmers make more efficient use of their water resources, potentially reducing the need for additional irrigation, and providing environmental benefits such as reduced erosion and improved water quality.
Top 5 Cover Crops for use in the Western US
For the Western United States – including the arid regions of California, Arizona, and Nevada, the best nitrogen-fixing cover crops are selected for their drought tolerance and ability to thrive in either high heat or mild winters.2
Cowpea: Best For: Summer heat in low-elevation deserts. Highly drought-tolerant with a taproot that can reach up to eight feet deep to access water. It thrives when temperatures exceed 100° F and can fix roughly 100–175 lbs of nitrogen per acre. The ‘Iron Clay’ variety is widely recommended for use in the Southwest.
Alfalfa: works best for long-term soil restoration. Often called the “queen of forages,” alfalfa is a perennial legume with deep roots that break up subsoil and reach nutrients deep in the earth. It is one of the most powerful nitrogen fixers, capable of producing 250–500 lbs of nitrogen per acre.
Crimson Clover: Used as winter cover in the Southwest or for spring cover in the north. A fast-growing annual that establishes quickly in the fall to provide winter protection. It is frequently used in mixtures with radish to improve soil structure while fixing roughly 70–150 lbs of nitrogen per acre.
Hairy Vetch: is excellent as a winter-hardy coverage and weed suppression. Why It Works: It grows slowly in the fall but resumes vigorous growth in the spring, creating a thick mat that smothers weeds. It is known for high nitrogen fixation (over 100 lbs per acre) and performs well in the cooler, non-agricultural environments of the West.
Lablab: works best during the summer-to-fall transition in Arizona. Lablab is specifically noted for its performance in the hot weather of central Arizona. It produces high biomass and can contribute 50–200 lbs of nitrogen per acre. Unlike some other summer legumes, it continues vegetative growth late into the year without flowering immediately, offering more flexible termination dates for growers.
The week was highlighted by a band of above-normal precipitation extending from south Texas into eastern Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, Michigan, and southern Wisconsin. Many areas in this swath received greater than 150% of normal precipitation, with some locations exceeding 400% for the week. From the Ohio Valley south into the Southeast, conditions remained quite dry, with little to no precipitation recorded across most of the region.
The West was also largely dry, with only coastal areas of California and parts of the Pacific Northwest recording above-normal precipitation. Northern portions of the Northeast received rain, with areas from western New York into Maine recording 200% or more of normal precipitation.
Temperatures were near normal to slightly below normal across the West, with departures of up to 5°F below normal in some areas. Portions of the central Plains, Midwest, Northeast, and Mid-Atlantic experienced above-normal temperatures, with departures of 5–10°F above normal. Temperatures in the Southeast were near to slightly above normal, with cooler conditions in the Florida Panhandle…
The region was mostly dry, with isolated rainfall in far southeast Nebraska, northern and southeast Kansas, and small areas of Colorado and North Dakota. Temperatures were generally above normal, with the warmest departures in southeast Nebraska and eastern Kansas.
Dryness and a warm spring led to widespread degradation. Extreme drought expanded across central and western Nebraska and into northwest Kansas. Severe drought expanded in central and southwest Kansas, with new extreme drought in far southwest Kansas.
Degradation continued across the plains of Wyoming and Colorado, with expansion of moderate to extreme drought. Extreme drought was also introduced in southern South Dakota.
Some improvements occurred in southeast Kansas, where moderate drought and abnormally dry conditions were reduced due to recent rainfall…
Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending April 21, 2026.
Precipitation was mixed. Parts of central to northern California, western Oregon and Washington, much of Idaho, and isolated areas in Montana, Utah, and Colorado recorded above-normal precipitation. However, most of the region remained drier than normal.
Temperatures were generally cooler than normal, with northern Nevada experiencing departures of up to 6°F below normal. Southern California and Arizona saw the warmest conditions, with temperatures up to 6°F above normal.
Drought conditions worsened across much of Nevada, with expansion of abnormal dryness to severe drought. Severe drought expanded into northwest Utah, while moderate to severe drought increased in western and southern Arizona. Severe drought also expanded in western Wyoming, and extreme drought was introduced in southwestern Montana.
Oregon and Washington saw slight expansion of abnormally dry to moderate drought, with a small increase in severe drought in southwest Oregon. Southern California also experienced expansion of abnormally dry conditions.
Impacts are becoming more evident as snowpack has largely melted, and early runoff may contribute to future water supply issues… [ed. emphasis mine]
Temperatures were above normal across northern and eastern areas, with departures of 2–6°F. Across Texas, temperatures transitioned to below normal in southern and western areas, with departures of 2–6°F below normal.
The heaviest rainfall occurred from central to southern Texas into central and eastern Oklahoma, where totals reached 150–400% of normal. Elsewhere, conditions were mostly dry, including the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles, and much of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee.
Where rainfall was sufficient in Texas and Oklahoma, drought conditions improved or were removed. However, drought intensified across Mississippi, where nearly the entire state experienced a full category of degradation and is now 100% in drought.
Extreme drought expanded in eastern Arkansas and northern and southern Louisiana, with moderate drought increasing in southern Louisiana. Severe and extreme drought expanded across western Tennessee, while moderate drought increased in the east. Tennessee is now also fully in drought…
Looking Ahead
Over the next 5–7 days, the highest precipitation chances are expected from the central Plains into the South, Midwest and parts of the Mid-Atlantic. The Pacific Northwest and northern Rockies may also see widespread precipitation.
Temperatures are expected to be above normal across the southern Plains, South and Southeast, with departures of 9–11°F in north Texas and Oklahoma and 5–7°F elsewhere. Cooler-than-normal temperatures are forecast for the northern Plains, northern Rockies, and California, with departures of 9–12°F below normal in North Dakota and Montana and 6–9°F below normal in California.
The 6–10 day outlook shows the highest chances for cooler-than-normal temperatures across the Plains and Midwest, with the greatest potential over the High Plains and upper Midwest. The best chances for above-normal temperatures are in the Pacific Northwest and along the southern Gulf Coast. The greatest likelihood of above-normal precipitation is across much of the central and southern United States, with the highest chances in the Southwest. Meanwhile, the northern United States along the Canadian border is expected to have the best chances for below-normal precipitation.
US Drought Monitor one week change map ending April 21, 2026.
The Grand Canyon survey party at Lees Ferry. Left to right: Leigh Lint, boatman; H.E. Blake, boatman; Frank Word, cook; C.H. Birdseye, expedition leader; R.C. Moore, geologist; R.W. Burchard, topographer; E.C. LaRue, hydraulic engineer; Lewis Freeman, boatman, and Emery Kolb, head boatman. Boatman Leigh Lint, “a beefy athlete who could tear the rowlocks off a boat…absolutely fearless,” later went to college and became an engineer for the USGS. The Grand Canyon survey party at Lees Ferry in 1923. (Public domain.)
It’s been a record dry winter across the West — and it’s making an already bad situation on the Colorado River even worse. If water levels get any lower, Lake Powell and the dam that holds it back could be in dire straits. So now, the federal government is stepping in to prop up water levels. But, as KJZZ’s Alex Hager reports, it could be a Band-Aid solution to a much bigger problem. Hager joined The Show to explain.
LAUREN GILGER: Good to have you. So, what’s the situation on Lake Powell right now after this really dry winter? Kind of a worst-case scenario almost.
ALEX HAGER: Well, right now water levels there are forecast to drop to dangerously low levels as soon as this summer. And when I say dangerous, that means we would start to see some of the infrastructure in Glen Canyon Dam, which is up in Page, Arizona, start to fail. So water levels are on track right now to drop below the intakes for the hydropower turbines that sit inside the dam. That means it would become difficult or impossible to spin them and make electricity for 5 million people across seven states. If water drops a little bit further than that, it might not be able to pass through the dam at all. We are already looking at — you know, if it falls below that hydropower intake, it could only travel through this little-used set of backup pipes. We don’t know that it could carry enough water through. You start to have all of these problems. So we are seeing some actions to prevent that from happening now.
LAUREN GILGER: OK. So tell us about those actions. This is the federal government sort of taking control of at least this aspect of it. What are they going to do?
ALEX HAGER: That’s right. The federal government is stepping in. It is kicking into action something of an emergency backup plan. It’s been done before, but it is definitely a backup plan. And they’re going to shuffle some water around. There is another big reservoir up in Utah and Wyoming called Flaming Gorge, and they’re going to release extra water from Flaming Gorge, send it down the Colorado River to help fill up Lake Powell. At the same time, they’re going to start tightening the tap on Lake Powell, meaning that less water comes out of it. That water will — less of it will flow into the Grand Canyon downstream to Lake Mead and downstream to us.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
The back of Glen Canyon Dam circa 1964, not long after the reservoir had begun filling up. Here the water level is above dead pool, meaning water can be released via the river outlets, but it is below minimum power pool, so water cannot yet enter the penstocks to generate electricity. Bureau of Reclamation photo. Annotations: Jonathan P. Thompson
A bad year in the Colorado River Basin – barring a truly miraculous spring, probably the worst in recorded history. It is bad enough so the Bureau may have to stop creating power from the Glen Canyon powerplant by this coming fall. At that point, the only way to get water downriver from Glen Canyon Dam will be dribbling it through four outlet tubes that the Bureau is now wishing it had built differently (better) 65 years ago. And praying for enough precip to push the level back above the danger point for the turbines.
Meanwhile the negotiations between the seven basin states about the future distribution of the water remained at an impasse. One might think that a really bad year might generate some new thinking, but the two Basins are still debating Compact numbers like 7.5 million acre-feet for the Lower Basin with a river that might produce less than 5 maf this year, and maybe not much more than that more frequently in the future.
It should be obvious by now that any further negotiation between the states needs to have an independent facilitator guiding the discussion, pushing both factions to disassemble their own non-negotiables. A hard-ass facilitator speaking on behalf of river reality. [ed. emphasis mine]
It seems likely that we will go into the 2027 water year this fall with some new ‘interim plan’ for operating the river system for the water year that begins in October – probably some mix-and-match from the Bureau’s five alternatives proposed last year and ‘EISed’ while the seven states fiddled. The real purpose of the new interim plan will be to keep the infrastructure of the river system viable – dancing with the dead pool. This will probably impose serious delivery shortages on those below the Powell and Mead Reservoirs (meaning the Lower Basin), and also drop the Upper Basin’s rolling 10-year total closer to the 75 million acre-feet (maf) that will cause the ‘compact call’ threat to rear its ugly head.
Year-to-year might be the most honest approach now, anyway, getting a habit of feeling our way forward carefully, with our eyes wide open – woke, one might say. The managerial ‘need for certainty’ in projections may not be part of the future we’ve imposed on ourselves.
But that’s a good place to let the present sit and settle, and go back to the unfolding saga of the ‘Era of Conquest’ in this update of Fred Dellenbaugh’s Romance of the Colorado River. You may remember that in the last post here, I related that the Bureau of Reclamation, feeling much loved for the Boulder Canyon Project that watered, fed and powered a massive regional development in Southern California, came out of World War II ready to do the same for the Compact’s Upper Basin, in response to a mandate in the Boulder Canyon Project Act that a plan be developed for the development of the rest of the river.
There was, however, already quite a lot of development going on in the Upper Basin – at least in the state of Colorado, beginning in the 1930s, simultaneous with the Boulder Canyon Project.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
To establish context – the whole Colorado River Basin was experiencing its first serious modern-times drought, even as the Great Depression was settling over the whole nation. After the ‘pluvial’ of water abundance in the first three decades of the 20th century, which convinced the water mavens that the river would deliver a dependable-enough flow of nearly 18 maf, the basin experienced its first 5 maf flow in 1933; by the end of the 1930s, there was reason to doubt that the river would ever again average 18 maf.
But Colorado had a special problem to resolve about Colorado River water distribution: the transdivide situation. I will not bore you again with my opinion of the imperial arrogance in randomly laying down straight line state boundaries in a region of great geographic and geological diversity. But what this created in the irrelevant rectangle called Colorado was like a blanket laid over a fence – the fence being the Continental Divide. West of the Divide, precipitation that fell (mostly snow in the winter) all ran off toward the Pacific Ocean in the Colorado River tributaries. East of the Divide, it all ran off toward the Atlantic in the Platte, Arkansas and Rio Grande Rivers. Because the weather mostly rode in on the prevailing westerlies, considerably more precipitation fell on the West Slope than fell on the East Slope. But the vagaries of cultural and economic development put most of the population and economic growth on the East Slope – ‘80 percent-20 percent’ is the rough ratio frequently used to describe the imbalance between water and population in the blanket dropped over the fence.
The distribution of water on both sides of the ‘blanket’ was governed by the appropriation doctrine as stated in the Colorado Constitution: all the water in the state belongs to the people of the state, subject to appropriation for individual use, and the right to divert ‘shall never be denied’ – with seniority among users determining the right to use the water in times of shortage. And by the turn of the century, challenges in water court had established the right to divert water from one basin to another.
As the drought of the 1930s settled in, farmers on the East Slope began to experience serious pressures on the water supply. And consistent with the optimism and technological advances of the early 20th century, this was not regarded as a fact of life to be acknowledged and adapted to, but as a problem to be addressed – in this situation, by moving water from the West Slope. A major task – but Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ efforts to alleviate the Great Depression offered the possibility of some help, through new agencies like the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the Public Works Administration.
So when the Colorado General Assembly gathered early in 1933, two water project bills were in the hopper: one to divert an unspecified quantity from the Upper Colorado River in the Grand Lake area to the South Platte River basin, and one to divert an unspecified quantity from the Gunnison River to the Arkansas River basin.
Inhabitants of the West Slope, however, knew nothing about this until they read about it in the newspapers. And they were even more surprised that summer when construction actually began on two transdivide projects: the Denver Water Board began constructing a system of small canals high in the Fraser River headwaters (Upper Colorado tributary) to bring water to the Moffat railroad tunnel pilot bore, which the Water Board had leased from the railroad – an unused but already dug ‘pipe’ to the northern Denver area. And the sugar-beet industry led by Great Western Sugar was doing the same collection system in the headwaters of the Roaring Fork River above Aspen for diversion into a small tunnel to the Arkansas River basin. Both of those enterprises were self-funded.
All of this precipitated a regional West Slope meeting in Grand Junction of ‘water people’ – county commissioners and attorneys who were also all ranchers or farmers – at which a ‘Western Colorado Protective Association’ (WCPA) was formed, and a letter was drafted to the state engineer expressing concern that the proposed and in-process projects threatened the future development of the West Slope, and requesting inclusion in all future discussion of them.
The situation as the West Slope people saw it was not a ‘water grab.’ The leadership in the WCPA knew that the East Slope irrigators and city-builders were exercising a constitutional right in appropriating ‘the people’s water’ on the West Slope. They also knew that most of the Colorado River water left the state’s West Slope in an unmanageable snowmelt flood anyway, and it might as well go through a tunnel to the Front Range as through Grand Junction and on to – well, soon, on to enviable storage behind the great dam being built far downstream rather than its historical destiny of flowing on into the salty sea unused.
Storage! That was the key to the West Slope’s chief water problem, which was water available throughout the growing season for finishing as well as starting crops. West Slope engineers had been drafting up a number of reservoir-and-irrigation projects to present to the Bureau of Reclamation, but dams are expensive, and all of the proposed reservoirs served mountain-valley populations too small to pass the Bureau’s cost-benefit analyses.
So the concept of ‘compensatory storage’ for water lost through transdivide diversions became the WCPA’s central focus. And despite their small population, the WCPA had two good cards to play. One was the fact that New Deal federal funding distributed to the states had to be for projects approved by the entire state; the transdivide diversions that needed federal assistance needed for the basin of origin to be as happy as the basin of destination.
A image shows a guest column by Rep. Edward Taylor that appeared from the Steamboat Pilot in 1921. Graphic credit: Northern Water
The other card was a congressional representative, Edward Taylor, whom they had returned to Congress for 12 terms by 1933, and who had over that quarter-century ascended to chairmanship of the subcommittee that controlled the Interior Department budget in the powerful House Appropriation Committee. Congressman Taylor launched the WCPA’s ‘defensive offensive’ by saying that any project seeking federal assistance for a transdivide diversion would have to provide, as part of their project, an acre-foot of compensatory storage for the West Slope for every acre-foot to be diverted.
That was a large and very expensive demand. Taylor exempted Denver and its Moffat project from the mandate – because, he said, we all want to see ‘our capital city’ grow unrestricted. More likely, he knew that Denver could fund its own project and would at best just ignore him; he was not their congressman, and the Denver Water Board at that point was coming under the domination by their attorney, Glenn Saunders, a city-builder who envisioned a water supply for a ‘thousand-year city,’ most of which he thought would have to come from the West Slope. He just wanted the hicks to stay out of his way. (Not an exaggeration at all.)
Taylor could, however, impose his acre-foot-for-every-acre-foot demand on those seeking federal Public Works Administration funds or Bureau of Reclamation assistance. And that set up what is really an interesting story of people working out difficult problems they’ve imposed on themselves in draping a blanket over a fence and calling it a state, then adopting a wide-open appropriations doctrine for the distribution of a limited resource statewide. It’s a story with many moving parts that we don’t really have time for here in depth; I will note, however, that the whole story is told in my Water Wranglers book, the story of the development of Colorado’s share of the Colorado River. (Out of print, but copies supposedly in all Colorado libraries.)
The principal players in the story were the Western Colorado Protective Association (WCPA), led by Frank Delaney, a lawyer-rancher, and D.W. Aupperle, a Grand Junction lawyer and fruit grower; the South Platte Water Users Association (SPWUA), led by Charles Hansen, a newspaper editor in farm country and a couple lawyer-farmers; and of course the Bureau which wanted to do a big transdivide diversion to the South Platte River. And what turned out to be the ‘wild card,’ Congressman Taylor.
A seemingly endless series of meetings began between the WCPA and the SPWUA with the Bureau in attendance. There was fundamental agreement that, first, the East Slope had legal right to appropriate West Slope water, and second, that the East Slope owed the West Slope some compensation for diverting part of the West Slope’s base for future development. The challenge was arriving at the amount of compensation. The SPWUA wanted to divert more than 300,000 acre-feet from the Colorado River, for what became the Colorado-Big Thompson Project, but they did not see how (even if they could get some New Deal PWA financing) they could afford to also create that much West Slope storage. But the WCPA felt bound to support their congressman – without whom they really had no card to keep them in the game. Frustration and ire grew on both sides – compounded by having to travel back and forth either on the slow trains or drive on roads that were really ‘country’ (a major West Slope chronic complaint).
Finally, in the spring of 1936, Frank Delaney of the WCPA suggested a compromise. If the Bureau and SPWUA wanted to rush into construction, it would have to be Taylor’s acre-foot-for-an-acre-foot mandate. But if they could delay their project until the Bureau did a thorough study of what the loss of 300,000 af of free-flowing water (most of it annually leaving the state unused anyway) would be to the West Slope, and how much storage would actually compensate the West Slope users for that loss of spring runoff, the West Slope would accept that number (and work on getting Cong. Taylor to accept it).
The ‘Delaney Resolution’ broke the stalemate. The Bureau men spent months poring over existing rights and land maps (long before computers and spreadsheets), and came up with a need for 152,000 acre-feet of compensatory storage: 52,000 af to make sure that the Shoshone power plant water right above Glenwood Springs could be met year round (which would also ensure enough late season water for the Grand Valley farms and orchards), and 100,000 af for future irrigation and domestic water development.
That cut Taylor’s demand in two – and the Bureau planned to add a powerplant to the dam that would significantly reduce what the SPWUA would have to pay back. During this period, Taylor – an old man – was actually too sick to participate, and the Delaney Resolution was adopted for the Colorado-Big Thompson Project. (Taylor would die in office in 1941 – still believing that an acre-foot-for-every-acre-foot was what should be adhered to.)
Graphic credit: RogerWendell.com
The compromise process was codified as ‘Senate Document 80,’ part of the Colorado-Big Thompson Project Act passed in 1937. Senate Doc. 80 became part of all subsequent transdivide project planning – except where Denver was concerned; it wasn’t until the veto of Denver Water’s Two Forks Project half a century later that Denver Water finally conceded to take West Slope needs into account in its transdivide projects.
That process of working through a significant challenge to mutual benefit stands, in at least my mind, as one of the highlights of the Era of Conquest in the Colorado River region – a period not without occasional efforts measuring up to the often naive but high-minded vision driving the developers’ ‘romancing of the river’ – to bring deserts into bloom, to reshape unfriendly environments to accommodate individuals and their families willing to work at it. It is too easy to condemn that from this side where we reap the harvest of all the mistakes involved that they didn’t know about until they had made them.
Next post, we’ll look at what happened to that carefully forged intrastate resolution when serious Colorado River planning came to the Compact’s Upper Basin. Meanwhile – pray for monsoons, or just a good rainy spell.
Colorado transmountain diversions via the University of Colorado
Water from Antero Reservoir (pictured) will be moved to Cheesman Reservoir in 2026 to help with drought response. This measure was last taken in 2002. Photo credit: Denver Water.
In the coming weeks, Denver Water will begin moving water from Antero Reservoirto Cheesman Reservoir,as part of the utility’s drought response.
Antero Reservoir has the highest ratio of evaporation to storage of any of Denver Water’s reservoirs, and moving the water to Cheesman Reservoir will prevent about 5,000 acre-feet of water (about 25% of the reservoir’s storage capacity) from evaporating. One acre-foot of water equals the annual water use of about three to four single-family households a year.
“A lot of forethought and planning went into our collection system and reservoirs,” said Nathan Elder, manager of water supply for Denver Water. “Antero is a drought reservoir, designed to provide water to our customers during a severe drought. Consolidating this water into Cheesman will help us make the most of the water we have.”
Denver Water is working closely with Colorado Parks and Wildlife to minimize the loss of fish during this process and to allow the public to use the reservoir for a brief period before it eventually closes. Following the fish relocation process, there will be no recreation, including camping, allowed at Antero Reservoir in 2026. More details about this plan will be announced when it is finalized.
The decision also allows Denver Water to use more water from its South Platte River Basin supplies, reducing the need to pull as much water from sources west of the Continental Divide, which are also below normal levels following an abysmal snowpack and runoff season.
In a standard year, the water lost to evaporation is recovered by the next runoff season. Because of the historically low snowpack levels in 2026, the water lost this year would not have been recovered.
Drought conditions will determine when the reservoir can be refilled. The reservoir was also drained to assist with water management during the 2002 drought. There were plans to drain the reservoir as a drought response in 2013, though a series of late-season snowstorms allowed Denver Water to continue storing water in the reservoir. The last time Antero Reservoir was emptied was in 2015 for a dam rehabilitation project.
The South Platte River Basin is shaded in yellow. Source: Tom Cech, One World One Water Center, Metropolitan State University of Denver.
They say that bad news will travel around the world three times while good news is still putting its shoes on, which is exactly how I feel about this news about our water use: Our transition from coal-fired power generation to wind and solar has turned out to be one of the most effective ways to conserve our nation’s fresh water.
Transitioning from coal-fired power generation to renewable wind and solar has significantly reduced water consumption, and has provided critical relief to water-stressed regions. While coal plants once competed directly with agriculture and municipalities for freshwater, the shift to renewables allows billions of gallons of water to remain in local ecosystems and aquifers.1
The electric power sector uses a large amount of water, mostly for cooling. Thermoelectric power plants (including natural gas, nuclear, and coal plants) boil water to create steam, which spins a turbine to generate electricity. The steam leaving the turbine must be cooled back into water to be used to generate more electricity. Plants withdraw water from nearby rivers, lakes, or oceans and pass that water through the steam leaving the turbine. That process cools and condenses the steam back into water. In 2021, 73% of the utility-scale electricity generated in the United States came from thermoelectric power plants.2
Traditional coal-fired power plants are incredibly water-intensive – requiring approximately 19,185 gallons of water per megawatt-hour, (primarily for cooling), while wind and photovoltaic solar power generation requires no water – except for periodic washing to remove dust and bird droppings. Nationally, replacing the remaining coal fleet with wind and solar could decrease electricity-related water consumption by over 99%, potentially making 2.6 billion cubic meters of water available for other uses each year.3
Environmental benefits
Protecting Local Ecosystems: Retiring fossil fuel plants directly restores local river health. For instance, some subbasins are projected to see a 57% increase in annual streamflow by 2050 as plant withdrawals cease, benefiting local agriculture and wildlife.
Efficiency Gains: The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that the changing energy mix—led by the rise of renewables—is responsible for roughly 80% of the downward trend in water withdrawals by the electric power sector.
Climate Resilience: This is a critical shaft for drought-prone regions. In the American West, moving to low-water energy sources leaves much-needed freshwater in its natural environment.
Regional Shifts in Water Stress
The impact of this transition has been most visible in arid regions where coal production and cooling previously dominated local water use. Coal plants in states like Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico have historically consumed enormous volumes of surface water from the Colorado River and other critical basins. Retiring these plants is projected to significantly curtail annual water withdrawals, with some rivers seeing a net increase in streamflow of up to 57% by 2050.4
In Texas and California replacing fossil fuel generation with wind and solar PV can decrease water consumption by over 98%. This shift is particularly impactful in Texas, which has seen the largest absolute reduction in coal generation in the U.S. over recent years.5
In China a transition toward renewables in northwestern regions (like Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang) has been essential for alleviating “extremely high” water stress. Research shows that closing coal mines in these areas leads to a rapid restoration of Terrestrial Water Storage, increasing water availability by an average of 18.8 mm per year through groundwater recovery.6
Elephant Butte Reservoir could go as low as 2% capacity this summer. I reported from Santa Fe on the Rio Grande Compact Commission meeting as Colorado, New Mexico and Texas contend with less water after a dismal winter and warm spring.@insideclimatehttps://t.co/lTKDYnAqRu
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (John Aguilar). Here’s an excerpt:
April 21, 2026
Colorado oil and gas regulators on Tuesday approved a controversial 24-well drilling operation that will sit just over a half-mile from hundreds of Aurora homes and a reservoir that serves as the city’s primary water supply. The 3-2 vote by the state’s Energy and Carbon Management Commission, in favor of the State Sunlight/Long well pad proposed by Crestone Peak Resources, came after about five hours of testimony and deliberation. The decision ends what had become one of the more contentious battles over energy extraction in Colorado. Board Chair Jeff Robbins acknowledged that the application from Crestone had evoked a strong reaction from homeowners living nearby. But in the end, the company complied with rigorous state oil and gas regulations enshrined in a law known as Senate Bill 181, which was passed by state lawmakers seven years ago.
“At the end of the day, State Sunlight/Long achieves the balance we were told to look for,” Robbins said.
[…]
The two commissioners who voted no were Trisha Oeth and John Messner. The approvals process for the Sunlight/Long well pad encompassed seven hearings before the commission, stretching over several months. Nearby homeowners rose up in opposition, claiming that the project would pose health hazards to those living nearby — in particular, to school-age children. They also worried about the drilling’s potential environmental impacts on the Aurora Reservoir, which is a water source for the 400,000 residents of Colorado’s third-largest city.
“I cannot believe that the state came down on the side of the industry yet again,” Randy Willard, the president of opposition group Save the Aurora Reservoir, said in an interview minutes after the vote came down Tuesday afternoon. “The group as a whole is severely disappointed.”
The group had pushed back on the proposed project using the 2019 oil and gas reform law as a guide, Willard said. The 2019 law prioritized public health, safety and the environment when regulators consider oil and gas development — a profound change from the industry-focused approach Colorado had taken for decades.
As Coloradans grapple with a record low snowpack heading into summer, the super El Niño and strong monsoon season in the forecast could provide some late summer relief.
Colorado’s weather is impacted by everything from temperature changes in the Pacific Ocean to pressure patterns over Texas — not to mention rising temperatures around the globe. This year’s La Niña conditions, created by cooler water temperatures in the Pacific, should have brought snow to Colorado’s northern mountains. Instead, the state ended the winter a month early with record hot days and a rapid snowmelt, prompting drought restrictions and water cutbacks around Colorado.
As of last week, the La Niña is over and the odds are increasingly good for a super El Niño later in 2026 — a climate pattern that has historically brought wetter winter conditions to Colorado, according to the National Weather Service.
It’s a tentative dose of hope for residents looking for a reprieve from record-breaking dry conditions, said Russ Schumacher, Colorado state climatologist and a professor at Colorado State University.
“Things are probably going to get worse before they get better,” Schumacher said. “I don’t think we’re going to be stuck in just dry, dry, dry for many, many more months to come. I think there is some reason for optimism.”
A lot of Colorado’s bad drought years have come during La Niña conditions, and Colorado has had multiple La Niña years in a row. Colorado should be rooting for La Niña to go away at this point, he said.
“It doesn’t guarantee that things are going to improve in the near term,” Schumacher added, “but we have a better chance of it if La Niña is in the rearview mirror.”
Here are the typical outcomes from both El Niño and La Niña for the US. Note each El Niño and La Niña can present differently, these are just the average impacts. Graphic credit: NWS Salt Lake City office
What are El Niño and La Niña?
El Niño and La Niña are opposing climate patterns in the Pacific Ocean that can affect weather worldwide. Together, they’re called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation cycle, ENSO for short.
The patterns vary based on water temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean that are influenced by winds circling the Earth near the equator, called trade winds because of their use in early sail-dependent commerce.
Meteorologists watch a specific region in the Pacific near the equator to determine whether the water temperature is warmer or cooler than normal, said Erin Walter, a service hydrologist for the National Weather Service in Grand Junction.
If the region’s water temperature is more than 0.5 degrees Celsius warmer than usual, then scientists call it an El Niño.
If the temperature is more than 0.5 degrees Celsius cooler than usual, it is a La Niña.
“They’re basically like opposite waves,” Walter said. “They ebb and flow together. And they’re more irregular than one would think.”
The warmer or cooler temperatures need to last for months before scientists will shift the classification from neutral into El Niño or La Niño territory. The climate patterns typically last nine to 12 months, but can sometimes last for years.
El Niño and La Niña events occur every two to seven years, on average, but they don’t occur on a regular schedule. Generally, El Niño occurs more frequently than La Niña, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Fun fact: The names for the two climate patterns can be traced back to observant South American fishermen in the 1600s, NOAA says.
The fishermen first noticed periods of unusually warm weather in the Pacific Ocean and called the resulting patterns El Niño de Navidad, the Christmas Child or the Christ Child in English, because El Niño typically peaks around December.
La Niña means Little Girl in Spanish. La Niña is also sometimes called El Viejo, anti-El Niño, or simply “a cold event,” according to NOAA.
How do ENSO cycles impact Colorado and the world?
The temperature fluctuations in the Pacific Ocean impact how and where jet streams, narrow bands of strong wind, flow in the atmosphere. Those jet streams impact which regions of the world have a dry spell, and which ones are hit with storms.
The ENSO events can lead to flooding, heavy rains, landslides and drought. They change where fish can find nutrients in the ocean. La Niña can lead to a more severe hurricane season, according to NOAA.
In the United States during El Niño conditions, a subtropical jet stream moves across southern states, like California, Texas and Florida, making them cooler and wetter than usual. Northern states tend to be warmer and drier than average, Schumacher said.
During La Niña, the jet stream comes out of the Northwest across the western United States. The Pacific Northwest and Midwest are cooler and wetter than average, while the Southwest is warmer and drier than average.
Colorado sits in the middle, which makes it harder to define clear impacts of ENSO events and to separate them from other common climate variations around the Rocky Mountains, Schumacher said.
Typically, El Niño tends to bring wetter-than-average conditions, particularly to southern Colorado and in the fall and spring. (This year, that would mean fall 2026 and spring 2027.)
During La Niña, the conditions flip. Colorado’s northern mountains often receive more snow while southern portions of the state are warmer and drier.
That doesn’t always happen: This winter is an example of La Niña conditions that did not drop very much snow on the northern part of the state — or anywhere.
Which team should Coloradans be on? Definitely El Niño, Schumacher said.
“It tilts the odds towards things being wetter,” he said.
A “super” El Niño in the forecast
This year, the region’s water temperature is more than 2 degrees Celsius warmer than usual for multiple months — prompting climate scientists to dub it a super El Niño.
They expect neutral conditions between April and June. After that, conditions could stay neutral or transition into a strong El Niño, according to the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center. Seeing El Niño conditions is likely, but whether they appear will depend on wind patterns over the Pacific Ocean.
For anyone looking for rain and snow in Colorado, this is a reason for optimism later in the summer and for the coming winter, Schumacher said.
In 1997, the last really strong El Niño brought moisture to most of Colorado in the summer and fall. There were floods along the Front Range and Eastern Plains.
But just because that’s what happened one other time doesn’t mean Colorado will see the same conditions again.
“It would be speculation to read too much into that,” Schumacher said.
So what exactly would a super El Niño mean for Colorado?
“The short answer is, we don’t really know,” he said.
Climate and weather researchers only have a few similar years in history to analyze, and that’s not enough data to identify clear trends with high certainty. There have been only five strong El Niños since 1950, with the last taking place from 2015 to 2016.
“In terms of what that’s going to mean for how the jet stream responds to that, and then in turn, what kind of precipitation we get in Colorado?” Schumacher said. “I think it’s too early to say.”
The non-Niño weather event you should be watching
There is one other weather phenomenon that will come into play this summer: monsoons.
“The outlooks are pointing towards the active monsoon season this summer, and so that’s probably the thing to keep a closer eye on in the near term,” he said.
Monsoons are different from ENSO patterns. El Niño conditions are stronger in the winter and weaker in the summer and have global impacts.
Monsoons are local seasonal circulations that develop every summer in the Southwest. They arise when shifting wind patterns bring moisture from the eastern Pacific and the Gulf of California into the Southwest.
Active monsoon seasons can provide a large fraction of the annual precipitation to lower elevations in parts of the state, like western and southeastern Colorado. This year’s forecast indicates monsoons are likely for July, August and September, Schumacher said.
These active seasons bring afternoon thunderstorms every day and flash floods in Colorado’s canyons. They can help reduce some of the risks of a historic drought year, like wildfire risks later in the summer.
“As with any seasonal forecasting, it’s uncertain,” Schumacher said. “Four months out it’s hard to put really high probabilities on anything.”
What do monsoons mean for Colorado’s water supply?
An active monsoon season will offer some relief, but it will not refill Colorado’s reservoirs.
The monsoon storms might bring intense rain over a short amount of time, but in the big picture, they do not provide very much water. The amount of water that normally comes from a big winter snowstorm is much higher than the amount of water in an afternoon storm. The cloudy and cool weather with rain showers would help reduce the demand for outdoor irrigation for gardens and crops while providing a small boost in the supply, Schumacher said. [ed. emphasis mine]
“Monsoon rains just aren’t nearly enough to fill up reservoirs or even bring them back up from really low levels,” he said.
A high desert thunderstorm lights up the sky behind Glen Canyon Dam — Photo USBR
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral website (Debra Utacia Krol). Here’s an excerpt:
April 17, 2026
Key Points
The Colorado River system’s water storage has dropped to 36% of its capacity due to a warm winter and ongoing drought.
Water levels in Lake Powell are projected to fall below the minimum needed for hydropower generation by this fall.
Federal officials are considering moving water from other reservoirs and reducing downstream releases to prevent a shutdown at Glen Canyon Dam.
Within charts listing projections of water levels, inflow and outflow, and anticipated releases for 15 reservoirs in the Colorado River Basin, one message was clear: The river is in dire straits and conditions likely won’t get better anytime soon. The warmest winter on record, coupled with an ongoing drought, has produced dismal conditions for the West’s water lifeline, conditions reflected by the Bureau of Reclamation in its April 24-month report. The system’s storage has plunged to about 36% of its capacity, the agency said in a statement. More alarming in the near term is the threat to hydropower production at Glen Canyon Dam. Water levels in Lake Powell would drop too low to operate the turbines by fall, according to the latest projections, unless the federal government steps in…The situation at Lake Powell raised red flags: The giant reservoir’s “minimum probable inflow,” a measure of winter runoff, is projected to total just 2.78 million acre-feet, or 29% of the historical average, one of the lowest on record, the agency said. By September, projections show the reservoir could decline to below 3,490 feet above sea level, the minimum needed to power the turbines at Glen Canyon Dam that supply electric service to about 5.8 million households and businesses in the region…
Reclamation said it would consider all tools that are available to avoid water levels below 3,500 feet, including a plan to move water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir in Utah and reduce downstream releases from Powell. Flaming Gorge would give up between 660,000 acre-feet up to 1 million acre-feet over the next year. Lake Powell will release about 1.48 million acre-feet less than planned. The move will lower water levels in Lake Mead and potentially reduce Hoover Dam’s hydropower generating capacity by as much as 40%, and would impact recreation throughout the Lower Basin…
The Arizona Department of Water Resources said in its March drought report that most of the state’s snowpack is gone, melted during Arizona’s warmest March on record. The Arizona Drought Monitoring Technical Committee also published its latest three-month drought map, which showed most of the state listed as enduring exceptional drought conditions, the driest level.
Undergraduate research students in Civil and Environmental Engineering collaborage with an employee at the Fort Collins Water Treatment Facility near the CSU Foothills Campus. The students are creating a piece of equipment to better evaluate water for treatment levels. Water samples at the treatment facility flow directly from the Horsetooth Reservoir.
Editor’s note: The FlocBot team will display its work during CSU’s Engineering Days celebration, called E-Days. The event, held by the Walter Scott, Jr. College of Engineering, showcases undergraduate senior design projects. It will run 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Thursday, April 23, in the Lory Student Center ballroom and on the Student Center Plaza at CSU. Students from the CSU team are available for interviews during the 2026 E-Days event on April 23 at the Lory Student Center on campus.
The future of safe drinking water might be found in the engineering school at Colorado State University.
Here, a student team has invented a device that automates water sampling and data analysis for the chemical treatment used to produce safe drinking water. Not only have the engineering students developed the technology, but they also have founded a startup company to perfect and commercialize it. Their target market: the utilities that treat municipal water to ensure its safety and quality for household use.
The invention is called FlocBot – named for a process called flocculation. During this process, water treatment plants add coagulants to raw water, causing particles and microorganisms, or “floc,” to clump for easier filtration.
Now, treatment plants perform flocculation and associated data collection manually. FlocBot builds upon existing technologies to automate the process, allowing operators to use their plant’s computer-based infrastructure to receive real-time data; this, in turn, allows them to determine their water’s optimal coagulant dose.
FlocBot will allow plants to more accurately dose coagulating chemicals to optimize floc clumps for filtration. Too few chemicals can allow pollutants to get through filters into drinking water. Too many can also impact drinking water quality, while wasting expensive chemicals and wearing down pipes and filters.
“Our goal is to allow water treatment plants and local governments to produce cleaner, more reliable drinking water while minimizing the environmental impact and saving taxpayer dollars,” said Josh Kates, a CSU senior studying civil engineering. He is co-leader of the 14-member FlocBot team. All are students in CSU’s Walter Scott, Jr. College of Engineering.
The student team visited more than 20 water treatment plants in the span of six months to understand the best way to engineer FlocBot. They have tested the device at the Fort Collins water treatment plant.
FlocBot is a senior design project for the students, who have worked on the project since the start of the academic year last fall. They will present their work alongside dozens of other projects during a campus event called Engineering Days, or E-Days, on April 23.
They have already won a business pitch competition called the I4E Startup Spotlight, sponsored by CSU’s Institute for Entrepreneurship.
As the FlocBot students complete their senior year of engineering studies, they are also building their company to commercialize their technology.
“Starting a business is always risky, but we’re fully committed,” Hugh McCurren, team co-leader, said. “We want to make a positive environmental impact in this industry. Based on conversations with numerous plants and possible customers, we’re optimistic about FlocBot’s potential.”
Aside from Florida, nearly the entire contiguous U.S. has experienced earlier than average first plant blooms in 2026. Earlier springs can cause longer allergy seasons, accelerate wildfire risk, increase pests/mosquitoes, and lead to less reliable snow-fed water.Map: http://www.usanpn.org/data/maps/sp…
May 6, 2023 – Volunteers with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL’s) ESCAPES (Education, Stewardship, and Community Action for Promoting Environmental Sustainability) program lend a hand to Jack’s Solar Garden in Longmont, Colo. Bethany Speer (left) goes back for more while Nancy Trejo distributes her wheelbarrow load to the agrivoltaic plots. (Photo by Bryan Bechtold / NREL)
Click the link to read the article on the Grist website (Rebecca Egan McCarthy & Kate Yoder):
April 20, 2026
Solar power is cheap, fast, and in demand as data centers consume more and more electricity.
The future looked dire for renewable energy in the United States last spring. Republicans in Congress started gutting the Inflation Reduction Act, forcing its generous tax credits for wind and solar into an early retirement. The Interior Department then rolled out a series of byzantine regulations aimed at restricting clean energy on federal land. Some feared those regulations would curb wind and solar development on private land, too.
Although these restrictions do seem to have hindered the wind industry, there are some signs that its fortunes are changing. But a year later, solar continues to boom. MAGA influencers are promoting it, there’s hope for legislation that would speed up approvals for new projects, and the industry has continued to expand over the last year as energy requirements from data centers demand fast, cheap power. The Trump administration has even signed off on some big solar projects: In February, the administration announced that it would allow several solar projects that had been blocked by the new Interior regulations to move forward.
“I feel like there has been so much written that’s like, ‘The Trump administration is delaying this stuff. It’s holding it all up in red tape. Nothing’s getting built,’” said Hannah Hess, director of the Rhodium Group’s Clean Investment Monitor team. “When we look at the data, that’s not true.” Combined, solar and battery storage (which banks excess energy for use when the sun’s not shining) accounted for 79 percent of power generation brought online in 2025 and are expected to continue to grow by 49 percent before the Inflation Reduction Act tax credits expire at the end of 2027.
Support for solar among rank-and-file-conservatives has fallen in recent years, caught up in partisan culture wars, but it could gain more traction in the party if it’s paired with affordability concerns. Some 69 percent of Republicans say they are supportive of solar, provided it lowered electricity costs, according to a recent poll from the research organizations GoodPower and NORC at the University of Chicago. The Solar Energy Industries Association, the industry’s primary lobbying group, has emphasized that its industry aligns with President Donald Trump’s “energy dominance” agendaand lowers energy costs for families and businesses. “Conservative voters are drawing a clear distinction between rhetoric and practical solutions that lower costs,” read a blog post from the association in February.
Even prominent conservative figures seem to be softening toward solar. Katie Miller, a former Trump administration official and the wife of Stephen Miller, the White House’s deputy chief of staff for policy, has gone so far as to herald solar as the “energy of the future.” In February, she posted to X: “Giant fusion reactor up there in the sky — we must rapidly expand solar to compete with China.” That same month, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who had been a vocal critic of solar power, started saying it could be beneficial. “Is there a commercial role for solar power that can add to the grid affordable, reliable energy?” he said. “Certainly there is.”
Data center developers have begun looking to solar as a complement to oil and gas, rather than a competitor. The incoming demand “feels crazy,” said Jim DesJardins, executive director of the Renewable Energy Industries Association of New Mexico. “It’s scary, almost. Five years ago, we were talking about an increase in load from EVs and building electrification — we’re not talking about that anymore. It’s all data centers and how are you going to power them.” This year marked the first time, said DesJardins, that the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association reached out to sponsor the renewable energy association’s annual conference.
Solar is, by far, the cheapest and fastest way to bring energy online, especially as the shortage of gas turbines — internal combustion engines that convert fuel into a steady, reliable energy — in the U.S. creates yearslong delays to build new power plants that run on natural gas. [ed. emphasis mine] The technology is crucial for data centers that need to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. “The backlog alone [for turbines] is five to nine years,” said Mike Hall, CEO of Anza Renewables, an energy intelligence and procurement platform based in California. “Then you’ve got to permit it. Then you’ve got to be near a gas pipeline for fuel, and then you’ve got the climate and the carbon issues.” A recent study from the analytics company Sightline Climate found that half of data center deals were expected to be delayed due to power constraints and local opposition, and developers are beginning to realize that waiting in line for a gas turbine could spell doom for their operation.
There are still some obstacles ahead for solar power, however. “We’ve definitely seen examples from our developer customers where the Department of Interior rules are creating challenges for their projects on federal land, but we haven’t seen that it’s really slowed down development on private land,” said Hall. “The bottlenecks are typically still local permitting and interconnection with utilities — those are still major challenges, and we haven’t seen a lot of improvement in either area yet.”
Shortly before Congress adjourned for its winter recess in December, the House passed the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development Act, also known as the SPEED ACT, a bipartisan bill that would streamline the permitting process for energy, infrastructure, and transportation projects by overhauling the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. Signed by President Nixon in 1970, NEPA requires federal agencies to consider how proposed infrastructure projects or drilling permits would affect the environment before approving them. Permitting reform is the rare, bipartisan issue that has sparked real enthusiasm on both sides of the aisle.
After a scuffle over the Trump administration’s decisions to shut down offshore wind projects, which judges ruled invalid, Democratic senators Martin Heinrich and Sheldon Whitehouse are coming back to the negotiating table to hammer out a deal. “Right now, we’re leaving electrons on the table thanks to Trump’s deliberate attacks on clean energy — forcing Americans to pay higher electricity bills,” Heinrich’s office told Grist. “To lower costs, this administration needs to stop stalling and slow walking clean energy projects and take the politics out of permitting reform.”
The war in Iran, which has caused oil prices to skyrocket, may serve to boost interest in solar power even more — especially as a way to combat rising electricity costs and promote energy independence. “Energy poverty has always been a problem in the U.S., and it’s gotten significantly worse in recent years,” said Brad Townsend, vice president of policy and outreach at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, an environmental policy nonprofit. He pointed to a study from the nonprofit RMI, formerly the Rocky Mountain Institute, that found 1 in 3 households were struggling to pay their utility bills. “I think folks in the administration are increasingly becoming aware of the fact that we can’t turn away renewable energy.”
In terms of the geopolitical reasons to support solar, “no one has fought a war over the sun,” DesJardins told Grist. “Not yet, anyways.”
On April 1, 2026, the Indian Peaks Band of the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, represented by the Native American Rights Fund, filed a Notice of Appeal and Petition for Stay with the U.S. Department of the Interior, Office of Hearings and Appeals, Interior Board of Land Appeals (IBLA), challenging the Bureau of Land Management’s March 2, 2026, approval of the Pine Valley Water Supply Project.
The filing seeks review of BLM’s decision authorizing a large‑scale groundwater extraction and pipeline project in southern Utah and asks the IBLA to stay the project approvals while the appeal is pending. The Band argues that the decision violates federal law, including the National Environmental Policy Act, and unlawfully threatens the Band’s federally reserved water rights and culturally significant resources.
The Band’s former Reservation, which is on the ancestral lands of the Band, is located just a few miles west of the Pine Valley Water Supply Project’s proposed wellfield. The amount of water that the Cedar Valley Water Conservancy seeks to extract from the Pine Valley exceeds the amount of water available and will harm the Band’s water resources.
“These water resources are fundamental to our Band’s history, culture, and future,”said Chairwoman Tamra Borchardt-Slayton of the Indian Peaks Band of the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah. “Federal law is clear that the Band’s water rights must be protected, and we are asking the Interior Department to do just that.”
The Indian Peaks Band holds federally reserved water rights associated with its former reservation lands under longstanding federal law. Those rights, which predate many other uses of water in the region, remain protected today and cannot be impaired by federal agency action. The appeal asserts that BLM failed to adequately consider these rights or uphold its federal trust responsibility to Tribal Nations before approving the project.
“Federal agencies have both a legal and moral obligation to protect Tribal water rights,” said NARF Staff Attorney Tom Murphy. “This appeal seeks to ensure that those obligations are honored for the Band’s water rights.”
The appeal and petition for stay were filed pursuant to 43 C.F.R. Part 4, which governs administrative appeals of BLM decisions. If granted, the stay would preserve the status quo and prevent construction or further project commitments while IBLA considers the merits of the appeal.
Roaring Fork Valley governments and fire and law enforcement agencies are gearing up for what is anticipated to be a much warmer and drier summer than normal. The Roaring Fork Valley is experiencing a “record breaking year” for drought, snowfall and snowpack, Erin Walter, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said during a press briefing Thursday with multiple local emergency management and fire leaders. The agencies are emphasizing both individual preparedness and cross-agency preparedness in hopes of mitigating wildfires or minimizing the damage of wildfires if they occur this summer.
“Wildfires are inevitable,” said Ali Hammond, director of wildfire resilience for Aspen Fire. “Wildfire disasters are preventable.”
Local leaders are encouraging individuals to make their own wildfire preparedness plans, like building a go-bag and establishing an evacuation plan. They’re also urging homeowners to harden their homes and ensure the first 5 feet around their homes is cleared of any vulnerable vegetation…Agencies across the valley are changing evacuation frameworks to “ready, set, go,” which they will use when notifying residents about wildfire risk in their area. They’re also trying to improve their messaging on wildfire risks, like red flag warnings and what different stages of a fire ban mean. Local officials are working to prevent wildfires from a number of angles. But it can be difficult under unprecedented circumstances. The city of Aspen is currently under stage two drought restrictions. Erin Loughlin-Molliconi, the city of Aspen’s utilities director, said the city is considering more stringent measures because of the persistent, dry conditions.
Difficult decisions for the Colorado River are starting to be made.
In what will be a defining year for the struggling watershed, the federal agency that manages the basin’s dams took unprecedented actions on Friday to store more water in Lake Powell in order to preserve hydropower generation and protect water-delivery infrastructure at Glen Canyon Dam that the agency says is at risk of damage due to low reservoir levels.
The April 17 announcement from the Bureau of Reclamation will also set in motion events that could result in first-ever lawsuits from Arizona, California, or Nevada against their upstream neighbors over water supply from the shrinking Colorado River.
The Central Arizona Project, which delivers Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson, called Reclamation’s actions “a band-aid” and urged the agency to release even more water from upstream reservoirs into Powell. CAP, because it has lowest water-rights priority in the lower basin, is the most vulnerable to proposed water cuts that would attempt to align water supply with demand.
“There is no time to delay,” Patrick Dent, CAP’s assistant general manager for water policy, told Circle of Blue two days before the announcement.
The Bureau of Reclamation will make two moves to support Lake Powell, the huge reservoir formed by Glen Canyon Dam that is less than 25 percent full and shrinking.
Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico are asking the federal government to pause some releases from Flaming Gorge Reservoir, which straddles the border between Wyoming and Utah. The reservoir, pictured here in 2021, is the third-largest in the Colorado River system.
Reclamation’s first move is to release more water from Flaming Gorge, an upstream reservoir that is 82 percent full. With the consent of the four upper basin states, between 660,000 acre-feet and 1 million acre-feet will flow from Flaming Gorge into Powell over the next 12 months.
Reclamation previously used upstream reservoirs to prop up Powell in 2022-23, when some 463,000 acre-feet were released. These extra releases are supposed to be recovered if water supply conditions turn favorable. If more dry years are ahead, then the upstream releases will have been a one-shot intervention.
The agency’s second move is to hold back more water in Powell. Using authority granted in a 2024 decision, the agency will cut Powell’s water releases from 7.48 million acre-feet to 6 million acre-feet. This is the first time that Reclamation has invoked its Section 6(E) authority.
Water supply conditions in the basin worsened each month this year as hot, dry weather drained a meager snowpack that is on a downward trend due to manmade climate change. A heat wave in late March was the most extreme on record in the Southwest for that time of year. Inflows into Lake Powell this year are projected to be the lowest ever measured, breaking a record set in 2002.
The water elevation at Powell currently sits at 3,526 feet. Reclamation has stated that it will do what it can to prevent the reservoir from dropping below 3,500 feet. Hydropower generation stops at 3,490 feet. Without Reclamation’s announced interventions, that level is expected to be breached by August.
With the two interventions, Powell is projected, with average weather conditions, to remain above 3,500 feet by April 2027, but just barely. If the next 12 months continue to be hot and dry, more emergency actions might be necessary.
The back of Glen Canyon Dam circa 1964, not long after the reservoir had begun filling up. Here the water level is above dead pool, meaning water can be released via the river outlets, but it is below minimum power pool, so water cannot yet enter the penstocks to generate electricity. Bureau of Reclamation photo. Annotations: Jonathan P. Thompson
If Powell were to drop below 3,490 feet, water would have to be released through a smaller set of pipes called the river outlet works. Reclamation has said that using these pipes for extended periods of time is untested and risks damaging them.
Reducing outflows from Powell will have two effects. One is that Lake Mead, located downstream, will shrink more quickly, as will its hydropower output. Boating access will be more difficult.
The other consequence is the specter of litigation. The 1922 Colorado River Compact requires the four upper basin states – Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming – to deliver 75 million acre-feet over 10 years. Add in the upper basin’s share of the water required for Mexico and the figure rises to roughly 82.5 million.
Cutting Powell outflows this year to 6 million acre-feet will likely push the 10-year total below the required threshold.
Reclamation is not focusing on the legal implications, says James Eklund, a partner at Taft Law.
“Reclamation is essentially telling the basin states, ‘We are going to protect our billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure, including Glen Canyon Dam, and if you believe that violates your compact entitlement, you know where the courthouse is’,” Eklund, a former Colorado River commissioner for Colorado, wrote to Circle of Blue.
States in both upper and lower basins have already set aside money for potential litigation or are considering it.
Still, a legal right does not necessarily mean the water is available, Eklund cautions. “No court can conjure acre-feet that aren’t in the reservoir.”
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
April 19. 2026
The multitude of water managers tasked with overseeing the drying Colorado River systemstand at a dire crossroads. As a years long stalemate in negotiations persists between the seven states that share the river, it’s become increasingly likely that the federal government will impose its own long-term plan, choosing from a range of proposals officials have outlined in recent months. But experts and water managers across the 250,000-square-mile Colorado River basin are raising the alarm about the five plans, questioning if any of them hold up under the new climate reality. They say the federal plans won’t keep the system from crashing in critically dry years — which are becoming more frequent — and could wreak chaos on the pivotal lifeline for 40 million people in the American Southwest.
“In every one of those alternatives, under what they call critically dry hydrology, the system is failing,” said Andy Mueller, the general manager of the Colorado River District, a taxpayer-funded agency based in Glenwood Springs that works to protect Western Slope water. “And critically dry hydrology is what we have continued to see consistently in the basin in the last 25 years and what we should expect going forward.”
[…]
In extremely dry years, the longer-term plans under consideration by Reclamation would allow the water levels of the system’s two main reservoirs to repeatedly fall below minimum power pool. Federal officials then would be forced to make recurring emergency cuts to the water supplies of the three states downstream of the reservoirs, creating uncertainty for millions of people and a massive agricultural industry…Letters from a number of Colorado entities — including the Northwest Colorado Council of Governments, irrigation districts, the Western Slope’s Club 20 and county commissions from a vast swath of the state — urged federal officials to present at least one plan that would hold up in extremely dry years.
“Sound science dictates that Colorado River management must evolve to handle a permanently drier future,” Tina Bergonzini, the general manager of the Grand Valley Water Users Association, wrote in her comments to the bureau. “The current federal preference for predictability is an atmospheric impossibility given that studies indicate rising temperatures have already slashed river flows by a fifth.”
[…]
The conflict on the Colorado is likely one of the world’s first major water policy overhauls to grapple with the reality of climate change, said Brad Udall, a senior water and climate research scholar at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Center. In the past, Colorado River managers made operational tweaks and short-term deals to address drought. This time, it’s different.
“We’re not looking at an incremental step here,” Udall said. “We’re looking at a complete redo of how we operate this resource that affects 40 million people.”
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Sometimes it feels like there are two parallel Southwestern United States out there.
One is naturally arid, is getting hotter and hotter by the year and is gripped by the most severe drought of the last millennium or more. Its water lifeline, the Colorado River system, is on the brink of collapse, and communities and farmers from Wyoming to Calexico are facing painful mandatory water cutbacks this summer.
And then there’s the other one, a sort of fantasy world, or maybe just an oblivious one, in which new water diversion projects like the Lake Powell Pipeline remain on the table, state leaders prepare to go to legal war to protect their states’ profligate water consumption, and a developer is breaking ground on a 2,300-acre “city within a city” called Halo Vista in North Phoenix.
Halo Vista’s developers are billing it as a companion development to TSMC’s $165 billion semiconductor fabrication facility complex. It will wrap around the industrial campus (thus the “halo” in the name), and plans call for some 30 million square feet of industrial, retail, office, research, and healthcare spaces along with 9,000 or more residential units.
“You have to think about all the people at full build-out who’ll work in this area — about 60 to 80,000 people,” Greater Phoenix Economic Council President Christine Mackay told AZFamily. “They’ll work in the Halo Vista science and technology park. They need restaurants, hotels, places to live — and places to shop for what they need.”
Historically, Arizona’s economy was said to run on five Cs: copper, cotton, citrus, cattle, and climate. Copper is still going fairly strong, most of the citrus groves have given way to housing developments, alfalfa has surpassed cotton, and the beef-cattle have been replaced by dairy factories. Now another C — computer chips — is being added to the mix, as the Phoenix-area experiences a semiconductor manufacturing boom and a coinciding data-center buildup.
The tech industry’s expansion is adding economic diversity, making the city somewhat less vulnerable to 2008-like financial breakdowns. But as Halo Vista demonstrates, it is also feeding Phoenix’s dominant economic force, the Growth Machine. And both the Growth Machine and the data center/semiconductor boom need water, and quite a lot of it. This, in turn, increases Phoenix’s exposure to future water shortages, which seem more and more likely with each passing day.
According to TSMC’s draft environmental assessment, the first phase of its Phoenix fabrication plants will initially use about 4.75 million gallons of water per day, or 5,320 acre-feet per year, which would jump to about 19,400 acre-feet yearly if and when all three phases are built out. But the company says it will eventually install a recycling system that will bring that number down considerably. The 9,000 residential units in Halo Vista would use about 2,800 acre-feet per year (based on Phoenix’s current per-capita water consumption multiplied by a rough estimate of 20,000 people occupying those residences). Halo Vista’s other industrial and commercial properties will consume an unknown additional amount of water.
So let’s say the whole development, including the “fabs,” will use about 25,000 acre-feet per year — less if the water efficiencies are realized, more if Halo Vista’s tech district includes data centers or other water-intensive industries.
That’s a lot of water, or a drop in the bucket, depending on how you look at it.
On the one hand it is equal to about one-fourth of Nevada’s total consumptive use from the Colorado River. Yes, the city of sin and excess only uses about four times more water than the TSMC/Halo Vista “city” will use.
On the other, it’s far less than the alfalfa farms in Maricopa County — in which Halo Vista is located — use for irrigation each year, which totals something like 500,000 acre-feet.1 And yet, Halo Vista/TSMC, once all built out in 20 years or so, will have a significantly larger economic output than a bunch of hay fields (which isn’t the only measure of value or even the most important one, and yet, well, water does flow uphill to money).
So yes, it is possible to sidestep water concerns by pulling out the “what about alfalfa” comparison. But it’s also not all that productive.
Halo Vista, which is being built on a plot of uncultivated state land in the desert, is not displacing an alfalfa farm’s water use. Rather, it represents a new water use piled on top of existing consumption. The water will come out of Phoenix’s municipal system, and therefore officially has an “assured and adequate” 100-year water supply, which is necessary in Arizona for this sort of development.
Yet there’s nothing assured about Arizona’s water future. Phoenix’s water comes primarily from high priority rights on the Salt and Verde Rivers, and from the Colorado River via the Central Arizona Project. But those rights will hardly matter if the rivers dry up: This year’s Salt River Basin meagre snowpack had vanished by March 1, spring runoff peaked weeks ago, and flows are rapidly falling. Meanwhile, the Central Arizona Project has relatively low priority rights, meaning it will be the first to take cuts as the river shrinks.
In other words, aridification and the Colorado River crisis pose an existential threat to Phoenix’s tech boom and, well, Phoenix, itself, which is one of the reasons Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs is preparing for a bitter legal fight with the feds and the Upper Basin states over the Colorado River.
The good news for the developers and the semiconductor makers is that agriculture continues to use a lot of water in Arizona. And where there is large consumptive use, there is also more room for increased efficiencies and, if it comes to it, “buying and drying” the farms for their water — which has its own negative consequences. The bad news is that the shortages to come may very well exceed the amount that could be wrung out of the existing farms.
Halo Vista, which is on a 20-year buildout schedule, is far from the only major water- and energy-guzzling development on slate for the increasingly arid West. And maybe it’s not realistic to expect all such development to come to a screeching halt simply because the water may run out sometime in the future. After all, climate change could cause more precipitation; maybe in 20 years we’ll be worrying more about flooding than desiccation.
But you would think that planners and policymakers and the developers would at least act in line with our current reality, where resources, especially water, are limited. Halo Vista-esque projects should be required not just to certify an “assured” 100-year supply, but they also should have to offset new consumption with cuts somewhere else, whether it’s paying for farmers to install drip irrigation or funding treated wastewater recycling projects.
Continuing to consume water at current rates is one thing. Adding new uses on top of our current overconsumption is quite another.
***
And so it begins. It looks like residents of the small Arizona community of Kearney may lose their water altogether later this summer, making developments like Halo Vista look even more surreal.
The town sent this emergency memo out to residents in April:
Kearney sits in Arizona’s “Copper Triangle” along the banks of Gila River and in the proverbial shadow of the Hayden copper smelter smokestack. The town was established by the Kennecott Mining Company in 1958 to house residents displaced from Ray, Sonora, and Barcelona as the mine’s gaping Ray mine pit gobbled up the communities. Resolution Copper’s proposed Oak Flat mine is also nearby, as is Faraday’s proposed Copper Creek project.
Kearney has a maximum allotment of 610 acre-feet of water from the Gila River. This year, however, extreme drought conditions have brought the allotment down to just .76 acre-feet, forcing the town to impose severe restrictions on use to try to make it last until the monsoon arrives.
As for all the mines surrounding Kearney? I’m guessing their dealing with their own water issues, but I’d also wager that they’re allowed a heck of a lot more than three-fourths of an acre-foot.
Condors perched on steel girders some 450 feet above the Colorado River. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
🐟 Colorado River Chronicles 💧
In the comment section on the last Land Desk dispatch, reader wkarls reported on the Colorado River’s flows during a recent raft trip on the Grand Canyon. It got me to thinking about how low those flows might go and what that could mean.
I’ve only boated down the Grand Canyon once, back in October and November of 1995 with a group of slightly crazy Salida rafting folks. It was a beautiful, terrifying, sublime — if somewhat debauched — experience. During the trip, releases from Glen Canyon Dam — which make up about 95% of the flow in the Grand Canyon — fluctuated between 11,000 and 16,000 cubic feet per second, a number that was bolstered downstream after a good rainstorm moved through, turning the river that intimidating blood-and-chocolate-milk color. That seemed like plenty of water to me; it was certainly enough to generate waves big enough to toss our little rafts about like toys (did I mention it was scary as hell?).
Somewhat surprisingly, the releases were about the same in September of last year, bouncing between 10,000 and 16,000 cfs, which appears to have been an effort to get the annual flows past Lees Ferry up to about 7.5 million acre-feet to keep the Upper Basin in compliance with the Colorado River Compact’s non-depletion obligation. Then, on Oct. 1, the beginning of the 2026 water year, releases plummeted. This spring they’ve been in that 7,000 to 9,000 cfs range that wkarls mentioned.
That’s in line with the Bureau of Reclamation’s plan to release just 6 million acre-feet from the dam this water year: 6 million acre-feet per year averages out to about 8,200 cfs. That’s also right in line with the Grand Canyon Protection Act’s operating criteria, which set a minimum allowable release during the day (between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.) at 8,000 cfs, while the minimum nighttime release is 5,000 cfs.
So, given all of that, we can assume that the flows shouldn’t drop much below current levels this summer. Of course, if conditions are worse than expected, then the reservoir could drop to 3,500 feet earlier than anticipated, which could force dam operators to further curtail releases to “defend” minimum power pool. If so, then you might see nighttime releases drop as low as 5,000 cfs. If that’s not enough, then I suppose dam operators would have to go to a run-of-the-river scenario, where flows could plummet to 2,000 or 3,000 cfs, which would make rafting quite interesting.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
Colorado River at/around Lees Ferry in autumn 2024, when Glen Canyon Dam releases were around 8,000 cfs.
Colorado River at/around Lees Ferry in autumn 2024, when Glen Canyon Dam releases were around 8,000 cfs.
Colorado River at/around Lees Ferry in autumn 2024, when Glen Canyon Dam releases were around 8,000 cfs.
The Mexican Hat uranium tailings repository on the Navajo Nation holds contaminated waste from uranium mills in Utah and Arizona. The Navajo Nation has raised concerns about its proximity to the San Juan River, a source of drinking water. Russel Albert Daniels/High Country News
Last fall, constructionon the Velvet-Wood uranium mine broke ground in the sandstone deposits of San Juan County, Utah. It’s the first mine that the federal government has permitted under a new expedited “emergency” process that allows projects to go through the environmental review required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in just 14 days, a process that previously took months or even years. Tribal governments were given just seven days to offer feedback, and the standard public comment period was eliminated owing to the project’s “emergency” status. In the past, both tribes and the public had at least 30 days give input.
The mine is located in an area already deeply scarred by uranium mining, where the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe has long opposed the White Mesa Uranium Mill, which abuts the community. During the weeklong tribal comment period, six nations shared their concerns with the Bureau of Land Management, citing the expedited process and possible water contamination from the mine’s activities. No changes were made to the project, however.
Earlier this year, in addition to mandating expedited “emergency” processes for NEPA reviews, the Trump administration finalized its proposed elimination of standards — including public comment periods — for how federal agencies carry out NEPA environmental reviews for large-scale projects on public lands. The changes came without consultation with tribal nations and despite their strong opposition.
Water towers in White Mesa, Utah. The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe has long opposed the neighboring White Mesa Uranium Mill. Six tribal nations warned the Bureau of Land Management about possible water contamination from the new Velvet-Wood uranium mine, but no changes were made to the project. Russel Albert Daniels/High Country News
“The announce-and-defend method of developing federal Indian policy is an inappropriate, paternalistic, unjustified, and historically inefficient method of decision-making,” the National Congress of American Indians and National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers said in a joint letter. Eliminating previous standards “ignores federal trust and treaty responsibilities, impinges on roles and sovereignty of Tribal Nations, and flouts longstanding policy and practice by failing to consult with Tribal Nations.”
The federal government is legally required to consult with tribal nations on rules and policies that affect them, but so far the Trump administration has regularly bypassed consultation requirements or sped through them in order to accomplish its “energy dominance” agenda on tribal nations’ ancestral lands. Altogether, the changes represent a shift in the way that tribal nations — and the public — are able to have a say in how land in the Western U.S. is managed.
A map of the upcoming Thacker Pass mine in northern Nevada. The federal government has bought stakes in mining companies, including the company behind the Thacker Pass lithium mine in Nevada, which is opposed by some tribal nations and Indigenous communities. Image used courtesy of Lithium Americas
FROM THE START, agencies under Trump have changed or revoked rules and policies to prioritize extraction, citing the so-called energy “emergency.” The BLM and the Forest Service rescinded the Public Lands Rule and the Roadless Rule without tribal consultation, even though both decisions have major implications for tribes’ ability to protect natural and cultural resources on public land. Meanwhile, the administration is seeking to “streamline” Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, one of the most useful tools tribal nations have for ensuring government consultation. Changes are also proposed for Section 401 of the Clean Water Act, which enables tribes to review the impacts of extractive projects within reservation borders before a federal agency permits the project.
“It’s all predicated on something that isn’t true: We don’t have an energy emergency,” said Gussie Lord, managing attorney at Earthjustice’s Tribal Partnerships Programs. Chipping away at public input and tribal consultation will only exacerbate issues that tribal nations face, Lord said. “A lot of their resources, their cultural and environmental resources often are one and the same. The existing laws and regulations that we have are already insufficiently protective of tribal rights and resources.”
The administration’s changes to the NEPA review process took effect immediately last year, also without consultation. Under the Biden administration, the Council on Environmental Quality spent three and a half years updating the implementation regulations by consulting with tribal nations and the public, incorporating provisions requiring agencies to consider climate change and environmental justice impacts when reviewing projects. NEPA applies to all federal agencies, meaning that each agency has to come up with its own implementation guidelines. Tribes and experts worry that, under the new guidelines, agencies may not be compelled to work with tribes.
According to University of Arizona professor of law Justin Pidot, who previously served as general counsel for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the resulting uncertainty could have serious consequences. “One is the agencies don’t know how to work together. The second is that there’s litigation risk. The third is that project sponsors don’t know what they’re supposed to do,” Pidot said. The removal of those standards “creates lots of complexity for the public, for tribes, for states, for local governments, for nonprofits.”
Under the Interior Department’s new interim set of standards, for example, reviews for something like a mining project will take 28 days. When the “emergency” declaration is added, it could take just 14 days, as it did with the Velvet-Wood mine. Past reviews could take up to four years. “It substantially limits the degree of information flowing from the federal government to the public about big projects, including to tribes,” Pidot said. “What is surprising about this particular decision of theirs is that having a common set of rules makes sense for everyone.”
In comments to the Council on Environmental Quality about the elimination of the NEPA standards, many tribal nations expressed similar concerns. (See sidebar.) Tribes said they were not consulted, and that while dealing with numerous agencies and their different processes was burdensome, the removal of the regulations weakens the whole purpose of NEPA. The National Congress of American Indians and other organizations noted that some streamlining and deregulating could prove useful — but not when tribal perspectives were excluded from the process.
Last year’s federal budget cuts and mass layoffs further complicate matters, affecting agencies’ ability to carry out their work. Meanwhile, congressional budget cuts impacted funding for, among other things, tribal historic preservation officers, which are key to carrying out government-to-government consultation. The idea seems to be to “drown people in an avalanche while providing them with no resources to meet the moment, and call that consultation and collaboration,” Pidot said.
At the same time that the federal government has moved to reduce public and tribal input, it has also been buying stakes in mining companies, including the two companies behind controversial projects opposed by some tribal nations and Indigenous communities: the Thacker Pass lithium mine in Nevada and the Ambler Road project in Alaska. “It’ll be interesting to see if their approval processes for mines in which the federal government has a stake is quicker than it otherwise would have been,” Lord said.
Pidot summed it up this way: “The big theme is that anything and anyone that stands in the way of the kinds of projects that this administration wants to do is an obstacle to progress that they’re going to overrun.”
The Daneros uranium mine in the Red Canyon uranium mining district in San Juan County, Utah. All uranium ore mined from this area travels through Bears Ears National Monument. Russel Albert Daniels/High Country News
Gay Mine, a former phosphate mine and current Superfund site on Fort Hall Reservation, in 1948. P1972-201-101. Courtesy of Idaho State Archives
Tribes’ perspectives on changes to nepa implementation
Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, ID “On the Fort Hall Reservation are environmentally hazardous sites created prior to modern-day NEPA protections. … By stripping away NEPA’s provisions for public participation and environmental review, the federal government would further entrench long-standing historic inequities that have disadvantaged Tribal communities.”
Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, MT “CEQ (Council on Environmental Quality) states that it does not need to consult with Tribes. … This is a tortured and disingenuous reading of EO 13175, in part because it focuses almost exclusively on a federal view of economic impacts on Tribal governments rather than the universe of environmental impacts.”
Susanville Indian Rancheria, CA “The proposed removal of these regulations represents a significant step backward in our nation’s commitment to environmental protection and tribal sovereignty.”
Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, SD “CEQ is ignoring its established policy of including indigenous traditional ecological knowledge in environmental reviews under NEPA. These issues that have been part and parcel of the implementation of NEPA for decades, such as the consideration of impacts to environmental justice communities, the cumulative effects of projects, and climate change, are being arbitrarily cast aside in contravention of explicit statutory language.”
Bishop Paiute Tribe, CA “Our traditional and ancestral lands extend far beyond the exterior boundaries of our reservation, and the natural resources on these lands are not merely commodities to be exploited. They are vital to the cultural, spiritual, and economic fabric of all Tribal communities, sustaining traditions that have endured for generations.”
Tulalip Tribes, WA “The lack of consultation exacerbates the already existing power imbalances, further diminishing the ability of tribes to exercise meaningful sovereignty and protect their interests.”
Nez Perce Tribe, ID “The Tribe strongly objects to CEQ’s Proposed Rule, which eviscerates the framework that has been relied upon since CEQ first issued NEPA regulations in 1978.”
Big Pine Paiute Tribe, CA “The interim final rule sidesteps NEPA … as it endorses Donald Trump’s personal agenda. The USA is a country of laws, not a place where one’s personal agenda may supersede the law.”
Native land loss 1776 to 1930. Credit: Alvin Chang/Ranjani Chakraborty
The AVC agreement stores water down-river in the Pueblo Reservoir, built after President John F. Kennedy signed legislation authorizing the Fry-Ark agreement in 1962. Photo courtesy of the City of Aurora.
In April and May of each year, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (which operates the Fry-Ark Project) and the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District (SECWCD), which handle allotments of this water, make forecasts about the amount of water that can be imported through the Fry Ark Project. According to Chris Woodka, Senior Policy and Issues Manager, Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District (SECWCD), the 20-year average for imported water is 60,000 acre-feet per year. On April 1, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation forecast importing barely ten percent of that, only 6,500 acre-feet in 2026. This is the least amount imported since the system became fully operational in the late 1970’s.
Also on April 1, the SECWCD projected allocating 4,600 acre-feet of those 6,500 acre-feet to water right holders. However, with the current snowpack, at this time it is not known if there will be any allocation this year. If not, the imported water will be held in storage in one of the Fry Ark Project’s reservoirs.
Fryingpan-Arkansas Project via the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District (Click to enlarge)
Dark red and green mudstone beds with tan sand-dominated layers above, marking the arrival of Colorado River sediment into the Bidahochi basin 6.6 million years ago. Drone image taken by Brian Gootee, with permission of the Navajo Nation*
Click the link to read the release on the UCLA website (Holly Ober):
April 16, 2026
Key takeaways
The Colorado River existed in western Colorado 11 million years ago and first exited Grand Canyon around 5.6 million years ago. Now, scientists know more about the path it took to eventually reach the Gulf of California.
A study of zircons found in sandstone suggests it pooled just east of the Grand Canyon, before making its way downstream, ultimately arriving at the Gulf of California around 5 million years ago.
The moment marked the Colorado River’s transition to a continental-scale river that connected life throughout its course.
Geologists have solved the mystery of the disappearance from the geological record, millions of years ago, of one of North America’s most important waterways: the Colorado River. A new paper published in Science shows that the river flowed into an upstream lake over the course of a few million years, then likely flowed for the first time into the Grand Canyon. The moment marked the Colorado River’s transition to a continental-scale river as it made its way down to the Gulf of California.
“In some ways, you could really think of it as the birth of the Colorado River that we know today,” said first author and UCLA geologist John He. “There are rivers everywhere, but a river that carries water and sediment across the continent connects life throughout the region, and the entire ecosystem probably changed as a result of the arrival of the Colorado River into the basin.”
The finding, based on the analysis of sandstone samples, complements paleontological evidence, such as fish fossils, that suggests life began to become part of an integrated ecosystem throughout the Colorado River basin during this hidden chapter of its history.
Shaded relief map of the US via Learner.org
How and when did the Colorado River reach the Grand Canyon?
The Colorado River existed in western Colorado 11 million years ago and first exited the Grand Canyon around 5.6 million years ago. But how it navigated the terrain between the two points for around 5 million years had been a mystery. Now, new evidence suggests it pooled just east of the Grand Canyon, in what is now part of the Navajo Nation, before charting a downstream path that ultimately led to the Gulf of California around 5 million years ago.
The Grand Canyon was carved in multiple phases over a long period of time, but precisely when and how much the Colorado River incised it remains debated among geologists.
“Geologists have proposed over a dozen hypotheses for the canyon’s formation and the Colorado River’s path,” said co-author John Douglass, a geologist at Paradise Valley Community College.
One obstacle in the ancient river’s path is the Kaibab Arch, a topographic high point located in northern Arizona and southern Utah. Geologists have proposed different scenarios for how the river crossed it, but one theory that the new evidence makes more plausible is lake spillover. In this scenario, the Colorado River would have filled a lake and eventually exited it along a course to the Grand Canyon.
“Other processes, such as karst piping, which involves water transport through rock, and headward erosion, may have also contributed to the establishment of the river’s course,” explained corresponding author Ryan Crow, from the U.S. Geological Survey. “Some reaches were likely newly carved, and others would have been significantly deepened by the integrated Colorado River over millions of years.”
The collaborative work began when He, Douglass and Emma Heitmann at the University of Washington, met in the field while studying the remnant deposits of Bidahochi Lake, an ancient lake on Navajo Nation land. Most of the deposits of this enigmatic lake have eroded away, so no one knows how large the lake was. Geologists also didn’t know what rivers fed the lake, or why Bidahochi Lake eventually disappeared.
To understand where the sediments in Bidahochi Lake came from, He searched for zircons in the sandstone they collected.
Zircons are microscopic crystals that form in cooling magma. They do not degrade or change much over time and therefore contain an accurate geochemical signature of the moment they were created. Zircon is found in granite and other volcanic rocks, so it occurs abundantly in many sediments after the source rocks erode.
Geologists have developed a technique called detrital zircon geochronology that uses lasers or ion beams to measure the ratios of uranium and lead isotopes in hundreds of zircons in a sample. The unique age and history of each zircon can thus be traced to learn the sources of a sediment and estimate when it was deposited. The age spectrum derived from hundreds of zircons in a sample is called its detrital signature.
“Zircons are some of the oldest fragments of our Earth,” said He. “They’re like little time vaults, and by looking at the age and geochemical signature of zircons, we can tell where a sediment that has been moved by a river originated.”
He was studying the detrital zircon signatures of the samples he collected when, to his surprise, he detected what he thought was the signature of sediments known to have been deposited by the Colorado River. When he brought this up to Douglass, his colleague said that was exactly what he, Crow and some of his colleagues at the U.S. Geological Survey were looking for at the same time.
The researchers teamed up with USGS geologists and colleagues at the Arizona Geologic Survey, the University of Oklahoma, and the University of Washington. Together, they compared the detrital signatures of thousands of zircons in the sand that He and coauthors collected with those from other known deposits of the ancestral Colorado River and a few other possible sources.
The results showed that signatures of the sediments deposited about 6.6 million years ago in Lake Bidahochi closely matched those of other Colorado River deposits downstream and upstream, including the Browns Park Formation in northern Utah and Colorado. Study of rock layers in the field from this time period showed signs of rippling that indicated a strong river flowed into standing water, and fossils of large fish species characteristic of fast-flowing waters.
These lines of evidence strongly indicated that the Colorado River was supplying water and sediment to the Bidahochi basin before it spilled over and the river began to flow through the Grand Canyon. This set the stage for the mighty Colorado River that carved much of the Grand Canyon and upon which much of the West depends for water.
“I think there is something unique and disquieting when the planet’s history is laid out before our eyes, but we cannot fully read it. We’ve always known the Grand Canyon is there, this solid towering wall of rock, but we’re learning more each day how it formed,” said He.
*Any person(s) wishing to conduct unmanned aerial vehicle flights on the Navajo Nation must first apply for and receive a permit from the Navajo Department of Transportation.
Dories at rest on a glorious Grand Canyon eve. Photo by Brian Richter
Click the link to read the article on the KJZZ website (Alex Hager). Here’s an excerpt:
April 17, 2026
On the outer edges of the Phoenix metro, the small town of Cave Creek sits nestled among the saguaro-dotted hills. It’s home to about 5,000 people and known mostly for its quiet residential neighborhoods, art galleries and an annual rodeo…Cave Creek, which gets about 95% of its water from the Colorado River, will be among the first to feel the impact of those cuts…Colorado River water travels to Cave Creek through the Central Arizona Project, a 336-mile canal that carries water from the state’s western border to the Phoenix and Tucson areas.
The federal government has suggested major cuts to the amount of water the CAP carries each year, forcing Cave Creek officials to find a backup plan quickly. They will be able to keep taps flowing in the short term, but the future is uncertain, as long-term fixes are expensive and complicated…The first option for most cities, [Brad] Hill said, would be a turn to groundwater. For most, it is relatively easy and cheap to dig more wells near town and carefully use some of the water sitting in underground aquifers. Cave Creek cannot do that. Aquifers underneath the Valley are shaped like bathtubs. For one of those bathtubs, the deepest part is in the middle, and Cave Creek sits on the outer edge, so there isn’t much water underneath town…Cave Creek is, part of a program to store excess Colorado River water underground. The town pays an annual fee for the rights to put water into that pool, which essentially serves as an emergency savings account for times when there isn’t enough water above ground to serve everybody’s needs. Cave Creek has the right to take some of that water, but first it has to physically get it to town. Since the underground aquifer is far away, building a pipe directly into it would be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. So instead, Cave Creek will be part of an exchange. Cave Creek is working on deals with three other Valley cities: Phoenix, Peoria and Surprise. Those cities can more easily tap into that underground savings account, so they will start using more groundwater and leave some of their CAP water in the canal, where Cave Creek can access it using its existing pumps.
