Members of Congress want Tijuana River cleanup and Rio Grande water deliveries discussed as part of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement.
EPA publishes a lead service line data dashboard.
Reclamation finalizes an operating plan to increase water deliveries to farms in California’s Central Valley.
A water pipeline break disrupts the Grand Canyon’s South Rim services.
DOE advisory group recommends limiting scope of state Clean Water Act reviews.
NOAA assesses the 2025 harmful algal bloom in Lake Erie.
And lastly, bipartisan bills in Congress would compensate farmers hurt by PFAS.
“In Maine, PFAS contamination affecting many different sectors, including agriculture, has been discovered over the past several years. The presence of PFAS in wastewater sludge once spread as fertilizer has prevented some Maine farms from selling their products, thus leading to significant financial hardship for these family farmers.” – Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) speaking on the Senate floor about the Relief for Farmers Hit with PFAS Act. The bill would provide financial aid to farmers affected by PFAS contamination.
The pot of money authorized in the bill could be used in several ways, the representatives say. Reimbursement for lost income. Soil and water testing. Remediation systems. Blood testing for farmers exposed to the chemicals.
By the Numbers
River Mile 58.4: Estimated location, as of December 2, of the saltwater “wedge” in the Mississippi River in southern Louisiana. Due to dry weather, the wedge – saltwater that pushed upriver due to weak flows – has advanced 12 miles since mid-November.
2.4: Severity of the Lake Erie harmful algal bloom in 2025, according to a NOAA assessment. That corresponds to a “mild” bloom – the second mildest since 2008. The severity rating is a measure of the bloom’s biomass, not its toxicity.
News Briefs
Tijuana River Sewage in Trade Talks California Democrats in the House and Senate want chronic sewage problems in the Tijuana River to be part of trade talks between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada.
The representatives made their case in a letter to Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative. The three countries are beginning to discuss revisions to the trade agreement that was signed in 2018.
The California contingent asked for:
a multi-year funding commitment from the Mexican government
expand the geographical scope of an infrastructure grant program to include projects in Mexico
more financing from the North American Development Bank
a permanent funding source
include a formal role for existing border river institutions in the trade agreement framework.
The Tijuana River Coalition, a public interest group, also asked the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to consider sewage pollution in a revised trade agreement.
Tijuana River sewage is not the only cross-border water problem that U.S. representatives would like to see addressed in the trade talks.
Rep. Monica De La Cruz of Texas encouraged the USTR to include Rio Grande water sharing in the agreement and to use its dispute resolution process as a way to enforce accountability. The Lower Rio Grande Valley Water District Managers’ Association also asked for Rio Grande water disputes to be handled through the trade agreement.
Studies and Reports
Lead Service Line Data The EPA published an online dashboard with data about the number of lead service lines for each public water system.
Public water systems were required to submit lead service line inventories to the EPA by October 2024. The agency estimates about 4 million lead drinking water lines in the country.
Central Valley Project Operating Plan The Bureau of Reclamation finalized a new operating plan for the Central Valley Project, the federal canal system that delivers water south of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
The new plan, which will maximize water deliveries to farms, stems from an executive order requiring the agency to do so.
Permitting and Energy Development A Department of Energy advisory group that represents oil and gas interests submitted a report recommending limiting the scope of state water-quality reviews.
Like many Republican-leaning groups, the National Petroleum Council wants to prevent states from blocking fossil fuel infrastructure through use of Section 401 of the Clean Water Act, which allows states and some tribes to review projects that could pollute their waters. Notably, New York denied a water-quality permit to the Constitution natural gas pipeline in 2016.
The council’s report calls Section 401 a “procedural chokepoint” in project permitting.
The Trump EPA is promoting a “specific and limited” use of Section 401 for water-quality considerations only.
National Renewable Energy Laboratory
On the Radar
More Renaming The Department of Energy has renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
The new name is the National Laboratory of the Rockies.
Economic Effects of Permitting Requirements The Congressional Budget Office is seeking information that would help it better model the economic and budgetary effects of changes in federal permitting requirements for infrastructure.
Send comments to communications@cbo.gov.
Grand Canyon Water Troubles The National Park Service is closing hotels on the Grand Canyon’s South Rim to overnight guests due to breaks in the water pipeline that serves the area.
The 12-mile pipeline crosses the canyon. The park service is in the middle of a $208 million pipeline upgrade that it expects to complete in 2027.
Federal Water Tap is a weekly digest spotting trends in U.S. government water policy. To get more water news, follow Circle of Blue on Twitter and sign up for our newsletter.
Seven U.S. states and Mexico depend on the Colorado River, shown here in the Grand Canyon. But over the past century, the river’s flow has decreased by roughly 20 percent. (Bureau of Reclamation)
A hot and dry November left the Intermountain West with much below average snowpack conditions. November temperatures were four degrees above average region-wide and much of Utah and Wyoming baked under mean temperatures that were six to ten degrees above average. High temperatures coupled with mostly below normal precipitation caused low snow water equivalent (SWE) and worsening drought conditions.
November precipitation was much below average for much of the region, especially in Wyoming, northern Colorado and northern Utah, which received less than half of normal precipitation. Much above average November precipitation was observed in southern Utah and eastern Colorado. Record dry Novembers were observed at thirteen locations in Wyoming, ten locations in Colorado and five locations in Utah. Despite dry November conditions, regional water year precipitation is near to above average except for eastern Colorado and southeastern Wyoming.
November was an extremely warm month, especially in western Wyoming, where monthly temperatures were more than eight degrees above average. The entire region observed November temperatures that were at least four degrees above average, with all of Utah, nearly all of Wyoming and western Colorado experiencing temperatures that exceeded six degrees above average. Record warm October conditions were observed in western Colorado, southwestern Wyoming and throughout Utah.
Record low SWE conditions exist at many locations in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. A hot and dry November left most regional river basins with SWE conditions at less than 50% of average, with the least snow in the Six Creeks near Salt Lake City, where December 1st SWE is 22% of median. Slightly better SWE conditions exist in southern Colorado and southern Utah.
Regional drought coverage expanded slightly during November, increasing from 51% five weeks ago to 54% on December 2. Eastern Colorado and eastern Wyoming remain drought-free, but drought emerged along the northern Front Range and adjacent plains. Coverage of drought in Utah dropped below 100% for the first time in five months. Utah and Colorado were last free from drought six years ago, while the current drought in Wyoming began five years ago.
West Drought Monitor map December 2, 2025.
A NOAA La Niña Advisory is still in effect as eastern Pacific Ocean temperatures are below average. Weak La Niña conditions are expected to transition (60% probability) to neutral conditions by early 2026. The NOAA December Precipitation Outlook suggests above average precipitation for most of Wyoming. For the winter months (Dec-Feb), there is an increased probability for above average temperatures in Utah and southwestern Colorado. In Wyoming, there is an increased probability for above average precipitation and below average temperatures.
Record high temperatures drive record low snowpack. On December 1, record low SWE conditions were present at 52 regional Snotel sites in northern Colorado, northern Utah, and across Wyoming. Despite very low snowpack conditions, water year precipitation is above average for the region, except in northern Colorado. During early October, daily precipitation records were set in Utah and Colorado, including widespread flooding in southwest Colorado. Due to the tropical origin of those storms, nearly all precipitation fell as rain. Contrasting precipitation, water year temperatures are much above average with record high temperatures observed in parts of western Colorado, eastern Utah, and southwestern Wyoming. Consequently, the current snow drought is primarily the result of high temperatures rather than low precipitation. While October precipitation generally fell as rain in regional mountains, above average precipitation has increased soil moisture, which could help to bolster the efficiency of runoff in 2026.
Negotiations among the Magnificent Seven representing the seven states of the Colorado River region begin to resemble the ongoing negotiations between the military and diplomatic representatives for North and South Korea, where negotiations for something beyond an armistice have been going on for more than sixty years. Here, as there, the negotiations have reached a stalemate, and both sides are now engaged in an information war. Between the two Koreas, this war takes the form of everything from huge arrays of speakers blasting pop music across the demilitarized zone to smuggled USB drives with movies and TV shows. Here, it is mostly just propaganda bombs tossed over our ‘DMZ,’ the Grand Canyons, about each side’s virtue and the other side’s obstinacy, depending on their regional media’s love of conflict and tendency to support the home team. The missed November deadline has been seamlessly replaced – as we all suspected it would be – by a February deadline. But otherwise – nothing new on that front. We can just hope it doesn’t go on for another fortysome years.
So I’m going to take advantage of the stalemate to ask the reader to think about a bigger picture that may be more interesting. It stems from a comment from my partner Maryo, from whom I learn too much to dismiss anything she says. ‘Why are you “romancing the river”?’ she asked the other day. ‘Romance is such a cheapened concept today – bodice-ripping stories of ridiculous antagonistic love. You’re undermining the value of your work, calling it a “romance.”’
‘Well,’ I said – figuring that if she feels that way, maybe my readers raise the same question – ‘maybe one of the things a writer ought to try to do is restore the value of words and the concepts they once represented that have become devalued through misuse.’ Spoken like a true Don Quixote, another old man who took arms, sort of, against abuse of the concept of ‘romance.’
I do think that one of the things that ‘civilization’ does in civilizing us is to simplify things for us, including words whose complexity and depth embrace concepts, ideas and feelings that can be inconvenient to an orderly civilized society. A ‘romance,’ from the medieval era on into the early 20th century, was a story of an adventure in pursuit of something mysterious, exciting, challenging, something beyond everyday life. That could be the pursuit of a love relationship that was life-changing (and maybe life-endangering) for its participants – Tristan and Isolde, Launcelot and Guinevere, Romeo and Juliet, Bonnie and Clyde.
But on a much larger scale, the romantic adventure can be establishing a relationship with anything outside of ourselves that intrigues or challenges us. The relationship can emerge with a place, a house, a horse, a car, a continent, a river, an idea, as well as another person, anything that intrigues us, wakes up our imagination – arational or prerational relationships that make the civilizing forces nervous. The relationship can run the quick dynamic spectrum from arational love to its flip side arational hate, through all the intermediary love-hate variations. It can also have a mythically selective or even creative attitude toward the gray-zone relationship between ‘truth’ and fact. Which leads those trying to develop an orderly civilization to dismiss anything (ad)venturing into the mythic as a lie. It just seems simpler that way.
The Powell survey on its second trip down the Colorado River, 1871. Photo credit: USGS
The first comprehensive study of the Colorado River region was uncivilized enough to state upfront its romantic origins: Frederick Dellenbaugh’s Romance of the Colorado River. Dellenbaugh’s book (available online for a pittance) delved as deeply as was possible at that time into both the First People prehistory in the region and the early history of the Euro-American invasion, from the Spanish trying to work their way up the river from its contentious confluence with the Gulf of California (‘Sea of Cortez’ to them) to the trappers imposing the first major Euro-American change on the river, stripping its tributaries of their beavers which increased the size and violence of the river’s annual spring-summer runoff of snowmelt. But the heart of the book is John Wesley Powell’s explorations to link the upper river and the lower river through its canyons.
Dellenbaugh, as a seventeen-year-old, accompanied Powell on his second Colorado River expedition, a ‘baptism under water’ (often literally) that shaped his ‘romantic’ vision. In his ‘Introduction,’ after observing that most of the great rivers that humans encountered in exploration and settlement gradually became like foster parents to those who settled along them, carrying goods for them and generally watering and growing their settlements, he says of the Colorado:
Dellenbaugh’s Romance was published in 1903. That same year, another great southwestern writer, Mary Hunter Austin came out with her Land of Little Rain, a fascinating collection of her explorations in the deserts of the lower Colorado River region. In that book she offered what might be a cautionary note about ‘romancing the river,’ in an observation about a small Arizona tributary of the Colorado River, ‘the fabled Hassayampa… of whose waters, if any drink, they can no more see fact as naked fact, but all radiant with the color of romance.’
I will now indulge my tendency to take a ‘tectonic’ look at history – looking for large chunks colliding or grating together or subducting under each other. I see the history of our engagement with the Colorado River dividing into three ‘tectonic romances’: first, the Romance of Exploration, which is chronicled in a couple different ways by those two explorers, Dellenbaugh and Austin; their 1903 publications summarize that age and put a semi-colon at the end of the period, as it were.
Second, the Romance of Reclamation: 1903 also marks the year the U.S. Reclamation Service came into being, an organization created almost specifically for settling the Colorado River deserts. Civilized people on both sides of the question would deny that there was any ‘romance’ to reclamation, but one early Bureau engineer would publicly disagree, writing in 1918 about ‘the romance of reclamation’:
C.J. Blanchard of the U.S. Reclamation Service authored that steaming verdure. The Service at that time was under the U.S. Geological Survey, a scientific organization disciplined to the ‘look before you leap’ methods of science, discerning the reality of a situation and adapting to that; but the Reclamation Service, frustrated by the seasonal flood-to-trickle flows of the Colorado, thought that changing that reality (through storage and redistribution) was a more promising route than adapting to it, and so was on its way to becoming independent of the USGS when Blanchard wrote his ‘romance of irrigation’ for an educational journal called The Mentor(thanks, Dave Primus, for calling it to my attention).
Members of the Colorado River Commission, in Santa Fe in 1922, after signing the Colorado River Compact. From left, W. S. Norviel (Arizona), Delph E. Carpenter (Colorado), Herbert Hoover (Secretary of Commerce and Chairman of Commission), R. E. Caldwell (Utah), Clarence C. Stetson (Executive Secretary of Commission), Stephen B. Davis, Jr. (New Mexico), Frank C. Emerson (Wyoming), W. F. McClure (California), and James G. Scrugham (Nevada) CREDIT: COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY WATER RESOURCES ARCHIVE via Aspen Journalism
The best-known document of the Romance of Reclamation was of course the Colorado River Compact – a document in which the romance of reclamation overrode any relationship to ‘naked fact’ about the river and its flows, a situation that is now biting our collective ass.Yet an Arizona water maven said recently that any Bureau of Reclamation solution to the seven-state impasse would have to cleave closely to the Compact…. The history of the Romance of Reclamation has been written in the gaggle of Congressional acts, court decisions, treaties, regulations and directives that make up the ‘Law of the River’ (recitations of which never seem to include the 1908 Winters Doctrine allocating assumed water to federal reservations, including to the First Peoples).
The end of the Romance of Reclamation would be in the 1960s, pick your date: publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964, passage of the Environmental Policy Act in 1969 – a decade in which the general American perception of the West underwent a sea change, from seeing it as a workplace for producing the resources to feed the American people and industries, to seeing it as a great natural playground to which America’s predominantly urban population could go to recharge, with a resulting desire to protect it from the very industrial consumption that supported the American ‘lifestyle.’.
This was the dawn of the third romantic epoch in our relationship with the river (and the continent in general) – the Romance of Restoration and Revision, driven by a belief that we have sinned against capital-N Nature – with many naked facts as evidence – and can only expiate our sins by preserving what remains of the nonhuman environment, restoring what we can of the damage we’ve done, and revising our own systems for consuming nature (e.g., renewable energy).
Aesthetics are at the root of our romance with capital-N Nature, aesthetics best served by the (increasingly rare) opportunity to be alone with and ‘silent on a peak in Darien,’ as Keats put it. We have a large (and growing) number of excellent writer[s] who work to elaborate on that aesthetic – Ed Abbey first, Craig Childs, Heather Hansman, Kevin Fedarko, to name a few.
But the aesthetic yearning to ultimately ‘put it back the way it was’ does not extend to other equally naked facts, like the dependence of the outdoor recreation industries on the creation of big mountain-highway traffic jams pumping big quantities of carbon and nitrogen gases into the already overladen atmosphere, as we all load up our cars with expensive gear to go off to commune with Nature. Or the naked fact that maintaining civilization-as-we-know-it for 300 million people involves a lot of nonrewable extraction from Nature that it will be very difficult to move away from entirely – unless we figure out how to control our breeding.
Just as significant achievements were achieved under the Romance of Reclamation, so significant achievements have been achieved under the Romance of Restoration and Revision – the setting aside of millions of acres of still-sort-of-wild land, instream flow laws, increasingly responsible forest management, et cetera. But we are clearly still in the early transition – half a century later – to a more realistic romance with restoring and revising to a kinder gentler relationship with the nonhuman systems of nature. And right now, we are experiencing a major counter-attack from the societal forces whose aesthetics still imagine a ‘working landscape’ of derricks, mines and other industrial-scale harvests, all suffused with the ‘smell of money,’ societal forces that believe the best of times were before we woke up to the increasingly fragile finitude of our planet under the burden of us. Let’s all go back and make America great again!
The back of Glen Canyon Dam circa 1964, not long after the reservoir had begun filling up. Here the water level is above dead pool, meaning water can be released via the river outlets, but it is below minimum power pool, so water cannot yet enter the penstocks to generate electricity. Bureau of Reclamation photo. Annotations: Jonathan P. Thompson
I cannot now imagine when and how this third epoch of our romance with the river will end. I think this aesthetic romance might peak with the ‘breaching’ of Glen Canyon Dam, an action that has taken on a somewhat mythic quality for today’s river romantics. I don’t think we will tear it down – let it stand as a monument to…something. But I suspect that even the Bureau of Reclamation is exploring some way of tunneling around it at river level, as we continue to flirt with the disaster of dead pool behind the dam. It will not be easy, due to the silt already piled up at the dam – but really, nothing is going to be easy anymore; that blessed civilization is now in the rear-view mirror.
I’m going to take advantage of the lull in the short-term news about the river’s management for maybe the next decade, to take a look at each of these three epochs of ‘romancing the river’ and their relationship to the ‘naked facts’ of the river – mostly see if there might be something there we’ve overlooked that might help us move forward in our ever-emerging relationship of this ‘First River of the Anthropocene.’ Onward and outward.
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 KUER website (David Condos). Here’s an excerpt:
December 3, 2025
Price Mayor Michael Kourianos drew an imaginary line in the air between two scrubby desert hills. His hand traced the path of a planned 100-foot dam for a new reservoir just north of the city in Carbon County. The project, which Kourianos described as vital to the area’s future, would provide irrigation to farmers and shore up the city’s water supply. It’s a big deal in a drought-prone area, and it could be built within five years, he said — if the federal funding that’s supposed to pay for it doesn’t disappear.
“I’m very much worried about that,” Kourianos said. “That could be at risk. That’s the unknown.”
To finish the project’s environmental impact study by next spring, he said the city and county had to scrape together about $215,000. That was after they were told there were no more federal funds to help with it due to the Trump administration’s recent cuts. The next step will be designing the reservoir, which he said is supposed to be paid for by the Natural Resources Conservation Service, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The agency is set to pay 75% of construction costs, too. In all, the project will cost around $200 million. For a city of 8,216 people, that’s just not in the budget…
Price’s reservoir isn’t the only one threatened. In January, for example, the Biden administration awarded more than $70 million to 10 proposals in Utah and another $50 million to four on the Navajo Nation and Ute tribal land within the state’s watersheds. The projects range from improving wetland habitat for endangered fish to removing invasive plants, such as Russian olive trees, from riverbanks. It was part of a $388.3 million effort to improve drought resilience across the Colorado River Basin with money from the Inflation Reduction Act. Just a few days after the money was awarded, however, President Donald Trump took office and paused it. Several months later, recipients are still waiting…One of the impacted proposals is a collaboration between the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources and conservation organizations Trout Unlimited and The Nature Conservancy that would pay people to voluntarily leave water in the Price River rather than use it.
Rare desert wetlands at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula could be wiped by global warming before the end of the century, a new report on climate change in the Arab region warns. Credit: Bob Berwyn/Inside Climate News
As global warming accelerates, about 480 million people in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula face intensifying and in some places unsurvivable heat, as well as drought, famine and the risk of mass displacement, the World Meteorological Organization warned Thursday.
The 22 Arab region countries covered in the WMO’s new State of the Climate report produce about a quarter of the world’s oil, yet directly account for only 5 to 7 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions from their own territories. The climate paradox positions the region as both a linchpin of the global fossil-fuel economy and one of the most vulnerable geographic areas.
WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said extreme heat is pushing communities in the region to their physical limits. Droughts show no sign of letting up in one of the world’s most water-stressed regions, but at the same time, parts of it have been devastated by record rains and flooding, she added.
“Human health, ecosystems and economies can’t cope with extended spells of more than 50 degrees Celsius. It is simply too hot to handle,” she said.
The region in the report stretches from the Atlantic coast of West Africa to the mountains of the Levant and the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula. It spans more than 5 million square miles, roughly the area of the continental United States west of the Mississippi River. Most people live near river valleys or in coastal cities dependent on fragile water supplies, making the entire region acutely sensitive to even small shifts in temperature and rainfall.
Egypt’s Nile Delta, one of the world’s lowest-lying and most densely populated coastal plains, is particularly vulnerable. The delta is sinking and regional sea levels are rising rapidly, putting about 40 million residents and more than half of the country’s agricultural output at risk.
The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report warns that large parts of the Nile Delta will face chronic flooding, salinized soils, and permanent inundation under nearly every future warming scenario. Some projections indicate that a third of the area’s farmland will be underwater by 2050. Because the delta is so low and flat, even modest sea-level rise will push saltwater far inland.
The new WMO report shows that the foundations of daily life across the Arab region, including farms, reservoirs and aquifers that feed and sustain millions, are being pushed to the brink by human-caused warming.
Across northwestern Africa’s sun-blasted rim, the Maghreb, six years of drought have slashed wheat yields, forcing countries such as Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia to import more grain, even as global prices rise.
In parts of Morocco, reservoirs have fallen to record low levels. The government has enacted water restrictions in major cities, including limits on household use, and curtailed irrigation for farmers. Water systems in Lebanon have already crumbled under alternating floods and droughts, and in Iraq and Syria, small farmers are abandoning their land as rivers shrink and seasonal rains become unreliable.
The WMO report ranked 2024 as the hottest year ever measured in the Arab world. Summer heatwaves spread and persisted across Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Egypt. Parts of Iraq recorded six to 12 days with highs above 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit), conditions that are life-threatening even for healthy adults. Across the region, the report noted an increase in the number of heat-wave days in recent decades while humidity has declined. The dangerous combination speeds soil drying and crop damage.
Northern African countries, including Egypt, are on the frontlines of the climate crisis, with temperatures soaring toward levels that aren’t survivable without shelter or air conditioning. Credit: Bob Berwyn/Inside Climate News
By contrast, other parts of the region—the United Arab Emirates, Oman and southern Saudi Arabia—were swamped by destructive record rains and flooding during 2024. The extremes will test the limits of adaptation, said Rola Dashti, executive secretary of the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, who often works with the WMO to analyze climate impacts.
Climate extremes in 2024 killed at least 300 people in the region. The impacts are hitting countries already struggling with internal conflicts, and where the damage is under-insured and under-reported. In Sudan alone, flooding damaged more than 40 percent of the country’s farmland.
But with 15 of the world’s most arid countries in the region, water scarcity is the top issue. Governments are investing in desalination, wastewater recycling and other measures to bolster water security,
but the adaptation gap between risks and readiness is still widening.
The worst is ahead, Dashti said in a WMO statement, with climate models showing a “potential rise in average temperatures of up to 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century under high-emission scenarios.” The new report is important, she said, because it “empowers the region to prepare for tomorrow’s climate realities.”
This Parshall flume measures the water in the Alfalfa Ditch on Surface Creek near Cedaredge. The Colorado Division of Water Resources estimates there are 2,800 diversions of more than 1 cfs without measuring devices across the Western Slope. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
The state of Colorado is ramping up an effort to measure water use on the Western Slope, developing rules and standards and rolling out a grant program to help water users pay for diversion measurement devices.
With input from water users, officials from the Colorado Division of Water Resources are creating technical guidance for each of the four major Western Slope river basins on how agricultural water users should measure the water they take from streams. The state is now doling out $7 million from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to eligible water users with faulty or missing devices to install structures such as flumes, weirs and pumps at their point of diversion.
Twenty-five percent of the funding is earmarked for each of the four river basins: Gunnison (Division 4); Colorado River mainstem (Division 5); Yampa-White-Green (Division 6); and San Juan-Dolores (Division 7). The first round of funding will go to Divisions 6 and 7, and applications close at the end of January. The goal is to have all the projects complete by 2029.
Measurement rules for Divisions 6 and 7 have been finalized and are in effect; rules for Division 4 are in the draft phase, and state officials are accepting comments until Dec. 19 on the draft rules in Division 5.
With thousands of diversions from small tributaries across rural, remote and mountainous areas, figuring out precisely how much water is used in Colorado has historically been challenging. According to state officials, there are about 2,800 diversions of more than 1 cubic foot per second from Western Slope rivers and streams that are not currently being measured. Historically, the state has required measuring devices on only diversions that have been involved in calls. When a downstream senior water rights holder is not getting the full amount of water they are entitled to, they can place a “call,” which forces junior upstream water users to cut back.
This Parshall flume measuring device is being installed on a ditch on Morrisania Mesa near Parachute. The state of Colorado has $7 million in federal funds to distribute to water users to install measuring devices on their diversions from waterways. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Compact compliance
The push for more-accurate measurement comes at a time when there is increasing competition for dwindling water supplies, as well as growing pressure on the Colorado River’s Upper Basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) to conserve water. Whether through forced cuts under the terms of the 1922 Colorado River Compact or through a voluntary conservation program that pays water users to cut back, the state will almost certainly face future cuts to its water use.
According to Jason Ullmann, who is the state engineer and director of the division of water resources, accurate and consistent water measurement is a prerequisite for making basinwide cuts related to the compact.
“While we’ve always been in compliance with the [1922 Colorado River] compact, we haven’t had to do a West Slope-wide administration,” Ullmann said. “We just don’t want to be in the position of having to do that on an emergency basis. We want to be proactive and provide people consistent and reliable standards for what we expect and work with them to get to a point where we do have that more accurate measurement network before that happens.”
Although the Colorado River Compact splits the river’s water evenly between the Upper Basin and the Lower Basin (California, Arizona and Nevada) with 7.5 million acre-feet each annually, the agreement says nothing about what happens when there’s not enough water to meet these allocations. A “compact call” is a theoretical legal concept, whose definition is hotly debated among water managers.
One way it could play out is that the Upper Basin states would have to cut off some water users in order to send enough water downstream to meet their obligations to the Lower Basin. If that happens, Colorado would need a plan for who gets cut off first. Under the strict application water law known as prior appropriation, the oldest water rights get first use of rivers and junior water rights are the first to be cut.
Michael Cohen, a senior fellow at the Pacific Institute, where he has written about the uncertainties of water use and measurement in the Upper Basin, said collecting better data will help water managers figure out where cuts should come from.
“Moving forward, it looks more and more likely that there’s going to be some kind of compact call,” Cohen said. “Then the state of Colorado, as well as the other Upper Basin states, need to figure out how they’re going to enforce that kind of call.”
This Parshall flume was installed in the Yampa River basin in 2020 and replaced the old rusty flume seen in the background. The state of Colorado is working toward creating measurement rules and installing measurement devices across the Western Slope. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Managing scarcity
But compact compliance is not the only reason that water measurement is needed. Scientists have shown that climate change has contributed to a 20% decline in flows from the 20th century average, and that every 1 degree Celsius of warming results in a 9% reduction in flows. The combination of climate change and a historic drought means that rivers that had never before experienced shortages or calls have started experiencing them in recent years. In the past few years, the Yampa and White rivers, in the northwest corner of the state, have had first-ever calls and have been designated “over-appropriated,” meaning there’s more water demand than supply at certain times.
“Even if you toss the compact situation out, it’s just the practical reality that we’re seeing less snowpack and we have more calls,” Ullmann said. “We’re just in need of improving that measurement accuracy because of the need for administration.”
John Cyran, an attorney who worked on developing the measurement rules for the South Platte River basin and is now a senior attorney with the Healthy Rivers department of Boulder-based environmental group Western Resource Advocates, uses the analogy of a pizza party with too-few pizzas where hungry partygoers are allowed only two slices each to illustrate how measurement is needed in times of scarcity.
“Just like sharing a shrinking pizza or Thanksgiving pie, our water supply is declining,” Cyran said. “The pie is getting smaller. So it is increasingly important to make sure that people don’t take more than their share. But we can’t manage what we don’t measure.”
Tightening up water measurement across the Western Slope could also help Upper Basin water managers as they grapple with a future conservation program that pays water users to cut back and then stores that water in a pool in Lake Powell. A criticism of past pilot programs was that the saved water was not tracked to Lake Powell. Water users downstream of a conservation project could pick up the extra water, with no guarantee that any of it reached the reservoir. Measurement rules and devices could help ensure that this conserved water is “shepherded” to Lake Powell.
Measurement is the first step toward management of a scarce public resource, Cyran said.
“The first step is measuring how much water is being diverted,” Cyran said. “The next step is management – making sure that folks only divert their share and that water we conserve stays in the stream and is not diverted by another user.”
Colorado River Basin map via the Babbit Center for Land and Water Policy/Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
The drought situation has improved markedly in the Southwest since the end of the last water year, especially in the Four Corners area. Source: National Drought Monitor.
We are now two months into the water year — and a couple of days into meteorological winter — and so far both are pretty weird. On the one hand, much of the West is covered by one of the scantest snowpacks for early December in decades. On the other, it’s also been one of the wettest beginnings to the water year in recent memory.
Graph of 2026 water year snowpack levels for the Animas River watershed (which this year reflects that for most of western Colorado and the Upper Colorado River Basin), along with every year since 2000 that has started as sparsely or more so than this year. Note that the 2008 snowpack in the Animas was just as meagre in early December as it is this year. Then the snows came with a vengeance, leading to one of the biggest winters on record as well as a very healthy spring runoff that lasted well into July.
While snow levels are paltry, the weather gods have delivered plenty of precipitation to the region. While that has helped ease drought conditions, it is no substitute for a healthy snowpack.
Adding to the uncanniness has been the wave of generous storms that have dumped up to a foot of snow on Colorado ski areas and snarled traffic, leading to at least two multi-car pileups on I-70 and shutting down other arteries — yet still failing to bring snowpack levels to anywhere near “normal.”
It’s a big ol’ mixed bag, in other words. The big October deluges eased the drought in much of the region, but the warm temperatures and snow drought don’t bode well for next spring’s runoff. Meagre early winter snowpacks can make and have made dramatic comebacks (e.g. water year 2008 in southwestern Colorado), and another storm is moving into the region as I write this, yet the National Weather Service’s is predicting an abnormally warm and dry winter for much of the Southwest.
🌵 Public Lands 🌲
The Grand County commissioners’ “Access and Capacity Enhancement Alternative” plan aimed at increasing visitation at Arches National Park was just the tip of an iceberg, it seems. Yesterday (Dec. 1), Commissioner Brian Martinez presented the plan to a group of state and federal officials at a closed State of Utah and National Park Service Workshop in Salt Lake City.
The meeting’s purpose, according to the official agenda, is:
This may sound fairly innocuous (and maybe it is). But given some of the players, it may also be the latest volley in Utah’s long-running effort to seize control of public lands. The meeting was run by the Interior Department’s associate deputy secretary, Karen Budd-Falen, and Redge Johnson, who leads Utah’s Public Lands Policy Coordinating Office.
Budd-Falen built her legal career on fighting federal agencies, including the Interior Department, and was part of the Sagebrush Rebellion and the Wise Use movements that endeavored to turn federal land over to states and counties and to weaken regulations on the extractive industries. Johnson, meanwhile, was a driving force behind the state’s effort to take control of 18.5 million acres of Bureau of Land Management land in the state.
An anti-BLM sticker (referring, presumably, to the federal land agency, not the Black Lives Matter movement) at another Phil Lyman rally against “federal overreach” and motorized travel closures in southeastern Utah back in 2014. Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk
It’s not clear what is meant when they say the meeting is aimed at achieving Trump’s agenda. As far as national parks go, the administration has been rather chaotic: Freezing hiring, laying off thousands of staff (only to rehire some of them), slashing budgets, and allowing visitors to run roughshod over the parks during the government shutdown.
It sure looks like they are trying to cause the parks to fail, which would give them an excuse to further privatize their functions. Private for-profit corporations already run the lodges, campgrounds, and other services inside many parks. That’s why, during the shutdown, concessionaire-run campgrounds within parks continued to operate, while all of the government-run functions, such as entrance-fee-collection, were shuttered. In this way a false contrast was created between the functional privately-run operations and the dysfunctional public ones; visitors during that time would be excused for preferring the former.
The timing of this meeting, purportedly to receive input from gateway communities, is kind of odd. I have to wonder whether the Interior Department consulted local elected officials before raising entry fees for foreign visitors to $100 at Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks in Utah, along with Grand Canyon, Acadia, Everglades, Glacier, Grand Teton, Rocky Mountain, Sequoia & Kings Canyon, Yellowstone, and Yosemite National Parks.
The Southwest’s tourism industry is highly reliant on international visitors. Visitation from abroad is already down, thanks mostly to the Trump administration’s “America First” creed and its general hostility to the rest of the world. Singling out foreign travelers for these higher fees — even if only at the most popular parks — is likely to dampen visitation from abroad even more, which will ripple through Western economies.
Grand County’s bid to cram even more visitors into Arches National Park won’t be too effective if would be visitors don’t even make it to the United States …
🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭
This is just another old map that caught my attention, in part because it’s a reminder of how extensive the railroad network was, even in the rugged parts of Colorado, back in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This one shows the Denver & Rio Grande rail lines in 1893.
January date scrapped in favor of June 29, 2026, after ‘key witness unavailability’ — four years after Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management was first approved by Subdistrict 1 and with the unconfined aquifer still in a historic decline
The San Luis Valley’s highly-anticipated district water court case — the water trial of this century if you will — originally scheduled to last five weeks beginning in January has been pushed back six months to the summer of 2026 due to the departure of a key witness in the fallout from a series of contentious October emails.
The Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management by Subdistrict 1 in the Rio Grande Water Conservation District has lived a precarious life without ever being implemented, going back to 2022 when it was originally crafted by subdistrict managers and January 2023 when it was adopted by Rio Grande Water Conservation District board.
Later came approval by the state engineer, and then after objections were filed against the new amended plan, Colorado Water Court Division 3 Judge Michael Gonzales set a trial date to commence on Jan. 5, 2026, and to last five weeks.
That is, until the week before Thanksgiving when Gonzales scrapped the January date in favor of June 29, 2026, some four years after the plan was first approved at the subdistrict level and the unconfined aquifer still in a historic decline. The judge did so after a series of emails sent by a key expert witness for the main objectors to the plan surfaced.
The effect is that a new plan to recover the Rio Grande’s unconfined aquifer, which has been approved at the local and state levels but still requires sign-off from district water court, remains in limbo.
Following filings by the Northeast Water Users Association and Sustainable Water Augmentation Group requesting a six-month continuance to the start of the trial, and the Rio Grande Water Conservation District and state Division of Water Resources objecting to the request, Gonzales ruled the two main objectors challenging the new aquifer recovery plan had good reason to ask for a six-month continuance after Taylor Adams, an environmental and water resources engineer for Hydros Consulting in Boulder, resigned from the case due to “personal and family circumstances.”
Adams was set to challenge the Subdistrict 1 water plan on a variety of engineering fronts until a series of emails he sent in October to State Engineer Jason Ullman and Senior Assistant Attorney General Preston Hartmann came to light. In one email, he tells Ullman, “Also, GFY.” In another, he emails that he is “no longer interested in anything other than publicly exploding the rampant corruption at DWR and the AG Office.”
And in an email sent Sunday, Oct. 19, to Attorney General Phil Weiser, Adams writes, “We haven’t met, but I understand that you’re running for governor of Colorado. You should know that if you continue this pursuit without addressing the persistent and laughable perjury that has been carried out in your name by Preston Hatman (sic) and Jason Ullman, you will be the subject of my attention throughout your campaign…”
The Rio Grande Water Conservation District asked Gonzales not to delay the water court proceedings due to the urgency to recover the unconfined aquifer and the lack of “credible evidence that demonstrates that Mr. Adams is unavailable. Rather, they now assert that he ‘should not be pressured into returning to the case at the risk of further harm to his mental health.’”
“In any event,” district water attorneys argued in their objection to a trial delay, “none of this changes the fact that the unconfined aquifer is still over 1.3 million acre-feet below the water levels measured in 1976, and more than 830,000 acre-feet below the water levels previously determined by this Court and the Colorado Supreme Court to be sustainable.”
State Engineer Jason Ullman, consultant Taylor Adams, Colorado Water Court Division 3 Judge Michael Gonzales
Subdistrict 1 is home to the San Luis Valley’s richest crops of potatoes, barley and alfalfa. Without recovery of the shallow aquifer, the state is threatening mass shut down of groundwater pumping wells and requires both a master plan and annual replacement plans to show recovery efforts.
The subdistrict’s proposed Fourth Plan of Water Management is its most drastic effort yet to meet the state’s orders. The new plan, crafted in 2022 and adopted by the Rio Grande Water Conservation District in January 2023, is designed to “match the amount of groundwater pumping to the amount of water coming into the subdistrict.”
It does this through a 1-to-1 augmentation, meaning for every acre-foot of water used, an acre-foot has to be returned to the unconfined aquifer through recharging ponds. The amended plan relies on covering any groundwater withdrawals with natural surface water or the purchase of surface water credits.
Farmers in the subdistrict have expressed support for the plan, which includes a $500 per acre-foot overpumping fee that farmers would pay if they exceed the amount of natural surface water tied to the property in their farming operations.
Objections are coming from farmers who do not have natural surface water coming into their property and around the steep fee for purchasing surface water credits from a neighboring operation to offset groundwater pumping irrigation. Both proponents and opponents of the plan say the $500 per acre-foot overpumping fee could put farmers who rely on groundwater pumping out of business.
The five-week water trial will sort through these issues in much more granular detail. With the trial date pushed back six months, any new strategy to recover the Valley’s ailing aquifer will shift into 2027 at the soonest.
San Luis Valley farm. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Republicans are rallying around former New Mexico Rep. Steve Pearce, Trump’s nominee to oversee the land management agency
Conservation groups in Montana and across the West are raising concerns about Steve Pearce, a former New Mexico representative who is President Donald Trump’s newest nominee to lead the Bureau of Land Management.
In Montana and the two Dakotas, the BLM manages more than 8.3 million acres of federal land. Nationwide, the BLM oversees 245 million acres of federal land, along with 700 million acres of subsurface rights for extraction and energy development, putting the position directly in the crosshairs of energy developers and outdoor industry groups.
According to the Center for Western Priorities, Pearce amassed a “lengthy anti-public lands record,” sponsoring bills to shrink national monuments and increase extraction on national forest land.
Many conservation groups are specifically honing in on Pearce’s long record of advocating to sell off federal lands, including sponsoring legislation in Congress to authorize land sales or exchanges with local governments.
In a letter to then-House Speaker John Boehner in 2012, Pearce wrote that of the federal lands located in the West, “most of it we do not even need.”
“We cannot afford to hand the keys to 245 million acres of our public lands over to someone who has spent his career trying to auction them off to the highest bidder,” Aubrey Bertram, staff attorney and federal policy director at Wild Montana, said. “Steve Pearce’s record is crystal clear: he believes public lands should be privatized for billionaires’ benefit, not protected for the people’s.”
But Pearce’s nomination has been greeted with enthusiasm by mining and energy companies that operate on federal land, as well as by many Republican officials, including Montana Sen. Steve Daines.
“I knew Steve in the House days, and Steve is a great pick. And I particularly like the fact that it’s a Westerner,” Daines said in an interview. “I think it’s helpful when we have leaders in those important positions that come from the West, when they understand uniquely the challenges we face as it relates to federal land, state land, private land. And Steve Pearce has lived it and breathed it.”
Daines is a member of the newly formed Senate Stewardship Caucus, which is co-chaired by Montana Sen. Tim Sheehy.
The two Montanans also bucked their party earlier this year by joining Senate Democrats in a resolution that would have prevented the use of public land sales to reduce the deficit.
Representatives for Daines and Sheehy did not respond to questions about Pearce’s nomination.
Sheehy has not publicly stated whether he will support Pearce.
But Montana’s federal delegation has been supportive of increasing coal and energy extraction in the state.
In eastern Montana, Congress recently voted to overturn a Biden-era restriction on resource extraction on federal land, reopening nearly 1.7 million acres to future coal leasing.
All members of the state’s delegation supported the move calling it vital to the state’s economy and the nation’s energy security.
Pearce has roots in the oil and gas industry that stretch beyond his political work.
Starting in 2003, he represented New Mexico in Congress for seven terms.
He lost races for the U.S. Senate in 2008 and governor in 2018.
While conservation and public land advocates have pushed back against Pearce’s nomination, industry groups have applauded Trump’s pick.
The National Cattleman’s Beef Association said Pearce’s experience makes him “thoroughly qualified to lead the BLM and tackle the issues federal lands ranchers are facing.”
The Western Energy Alliance, comprising oil and gas companies across nine western states, also put out a statement of support for Pearce.
“As a westerner coming from a state that’s nearly 20 percent BLM land, he understands the bureau’s mission. As a former congressman and chair of the Congressional Western Caucus, his record shows he’s been a champion of multiple-uses of public lands. Steve has been a longtime friend who understands the value of energy development among other uses,” the Alliance said.
This story was originally produced by Daily Montanan, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Utah News Dispatch, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
December 2, 2025
Changing a name is simple enough, if somewhat expensive and time-consuming, at least in the case of businesses.
But what to make of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s new name? Is the change all bad for the laboratory and for its mission of the last 34 years?
It became National Laboratory of the Rockies as of Monday. It had been known as NREL since 1991 and before that had been the Solar Energy Research Institute since its founding in 1977 during the presidency of Jimmy Carter.
The laboratory has become one of the nation’s — and perhaps the world’s — seminal institutions devoted to engineering an energy transition. As of October, it had 3,717 employees after a reduction of 114 during May.
“Clearly an effort is underway (by President Donald Trump)‚ to downplay renewable energy as a premier, viable energy source in the United States. So it is hard to separate the politics from this given the timing,” said David Renee, who worked at the laboratory from 1991 until his recent retirement.
Renee said that in part he was very disappointed to see the words “renewable energy” deleted from the name but does see the new name allowing the institution to broaden its mission to reflect needs of the ever-more-complex electrical grid.
“I can see some good, long-term benefits from this. It gives the laboratory flexibility to have a broader scope,” he said. “A lot of the work is not exclusively related to renewable energy but more related to grid reliability and expansion, of which renewables play an important part. So one could argue that the name change was overdue anyway in order to be consistent with other national laboratories, which are mostly named for their locations and not the technology.”
The United States has 17 national laboratories engaged in energy and other research, and most are named for their local geographies. New Mexico, for example, has the Sandia and Los Alamos labs, the former named for a mountain range and the latter a town. Renee arrived in Golden from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and retired after running the solar resource assessment program.
Ron Larson, one of the earliest employees of the solar institute who arrived in 1977, a time when solar was 100 times more expensive than it is now, also tends toward a charitable view of the name change.
A possible reason, and a valid one, he said, could be that other national labs wanted more to do on renewable energy topics and are qualified to do so. “Too, maybe some at NREL have wanted to expand into other sectors, including fossil fuels and nuclear.”
Peter Lilienthal, an NREL employee from 1990 to 2007, when he formed an energy-related business, was less charitable. He was incensed by a statement from Audrey Robertson, the assistant secretary of energy, in Monday’s announcement.
“The energy crisis we face today is unlike the crisis that gave rise to NREL,” Robertson said. “We are no longer picking and choosing energy sources. Our highest priority is to invest in the scientific capabilities that will restore American manufacturing, drive down costs, and help this country meet its soaring energy demand. The National Lab of the Rockies will play a vital role in those efforts.”
Lilienthal called that statement gaslighting. “That is just not true,” he said of Robertson’s assertion about no longer picking energy sources. He points to the promises of President Donald Trump on the campaign trail and elsewhere to restore fossil fuels and discourage renewable energy. This, he said, will slow the energy transition away from fossil fuels, he believes.
Jud Virden, the director of the renamed laboratory since October, said the new name “embraces a broader applied energy mission entrusted to us by the Department of Energy to deliver a more affordable and secure energy future for all.”
That statement clearly fits in with the narrative of Chris Wright, the Colorado-born director of the Department of Energy. A graduate of Cherry Creek High School, in south Denver, Wright was a rock climber and skier before going to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study engineering, first mechanical and then electrical. He also later studied at the University of California at Berkeley.
In April, Wright returned to Colorado to tour NREL. Afterward, he met with reporters, where he said that he had worked on solar energy during graduate school and then geothermal. Only later, needing a paycheck, did he begin work in the oil and gas industry. In Denver, he founded Liberty, an oil and gas field services company, in 2011.
In his remarks, Wright did not dismiss renewable energy, but he did — as he had done before — dismiss “climate alarmism.” He said the science does not support the perception of risk that has, in part, driven the work to make renewable energy affordable and integrated into the electrical grid.
Wright sees the need for more energy being paramount and climate change worries a hindrance to archiving that plentitude that will result in higher standards of living.
“The biggest barrier to energy development the last few decades is people, for political reasons, calling climate change a crisis,” he claimed.
He went on to cite 3 million people dying every year because they don’t have clean cooking fuels or the 4 or 5 million people dying because they don’t have sufficient food as well as the disconnect notices to American consumers for non-payment.
“If you call climate change a crisis and you don’t look at any data, you can pass laws to do anything.
Chris Wright has argued that energy scarcity poses a greater threat to quality of life than climate change. Here, he speaks to reporters in April 2025 while Martin Keller, then the director of NREL, looks on. Photo/Allen Best. Top image/National Laboratory of the Rockies.
In an essay published in The Economist in July, Wright said much the same thing.
Wright also talked about the need to deliver plentiful energy and lowering energy prices. He talked about the drive to integrate artificial intelligence data centers into the U.S. economy.
“Artificial Intelligence is critical. This is a phenomenal new technology. People are seeing the great consumer services it provides, the business efficiencies it provides, and we are very early on.”
And again, he talked about the need to expand electrical production as necessary to support artificial intelligence. Even without strong demand for data centers, he said, electricity prices have been rising.
“We’ve seen 20 to 25% rise in the price of electricity over the last four years. Americans are mad and angry and upset about that, which is why they’re all worried about AI — ‘No, we don’t want new demand on our grid that’s just going to make our prices more expensive.’ — We need to show them we can walk and chew gum at the same time. We’ve got to grow our electricity production capacity without raising the prices to consumers, and we’ve got to keep our grid stable, not just the complicated system stable, but the increasing cyber threats of people that want to do us harm on our grid.”
Chuck Kutscher took a broad view of the change. A mechanical engineer by training, he began working at NREL in the 1980s before retiring in 2018.
“NREL is widely viewed as the leading renewable energy laboratory in the world. In the U.S. and throughout the world, solar and wind dominate the new electricity generation being deployed because they are now the lowest in cost and are also the fastest to deploy, in addition to avoiding air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. China is clearly the world leader in renewable energy development and deployment, but NREL has played a critical role in keeping the U.S. competitive,” he said in a statement.
“As a Department of Energy lab, NREL takes direction from DOE. The current administration made it clear in the last election that it would support fossil fuels. DOE does have a lab that focuses primarily on fossil fuels, the National Energy Technology Lab, so continuing to have a lab that performs R&D on renewables makes perfect sense, especially given the transition to renewable energy happening around the world. I’m sure the new lab director is working hard to preserve NREL’s tremendous expertise and important work in renewable energy while at the same time being responsive to DOE directives to strengthen the lab’s portfolio in areas such as AI and data centers.”
The Crossing Trails Wind Farm between Kit Carson and Seibert, about 150 miles east of Denver, has an installed capacity of 104 megawatts, which goes to Tri-State Generation and Transmission. Photo/Allen Best
In Brief Unusually wet conditions in the Basin in October and November 2025, combined with reduced releases from some reservoirs, led to a basin-wide increase in storage for the two-month period. The combined contents of Lake Powell and Lake Mead increased during the two months for only the second time since 2010, and storage in the San Juan River basin increased by 19%, especially in Vallecito and Navajo Reservoirs. These changes were a welcome respite from the relentless depletion of storage that has dominated the last few years. Nevertheless, the upcoming winter snow season is predicted to be below average, and total active storage in the Basin is less than a 2 year supply when compared with recent Basin-wide consumptive uses and losses.
Total precipitation (inches) from 9-15 October 2025 with gridded data from the PRISM Climate Group and observations from the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow (CoCoRaHS) network. Credit: Russ Schumacher/Colorado Climate Center
The Details
The rains of October and November 2025 slowed depletion of the Colorado River’s reservoirs due to increases in stream flow and reduced reservoir releases in some places. Water levels rose in a few reservoirs, and autumn’s rains provided a small bit of flexibility for water managers at the beginning of what is likely to be a below-average winter snow season.
As of November 30, the Basin’s 46 reservoirs held 24.63 million af (acre feet) of active storage[1], of which 90% was in 12 federal reservoirs,[2] including 15.00 million af in Lake Powell and Lake Mead (hereafter, Powell+Mead) and 4.88 million af in 8 federal reservoirs upstream from Lake Powell (Fig.1). This amount of storage is similar to conditions in early 2022, a situation that was described at that time as a crisis. If we divide the total active storage in the Basin’s 46 reservoirs by the basin-wide total annual rate of consumptive use and loss that was 12.7 million af in 2024, the basin-wide reservoir water supply would sustain Basin-wide use for less than 2 years. We continue to live at the doorstep of crisis.
Figure 1. Graph showing active storage in Colorado River basin reservoirs between January 1, 2021, and November 30, 2025. Credit: Jack Schmidt/Center for Colorado River Studies
Basin-wide reservoir storage stabilized in October and November, because Powell+Mead storage stabilized and storage in the San Juan River basin increased. Total Inflow to Lake Powell exceeded releases for more than one week between October 11 and October 18, when Lake Powell increased by 105,000 af[3] which is a 1.6% gain (Fig. 2). Approximately 40% of the total inflow came from the San Juan River, and the monthly October inflows were the largest since 2015. The gain in storage in Lake Powell during this weeklong period exceeded depletions during the rest of the month, and Lake Powell gained approximately 52,000 af during the month. Lake Powell lost 147,000 af in November.
Figure 2. Graph showing inflow and outflow from Lake Powell and active storage between October 1 and November 30, 2025. Total monthly flow at Lees Ferry, representing the total releases from Lake Powell, were 490,000 af in October and 501,000 af in November. Credit: Jack Schmidt/Center for Colorado River Studies
In contrast, the autumn rains did not significantly increase inflow to Lake Mead, because most of the inflows come from scheduled releases from Lake Powell. These reservoir releases were supplemented by 101,000 af of inflows downstream from Lees Ferry[4] and 8000 af from the Virgin River.[5] The most significant changes in Lake Mead occurred at the end of November when releases from Hoover Dam were significantly reduced (Fig. 3).
Figure 3. Graph showing inflow and outflow from Lake Mead and active storage between October 1 and November 30, 2025. Total monthly flow inflow of the Colorado River, representing the total releases from Lake Powell and inflows within Grand Canyon, were 574,000 af in October and 550,000 af in November. Reservoir releases from Hoover Dam were 485,000 af in October and 415,000 af in November. Withdrawals and return flows of the Southern Nevada Water Authority were not included in these data. Credit: Jack Schmidt/Center for Colorado River Studies
Together, total active storage in Powell+Mead increased by 63,000 af during October,[6] and decreased by only 38,000 af in November (Fig. 4).[7] More significant than the gains, however, was that the the pace of reservoir depletion was significantly slowed. Storage in Powell+Mead increased by approximately 25,000 af in October and November, only the second time since 2010 that total storage in these two reservoirs increased during these two months.[8]
Figure 4. Graph showing active storage in Lake Powell, Lake Mead, and in Powell+Mead between January 1, 2023, and November 30, 2025. Credit: Jack Schmidt/Center for Colorado River Studies
Reservoir storage in the San Juan River basin increased more than in any other part of the Colorado River Basin. Five San Juan basin reservoirs increased by 197,000 af in October and November, mostly in Navajo and Vallecito Reservoirs.[9] Not much happened elsewhere, however. The 21 reservoirs of the upper Colorado River watershed lost 57,000 af during October and November, and 16 reservoirs in the Green River watershed lost 10,000 af during the same period.
[2] Taylor Park, Blue Mesa, Morrow Point, Crystal, Fontenelle, Flaming Gorge, Vallecito, Navajo, Lake Powell, Lake Mead, Lake Mohave, and Lake Havasu.
[3] Inflow to Lake Powell was computed as the sum of mean daily discharge of the Colorado River at Gypsum Canyon near Hite (gage 09328960), Dirty Devil River above Poison Springs near Hanksville (09333500), Escalante River near Escalante (09337500), and San Juan River near Bluff (09379500), as reported by the U.S. Geological Survey. Outflow from Lake Powell was computed as the mean daily discharge of the Colorado River at Lees Ferry (09380000), because stream flow is measured 15 miles downstream from the dam and includes ground-water seepage around the dam. Lake Powell storage increased between October 10 and October 20, as reported by Reclamation.
[4] Inflows within Grand Canyon were calculated as the difference between measurements of the Colorado River at Lees Ferry (09380000), Colorado River above Diamond Creek near Peach Springs (09420000), and Diamond Creek nr Peach Springs (09404208).
[5] Virgin River below confluence Muddy River near Overton (09419530)
[6] Between October 1 and November 1, 2025, active storage in Lake Powell increased 52,000 af and 11,000 af in Lake Mead.
[7] Between November 1 and November 30, active storage in Lake Powell decreased by 147,000 af and increased by 109,000 af in Lake Mead.
[8] During the previous 15 years between 2010 and 2024, total storage in Powell+Mead increased by 36,000 af in 2011. During the other 14 years of that period, the median depletion of Powell+Mead was 436,000 af.
[9] Storage in Navajo Reservoir increased 126,000 af between October 9 and November 8 and increased by 114,000 af in October and November. Active storage in Vallecito Reservoir gained 68,000 af in October and November. At the end of November, Navajo Reservoir was 60% of its 1.65 million af capacity. Vallecito Reservoir was 77% of its 125,400 af capacity.
Map of the San Juan River, a tributary of the Colorado River, in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, USA. Made using USGS National Map data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47456307
A warm fall in Albuquerque 2025. Credit: John Fleck/InkStain
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):
December 3, 2025
Inspired by this morning’s Downtown Albuquerque News Climate and Transport Index (come for the bus boardings and river flow data, stay for the Shawarma restaurant news), I give you data, one of those “Science confirms the obvious, but with graphs!” things.
The overnight lows were 2.5F higher than the recent average. I wonder if that sensibly improves your quality of life if you’re sleeping rough?
This U.S. Drought Monitor (USDM) week saw improvement in drought-related conditions across areas of the West, Plains, Midwest, South, Southeast, and the Northeast. Out West, improvements continued in areas of eastern California and southern Nevada, where conditions since the beginning of the Water Year (October 1) have improved significantly. As of early December, mountain snowpack conditions continue to be well below normal levels for the time of year across much of the western U.S., except for isolated areas of the Southwest and southern Rockies, where recent storms have boosted snowpack conditions well above normal levels. As of December 2, the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) SNOw TELemetry (SNOTEL) network reported the following region-level (2-digit HUC) snow-water equivalent (SWE) levels: Pacific Northwest 43%, Missouri 47%, Upper Colorado 53%, Great Basin 39%, Lower Colorado 121%, Rio Grande 64%, and Arkansas-White-Red 53%. In California, the statewide snowpack was 39% of normal (December 3), with the Southern Sierra at 78%, Central Sierra at 36%, and Northern Sierra at 17%. Elsewhere on the map, conditions continued to improve in drought-affected areas of central and northeastern Texas, where precipitation during the past month has been above normal. In the Southeast, drought conditions have intensified in recent months, both in spatial extent and intensity, including in southern Georgia and Florida Panhandle where soil moisture and streamflow levels have dropped significantly in recent weeks. In the Northern Plains, Midwest, and Northeast, moderate-to-heavy snowfall accumulations provided some minor relief to drought-affected areas…
On this week’s map, only minor changes were made in the region. In eastern Kansas, two areas of lingering Moderate Drought (D1) were removed in response to improving conditions during the past 90-day period. For the week, some beneficial snowfall was observed across the northern Plains, with accumulations ranging from 1 to 14 inches. The highest accumulations were logged in areas of North Dakota. In terms of average temperatures, cooler-than-normal temperatures (5 to 20+ degrees F below normal) were observed across the region, with the greatest anomalies observed in the Dakotas. According to NWS NOHRSC, the Upper Midwest region is currently 94.4% covered by snow (area) with an average depth of 3.7 inches and a maximum depth of 22.2 inches…
Out West, recent storms and overall improving conditions on short-term indicators (precipitation, soil moisture, streamflows) led to improvements on the map in California (eastern Sierra, Mojave Desert), Nevada (west-central, southern), Utah (southwestern), Wyoming (central, southwestern), Montana (northwestern, central, northeastern), and Washington (southeastern). Conversely, degradations were made on the map in areas of Oregon (central, southern), Idaho (west-central), Wyoming (southeastern), Colorado (central, north-central), and New Mexico (southeastern). For the week, most of the region experienced dry conditions except for portions of the Pacific Northwest and isolated areas in the central and northern Rockies. In the Pacific Northwest, light-to-moderate precipitation accumulations were observed along the coastal areas of northwestern Oregon and western Washington. Despite this week’s storm activity, significant precipitation deficits (2 to 10 inches since October 1) remain, with the greatest anomalies observed in the Olympic Peninsula and Cascade Range. In terms of the snowpack out West, below-normal SWE levels are being observed at SNOTEL stations across most of the West, except for areas in the southern Sierra, Colorado Plateau, and southwestern Colorado. In California, the NWS Forecast Office in Los Angeles is reporting that November was one of the wettest Novembers in the last 50+ years across southwestern California. Moreover, the city of Santa Barbara has reported the wettest water-year start on record through November with over 9.5 inches observed. Other areas in Santa Barbara County, including areas of the Santa Ynez Mountains, have received over 15 inches for the contemporaneous period…
On this week’s map, widespread improvements were made in drought-affected areas of Texas, while isolated areas of Oklahoma, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee saw minor improvements in response to rainfall activity during the past week. The heaviest rainfall accumulations were observed in isolated areas along the Gulf Coast of southeastern Texas, while lesser accumulations (ranging from 1 to 2 inches) were observed in other areas of the region including eastern and southern Texas, Louisiana, southeastern Oklahoma, southern Arkansas, northern Mississippi, and eastern Tennessee. In western Texas, conditions on the map deteriorated in response to drier-than-normal conditions during the past 90-day period. Looking at climatological rankings for the past 30-day period (November 2 to December 2), Austin, TX was 10th driest (-2.31-inch departure), College Station, TX 9th driest (-2.54 inches), New Orleans, LA 8th driest (-3.32 inches), Slidell, LA 2nd driest (-3.49 inches), and Hattiesburg, MS driest on record (-3.71 inches). In Texas, Water for Texas (December 3) reported statewide reservoirs at 74% full, with numerous reservoirs in the eastern part of the state in very good condition, while numerous reservoirs in the southern and western portion of the state were experiencing continued below-normal levels, including at Falcon Reservoir along the Rio Grande River (15.9% full). In terms of drought-related impacts, the National Drought Mitigation Center’s Conditions Monitoring Observer Reports (CMOR) tool showed numerous impact reports during the past 30-day period with the highest concentration of reports yielding from southern Oklahoma, northern Arkansas, and northern Louisiana. For the week, average temperatures were below normal across most the region with anomalies ranging from 4 to 10 degrees F above normal…
Looking Ahead
The NWS 7-day quantitative precipitation forecast calls for the heaviest rainfall (2 to 5 inches) to be along the central Gulf Coast, including southern Louisiana, southern Mississippi, southern Alabama, and the western Florida Panhandle, while 1 to 4 inches is expected in southern Georgia and areas of coastal South Carolina. The southern extent of the Mid-Atlantic coast is forecast to receive 1 to 3 inches, while New England is expected to have totals less than 1 inch. In the Pacific Northwest, 2 to 7+ inches (liquid) of precipitation is expected across western portions of Washington and Oregon, while the Northern Rockies—including northern Idaho, western Montana, and western Wyoming—are forecast to receive liquid totals ranging from 1 to 3 inches. These values represent liquid precipitation and may fall as rain or snow; actual snowfall amounts will vary depending on temperature and snow-to-liquid ratios. Meanwhile, much of the Intermountain West, Desert Southwest, and the central and southern Great Basin is expected to remain mostly dry, although northern portions of Utah and Colorado are forecasted to observe totals ranging from 0.25 to 2.0 inches. Across the Plains and Midwest, precipitation totals are expected to be less than 0.5 inch.
The 6–10-day temperature outlook (valid December 9 –13, 2025) calls for above-normal temperatures across the western U.S., much of the Plains, and Texas, with the highest probabilities centered over the Far West and Great Basin. Below-normal temperatures are favored across the eastern United States, with the highest probabilities in the Northeast and portions of the northern Mid-Atlantic and Great Lakes. Near-normal temperatures are expected across a narrow swath extending from the Lower Mississippi Valley through the eastern portions of the Dakotas. In terms of precipitation, the 6–10-day outlook calls for below-normal precipitation across the southern half of the continental United States, including California, Great Basin, southern half of the Intermountain West, South, and much of the Southeast. Above-normal precipitation is forecasted for much of the northern tier of the continental U.S., including the Pacific Northwest, Northern Plains, Upper Midwest, and the Northeast. Near-normal precipitation is expected across the Lower Midwest and southern Florida.
US Drought Monitor one week change map ending December 2, 2025.
Just for grins here’s a slideshow of early December US Drought Monitor maps for the past few years.
A patch of cheatgrass, pictured here in January 2025, emerged from a mountainside along the east shore of Flaming Gorge Reservoir. Cheatgrass has steadily invaded the lower Green River Basin, about half of which “needs attention,” according to the Sweetwater County Weed and Pest District. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
An all-hands-on-deck effort, tens of millions in funding and a breakthrough herbicide are slowing but not halting a destructive force steadily enveloping the best sagebrush left on Earth.
POWDER RIVER BASIN—Brian Mealor scanned the prairie east of Buffalo, but his mind drifted west to a haunting scene in northern Nevada.
In the burn scar of the Roosters Comb Fire, a single unwelcomed species had taken over, choking out all competitors. Mealor saw few native grasses or shrubs, scarcely a wildflower.
Not even other weeds.
“Literally everything you see is cheatgrass,” Mealor recalled of his June tour of the scar. “I just stood there, depressed.”
A sea of cheatgrass photographed about 20 miles north of Battle Mountain, Nevada, off of Izzenhood Road. (Claire Visconti/University of Wyoming)
Mealor already knew plenty about the Eurasian species’ capacity to decimate North American ecosystems since he leads the University of Wyoming’s Institute for Managing Annual Grasses Invading Natural Ecosystems. But he was still shocked walking through the endless cheatgrass monoculture taking over the 220,000 once-charred acres northwest of Elko.
The same noxious species, he knew, is steadily spreading in Wyoming.
The ecological scourge made Silver State officials so desperate that they were planting another nonnative, forage kochia, because it competes with less nutritious cheatgrass and offers some nourishment for native wildlife, like mule deer.
“They’ll just die, because there’s nothing there,” Mealor said. “That’s why we have to do stuff. Because we could turn into that.”
Brian Mealor, center, looks off into the sagebrush along the outskirts of the House Draw Fire scar near Buffalo in November 2025. The 2024 blaze eliminated over 100,000 acres of core sage grouse habitat, including 18 active leks. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
Scientists, rangeland managers and state and county officials are doing everything in their power to prevent Wyoming from becoming another landscape lost to cheatgrass. There’s a powerful new herbicide that’s helping. And funds enabling the spraying of hundreds of thousands of acres are being secured and raised. Yet, Wyoming is still losing its cheatgrass fight, and ultimately far more resources are needed to turn it around.
“Let’s not kid ourselves,” said Bob Budd, executive director of the Wyoming Wildlife and Natural Resource Trust. “The magnitude of the need is utterly staggering. We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars over the next decade. That’s daunting.”
Budd voiced that warning Tuesday while addressing a statewide group that focuses on bighorn sheep, which depend on seasonal ranges being invaded by cheatgrass. A recent study co-authored by Mealor underscores the need to act soon to protect Wyoming’s wildlife. UW researchers concluded that cheatgrass, which is only edible in spring, could cost northeast Wyoming’s already struggling mule deer half their current habitat in the next couple of decades.
Eighteen months ago, green sagebrush plants would have dominated this vista all the way to the horizon in the Powder River Basin. Today, because of the House Draw Fire, it’s a golden prairie — the lighter-hued portions are dominated by invasive cheatgrass and Japanese brome. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
On Nov. 6, the Sheridan-based professor joined fellow academics, biologists and volunteers on a field trip to a mixed-grass prairie. Like the Nevada burn scar, this was a Wyoming landscape on the mend from wildfire. In fact, it wasn’t a grassland until last year.
Before Aug. 21, 2024, the ground where they stood had been considered the best of what’s left of northeast Wyoming’s sagebrush biome.
Transformation
A lightning storm that sparked a conflagration abruptly ended that era. Over the course of two days, the House Draw Fire tore a 10-mile-wide, almost 60-mile-long gash into the landscape, inflicting over $25 million in damage. In a fiery blink, the native plant community mostly disappeared.
Once-prized sagebrush within roughly 100,000 acres of the burn area is basically gone, a worrisome loss of habitat for the region’s already struggling sage grouse. What grew back isn’t a monoculture, like in Nevada. Native species are easily found. But portions of the Powder River Basin’s rolling hills are now dominated by big densities of cheatgrass and Japanese brome, another invasive annual grass. Without mature sagebrush shrubs to compete with, there’s reason to believe the invaders, which flourish with fire, will expand their grip.
“It’s not like you have a fire and all of a sudden you’re just completely covered with cheatgrass,” Mealor said. “There’s a lag.”
Cheatgrass grows in thick amid sagebrush southeast of Buffalo, adjacent to the House Draw Fire scar. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
The Johnson County Natural Habitat Restoration Team is throwing everything it can at the fire scar to try to prevent invasive grasses from taking over. Armed with $12 million in state funds, crews will aerially spray some 120,000 acres with a cheatgrass-killing herbicide. Aerial sagebrush seeding is also underway on 3,000 acres of burned-up sage grouse nesting habitat. And there are even funded plans to build hundreds of simple erosion-controlling Zeedyk structures to protect the wet meadows within the fire scar.
Yet, on a broader scale, Mealor is a realist about the immense challenge of keeping cheatgrass and its noxious counterparts at bay in Wyoming, let alone enabling sagebrush to stage a comeback — a costly, complicated feat.
“If we were talking about a 25,000-acre fire here and there,” Mealor said, “it would be a little different.”
About a half-million acres of northeastern Wyoming burned in 2024, the state’s second-largest fire year in modern history. Wyoming lawmakers agreed to carve out $49 million for wildfire recovery grants statewide, less than half of Gov. Mark Gordon’s requested amount. Optimistically, Mealor said, the awarded sum might be enough to treat a million acres. That sounds significant — it’s half the acreage of Yellowstone. But cheatgrass is spreading just about everywhere in a state that spans 62 million acres.
Gov. Mark Gordon gives his State of the State address Feb. 12, 2024, at the Capitol in Cheyenne. (Ashton J. Hacke/WyoFile)`
“If you think about it from a statewide level, it’s not a lot,” Mealor said of the funding. “That’s not an attack. I’m not downplaying the importance of the money that was set aside by the Legislature for this. It’s a lot of money. But it’s also not enough.”
The governor, who’s a rancher by trade, has voiced the same concern. Pushing for $20 million in cheatgrass spraying funds during the Legislature’s 2024 budget-making process, Gordon acknowledged Wyoming is “losing the battle” against invasive annual grasses. Lawmakers ultimately agreed to $9 million, less than half the requested amount, according to the budget.
‘Best of the best’
The incursions that cheatgrass, Japanese brome and fellow invasives medusahead and ventenata are making into Wyoming rangelands are significant because of what’s at stake. The Equality State is the cornerstone of what remains of the sagebrush-steppe biome, a 13-state ecosystem vanishing at a rate of 1 million-plus acres per year.
“Half of the best of the best is in Wyoming,” said Corinna Riginos, who directs the Wyoming science program for The Nature Conservancy.
In 2020, the U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies completed a conservation plan to proactively restore the United States’ declining sagebrush habitat. This map from the plan illustrates Wyoming’s importance, being the stronghold of the biome. (USGS)
The Lander-based scientist is spearheading a Camp Monaco Prize-winning project that seeks to safeguard the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem from cheatgrass. The flanks of the ecosystem, such as the Golden Triangle, southwest of the Wind River Range, contain some of the most expansive unbroken tracts of sagebrush remaining on Earth. Distribution maps show that almost all of those areas are in Wyoming. It’s no coincidence that the same places also host remarkable biological phenomena, like the world’s largest sage grouse lek and longest mule deer migration.
Riginos’ research is focused on defensive measures to catch and kill cheatgrass early on, when it exists at low levels. Keeping the invasion out of core tracts of sagebrush, she said, is a more efficient use of funds than trying to shift heavily contaminated landscapes back to what they used to be.
“Maybe we live with what they are, we cope with it, rather than trying to recover from it,” Riginos said of cheatgrass-dominated areas.
Cheatgrass grows where reddish stripes appear on the hillsides leading up to Washakie Reservoir in June 2024. The green stripes are where an herbicide, Indaziflam, was experimentally applied. Rangeland managers have since scaled up the effort, funding 16,000 acres of cheatgrass removal in the Washakie Park area. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
Within Wyoming, invasive grass experts don’t have to go far from the world’s most unsullied sagebrush stands to find heavily infested landscapes. In June 2024, Riginos toured cheatgrass treatments in the Wind River Indian Reservation’s Washakie Park area. Although they stood about 40 straight-line miles from the Golden Triangle, scientists, wildlife managers and weed experts on the tour were surrounded by hillsides purple-hued from cheatgrass.
“You have to respect it, as an organism,” Riginos said. “The adaptability and just kind of sheer ability to get a toehold and take over is pretty remarkable.”
Cheatgrass gets its name from its ability to “cheat” surrounding vegetation out of moisture and nutrients. Its mechanism for success is essentially a head start. It germinates in the fall and starts growing in cold temperatures. Then it overwinters, matures, throws off prolific amounts of seeds and dies by midsummer when native grasses and forbs are much earlier in their life cycle.
A patch of cheatgrass colors a 7,500-foot-high northern Wyoming Range ridgeline in November 2025. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
On top of the advantageous life cycle, the West’s ever-increasing, climate-driven wildfires help cheatgrass flourish. When a cheatgrass-infested area burns and becomes more cheatgrass dominant, it’s more prone to burn again, creating a vicious feedback loop.
Giving cheatgrass yet another advantage, research has shown the plant in North America adapts well to different locales. That trait enables it to flourish in a wide range of temperatures and moisture conditions across the West, Riginos said.
“I don’t want to see the West become a wasteland of cheatgrass, I really don’t,” she said. “I feel that this is the most existential, sweeping threat to our western ecosystems. It really concerns me.”
Closing in
All those traits have enabled an impressive, though foreboding, expansion. Since its introduction from Europe in the 1800s, cheatgrass has spread to all 50 states and parts of Canada and Mexico. There are signs it’s not slowing down. Rangeland ecologists have detected an eightfold increase in cheatgrass across the Great Basin since the 1990s, according to the National Wildlife Federation.
Simultaneously, sagebrush-dominated landscapes have sustained a decline. A 2022 U.S. Geological Survey reportfound that an average of 1.3 million acres are being lost or degraded every year. That’s an area larger than Rhode Island.
Although the spread of Wyoming cheatgrass hasn’t been as overwhelming as in lower-elevation, drier western states, the invasion has, and continues to be, successful. A whitepaper distributed by the Wyoming Outdoor Council in the state Capitol during the 2024 funding fight reported that invasive annual grasses already affect 26% of the Equality State’s landmass, which pencils out to over 16 million acres.
Cheatgrass is widespread along the east side of South Pass, just a couple dozen miles away from the most expansive and intact reaches of the sagebrush biome remaining on Earth. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
Historically, Wyoming land managers believed that much of the nation’s least-populated state was too high and too cold for cheatgrassto gain much ground. But the climate has tilted in its favor, according to Jeanne Chambers, an emeritus U.S. Forest Service research ecologist who has studied cheatgrass for decades.
“Cooler temperatures, especially those cold nighttime temperatures, used to keep cheatgrass at bay,” Chambers said. “But now that things are warming up and people and livestock and animals are all over the place, the propagules — the seeds — are getting everywhere.”
As a result, slightly lower-elevation reaches of Wyoming, like the Bighorn Basin, are seeing more and more cheatgrass, she said. The same goes for where the salt desert transitions into sagebrush in the state’s southwestern corner.
“Those areas are pretty vulnerable,” Chambers said.
Cheatgrass sprouts off a badland-like formation near Burlington in November 2025. The noxious grass is widespread in the Bighorn Basin, and wildfires that have flared up in recent years are exacerbating its spread. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
Wyoming specialists in those communities corroborate the claims.
“Cheatgrass is moving into our county, primarily on the south end — but it’s not exclusive to the south end,” Sweetwater County Weed and Pest Supervisor Dan Madson said. “There are hot spots throughout the county invading mule deer, antelope and elk habitats, as well as sage grouse core areas.”
Some of the encroachments are well north into the Green River Basin and Red Desert, noted sagebrush strongholds. North of Rock Springs, north of Superior and in the Seedskadee National Wildlife Refuge are all places being actively invaded, Madson said.
Sweetwater County is scaling up its response, Madson said. The county is spending about $750,000 to spray nearly 12,000 acres of cheatgrass this year and plans to treat more like 15,000 acres in 2026.
But money is a limiting factor. Wyoming landscapes have been the recipient of many millions of federal dollars, including from the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which have complemented the state’s contributions.
Wyoming contains half of the core sagebrush-steppe habitat, in dark blue, that remains in the United States. Light blue signifies areas habitat managers have identified as having potential for restoration and tan areas are classified as “other rangeland.” (U.S. Geological Survey)
Still, the pace of infestation statewide and in Sweetwater County far exceeds the total resources available.
“We could easily, easily triple that [15,000 acres] in a year,” Madson said, “and still have enough to do for the rest of my career.”
“That money got lost,” said Budd, at the Wyoming Wildlife and Natural Resource Trust. “It actually hurt some parts of the state that were doing a very good proactive job, managing to keep cheatgrass down.”
‘Defending the core’
The upper Green River Basin is one example of a landscape where cheatgrass advances have been reversed. Its remoteness, harsh climate and high elevation helped, but those factors alone didn’t prevent a slow incursion of the virulent vegetation early in the century. By 2014, for example, hues of red and purple — hallmarks of cheatgrass — were painting the ridges rising over Boulder Lake.
The Sublette County Weed and Pest District fought the invasion with repeated treatments. In 2018 alone, some 30,000 acres of the western front of the Winds were aerially sprayed. It worked.
By the summer 2020, no cheatgrass was being detected at Boulder Lake, once a hotspot, District Supervisor Julie Kraft said. Nowadays, she said, no major problem areas remain in Sublette County.
In August 2019, a recreational shooter hit an exploding target and sparked the Tannerite Fire, which ripped across the pictured ridge on the north end of Boulder Lake. Afterwards, cheatgrass that was already in the area grew in thick where the sagebrush once stood, but the mountainside was subsequently treated and today the invasive grass occurs only in trace levels. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
Kraft even felt “good” about the future of her cheatgrass fight, expressing uncommon optimism for those grappling with an organism overtaking so many places.
“A couple of years ago, I might not have said the same thing,” Kraft said. “But with this new tool, and particularly because of the influx of money that came [during] the [Biden] administration, it allowed us to do so much more.”
That new tool is an herbicide, Indaziflam. It’s a product, also known by its trade name, Rejuvra, that provides far more enduring protection against cheatgrass than any previous chemical treatment. It works by attacking the seedbank and shallow root structure of cheatgrass, while not infiltrating the soil deep enough to kill perennial native grasses and plants like sagebrush.
“It depletes it down until there won’t be a seedbank of cheatgrass anymore,” Kraft said. “We’ve seen that on our sites. Year one, you can go out and grab handfuls of cheatgrass seed off the top of the soil. Year two, you can’t find those handfuls anymore. By year three, you can’t dig [cheatgrass seeds] out of the bottoms of sagebrush.”
Sublette County, a stronghold of the sagebrush biome, has fared better than other parts of Wyoming at keeping cheatgrass at bay. Still, patches can be found here or there, like this pocket overlooking Half Moon Lake in March 2025. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
The June 2024 outing that drew Riginos, the Nature Conservancy scientist, to Washakie Park along the east slope of the Winds included a stop at an experimental Indaziflam treatment plot.
Although a mix of the herbicide had been misted over strips of cheatgrass nearly four years earlier, its effect remained obvious and unmistakable. Curing, purple drooping brome blanketed untreated strips, and native green grasses filled the niches between.
“It’s holding still,” said Aaron Foster, Fremont County’s weed and pest supervisor, who led the cheatgrass treatment tour on the reservation. “It’s been holding now for four growing seasons. Pretty impressive.”
The project will be on 480 acres of degenerated land, in between Stanley Road, the 105, and the 106. The property sits within Subdistrict 1, and its water rights, all groundwater access and wells, were sold to the Rio Grande Water Conservation District in December of 2024. Credit: The Citizen
Down the Stanley Road looking north in central Alamosa County are the massive solar panels that offer an unusual but common skyline in the high mountain desert west of Mosca. In the foreground of the solar structures, on 480 acres of degenerated land, is a grand new experiment by the Colorado Land Board that promises to offer new insights into carbon, the Valley’s soil, and the growing but complicated “carbon market.”
In September the state land board inked a partnership with Land & Carbon Inc., a carbon project development company, to revegetate and restore the land under an initial 15-year partnership, and then a 40-year monitoring period to determine long-term success.
This is the first contract of its kind in the Valley, but it definitely won’t be the last. With more land and water being retired from irrigation every year, the question of how to revegetate only becomes more urgent. Revegation helps not just to improve carbon sequestration, but also to prevent dangerous dust-bowl conditions that threaten an increasingly dry Valley. The water on the Stanley Road property was retired to the Rio Grande Water Conservation District in 2024, and the partnership has committed to using only the allotted 18 inches of water over the first 3 years for revegetation. This project will illuminate the possibilities for revegetation in the Valley, and is likely to lead the way for more innovative partnerships and projects focused on both land restoration and carbon sequestration in the coming years.
The Colorado State Land Board manages lands that were granted to the state in a public trust from the federal government back in 1876. It operates as the second-largest land owner in the state, holding 2.8 million acres of surface land and 4 million acres of subsurface assets. Its land management practices aim to both steward the land and produce reasonable and consistent income, a majority of which gets distributed to the Colorado Department of Education’s Building Excellent Schools Today (BEST) program.
The Land Board established an ecosystem services program, focused on generating revenue from nontraditional products, like wetland and carbon credits, as opposed to more traditional products like agriculture, grazing, mining, oil and gas, hunting, recreation and renewables. A few years ago, through this program, the Land Board started exploring the prospect of carbon sequestration and carbon credits.
“We hired a group of consultants to help us enter this market. It’s new and not well understood by most people. It’s kind of on the leading edge of being developed, what we sometimes call an emerging market,” said Mindy Gottsegen, the State Land Board’s Stewardship and Ecosystem Services manager.
The carbon market has emerged as a viable way to simultaneously restore damaged lands, while generating valuable revenue. While there are government regulations around carbon emissions and compliance with certain environmental standards, the carbon market is an entirely voluntary system that operates without large government oversight. Companies buying and selling carbon credits can join the market, and participate, as long as they meet certain standards, set by third-party organizations.
While it is a complicated system, this is generally how it works for soil carbon credits in the Valley: Every piece of land has some amount of carbon in the soil because plants take in CO2 from the atmosphere, photosynthesize, and store it. Through plant roots, and the decay of other organic matter, the soil ends up holding on to a certain amount of carbon. Different land management practices can increase or decrease the amount of carbon sequestered.
To quantify carbon sequestration and sell credits, verified companies (or land owners) must first establish a baseline carbon measurement. Then, carbon gains are estimated over time using a combination of measurements and modeling. These numbers are reviewed, and based on the additional amount of carbon stored, carbon registries issue a proportionate amount of carbon credits. These credits can be sold on the market to entities looking to offset their carbon emissions. The revenue from carbon credits helps to fund and sustain carbon sequestration and land restoration projects.
“The Biological Carbon Program framework that our board approved in April of this year was kind of saying ‘This is how we’re going to get involved in the carbon market,’” said Gottsegen.
The program allows agricultural and land lessees to partner with board-approved Qualified Project Developers (QPDs) to create and implement restorative project plans. These companies work as the middle man between land owners and the carbon market, helping to make successful and sustainable changes, while also navigating the approval and acquisition of carbon credits.
Enter Land & Carbon Inc. Founded by Dave Lawrence in 2023, Land & Carbon is an innovative project development company, restoring highly degraded lands with low-cost, science-driven solutions. The company works to regenerate and revegetate land while offsetting and storing CO2 in the soil, using carbon credits to help pay for the projects.
“I used to — well I still do — drive around the country quite a bit. I’ve observed just how much degraded and barren land there is, without healthy crops or native vegetation — brown trampled land all around the country,” said Lawrence.
Lawrence had previously served as both the chairman of the Yale Climate & Energy Institute and the executive director of the Salk Institute Harnessing Plants Initiative. In these roles, he was actively involved in carbon projects, and realized that reducing atmospheric carbon would require more than just emissions reduction.
“I recognized that there were a number of different solutions available, and that they could be used in combination,” said Lawrence. “I started Land & Carbon with this idea that we would use a combination of practices, and collaborate with communities, ranchers, farmers, land holders, and experts — local, regional, national, and global — pulling all of this together to do the best job that we could restoring degraded land, and at the same time taking carbon out of the atmosphere.”
A significant amount of the degraded land across the West is largely agricultural and sits with different state land boards. Land & Carbon reached out to the Colorado State Land Board with hopes of collaborating to regenerate these lands in a way that was mutually successful, taking advantage of best practices to sequester carbon, restore ecosystem health, and help fund the state’s public education system.
Land & Carbon got approved as the Land Board’s fourth QPD in August and the deal, officially titled Grassland Carbon Ecosystem Services Production Lease, ES 117611, came soon after.
Of the land in the State Land Board’s portfolio, the Stanley Road property was selected because of a combination of factors. The property consists of 480 acres, in between Stanley Road, the 105, and the 106. It sits within Subdistrict 1, and its water rights, all groundwater access and wells, were sold to the Rio Grande Water Conservation District in December of 2024. This means moving forward there are severe limitations to the amount of water that can be used to revegetate. The land is highly degraded from decades of agricultural use, and has been barren for years. In that time, a takeover of invasive weeds, along with harsh soil and climate conditions, have prevented any sort of natural recovery.
This property had been a challenge for the Land Board, because of the amount of damage. While this level of degradation can be seen as a deterrent for other QPDs, these types of highly degraded properties are exactly what Land & Carbon seek out. When the Land Board asked if it would be interested in taking on the challenge, the answer was a resounding “Yes.”
In any project for Land & Carbon, the first steps include a “scope and discovery” research deep dive, to better understand what has already been done, and learn how its efforts will be situated in the broader context of work in the region. In the Valley, this means looking at CSU Extension information, published papers, USDA, State Land Board and Conservation District data, conducting their own boots-on-the-ground field visits, and also engaging with the community. All of it is pulled together to assess initial land characteristics.
“We’re a big believer in talking with people and learning from people who are actually doing the work. So we participated in workshops, convened by Colorado State, that allowed us to get to know different individuals and people and groups who were already doing things,” said Lawrence. “We don’t believe we have the corner on the market on all expertise. We really try to tap into as much local knowledge as we can, as to what has worked, what hasn’t worked and why.”
After that, an exhaustive evaluation of all available data and information is done, pulling in literature, field data, and models to create an initial plan, taking into consideration resource availability and supplies. Then they take baseline measurements to determine the starting amount of carbon in the soil that is crucial to then quantify improvements and carbon credits.
The Stanley Road project is still in these early stages, and they are working to collect data, determine land characteristics, and establish a carbon baseline, before considering different solutions and strategies.
“We tailor our solutions to the land. Not everything grows everywhere and not all grazing practices work everywhere. So how can we tailor the best combination to this land?” said Lawrence.
The next steps will come in the spring, at the start of the growing season, when Land & Carbon plans to establish what it has trademarked as Innovation Sites. These five- to 20-acre patches on the property are used to test out new ideas and different combinations, seed mixes, and technologies, in order to learn what works best on this specific land. These experimental sites will run for three to five years, after which the best, most successful techniques will be used on the larger property. Many of the tests will not work, but some will, and those are what get implemented broadly.
In the years to come, these plans will continue to develop. Final decisions around irrigation, and how to use the 18 inches of water allocated for the first 3 years of the project, have not yet been made. Nor have more definitive restoration plans, though in the press release by the Land Board, it was stated that the property is expected to support regenerative grazing within four to eight years.
The project is estimated to sequester greater than 10,000 metric tonnes of CO2 in the first 15 years, which is when the initial contract ends. This will be followed by a 40-year monitoring period to ensure the permanence of the soil carbon storage.
With the state of water in the Valley, and efforts to retire agricultural land for water conservation purposes, the amount of land in need of revegetation and restoration will only continue to grow over the next few years.
Both the State Land Board and Land & Carbon expressed interest in expanding the reach of this project and methodology, once it has been established. But that will take time.
“I always think it’s good to try to do one thing very well, and to kind of get a proof point. We are very focused on this property, and of course we would love to work with others as we move along in this, and show what we have going,” said Lawrence.
“We’re just getting started. The first few take extra time, but we’re hoping that once we get these few under our belt, we’ll be able to expand,” said Gottsegen. “Hopefully we can continue to build the carbon program with more leases in the coming years.”
Lawrence emphasized that Land & Carbon aims to make this project the template for affordable, quality land regeneration using carbon credits, that will work for people in the Valley.
“The idea is that what we learn, we share. We can serve as just advisors if that’s what somebody who has all the capabilities wants, and there’s a ton of people with capabilities, or we can actually do the work,” said Lawrence. “I think we all know the challenges that we face with water in the San Luis Valley. It’s important that we take whatever we learn, in collaboration with others, and work with them to try to implement this at scale.”
Evan Arvizu is a recent graduate of Colorado College with a degree in Environmental Anthropology and minor in Journalism. She is a former intern with the Rural Journalism Institute of the San Luis Valley. More by Evan Arvizu
Dust event from thunderstorm Great Salt Lake. Photo credit: Kevin Perry/University of Utah
Click the link to read the article on the Grist website (Leia Larsen):
December 1, 2025
Instead of waiting for more data, a new report lays out the case for action.
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and The Salt Lake Tribune, a nonprofit newsroom in Utah.
The dust blowing from the dry bed of the Great Salt Lake is creating a serious public health threat that policymakers and the scientific community are not taking seriously enough, two environmental nonprofits warn in a recent report.
The Great Salt Lake hit a record-low elevation in 2022 and teetered on the brink of ecological collapse. It put millions of migrating birds at risk, along with multimillion-dollar lake-based industries such as brine shrimp harvesting, mineral extraction, and tourism. The lake only recovered after a few winters with above-average snowfall, but it sits dangerously close to sinking to another record-breaking low.
The report from the Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment and the Utah Rivers Council argues that Utah’s “baby steps” approach to address the dust fall short of what’s needed to avert a long-term public health crisis. Failing to address those concerns, they say, could saddle the state with billions of dollars in cleanup costs. “We should not wait until we have all the data before we act,” said Brian Moench, president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, in an interview. “The overall message of this report is that the health hazard so far has been under-analyzed by the scientific community.”
Click the image to download the report.
After reviewing the report, however, two scientists who regularly study the Great Salt Lake argued the nonprofits’ findings rely on assumptions and not documented evidence.
The report warns that while much of the dust discussion and new state-funded dust monitoring network focus on coarse particulates, called PM10, Utahns should also be concerned about tiny particulates 0.1 microns or smaller called “ultrafines.” The near-invisible pollutants can penetrate a person’s lungs, bloodstream, placenta, and brain.
The lake’s dust could also carry toxins like heavy metals, pesticides and PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” Moench cautioned, because of the region’s history of mining, agriculture, and manufacturing.
“Great Salt Lake dust is more toxic than other sources of Great Basin dust,” Moench said. “It’s almost certain that virtually everyone living on the Wasatch Front has contamination of all their critical organs with microscopic pollution particles.”
If the lake persists at its record-low elevation of 4,188 feet above sea level, the report found, dust mitigation could cost between $3.4 billion and $11 billion over 20 years depending on the methods used.
Exposed shoreline of the Great Salt Lake in Utah (USA). The lake’s level has dropped over the past three decades, creating an enormous public health threat from windblown dust disrupting a continental migratory flyway. Photo by Brian Richter
The Great Salt Lake needs to rise to 4,198 feet to reach a minimum healthy elevation, according to state resource managers. It currently sits at 4,191.3 feet in the south arm and 4,190.8 feet in the north arm.
The lake’s decline is almost entirely human-caused, as cities, farmers, and industries siphon away water from its tributary rivers. Climate change is also fueling the problem by taking a toll on Utah’s snowpack and streams. Warmer summers also accelerate the lake’s rate of evaporation.
The two nonprofits behind the report, Utah Physicians and the Utah Rivers Council, pushed back at recent solutions for cleaning up the toxic dust offered up by policymakers and researchers. Their report panned a proposal by the state’s Speaker of the House, Mike Schultz, a Republican, to build berms around dust hot spots so salty water can rebuild a protective crust. It also knocked a proposal to tap groundwater deep beneath the lake bedand use it to help keep the playa wet.
“Costly engineered stopgaps like these appear to be the foundation of the state’s short-sighted leadership on the Great Salt Lake,” the groups wrote in their report, “which could trigger a serious exodus out of Utah among wealthier households and younger populations.”
Bill Johnson, a professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Utah who led research on the aquifer below the lake, said he agreed with the report’s primary message that refilling the Great Salt Lake should be the state’s priority, rather than managing it as a long-term and expensive source of pollution.
“We don’t want this to become just about dust management, and we forget about the lake,” Johnson said. “I don’t think anybody’s proposing that at this point.”
It took decades of unsustainable water consumption for the Great Salt Lake to shrink to its current state, Johnson noted, and it will likely take decades for it to refill.
Kevin Perry, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Utah and one of the top researchers studying the Great Salt Lake’s dust, said Utah Physicians and Utah Rivers Council asked him to provide feedback on their report in the spring.
“It’s a much more balanced version of the document than what I saw last March,” he said of the report. “It’s still alarmist.”
Perry agreed with the report’s findings that many unknowns linger about what the lake bed dust contains, and what Utahns are potentially inhaling when it becomes airborne. He said he remains skeptical that ultrafine particulates are a concern with lake bed dust. Those pollutants are typically formed through high-heat combustion sources like diesel engines.
“In the report, they just threw it all at the wall and said it has to be there,” Perry said. “I kept trying to encourage them to limit their discussion to the things we have actually documented.”
The report’s chapter outlining cost estimates for dust mitigation, however, largely aligned with Perry’s own research. Fighting back dust over the long term comes with an astronomical price tag, he said, along with the risk of leaving permanent scars from gravel beds or irrigation lines on the landscape.
“Yes, we can mitigate the dust using engineered solutions,” Perry said, “but we really don’t want to go down that path if we don’t have to.”
Sunset from the western shore of Antelope Island State Park, Great Salt Lake, Utah, United States.. Sunset viewed from White Rock Bay, on the western shore of Antelope Island. Carrington Island is visible in the distance. By Ccmdav – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2032320
The News:The Trump administration last week weighed in on the 53-year battle over what waterways are covered by the 1972 Clean Water Act — with a draft rule that would narrow the definition of “Waters of the United States,” or WOTUS. The rule would effectively remove federal CWA protections from hundreds of arroyos, rivers, and ephemeral streams in the Southwest, giving developers industries more latitude to alter or pollute those waterways. The public has until Jan. 5 to submit comments.
The Context: For years, the Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers—the agencies charged with enforcing the CWA—considered WOTUS to include everything from arroyos to prairie potholes to sloughs to mudflats, so long as the destruction or degradation thereof might ultimately affect traditionally navigable waters or interstate commerce (which could include recreation, sightseeing, or wildlife watching). It was a broad definition that gave the agencies latitude to “restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters,” as Congress mandated when creating the law in 1972.
Developers and property rights ideologues pushed back on this definition, saying it was too broad and therefore gave the feds too much power to curb pollution or restrict development. The issue ended up in the courts and, ultimately, to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The waters were muddied, so to speak, by the 2006 Supreme Court split decision on the Rapanos case. The late Justice Antonin Scalia wrote what would become the right-wing’s preferred definition of waters of the U.S. He argued that they should include only “relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water … described in ordinary parlance as streams[,] … oceans, rivers, [and] lakes.” Scalia’s definition emphatically excluded “ephemeral streams” and “dry arroyos in the middle of the desert.” Justice Anthony Kennedy disputed Scalia, saying instead the CWA should extend to any stream or body of water with a “significant nexus” to navigable waters, determined by a wetland’s or waterway’s status as an “integral part of the aquatic environment.”
Then, in 2023, in its ruling on the Sackett case, the SCOTUS majority deferred to Scalia’s Rapanos definition, writing: “… we conclude that the Rapanos plurality was correct: the CWA’s use of ‘waters’ encompasses ‘only those relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water forming geographical features that are described in ordinary parlance as streams oceans, rivers and lakes.’”
It’s up to the relevant agencies to translate these rulings into actual rules, often adding their own ideological twists. The W. Bush, Obama, and Trump I administrations issued their own post-Rapanos definitions of WOTUS, Biden weighed in post-Sackett, now Trump II is submitting its own set of industry-friendly, deregulatory definitions.
The EPA’s proposed definition of ‘‘waters of the United States’’ would include:
“Relatively permanent,” under the new rule, would mean
And then there’s this weird and vague, yet critical, term, “wet season,” which the rule defines as:
Sometimes you have to wonder whether the bureaucrats who come up with these things have ever even been to the Western U.S., particularly the arid Southwest.
The “relatively permanent” requirement clearly excludes thousands of arroyos, ephemeral streams, washes, gullies, and even rios and rivers — from the Santa Cruz to the Rillito to the Santa Fe to the Puerco and the Dirty Devil — from CWA jurisdiction. Indeed, it leaves huge swaths of the Southwest without Clean Water Act protections, and at the mercy of respective states or counties. A 2008 EPA study estimates that ephemeral and intermittent streams make up 59% of all of the waterways in the U.S. (excluding Alaska) and over 81% in the arid and semi-arid Southwest (AZ, NM, UT, CO, CA).
Source: U.S. EPA.
The ecological benefits of ephemeral streams are obvious to any Western wanderer who happens to venture down a seemingly dry and barren arroyo bed, where they may find cool air, the smell of water even on the hottest day, tiny tracks of animals seeking sanctuary from the sun, the lascivous bloom of a datura, and cottonwoods and even willows miles and miles away from any “relatively permanent” water source. And if that’s not enough, then consider that peer-reviewed research has found that these same ephemeral streams are major contributors to the water quantity and quality of the entire river drainage network of which they are a part.
Ephemeral streams are streams that do not always flow. They are above the groundwater reservoir and appear after precipitation in the area. Via Socratic.org
A 2024 study by Craig Brinkerhoff et al concludes: “This ephemeral influence directly implicates downstream water quality standards: Excluding ephemeral streams from coverage under the CWA would substantially narrow the extent of federal authority to regulate water quality in the United States.”
While the administration was looking to provide “clarity,” the “wet season” provision does exactly the opposite, especially when one tries to apply it to the desert Southwest. If southern Arizona has a wet season, wouldn’t it be the days and weeks of the late summer monsoon? Many arroyos do run continuously during a good monsoon season, even if it is only for two or three weeks. So would that put them back under CWA jurisdiction?
How these proposed changes would play out on the ground is a bit of a puzzle — especially given the “wet season” ambiguity. But what is clear is that developers of big housing projects in the desert outside Phoenix or Las Vegas or Tucson, for example, would be allowed to fill in or build roads through arroyos and washes without obtaining a federal CWA permit from the Army Corps of Engineers. That would leave it to the state and county to implement their own, similar, permitting systems if they chose to do so.
As one might expect, the energy industry, developers, ranchers, and farmers generally support the changes, since it will eliminate some of the red tape that tangles up and delays projects.
“For U.S. oil and natural gas operators, this is a game-changer,” wrote the head of a Texas petroleum industry group in the Odessa American. “Picture the Permian Basin or Bakken Formation: vast swaths dotted with intermittent draws and playas that previous rules treated like sacred rivers, triggering Section 404 permits under the U.S. Army Corps that could drag on for years and cost millions in mitigation. Now, with ephemeral features sidelined and groundwater off-limits, operators can overcome those hurdles for well pads, access roads, and seismic surveys.”
If you live in the West, you probably live near at least one of the ephemeral streams that would lose federal protections under these new definitions. You might want to go walk up it sometime soon before it goes away.
In the meantime, you have until Jan. 5 to send your comments, identified by Docket ID No. EPA–HQ– OW–2025–0322, by any of the following methods:
Federal eRulemaking Portal: https://www.regulations.gov/ (our preferred method). Follow the online instructions for submitting comments.
Email: OW-Docket@epa.gov. Include Docket ID No. EPA–HQ–OW– 2025–0322 in the subject line of the message.
Mail: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, EPA Docket Center, Water Docket, Mail Code 28221T, 1200 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20460.
Read more about the Clean Water Act, WOTUS, and the value of ephemeral waterways here (but remember, you gotta become a paid subscriber to bust through the paywall!)
Scene from a huge coal mine in the Powder River Basin. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
🌵 Public Lands 🌲
Congressional Republicans have apparently decided that the best way to turn over public lands to the extractive industries is to do away with the plans guiding management of those lands. Earlier this year, Congress revoked three Bureau of Land Management resource management plans in Montana, North Dakota, and Alaska. Now, they’ve done the same for the RMP for the BLM’s Buffalo Field Office in Wyoming, which covers a good portion of the coal-rich Powder River Basin.
These mark the first times ever that the Congressional Review Act, which is intended to give Congress the power to review and possibly revoke recently implemented administrative rules, has been used in this manner. That’s in part because RMPs have not been considered “rules” in the past, meaning they are not subject to congressional review.
Resource Management Plans provide a framework for managing large swaths of land and authorize the BLM to permit mining, drilling, grazing, and other activities. They endeavor to balance the agency’s multiple-use mandate with environmental protections, guiding resource extraction and development away from sensitive areas and toward more appropriate ones, for example. They can take years to develop, and incorporate science, legal considerations, court orders, tribal consultation, and input from local officials and the general public.
And then, with just a few hours of debate and no opportunity for public input, Congress can toss the whole thing into the can.
In this case, the main target was a provision of the Biden-era RMP that halted new coal leasing on that swath of public land. While the moratorium was celebrated by environmentalists and panned by fossil fuel lovers when it was implemented late last year, it was largely symbolic, since existing leases contain enough coal to meet demand at least until 2040. So revoking the ban similarly won’t lead to any new mining anytime soon, nor are resulting lease sales likely to fetch much industry interest or acceptable bids.
But in their haste to scrap the ban, Congress also may have taken away the BLM’s power to issue new leases altogether — not just for coal, but for oil and gas drilling, grazing, or any other use. And not just for the Buffalo Field Office, either. This is a bit wonky, but basically it goes like this:
By applying the CRA to RMPs, Congress is saying that RMPs are “rules.”
According to the CRA, rules must be submitted to Congress before they can take effect.
No RMP that has been implemented since 1996 has been submitted to Congress.
Therefore, no post-1996 RMP has legally taken effect, making it invalid.
The Federal Land Policy Management Act says the BLM can only issue permits, leases, rights of way, and other authorizations “in accordance with” a valid land use plan, or RMP.
Therefore all permits, leases, ROWs, and other authorizations issued under post-1996 RMPs — including over 5,000 oil and gas leases, and hundreds more coming up for auction in the near future — are invalid.
This summer, 31 law professors and public land experts called on Congress to refrain from using the CRA to revoke RMPs. “The resulting uncertainty could trigger an endless cycle of litigation,” they wrote, “effectively freezing the ability of the BLM and other agencies to manage public lands for years, if not decades to come.”
Just last week, a group of conservation organization legal analysts expanded on the potential for chaos, and called on the BLM to pause new leasing and address the “potential legal deficiencies” of oil and gas leases covering some 4 million acres that were issued under now potentially invalid RMPs. The agency should not issue drilling permits for those leases, the analysts wrote, and it should consider canceling the leases.
Somehow, I don’t think the BLM under the current administration is going to follow that suggestion. Given its track record, it seems more likely that the agency will see the sudden lack of valid RMPs as an open gate through which it can ferry its pro-extractive agenda. This one is almost sure to end up in court.
🦫 Wildlife Watch 🦅
The Trump administration is proposing new regulations that would dial back Endangered Species Act protections and weaken the landmark law to “strengthen American energy independence,” according to an Interior Department news release.
The new rules would:
Make it more difficult for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to designate critical habitat in areas that are not currently occupied by an endangered species — likely because they were extirpated from the area — but that are essential for the conservation of that species. This would make recovering an endangered species that much more difficult.
Remove a rule that extends ESA protections to species that are listed as “threatened,” which is one step away from “endangered.” This would potentially remove protections for species such as the marbled murrelet, vernal pool fairy shrimp, western snowy plover, Gunnison sage grouse, northern sea otter, and many others.
Direct agencies to give economic impacts greater weight when deciding whether to extend ESA protections to a species. This could have potentially pushed the feds to, say, back off on listing the Tiehm’s buckwheat under the ESA, because doing so would potentially restrict or nix a proposed lithium mine in its only known habitat.
Make it more difficult for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to designate critical habitat in areas that are not currently occupied by an endangered species — likely because they were extirpated from the area — but that are essential for the conservation of that species. This would make recovering an endangered species that much more difficult.
Remove a rule that extends ESA protections to species that are listed as “threatened,” which is one step away from “endangered.” This would potentially remove protections for species such as the marbled murrelet, vernal pool fairy shrimp, western snowy plover, Gunnison sage grouse, northern sea otter, and many others.
Direct agencies to give economic impacts greater weight when deciding whether to extend ESA protections to a species. This could have potentially pushed the feds to, say, back off on listing the Tiehm’s buckwheat under the ESA, because doing so would potentially restrict or nix a proposed lithium mine in its only known habitat.
“This plan hacks apart the Endangered Species Act and creates a blueprint for the extinction for some of America’s most beloved wildlife,” said Stephanie Kurose, deputy director of government affairs at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a written statement.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
Raven and the red, white, and blue. Digital Painting by Jonathan P. Thompson.
And, finally, the Land Desk readers have spoken, and they have chosen El Burro Blanco as the name for the new Land Desk dispatch-mobile, with Hank coming in a distant second.
The Colorado River and its woes tend to get all of the attention, but the Southwest’s “other” big river, the Rio Grande, is in even worse shape thanks to a combination of warming temperatures, drought, and overconsumption. That’s become starkly evident in recent years, as the river bed has tended to dry up earlier in the summer and in places where it previously had continued to carry at least some water. Now Brian Richter and his team of researchers have quantified the Rio Grande’s slow demise, and the conclusions they reach are both grim and urgent: Without immediate and substantial cuts in consumption, the river will continue to dry up — as will the farms and, ultimately, the cities that rely on it.
The Rio Grande’s problems are not new. Beginning in the late 1800s, diversions for irrigation in the San Luis Valley — which the river runs through after cascading down from its headwaters in the San Juan Mountains — sometimes left the riverbed “wholly dry,” wrote ichthyologist David Starr Jordan in 1889, “all the water being turned into these ditches. … In some valleys, as in the San Luis, in the dry season there is scarcely a drop of water in the riverbed that has not from one to ten times flowed over some field, while the beds of many considerable streams (Rio la Jara, Rio Alamosa, etc.) are filled with dry clay and dust.”
San Luis Valley farmers gradually began irrigating with pumped groundwater, allowing them to rely less on the ditches (but causing its own problems), and the 1938 Rio Grande Compact forced them to leave more water in the river. While that kept the water flowing through northern and central New Mexico, the Rio Grande’s lower reaches still occasionally dried up.
Then, in the early 2000s, the megadrought — or perhaps permanent aridification — that still plagues the region settled in over the Southwest. [ed. emphasis mine] Snowpack levels in the river’s headwaters shrank, both due to diminishing precipitation and climate change-driven warmer temperatures, which led to runoff and streamflows 17% lower than the 20th century average, according to the new study. And yet, overall consumption has not decreased.
“In recent decades,” the authors write, “river drying has expanded to previously perennial stretches in New Mexico and the Big Bend region. Today, only 15% of the estimated natural flow of the river remains at Anzalduas, Mexico near the river’s delta at the Gulf of Mexico.” Reservoirs, the river’s savings accounts, have been severely drained to the point that they won’t be able to withstand another one or two dry winters. As farmers and other users have increasingly turned to groundwater pumping, aquifers have also been depleted. The situation is clearly unsustainable.
Something’s gotta give on the Rio Grande, and while we may be tempted to target Albuquerque’s sprawl, drying up all of the cities and power plants that rely on the river wouldn’t achieve the necessary cuts.
Source: “Overconsumption gravely threatens water security in the binational Rio Grande-Bravo basin” by Brian Richter et al.
It will come as little surprise to Western water watchers that agriculture is by far the largest water user on the Rio Grande — taking up 87% of direct human consumption — and that alfalfa and other hay crops gulp up the lion’s share, or 52%, of agriculture’s slice of the river pie. This isn’t necessarily because alfalfa and other hays are thirstier than other crops, but because they are so prevalent, covering about 433,000 acres over the entire basin, more than four times as much acreage as cotton.
Source: Overconsumption gravely threatens water security in the binational Rio Grande-Bravo basin
This kind of math means farmers are going to have to bear the brunt of the necessary consumption cuts — either voluntarily or otherwise. In fact, they already have: Between 2000 and 2019, according to the report, Colorado lost 18% of its Rio Grande Basin farmland, New Mexico lost 28%, and the Pecos River sub-basin lost 49% (resulting in a downward trend in agricultural water consumption). Some of this loss was likely incentivized through conservation programs that pay farmers to fallow their fields. But it was also due to financial struggles.
Yet even when farmers are paid a fair price to fallow their fields there can be nasty side effects. Noxious weeds can colonize the soil and spread to neighbors’ farms, it can dry out and mobilize dust that diminishes air quality and the mountain snowpack, and it leaves holes in the cultural fabric of an agriculture-dependent community. If a field’s going to be dried up, it should at least be covered with solar panels.
Another possibility is to switch to crops that use less water. This isn’t easy: Farmers grow alfalfa in the desert because it’s actually quite drought tolerant, doesn’t need to be replanted every year, is less labor-intensive than other crops, is marketable and ships relatively easy, and can grow in all sorts of climates, from the chilly San Luis Valley to the scorching deserts of southern Arizona.
Still, it can be done, as a group of farmers in the San Luis Valley are demonstrating with the Rye Resurgence Project. This effort is not only growing the grain — which uses less water than alfalfa, is good for soil health, and makes good bread and whiskey — but it is also working to create a larger market for it. While it’s only a drop in the bucket, so to speak, this is the sort of effort that, replicated many times across the region, could help balance supply and demand on the river, without putting a bunch of farmers out of business.
Photo credit: The Rye Resurgence Project
***
Oh, and about that other river? You know, the Colorado? Representatives from the seven states failed to come up with a deal on how to manage the river by the Nov. 15 deadline. The feds had mercy on them, giving them until February to sort it all out. I’m not so optimistic, but we’ll see. Personally, I think the only way this will ever work out is if the Colorado River Compact — heck, the entire Law of the River — is scrapped, and the states and the whole process is started from scratch, this time with a much better understanding of exactly how much water is in the river, and with the tribal nations having seats at the table.
⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️
There are a bunch of wannabe uranium mining companies out there right now, locating claims and acquiring and selling claims and touting their exploratory drilling results. But there are only a small handful of firms that are actually doing anything resembling mining. One of them is the Canada-based Anfield, which just broke ground on its Velvet-Wood uranium mine in the Lisbon Valley, even without all of the necessary state permits.
Now Anfield says it has applied for a Colorado permit to restart its long-idle JD-8uranium mine. The mine is on one of a cluster of Department of Energy leases overlooking the Paradox Valley from its southern slopes, and was previously owned and operated by Cotter Corporation. The mine has not produced ore since at least 2006. Anfield says it will process the ore at its Shootaring Mill near Ticaboo, Utah, which has yet to get Utah’s green light.
🏠 Random Real Estate Room 🤑
Look! Affordable housing near Moab! Sure, it’s a cave, but it’s only $99,000. Oh, what’s that? $998,000? They’re selling a cave for a million buckaroos? But of course they are. To be fair, it’s not just a cave. It’s several of them, plus a trailer. Crazy stuff.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
A work train in the Animas River gorge just below Silverton. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
Click the link to read the article on the NOAA website:
November 20, 2025
Key Points
Start of Water Year 2026:Leading up to the start of Water Year (WY) 2026, drought conditions improved across the eastern Intermountain West, but drought expanded and intensified across western areas of the region. Storage for Lake Powell and Lake Mead reached a 30-year low for the date as of October 25, 2025.
Water Year 2025: Precipitation was lower than average in western portions of the region, and greater than average in eastern parts of Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Much of the Intermountain West experienced warmer-than-average temperatures.
Water Year 2025 Impacts: Hot and dry conditions led to large fires in several states. Lack of precipitation, early snowmelt, and warm spring temperatures harmed crop production and forage in many areas.
La Niña Winter Ahead: La Niña conditions are present and favored to continue into early winter. La Niña typically brings warmer and drier winter conditions to the southern region of the Intermountain West. A transition to El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) neutral is favored for the January-March 2026 time frame. Neutral conditions mean neither El Niño or La Niña are influencing weather patterns.
This update is based on data available as of Thursday, November 20, at 7 a.m. MT. We acknowledge that conditions are evolving.
Conditions at the Start of Water Year 2026
The start of the new water year (beginning October 1, 2025) brought intense rainstorms and flooding in parts of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. However, due to warmer-than-average temperatures, combined with lower-than-average precipitation across Water Year 2025, much of the region still remains in drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
At the start of Water Year 2026, drought conditions were split across the Continental Divide, with no drought in much of the eastern extent of the Intermountain West region. Over Water Year 2025, drought conditions persisted or intensified across western portions of Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico, as well as statewide across Arizona and Utah.
Flaming Gorge Reservoir started Water Year 2026 at near-average storage levels, but many other reservoirs remained below average, including Lake Mead, Lake Powell, and Elephant Butte Reservoir. Greater-than-average runoff is needed to increase reservoir levels next spring.
Moving into winter, soil moisture levels are better than they were in November 2024, with root zone soil moisture in headwater basins for the Upper Colorado River and the Rio Grande River experiencing a mix of wetter-than-average conditions at some locations and drier than-average conditions at others, according to both SPoRT-LIS modeled data and SNOTEL station data.
Storage is below average for most Bureau of Reclamation–managed reservoirs in the headwaters of the Upper Colorado River Basin. As of November 18, 2025, Lake Powell is at 44% of typical storage, the lowest observed level for this date in the last 30 years.
Storage is also below average for Elephant Butte Reservoir in the Rio Grande Basin, at 11% of average as of November 18, 2025.
With La Niña conditions anticipated to persist from December to February, snowpack is more likely to be lower than average during these months. However, all La Niñas differ, and there is uncertainty around how this season will play out. La Niña conditions are expected to weaken into El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) neutral conditions from January to March 2026.
Water Year 2025 Brings a Mix of Drought Degradation and Recovery
52-week U.S. Drought Monitor Change Map, showing where drought improved (green and blue), remained the same (gray), and intensified (yellow and orange) from October 8, 2024 to October 7, 2025. Conditions were largely split across the western and eastern sides of the region, with 1- to 4-class degradations in the west and 1- to 2-class drought recovery in the east. Source: National Drought Mitigation Center.
November 2025 Reservoir Storage Levels
Lake Powell’s storage declined over Water Year 2025. While Lake Mead’s storage at the end of Water Year 2025 was similar to Water Year 2024, both years had low reservoir levels, with storage near only 50% of average. Source: U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Interactive Reservoir Dashboard.
Intermountain West Water Year 2025 Summary
Water Year 2025 (October 1, 2024–September 30, 2025) brought varied drought conditions to the Intermountain West. Drought largely worsened west of the Continental Divide and improved to the east of the Continental Divide.
Drought intensified and spread in Utah, Arizona, and western portions of Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico. Over the summer, portions of western Colorado and the southern border of Arizona and New Mexico reached Exceptional Drought (D4), according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
Above-average temperatures (+ 1-3 ºF) were widespread across the region in Water Year 2025, with some isolated areas being even hotter.
Water year precipitation for the region was variable, with a wet-dry split along the Continental Divide. The Southwest Monsoon season was slow to start this year, but precipitation ramped up at the end of August for Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. Utah had a weaker than usual summer rain season, and Salt Lake City experienced its fourth driest summer on record.
Utah: Total water year precipitation was below average across the entire state in 2025. The driest areas were in the south-central region of the state, and in Juab and Tooele Counties in Western Utah. Water Year 2025 was among the top five driest years on record for many portions of the state.
Arizona: Arizona received lower-than-average precipitation. Stations in some southeastern counties measured total water year precipitation among the lowest 10% on record, with some counties recording their 5th driest water year on record. August 2025 was the 16th driest August on record for the state. Yuma County was the only area with above-average precipitation, with the 9th wettest August on record for the county.
Colorado: Precipitation conditions were split between western and eastern Colorado. The western side of the state saw total water year precipitation between 50-90% of average. The eastern side of the state was unusually wet. Parts of Lincoln and Kit Carson Counties received over 130% of average precipitation.
New Mexico: Water year precipitation followed a diagonal split across the state. Temperatures were warmer than average for two-thirds of the state, and near average in counties to the northeast. The western and southern areas were drier than average (50-80% of average), and the eastern half of the state was wetter than average (100-150%). Hidalgo, Grant, and Catron Counties experienced the driest water year conditions in the state. Meanwhile, multiple counties on the eastern side of the state received 130-150% of average precipitation.
Wyoming: Total water year precipitation varied across Wyoming, ranging from 50-70% of average in parts of Sweetwater County to 120-130% of average in Converse County. Much of the state received 80-100% of average precipitation.
April 1, 2025 snow water equivalent (SWE) was 81-96% of average for many headwater basins in the Upper Colorado, but runoff efficiency was low and yielded below-average streamflows in many reaches. The Colorado Climate Center attributed low runoff efficiency to early snowmelt and below-average spring snowfall. April 1, 2025 snowpack was much lower than average for the headwaters of the Rio Grande basin, located in southern Colorado, with SWE at ~56% of average for the basin.
Dry conditions and high evaporative demand led to several large fires in the Intermountain West during the 2025 fire season, including the 145,000+-acre Dragon Bravo Fire in Arizona and 137,758-acre Lee Fire in Colorado (5th largest fire in Colorado history).
Near- to Below-Average Precipitation West of the Continental Divide
Percent of average precipitation for Water Year 2025 (October 1, 2024–September 30, 2025), compared to historical conditions from 1991-2020. Tan and brown hues indicate below-average precipitation. Green hues indicate above-average precipitation. Gray and white hues indicate near-average precipitation. Parts of eastern Colorado and New Mexico received 110-150% of average precipitation during Water Year 2025, but the western two-thirds of the region and much of Wyoming received lower than average precipitation. Source: WestWide Drought Tracker, Western Regional Climate Center. Data from PRISM.
Departure from average water year average temperature (October 1, 2024–September 30, 2025) in degrees Fahrenheit, compared to historical conditions from 1991-2020. The majority of the Intermountain West experienced higher than average temperatures (red hues), with parts of Utah hitting 3-4 ºF above average. Source: WestWide Drought Tracker, Western Regional Climate Center. Data from PRISM.
Water Year 2025 Impacts
High evaporative demand, warmer-than-usual temperatures, lower-than-usual precipitation, and dry soils contributed to dry fuel conditions and large fires across many parts of the Intermountain West. Across the region, earlier snowmelt and warm temperatures led to longer-than-usual fire seasons.
Wildfire impacts across the Intermountain West varied by state during Water Year 2025. Arizona and Colorado experienced record-breaking fires, including the 145,000+ acre Dragon Bravo Fire in Grand Canyon National Park and 137,000 acre Lee Fire–Colorado’s 5th largest wildfire on record. Meanwhile in Wyoming, the number of wildfire incidents increased, but acres burned decreased compared to Water Year 2024.
By April 2025, conditions were so dry in Utah that the governor declared a drought emergency.
Dry conditions, early snowmelt, and warm spring temperatures negatively impacted crop production in portions of all states across the Intermountain West. Poor forage conditions likewise harmed grazing in many areas, leading to curtailed grazing seasons or herd reductions.
La Niña Outlook
As of November 17, 2025, La Niña conditions are present and expected to continue through December to February, with a transition to El Niño Southern Oscillation–neutral conditions likely from January to March.
Every La Niña is different. For the Southwestern U.S., La Niña is typically associated with a greater statistical likelihood of warmer, drier conditions during winter months.
Other variables also influence winter precipitation, and not all La Niñas are associated with below-average winter precipitation in the Intermountain West.
A Weak La Niña Is Here, ENSO-Neutral Forecast Early Next Year
Official NOAA El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) Outlook, showing the probability (percent chance) of La Niña (blue), El Niño (red), or ENSO-neutral (gray) conditions for three-month periods over the next year. Taller bars indicate a greater likelihood of occurrence, shorter bars indicate a lower likelihood of occurrence. La Niña conditions are present as of October 2025, and the official outlook favors ENSO-neutral conditions beginning in January and lasting through the remainder of the water year. Source: National Weather Service Climate Predication Center.
Additional Resources by State
More local information is available from the following resources:
Elise Osenga University of Colorado Boulder/Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), NOAA/National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS)
Meredith Muth NOAA National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS)
Erinanne Saffell Arizona State Climate Office, Arizona State University
Dave Simeral Desert Research Institute, Western Regional Climate Center
Jon Meyer Utah Climate Center, Utah State University
Paul Miller Colorado River Basin Forecast Center, National Weather Service
Special Thanks
This Drought Status Update was issued in partnership between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)/National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) and partners across the Intermountain West. NIDIS is an interagency program within the Climate Program Office, which is part of NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research.
Welcome to the Landline, a monthly newsletter from High Country News about land, water, wildlife, climate and conservation in the Western United States. Sign up to get it in your inbox. Screenshot from the High Country News website.
This is an installment of the Landline, a monthly newsletter from High Country News about land, water, wildlife, climate and conservation in the Western United States. Sign up to get it in your inbox.
In early November, Texas-based New Era Energy & Digital announced plans to build a “hyperscale,” meaning massive, AI-processing data center complex in Lea County, New Mexico, the epicenter of the Permian Basin oil and gas drilling boom. The campus will be so big, and use so much power, that, if and when it is built, it will come with its own nuclear and gas power plants, with a mind-blowing combined generation capacity of about 7 gigawatts. That’s like piling the West’s largest nuclear and natural gas plants — Palo Verde and Gila River, both near Phoenix — on top of one another, and then adding another 800 megawatts. That kind of power could electrify something like 5.3 million homes, though these power plants’ output presumably will all go toward more pressing requirements: processing movie streaming, doomscrolling, social media posting and, especially, AI-related activities. [ed. emphasis mine]
Despite the enormity of this proposal, it has received very little news coverage. This is not because anyone is trying to keep it secret, but rather because such announcements have become so common that it’s hardly worth mentioning every new one. New Era’s hyperscale server farm and others like it are still a long way from generating and then devouring their own electricity. But even if only a fraction of the current proposals succeed, they will transform the West’s power grid, its landscapes and its economies as significantly as the post-World War II Big Buildup, when huge coal plants and hydroelectric dams sprouted across the region to deliver power to burgeoning cities via high-voltage transmission lines.
Data center construction at 49th & Race, Denver. Photo credit: Allen Best
In fact, this transformation is already underway. A new report from the nonprofit NEXT 10 and University of California Riverside found that, in 2023, data centers in California pulled 10.82 terawatt-hours of electricity — 1 terawatt equals 1 trillion watts — from the state’s grid, or about enough to power 1 million U.S. households. This resulted in about 2.4 million tons of carbon emissions, even with California’s relatively clean energy mix. (On more fossil fuel-reliant grids, the emissions would have been twice that, or even more.) These same centers directly and indirectly consumed about 13.2 billion gallons of water for cooling and electricity generation. In Silicon Valley, more than 50 data centers accounted for about 60% of one electricity provider’s total load, prompting the utility to raise its customers rates to fund the transmission and substation upgrades and new battery energy storage the facilities required.
These facilities are also colonizing cities and towns far from Big Tech’s Silicon Valley epicenter. Over 100 data centers — structures that resemble big-box stores overflowing with row after row of computer processors — have already sprung up in Phoenix-area business parks, and the planned new ones could increase Arizona’s total power load by 300% over current levels, according to utilities. Recently, Arizona Public Service announced it would keep burning coal at the Four Corners Power Plant beyond its scheduled 2031 retirement to help meet this growing demand.
Data center developments around the West include:
NorthWestern Energy signed on to provide up to 1,000 MW of power — or nearly all of the utility’s generating capacity — to Quantica Infrastructure’s AI data center under development in Montana’s Yellowstone County.
The 290-mile Boardman-to-Hemingway transmission project under development in Idaho and Oregon was initially designed to serve about 800,000 PacifiCorp utility customers. But in October it was revealed that the line now will deliver all of its electricity to a single industrial customer in Oregon, most likely a new data center.
In September, an NV Energy executive told a gathering in Las Vegas that tech firms are asking the utility to supply up to 22,000 megawatts of electricity for planned data centers. Since the utility has largely moved away from coal, this new load would likely be met by generation from existing and planned natural gas facilities, along with proposed utility-scale solar installations.
Xcel Energy expects to spend about $22 billion in the next 15 years to meet new data centers’ projected power demand in Colorado, potentially doubling or even tripling legacy customers’ rates. Xcel and the state’s public utilities commission are currently working to reverse the planned closure of a coal plant due to projected data center-associated electricity shortages.
Wyoming officials are doing their best to lure data centers and cryptocurrency firms to the state, and it seems to be working. This summer, Tallgrass proposed building an 1,800 MW data center, along with dedicated gas-fired and renewable power facilities, near Cheyenne. It would add to Meta’s facility in Cheyenne and the 1,200 MW natural gas-powered Prometheus Hyperscale data center under development in Evanston. Observers say electricity demand from these centers could transform the physical and regulatory utility landscape and potentially drive up costs for “legacy” customers.
New Mexico utilities are struggling to meet growing demand from an increasing number of data centers while also complying with the state’s Energy Transition Act’s requirements for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
Doña Ana County approved tax incentives for Project Jupiter, a proposed $165 billion data center campus in Santa Teresa in the southeastern corner of New Mexico. Developers have indicated they plan on building dedicated power generation, though they have not yet disclosed the energy sources.
Numerous companies are eyeing Delta, Utah, as a site for new data centers, drawn by the area’s relatively cheap land, existing agricultural water rights and the fact that it’s home to the Intermountain Power Project, a colossal coal plant built during the original Big Buildup in the years after World War II. The plant is scheduled to be converted to run on natural gas and, ultimately, hydrogen, but Utah lawmakers want at least one of its units to continue to burn coal. They just need a buyer for the dirty power it would produce, and data centers could fit the bill. Fibernet MercuryDelta is looking to construct the 20 million-square-foot Delta Gigasite there, and Creekstone Energy plans to manage 10 gigawatts of capacity there, with power coming from coal, solar and natural gas.
The Intermountain Power Project plant in Delta, Utah. The plant was scheduled to be converted away from coal, but Utah lawmakers want it to continue to burn coal. They need a buyer for the dirty power, and data centers could fit the bill. By Doc Searls from Santa Barbara, USA – 2014_11_21_lhr-lax_330, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38536818
The Western power grid is interconnected but also divided into 38 balancing authorities, or grid operators. Nearly every one of them is expected to see an increase in data center-driven demand over the next decade or so as the Big Digital Buildup gains steam, and few of them are currently equipped to meet that demand. In fact, the North American Electricity Reliability Corp. warned this month that growing data center-driven power demand is increasing the risk of outages this winter in parts of the West. Therefore, many of the largest data centers are going to need to generate their own power, while utilities also will have to scramble to add generating capacity and associated infrastructure as quickly as possible to serve the region’s on-grid facilities. The costs of that new infrastructure will be borne by each utility’s ratepayers.
How will the needed power be generated?
There’s simply no way utilities and developers can meet the projected demand with solar and wind, alone. So, utilities are already making plans to keep existing coal plants running past previously scheduled retirement dates, and to build new natural gas plants and even nuclear reactors. Yes, nukes: Google, Switch, Amazon, Open AI and Meta are all looking to power proposed facilities with the new — so new they have yet to be developed — crop of small, modular and advanced reactors, if and when they are finally up and running.
Can data centers be “sustainable”?
These developments will have environmental consequences, some more than others. Fossil fuel burning feeds climate change and pollutes the air, and oil and gas drilling and coal mining ravage landscapes; utility-scale solar and wind facilities can harm wildlife habitat and often require hundreds of miles of new transmission lines to move the power around; and nuclear power comes with unique safety hazards and a nagging radioactive waste problem, while the uranium mining and milling industry risks reenacting its deadly Cold War legacy. Even a facility that gets all of its power from solar and batteries is still using resources that, without the extra demand, would otherwise be replacing fossil fuels on the grid. And, unless it has a closed-loop air-cooled system, the data center will still consume water for cooling, usually from municipal drinking water systems.
Wyoming-based Prometheus Hyperscale has made waves with its ambitious and seemingly visionary talk of building “sustainable” data centers with dedicated clean energy generation, water recycling and efficient cooling systems that would capitalize on the cold in the Northern Rockies. It’s even talked about harnessing the heat from the servers to warm greenhouses and shrimp-farming operations. Maybe, one day, the power will be supplemented by nuclear micro-reactors. But so far, the company’s walk is not exactly matching its talk. In the beginning, at least, the facility will run on natural gas, and Prometheus says it will offset carbon emissions by paying another company to capture and sequester carbon dioxide from biofuel plants in Nebraska.
Is resistance futile?
Resistance to the imminent server farm tsunami and its outsized energy and water use is widespread, but because these are local projects considered on local levels, battling them can feel a bit like playing whack-a-mole. After Tucson-area residents defeated the city’s plan to annex the proposed Project Blue data center, which would have enabled it to use treated wastewater for cooling, the developers simply moved the project into the county and planned to use an air-cooling system, which requires less water but more energy. When opposition continued, the firm committed to investing in enough renewable energy on Tucson Electric Power’s grid to offset all of its electricity use.
Also working against the resistance is the fact that many local governments and utilities actually welcome the onslaught. Data centers can bring jobs and tax revenues — assuming the state, county or municipality doesn’t exempt them from taxes — to economically distraught areas. Meanwhile, utilities are champing at the bit to sell more of their product and raise rates to pay for the needed additional infrastructure. When announcing all the data centers headed for Nevada, NV Energy executive Jeff Brigger noted that the utility is “excited to serve this load.”
While much of the opposition to data centers is based on their environmental impacts and the effects they might have on utility rates and on the communities where they’re built, the notion of AI itself is also a factor. It’s one thing to see a lot of water or power used to grow food, for instance, but quite another to see coal power plants continue to run simply so that a computer can write a high school essay or answer an inane question or draw a picture or even serve as a companion of sorts. To be fair, AI does have potentially significant and positive applications, such as diagnosing medical conditions and crunching large quantities of data to find, say, possible cures for cancer or solutions to geopolitical problems.
But before it goes about changing the world, maybe AI ought to start with itself and figure out how to do its thing without using so much energy and water.
The city of Aspen’s drought response committee is recommending the city maintain a stage 2 water shortage that was declared in August. Monsoonal moisture and cooler temperatures that came since Aspen City Council activated the stage 2 restrictions have helped drought conditions, but not changed them, according to an information memo sent to city council this week. As of Nov. 6, Aspen and Pitkin County remained in severe and extreme drought categories, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
“Pitkin County has experienced its second driest year to date (January — September 2025) in 131 years of record with a precipitation deficit of 6.84 inches from normal,” the memo states.
Data collected from a National Weather Service station at the city’s water treatment facility recorded 1.52 inches of rain in August and 1.89 inches of rain in September. It brought the city’s precipitation deficit to 3.43 inches. Water demand typically decreases in Aspen during the winter when irrigation systems are turned off, but it is when streams are at their lowest point in the year, according to the memo. Councilman John Doyle, a staunch supporter of water conservation, said restrictions are especially important now as ski seasons get shorter and less snow falls…The stage 2 water shortage declaration came two months after the city declared a stage 1 water shortage with a goal to cut overall water consumption by 10% within city limits. Well below-average stream flows led the city to enact the second stage of water shortage, which represents severe drought conditions…The city relies primarily on streamflow from Castle and Maroon creeks for its water supply. It depends on consistent release of water from snowmelt. The city’s stage 2 water restrictions are mandatory. Watering of any lawn, garden, landscaped area, tree, shrub or other plant is prohibited from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Household watering schedules are also mandatory.
For the second time in the 21st century, this segment of the Rio Grande in Albuquerque went dry, leaving this image of cracked sediment on a blistering afternoon on Aug. 7, 2025. Photo (and copyright)/WWF-us, Diana Cervantes
Click the link to read the article on the Associated Press website (Susan Montoya Bryan). Here’s an excerpt:
November 20, 2025
Research published Thursday says the situation arguably is worse than challenges facing the Colorado River, another vital lifeline for western U.S. states that have yet to chart a course for how best to manage that dwindling resource. Without rapid and large-scale action on both sides of the border, the researchers warn that unsustainable use threatens water security for millions of people who rely on the binational basin. They say more prevalent drying along the Rio Grande and persistent shortages could have catastrophic consequences for farmers, cities and ecosystems…The study done by World Wildlife Fund, Sustainable Waters and a team of university researchers provides a full accounting of the consumptive uses as well as evaporation and other losses within the Rio Grande-Bravo basin. It helps to paint the most complete — and most alarming — picture yet of why the river system is in trouble…The research shows only 48% of the water consumed directly or indirectly within the basin is replenished naturally. The other 52% is unsustainable, meaning reservoirs, aquifers and the river itself will be overdrawn…
Irrigating crops by far is the largest direct use of water in the basin at 87%, according to the study. Meanwhile, losses to evaporation and uptake by vegetation along the river account for more than half of overall consumption in the basin, a factor that can’t be dismissed as reservoir storage shrinks…The irrigation season has become shorter, with canals drying up as early as June in some cases, despite a growing season in the U.S. and Mexico that typically lasts through October. In central New Mexico, farmers got a boost with summer rains. However, farmers along the Texas portion of the Pecos River and in the Rio Conchos basin of Mexico — both tributaries within the basin — did not receive any surface water supplies…The analysis found that between 2000-2019, water shortages contributed to the loss of 18% of farmland in the headwaters in Colorado, 36% along the Rio Grande in New Mexico and 49% in the Pecos River tributary in New Mexico and Texas. With fewer farms, less water went to irrigation in the U.S. However, researchers said irrigation in the Mexican portion of the basin has increased greatly.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
Browns Canyon National Monument protects a stunning section of Colorado’s upper Arkansas River Valley. The area is a beacon to white water rafters and anglers looking to test their skills at catching brown and rainbow trout. Photo by Bob Wick / @BLMNational
Andre Spino-Smith scoots his Waka kayak into the trickling Arkansas River. It’s barely flowing at 350 cubic-feet-per-second in the river above the Pine Creek stretch. The rapids below are meek, far from the raging rowdiness of a couple months earlier when the steep section of Class V rapids here peaked at nearly 1,700 cfs.
“You know, it doesn’t matter what the flow is,” says Spino-Smith, a former professional kayaker who has probably paddled this stretch more than anyone else in the last quarter century. “I always have fun on this river.”
Today, the Upper Arkansas River between Leadville and Pueblo is the source of a lot of fun. While it primarily serves as a source of urban water, that tumbling snowmelt delivers a secondary but critical benefit of countless good times.
The river boasts one of the most vibrant trout populations in the land and floats more paying rafters than any stretch of river in the country. The Upper Arkansas River’s modern-day role of floating rubber and sating cities has evolved over many centuries.
The Arkansas River from Leadville down to Pueblo sustained Indigenous people for most of that time. Then came the miners and railroad builders and high country settlers. The waterway was a thoroughfare for floating beaver pelts and fresh hewn lumber to market. Then it was a dumping ground for miners scouring deep holes for gold and silver. Its meandering path through craggy gorges marked an easy route for railroad builders who breathed new life into former mining towns at the dawn of the 20th century.
The Upper Arkansas River continues to feed its communities, but residents extract less from the endlessly rolling water. Before reaching taps in thirsty cities and sprinklers on the arid plains, the river is celebrated for being, well, a river. Recreation in the water has expanded to trails above the canyons, anchoring economies that are increasingly dependent on natural beauty.
That embrace of the lifeblood of the Upper Arkansas Valley continues to evolve as communities grapple with larger and larger crowds and new residents flocking to a place where water runs and stars sparkle.
Mike Harvey leans on his shovel, whistles and points.
Tommy Garcia, piloting a John Deere 345 excavator in the middle of the Arkansas River, turns his head and swings his boulder-pinching bucket toward Harvey. Garcia, with Lowry Construction, deftly drops a massive stone in the river, right where Harvey is pointing.
“That machine is pretty impressive to watch, isn’t it?” says Harvey, standing atop a gently sloping, freshly poured slab of concrete in September.
In a few days, Garcia will shift more boulders and the Arkansas River will flow over that slab, creating a glassy standing wave. Even with super-low fall flows, the surfers will flock, just as they do downstream at Harvey’s slab-formed Scout Wave in his hometown of Salida.
This is the third time in more than a decade that Harvey has tinkered with the Pocket Wave in the Buena Vista Whitewater Park. Buena Vista locals — led by the Friends of the Buena Vista River Park — raised more than $150,000 to support this year’s $240,000 rebuild of the Pocket Wave.
Harvey and the park builders at the pioneering Recreational Engineering and Planning firm have deployed the heavy equipment operators from Lowry Construction to build both the Buena Vista and Salida parks. Piloting quarter-million-dollar excavators, they nimbly pluck giant boulders as if they were pepper shakers, twisting and turning them to fit so just in the river puzzle. Harvey directs the rocky Tetris like a maestro, pointing and whistling over the machine’s rumbling diesel engine.
A standup surfer in the Arkansas River at Salida during Fibark, the river celebration held in late June 2017. Photo/Allen Best
Two decades ago, nascent whitewater parks on Colorado rivers were largely about economics and luring visitors. Now they are more about local amenities and community-based recreation. That resonates with communities in the Midwest, says Harvey, who has designed and built more than a dozen river parks in Colorado as well as parks in Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Texas.
“Salida and Buena Vista are national models for what people want,” says Harvey, noting the cooperation of the local South Main developer, a nonprofit and the Buena Vista recreation department in designing and building the Buena Vista Whitewater Park and miles of hiking and biking trails spiderwebbing above the river.
Mike Harvey has worked with many communities to successfully guide whitewater park, dam modification and river corridor improvement projects through planning, permitting, public-process, funding, design and construction phases. Mike Harvey Badfish SUP and Whitewater Park Designer at REP from his LinkedIn feed.
Salida and Buena Vista are “making their river the focal point of their community in a way that drives economics and works for locals.” And other riverside communities are watching.
“For towns in the Midwest, we are seeing communities trying to figure out how to keep young people around and they want to make their town as attractive as possible,” Harvey says. “And younger generations don’t necessarily want golf courses. They want bike trails and surfable waves.”
Harvey said river parks have “democratized the river” for the recreation generation, the growing demographic of young and old championing outdoor play as a sort of life purpose. Being able to safely play in swift water once required years of practice with wise mentors. Now, river park lineups, like at the Scout Wave in Salida, include school kids carving potato-chip surfboards next to middle-aged moms and land-locked surfer bros.
“I think there’s going to be a profound impact in the coming decades as these kids grow older and start businesses and families here,” says Harvey, whose son, Miles, grew up surfing his dad’s waves in Salida and now ranks as one of the world’s top river surfers. “These kids are going to be business leaders who clearly recognize the value of the river.”
Private investment, public reward
Like Harvey, Brice Karsh has spent long days improving his stretch of the Arkansas River. Karsh just dropped about $100,000 to improve riparian habitat along 300 yards of Arkansas River at his 262-acre Rolling J Ranch at the confluence of the river and the Lake Fork of the Arkansas and Halfmoon Creek. He hosts anglers and is planning another $200,000 to improve the fishing on the property downstream of Leadville he bought in 2016.
“There are 300 head of elk in the willows outside my window right now,” he says on a warm Tuesday in late October.
He’s used mapping technology to plan his million-dollar restoration effort on nearly 2.5 miles of riverfront. His ranch is just downstream from the 30-year, $40 million Superfund project in the 18-square-mile California Gulch, where federal cleanup of more than 2,000 mine waste piles and miles of toxin-leaking underground mines dating back to the 1860s is nearing its end.
His property, Karsh says, has been transformed “from outhouse to penthouse.”
“The people who do have access to the public areas below me and above me, just below Turquoise Lake, they catch my fish all the time,” he says of prized golden palomino trout he’s released into the river. “Private land owners who put a lot of money into their watersheds should not be forgotten when we celebrate trophy waters in the Arkansas and elsewhere. When we invest, everyone wins.”
Photo credit: Rolling J Ranch
“Every pan is a scratch ticket”
Kevin Singel is a guardian of one definitively old-school use of the Arkansas River. The Silverthorne resident and guidebook author is highly respected among the thousands of recreational gold panners who poke through eddies in Colorado rivers every year, sifting through sediment in search of shiny flakes swirling in their ridged pans.
“It doesn’t take a very big piece to be exciting,” Singel says, poking a shovel into a pile of rocks just below a shack-sized boulder on the Arkansas River. “I’ve had some amazing experiences just downstream of big rocks.”
Singel has more than 28,000 members who follow his Facebook posts detailing how to find gold in Colorado. His 2018 “Finding Gold in Colorado: Prospector’s Edition” details 186 sites he’s visited in his search for gold. His 2023 “Finding Gold in Colorado: The Wandering Prospector” details 270 legal-to-pan locations where Singel suspects there could be gold.
Not much has changed for how placer mining prospectors pan for gold. But everything else around the rivers has changed.
The 1859 gold rush in Colorado followed economic distress back East that sent countless young people West in search of fortune waiting in rocky landscapes. Many mountain communities were established during that rush as miners stuck around after scouring the hills.
“The history is powerful. We all feel it,” says Singel.
After many decades of poking and prodding through the rivers, the frequency of finding life-changing nuggets has faded. A full day of panning typically yields flecks that make up a fraction of a gram. It’s been many years since a Colorado panner scored big.
Most panners count a win with tiny hydrophobic grains that flicker in a swirl of sandy sediment.
“We call it flour gold or even fly-poop gold,” Singel says. “You just never know. This is like scratch lottery tickets. Every pan is a scratch ticket.”
Suddenly, the sun glints in black sand swirling in his blue pan.
“There we go. That’s what we are chasing,” he says, scooping the speckles into a tiny vial.
After a couple decades of prospecting, Singel tips his vials of gold flakes into jeweler melting pots. He turns his bits of gold collected from a couple dozen rivers across Colorado into wedding rings and pendants for his wife, nieces and nephews.
“I make them come digging with me too,” Singel says. “It’s become a thing for our family.”
A 100-mile video map of the Ark
Brian Ellis and his team at Wilderness Aware recently floated the Arkansas River from Granite through Cañon City with a 360-degree camera. The uploaded photos provide a foot-by-foot Google Street View of more than 100 miles of the river and its rapids. Ellis hopes the video can expose more potential rafters to the thrills of whitewater.
“We are thinking this could open the river to a lot more people,” says Ellis, who started guiding on the Arkansas River in 1999 and he bought the venerable Wilderness Aware rafting company in 2019.
In the late 1990s, whitewater rafting was on the edge; “kind of an extreme sport,” says Ellis, sitting on a rock down by the Wilderness Aware boat ramp.
Today, it’s much more mainstream and there are a lot more folks paddling their own rafts. Wilderness Aware, on the banks of the Arkansas River at the put-in for the easy Milk Run downstream of Buena Vista, offers boaters private river access and a parking lot. Back in the 1990s, there were maybe 100 boaters using that put-in every season. Today, more than 100 boaters pass through the Wilderness Aware boat ramp every summer weekend.
And that growth in private traffic has accompanied a general flattening and even a decline in the number of commercial rafters. Still, the more than 200,000 paying customers rafting with 45 outfitters every year makes the Arkansas River the most commercially rafted stretch of water in the country.
The Arkansas River Headwaters Recreation Area, which spans 152 miles and 5,355 acres along the Arkansas River between Leadville and Florence, hosted 1.13 million visitors in 2024. That’s up314,000 — or 40% — from 2014.
The management system for the AHRA is a national blueprint for regional and federal collaboration. The recreation area is managed by Colorado Parks and Wildlife and covers four counties as the river winds through Forest Service and BLM land and a national monument.
In the early 1990s, rafting outfitters proposed a one-of-a-kind arrangement with the federal Bureau of Reclamation, the Colorado Department of Natural Resources and the powerful Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District, which manages the complex Fryingpan-Arkansas Project that diverts water from the Western Slope into the Arkansas River drainage to water some 900,000 users along the growing Front Range.
Since the early 1990s, the Voluntary Flow Management Program has rafts floating on about 700 cfs every day between early July and the middle of August by timing the release of up to 10,000 acre-feet of water each year from Twin Lakes. The program gives the Arkansas River one of the most reliable boating seasons in the state. In 2022, nearly 200,000 commercial rafters on the Arkansas River spent about $39 million, supporting 498 jobs and creating a $50 million economic impact in the region. Almost all of that impact is delivered in June, July and August.
“The folks who have the biggest interests in this river — the owners of all the water rights and the Front Range municipalities— they have a much greater understanding of what this resource means to recreation now than they did 20 years ago,” Ellis says.
Harvey, standing in the Arkansas a few miles upstream of Ellis’ rafting company headquarters, agrees. He too is seeing a bit of a local pushback on development that draws tourists to the Arkansas River when tax funds could maybe be better spent on things like housing and infrastructure. That’s certainly the case across most of Colorado, where a growing number of communities are redirecting lodging tax dollars once dedicated to tourism marketingtoward things like early education, housing and trails.
“It’s funny how you can actually kick out the other side of the economic development argument into a place where people are saying ‘Hey pump the brakes,’” Harvey says.
But it’s coming from a deepening local attachment to the Arkansas River, Harvey says.
“What’s changed here is the level of collaboration,” he said. “What’s impressive here and probably is a model for other places is how these varied interests work together to meet their own needs while protecting the resource. I’m not sure other communities have such an impressive coalition around their river.”
Both Harvey and Ellis appreciate the renewed vigor in supporting the river but they fret the accompanying shift that is scrutinizing the visitors who flock to the valley.
The summer months are, obviously, exceptionally busy along the Arkansas River. And that is stirring a bit of a shift in communities hosting all that traffic. While lots of people visit the Arkansas River, today, a lot of people are moving closer to the river. The population in Chaffee and Fremont counties is up 20% in the last decade. That growth has shifted public sentiment around the river.
“People have moved here to better appreciate the river and its resources. But back in the 1990s and early 2000s, that often meant a lot of support for rafting. But that’s changing now,” says Ellis, who employs 40 workers at the height of summer. “That’s a little bit of backlash against rafting and visitors. Some people want town to be quieter in the summer because the restaurants are too full and the streets are too crowded. It’s an interesting dynamic, with a growing number of folks who are maybe not in the working world around them. And maybe they don’t recognize how badly we need that tourism flow to support the local economy.”
In the dark
Browns Canyon National Monument, nearly a decade after it was designated by President Barack Obama, secured International Dark Sky Park certification in December 2024. The campaign was organized by the nonprofit Friends of Browns Canyon, which regularly hosts night-sky gatherings and hired tech-equipped light measuring scientists to earn the recognition by DarkSky International.
The Friends of Browns Canyon group also was instrumental in forcing the Surface Transportation Board to scrutinize a plan to revive railroad traffic over Tennessee Pass and along the Arkansas River through Browns Canyon, the Royal Gorge and Cañon City. The board in 2021 nixed a request for expedited approval of trains on the Tennessee Pass Line, which has not seen trains since 1997.
While that 2021 decision was a victory for communities vehemently opposed to restoring train traffic along the Arkansas River, the threat is not dead. The Tennessee Pass plan was proposed by Colorado Midland & Pacific, which promised it would only transport people and perhaps construction materials, but not crude oil on the mountain route owned by Union Pacific.
The company that owns Colorado Midland & Pacific is the planned operator of the Uinta Basin Railway in Utah. That controversial 88-mile railroad was approved by the Surface Transportation Board in 2021 but a federal appeals court overturned that approval in 2023. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned that 2023 court decision earlier this year, resuscitating a plan that would route 2-mile-long trains loaded with Uinta Basin waxy crude along the Colorado River and through the Moffat Tunnel and metro Denver en route to Gulf Coast refineries. A secondary route for that eastbound crude could be over Tennessee Pass; a possibility that galvanizes communities who fear oil-train traffic along the Arkansas River would be a step back to that industrial use of their quiet, natural waterway.
“We have come such a long way from the mining and the railroads being economic drivers to the rafters and anglers, who pioneered recreation as the new economy in this valley,” said Michael Kunkel, who cofounded Friends of Browns Canyon and has lived in Chaffee County for more than 25 years.
“Depending on how the chips fall with the Uinta Basin Railway, I think trains on Tennessee Pass could come back. And we’ve got to fight that. There is no more precious resource than water.”
That water — for drinking, farms, fish and fun — has shaped unique communities along the Arkansas River. And those communities are increasingly ready to step up and protect the lifeblood of their valley.
“It’s still the river that is driving everything here,” Kunkel said.
“America’s infrastructure is the foundation on which our national economy, global competitiveness, and quality of life depend,” begins the 2025 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure from the American Society of Civil Engineers, or ASCE, a trade group.
The report, issued once every four years, gave America’s infrastructure an overall grade of C, up from a C- grade in its 2021 report. ASCE credited the improvement to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021, plus federal partnerships with state and local governments and the private sector.
But dams, levees, stormwater, and wastewater infrastructure components received D to D+ grades. That’s concerning given that climate change is increasingly stressing dams, levees, wastewater, and stormwater systems through heavier precipitation events. What’s more, the federal government has shown little interest in sustaining the funding needed to continue improving infrastructure.
A “D” grade, in ASCE’s words, means “the infrastructure is in fair to poor condition and mostly below standard, with many elements approaching the end of their service life. A large portion of the system exhibits significant deterioration. Condition and capacity are of serious concern with strong risk of failure.” Each of ASCE’s assessments since the first was issued in 1998 has given U.S. dams a “D” or “D+” grade.
ASCE called for investments of over $165 billion for dams, more than $70 billion for levees, and by 2044, $690 billion for wastewater and stormwater systems. That adds up to about $1 trillion.
The change in heavy downpours (defined as the top 1% of precipitation events) from 1958-2021, from the 2023 U.S. National Climate Assessment. (Image credit: Climate Central)
Climate change is increasing the risks to water-related infrastructure
Increased precipitation in the U.S. in recent decades, partially the result of climate change, has caused an additional $2.5 billion a year in U.S. flood damages, according to a January 2021 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers, climate scientists at Stanford University, found that between 1988 and 2017, heavier precipitation accounted for more than one-third of the damage.
“There is real economic value in avoiding higher levels of global warming,” study co-author Noah Diffenbaugh said in an interview with E&E News. “That’s not a political statement. That’s a factual statement about costs. And it also shows that there’s real economic value to adaptation and resilience because we’re clearly not adapted to the climate change that’s already happened.”
Aging infrastructure and more frequent and intense rainstorms cause additional strain to the nation’s dams. Since 2018, heavy rains have resulted in approximately 30 dam failures or near failures just in the Midwest, according to ASCE. Some examples:
Minnesota, June 2024: The 115-year-old Rapidan Dam, which had gone through several rounds of repairs since 2002 and was assessed to be in poor condition in 2023, failed. The failure resulted in the destruction of a power station and destroyed part of a riverbank.
Michigan, May 2020: Heavy rains from a 1-in-200-year rainstorm destroyed two 96-year-old dams, the Edenville Dam and Sanford Dam, and damaged four other dams, causing $250 million in damage.
Drawing upon the latest data from the Association of State Dam Safety Officials, ASCE estimated the cost of rehabilitating all non-federal U.S. dams (which comprise 96% of the country’s more than 92,000 dams) at $165 billion. Of that amount, $37 billion is needed to address high-hazard dams, defined as those whose failure would result in loss of life and significant property damage. Additional money, which was not quantified in the report, would be needed to upgrade federal dams.
Over 2,500 dams are considered “high-hazard.” This class of dams has increased by 20% in number since 2012, driven mostly by increased development in downstream areas.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says the dams it maintains are designed to serve for 50 years. Yet the average age of America’s dams is 64 years, and over 70% of U.S. dams are more than 50 years old. Old dams are a hazard: Approximately 75% of all U.S. dam failures occurred in dams over 50 years old.
Debris fills the Feather River from the damaged spillway of California’s Oroville Dam, the nation’s tallest dam, after its near-collapse in February 2017. The Oroville incident forced the evacuation of nearly 190,000 people and cost $1.1 billion in repairs. (Image credit: California Department of Water Resources)
A key problem for old dams is that their reservoirs gradually fill up with sediment as they age, reducing their storage capacity and increasing the risk that the dams will overtop and fail. This problem is exacerbated by climate change, because increased drought and wildfire in the surrounding watershed increase the amount of debris flowing into reservoirs during heavy rains. In addition, dams built for flood-control purposes for the climate of the 20th century may no longer be up to the task for the warming climate of the 21st century, when heavier downpours can be expected to put pressure on infrastructure not designed for such extreme flows.
Worse than most: Vermont’s dams
In Vermont, the average age of the state’s dams is 89 years, and many were not built using modern codes and standards. In other words, they are not designed to withstand increasingly heavy and frequent rainstorms. Following historic flooding in July 2023, state dam inspectors found that 57 dams were overtopped by flooding, 50 dams sustained “notable damage,” and five dams failed.
The L-550 levee on the Missouri River overtopping during the spring 2011 floods. (Image credit: USACE)
U.S. levees need significantly more than $70 billion in upgrades
“Twenty-three million Americans nationwide live and work behind a levee,” the report notes. “The National Levee Database contains over 24,000 miles of levees across the U.S., but nearly two-thirds have not been assessed for risks posed to the communities behind them.”
In that context, the Civil Engineers’ 2025 report card grade of D+ for the nation’s 40,000 miles of levees is concerning. The ASCE said that the cost of bringing the nation’s levees into a state of good repair was significantly more than the $70 billion it estimated in 2021.
U.S. levees are, on average, 61 years old, many built using engineering standards less rigorous than current best practices. The good news is that fewer than 3% of U.S. levees are rated high or very high risk, down from 4% in 2021.
Wastewater and stormwater systems are 70% underfunded
“The nation’s sewers are estimated to be worth over $1 trillion and include nearly 17,500 wastewater treatment plants that operate to protect public health and ensure the well-being of communities,” the report said.
In 2024, the wastewater and stormwater annual capital needs were $99 billion, but funding was just 30% of that – $30 billion per year. The report said, “Assuming the combined wastewater and stormwater sector continues along the same path, the gap will grow to more than $690 billion by 2044.”
The report’s D and D+ grades for stormwater and wastewater infrastructure, respectively, were unchanged from the 2021 report, despite the injection of $46 billion allocated by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act in 2021 and 2022 to assist the stormwater, wastewater, and drinking water sectors.
Smart infrastructure spending is essential
Although massive investments in our infrastructure are essential, the money must be spent wisely. Many infrastructure upgrades don’t account for future climate extremes. As sea level rise expert Robert Young of Coastal Carolina University wrote in a 2022 New York Times op-ed, “most of the funded projects are designed to protect existing infrastructure, in most cases with no demands for the recipients to improve long-term planning for disasters or to change patterns of future flood plain development. At the very least, we need to demand that communities accepting public funds for rebuilding or resilience stop putting new infrastructure in harm’s way.”
Some of the projects funded in the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law were of questionable wisdom. For example, it allocated funds to elevate 19 single-family homes in the Florida Keys. I love the Keys, but cruel math says that it is not cost-effective to defend the low-lying islands, which are all but certain to be swamped by rising seas in the coming decades. A state-commissioned 2020 report by the Urban Land Institute found that spending about $8 billion to combat sea level rise and storm surges in the Keys would only prevent about $3 billion in damages over the period 2020-2070 — a return of just 41 cents on each dollar spent. In contrast, the study found that in Miami, a similar investment would yield a return of over $9 for each dollar spent.
And civil engineer Chuck Marohn, founder of the nonprofit strongtowns.org, argues that infrastructure spending encouraging sprawl is to be avoided, since “when you sprawl outward, every new house adds more to the public obligation to maintain. More pipes, more roads, more services. But there’s no corresponding bump in tax productivity. Instead, you create what we call a “bad party” — a place where every new resident consumes more than they contribute.”
Indigenous climate activists marched on Friday through the conference hall at COP30 in Belem, Brazil, to protest continued fossil fuel exploitation on Indigenous lands. Credit: Bob Berwyn/Inside Climate News
Frustration about slow progress at the United Nations climate talks boiled over this week. After hours under the equatorial sun at COP30 in Belém, Brazil, scores of protesters pushed past security guards Tuesday evening and briefly occupied parts of the negotiating area, calling for an end to mining and logging in the Amazon, among other demands.
The clash symbolized a deeper tension at the heart of the U.N. climate summits. The people demanding change are often outside the gates while those with power inside are bound by rules that slow progress to a crawl.
UNFCCC officials said two people suffered minor injuries and that parts of the venue were temporarily closed for cleanup and security checks. The U.N. and local police are investigating the protests and the talks resumed on schedule Wednesday morning.
On Instagram, a group calling itself Juventude Kokama OJIK posted a video of the Blue Zone occupation and called it an act against exclusion.
“They created an ‘exclusive’ space within a territory that has ALWAYS been Indigenous, and this violates our dignity,” the group wrote. “The demonstration is to say that we will not accept being separated, limited, or prevented from circulating in our own land. The territory is ancestral, and the right to occupy this space is non-negotiable.”
The Tuesday tumult was a stark contrast to normal proceedings at the annual conference, where delegates with swinging lanyards and beeping phones usually file meekly through the metal detectors and past the espresso kiosks as if they’re heading to an office supply expo rather than negotiations to avert catastrophic climate collapse.
Somehow, that urgency rarely crept inside, partly because the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change runs the annual meetings like a corporate conference, said Danielle Falzon, a sociologist at Rutgers University whose research on the climate talks draws on dozens of interviews with negotiators and other participants from both developed and developing countries at most COPs since 2016.
In the UNFCCC setting, she said, success is measured by how long you stay in the room, how polished your presentation is, how fluent you are in bureaucratic English—and how well you can pretend that the world isn’t burning outside.
“I’d like to go to the negotiations and see people taking seriously the urgency and the undeniability of the massive changes we’re seeing,” she said. “I’d like to see them break through the sterilized, shallow, diplomatic language and talk about climate change for what it actually is.”
For all its talk of unity, the climate summit has struggled to deliver because the talks mirror the global inequalities they are meant to fix, Falzon said. Based on her research, COP hasn’t made much progress because it still fails to serve the countries that have contributed least to the problem but are suffering the most from it.
The negotiations, she said, are dominated by well-staffed teams from wealthy, developed nations that can afford to be everywhere at once. Smaller delegations from less-developed countries often can’t even attend the dozens of overlapping meetings.
“Everyone is exhausted but people from smaller delegations are just trying to keep up,” she said. That exhaustion, she added, shapes the talks themselves: those with the most capacity set the pace and define the terms, while the rest simply try not to fall behind.
“You can’t just pretend that all countries are equal in the negotiating space,” she said.
The imbalance is built into the institution, she said. The U.N. climate process was designed to keep everyone at the table, not to shake it. That makes it resilient, but also resistant to change, and she said her multiyear study of the talks shows the system values consensus and procedure over outcomes and the appearance of progress over actual results.
“Much of what’s called success at COP now is the creation of new texts, new work programs, rather than real climate action,” she said. After 30 years of meetings, the pattern delivers new agendas, new acronyms and new promises that keep the gears grinding but rarely move the needle on emissions, she added.
Most people involved in the climate talks see the need for change, but Falzon said that institutions are built to preserve themselves.
How (not) talk about climate
Part of the paralysis Falzon describes stems from a reluctance to speak plainly about the emergency it exists to address, said, said Max Boykoff, a climate communications researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder.
The problems associated with climate change were first framed as scientific issues all the way back in the 1980s, and that has become the dominant way we understand a changing climate,” Boykoff said. “But that has crowded out other ways of knowing; emotional, experiential, aesthetic, or even just visceral ways of understanding that something’s not right.
A two-part storm stretching from Friday night into Monday afternoon could create snowy conditions for Thanksgiving weekend skiers and travelers, but it won’t do much for Colorado’s record-low snowpack
It’s been a lackluster start to the winter season as Colorado’s snowpack hit its lowest level in three decades, but a warmer-than-usual Thanksgiving and subsequent weekend storm could bring some much-awaited snow to Colorado’s northern and central mountains. Colorado’s snowpack is currently at the 0th percentile, meaning the snow water equivalent is the lowest on record for Nov. 26 since 1987. Several basins in Northwest Colorado are at 23% of normal, while snowpack levels along the I-70 corridor are closer to 24% of normal, according to National Weather Service Forecaster David Byers. The state’s end-of-month forecast doesn’t promise much in terms of notable changes to the snowpack…next is a two-part weekend storm expected to bring up to 8 inches of snow to Colorado’s northern and central mountains, according to a Wednesday report by OpenSnow. The first part is set to begin Friday night with 3-6 inches of snow to the northern mountains and 0-4 inches in the central mountains.
This U.S. Drought Monitor (USDM) week saw improvement in drought-related conditions across areas of the West, Lower Midwest, Northeast, and the South. On the map, widespread improvements were made in drought-affected areas across Arizona as well as in other areas of the Desert Southwest including western New Mexico and southern Utah. In California, storms during the past few weeks, in addition to an overall wetter pattern in recent months, have continued to help improve conditions leading to removal of areas of drought in Southern California. Since October 1st, numerous locations in California, southern Nevada, and Arizona have received record to near-record precipitation accumulations including Santa Barbara, California (+8.2-inch departure from normal), Ontario, California (+4.11 inches), Las Vegas, Nevada (+2.08 inches), and Flagstaff, Arizona (+5.71 inches). In the Pacific Northwest, drier-than-normal conditions have prevailed (past 30-days) across areas of the region including central and eastern Oregon, southern Idaho, and southwestern Montana. Moreover, snowpack conditions across the Pacific Northwest continued to lag behind normal levels. In the Lower Midwest (Missouri) and areas of the South (Texas), widespread improvements were made in response to rainfall events during the past week. In areas of the Upper Midwest (Michigan, Wisconsin), exceptionally dry conditions have prevailed during the past 60-day period with numerous locations observing record to near-record dryness. In the Southeast, warm and dry conditions continued leading to expansion and intensification of drought conditions in the Florida Panhandle, southern Alabama, and southern Georgia. In the Northeast, recent rains led to reduction of areas of drought in West Virginia, while isolated areas of New England saw minor improvements.
In terms of reservoir storage in areas of the West, California’s reservoirs continue to be at or above historical averages for the date (November 24), with the state’s two largest reservoirs (Lake Shasta and Lake Oroville) at 110% and 100% of their averages, respectively. In the Southwest, Lake Powell is currently 29% full and Lake Mead is 32% full, with the total Colorado River system contents at 37% of capacity on November 23 (compared to 42% of capacity at the same time last year), according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. In Arizona, the Salt River Project is reporting that the Salt River system reservoirs are 54% full, the Verde River system is 68% full, and the total reservoir system is 56% full (compared to 73% full a year ago). In New Mexico, the state’s largest reservoir, Elephant Butte, along the Rio Grande River is currently 5% full (12% of average). In the Pacific Northwest, Washington’s Franklin D. Roosevelt Lake is 94% full (105% of average for the date), Idaho’s American Falls Reservoir on the Snake River is 25% full (64% of average), and Hungry Horse Reservoir in northwestern Montana is 88% full (107% of average)…
On this week’s map, only minor changes were made in the region, including changes in eastern Kansas, Nebraska, and southwestern South Dakota. For the week, precipitation across the region was generally light and primarily restricted to eastern and central portions of Kansas as well as in eastern and central South Dakota. In terms of average temperatures, warmer-than-normal temperatures (5 to 15+ degrees F above normal) were observed across the region with the greatest anomalies observed in the Dakotas. According to NWS NOHRSC, the current regional snowpack spatial extent is limited to areas of central and northern North Dakota…
Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending November 25, 2025.
Out West, recent storms have delivered much-needed precipitation to drought-affected areas of California, central and southern Nevada, southern Utah, Arizona, southern Colorado, and western New Mexico. On this week’s map, widespread improvements were made in Arizona, across the southern-third of California, and in isolated areas of Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. Moreover, the recent storm activity in the southern extent of the region has boosted snowpack conditions in the southern and central Sierra Nevada, Spring Mountains (southern Nevada), San Francisco Peaks (northern Arizona), Mogollon Rim (central Arizona), ranges of southwestern Utah, and Nacimiento Mountains (northern New Mexico). Elsewhere, snowpack conditions were poor across most of the Intermountain West and Pacific Northwest. In other parts of the region, some minor degradations were made on the map in northern Colorado and north-central Montana…
Across much of the region, generally dry conditions prevailed this week, especially in the far southern and western portions of the region, with little or no precipitation observed. In contrast, light to moderate rainfall (2 to 4+ inches) was observed along a swath extending from central Texas to southwestern Arkansas. The beneficial rainfall led to one-category improvements in areas of Moderate (D1) to Extreme Drought (D3) with most of the improvements focused on areas of central and northeastern Texas. Elsewhere, minor improvements were made on the map in southeastern Oklahoma, southwestern Arkansas, and northern Mississippi. In Louisiana, short-term precipitation deficits (past 90-day period) and declining soil moisture levels led to expansion of areas of Moderate Drought (D1) and Severe Drought (D2). For the week, average temperatures were well above normal across the region with anomalies ranging from 4 to 16 degrees F above normal. Looking at reservoir conditions in Texas, Water for Texas (November 25) was reporting statewide reservoirs at 74% full, with many reservoirs in the eastern part of the state in very good condition, while numerous reservoirs in the western portion of the state were experiencing continued below-normal levels…
Looking Ahead
The NWS Weather Prediction Center 7-Day Quantitative Precipitation Forecast (QPF) calls for moderate precipitation accumulations ranging from 2 to 4+ inches (liquid) across areas of the South and areas of the Southeast. Likewise, a significant winter storm is expected to impact the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes regions. In the West, dry conditions are expected to prevail across California and the Great Basin, while some lighter accumulations are expected across the Intermountain West. In the Pacific Northwest, moderate accumulations are expected across western Washington and some lesser accumulations across areas of the Northern Rockies of Idaho and northwestern Montana. The Climate Prediction Center 6-to-10-day Outlook calls for a moderate-to-high probability of below-normal temperatures across the eastern half of the West, Plains, South, Midwest, and Northeast. Above-normal temperatures are expected across the Southeast and along the Pacific Coast from Northern California to Washington. In terms of precipitation, there is a low-to-moderate probability of above-normal precipitation across most of the conterminous U.S. except for northern California and western Oregon where below-normal precipitation is favored.
US Drought Monitor one week change map ending November 25, 2025.
A new study in the journal Science suggests rivers in the arid American West may be doing something unexpected: absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The finding could reshape how scientists model climate change.
For decades, researchers believed most rivers were net carbon emitters. That’s because leaves, wood, and other organic material wash into the water, decompose, and release carbon dioxide, a process especially common in shaded, forested landscapes. Most of the data scientists had come from those kinds of environments, particularly in the eastern United States. But the West’s desert and shrubland rivers have been far less studied. Taylor Maavara, an aquatic biogeochemist and one of the study’s lead authors, wanted to change that. Her team gathered data from thousands of river monitoring sites across the continental U.S. and used machine learning to estimate whether each reach of river tends to release carbon or take it up.
Their results point to a stark geographic split: Western rivers — from Nevada to Arizona to parts of New Mexico — are much more likely to act as carbon sinks. Maavara says the region’s open landscapes play a key role. With less tree cover, more sunlight reaches the water, boosting photosynthesis. And with fewer leaves and organic material falling in, there’s less decomposition, a process that releases carbon dioxide back into the air. The findings, she says, “shed some light on the value of these desert ecosystems, which we tend to think of having a bit less life. We show that there’s just as much life, they’re just doing different stuff.” While the U.S. as a whole still emits more carbon from its rivers than it absorbs, this study suggests that the “carbon gap” may be smaller than once believed.And because arid and semi-arid regions make up a large part of the world’s land surface, Maavara says these findings could have global implications
Created by Imgur user Fejetlenfej , a geographer and GIS analyst with a ‘lifelong passion for beautiful maps.’ It highlights the massive expanse of river basins across the country.
Much of the region received above average October precipitation, except for eastern Colorado and southeastern Wyoming where below average precipitation fell. October temperatures were near to above normal throughout the region. Regional snow-water equivalent (SWE) was variable, with statewide SWE levels at 0.3 inches in Colorado, 0.3 inches in Utah, and 0.9 inches in Wyoming as of November 1. By the end of October, regional drought coverage was 51%, a 10% improvement since the end of September. Streamflow conditions were generally near normal in Colorado and Wyoming, and below normal in Utah, with the highest streamflow conditions seen in southwestern Colorado. La Niña conditions continued during October and will likely shift to ENSO-neutral conditions by late winter. The NOAA seasonal outlook for November-January suggests an increased probability of above average precipitation for northern Wyoming, and above average temperatures in Colorado, Utah, and southern Wyoming.
Utah, most of Wyoming, and western Colorado received above to much above average precipitation during October. Large areas of the region received 150-200% of normal precipitation, with some locations in northern Utah, southeastern Utah, northern Wyoming, and southwestern Colorado receiving 200-400% of normal precipitation. One pocket of 400-800% of normal precipitation was observed in Big Horn County in northern Wyoming. A rainfall event in Salt Lake City, UT on October 4 nearly broke the all-time daily rainfall record of 2.64” when 2.47” fell. In contrast, the majority of eastern Colorado experienced 25-50% of normal precipitation, with a swath of 5-25% of normal precipitation along the Front Range and eastern slope, from Weld County in the north to Las Animas County in the south. One pocket of 2% or less of normal precipitation occurred in Pueblo County in southern Colorado.
Regional temperatures were near to above normal in October. Temperatures were 2-4°F above normal throughout most of Colorado, Wyoming, and eastern Utah, with scattered pockets of 4-6°F above normal temperatures throughout. A swath of 4-6°F above normal temperatures occurred in southeastern Colorado, with a pocket of 6-8°F above normal temperatures in Cheyenne and Kiowa Counties. The majority of western Utah experienced near normal temperatures.
As of November 1, snow-water equivalent (SWE) was variable across the region. SWE was much below normal for Colorado, from 46% of normal SWE in the Upper Colorado-Dolores basin to as low as 24% of normal SWE in the Upper San Juan basin. SWE was much above normal in the Cheyenne (167%) and Belle Fourche (167%) basins in Wyoming. Basins with above normal SWE include the Powder (132%) in Wyoming, and the Lower Colorado-Lake Mead (127%) and Lower Bear (121%) in Utah. Basins with below normal SWE include the Tongue (63%) and North Platte (51%) in Wyoming, and the Escalante Desert-Sevier Lake (69%) and Upper Colorado-Dirty Devil (50%) in Utah. Statewide SWE levels are 0.3 inches in Colorado, 0.3 inches in Utah, and 0.9 inches in Wyoming.
Note: Current SWE as a percent of normal maps are often skewed at this time of year due to the very low average SWE this early in the season.
Westwide SNOTEL basin-filled map November 23, 2025.
Regional drought conditions significantly improved during October. By October 28, regional drought coverage was 51%, a 10% improvement since the end of September. Moderate (D1) drought coverage decreased by 16% in Colorado, 6% in Utah, and 6% in Wyoming. Severe (D2) drought coverage decreased by 22% in Colorado, 32% in Utah, and 5% in Wyoming. Extreme (D3) drought coverage decreased by 13% in Colorado, 10% in Utah, and 8% in Wyoming. The most significant improvement in drought conditions occurred in southwestern Colorado, with a 2 to 3 class improvement.
Regional streamflow conditions were generally near normal in Colorado and Wyoming, and below normal in Utah. Much below normal streamflow conditions occurred in the North Fork Gunnison River basin in western Colorado, the Hamlin-Snake Valleys River basin in western Utah, and the Madison River basin in northwestern Wyoming. However, some regional basins experienced above to much above normal streamflow conditions, particularly in southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah. Much above normal streamflow conditions occurred in the San Miguel, Animas, and Upper San Juan River basins in southwestern Colorado, the Lower San Juan-Four Corners River basin in southeastern Utah and Raft River basin in northern Utah, and the Angostura Reservoir region of the Cheyenne River basin in eastern Wyoming. The Piedra River basin in southwestern Colorado experienced streamflow conditions in the highest percentile.
La Niña conditions continued in October and are expected to persist through early winter, followed by a 55% probability of returning to ENSO-neutral conditions by late winter. The NOAA Monthly Precipitation Outlook suggests an increased probability of below average precipitation for Colorado, Utah, and southern Wyoming in November. The NOAA Monthly Temperature Outlook suggests an increased probability of above average temperatures for the entire region in November. The NOAA Seasonal Precipitation Outlook for November-January suggests an increased probability of above average precipitation in northern Wyoming and part of northern Utah, and below average precipitation in southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah. The NOAA Seasonal Temperature Outlook for November-January suggests an increased probability of above average temperatures in Colorado, Utah, and southern Wyoming.
Significant weather event: Flooding in southwestern Colorado. WWA produced a rapid assessment of the flooding in southwestern Colorado from October 10th-14th to serve as a scientific resource for understanding the drivers and impacts of the flooding events. The report is designed to support local resilience-building efforts and hazard planning for communities in the region. It provides the long-term and recent historical context for the flooding, hydrologic characteristics of the flood event, and an assessment of the local probability of an event of this magnitude.
Key Findings:
The October 10th-14th, 2025 floods were the 3rd largest on record for Pagosa Springs, CO, with river levels reaching a maximum gauge height of 12.82 feet and peak flow rates of 8,570 cubic feet per second.
A total of 12.5 inches of precipitation fell at a high-elevation observation site in the watershed over 5 days, saturating the watershed and driving the river to reach Major Flood stage twice in that period.
Flood frequency analysis based on historical observations of runoff in Pagosa Springs suggests this flood has a return period of 25 to 40 years, meaning that there is a 2.5-4% likelihood of a flood of similar magnitude occurring in any given year.
Early reports following the flooding suggest that hundreds of residents and households were evacuated in Pagosa Springs and surrounding rural communities and many structures were damaged or destroyed by the floods including homes, bridges, and roadways.
Nearly two decades of exposure to drought conditions, increasing wildfire activity, and now the recent flooding collectively highlight the geographically unique and increasingly frequent natural hazard risks that rural mountain communities face in southwest Colorado.
Comanche 3 in 2010. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
November 21, 2025
Comanche 3, the trouble-plagued coal-fired power plant in Pueblo, went down on Aug. 12. Xcel Energy, the unit’s operator and primary owner, says it can’t be restored to service until June 2026.
This will be the third extended outage since 2020 for the coal plant, Colorado’s largest and newest unit.
Might the best thing for Xcel’s customers be if the plant remained dormant? Don’t try to repair it, whatever is wrong this time. Instead, save the money and just continue operating the much older and more reliable — but soon to be retired — Comanche 2?
Several environmental groups have advanced that idea in response to a proposal by Xcel and three state agencies to keep Comanche 2 operating for a full year beyond its current planned retirement at the end of December.
That plan on the table would leave both coal-burning units operating in the second half of 2026, point out the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council. They would provide more power than needed and will also generate pollution at levels greater than acceptable.
Western Resource Advocates, the City of Boulder and others have similar things to say. They also embrace an alternative plan. That plan would have the state’s Public Utilities Commission give Comanche 3 a hard look in coming months instead of waiting until next summer.
“The question must be asked whether any further reliance on Comanche at this juncture is prudent,” says Boulder in its filing with the PUC yesterday. “Ratepayers continue to bear the consequences of (Xcel subsidiary) Public Service’s failings when it comes to Comanche 3. At some point, the bleeding must stop.”
In asking to keep the plant open, Xcel insists that it is vulnerable to having too little generating capacity. It is at risk of having resource inadequacy. The basics of any utility are to keep the lights on, with only rare outages. The environmental groups do not disagree, but they do question whether Xcel — in concert with a trio of state agencies — have over-stated the case.
Western Resource Advocates also questions what is causing the “resource adequacy” about which Xcel has been fretting.
“The proposed extension to the retirement of Comanche 2 and the unplanned, extended outage of Comanche 3 represent extreme circumstances that may result in tens of millions of dollars in unexpected cost and increased emissions above levels previously expected,” the Boulder-based WRA says in a filing with the PUC.
“Further, the proposed variance calls into question whether the company has strained its resource capacity position — at the expense of all existing customers — by soliciting and accepting new large-load interconnections.”
Large loads are commonly understood to consist mostly of data centers.
Pueblo County, along with the city and economic development group there, take a contrary point of view. They want to see the coal plants operating without question. They insist that the coal-fired power production from both units will be needed to power the steel mill in Pueblo. The plant is formally called Rocky Mountain Steel.
That’s partly accurate. However, the steel plant in 2023 went on-line with the Bighorn Solar Project, which has a capacity of 300 megawatts and can, on a net-basis, deliver almost all the electricity needed at the steel plant. The steel plant also operates when the sun does not shine, of course.
As part of their long-standing complaint, the Pueblo interests say that they badly need the coal jobs at Comanche. “Approximately one out of every four residents receive SNAP benefits compared to the state average of one in 10,” says Pueblo.
In 2018, Xcel and other parties at the negotiating table agreed that Comanche 2 would be retired by the end of 2025. The PUC commissioners stamped their approval on the agreement. That agreement assumed more or less steady operations of Comanche 3. The assumption was misguided.
Comanche 3 was down for an average 91 days each year during its first decade. Then came 2020, an outage that extended about a year and into 2021. Another outage soon followed. A 2021 PUC staff report found that the actual cost of energy from Comanche 3 had been nearly 50% higher than expected when the unit was proposed almost 20 years before.
The proposal has the backing of the Polis administration, including the Colorado Energy Office, the Office of the Utility Consumer Advocate, and the PUC trial staff. The petition with the PUC was filed Nov. 10 by Attorney General Phil Weiser.
The petitioners said that keeping Comanche 2 operating for a year was the “most cost-effective approach to providing needed electricity for the system” as identified by Xcel.
Given the outage of Comanche 3, say the environmental groups, they do not object to Comanche 2 remaining open for a year longer. They do, however, see problems with the proposal by Xcel.
First, the solution is “far broader than the problem it tries to solve,” says the Sierra Club and NRDC. If both Comanche 2 and 3 are operating, they will produce more power — and pollution — than had been planned.
They also point to a “glaring contraction” in the petition by Xcel and the state agencies. They see an imminent need to justify continued operation of Comanche 2 yet propose to delay starting a litigated proceeding at the PUC until next June to investigate all options for dealing with a near-term need.
This is getting the cart before the horse, they say. “Given the long history of forced outages at Comanche 3, its repeated cost overruns, and the fact that it is already slated to retire by 2031,” the PUC commissioners should weigh in before Xcel decides whether to repair Comanche 3.
The alternative plan advocated by the environmental community would keep Comanche 2 operating for a full year — but place limits on the operations of the unit coupled with that of Comanche 3, whenever it returns to service. “This allows the same total amount of generation from the two units as if Comanche 3 were available for all of 2026.”
Comanche Generating Station. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
University of Utah graduate student Joey Bail works to remove snow from the mid-mountain instruments operated by Storm Peak Laboratory in February 2025 at Steamboat Resort. The station measures dust on snow, which can increase snow melt rates. Storm Peak Laboratory/Courtesy photo
Changing snowpack trends in the West are bringing more variability to snow conditions and more moisture to the snowpack, threatening the future number of light and fluffy powder days. Increasing variability was the predominant message from a panel of snow experts during the presentation “Stories of a Changing Snowpack” hosted by nonprofit Yampatika on Nov. 13 in Steamboat. The panel, including representatives from the Storm Peak Laboratory and Airborne Snow Observatories, presented in-depth data and answered audience questions about how changing weather and climate conditions are affecting snowfall and snowpack impact to recreation and water supplies in northwest Colorado.
“We are seeing earlier snowmelts, heavier snow, more variability,” said Atmospheric Science Professor Gannet Hallar, Ph.D., who directs the Storm Peak Lab which sits atop the Steamboat Resort.
Hallar said across the Western states, scientists are confirming decreases in snow-water equivalent, according to measurements taken April 1, increasing spring temperatures and dust — factors that cause snow to melt. She explained the snowflake formation science behind how even small increases in winter temperatures can make a large difference in snow quality…Earlier spring runoff, hydrograph changes and increased variability of snowpack creates challenges for everything from sufficient river flows for endangered fish species to the timing of reservoir releases to agricultural irrigation, Burchenal said. Hallar said dust on snow measurements and understanding how dust on snow impacts melt timing is important because some scientists have documented that a large dust storm may lead to a 10- to 14-day earlier snow melt off…Allen and Hallar discussed the value of snowmaking additives such as Snomax, made from a protein derived from a naturally occurring microbe, used to provide nuclei for artificial snow making.
“This allows more significant volumes of snow to be produced at lower temperatures, with less water and energy.” according to the website for Snomax International. “This substantially increases the efficiency of the snow-making system, while at the same time delivering a consistent snow quality even during the most extreme temperature fluctuations.”
Westwide SNOTEL basin-filled map November 23, 2025.
The convention center in Belem, Brazil, where COP30, the United Nations annual climate talks, took place over the past 12 days. Credit: Bob Berwyn/Inside Climate News
November 22, 2025
BELÉM, Brazil—After negotiators at COP30 retreated from meaningful climate action by failing to specifically mention the need to stop using fossil fuels in the final conference documents published Saturday, the disappointment inside the COP30 conference center was as pervasive as the diesel fumes from the generators outside the tent.
This year’s United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was billed as the “COP of Truth” by host country Brazil, but it could go down in history “as the deadliest talk show ever,” said Harjeet Singh, founding director of the Satat Sampada Climate Foundation in India and strategic advisor to the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative.
COP30 was yet another “theater of delay” with endless discussions, and the creation of yet more administrative duties, “solely to avoid the actions that matter—committing to a just transition away from fossil fuels and putting money on the table,” he said.
A draft text released Nov. 18 clearly spelled out the need to transition away from fossil fuels, but in the final version, the language was watered down, merely acknowledging that “the global transition towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development is irreversible and the trend of the future.”
After setting out ambitious targets ahead of the climate talks, COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago, the secretary for climate, energy and environment in Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, acknowledged the disappointment.
“We know some of you had greater ambitions for some of the issues at hand. I know the youth civil society will demand us to do more to fight climate change,” he said during the opening of the final plenary.
Do Lago pledged to press for more action during his upcoming year as the COP president.
“I, as president of COP30, will therefore create two roadmaps, one on halting and reversing deforestation and another on transitioning away from fossil fuels in a just, orderly, and equitable manner,” he said.
That was not enough for some leading climate scientists.
“Implementation requires concrete roadmaps to accelerate the phase out of fossil fuels, and we got neither,” said Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
Indigenous climate activists marched on Friday through the conference hall at COP30 in Belem, Brazil, to protest continued fossil fuel exploitation on Indigenous lands. Credit: Bob Berwyn/Inside Climate News
During the closing plenary, a representative from Colombia said that her country refused to accept parts of the decision as written. “Denying the best available science not only puts the climate regime at risk, but also our own existence. Which message are we sending the world, Mr. President?”
In a post on X, Colombian President Gustavo Petro elaborated, saying, “I do not accept that in the COP 30 declaration. It is not clearly stated, as science says, that the cause of the climate crisis is the fossil fuels used by capital. If that is not said, everything else is hypocrisy.”
He noted that life on the planet is only possible “if we separate from oil, coal, and natural gas as a source of energy … Colombia opposes a COP 30 declaration that does not tell the scientific truth to the world.”
After several similar objections, do Lago suspended the plenary to consult with the UNFCCC secretariat about how to proceed, since the entire process is built on consensus. And while consensus isn’t the same as unanimity, the U.N.’s climate body has faced repeated criticism in recent years for ignoring the pleas of smaller countries amid the rush to finalize COP agreements.
But apparently there was enough consensus to proceed.
Looking for bright spots, former Irish President Mary Robinson, now a member of The Elders, a group of global leaders that works to address issues, including climate change, said the deal is far from perfect, but it shows that countries can still work together “at a time when multilateralism is being tested.”
Robinson said the COP30 outcome includes concrete steps toward establishing a mechanism to ensure no countries are left behind in the transition away from fossil fuels.
“We opened this COP noting the absence of the United States administration,” she said. “But no one country, present or absent, could dampen the ‘mutirao’ spirit,” or collective effort.
Given the recent rise of global political tensions, she said Belém “revealed the limits of the possible, but also the power of the determined. We must follow where that determination leads.”
In another of the final documents, COP30 emphasized “the inherent connection between pursuing efforts to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 °C and pursuing just transition pathways,” and that such a pathway leads to “more robust and equitable mitigation and adaptation outcomes.”
The conference’s adoption of a just transition mechanism was hailed as a huge win by the Climate Action Network International, an umbrella group that represents hundreds of local, regional and national grassroots organizations working on climate justice. In a statement, the group called it “one of the strongest rights-based outcomes in the history of the UN climate negotiations.”
The outcome could have been even better with stronger leadership from the European Union, which publicly advocated for more ambition, but opposed key provisions in closed-door negotiations, several observers said.
“With the U.S. absent, the European Union had a chance to lead; instead, they stepped into the vacuum as the primary obstructionist,” said Singh, including opposition to language on fossil fuel phaseout timetables.
He said the European Union member countries were “playing a cynical blame game while the planet burns.” Decisions made at this and previous COPs provided the tools needed to address the crisis, but the political will and the money to implement them are still lacking.
San Luis Valley farm. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
November 20, 2025
In November 2023, I stopped by the office of Cleave Simpson, then (and still now, at least for a brief time more), the general manager of the Rio Grande Water Conservancy District.
There, in Alamosa, he shared with me his observation that the Rio Grande during the 21st century has had water declines parallel to those of the Colorado River.
Both rivers originate in Colorado, and neither river has been able to deliver the water assumed by any number of diversion projects. Problems began in the 20th century but have intensified greatly in the 21st century because of drought but also rising temperatures.
The Rio Grande has had 17% reduced flows since 2000. The Colorado River flows have declined 20%.
Of the two rivers, the Rio Grande is longer, at 1,900 miles but carries less water, 9.1 million acre-feet/year. The Colorado flows 1,450 miles and has been carrying an average 15.4 million acre-feet. Neither river has delivered water into oceans with any reliability in decades.
Sandhill cranes and a few mallard ducks roost at sunset on a sandbar of the Rio Grande in Albuquerque during January. Photo(and copyright)/WWF-us, Diana Cervantes. Top: The San Luis Valley near Del Norte. Photo/Brian Richter
Despite these parallels, the Colorado has received far more attention, as is pointed out in a new report by Brian Richter of the World Wildlife Fund and nine others from academic institutions in Arizona, California, and other states.
Why is that? The Colorado provides drinking water for about 40 million people compared to 15 million for the Rio Grande. In irrigated agriculture, it’s a similar story: 22,300 square kilometers in the Colorado River Basin vs. 7,800 square kilometers in the Rio Grande.
“However, the water crisis facing the Rio Grande Basin is arguably more severe and urgent than the Colorado River Basin,” Richter and his colleagues contend. They argue for some rethinking and institutional alignments to help ratchet water use down to sustainable levels.
The study is the first full accounting of how water is consumed across the entire Rio Grande Basin. Mexico calls it the Rio Bravo.
Doesn’t Colorado also have a strong accounting system, as necessary to meet requirements of the 1938 compact among states that share the Rio Grande?
Yes, says Richter. However, he adds a “but.” He reports difficulty in getting estimates of how much water is being consumed by each sector and by each crop. He believes he has succeeded.
“To my knowledge, nobody has laid out the numbers at the level of clarity and accuracy that we were able to accomplish,” he said.
Another major contribution of the paper is the estimation of the degree to which water consumption is unsustainable, he said.
“We estimate that 11% of water consumption in Colorado is unsustainable. Natural replenishment from snowmelt runoff, precipitation, and groundwater recharge supplies only 89% of the water being consumed; the remainder (deficit) is being met by depleting groundwater.”
“The Rio Grande basin is at a tipping point, and everyone needs to be part of the solution,” said Enrique Prunes, a co-author and the World Wildlife Fund Rio Grande manager. “These findings will help us rethink how we manage water to secure a future for everyone.”
For the second time in the 21st century, this segment of the Rio Grande in Albuquerque went dry, leaving this image of cracked sediment on a blistering afternoon on Aug. 7, 2025. Photo(and copyright)/WWF-us, Diana Cervantes
Dry cracked sediment from the Rio Grande on a blistering afternoon on Aug. 7, 2025 in Albuquerque, N.M. For the second time in the 21st century the Rio Grande has gone dry in the Albuquerque stretch. (TC) (EDITOR’S NOTE: T/C, to fact check).
Agriculture uses 99.9% of the water in Colorado’s San Luis Valley and 87% in the basin altogether.
Dramatic declines in reservoir storage illustrate the scope of problem. Altogether, 12% of reservoir storage has been lost in the 21st century. The decline is most severe in New Mexico, where 71% less water was stored at the end of 2024 compared to 2002.
Groundwater depletion has been even more drastic. Roughly 15 times more groundwater has declined compared to surface storage. The two are coupled. As surface water supplies decline, groundwater mining grows.
“In the San Luis Valley of Colorado, diminished river flows and aquifer recharge have led to continued over-pumping, causing aquifers levels to decline,” Richter and his team write. “The Colorado state engineer has threatened to shut off hundreds of groundwater wells if the aquifer supporting irrigated farms cannot be stabilized.”
The San Luis Valley is famous for its potatoes as well as the barley to make Coors beer, but potatoes use just 7% of the water and barley 9%. The vast majority of water in the valley produces feedstocks for livestock: 47% for alfalfa, 27% for other hay, and 6% for pasture lands.
The study finds that groundwater in the San Luis Valley has been depleted at a rate of 89,179 acre-feet/year, equivalent to 11% of the annual average of direct water consumption in the valley.
What can be done? Large cities have done more with less. Albuquerque’s population grew 40% while its water use declined by 17%. However, municipal and commercial water consumption account for only 7% of all direct consumption in the three-state and two-country basin.
Strategies for reducing consumption in irrigated agriculture have been proven but must be rapidly deployed at sufficient scale and financially sustained by governments, companies, and credit institutions to rebalance the basin’s water budgets, state, and binational levels.
At the same time, water shortages have contributed to the loss of 18% of farmland in the river’s headwaters in Colorado, 36% in New Mexico, and 49% in the Pecos River tributary in New Mexico and Texas.
Strategies being embraced to curb groundwater drafting in the closed basin of the San Luis Valley have been controversial. A key case is likely to go before the Colorado Supreme Court. In Mexico, cutbacks have led to violence. One protestor died.
The study points to several strategies that could reshape how water is used in the basins. These include restoring river habitats, adjusting dam operations to better support seasonal flows, improving water-sharing agreements, and helping farmers switch to crops that require less water.
That effort to encourage crop-switching has been underway in the San Luis Valley, but with successes only at the margins.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
A high-severity burn in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. Wildfires are altering the snowpack, a crucial source of water in the West. Photo by Arielle Koshkin.
Click the link to read the article on the Water Desk website (Mitch Tobin):
November 13, 2025
As the American West warms due to climate change, wildfires are increasingly burning in higher-elevation mountains, charring the watersheds where the region’s vital snowpack accumulates.
A new study has found that in the immediate aftermath of fires across the region, the snowpack disappears earlier in burned areas. This change can threaten forest health and affect the downstream farms, cities and species that rely on the snowpack for their water, according to other research.
Scientists who study the effects of wildfires on the snowpack and streamflows are finding that the story is complex and nuanced. The impacts can vary greatly across the West’s diverse ecosystems and topography. Plus, each wildfire burns differently, so the severity of the blaze is another critical factor.
While streamflow volume typically increases after a wildfire, the peak flows come earlier in the season, and the water may be clogged with sediment that can harm wildlife and water infrastructure.
The new study, published in the September 17 issue of Science Advances, used satellite data to track when the snowpack disappeared each season and examined how that timing changed after a fire burned through forests. The research also concluded that warming temperatures due to climate change will further accelerate post-fire melting.
In the first year after a fire, the researchers found that under average winter conditions, snow melts earlier in 99% of the snow zone. “Postfire snow cover loss is more extreme in relatively low-elevation, warm environments compared to that in high-elevation, cold regions,” wrote the researchers from the Colorado School of Mines and the University of Colorado Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research.
The loss of the forest canopy due to a fire can actually increase snow accumulation on the ground below because scorched trees that are missing branches and needles intercept fewer falling snowflakes. But opening up the canopy changes the flow of energy in the forest by exposing the underlying snowpack to more solar radiation that can melt the snow.
Wildfires also cause soot and darkened debris to fall on the snowpack, which reduces its reflectivity, allows more heat to be absorbed and leads to quicker melting. Burned forests are also more susceptible to wind, which can further erode the snowpack.
“It’s basically just a big energy balance puzzle, but it seems like that increase in sunlight and decrease in the reflectivity of the snow are both leading to (an) earlier snow disappearance date,” said lead author Arielle Koshkin, a doctoral candidate in hydrologic science and engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. “Even if we do see more snowfall in the forest, it’s not overriding those energy balance changes.”
The study notes that previous research has found that the acreage of Western forests burned in the seasonal snow zone increased by up to 9% annually between 1984 and 2017, with the biggest rise in burned area occurring above an elevation of 2,500 meters (8,202 feet).
“Fire is burning higher and higher in elevation, which increases this overlap between where burned forests are and where it snows,” Koshkin said.
Stephanie Kampf, a professor of watershed science at Colorado State University who wasn’t involved in the study, said the findings are “pretty consistent with prior research” showing that snow disappears earlier after a fire and that lower-elevation locations with more “transitional” snowpacks are more vulnerable. “This study shows it really nicely with a big dataset,” Kampf said.
Climate change speeds up melting
Looking ahead, the authors project that post-fire melting will accelerate further as the West gets hotter due to rising atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases. If warming increases by 2 degrees Celsius—something that’s possible by the middle of the 21st century under some emissions scenarios—“73% of the snow zone would experience more extreme earlier postfire snowmelt compared to historically average conditions,” according to the paper.
“Under two degrees (Celsius) warming, the areas that already showed large changes are going to show even larger changes,” Koshkin said. “That warming is going to really have (an) impact on those warmer snow climates. So think maritime, Cascades, Sierras, comparative to the higher, colder, Rocky Mountain West.”
Previous research has also looked at what happens to the snowpack after a fire and found that the snow disappearance date moves up four to 23 days. Some of those studies have used ground-based observations, but the papers typically focused on one to three fires. Other research has examined snowpack readings from the automated SNOTEL network, but those snow sensors are usually placed in gaps in the forest canopy and may not capture the diversity of the West’s landscapes.
This new study relies on images captured by the MODIS instruments aboard two satellites to provide a Westwide look at wildfire’s effects. Currently, satellites cannot measure the water content of the snowpack, known as the snow water equivalent. But repeated satellite imagery can detect whether snow is present on the ground, allowing researchers to measure when the snowpack disappears during the year.
“I was really interested in seeing if we could leverage remote sensing to look at it on a pixel-by-pixel scale across the whole Western United States to really try to understand, are we seeing the same responses in the Pacific Northwest as in Colorado?” Koshkin said.
Each pixel in the MODIS satellite imagery represents a square on the ground with 500-meter (1,640-foot) edges. That’s a somewhat coarse resolution for measuring the snowpack, which can vary dramatically over very short distances, but the satellites provide daily or near-daily coverage.
While satellite data offers broad coverage of the region, it has significant limitations.
“The satellites can’t really peek underneath the forest canopy,” said Anne Nolin, a professor in the geography department at the University of Nevada, Reno, who wasn’t involved in the study. (Koshkin is a former student of Nolin’s.) “The other issue is that the satellite data can’t measure snow at times when there’s rain occurring or anytime there’s cloudiness. And so if you have a rain-on-snow event that’s changing your snowpack, which we’re having more and more, and which we would anticipate to occur more frequently, then you’re probably missing short-term changes in snowpack.”
Nolin said that the satellite-based estimates of the snowpack were “likely to be inaccurate in places where you have remaining forest, and especially in low-elevation snow zones and under warmer winter conditions.” That’s because previous studies have found that in warmer forests, the snow melts off under the canopy early, but it’s retained in the gaps between the trees, so the algorithm used to process the satellite imagery can overestimate the amount of snow in the pixel. “There’s less snow there than you think,” Nolin said.
Stark regional differences
Elevation, temperature, burn severity, vegetation type and the amount of incoming solar radiation are among the drivers explaining when the snow disappears. The variability of these factors across the West may help explain why previous studies have found such a wide range in the timing of the snow disappearance date.
“Everywhere we looked was disappearing earlier, but there were these kind of hotspots that disappeared way earlier,” Koshkin said. “I think the disruption in streamflow from these earlier melting-out pixels will be much more significant in Oregon, Washington and California.”
Wildfires had the biggest effect on the snowpack during the first five years after the blaze. In the first year after a fire, the snow disappearance date advanced by an average of 3.3 days. That might not sound like much, but the figure is just an average for the entire West—in some parts of Northern California and Oregon, the snow disappeared up to two weeks earlier.
Over time, the effects of fire declined. Ten winters after a blaze, for example, the average snow disappearance date moved up by less than a day.
While the advance of the snow disappearance date was most pronounced at lower elevations, the snowpack actually persisted slightly longer in some burned areas in Colorado and Utah, where the colder temperatures at higher elevations can insulate the snowpack from changes.
The finding that some higher elevation locations had a later snow disappearance date “would definitely be something to explore because everything that we know so far suggests that snow disappearance should be earlier after a fire,” Kampf said.
Higher elevations may be less vulnerable to an early disappearance of the snowpack due to late-season storms. “Here in Colorado,” Kampf said, “we get a fair amount of spring snow, and so that’s one of the reasons why we’re not as sensitive because sometimes that snow just comes in May and it resets everything and you don’t see the big change in snow disappearance date.”
Another factor in explaining the regional differences is the West’s diversity of vegetation. “The forests are different in places that are colder, so you have different tree species and different densities of forest and different ecosystems in general,” Nolin said. “The northern tier of states and the high country—that’s where you would be probably seeing the least amount of change. It doesn’t mean, though, that you have the least amount of fire because some of these places, especially in places like Idaho and Washington state, have significant amount of fire, and there’s some interesting studies that have shown earlier snowmelt in those locations as well.”
A large burn scar in the Northern Rocky Mountains. Post-fire changes to the snowpack vary significantly across the West’s diverse landscapes. Photo by Arielle Koshkin.
How wildfires change streamflow
Previous research has found that wildfires can significantly alter the timing and magnitude of runoff in burned watersheds, but scientists are still unraveling the details.
“If you burn down the forest, you don’t have as many trees that are using that water,” Nolin said. “You probably expect the streamflow to be earlier because the snow’s melting off earlier.”
Fires can not only kill trees and ground cover that would absorb water—they can also eliminate organic material in the soil, which causes the ground to become more water repellent and makes the snowmelt more likely to run off into streams.
A 2022 study that examined 72 forested basins that burned across the West found that average streamflow was significantly higher after a wildfire for an average of six years. The increase in streamflow was greater in areas where the extent of wildfire was larger. That study also found that the annual acreage burned by wildfires in the West skyrocketed by more than 1,100% from 1984 to 2020.
Kampf said more research is needed to understand how streamflow changes after a fire. “We don’t have all those interactions figured out yet, but there have been some studies that have shown that streamflow actually decreases after fire,” Kampf said. “We certainly know it will affect streamflow timing, but the amount of streamflow we’re less sure.”
Fire intensity is one key determinant of subsequent streamflow.
“If the forest is totally torched, then the increased solar radiation that’s coming into the snowpack is going to have a much bigger effect than if the trees still have live branches on them,” Kampf said. “Similarly, when you get down to the soil, if the soil is totally burned to a crisp, then its infiltration impacts will be much greater than if a lot of the litter and other stuff in the soil is still there.”
Nolin said she would have liked to see the authors distinguish between areas of high, moderate and low burn intensity.
“When you see photographs of burned areas, we tend to show the photos that are most dramatic with just charred trunks that have (been) left behind, but in fact, most fires are mainly low to moderate burn severity that maintain the forest canopy,” Nolin said. “To not distinguish between different burn severities and to indicate that it’s all about the canopy being burned off and all of this carbon shedding on the snow—I think that stretches the results.”
The speed of vegetation recovery also shapes how the snowpack and streamflows respond to wildfire over time.
“If it’s a forest type where the vegetation can respond quickly and come back, that’s going to be a really different response than if the vegetation is slow to grow,” Kampf said. “Here in Colorado, we have some fires where it’s not coming back as forest at all, and where there are just no seedlings, and so we would expect the fire effect on snow to persist for a long time because we just don’t have trees coming back.”
The post-fire effects on streamflow tend to be localized, so it can be difficult to detect their effects on major river basins.
“Even though the fires we’ve been experiencing have been really large, they’re still not huge compared to the size of the watershed as a whole,” Kampf said. “If you looked at something like the Colorado River Basin, it might be hard to detect the fire effect on the flow because there’s such a huge area that’s contributing to that flow. So in terms of how water is managed in forecasting and dam operations, I don’t think we’re there yet in terms of knowing how to account for fire.”
A major worry for water managers is the threat of high-intensity fires burning through dense stands of forest in the watersheds above their systems.
“Those are places that water managers are concerned about because if the forest burns, then they experience problems with post-fire erosion and sedimentation and harms to water infrastructure, so it’s kind of a different side of the water management issue,” Kampf said.
Impacts on ecosystems
Besides posing challenges for water managers, wildfires can have profound effects on wildlife and forest health.
For aquatic ecosystems, “having a shift in the timing of when flow is coming in could also have an impact,” Kampf said, but “probably the greater impact is when that flow is bringing in with it a lot of sediments that are changing the habitat more profoundly.”
More rapid melting of the snowpack after a fire can also lead to a longer dry season for forests.
“If the snow disappears earlier, plants will start greening up sooner,” Kampf said. “If they’re not getting a lot of summer rain, they may find drier conditions later in the growing season that can stress plants.”
In addition to snow disappearing earlier due to fires, Nolin said the weather in November is getting drier. “If you have an earlier snow disappearance date and a later snowfall date, that dry season’s really getting quite a bit longer, and so it means that you have a decline in forest health and you also have an increase in the potential” for a longer fire season, Nolin said.
How burned ecosystems will respond to fire remains an open question as the climate continues to warm. In many parts of the West, decades have passed since flames swept through a forest, but trees have yet to return.
The burned trees may be centuries old, “and the climate was different than when those little seedlings sprouted and became the big trees that ultimately were involved in the fire,” Nolin said. “They grew initially under a different climate, and we don’t have that climate anymore, so we might see a lot more shrubs.”
Nolin said the paper “used a very simplistic approach to looking at future impacts on snow” by only examining what will happen under 2 degrees Celsius of warming. Climate change will also alter such factors as relative humidity and precipitation, so including these other effects “would’ve been more nuanced and perhaps a little more supportable,” Nolin said. She would have liked to see the results for various temperature increases up to 4 degrees Celsius, noting that mountains are warming faster due to climate change, and a key question is whether rain or snow will fall under warmer conditions.
“Just having a single temperature change to look at helps us understand the impacts of temperature, and that’s great, but there is a lot more to be done in this area,” Nolin said.
This story was produced and distributed by The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
Chart showing water use trends in US and Mexico. Credit: Overconsumption gravely threatens water security in the binational Rio Grande-Bravo basin. Map via Springer Nature.
major new study on the nearly 1,900-mile long Rio Grande Basin — from the San Luis Valley into the Gulf of Mexico — shows a “severe water crisis emerging” with total reservoir storage in decline at around 4.24 million acre-feet or 26 percent of capacity.
The study brings together detailed water consumption estimates of surface and ground water use throughout the basin and concludes “a likely outcome will be continued loss of farmland due to financial insolvency from lowered crop production and other factors including the aging of farmers and lack of affordable farm labor,” without urgent action.
“Climate scientists have reframed the long-running drought as the onset of long-term aridification and are forecasting additional river flow diminishment of 16-28% in coming decades as the climate continues to warm,” the study notes.
The authors’ analysis shows that during 2000–2019, Colorado lost 18 percent of its farmland in the Upper Rio Grande Basin, New Mexico lost 28 percent along its Rio Grande sub-basins, and the Pecos River sub-basin lost 49 percent.
Further drying puts farmers and cities who rely on the Rio Grande in an “existential water crisis.”
Brian Richter, one of the authors of the study, says San Luis Valley farmers are central to the development and implementation of solutions for the rapidly drying Rio Grande given that “the vast majority of the direct human consumption of water in the SLV takes place on irrigated farms.”
Researchers estimate that the present level of over-consumption of both surface and groundwater in the Valley is approximately 11 percent. “That means that water consumption needs to be reduced by that percentage,” Richter said.
Richter is president of Sustainable Waters and senior freshwater fellow for the World Wildlife Fund. The two organizations teamed with researchers to provide a full accounting of the consumptive uses as well as evaporation and other losses within the Rio Grande Basin.
The Rio Grande stretches nearly from the San Luis Valley through New Mexico, El Paso, Texas, and empties into the Gulf of Mexico. It provides drinking water for more than 4 million in Colorado, New Mexico and Texas, and 11 million people in Mexico, the study notes. More than 1.9 million acres of irrigated farmland is tied to the Rio Grande.
The study, “Overconsumption gravely threatens water security in the binational Rio Grande-Bravo basin,” relies on data from annual runoff volumes, municipal and commercial consumptive use estimates from the U.S. Geological Survey, and reservoir storage levels, among other data sets.
Snowmelt runoff has decreased 17 percent over the past 25 years, according to the report. At the same time, total direct water consumption has been increasing since 2000, largely due to increasing water usage by farmers in Mexico.
When comparing challenges of Colorado River users to the Rio Grande, researchers say the “water crisis facing the RGB is arguably more severe and urgent than the CRB,” given the fact groundwater in the San Luis Valley has been depleted at a rate of 89,000 acre-feet per year; New Mexico has a water debt to Texas; and Mexico has a mounting water debt to the U.S. under a 1944 treaty that is causing political tension between the two countries.
The Upper Rio Grande here at the end of 2025 is benefitting from heavy October rainsthat materialized across the southwest and provided a stopgap to what were some of the worst summer river flows ever recorded on the river.
Management of the Upper Rio Grande Basin will be back in the spotlight come January 2026 when Colorado Water Court Division Three takes up the Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management for Subdistrict 1 of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District. The new strategy calls for a groundwater overpumping fee of $500 per acre-foot any time an irrigator in Subdistrict 1 exceeds the amount of natural surface water tied to the property of their operation. The rule punishes farmers who do not have natural surface water coming into their fields but instead rely solely on groundwater pumping for their crops.
The whole point of the plan for the agricultural-rich area of the San Luis Valley is to let Mother Nature dictate the pattern of how irrigators in Subdistrict 1 restore the unconfined aquifer and build a sustainable model for farming in the future.
Richter credits Colorado and irrigators in the Valley for taking steps to address the Rio Grande. The proposed $500 fee for overpumping in Subdistrict 1, he says, “is going to set off a lot of change in the Valley, because many/most farmers won’t be able to continue producing the same crops they’ve been growing in recent years.”
“Colorado has definitely taken some important steps, and manages its water resources far better than New Mexico or Texas,” Richter says. “But Colorado still has not been able to reduce pumping to anywhere near the needed degree, so it’s no surprise the aquifer continues to decline.”
The study looks at crops grown along the Rio Grande and how agricultural fields account for 87 percent of direct water consumption.“Overall, agricultural consumption is nearly seven times the volume of all other direct uses combined.”
Alfalfa and grass hay – water-intensive crops that dominate the landscape in the Valley and in Northern and the Middle Rio Grande of New Mexico – account for nearly 45 percent of the irrigation water consumed along the Rio Grande Basin. A shift to less-intensive crops, as the Rye Resurgence Project advocates, and a moratorium on new wells in over-drafted areas of basin in New Mexico and Texas, are necessary first steps to addressing the Rio Grande’s challenges, according to researchers of the study.
“Potatoes might be one of the few crops that remain sufficiently profitable to persist in the Valley,” says Richter. “If those transitions to other crops or to permanent farmland retirement lead to reduced water consumption to the level needed (11 percent), there is hope that the (unconfined) aquifer can be rebalanced with natural replenishment. However, it will require a greater level of pumping reductions to enable the aquifer to recover to the level required by the state engineer.”
San Luis Valley center pivot August 14, 2022. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the report on the NOAA website. Here’s an excerpt:
1.2.2 Water Year 2025 Snowpack Accumulation and Water Supply Forecast Evolution
Early season snowpack accumulation through the first week of January throughout the Upper Colorado River Basin and Great Basin ranged from near to slightly above normal throughout much of central Colorado and the headwaters of the Green River Basin and much of far northwestern Utah. Snowpack accumulation values were below normal in the San Juan and Dolores River Basins. In the Lower Colorado River Basin, early season snowpack accumulation was essentially non-existent, with the highest snowpack amounts observed in the northern portion of the Virgin River Basin at 10% of average. Other areas were at, or very close to, 0% of normal (Figure 4).
Snowpack is a dominant driver of seasonal water supply forecasts. As a result of relatively near normal snowpack conditions throughout much of the Upper Colorado River Basin and Great Basin regions and generally dry soil moisture conditions, official January Forecasts ranged from near average throughout much of the wetter portions of Colorado to approximately 70% of average throughout much of Utah and the San Juan River Basin (Figure 5).
Generally dry conditions continued through February, with numerous NRCS SNOTEL stations located in the southern portion of the Upper Colorado River Basin and Great Basin regions their lowest precipitation accumulation on record for the December through February period. These record setting conditions corresponded with generally well below average water year precipitation values from October through February (Figure 6).
It is important to note that while some areas saw beneficial It is important to note that while some areas saw beneficial precipitation, particularly in the Green River Basin, warmer than normal temperatures at the end of January and into early February resulted in snowmelt at lower elevation zones (Figure 7).
These generally dry conditions resulted in below normal water supply forecasts throughout the CBRFC’s area of responsibility. Snowpack accumulation over the Colorado River Basin and Great Basin region typically peaks near April 1st. Snowpack conditions varied throughout the Colorado River and Great Basin regions, but were generally near to slightly above average in the northern portions of the Green and Yampa River Basins, and Colorado River headwaters. Drier conditions were apparent throughout much of the Gunnison and San Juan River Basins, as well as central and southern Utah. Lower Colorado River Basin snowpack conditions remained essentially at zero. Many NRCS SNOTEL locations indicated snow water equivalent (SWE) amounts that were near average (Figure 8).
However, while peak SWE values at NRCS SNOTEL locations generally located at higher elevations indicated near normal peak snowpack conditions, CBRFC modeled SWE at lower and middle elevation zones over major contributing areas showed below to well below normal SWE conditions (Figure 9).
As a result of generally below normal SWE conditions and dry soil moisture conditions, April official forecasts ranged from near normal in portions of the Colorado River Headwaters, to approximately 50% of normal in the Dolores and San Juan River Basin. The official April forecast for Lake Powell was 67% of normal.
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
The states that share the Colorado River have failed to agree on how to protect it, leaving 35 million people without a clear path forward. We still have a chance to protect the river – but we must act now. Our communities need a plan that responds to climate change, proactively prepares for water shortages, promotes conservation across the Basin, and protects river health.
One in 10 Americans depend on a healthy Colorado River. For the last two years, their future has been hotly debated behind closed doors.
The states that share the river have failed to agree on how to protect it, missing a critical deadline to provide a plan for managing the river – leaving our communities high and dry.
It’s time to put the river before politics. Our communities need results and a plan that saves water across the West.
One in 10 Americans, along with countless fish and wildlife, depend on a healthy Colorado River. For years, our future has been hotly debated by a handful of state officials behind closed doors. The river has faced escalating threats from climate change and unsustainable water demands. River flows are declining, and our two major reservoirs are less than one-third full. That is why it was so disappointing when officials finally emerged from two years of negotiations empty-handed.
The guidelines for managing the Colorado River expire in 2026, and the Bureau of Reclamation has been working with the Basin states, Tribes, and stakeholders on a new plan for the dry years ahead. Reclamation gave the states until Nov. 11 to outline their framework for the new guidelines with the details due Feb. 14.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
What is the hold up? The Colorado River Basin states are divided into two camps — the Lower Basin (Arizona, California, and Nevada) and the Upper Basin (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming). The two Basins are at odds over a variety of fundamental issues, including who should take water shortages, how much these should be, and whether shortages are mandatory or voluntary. The Lower Basin has agreed to take the majority of the shortages in most years, but there is significant disagreement over who bears responsibility for the remaining shortages. Both Basins argue that the other is responsible. The threat of interstate litigation over the river looms large. These court battles would take decades to resolve, cost millions of dollars, and plunge the region into a state of uncertainty — all while the river system continues to crash.
The states held numerous confidential meetings in an attempt to reach an agreement while communities throughout the West anxiously awaited the outcome. On Nov. 11, the states released a joint statement that offered a commitment to continue negotiating, but little else.
The Colorado River is not going to wait for process or politics. Drought and climate change are reshaping the West. The window to secure the river’s future is closing fast.
Decision makers need to start making real progress. If we have another dry year like this one, water demands could exceed the river’s natural flow by 3.6 million acre-feet, which is enough water to sustain over 7 million families for an entire year. Such a shortfall could mean water levels in Lake Powell drop so low that Glen Canyon Dam can no longer produce hydropower and it raises serious concerns about whether the dam can safely operate at all.
This problem is too big for one state or sector to solve on its own. Everyone in the Basin must do more to save water and protect the river. Every drop matters.
Decision makers are trying to solve a complex problem with difficult trade-offs, but the challenges will only grow with each passing day. We simply can’t do our best work if we wait until the last minute. A plan that is hastily put forward at the eleventh hour leaves little room for public input or creative solutions. Instead, it risks perpetuating a status quo that hasn’t been working for anyone.
We must allow time to incorporate input from the 30 Basin Tribes, many of whom have long been excluded from key negotiations and lack access to clean water. We also need to leave room to build in solutions that protect the health of the river that sustains the West.
The future of our region — from families in Denver to raft guides in Moab to communities on the Navajo Nation to farmers in Yuma — depend on a healthy river.
We need a plan for the dry years ahead, and we need it now. While state negotiations remain important, the Bureau of Reclamation cannot let the ongoing impasse stand in the way of meaningful solutions. Reclamation must press on and work with Tribes and stakeholders across the West to develop robust and equitable guidelines that protect the river we all depend on.
At WRA we are continuing to advocate for policies that:
Base management decisions on the best available science, including how much water is actually flowing in the river
Expand water conservation efforts across the Basin and create flexible water storage accounts so that we can store water to protect river health and meet our needs in dry years
Ensure Tribes have meaningful opportunitiesto shape decisions on the river and can access their fair share of the river’s water
Invest in projects to maintain the river’s infrastructure, incentivize water conservation, build water security, and restore irreplaceable fish and wildlife habitat
Enable ongoing collaboration across the region
Adopt policies that prioritize the health of the river so that future generations can build a life in the West
Photo credit: Lighthawk
The next few months will determine the future of the river for years to come. By the end of this year, Reclamation is expected to publish a draft environmental impact statement analyzing alternatives for managing the river. This will be followed by a public comment period where you can make your voice heard. Reclamation’s final record of decision is expected late next summer.
We are up against hard deadlines enforced by the federal government and Mother Nature. The clock is ticking. We still have a chance to protect the river — but we must act now.
This historical photo shows the penstocks of the Shoshone power plant above the Colorado River. A coalition led by the Colorado River District is seeking to purchase the water rights associated with the plant. Credit: Library of Congress photo
The acceptance of the Shoshone water rights marks a landmark partnership between the State of Colorado and the western slope.
Today, Wednesday, November 19, the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) voted unanimously to accept the joint offer by the Colorado River District and Public Service Company of Colorado (PSCo) of a perpetual interest in the use of the Shoshone Water Rights for instream flow purposes.
Once confirmed by water court, this acquisition will create the largest environmental water right in the state’s history and permanently protect the historic flow of the Colorado River.
“The importance of today’s vote cannot be overstated as a legacy decision for Colorado water and the western slope. It secures an essential foundation for the health of the Colorado River and the communities it sustains,” said Andy Mueller, General Manager of the Colorado River District. “We continue to be impressed by, and thankful for, the broad coalition of voices that have come together in support of protecting the Shoshone Water Rights. Without them, we would not have been able to meet this historic milestone.”
“Today, the CWCB demonstrated its deep commitment to Colorado’s water security by taking bold, permanent action to protect our namesake river. We are proud to stand with the State and with our many partners across the West Slope in securing these flows for the benefit of all Coloradans,” said Sen. Marc Catlin, president of the Colorado River District Board of Directors. “This agreement strengthens water security for hundreds of communities within our state and represents a proactive, durable solution for the 40 million people who rely on the Colorado River downstream. The Shoshone Water Rights Preservation Project keeps the river as whole as possible, keeping water in its natural basin and safeguarding this lifeline for generations to come.”
The board’s decision today was the final step in the instream flow acquisition process that began with the formal offer in May 2025. Following a contested hearing in September – requested by four Front Range water entities – the Colorado River District and PSCo granted the CWCB additional time to continue deliberations and fully consider the historic proposal and partnership at their November meeting.
35 entities filed for party status in support of the Shoshone Water Rights ISF proposal. These include West Slope towns and counties, water districts, as well as local and regional non-profits. Over 400 positive public comments were also submitted over the summer.
“Today’s decision by the CWCB is a tremendous step forward for the health of the Colorado River and the communities that rely on it,” said Senator Dylan Roberts. “The Shoshone Permanency effort reflects years of collaboration and a shared commitment to protecting our headwaters, and I’m grateful to all the partners who brought us to this point. There is still important work ahead, but this vote positions Colorado to take advantage of the years of effort and protects these flows for generations to come.”
“The Shoshone water rights are a lifeline for western Colorado,” said Mesa County Commissioner Bobbie Daniel. “Our farmers, ranchers, recreation enthusiasts, and energy producers depend on this water, and we are proud to see the CWCB support this project. These flows are the future of our families and communities, and now, more than ever, it is critical that we are doing everything we can to protect them.”
Xcel Energy provided the following statement: “Xcel Energy recognizes the significant collaboration and effort that brought us to today’s decision by the Colorado Water Conservation Board. We appreciate the engagement from all parties throughout this process and look forward to continuing the work ahead. This agreement represents an important step in ensuring reliable, clean energy for the communities we serve while supporting responsible stewardship of Colorado’s water resources.”
In December 2023, the Colorado River District and Public Service Company of Colorado (PSCo), a subsidiary of Xcel Energy, entered into a $99 million Purchase and Sale Agreement (PSA) to acquire the historic Shoshone Water Rights, senior (1902) and junior (1929) non-consumptive rights that stabilize flows on the upper Colorado River. The PSA is the product of decades of work by the statewide Shoshone Water Right Preservation Coalition.
To close the transaction, the PSA requires four conditions: execution of an Instream Flow Agreement with the CWCB (approved today), receipt of a water court decree approving the change of water rights, securing commitment of full project funding ($99 million), and approval from the Colorado Public Utilities Commission. So far, the Shoshone Water Rights Coalition has secured commitments of over $57 million from West Slope entities, the State of Colorado, and the Colorado River District’s Community Funding Partnership. The Bureau of Reclamation awarded the project $40 million through the Inflation Reduction Act Funds in January 2025 – those funds remain under review by the current administration.
Today’s CWCB decision fulfills that critical Instream Flow Agreement requirement, moving the project significantly closer to final completion and the permanent protection of the Shoshone flows. The River District, PSCo, and the CWCB will be initiating the water court process to add instream flow use to the Shoshone water rights. The River District and its full coalition of supporters will also be turning their focus on fully securing the previously awarded federal funds.
Colorado River Basin in Colorado via the Colorado Geological Survey
River District General Manager Andy Mueller speaks to the Colorado Water Conservation Board in front of a packed house Wednesday. The board voted unanimously to accept water rights tied to the Shoshone hydropower plant to benefit the environment. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
In a historic move Wednesday evening, the state water board voted unanimously to accept water rights tied to the Shoshone hydropower plant, a major step toward securing those flows in perpetuity for the Western Slope.
The Colorado Water Conservation Board said the Shoshone water rights, which are some of the oldest and most powerful on the mainstem of the Colorado River, can be used to benefit the environment.
“The Shoshone acquisition makes a lot of sense to me, and I’m very proud to be a part of the work that everybody’s put into it,” said Mike Camblin, who represents the Yampa, White and Green river basins on the CWCB. “I hope that our children and our grandchildren look back and realize we made the right decision on this.”
The Glenwood Springs-based Colorado River Water Conservation District plans to purchase the Shoshone water rights for $99 million from Xcel Energy, but the district first needed the approval of the CWCB, which is the only entity in the state allowed to hold instream-flow water rights to benefit the environment. Because the water is returned to the river after it runs through the hydroplant’s turbines, downstream cities, irrigators, recreators and the environment all benefit.
River District General Manager Andy Mueller called it a fantastic day in Colorado history.
“I think that was the right decision for the Colorado River and the right decision for our whole state,” Mueller said. “I think the state for generations to come, centuries in the future will benefit from having that water in the Colorado River.”
Importantly, the instream-flow agreement approved by the board says that the Western Slope, along with the CWCB, will retain some control over exercising the rights. The River District and its constituents drew a hard line in the sand regarding this point and said they would walk away from the deal if they had to cede control solely to the CWCB.
Though not totally unprecedented, co-management is a departure from the norm, as the CWCB has never shared management of an instream-flow water right this large or this powerful with another entity.
In attendance at Wednesday’s CWCB meeting in Golden were representatives of ditch companies, elected officials and water managers from across the River District’s 15-county area. Some of the attendees said during their public comments that if the River District didn’t retain some control over the water rights, they would pull their funding and withdraw their support from the Shoshone campaign.
Mesa County Commissioner Bobbie Daniel said the joint-management proposal is a safeguard that ensures that Western Slope interests are not pushed aside. Mesa County has committed $1 million toward the purchase of the water rights.
“The Shoshone call is one of the great stabilizing forces on the river, a heartbeat that has kept our valley farms alive, our communities whole and our economy steady, even in lean years,” Daniel said. “If a joint management is not adopted, Mesa County will withdraw its support for this acquisition. It’s not out of anger or politics, but because anything less would fail the people that we serve.”
The Shoshone hydropower plant in Glenwood Canyon has some of the oldest and most powerful nonconsumptive water rights on the Colorado River. A broad coalition of Western Slope entities support the River District purchasing the rights. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Blow to the Front Range
The CWCB’s decision was a blow to Front Range water providers, who objected to the River District’s having a say over how to manage the water rights, even though they supported the overall goal of protecting flows for the environment. Denver Water, Northern Water, Aurora Water and Colorado Springs Utilities argued that the CWCB has exclusive authority over the rights, according to state statute.
Critically, because the Shoshone plant’s water rights — one that dates to 1902 for 1,250 cubic feet per second and another that dates to 1929 for 158 cfs — are senior to many other water users, they have the ability to command the flows of the Colorado River and its tributaries upstream all the way to the headwaters. This means that the owners of the rights can “call out” junior Front Range water providers with younger water rights that take water across the Continental Divide via transmountain diversions and force them to cut back.
The fact that Front Range water providers take about 500,000 acre-feet annually from the headwaters of the Colorado River is a sore spot for many on the Western Slope, who feel the growth of Front Range cities has come at their expense. These transmountain diversions can leave Western Slope streams depleted.
The Shoshone call pulls water west much of the time. But the Front Range parties wanted assurances that during extreme droughts or emergency situations, the call would be “relaxed,” allowing them to take more water to their cities’ millions of customers.
Alex Davis, assistant general manager with Aurora Water, said the CWCB should retain the ability to relax the call as a “backstop” under extremely rare circumstances.
“It is asking that in those emergency situations, the board has the ability to step in and say: We’re going to do what we think is best for the state of Colorado,” Davis said.
The agreement approved by the board lays out a collaborative process to consider a call relaxation, with a stakeholder panel of water managers from both sides of the divide. The specific wording of this agreement was hashed out during Wednesday’s meeting, with lawyers representing the CWCB and River District conferencing to tweak language and make edits.
Colorado Water Conservation Board member representing the Arkansas River basin Greg Felt, left, talks with River District General Manager Andy Mueller Wednesday after the board voted to accept the Shoshone water rights for instream flow purposes. The move represents a major step toward securing those rights in perpetuity for the Western Slope. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
The CWCB had been set to decide on the Shoshone rights at its meeting in September, but the River District granted an eleventh-hour 60-day extension so they could address issues raised by the board and try to negotiate a consensus with the Front Range parties.
Despite all the detailed arguments laid out by the parties, thousands of pages of technical and legal documents, and hours of testimony and public comment over the September and November CWCB meetings, the board’s scope of decisionmaking remained narrow: Should the CWCB accept a perpetual interest in the Shoshone water rights and will these rights preserve the natural environment to a reasonable degree?
In the end, the board decided yes, and also determined that it did, in fact, have the authority to allow the River District to co-manage the Shoshone water rights alongside it.
“I really think it’s pretty incredible that there’s no objection to the environmental aspects of this flow and the purpose of this water right for environmental purposes,” said CWCB Director Taylor Hawes, who represents the mainstem of the Colorado River where the Shoshone plant is located. “(The River District is) donating that water right. It seems like they should have a say. And while I realize this case is unique, I don’t see anything in the statute or the rules that prohibits us from doing this.”
But the fight to keep Shoshone flowing west is not over for the River District. The CWCB, River District and the water rights’ current owner, Xcel, now plan to file a joint application in water court to make the deal official by adding the instream-flow use to the water rights.
The water court process will decide another contentious issue that is sure to again highlight disagreement between the Western Slope and Front Range as they compete for the state’s dwindling water resources: precisely how much water is associated with the water rights, a number based on the plant’s past use.
“I also very much understand the concerns of both sides of the divide in not wanting the other side to have a windfall,” Hawes said. “That has been kind of the heart of all of this. And I hope we can all trust that the water court’s process will give us a result where we don’t have to worry about that. Everyone’s concerns will be addressed in that process.”
View of Shoshone Hydroelectric Plant construction in Glenwood Canyon (Garfield County) Colorado; shows the Colorado River, the dam, sheds, a footbridge, and the workmen’s camp. Creator: McClure, Louis Charles, 1867-1957. Credit: Denver Public Library Digital Collections
In a momentous decision for the Western Slope, state water officials unanimously approved a controversial proposal to use two coveted Colorado River water rights to help the river itself.
Members of the Colorado Water Conservation Board voted to accept water rights tied to Shoshone Power Plant into its Instream Flow Program, which aims to keep water in streams to help the environment.
The decision Wednesday is a historic step forward in western Colorado’s yearslong effort to secure the $99 million rights permanently. But some Front Range water providers pushed back during the hearings, worried that the deal could hamper their ability to manage the water supply for millions of Colorado customers.
For the state, the two water rights will be a crown jewel in its five-decade environmental effort to help river ecosystems. It’s one of several steps in the agreement process, and it could take years before the river feels that environmental benefit.
“The Shoshone acquisition makes a lot of sense to me, and I’m very proud of the work that everybody’s put into it,” said Mike Camblin, who represents the Yampa and White river basins on the Colorado Water Conservation Board. “I hope that our children and our grandchildren look back at this and realize we made the right decision.”
Over 100 Colorado water professionals and community members gathered in Golden for a six-hour hearing about the environmental proposal, brought forward by the Colorado River District, which represents 15 counties on the Western Slope.
The small hydropower plant off Interstate 70 near Glenwood Springs has used Colorado River water to generate electricity for over a century. But the aging facility has a history of maintenance issues, and Western Slope water watchers have long worried about what happens to the rights if it were to shut down for good.
The Colorado River District wants to add the environmental use as part of a larger plan to maintain the “status quo” flow of water past the power plant, regardless of how long it remains in operation.
Western Slope communities, farms, ranches, endangered species programs and recreational industries have become dependent on those flows over the decades and broadly supported the district’s proposal.
From left, Hollie Velasquez Horvath, Kathy Chandler-Henry, and Andy Mueller, general manager of the River District, at the kickoff event Tuesday [December 19, 2023] for the Shoshone Water Right Preservation Campaign in Glenwood Springs. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
“I’m good. I’m much more relaxed now,” Andy Mueller, the district’s general manager, said after the vote Wednesday. “The reality is, we have set up our state, through this instream flow agreement, for success for centuries on the Colorado River.”
Some powerhouses in Colorado water support the general permanency effort but oppose parts of the agreement. Northern Water, Colorado Springs Utilities, Denver Water and Aurora Water said the proposal would give the Colorado River District too much sway in decisions that would impact them.
These water managers and providers are responsible for delivering reliable water to millions of people, businesses, farms and ranches across the Front Range. Any change to Shoshone’s water rights could have ripple effects that would affect over 10,000 upstream water rights, including some held by Front Range water groups.
The negotiations over the agreement continued throughout the meeting. Board members had about 24 hours to review a stack of documents marked with tweaked phrasing and proposed edits.
Both sides are concerned that the other could get a water windfall through the agreement, said Taylor Hawes, who represents the Colorado River on the board. Those concerns can be addressed in the next step of the process: Water Court.
“That has been the heart of all of this,” Hawes said. “I hope we can all trust that the water court’s process will give us a result where we don’t have to worry about that.”
Who will control the flow of water?
The Colorado Water Conservation Board was supposed to make its final ruling on the environmental use proposal in September. Then Public Service Company of Colorado, the Xcel subsidiary that owns the rights, and the Colorado River District filed an 11th-hour extension to delay until the meeting Wednesday.
That’s, in part, because they needed more time to address a central conflict in the agreement: Who makes the final decisions when managing the powerful rights?
Shoshone uses two rights to access the Colorado River: one for 1,250 cubic feet per second that dates back to 1905, and a right to 158 cubic feet per second that dates back to 1940.
They amount to a big chunk of water. Plus, these rights can be used year-round, and they supersede more recent, junior rights like several held by Front Range water providers.
Under the agreement, the water rights will be co-managed by the Colorado River District and the Colorado Water Conservation Board.
Western Slope parties were adamant about this. Several speakers said they would pull their funding, and there would be no agreement if the River District did not have a say in how the water rights would be used.
“If joint management is not adopted, Mesa County will withdraw its support for this acquisition,” Bobbie Daniel, Mesa County Commissioner, said. “It’s not out of anger or politics, but because anything less would fail the people that we serve.”
The Front Range groups said the state should make the final decision if Colorado River District staff and CWCB staff disagreed over how to manage the water rights. They argued the board has exclusive authority under state law.
Alex Davis with Aurora Water said her team was pushing for a “hammer” — an entity, preferably the state, that could force water providers on either side of the Continental Divide to come to the negotiating table or that could make the final decision, especially in times of crisis.
Aurora pulls about 25,000 acre-feet of water from the Western Slope, through mountain tunnels and into its water system each year, she said. (An acre-foot of water is about what two to three households use in a year.) But when Shoshone is using its 1905 water right to its fullest, nearly all of Aurora’s transmountain diversions are turned down or turned off.
The city might want to ask Shoshone to use less water to provide some relief in an emergency. The agreement seems to give the Colorado River District a veto, Davis said.
“By the River District having that decision-making power, it may lead to less incentive on the West Slope side in those emergency situations,” Davis said in an interview with The Sun. “That’s what we were worried about.”
Colorado Water Conservation Board members decided to continue with the co-management approach, saying they were not giving up authority or working outside of state statute by doing so.
Mueller said the agreement is a win for the river and the entire state. It will protect endangered fish and a critical 15-mile stretch of habitat near Grand Junction. It includes exceptions that will protect cities during multi-year droughts and emergency situations, he said.
“The CWCB and the River District can act together for the best interest of the state,” Mueller said in an interview. “We’ll have to earn some trust in that realm over the years, but I’m quite convinced we can do it.”
About that $99 million bill…
The Colorado River District has entered into a $99 million agreement with Xcel Energy to buy the Shoshone water rights.
The state’s decision to accept Shoshone’s water rights into its environmental program met one of four key closing conditions of that purchase agreement, Amy Moyer, chief of strategy for the Colorado River District, said.
The deal still needs approval by Colorado’s Public Utilities Commission. It’ll be weighed in Water Court, where Western Slope and Front Range representatives will wade through another thorny issue: What has Shoshone’s “status quo” water use been over the last century?
The Colorado River District and its Western Slope supporters need to pay up. Although they’ve pulled together over half the asking price, they’re still waiting to hear about whether a request for federal funding will be approved.
If the deal passes those hurdles, then the resulting purchase and instream flow agreement will go on indefinitely. It will provide more predictability for water users across the state, and it will continue to factor into how Colorado communities grow, officials said Wednesday. “We’re making some very far-reaching decisions here,” Nathan Coombs, the board’s Rio Grande Basin representative, said. “I still think this is the right choice right now with the information we have.”
November 19, 2025, Golden, CO – This evening, the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) voted to approve the long-anticipated Shoshone water rights acquisition, to secure two water rights associated with the Shoshone Power Plant, including one of the state’s most significant Colorado River water rights, for permanent instream flow protection. The vote launches the next phase of the process, including water court, and begins the work of preserving and improving the 2.4-mile reach of the Colorado River between the Shoshone Power Plant Diversion Dam and Tunnel and the Shoshone Power Plant Discharge Outlets.
“Securing one of the state’s most significant Colorado River water rights for permanent instream flow protection is a momentous achievement,” said Lauren Ris, CWCB Director. “This outcome reflects a tremendous amount of work, from extensive technical analysis and stakeholder engagement to thorough regulatory review and legal preparation. This careful evaluation ensures our investment delivers long-term benefits for the river and for Coloradans.”
The agreement passed on a unanimous vote, with two directors recused. The decision follows the Colorado River District’s authorization of an extension from the September hearing to the November Board meeting, allowing additional time for review of the information presented and continued efforts to achieve a negotiated resolution of contested issues.
“I want to thank all the people who have worked so hard to inform this decision for the Board and the diverse range of stakeholders who earnestly engaged,” said Dan Gibbs, Executive Director, Colorado Department of Natural Resources. “Acquiring the Shoshone water rights for instream flow use is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to preserve and improve the natural environment of the Colorado River. But I also want to stress that the state is committed to ensuring that the historical use of the water rights is maintained at the status quo and we are committed to participating in any process to settle and resolve these issues for all water users. I am confident in our ability as a state and as a water community to come together in a way that is beneficial to all.”
Over the last two months, the CWCB and the Colorado River District met with Front Range entities and other interested parties to work toward resolving the issues raised at the September hearing. The next step in the process is the filing of an application in water court, for approval of the change of water rights to include instream flow use in a way that will not cause injury to decreed water rights.
This milestone follows significant commitments from the Colorado River District, local partners, and the CWCB, including the State’s $20 million Projects Bill contribution, to secure the long-term future of the Shoshone water rights.
This map shows the 15-mile reach of the Colorado River near Grand Junction, home to four species of endangered fish. Map credit: CWCB
Dry weather covered most of the central and eastern U.S. this week, with a few localized areas of heavier precipitation falling in the Northeast and parts of eastern South Dakota. In the West, heavy rain and snow was widespread, especially in parts of southern Nevada, southern and coastal California, the Sierra Nevada, the Pacific Northwest and northwest Montana. Temperatures west of the Mississippi River were mostly warmer than normal, especially in Montana and Wyoming, where temperatures of 12 or more degrees above normal were common. East of the Mississippi River, near- or below-normal temperatures were widespread, especially in southern Georgia and Florida, where temperatures were 6-12 degrees colder than normal. Given the wetter weather recently, improvements continued in parts of the Northeast, where streamflow and soil moisture continued to recover and precipitation deficits lessened. Improvements were also widespread in California and Washington, where recent precipitation has cut into or erased precipitation deficits and boosted soil moisture and streamflow. Degradations were common in Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, where short-term precipitation deficits grew. Widespread degradation also occurred in parts of Nebraska, central and northeast Montana and the western Great Lakes area, as primarily short-term dryness intensified in each of these areas. Recent pockets of drier- or wetter-than-normal weather led to a few small changes in areas of abnormal dryness in Puerto Rico. Wetter weather in the windward sides of Hawaii led to local improvements on Oahu, Maui and the Big Island, where streamflows have responded well to increased precipitation…
Primarily dry and warmer-than-normal weather occurred in the High Plains region this week, with the exceptions of east-central South Dakota and some high-elevation areas of Colorado and Wyoming. Temperatures in Wyoming and parts of eastern Colorado were 12 or more degrees above normal this week, while eastern parts of the Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas were mostly 3-9 degrees warmer than normal. Short-term precipitation deficits and decreasing soil moisture in some areas led to expansions and development of abnormal dryness and moderate drought in parts of eastern and central Nebraska. In western Nebraska, abnormal dryness and moderate drought expanded under similar conditions, while severe drought also developed where more substantial longer-term precipitation deficits were taking place. In and near the Kansas City area, moderate and severe drought locally expanded where soil moisture levels decreased and short-term precipitation shortfalls grew. Abnormal dryness expanded across the southeast Colorado plains where short-term precipitation deficits grew, while moderate drought filled in in northwest Colorado where short-term dryness aligned with long-term precipitation deficits…
Drought Monitor one week change map ending November 18, 2025.
Widespread heavy precipitation fell this week in California, southern Nevada, the Pacific Northwest and northern Idaho and northwest Montana. Locally over 5 inches of precipitation fell in northwest Washington, spots in northwest Montana and northern Idaho, and across scattered parts of California, especially in some coastal regions and the Sierra Nevada. Soil moisture levels increased across California amid the heavy precipitation. Precipitation deficits lessened in many areas or were entirely removed, leading to widespread 1-category improvements in California and localized 2-category improvements near Los Angeles. As the impact of this precipitation on the water cycle in California and Nevada is evaluated in the coming weeks, further improvements may occur. Conditions also improved after recent precipitation cut into precipitation deficits and locally improved soil moisture, groundwater and streamflow in northwest Washington, central and eastern Washington, northern Idaho and northwest Montana, southwest Arizona, and southwest Utah and along a portion of the Utah-Nevada border. Despite the widespread precipitation, weekly temperature anomalies were warm across the entire West this week. Compared to normal, Montana and Idaho were generally the warmest, with parts of Montana and southern Idaho finishing the week 12 degrees or more warmer than normal. In the plains of central and northeast Montana, moderate and severe drought and abnormal dryness quickly worsened amid warmer-than-normal temperatures and drier weather. In these areas, streamflow locally decreased amid growing soil moisture and short-term precipitation deficits…
Dry weather occurred across nearly the entire South region this week, which led to widespread degradations in conditions in some states. Warmer-than-normal temperatures occurred in parts of Texas and Oklahoma and some locales in Arkansas, while near- or below-normal temperatures were more common elsewhere. In the Texas Panhandle and southwest parts of the Lone Star State, temperatures of at least 9 degrees above normal were common. South of Oklahoma City, extreme drought developed where ponds dried up amid large short-term precipitation deficits and above-normal evaporative demand. Degradations occurred across large parts of southern Oklahoma where short-term precipitation deficits continued amid above-normal temperatures. A mix of short- and long-term precipitation deficits and warm temperatures led to degradations in southern Texas, while conditions also degraded in parts of north Texas and the Texas Panhandle during recent dry and warm weather. Short-term precipitation deficits also grew in much of northeast Texas, Louisiana, southwest Arkansas and southern Mississippi, leading to degrading conditions. Streamflow and soil moisture levels also were low in some areas that worsened this week…
Looking Ahead
From the evening of Nov. 19 through Nov. 24, the National Weather Service Weather (NWS) Prediction Center is forecasting a large area to receive near or over 1 inch of precipitation from southern Ohio eastward to northeast Colorado and south to northwest Louisiana and much of Oklahoma and Texas (excluding the southwest). Precipitation amounts of at least 0.75 inches are also forecast in parts of southern California, southern Arizona and southeast two-thirds of New Mexico. Heavy precipitation, locally exceeding 3 inches, is forecast in parts of western Washington. Mostly dry weather is forecast across the northern Great Plains and from the Upper Midwest eastward to most of New York and northern New England. Dry weather is also likely to continue in much of the Southeast, especially in drought-stricken areas of southeast Louisiana, southern Georgia and Florida.
For Nov. 25-29, the NWS Climate Prediction Center forecast favors above-normal precipitation across parts of the northern, central and eastern U.S. The highest confidence areas for above-normal precipitation include the northern Great Plains and the Southeast. Drier-than-normal weather is favored in the Southwest U.S., especially in coastal California, southeast Arizona, southern New Mexico and southwest Texas. The forecast favors colder-than-normal temperatures from northern Washington east to Lake Superior and southward through the central Great Plains. In the West, warmer-than-normal temperatures are likelier from central Oregon southward along the Pacific Coast and eastward to near the Continental Divide. The forecast favors warmer-than-normal temperatures in areas from the Gulf Coast to the Mid-Atlantic, with the highest confidence for warmth centered over the Southeast.
In Hawaii, above-normal temperatures and precipitation are favored across the state. In Alaska, the forecast favors warmer-than-normal temperatures in central and western parts of the state, while southeast Alaska is more likely to be colder than normal. Above-normal precipitation is favored for the southwest part of Alaska, while the forecast leans towards below-normal precipitation in northern and southeast Alaska.
US Drought Monitor one week change map ending November 18, 2025.
I promised a while back to take a closer look at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s plan to “Fortify the American Beef Industry.” I did, and my conclusion is that it’s a bunch of bunk. Okay, maybe not all of it: There are some parts about enforcing “Product of USA” labeling, and about supporting small processors by reducing overtime and holiday inspection fees and so forth that could be helpful to your friendly, local meat processor.
Curiously, however, the plan’s main emphasis is on grazing on both Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management public lands, even though this makes up only a tiny portion of the U.S. beef industry. It’s almost as if the plan was driven by an ideological agenda rather than a practical one. Oh, and look at that: The Public Lands Council is taking credit for essentially formulating the grazing section of the plan! (h/t to Western Watersheds Project)
The plan will “streamline and expand grazing on federal lands, elevate grazing as an administration priority, and provide direct relief and support to American ranchers.” The plan endeavors to return livestock to vacant grazing allotments and promises to ensure that the number of livestock grazing on public lands remains steady or increases. The plan also aims to diminish protections for wild predators — including endangered ones — and make it easier for ranchers to collect taxpayer subsidies when a wolf or bear is suspected of killing their cattle.
It’s difficult to imagine how public lands grazing can be made any easier. After all, the feds have charged a measly $1.35 per month for a cow-calf pair to graze on the public’s forage for years, which is the congressionally mandated minimum. And while the “Bureau of Livestock and Mining” might go back and forth on the “mining” part of the monicker, it has retained its livestock-friendly reputation through every administration, Republican or Democratic. The agency regularly bends over backwards to accommodate livestock operations, and it often has been unable or unwilling to remove livestock from cattle-trampled lands to allow them to recover — even in “protected” areas such as national monuments.
The administration is hoping to fill up the estimated 24 million acres of vacant grazing allotments and to bolster the number of cattle grazing on public lands, but it’s not clear how that would happen. It’s not like active allotments are bursting at the seams with too many cattle: In many cases, ranchers run far fewer cattle than authorized simply because they have fewer cattle to graze and because the industry is putting more cattle on feed. U.S. beef cattle inventories have declined by more than 30% since the 1970s (along with per capita consumption), but the number of beef cows in feedlots has ballooned.
Source: USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service.
Allotments may be vacant not because the BLM or Forest Service cancelled the lease, but because the forage is of marginal quality, due to drought or overgrazing or just not great grass growing conditions, or a conservation group bought out the lease from a willing seller.
Even if the plan did increase the number of cattle on public lands, it wouldn’t make a big difference to the industry as a whole, because public lands provide less than 2% of all of the forage consumed by the nation’s 27.9 million head of beef cattle.
Sending more cattle out into desert lands to eat what’s left of the native grasses and trample more sensitive places isn’t going to “fortify” the American beef industry. It will merely perpetuate the age-old and culturally embedded practice of giving grazing incredible leeway on public lands, while benefitting only a handful of chosen livestock operators.
I’m not an absolutist on the issue; I don’t believe that all public lands grazing should be outlawed. But it should be limited to appropriate places and at appropriate levels, and should be halted before it wrecks a particular landscape. Plus, ranchers should pay a reasonable amount for the thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ forage their cattle consume each month, along with a bit extra for the externalities, with which public lands grazing is rife. This sensible type of management simply is not occurring presently, as can be witnessed on just about any tract of active BLM “rangeland” in the Four Corners Country, where fragile desert streambeds are being sullied and valuable cryptobiotic crusts decimated by herds of thousand-pound beasts.
Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
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If the administration was really interested in helping these ranchers, it would support a “just transition” away from public lands grazing, which is on the decline despite the government’s efforts to prop it up. That would include backing the Voluntary Grazing Permit Retirement Act, which was recently reintroduced in Congress by Rep. Adam Smith, a Washington Democrat.
The legislation would allow conservation groups to buy out federal grazing allotments from willing ranchers and livestock operators, after which the BLM or USFS would permanently retire the allotment.
While private entities can and do buy out leases currently, there is no guarantee that the leases will remain cattle-free, which is what would allow the administration to re-cow some of those vacant leases mentioned above. The proposed legislation would fix that, making the retirement permanent. The resulting certainty would encourage conservation groups to invest more in the buyouts, which would benefit the ranchers, who may be looking to get out of the business or out of a specific grazing allotment.
A cow in the desert. Jonathan P. Thompson photo
🤖 Data Center Watch 👾
Certain aspects of the film Eddington just keep jumping off the screen into real life. The movie, if you haven’t seen it, is about a small town in southern New Mexico where a gargantuan tech firm, SolidGoldMagiKarp, has chosen to site a data center during the height of the COVID epidemic. There’s also a conflict between a mask-denying sheriff and a slightly more high-falutin’, charismatic mayor (who supports the data center and its purported economic benefits). A lot of drama ensues — most of it not directly related to the data center — which leads into a bloody, over-the-top machine-gun battle, which, it turns out, does have ties to the data center (which ultimately gets built, because: big money).
So far data centers haven’t provoked warfare of the kind in the movie. But they are spurring a lot of conflict in the desert over their potential water and power use. There’s Project Blue in southern Arizona, which promises to add enough electricity from renewable sources to Tucson Electric Power’s grid to offset its projected enormous power use, but a lack of specifics invites skepticism. Project Jupiter, the gargantuan data center campus planned for Santa Teresa, New Mexico, says it will generate its own power, but hasn’t specified how — except that it’s not likely to use nuclear reactors because they couldn’t come online quickly enough.
Now there’s another proposal, this one for New Mexico’s Permian Basin. New Era Energy & Digital wants to build a hyperscale, AI-processing data center complex in Lea County. It, too, will build dedicated generation: A whopping 2,000 megawatts of capacity from gas, and 5,000 MW from nuclear, according to a Power magazine report. That’s an insanely huge amount of electricity. Palo Verde nuclear plant near Phoenix has a nameplate capacity of 3,937 MW and Diablo Canyon in California has 2,236 MW of capacity.
Take a moment to digest that: This proposed data center would gobble up more electricity than two of the West’s largest power plants combined could generate, which is enough to power some 2 million homes. These numbers are terrifying, but they also strain belief and reinforce the suspicion that the AI-data center boom is actually just a hype-inflated bubble that’s poised to burst before most of these facilities are ever built.
If New Era does advance its plan, it’s likely to encounter resistance (along with support) of the kind that could spark some cinematic conflict. A natural gas plant of that size could burn methane from oil wells that might otherwise have been flared off, but it will also emit carbon dioxide and other pollutants. And the nuclear reactors will produce radioactive waste, which likely would be stored onsite, something that even those accustomed to oilfield pollution might not be too enthusiastic about.
Meanwhile, the firm’s only disclosure about potential water use for cooling is that it chose the location in part for its “abundant water supply,” which is odd given the fact that the Ogallala aquifer on which the region depends is being depleted rapidly. The only kind of water that’s abundant in those parts is produced water, the briny, contaminated liquid waste that comes up from oil wells at a rate of at least four barrels of water to each barrel of oil.
⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️
Anfield Resources went ahead and broke ground on its Velvet-Wood uranium mine in the Lisbon Valley in southeastern Utah last week, and claims it will be producing ore by the middle of next year. That’s despite the fact the firm has yet to submit its plans for a water treatment plant to state regulators. Also, the state has not approved Anfield’s proposed reopening of its Shootaring mill near Ticaboo, Utah, which is where the ore would be processed. Anfield officials told the Moab Times-Independent that they are unlikely to send ore to the White Mesa Mill near Blanding.
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Atomic Minerals says it has received Bureau of Land Management approval to drill more exploratory holes at its Harts Point Uranium Project just outside Bears Ears National Monument and adjacent to the Indian Creek climbing area and the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park. The new drill holes will be just over two miles from the Dugout Ranch and Canyonlands Research Center.
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The Trump administration has added 10 new minerals to the U.S. Geological Survey’s critical minerals list, including copper, potash, and uranium. This doesn’t automatically mean a whole lot, but it will potentially give federal and state agencies and regulators yet another reason to fast-track mining proposals.
🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭
One of the reasons I like looking at old maps and including them in these dispatches is that they provide a snapshot of how people, or at least the mapmakers, saw the region. Usually I put maps here that are at least a century old, simply because the changes they reveal are so dramatic.
When someone posted this 1940 Rand McNally map of Utah on Facebook the other day, the most remarkable thing at first glance was that it included the proposed Escalante National Monument (which is why they posted it). But as I looked more closely, I realized that this map was made just as the West was about to go through a major transformation. Over the ensuing few decades the population of the region would explode as the post-war migration and uranium, coal mining, oil and gas, power plant building, and dam building booms swept across the West.
Roads were built, small communities virtually vanished, and the landscapes and cultures were altered — along with the maps. These outtakes from the old map gives a glimpse of what the place was. For best viewing, click on the image and it will take you to the website. Click again and it should show you a larger version.
On the top outtake, notice the proposed Escalante National Monument, which would have stretched from Moab down to what is now Page, Arizona. By this time the proposal had been whittled down from the original concept, which also would have included much of what is now Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments and Canyonlands and Capitol Reef National Parks. Also note what is absent. The town of Page didn’t yet exist, because it was created to house workers building Glen Canyon Dam (construction began in 1956). Highway 95 followed a different route over Comb Ridge and ended at Natural Bridges NM. And the Moki Dugway road wouldn’t be built until the 1950s.
In western Colorado, especially, there were a lot of communities (probably very small, but big enough to include on a map) that no longer exist, including: Renaraye, McElmo, Ruin Canyon, Spargo, Ackmen, and Gladel. Ackmen basically relocated to Pleasant View after highway 666 (now 491) bypassed the older town; and Gladel is now Slick Rock. Egnar, meanwhile, does not appear on the map.
On the bottom map, note that I-15 didn’t yet exist, and the major artery through southwestern Utah, Hwy 91, bypassed the Virgin River Gorge south of St. George. I have to say, I really wish they hadn’t built an interstate through that lovely canyon. Also notable: Hildale, Utah/Colorado City, Arizona was simply Short Creek back then, and was on the Arizona side of the line (possibly where “Old Colorado City” is now?).
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Oliver Skelly):
November 18, 2025
Colorado water transfers rarely come easily. State water law ensures that every last drop of water is accounted for, litigated, and litigated some more.
It is no surprise then that the attempted Shoshone purchase by the Colorado River Water Conservation District has snagged on a couple of thorny legal and policy issues. Whether those issues will prove fatal to the purchase will be taken up at a meeting tomorrow afternoon, Nov. 19, in Golden.
The Shoshone rights
The transferred water rights from Xcel Energy to the Glenwood Springs-based River District have huge implications. Xcel uses the water rights for hydroelectric production at the Shoshone plant in Glenwood Canyon. The hydro plant produces relatively little power. As in real estate, though, location matters entirely.
Xcel’s water rights of 1902 and 1929 are senior to most other water rights upstream of Glenwood Canyon. They are also high-volume water rights, at 1,250 and 158 cubic feet per second, respectively. Additionally, they are entirely non-consumptive, meaning that all water taken out of the river (to spin the turbines) soon returns to the river for downstream use. As such, they have tremendous power to influence flows along the entirety of the Colorado River through Colorado.
If Xcel were to cease making electricity there, junior users upstream could divert more water. Many of those users would be the state’s transmountain diversions, which extend from Rocky Mountain National Park to Independence Pass. They benefit farmers and now mostly cities from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs. Any water that is diverted to the Front Range, however, is water that does not flow westward.
Because of this, both the River District and the Front Range diverters have had their eyes on those water rights for decades. What happens at Shoshone matters greatly both on the Western Slope, where the river naturally flows, and on the Front Range, where some of the river is now diverted.
Will the River District get that water right? It plans to keep the senior, high-volume hydropower water rights but also add an environmental instream flow right to the original decree, a class of water right approved by state legislators in 1973.
The district has already inked a purchase-and-sale agreement with Xcel and has raised $57 million of the $99 million price. It has been promised an additional $40 million from the Bureau of Reclamation, although the Trump administration has now frozen that money.
The Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB), a state agency responsible for water policy and funding, plays several major roles. In addition to agreeing to contribute $20 million, the CWCB has the sole authority under state law to own instream flow rights. For this deal to work, the River District also needs the agency’s board approval. That approval would seem to be a given because of the board’s commitment of $20 million to the purchase. But there are complications.
Not so simple
You are likely not shocked that Front Range water providers have not been thrilled with this pending transfer. In June, they asked the CWCB to hold a hearing to express their concerns.
At a September 19th meeting held on the campus of Fort Lewis College in Durango, the two primary parties testifying fell along predictable geographical lines: the Front Range (water providers) and the Western Slope (River District). CWCB staff also presented findings.
The question before the CWCB was a simple one: Does the acquisition “preserve the natural environment to a reasonable degree?” If the answer is yes, the water right is suitable as an instream flow right. By law, the board must consider 11 factors when making this determination. These factors are found in the instream flow law’s implementing regulations and range from whether this transfer will cause injury to other water users, the impact on interstate water compacts, and the cost of the transaction.
At the hearing, a host of messy realities surfaced. The first came after the CWCB staff presentation on the environmental importance of the 2.4-mile instream flow segment (i.e., whether the acquisition would in fact “preserve the natural environment to a reasonable degree”) in Glenwood Canyon.
The Front Range and Western Slope parties then trumpeted the many but competing public benefits afforded by the Shoshone rights: rafting in Glenwood Canyon, orchard irrigation at Palisade, hospitals in Aurora.
Public interest…in Colorado?
Nearly all other Western states have incorporated some form of public interest requirement during water transfers. Although a difficult term to pin down, public interest reviews involve the consideration of public goods, such as healthy rivers or recreational amenities. The presiding bodies, when evaluating transactions, must weigh the private interests against the broader public benefits (or lack thereof).
Colorado has no requirement. In 1995, the Colorado Supreme Court found the public interest theory conflicts with the prior appropriation doctrine. Without any legislative developments or a judicial about-face, that is that.
So, if we don’t have a public interest review, why the parade of testimony?
The most obvious answer is politics. When seeking approval (or denial) from an administrative body, it’s not a bad bet to show pretty pictures and tell compelling stories. But “politics” in this context can also be seen as a sub-in for those public interest principles.
The eighth factor governing the CWCB’s deliberations requires consideration of the “effect of the proposed acquisition on the maximum utilization of the waters of the state.” Maximum utilization and the public interest, although not direct parallels, both share a principle of the “greatest good.”
This backdoor introduction of the public interest gave listeners a glimpse of what the judicially disapproved principle might look like in Colorado water transfers.
Whose right is it, anyway?
That introduction at the hearing spurred perhaps the trickiest legal and policy issue of the day: Who has authority to enforce the instream flow agreement? That is, who can make the legal call instructing other water users to forgo their diversion so that the instream flow right gets its full water allocation. Is that a Western Slope political entity, the River District, or the statewide agency, the CWCB?
And if it is the CWCB, does it have authority to grant its enforcement power to the River District? While the law appears to say yes, the River District can be granted authority, there is enough ambiguity in the 1973 law to perhaps send this to Colorado Supreme Court.
The policy question, however, quickly returned parties to the realm of the public interest.
The Front Range parties, arguably the most averse to any sniff of public interest requirements, ironically now found themselves supporting the idea that the broader public benefits should be under consideration.
They contended that the CWCB should preserve its discretion to use and operate the instream-flow right. That, they said, would be sound public policy. Or if you will, “in the public interest.”
Meanwhile, the River District, as the purchasing party and longstanding practitioners of Colorado water law, understandably wants to get what they are paying for: full control over exercising their water rights. Retaining enforcement powers under the agreement was, in fact, “the one sword that the West Slope” was prepared to fall on.
Filings from both parties on Monday suggest that there is ongoing disagreement on this issue, meaning the CWCB will have a big decision to make.
The Colorado River flows through Glenwood Springs, paralleled by Interstate 70 and the Union Pacific tracks, at sunset in March 2024. Photo credit: Allen Best
Can’t you just compromise?
The next display of messiness came when it was time for the Board to apply the 11 factors.
To those listening, it was quickly apparent that such a contested hearing had not been before these board members before. Few of the directors seemed to understand how each factor was to be applied to the proposal in front of them. Although no fault of the board members, the misalignment between their understanding of their roles and the consequences of the decision to be made felt almost incommensurate.
That unpreparedness may have resulted in the Board’s parting directive to the parties to “compromise”: surely a favorable idea aimed at inspiring creative strategies and good faith negotiating.
But in the adversarial world of Colorado water law, what might result from this directive?
Such directives are common enough in water disputes. Recently, in the case of the Gross Reservoir expansion, a federal court, the 10th Circuit, told Denver Water and Save the Colorado to do the same.
In matters of purely Colorado domain, however, such directives are normally reserved as an outcome of the water court process. Ordering it before litigation seemed premature, perhaps even subversive.
The parties’ reactions were revealing here. The Front Range interests will certainly see it as a tally in their favor because it suggests the River District needs to move away from its hardline position. Perhaps their aversion to the public interest doctrine is not so set in stone, after all.
For the River District, it is hard not to imagine some frustration. This was a contracted-for acquisition under Colorado’s longstanding, private property water rights regime. But here, too, the water is muddy. Recall that the CWCB is providing 20% of the purchase price. What kind of leverage, tacit or otherwise, does that commitment provide?
Nov. 19th hearing
These are all difficult questions, and they are being asked amidst a backdrop of high stakes, interstate Colorado River negotiations. Answering them will be no easy feat, and as the filings on Monday indicate, those questions remain unanswered. Whether it is indeed a “compromise” at the CWCB meeting on Wednesday, Nov. 19, or back to the drawing board for the River District is anyone’s guess. But the uncomfortable positions and contortions on display at the contested hearing gave an insightful glimpse into the messy realities of today and stress tests of the future for Colorado water law.
Oliver Skelly is a 2025 graduate of the University of Colorado Law School, a former river guide, and follower of Western water happenings. He has worked at various law practices around Colorado and is now clerking for a judge on the Western Slope.
Colorado transmountain diversions via the State Engineer’s office
Click the link to read the article on the Summit Daily website (Town of Silverthorne):
November 17, 2025
Starting Jan. 1, 2026, the metered water service rate for a normal rate building from $19.55 per equivalent residential unit per month to $22 per equivalent residential unit per month.
Also effective Jan. 1 2026, the town will increase its water system development fees by $276 per equivalent residential unit. This will bring the one-time fee to connect new development to the town’s water from $9,200 to $9,476.
“That’s really just to keep up with inflation,” Finance Director Laura Kennedy said. “Despite the fact that we are growing as a town, water usage really hasn’t grown as much as we’ve seen the number of units come on.”
Residential storm water management fee will also increase, taking the fee from $7.50 per month to $7.57 per month. The sewer opportunity fee — which is applicable to properties outside of town that receive sewer services from the town or will receive service because of a planned annexation — will increase in 2026 as well from $2,700 to $2,750.
This photo from the Uncompahgre Valley Water Users Association website shows some of its water infrastructure. The association is facing a lawsuit from some of its shareholders who say they aren’t getting a fair share of their irrigation water.
Some shareholders have sued the Uncompahgre Valley Water Users Association, contending they aren’t receiving their fair share of irrigation water and their livelihoods are being harmed…The plaintiffs have been “deprived of consistent and proportional water deliveries during critical irrigation periods since 2022,” which is when new association management took over, the suit says. Over that period plaintiffs also have been deprived of water owed to them based on priority water rights, the suit says.
“These failures have occurred even in years with above-average snowpack and available water. Despite Plaintiffs’ repeated requests to the UVWUA to correct these deficiencies, Plaintiffs continued to receive disproportionate, inconsistent, and insufficient water deliveries during the 2025 irrigation season,” the suit says…The suit says the plaintiffs have experienced problems including weeks without delivery during planting and growing seasons. One plaintiff, Tom Gore, reported going 60 days last year without expected water deliveries. Another, Frank Gilmore, has been able to run only two irrigation pipes simultaneously instead of the normal five and has lost entire cuttings of hay. Delayed irrigation last year left a third of plaintiff Dan Varner’s newly reseeded 34-acre hayfield unproductive, requiring costly reseeding, the suit says. It says the impacts to shareholders have included things such as failed crop rotations, increased cattle feed costs, reduced soil health, and loss of profit from hay and sweet corn yields…
The plaintiffs are shareholders receiving water from the Ironstone Canal system, one of the project’s primary delivery systems. The suit says the association’s delivery practices have deprioritized the Ironstone system and intentionally favored the East Canal system instead. The suit says that last March, Pope admitted in a meeting that the association was intentionally and disproportionately routing water to the East Canal system before delivering to Ironstone System shareholders, contrary to historical practice. It says that in July, Pope also acknowledged that the delivery of 10 cubic feet per second of priority water rights had been mismanaged that irrigation season. Pope said that corrective action would be taken, but as of August, the association had failed to restore full delivery of that water, the suit says. The suit says the association also has failed to regularly maintain association ditches by burning or clearing debris.
