Here’s the release from the Blue River Watershed Group (Reyna Schedler):
As drought conditions continue to shape water management decisions across Colorado, Blue River Watershed Group is hosting a free public forum to help community members better understand how current operations and water management strategies are affecting the Blue River Watershed and the local community.
The Summit County Drought Response Event will bring together representatives from state and federal agencies, local water providers, water utilities, and local governments to discuss current drought conditions, reservoir operations, water supply management, and the challenges facing communities throughout the region.
The event will take place on Tuesday, June 23, 2026, from 5:30–7:30 p.m. at the North Branch Library in Silverthorne. Attendees will hear directly from water experts working across Summit County’s water systems and will have opportunities to ask questions throughout the evening.
The program will begin with an overview of current drought conditions and watershed impacts, followed by presentations from agency and water provider representatives. The evening will conclude with an open community question-and-answer session featuring participating speakers and local water providers.
Event Focus
Presentations will address:
Current drought conditions and outlook for the Blue River Watershed
Status of water operations and reservoir management
Impacts on local rivers, water supplies, and watershed health
Regional coordination among water providers and agencies
Opportunities for community engagement and education
Featured Speakers
Troy Wineland – Event moderator, introductions, and current drought overview
Christina Pearson, Colorado Division of Water Resources
Nathan Elder, Denver Water
Kyle Whitaker, Northern Water
Marc Baldo, Bureau of Reclamation
Nick Harris or Maria Pastore, Colorado Springs Utilities
Will Stambaugh, City of Golden
Local water providers will also participate in the community Q&A session.
Event Details
What: Summit County Drought Response Event
When: Tuesday, June 23, 2026, 5:30–7:30 p.m.
Where: North Branch Library, Silverthorne, Colorado
Who Should Attend: Community members, water users, elected officials, business owners, educators, recreation stakeholders, and anyone interested in learning more about drought conditions and water management in the Blue River Watershed
The Blue River Watershed Group is a community-led nonprofit working to promote, protect, and restore a healthy Blue River watershed through cooperative community education, stewardship, and resource management. We focus on the entire watershed, which drains an area of about 680 square miles covering all of Summit County and portions of Grand and Lake Counties.
Recently, my colleagues at High Country News and I had a bit of a kerfuffle over whether the place on the Colorado River that divides the Upper Basin from the Lower Basin was called Lee Ferry, Lee’s Ferry, or Lees Ferry. Our esteemed copyeditor, Diane Sylvain, was beating herself up for letting a “Lee Ferry” sneak into an article I wrote, when the HCN style guide says it should be “Lees Ferry.”
I pointed out that it was fine, since “Lee Ferry” is an accepted spelling, as is “Lee’s Ferry.” This prompted a sharp rebuke: “Its name is Lees. … Dissenters can use apostrophes on their own time.”
Great. Now I’ve been labelled as a copyedit dissenter. That hurts. But it also sent me down a wormhole on this whole Lee Lees Lee’s Ferry thing, not in an effort to catch any copyeditors out, not as an act of dissent, but just because I’m curious about how we got to where “Lees Ferry” is the accepted spelling, in defiance of apostrophes and, perhaps, history. In the process I learned a lot about one of the coolest spots I know.
Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk
Honestly, I wish we could use a different name altogether for this place of convergence in the far reaches of northern Arizona, something grander and more suited to the landscape, to the condors that ply the skies over the Marble Canyon, to the towering Vermillion Cliffs, and the way the light plays off the stone and dances across the ripply waters of the Colorado River, a dim echo of the geological turmoil that occurred here. Lees Ferry is where the Wingate sandstone of Glen Canyon gives way to the Kaibab limestone of Marble Canyon, where the deep gorge of the Paria River meets up with the Colorado, and — more arbitrarily — where the Upper Basin of the Colorado River meets the Lower Basin.
The geologic transition influenced the topography, making this one of the few places in the region that people and their horses and wagons can reach the Colorado River safely without winches and ropes or parachutes.
Hopi people probably forged the first footpaths to the river from the east, making their way down the giant limestone ramp. Much later, the Escalante-Dominguez expedition of 1776, searching for a return route to Santa Fe, stumbled upon this place, naming it San Benito de Salsipuedes1. “The entire terrain from San Fructo up to here is very troublesome,” the friars wrote, “and altogether impassible when it contains a little moisture from snow and rain.” They also said the land was “pleasingly jumbled,” which seems a perfect descriptor. Some of the Spaniard colonists tried to cross the river, but found that the water was too deep and the current too swift — although they managed to survive. They had to exit the canyon and continue upstream for miles before finding a way across.
A section of Don Bernardo Miera y Pacheco’s map from the Escalante-Dominguez expedition showing what is now known as Lees Ferry.
Paiute guide Naraguts led explorer Jacob Hamblin to the crossing in the 1860s, putting it, figuratively, on the Euro-American maps. And in 1871, a man named John Doyle Lee and his wife Emma settled near the mouth of the Paria and, with a boat abandoned by John Wesley Powell, established a ferry river crossing just upstream from the confluence of the Paria River, naming the place Lonely Dell.
Lee was the adopted son of Brigham Young and had been a Church of Latter Day Saints leader. However, the church excommunicated him after he helped lead the Mountain Meadows Massacre in southwestern Utah, which resulted in the killing of more than 100 non-Mormon white settlers. Whether he chose to go to the remote Lonely Dell to escape prosecution for mass-murder or was exiled there isn’t really clear. Either way, it didn’t work out: Federal marshals arrested him in 1874. In a jail-house interview with the Philadelphia Times the following year, Lee said he had 18 wives, 63 children, 100 grandchildren, and one great grandchild. He also refused to implicate Brigham Young for his role in the massacre. Lee was tried, convicted of first-degree murder, and executed by firing squad in 1877.
Emma Lee continued operations at the ferry until 1879 (meaning she ran it for longer than her husband). Then Warren Johnson and sons ran the enterprise on behalf of the LDS Church, followed by James Emmet and the Grand Canyon Cattle Co., followed again by Johnson and sons for Coconino County. The ferry was finally shut down in 1928 after an accident killed three people. The Navajo Bridge downstream was under construction at the time and would have displaced the ferry, so it would have been abandoned anyway.
John Lee’s notoriety and his conviction didn’t dissuade folks from using his name to refer to the ferry and the place — although it could be argued that it’s named after Emma, not John.
George F. Cram maps from 1879 and 1900 show “Lee’s Ferry” at the confluence of the Paria and the Colorado rivers, but an 1881 version of Cram’s map calls it “Lees Ferry.” Newspaper articles in 1899, 1905, and 1935 refer to the place as “Lee’s Ferry,” as does an 1884 Rand McNally map. It goes like this up until the 1930s, with mapmakers and others generally using both Lee’s and Lees, depending, perhaps, on the typesetter’s fondness for apostrophes. Another theory (albeit likely false): “Lees” is actually the plural form, not the possessive without the apostrophe, so as to give both Emma and John credit for starting and running the ferry. Whatever the case, by the 1940s “Lees Ferry” had edged out “Lee’s Ferry” as most cartographers’ preferred form.
It seems, then, that we have come to the end of this journey, and that “Lees Ferry” is the most acceptable spelling, whether or not it’s grammatically correct. But then along comes “Lee Ferry” to throw it all out of whack.
In 1916, Eric C. LaRue wrote a paper on “The Colorado River and its Utilization” for the U.S. Geological Survey, which is the arbiter of place names. In it, he refers to the place where the Paria River meets the Colorado River as “Lee Ferry.” Except then, five years later, the USGS installed a Colorado River streamflow gage just upstream of the Paria River confluence and called it “Lees Ferry.”
Does this settle it? Nope. Because in 1922, the Colorado River Compact was hammered out. This is the foundational document of the “Law of the River,” and it partitioned the Colorado River watershed into the Upper Basin and Lower Basin states and parceled out its waters to each. The dividing line between the two? Lee Ferry. No, the authors did not accidentally omit the “s” in “Lees.” In its definition-of-terms section, the Compact says: “The term ‘Lee Ferry’ means a point in the main stream of the Colorado River one mile below the mouth of the Paria River.” Yet, the ferry established by John and Emma Lee — along with the USGS streamflow gage — are located above the mouth of the Paria River (because sediment from the Paria can mess up measurements and, possibly, ferries).
A passage from he U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s 1946 report, “The Colorado River: A Natural Menace Becomes a Natural Resource,” in which they use both “Lees Ferry” and “Lee Ferry” and explain the difference between the two. Source: USBR.
While these two points on the map are close enough together to be considered the same place, there is a significant distinction when it comes to accounting for the water in the Colorado River: By putting the dividing point (Lee Ferry) below the mouth of the Paria, it includes the Paria River in the Upper Basin, and includes those flows in the 75 million acre-feet every ten years the Upper Basin is obligated to allow to flow past Lee Ferry. To determine the flow at Lee Ferry, the USGS adds the measurement from the Lees Ferry streamflow gage to the one from the Paria River gage.
It’s about as clear as a sediment-choked Colorado River now, isn’t it? Here it is in a slightly more concise version:
Lees Ferry = Lee’s Ferry ≠ Lee Ferry
Lees Ferry is the most widely accepted term for the geographical location at and around the confluence of the Colorado River and Paria River in northern Arizona. It’s probably derived from “Lee’s Ferry,” as the USGS typically drops apostrophes from possessive place names for reasons unknown. Lees Ferry also refers to the USGS Colorado River streamflow gage located just upstream from the mouth of the Paria River.
Zipline at the USGS Lees Ferry streamflow gage, not to be confused with Lee Ferry, which is the point that divides the Colorado River’s Upper Basin from the Lower Basin. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Lee Ferry is the correct term for the point one mile downstream from the mouth2 of the Paria River that divides the Colorado River’s Upper Basin from the Lower Basin. The Colorado River Compact mandates that the Upper Basin “will not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depleted below an aggregate of 75,000,000 acre-feet for any period of ten consecutive years.”
The streamflow at Lee Ferry is determined by adding the measured flow at the Lees Ferry streamflow gage to that at the Paria River gage just upstream from the Paria River’s mouth.
So, if one is writing about the Upper Basin’s non-depletion obligation, they should use “Lee Ferry.” If they are writing about the historical settlement, the general place, or the streamflow gage, they should write “Lees Ferry.”
🌵 Public Lands 🌲
THE NEWS: MAGA Sen. Mike Lee, of Utah, is back on his anti-public-lands crusade, this time with an underhanded attempt to repeal the wildly popular 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which protects some 45 million acres of U.S. Forest Service land from roadbuilding and logging3. And yes, Mike Lee is related to the aforementioned convicted mass murderer John D. Lee, though I’m sure that has nothing to do with this.
THE CONTEXT:Lee had a busy week. First, he went ballistic on social media after the Trump Defense Department removed the Church of Latter Day Saints from its list of Christian religious denominations (it’s still a recognized faith, but lost the “Christian” label). Apparently he was worried Mormons would be left out of Pete Hegseth’s white Christian Nationalist holy wars.
Then, ol’ Jell-O-Social Lee snuck a last-minute amendment into the bipartisan Wildfire Prevention Act that would not only kill the Roadless Rule, but also prevent a similar rule from being implemented later. The Senate’s energy and natural resources committee voted to advance the amended legislation along party lines. Next it will be subject to a full Senate vote.
Lee’s amendment “just blows up” the bipartisan support for the larger Wildfire Prevention Act, said a clearly dismayed Sen. Martin Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat. The larger legislation, introduced by Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., aims to increase forest thinning and other vegetation treatments as well as prescribed burns on Forest Service and BLM land. It would also guide the agencies to develop strategies for using “livestock grazing as a wildlife risk reduction tool.”
The jury is certainly still out on the efficacy of forest thinning as a wildfire hazard mitigation method. As for livestock grazing? Yeah, probably not, unless all vegetation is eaten down to bare dirt. And once all of the native grasses are gone, it opens the door to cheatgrass, which is especially flammable. Then there’s the question of whether wildfires are really a bad thing — but we’ll leave that debate for later.
Lee claims his motives are pure, and that the Roadless Rule is hampering access for fire prevention and fighting efforts. That’s not true. While the rule generally prohibits roadbuilding and timber harvesting in inventoried roadless areas, it makes exceptions for both if they are deemed necessary for wildfire hazard mitigation or to fight fires. In a public hearing, Sen. Alex Padilla, D-California, pointed out that 240,000 acres of inventoried roadless areas in his state alone had been treated for wildfire hazard mitigation treatment, proving Lee wrong. And the Trump administration, for better or worse, has lagged on forest thinning: A Center for Western Priorities analysis found the Forest Service treated 35% less acreage in 2025 than it did under Biden in 2024.
In fact, building more roads increases access to remote areas. Since most fires are started by humans, it follows that putting more humans into a forest makes it more likely that forest is going to be ignited by an errant spark, cigarette, campfire, or a hot catalytic converter in some tinder-dry grass. So if you really want to prevent wildfires, consider closing some of the thousands of miles of existing roads across public lands.
It’s not clear what Lee hopes to accomplish with these inane, and often futile moves, but what he has done is given strength and energy to the environmental movement. His bid last year to sell off public lands to real estate developers not only flopped, but enlarged the constituency opposing land transfers of any kind. His latest assault on public lands has riled up the hook and bullet crowd, who don’t want roads and timber operations sullying game habitat and streams. And his amendment may very well kill the wildfire bill’s chances at passing, disrupting the efforts of his right-wing colleagues.
Maybe Lee’s inherent extremism forces him to lash out at bipartisanship and pragmatism, in general. After all, he got into the Senate by unseating the late Sen. Bob Bennett, a conservative Republican who lost favor with the more extreme wing of his state’s party by attempting to broker a compromise on public lands in Utah.
It’s tempting to blame Lee’s zealotry on genetics, given that he is the great-great-grandson of John D. Lee, who was convicted and executed for his role in the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, when a group of Mormon militia members killed about 120 gentile emigrants as their wagon train made its way from Arkansas to California. The attack came during a time of heightened tension and conflict between the LDS church and the federal government.
Water and climate scientist Brad Udall speaks at the annual Colorado Law Conference on Natural Resources at the University of Colorado Boulder June, 2014. Udall has been one of the loudest voices calling for audacious leadership on issues of climate and the Colorado River. Photo credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
The problem with that theory is that John D. Lee’s direct descendants — who likely number in the thousands by now — also include Stewart and Morris Udall, influential Western Democratic politicians and public lands champions. Stewart served as Interior Secretary under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and Morris was an Arizona congressman for three decades. Stewart’s son Tom represented New Mexico in the House and Senate, and Mo’s son Mark, a Colorado Democrat, served in the Senate and House as well.
Those Udalls were (and are) Democrats and environmentalists and, according to some takes, “staunch liberals.” But they were also old-school Western politicians who valued pragmatism over ideology and values over party, everything Mike Lee is not. Lee could learn a lot from his kin.
🛢️ Hydrocarbon Hoedown 📈
I’ve written here often about how the Trump administration is handing out drilling permits to petroleum companies like Shriners throwing candy at a parade. Over the last six months, for example, the BLM has issued drilling permits at a rate of 500 per month; you’d have to go back to the George W. Bush administration to see the agency acting at a more rapid pace. But the administration is supplicating itself even more to the fossil fuel industries in a different realm: leasing as much public land to oil and gas companies as they possibly can.
Earlier this month, for example, the Bureau of Land Management auctioned 114,439 acres of public land in Wyoming to the oil and gas industry. Next week, the BLM will put a whopping 160,268 acres in Colorado on the auction block, which could open 174 parcels in Arapahoe, Garfield, Jackson, Mesa, Moffat, Rio Blanco, Routt, and Weld counties — including prime elk habitat — to drilling. And in December, the agency is looking to auction nearly 79,000 acres on the Arizona Strip, despite the fact that there are no known petroleum reserves there.
The public comment period is long gone for those lands, but another planned December sale in Colorado is still subject to your input. This time the BLM is looking to sell 114 parcels on nearly 127,000 acres. The parcels are scattered around the state, with the biggest chunk east of Trinidad, including a block along the Purgatoire River. More than 2,000 acres in and around the HD Mountains in southwestern Colorado — including one big swath south of Chimney Rock — are also going on the block.
Parcels in Archuleta County, Colorado, the BLM plans to put on the oil and gas lease auction block in December (outlined in black). To comment on the proposal, click on this link.
1I’ve seen different translations for “Salsipuede,” including: “you can get out” and “get out if you can.” It seems that the latter is most accurate, given that a “San Benito” is a cassock worn by errant friars. They also called the place “distressful.”
2This is not at a fixed point, as the mouth of the Paria River has migrated from north to south over the years, thanks to sedimentation and so forth.
3The original rule covered nearly 60 million acres, however, as the rule was battered around the courts and political playing field in the years after its implementation, Colorado and Idaho petitioned to create state-specific rules for inventoried roadless areas in their states. That means that any rescission of the rule, whether it’s administratively by the Trump administration or via Lee’s amendment, would not affect Colorado or Idaho roadless areas.
Dairy cow bathing with a shower cap on. Created by Google’s Nana Banana 2.
by Robert Marcos, photojournalist
In terms of actual volume consumed, cattle depend significantly more on Colorado River water than people do. All total, the Colorado River water that’s consumed by the 40 million people who have access to it represents about 18% of the river’s total allocate use. Meanwhile cattle and their forage – specifically alfalfa and hay, use 46% of the river’s allocated use, making livestock the single largest consumer of the Colorado River.1
The Data Breakdown
According to a landmark Nature Communications Earth & Environment study tracking the river’s allocation, the water consumption heavily favors cattle and the production of forage over use by cities. 2
Cattle Feed vs. Cities: Crops like alfalfa and grass hay consume roughly twice as much water as the combined municipal and industrial use of every single city that relies on the river – including massive hubs like Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, and Las Vegas. 3
The Agricultural Monopoly: Irrigated agriculture accounts for 52% of the river’s overall water consumption (which includes natural evaporation). Of that massive agricultural share, 62% goes strictly to feeding livestock. 4
Upper Basin Extreme: In the Upper Colorado River Basin (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming), cattle-feed crops consume 90% of all agricultural irrigation water. This is three times more water than all municipal, commercial, and industrial uses combined in that region. 5
Critical Nuance
Water policy experts note that most of the 40 million people who are said to “depend” upon Colorado River water actually utilize water from a variety of sources: including surface water, recycled water, groundwater, captured rain water, water from state water projects, and in some cases desalinated water. Only five American cities rely solely on Colorado River water: Yuma, Lake Havasu, Bullhead City, Needles, and Green River Wyoming. 6
Las Vegas draws approximately 90% of its water from Lake Mead, making it perhaps the most vulnerable major city to reservoir decline. Phoenix and the broader Phoenix metropolitan area relies on the river for about 40% of its water through the Central Arizona Project canal. Tucson receives most of its water from the Colorado River via the same 336-mile Central Arizona Project. Denver and Colorado’s Front Range cities draw water from the river’s headwaters through transmountain diversions like the Colorado-Big Thompson Project. The Imperial Valley and Coachella Valley in California—among the nation’s most productive agricultural regions—use more Colorado River water than any other area. 7
The new conveyor system moved concrete across the gap where the spillway channel will be to the far side of the dam. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
June 14, 2026
…it remains unclear whether Denver Water will ever be able to fill the reservoir to its new full capacity as a yearslong court battle lumbers on between the utility and environmentalists. Months of mediation between the parties have failed. Denver Water is now asking a federal appeals court to reverse a lower court judge’s 2025 order barring the utility from filling the expanded reservoir and ordering the yearslong federal permitting process to be redone. A panel of three judges for the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is scheduled to hear arguments in the case on July 31 in Santa Fe…
U.S. District Court Judge Christine Arguello in 2024 found that federal regulators violated environmental protection laws when they failed to properly analyze the environmental impact of the project or consider reasonable alternatives to the dam expansion that would be less harmful. She later issued the order against filling the reservoir. Environmental groups argued in court, and in their filings, that regulators failed to evaluate how siphoning more water from the drought-stricken Colorado River would impact the basin as a whole. And the groups charged that they failed to weigh other project options that wouldn’t require the clear-cutting of a half-million trees or risk damage to wetlands. The case has drawn the attention of other Front Range water providers, lawyers from across the county and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — all of which have filed briefs in the appeals case…
While the dam structure itself is complete, at least a year of work remains to fully finish the project, Martin said. Construction crews must finish the spillway and place the final topper foot of concrete on the completed dam structure. Divers will place a gate between the reservoir’s water and the dam’s intake tubes. But the crews on site will diminish in the coming months, from up to 500 workers a day to closer to 100. On the morning of June 3, crane operators already worked to remove from the dam crest the heavy machinery that was necessary to build the main structure.
Roller-compacted concrete will be placed on top of the existing dam to raise it to a new height of 471 feet. A total of 118 new steps will make up the new dam. Image credit: Denver Water.
Ranchers are constantly adjusting to changing weather conditions and seasonal variations by nature. Jay Fetcher, of Fetcher Ranch in North Routt County, has documented snow melt dates for his hay meadows for each of the 75 years the ranch has been in the family, and said the variation is “incredible.” A year with low snowpack and a warm spring is just another condition to adjust to in the ranching world. This year, dryland hay broke dormancy early in Routt County, meaning cutting has already started, about two or three weeks earlier than usual. The low snowpack is not only generating concerns for ranchers with irrigated hay but water concerns for those with livestock. Despite these problems, the general consensus was that this year is expected to be below average, but not detrimental.
“People with dry land probably can expect some reduced yields, but I will say that the rains we’ve gotten over the last couple weeks have brought on grasses in dry land and pasture situation areas better than I would have anticipated,” said Todd Hagenbuch, the county director and agriculture agent for the Colorado State University Routt County Extension…
The second big concern from the lack of snowpack was water for cattle and other livestock. According to Hagenbuch, the snow runoff fills ponds and streams that the animals drink out of, but this year there’s simply no water in a lot of them. For ranchers whose ponds and streams are not filled, they have to haul water in for the livestock.
“That’s the big issue is adequate water for livestock, and it will be all summer,” said Mucklow. Mucklow is currently not needing to haul water on his ranch, but he personally knows several ranchers who are in that position.
Mucklow also said that there is a federal drought program conducted by the U.S Department of Agriculture that compensates ranchers who have to haul water.
Having drinking water for his cattle was also a primary concern for Fetcher earlier in the season. “It was on my mind as we had no snowpack, and the snow was gone,” said Fetcher. On his ranch, they rely on the streams and springs for the cows in the pastures. Fetcher said the recent rains gave him a significant amount of moisture that eased his worries considerably.
The South Platte river basin is pretty much melted out. Below is the June 15, 2026 Snow Water Equivalent in South Platte graph from the NRCS.
Below is the Precipitation Accumulation in South Platte graph from the NRCS for June 15, 2026. Precipitation is at 74% of the median and 58% of the water year median this morning. There are 107 days left in the water year.
General Edward M. McCook, U.S.A. By Mathew Benjamin Brady – Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Brady-Handy Photograph Collection CALL NUMBER: LC-BH831- 935[P&P], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1355339
Smith Ditch Washington Park, Denver
Here’s a look at the 7-Day Colorado precipitation map through June 14, 2026 from the High Plains Regional Climate Center. Precipitation in the South Platte Basin along the Continental Divide of the Americas ranged from 0.00” to 0.30”.
Here’s the 7-Day percent of normal precipitation map through June 14, 2026 from the High Plains Regional Climate Center. Precipitation in the South Platte River Basin along the Continental Divide of the Americas ranged from 0% to 50% of normal.
Here’s the 7-Day Quantitative Precipitation Forecast issued June 15, 2026 by NOAA. Precipitation is anticipated for the mountains of the South Platte River Basin and may total 0.50”.
Below are the 8-14 day outlooks from the Climate Prediction Center, issued June 15, 2026, for temperature and precipitation, for the week starting June 22, 2026. The CPC expects above normal temperatures and above normal precipitation for the mountains of the South Platte River Basin.
Below is the Colorado Drought Monitor map from June 9, 2026. There were one class degradations in Weld and Morgan counties, in the South Platte River Basin. Drought and abnormal dryness covers 99.45% of Colorado. The South Platte Basin is experiencing Abnormally Dry, Moderate, Severe, Extreme, and Exceptional drought conditions.
Colorado Drought Monitor map June 9, 2026.
Below is the Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending June 9, 2026.
Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending June 9, 2026.
Here’s the US Drought Monitor Map from last week along with the one week U.S. change map.
US Drought Monitor map June 9, 2026.
US Drought Monitor one week change map ending June 9, 2026.
The Climate Prediction Center published their latest El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) diagnostic discussion last week. They write: “June 8, 2026, ENSO Alert System Status: El Niño Advisory. Synopsis: El Niño conditions are present and expected to strengthen into the Northern Hemisphere winter 2026-27.“
Official ENSO probabilities for the Niño 3.4 relative sea surface temperature index (5°N-5°S, 170°W -120°W) minus tropical mean (20°N-20°S). The relative index is re-scaled to match the variance of the traditional index. Figure updated 11 June 2026. Higher resolution image/table: https://cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso/roni/probabilities/
On June 2, the Pagosa Springs Town Council heard a presentation from Al Pfister, board president of the Upper San Juan Watershed Enhancement Partnership (WEP), about an application for the state-run Wildfire Ready Action Plan (WRAP) grant. The WRAP grant is a state of Colorado program, with its website describing the program as “locally-developed wildfire ready action plans (WRAP), refining the statewide susceptibility evaluations to reflect local values and community-scale data.” Pfister explained that the total project cost for WEP to do a watershed fire action plan for the Upper San Juan watershed would be about $400,000, and the grant would require a match of about $100,000. He noted the benefits of a WRAP would include identifying critical infrastructure that may be susceptible to risk and developing plans for roads and trails that may be impacted by post-wildfire effects. The fostering of collaboration between planners and emergency management agencies would also be a benefit to the community, he stated.
He explained what a WRAP actually does, saying it fosters stakeholder engagement, collects data and resources for the watershed, and organizes that data into a central database for use down the road. He added that the models could help predict how a watershed will behave in a post-wildfire situation and that the action plan would include both pre-and post-wildfire projects to mitigate damage to the watershed. He added that he was not at the meeting asking for funding at this time, but wanted to give the council a “heads up” that this was coming up.
Yesterday on the way to the airport, I told my friend Brad that a solution another friend provided – to help save the Great Salt Lake, had already been considered and was shot down because of its expense.
You see there’s solutions out there but many of them are unpalatable. Take dairy cows for instance – they’re cute, right? I like to imagine that my beloved Kerrygold butter comes from white cows with big brass bells around their necks, sniffing daisies and running free over miles of rich green fields in Switzerland. If you’re like me and you don’t want to know the facts, just walk away now and turn on the TV because Bob Ross is about to start painting.
The unfortunate fact is that dairy cows emit literally tons of pollution into the air, the groundwater, and soil. Worse – the forage they consume is using up the vast majority of our fresh water supply.
Precision Fermentation to the rescue
Just as vertical agriculture will be used in order to continue to produce some of our crops once the Colorado River’s gone, Precision Fermentation is gearing up to replace dairy cows. It uses genetically engineered microbes (like yeast or fungi) in bioreactors to produce exact, molecular duplicates of dairy proteins (e.g., whey and casein). This process provides revolutionary environmental advantages over traditional dairy farming – dramatically cutting emissions, water consumption, and land use while eliminating agricultural pollution.1
Key Environmental Advantages
Land & Habitat Conservation: Cows require vast tracts of arable land for grazing and growing feed crops, which is a primary driver of deforestation. Fermentation takes place in vertical stainless-steel bioreactors, bypassing the need for pastures. This uses far less land and provides the opportunity to return millions of acres to natural ecosystems that could absorb massive amounts of carbon.
Drastic reductions in greenhouse gasses: Traditional dairy farming is a massive emitter of methane and nitrous oxide. Precision fermentation eliminates enteric fermentation (cow burps) and manure emissions, generating far fewer greenhouse gases than conventional dairy systems.2
The elimination of nitrate leaching: The urine from dairy cows pollutes groundwater with nitrates because it contains highly concentrated loads of urea, a nitrogen-rich compound. When cows urinate on pastures soil microbes rapidly convert this urea into ammonium and then into nitrate through a biological process called nitrification. Because pastures feature localized “urine patches,” the amount of nitrogen deposited drastically exceeds what the surrounding plants can absorb. The excess, highly soluble nitrate does not bind well to soil particles, causing it to leach downward through the soil layers during rainfall or irrigation and accumulate in the underlying water table.
A rainstorm over southern Colorado. Photo: Abby Burk
Click the link to read the article on the Audubon website (Abby Burk):
May 7, 2026
Drought in Colorado isn’t abstract—it’s shaping decisions right now, from headwater streams to major reservoirs. And this year, the signals are hard to ignore. At the same time, conversations about water are tightening. There’s more concern and more sensitivity—especially around anything tied to water availability.
Snowpack across the Upper Basin has dropped to record or near-record lows. By early April, snow water equivalent in many areas fell to a fraction of normal, and snow cover reached the lowest levels observed in the satellite record. At the same time, this winter ranked among the warmest on record—reducing snow accumulation, accelerating melt, and increasing evaporative losses. These patterns are consistent with the impacts of climate change across the Colorado River Basin, where rising temperatures are diminishing snowpack reliability and reducing overall runoff efficiency.
June 1, 2026 seasonal water supply forecast summary.
Those conditions are now reflected in forecasts. Runoff across the Upper Basin watersheds is expected to be among the lowest on record, with sharply reduced inflows into Lake Powell. Meanwhile, Lake Powell and Lake Meadcontinue to sit near historic lows—leaving very little buffer in the system.
Even where spring storms have brought some relief, the underlying deficitremains. Dry soils, warm temperatures, and reduced snowpack mean less water ultimately reaches rivers.
This is not just a dry year. It’s a system under compounding stress.
Why This Matters: Ecological Drought
Ecological drought helps explain what those conditions mean on the ground.
That definition matters because it expands how we think about drought.
It’s not just about precipitation. It’s about how drought moves through a system:
From snowpack to soil moisture
From soil moisture to vegetation and habitat
From ecosystems to the services people depend on
Modern droughts are also changing. They are becoming hotter, longer, and more widespread, with impacts amplified by both climate conditions and human water use.
And those impacts don’t stay contained.
Ecological drought is fundamentally about connected systems. When ecosystems cross critical thresholds—losing wetland function, shifting vegetation, or degrading habitat—those changes feed back into water supply, with wide-ranging implications to agriculture, wildfire risk, and community stability.
What it Looks Like Right Now
In Colorado, ecological drought is showing up as a shift in timing, duration, and connectivity.
Even with recent moisture:
Peak river flows are shorter and less effective
River baseflows drop earlier
Floodplains connect less often
Wetlands and side channels dry sooner
These aren’t always dramatic changes—but they compound, especially when they occur in back-to-back years, reducing recovery time.
That’s a critical shift. Drought is no longer just episodic. It’s increasingly persistent, with ecosystems spending less time in recovery and more time under stress.
Birds Are Early Indicators
For birds, these shifts are immediate.
Migratory species depend on wetlands that function like stepping stones across the landscape. When those wetlands shrink or disappear earlier, habitat becomes compressed.
Riparian birds like the Northern Yellow Warbler and Song Sparrow rely on dense, water-supported vegetation during breeding season. Earlier drying reduces both cover and food availability.
And beneath all of this, food webs shift. Aquatic insects emerge differently under drier conditions, creating mismatches with nesting cycles.
Birds are often the first to show us what’s changing—but they’re not the only ones affected.
People Are In This System, Too
Ecological drought makes one thing clear: this is a single, connected system responding together. The same processes that shape habitat also shape outcomes for people. Soil moisture influences forage conditions for agriculture. Water timing and availability affect the reliability of community supplies. River flows support recreation and local economies, while connected floodplains help reduce risk and support recovery after disturbance.
This is what we mean by ecosystem services—the benefits people receive from functioning natural systems. When those systems are strained or begin to break down, those benefits decline as well.
What This Means for the Basin
The science is pointing to something bigger than a single dry year.
The Colorado River Basin is increasingly operating in a warmer, drier regime, where snowpack is less reliable and variability is higher. Recent conditions mirror some of the most consequential low-flow years in recent history—and they are becoming more frequent.
At the same time, current operating guidelines are set to expire, and the decisions made now will shape how the system responds to these conditions going forward.
What’s needed is a shift—from reactive, year-to-year crisis management to more durable and flexible operations; from short-term fixes to sustained investment in long-term resilience; and from fragmented efforts to stronger alignment across states, Tribes, and water users.
There is growing recognition that solutions must include conservation, efficiency, infrastructure, and watershed health—including restoration that improves how water is stored and functions across the landscape. Without that kind of alignment, risks will continue to compound—ecologically, economically, and socially.
A Clearer Lens for What’s Ahead
Ecological drought is not a new agenda. It’s a way to understand how drought actually works in today’s world—how water shortages move through ecosystems, how impacts cascade, and how those impacts ultimately reach people.
It connects snowpack to rivers, rivers to habitat, and habitat to communities. And it underscores something essential: when ecosystems are pushed beyond their limits, the consequences don’t stay ecological—they become systemic.
That’s why this matters now. Because the question in front of us isn’t just how we respond to this year’s drought. It’s whether we’re building a system that can function—ecologically and socially—under the conditions we know are coming (or are here).
Public bicycle parking near W. 39th & Tennyson June 12, 2026.
Councilmember Sandoval’s staff reached out to the Denver Department of Transportation and Infrastructure. I received a response from DOTI which basically said that Veo can use the public bicycle parking but is encouraged to not fill it up so that it is also available for other bicycle riders.
Public bicycle parking near W. 41st & Tennyson June 12, 2026.
Public bicycle parking near W. 43rd & Tennyson June 12, 2026.
Public bicycle parking near W. 44th and Tennyson June 12, 2026.
As the Veo vehicles get distributed around the city they are ending up in the neighborhoods.
Veo vehicle on the street in front of my house June 12, 2026. I’m okay with this as it helps Denver’s carbon goals. I don’t need the parking space.
An archipelago of ancient bioherms living on the Great Salt Lake’s southeastern side. Photo by Robert Marcos.
“This day we arrived in the valley of the great Salt Lake. My feelings were such as I cannot describe. Everything looked bloomy and I felt heart sick.”Lorenzo Young, Brigham Young’s younger brother
by Robert Marcos
Utah’s Great Salt Lake sits at dangerously low levels
The Great Salt Lake is currently locked in a critical structural decline, hovering in a “serious adverse effects” range at nearly seven feet below its minimum healthy level. Decades of excessive human water diversions for agriculture and rapid urban growth, coupled with a warming climate, have stripped the lake of over half its historic water volume. This trajectory directly parallels the Aral Sea disaster in Central Asia, where Soviet-era river diversions for cotton farming completely decimated a massive inland sea, turning it into a barren desert of toxic salt flats. If Utah fails to drastically alter its current water policies and consumption, the Great Salt Lake faces the exact same fate of complete ecological collapse.1
The Source of Half of the Wasatch Front’s Precipitation
The potential disappearance of the lake would critically disrupt the regional water cycle because half of the convective precipitation along Utah’s heavily populated Wasatch Front relies on the lake’s evaporation. As a terminal lake, its vast surface area fuels a vital localized hydrological sub-cycle, generating the famous “lake-effect” storms that dump immense snowpacks into nearby mountains. Recent research from Utah State University confirms that if the lake dries up completely, regional precipitation will face an approximate 50% reduction. This would trigger a devastating, self-perpetuating drought loop: less lake surface area means fewer storms, which shrinks mountain snowpacks and further dries the rivers needed to refill the basin.2
Potential for a Widespread Respiratory and Cardiovascular Crisis
The long-term consequences of a completely dried lakebed would be catastrophic for Utah’s public health, economy, and environment. With nearly 1,000 square miles of exposed lakebed, heavy winds would unleash massive, toxic dust storms laced with naturally occurring arsenic, mercury, and other hazardous minerals directly into the Salt Lake City metropolitan area. This airborne pollution would trigger widespread respiratory and cardiovascular crises, rendering the region largely uninhabitable. Furthermore, the collapse would wipe out the lake’s multi-billion-dollar mineral extraction and brine shrimp industries, decimate the habitat of 10 million migratory birds, and permanently cripple Utah’s iconic multi-million-dollar ski industry due to the permanent loss of winter snowpack.3
The country’s most severe drinking water problems, from high levels of contaminants and foul-smelling water to pipe breaks, low water pressure, and expensive rates, are generally found in the thousands of small systems that serve dozens of people up to a few thousand.
These systems are public health crises waiting to emerge, said Denise Schmidt, director of water at the Environmental Policy Innovation Center, a group that works with water utilities on infrastructure funding.
Though some are perpetually struggling, small water systems, especially those serving low-income communities, are encountering a fresh set of economic and political hurdles in their quest for safe drinking water.
In recent industry surveys, small utilities report that accessing financing to repair and upgrade their systems is becoming increasingly difficult. Their credit ratings are deteriorating, making borrowing more expensive. The rates they charge customers are not covering the cost of providing water service, thus digging a long-term financial hole. Extreme weather is burdening them with unexpected and daunting repairs to their reservoirs, treatment plants, and pipe networks. Federal water quality mandates for PFAS and lead pipe replacements, though both providing public health benefits, are an added cost.
Small systems, in effect, are walking a precarious path. They are trying to survive today while also staring at a gathering wave of necessary replacements to aging pipes and treatment plants.
The Trump administration and Republican allies in Congress, meanwhile, are casting more obstacles. The White House’s tariffs have increased the price of equipment and materials. And the House’s fiscal year 2027 budget would cut the main federal water infrastructure program by about a quarter.
“I don’t think people realize how big this wave is and how much it’s going to cost,” said Blake Anderson, president and founder of Mogollon Water Management, a company that operates and maintains 11 small water systems in northeast Arizona. “The utilities that were built in 1970 now are 56 years old. There was a lot of development that happened back then. And all of these waves are going to start crashing.”
Negative Outlook
Crashing sounds are gaining strength.
Last year, for the first time, S&P Global, a credit rating agency, lowered the financial outlook for small water and wastewater utilities from stable to negative. Large and medium utilities remained stable.
The increased pessimism for small water utilities is due to stiffening financial headwinds, said Malcolm D’Silva, an associate director at S&P, which rates roughly 1,700 water and wastewater utilities. Ninety-one percent of the agency’s credit downgrades last year were for small systems, he said. Credit downgrades increase the cost of borrowing.
D’Silva narrated a story in two parts. One is the “expense squeeze.” Costs are rising across the board. First from the post-Covid inflation and supply chain shortages, and now from the Trump administration’s tariffs. Half of the utilities that responded to the American Water Works Association’s annual survey said that tariffs had “moderate or considerable” pressure on equipment and materials costs. At the same time, revenue is not keeping up. In the same survey, only 43 percent of utilities said they charged customers enough to fully cover service costs.
The second part is managerial. Small systems typically do not have the technical expertise, staff, or budget to analyze their infrastructure and apply for funding in the way that larger utilities do. Some might keep only paper records of their pipe networks. The smallest systems have volunteer board members or staff that might also oversee the fire department and run a business.
The positive news is that last year might have been the bottom for small systems, D’Silva said. S&P is seeing some improvement in the first half of 2026, with the rate of downgrades slowing. More utilities have instituted rate increases to fill budget holes, D’Silva said.
Federal Question Mark
Just as one hole is closing, however, another might be opening.
Every year the White House lobs a spending plan toward Capitol Hill and members of Congress decide whether those numbers are a good idea. For fiscal year 2027, the Trump administration proposed a roughly 90 percent cut to the two state revolving funds, the main federal sources of water infrastructure funding.
Congress usually sustains the state revolving funds, which have broad support. But this budget cycle could be different.
A House spending bill cuts the revolving funds by about 24 percent combined. The House Appropriations Committee approved the bill on June 3.
The bill provides $1.2 billion for the Clean Water State Revolving Fund (27 percent cut) and $911 million for the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund (19 percent cut). The Senate has not yet introduced its version.
The Environmental Policy Innovation Center, or EPIC, tracks state revolving fund expenditures and project proposals in 15 states. At Circle of Blue’s request, EPIC analyzed small system and very small system requests for drinking water funding. By EPA’s definition, small systems serve fewer than 10,000 people and very small systems fewer than 3,300.
The data indicate high demand from these systems. Some 61 percent of projects seeking drinking water funding were small or very small. However, only about a third of these proposed projects advanced to the next step in the funding process. This “highlights significant unmet infrastructure needs,” EPIC analysts wrote.
Water infrastructure funding needs and the status of the revolving funds were a point of discussion during a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on May 20.
Jessica Kramer, the head of the EPA Office of Water, defended the administration’s proposed cuts. Her justification: the states have $14.8 billion in uncommitted state revolving funds, those sitting in coffers for more than a year without being allocated. That money should be distributed first, she argued.
“It doesn’t do any good to get the money to the states if the states aren’t actually getting it out to the communities that need it,” Kramer said.
Schmidt, the EPIC water director, had a different view. Two issues are being wrapped into one, she said. If state administrative capacity to review and approve applications is the problem, then focus on that. But don’t use it to rationalize disinvestment in an otherwise successful decades-long infrastructure program.
“Uncommitted does not mean unneeded,” Schmidt said. “Cutting moves us farther from the solution.”
The View from Arizona
The financial pressures that populate D’Silva’s and Schmidt’s spreadsheets are the on-the-ground reality for Blake Anderson.
Anderson is the president and founder of Mogollon Water Management, a company that operates and maintains 11 small water systems in the White Mountains of northeastern Arizona. Mogollon oversees the smallest of the small – systems ranging in size from 29 service connections to roughly 1,100.
These are not the sophisticated, professionally managed systems that you would see in Phoenix or Flagstaff.
“They’re volunteer board members and they’re aware that there’s some sort of money for water out there but they don’t know where it is, or if they do know, they aren’t sure how to go about applying and accessing it,” Anderson said, describing the challenges for small systems in securing grants and loans.
“Most of them have never done a capital improvement project over $50,000,” he added. “And so there is not institutional knowledge in how do you manage a federally funded program or a state funded program? How do you go about securing engineers or contractors? What are the proper procurement practices?”
One school of thought for solving the small systems problem is that there should be fewer of them. By connecting with larger systems or forming regional partnerships, small utilities could grow into medium-sized utilities with favorable economics: more customers to cover expensive infrastructure costs, better credit ratings, money to hire knowledgeable staff.
Research from Manny Teodoro at the University of Wisconsin indicates that the target size for utility consolidations should be about 20,000 service connections, or about 60,000 people. At that point the most serious water quality violations become far less common and operating costs become more reasonable.
Where might funding for consolidations come from? States like California have dedicated programs, though even those are facing funding shortfalls. Another source is federal: the state revolving funds that House Republicans want to cut.
At the Yampa Town Board meeting last week, Andi Schaffner with the Bear River Reservoir Company presented plans and cost estimates for a Stillwater Reservoir project that would lead to removal of its storage restriction. The plan consists of two phases involving installation of a strain and a sand filter to alleviate seepage into the dam’s embankment, the primary concern that led to the storage restriction designation…Currently, the town of Yampa owns 112 shares in Stillwater Reservoir, or about 2% of the reservoir. Phase 1 of the project consists of a blanket drain and filter collar and is estimated to cost $730,717. Phase Two of the project will be stabilizing the channel and the removal of the culvert and the flume, at a total estimated cost $209,874. Schaffner said that the team at Bear River Reservoir Company has spent hours on engineering and studies at the reservoir in order to determine the best solution for the dam. “We finally opted for the least expensive fix, which is what we’re working on right now,” said Schaffner…The project has received a significant amount of grant funding despite higher than anticipated bids, including a $202,000 loan from the Colorado Water Conservation Board. This loan was the primary expected cost for the town of Yampa, and is expected to be approved with an increase to $404,000 ahead of the project’s notice to proceed with the contractor on July 13. The project is expected to be completed by the end of October. The Colorado Water Conservation Board loan is 30 years with 1.85% interest, or $3.40 per share per year. For the town of Yampa’s 100 or so shares, this amounts to $381 a year. Schaffner did not expect any more expenses besides an assessment of the shares which amounts to about $5.
Official ENSO probabilities for the Niño 3.4 relative sea surface temperature index (5°N-5°S, 170°W -120°W) minus tropical mean (20°N-20°S). The relative index is re-scaled to match the variance of the traditional index. Figure updated 11 June 2026. Higher resolution image/table: https://cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso/roni/probabilities/
Synopsis: El Niño conditions are present and expected to strengthen into the NorthernHemisphere winter 2026-27.
El Niño conditions developed over the past month, as shown by above-average sea surface temperatures (SSTs) across the central to eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. The latest weekly Niño-3.4 index value was +0.7ºC, with the westernmost (Niño-4) and easternmost (Niño-1+2) indices at +0.7ºC and +2.1ºC, respectively. The equatorial subsurface temperature index (average from 180º-100ºW) decreased in the past month, but significantly above-average subsurface temperatures remained in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific. Low-level westerly wind anomalies and upper-level easterly wind anomalies were evident over the central equatorial Pacific. Convection was slightly above average over the central and east-central equatorial Pacific and was near or below average over Indonesia. The traditional and equatorial Southern Oscillation indices were negative. Collectively, the coupled ocean-atmosphere system reflected the onset of El Niño conditions.
The North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME) average, including the NCEP CFSv2 , forecasts El Niño to intensify into the Northern Hemisphere winter 2026-27. High confidence in El Niño is also linked to anomalously high oceanic heat content and expanding westerly wind anomalies across the equatorial Pacific Ocean. There is a 63% chance of a very strong El Niño during November-January that would rank among the largest El Niño events in the historical record going back to 1950. Even very strong El Niño events do not lead to the expected impact everywhere, but stronger events can more significantly tilt the odds in favor of expected outcomes (see CPC outlooks for probabilities of seasonal anomalies). In summary, El Niño conditions are present and expected to strengthen into the Northern Hemisphere winter 2026-27.
Elkhead Reservoir is taking center stage following a winter of historically low snowfall, leaving water managers with hard decisions and water users with a high degree of uncertainty. Courtesy Photo/Colorado Parks & Wildlife
In response to extreme drought conditions throughout northwestern Colorado, the Colorado River District, in partnership with the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB), is offering up to 420 acre-feet of supplemental agricultural water from Elkhead Reservoir for irrigators in the Yampa River Valley. Modeled on the successful joint CWCB-River District program implemented in 2021, this effort will provide additional supplies during critical times of agricultural production.
“The drought conditions this year have been exceptional and unpredictable,” said Colorado River District’s Director of Asset Management, Hunter Causey. “And it’s that kind of unpredictability that hits small family farms and ranches the hardest. The Yampa Valley, the western slope, and our entire region depend on local agriculture to drive economies, produce local food, and preserve landscapes. While a program like this cannot solve the drought problem at large, we can be strategic in how we use our available supplies and support our constituents wherever possible.”
“The challenges posed by this year’s drought call for creative solutions and strong partnerships,” said Lauren Ris, CWCB Director. “This project reflects what can happen when local water users and water management agencies work together to respond to emerging needs. We’re pleased to support this collaborative effort in the Yampa Valley and remain committed to working with communities across Colorado to explore creative, locally driven solutions that help address drought impacts and strengthen drought resilience.”
Program Structure:
Water will be allocated using a lottery with an initial round of allocations of up to 50 AF per applicant, totaling 420 AF.
Any water remaining after the lottery will be awarded equally to initial round applicants that expressed a need beyond 50 AF. If there is any remaining water, it will be available on a first-come, first-served basis and will need to be contracted at no cost with the District.
Successful participants in the lottery will need to enter into a no-cost contract with the River District for direct delivery and/or use of the District’s Elkhead water through administrative exchange.
In the event there is a mainstem Yampa River call and to the extent that lessees are out-of-priority, water will be released at the diversion rate plus transit losses.
Water will be available for delivery or exchange beginning on July 10, 2026.
At current agricultural water marketing rates, the total project will cost $18,375. On June 4, the Colorado River District Board of Directors agreed to make $4,594 available from the Board’s previously authorized CFP expenditures for the District’s 2026 Drought relief effort. The CWCB has committed to providing the remainder of the funds – approximately $13,781.
Applications are due by June 26th, and a lottery will be conducted for the initial round of contracts on July 1st. Available augmentation water is limited. Those interested in applying should contact the Colorado River District’s Director of Asset Management, Hunter Causey, at hcausey@crwcd.org or visit HERE for more information.
The IID’s former Watermaster, Merlon Kidwell, makes a presentation to a group studying the Colorado River crisis. Photo by Robert Marcos.
by Robert Marcos & Brad Barham, PhD
In 2022 – while conducting a study of the Colorado River crisis, Dr. Brad Barham – a Professor of Agricultural Economics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, two of his undergrads and I watched a Powerpoint presentation given by the Imperial Irrigation District’s Watermaster, Merlon Kidwell. Kidwell retired last year after fifty years with the IID. Besides the IID’s hospitality that day, there were two fundamentally-important things we’ve never forgotten –
1. The IID maintains 3,000 miles of delivery canals and agricultural drains that convey 3.1 million acre feet of Colorado River water every year. This amount represents about a quarter of the Colorado River’s average annual 12.5MAF output since 2000.1 Under its historic contracts with the federal government, the IIDis exempt from paying for the water it receives, it does however pay for the operation, maintenance, and repair of the 80-mile long All-American Canal, its own internal water delivery systems, and a portion of the cost of maintaining the Imperial Dam.2
2. Similarly, the IID does not charge farmersfor the water itself. It charges farmers (who are connected to the IID’s water delivery system) an annual fee for that connection, plus a flat $20 per acre foot for the costs associated with the delivery of their water. 3
IID employees demonstrate an automated canal gate to a group studying the Colorado River crisis. Photo by Robert Marcos.
Meanwhile, the San Diego County Water Authority pays a wholesale price that’s between $700 and $1,200 per acre-foot for that same (untreated) Colorado River water.4 With such a disparity in water prices it seems reasonable to ask if the IID could both conserve water and lower the price paid by municipal users by raising the price paid by farmers.5
It doesn’t take an economist to understand the “law of demand” which says: “As the price of goods or services go up, people will generally use less of it”. Today with Lake Powell hovering just above the dead pool level it’ has become crucial’s more urgent than ever to understand why the price of water that’s provided to Imperial Valley farmers hasn’t gone up considering the increased scarcity of Colorado River water.
For decades now the Imperial Irrigation District has demonstrated that they prefer the carrot to the stick – in other words the IID has provided farmers with financial incentives and the technology that’s required in order to conserve water. The IID also cannot raise water prices because of laws established by California Proposition 218.
California’s Proposition 218 was passed by voters in 1996 in order to protect taxpayers by requiring voter approval for local tax increases and restricting property-related fees to the actual, proportional cost of service delivery 6. Since the IID receives Colorado River water for free, they can only charge farmers $20 per acre-foot to recover the costs associated with the water’s conveyance – but not for the water itself. Consequently, to legally increase agricultural water rates, the IID must prove higher service expenses through a formal cost-of-service study, issue a 45-day advance notice to landowners, and then begin the “majority protest” process. Because water, sewer, and refuse collection fees are legally classified as “property-related fees,” the Imperial Irrigation District board could pass the rate increase automatically unless a majority of affected stakeholders vote “no” by submitting written protests.7 In this context the “affected stakeholders” are the legal landowners of the agricultural parcels that are subject to the water fee, and the ratepayers, tenants, or farmers who are directly responsible for paying the water bill under their lease terms. 8
However the cost of these (very successful) conservation measures – especially the cost of paying farmers to fallow some of their fields, are very high: about $250 million per year (or $300-450 per acre foot depending on conservation practices used). Given how Western water laws work, and the addition of Proposition 218, that is currently the most feasible and the most immediate path to water conservation in the Colorado River system.
A lower cost, more sustainable solution would require changing the rules that guarantee specific volumes of water at only the cost of conveyance to farmers across the basin. That will be a challenging transition, and will probably require federal legislation to be achieved.
Summer thunderstorms, with their hit-or-miss nature, dominated precipitation patterns across the U.S. this week. The greatest departures from normal precipitation occurred across portions of the central and southern Plains, West Texas, New Mexico, and the Midwest. Areas of southern Louisiana, northern Alabama, and western Kentucky also recorded well-above-normal precipitation. The East Coast remained dry, with the exception of Florida’s Atlantic coast. Much of the West also remained dry, with only portions of the Pacific Northwest and southern California recording near- to above-normal precipitation.
Temperatures for the week were below normal across the Southeast, with parts of Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina averaging 3–6 degrees below normal. Portions of West Texas, southeast New Mexico, and the Pacific Northwest were also below normal. The greatest temperature departures occurred in the central and northern Plains, where portions of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Minnesota experienced temperatures 9–12 degrees above normal.
Drought signals across much of the southern U.S. remain mixed, with wetter short-term conditions developing while long-term deficits persist despite the recent pattern change. In the Plains, impacts have primarily affected winter wheat and forage production, and areas that have remained dry continue to experience elevated fire danger. In the Southeast, water supply concerns and fire danger remain significant, particularly in Florida…
Temperatures were generally warmer than normal across the region, with portions of the Dakotas and western Nebraska averaging 9–12 degrees above normal. Above-normal precipitation occurred in southern Nebraska, northern Kansas, northern Nebraska into southern and central South Dakota, and across much of northern North Dakota. Areas along the foothills of the Rocky Mountains from Montana through Colorado remained largely dry.
Drought intensity eased where the heaviest rains fell in Nebraska, Kansas and South Dakota, and drought was eliminated in portions of northern Kansas and southeast Nebraska. Southeast South Dakota continued to miss significant rainfall, and the combination of short- and long-term dryness allowed moderate and severe drought to expand. Degradation also occurred in eastern Colorado, where extreme drought expanded in the north and moderate drought expanded across east-central portions of the state. Extreme drought was reduced slightly in southern Colorado following recent rainfall…
Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending June 9, 2026.
Above-normal precipitation was limited to a few locations, primarily along the Pacific Northwest coast and across southern and eastern New Mexico. Temperatures were above normal across much of the region, with departures of 6–9 degrees above normal across Nevada, Utah and western Colorado. Cooler-than-normal temperatures occurred in the Pacific Northwest and eastern New Mexico, where departures averaged 3–4 degrees below normal.
Although some areas have recently received additional precipitation, a winter characterized by above-normal temperatures and below-normal snowpack continues to affect the region and will likely influence conditions through the summer. Conditions deteriorated in Oregon, where moderate, severe and extreme drought expanded across much of the eastern portion of the state, although southern Oregon experienced localized improvements to moderate drought.
Elsewhere, western Montana benefited from recent rainfall, allowing severe and extreme drought to improve. Extreme drought also improved across much of eastern Utah, while southern and eastern New Mexico saw additional improvements following precipitation totals exceeding 200% of normal…
Temperatures were mixed, with Oklahoma and Arkansas averaging 2–4 degrees above normal. Meanwhile, much of West, south and east Texas, along with eastern Mississippi and Tennessee, averaged 2–4 degrees below normal.
Most of the region received some precipitation, although eastern Arkansas, northern Mississippi, southern Texas, and southwest Oklahoma were the driest locations. The continuing wetter pattern resulted in additional improvements, with drought eliminated across more of central Texas and eastern Oklahoma. Drought also eased across much of the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, although widespread severe and extreme drought persisted.
Long-term dryness in far south Texas continues to improve, and improving local conditions combined with short-term data supported the removal of remaining abnormally dry designations. Improvements also occurred in Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee, where recent wet conditions are beginning to offset longer-term drought indicators…
Looking Ahead
During the next 5–7 days, the West is expected to remain quite dry, [ed. emphasis mine] while the southern U.S. and portions of the Midwest have the greatest potential for above-normal precipitation. The northern Plains and Southwest are forecast to receive less than 1 inch of precipitation.
Temperatures are expected to remain warmer than normal across the West, with departures exceeding 10 degrees above normal in Nevada and portions of the Pacific Northwest. Most of the remainder of the country is expected to experience near- to slightly below-normal temperatures.
The 6–10 day outlook shows the best chances for above-normal temperatures will be across the West and Southeast, especially in areas centered on Nevada and much of South Florida. Above-normal chances for below-normal temperatures will be centered on the Great Lakes and Midwest, with the highest probabilities over Michigan.
Above-normal chances for below-normal precipitation will be over much of the northern Plains and Upper Midwest, as well as northern areas of California, Nevada, and into Oregon. Above-normal chances for above-normal precipitation will be mainly in the southern and eastern U.S., with the highest probabilities in South Texas and into the lower Mississippi River Valley.
US Drought Monitor one week change map ending June 9, 2026.
The period of March through May 2026 ranked as the second warmest spring in records going back to 1895 for the contiguous U.S., according to NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). Across the past 131 years, only 2012 had a warmer spring, said NCEI in its monthly analysis released on June 8.
The nationwide average temperatures for both spring 2012 (56.17 degrees Fahrenheit) and 2026 (55.79°F) are both more than 1.5°F above any rivals in the 131-year database. Spring 2026 was the hottest on record for Arizona, Colorado, Texas, and New Mexico, and 38 of the 48 contiguous states had a top-five hottest spring (see Fig. 2).
Figure 1. Average temperature for the contiguous United States for each spring (March-May) from 1895 through 2026. (Image credit: NOAA/NCEI)
Figure 2. Temperature rankings by state for the contiguous United States for each spring (March-May) from 1895 through 2026. (Image credit: NOAA/NCEI)
Exceptional warmth this year in both March (warmest on record) and April (3rdwarmest on record) – including a phenomenal heat wave that brought summerlike temperatures in late March to much of the central and western U.S. – was only partially tempered by a less extreme but still unusually mild May (28th warmest on record). Over the longer-term, the contiguous U.S. remains locked in a long-term warming pattern fully in line with human-caused climate change.
The 12-month running average temperature for the Contiguous U.S. continues to be at a record high.
For the nation as a whole, spring 2026 ranked as the 37th driest on record, with a contiguous-U.S. average of 7.43 inches. After a parched March (8th driest), precipitation came in closer to average nationwide in April (46th wettest) and May (55th driest). However, that moisture was largely focused in the Midwest and Northeast. Michigan experienced its wettest spring on record, and it was a top-ten wettest spring for Wisconsin, Ohio, and Indiana. In contrast, it was a top-ten driest spring for Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, and Virginia (see Fig. 3).
Figure 3. Precipitaton rankings by state for the contiguous United States for each spring (March-May) from 1895 through 2026. (Image credit: NOAA/NCEI)
For the contiguous U.S. as a whole, May 2026 had the second-worst May drought conditions in contiguous U.S. history, with a Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) of -6.93. The only worse May occurred in the Dust Bowl year of 1934 (a PDSI of -7.03). The year 2026 has now had three of the top-10 months for worst contiguous U.S drought conditions since records began in 1895:
Aug 1934: -8.42 Jul 1934: -8.09 Mar 2026: -7.82 Apr 2026: -7.49 Sep 1934: -7.21 Jun 1934: -7.18 Oct 1934: -7.16 May 1934: -7.03 Jan 1940: -6.97 May 2026: -6.93
Figure 4. Departure of snow liquid water equivalent for the winter of 2025-2026, ending in April 2026. Units are in mm; 25.4 mm = 1.0 inch. The vast majority of the Western U.S. saw below-average snowfall, while much of western Canada had much above average snowfall. (Image credit, used by permission: Jihan Bhuiyan, Cornell)
For much of the mountain West, more “no” than snow
The March heat wave dissolved any hope of a respectable snow season for large parts of the western United States. From April into early May, large swaths of the Rockies had record-low snow levels for the season, as much of what was already a skimpy snowpack melted weeks ahead of average.
12-month running average snowfall for the Contiguous U.S. It's as if warming temperatures mean less snowfall. Who knew?
Taking the edge off slightly was a notably moist period over parts of the Southwest in mid-May. That system brought some of the heaviest snowfall of the entire winter to areas that included the Front Range of Colorado (Fig. 5).
Figure 5. The heaviest snowfall of winter 2025-26 fell over leafed-out trees on May 6 in Boulder, Colorado. The May 5-6 storm total was 11.3 inches, capping the least-snowy winter in the 36-year history of Boulder’s current official observing station. (Image credit: Bob Henson)
In California, substantial rain and mountain snow in midwinter helped to keep put of the state’s reservoirs in better shape than one might assume from the early melt-off from unusual warmth.
Most of northern and central California remain within about 10% of normal, while much of the south state is well above normal, mostly on the basis of heavy rains in Nov and Dec.
The situation is considerably more dire across the Desert Southwest. Lake Powell and Lake Mead, which together serve thousands of farmers and millions of residents in six states, were both at less than 30 percent of capacity by early June.
Figure 6. Active storage in 46 Colorado River Basin reservoirs between January 1, 1999, and late May 2026. The progressive decline in storage shown above, despite occasional replenishment during wet years, is referred to as the “ratchet effect.” Data for these reservoirs is available at https://www.usbr.gov/uc/water/hydrodata/reservoir_data/site_map.html. (Image credit: University of Colorado)
The lack of remaining Southwest snowpack means runoff will be limited this summer, only worsening the situation. There’s at least some chance that the fast-evolving El Niño event – which has a greater-than-60-percent of reaching “strong” or “very strong” levels, according to NOAA’s intensity outlook issued in May – will bring generous moisture to the Southwest later this year into early 2027.
Bob Henson
However, scientists at the University of Colorado cautioned in a June 1 press release that even a very wet year such as 2023 would likely forestall major long-term trouble by only about two years, while another dry year could lead to “run-of-the-river” conditions that would hasten depletion and lead to devastating consequences.
“Both scenarios demonstrate the need to adopt significant additional measures topermanently decrease consumptive uses across the entire basin,” the researchers warned.
Bob Henson is a meteorologist and journalist based in Boulder, Colorado. He has written on weather and climate for the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Weather Underground, and many freelance… More by Bob Henson
Heat-emitting Phoenix-area data centers next to already hot neighborhoods. Good thing a lot of those houses have swimming pools. They’ll need them. Source: Data Center Waste Heat as an Emerging Urban Thermal Hazard: First Field Measurements of Neighborhood-Scale Air Temperature Impacts, by David J. Sailor, Soroush Samareh Abolhassani, Eli P. Martin.
🤖 Data Center Watch 👾
Phoenix is hot, thanks to its location and elevation; it’s getting hotter, due to climate change, all that concrete and steel and glass and the urban heat island effect, and heat output from thousands of overworked air conditioning units; and it’s bound to get even hotter thanks to … data centers.
A team of Arizona State University researchers recently published a report on data center waste heat as an “emerging thermal hazard.” What they found will make folks who live near the facilities sweat, literally.
Data centers do a lot of work crunching information to stream movies, power AI queries, make those Tik Tok videos, and keep you doomscrolling, and work creates heat, meaning that data centers need constant cooling. As the paper’s authors put it, “virtually all electrical energy consumed by information technology equipment is ultimately converted to sensible heat,” and data centers consume huge amounts of electricity. More and more data centers, especially in arid areas, are using air cooling technology, which means taking that heat away from the equipment and putting it elsewhere — i.e. outside the facility, creating thermal plumes.
The researchers determined that these thermal plumes are migrating into adjacent neighborhoods and heating them up, with downwind air temperatures measuring up to .9° C warmer than upwind temperatures. The data centers’ excess heat was detected up to 500 meters, or about 1,600 feet, away from the facility. This is troubling given that many data centers are being constructed in or next to residential neighborhoods. The massive Cyrus One server farm complex in Chandler, Arizona, for example, is about 600 feet from single-family residences.
The authors write:
Keep in mind that this study only looked at the warming effect of on-grid facilities. Many of the new hyperscale data centers in the pipeline are planning to install power generation infrastructure, usually natural gas-fired, on-site, most likely radiating even more heat than the data centers alone. Putting your data center in Wyoming or Alaska rather than Phoenix or Las Vegas is making more and more sense.
⛈️ Wacky Weather Watch⚡️
Will it be the Sultry Summer of 2026 for the Four Corners region? The long-range forecasts sure do look that way. The good news is that it’s looking more and more likely that the monsoon will be potent in the Southwest, with the National Weather Service predicting above average precipitation over the next three months. The bad news is they are also calling for higher-than-normal temperatures for the entire West during that time period, which could offset some of the benefits of the rain.
But whether it’s normally hot or abnormally so, the extra moisture will be especially welcome this year. Many an irrigation ditch is likely to go dry in the next month or so, thanks to extra-low streamflows, and regular afternoon downpours could help farmers get their crops to harvest, so long as the storms aren’t too severe and don’t produce softball-sized hail stones or whatever.
Once the monsoon arrives, it should help dampen wildfire hazard a bit (although the lightning that always comes with it will certainly spark many a blaze). In the meantime, however, big swaths of the West are expected to have above normal wildland fire potential for the next month or so.
And blazes are flaring up here and there, including a small conflagration atop Hermosa Mountain north of Durango that is eerily reminiscent of the 416 Fire in 2018: This winter’s snowpack resembled 2018’s, the 416 broke out on June 1, and the starting points are in the same general area.
The current fire is burning in a hard-to-reach area at higher elevation and was definitely not started by sparks from the railroad. It’s also growing relatively slowly, having reached just 18 acres as of the evening of June 4.
***
Emery Peak near Silverton, Colorado, on June 2, 2026. Andy Gleason photo.
I don’t know about y’all, but the crazy winter and spring has screwed up my perception of the water situation. When skiing-obsessed snow-nerd Andy Gleason sent me this photo, I was somewhat surprised to see that there was any snow at all left in the high country, especially enough to carve a few turns on. When I see that the Animas River is running above 800 cfs right now, I think: That’s not so bad! And when I see Lake Powell’s surface level inching upwards rather than downwards a temporary feeling of relief washes over me.
Then I remember: It’s the beginning of June. The north facing high mountains should be coated with several feet of snow, not a few inches. The Animas should be running at 3,000 cfs, at least, and in a good year still would be approaching its peak. And Lake Powell’s inflows should far exceed releases at this time of year, bringing the surface level up by several feet or more, without requiring Flaming Gorge to be drawn down to “devastating” levels.
That bout of summer-like weather at the end of March set my internal season clock a couple of months ahead, so that I expect the conditions to be like they typically would be in late July. So once that split second of disorientation, and accompanying optimism, passes, there’s a sort of letdown.
Because, yes, the conditions are grim. And it was one of the worst winters, in terms of snowpack, on record. But there are reasons not to despair. While the snow was dismal, precipitation accumulation for the water year so far has been far less so, keeping extreme drought at bay. Temperatures cooled after the March heat spell, a series of storms kept the forests from becoming kindling, and desert rains summoned the wildflowers. Patches of globe mallow, sego lily, primrose, and prince’s plume brightened up the burnished sands of Utah, and my friend and I rode our bikes through a purple-hued super bloom near Farmington.
The land may be dry, but it still offers beauty, solace, and refuge from these trying times. [ed. emphasis mine]
Redrock reflection on the Dolores River near Gateway, downstream from the confluence with the San Miguel. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Last month I wrote about the despair I felt as I witnessed the virtually dry Dolores River bed a mile or so above its confluence with the San Miguel River. Neither the dryness nor the despair are new, though they both came early this year.
For decades, the wild Dolores would swell up into a raging torrent during the spring runoff. Then, during the summer, Montezuma Valley irrigators would divert nearly all of the stream’s flow, reducing these lower reaches to little more than a trickle come late July and August.
McPhee Dam started holding back those spring flows in the early 1980s. Like any dam, this one robbed so much life from the river. Yet this one also promised to give some life back to the beleaguered river by mitigating the impacts of all of that irrigation. The idea was to capture enough of the runoff to fill up the reservoir in the spring. During summer, the storage could be drawn down to serve irrigators, while most or all of the river’s natural flow could be sent through the dam to the Lower Dolores. It was like putting the river’s manic-depressive flows on lithium.
It worked, for a while: The massive spring runoffs, known to hit upwards of 11,000 cfs, were tempered, but enough water still flowed downstream to scour beaches and preserve Snaggletooth’s whitewater snarl. And for the first time in a century the lower Dolores didn’t run dry in July. In fact, the year-round flows were enough to build and sustain a cold-water fishery for trout in the first dozen or so miles below the dam and a habitat for native fish below that. Meanwhile, the Dolores River water was able to reach far more irrigators, including the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and former dryland farmers out Dove Creek way.
It appeared to be a win-win situation. Then, beginning in 2000, things went awry as a long-term drought gripped the region. More often than not, the dam’s operators held back almost all of the water running into the reservoir to allow them to continue delivering something to the irrigators. And even then the reservoir still isn’t full enough to deliver all of the water that’s allocated: This year the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and irrigators outside of the Montezuma Valley Irrigation Company will receive just 13% of their allotted amount. The river below the dam, of course, is the biggest loser, receiving virtually nothing.
And yet, not all is lost. The Dolores River Boating Advocates recently put out a postdetailing the grim forecast for this year, but also reporting on a new Colorado Parks and Wildlife effort to help fish in the Lower Dolores: pulse flows. They tested the concept last year by holding water back behind the dam for a few days by reducing release flows to 24 cfs, then bumping up releases to 75 cfs create a slight surge of water to reconnect downstream pools, to induce enough current to keep the water cooler, and allow fish to move around again.
Graph showing the pulse flows last summer as they reached Bedrock. So far this spring flows there have been below a dismal 10 cfs. Source: USGS.
The Boating Advocates write:
Of course streams also need water, and it’s so scarce this year that the base flows will be just 5 cfs, or one-fifth of last year’s base flows. And so the sorrows continue for the poor Dolores River.
And here’s the thing: closed loop water systems are 100% possible. They just require a bit more investment.Similarly, powering data centers off clean energy is also 100% possible. In some cases, it’s even cheaper!This disastrous overconsumption is not a technological failure: it’s a policy one.
Glen Canyon Dam forms Lake Powell on the Colorado River near Page, Ariz. Officials from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation are holding back water and releasing water from an upstream reservoir to prop up levels in Lake Powell. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Federal officials announced on Thursday that they plan on using a shorter-term framework for future Colorado River management so they can be more responsive to changing conditions and reservoir levels.
Acting Commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Scott Cameron said at an annual conference on water policy that the agency will be using a 10-year framework, issuing new operational guidelines every two years. In the absence of a seven-state deal for sharing shortages and managing reservoirs, river management now falls to the federal government — an outcome nearly everyone had hoped to avoid.
“We would love to have a 20-year deal or a 30-year deal but, frankly, we haven’t even been able to get the seven states to agree on what a two-year deal would look like,” Cameron said. “Given the highly unusual hydrological situation in the basin … we think it makes sense to take a second look at decision making every couple of years.”
As part of the required process under the National Environmental Policy Act, Cameron said Reclamation will release a final Environmental Impact Statement with its “preferred alternative,” in mid-to-late summer. It will lay out a more detailed 10-year operations plan for the nation’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, and will include short-term operational guidelines for 2027 and 2028. He said the plan provides a stable, transparent and adaptable framework for river management.
Scott Cameron is the acting commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. He announced Thursday the federal agency is planning to release a river management plan in mid-to-late summer that includes a 10-year framework, with new operational guidelines every two years. CREDIT: U.S. BUREAU OF RECLAMATION
“We want to pay more attention to what’s actually happening in the river and what’s happening in terms of the elevation of the reservoirs,” Cameron said. “We want to manage conservatively during low inflow periods and hopefully be able to transition to recovery as conditions improve across the basin to keep the system stable and resilient.”
Cameron left the door open for a return to future management by the states and added that if they eventually come to an agreement, it could supplant the federal plan.
Cameron’s update came at the Colorado Law Conference on Natural Resources at the University of Colorado Boulder, hosted by the Getches-Wilkinson Center and the Water & Tribes Initiative. Water managers from around the basin gathered at the Wolf Law School in the midst of one of the worst droughts on record that threatens the water supply for about 40 million people in the American Southwest. Record hot temperatures and one of the worst snowpacks since measuring began resulted in streamflows that peaked much lower than normal and, in some reaches, a month early. Reclamation’s most recent projections put spring runoff into Lake Powell at just 800,000 acre-feet, which would be 13% percent of normal and the lowest on record.
On top of the abysmal hydrologic conditions, the basin is also in the midst of a management crisis. The Upper Basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) and Lower Basin states (California, Arizona and Nevada) after two years of negotiating have failed to reach a consensus on how they will share future cuts and have blown past deadlines to come up with a plan. The current guidelines, which have determined shortages and releases since 2007, expire at the end of the year. But for all intents and purposes, water managers need a new plan in place by the start of the new water year on Oct. 1.
Some of the problem still centers around the 1922 Colorado River Compact, which allocated half of the river’s flows (7.5 million acre-feet a year) to each basin. But this framework no longer applies under 21st century conditions, which has seen flows decline by 20% due to climate change. Despite indications a year ago that the states were moving to a supply-driven model based on each year’s snowpack and available water — rather than a fixed allocation of water — a new management framework the states can agree on has remained out of reach.
Colorado representative Becky Mitchell and Nevada representative John Entsminger speak at a conference on Colorado River policy in Boulder on Friday, June 5, 2026. The federal government is set to release a plan for future river management in mid-to-late summer. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Beyond the band-aid
The feds’ operating plan for the first two years may be based on a proposal submitted by the Lower Basin states in early May, in which they propose to cut another 700,000 acre-feet of water per year through 2028, on top of the 1.5 million acre-feet they had already promised. California and Arizona will each take another 300,000 acre-feet of cuts and Nevada will take a cut of 100,000 acre-feet. The proposal does not include any mandatory conservation from the Upper Basin.
Federal officials responded in a May 28 letter with adjustments to make the proposal feasible, including the requirement that the Lower Basin states help pay for the 700,000 acre-feet of conservation. In the past, conservation programs have depended heavily on federal funding.
Becky Mitchell, who represents Colorado in the negotiations among the states, said during a Friday panel that the feds’ plan was a starting point but raises some concerns. Constantly renegotiating an operating plan every two years would be hard to fathom, she said.
“How do we fund and finance if we’re constantly renegotiating?” Mitchell said. “And how do we create the certainty that the 40 million people deserve?”
The feds have already stepped in this spring to prevent the worst consequences of the exceptionally dry winter and keep water levels at Lake Powell from falling below the threshold for making hydropower at Glen Canyon Dam. They are releasing up to 1 million acre-feet from Flaming Gorge Reservoir to prop up Powell and holding back Powell releases by about 1.5 million acre-feet. Cameron conceded, however, that these are temporary, stop-gap measures meant to address a critical situation.
“I think we succeeded in making everybody unhappy and everybody mad, which maybe means we’re doing the right thing in terms of Lake Powell,” Cameron said.
The Upper Basin states, including Colorado, are exploring ways to contribute water to a pool in Lake Powell as a means of maintaining higher water levels and an insurance policy against drastic cuts. But officials have not budged from their position that the Upper Basin is limited in what it can do and that cutting Lower Basin overuse is the primary solution to the Colorado River crisis.
Brad Udall, a water and climate scientist at Colorado State University whose presentation kicked off the conference, asked water managers not to waste this unique opportunity to redo 100 years of law and policy around how to manage a critical resource. And he directed a plea at the Upper Basin, saying that they, too, are part of the problem.
“We need everybody with a shoulder to this wheel,” Udall said. “We understand that the Upper Basin is different. We understand that they don’t have (large upstream) reservoirs and that every year people suffer. But we need you to help. Please help us.”
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
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 InkStain website (John Fleck):
June 1, 2026
I’ve been on a “Colorado River sabbatical” of late, but I took a peek last week at Reclamation’s latest 24-month study. Holy moly things have gotten bad since the last time I looked!
Those not on sabbatical already know all of this, but to keep Lake Powell above a surface elevation of 3,500 feet, Reclamation is:
increasing releases out of Flaming Gorge on the Wyoming-Utah border
dropping releases out of Lake Powell to 6 million acre feet this year
Even with those two “hail Mary” moves, Lake Mead is projected in the “most probable” scenario to drop to elevation 1,020 by summer 2027. Under the “minimum probable” forecast, Mead drops all the way to elevation 1,008 in 2027.
We are on the brink, as a group of my colleagues explains in a new analysis out this morning (Monday June 1, 2026), of a system crash:
Even a wet year, my friends conclude, would only provide a short reprieve from the need to significantly reduce consumptive use.
Building on a similar analysis done last September (I was a co-author on that one), the authors attempt to overcome one of the shortcomings of the traditional Colorado River accounting systems, which is to treat any water above “dead pool” as usable storage. This is not the case, with clear do-not-cross lines in the reservoirs that are maintained for technical reasons well above the bottom, defined by my colleagues as…
One of the reasons for my “sabbatical” is, frankly, an agonized frustration with the abject failure of Colorado River governance at the basin scale, and a desire to turn my attention to the local level, which is where the problem solving responsibility seems to rest right now. Each community needs to be having a serious conversation right now about the specifics of its Colorado River water supply, and how it intends to go about using less. Blaming other people for using too much isn’t particularly useful at this point, we seem to have chosen to hand that set of questions (the rule-based part of “who is entitled to how much”) over to the courts, and who knows what that process holds. We know the answer for everyone is “use less water”, and each community needs to be getting on with that conversation.
Saguaro cactus in Southern Arizona. Image provided by Storyblocks.
The forecasted “Super El Niño” is expected to delay the start of Southern Arizona’s monsoonal season but by August it could trigger heavier, more intense rainfall, severe flash flooding, and unusually high humidity during its peak. While El Niño historically weakens global monsoons, its impact on the Desert Southwest creates unique atmospheric shifts for the June 15 to September 30 season.1 Climate experts from the National Weather Service and the University of Arizona predict the season will unfold across three distinct phases: 2
A DELAYED AND DRIER ONSET
Early in the summer, El Niño’s atmospheric patterns alter the subtropical jet stream, creating persistent westerly winds across the Southwest.
Moisture Suppression: These westerlies act as a wall, driving out early moisture from the south and delaying the typical shift to monsoonal wind patterns.
Increased Fire Risk: A slower, drier start to the monsoon prolongs the summer dry spell, elevating the risk of wildfire ignition from dry lightning storms.
HIGH-INTENSITY PEAK (August into September)
Tropical Cyclone Activity: The incredibly warm ocean temperatures of a Super El Niño fuel severe hurricane activity off the Pacific coast of Mexico.
Tropical Moisture Pumps: While the hurricanes themselves rarely hit Southern Arizona directly, they act as massive atmospheric pumps, steering heavy tropical moisture straight into the Desert Southwest.
Rain Bombs and Flooding: As this extra moisture collides with the desert heat, it increases the likelihood of high-intensity storms, widespread flash flooding, severe dust storms, and heavy rainfall that could reach up to 150% of normal averages in some areas.
A SHIFT TO MOIST HEAT (after September)
High Humidity: Southern Arizona is famous for its dry heat, but the influx of Pacific moisture will cause humidity levels to skyrocket.
Stubbornly High Temperatures: Even with localized cloud cover and rain mitigating the most extreme temperature spikes, daily highs will remain brutally hot—frequently ranging between 100°F and 115°F. The added moisture will result in a heavy, oppressive “moist heat” rather than a dry one.
Video and photos of fish-shaped intaglio (geoglyph) damaged by border wall construction contractors at Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. Footage taken from Mexico. Credit Russ McSpadden / Center for Biological Diversity
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral website (Debra Utacia Krol). Here’s an excerpt:
June 7, 2026
Key Points
Border wall construction is damaging or threatening sacred Indigenous, cultural, and environmentally sensitive sites in four states along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The Department of Homeland Security has waived environmental and historic protection laws to expedite construction of a two-layered structure.
Sites affected include a 1,000-year-old O’odham geoglyph in Arizona and Kuuchamaa, a sacred mountain to Kumeyaay tribes in California.
The recent destruction of a 1,000-year-old sacred O’odham geoglyph in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge is only the latest example of damage and desecration to religious, cultural and environmentally sensitive sites caused by construction of the border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. At least one Catholic shrine, two mountains held sacred by Kumeyaay bands in California and Catholics on the New Mexico-Texas state line, and wetlands prized as life-giving water sources for wildlife and humans have all suffered damage or are in the work zone. The Las Playas Intaglio holds great cultural and historical importance to O’odham and other Indigenous peoples in the Southwest. The intaglio, or geoglyph, was created by scraping the top darker layer of earth from the desert floor, resulting in a 200-foot-long rendition of a fish with its nose pointing south. Some tribes say it served as a directional marker along a trail that led to the Gulf of California and its marine resources, including salt deposits…
The Department of Homeland Security is filling in the gaps in the border wall not completed during President Donald Trump’s first term. The agency is also building a second wall parallel to the first in areas deemed to be at higher risk of smuggling and human trafficking. The Trump administration has moved to waive environmental and historic protection laws and regulations in its rush to build the walls. In April 2025, the Department of Homeland Security issued waivers to expedite construction in Arizona and New Mexico, based on a 2005 law that gave the agency the authority to waive laws to expedite barriers and roads at the U.S. border…The agency has also ignored directives such as sites being included in the National Register of Historic Places, the United States’ official list of historic and archaeological resources deemed worthy of protection…
Members of the 16 Kumeyaay tribal communities in Southern California and Baja California sounded alarms when the government began blasting chunks off Kuuchamaa, also known as Mount Cuchuma or Tecate Peak. The 3,885-foot-high mountain straddles the U.S.-Mexico border and is about 4 miles west of Tecate, Baja California. Kumeyaay people consider Kuuchamaa their most sacred mountain. According to the Kumeyaay Diegueño Land Conservancy, a nonprofit founded in 2005 to protect areas important to the Kumeyaay peoples, the peak is the namesake of a powerful Kuseyaay, or religious leader…Like other cultural and sacred places, the government has waived environmental laws and disregarded Kuuchamaa’s listing in the National Register of Historic Places. The 1992 listing, which Bergueno said was led by her elders, was the first-ever Native religious site to be listed…
Quitobaquito Springs was heavily damaged as the first border wall was built in 2020. At least two endangered species, the Sonoyta pupfish and Sonoyta mud turtles, are endemic to the springs and found nowhere else on the planet. Their survival was on the line as construction crews pumped water and damaged wetlands. The spring is also a lifeline for other wildlife in one of the hottest, driest parts of the Sonoran Desert. Biologists and environmentalists are already mapping strategies to rescue Sonoyta mud turtles from the pond should CBP damage it again. A small population of the Sonoyta pupfish was brought to a new desert stream habitat at Biosphere 2 in October 2025 to provide a backup to the critically endangered species.
Underwater until recently, a biodiverse ecosystem has quickly re-established in this particular side-canyon of Glen Canyon. Along with a whole host of plant life, I’ve documented crayfish, otters, beavers, deer, coyotes and tracks of mountain lions and bobcats throughout Glen Canyon’s wet tributaries. Photo credit: Elliot Ross/Glen Canyon Institute (GlenCanyon.org)
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
June 7, 2026
The tops of trees, dead since Lake Powell’s levels rose decades ago, poked through mud and ooze at the silent mouth of Davis Gulch, where the side canyon met the reservoir’s still waters. But just around a few bends in the sandstone walls, life began to appear. First, a fuzz of inch-tall greenery. Then, knee-high cattails and primrose, followed shortly by small cottonwoods and willows, then by towering gambel oaks. The silence of the canyon mouth was replaced by the soft rush of a creek, bird songs, and the constant cacophony of dragonflies and gnats. Scattered throughout the canyon, an ecologist, bug scientists, birders and advocates for Glen Canyon were working to document the ecosystems emerging as Lake Powell’s water levels have dropped after decades of drought and water overuse.
“Hiking the side canyons is like going through ecological time travel,” said Eric Balken, the executive director of the Glen Canyon Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to restoring the canyons inundated by Lake Powell, as he hiked up Davis Gulch…
The falling water levels have also steadily revealed long-submerged canyonlands: red slot canyons, sandstone amphitheaters, waterfalls that tumble over slickrock cliffs. The reemerging landscapes provide a new opportunity to study life in Glen Canyon, which sits just upstream of the iconic Grand Canyon. Little scientific work was completed in Glen Canyon before the federal government flooded it — an event seen by environmentalists then, and now, as an unmitigated ecological disaster, a paradise lost…But for a new generation of advocates, regaining paradise seems possible as the reservoir’s shorelines recede, bringing more than 100,000 acres of rugged terrain out of the water. The Glen Canyon Institute and canyon activists for years have argued that Lake Powell should be drained and the Colorado River allowed to again flow freely through Glen Canyon. Now, their argument is also bolstered by the fact that Lake Powell is emptying — whether Colorado River managers like it or not. For those advocates, recent years have provided a rare chance to study life in the emerging canyonlands and to make their case to basin leaders who are contemplating the long-term future of Colorado River management…
A map of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area produced by the U.S. National Park Service. The map shows the shoreline of Lake Powell as it was when it was full — the water level is now more than 170 feet lower. Click image to enlarge map. (National Park Service via Wikimedia Commons)
April 2023 photograph showing the Colorado River as it enters Lake Mead. Photograph by Robert Marcos.
By Robert Marcos, photojournalist
Arizona, California, and Nevada are actively preparing for a future that may provide little or no Colorado River water through a combination of aggressive local conservation, infrastructure changes, and unprecedented collective agreements. On May 1st – driven by the imminent expiration of current river guidelines, the states finalized a joint Water Stabilization Plan to collectively slash usage by up to 3.2 million acre feet. J.B. Hamby, the Chairman of the Colorado River Board of California, said, “We’re putting forward additional measurable water contributions for the system. Without that, the system will continue to decline.” 1
ARIZONA: Agricultural sacrifices and groundwater banking
Arizona holds the lowest-priority water rights among the major Lower Basin states, which means that it takes the earliest and deepest cuts during shortages.2 Under multi-state and federal plans, Arizona has offered up to 760,000 acre-feet in voluntary reductions, nearly half of what typically flows through the Central Arizona Project canal.3 Central Arizona agriculture has borne the brunt of these reductions. In counties like Pinal, farmers have already been forced to operate at half their normal capacity, switching to high-tech drip irrigation or leaving fields fallow. 4
The state is shifting heavily toward managing its underground aquifers, heavily regulating new real estate developments that cannot prove a 100-year assured water supply independent of dwindling surface flows.
An article in the Manataba Messenger said, “In Phoenix, city leaders are getting ready for the possibility of Colorado River cuts by checking out alternative water sources and long-term reserves. Phoenix relies on several water sources, including the Colorado River through the Central Arizona Project. As future reductions become more likely, the city’s planning mirrors a broader trend across the Southwest: big cities are no longer seeing Colorado River shortages as just a distant threat. They’re preparing for a future where less river water might be available, and backup supplies might be needed to keep up with demand.” 5
CALIFORNIA: Agricultural efficiency and urban recycling
As the largest consumer of the river’s water, California has historically avoided the earliest shortage cuts, but now it has begun to force its massive agricultural districts to adapt to having less water.6 The Imperial Irrigation District which rceives 3.1 million acre feet of Colorado River water every year, is expanding its efficiency programs. On January 20th the IID Board of Directors approved the continuation of the District’s Deficit Irrigation Program for 2026. This program motives local growers to voluntarily pause irrigation on select perennial forage crops (such as alfalfa, Bermuda grass, and Klein grass) during peak summer water use windows. Growers are then financially compensated for their reduced crop yields.7
On May 15th the IID Board of Directors announced an amendment that would leave an additional 100,000 acre feet of Colorado River water in Lake Mead. The amendment increased the IID’s existing three-year conservation agreement capacity from 700,000 acre-feet to 800,000 acre-feet, in addition to the 106,111 AF conserved for Lake Mead in 2023. Cumulatively these programs are slated to add about 12 feet of elevation to Lake Mead by the end of the year.8
TheMetropolitan Water District of Southern California, is investing billions of dollars into advanced local wastewater purification systems to reduce coastal cities’ reliance on imported river water –
Pure Water Southern California: MWD has partnered with the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts to develop Pure Water Southern California, aiming to produce up to 150 million gallons of recycled water daily for 15 million people. MWD has allocated $150 million within its capital investment plan for the planning and final design of the project’s first stage, and has financed and operates a 500,000-gallon-per-day demonstration facility (the Grace F. Napolitano Innovation Center) to test advanced purification techniques before full scale construction.9
The Local Resources Program: MWD has provided financial subsidies to its 26 member public and private water agencies based on the volume of recycled water they successfully produced, and it has invested over $1.5 billion since 1990 to support more than 100 localized recycling and groundwater recovery projects across Southern California. Additionally, the MWD funds localized conversions, such as transforming unused sewer lift stations into active recycling plants for urban irrigation.10
Commercial and Research Grants: MWD has awarded grants to public and private entities to evaluate next-generation water-saving devices and urban reuse technologies. It has funded studies on innovative Membrane Bioreactors that are paired with reverse osmosis to reduce the energy and financial costs of recycling wastewater.11
NEVADA: Focused on a new lower-lake pipeline and a war on turf
Nevada has the smallest allocation of the river but is widely considered to have established a blueprint for urban climate adaptation, having spent decades in preparation for the kind of low-water scenario the Southwestern US is now facing. 12
Low Lake Level Infrastructure: Nevada’s water manager, the Southern Nevada Water Authority has completed a “third” intake and a specialized low-level pumping station at Lake Mead. This will allow Las Vegas to continue drawing water even if Lake Mead drops below the deadpool level where water can no longer flow downstream to California and Arizona.13
A War on Turf: Nevada has passed strict laws mandating the removal of “non-functional turf” (decorative grass) at commercial, multi-family, and government properties. It also bans outdoor water features and prohibits new grass in future developments. 14
Indoor Water Recycling: Las Vegas treats and returns nearly 100% of its indoor wastewater back to Lake Mead. This cycle earns the state “return-flow credits,” stretching its small allocation significantly further than other states. 15
A large crowd listens to a presentation at the University of Colorado Boulder law school about securing powerful new water rights on Colorado’s West Slope to benefit the health of the Colorado River. Scott Franz/KUNC
June 5, 2026
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
Water negotiators, river enthusiasts, Native tribes and lots of lawyers convened at the University of Colorado Law School on Thursday to take stock of the future of the dwindling Colorado River.
Here are five things KUNC’s water and environment reporter learned on the first day of the gathering.
There’s a thirst for treating the river as more than something to be consumed, and monetized and stretched out
Dale Sinquah, a tribal council member for Arizona’s Hopi tribe, is among a growing number of people who view the Colorado as a living being that should have the same rights as a person.
“If you look at it at that level and you allow it to, then it starts changing the ways in which you think about it, and maybe your actions,” he said.
Late last year, the Colorado River Indian Tribes of Arizona and California voted to give their namesake waterway the same legal rights as a person, saying the ‘living being’ deserves more protection while it’s being threatened by overuse and drought.
Sinquah said he had mixed reviews of the discussions at the water conference halfway through the first day.
“I’m kind of wondering if we’re stuck in that mode where you know personal interest (is winning) instead of how do we fix this as a whole, as a group,” he said. “It works better when you work together as a group.”
There’s still no finalized federal plan for the river yet, and the White House could have the final say…
Scott Cameron, the acting commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation overseeing the operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead, said the Interior Department is expecting to publish a short term operating plan for the reservoirs by “mid-summer.”
He said the plan would have to be renegotiated every two years and could be replaced at any time with one that the seven states can agree on.
“The good news is that the White House is very interested in what’s going on with the Colorado, so we’ll probably have to brief the White House on the (Secretary of the Interior’s) decision before it’s final,” Cameron said.
U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, center, speaks during a gathering with governors from six states in the Colorado River basin on Friday, Jan. 30, 2026. Photo credit: Lowell Whitman/Department Of Interior
River negotiations are ongoing, but details are scarce…
First governors from all seven states in the river basin were summoned to Washington, DC, ahead of the Feb. 14 deal deadline they missed.
Then, after that didn’t work, came the Microsoft Teams meeting.
Scott Cameron, the acting commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum recently talked with the seven governors again on the virtual meeting platform.
“The fact that he is trying to wrangle his gubernatorial colleagues twice, I think, indicates how seriously Secretary Burgum takes what’s happening in the Colorado River,” Cameron said.
However, no deal has yet to materialize as the states remain at an impasse, and some in the upper basin have called for a different mediator to intervene.
June 1, 2026 seasonal water supply forecast summary.
One thing is clear.
Forecasts for the river have gotten worse in recent months. And there was an acknowledgement that the status quo is not sustainable.
Graphic via Holly McClelland/High Country News.
Could the feds get more involved in the management of upper basin reservoirs like Flaming Gorge? The answer is murky…
The audience asked Cameron, the Bureau of Reclamation official, about his thinking on how Interior should manage four large reservoirs in the upper basin that are collectively known as the upper initial units (they include Flaming Gorge on the Wyoming-Utah border).
Flaming Gorge is currently being partially drained so water can be sent down to Lake Powell so it doesn’t get so low that it stops producing hydropower.
Cameron said the Interior Secretary could exert more control over the reservoirs in the future in the event of an “emergency.”
“And what an emergency is, I think, is probably in the eyes of the beholder,” he said. “Now, you put four or five lawyers in a room. You’ll probably get nine answers on how much discretion the secretary has or doesn’t have in the upper initial units.”
Parts of the lake that have only recently been uncovered are full of old beer cans and other relics of boating escapades, including sunken boats.
But deeper down, Podmore shared photos of Native artifacts that have survived decades of being submerged.
New ecosystems are also taking shape.
The Colorado River Basin spans seven U.S. states and part of Mexico. Lake Powell, upstream from the Grand Canyon, and Lake Mead, near Las Vegas, are the two principal reservoirs in the Colorado River water-supply system. (Bureau of Reclamation)
Doug Kenney at the Getches-Wilkinson Center 2026 Conference on the Colorado River June 5, 2026. Photo credit: Allen Best
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
June 7, 2026
Doug Kenney, principal organizer of annual gathering in Boulder, talks about how the growing tensions among basin states pose challenges in setting the agenda
The Colorado River has always had a magnetic appeal to the public consciousness. John Wesley Powell and his crew were instant national heroes after they emerged from the Grand Canyon in 1869.
That interest continues to this day. Bathtub rings are an absorbing visual, an easy way to communicate declines in the two biggest reservoirs in the basin, Mead and Powell. The river is being hammered by a warming climate and archaic governance of the shared resource.
This provides much to chew on, and that discussion continued again on June 4-5 at the Colorado River Conference hosted by the Getches-Wilkinson Center at the University of Colorado Law School. Organizers reported 373 people were registered to attend in person and another 132 remotely, a record for both. This surpasses a record set last year.
Afterward, Big Pivots sat down with Doug Kenney, the principal organizer of the conference, to take stock of what had just transpired. He directs the Western Water Policy Program and chairs the Colorado River Research Group.
What year did this conference begin? What was the thinking that gave birth to it?
I believe 1983 was the first one. This was mostly a creation of Larry MacDonnell, (the first director of the Natural Resources Law Center, a position he held from 1983 to 1994).
Larry pursued a dual mandate of researching key issues but also of trying to involve the public and other constituencies. A conference was a natural thing to do. We are an educational institution.
I’ve done the last 30 or so of them, but Larry got it started,
It seems like two or three, maybe three years ago, the tribes became a major presence in attendance and on the agenda. How did this come about?
Mostly through our professional networks. We knew people who were associated with the (Colorado River Basin) Water and Tribes Initiative. They wanted to broaden their reach and their influence. At the same time, we’ve here always wanted to involve tribal interests in what we do, going back to the work of David Getches and Charles Wilkinson.
We decided we’d try co-hosting a conference. It’s a partnership, and like all partnerships, it grows over time. But it’s working pretty well, I think.
Am I wrong? Was I missing something? I didn’t notice much of tribal presence in the agenda or participation until just a few years ago.
We’d usually maybe have one tribal speaker sprinkled in the program somewhere, but it was pretty hit and miss, in part I think because you kind of need a critical mass of involvement from the tribal community for other tribes to feel like this is a place that they’d be taken seriously and that they’d be welcomed. It wasn’t a slow linear growth to where we’re at today. There was a pretty dramatic shift four or five years ago.
How new is the Water Tribal Initiative?
They’ve been around I think for about a decade. They’re co-managed by Matt McKinney, who wasn’t here, and Daryl Vigil.
Native America in the Colorado River Basin. Credit: USBR
It’s not a national thing, but the Colorado Basin has 30 different tribes. That’s a pretty big number of tribes to keep track of. It’s a network as much as it is anything, and every so often they try to get together. They consider this conference their big convening. They also get to get together at CRWUA (Colorado River Water Users Association, which holds an annual conference during December in Las Vegas).
They have also produced a few research reports. This week they talked about their report on tribal sovereignty. And they have particular initiatives within the Water and Tribes Initiative, such as universal access to clean water. They are pushing, mostly through federal legislation, to provide assurances that all tribes have access to clean water.
Do they have a strong benefactor?
I don’t think so, but they have a very broad base of funders and supporters. A lot of water agencies, a lot of people, and a lot of organizations that know tribes have been treated poorly and that tribes have legitimate interests in the basin but (know) that many tribes just don’t have the resources to do this without some assistance.
As I’ve attended most years since 2002, I have noticed some ebbs and flows. There were some empty seats this afternoon, but the seats were mostly occupied through the first day and a half, and that’s somewhat different than, say, 10 years ago. What explains the ebb and flow?
I attribute that mostly to two things: one is this partnership with the Water and Tribes Initiative. The other thing is the fact that we’re talking about the Colorado River, which by every measure is in a crisis. It’s easier to get people’s attention when you’re talking about a crisis than when you’re talking about something that’s still not that serious. That’s part of it.
We used to be in another building. This is clearly a better facility for audience and speakers alike. That helps us attract a larger audience. We’ve had good foundation support, good funders. It takes a lot of money to do this, but we’ve had funders that see value in it. That has allowed us to make this a bigger event.
The conference is always the first week of June, so when do you begin rough-drafting the agenda?
Usually January. In some years it’s easier than others. This year was the most difficult. It was the easiest year in terms of attracting an audience. The hardest year in terms of putting the program together.
Everyone’s mad at each other, and everyone is — I can’t tell you all the back stories. Becky Mitchell said something today about how it’s hard to negotiate and prepare for litigation at the same time. She’s right. And I was thinking to myself, it’s hard to bring people together to talk at a conference while acknowledging the fact that they’re all mad at each other, and some of them are about to sue each other, and some can’t be in the same room with each other because they’re that angry, and some will be deeply offended if someone else is there.
It’s one of these years that there’s just so many delicate issues and angry folks — and angry for legitimate reasons; I’m not discounting that. But it’s been a really challenging year.
Your answer anticipates my next question, but I’ll ask it nonetheless. If memory serves me, a few years ago you had representatives of all seven basin states at the same table. This year you had two. I guess it’s fair to say that agenda setting has become more politically sensitive.
Every year for the last four or five years we’ve given all seven principals, all seven states, an opportunity to sit at the same table and have a discussion. In every passing year it becomes more difficult to do that.
Commissioner to the Upper Colorado River Commission Becky Mitchell, center, speaks on a panel with representatives of each of the seven basin states at the annual Colorado River Water Users Association conference in Las Vegas Thursday, December 15, 2022. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
You have seen this at CRWUA as well. Some years they had to divide into two sessions, upper and lower basin sessions. For awhile we were thinking of just having a lower basin session. The lower basin folks were happy to do that, but the upper basin folks weren’t as comfortable. We (also) thought about a different part of the session or a different location.
Ultimately we came to the conclusion that everyone could agree if it would be a conversation, not a posturing or confrontational thing. (Having) one upper basin person and one lower basin person, that was a format that could work. That’s what we did (with Becky Mitchell from Colorado and John Entsminger of Nevada). Anything more elaborate than that I don’t think was viable this year. It’s a really delicate time.
In terms of conferences devoted to the Colorado River do you have rivals for what you’re doing? Are there other places in Arizona or California, for example, that are kind of like must-go sessions?
There are two must-attend Colorado River conferences each year, and this is one of them. CRWUA (in Las Vegas) is the other one.
We specifically try to be different than CRWUA. We’re the opposite end of the calendar, roughly six months away. CRWUA is in many respects much more of a social event. We try to be more academic and about policy, with serious talk about serious issues. CRWUA, just like us, ebbs and flows from year to year in terms of what it looks like. But we try to be a little more hard-hitting and less of a, you know, take-the-family-and-have-a-vacation sort of event. I don’t mean to sound like I’m negative on CRWUA. I think we’re the perfect compliment.
Aside from that, there are some meetings such as CLE, Continuing Legal Education. It always has a Colorado River event. This year was quite good. Many other years, it’s not as strong. For practicing attorneys, that’s something that they want to go to every year, because they can get some credits there.
Still another one in New Mexico that’s held each year kind of commemorates the signing of the compact.
How do you measure success? I’m sure you constantly ask that question of yourself.
You understand the challenge of it all. We can measure success by the size of the crowd and that they mostly seemed to have a good time. In that sense, that’s success.
The other side of that is that we’ve been focused just on the Colorado River issues for the last five or six of these, and things have only gotten worse on the river. Obviously, we don’t think we’re to blame for that. But clearly, there’s no great success story that we can lay credit to either.
So I think we’re successful in that we promote conversation and the exchange of ideas, and we shine a light on new and innovative ideas, and we give a voice to people who sometimes don’t have a voice. This is where the tribes come into play again.
Some elements I think are successful, but in the very big scope of things, the issues that we’ve been addressing in our conference aren’t getting any better. It does force me to think about (and question) whether there is a better way for us to make a difference. I don’t know what that would be, but I do think about that a lot.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
For June–August 2026, WMO forecasts indicate significant shifts in rainfall patterns—a classic atmospheric response to the developing Pacific El Niño. See which regions are likely to experience below-normal, normal or above-normal rainfall: https://t.co/isVXTJ27m4pic.twitter.com/NL86C2CMUs
— World Meteorological Organization (@WMO) June 6, 2026
The 123-mile long Coachella Canal carries Colorado River from the All-American Canal to the Coachella Valley. Photo by Robert Marcos.
Southern California’s Coachella Valley includes the cities of Palm Springs, Palm Desert. Rancho Mirage, Indian Wells and Indio. It is a hot, dry, low-desert region that nonetheless supports 100 to 120 commercial farms, 120 golf courses, dozens of world-class resorts and one of the nation’s highest rates of per capita water use.1 The Coachella Valley sustains this (artificially) verdant environment with imported water from two sources: 430,000 acre feet of Colorado River water that’s diverted at the Imperial Dam and then conveyed by the Coachella Canal, and 194,000 acre feet of water from California’s State Water Project – but only if there’s sufficient snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Both sources of imported water arrive via the Coachella Canal and the majority of it’s used by farms and by aquifer replenishment programs. The remainder is used by golf courses and for the irrigation of commercial landscaping. Municipal water (for residents and businesses) is pumped from the Coachella Valley Groundwater Basin – an aquifer that at one time contained an estimated 39.2 million acre-feet of water, just in its upper 1,000 feet. Municipal water users, who consumed 5.6% more water in 2025 than they did in the previous year,3 natural recharge from rainfall and runoff currently provides about 21,000 acre-feet per year2. So without the imported replenishment water the basin would plunge into an immediate and severe deficit. Water tables would drop rapidly in historically vulnerable zones like the East Valley and Palm Springs.3
This scenario is alarming for a variety of reasons –
The Colorado River is rapidly become unreliable as a source of water.4 Since both sources of imported water depend upon the Coachella Canal for delivery, 100% of the imported water will stop flowing just days after Lake Mead reaches deadpool. Again – not one drop of the imported water that the Coachella Valley depends upon will arrive in the Coachella Valley if that water can’t make it past Hoover Dam. A second, albeit less-likely danger is the known fact that the Coachella Canal crosses over the San Andreas Fault.4
Cheap water encourages farmers to grow water-intensive crops. Coachella Valley farmers who obtain raw irrigation water directly from the Coachella Canal can pay as little as $40.14 per acre foot. This cheap water encourages farmers to grow profitable but water-intensive crops – like alfalfa.5
Municipal water use in the Coachella Valley is increasing. Instead of the Valley’s water consumption falling – as we’ve seen in almost every other Southwestern municipality, the Coachella Valley’s municipal water use continues to increase due to a rising population and an increase in the irrigation of crops and landscaping due to climate change. On April 15, 2026 The Indio Post reported that urban water use – which includes municipal customers, golf courses, and other recreational users, climbed by 12,989 acre-feet, or 5.8% compared to the previous year.
The Thomas E. Levy Groundwater Replenishment Facility is one of four replenishment facilities operated by CVWD. Photo by Robert Marcos
Challenge #1 – Maintaining groundwater levels
The Coachella Valley Water District and four other water agencies have been doing their best to maintain groundwater levels through the use of groundwater replenishment facilities. These programs are designed to reverse decades of aquifer overdraft and ensure long-term water sustainability. By percolating 165,000 acre feet a year of imported water directly into the ground, the districts have successfully stabilized and even raised groundwater levels in historically depleted areas. But what has been left unsaid is that both sources of imported water – the Colorado River and the State Water Project, both use the same conveyance and both are under severe long-term threat from climate change. Therefore Coachella Valley’s water districts have to plan for the day when they have no sources of imported water, and will have to depend entirely on groundwater.5
Challenge #2 – Convincing residents to use less water
Individuals living in the Coachella Valley city of Bermuda Dunes consume between 217 and 380 gallons of water a day.6 While residents of Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, Thousand Palms, Indian Wells, La Quinta, and Thermal consumed an average of 188 gallons of water per day. And residents of the Desert Water Agency, which serves Palm Springs and Cathedral City, used an average of 178 gallons of water per day.7 The residents of other comparably-sized desert cities use far less water. On average residents of Tucson use as little as 72 gallons a day, residents of Phoenix 92 gallons, and residents of Albuquerque use just 56 gallons per day.
While the Coachella Valley relies entirely on imported Colorado River water to recharge its aquifers, and loops recycled water back to its farms and golf courses, other Southwestern desert cities have shifted to advanced purification technology that recycles100% of their wastewater directly back into municipal drinking supplies. In the Arizona cities of Phoenix, Glendale, Mesa, Scottsdale, and Tempe, they treat the recycled water to high standards so it can be used to irrigate sports fields, golf courses, commercial landscapes, and create or restore riparian habitats. It is also used to recharge aquifers and stored underground for use during times of shortage. Recycled water can extend water supplies, improve water quality, reduce discharge and disposal costs of wastewater, and save energy.8
Challenge #3 – Preparing for “Day Zero” when the Coachella Valley receives no more Colorado River water
If the current drought continues and Lake Powell reaches dead pool, it’s estimated that Lake Mead will also reach dead pool within two-to-four years. This means that absolutely no Colorado River water pass beyond Hoover Dam and into the lower Colorado River basin. The Colorado River Aqueduct, the All-American Canal, and the Coachella Canal would be shut down. In this worst-case scenario, the Coachella Valley would survive by pumping from its underground aquifer, though this would immediately trigger a severe, unsustainable deficit. Because the region averages only 3 inches of rainfall annually, its primary long-term buffer would be exhausted without Colorado River and SWA water being available to replenish it.9 To prevent the aquifer from going dry, the State of California would likely enforce extreme water rationing, ban all outdoor ornamental landscaping, and trigger a massive, forceddownsizing of the local agricultural sector. 10
Why not do some of these things now instead of waiting until the Colorado River has dried up?
Tesla Model Y and electric camper trailer charging in Lake St. Louis June 5, 2026. Sorry, I forgot to ask the dude for the manufacturer information.
I am in St. Louis for my first ever punk rock concert and some baseball!
The owner of the rig in the photo told me that the trailer was fully electric, but he said that the Tesla couldn’t draw charge from the trailer. Nice light low-profile rig.
The Model Y I am driving (rented from Turo) has Grok integrated so you can set and change your navigation interactively. I asked many questions of her (I mean IT!) during the solo drive from Denver so it’s sort of like having your computer available while driving. Of course the discourse was mostly, “What river am I crossing?”
Grok, “That is likely the Missouri River which is located in this general area.” Sure enough, a road sign validated Grok’s message — one correct query!
The Trump administration is attacking public lands again, this time in an apparent effort to open more special places to off-road vehicles. Late last Friday, Trump issued an executive order revoking a Nixon-era policy aimed at ensuring “that the use of off-road vehicles on public lands will be controlled and directed so as to protect the resources of those lands, to promote the safety of all users of those lands, and to minimize conflicts among the various uses of those lands.”
No, this does not mean unfettered swarms of ATVs will be kicking up dust on your favorite public lands next week. But it does bolster the off-road vehicle lobby’s effort to open up motorized access to federal lands, and takes away one of the long-term planning tools used by land management agencies to protect those places from off-road vehicle use and abuse.
In the nearer-term, Trump’s order could end or diminish the ban on OHVs in national parks, allowing the vehicles to travel backroads in, say, Capitol Reef National Park. This might not sound so bad: If a three-ton SUV can drive there, why not let a smaller side-by-side or four-wheeler on the same road?
The answer lies in the nature of the newer OHVs, namely “side-by-sides” or razors, which more closely resemble souped-up dune buggies than conventional SUVs. While some people use OHVs as mere modes of transportation, the vehicles are more commonly treated and utilized like recreational playthings — very powerful, fast, and noisy toys that tend to travel in herds. They therefore bring their own type of impacts.
Alpine Loop Backcountry Scenic Byway near Lake City, Ouray, Powderhorn, Ridgway, Silverton Credit: ColoradoDirectory.com
Anyone who has traveled on or hiked around the Alpine Loop in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado on a busy summer day has likely experienced these particular impacts first-hand. Those roads were first opened up to OHVs in the early 2000s. Since then Alpine Loop traffic numbers have exploded, with at least half of the motorized traffic made up of OHVs.
Law enforcement officers now spend a disproportionate amount of time and energy trying to keep the OHV drivers on designated routes and in compliance with traffic laws. OHV crashes, often resulting in serious injury, are not uncommon. And each summer several riders surrender to the temptation to illegally leave the road — these are off-road vehicles, after all — and rip across the tundra, causing irreversible damage. Unlike regular vehicles, OHVs tend to travel in herds, spewing exhaust and kicking up dust, their collective buzzing reaching far beyond the roads on which they travel. It has become almost impossible during the high season to completely escape the incessant din of OHVs on the Alpine Loop, even in wilderness study areas.
This same phenomenon could now be coming to a national park near you.
The administration claims it eliminated the policy because it was outdated, vague, and redundant, because Congress has since passed a host of other laws protecting public lands from OHVs and other uses. The order goes on to say:
This makes very little sense. Sure, the restrictions on OHVs could hamper energy or timber development if it required destructive off-road vehicle use, but you’re not going to haul a drill rig into the backcountry on a side-by-side. And the idea that a hiker might feel “banned” from a trail because they couldn’t ride get there on an OHV is just silly.
The dubious statement reeks of the rhetoric of the crowd that claims that motorized vehicle restrictions are locking folks out of public lands, and therefore are discriminating against the type of people who drive these vehicles. But the discrimination claim simply does not fly. Mountain bikes are banned from wilderness areas, from a majority of trails in national parks, from some trails on BLM land, and are not allowed to ride off-trail on all federal land. This has nothing to do with the people who ride the bikes, or even the funny clothes they tend to wear, and everything to do with the vehicles’ potential impacts.
Trump probably did this at the behest of the Blue Ribbon Coalition and the likes of Sen. Mike Lee, who has pushed legislation that would open up national parks to OHVs. Maybe he’s trying to garner support from somewhere, given his terrible favorability ratings. Or perhaps he’s trying to appease the motorized crowd, which is probably a bit miffed that their drug of choice — gasoline — is so damned expensive thanks to Donny’s dumb war. Maybe he’s even trying to increase national park entry fee revenues so he can funnel it to his ballroom/drone-port or his White House UFC fight.
Near Hite with the Henry Mountains. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
🐟 Colorado River Chronicles 💧
It pretty much goes without saying that if next winter is as bad as this past winter, in terms of mountain snowpack, then the collective users of the Colorado River and its infrastructure will be toast — at least figuratively (maybe literally, too?). Now, my favorite team of Colorado River wonks1 [Anne Castle, Jack Schmidt, Eric Kuhn, Kathryn Sorensen, Katherine Tara] have crunched the latest water numbers, and they’ve found that even a nearly “normal” winter won’t stop depletion of “reasonably accessible storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, leading to “devastating consequences.”
Back in 1999, the Colorado River’s storage system, which consists of Lake Powell, Lake Mead, and several other smaller reservoirs in the Upper and Lower basins, was almost full, holding about 60 million acre-feet of active, or available, storage. This provided a robust savings account that could be tapped during the inevitable dry spells on the notoriously fluctuating river system.
The reserve, however, was not adequate for the megadrought — or long-term aridification — that started in 2000 and continues today. Instead of following the usual up-down cycle, the Colorado River’s flows began a downward trend that is on track to hit its lowest point so far this water year, while consumptive use stayed more or less steady. Demand exceeded supply more years than not, drawing the savings account down significantly. That has forced the Bureau of Reclamation to take extraordinary measures, such as reducing downstream releases and tapping upstream reservoirs, to keep Lake Powell’s surface level from dropping below 3,500 feet, or what I call de facto dead pool 2.
Thanks in part to extra releases from Flaming Gorge Reservoir in May, Lake Powell’s surface level climbed slightly to 3,528 feet last month. Given that spring runoff in the Upper Basin has peaked and most tributary flows are decreasing, we can expect that number to start dropping, perhaps precipitously, at least until the monsoon arrives.
The wonks wanted an idea of how things might play out in the slightly longer-term, so they modeled two scenarios:
In the first scenario, they assume that the Colorado River’s natural flow, or the estimated amount of water in the river without human consumption or interference, will be similar to water year 2025, when the mountain snowpack was below average but not nearly as slim as this year. They also assume that consumptive uses will remain at the lowest levels in recent years.
Natural flow: 8.5 MAF at Lees Ferry + .70 MAF from Grand Canyon and Virgin River = 9.20 MAF Consumptive use: 3.56 MAF Upper Basin (includes evaporation and other losses) + 8.23 MAF Lower Basin + Mexico (incl. evap and other losses) = 11.79 MAF Deficit and resulting reservoir drawdown: 2.59 MAF Realistically accessible storage (RAS) remaining in Mead, Powell, and Flaming Gorge: 3.63 MAF
For the second, they plug in snowpack/flow numbers similar to those from water year 2023, which was a huge winter. Consumptive use would be about the same as in 2023.
Under the first scenario, the BoR will almost certainly have to go to a run-of-the-river situation on Glen Canyon Dam to defend 3,500 feet. That would mean releases would be approximately equal to inflows minus evaporation and seepage from the reservoir, and might drop to 3,000 to 4,000 cubic feet per-second or even lower. In the summer of 2002 inflows at times dropped below 1,000 cfs. This would turn the river through the Grand Canyon into a relative trickle, and cause a significant drawdown of Lake Mead.
The second scenario would be far better, but is far from an enduring solution. At best it would buy a little time, perhaps enough for the feds to build bypass tunnels around Glen Canyon Dam to allow for sustained releases below 3,500 feet. If it were followed by another three or four 2023-like winters, then things would start to look pretty darned good.
But if it were followed by just one more dry year it would bring everything back to today’s rather dire situation.
Since there’s no way to bolster supplies, the only way out of this mess is to continue to slash demand. The paper’s authors write:
Oof.
As long as we’re on the topic, the BoR recently released its Lower Basin accounting report for 2025, which tallies up consumptive uses in the basin. As you can see from the following graphs, which the Land Desk whipped up using the BoR data, the Lower Basin uses significantly less water now than it did in 1999, just before the current megadrought began. Upper Basin consumptive use figures for 2025 are not yet available. The following figures do not include reservoir evaporation, conveyance losses, or Mexico’s use.
All three Lower Basin states have substantially reduced Colorado River water consumption since 1999. However, more cuts will be needed if current climatic and streamflow trends continue. Data: USBR, Graphic: The Land Desk
🤖 Data Center Watch 👾
Has Enchant Energy finally found a raison d’être? The Farmington-based company was created in 2019 to try to save the San Juan coal-fired power plant from retirement by retrofitting it with carbon capture equipment. Enchant would then sell the carbon to oil producers in the Permian Basin, while also receiving generous federal tax credits. Basically they wanted to turn the power plant into a taxpayer subsidized carbon dioxide factory. It flopped for various reasons. Now the San Juan plant — and all of its pollution — are no more. We suspected Enchant Energy had met a similar fate.
But then I received a press release letting me know the not-so-up upstart is not dead, but has instead signed a letter of intent with Creekstone Energy to capture carbon from the tech firm’s proposed hyperscale Delta Gigasite data center in Delta, Utah. As is often the case, Creekstone touts all of the renewable energy it plans on building for its center, but the first phase will be powered by natural gas, which emits carbon dioxide.
Enchant hopes to capture the carbon from the gas plant and convert it into marketable fuel. The company has apparently given up on trying to give coal-burning a slightly more climate-friendly veneer (after all, Trump has declared coal to be “clean” and “beautiful”). Instead, it looks like they’re jumping on the data center bandwagon, along with wannabe nuclear reactor developers and the like.
Who knows, maybe this is the thing that finally gives Enchant some meaning. But we’re not holding our breath. After spending gobs of money on lobbying, pulling in some hefty federal grants, then failing spectacularly with the San Juan generating bid, Enchant partnered with another firm and tried to buy the Intermountain coal plant in Delta to use it to power its own data center. That didn’t work, either.
Dolores Canyon solar project outside of Cahone, Colorado, with Airproduct’s apparently defunct helium plant on the right. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
🔋Notes from the Energy Transition 🔌
Yes, the energy transition may have run into some stumbling blocks, i.e. the Trump administration’s hatred for anything that might compete with coal and oil and gas, but it’s still quietly underway. For example, out by the aforementioned, defunct San Juan coal plant, DESRI recently broke ground on two utility-scale solar installations: the 170-megawatt Foxtail Flats solar-plus-battery storage array; and the 100-MW Four Mile Mesa solar-plus-storage project.
That’s some pretty serious generating capacity and adds to the existing San Juan solar facility nearby. Los Alamos County has signed on to purchase power from Foxtail Flats, and Meta will be drawing electricity Four Mile Mesa via PNM to power its data centers.
Both of the new facilities are under development on Ute Mountain Ute tribal land.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
In last week’s comments, ncoffey94 asked what kind of bike I ride. It’s a 2023 Niner RLT, with an aluminum frame, carbon fork, and SRAM Apex parts. It’s nothing fancy and isn’t super light. But I dig it for riding on the roads, dirt, and even singletrack. It’s got 40 mm tires, so isn’t so great in the sand, and with no suspension I don’t do big drops or super-cobbly stuff. But it sure is nice having just one bike for all uses.
Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson.
1Anne Castle, Jack Schmidt, Eric Kuhn, Kathryn Sorensen, and Katherine Tara.
2 Water can no longer be released through the penstocks and hydropower turbine below 3,500 feet, forcing dam operators to rely on the lower river outlets for all downstream water releases. Those outlets are not engineered for sustained, long-term use, however, and could be damaged. The feared scenario looks kind of like this: The penstocks are closed; the river outlets release water faster than reservoir inflows; the reservoir surface level drops down to, say, 3,450 feet; the river outlets get damaged so must be shut down altogether, trapping the remaining water behind the dam and halting all releases until the water climbs back up to 3,500 feet. This would effectively dry up the Grand Canyon and cause Lake Mead to start plummeting as well. Of course, no one wants this to happen, so BoR is doing all it can to defend 3,500 feet, making that level the effective dead pool, even though technically 3,370 feet (the river outlet elevation) is the actual dead pool.
Click the link to read the report (and drill down to the individual major basin stats) on the NRCS website. Here’s an excerpt:
Colorado experienced an unusual volatile winter this year. In October 2025 at the start of the water year; the southern basins received record amounts of rainfall, while the rest of the state saw minimal early-season accumulation. November brought intermittent storms but not enough to build a meaningful base and the snowpack remained well below normal. Early December finally delivered a measurable amount of snow for the northern basins but record high temperatures and lack of moisture in the middle of the month raised concerns heading into 2026. January continued the trend of minimal snow accumulations, and many basins began falling into single-digit percentiles. The first half of February remained dry, and although the second half brought some moisture it was not nearly enough to recover from the early-season deficit. Statewide snowpack entered March at 60 percent of median. March delivered a combination of record high temperatures and record low precipitation, causing some basins to reach peak snow-water-equivalent (SWE) almost a month early. The rate at which the snowpack began to melt was unprecedented, with soil moisture sensors and streamflow gages showing an immediate response. Thankfully, April brought cooler temperatures and above normal precipitation, allowing the remaining snowpack to linger a bit longer. With increased storm activity, the majority of hydrographs receded as runoff slowed down. However, by May 1st statewide snowpack had fallen to the zeroth percentile and the remaining snowpack continued to melt. Melt in May is common, but the combination of extremely low snow conditions and warm temperature triggered a second peak in the hydrographs – a peak that normally would represent the first rise of the season. At nearly all streamflow forecast points the runoff duration was significantly shortened, as much of the volume had already been observed in March. By June 1st 91% of SNOTEL stations were fully melted out – compared to the typical 56% for this time of year, highlighting the exceptionally early and accelerated melt season.
Statewide snowpack was 14 percent of the historical median as of June 1, with an average of 0.4 inches of snow water equivalent (SWE) in the state. This is the third-lowest June snowpack in the NRCS Snow Survey period of record, surpassed only by 2002 and 2012—years which both contained a higher seasonal SWE peak in mid-March but experienced rapid meltout in early April and May. Comparatively, 2026 experienced a record-breaking early initiation o snowpack melt in mid-March, reducing the total snowpack by half before cooler conditions and late-season snowfall hastened the decline throughout April. Snowpack melting returned to a predictable bell-curve pattern in May and at the end of the month all river basins currently exhibit far lower-than-median SWE in the state. The San Miguel-Dolores-Animas-San Juan, Upper Rio Grande, Gunnison, Colorado Headwaters, and South Platte exhibit the most extreme deviations from the 1991-2020 historical median, reporting 0, 1, 2, 3, and 7 percent of median snowpack SWE respectively. Meanwhile the Laramie-North Platte, Arkansas, and Yampa-White-Little Snake have low but less extreme deviations from median snowpack levels, reporting 17, 18, and 30 percent of median SWE.
The statewide water year-to-date precipitation remains below normal at 77 percent of median. May brought some improvements, with statewide precipitation at 104 percent of median, but the spatial distribution varied greatly. The front range and northern part of the state received above median precipitation with the South Platte River basin at 138 percent and the Laramie-North Platte basin at 128 percent for the month of May; an encouraging shift that helped boost soil moisture and short-term streamflow potential. In contrast, the southwestern basins received below median with the combined San Miguel-Dolores-Animas-San Juan River basin and Gunnison River basin at 53 percent and 60 percent of median, respectively. A shift from last month, where those two basins received the most precipitation in April at 155 percent and 116 percent of median. Tower SNOTEL located in the Yampa-White-Little Snake River basin received the most precipitation in the month of May with 5.8 inches total; 2.2 inches falling in a single day (May 5th, 2026).
Colorado Drought Monitor map June 2, 2026.
The current U.S. Drought Monitor Map shows drought conditions are still prevalent across the state, with slight improvements in some northern basins and slight degradations in the southern front range basins since last month. Spring moisture has brought some much-needed precipitation after a well-below normal winter. The monthly precipitation outlook from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center forecasts above to near normal precipitation for the month of June.
Reservoir storage is currently 75 percent of the 1991-2020 median on a state-wide scale, down from 85 percent last month. Mean water storage decreased in all river basins in the state compared to last month. As of June 1, storage remains relatively close to median in the Arkansas and South Platte*, reporting 91 and 90 percent median storage, respectively. The Upper Rio Grande, which had been an outlier with above-average reservoir storage since October 2025, is now down to 86 percent of median storage. Five additional basins are reporting reservoir storage levels somewhat below the 30-year median, with the Colorado Headwaters, Eastern South Platte, Yampa-White-Little Snake, Gunnison, and San Miguel-Dolores-Animas-San Juan reporting 80, 79, 78, 70, and 69 percent, respectively. The Eastern Arkansas remains the basin with the lowest overall percent of median storage, decreasing from 56 percent down to 41 percent of median storage this month. Overall, Colorado is currently utilizing 54 percent of total reservoir capacity statewide compared to 61 percent storage this time last year (see June 1 2026 Reservoir Storage Capacity chart).
*At the time of publishing, end-of-month reservoir water storage data had not yet been reported for 8 out of 23 reservoirs in the South Platte basin. These reservoirs were excluded (rather than reported zero) in the statistics above, and the data will be updated on our website as soon as it is available.
June through July forecasts at the 50 percent exceedance probability are at 24 percent of median statewide. Observed streamflow from March through May is 50 percent of median statewide. April and May alone are 41 percent as March runoff occurred outside the normal primary period. Record March temperatures drove an early rise in streamflow statewide weeks ahead of typical spring melt timing. Cooler April temperatures and increased April and early May storms placed a pause on snowmelt. A second rise in streamflow followed in mid-May consistent with normal sun angle-driven melt onset. May observed flows averaged 34 percent at a median percentile of 2. Those runoff conditions are observed downstream at Lake Powell where March through May observed inflow is 1,104,000 acre-feet at 28 percent of the period of record median ranking 3rd lowest in the 117-year record behind 2002 and 1977. June and July typically deliver 54 percent of the April through July volume at Powell. The June through July combined forecast is 300,000 acre-feet at 9 percent of median and is near 21 percent of projected total seasonal volume remaining. The forward-looking period 63 of 70 points rank at or below the 10th percentile with a median percentile of 3. Statewide remaining period volume at the 50 percent exceedance probability represents one third of projected total seasonal volume. May storm activity shaped a distribution where eastern basins retain comparatively more remaining volume. The South Platte is at 51 percent and Arkansas at 38 percent of median. Remaining snowpack is limited to the highest elevations and will contribute modestly to late-season flows. Above normal temperatures and above normal precipitation are both favored through the remaining period.
Cumbres Trestle SNOTEL located in the east San Juan mountains and a part of the Upper Rio Grande River basin. This site is currently at 76% of median precipitation with a cumulative 22.7 inches since the start of the water year (October 1st 2025). Field crews visit every SNOTEL site in the state to perform routine maintenance and site upgrades; Colorado has 118 SNOTEL stations. Photo by: Tom White/NRCS
Click the link to read the release on the NRCS website:
June 5, 2026
An early runoff season shifted a substantial portion of annual runoff into March through May. At Lake Powell, where June and July normally account for about half of seasonal inflow, only about 21 percent of projected seasonal volume remains. Similar conditions are forecast throughout Colorado.
June through July runoff forecasts remain well below normal statewide at the 50 percent exceedance probability at 24 percent of median (Figure 1). Outlooks in the Front Range Mountains remain the exception. May storm activity helped to sustain comparatively higher forecasts in the Front Range and boosted precipitation in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and in the northern Park Range. The South Platte is forecast at 51 percent of median and the Arkansas at 38 percent. In the Upper Rio Grande River basin the most probable outlook is 28 percent of median. Western slope remaining period forecasts range from 19 to 23 percent in the combined Yampa-White-Little Snake and San Miguel-Dolores-Animas-San Juan (SMDASJ) basin, respectively. May precipitation ranged from 54 to 59 percent in southwest basins while the South Platte received 140 percent of median.
Figure 1. Remaining period (June through July) streamflow forecast volume at the 50 percent exceedance probability. Credit: NRCS
Record March temperatures initiated an early rise in streamflow weeks ahead of the typical spring melt period. A second rise followed in mid-May consistent with normal sun angle-driven melt timing. In some rivers the May peak became the seasonal maximum. Statewide observed flows from March through May are 50 percent of median. April and May alone are 41 percent, as March runoff occurred outside the normal primary period and skews the seasonal comparison.
Statewide reservoir storage is 75 percent of median and largely reflects October precipitation and carry-over storage from the previous water year. Some of the state’s larger reservoirs are well below the statewide median particularly in southwest basins. Blue Mesa and McPhee reservoirs are both at 59 and 57 percent of median respectively and rank at the 10th percentile in their period of record. Navajo Reservoir is 69 percent of median at the 20th percentile. Colorado Headwaters basin storage is 80 percent of median, and the Upper Rio Grande is 86 percent. Eastern basins are the highest in the state. Pueblo Reservoir is 93 percent of median and aggregate South Platte basin storage is 90 percent. Remaining period inflow forecasts are considerably lower than current storage levels. McPhee inflow is forecast at 24 percent and Navajo at 18 percent. Dillon Reservoir inflow is forecast at 25 percent ranking lowest in the 75-year period of record. Pueblo inflow is forecast at 44 percent of median.
As of June 1, statewide snowpack is averaging 14 percent. Median melt-out timing across the Colorado SNOTEL network is running 36 days ahead of normal. Remaining snowpack is limited to the highest elevations and will contribute modestly to late-season flows. Above normal temperatures and above normal precipitation are both favored through the remaining period.
*combined San Miguel-Dolores-Animas-San Juan River basin
Click the link to read the discussion on the CBRFC website:
The Colorado Basin River Forecast Center (CBRFC) geographic forecast area includes the Upper Colorado River Basin (UCRB), Lower Colorado River Basin (LCRB), and Eastern Great Basin (GB).
Water Supply Forecasts
April-July volume forecasts are well below normal and rank in the driest five on record at many locations. Record low snowpack and poor soil moisture conditions are the primary hydrologic conditions impacting the water supply outlook, while future weather is a primary source of forecast uncertainty. June 1 water supply forecasts are summarized in the figure and table below.
June 1, 2026 seasonal water supply forecast summary.
Observed Streamflow (April-May)
Poor soil moisture and snowpack conditions have led to well below normal April-May observed unregulated streamflow volumes, which are summarized in the below table.
Much of the CBRFC area experienced its warmest and least snowy winter on record. Following this, an unprecedented heatwave in March initiated significant snowmelt in areas that would usually still be building a snowpack. April brought cooler and wetter weather, and May generally continued this trend, with temperatures remaining mostly near normal across the CBRFC area. Portions of the GB and UCRB experienced periods of snowfall accumulation through May, but above normal precipitation was limited to small areas within the Green River Basin and Colorado River headwaters. In the LCRB, central/eastern AZ into western NM ended the month with significantly above normal precipitation, but this is a function of the very dry climatology as most of the LCRB routinely receives near zero precipitation in the month of May.
Water year 2026 precipitation summary.
Snowpack Conditions
Snow water equivalent (SWE) has been at or below record low for most of the snow accumulation season. The significant heatwave during the last half of March led to historically low April 1 snow water equivalent conditions across the region. UCRB and GB SNOTEL SWE peaked around March 8, which is 3-4 weeks earlier than the 1991-2020 normal peak date. June 1 SWE across the UCRB and GB is generally less than 25% of normal, with more favorable conditions in the Upper Green River Basin. SWE conditions are summarized in the figures and table below.
Left: June 1, 2026 SWE – NRCS SNOTEL observed (squares) and CBRFC hydrologic model. Right: CBRFC hydrologic model SWE conditions summary.
UCRB SNOTEL SWE during historically dry winters: 2026, 2021, 2012, 2002.
GB SNOTEL SWE during historically dry winters: 2026, 2021, 2012, 2002.
Soil Moisture
CBRFC hydrologic model soil moisture conditions impact water supply forecasts. Basins with above average soil moisture conditions can be expected to experience more efficient runoff from rainfall or snowmelt while basins with below average soil moisture conditions can be expected to have lower runoff efficiency until soil moisture deficits are fulfilled. The timing and magnitude of spring runoff is impacted by snowpack conditions, spring weather, and soil moisture conditions.
Mid-November 2025 soil moisture conditions were below average across most areas as a result of warmer and drier than normal weather during the 2025 water year. Early June soil moisture conditions are generally well below average across the region due to the lack of snow. CBRFC hydrologic model soil moisture conditions are shown in the figures below.
CBRFC hydrologic model soil moisture conditions as a percent of the 1991–2020 average – Mid-November 2025 (left) and early June 2026 (right).
Upcoming Weather
Temperatures are heating up across the CBRFC area as June begins. Precipitation chances in the near-term are limited to warm, convective showers and storms, mainly over eastern areas. The 7-day precipitation forecast and the Climate Prediction Center (CPC) 8–14 day temperature and precipitation outlooks are shown in the figures below.
7-day precipitation forecast for June 4–10, 2026.
Climate Prediction Center temperature probability forecast for June 12–18, 2026.
Climate Prediction Center precipitation probability forecast for June 12–18, 2026.
US Drought Monitor one week change map ending June 2, 2026.
High Plains Drought Monitor one week change map ending June 2, 2026.West Drought Monitor one week change map ending June 2, 2026.Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending June 2, 2026.
The mid-level height anomaly pattern during the week exhibited an omega-block type pattern, with mean troughing over Alaska and both the West and East, with the western trough cutting off over California, and strong ridging between the troughs across the central contiguous US. This pattern promoted below-normal temperatures across the Southwest for much of the period, with colder air pushing eastward towards the end of the week followed by warming temperatures. Across the East, cooler air overspread New England and the mid-Atlantic, keeping evapotranspiration rates a bit lower than normal. In contrast, much above-normal temperatures were observed throughout the week across the northern Plains and upper-Midwest, though colder weather and storminess overspread the northern Rockies and adjacent High Plains at the end of the week.
An active pattern was noted across the Plains, South, and Southeast as a mean frontal boundary provided a focus for stormy weather. These rains, in conjunction with a wetter pattern overall during May, prompted widespread additional drought relief for the South and Southeast regions, as well as portions of the High Plains. In contrast, hot, dry weather across the northern Plains and upper-Midwest caused expansion of drought and abnormal dryness, with widespread degradation occurring in western portions of the Midwest region. Towards the end of the week, a storm system brought heavy precipitation to western and central Montana, bringing some drought relief following a period of hot, windy weather. Across the Northeast, additional rainfall benefitted portions of New England, while drier weather overspread the mid-Atlantic and southern New England following a wet week previously…
Stormy weather brought soaking rains across much of the High Plains, with the highest coverage and accumulations over Kansas and Nebraska. While beneficial, this precipitation competed during the week with much above-normal temperatures, which maintained high evapotranspirative demands. Accordingly, areas that missed out on significant rainfall, including portions of the Dakotas and far northern Nebraska, experienced some degradation, while reductions were noted across much of Kansas and eastern Nebraska. Further west, beneficial precipitation brought some relief to portions of the Colorado Plains and a few spots in Wyoming, while drier conditions resulted in deterioration in southwestern Colorado…
Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending June 2, 2026.
A late season storm system brought heavy rainfall to southern Oregon and northern California, sparking a few modest improvements but overall doing little to change the current drought depiction. Some degradations were noted across portions of California, Oregon, and the Great Basin, where impacts from a lack of snowmelt recharge – especially low streamflows – are beginning to be felt. Temperatures during the week were near to above-average across the Northwest, but below average across California, helping to keep evapotranspiration demands lower than average…
Soaking rains overspread most of Texas during the week, promoting additional drought reductions, primarily across southern Texas and the Big Bend country. Rainfall also overspread eastern Oklahoma, but conditions worsened across the western half of the state which fared drier during the week. Along the lower Mississippi Valley, heavy rains, exceeding 6 inches in some locations, fell across northern Arkansas, promoting drought reduction. Soaking rains were less intense across Louisiana and Mississippi, but were still sufficient to promote substantial drought reduction at the tail end of a wet May. Although conditions have improved overall across the Southern Region, widespread D3 to D4 continues across northern Texas and western Oklahoma, and long term drought impacts to groundwater remain a concern heading into the summer months across the whole region…
Looking Ahead
At the start of the next 7 days, drier conditions are favored across much of the East, with daily temperatures quickly warming to above-normal. A storm system now over the Plains will progress slowly eastward, bringing a potential for much needed rainfall across the upper Midwest and Great Lakes region. Current QPF forecasts from the Weather Prediction Center show amounts potentially exceeding 1.5 inches across much of Iowa and far southwestern Wisconsin, but lighter amounts elsewhere will likely be insufficient to overcome the high demands coming from much above-normal temperatures and summer agriculture, especially across Illinois, Indiana, and northern Minnesota. A gradual return to a summer convective regime is favored across the Southeast during the week, but accumulations are forecast to be less than what fell over the past few weeks, especially across northern Florida and east of the Appalachians. Seabreeze-driven convection is favored to remain active across South Florida. Mostly dry conditions are favored across the West, with a storm system bringing some precipitation to the Pacific Northwest. Meager precipitation is forecast for the Northeast region, raising concerns for a return of short term drought impacts.
During Week-2, weak troughing over Alaska is favored to maintain below-average temperatures and above-average precipitation for another week. Downstream, positive height anomalies are forecast for most of the contiguous United States, leading to coast-to-coast enhanced chances for above-normal temperatures. The highest probabilities for above-normal temperatures extend across both the West and the Northeast. Enhanced low-level southerly flow in this pattern favors a wide open Gulf, with moist air penetrating far to the north across the central US. Any interactions with shortwave troughs or other synoptic features could trigger periods of organized convection. Therefore, a broad signal slightly favoring above-normal precipitation extends from the Gulf Coast through much of the CONUS east of the Rockies. Near normal precipitation is the most likely outcome across the Northeast with weak troughing just offshore, and a slight tilt towards below-normal precipitation is forecast for the Pacific Northwest. Across Hawaii, both above-normal temperatures and precipitation are favored, based on a consensus of dynamical model guidance.
Drought Monitor one week change map ending June 2, 2026.
Just for grins here’s a slideshow of early June US Drought Monitor maps for the past few years.
US Drought Monitor one week change map ending June 2, 2026.
Anthropogenic objects suspended in strata, as described by the author and then brought into reality by Google’s Nano Banana 2
by Robert Marcos, photojournalist
If Lake Powell ever dries up completely scientists excavating the exposed reservoir floor will uncover a massive, human-made geological record known as anthropogenic stratigraphy. This towering wall of trapped sediment, which already reaches up to 150 feet thick in some areas, acts like an open book detailing the history of Lake Powell. Researchers will find a distinct, repeating pattern of cyclic sand-mud interbeds that chronicle the reservoir’s seasonal fluctuations and regional hydroclimate. The thick layers of coarse sand will mark rapid, powerful depositional events fueled by annual spring snowmelt and dramatic upstream floods. Conversely, the alternating bands of thinly laminated, fine-grained lacustrine mud will reveal prolonged periods of high water levels when the reservoir was full and the currents slowed, allowing the finest suspended particles to settle to the canyon floor.1
Beneath this structural rhythm, a geochemical analysis will expose a darker record of the West’s industrial and agricultural history. Because the dam permanently trapped Colorado River sediments that once flowed naturally to the sea, the dry lakebed will serve as a containment sink for concentrated toxins and heavy metals. Geologists and environmental scientists will encounter dense pockets of arsenic, lead, selenium, boron, and mercury swept down from upstream agricultural runoff and legacy mining districts. Most notably, the layers will hold chemical fingerprints from historical events like the 2015 Gold King mine spill and the submerged yellowcake uranium mill tailings pile near Hite. As water levels vanish, these hazardous materials will remain bound to the platy clay aggregates and iron oxide coatings of the sediment, posing a significant risk of toxic dust storms if re-mobilized by the wind.2
Finally, the deepest trenching will reveal a stark ecological and physical boundary line: the pre-dam canyon floor. At the very base of the mud, scientists will strike an erosional surface composed of native boulders, coarse river gravels, and heavily weathered sandstone that directly predates 1963. Preserved just above this bedrock, researchers will find an anaerobic time capsule of organic debris. This includes preserved strands of invasive tamarisk and Russian thistle, ancient cottonwood fragments, and dense layers of decaying organic matter that once starved the deep reservoir of oxygen. By using advanced tools like X-ray diffraction, environmental DNA (eDNA), and scanning electron microscopy, scientists will be able to reconstruct the precise timeline of how human engineering completely transformed, and ultimately choked, a vibrant desert river ecosystem.3
Blue Castle Holdings is proposing to build a nuclear power plant in Green River, Utah. You have not gone through a time warp, nor is this a “this date in history” sorta thing, though it could be. The same company tried to build a reactor in Green River a couple of decades ago, during the last “nuclear renaissance,” but the project fizzled amid fierce opposition, uncertainty over water rights, and as the nuke boom busted before it ever really got going.
This week, Blue Castle announced that the concept had only been dormant, not dead, and that it was coming out of hibernation in a spiffed up form in hopes of serving rapidly growing data center-driven electricity demand. Instead of constructing two, 1,500 MW reactors, the company — in partnership with Fulcrum Point Holdings — looks to install small modular reactors. It has not specified what the nameplate capacity will be, but says the units can be air-cooled, meaning they wouldn’t use as much water as conventional reactors.
Blue Castle has a bit of a head start on the project, since they’ve already done most of the site characterization work (on private land about five miles west of Green River). But they’ll still have to jump through the nuclear reactor licensing hoops, which can be arduous. That said, it should be a lot easier with both the Trump administration and the Cox administration champing at the bit to get more nukes up and running. Meanwhile, opposition to the idea is not likely to be any less fervent now than it was 20 years ago, and they’ll still have to secure water in an increasingly aridified region.
The melon-farming town along the banks of the Green River has become a magnet for proposed and actual industrial projects lately. The prospective nuclear plant joins Anson Resources’ lithium extraction project, Western Uranium & Vanadium’s proposed uranium mill, a 400-megawatt solar-plus-storage installation, and various uranium, lithium, and potash extraction proposals in the surrounding areas.
Check the weather report before heading out on this road. Photo credit: NPS
🌵 Public Lands 🌲
Well, they’ve gone and done it now. Garfield County has paved the Hole-in-the-Rock Road, or at least the first 10 miles of it. To folks who are unfamiliar with the road situation in Utah, paving — chip-sealing, actually — a notoriously washboarded, suspension-blasting, teeth-rattling dead-end dirt road may not seem like such a big deal. But this little maintenance action could have real consequences for the public land it runs through, i.e. Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and sets a dangerous legal precedent when it comes to roads on public lands. It is also a symbolic move for both the opponents and proponents of the asphalt-laying project.
The Hole-in-the-Rock (HITR) road roughly follows the first segment of the Hole-in-the-Rock trail, which is the route Church of Latter Day Saints colonists forged in 1879 to get from Escalante to what would become Bluff City on the banks of the San Juan River in the southeastern corner of Utah. When the early Mormon travelers reached the seemingly-impassable, 2,000-foot-deep Glen Canyon on the Colorado River, they blasted and built a passage for their wagons, horses, and cattle through a natural opening in the cliff and called it Hole in the Rock.
It may have been this experience, in part, that led the descendants of those folks to develop a kind of fetish for roads, especially ones that cross federal land. By building the path across an especially rugged chunk of country and even crossing the mighty Colorado, they were able to assert a certain amount of control over what they saw as a hostile and wild landscape. Now county commissioners in Utah fight for control over backcountry roads* as a sort of proxy for dominating the lands they pass through. Garfield County has long looked to take ownership of the HITR road so that they can improve and pave it and be sure the Bureau of Land Management never closes it.
Environmental groups, meanwhile, have pushed back against county control. While the feds almost never close roads, they are more likely than counties to do so if necessary to protect cultural or ecological resources**. Counties are more likely to improve the roads, which leads to more people and attendant impacts in the backcountry.
Today’s HITR road runs 62 miles, from just outside Escalante to Hole in the Rock, where the canyon below is now mostly inundated by Lake Powell. It snakes its way on a rough parallel path to the Escalante River and passes near the heads of many of its tributary canyons that are popular with backcountry adventurers.
As visitation to the national monument and its surroundings has increased, so has the HITRR’s traffic: Garfield County’s road crew says some 600 vehicles per day travel the washboard-plagued road, with as many as 1,500 each day on weekends. All those cars wreak havoc on the road, and the county says it has been spending $150,000 annually on maintenance, some of which it claims could be avoided if it were allowed to pave the road.
Last July, a federal court ruled in favor of Garfield County and granted it quiet title to the section of the HITR Road in the county (the lower section is in Kane County, which also won quiet title to that portion of the road). In February, the county began preparing the route for chip-sealing. It informed the BLM of the work, but did not apply for a permit, and the BLM did nothing to stop the work. That was two victories in a row for the local-control over the public’s land crowd.
The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance sued both the BLM and the county, saying the work required federal approval, since it occurred on federal land. It also sought an emergency injunction on further work while the case is pending.
Earlier this month, a judge denied the injunction request, clearing the way for Garfield County to proceed. A few days later, the machines were out there laying asphalt, while county officials and their backers crowed triumphantly and public land lovers cried foul. The courts may eventually rule against the county, but the chip seal is there to stay.
“Paving will lead to more, faster, and louder traffic,” said SUWA attorneys in a written statement, “changing the remote, serene backcountry experience the monument was created to protect, and that draws visitors from around the world.”
Even pavement/chip-seal can’t stop the desert from taking back the Burr Trail. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
The HITR Road battle is an echo of an almost identical fight over the Burr Trail, another backcountry road between Boulder, Utah, which lies within Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and Ticaboo/Bullfrog on the shores of Lake Powell. The sections on BLM land on either side of the route have been paved and/or chip-sealed after years of conflict. But the National Park Service has blocked Garfield County from paving the middle segment, which passes through Capitol Reef National Park.
I drive the Burr Trail any chance I get, simply because I love the country it travels through and because the slower pace the road requires allows me to see more, and facilitates frequent stops to get out of the car and look around.
I’m sure that traffic has increased since the paving. Just based on my observations, however, I would say that the added number of vehicles is not necessarily increasing the number of folks going into the surrounding backcountry. What I’ve seen are more RVs and low-slung sedans heading down the road from Boulder, going beyond the end of the pavement, stopping at the top of the switchbacks through the Waterpocket Fold (where the road is steep, loose gravel, and washboarded), then turning around and heading back up to Boulder. The eastern paved section, towards Bullfrog, has very little traffic. (On my most recent trip I did see a few vehicles drive up the Burr Trail switchbacks, then come back down before heading north on the Notom Road back toward Capitol Reef, a phenomenon that was also evident at the Moqui Dugway road in San Juan County.)
Looking down at the unpaved part of Burr Trail from the switchbacks. Jonathan P. Thompson photo
So while paving HITRR is a sort of symbolic and even spiritual defeat for those public lands and the folks looking to protect them, I’m also not sure that it will necessarily lead to more impacts to the surrounding backcountry. Garfield County’s vehicle count numbers, if correct, indicate that the automobile-driving masses are already driving the road. How could you cram more than 1,500 vehicles a day onto that little section?
In any event, it’s certainly the end of an era, and driving the first ten miles of the HITRR will be a completely different experience than it was pre-blacktop. Whether the phenomenon will be limited to those ten miles (and the Burr Trail), or spread throughout the rutted byways of Utah may depend on the outcome of SUWA’s lawsuit.
Campsite boulder. Utah. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
🛻 Notes from the Road 🏕️
The hummingbirds have come back to southern Utah for the spring. Are they earlier than usual? Later? Maybe all that really matters is the penstemon are blooming, scarlet red.
***
One of my non-Land Desk gigs is compiling and summarizing Western energy news for a Canary Media newsletter every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning. This requires early morning internet, so when I’m out and about it means staying in a hotel on those nights or camping in a site where I know there is a strong and steady cell signal.
Stone, water, light. Utah. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
But on Tuesdays and Thursdays and weekends, I’m free to wander as far off grid as I can get. This is not difficult in southern Utah, which may have the highest proportion of out-of-cell-signal-range lands in the continental U.S.
Liberated from the digital shackles, I meander impulsively, by car, by bike, on foot, in search of the perfect campsite, a cool pool of desert water, a viewpoint from which the landscape unfurls before me, the post-storm light playing among the red rock crevices and spires far below. The sense of time slips away and I quickly forget what day it is. The lack of destination or deadline allows me to wander down whatever road, canyon, or trail looks appetizing. More often than not, they are dead ends, which is just fine.
A tinaja, or pothole, after a good rain. Southeastern Utah. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Recently I set off on such an amble from Bullfrog Marina on Lake Powell. A storm had blown through the night before, leaving a few inches of wet snow on the steep slopes of the Henry Mountains and clearing the haze and smoke and dust from the air. Remnants of the storm lingered over the mountains and high mesas, defying the weather forecasts.
Following a bike ride up the paved part of the Burr Trail, I headed in el Burro Blanco onto the eastern slope of the Henries, and followed a back road that traversed the incline.
The soil was rocky enough to naturally gravel the road, or rather, to cobblestone it. While it wasn’t a smooth ride, it did keep the surface solid despite a couple of inches of moisture that fell the previous night and morning, at least for a while. Then, after topping a little rise, and as I descended a north-facing slope into a small drainage, the cobbles vanished, giving way to classic southern Utah clay. Goopy nasty stuff, that is, the kind of mud that steals your shoes, builds up on your tiles, and turns a motorized vehicle into a slip-sliding, uncontrollable, wheeled sled and that inspires signs warning “Impassible When Wet.”
Post-rain arroyo patterns. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Luckily, the fall line followed the line of travel, meaning I landed safely on a more solid patch of road at the trough of the drainage. I got out and surveyed the path ahead on foot, only to find that conditions worsened. I could either camp there and wait for the road to dry, or try to make it back up the hill I had just slid down in my rear-wheel drive pickup.
The former was the more intelligent choice, of course. But the campsite was far from ideal, and the clouds were still pretty thick, meaning it might rain or snow even more, and I don’t always make the smartest choices. Then I remembered: I had bought chains for the truck soon after inheriting it. I broke them out, chained up the rear wheels, did a thirty-point turnaround, and barreled back up the way I came, no problemo.
A couple of hours later, after venturing down another backroad, albeit one on more stable soil and at a considerably lower elevation, I landed in a delightful campsite. The rain had flushed away the gnats, settled the dust, sculpted the sand in the arroyos that flowed past the camp, summoned the wildflowers to bloom, and filled the tinajas and potholes to the brim with murky, cool water.
***
Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk
I’ve included a lot of different types of content in the Land Desk, from Messing with Maps, to Data Dumps, to movie reviews, but I don’t believe I’ve ever included a recipe here. That all changes today. I would recommend that you not try this recipe at home; it’s refined nature can only be fully appreciated when prepared on a camp stove and eaten in the outdoors, preferably while watching the evening light slide slowly across the desert.
I grew up going camping, usually in the Utah desert, with my family. It’s just what we did on many a weekend and on just about every school break. We didn’t have enough money for “real” family vacations, and we wouldn’t have wanted to do the Disneyland thing, anyway. This means I also grew up eating my father’s distinctive camp cooking, almost always made over a campfire because we didn’t have a camp stove.
I remember liking the food back then, but looking back I do have to wonder whether it wasn’t a form of child abuse. Delicacies included Dinty Moore beef stew on top of a bed of those canned deep-fried chow mein noodles; corned beef hash from a can; Vienna sausages — my dad’s friend called them cows lips in order to get us to hand them over; generic grape, orange, or black-cherry soda-pop; and, my personal favorite, those Pillsbury biscuits in a can cooked in a skillet over the fire in a sizzling reservoir of Country Crock squeeze-bottle margarine.
I’ve spent years trying to heal the taste-bud trauma, partially by sprinkling my food with truffle oil whenever someone else is paying for it, and have come quite a ways in my recovery. But it all went to hell in a hand basket when I went camping with a friend, who originally hails from the Midwest, and let him assume dinner duties one night. To my horror and dismay, he prepared something called Chili-Mac, which consists of a can of Hormel canned beef chili dumped into a batch of Krafts instant macaroni and cheese. I guess I’m lucky he didn’t do his other specialty, which involves hot dogs and mac-and-cheese — entirely too reminiscent of those damned jelly-coated cows’ lips, er, Vienna sausages.
Anyway, I learned my lesson, and I vet all of his dinner choices beforehand, and bring backup food just in case he tries to pull a fast one. Meanwhile, I’ve developed a more regionally and taste-bud appropriate alternative to his Chili-Mac. I call it Mac-n-Chile. Here’s the recipe (serves one hungry person):
One box of Annie’s macaroni and cheese. I prefer the aged cheddar stuff, but any flavor will do.
One can of hot Hatch green chiles. Yes, you can bring fresh roasted chiles if you want, but that adds to the work and complexity and who wants all of that? The canned stuff is fine.
A liberal sprinkling of Cobblestone farm’s garlic powder. Oh, you want to buy the cheap grocery store stuff that has no flavor and is filled with anti-caking agents like silicon dioxide? Suit yourself! But if you want the best, you gotta go with Cobblestone Farms.
A touch of salt and olive oil or butter.
Follow the instructions on the box, but salt the pasta water (they don’t put enough salt in those cheese packets), and add some olive oil or butter when mixing in the dried cheese. Dump in the green chiles and a liberal sprinkling of garlic powder — more is better. Pour yourself a beverage of your choice, sit down on your camp chair, truck’s tailgate, or a slab of sandstone, and devour it.
Oh, and keep your eyes open for those hummingbirds. I hear they’re buzzing about the canyon country these days.
A reservoir built to serve nearly a million Northern Coloradans started filling this spring. But Chimney Hollow’s future is still murky weeks after the initial fill. Chimney Hollow will eventually pull water from the Colorado River near its headwaters in Grand County to serve a dozen fast growing cities on the Front Range from Broomfield to Greeley…Chimney Hollow is holding just 2% of its total volume today because there’s a problem. Northern Water discovered that some of the rocks it used to build the massive dam at the reservoir contained radioactive uranium. It was naturally occurring, but it set the project back at least a year. Northern Water is still coming up with a mitigation plan.
“Really, the best way to kind of move that uranium out is to draw down the water and force that out,” spokesperson Rachel Stevens said. “But before we make any of those decisions, we really want to see what the levels of uranium are.”
So every week, crews are taking water samples from the small pool and sending it to a lab to see how much radioactive material is really in the water. The results are expected soon. Northern Water has only been able to test how uranium leaches out of the rocks in a laboratory setting. Filling the reservoir just slightly will help reveal the extent of the problem.
Map from Northern Water via the Fort Collins Coloradan.
Specialists surveying Colorado’s forests know this year will be challenging. Snow melted too quickly, strong winds dried out the trees, and the early signs of danger are already settling across the landscape. Wildfire season is no longer confined to a few months — it’s a year‑round reality, they said…And this year, the risk is even higher. Snowpack peaked at just 58% of normal — and weeks earlier than usual. An unusually warm March accelerated the melt, and parched soils absorbed much of the runoff before it reached streams and reservoirs, leaving less water to flow downstream. While much of the public conversation focuses on drought, dry fuels, and wildfire danger, another worry runs deeper — what happens to the state’s water supply if a major fire strikes?
[…]
When a large fire burns, the flames strip hillsides of vegetation, said Weston Toll, a watershed program specialist for the Colorado Forest Service. Once rainstorms arrive, there’s nothing left to hold the soil in place.
“When we have a storm event, all the sediment that is now exposed typically runs downhill and … will fill up reservoirs, which is bad from a water quality and quantity standpoint,” Toll said…
A 2023 report by the U.S. Geological Survey echoes that warning.
The agency found that wildfires pose a significant risk to water supplies by triggering severe flooding, erosion, and the delivery of sediment, nutrients, and metals into rivers, lakes, and reservoirs.
According to the USGS, these changes can degrade water quality, reduce reservoir storage, harm stream habitats, and drive up treatment costs for drinking‑water providers. The effects can vary widely — from barely noticeable shifts to 100‑fold increases in sediment, nutrients, and other contaminants. In the worst cases, experts said the water can resemble “chocolate milk.”
Ash and silt pollute the Cache la Poudre River after the High Park Fire September 2012. Photo credit: USDA
Click the link to read the article on the Associated Press website (Susan Montoya Bryan). Here’s an excerpt:
May 27, 2026
In a brief order Tuesday, the court accepted the recommendation of a special master to move forward with agreements first proposed last year by New Mexico, Texas and Colorado. The settlement calls for reducing groundwater pumping along the dwindling river and retiring water rights from irrigated farmland in southern New Mexico. The states held up the proposal as a promise to restore order to an elaborate system of storing and sharing water between two vast irrigation districts in southern New Mexico and western Texas.
“We’re very excited to be redirecting resources from costly and lengthy litigation to solutions on the ground,” Hanna Riseley-White, director of the Interstate Stream Commission, said Wednesday…
Those solutions will include everything from long-term fallowing programs and more efficient irrigation infrastructure to developing new sources of water, like tapping brackish supplies or importing water, and improving stormwater management so more runoff can be captured and stored.
Before he died at age 87 in early May, Ted Turner knew that stewardship of land would be his real legacy. Of course, he might also be long known for starting CNN and 24-hour news, as well as building a major league baseball team, his hometown Atlanta Braves.
He also started a UN Foundation to help bring peace to the world, thanks to his starter $1 billion contribution, and he tapped former U.S. Sen. Tim Wirth of Colorado to lead it. Wirth recalls how Turner, once dubbed “Captain Outrageous,” liked to shoot from the hip and could never be bothered by whatever passed as political correctness. A plaque on his desk in Atlanta said it all: “Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way.”.
Most of all, Turner left a significant swath of private lands in better condition than he found them. In Montana and other parts of the Rockies, Turner bought huge ranches and made sure the land was healthy enough to grow a bison herd to over 55,000 animals at its peak.
Turner never subscribed to the notion that property rights trumped the common good. He also challenged the conviction that landowners ought to be able to do whatever they want on their land—even if it resulted in environmental harm.
As an entrepreneur with green intentions, Turner believed he could operate better and cheaper in recovering wildlife and rivers on his ranches that had been degraded by overgrazing. He was able to show that smart management also offered safe harbor to wildlife without sacrificing profit.
Some locals around Bozeman, Montana, in the 1980s thought Turner was out of his mind when he placed a conservation easement on his 113,000-acre Flying D Ranch, one of the largest easements in America at the time. The easement limited development in perpetuity, and had Turner exploited the Flying D as a real estate play, he could easily have made hundreds of millions in profit.
Turner could make a big impact on people. One was the billionaire businessman Thomas Kaplan, who likens Turner to a combination of John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt. Kaplan says Turner inspired him to co-found Panthera, now the leading global wildcat conservation organization, as well as The Orianne Society, named after his daughter and dedicated to perpetuating the survival of snakes.
Kaplan likes to recount how, when he visited Turner’s Flying D, he saw a wolf pack and howled back and forth with them. The ranch was home to the one of the largest, free-ranging wolf packs in North America, co-existing with Turner’s buffalo, and a population of elk, deer, moose and other wild animals that moved on and off the property.
Turner issued an edict that wolves visiting his land were never to be hunted or lethally controlled. Emulating the Turner model, Kaplan acquired thousands of acres in a vast wetland area of southwest Brazil called the Pantanal, and there he advanced a model of co-existence between cattle ranchers and jaguars. The Pantanal is considered the best place in the world for watching jaguars, and even cattle ranchers, who used to shoot the cats, now have eco-lodges on their estancias.
Turner was aware of his foibles, for which he hoped he would be forgiven. Biologist Mike Phillips, who oversaw a number of rewilding projects for Turner, told me, “In these recent years, as he was in decline, Ted once asked me, “Mike, we did okay, didn’t we?’ And I replied, “Ted, we accomplished exactly what we set out to do so long ago. I reminded him that he had done more as a private citizen to benefit native species than any other individual in the history of the world.”
Phillips said that Turner choked up with emotion.
Todd Wilkinson
Jane Fonda, Turner’s “third and favorite wife,” according to those who knew the couple, told me that after a brutal childhood with a hard-driving father who took his own life, along with a sister who died young from lupus, Turner found solace in nature.
“What did he want most of all? asked Fonda. “To be recognized as a good guy. There was a part of Ted who believed that by trying to save nature and bring more peace to the world, he could save himself. But he saved much more than that.”
Todd Wilkinson is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring conversation about the West. He is a longtime journalist and founder of Yellowstonian.org, who wrote an award-winning biography about Turner.
One good thing the Trump administration’s and the GOP’s attack on public lands has brought about is more attention to public lands and the sometimes arcane policies governing them. When I started the Land Desk back in 2021, it was one of the only Substack-like outlets focusing on public lands issues; now there are more than a dozen of them, put out by journalists, quasi-journalists, and advocacy groups — with a fair amount of overlap. Meanwhile, more conventional media outlets have also beefed up their public lands coverage since Trump took office.
I’m all for it — a well informed public makes for a stronger democracy — but it does have a major downside. There has been a noticeable increase in disinformation and misinformation and simply erroneous coverage of the issues and, especially, of the potential effects of the administration’s actions. The motives are surely mixed, ranging from honest misunderstandings to the writer trying to simplify complex issues for the average reader. Maybe they feel that the nuanced reality won’t rally the troops as effectively as hyperbolic alarmism. Maybe they know that outrage is more likely than mere concern to garner clicks, subscriptions, and donations.
While I understand the need to get people fired up about these issues and actions — most of which should indeed be stopped — I also worry that writing one’s congress member or commenting to the federal agencies based on erroneous information will be ineffective or even counterproductive. The truth in most of these cases is bad enough. Let’s just stick with it. Please?
Here are a few examples of what’s got my goat:
The claim: Revoking Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument’s management plan will open up nearly 900,000 acres of the monument to oil and gas drilling, coal extraction, and uranium mining.
The messier reality: MAGA Sen. Mike Lee’s and Rep. Celeste Maloy’s attempts to use the Congressional Review Act to revoke Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument’s management plan is abhorrent, stupid, and is done out of spite rather than for any pragmatic reasons. If they succeed, the monument’s management will revert back to the far weaker 2020 plan that allowed more grazing, more damaging “vegetation management,” and more off-road vehicle use. Plus the 2020 plan only covered the 1 million acres left in the national monument after Trump removed about 900,000 acres from its boundaries, meaning there would be a sort of management limbo on those 900,000 acres.
However, rescinding the plan will not eliminate or shrink the national monument or its basic protections, nor will it allow drilling or mining or other development anywhere within the 1.9 million acre national monument. The boundaries will remain the same, which means that the terms set in the 2021 proclamation restoring them also remain in effect1, and that includes no new oil and gas or coal leases or mining claims within the national monument.
Furthermore, the claims about grazing have been exaggerated as well. The 2020 plan allowed grazing in all but 125,800 acres of the national monument, but did not allow it right along the Escalante River or in Lower Calf Canyon, and it would have allowed suspended allotments to be reissued (if a rancher wanted them). The 2024 plan put 314,700 acres off-limits to grazing — including bigger buffers around the Escalante River — and would have permanently retired suspended allotments.
The claim:Moving the U.S. Forest Service headquarters to Salt Lake City, “the beating heart of the anti-public-lands movement in America,” will lead to a mass selloff of public lands and is part of an “execution” of the agency.
The messy reality: Look, I know that Utah politicians are kooky and that they don’t like the idea of federal land management. I wrote a whole damned book about it. But that doesn’t mean that once you cross the border into Utah you become a raving sagebrush rebel. There are pros and cons to moving a federal agency to the West, but it’s not like Phil Lyman, Mike Lee, Celeste Maloy, Ken Ivory, and the ghost of Cal Black are going to have more influence over the agency’s HQ in SLC than they would in D.C. Nor is the relocation, alone, going to lead to public land sales. Utah happens to be home to strong public lands advocacy and environmental groups, including SUWA, Grow the Flow, Utah Rivers Council, HEAL Utah, Uranium Watch, Torrey House Press, and others. Salt Lake City is more progressive politically than many cities in blue states. Over the last three decades it has elected liberal mayors and other city leaders, including climate, human rights, and air quality activists.
Instead of fear-mongering over Utah, maybe we should be focused on the severe budget cuts plaguing the Forest Service, the loss of thousands of staffers and their deep well of institutional knowledge, its growing inability to manage lands under its purview regardless of where it’s headquartered, along with policies aimed at increasing logging and grazing on the nation’s forests. That’s the real danger.
The mislead:Almost every story or blog post or call to action regarding the administration’s move to rescind the oil and gas leasing moratorium in the area around Chaco Culture National Historical Park is accompanied by a photo of Pueblo Bonito, Casa Rinconada, or another site inside the park itself.
The messy reality: This is misleading because it gives the impression that those structures will now be open to drilling. That’s not the case. The park and the pueblos in it retain their protections no matter what happens with the moratorium. The leasing ban is for a ten mile radius outside the park boundaries, which is, indeed, a very significant cultural landscape, replete with Chacoan “roads,” outlier pueblos and great houses, shrines, and other sites — and absolutely should be protected from energy development. This is an innocent mistake: The sites in “downtown Chaco” are not only photogenic, but most outlets probably can’t find stock images of the sites that could be wrecked by drilling if the moratorium is lifted. Still, they could ask me …
So yes, write to your congress member, protest, write letters to the editor, and send your two cents to your public lands agencies. But please, base your protests and suggestions and recommendations on facts, not on outrage-inciting hyperbole or speculation.
The Shootaring uranium mill near Ticaboo, Utah. Anfield says it plans to restart the facility. Built in 1980, the facility ran for only six months or so before shutting down. It has remained idle ever since. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️
If nuclear reactors could run on hype, alone, then we’d have plenty of power for all of those hyperscale data centers in the pipeline. The optimistic, gold-rushesque press releases about new uranium mining claims, acquisitions, and exploration just keep coming, giving the impression that there is a nuclear renaissance underway in the West. Maybe there is, sort of, but it hasn’t made it to the uranium mining space yet.
The one substantial move forward was the Nuclear Regulatory Commission granting a construction license to Bill Gates-backed Terra Power, allowing it to begin building its Natrium advanced reactor in Kemmerer, Wyoming. It’s a big deal, but the company doesn’t expect to bring the plant online until 2030, at least, and will still need an operating license to do so.
It will take more than one reactor to bring the western Colorado and eastern Utah uranium mining industry back to anywhere near its Cold War-era glory days, though that’s not stopping mining firms from courting investors.
Some of the latest hype includes:
American Atomics’ website banner is an image of Monument Valley, where Diné miners worked Cold War-era uranium mines with virtually no safety measures or protective equipment, despite industry and government knowledge of the occupational hazards. Many of those workers eventually fell sick and died from exposure to radon and other substances in the mine. Now the company hopes to “reshape how nations fuel their power grids and defend their energy sovereignty” by building a “fully American-controlled nuclear fuel cycle, from exploration and extraction to enrichment and supply.” They hope to seed the effort with the 217-claim Big Indian project in the Lisbon Valley in cooperation with a company run by Mark Steen, the son of Charles Steen. American Atomics also has a block of mining claims in the Uravan uranium belt in western Colorado.
After abandoning its proposal to use high-pressure slurry ablation, or HPSA, to extract uranium from the October waste rock pile near Gateway, Colorado, Disa applied to do the same on the smaller Mary Ann pile in Montrose County. On April 22, the NRC replied to Disa with a request for more information. Disa filed an amendment to its application on May 14.
Anfield Energy submitted a permit to restart its long-idle JD-8 mine located on a mesa south of the Paradox Valley in western Colorado. This is part of an effort to restart its entire Monogram Mesa Complex, which consists of five inactive facilities. The company claims it plans on being permitted and starting production in mid-2026. If it hits its target, however, it doesn’t appear to have a place to mill the ore. While it says it plans to restart the Shootaring Mill near Ticaboo, Utah, the state hasn’t issued a permit for it to do so. However, Anfield did apparently drill monitoring wells at the Shootaring Mill and at its Slick Rock project near the western Colorado hamlet of the same name.
Anfield, as you may remember, is the company behind the Velvet-Wood uranium mine in the Lisbon Valley. The same one the Trump administration dramatically fast-tracked permitting for to help solve the so-called “energy emergency.” Well, Anfield did do some work at the mine, but they still don’t have state air quality, ventilation shaft, or groundwater remediation permits, meaning actual production is a long ways off. That must be some emergency, eh?
The Velvet Wood-Mine as it appeared in May 2026. Without critical state permits, they won’t be solving the energy emergency anytime too soon. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
1 It’s worth remembering that restored GSENM was managed by the Trump-era plan for the three years between when Biden restored the monument in 2021, and when the new management plan went into effect in 2024.
Photograph of Iron Mountain Pumping Plant by Jet Lowe. Provided by the U.S. Library of Congress
The 85-year old Colorado River Aqueduct – which was constructed over a 8-year period beginning in 1933, is a major water conveyance system that brings 1.2 billion gallons of Colorado River water to Southern California every day. The aqueduct was paid for by voters in 13 Southern California cities who overwhelmingly approved a $220 million municipal bond in order to finance the monumental construction project. Managed by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the aqueduct stretches 242 miles across the Colorado and Mojave deserts, tunnels under two mountain ranges, and rises a total of 1,617 feet in elevation from its starting point downstream of Parker Dam near Lake Havasu.1
Photograph of canal and adjacent sand filters at Iron Mountain. Photograph by Jet Lowe. Picture provided by the U.S. Library of Congress
Numerous engineering features mark the aqueduct, including dams, reservoirs, pumping plants, tunnels, canals, conduits, inverted siphons, and transmission lines. Each of these parts works together to provide what was determined to be the most efficient, cost-etfectlve, and safe combination of transporting water from the Colorado River to the southern California coastal basin. The aqueduct has always been much more than just a canal. Its engineering coincided with American during the Depression-era, when the appearance and promotion of technological “progress” provided the American public with a sense of accomplishment and pride. During its construction the aqueduct provided jobs for 35,000 people for over eight years.
Headgate house at the Iron Mountain Pumping Plant, photographed by Jet Lowe. Provided by the Library of Congress.
The combination of the total height that water is lifted (1,617′) and the aqueduct’s 242-mile length was unprecedented, as was the aqueduct’s carrying capacity of 1,605 c.f.s. The vertical synchronous motors driving the pumps were the largest of these types of motors then constructed. The difficulties encountered during the construction of the Mt. San Jacinto tunnel received national attention, and engineers argued that it was one of the most difficult tunnel construction jobs undertaken in the history of world engineering. Some of the equipment introduced and engineering techniques employed during the aqueduct’s construction overall were celebrated for their ingenuity and ability to set standards for future projects of similar magnitude. The Parker diversion dam had to be erected upon bedrock 233′ deep, which at the time made it the world’s deepest. The Colorado River Aqueduct overall was the world’s most technologically-advanced water conveyance system, and it has proven its reliability by serving the needs of 19 million Southern California residents for the last 85 years.
Click the link to read the article on the KSL website (Shelby Lofton). Here’s an excerpt:
May 27, 2026
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Central Utah farmers said severe drought, frost and strong winds have led to the worst conditions they’ve seen.
Farmer Neil Sorensen said his alfalfa crop is far below where it should be.
Scott Sunderland is struggling with irrigation, raising concerns about his long-term crop viability.
Central Utah farmers said a combination of drought, frost and strong winds has created some of the worst conditions they have ever seen. Farmer Neil Sorensen said normally, fields across the Sanpete Valley would be lush and green this time of year. Instead, he said conditions look more like late summer.
“The frost, the wind and the drought, it’s just took a toll on all our crops,” Sorensen said.
He primarily grows alfalfa but also grows grass and barley, grass mix and potatoes. Sorensen said his alfalfa crop is far below where it should be.
“Right now, you can see it’s below my knees,” he said, adding that even his best fields are struggling.
The National Weather Service’s Central Region Climate Outlook issued Sunday [May 24, 2026] said there is an 82% chance that an El Niño weather pattern will develop between May and July, which could bring a higher chance of above-average precipitation this summer…
Additionally, the U.S. Drought Monitor said drought conditions, which have been persistent across the Western United States for the past several months, are expected improve in Colorado over the next three months. But, even with such a hopeful outlook, NWS Meteorologist Kate Abbot said a slightly rainier pattern should start to appear the first week of June in Southwest Colorado.
“As we move into next week, we start to set up into more of a southwesterly flow pattern,” Abbot said. “We start to see some chances for afternoon showers in the San Juan Mountains, with probabilities increasing as the week progresses.”
Colorado is headed toward a potentially wetter-than-normal summer, with promises of an active monsoon season and growing confidence in developing El Nino conditions. However, with hotter temperatures likely, this summer could look different from the mountains’ last El Nino visit. The Climate Prediction Center’s seasonal precipitation outlook shows above-normal chances for rainfall in Colorado from June through September, with the Western Slope and Utah border seeing the highest likelihood of above-average rainfall. Forecasts also show a strong possibility that Colorado will see an active monsoon season, according to Peter Goble, assistant state climatologist at the Colorado Climate Center…
A super El Niño appears to be forming, but the effects in the Upper Colorado River Basin are especially hard to predict because it sits right in between the “warmer, drier” and the “wetter, colder” zones, meaning it could go either way. Source: NOAA.
The forecasts for summer showers coincide with those predicting the fast arrival of El Nino conditions, though Goble said he doesn’t currently see a strong tie between El Nino and stronger summer precipitation…A release published by the center on May 14 predicted that El Nino is likely to emerge during what’s left of spring, with an 82% chance that it will materialize between May and July and continue through the Northern Hemisphere for the upcoming winter. The center predicts a 96% chance that El Nino will remain from December through February 2027…Historically, El Nino conditions have brought wetter summers and falls , but drier than normal winters to the Northern Rockies. The last time Colorado saw El Nino conditions in the summer was in 2023, which created “a really wet late spring and summer east of the Continental Divide,” Goble said.
