[Colorado U.S.] Senator John Hickenlooper is looking into the proposal to create a U.S. Wildland Fire Service and what it could mean for wildfire response and resources
President Donald Trumpโs 2026 budget proposal outlines plans to create a new U.S. Wildland Fire Service by combining the wildfire assets currently distributed between the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service. The budget request states that the โdispersed natureโ of the federal wildfire program โcreates significant coordination and cost inefficiencies that result in sub-optimal performance.โ It would house the U.S. Wildland Fire Service in the Department of Interior. But in a letter to the Senate earlier this month, a nonprofit group representing thousands of U.S. Forest Service retirees, including seven previous chiefs of the agency, raised concern that consolidating federal firefighting operations would be โa costly mistake.โ
โWildfire management is more than extinguishing fires,โ National Association of Forest Service Retirees Chair Steve Ellis wrote in the letter. โThe critical linkage between fire suppression and forest management, including fuels reduction and prescribed fire, must be maintained. Severing forest management and forest managers from fire suppression will make firefighting less safe and put communities at greater risk.โ
In addition to relocating firefighting operations, Trumpโs budget request for the Forest Service asks Congress to zero out millions of dollars of funding, including for forestry research and grants that support state, tribal and private forestry efforts. It also proposes cuts of $392 million to the Forest Service management budget and $391 million to forest operations…Ellis, who worked for the federal government for 38 years in both the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, said โthe fire program is integrated into almost everything the Forest Service does.โ From forest thinning to prescribed burns, prevention and suppression, Ellis said strategies have to be integrated into the broader forest management goals. By removing firefighting operations from the Forest Service, the proposal could divorce firefighting from land management, he added…
When asked about the U.S. Wildland Fire Service proposal, White House Assistant Press Secretary Taylor Rogers pointed to the Los Angeles wildfires that killed 30 people, forced 200,000 to evacuate and burned 57,000 acres earlier this year…But Ellis questioned whether a consolidated federal firefighting agency like the U.S. Wildland Fire Service would have done anything to prevent or lessen the impacts of the Los Angeles fires. In his experience, Ellis said the fire program in the United States is โpretty seamlessโ with different agencies not only working with each other but also collaborating with state and local partners to combat wildfires.
There it is again โ the invocation for most of the 20th century. But โ wait: arenโt we in the 21st century? Well, really โ not yet in any way that matters. President Biden tried, through his big beautiful legislative acts (two of them), to nudge and cajole us into the early 21st century: beginning to commence to proceed to address the scientific reality of a climate that our created realities have been inadvertently changing for the worse, and the socioeconomic realities of an increasingly inequitable society that unbridled private capitalism has been advertently imposing on us all. But Bidenโs acts no longer address our official realities.
The new official reality, which wants to take us back to the good old days of the mid-20th century, includes a full restitution of the fossil energies (including beautiful clean coal) that, a mere seven months ago, we were told we needed to stop using as soon as we possibly could for the sake of our continued existence on the planet. Trump may have missed a couple โfirst dayโ promises โ low grocery prices and peace in the Ukraine โ but one first-day promise he did fulfill was issuing an executive order on January 20, 2025 for โUnleashing American Energy,โ colloquially known as โDrill, baby, drill.โ
Therein, Trump explained that โin recent years, burdensome and ideologically motivated regulations have impeded the development of these (fossil) resources,โ inflicting โhigh energy costs upon our citizens โฆ driving up the cost of transportation, heating, utilities, farming, and manufacturing, while weakening our national security.โ Trump proclaimed that this constituted a โNational Energy Emergencyโ caused by President Biden and other liberals obsessed by a โclimate crisisโ that is now, almost magically, no longer an official part of American reality.
Biden-era policies, according to this MAGA narrative, kept energy development off of the public lands by โlocking the lands upโ for conservation, preservation and recreation, making Bidenโs administration responsible for our high gasoline and home-heating prices. And the Trump administration was going to reverse that by reopening the public lands for the O&G industry to drill new wells, increasing the supply of gas and oil to both bring down O&G costs and re-establish Americaโs global energy dominance โ a dominance in O&G production that we already in fact have.
Trumpโs Interior Secretary Doug Burgum followed this up February 3, 2025 with a seven-page order revoking all of President Bidenโs energy-related executive orders dating back to 2021, and replacing them with orders specific to โdrill, baby, drill.โ
But there is a problem they are not acknowledging, however: is the O&G industry really going to get out there and โdrill, baby, drillโ?The truth, as usual with Trump, lies elsewhereโฆ.
Letโs take a look at how the leasing process goes, on our Bureau of Land Management lands (with similar rules on the National Forests):
First, someone from the public โ usually someone from the O&G industry โ expresses interest in a piece of land for oil or gas production. The BLM then has to prepare a lease sale for that land. Biden rules put in force last year (now rescinded) restricted this to lands with some probability of actual O&G resources in the land.
Once requested lands are mapped into lease units (maximum lease 2,560 acres in the lower 48 states, 5,760 acres in Alaska), the BLM holds quarterly auctions to lease the mapped units. The 2024 rules (now rescinded) raised the minimum bid from $2/acre to $10/acre, and also declined to sell the leases when there was no competitive bidding. The leases are for 10 years (renewable in some cases), with rental at $3/acre for the first two years, $5/acre for the next six years, and $15/acre for any year thereafter โ obvious incentive to get a lease into production.
Before leaseholders can do anything on the land, they need to put up a bond to cover the cost of closing-off and site reclamation when they abandon the well (after 4 years with no action). The minimum bond was increased in 2024 from $10,000 to $150,000, making forfeiture painful (now rescinded).
When leaseholders are ready to โdevelopโ a lease, they apply for a drilling permit. If their drilling plan is approved by the BLM (more than 95 percent are), they pay a permitting fee (minimum $10,000) and can then โdrill, baby, drill.โ Biden rules (now reduced again) charged a 16.67 percent royalty to the government on what they produce.
Oil wells can be operated as long as they are profitable, with lease extensions. When they are no longer producing enough to profitably cover lease rent plus operating expenses, the company owning the lease is responsible for closing down the well and restoring the land.
Did the โBiden-eraโ government โshut downโ this leasing and permitting process, โlocking outโ energy development, as the Trump administration and the O&G industry claim? Hardly; thatโs just more Trumpty-Dumpty fake news. Anyone with a cultural memory that goes back further than 2025 will remember that environmental interests were constantly haranguing the Biden administration to stop the leasing on public lands, since it undermined the administrationโs other efforts to address the climate crisis, which was then officially part of our reality, like it or not. It is also part of our reality, however, that our need for gasoline and natural gas has not diminished much, and Biden had to work for a balance no one liked. Anyone wanting to revisit the kind of pressure from both sides that Biden and his Interior Department encountered on such issues could look at this AP story about leases in Alaskaโs far frozen north.
Thereโs a more important fact (remember โfactsโ?) to keep in mind about the leasing situation, however, and Trumpish complaints that the government is blocking our energy dominance on the planet: 25 million acres of public land are currently reserved in O&G leases, but at least a third of that, maybe more, is in leases that have not been developed. Let me say that again: the O&G industry already holds several thousand leases that it has not begun to bring into production.
Two questions rise: Why are they not developing these leases on which they are paying rent? And why are they agitating for even more leases?
The answer to the first question is the most obvious: they do not want to bring more wells into production because the price of a barrel of oil has been dropping below their industrial break-even price of around $65/barrel. Energy production is governed to some extent by a calculation called the ER:EI โ โEnergy Return on Energy Investment.โ In the good old days of 30-cents-a-gallon gasoline, oil was โgushingโ abundantly from wells. The ER:EI of oil then ranged from 20:1 upward, depending on how fast it flowed and how far it had to go to market โ meaning 20 barrels were produced for every barrel-equivalent of energy invested.
The miracle of โfrackingโ opened up vast new regions from which oil could be squeezed, but fracked oil does not gush; instead it has to be freed from rock formations with complex and expensive drilling and pumping procedures. The ER:EI of fracked petroleum and natural gas is 5:1 or often lower. The O&G frackers need barrel prices above $65 to even begin making a profit.
Recent rumors of war in the Mideast have pushed the price up to the $70-75/barrel range, but that is a fluctuating situation that will not be reflected at the gas pump. And that may be countered by the OPEC+ nations (all the Arabian nation-states plus Russia and a handful of other non-Arabian states), who just upped the ante. They still have oil they can access at an ER:EI significantly above that of the United States frackers โ and they recently voted to increase their production June 1 by an additional 411,000 barrels a day, which pretty well insures that the global prices of a barrel will not go up to where United States frackers will want to start developing the thousands of leases they are paying rent on. Unless, perhaps, Trump decides to put a tariff on OPEC oil and gas, with all the political chaos that would create โ including driving up the price of gasoline and heating gas here.
So therein lies the truth about who is responsible for persisting higher gas prices: it wasnโt the Biden administration shutting off opportunities; it was the O&G industries refusing to develop low-cost public-land opportunities they already owned โ not wanting to produce oil and gas at a loss as a patriotic MAGA gesture. America has no more โcheapโ oil with the massive profitability of a high ER:EI.
But at any rate, if we do actually have a โnational energy emergency,โ it is certainly not going to be resolved by putting a lot more public land up for leases to โunleashโ Americaโs fossil energy, with more than a third of the public land already leased but not developed due to low energy prices. A January lease offer โ Bidenโs last โ in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge had no bidders.
So why the big push for more public lands leasing?
Well, in Trumpland it may not be about lower prices for consumers at all, but about industrial control in the public lands. An O&G lease, so long as the rent is paid โ pocket change for the industry โ amounts to a priority use on public lands managed for multiple uses. So long as a lease remains undeveloped, it canโt be fenced; it is open for grazing cattle, hikers, bikers and other โmultiple-usersโ to wander over. But the O&G company has the priority use on the land, and if it decides to develop the lease, the surface land needed for the drilling and pumping operations becomes single-use land, with a road leading into it โ no longer really โpublicโ or โmultiple useโ for so long as the well operates.
As noted in the leasing and permitting process outlined above, the drilling company has to put up a bond assuring that it will properly shut down and plug the well and reclaim the area when the well runs out. The historic $10,000 bond was so low that companies found it cheaper to just forfeit the bond and leave it leaking methane into the atmosphere, polluting the underground water table, and surrounded by the refuse from the fracking operation. The Biden administration raised the bond for a permit to drill to $150,000, about twice the current average reclamation cost, and enough to make some miners/drillers to think twice about just abandoning the well. Now, of course, that Biden-era move toward good sense is being rescinded.
How many โorphaned wellsโ are there (abandoned with little or no reclamation)? No one seems to know for sure. The EPA estimates there are as many as four million abandoned wells nationwide, most plugged to some degree with known owners and operators; but some 100-150 thousand of the abandoned wells are orphaned โ no financially solvent owner-operator can be found, and many of those are not plugged, and are emitting methane into the atmosphere and oil and toxic fracking fluids into water tables. Those numbers are more guesstimates than estimates, and no one really knows how many of the orphaned wells are on public lands, but we taxpayers will end up paying to plug, clean up and maintain the orphans, as (chronically inadequate) budgets allow (2024 information).
There may be another rationale behind the O&G industriesโ desire for more leasing and permitting, when they arenโt developing a third of what they already have. There is a huge overlap between the 90 percent of BLM land that is open for O&G leasing at the request of the industry, and the BLM land that is suitable for the development of the massive solar, wind and geothermal renewable energy resources that will be needed when American reality again encompasses the climate crisis. Leasing processes have been worked out for renewable energy development โ somewhat more rigorous than those for the O&G industry โ and many of the suitable sites find an O&G lease right in the middle of them, with its undeveloped use priority. The developers of the renewables have to buy surface-use waivers from the O&G leaseholders โ unless the O&G leaseholders donโt want to give up the chance to develop their non-renewables.
Well โ enough said on this. I hope this disabuses you of the Trumpty-Burgumty nonsense about a โnational energy emergencyโ that can be resolved through a wide-open assault on our public lands. Thatโs the good news; the bad news is the fact that gasoline at the pump is probably never going to go down much, so long as a barrel of oil has to bring more than $70 to the fossil-fuel producer.
An intelligent and forward-looking society would be working to gently and fairly phase out the truculent O&G industries, and phase in the renewable energy resources with a lot of job creation โ which the Biden administration, now seemingly maligned by everyone, was actually trying to do with the two big beautiful infrastructure acts that the Trumpty-Burgumties are trying to rescind as thoroughly as possible, for no discernible reasons other than their own โcreative reality,โ and of course, with Trump, vengeance on his enemies.
The Trumpty-Burgumty teams have come up with some other plans for the public lands, including selling off some of them โ a lemon from which it might actually be possible to squeeze some lemonade, depending on how it shakes out. More about that in the future, when we see if it stays in the Big Piggy Billโฆ.
Next post โ back to the Colorado River where, believe it or not, things are pretty much still where they were a year ago โ which is to say โa standstillโ โ at least in terms of a new management plan for the post-2026 era. Stay tuned.
Oil and gas infrastructure is seen on the Roan Plateau in far western Colorado. (Courtesy of EcoFlight)
This week, widespread degradations occurred in the Northwest United States, where despite slightly cooler and wetter conditions this week, rapid drying continued to be a problem. In the central Great Plains and Midwest, scattered heavier rains led to improving drought or dryness conditions in some areas, especially in northern Missouri and Iowa, while some others who missed out on the heavier rains saw degrading conditions amid hotter-than-normal temperatures. In Florida, a mix of localized improvements and degradations occurred; scattered heavy rains improved the situation for some, while other areas that missed the heavy rain saw short- and long-term precipitation deficits grow amid worsening fire danger. After recent heavy rain, a small area west of Baltimore saw improvement to long-term moderate drought, while the most of the rest of the Northeast remained free of drought or abnormal dryness, with a small area of long-term moderate drought on Cape Cod continuing this week. A mix of improvements and degradations occurred in Texas following heavier rains last week in the south-central part of the state but drier weather in the Midland-Odessa area this week. Localized improvements occurred in areas of heavy rainfall on the eastern plains of New Mexico. Please note that any rain that fell from mid-Tuesday morning onward will be considered in next weekโs map.
In Alaska, short-term abnormal dryness and moderate drought developed and expanded in parts of central Alaska, where short-term precipitation deficits built and fire danger increased.
In Hawaii, localized improvements and degradations occurred after an overall drier week with trade-wind showers on the windward sides of the islands.
In Puerto Rico, abnormal dryness developed along the northwest and south-central coasts where short-term precipitation deficits grew amid crop stress and decreasing groundwater levels…
In Nebraska and Kansas, scattered heavy rains fell in parts of both states, especially in central and eastern areas, leading to localized improvements to ongoing drought and abnormal dryness. In some areas that missed heavier rains this week, temperatures ranging from 4-8 degrees hotter than normal led to degrading conditions, as streamflow and soil moisture levels dropped. Long-term drought over the last few years has continued to take a toll on trees in eastern Nebraska, as the bur oak, elm, hackberry, ash and red oak populations saw increased mortality or significant loss in canopy. Short- and long-term precipitation deficits continued to grow in parts of northern Colorado, which along with drops in soil moisture and streamflow led to localized worsening of drought or abnormal dryness. Meanwhile, heavier rains in the last couple of weeks in southeast Wyoming led to improving conditions there. The western half of Wyoming, in contrast, has continued to see rapid drying, leading to poor vegetation health and locally decreasing streamflow and soil moisture. Moderate and severe drought grew in coverage in parts of southwest Wyoming, while abnormal dryness grew in coverage northeast of Yellowstone National Park..
Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending June 24, 2025.
Predominantly cooler temperatures occurred in the West this week, with many areas west of Utah, Arizona and Wyoming seeing temperatures range from 2-8 degrees cooler than normal. Despite the cooler weather this week, the drying trend continued across much of the Northwest states, with abnormal dryness and moderate and severe drought significantly growing in coverage in northern portions of Utah and Nevada, northeast California, far western Montana, Idaho and southeast portions of Oregon and Washington. In these areas, short-term precipitation deficits are growing, streamflow is lower in spots, vegetation is struggling and soil moisture deficits are developing. Near the end of the week, scattered heavy rains fell in the eastern plains of New Mexico, leading to localized improvements in drought and abnormal dryness. The impact of these rains on the rest of the water cycle, as well as any further rain, will be further evaluated next week…
Temperatures across the South region this week ranged from near-normal to 2-6 degrees warmer than normal in most of the region. Heavy rains fell in parts of central and northern Oklahoma, Tennessee, northeast Arkansas, Mississippi, and the western Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles. Most of central and south-central Texas had drier weather this week. Despite the dry weather there, some improvements to the Drought Monitor occurred in south-central Texas as the impact of recent heavy rains continued to be evaluated. A small increase in abnormal dryness and moderate drought occurred in the Midland-Odessa area due to growing short-term precipitation deficits and decreasing soil moisture and streamflow. Outside of Texas, the rest of the South remained free of drought or abnormal dryness…
Looking Ahead
The National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center forecast through the evening of Monday, June 30, shows mostly dry weather in the West, especially for areas west of the Continental Divide. Drier weather is also expected in western North Dakota and Montana, most of Texas, Arkansas and western Louisiana, and in the eastern Carolinas. Rainfall in excess of 1 inch is forecast in parts of eastern Kansas and Nebraska, the eastern Dakotas, the Upper Midwest, the Northeast, the eastern half of the Gulf Coast and the Florida Peninsula.
For July 1-5, the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center outlook favors above-normal precipitation across Alaska, Hawaii and most of the Contiguous United States. The highest confidence for above-normal precipitation during this period is centered on Arizona, New Mexico, southwest Texas, Utah and Colorado as monsoonal moisture streams into the region. Cooler-than-normal temperatures are favored in southeast Arizona, New Mexico, western Texas and southern Colorado, while near-normal temperatures are favored from the central Great Plains into the Great Lakes. Within the Contiguous United States, warmer-than-normal temperatures are favored elsewhere, with the highest confidence for this residing in the Northwest, western Gulf Coast, and Mid-Atlantic. Warmer-than-normal temperatures are favored across most of Hawaii. Warmer-than-normal temperatures are also favored from southwest to north-central Alaska (excluding the Aleutian Islands), while cooler-than-normal weather is favored in the extreme northwest reaches of Alaska and in the southeast portion of the state.
US Drought Monitor one week change map ending June 24, 2025.
Public lands are the birthright of every American. One of the great privileges of living in this country is the ability to access hundreds of millions of acres to enjoy the great outdoors โ all for free.
People care about and use public lands for many reasons. From hunters and anglers to miners and ranchers, hikers and mountain bikersโthere is something for almost everyone on public lands. But what if you live in a city and never set foot on public lands? Why care about them then?
Log Meadow, California | Maiya Greenwood
Not everyone hunts, fishes, mines, ranches, hikes, or bikes; but everyone, truly everyone, depends on clean water. The big secret about public lands is that they are arguably the countryโs single biggest clean water provider. According to the US Forest Service, National Forests are the largest source of municipal water supply in the nation, serving over 60 million people in 3,400 communities across 33 states. Many of the countryโs largest urban areas, including Los Angeles, Portland, Denver, and Atlanta receive a significant portion of their water supply from national forests.
Healthy forests and grasslands perform many of the functions of traditional water infrastructure. They store water, filter pollutants, and transport clean water to downstream communities. And they do it naturally โ essentially for free. When rivers are damaged from land uses on public lands, we all pay the price โ literally; we all pay more in taxes and utility bills to clean up the water.
What happens on the publicโs land also happens to the publicโs water. The importance of managing public lands for the benefit of public water is so fundamental, it has been a pillar of public lands management agenciesโ missions since their inception over a century ago. For example, The Organic Act of 1897[1]ย that created the US Forest Service stated:
A two-track road cuts through Bureau of Land Management property west of Pinedale in April 2024. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
Click the link to read the article on the WyoFile website (Angus M. Thuermer Jr.):
June 25, 2025
In the face of a backlash, Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee has revamped his public land sell-off measure to target only Bureau of Land Management holdings while also declaring, โweโre just getting started.โ
A reconciliation budget proposal revised by Leeโs Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee targets BLM land within five miles of undefined โpopulation centers.โ It puts checkerboard BLM holdings back on a priority list for his โmandatory disposalโ measure and takes lands under permit for grazing off the auction block.
The revision would shift 15% of revenue to local governments and conservation. The bill would appropriate $5 million to carry out the mandatory sales, which are designed to be offered within 60 days of passage and regularly thereafter.
Lee has not said or mapped how much land must be sold, ostensibly for affordable housing.
โWe havenโt put out maps because there are a whole bunch of criteria established by the legislation, and those criteria are very difficult to reduce to a map,โ Lee told conservative radio host Charlie Kirk in a video posted on X.
But opposition to Leeโs measure comes from โall walks of life,โ said Land Tawney, former president and CEO of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. That includes โDemocrats, Independents, Republicans, hunters, anglers, bird watchers, kayakers, ranchers [and] loggers,โ he said Wednesday at a roundtable hosted by Democratic U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico.
Heinrich excoriated Leeโs measure.
โEighty-five percent of the money from these sales would go to pay for tax cuts,โ Heinrich said. โThat means that folks like Elon Musk, who already own[s] 4,400 acres of land in Texas [worth] some $3.4 billion, will make money off the public lands that should belong to the American people.
โThatโs horseshit,โ Heinrich said.
A spectrum of opposition
Leeโs plan to include U.S. Forest Service land in the โmandatory disposalโ provision flunked a parliamentarianโs rules test that limits reconciliation budget measures to relevant budget matters. The revised provision must undergo the same scrutiny, Democrats say.
Heinrich poo-pooed the notion that Leeโs measure would result in affordable housing. โAn out-of-town billionaire can show up, buy a 100-acre parcel and throw a trophy home on it,โ he said.
Powell resident Mike Tracy criticized Leeโs linking of public land and affordable housing.
โIf you put those two concepts in the same sentence,โ he said of Leeโs proposal, โit makes them seem somehow related, maybe even somehow causal.
โIt makes people not feel comfortable speaking out against it because who wants to be against affordable housing?โ he said at the roundtable. โI donโt think itโs proper to say that theyโre related.โ
U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat from Nevada, had a message for Lee. โDonโt come into our states and dictate what should be done.
โIt is clear theyโre trying to sell this public land to pay for this reconciliation package, which gives tax cuts to billionaires,โ she said. โThatโs what this is about.โ
โRight now, we are pissed,โ said hunting advocate Tawney, who represented American Hunters and Anglers. โThey want to defund, dismantle and then divest,โ he said of President Donald Trumpโs administration.
Native American tribes are upset, too, said Hilary Tompkins, former solicitor for the Department of the Interior.
โThe Southern Ute Indian tribe in southwestern Colorado is concerned because they have off-reservation hunting and fishing rights on an area that includes BLM lands,โ she said. โThey have not heard from anyone who is advocating for this proposal about the impact on those off-reservation treaty rights.โ
Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon sees opportunities to resolve the stateโs challenges with the checkerboard land ownership pattern along the Union Pacific Railroad line, said Jess Johnson, government affairs director with the Wyoming Wildlife Federation.
โI want to figure out how we do this in a Wyoming way,โ she said of the checkerboard conundrum. โThis budget reconciliation is not it.โ
Not sensitive lands?
Wyomingโs U.S. Sens. John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis, Republicans who continue to support Trumpโs agenda, did not respond Wednesday to requests for comment about the backlash. โIt is clear that our congressional delegation isnโt in it for Wyoming,โ the stateโs Democratic Party chair, Lucas Fralick, said in a statement.
Lee, however, explained some of his thinking.
โIโm working closely with the Trump administration to ensure that any federal land sales serve the American people โ not foreign governments, not the Chinese Communist Party, and not massive corporations looking to pad their portfolios,โ he said in a post. โThis land must go to American families. Period.โ
In the radio interview, he said opposition was ginned up.
American Enterprise Instituteโs proposed Freedom City sites on BLM land near Grand Junction, Colorado.
โThe left is working overtime to dupe conservatives about my federal land sale bill,โ he said. โThis is just basically surplus land thatโs suitable for housing because itโs right next to where people live.โ
He characterized critics as having an agenda. โWhat Iโve heard is that people on the left generally want people moving from rural areas into urban areas, more suburban areas and from single-family housing into multi-family housing, higher density housing units,โ he said. โThey believe that thatโs good for them, perhaps for Mother Earth, or whatever their reasons might be.
โThese are not sensitive lands,โ Lee said of the targeted BLM parcels. โThey are not lands that are out there, that are part of an environment thatโs appropriate for hunting, for hiking, for fishing, etc.โ
Wyomingโs Johnson challenged that notion at the roundtable. She said she arrowed her first mule deer on public land near town.
โI was on this amazing parcel of public land โ tiny,โ she said. โItโs little. Itโs one to three miles from Lander. Itโs BLM. Itโs really nothing special to look at, except it is everything to me.โ
An image of the ruins of Chetro Ketl in Chaco Canyon (New Mexico, United States); shown is the complex’s great kiva. By National Park Service (United States) – Chaco Canyon National Historical Park: Photo Gallery, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1536637
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral website (Arlyssa D. Becenti). Here’s an excerpt:
June 25, 2025
Key Points
The National Congress of American Indians passed a resolution seeking new protections for Chaco Canyon in New Mexico.
The group says the Trump administration wants to rescind an administrative order that created a 10-mile buffer around Chaco Canyon, barring oil and gas drilling for 20 years.
The resolution has renewed a rift between other tribes and the Navajo Nation, which says the 10-mile buffer could cost local residents royalties from gas and mineral extraction.
The oldest and largest organization representing tribal governments is urging action to protect Chaco Canyon from oil and gas leasing, amid what its leaders say are growing threats from the Trump administration’s energy policies. The National Congress of American Indians passed a resolution urging action to restart efforts to protect Chaco Canyon and the public lands surrounding it, and to pass the Chaco Cultural Heritage Area Protection Act, which would create a permanent 10-mile buffer zone around the site restricting oil, gas and mineral extraction. Trump has ordered federal agencies to prioritize energy and mineral extraction on public lands. Supporters of the buffer say that a shift in policy risks damage to Chaco Canyon, but residents with land allotments in the region argue that the buffer could deprive them of an income. With the resolution, the NCAI joins other tribes, elected officials and environmental organizations opposing a proposal to revoke Public Land Order 7923, which withdraws approximately 336,404 acres of federal land from new oil and gas leasing within a 10-mile area around Chaco Canyon for 20 years…
On June 6, New Mexicoโs senators and congressional delegation sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum expressing support for the 10-mile buffer zone around Chaco Canyon. Sens. Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Lujรกn, along with Reps. Melanie Stansbury, Teresa Leger Fernรกndez, and Gabe Vasquez, all Democrats, signed the letter, which voiced concern over the Interior Department’s move to begin revoking the public lands order…The letter said Interior has yet to adequately consult tribal nations on Chaco Canyon protections. A May 9 letter from the Bureau of Land Management, an Interior agency, announced a general tribal consultation for May 28, 2025, which gave less than 30 daysโ notice and was short of the departmentโs own consultation standards. The letter also claimed that many affected Pueblos were not directly notified, and that BLMโs informal virtual presentation lacked the detail and structure needed for meaningful dialogue or informed tribal input According to the bureauโs own estimates, the 10-mile withdrawal area protects approximately 4,730 documented archaeological sites while oil and gas operators forgo development of only a few dozen wells, stated the letter.
The Navajo Nation is embroiled in a lawsuit against Haaland and the Interior Department, filed in a New Mexico federal court three days before President Donald Trump took office. The suit argues that Interior’s plan to withdraw land from new oil and gas leasing violated the law and could cost land allottees millions of dollars in royalties.
Sen. Mike Lee, the Utah Republican and Trump sycophant, has slightly backed off on his proposal to sell-off public lands, but only slightly.
Lee posted the following on X/Twitter at 5:42 a.m. today:
Big sigh of relief? Nope. Sure, itโs great heโs removing Forest Service land from the pool of land eligible for โdisposal.โ This means the Hidden Valley/Falls Creek areanear Durango is out of danger, as are parcels near Flagstaff and Boise and Santa Fe that could have ended up on the auction block under the original provision. The 5-mile limit from population centers will also take some remote BLM parcels out of consideration โ parcels that wouldnโt have been prioritized, anyway.
The change reduces the size of the pool of available land, and presumably also reduces the amount of land that would be sold to between 1.25 million and 1.9 million acres. Thatโs still a crap-ton of public lands that will be privatized, cluttered up with houses and roads and cul-de-sacs and power lines and so forth, and to which the public will lose access. If this goes forward, you can plan on houses popping up on some of your favorite hiking, trail-running, or biking areas.
And it still includes places like:
Animas Mountain and upper Horse Gulch near Durango;ย
swaths of BLM land near Naturita and Nucla, Colorado;ย
BLM land, including wilderness study areas, near Moab (wilderness study areas and areas of critical environmental concern are not exempted from the sell off);
parcels that abut Zion National Parkโs boundaries (within five miles of Springdale and Rockville);
the lower slopes of Jumbo Mountain near Paonia;ย
parcels on Las Vegasโs fringe, along with tracts around Mesquite and Moapa that the Freedom Cities folks have their eyes on;ย
other Freedom City-proposed parcels near Fruita and Grand Junction;
the list goes on and on. (To get an idea just check out the Wilderness Society map, ignore the green areas, and look for โpopulation centersโ around the brass-colored areas to see what might be eligible).
Lee says he will protect ranchers, which may or may not mean his provision would again leave out land that is in active grazing allotments. He doesnโt explain what the hell he means by โFREEDOM ZONES,โ except to imply that he wouldnโt let any foreigners buy the land(?). Lee once again doesnโt mention a damned thing about affordable housing, meaning heโs just fine with public lands being used for luxury developments or even multi-million dollar mansions.
Oh, and then thereโs that little aside about the Byrd Rule. Yeah, that might get in Leeโs way. See, the Senate parliamentarian ruled that the public land sell off provision, along with several other sections relating to energy development on public lands, were subject to a 60-vote threshold. This means they would likely be dropped from the reconciliation bill altogether, since leaving it in could sink the entire โBig Beautifulโ whatever. Still, the GOP has a thing about ignoring the parliamentarian and the usual rules, and Lee indicated he would push on with this concept in one form or another. So now is not the time to back down.
The public lands sell-off provision has generated a huge amount of outrage and public push back, which is clearly working (after all, why else would Lee make those changes?). But itโs not the only or even the worst thing the MAGA folks are inflicting on the American publicโs lands.
For example, yesterday Agriculture Secretary Brooke announced that the U.S. Forest Service plans to repeal the Clinton-era Roadless Rule, which blocks roadbuilding and other development on about 58 million acres of Forest Service land. If the rollback survives inevitable legal challenges, it will open up a lot of forest to logging.
Glen Canyon Dam, January 2022. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
๐ฅต Aridification Watch ๐ซ
To be a Colorado River watcher is to ride a slow-motion emotional roller coaster. We reached extreme highs during the late 1980s and into the 1990s, fell into a two-decade depression beginning in 2002 โ with ebullient spikes in 2005, 2008, 2011, 2019 โ and then the bountiful winter of 2023 came along and was followed up by a not-so-sad 2024.
It was enough to convince us we were recovering, and we could quit therapy, cut back on the meds, and stop worrying (all figuratively, of course). During this period of relative abundance, all of the studies about climate heating diminishing snowpacks and threatening the Westโs lifeline seemed a bit abstract: Scary, sure, but we still had years and years before it manifested itself.
Yeah, no. It turns out that 2023 was just another manic and anomalous episode that falsely lulled us into complacency. And now that it has past, weโve been sent spiraling back down into a deep aridification-sparked depression (somewhat figuratively speaking).
The snowpack-meagre 2025 winter delivered the first buzzkill to the Upper Colorado River Basin, followed by a warm and dry and dismal spring. Now, Lake Powellโs surface level is flatlining just as it should be shooting upward, an indicator that the river is back to its new normal. That is to say it is once again shrinking, and the gap between how much water has been allocated to the riverโs users and whatโs actually in there continues to grow. Which is to say, weโre still f&$#ed, and getting even more so with each passing year.
In fact, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamationโs latest projection has Lake Powell possibly dropping below the minimum power pool, or the level at which hydropower production shuts down, as soon as the end of 2026. Mind you, thatโs their worst case scenario, but these forecasts often lean towards optimism. Most notable is how dramatically the forecast has changed since April, a difference that is visible in the graph below.
Get used to it: Iโm probably going to be using that quote at the head of every post here for the near future at least; nothing so perfectly summarizes the history not just of the past several months, but of the past century, beginning โ so I would argue โ in the 1920s with the first crash of over-financialized hog-trough capitalism, resolved with the construction of Hoover Dam, and the birth of a growing government partnership with the private sector in financing and building what we came to accept as 20thcentury reality.
Since the 1990s and the creation of the internet and virtual reality, we have seen the process of imperial reality creation speed up โ now to a literally unbelievable speed with leadership standing firmly athwart the line between the merely incredible and the absolutely ridiculous.
Science has been puffing and panting along behind the juggernaut of industrial civilization for that whole century, trying to point out theโreal realitiesโ we have to ultimately confront and learn to live with, real realities whose consequences for what we have been doing are measurable, documentable โ and increasingly alarming. So alarming that the Trumpty-Mumpty masters of the universe are telling us we can ignore, deny them. No, not can, but will deny and ignore them, because in their new reality such things as โclimate crisis,โ โsocial inequity,โ โresource depletionโ (including potable water) either do not exist, or are deported, or are otherwise under control.
A Big Beautiful Joke: How many Republicans does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: None; Trump just says Iโve fixed it, and the Republicans sit in the dark and applaudโฆ.
Okay โ moving on. Iโll begin with a couple of corrections to the last post, about the Trumpish assault on the public lands, specifically the lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). First, the correct name of the law mandating the BLM Resource Management Plans that the MAGAs donโt like, is the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA). And second, the Gunnison Sage Grouse is not a subspecies of Sage Grouse; it has been recognized as a distinct species. My apologies, and thanks to Arden Anderson, a retired BLM agent living in Gunnsion.
But now โ well, Iโm confused.
In my last post here, I got about halfway through some historical perspective on a bill proposed by my occasional congressional representative, Jeff Hurd, a lawyer from Grand Junction. (By โoccasional representative,โ I mean I occasionally feel represented by Congressman Hurd, a definite improvement over the Repugnican Lauren Boebert whom he replaced.) But โ now heโs got me almost as confused as Trump gets us all on tariffs.
Hurdโs bill to the House is for a โProductive Public Lands Actโ (โPPL Actโ). In Hurdโs own words: โThis bill would force the Bureau of Land Management to reissue nine Biden-era Resource Management Plans (RMPs) which locked up access to viable lands throughout Colorado and the West. A reissue of these RMPs will put us on a path to energy dominance allowing for a more secure and prosperous United States.โ This is a direct legislative response supporting Trumpโs trumped-up โnational energy emergency,โ announced his first day in office with an executive order titled โUnleashing American Energy.โ One โFirst Dayโ promise he did keep. We will look at more closely at the โnational energy emergencyโ in the next post (if it is still part of official reality).
Meanwhile,ย however, at about the time my post about Hurdโs PPL Act was appearing in your inbox, Hurd announced that he was introducing in the House, as a bipartisan legislation proposal, the bill that Coloradoย Democratย Senator [Michael Bennet] had just introduced in the Senate, for a โGunnison Outdoor Resources Protection Actโ (โGORP Actโ).
The GORP Act, if passed, according to Senator [Bennet’s] website description, โwill protect over 730,000 acres of public lands in Western Colorado, safeguarding the regionโs local economy, world-class recreation, ranching heritage, wildlife habitat, and clean air and water.โ Itโs a true mulitple-use bill, in the spirit of the FLPMA, that includes:
Enlargement of existing wilderness areas into undeveloped land around their edges;
โProtection Areasโ designated to protect the natural and undeveloped character of public lands;
โRecreation Management Areasโ to provide for sustainable management of both motorized and unmotorized recreation;
โSpecial Management Areasโ set aside for โbroadly conserving, protecting, and enhancing the natural, scenic, scientific, cultural, watershed, recreation and wildlife resourcesโ;
A โRocky Mountain Scientific Research and Education Areaโ in the upper East River valley, above and below the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab in Gothic;
โWildlife Conservation Areasโ to conserve and restore wildlifeย andย wildlife habitat (including the Gunnison Sage Grouse);
Existing mineral claims or oil and gas leases can be developed, but there will be no further withdrawals for minerals or oil and gas on the public lands covered by GORP, and the oil and gas rights under some of the land can only be developed with no surface disturbance (by horizontal drilling or tunneling).
If the GORP bill were to pass, it would require new Resource Management Plans that would, in Repugnican terminology, be โlocking upโ a large quantity of public land for a diversity of uses valued in the local economy and culture โ with no accommodation for the โnational energy emergency.โ The GORP bill includes practically everything the โProductive Public Landsโ bill wants to undo in nine existing BLM Resource Management Plans.
It is not, in short, a bill anyone would expect from even a Republican, let alone a Repugnican โ and certainly not from the congressman who put the โProductive Public Landsโ bill before the House. Iโve submitted a question to Congressman Hurd asking for his rationale, in submitting one bill that essentially contradicts another bill he had submitted. Iโve received no answer yet, but will pass it along when I do.
The simplest explanation โ maybe just simplistic, fitting the Trumpty-Mumpty era โ is that Rep, Hurd knows that the โProductive Public Landsโ bill will probably be passed by the Republican-majority House (the usual one or two vote โlandslideโ), while the GORP Act has practically no chance of passing. But proposing it will make him some friends among the conservationists and environmentalists that continue to be a growing part of his district, grasping at any straw in these times. Or maybe, Iโve heard it suggested locally, his work session with the Gunnison County Commissioners, between his presentation of the two bill, was a low voltage version of the biblical bolt that struck Saul/Paul on the road to Damascus. The commissioners did make a well-informed and passionate defense of the grassroots input on and support for the amended Gunnison Sage Grouse RMP that Rep. Hurdโs PPL Act would throw out.
And the amended Sage Grouse Resource Management Plan deserves a defense, in whatโs left of our democratic system of governance. Rep. Hurd and other Repugnican supporters blame these RMPs on President Biden, but all President Biden did was what other presidents this century, excepting Trump, have done: they have stood back and let the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act, and the two 1976 Acts, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act and the National Forest Management Act, work as Congress intended, back in the way-too-short 1970s โenviro-populistโ era.
That legislation happened before the Supreme Court turned our elections over to the plutocrats who only want to get richer. From the mid-1960s through the 1970s, the people elected a series of Congresses that actually performed the will of the people, who saw the forests dying from acid rain, rivers too polluted to even swim in let alone drink from, air sometimes unbreathable, and who wanted to protect and restore what was still salvagable on the planet after a century of pedal-to-the-metal, balls-to-the-wall industrial capitalism. That, in at least my mind, is one of the times when America was great. And needs to be great again in that way, even greater as the challenges escalate โ but that wonโt happen during the Trumpty-Mumpty hog-trough administration.
The GORP bill is a synthesis of portions of the plans evolving since the turn of the century to keep the Gunnison Sage Grouse viable as a species, and also of a โGunnison Public Lands Initiativeโ that has been evolving since 2014. The โGPLIโ is a collaboration involving ranchers, motorized and non-motorized recreational users, whitewater and flatwater interests, and other stakeholders whose joint purpose is to strike a balance between conservation (in culture as well as nature), preservation, and tourism on the 2.5 million acres of public lands in Gunnison County โ four-fifths of the County. Sage Grouse concerns spread the GORP bill into counties beyond Gunnison County where the bird is found in small populations.
The national public land agencies โ mainly the BLM and Forest Service โ accept the need for public participation in resource management planning, and respect the level of knowledge that most stakeholders bring to the table; but they also have top-down management priorities to work into the mix, and are a little reluctant about โcitizen initiativesโ with a more local economic and ecological focus. Senator Bennett used the Gunnison Public Lands Initiative as a foundation document for his GORP bill, but the U.S. Forest Service mostly ignored it in the recent Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forest planning process for the next decade.
They prefer citizen response to alternatives established (with citizen participation) through the NEPA environmental analysis procedure; various alternative management action plans are outlined and analyzed according to the exhaustive (and often exhausting to read) environmental analysis that had been assembled. There is always a โno action, continue current managementโ alternative; there is usually a โheavy industrialโ alternative that the environmental and recreational users donโt like, a โheavy recreation and preservationโ alternative that the loggers and miners donโt like, and gradations between leading to a โpreferred alternativeโ that tries to balance the various multiple uses in a way that everyone can live with.
So that is where we stand now: Senator [Bennet] and Representative Hurd are presenting the grassroots, multiple-use โGunnison Outdoor Resource Planning Actโ bill (GORP Act) in the two houses of Congress, with thirty West Slope participating organizations signed on, including eleven County Boards of Commissioners. And Representative Hurd is presenting in the House of Representatives the โProductive Public Lands Act bill (PPL Act). The GORP bill, if passed, would require Resource Management Plans of exactly the type that the PPL bill, if passed, would seek to rescind, in favor of a top-down, single-use bill to โUnleash American Energy.โ
Next time, we will take a deeper look at the unleashing of American energy on our public lands. (And after that, I promise, itโs back to the river โ the beautiful, the beautiful and also useful river.
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
June 23, 2025
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC and supported by the Walton Family Foundation.
Thereโs a break in the clouds that have hovered over Colorado River negotiations for more than a year. State water leaders appear to be coalescing behind a new proposal for sharing the river after talks were stuck in a deadlock for more than a year.
The river is used by nearly 40 million people across seven states and Mexico, but itโs shrinking due to climate change. As a result, state leaders need to rein in demand. For months, they were mired in a standoff about how to interpret a century-old legal agreement. The new proposal is completely different.
Instead of those states leaning on old rules that donโt account for climate change, theyโre proposing a new system that divides the river based on how much water is in it today.
โWe finally have an approach that at least allows a glimmer of hope that the laying down of arms is possible,โ said John Fleck, a writer and water policy researcher at the University of New Mexico.
The long, tense negotiations have mostly been stuck on one issue: How much water should the Upper Basin states โ Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico โ send downstream from their largest reservoir, Lake Powell?
The new plan says the amount should be based on a three-year rolling average of the โnatural flowsโ in the river โ basically, how much water would flow through it if human dams and diversion werenโt in the way.
States would still have to negotiate the exact percentage of those โnatural flowsโ that would go downstream to the Lower Basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada. Picking that number will likely be difficult, but the fact that states are willing to base it on current climate conditions represents a major philosophical shift in how the river is divided.
โThis new approach gets beyond the obsessively arcane discussions about various interpretations of laws written 100 years ago, with people hoping that their lawyers’ arguments can mean they get more water,โ Fleck said. โIt says, โLook, we all have to share this river. We have to do some math about how much water it really has.โโ
Nevada’s John Entsminger, Arizona’s Tom Buschatzke, and California’s JB Hamby sit on a panel of state water leaders at the Colorado River Water Users Association annual conference in Las Vegas on December 5, 2024. Arizona’s Tom Buschatzke (center) brought details of a Colorado River plan to the public, and said it “allows for a fair division of what Mother Nature provides to us. Alex Hager/KUNC
Details of the plan first emerged in a meeting of the Arizona Reconsultation Committee, where the stateโs water leaders gather to discuss Arizonaโs position in multistate talks. Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, described the plan as โinnovative.โ
โI was very pessimistic that we were on a path towards litigation,โ he said. โIโm more optimistic now that we can avoid that path if we can make this work.โ
Buschatzke emphasized that the proposal is in its early stages. The concept is now heading to the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal water agency which manages dams and reservoirs in the West. Employees there will run models to figure out exactly how much water would flow between the two basins.
State and federal leaders are in a crunch to finalize new water sharing rules before a 2026 deadline, when the current rules expire.
โIt is still just a concept,โ Buschatzke said. โWe havenโt agreed to anything at this point, but we agreed to test it.โ
Colorado, which often speaks on behalf of all four Upper Basin states, appears cautiously supportive of the plan.
โColorado remains committed to developing supply-driven, sustainable operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead,โ Becky Mitchell, Coloradoโs top water negotiator, wrote to KUNC in a statement. โThe natural flow approach is one way to achieve this, if it is done right.โ
Colorado and its allies initially dug in their heels on aย very specific interpretationย of the 1922 Colorado River compact, arguing that they shouldnโt have to take new cutbacks to their water supplies since theyย feel the impactsย ofย climate change-fueled shortages more than their downstream neighbors.
โThere is no doubt that Arizona views things differently than the Upper Division States, and a successful framework will set aside our differing views and focus instead on the health and sustainability of the Colorado River System for all who depend upon it,โ Mitchell wrote.
This story was published in partnership with Public Domain.
Last year, as Utah prepared to file a federal lawsuit aiming to take control of millions of acres of federal public land within its borders, state officials sought help swaying public opinion in their favor. So they turned to a group of public relations professionals at Penna Powers, a media and branding firm based in Salt Lake City.
Backed with a commitment of more than two million in tax-payer funds, the firm sprang into action. One of the early orders of business was studying the opposition. In June 2024, an assistant attorney general sent an email to numerous state government colleagues and Penna Powers staffers that contained a video from the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership (TRCP) in which the well-known hunter and media personality Randy Newberg described the dangers of transferring federal land to state control. โIt doesnโt matter how many promises are made,โ warned Newberg, โthe financial realities would force states to sell off our public lands.โ
Noting that organizations like TRCP are good at connecting with โtraditionally conservativeโ audiences, the Utah official told his colleagues that โour PR efforts will largely depend on how well we can anticipate and effectively respond to these expected criticisms.โ
โThat definitely helps us know what we need to counter the opposition,โ added Redge Johnson, director of Utahโs Public Lands Policy and Coordinating Office, or PLPCO, which has played a central role in organizing the stateโs campaign to seize federal land.
Throughout 2024, Penna Powers put together an elaborate PR and media campaign to do just that โ counter the opposition and build support for Utahโs efforts. They churned out videos, newspaper ads, social media spots and more. They hired actors, ran focus groups and helped prominent Utah politicians write talking points. In at least one instance, Penna Powers relied on AI to help create voice-overs in videos. In another instance, PLPCO staffers warned Penna Powers not to use too much scenic imagery in the campaign for fear it might undermine their efforts. They called the campaign โStand for Our Land,โ and those who worked on it were required to sign non-disclosure agreements. โThe Office of the Attorney General is taking this NDA extremely seriously,โ wrote one government official.
Hundreds of records reviewed by Public Domain shed light on the key players involved in this campaign and the strategies they used to persuade the public in their favor. Among other themes, their campaign relentlessly portrays the federal government as an absentee landlord that mismanages land and cuts off access to the public domain. Utah, on the other hand, is painted as a benevolent force working to ensure public land access. The campaign โ like the lawsuit it was meant to support โ seeks one principal outcome: federal land disposal. Utah has identified some 18.5 million acres of federal land within the stateโs boundaries that are currently administered by the Bureau of Land Management on behalf of all Americans โ and it wants those lands for itself.
Penna Powers, meanwhile, landed a big pay day. The contract between the PR firm and PLPCO runs until 2029 for a total cost of some $2.6 million.
In response to queries, PLPCO in a written statement said that,โUtah believes in protecting access to public lands for all users of all ages and abilities, and we are committed to actively managing these lands for generations to come. Utah is home to five national parks, several national monuments, and many other natural wonders. The state has always welcomed, and will continue to welcome visitors from around the world to visit and enjoy all that this great state has to offer.โ Penna Powers did not respond to requests for comment.
Meanwhile, critics of the Utah PR effort called it a โpropagandaโ campaign meant to mislead Utahns and the general public.
โPenna Powers worked hand-in-hand with the state of Utah to craft a misleading message about the stateโs land grab lawsuit,โ said Kate Groetzinger, communications manager at the Center for Western Priorities, a conservation group. โThey made it seem like forcibly taking ownership of public lands would help recreationists and ranchers, when the real goal of this lawsuit was to increase extraction and privatize national public lands in Utah. This campaign is the very definition of propaganda โ misleading political messaging paid for by taxpayers.โ
UTAHโS EFFORT TO take control of federal lands kicked off in earnest in 2012, when Utahโs then-Governor Gary Herbert signed into law the Utah Transfer of Public Lands Act, demanding state control of the majority of federal public land in Utah. โThis is only the first step in a long process,โ Herbert said at the time, โbut it is a step we must take.โ In 2018, Senator Mike Lee, a leading proponent of the land transfer movement, shared similar sentiments during a speech to the conservative Sutherland Institute in Salt Lake City. The campaign for land transfer, he said, โwill take years, and the fight will be brutal.โ Indeed, just last week, Lee put forward a proposal in the GOPโs massive reconciliation bill that would force the sell off of millions of acres of federal land in the Western U.S.
Utahโs actions to seize control of federal land have only grown more aggressive as the years have progressed. In August last year, it filed a lawsuit directly with the Supreme Court seeking to strip federal ownership over some 18.5 million acres of BLM land within Utah. It claims these lands are โunappropriated,โ a novel argument meant to create a legal distinction between national parks, forests and monuments, and large swaths of BLM land across the West. If successful, Utahโs lawsuit would deprive the vast majority of Americans of their ownership stake in such BLM lands. Tribal nations, meanwhile, have been staunch opponents of Utahโs lawsuit, which the Ute Indian Tribe described as an โexistential threatโ to the tribe and its reservation lands.
In January this year, the Supreme Court declined to hear Utahโs case. It remains unclear whether Utah will refile its lawsuit in lower court, but its efforts to seize federal land are a generational project.
Regardless, Utah, faces a major public opinion hurdle. A large majority of Western voters are opposed to the idea of state control over federal public lands, according to Colorado Collegeโs annual polling. Even in Utah, some 57% of voters oppose public land transfers. That is where Penna Powers comes in. The firm worked to reshape public opinion in the stateโs favor, with a focus on building support among Utah residents as well as key decision makers at the national level.
โThe Stand for Our Land public education campaign is informing Utahns about the management of public lands, and how federal agencies are restricting access to public lands and ignoring local concerns,โ wrote PLPCO in a statement. โThe Bureau of Land Management closed over 2,000 miles of Utah roads on public lands in the past two years.โ
A centerpiece of Penna Powersโ effort has been glossy videos that portray federal land agencies as an exclusionary force bent on keeping people off the public domain. In one video, Penna Powers and PLPCO hired a voice actor to portray a โdisabled camperโ in a wheelchair on a camping trip with her family. โBecause of my disability I need to reach campsites in a motorized vehicle,โ the actor said. โIf I lose road access, I lose the ability to do something I love with my family. Thatโs why I think Utah should be managing Utah land.โ The actor who was selected to voice the video does not appear to use a wheelchair or mobility aid in social media posts and other records reviewed by Public Domain. PLPCO appears to have had many of those involved in its video shoots also sign NDAs. A talent agent for the actor in question did not provide comment at the time of publication.
Redge Johnson, the executive director of PLPCO, was particularly keen on the โdisabled camperโ storyline, among others. He asked about a video that combined the โdisabled camperโ story with one about an off-highway vehicles business. โI really want that video in the folder, it tells a great story,โ he wrote to Penna Powers staffer Allyse Christensen, who worked on the Stand for Our Land campaign.
Others, like disability community advocate Syren Nagakyrie, said Utahโs use of a โdisabled camperโ storyline to promote its political agenda is โdisingenuous.โ
WESTERN PUBLIC LANDS ARE HABITAT FOR ARIDLAND BIRDS
This map shows the cumulative range for 30 aridland bird species in North America, with the vast majority of that range falling within the boundaries of federal and state public lands. Source: Aridland bird data from Bird Conservation Regions, Bird Studies Canada and NABCI. Public lands map from GISGeography.com.
The Wyoming Office of State Lands and Investments was ultimately given $75,000 for the study, and it picked Jackson-based Y2 Consultants to complete the analysis. When the 357-page study was completed the following fall, state land managers and lawmakers were warned that they lacked staff and resources to take over control of 25 million acres of Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Reclamation property that fell within state boundaries.
A two-track road cuts through Bureau of Land Management property west of Pinedale in April 2024. Such tracts of public land could be on the chopping block because of federal budget reconciliation text that seeks to sell between 2-3 million acres of the federal estate. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
โUltimately, without significant changes to federal law, the greatest challenge would be that the state would be inheriting the same bureaucratic maze of overlapping, entwined, often conflicting federal mandates established in the labyrinth of laws and directives laid out by Congress,โ the 2016 Y2 Consultants report stated. โThe land management trials, conundrums, and conflicts encountered would largely be the same for the state that exist under present [federal] management.โ
The first author listed on the report, a slot that typically denotes the lead, was Brenda Younkin, a natural resource specialist who co-founded Y2 Consultants with her husband, Zia Yasrobi.
On Wednesday, Politicoโs E&E News publicized that Younkin had been appointed by the Trump administration and had started working in a senior advisor post at the Bureau of Land Management, where sheโd report to its acting director, Jon Raby. Trumpโs first pick to lead the BLM, Colorado oil and gas advocate Kathleen Sgamma, withdrew her bid after it was revealed that sheโd written a memo expressing โdisgustโ for โPresident Trumpโs role in spreading misinformation that incitedโ the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
WyoFile was unable to reach Younkin for an interview Friday, but an auto-response from her Y2 Consultants email address confirmed a โleave of absenceโ because of a new gig with the U.S. Department of the Interior, the BLMโs government parent.
The Bureau of Land Managementโs 245 million surface acres, depicted in yellow in this map, account for about 10% of the United Statesโ landmass. (Library of Congress)
According to her biography and past interviews, Younkin has worked in the public lands and ranching sphere her entire career.
In statements made to the Cowboy State Daily, U.S. Sens. Cynthia Lummis and John Barrasso both lauded Younkinโs appointment.
โThe more Wyoming voices we can have in the room, the better off we will all be,โ Barrasso told the outlet.
Younkin joins a handful of other Wyoming residents whoโve gone to work for the Trump administrationโs Interior Department via political appointments, or who have been nominated for positions.
Wyoming Game and Fish Director Brian Nesvik speaks at a Game and Fish Commission meeting in Douglas in September 2024. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
Last, southwestern Wyoming big game hunting advocate Josh Coursey was appointed to a Fish and Wildlife Service post, pulling him away from the Muley Fanatic Foundation, which he co-founded. That group has since gone on record opposing a provision expected to be yoked into the so-called โOne Big Beautiful Bill Actโ that would mandate the sale of an estimated 2-3 million acres of federal land in 11 western states.
โPublic lands need to stay in public hands and the Muley Fanatic Foundation opposes anything or anyone that threatens our lands that we hold dear for personal use,โ President and CEO Joey Faigle told WyoFile in a written statement. โThe public land sales being included in the reconciliation needs to stop now.โ
If the public land sale mandates donโt stop, the amount of land that Younkin, the Jackson Hole consultant, will be tasked with overseeing at the Bureau of Land Management will shrink.
The disposal language in the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources legislative text demands selling between 0.5% and 0.75% of the BLM and U.S. Forest Serviceโs 438 million surface acres within the next five years. Although just a fraction of the agenciesโ overall holdings, itโd translate to doing away with public lands that collectively add up to an area no smaller than Yellowstone National Park.
War, tariffs and inflation are not the only things driving up the price of food. Widespread drought is also looming over what people around the world eat. In Brazil, parched coffee farms have affected latte prices everywhere. In the Midwestern United States,ย years of poor rainshave led ranchers to cull cattle herds and have raised beef prices toย their highest levels ever. In China, one of the nationโsย key wheat-producing regions,ย the Yellow River Basin, is withering under unusually hot, dry conditions. Germany had itsย driest spring since 1931, though rains in recent weeks have allayed concerns about its wheat and barley crops. Ukraineย andย Russia, rivals on the battlefield, are also facing the threat of drought for their wheat crops. Both countries are breadbaskets for millions of people far and wide. Morocco, for instance, now in its sixth year of drought, has relied increasingly on wheat imports from Russia. Droughts are part of the natural weather cycle but are exacerbated in many parts of the world by the burning of fossil fuels, which is warming the world and exacerbating extreme weather. Droughts can be particularly risky as the production of important foods becomes increasingly concentrated. For example, much of the worldโs coffee comes from Brazil, cacao from Ivory Coast and Ghana in West Africa, and corn from Brazil, China and the American Midwest…Around the world, most people get their calories from three staple grains โ rice, wheat and corn โ which means that weather hazards to places where they are produced can have big repercussions for food security. Bad weather in one or two of those regions can destabilize the global supply…
Sandwiches, instant noodles, rotis. Wheat, in all its forms, has become one of the worldโs most commonly eaten grains, second only to rice. That makes it one of the most closely watched crops in the era of extreme weather. Wheat is also often closely guarded. Take India, for instance. Prompted by an intense heat wave in 2022, the Indian government banned wheat exports in order to stockpile it at home…
Summer barbecue season is approaching just as the price of beef has topped records. Ground beef in the United States is close to $6 per pound, and steak is nearly twice that…A few factors are driving the price rise, including soaring insurance costs for farmers and the abiding demand for beef. But central to the rising cost of beef is a drought that has stretched across the Midwestern United States over the past several years. The conditions have dried up a lot of grazing land. Cattle herd numbers are at their lowest in 70 years.
The San Juan River near Navajo Dam, New Mexico, Aug. 23, 2015. Photo credit: Phil Slattery Wikimedia Commons
From email from Reclamation (Conor Felletter):
June 23, 2025
The Bureau of Reclamation has scheduled an increase in the release from Navajo Dam from 350 cubic feet per second (cfs) to 450 cfs for Tuesday, June 24th, at 4:00 AM.
Releases are made for the authorized purposes of the Navajo Unit, and to attempt to maintain a target base flow through the endangered fish critical habitat reach of the San Juan River (Farmington to Lake Powell). The San Juan River Basin Recovery Implementation Program recommends a target base flow of between 500 cfs and 1,000 cfs through the critical habitat area. The target base flow is calculated as the weekly average of gaged flows throughout the critical habitat area from Farmington to Lake Powell.
This scheduled release change is subject to changes in river flows and weather conditions. If you have any questions, please reply to this message, call 970-385-6500, or visit Reclamationโs Navajo Dam website at https://www.usbr.gov/uc/water/crsp/cs/nvd.html
Lake Mendocino, in Northern Californiaโs wine country, was the proving ground for Forecast-Informed Reservoir Operations. (Source: California Department of Water Resources)
Western Water in-depth: For years, atmospheric rivers were a mystery. now, an innovative dam management approach is putting them to work
In December 2012, dam operators at Northern Californiaโs Lake Mendocino watched as a series of intense winter storms bore down on them. The dam there is run by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineersโ San Francisco District, whose primary responsibility in the Russian River watershed is flood control. To make room in the reservoir for the expected deluge, the Army Corps released some 25,000 acre-feet of water downstream โ enough to supply nearly 90,000 families for a year.
In doing so, the Army Corps averted the possibility of a catastrophic flood. But almost as soon as the water headed downstream, the pendulum swung in the other direction. The weather turned dry, and the months that followed proved to be the driest on record in California up to that point. A year later, the reservoir became a drought-cracked mudflat. The local water supplier, Sonoma County Water Agency, was forced to reduce releases by 60 percent during the dry summer, impacting urban and agricultural water users downstream.
State officials were frustrated. Members of a drought task force created by then-Gov. Jerry Brown traveled to Lake Mendocino, tucked into the coastal wine country near Ukiah, to hold a press conference. An exasperated John Laird, the state resources secretary at the time, asked some of the Army Corpsโ top brass what theyโd been thinking when they sent so much water downstream.
โI just blurted it out,โ says Laird, now a state senator. โIt was one of those emperor-has-no-clothes moments, because somehow nobody was speaking up about this.โ
It made for an uncomfortable moment. But the incident catalyzed a wide-reaching effort to manage dams more nimbly in the face of wildly variable weather, and particularly to meet the challenge of atmospheric rivers โ intense winter storms that pummel California and other parts of the West with huge amounts of rain.
In the wake of the controversy at Lake Mendocino, the quest to harness the power of atmospheric rivers birthed a new water-management approach: Forecast-Informed Reservoir Operations, or FIRO. The concept has been tested on three dams in California since 2019, with programs in development for several other dams across the West.
By pairing FIRO with accurate forecasts of where those storms will hit and how much rain theyโll bring, dam operators can work in real time to not only reduce the risk of dangerous floods, but also capitalize on atmospheric riversโ potential as a source of additional water for protection from drought.
Now, the concept is poised to improve operations at 39 more dams across the arid Southwest and another 71 throughout the rest of the country. That will vastly increase FIROโs potential and help dam operators stand ready for the wilder weather that the future will likely bring: storms intensified โ and made more erratic โ by climate change.
Some 50 atmospheric rivers hit the West Coast of the U.S. during the 2024-25 season. (Source: Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes)
Atmospheric Rivers Enter the Lexicon
For decades, the โPineapple Express,โ a type of storm that feeds off warm tropical moisture, figured prominently in local weather lore. By the early 1990s, researchers realized that it was just one kind of a broader category of unique storms that take shape far out in the Pacific. In a 1994 research paper, Yong Zhu, now at North Carolina State University, and MITโs late Reginald Newell, christened them atmospheric rivers.
According to a 2019 study, atmospheric rivers caused $5.2 billion in damage in Sonoma County over the preceding two decades and were responsible for 99.8 percent of all insured flood losses there. A single 1995 storm โ the most damaging event in 40 years of record keeping in the West โ inundated the town of Guerneville on the Russian River and caused $50 million in insured losses countywide. The study determined that atmospheric rivers are the primary driver of flood damage in the West.
These powerful plumes of water vapor โ which, on average, carry 25 times the flow of the Mississippi River โ deliver 30 to 50 percent of total annual precipitation in California.
โAtmospheric rivers are the hurricanes for the West Coast,โ says Cary Talbot, the FIRO National Lead with the Army Corpsโ Engineer Research and Development Center.
But when they fail to arrive, that can also have a big impact, leaving the state parched and reeling. Their influence isnโt limited to just California, either: In 2021, researchers Mu Xiao, now at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, and Dennis Lettenmaier, now at University of California, Los Angeles found that almost one third of snowpack in the Upper Colorado River Basin comes from snowfall brought by atmospheric rivers.
The Army Corpsโ primary responsibility is the high-stakes task of controlling floods, or as the agency puts it, โflood risk management.โ As a result, the Army Corps tends to be extremely risk averse, and it literally runs its dams by the book: Each of its dams has an individually formulated water control manual with flood control curves, more commonly known as โrule curves,โ that are practically chiseled in stone.
โWhen those things are written, they go through a really rigorous (vetting) process because itโs what we are going to be graded on in the courts,โ says Talbot. โWhen somebody sues us for how we operated, theyโre going to look at the water control manual and say: โDid the operators follow the rules?โ So, water managers donโt really want to stray too far from what it says.โ
Rule curves typically force operators to keep reservoir levels low during wet seasons so they can catch and hold back the rainfall from anticipated storms and reduce the impacts of flooding downstream. But if those storms veer off their predicted course, or dissipate before they arrive, operators canโt get back the water theyโve already released โ exactly what happened at Lake Mendocino in 2012.
The public outcry over that incident, which would be followed by the driest three-year period on record until then, helped nudge the Army Corps toward a more flexible approach.
Flood-control releases in December 2012, followed by months of drought, sent reservoir levels in Lake Mendocino โ shown here in December 2013 โ plummeting. (Source: Sonoma Water)
โThe disaster of a really bad drought in California focused congressional attention,โ says Talbot. In 2015, Congress added a line in the Army Corpsโ budget for a research-led Water Operations Technical Support program. โIt wasnโt much money โ it was really just $2 million to get it started โ but the direction from Congress was to see if we canโt find a better balance between flood risk management and water supply, especially with respect to atmospheric rivers.โ
The following year, the Army Corps modified its regulations to allow for the use of forecasts in operations planning. Actually incorporating that change into each damโs water control manual, many of which are decades old, still required an administrative process that typically takes several years. But the announcement was a significant first step in the shift away from the hidebound rule curves that governed dam operations.
To make it all work, though, dam operators had to have weather forecasts that they could trust.
Decoding Atmospheric Rivers
As it happened, weather researchers were already on a quest to crack the mystery of how atmospheric rivers work. A key figure in the effort was Marty Ralph, who spent more than two decades as an atmospheric scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) beginning in 1992.
Marty Ralph, head of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes (CW3E), worked with colleagues to vastly improve the accuracy of atmospheric river forecasts. (Source: CW3E)
Ralph had begun studying cyclones off the U.S. West Coast in the mid-1990s. To get an up-close view of the storms in their spawning grounds far out at sea, he wheedled and cajoled the use of weather research aircraft from NOAA, NASA and the Air Force that sat idle following the busy summer hurricane season on the Gulf Coast. (At one point, Ralph experimented with โ but ultimately gave up on โ using a long-range surveillance drone called the Global Hawk, an $80-million-plus โhand-me-down,โ as he puts it, from the Air Force to NASA.)
Ralphโs research focus gradually zeroed in on what would turn out to be atmospheric rivers. He didnโt read Zhu and Newellโs groundbreaking work on the phenomenon until 2003, but when he did, โthe light bulb just went off, like, โOh โ thatโs what weโre studying!โโ
Ralph organized a series of annual โfield campaignsโ to learn more about atmospheric rivers and racked up more and more flight time. In 2013, he left NOAA to start the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes, or CW3E, at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. There, working with other researchers, he continued to research atmospheric riversโ origins and behavior. But along the way, he says, โit became clear to me that we should be trying this as an operational program to help with forecastingโ so that dam operators could have a more accurate real-time picture of individual stormsโ paths and intensity.
Lake Becomes Proving Ground
Meanwhile, Lake Mendocino was emerging as the first test case for FIRO. At the time, Jay Jasperse was the chief engineer and director of groundwater management for Sonoma Water, which gets much of its supply from the lake. Despite the Army Corpsโ new openness to using forecasts for more flexible dam operations, he says, there initially was โa lot of skepticism from some parties, and there was a lot of concern that the Army Corps was going to be incurring a lot of liability, and that this is going to negatively impact their flood risk management operations.โ
During the 2020 water year, FIRO allowed an extra 19 percent, or 11,175 acre-feet of water, to be captured in Lake Mendocino. (Source: Sonoma Water)
โThere were some spirited debates, and I think it took us a few years just to learn about each other and about each otherโs agencies and how we worked and what our needs were,โ Jasperse says. โBut we all stuck with it, because the overall idea just made too much sense.โ
Before FIRO was tried at Lake Mendocino, it went through an exhaustive modeling process to determine how it would affect dam operations. Gradually, Jasperse says, โwe started seeing this was pretty doable, and the Army Corps started to get more comfortable with it.โ
After extensive modeling, FIRO was first tested at Lake Mendocino during the 2020 water year and immediately proved its worth: That year, FIRO allowed an additional 11,175 acre-feet of water to be captured and stored there. That helped show that dams originally built principally for flood control could also be used to increase water storage and reliability.
โThereโs ways to do both under the right conditions, and Lake Mendocino is proof of that,โ says Patrick Sing, the lead water manager for the Army Corpsโ San Francisco District. โWhen all the weather forecasts say itโs going to be dry, we can hold onto a lot of water instead of releasing it. Weโre not impairing our flood management mission, and weโre doing our part to be stewards of a resource thatโs very valuable in the event that the next year is a drought.โ
Still, Sing notes that FIRO isnโt a silver bullet.
โYou do all this research and modeling, but at the end of the day, it comes down to the reservoir operator to make a decision, and their agency is going to be held responsible for that decision,โ he says. โIf theyโre not comfortable enough with FIRO, itโs probably not going to move forward. And they shouldnโt be forced to do it. They should be comfortable and convinced that it is safe to do.โ
At Lake Mendocino, Sing says, โthereโs been enough research and development and testing that weโre comfortable doing this.โ
Forecast-Informed Reservoir Operations are currently underway or being actively assessed at 21 dams on the West Coast. (Source: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers)
Expanding FIRO
In 2022, FIRO-based operations were extended to Lake Sonoma, the other reservoir that supplies Sonoma Water within the Russian River watershed. And this year, FIRO was put in place on a preliminary basis at another dam, Prado Dam on the Santa Ana River in Southern California. Since 2020, FIRO has contributed to an additional 95,000 acre-feet of storage in the three reservoirs โ an amount equal to just over 75 percent of Lake Mendocinoโs total volume.
โWeโre getting better and better,โ says Jasperse, who now works as a consultant for both Sonoma Water and CW3E. โEverybodyโs getting more and more experience every year.โ
FIRO wonโt work at all dams, especially in areas where forecasts are less reliable. In the summertime in the Deep South, for example, โpop-up thunderstorms can happen any day, any time,โ says the Army Corpsโ Talbot, who is based in Mississippi. โWeโve got a lot of moisture coming up from the Gulf, so itโs much harder to predict that kind of impactful rain here than it is in the West.โ
But experience has shown that where FIRO is viable, it can provide additional water at a cost far lower than traditional approaches for boosting water supply, like increasing the size of a dam.
โThose are lengthy, expensive and complicated processes. Itโll take, in some cases, a decade or more to realize those benefits,โ says Talbot. โFIRO is something that we literally can do today. We didnโt have to change the dam at all. This is just taking existing infrastructure and making it work better.โ
At Prado Dam in Southern California, the Orange County Water District is expanding the possibilities of FIRO by pairing it with a groundwater recharge program to ensure that water thatโs released from the dam isnโt lost. There, releases can be diverted into recharge basins downstream, where the water then soaks into the local aquifer.
Adam Hutchinson, the districtโs recharge planning manager, says the agency anticipates getting an average of an extra 6,000 acre-feet per year through its FIRO operations. Thatโs not a lot of water, but it makes a big difference. The water retailers in the districtโs service area rely on groundwater for the majority of their water supply, but they still have to import about 15 percent from Northern California and the Colorado River, at a cost of more than $1,000 per acre foot.
โSo for that 6,000 acre-feet that we hope to get,โ he says, โthatโs $6 million a year that weโre saving by putting this free water in the ground.โ
“AR Reconโ flights to improve the accuracy of atmospheric river forecasts, which have been carried out from California and Hawaii for years, are now also being launched from Guam and Japan. (Source: U.S. Air Force 403rd Wing)
More Dams on the Radar
While FIRO is currently in place at just three dams, it is on the brink of a dramatic expansion. Earlier this year, two more dams โ both significantly larger than any at which FIRO is currently in place โ were added to the roster of potential FIRO sites: The Yuba Water Agencyโs New Bullards Bar on the Yuba River, and Lake Oroville, the 3.5-million-acre-foot flagship of the State Water Project on the Feather River. A group of federal and state agencies and CW3E completed a final viability assessment at the two dams. The California Department of Water Resources and Yuba Water are now contemplating what steps to take to put FIRO into practice at those facilities. (In 2019 a more limited program, often referred to as โFIRO Lite,โ went into operation at the federal Bureau of Reclamationโs Folsom Dam, on the American River just upstream of Sacramento.)
FIRO-implementation efforts are also in progress for several other dams: Seven Oaks, upstream of Prado on the Santa Ana River; a system of 14 dams in Oregonโs Willamette Valley; and Howard Hanson Dam near Seattle.
And now, FIRO is about to get a much bigger boost. In May, the Army Corps completed an initial evaluation of the suitability of FIRO at each of the 593 flood-control dams under its authority nationwide. It found that implementing FIRO is promising at 110 of those, including 39 across the Southwest. Another 299 dams nationwide may have potential as candidates for FIRO, although they face some significant barriers to implementation.
The Army Corps is now moving forward on two more-detailed rounds of evaluation on the 110 top-tier dams. Then, beginning in 2027, it will move toward implementing FIRO at those with the most potential.
The biggest impediment to more widespread implementation of FIRO remains a lack of accurate forecasts in parts of the country that donโt experience atmospheric rivers.
โThe most common reason itโs not going to work is forecast skillโ โ essentially, accuracy, says Talbot. โThatโs the leading factor for eliminating dams in the screening process.โ
In the West, the effort to improve forecasts only continues to advance. In December 2023, then-President Biden signed the Atmospheric River Reconnaissance, Observations and Warning Act, which had been introduced by Californiaโs senior U.S. senator, Alex Padilla. The law called for what has become known as the AR Recon aerial surveillance program, led by Ralph and Vijay Tallapragada of the National Weather Service, to be expanded throughout the full winter season. The past two years, AR Recon carried out 107 reconnaissance flights across the Pacific, flying not only out of California and Hawaii, but Guam and Japan, as well.
โThe farther West we go, the greater the lead time improvement we getโ in forecasting, says Ralph. โWeโve been able to improve the forecast of extreme precipitation in California by about 12 percent just by adding the (AR Recon) data. Thatโs the equivalent of 10 years of the typical process of improving forecasts through research โ so weโre buying a decade of advances just by adding these data.โ
The Army Corpsโ Talbot says those strides forward are welcome news for dam operators.
โIf you take a water manager and you give them three extra days of lead time, they can do a lot with that. Water managers always tell me, โLook, you give me a weather crystal ball and Iโll manage water better,โโ he says.
โAs long as we keep the aircraft flying and people advancing on the science and the meteorological wizardry, these water managers are getting closer and closer to that crystal ball.โ
Today, Monday, June 23rd at noon MT, the releases from Crystal Dam will increase to 1,650 cfs. On Tuesday, June 24th at 9am MT, the scheduled releases from Crystal Dam will increase to 1,750 cfs. Releases are currently at 1,550 cfs. This release change is intended to meet the baseflow target in light of rapidly declining tributary flows. Reclamation will evaluate the need for further release increases in the coming days based on updated forecasts.
Gunnison River flows in the Black Canyon/Gunnison Gorge are currently ~500 cfs and are anticipated to increase to approximately 700 cfs. Gunnison Tunnel diversions remain at 1025 cfs.
Releases are made for the authorized purposes of the Aspinall Unit, and to attempt to maintain a target base flow through the endangered fish critical habitat reach of the Gunnison. Future release changes will be determined based on changes in tributary flows and weather
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral website (Brandon Loomis). Here’s an excerpt:
June 18, 2025
Key Points
Arizona officials present details of a new proposal to share future shortages on the Colorado River.
The “supply-driven” solution would base allocations on the river’s actual flows, not on storage in the reservoirs.
Upper Basin states say the plan has problems, but Gov. Katie Hobbs insisted Arizona will defend its river allocation and demand other states take cuts.
Negotiators for the seven states arguing over diminished Colorado River water are discussing an option they hope will end their deadlock, one that Arizona officials say would focus less on who gets what and more on what the river can realistically provide. Theyโre calling it the โsupply-drivenโ solution, Arizona Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke said, and it links the required water deliveries out ofย Glen Canyon Damย to what might naturally be flowing downstream at Lees Ferry if the dam werenโt there. The Rocky Mountain states upstream from there would have to let that amount pass, and the Southwestern states would have to live within its limits. Itโs intended as a fair way of adapting โ and shrinking โ the regionโs use of a river whose flow was once thought to exceed 15 million acre-feet of water a year but, in the last 25 years, has averaged 12.4 million…
Jennifer Pitt and Brad Udall at the Getches-Wilkinson Center/Water and Tribes Initiative conference June 5, 2025. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
So far, agreement about whatโs fairย has appeared distant.ย The Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada have the bulk of the regionโs population and farm production, and have fully developed and then started to cut back on the half of the riverโs flow that the compact awarded them. The Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming have not fully developed their share of the water โ a share that no longer fully exists. They have balked at cutting their existing uses to meet the compactโs requirement that they send at least half of the riverโs flow of a century ago now that a changing climate has exposed the folly of the compactโs numbers. The supply-driven model would generally mandate a flow past Lees Ferry to the Southwestern states equal to a rolling three-year average of the natural flow that the mountain snowmelt provides, Buschatzke said. There would be upper and lower bounds on that number, to account for needs such as protecting reservoir levels that are safe for Glen Canyon and Hoover dam operations. Those bounds are as yet unidentified.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
The long-term drying of the American Southwest poses a gathering and measurable threat to hydropower generation in the Colorado River basin.
Should Lake Mead, the reservoir formed by Hoover Dam, continue to shrink, a substantial drop in the damโs hydropower output is on the horizon.
The diminished state of the lake and the potential severe drop in electricity supply illustrate the consequences of a warming climate for the region. Built in the throes of the Great Depression, Hoover was the signature project of a country displaying its grit and engineering prowess to tame the Westโs mightiest rivers to irrigate farmland and build cities. Today the dam is an aging asset buffeted by hydrological change and generating half the power that it did just a generation ago.
According to the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that manages the basinโs large dams, if Lake Mead falls another 20 feet, Hoover Damโs capacity to generate electricity would be slashed by 70 percent from its current level.
If there is a reason not to be especially alarmed itโs this: Hoover is just a small piece of the regionโs electric power infrastructure. Federal dams along the Colorado River account for just over 4 percent of Arizonaโs generating capacity, for instance.
Still, the cheap electricity is a lifeline for tribes and small rural electric providers. And the damโs ability to be quickly turned on and off helps regulate the peaks and troughs of electricity demand. Curtailing this source of inexpensive electricity would raise the cost of power in the region while also challenging the integration of renewable energy into the electric grid.
A hydropower shortfall will be โbad news for us,โ said Ed Gerak, executive director of the Irrigation and Electrical Districts Association of Arizona, which represents power providers that receive federal hydropower from Colorado River dams.
Lake Mead now sits at an elevation of 1,055 feet. The break point for hydropower is 1,035 feet. At that level, 12 older turbines at Hoover that are not designed for low reservoir levels would be shut down, Reclamation said. Five newer turbines installed a decade ago would continue to generate power.
The threat is real, especially as this yearโs runoff forecast for the basin continues to worsen. Every month, Reclamation updates its projection of reservoir levels over the next two years. The June update shows a 10 percent chance that Lake Mead breaches 1,035 feet in spring 2027.
In a worst-case scenario, the breach would happen at the end of 2026, just when current operating rules for Lake Mead and Lake Powell expire. The modeling indicates a similar chance that Lake Powell drops low enough in 2027 that Glen Canyon Dam, another key hydropower asset in the basin, stops producing electricity.
The probability that Lake Mead drops that far is small and laden with uncertainties about weather and water use. But it is large enough that Hooverโs power customers are signaling their concern.
Reclamation, for its part, acknowledges the problem at Hoover and is evaluating its options. The agency estimates that replacing the 12 turbines would cost $156 million.
โReclamation is assessing the cost-benefit analysis of replacing some of the older style turbines and the timeline for installation,โ the agency wrote in a statement to Circle of Blue. โOrdering new turbines is a lengthy process as they have to be designed, model tested, built and ultimately installed.โ
The dozen older turbines are not designed to operate at low reservoir levels. Dams like Hoover, which was completed in 1936, function based on the principle of hydraulic head, which is the difference in elevation between the top of the reservoir and the intake pipes for the damโs powerhouse. When the hydraulic head drops, so does the water pressure. That can trigger the formation of air bubbles in the water, which can gouge and damage the turbines in a process called cavitation.
The five turbines that would not be shut down are low-head units that can accommodate lower reservoir levels. Installed a decade ago at a cost of $42 million in response to a previous rapid decline in Lake Mead, they can operate down to 950 feet. (One of those five turbines is currently offline, and Reclamation does not have an estimate for when it will resume operating.)
Hoover Dam, at the center of the photo, forms Lake Mead, which is currently just 31 percent full. Photo ยฉ J. Carl Ganter/Circle of Blue
Hoover is already hobbled by low water. Power generation in 2023 was roughly half the output of 2000, the last year that Lake Mead was effectively full.
When Lake Mead is full, Hoover has a generating capacity of 2,080 megawatts, equivalent to a large coal-fired or nuclear power plant. Today its capacity is 1,304 MW. If the dozen older turbines go offline, it will drop again, to 382 MW.
These declines in hydropower generation have been felt by the customers who buy Hoover Damโs electricity, Gerak said. In a shortfall, they have to buy market-rate electricity. Depending on the season and power demand, market rates can be considerably more expensive.
Eric Witkoski is the executive director of the Colorado River Commission of Nevada, which manages the stateโs allocation of Hooverโs power. Witkoski said that rural electric companies in his state have a higher share of their electricity coming from the dams and would be most affected by a shortfall.
The value of Hooverโs electricity is measured not just in raw megawatts and dollars. It is a flexible power source that can be ramped up and down to match the regionโs daily and seasonal rhythms. Energy use rises in summer afternoons when air conditioning units are blasting and electricity-consuming household chores are at hand. It falls at night when cooler air prevails and washing machines are silent.
โThe beauty of hydropower is that itโs great for helping to stabilize and regulate the grid,โ Gerak said.
IEDA and other interest groups are pursuing a number of fixes. They are encouraging Reclamation and its parent agency the Interior Department to use federal infrastructure funds to install new low-head turbines or to request appropriations from Congress.
They are writing their congressional representatives in support of the Help Hoover Dam Act, a bill that would unlock some $50 million in ratepayer funds that had been set aside for pension benefits for federal employees. The trade groups claim that Congress funds the pension benefits through other means and that the funds could be spent on dam upgrades if Reclamation was given the authority to do so.
They also want to set up an organization modeled after the National Parks Foundation that can accept donations for dam operations and maintenance, including the visitor center, which is supported by power sales.
These fixes will take time. But as Lake Mead declines, the urgency to achieve them will intensify.
Peak river flows have come and gone on the Western Slope, with most rivers seeing below normal peaks and currently running well below last yearโs levels. According to Aspen Journalismโs real time local streamflow tracker, streams are flowing at 42-63% of normal in the Roaring Fork Watershed.
Streamflows peaked on June 3 or June 4 with the Roaring Fork River flowing as much as 3,050 cfs at Glenwood Springs, which was 87% of average peak flow, and the Colorado River running up to 11,400 cfs near the stateline the next day, which was 64% of normal.As of June 18, the Colorado River is running at about 4,370 cfs at Glenwood Springs, or 43% of average, down from 5,640 cfs last week and from last yearโs 13,000 cfs, while the Colorado flowed at 5,360 cfs near the Colorado-Utah stateline, or 33% of average.For more river data, check out Aspen Journalismโsย streamflow tracker.According to the National Resources Conservation Serviceโs June 1 Water Supply Outlook report, statewide snowmelt was tracking about 10 days earlier than average and the streamflow forecasts for all Western Slope basins were below average and down from the April forecasts.ย
The low streamflows are sure to affect reservoir levels. According to a June 11 update from Tim Miller, a hydrologist with the Bureau of Reclamation, Ruedi Reservoir on the Fryingpan River is no longer forecast to fill. The seasonal inflow forecast for June is 66% of average, a 34,000-acre-foot drop from the April forecast. Miller said the plan is to keep releases to a minimum until the third week in July when the Cameo call is expected to come on. The Aspen Yacht Club boat ramp should be useable through the end of August.
According to the June forecasts from Reclamation, spring runoff into Lake Powell is forecast to be 45% of average, down from Aprilโs forecast of 67%. Lake Powell is currently about 33% full.
Those who lived through it will tell you that the spring of 1965 was not like other springs in eastern Colorado.ย From Fort Collins to La Junta, the land shuddered and groaned, afflicted with mini-earthquakes and baby twisters, freak hailstorms and gale-force winds. But to say people should have paid attention is to wrap yourself smugly in half a century of hindsight. At the time, the bad winds and unfriendly skies were seen as mere anomalies, a little Wild West weather, nothing more. Nobody could anticipate what was coming because there had been nothing like it around here for generations, and the past was not much studied in these parts. Yes, it was wet, but after three years of drought, the farmers welcomed the rain. June arrived gray and damp, more like a New York November than the parade of dry, sunny days and mild nights the citizens of Denver had come to expect. A cold front from the Northeast butted against the Front Range and camped out, entwined with a flow of warm, humid air oozing up from the Gulf of Mexico. The unholy coupling went on for days, blotting out the sun and generating bursts of what the meteorologists called โorographic precipitation.โย A few parched burgs got hosed. For the most part, though, the bank of dark thunderclouds just sat there over the mountains, swollen and ominous. Then the signs, the portents, became too violent to ignore…
The main event came on Wednesday, June 16, starting at about half past one in the afternoon. It began on the southern edge of Douglas County, with a hard rain and a tornado that ripped through the tiny town of Palmer Lake, peeling the roofs off thirty houses like so many soup-can lids. The twister scooped up water from the lake and dumped it into the houses, mixed with frogs, fish and gravel…Then it went away. But the rain kept coming. The rain was torrential. It was record-busting. It was biblical…It was no longer simply a flood. It had leapt in rank to a hundred-year flood, or even a five-hundred-year or thousand-year model, a millennial event. State patrol officers reported a wall of water estimated to be twenty feet high headed for Littleton, carrying in its wake a tangle of trees, asphalt, cars and other debris, with a second crest not far behind…It would be the darkest night in Denverโs history, a night of destruction far exceeding anything the city had ever known. The โ65 flood claimed 21 lives and resulted in property losses statewide estimated at $543 million โ adjusted for inflation, thatโs more than $4 billion in 2015 money โ with the worst damage in the Denver metro area. Other floods in the stateโs history have resulted in a greater loss of life; the Big Thompson flash flood in 1976 killed 143 people, while the death toll from a 1921 flood in Pueblo has been set as high as 1,500 people. But no natural disaster has had a more profound or lasting impact on state policy โ or in shaping the Denver we know today…
The flood ravaged hundreds of homes and all but obliterated dozens of businesses; many never recovered. But it also triggered a painful re-examination of a century of haphazard growth and myopic planning, during which the city had abused and poisoned its main waterway and ignored the communities on its banks. The disaster became a trigger for long-delayed flood-control projects, ambitious urban-renewal plans and a bitter diaspora for longtime residents of Auraria…It was also the start of a renaissance along the South Platte itself. What was once the cityโs greatest eyesore is now its showcase. But the transformation of the river didnโt occur overnight, or even over a decade. It took the determination of many officials, businesses, philanthropists and volunteers, as well as a still-evolving discussion of what the city lost โ and found โ in the flood.
The Colfax Viaduct during the 1965 flood of the South Platte River. Denver Public LIbrary
A welding company at West 11th Avenue and Zuni Street.
Denver Public Library
Trains at 14th St and South Platte River June 19, 1965. Photo via Westword.com
Steam rises above the cooling towers in The Dalles data center in Oregon (Google, 2020).
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
June 5, 2025
On Auroraโs eastern edge, where the bustle of metro Denver fades to farms, the first building of what will become the stateโs largest data center stands behind a wrought-iron fence. In another section of the 65-acre campus, front-end loaders are at work preparing for the foundation of another building. Seventeen miles west, in a dusty industrial nook of northern Denver, workers on a recent day scattered across a huge pit dug into the earth to lay the foundation for that cityโs newest data center. The two construction sites offer a glimpse into what a predicted boom in Coloradoโs data center industry may look like as the industry expands exponentially nationwide to meet the needs of Americansโ increasingly online lives โ and to provide the computing power demanded by artificial intelligence. The potential growth โ and repeated proposals for state incentives to expedite that development โ are creating concerns that the centersโ required power and cooling needs could keep Colorado from meeting its climate goals and drain already-stretched water resources…
Already, an โabsolute arms raceโ among data center developers has prompted the stateโs largest electricity provider to stop offering lower rates for the facilities, according to Xcel Energy executives. If all of the data centersโ requests to the utility for power were to come to fruition, Xcel would need to double its current generating power. When completed, the Aurora data center will be a 160 megawatt hyperscale facility that, at max capacity, could consume as much power as 176,000 homes. The northern Denver data center, once completed in the Elyria-Swansea neighborhood, could use a maximum of 805,000 gallons of water a day for cooling โ the same asย 16,100 Denveritesโ average daily indoor water use. Regulators, environmental advocates and data center representatives all say Colorado faces a critical moment: Can the state balance the desire from some government leadersย for the economic development brought by data centers with Coloradoโs climate goals and water realities? And can it do that while protecting electric customers from bearing the costs of the burgeoning industry?
The Central Arizona Project canal carries water through Phoenix in 2019. The project’s former general manager, Ted Cooke, was recently nominated to run the top federal agency for the Colorado River. Those who have worked with Cooke described him as a qualified expert. Ted Wood/The Water Desk
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
June 17, 2025
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC and supported by the Walton Family Foundation.
President Donald Trump has tapped longtime water manager Ted Cooke to be the next commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The nomination, submitted Mondayto the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, attempts to fill a pivotal role at the top federal agency for Western rivers, reservoirs and dams.
If confirmed, Cooke will become the main federal official overseeing Colorado River matters. His nomination comes at a tense time for the river. The seven states that use its water appear deadlocked in closed-door negotiations about sharing the shrinking water supply in the future.
Cooke will likely try to push those state negotiators toward agreement about who should feel the pain of water cutbacks and when. If they canโt reach a deal ahead of a 2026 deadline, the federal government can step in and make those decisions itself.
Cooke has spent most of his lengthy career with the Central Arizona Project, which brings Colorado River water to the Phoenix area. He first joined the agency in 2003, according to his LinkedIn page. He climbed the ranks and served as CAPโs general manager from 2015 to 2023.
Ted Cooke and Tom Buschatzke: Photo credit: Arizona Department of Water Resources
Water experts across the Colorado River basin, including some who have worked with him in the past, told KUNC they regard Cooke as a qualified technical expert. Sharon Megdal, whose tenure on CAPโs board of directors overlapped with Cookeโs time as general manager, said she had โgreat admirationโ for Cooke.
โHe’s thorough, he’s deliberative, he looks for solutions, and boy, we need to find solutions right now,โ said Megdal, who now directs the Water Resources Research Center at the University of Arizona. โMy observation of seeing him in action in tough situations shows that he’ll keep working until a resolution is reached or a solution is achieved, and I think that’s what we need now.โ
John Entsminger, Nevadaโs top water negotiator, called Cookeโs appointment a โgreat choice,โ and cited his work in shaping the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan. If confirmed, Cooke will likely be in the same negotiating rooms as Entsminger.
โThere are times when [the Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner] has to level pretty realistic threats at everybody,โ Entsminger said. There’s also times when they have to be the mediatorโฆ I think Ted has both of those skills. I’ve seen him be pretty pointed, and I’ve seen him drive compromise.โ
The seven states working on the next set of rules for managing the Colorado River are currently split into two caucuses โ the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico and the Lower Basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada.
The appointment of Cooke, a longtime Arizonan, could upset some on the other side of that divide. The Central Arizona Project, his former employer, is generally among the first entities to lose water under any plan for cutbacks.
Eric Kuhn is the former general manager of the Colorado River District. The taxpayer-funded agency was founded to keep water flowing to the cities and farms of Western Colorado. He said Cooke is qualified, but added “the nomination of someone from Arizona is interesting at a time when the Lower Division and the Upper Division states are far off.”
โI assume that he would recuse himself from decisions that could affect the CAP – which is just about any decision in the basin,โ Kuhn wrote to KUNC. โNone the less, his nomination is a plus for Arizona and the Lower Division States.โ
Negotiators from Colorado and New Mexico declined to comment, and negotiators from Wyoming and Utah did not get back to KUNC in time for publication. Chuck Cullom, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission and a former colleague of Cookeโs, also declined to comment.
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):
June 18, 2025
Arizona yesterday finally moved the super-secret idea at the heart of current Colorado River negotiations out of the shadows.
The idea is deceptively simple: base Lake Powell releases on a percentage of the three-year rolling average of the Colorado Riverโs estimated โnatural flowโ at Lee Ferry. Allocate water based not on a century-old hydrologic mistake, but rather based on what the river actually has to offer. It presents an attractive alternative to the increasingly baroque and unproductive shitshow that had taken over interstate negotiations.
It has the great virtue of each basin getting out of the other basinโs business โ one clean, simple number. But establishing the right percentage remains the hard part. Make the percentage too high and the Upper Basin will have to cut users with pre-Compact water rights. Make the percentage too low and Lake Powell fills up while Central Arizona goes dry.
But some of the early modeling suggests that there may be a sweet spot where a combination of Lower Basin cuts along the lines of what the Lower Basin has already been willing to offer, combined with modest Upper Basin system conservation programs, might thread a needle that could allow the crafting of a compromise. This is very good news if the negotiators and the folks back home who have been egging them on can seize this opportunity to set aside parochial smallness and think at the basin scale.
The possibility of a new approach was hinted at a CU Boulderโs Colorado River conference two weeks ago (I spent most of the conference hidden away watching and listening on Zoom through a covid haze, so it might have just been a fever dream, but I thought I heard the hints), and Iโm told was a topic of some of the hallway conversations. But Tom Buschatzkeโs reveal at yesterdayโs meeting of the Arizona Reconsultation Committee (the closest thing we have to the much-needed C-SPAN for the Colorado River Basin) was the first public discussion of the hush-hush stuff that shouldnโt be quite so hush-hush given, yโknow, 40 million of us stakeholders.
The full slide deck from the Colorado River C-SPAN Arizona Reconsultation Committee is useful. Reclamationโs Dan Bunk, for example, shared a slide slowing the latest โmin probableโ forecast (hilarious typo โ โmin problemโ now corrected) showing the system tanking โ dropping below minimum power pool at Powell โ in winter 2026. The min probable forecast has been a useful guide lately, frankly, and the latest version is horrifying. (On any other day this would be the lead, and probably deserves its own post, but I try not to work on Wednesdays.)
Active weather east of the Rockies led to significant reductions in drought coverage, especially in Florida, Texas, the northern and central Plains, and the upper Midwest. Amid early-summer showers, drought-free conditions largely continued from the southern Plains to the Atlantic Coast, excluding parts of Florida. Meanwhile, a Western hot spellโaccompanied by short-term dryness across roughly the northern half of the regionโwas manifested in rapidly developing soil moisture shortages, declining prospects for summer water supplies, an elevated wildfire threat, a boost in irrigation demands, and increased stress on rain-fed crops…
Rain-related drought improvement dominated the High Plains, although some significant drought-related agricultural problems persisted. By June 15, statewide topsoil moisture ratings on the High Plains ranged from 19% very short to short in Kansas to 50% in Wyoming, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Wyoming led the region on that date with 36% of its rangeland and pastures rated in very poor to poor condition, followed by Nebraska at 30%. Elsewhere, significant rain bypassed a few areas, including northeastern North Dakota, where moderate drought (D1) expanded…
Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending June 17, 2025.
In contrast to areas east of the Rockies, mostly dry weather dominated the West during the drought-monitoring period. Rapid surface drying and prematurely melting (or melted) snowpack had led to a variety of agricultural and water-supply issues and concerns. The Northwest has been especially dry in recent weeks, with topsoil moistureโas reported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture on June 15โrated 65% very short to short in Montana, along with 56% in Oregon and 45% in Washington. Unlike Oregon and Washington, Montana received some much-needed precipitation in mid-Juneโbut continued to experience agricultural drought impacts. For example, Montanaโs rangeland and pastures were rated 46% in very poor to poor condition on June 15. Among major production states, Montana led the nation on that date in very poor to poor ratings for spring wheat (28% of the crop) and barley (25%). Meanwhile, among several early-season Northwestern wildfires was the 3,600-acre Rowena Fire near The Dalles, Oregon, which has destroyed more than 150 structures, including several dozen homes…
Downpours in parts of Texas, the only state in the region still experiencing drought, delivered significant relief but also sparked flooding. In fact, deadly flash flooding struck the San Antonio area on June 12, when the official airport observation site received 6.11 inchesโthe second-wettest June day on record in that location, behind only 6.18 inches on June 3, 1951. San Antonio also set a one-hour station rainfall record for any time of year, with 3.98 inches falling from 3 to 4 am CDT. In drought-affected areas where heavier rain fell, some of the water was lost due to runoff, rather than absorption into parched soils. Additionally, groundwater and aquifer depletion in south-central Texas and neighboring areas has developed over many yearsโand will require much more than a singular heavy-rainfall event for replenishment…
Looking Ahead
Active weather will shift eastward during the next couple of days, as a hotter, drier pattern envelops the nationโs mid-section and quickly expands. Additional rainfall could total 1 to 3 inches across the eastern one-third of the United States, with some of the highest amounts expected from the lower Great Lakes States into northern New England. However, by the end of the week, any significant precipitation should be limited to parts of the North, with hot, dry weather dominating the remainder of the country. During the weekend, high temperatures should top 100ยฐF in the western Corn Belt as far north as South Dakota, while readings will reach 95ยฐF in nearly all areas of the Midwest. By Sunday, however, cooler air should spread as far east as the northern High Plains. During the transition to cooler weather, showers will develop from the Pacific Northwest to Montana. In the East, the first major heat wave of the season will persist into the first half of next week, with high temperatures near 100ยฐF expected at lower elevations of the Atlantic Coast States from Georgia to southern New England. There are some indications that, by early next week, remnant tropical moisture once associated with Eastern Pacific Hurricane Erick could be entrained by a cold front, leading to an increase in shower activity from the southern Rockies into the upper Midwest.
The NWS 6- to 10-day outlook for June 24-28 calls for the likelihood of above-normal temperatures across much of the eastern half of the country, as well as the northern Rockies and environs, while cooler-than-normal conditions will be mostly limited to the Southwest. Meanwhile, near- or above-normal rainfall can be expected nationwide, with an area stretching from the Southwest into the Great Lakes States having the greatest likelihood of experiencing wet weather.
US Drought Monitor one week change map ending June 17, 2025.
In his brief slot on the panel, Udall was first a cheerleader for Colorado River problem solving but reminding listeners that climate change was the elephant in the room, as several speakers later in the conference acknowledged.
Following are his remarks, lightly edited:
Given the policy expertise on this panel, Iโm going to constrain my remarks to whatโs going on in the climate space. I want to make the following two points and end with a heartfelt plea.
Within this basin, we can and have worked together to deal with a really sticky, difficult issue like climate change, to inform decision-making given the right partners, including the federal government at the table. Point two is our current climate trajectory is beyond awful, and that makes our challenge even worse.
So let me get to point one. We can, in fact, work together on a really difficult issue. In late 2006 Terry Fulp (then regional director of the Lower Colorado Basin Region for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation), pulled together six different sciences to consider how a changing climate would impact runoff, to inform the 2007 Interim Guidelines EIS. That effort became Appendix U.
Interestingly, it was the first time climate science was incorporated into a major EIS. It was not particularly controversial, and it was done during a Republican administration. It set the stage for future (Bureau of) Reclamation climate change efforts, efforts that have continued to this day.
But put an asterisk next to that.
The next year (2008), the Water Utility Climate Alliance was formed by eight major national water providers, and four of those were actually in our basin: the San Diego County Water Authority, Denver Water, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, and Southern Nevada Water Authority.
Members have led the way in figuring out how to adapt to climate change, including hiring certain staff to deal with this. And a hat tip for this to both Jim (Lochhead, former CEO of Denver Water) and Bill Hasencamp (Colorado River resources manager for Metropolitan).
Let me mention Reclamation again, because in 2009 Mike Connor, as a congressional staffer, wrote the SECURE Water Act, which made Reclamation perform a series of continuing climate change studies that are important to this day.
The lesson here is that when faced with such a daunting and unknown challenge, we actually can come together to discover scientific truths, but we need both federal and basic leadership to make this happen. Unfortunately, right now, one leg of this is seriously threatened, hence my asterisk.
My second point is about our awful moment, our global climate change trajectory. Hold on to your seats, because Iโm going to make you uncomfortable. The world is on track for 3 degrees Celsius warming by 2100. This far exceeds anything agreed to by the 2015 Paris Climate Accords. And frankly, terrifies scientists. Three Celsius is a projected average global warming, but over land, thatโs 5 Celsius. Converted into Fahrenheit, itโs nine Fahrenheit. Imagine every day, 9 Fahrenheit warmer. Highs, 9 Fahrenheit warmer. Lows, 9 Fahrenheit warmer. Thatโs a world unlike anything we currently know, and itโs going to challenge us all on every front.
And whatโs worse about this, and not particularly appreciated, is that to get to 3 Celsius, we need large global greenhouse emissions to continue through this century to 2100. So, it will continue to warm significantly beyond 2100. Nine Fahrenheit is not where we end up. Itโs kind of where we start.
This 3 Celsius outcome has been has been obvious for at least five years, as climate policy progress has stalled and even gone backwards. You know, post-Paris in 2015 there were all kinds of great net-zero by 2050 pledges by government and industry, including the fossil fuel industry.
But since then, the fossil fuel industry is trying to have it both ways. They love to tout these goals while at the same time talking to the shareholders about how theyโre going to expand production in ways that are completely incompatible with 2 Celsius. And there are about 25 large, mostly national oil companies that are living this lie. Each one thinks theyโre going to be the last one standing, selling a product thatโs fundamentally incompatible with a stable climate. [ed. emphasis mine]
If you think weโve got plenty of time to solve this, like 75 years, normally, Iโd agree with you. But think about whatโs happened over the past 35 years. Emissions have gone up 60% and continue to rise. With these bad actors and with banks willing to finance this and governments willing to subsidize it, what weโre witnessing is a monumental failure of both capitalism and governance.
Now, if this werenโt all bad enough for you, we now have an anti-knowledge president and his vile enablers systematically attacking all forms of knowledge using illegal and unconstitutional tactics. Nowhere has this been more true than in this climate science space, where theyโre going after anything and everything that has the word climate on it, every federal agency.
Iโll mention three here in our basin that are really critical: NOAA, the USGS and Reclamation. All of that climate work is in the sights of these vile enablers and the administration. Hence that nasty asterisk again. This administration aims to stop all work at preventing future greenhouse gas emissions as well as our ability to adapt to coming changes.
And 95% of what I can say on this panel about this is not suitable for this room, but letโs call it what it is: itโs insanity what theyโre doing.
There are also recent, strong signs that climate warming is speeding up. So 2023 and 2024 were 1.5 Celsius above a pre-Industrial average. And there, those two years have a trend line thatโs twice what weโre used to seeing, and it has climate scientists flummoxed about the reasons behind it.
So why talk about global climate issues in a conference about the Colorado River? Well, it should be obvious. There is no way this makes for a better world in which we live, a better world in which the Colorado River flows, and if you live in that world, tell me how to join in la-la land, because Iโd love to be there.
Iโm now convinced that we need to plan for the worst possible climate future, and thatโs somewhere around 10 million acre-feet runoff. But what it also means is taking a hard look at every existing agreement in the river. It either breaks them or substantially modifies them.
Let me get to my plea. These facts should be a call to action to everybody. Not only are we in a really deep climate hole, weโre continuing to dig. Absolutely the last thing we need is the federal government undercutting our efforts to meet the water supply challenges in this basin. Thereโs a term called the pessimism aversion trap. Iโm going to urge you not to fall on that. And itโs the tendency to look the other way when confronted with dark realities. We still control our destiny, even if the solutions seem daunting.
So Iโm going to ask for two things. One, obviously, fight back against all these harmful cutbacks to all aspects of our national climate effort, including the abandonment of science and scientists. Our federal allies are critical partners in this fight, and lasting damage has been done.
Second, some of you think that your job description doesnโt include worrying about reducing greenhouse gas emissions or what might happen at 2100 or beyond. I disagree. I plead with you to get serious about figuring out how to reduce the emissions of your organization and even your own personal emissions. I agree that individual actions arenโt going to solve this, but they send a really strong signal to everyone around us.
Finally, I need to apologize to and beg forgiveness our next speaker who deserves to follow someone far nicer than I am.
Chimney Hollow Reservoir Project managers are investigating strategies to mitigate the presence of mineralized uranium that is anticipated to be present in the first fill of the reservoir.
Mineralized uranium was detected in water samples taken from behind the cofferdam at the site following a series of major precipitation events in summer 2023. Further testing through 2024 identified the source of the minerals as being the granitic rock being quarried on the west side of the reservoir for placement in the rockfill shell of the asphalt-core dam. The low-level uranium minerals detected were not anticipated to be the result of leached material at the site.
During dam testing and first fill of the reservoir starting later this summer and continuing through 2027, no releases of water from Chimney Hollow Reservoir are expected. Ongoing monitoring of water quality at the reservoir will help managers develop a mitigation strategy that could include treatment and dilution with the significant sources of other water present in the infrastructure nearby.
As more information becomes available, Northern Water will share it with project participants, partner agencies and the public.
Hidden Valley on National Forest land near Durango, Colorado. This is the type of parcel that could be on the auction block if Sen. Mike Lee gets his way. Photo credit: The Land Desk
It is not hyperbole to say we are living in dark times.
The U.S. President is about to hold a multi-million-dollar, taxpayer-funded, dictator-style military parade โ for his frigging birthday. He activated the national guard and the marines to violently quell non-violent protests in Los Angeles. A U.S. senator was tackled, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed for deigning to ask a question of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during a press conference in which she admitted that federal troops were in Los Angeles not to stop rioting, but to โliberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country.โ Oh โฆ
American democracy, morality, empathy, civil liberties, and the rule of law are all under attack, and the assailants are none other than the President, his administration, and a vast majority of congressional Republicans.
So when Sen. Mike Lee, the Jello-slurping Utah MAGA-ite, proposed selling off a mere one half of one percent of the nationโs public land, it might not seem worth squandering whatever remains of oneโs outrage on. But we โ as in the American people โ stand to lose a lot from this latest push to take public lands out of the publicโs hands.
Lee installed his amendment into the Energy and Natural Resources section of the so-called โBig, Beautiful Bill,โ which proposes to rescind environmental protections on millions of acres in Alaska, slash royalty rates for oil and gas, and revive noncompetitive leasing, among other mining- and drilling-friendly provisions.
Leeโs provision would require the Interior Secretary to โselect for disposal not less than .50% and not more than .75% of Bureau of Management land, and shall dispose of all right, title, and interest of the United States in and to those tractsโ and the Agriculture Secretary shall select for disposal .50% to .75% of National Forest System.โ Lands in national parks, monuments, or conservation areas, wilderness, wildlife refuges, and other protected areas would not be eligible for disposal.
While thatโs a tiny fraction of the nationโs public lands, it adds up to between 2 million and 3.2 million acres, which on the upper end is about equivalent to Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments combined. The amendment would apply to every Western state except Montana, which was probably exempted in the hopes of winning Rep. Ryan Zinkeโs support.
While the amendment is purportedly to free up more land for affordable housing, there is nothing in the text restricting the end use of the land after itโs sold or transferred. It only requires someone nominating a parcel to specify what they plan to use land for and the extent to which development of the tract would address local housing needs (including housing supply and affordability).
It would prioritize tracts for disposal that are:
nominated by states or local governments
adjacent to existing developed areas
have access to existing infrastructure
suitable for residential housing
would reduce checkerboard land patterns
inefficient to manage.
At first glance, this appears relatively harmless: It would merely consolidate private holdings on the urban fringe, and ease the management nightmares of checkerboard land-ownership. But this is where I urge you to think about your favorite public land-adjacent community and consider what might parcels might be prioritized for disposal.
I went through this exercise somewhat inadvertently recently as I rode my bike on a trail through a place known as Hidden Valley on National Forest land north of town. The valley floor is nearly perfectly level, having been carved by a glacier many millennia ago, and bounded on two sides by bone-white sandstone cliffs. Up until the fifth century A.D., Pueblo people inhabited and farmed the valley, and the area continues to hold cultural and archaeological significance. Grass โ green during this time of year โ covers much of the valley. Cattails, nourished by the waters of Falls Creek, jut from the northern end.
Durango folks come up here to walk and seek solace from the din of humanity. They walk and bike and in the winter even ski and snowshoe here and coexist โ sometimes uneasily โ with bears and mountain lions and deer and elk and even rattlesnakes.
That this tract of public land would be sold off for development is almost unthinkable. And yet, it fits all of the criteria: It is just a few miles from town, is sandwiched between existing residential areas, is easily accessible and quite buildable, and infrastructure is already in place. Durango is grappling with a severe housing affordability crisis and Hidden Valley could theoretically support hundreds of housing units, alleviating some pressure on the real estate market. Unthinkable to you and I, yes. But keep in mind that it would be the Trump administration calling the shots on this one.
There are hundreds of other Hidden Valley-like tracts of land across the West, pieces of public land near communities that provide all kinds of benefits to wildlife and humans and the ecosystem and solitude. And if Mike Lee has his way, 3 million acres of these special places would go on the auction block, ultimately to be covered with homes, affordable or otherwise, and other development.
Fascinating observation from Jim Lochhead this morning at the Getches-Wilkinson Center Colorado River Conference about the nature of the current negotiations and the role of the federal government. It came during a panel moderated by Anne Castle focused on what we learned from the expiring 2007 river management guidelines, which are the subject of intense renegotiation among the seven basin states.
From the perspective of the panelโs charge โ what have we learned since the 2007 agreements โ the way I phrased that, the the way the current process is going, should seem weird to us: โintense negotiation among the seven basin states.โ
According to Lochhead, a Coloradan who was in the room for the โ07 negotiations, the current cloistered seven-state process is very different from what happened leading up to the โ07 agreement. In 2007, Lochhead explained, the states werenโt the decision maker, the federal government was the decision maker, playing a much more active role as facilitator compared to the current process, which has deferred to the states to come up with a deal.
This is not going well. At least I think itโs not going well. Who knows? Lochhead likened it to the selection of a pope, as we all await the puff of smoke. โThe current process seems to me to be like the conclave.โ
In my gossip network, Iโve heard good things about the current role being played by Scott Cameron, the Trump Administrationโs point person on this stuff. We will hear from him tomorrow. I look forward to that.
Other stuff from the morning sessions
Weirdly, after driving all the way to Colorado for the meeting, I spent the morning in my hotel room on Zoom โ a bit under the weather, not feeling up to the social battery drain of all those people, saving energy for tomorrow when Iโm moderating the closing panel. But what I lost in social capital construction and maintenance, I made up for in being able to focus on the talks. Among them.
Brad Udall, our modern-day E.C. LaRue, was pretty frank about the climate change trajectory, arguing that we need to prepare for a 10 million acre foot river. For those not steeped in the numbers, thatโs not very much water. The current climate trajectory, Brad said, is โbeyond awful.โ
Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis from the Gila River Indian Community argued that enduring solutions to the Colorado Riverโs problems will require federal financial help.
A couple of useful nuggets from my Bill Hasencamp of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. One: Bill talked about a really interesting analysis his team has done of the Intentionally Created Surplus Program, which concludes that there is a lot more water in the reservoirs right now, including in Lake Powell, than would otherwise be the case. Theyโve briefed me on their analysis and shared the report with me, I just havenโt had the time to write about it yet, itโs super interesting.
Bill also talked about the weird state of the current state negotiations. One on one, people say theyโre interested in compromise, in finding an agreement. In the negotiating room, they stick to hard line positions. This circles back nicely to Lochheadโs point that last time around, this was a federal process, not a state-run process.
Anne Castle made an incredibly important point about the challenges face by the stateโs negotiators. They are sent into the room to advocate for their stateโs water supplies. They need permission from their constituents to compromise, to be able and willing to give up some water in order in the interests of the good of the basin.
The Getches-Wilkinson Center is pleased to announce the publication of a thought-provoking article, โFacilitating a Green Future? Permitting Reforms and Renewables on Public Lands,โ co-authored by Chris Winter, Executive Director of the Getches-Wilkinson Center, and Obie Johnson, a Colorado Law student and Wyss Scholar.
The piece was featured as the lead article in the spring 2025 issue of the American Bar Associationโs Natural Resources & Environment journal and explores recent federal permitting reforms aimed at expanding renewable energy development on federal public lands. In recent years, the United States has accelerated its transition to a clean energy future, increasing the demand for new wind, solar, and transmission infrastructure. The article discusses many of the legal and policy initiatives spearheaded by the Biden Administration to facilitate the development of clean energy infrastructure on public lands.
Winter and Johnson highlight the tension between the development of clean energy infrastructure and the need to protect wildlife habitat and other natural resource values. They evaluate recent permitting reforms implemented under the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act and highlight how these new policies attempt to balance these important objectives across federal public lands.
Since the article was written, a new Administration that is less supportive of clean energy and conservation has taken office, prompting rapid changes to the legal and policy landscape. Despite these political dynamics, the long-term market trends still favor clean energy, though the full impacts of the Administrationโs new policy agenda remain uncertain.
This publication reflects the GWCโs ongoing commitment to supporting scholarship and policy work that addresses the most pressing challenges in natural resources, energy, and environmental law. We are especially proud to highlight the contributions of student co-author Obie Johnson, whose work as a Wyss Scholar exemplifies the next generation of leadership in land conservation. The Wyss Scholars Program at Colorado Law School is made possible by the generous support and partnership of the Wyss Foundation.
The Middle Colorado Watershed Council presented to Rifle City Council during the June 4 meeting for their plans on the restoration of Rifle Creek. The watershed is facing multiple challenges, including overallocation, ecological stress, aging irrigation infrastructure, salinity and natural contaminants, and growing pressure from climate-related threats like prolonged drought and wildfire risk.
โWeโve got some invasive species issuesโฆthe creek is creating a deeper channel because thereโs no meandering and thereโs nothing stopping it from racing towards the Colorado River,โ said Wes Collins, director of restoration services at EcoPoint. โWith some love, with some care, it can be a centerpiece for a lot of folks to enjoy, as well as create educational opportunities for our kids here in town.โ
Kate Collins, executive director of the Middle Colorado Watershed Council, described the groupโs Rifle Creek Master Plan for Resilience, which covers a 6.5-mile stretch from Rifle Gap Reservoir to the Colorado River confluence…The Middle Colorado Watershed Council is focusing on infrastructure upgrades, habitat restoration and monitoring water quality and flows to get the Rifle Creek watershed back to being healthy. This Resilience Plan aligns with Coloradoโs Water Plan, supporting robust agriculture, thriving watersheds and the environment and fish passage among many other alignments, while also supporting Rifle community values through recreation, environment, agriculture and more…nitial projects include the Middle Colorado Watershed Council will be at Centennial Park, Deerfield Park, the Re-2 School District property, Government Creek, Grand Tunnel Ditch, the golf course and the Wisdom Ditch Outtake. Proposed improvements range from step pools and invasive species removal to flume replacement. These projects will hopefully lead to better instream flow, water quality, healthy vegetation, vibrant agriculture and crop production, public access and wildlife and fish migration.ย
Click the link to read the article on the NOAA website (Emily Becker):
June 12, 2025
The Pacific Ocean has hit pause and settled into ENSO-neutral conditions, which are expected to continue through the Northern Hemisphere summer. This makes seasonal forecasting for upcoming global rain, temperature, and other patterns a bit trickier.
The odds of La Niรฑa increase through the fall but remain lower than the odds of neutral. By the NovemberโJanuary period, thereโs a 48% chance of neutral and a 41% chance of La Niรฑa, with El Niรฑo a distant third. Grab your towel, today weโre touring the galaxy of ENSO-neutral and what it means for seasonal prediction.
The story so far: what ENSO is, and why it matters
El Niรฑo and La Niรฑa, known collectively as the El Niรฑo/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), are a system of changes in the tropical Pacific Ocean and atmosphere. El Niรฑo and La Niรฑa alter global atmospheric circulation and the jet streams, affecting weather patterns around the world. El Niรฑo and La Niรฑa can often be predicted many months in advance, giving us an early heads-up for their impacts. ENSO-neutral conditions are in place when neither El Niรฑo nor La Niรฑa are present, and the tropical Pacific Ocean and atmosphere are close to the long-term average temperature and circulation.
El Niรฑo and La Niรฑa have expected impacts on global seasonal weather and climate, but what about neutral? ENSO-neutral doesnโt mean we expect upcoming seasonal rain, snow, and temperature to be close to average. Rather, during neutral, we donโt have the same predictive information that El Niรฑo and La Niรฑaโs atmospheric changes provide, making upcoming patterns harder to predict very far in advance.
The restaurant at the end of the universe: whatโs happening in the Pacific right now
Our primary ENSO measurement, the temperature of the Pacific Ocean surface in the central tropical Niรฑo-3.4 region, has been near average for the past few months, following last winterโs dip below the La Niรฑa horizon. According to our most reliable sea surface temperature dataset, the Niรฑo-3.4 region was 0.2ยฐC (about 0.4ยฐF) cooler than the long-term average in May.
The restaurant at the end of the universe: whatโs happening in the Pacific right now
Our primary ENSO measurement, the temperature of the Pacific Ocean surface in the central tropical Niรฑo-3.4 region, has been near average for the past few months, following last winterโs dip below the La Niรฑa horizon. According to our most reliable sea surface temperature dataset, the Niรฑo-3.4 region was 0.2ยฐC (about 0.4ยฐF) cooler than the long-term average in May.
The atmospheric circulation over the tropical Pacific also has looked mostly neutral. This overturning pattern, called the Walker circulation, is characterized by rising air over the far western Pacific and Indonesia, west-to-east winds aloft, sinking air over the eastern Pacific, and the east-to-west trade winds near the surface. During La Niรฑa, the Walker circulation strengthens, while El Niรฑo weakens it. A few La Niรฑa-ish characteristics are still hanging around, including more rising air and more rainfall than average over Indonesia with some regions of stronger easterly trade winds over the tropical Pacific. Despite those fading, localized signs of La Niรฑa, the ocean-atmosphere system across the Pacific as a whole is neutral.
We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty! What the models say about months ahead
Itโs very likely that ENSO-neutral conditions will remain through the summer. By the fall, chances of La Niรฑa do increase, but they are still lower than the chance for neutral. El Niรฑo is the least likely, with odds of less than 1-in-8.
Out of the three climate possibilitiesโLa Niรฑa, El Niรฑo, and neutralโforecasts say that ENSO-neutral conditions (gray bars) are most likely for the Northern Hemisphere spring and summer. Looking out to the fall, neutral is still the most likely, but chances for either La Niรฑa (blue bars) or El Niรฑo (red bars) are increasing. NOAA Climate Prediction Center image.
This forecast is informed by computer climate models, including those from theย North American Multi-Model Ensemble. We consider lots of climate models, which gives us a range of potential outcomes. Most of these model runs fall into the neutral category through the end of 2025, with some in La Niรฑa, and a few in El Niรฑo, informing our forecast probabilities.
Line graph showing observed and predicted temperatures (black line) in the key ENSO-monitoring region of the tropical Pacific from spring 2025 through the fall. The gray shading shows the range of temperatures predicted by individual models that are part of the North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME, for short). By late summer, the shading spans from El Niรฑo to La Niรฑa, showing the range of potential ENSO states. However, the majority of model forecasts are concentrated in the neutral range, meaning the highest chance is that the temperature in the Niรฑo-3.4 region of the tropical Pacific will be near average. NOAA Climate.gov image, based on data from the IRI.
In addition to the climate models, we study current conditions in the ocean and atmosphere. One valuable source of information is the pattern of water temperature under the surface of the Pacific Ocean. Our colleague, Caihong Wen of NOAAโsย Climate Prediction Center,ย has been studying ENSO oceanic signals for years. She pointed out that there is a very narrow band of slightly warmer-than-average subsurface water near theย thermoclineย along the equator, with large regions of cooler subsurface water to the north and south.
This map shows the temperature pattern under the surface of the tropical Pacific Ocean. The colors show how much deeper (red) or shallower (blue) than average the 20-degree temperature line lies. More warm subsurface water is present where the 20-degree isotherm is deeper than average (red), while cooler water is indicated when the 20-degree line is closer to the surface (blue). There is a narrow strip of warmer subsurface along the equator in the western and central Pacific, flanked by large areas of cooler subsurface to the north and south. In the past, this pattern has preceded second-year La Niรฑa events. Figure by climate.gov based on original from Caihong Wen.
Caihong led some interesting research a few years ago showing that this off-equator subsurface water can provide a source for a developing El Niรฑo or La Niรฑa event. For example, a pattern of cooler subsurface water like weโre seeing now preceded second-year La Niรฑa events in 2008, 2011, and 2017. Itโs not a strong enough relationship for a confident prediction of La Niรฑa, but it may help explain why some of the model forecasts are tilting in a La Niรฑa-ish direction.
Infinite improbability drive
Let me leave you today with a reading selection from our past 11 years of ENSO blogs, since we didn’t get around to it on our birthday last month. Curious about how ENSO helps with predicting tornadoes? Check out these posts from 2017, 2021, and just last month. ENSO influences the hurricane seasonโfind out more in these articles from 2014, 2017, and 2024. Weather and climate extremesโincluding drought, heatwaves, atmospheric rivers, coastal flooding, and the range of daily temperatureโare affected by El Niรฑo and La Niรฑa. Our runaway most popular post was about how ENSO changes snow patterns (read the La Niรฑa follow up post here). We chronicled the strong El Niรฑo events of 2015โ16 and 2023โ24, the endless La Niรฑa of 2020โ23, and had some funalongthe way. Our smart, inquisitive audience, and the relationships weโve formed along the way, make this the best place to be on the internet. Thanks for reading!
Iโm calling it! Spring runoff appears to have peaked on most Western streams โ and almost definitely has done so on the streams in this yearโs Land Desk Super Predict the Peak Contest.
The good news is, the runoff was later and bigger than a lot of folks โ including myself โ predicted it would be. The bad news is that the flows were still downright pathetic compared to other years, even though in most cases the peak snowmelt was supplemented by heavy rain, meaning the runoff numbers donโt necessarily reflect a healthy snow year. Which is to say: The megadrought persists across much of the Western United States, with extreme conditions in the Southwest.
Unfortunately, we had very few entries this year, possibly because these things are really hard to predict. That said, it looks like Andrew High has a winning formula, at least on a few of these stream segments. Here are the winners and their predictions:
Animas:ย Andrew High, 2,710 cfs on May 21.
North Fork:ย Andrew High, 1,260 cfs on June 7.
Rio Grande:ย Jim OโDonnell, 1,150 cfs on May 15.ย
San Miguel:ย B Frank, 692 cfs on May 15.ย
Colorado:ย Andrew High, 13,160 cfs on June 13.
Congratulations, winners! Andrew, B, and Jim, please send me your mailing address and t-shirt size at landdesk@substack.com and Iโll get your prizes in the mail ASAP.
Now, on to the not so happy news. What a difference a year can make. Last year at this time, the West seemed to be on its way to being drought-free, with the exception of New Mexico. Now? Not so much. Itโs looking downright grim for New Mexico, Arizona, and southern Nevada, even though the Las Vegas area received a healthy dose of rain in May.
Source: National Drought Monitor.
And, after a couple years of respite, itโs time once again to start worrying about Lake Powell โ the barometer of the Colorado Riverโs health. Thus far this year, the volume of water flowing into the reservoir has been far lower than last year, which already was below normal. Judging by the runoff patterns so far, it appears as if Juneโs inflows may be even lower than Mayโs. If the rest of June is hot and dry, prompting greater evaporation from the reservoir, it could actually draw reservoir levels down this month during a time when water levels normally would rise.
The black bars show inflow volumes for the 2025 water year compared to the red bars for 2024. Source: USBR.
Normally Lake Powellโs surface level would jump substantially over the next month or so before dropping later in the summer after all of the mountain snowpack has completely melted. While reservoir levels are currently rising, it likely wonโt continue for long. Source: Lake Powell Water-Data
But one of those truths about the West, is that aridification provides no buffer against flooding โ especially flash-flooding. Some hikers found that out the hard way last week when a flash flood ripped down Big Horn Canyon in Utah, stranding them on the opposite side of the arroyo from their vehicle. They called for help and Bureau of Land Management rangers and Garfield County deputies responded and rescued the folks, according to the BLMโs Utah office. The Escalante River nearby jumped from 0 cfs to 1,200 cfs in just minutes around the same time. You can see some video of the flash flooding here: http://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1036784068519285
๐ Data Dump ๐
As long as weโre doing the graphs and charts thing, we might as well check in on that olโ Trumpian โenergy dominanceโ thing. The rig count โ which is a snapshot of the number of rigs actively drilling at any given time โ is the most accurate indicator of the oil and gas industryโs enthusiasm to extract the fossil fuels. And that verve appears to be waning under Trump. The number of rigs operating in the West has dropped since Trump took office, and is down significantly from the most recent peak in 2023 when, yes, Joe Biden was president and was supposedly waging a โwarโ on fossil fuels.
The red and blue shades indicate Republican and Democratic administrations, respectively. Source: Baker Hughes.
Click the link to read the article on the NOAA website:
June 12, 2025
Persistent Snow Drought and Rapid Spring Snowmelt Will Decrease Western Water Supplies and Increase Wildfire Risk
Key Points
Snow drought developed and persisted this winter in pockets of the western U.S., largely driven by lack of precipitation with a lesser role from above-normal temperatures. The most severe conditions have persisted across Arizona and New Mexico into southern Utah and Colorado.
Snowpack has nearly disappeared from monitoring stations across the West asย dry and warm conditions accelerated snowmeltย and early snowpack loss. Snow disappeared early even in areas without widespread snow drought conditions and with above-normal peak snow water equivalent (SWE).
Summer streamflow volume forecasts are lower than normal across the West. The impacts of early season snow drought in some regions and the widespread rapid melt out across the West will challenge water supplies, agriculture, outdoor recreation, and tourism, as well as increaseย wildfire potentialย (see recentย Southwestandย Great Plainsย Drought and Wildfire Outlook webinars for more information).
Widespread snow drought conditions were not apparent in peak snow water equivalent (SWE) values across much of the northern Rocky Mountains. The region had near- to above-median peak SWE, although some SNOTEL stations peaked at 70-89% of median SWE. Most of the areas with below-median peak SWE were along the border of western Montana and eastern Idaho. Despite these conditions, the snowmelt season (April-May) was dry and warm across most of the region, which led to accelerated melt rates and early loss of snowpack. In Montana, snow at 84% of SNOTEL stations (62 locations) melted earlier than the median date. In Idaho, snow at 84% of stations (64 locations) melted early, and in Wyoming, snow at 84% of stations (57 locations) melted early. Snow is still present at some high-elevation stations in the region (about 20% of all stations).
Water Supply Outlook
The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Serviceโs June-July water supply forecasts indicate below-median runoff for the entire northern Rocky Mountain region, with most large river basins expected to receive less than 80% of median flows. Forecasts for the Marias, Salmon, and Upper Snake Basins are among the lowest in the region at 45%, 65%, and 67% of median, respectively. Moderate and Severe Drought (D1โD2) are present throughout the region, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Based on the late onset snow drought conditions, near- to below-median October-May observed runoff, and below-median June-July forecasted runoff, NOAAโs Climate Prediction Center forecasts that drought will persist and develop this summer.
Central and Southern Rocky Mountains
Snow Drought
The central Rocky Mountains (northern Utah and northern Colorado) had near-normal snow accumulation with peak snow water equivalent (SWE) of 85-105% of median at many SNOTEL stations. Snowpack in southern Utah and southern Colorado was much lower. Many locations reported peak SWE of less than 50% of median, and two stations in Utah reported record low peak SWE.
The primary driver of the low snowpack in the southern Rocky Mountains was an extremely dry winter (December-February) with record low precipitation in some areas. Across most of the central and southern Rocky Mountains, snowpack peaked early (1-2 weeks early in many locations) and then melted more quickly than normal (also 1-2 weeks early, or more) in April and May. In Utah, snow at 93% of SNOTEL stations melted earlier than the median date, and in Colorado, snow melted early at 82% of stations.
Water Supply Outlook
Water supply forecasts for central and northern Utah and Colorado indicate below-median June-July flows in three major sub-basins in the Upper Colorado: the Upper Green, Lower Green, and White-Yampa Basins are expected to receive 78%, 63%, and 59% of median runoff, respectively. In southern Utah and Colorado, the outlook is worse, with well-below-median runoff predicted for the Upper San Juan (63% of median), Lower San Juan (38% of median), and Upper Colorado-Dirty Devil (48% of median) Basins.
Low observed and forecast river flows are expected to lead to much-below-normal unregulated inflows into Lake Powell. May observed inflows were 41% of normal. The Colorado Basin River Forecast Center is forecasting 45% of normal (average) seasonal inflows. As of early June, Lake Powell was at 34% of capacity. Moderate to Extreme Drought (D1-D3) is currently widespread throughout western Colorado and most of Utah. Drought conditions are expected to persist and likely intensify throughout summer due to low snowpack and seasonal runoff.
New Mexico and Arizona Water Year Snow Drought Summary
Snow Drought
Arizona and New Mexico, along with southern Utah and Colorado, faced severe snow drought conditions this year with peak snow water equivalent (SWE) of less than 50% of median at most SNOTEL stations. Four stations in Arizona and four stations in New Mexico reported record low peak SWE. Peak SWE at some locations in central Arizona and northern New Mexico was 50-89% of median, but no station reported above 89% of median peak SWE.
Winter was extremely dry. Record low precipitation in many locations, likely influenced by a weak La Niรฑa event, led to little snow accumulation and persistent snow drought conditions throughout the season. March storms brought the greatest snow accumulation of the season and some relief to part of Arizona. The March storms led to snow melting later than normal; however, these same locations had little to no snow on the ground for most of winter. In New Mexico, all but one SNOTEL station with at least 20 years of recorded observations were snow free at least two weeks earlier than the median date. This is due to the combined impacts of a dry winter, early peak SWE, and rapid spring snowmelt.
Water Supply Outlook
Observed October-May flows in eastern New Mexico in the Upper Pecos and Upper Canadian Basins were 144% and 95% of median, respectively. Water year flows in the Upper Rio Grande and Rio Grande-Elephant Butte Basins in western New Mexico were much lower, at 59% and 42% of median, respectively. Seasonal water supply forecasts indicate much-below-normal seasonal volumes for all of New Mexico, with many locations forecast to receive less than 25% of median flows. In Arizona, observed October-May flows were extremely low in the Little Colorado (12% of median), Salt (15% of median), and Verde (40% of median) Basins.
The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) June-July runoff forecast for the Lower Colorado-Lake Mead Basin is just 48% of median. Lake Mead is currently at 31% of capacity. The lake level is lower than this time last year, but not at the record low levels set in 2022. On May 22, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, signed an executive order declaring a state of emergency due to persistent and severe drought and escalating fire risk across the state. In late May, the Navajo Nation issued a Declaration of a Drought Emergency across tribal lands in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. The U.S. Drought Monitor indicates that drought is currently widespread in both Arizona and New Mexico, with several areas of Extreme and Exceptional Drought (D3-D4). Drought conditions are expected to persist and intensify throughout summer.
Oregon and Washington Water Year Snow Drought Summary
Snow Drought
Snow drought developed early in the season and persisted throughout the year, especially along the west slope of the Washington Cascade Range, where many SNOTEL stations reported peak snow water equivalent (SWE) of 50-69% of median. A handful of sites there reported less than 50% of median peak SWE.
Low precipitation was the main driver of the low snowpack in Washington, with some stations in the Washington Cascades reporting water year precipitation below the 15th percentile of historical conditions. Some isolated, lower-elevation locations on the west slope of the northern Oregon Cascade Range also experienced snow drought conditions this year, mainly due to warmer-than-normal spring temperatures. The southern Oregon Cascade Range and the Blue and Steens Mountains in Oregon were in a narrow wet corridor that received much-above-median water year precipitation and peak SWE greater than 150% of median. Snow melted more than two weeks earlier than the median date at 19 stations in Washington and 10 stations in Oregon.
Water Supply Outlook
Below normal June-July runoff is forecast for all basins in Washington, from 63% of median in the Lower Snake to 87% of median in the Lower Columbia. Washington issued a drought emergency in April for the Yakima Basin watersheds due to low snowpack, low runoff, and persistent drought over the past several years. This drought emergency was expanded in early June to 19 other watersheds in the Puget Sound and Central Washington regions.
Water supply forecasts are more optimistic in Oregon, with several central and southern Oregon basins expected to receive above-median runoff. Some basins in northern Oregon are forecast to receive below-median runoff during June and July, including the Middle Columbia (75% of median), Willamette (78% of median), and John Day (85%) Basins. The Washington and northern Oregon Cascade Range is currently in Moderate Drought (D1), and the Climate Prediction Centerโs seasonal drought outlook indicates further drought development throughout summer is likely in other parts of northern and western Oregon.
California and Nevada Water Year Snow Drought Summary
Snow Drought
In California and far western Nevada (Lake Tahoe Basin), snowpack generally peaked above median in the north (Trinity Alps, Cascade Range, and Sierra Nevada), near median in the central Sierra Nevada, and near- to below-median in the southern Sierra Nevada. A few lower-elevation stations in the central Sierra Nevada and along the west slope of the southern Sierra Nevada reported peak snow water equivalent (SWE) of less than 70% of median, but snow drought concerns were fairly limited in California this winter. Similar to other regions across the West, April-May in California and Nevada was generally dry and warm, which led to rapid snowmelt and snow disappearing early even in locations that received above-normal peak SWE.
In northeast Nevada, peak SWE was generally above normal, with most stations reporting 110% to greater than 150% of median SWE. Peak SWE was closer to normal in central Nevada and below-normal in east-central Nevada near the Utah border. The Spring Mountains in southern Nevada received very little snow during most of the winter. Though some snow fell in the Spring Mountains in late February into March, overall snowpack was much-below-normal in that mountain range.
Water Supply Outlook
USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) June-July forecasts indicate runoff in the eastern Sierra Nevada is expected to be 119%, 82%, and 79% of median in the Truckee, Walker, and Carson River Basins, respectively. The California-Nevada River Forecast Center seasonal water supply forecasts indicate above-normal runoff elsewhere in California, except in parts of the central Sierra Nevada, where 80-90% of median runoff is forecast.
Nearly all of the major reservoirs in California are currently above the historical average water levels, which should help limit major surface water supply concerns this summer despite below-normal runoff forecast for parts of the Sierra Nevada. NRCS runoff forecasts for the three large basins in NevadaโCentral Nevada Desert, Humboldt, and Black Rock Desertโare 90%, 75%, and 75% of median, respectively.
Currently, drought persists in southern California and central and southern Nevada. Extreme and Exceptional Drought (D3-D4) conditions are present only in large desert areas of southern California and Nevada that are largely disconnected from the seasonal snowpacks in the Sierra Nevada and northeast Nevada. The Climate Prediction Centerโs seasonal drought outlook indicates that further drought development is likely throughout summer in parts of central California and far northwest Nevada.
Alaska Water Year Snow Drought Summary
Snow Drought
In South Central Alaska, peak snow water equivalent (SWE) was variable and highly dependent on elevation, especially in the coastal mountain ranges. Winter precipitation was above normal for the region, but winter mean temperatures were very warm (5-7 ยฐF above normal), which led to more rainfall and less snow at lower elevations. Higher-elevation SNOTEL stations in South Central Alaska had peak SWE around 90-120% of median. Most of the lower-elevation stations had peak SWE around 60% of median.
Port Graham, on the southwest tip of the Kenai Peninsula, sits at 270 feet in elevation and reported peak SWE of just 19% of median despite above-normal winter precipitation. Snow melted about one to two weeks early at lower elevations in South Central Alaska. SNOTEL stations in the Fairbanks region reported peak SWE of 99-167% of median. Winter temperatures were well above normal, but the interior climate in the Fairbanks region is much colder than in coastal regions, which supported abundant snowfall at all elevations. The U.S. Drought Monitor currently shows a small area of Abnormally Dry (D0) conditions in South Central Alaska.
Low Water Year Precipitation Totals Drove Western Snow Drought
Water year to date (June 8, 2025) precipitation percentiles based on the period of record for each station. Only stations with at least 20 years of data are included in the station percentiles. Red indicates precipitation below the 15th percentile, orange/yellow between the 15th to 42nd percentiles, green/light blue the 43rd to 84th percentiles, and dark blue at or above the 85th percentile. For an interactive version of this map, please visit the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). Source: USDA NRCS.
Earlier than Normal Snowmelt Across the West
Snow Telemetry (SNOTEL) snow water equivalent (SWE) date of water year melt out for Water Year 2025, compared to the median melt out date. Only stations with at least 20 years of data are included. Blue indicates later than normal melt out, whereas yellow, orange, and red indicate earlier than normal melt out. For an interactive version of this map, please visit the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). Source: USDA NRCS.
Low JuneโJuly Streamflow Volume Forecasts Across the West
JuneโJuly streamflow forecast volume (50% exceedance probability; equivalent to the median value) for watersheds in the western U.S. Streamflow forecast volume is shown as a percentage of the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) 1991โ2020 median. This map is valid as of June 1, 2025. For an interactive version of this map, please visit NRCS.
The Yampa River Environmental Release Program is a collaboration between several local and state entities to ensure the Yampa River remains at a healthy flow and water temperature. Three of the main partners are the Colorado Water Trust, the city of Steamboat Springs and Friends of the Yampa. Friends of the Yampa is essentially the managing body for the finances of the Yampa River Fund, which provides necessary money for ideal water flow into the Yampa. Mike Robertson, the Yampa River Fund manager, explained the fund is a committee made up of groups throughout the Yampa Valley that help allocate and provide a sustainable funding source for flow releases. The money is held with Yampa Valley Community Foundation, which doles out the grants, while Friends of the Yampa acts as the managing entity. Each year, the Yampa River Fund provides about half of the money Colorado Water Trust needs to lease water from Stagecoach and Elkhead reservoirs. According to Blake Mamich, programs director at the Colorado Water Trust, the other half of the funding comes from the Colorado Water Conservation Board. The financial support of these two groups is crucial to the success of the release program in keeping the Yampa River at a safe temperature and flow rate for its ecosystem…
The Colorado Water Trust is set to release 5,100 acre feet from Stagecoach Reservoir in addition to 2,000 acre feet from Elkhead Reservoir over the course of this summer. This water will be released during times when the river is considered to be at a low flow…This water is not released all at once but must be stretched out and conserved to ensure that there is enough to sustain the Yampa during its critical period in late summer and early fall. Mamich noted that during this time, about half the water that runs through downtown Steamboat originates from Stagecoach.ย Factors that determine low-flow status are measured by the city. These criteria are primarily water temperature and water flow. According to city municipal code, recreational activity is closed if any or all of these conditions are met: the Yampa River flow drops below 85 cubic feet per second, the dissolved oxygen level average is less than 6 milligrams per liter and/or the water exceeds 75 degrees Fahrenheit for two or more consecutive days.ย
Black Canyon National Park July 2020. Photo credit: Claire Codling/The Department of Interior
From email from Reclamation (Conor Felletter):
On Monday, June 16th, the scheduled releases from Crystal Dam will decrease to 1,400 cfs. This release change is intended to conserve water amidst the increasingly hot & dry conditions in the Gunnison basin while downstream tributaries are still providing enough water to keep the lower Gunnison River above the baseflow target.
Gunnison River flows (Black Canyon/Gunnison Gorge) are currently 520 cfs and will decrease to ~420 cfs.
Releases are made for the authorized purposes of the Aspinall Unit, and to attempt to maintain a target base flow through the endangered fish critical habitat reach of the Gunnison (near Whitewater). Future release changes are subject to changes in river flows and weather conditions.
Colorado River Basin reservoir storage. Credit: InkStain.net
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain.net website (Jack Schmidt and John Fleck):
June 1, 2025
We now begin June, when the Colorado Riverโs two largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, should be swelling with melting snow for use later this year and beyond, but that is not happening. Although Lake Powell is our reservoir and Lake Mead is theirs (or vice versa), the two reservoirs are effectively one very large facility located downstream from Upper Basin consumptive users and upstream from Lower Basin users. At least 60% of the total storage in 46 reservoirs tracked by Reclamation is in Lake Powell and Lake Mead. The total contents of the two reservoirs have been steadily declining since early July 2024 and continued to decline through at least 31 May 2025. Never in the past 15 years has the decline in total storage of Powell and Mead extended so late into spring. Current reservoir storage data are showing us, in real time, an ominous pattern familiar from past dry years: upstream use of water before it has a chance to get to Lake Powell combined with releases from Lake Mead to users further downstream is outpacing the melting snowpackโs ability to replenish the two reservoirs.
While the normal tools we use for measuring and managing use of Colorado River water โ the Consumptive Uses and Losses Reports and the Lower Basin decree accounting reports โ lag by weeks or even years, reservoir storage, which is the net difference between stream flow into reservoirs and what is released downstream or is lost to evaporation, provides the closest thing we have to an accurate, real-time measure of the Colorado River basinโs water budget. Right now, we are not doing well.
The duration of time this year during which total storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead has declined is unprecedented in the past 15 years. In a typical year, the steady decrease in the combined contents of Powell and Mead that begins the preceding summer ends in early May when Rocky Mountain snowmelt becomes significant. However, inflows to Lake Powell this year have yet to exceed releases from Lake Mead , and the total contents continue to decline, suggesting that this yearโs recovery in storage will be minimal.
Data from other years also suggests that reservoir recovery this year will be relatively small. This year, total unregulated inflow to Lake Powell is predicted to be 55% of normal. Based on past trends, net increase in total reservoir storage of the 46 reservoirs tracked by Reclamation will be ~1.2 million acre feet (af). By July, we are likely to resume draw down the basinโs reservoirs until the 2026 snowmelt season begins.
Presently, storage in the watershedโs reservoirs is comparable to conditions in late summer and fall 2021 when water managers expressed significant concern. The very wet conditions of 2023 averted a major crisis, but the system remains depleted. In 2024, total basin reservoir storage climbed by 2.5 million af, but subsequent drawdown of those reservoirs was 3.6 million af during the following 10 months. Although the net difference between reservoir gain and subsequent drawdown of 1.1 million af might be considered โbalancedโ in the context of the last 15 years, there is no question that we have begun to mine the bounty of 2023, and we are likely to continue to do so until at least spring 2026 unless we greatly reduce consumptive uses.
For too long, we have hoped that big wet years will occur with sufficient frequency to avert true crisis, but there have been too few of those wet years during the 21st century. Only three of the last 15 years have been sufficiently wet to result in a significant increase in reservoir storage given the magnitude of the basinโs consumptive uses. We canโt continue with a water management policy that hopes for another wet year. The basinโs water managers have no choice but to further reduce consumptive uses to sustainably manage the dwindling water supply.
In response to a previously posted mini-white paper on reservoir storage, a supportive friend commented, โNobody cares.โ Another friend said, โI donโt see how we can get agreement about recovering storage. Letโs hope for more wet years.โ We should care, and we need to try harder.
These mini-white papers seek to demonstrate that reservoir storage data, analyzed in aggregate, provide timely and accurate data relevant to understanding the reliability and security of the Colorado Riverโs water supply. These data are more precise, accurate, and timely than estimates of natural runoff, reservoir inflow, consumptive uses, or evaporation. Reservoir storage data provided by Reclamation are a significant contribution to transparency in water management. However, these data are under-utilized and under-analyzed and are typically reported without long-term context. We can do better.
These data can be used to develop an excellent correlation between April-July unregulated inflow to Lake Powell, forecast by the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center, and anticipated increase in basin-wide storage. Such an analysis strongly indicates that the 2025 snowmelt runoff will yield only a small increase in basin storage and necessitate greater reductions in consumptive use so as to better position the basinโs water users should next year also be dry.
In May 2022, a couple paused at once had been the bottom of the boat put-in ramp in Antelope Canyon to lok down on the receding waters of Lake Powell. The reservoir at that point was 22% full. Photo/Allen Best
ย Almost 300 water wonks converged on Boulder Thursday [June 3, 2025] for two days of sobering conversations about the riverโs future punctuated by frustration, pleas for creative solutions and references to everything from the musician Lizzo to the kids movie โFrozen.โ
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
The Colorado River Basin is in dire straits: The water supply for 40 million people has been dwindling, and climatologists say the climate future is bleak. State officials have spent months mired in thorny negotiations over things like how to split painful water cuts in the driest conditions โ with scant progress to report publicly. The lack of progress and insight into the talks had some conference-goers feeling frustrated. Concerned. Uncertain.
High-ranking federal officials joined the Boulder event to reassert the federal governmentโs frequent role in talks over the Colorado Riverโs future: The parent ready to stop the car if the kids canโt stop fighting.
In the event that the states canโt agree on how to manage the riverโs reservoirs and water supply in a timely fashion, Department of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is ready to wield his federal authority over reservoirs, water contracts and more in the basin.
โHeโs not looking forward to that, but in the absence of a seven-state agreement, he will do it,โ Scott Cameron, the Department of the Interiorโs acting assistant secretary for water and science, said Friday at the 45th annual Conference on the Colorado River at the University of Coloradoโs Getches-Wilkinson Center.
The basinโs task is to submit a joint management proposal to the federal government for analysis. For months, however, theyโve been stuck working on separate ideas for how to manage the river.
Upper Basin states โ Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming โ are on one side, and Lower Basin states โ Arizona, California and Nevada โ on the other. The 30 tribal nations in the basin are advocating for their individual needs, as is Mexico.
Notably, the top state negotiators, except Californiaโs, skipped the Boulder conference this year, unlike in the past.
The Interior Department will analyze a joint basin proposal as part of a larger process to select draft alternatives and then settle on a final plan.
The final plan could determine everything from how key reservoirs store and release water to who takes cuts in dry years and how environments, like the Grand Canyon, will be impacted for years to come. It will impact water supplies for cities, like Denver, Phoenix and Los Angeles, ecosystems, a multibillion-dollar agricultural industry, hydroelectric power and more.
โThe time for action is now,โ Cameron told the gathering in a speech. โWe do not have a lot of time to waste, people.โ
Mounting challenges and a bleak climate future
The Bureau of Reclamation plans to release a draft outlining management options by the end of 2025 with a final plan in place by early summer 2026, Cameron said.
But the negotiating challenges are significant. State officials face the political problem of bringing home a deal that includes water cuts. Policymakers distrust each other. Anxious water users are nixing ideas before they have time to grow into policy solutions.
L. to R. Chris Winter, Colby Pelligrino, Chuck Cullom June 4, 2025 during the “Turning Hindsight into Foresight: The Colorado River at a Crossroads” the annual Getches Wilikinson Center/Water & Tribes Initiative shindig in Boulder.
We have to let people develop their ideas, said Colby Pellegrino with the Southern Nevada Water Authority and part of the Nevada negotiating team.
โWeโve done a really crappy job of that. Everyone in this room,โ she said. โWe need to do more to support the compromise.โ
The basin states are already running behind schedule: In March, Upper Basin officials said the basin states had until May to submit their joint management proposal for federal analysis. But May passed, and nothing happened.
Itโs like watching the Catholic Churchโs secluded conclave to select the next pope, Jim Lochhead, former CEO of Denver Water and state negotiator, said.
โThe smoke is all black right now,โ he said. โIโm not hearing of any major breakthroughs.โ
Thatโs not for lack of effort: The states are meeting twice a month, and theyโre at the negotiating table together.
โWe know that we get the best solutions when the states work together,โ Coloradoโs top negotiator Becky Mitchell said in a prepared statement. (She wasnโt at the conference.) โI am focused on building a broad consensus to address the risks facing the Basin States.โ
One of those risks is a changing climate: The basin, along with the rest of the planet, is facing a โbeyond awfulโ climate future, said Brad Udall, senior research scientist at Colorado State University.
The world is on track to warm by 9 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, and continue warming from there. Itโs a future with even less water to share among the U.S., Mexico and 30 tribal nations โ and an outcome that, frankly, terrifies scientists, Udall said.
โThatโs a world unlike anything we currently know, and itโs going to challenge us all on every front,โ Udall told the gathering.
Searching for a unicorn
While some conference-goers were frustrated, speakers took the opportunity to pull lessons from past interstate negotiations and share their ideas for how to break the deadlock.
Tribal leaders called for continued and increased tribal involvement in the Colorado River talks.
โHonestly, I think if our state representatives are going to sit silent, then we have 30 tribal nations that are ready to take over and make a decision and save our river,โ said Lorelei Cloud, a member of the Southern Ute Indian Tribe bordered by Colorado and chair of the Colorado Water Conservation Board. โWeโve been doing it since time immemorial.โ
Some suggested solutions, like bringing in an external facilitator. Former negotiator and federal official Mike Connor said the states need to seize every olive branch and set aside personal agendas or political legacies. (This is where speakers turned to the โFrozenโ mantra: โLet it go.โ)
Jennifer Pitt of the National Audubon Society said building personal connections has been the key to progress in the past. Many people pushed for states to find creative solutions, like desalting seawater โ a very expensive solution with a relatively small benefit (the equivalent of Lizzoโs tiny, Valentino purse, one water expert said).
โPeople are trying to turn this thing upside down and sideways to find a unicorn,โ Chuck Cullom, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission, said.
Concerns abounded. Lochhead said the basin had a once-in-a-generation influx of federal funding โ and blew it. Reclamationโs staff has been cut, something that Cameron said he was working to address. With shrinking water supplies, the basinโs communities are feeling the impacts of dry conditions more immediately than in the past.
Western Slope water leader Andy Mueller pushed for more information and faster action to help Colorado communities have more time to adapt and come up with water conservation plans.
โI think failure of our negotiators would be to fail to recognize that our hydrology could be just as bad as Brad Udall is predicting, or worse,โ Mueller said.
This week brought sharp weather contrasts across the U.S. The central Plains were 5 to 10 degrees cooler than normal, while the Pacific Northwest was 5 to 10 degrees warmer than average. A broad stretch from Texas through the Midwest to the Northeast received well above-normal rainfall, helping to ease drought conditions, while much of the West, northern High Plains and Florida remained dry, with many areas receiving just 5 to 25 percent of normal precipitation. These patterns led to widespread drought improvements across the High Plains, Midwest, South, and Northeast, particularly from northern Texas to southern Illinois, where 1 to 3 inches of rain reduced short-term dryness. Kansas, Nebraska, and eastern Colorado saw significant gains, while drought worsened in north-central Kansas, northwestern Colorado, and western Wyoming. Southwestern South Dakota and eastern Wyoming also improved. In the Midwest, drought eased in Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan, but degraded in northern Minnesota and eastern Iowa. The Southwest benefited from rare early June rainfall and an unusually wet spring, with Arizona, southern Utah, southern Nevada, and parts of California improving after receiving 4 to 8 times their typical rainfall. New Mexico saw minor improvements in the southeast but stayed dry elsewhere. In the West, drought continued to worsen in Montana, northern Utah, and southeastern Wyoming due to ongoing dryness and low snowpack. Conditions in the Northwest are quickly degrading with well below-normal precipitation. The Southeast had mixed resultsโsouthern Georgia, the Carolinas and northeast Florida, and the Panhandle improved, while southern Florida remained dry. The Northeast continued its gradual recovery with steady rain. Alaska saw no changes, Puerto Rico remained drought-free, and Hawaii experienced mostly minor degradations…
The High Plains experienced a mix of drought improvements and degradations over the past week, driven by rainfall. Kansas saw the most widespread improvements, especially in the southern and eastern regions, where many areas received over two inches of rain, leading to significant one-category upgrades. However, north-central Kansas received less precipitation, and drought conditions there either persisted or worsened. Nebraska also benefited from recent storms, with helpful rainfall improving conditions in the central and southeastern parts of the state, though some areas now show signs of short-term moisture surplus. Colorado had a similar split. While much of the central and eastern regions received beneficial rainfall and saw improvements, the northwestern and southwestern corners remained dry and experienced drought deterioration. Wyoming followed an eastโwest divide as well: rain improved conditions in the central and eastern areas, but the west remained dry, resulting in further degradation. Long-term moisture deficits and below-average snowmelt runoff continue to be a concern across western parts of both Colorado and Wyoming. In South Dakota, the southwest corner received 1 to 3 inches of rain, leading to localized improvement, while the rest of the state remained mostly unchanged. North Dakota saw little change overall, with limited but sufficient moisture keeping conditions stable…
Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending June 10, 2025.
The West saw a mix of drought relief and worsening conditions this past week, with the most notable improvements concentrated in the Southwest due to rare early June rainfall. Parts of western and central Arizona, southern Nevada, and southwestern California received between 1โ2 inches of rain. Even light to moderate amounts made a big impact, leading to broad one-category improvements in drought severity. New Mexicoโs southeastern areas saw some improvement from the same rainfall that led to improvements in Texas. Elsewhere in the West, conditions were less favorable. The Intermountain West, including northern Utah, largely missed recent storms and saw continued drought deterioration. Montana faced some of the worst conditions in the region. Dry weather and below-normal snowpack led to expanding drought across the northwest and central parts of the state, raising concerns as the region enters the warmest part of the year with limited water reserves. The Pacific Northwestโcovering Washington, Oregon, and Idahoโremained relatively stable this week, with no major shifts. However, dryness is quickly appearing across the region, where conditions will need continued monitoring…
In the South, especially in Texas and Oklahoma, heavy rain led to drought improvements in many areas. Northern and central Texas saw improvements, while southern and western Texas only received enough precipitation to lead to one-category improvements along the border of the drought area. Oklahoma received a lot of rain and showed clear signs of recovery. Other southern states like Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee, conditions continue to be stable…
Looking Ahead
Over the next five to seven days, heavy precipitation is expected across several regions. Eastern Texas, southeastern Oklahoma, and Arkansas will experience significant rainfall, which will continue through the Ohio River area and Pennsylvania. The northern Midwest and High Plains are also expected to receive moderate rainfall, with two to four inches expected in parts of northern Minnesota and northeastern Iowa. Nebraska is forecasted to see above-normal precipitation. Meanwhile, the West Coast will miss out on significant rain, with little to no precipitation expected from Washington down through eastern Colorado and New Mexico.
The six to 10 day outlook shows below-normal temperatures in the Pacific Northwest, while above-normal temperatures are expected across the rest of the lower 48 states, Alaska, and Hawaii. The greatest chances for above-normal temperatures are in Utah, Colorado, southern Wyoming, and across the southeast, from southern Louisiana to West Virginia. Above-normal precipitation is more likely in the Pacific Northwest, northern High Plains, upper Midwest, southern Texas, western Louisiana, and many of the Hawaiian Islands. There is a greater likelihood that southern Florida and much of the West is expected to have near- or below-normal precipitation, with the greatest likelihood of below-normal precipitation extending from southeastern Oregon to the Four Corners region.
US Drought Monitor one week change map ending June 10, 2025.
In May, hydrologists forecasted that spring runoff into Lake Powell would be the lowest in years. A month later, the projections have only gotten worse. The Colorado Basin River Forecast Centerย reported on June 1ย that the amount of water expected to flow into Lake Powell between April and July this year will be 45% of average. โAverage,โ in forecasting, refers to the average runoff between 1991 and 2020. The June forecast follows a consistent decline since the start of winter. Hydrologists said in December that Lake Powellโs runoff would be 92% of average. In January, the forecast dropped to 81%, then to 67% in February. The prediction pushed up to 70%ย in March,ย but fell to 55% in May, before dropping to 45% in June.
Jack Schmidt, a watershed sciences professor at Utah State University and director of the Center for Colorado River Studies, and John Fleck, a water professor at the University of New Mexico,ย released a studyย about the state of the Colorado Riverโs largest reservoirs on June 1. They wrote that instead of increasing with spring runoff flows, the amount of water in Lake Powell and Lake Mead has decreased through the end of May.
โNever in the past 15 years has the decline in total storage of Powell and Mead extended so late into spring,โ the study reads.
That decline is the result of chronic overuse, Schmidt and Fleck write, which is โoutpacing the melting snowpackโs ability to replenish the two reservoirs.โ
As the climate warms and theย risk of drought grows, the Eagle River Water & Sanitation District is taking action to protect its most precious resource. In presentations at the 2025 Eagle River Valley State of the River on May 29 and to the Eagle River Water & Sanitation District board on May 22, David Norris, the districtโs director of business operations and Allison Ebbets, the districtโs water conservation manager, laid out the districtโs plan for encouraging its most consumptive customers to lessen their use. The hard truth is that some homes in Eagle County are using way too much water. Nearly 600 individually metered residential accounts โย single-family homes โ used over 30,000 gallons of water for three or more months in 2024. One home used over 1 million gallons of water throughout the year, equivalent to the use of a large hotel.
โWater conservation is crucial,โ Norris said at the State of the River. โWe all need to be a part of this together.โ
[…]
The Eagle River Water & Sanitation District has set a goal to reduce its customersโ overall water use by 400 acre feet by the end of 2026…Since the district began working on the project in 2023 through strategies that include a conservation-focused water rate redesign, an industry standard-focused rate redesign and increased public outreach, its total reduction has been 111 acre feet. That leaves 279 acre feet to reduce to reach the districtโs goal.
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral.com website (Austin Corona). Here’s an excerpt:
June 7, 2025
Key Points (AI assisted summary)
After months of little progress and public battles, negotiators from the seven Colorado River states may have regained their footing toward a shortage-sharing agreement.
Officials say the Trump administration has engaged in the work to complete an agreement, spurring the states to resume talks. Without a deal, the federal government would impose its own plan.
An official said a new agreement could require changes in the bedrock laws that govern the river, suggesting that even the “Law of the River,” a 100-year old management framework, could face scrutiny.
Metaphors about divorce and grief defined an emotional presentation about the Colorado River in Boulder, Colorado, on June 6. Those metaphors, however, did not represent strife or disaster in stalled water negotiations, but apparent progress and the willingness to let go of past ideas and move toward compromise.
“We’ve heard about the stages of grief … about denial and anger and the need to be at bargaining,” said Chuck Cullom, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission. “Well, I believe the basin states are there.”
Officials involved in tense negotiations over how to manage shortages on the Colorado River suggested thatย months of harsh talk and stalematesย have ended and negotiators are exploring new options…Federal officials indicated that even parts of the “Law of the River,” a 100-year-old legal framework that governs Colorado River allocations, could change as a result of the negotiations.
โWe’re trying to pivot to something else and be creative, and we have good engagement on that right now,” said Colby Pellegrino, deputy general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority…While most of the negotiators from the seven Colorado River basin states did not attend the conference at the University of Colorado in Boulder, the speakers who did attend were cautiously optimistic about their chances at making a deal.
Bill Hasencamp with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California speaks at the University of Colorado, Boulder on June 5, 2025. More than 300 Colorado River experts attended, but the region’s top water policymakers skipped the event. Alex Hager/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
June 6, 2025
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
Closed-door negotiations about the future of the Colorado River are at a standstill. The news of the day is that thereโs barely any news. So, when more than 300 water experts got together for an annual conference this week, they had little to do besides wring their hands, listen for crumbs of news, and talk about how they would do things differently if they were on the inside of those negotiations.
โThe current process to me kind of feels like the conclave,โ said Jim Lochhead, who formerly served as Coloradoโs top water negotiator.
Top policymakers caused a stir when they decided to skip the meeting at the University of Colorado, Boulder, withdrawing further into the shadows as tense talks about sharing water appear to be making little progress. The people excluded from those meetings โ scientists, academics, tribal leaders, environmental advocates and others with a stake in the river โ have been left waiting like the masses gathered in St. Peterโs Square.
โWeโre waiting for the black smoke or the white smoke to come out of the seven-state negotiating room,โ said Lochhead, who once served as CEO of Denver Water and now works as an independent consultant.
On the other side of this Colorado River โconclave,โ seven state-appointed negotiators are trying to come up with a new set of rules for sharing water after 2026. Theyโre under pressure to cut back on demand for water because the riverโs supply is shrinking due to climate change. Until they emerge with a new set of rules, farmers, cities and everyone else will be wondering if they will feel the sting of those cuts.
Across the Colorado River basin, those who depend on the riverโs water are making preparations however they can. Cities are spending big on technology that will help stretch out their water supplies if theyโre given less in the future. Tribes are trying to get a more formal role in river negotiations, so future water-sharing policies donโt leave them behind like so many in the past.
Efforts like those have been underway for years now. But in Boulder, as top state negotiators keep their heels firmly planted in incompatible policy positions and an unpredictable federal government has yet to appoint a top official to oversee Colorado River matters, everyone else was left to marinate in the anxiety that will linger until a new set of rules is formed.
Looking to the past
With little information about the future, the talks in Boulder mainly focused on lessons from history.
Some of those lessons were relatively recent. For example, Lochhead pointed to talks ahead of a 2007 plan that saw more than seven people in the negotiating room, including federal government representatives who were able to push the states towards consensus. He said todayโs negotiations would benefit from a similar approach.
Other lessons were more than a century old. Tribal leaders advocated for the presence of Indigenous interests in todayโs talks. Were they included in previous discussions, said Lorelei Cloud, things might be different today.
September 21, 1923, 9:00 a.m. — Colorado River at Lees Ferry. From right bank on line with Klohr’s house and gage house. Old “Dugway” or inclined gage shows to left of gage house. Gage height 11.05′, discharge 27,000 cfs. Lens 16, time =1/25, camera supported. Photo by G.C. Stevens of the USGS. The Colorado River flows past a measuring device at Lee’s Ferry in Arizona on Sept. 21, 1923. Speakers at a recent conference on the Colorado River drew lessons from history to inform the next chapter of water management in the region.. Source: 1921-1937 Surface Water Records File, Colorado R. @ Lees Ferry, Laguna Niguel Federal Records Center, Accession No. 57-78-0006, Box 2 of 2 , Location No. MB053635.
โThe past century has really shown that the exclusion of tribal voices has really led to this crisis that we’re dealing with now in the basin,โ said Cloud, a member of the Southern Ute Tribe and the recently appointed chair of the Colorado Water Conservation Board. โIf we had just honored tribal sovereignty from years back, even from the beginning, we probably would have had serious offers that provided solutions to what we’re dealing with now. We wouldn’t be sitting here talking about hindsight to foresight.โ
Patty Limerick, a historian and author whose work focuses on the American West, also brought lessons from more than a century ago when she told the story of a man named E.C. LaRue.
LaRue was a federal engineer who studied the river in the early 1920s. He urged his higher-ups to be conservative in their estimates about the amount of water in the Colorado River. They largely ignored LaRue, instead signing legal agreements that promised more water than the river, in most years, is able to provide.
If policymakers had listened to LaRue more than a hundred years ago, some say, those who rely on the Colorado River today would not be in such a crisis.
Limerick finished describing LaRueโs tale and posed a question to the room.
โIs there a latter-day counterpart to E.C. LaRue to whom we should be paying attention?โ she asked. โIs that person among us?โ
Another speaker suggested that counterpart might be climate scientist Brad Udall. When he spoke shortly thereafter, his outlook was grim.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
โBeyond awfulโ forecasts
Udall and other scientists have provided a rare, uncomfortable dose of certainty to Colorado River talks: The planet is getting warmer, the Colorado River is losing water, and cutbacks to water demand are unavoidably necessary.
He told the audience to โhold on to [their] seatsโ before describing the climate forecast as โbeyond awful.โ
While his predictions are rarely rosy, Udall struck a more pessimistic tone than previous years, calling out fossil fuel companies and an โanti-knowledge president and his vile enablersโ for attacking science and efforts to gird the nation against the harms of climate change, including water shortages.
โNot only are we in a really deep climate hole,โ he said, โWe’re continuing to dig and absolutely the last thing we need is the federal government undercutting our efforts to meet the water supply challenges in this basin.โ
What the feds said
Those in attendance looking for crumbs of information about negotiations from state leaders were left empty-handed. But one federal representative, perhaps surprisingly, dropped a few tiny ones.
The federal government has stayed relatively tight-lipped on Colorado River matters since Donald Trump returned to the White House. In the administrationโs early days, it paused funding for water conservation and infrastructure projects. It has yet to appoint a new commissioner for the Bureau of Reclamation, the agency which manages dams and reservoirs across the West.
Scott Cameron, the Interior Department’s acting Assistant Secretary for Water and Science, speaks at a conference in Boulder, Colorado on June 6, 2025. He said federal officials are working closely with state negotiators to shape the next chapter of Colorado River management. Alex Hager/KUNC
With that role unfilled, the administrationโs highest-ranking official focused on Colorado River matters is Scott Cameron, a longtime federal official who currently serves as the Department of the Interiorโs acting Assistant Secretary for Water and Science.
Cameron said heโs been meeting with state negotiators roughly โevery other week for the last eight weeksโ after his boss, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, said he wanted the departmentโs leadership to be โpersonally, intensely, and constantlyโ involved in discussions with the seven states. Cameron did, however, say he did not believe the states needed an external moderator to help break their deadlock.
โMy impression is they really want a deal, they really want to find a path forward to working together, and Iโm convinced that theyโre all sincere in that regard,โ he said.
Cameron also said he was โconstantlyโ asking Reclamationโs senior leadership to bolster the agencyโs staff on Colorado River matters as a way to โmitigate any unintended consequences of national level initiatives to reduce overall federal spending.โ
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
This land in Woody Creek is owned by the city of Aspen and is a potential site for a reservoir. On May 30, the city reaffirmed its plans to build water storage with two water court filings. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
The city of Aspen is reaffirming its plans to build reservoirs to store water from Castle and Maroon creeks โ but where they might be built has still not been decided.
On May 30, attorneys for the city filed two applications in water court: a diligence application detailing the actions Aspen has taken toward developing the rights over the past six years and an application to change the original locations of the reservoirs. After a water court process, which saw 10 groups oppose the reservoirs, Aspen in 2019 agreed to modify the rights and move the proposed reservoirs out of Castle and Maroon valleys.
The city has previously identified five potential locations for reservoirs: on land the city owns in Woody Creek; Vagneur Gravel Quarry; and three underground sites โ the Aspen Golf Course, Cozy Point Ranch and Zoline Open Space.
โI think the city would try and prioritize sites that we own already, or those that have larger and contiguous areas and focus on those, but I think a lot of it will come down to the feasibility and constructability, and those sites that might have the least impact as well,โ said Erin Loughlin Molliconi, Aspenโs utilities director.
Aspen has whatโs known as conditional storage rights for up to 8,500 acre-feet of water from Castle and Maroon creeks, which it could store in one or more locations. Conditional water rights allow a water rights owner to save their place in line while they work toward developing the rights.
Since first claiming the rights in 1965, the city every six years filed little-noticed diligence applications to maintain them. But the cityโs 2016 diligence filing brought statements of opposition from 10 parties: the U.S. Forest Service, Pitkin County, American Rivers, Western Resource Advocates, Trout Unlimited, Wilderness Workshop and four private-property owners โ two who owned land in the Maroon Creek Valley and two who owned land in the Castle Creek Valley.
The location of the potential Maroon Creek Reservoir. Photo credit: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
The Maroon Creek Reservoir would have had a dam 155 feet tall and would have held 4,567 acre-feet of water in a pristine location in view of the Maroon Bells. The reservoir would have flooded 85 acres of U.S. Forest Service land, including some in the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness.
The Castle Creek Reservoir would have had a dam 170 feet tall and would have held 9,062 acre-feet of water. The reservoir would have flooded 120 acres on both private and USFS lands, including a small area in the wilderness.
After settling with the opposing parties, Aspenโs total storage rights were winnowed to 8,500 acre-feet, and the city is now required to find a new site or sites to build storage buckets.
Conditional water storage rights that have not yet been developed โ such as Aspenโs โ are held by many cities, water conservancy districts and fossil fuel companies across the Western Slope.
Five new potential reservoir sites
Besides the five previously identified sites where the city might want to move its potential water storage, officials had been seeking to add five new reservoir sites to the change case, but ultimately they did not include them. In a March 28 letter to opposersin the 2016 case, the city requested approval to include Thomas Reservoir, Marolt Open Space, Snowmass Reservoir, Ziegler Reservoir and Wildcat Reservoir in the list of potential locations.
According to the settlements with opposers, the city needs written approval from the opposers to add any new potential reservoir locations, other than the previously identified five (Woody Creek, Vagneur Gravel Quarry, Aspen Golf Course, Cozy Point Ranch and Zoline Open Space). Aspen did not get that approval from all of the opposers for all of the locations before the May 30 water court filing deadline.
โWe can say that some parties did approve of sites,โ Molliconi said. โWe just didnโt get all parties to approve of all sites.โ
Molliconi said the city chose the five additional sites because they already have existing reservoirs or ponds.
โIt would be better to get either a partnership with an existing site or enlarge an existing site,โ Molliconi said.
It is unclear if the city will pursue adding any of the five new sites to a future proposal. In an emailed statement, officials said they would โcontinue to respect and honor the stipulations and conditions of other stakeholders in this process.โ
โThe city intends to maintain site flexibility because we canโt perfectly predict future demands,โ the statement said. โWe feel it is our responsibility to continue analyses and stakeholder conversations for storage given the need for resource resiliency, storage and demand gaps, and other beneficial uses.โ
Bill Hegberg is the association president of Wildcat Ranch, a residential subdivision outside of Snowmass Village. He said he had talked with city officials about including in their plans Wildcat Reservoir, a 1,100-acre-foot lake on Wildcat Creek, a tributary of Snowmass Creek.
โIt doesnโt really work when weโve got a lake thatโs a recreation amenity,โ Hegberg said. โWe arenโt available for that.โ
Aspen officials did not provide additional information on how reservoirs in the Brush Creek and Snowmass Creek drainages could be used to provide water to the city.
Environmental conservation organization American Rivers was one of the opposers Aspen settled with in 2019. Matt Rice, American Riversโ southwest regional director, said the organization couldnโt sign off on the five additional new locations until Aspen provided more information.
โWe canโt in good faith approve Aspenโs very vague plans,โ Rice said. โBut we are not trying to throw up unnecessary roadblocks. They just need to do a little bit more work on that and we can have this discussion in six years, especially if they provide us a longer timeline to get our approval.โ
Every six years, holders of conditional water rights must file whatโs known as a diligence application with the stateโs water court, proving that they still have a need for the water, that they have taken substantial steps toward putting the water to use and that they โcan and willโ eventually use the water. They must essentially prove they are not speculating and hoarding water rights that they wonโt soon use.
According to the water court filings, the city says the following things count as diligence over the past six years: It has spent about $310,000 to investigate the 10 potential reservoir locations; it has spent $300,000 on attorneys fees to โdefendโ its water rights; and it has continued to improve, operate and maintain its water systems that serve Aspen residents.
The Aspen municipal golf course, which sits between Castle and Maroon creeks. The golf course is one potential site the city of Aspen is considering for underground water storage. CREDIT: BRENT GARDNER-SMITH/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Storage is part of Aspenโs Integrated Water Resource Plan, which was completed in 2021and lays out options for meeting increasing water demands in a hotter and drier future. In addition to storage, the IWRP options include nonpotable reuse; groundwater wells; using Hunter Creek as a water source; enhanced water conservation; and drought restrictions.
โI think that [IWRP] is part of the reason why keeping these water rights alive was important, too, for the supply and demand,โ Molliconi said.
According to the plan, which uses estimates of population growth and climate change to make projections 50 years into the future, the worst water shortages could occur in two consecutively dry years and be about 2,300 acre-feet total over the course of both years.
In recent years, Aspen has worked at reducing customersโ water use โ especially outdoor water use โ with increased public outreach, a landscape ordinance, automated metering and tiered water use rates. The city has also stepped up the monitoring of snowpack and streamflow by funding a new SNOTEL site at the headwaters of Castle Creek and Airborne Snow Observatory flights that measure snowpack from planes using light detection and ranging, or lidar.
Steve Hunter, Aspenโs utilities resource manager, said he plans to recommend to City Council on June 10 that the city move into a Stage 1 water shortage declaration, which aims to reduce water use by 10% through voluntary conservation.
Now that the applications are filed, anyone who might want to oppose the cityโs plans has 60 days to file a statement of opposition. The 10 original opposers in the case agreed not to fight the cityโs efforts to move the rights to the five alternative locations for 20 years.
If the cityโs change case is approved, officials would still need land-use and permitting approval to build any eventual new water-storage reservoir and associated infrastructure.
Aspen Journalism is supported by a community nonprofit grant from the city of Aspen.
Aspen Journalism is a nonprofit, investigative news organization covering water, environment, social justice and more. Visit http://aspenjournalism.org.
Perry Cabot, left, and Manny DeLeon hold a 3D-printed Parshall flume that they created to make the water-measurement device more affordable and accessible. Photo credit: Colorado State University
At Colorado State University, innovation doesnโt always start in a state-of-the-art lab. It sometimes begins with a farmer in need, a researcher with a goal and a healthy dose of curiosity. That spirit drives work at the Colorado Water Center, where scientists and collaborators are rethinking how we manage and measure one of our most vital resources.
CSU Extension Professor Perry Cabot, who is jointly appointed through the Colorado Water Center and the Agricultural Experiment Station, is blending historic engineering with cutting-edge technology to make irrigation measurement more affordable and accessible. Cabot and a team of CSU researchers are harnessing the power of large-format 3D printing to revive and reimagine the Parshall flume โ a century-old water measurement device first developed at CSU.
The project was made possible through funding from the Colorado Water Centerโs grant program, which supports applied research projects that address urgent water issues across Colorado.
From legacy to low-cost innovation
The Parshall flume, invented by Ralph Parshall in 1921 at what was then called Colorado Agricultural College, remains one of the best methods for measuring water in open channels like irrigation ditches. Its distinctive shape slows and constricts the water as it flows through, making it possible to calculate the flow rate, or how much water is flowing through per second, by measuring the height of the water at a specific point in the flume. The flow rate is multiplied by the amount of time the water flows through the flume to calculate the amount of water. This information is essential for tracking and managing water used for irrigation, especially in regions where every drop counts.
โThe genius of the flume is in the geometry,โ Cabot said. โWe can convert the height of the water in the flume into flow without needing fancy instruments, which is precisely why it has stood the test of time.โ
Farmers can use flume data to schedule precise watering, reduce excess runoff and document their water use to meet regulatory requirements. By knowing the exact flow rate, a farmer can match irrigation timing and volume to crop needs more accurately. This minimizes the risk of overwatering, which wastes both water and energy, and reduces the risk of nutrient runoff. Over the course of a growing season, this kind of precision can lead to better harvests, lower costs and more sustainable use of limited water supplies.
However, traditional flumes are expensive, often ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars, depending on size, and they are cumbersome to ship. For many farmers, researchers and conservation districts, the cost alone can be a barrier to access.
At left, a small 3D-printed Parshall flume inside the printer. At right, a larger version of a 3D-printed Parshall flume in action. Photo credit: Colorado State University
โWe measure what we value, and we value water, but itโs a resource thatโs increasingly difficult to put a clear, consistent price on,โ said Cabot. โThat lack of clarity makes it harder to justify costs associated with industrial tools like Parshall flumes.โ
โInstead of buying an expensive, prefabricated flume, 3D printing allows us to create and sell Parshall flumes at a much more affordable rate,โ Cabot said.
Manny DeLeon, a CSU researcher in the College of Agricultural Sciences and research technician on Cabotโs team, uses tools such as 3D printing to help develop low-cost technologies to make water measurement more accessible and efficient.
Using a durable, petroleum-based resin, Cabot and DeLeon have successfully printed the first large-scale Parshall flumes ever produced using additive manufacturing. Their 3D-printed version costs as little as 10%-20% of its traditional counterpart, with minimal compromise in durability or accuracy.
Printing the future of water management
Cabot sees this as a transformative step toward democratizing water measurement tools. His long-term vision is to decentralize flume manufacturing by equipping local conservation and river districts with the 3D printers needed to build and calibrate their own equipment.
โImagine a farmer walking into their local conservation office, asking for a flume and walking out with one the next day,โ Cabot explained. โThis puts the tools of water management into the hands of the people using them.โ
Rooted in service, driven by ingenuity
For Cabot, this project represents more than cost savings or tech adoption; itโs about service.
โMy job is to help people,โ he said. โEngineering, for me, is fun, but itโs also about solving problems that matter. Thatโs what engagement and extension are all about.โ
Cabot said his work on the Western Slope is a great reminder for the future of research and innovation at CSU. โWe donโt need to have the flashiest tools to build something transformative that can change the world. All it takes is a little ingenuity, a bit of resin and those willing to do the work.โ
Learn more
To explore more about CSUโs legacy in water innovation and the Colorado Water Centerโs work, visit the Colorado Water Centerโs website.
Ralph Parshall squats next to the flume he designed at the Bellevue Hydrology Lab using water from the Cache la Poudre River. 1946. Photo Credit: Water Resource Archive, Colorado State University, via Legacy Water News.
Click the link to read the release on the NRCS website:
June 6, 2025
Snowmelt is nearly complete across Colorado. Most basins report early melt and below normal runoff forecasts. Early monsoonal precipitation has started and increased rainfall is expected to continue through the summer, particularly across southern regions.ย
Coloradoโs snowpack is nearing its seasonal end. Melt-out is occurring ahead of schedule across most of the state. Statewide snowpack is at 54 percent of normal. Snow water equivalent (SWE) statewide declines rapidly and most high elevation sites are now melted out, with only isolated locations primarily in northern basins retaining measurable snowpack. Statewide snowmelt is tracking 10 days earlier than median based on historical trends. The San Juan Mountains and Sangre de Cristo Range show a more pronounced signal. Many sites record snowmelt onset dates 20 days or more ahead of median. Southern sites already hampered by a meager accumulation season experienced accelerated melt due to persistent warm temperatures through May. Sites in the Front Range and near the divide have held onto snow slightly longer and are closer to normal melt-out timing.
May brings a welcomed reprieve from dry patterns. Totals rank second highest for the water year to date (WYTD), behind only November. WYTD precipitation is at 86% of median statewide with May at 96% and outperforming traditionally stronger accumulation months like December, January and April. Despite lower climatological averages for May, precipitation was most favored in the San Juan Mountains, Sangre de Cristo Range and the Front Range.
Early June storms extend the trend from May, delivering over 2 inches of precipitation at SNOTEL sites in the southwest between June 2 and June 5. Precipitation patterns shift toward higher humidity, more persistent cloud cover and frequent showers. These early June rain events align with the onset of the North American Monsoon, which often delivers afternoon storms and elevated atmospheric moisture, a vital source of summer water supply in southern Colorado.
Historically, 7% of annual precipitation falls during May, while June through September account for nearly 30% of annual accumulation in basins like the San Miguel-Dolores-Animas-San Juan (SMDASJ) and Upper Rio Grande (URG). A strong early start to the monsoon improves soil moisture, support reservoir levels and reduces wildfire risk as runoff tapers. That said early monsoon activity also raises concerns about short-term risks. Flood watches have already issued for portions of the southwest.
Observed streamflows reflect a compressed runoff season, particularly across the Western Slope. โEarly snowmelt combined with limited snowpack has resulted in lower runoff forecasts, particularly in southern basins,โ notes Nagam Bell, NRCS hydrologist. โEarly monsoon activity could improve moisture conditions but consistent summer rainfall will be critical moving forward.” Southern and western basins run at approximately 50% of average flows for early June. Northeastern regions, benefitting from slightly better snow retention, track closer to seasonal norms but remain below median.
Streamflow forecasts for the remainder of the runoff period reflect below normal runoff particularly west of the Continental Divide. Forecast departures from normal are concentrated across the Western Slope where the largest deficits are observed. At the Colorado River near Cameo the forecast volume is 391,000 acre-feet below normal. Upstream of the Colorado and Gunnison confluence the Gunnison River near Grand Junction forecasts a volume 351,000 acre-feet below normal. Statewide the average forecast percentile at the 50% exceedance probability is near the 22nd percentile based on 80 forecast points. The median forecast across the state is 67% for the 30-year median, with a majority of forecast points between 50% to 75% of median. Outlooks near major reservoirs including inflow into Pueblo Reservoir, Colorado River below Lake Granby and the Blue River below Dillon Reservoir are below median but generally near seasonal norms. By contrast, the Gunnison River inflow to Blue Mesa Reservoir is forecast at 64% of median and the Dolores River above and below McPhee are forecast near 60% of median. Forecasts point to continued low runoff volumes for rivers across the Western Slope, while flows in the Front Range and north central regions remain closer to median conditions.
Statewide reservoir storage holds at 89% of median as of June 1. This marks a modest decrease from 93% a year ago. The Arkansas, URG, Gunnison, Colorado Headwaters and South Platte maintain near to above median storage ranging from 92% to 107% of median. The SMDASJ continues to trail at 74% of median with McPhee Reservoir at 66% capacity and 70% of median. These storage levels become increasingly important as snowmelt contributions diminish and summer water demand increases.
Colorado is shifting from snowmelt to summer moisture. While early runoff and below normal snowpack limit streamflow the recent precipitation and early monsoonal activity provide cautious optimism. NOAAโs seasonal outlooks forecast above normal precipitation for Colorado through the 6-10 day and monthly periods, with the southwest showing the strongest signal for wetter conditions. Temperatures are forecast to trend above normal statewide.
Solar panels San Luis Valley. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
June 3, 2025
Not much to like in this bill. But then, itโs only half-time. How hard will key Republicans in Senate push back?
Higher electricity rates? In Colorado as elsewhere, thatโs the given if the U.S. Senate adopts the recent budget reconciliation bill passed by the House of Representatives that would end a whole host of federal tax credits.
Tax credits shorn by the bill include those now available to consumer who purchase electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids
How exactly will that impact Glenwood Springs-based Holy Cross Energy? In the short term, the legislation adds uncertainty as the electric cooperative works to move from 80% emission-free energy in 2025 to its goal of 100% in the next five years. It serves the Aspen- and Vail-dominated resorts valleys.
Brighton-based United Power has a different problem posed by the sharp-elbowed bill if it remains intact after review by the U.S. Senate. An electrical cooperative also, United serves one of Coloradoโs fastest growing areas for population growth, but the electrical demand from new homes is dwarfed by that from new industrial and commercial development.
By a one-vote margin, the House approved the sweeping tax and spending bill on May 22. In addition to other sweeping provisions, the bill largely guts incentives created by Congress in 2022 in the Inflation Reduction Act to advance clean energy and storage. The IRA is widely regarded as the most significant climate change legislation ever adopted in the United States.
Supporters of the controversial bill included two Republicans from swing districts in Colorado, Rep. Gabe Evans of Fort Lupton and Jeff Hurd of Grand Junction. Two Republicans and all 212 Democrats voted against the bill. Another two Republicans did not vote and one merely registered presence.
Evans and Hurd were among 21 House Republicans who signed a letter in March that calls for preserving energy tax credits as necessary to โincrease domestic manufacturing, promote energy innovation and keep utility costs down.โ Hurd, but not Evans, was among 26 who signed a May letter calling for preservation of tax credits necessary to accelerate deployment of next-generation nuclear power technologies.
After the vote, Evans posted a press release that said the bill โeliminates Green New Deal-style giveaways.โ
Two days before the vote, President Donald Trump visited Capitol Hill to inform on-the-fence representatives that they could face primary opposition if they voted against what the president had called his โone big beautiful bill.โ Big Pivots requested comment of both Evans and Hurd but without response.
he Senate, where Republicans hold a three-vote advantage, may act on the budget bill as early as July. However, the Washington Post on Monday noted that four Republicans senators in April sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune cautioning against โthe full-scale repeal of current credits.โ
โWe just hit half-time. Weโre still very much in the middle of this game,โ said Harry Godfrey, who manages federal priorities for Advanced Energy United, a national industry association that monitors Colorado and 16 other states.
Differences would be negotiated by a conference committee before being returned to the two chambers for review.
โThey really went after just about everything that they could in the realm of clean energy and electric vehicles,โ said Will Toor, who directs the Colorado Energy Office.
โI would certainly hope that cooler and wiser heads will prevail in the Senate,โ Toor added. โThe benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act are widespread, not just for clean energy but for consumers and for jobs, especially in red states and districts. Weโre hopeful that the Senate will reject this incredibly unwise bill that was adopted by the House of Representatives.โ
Mike Johnson, speaker of the House, had described the bill as being โsomewhere between a scalpel and a sledgehammerโ approach to the IRA. Abigail Ross Hopper, head of the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group, called it a โsledgehammer masquerading as a scalpel.โ
The IRA along with the earlier Bipartisan Infrastructure Law have produced a proliferation of announcements about expanding battery production and other business ventures along the Front Range.
For example, Louisville-based Solid Power is developing next-generation solid-state batteries and has agreements with EV manufacturers Ford and BMW. The companyโs business model assumes continued rapid expansion of the market for EVs. See October 2024 story.
Wind turbines near Pawnee Buttes in northeastern Colorado. Photo/Allen Best
Employment at the Vestas factories in Brighton and Windsor may suffer if clean energy incentives get gutted. The manufacturer of blades and nacelles for wind turbines invested $40 million at its plants. In the last year it hired 700 people in anticipation of orders for 1,000 turbines during 2025. Orders for wind turbines would be impacted by loss of the manufacturing production tax credit, according to Advanced Energy United.
At Namaste Solar, chief executive Jason Sharpe said he is unsure whether to plan for expansion or constriction.
โAs a business owner, how do you plan a business with this amount of uncertainty, trying to thread the needle between coping with political change and not creating panic among my employees? Itโs challenging,โ he said.
Namaste sees the bill having a target on residential solar because it would eliminate tax credits that homeowners can apply for directly.
The bill also has a provision that would disrupt the transfer of tax credits, harming existing renewable energy and storage projects and making funding more difficult for other, less proven technologies.
โIf Xcel Energy, for example, builds a large solar project, they might not have enough tax obligation to fully utilize the tax credit. So, they could sell that, or transfer it, to other investors to monetize the tax credit.โ
Advanced Energy Unitedโs Godfrey says that a conventional big bank will be more risk adverse, but the transferrable tax credit enlarges the pool of potential investors. As such, this sweetener, as the Economist describes it, will also be lost for nuclear energy and carbon capture and storage, technologies currently absent in Colorado but which remain theoretically possible. The State Land Board has leased subterranean rights to several parcels for carbon capture.
As for Coloradoโs solar sector Sharpe says Namaste will survive if the bill becomes law but with fewer employees. Now 20 years old, the company has 200 employees โWe will have a smaller market but not a zero market,โ he said.
U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet met last week with Sharpe as well as representatives of Vestas, electrical utilities, and others to hear how they saw the proposed shift in tax incentives impacting them.
โThis casts a broad shadow on lots of the progress that the state has made in terms of power supply,โ said Mark Gabriel, the CEO of United Power, in a later interview. The bill as written, if it becomes law, will impact โvirtually all of our members and virtually all of Colorado.โ
Project developers will find it more difficult to get financing, said Gabriel. Those projects that do go forward will cost more.
United serves 115,000 members across a 900-square mile service territory stretching from the oil-and-gas wells of the Wattenberg Field to the foothills west of Arvada. During the last four years demand in April, to cite just one month, has grown from 350 megawatts to 500 megawatts.
โI am a practical businessman. I donโt have dreadlocks. I donโt wear Birkenstocks. This is not a crusade,โ said Gabriel.
Resource adequacy and reliability lie at the heart of Gabrielโs concerns. Colorado has plans to close all of its coal plants in the next six years. Coal has become expensive when compared to renewables. Most Colorado utilities plan major investments in natural gas plants, and United Power has one nearing completion about 40 miles northeast of Denver.
United also plans new renewable generation and battery storage in what Gabriel calls a hyper-localization strategy. Cheap renewables from other states and time zones could be part of the long-term strategy, but getting new transmission built remains a daunting, long-term challenge.
โReplacing base-load generation takes time,โ said Gabriel. โThe transmission is not coming over the hill to save us between now and 2030. What resources can we install in a relatively expeditious manner? They tend to be solar and storage and some gas.โ
Perversely, the higher cost of electricity would also add to the cost of production of oil and gas in Colorado. Chevron, said Gabriel, has reported plans to drill 262 wells north of Denver in the Wattenberg Field, some of which is served by United.
โIf you think about it, oil and gas is moving to electrify many of their fields. Certainly, the folks in the mid-stream arena are under certain requirements of the state,โ Gabriel observed.
Xcel Energy CEO Robert Kenney was also at the meeting. He told Bennet that the existing tax credits will help Xcel reach its goals for emissions reduction while simultaneously reducing the cost of projects, all while keeping customersโ bills well below the national average.
In a filing with state regulators in October, Xcel said it needs 700 megawatts of new generating capacity, about two-thirds of it for a wave of new and large data centers.
Tri-State Generation and Transmission, Coloradoโs second largest electrical wholesaler, said that the House version presents challenges to meeting its priorities of maintaining reliable and affordable energy for rural communities.
Residents of Castle Rock and other communities served by CORE Electrical Cooperative could also expect higher electricity prices. The utility, Coloradoโs largest in terms of members, has entered into contracts for renewable and battery projects. Any reduction of the tax credits will result in increased costs to COREโs members,โ said the utility in a statement. โThese tax credits are critical to keeping costs, and therefore rates, stable for our members.โ
Holy Cross Energy has no large data centers on its horizon and serves only a few gas wells in the Western Coloradoโs Piceance Basin. Growth in electrical demand from the Aspen and Vail-dominated resort valleys has been modest. It has a different challenge. It wants to erase all emissions from its electrical generation by 2030.
Bryan Hannegan, the chief executive, said six years ago that achieving 85% to 90% emissions-free energy would be the easier task. Holy Cross is close to complete. For 2025, the utility expects to surpass 80% emissions-free energy. That compares to 50% in 2022. Last October and again in April, it surpassed 90% emissions-free electricity.
Holy Cross did this while maintaining some of Coloradoโs lower electrical rates.
Now, the utility has started work on that last 10% to 15%. After securing large amounts of wind and solar energy from Coloradoโs eastern plains, Holy Cross now is focused on adding local resources with greater flexibility and in precise locations within its service territory or base-load generation that can be relied upon when the wind isnโt blowing and the sun isnโt shining. Geothermal is one of the options.
A program called Power+FLEX encourages Holy Cross members to install batteries that can benefit the homes and businesses where they are located but in a way that Holy Cross can draw upon them when needed to support the local power grid. Roughly 850 batteries have been installed as part of the program with a combined capacity for 4.25 megawatts.
The batteries are financed through a combination of upfront rebates, low-interest financing by the utility, the federal investment tax credit and the direct pay provisions in the current tax code. These provisions allow Holy Cross to subtract the value of the tax credit from the amount financed. Loss of the tax credit will make the batteries more expensive, dampening future demand.
Bryan Hannegan has been leading Holy Cross Energy in a quest to mostly end emissions in generation of electricity nad, possibly, become a model for larger utilities. Photo/Allen Best
On May 22, the same day the House passed its bill, Holy Cross issued a request for proposals for solar combined with battery storage and other technology that may allow it to produce 90% clean energy consistently in coming years.
โThese resources are different from what they were in the past: much more flexibility, much more localized, even specific locations. That reflects the success of the energy transition so far. To go further, we will need different things than what we have had in the past,โ said Hannegan.
How might the bids โ which are due by the end of June โ impact Holy Crossโs plans? The uncertainty about federal law will introduce a large amount of uncertainty, said Hannegan.
โThese tax changes will be far reaching throughout the entire energy system, and without some clarity, it is hard to say what those impacts will be,โ he said. โBut if you increase the cost of something, people tend to reduce their consumption of it.โ
In other words, if solar and energy storage become more expensive because tax credits go away, the costs to utilities will increase.
Wouldnโt it be fair for the renewable sector to stand on its own now? Prices for first wind and then solar have dropped with jaw-dropping speed during the last decades with energy storage now echoing their successes.
Namasteโs Sharpe says that time is approaching but has not yet arrived.
โI think we are getting close, and I do look forward to that day,โ he said, while noting that the fossil fuel industries had what he called a 200-year head start in their subsidies.
Solar, he said, has become the lowest cost resource and the fastest dispatching. But it does have a vulnerability, as does wind: variability.
โThe problem with high-penetration renewables is that variability,โ said Sharpe. โThat is the last hurdle.โ
Colorado โ and the world, actually โ are on the โcusp of what we need to get over that hurdle,โ said Sharpe, as we work on new storage technologies such as the Form Energy iron-air project in Pueblo. For that, innovation โ which has started coming in great spurts, particularly by companies along the Front Range โ must continue, and that innovation has been driven by the favorable tax credits.
โItโs wrong to abruptly end incentives at a time when we are on the cusp of innovation that will solve this problem,โ he said.
Public lands in Bears Ears National Monument. The Trump administration has indicated it may attempt to shrink the monumentโs boundaries once again, potentially removing this area near White Canyon from heightened protections. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Even before public lands lovers were still celebrating one small victory โ i.e. killing a budget bill amendment that would have sold off a half-million acres of federal holdings in Nevada and Utah โ the MAGA/Trump/GOP launched a multi-pronged assault on the places Americans hold dear.
The blows come from all three branches of the federal government and seem to be designed to unravel the nationโs framework of environmental protections that have been developed over the last 50 years and more. Meanwhile, the Trump administrationโs proposed 2026 budget would gut the agencies that oversee public lands and the programs aimed at stewarding them. Hereโs a breakdown of just some of the attacks:
Oak Flat, Arizona features groves of Emory oak trees, canyons, and springs. This is sacred land for the San Carlos Apache tribe. Resolution Copper (Rio Tinto subsidiary) lobbied politicians to deliver this National Forest land to the company with the intent to build a destructive copper mine. By SinaguaWiki – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98967960
The Supreme Court rejected Apache Strongholdโs bid to block a land swap at Chiโchil Biลdagoteel, akaย Oak Flat, in central Arizona, clearing the way for Resolution Copperโs massive mine on sacred ground.
SCOTUS also overturned a lower courtโs decision to block federal approval of a proposed Utah railway that would ship Uinta Basin oil alongside the Colorado River and across multiple states to larger markets. More significantly, the ruling also limited the scope of federal environmental reviews to the direct impacts of a proposed project. This means the relevant federal agency need not consider effects of upstream oil and gas drilling facilitated by the railway, or those of processing and burning the oil downstream. The ruling will make it easier for corporations to build pipelines, highways, major oil and gas projects, and so forth.
Excerpt from the Supreme Courtโs decision on SEVEN COUNTY INFRASTRUCTURE COALITION ET AL. v. EAGLE COUNTY, COLORADO, ET AL.
The U.S. Interior Department egregiously fast-tracked its approval of the Velvet-Wood Mine in Utahโs Lisbon Valley and promised to do the same for similar projects on federal lands to address a purported โenergy emergency.โ
Interior alsoย expedited permittingย for geothermal energy developments on federal lands, beginning with three projects in Nevada.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum โ whose original appointment was endorsed by none other than outdoor retailer REI (remorsefully, it turns out) โ moved to roll backย protections on 13 million acresย of wilderness-quality lands on Alaskaโs North Slope, reopening it to oil and gas drilling, mining, and other development.
Sen. Mike Lee, the Utah Republican who apparently still holds Jell-O socials in his office every Wednesday, said he plans toย revive the public land sell-offย provision in the budget bill. So much for dodging that bullet!
The Trump administration has granted FAST-41 status to Laramide Resourcesโ proposedย La Jara Mesaย andย Crownpoint-Churchrockย uranium mines in New Mexico. The designation is aimed at streamlining permitting for the contested projects in the Grants area. However, the FAST-41 program does not compress the environmental review or licensing process as radically as the BLM did for the Velvet-Wood mine. The Environmental Impact Statement likely wonโt be completed until next November.
And then thereโs the Trump administrationโs proposed 2026 budget. A while back I gave a more general overview of the budget and the deep, deep cuts to almost everything except for defense, border security and Trumpโs golf trips. Now we have more detail in the form of the Technical Supplement to the 2026 budget.
Just like the overview, it would would tear apart the nationโs social safety net, set back science, destroy Americaโs global standing, erode education, eviscerate the federal workforce, rob communities and low-income households of vital funding, gut dozens of federal agencies, generally weaken regulatory oversight, and even transfer some national park units to states. You can read my take on that one here.
Yet the budget still increases the federal deficit โ even Elon Musk calls it an โabominationโ (harsh words coming from the guy who brought us the vehicular abomination known as the cybertruck) โ because it would hike spending to more than $1 trillion for the military industrial complex and the Department of Homeland Security. It would slash funding for nuclear energy research, but spend an additional $11 billion annually to build more nuclear weapons.
This time, Iโll focus on public lands (and related bureaus under the Interior Department and the USFS) because we only have so much space in these emails, and I only have enough self-medication to handle so much outrage and anxiety. Comparisons are between the 2024 actual expenditures and proposed spending for 2026. This is merely a sampling of some items that really stood out.
Cuts for the Bureau of Land Management:
1,157 full-time-equivalent staff positions (or about 20% of the entire full-time workforce)
– $216 million for personnel compensation
– $45 million for recreation management
– $17 million for energy and minerals
– $65 million for workforce and organizational support
– $30 million for aquatic resources management
– $114 million for wildlife habitat management
– $45 million for national monuments and national conservation areas
National Park Service
-$980 million (yes, you read that right: The agency that oversees Americaโs โBest Ideaโ is having its budget slashed by nearly a billion buckaroos โฆ).
– 5,518 full-time-equivalent employees (โฆ and the agency is losing over 40% of its full-time workforce).
U.S. Geological Survey
$563 million budget cut for the agency
– $281 million from ecosystems programs
– $46 million from natural hazards programs
– $74 million from water resources programs
– 2,067 full-time-equivalent employees (44% of the permanent workforce)
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
$149 million from the National Wildlife Refuge System
– $50 million from conservation and enforcement programs
– $16 million from habitat conservation
– $9 million from science support
– $33 million from state and tribal wildlife grants
– 1,785 full-time-equivalent employees (27% of the workforce
Bureau of Indian Affairs
$120 million from public safety and justice
– $625 million from gross outlays
– 282 full-time-equivalent employees
Bureau of Reclamation:
$253 million from water and energy management and development
– $51 million from fish and wildlife management and development
National Forest System
4,636 full-time-equivalent employees (or 33% of the workforce)
Other notes
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management would have its renewable energy program zeroed out, along with $51 million in cuts for its environmental programs. The Bureau would slash about 10% of its workforce.
The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (which regulates offshore oil and gas operations on the Outer Continental Shelf) would see its budget cut by $150 million.
The Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcementโs budget would be reduced by $15 million.
The strikes are coming so rapidly, and from so many different directions, that it has become difficult to keep track, let alone to fight back. That is by design, of course. Advocates can take to the courts to block some regulatory rollbacks, but they have little recourse against Supreme Court decisions. Citizens may be able to convince their congressional representatives to block public land sell-offs, but that draws attention away from lawmakersโ efforts to make it easier to drill and develop public lands.
The attacks will only intensify. The resistance must meet it with equal, opposing force.
๐ธย Parting Shotย ๐๏ธ
Sacred Datura in Utah. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Sacred Datura in Utah. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
