Survey work begins in 2018 for the Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project on the Navajo Nation. Photo credit: U.S. Bureau of Reclamation via The High Country News
Bidtah N. Becker, chief legal counsel for the Navajo Nation, told St. George News there is an urgency to secure the tribe’s legal rights to the Colorado River in Arizona, calling it their “No. 1 issue.” Becker explained that while the tribe secured water rights settlements in Utah in 2022 and in New Mexico in 2009, members still lack a legal water allocation in Arizona. A proposed bill in Congress, the Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement Act of 2025, seeks to address this gap. The bill involves partnerships with the Hopi Tribe, the San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe, the state of Arizona and more than 30 municipalities and communities in northern Arizona…The legislation has been delayed due to a lack of agreement from the seven Colorado River Basin states, which are focused on post-2026 guidelines for managing the river. Becker said the Navajo Nation remains hopeful that once those discussions advance, a settlement can gain momentum…
The Navajo Indian Irrigation Project, located in northwest New Mexico, draws its water from Navajo Lake on the San Juan River and moves it through more than 70 miles of main canals and 340 miles of laterals. Approved by Congress in 1962, the project transformed from a small-scale farming initiative into a major agricultural operation. The project holds rights to 508,000 acre-feet of San Juan River water annually, used to irrigate high desert lands south of Farmington, New Mexico…
Beyond agriculture, the Navajo Nation is working to secure municipal water supplies. Becker said one key project underway is the Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project. A lateral portion of the project, running along U.S. Route 550, is already constructed; the second lateral section still requires funding to be completed.
A truck drives out to Ritschard Dam, which forms Wolford Mountain Reservoir, on July 13, 2016. A court sided with the River District in a dispute with Denver Water over repairs to the dam.
A judge has sided with a Western Slope water district in a dispute with Denver Water over a problem dam in Grand County.
In its 2021 complaint, Denver Water accused the Colorado River Water Conservation District of breach of contract by slow walking required repairs to Ritschard Dam until Denver Water became part owner of the dam in 2020, at which time the Front Range water provider would share financial responsibility for repairs.
But in a June 19 judgment, District Court Judge Mary C. Hoak found in favor of the River District, writing that the River District made thoughtful, prudent and reasonable decisions with respect to repairs to Ritschard Dam, and did not act dishonestly or outside of accepted practices.
“Our partner in that reservoir turned around and sued us, in my mind, because they wanted a different contract over how the dam is managed and they wanted to weasel out of their obligation to pay for the repair and rehabilitation, should it ever be required,” said River District General Manager Andy Mueller at the River District board’s regular meeting Tuesday. “The judge saw through their smokescreen and really rewarded the district for doing the right thing.”
The River District is now asking that Denver Water pay nearly $773,000 in costs associated with the lawsuit.
In an emailed statement, Denver Water spokesperson Todd Hartman said the water provider “continue(s) to assess the ruling and consider potential next steps.”
Wolford Mountain Reservoir. An aerial view of Wolford Reservoir, formed by Ritschard Dam. An aerial view of Wolford Reservoir, formed by Ritschard Dam. The reservoir is managed by the River District and Denver Water owns 40% of the reservoir capacity.
The complaint stemmed from structural issues at Ritschard Dam, which forms Wolford Mountain Reservoir on the Muddy Creek upstream of the town of Kremmling. Built in 1995, the reservoir has a capacity of 66,000 acre-feet, and Denver Water releases water from it downstream to offset its upstream diversions at Dillon Reservoir and the Roberts Tunnel. Denver Water, which is Colorado’s oldest and largest water provider serving about 1.5 million people, helped finance construction of the dam and reservoir, paying about $43 million.
The River District owns and operates the 122-foot-tall dam and reservoir, and according to agreements between the two entities, Denver Water would lease 40% of the reservoir capacity from when the reservoir was completed in 1995 until 2020. At the end of 2020, Denver Water would take 40% ownership of the reservoir capacity along with 40% ownership of the water right.
Denver Water would also become responsible for 45.33% of the costs of operation, maintenance and rehabilitation of the dam, which had been solely the River District’s financial responsibility up until that point.
Because of the disagreement, the two entities extended the lease agreement until summer 2021. At that point, according to Mueller, the River District conveyed a deed to Denver Water, which then became part owner, and the water provider has been paying for its share of the operation, maintenance and repair costs during the litigation.
Settling and cracking
In 2009, the River District became aware of settling and deformation of the dam, meaning the structure is moving more than expected, and has been intensely monitoring the situation since then. From 2012 to 2015, the River District began moving toward structural rehabilitation, but a 2015 expert review panel found there was not a need for immediate remediation.
In 2019 and 2020, cracks appeared in the dam, prompting further study and dam safety evaluations. From 2013 to 2022, the River District spent $3.7 million on dam-related maintenance and dam-deformation expenses.
Denver Water argued the River District led Denver Water to believe that the River District would make repairs to the dam, but then changed its mind just prior to the expiration of the lease agreement, after which Denver Water would be on the hook for its share of the cost of repairs. Denver Water argued that instead of repairing the dam as required, the River District hired new experts and reversed course.
Jim Lochhead, who was Denver Water CEO from 2010 to 2023, testified at a 12-day trial in May 2024 that Denver Water didn’t know until an August 2019 meeting that the River District wasn’t going to repair the dam. But the court disagreed, citing evidence Denver Water knew of the River District’s plans as of February 2017 at the latest.
“…the Court does not find Mr. Lochhead’s testimony on this point credible,” the judgment reads. “Mr. Lochhead was the only witness that testified at trial regarding this meeting, there are no documents supporting the occurrence or substance of this meeting, and Denver Water’s Complaint, Denver Water’s Notice of Breach and discovery responses do not reference this meeting.”
In addition to expert testimony and documents, the court’s judgement relied on the annual inspection reports for Ritschard Dam from the Colorado Division of Water Resources State Engineer’s Office, which have rated the dam “conditionally satisfactory” since 2012 and never ordered a storage restriction.
“The SEO annual inspection reports were uniformly positive as to the maintenance of the dam,” the ruling reads.
“(Denver Water) had an elaborate scheme cooked up in their heads that this board and staff management, as well as the past management, concocted some way to delay things and did it in bad faith,” Mueller told the River District board. “They told a story to the court that they completely failed to support with any facts at the court level, and we won on all claims.”
Wolford Mountain Reservoir, on Muddy Creek in Grand County, is managed by the River District. Denver Water owns 40% of the reservoir capacity. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
The River District win comes at a pivotal time for Colorado water managers that underscores the simmering tension that remains between the West Slope and Front Range. Denver Water, along with other Front Range water providers, has been granted a special hearing in September to air their concerns about the River District’s plan to purchase water rights tied to the Shoshone hydropower plant in Glenwood Canyon.
Although this chapter of litigation is over — Denver Water has a right to appeal — the problems with the Ritschard Dam remain. The dam is classified as high hazard, which means dam failure is expected to result in loss of human life. The River District board allocated more money to address the structural issues at its regular meeting Wednesday, approving a $294,185 contract with HDR Engineering, Inc. for an alternatives analysis to evaluate potential modifications to the dam. The alternatives analysis was recommended in a 2024 Comprehensive Dam Safety Evaluation.
“We’re not out of the woods on that dam, so we just have to continue to put public safety as the number one priority of the district, and use that as our guiding principle,” Mueller said.
CPW sampling on the Colorado River found zebra mussel veligers. The river is now considered “positive” for zebra mussels from its confluence with the Roaring Fork River to the Utah state line. CREDIT: PHOTO COURTESY OF COLORADO PARKS & WILDLIFE
State officials may have solved the puzzle of how zebra mussels got into the Colorado River.
On July 3, Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials discovered a large number of adult zebra mussels in a privately owned body of water in western Eagle County. On Monday, Madeline Baker, an invasive species specialist with CPW, told members of the Colorado Basin Roundtable they believe this private lake is an upstream source of the mussels that have contaminated the Colorado River, the Government Highline Canal, Highline Lake and Mack Mesa Lake.
“We do believe this to be the primary source, but it could now have created other secondary sources downstream with locations that hold water,” Baker said. “There is a lot of speculation of could these veligers survive the journey from Eagle County down to Highline and create a new population there or is there some sort of intermediate population in between. So we still have a lot to figure out.”
Baker said that the lake’s owner is collaborating with CPW on a mitigation plan. CPW is not releasing the owner’s name or specific location of the lake.
“The property owner is unsure of how this could have happened, but is being cooperative,” she said.
Baker said there were quite a few dead shells on the shoreline of the private lake, which indicates the zebra mussel population has been there for several years. She said CPW staff found the lake by searching Google maps for bodies of water on private property near the Colorado River and then calling property owners and asking if they could inspect their lakes. An outlet from the lake was bringing zebra-mussel-infested water into the Colorado River, an issue that has since been fixed.
“We’ve done a dye test at the reservoir to be sure that nothing more is flowing into the river, and that dye test showed us that it should be contained at this point, which will allow us to pave a path toward mitigation,” Baker said.
Zebra mussels are a prolific invasive species that if left unchecked could clog irrigation infrastructure, and strip the plankton and nutrients from the water. Once established, they are nearly impossible to eradicate.
For the last two summers, microscopic zebra mussel larvae, known as veligers, have been found in the Colorado River at several locations. In June, they were found at the boat launch in New Castle, in Highline Lake and Mack Mesa Lake. The Colorado River is now considered “positive” for zebra mussels from the confluence with the Roaring Fork River to the Colorado-Utah border.
CPW staff inspects a boat motor at Highline Lake in 2023. The lake is infested with zebra mussels. CREDIT: PHOTO COURTESY OF COLORADO PARKS & WILDLIFE
Threat to the Grand Valley
The arrival of zebra mussels has been especially alarming for the Grand Valley, which is one of the most important agricultural areas and home to the biggest agricultural water users of Colorado River water on the Western Slope.
“At least from a Grand Valley perspective, we feel like we are under a very serious threat,” said Kirsten Kurath, a Grand Valley attorney and vice-chair of the roundtable.
Adult mussels were found in 2022 in Highline Lake near the Utah state line. Officials treated it with a form of copper that kills zebra mussels called EarthTec QZ and drained it for the 2024 boating season. The lake reopened for recreation this year but on June 10, CPW staff found more veligers in Highline Lake, which is now designated an infested body of water. Highline Lake is filled with water from the Government Highline Canal, which pulls water from the Colorado River.
“We now know that Highline Lake was continuously being reinfested with mussels after the treatment, so it’s difficult to ascertain the effectiveness of the treatment,” Baker said.
Veligers were also found last year in the Government Highline Canal, which brings water from the Colorado River to Grand Valley farms, vineyards and orchards. Realizing the mussels could be disastrous for commercial peach growers who use micro-drip irrigation, water managers sprang into action last fall, treating their systems with a copper solution that kills the mussels.
An adult zebra mussel found at Highline Lake in 2023. The lake was treated with a copper solution and drained for the 2024 boating season in an effort to eradicate the invasive species. CREDIT: PHOTO COURTESY OF COLORADO PARKS & WILDLIFE
Grand Valley Water Users Association General Manager Tina Bergonzini said the copper treatment was successful — the irrigation company has not seen any signs of adult mussels in their system — and the Government Highline Canal has not had any more positive tests for veligers. Still, Bergonzini said GVWUA will probably do the copper treatment again this fall, and that preventing zebra mussels from becoming established is something they will be working on for the foreseeable future.
“I don’t think there is any way around [doing the copper treatment again],” Bergonzini said. “We can’t risk our infrastructure. It’s a financial hurdle for the irrigation companies because it’s very costly, but not as costly as having fouled infrastructure.”
The discovery of the source pond in Eagle County is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t mean the fight against zebra mussels is over. CPW will continue sampling and mitigation work, Baker said.
“Finding the source was always the main focus,” Bergonzini said. “There’s no way you can win the war if you can’t figure out where they are coming from. So I think discovering that pond was huge. That gives us a really good chance.”
CPW says cleaning, draining and drying fishing gear, motorized boats and hand-launched vessels like paddle boards is key to preventing the spread of invasive species.
n July, the Parachute Town Council adopted a Water Restriction and Conservation Program to help the town respond quickly and responsibly to changing water conditions.
The new program allows the town to implement or lift water use restrictions as needed throughout the year, based on water availability, drought conditions and regional coordination.
On July 15, it was announced that Parachute remains at a Stage 1 Water Watch due to low flows on the Parachute Creek. It has remained at Stage 1 partially due to ongoing coordination with other users of Parachute Creek and the community’s ongoing conservation efforts.
Stage 1 is a voluntary stage that applies to raw water irrigation users only. Parachute has not implemented any mandatory restrictions at this time and potable drinking water customers are not affected.
Parachute is encouraging all irrigation water users to take simple voluntary actions to help conserve water, such as:
Reducing outdoor watering to three to five days a week
Watering in the early morning or late evening to reduce evaporation
Focusing water use on trees, vegetables and essential landscaping only
Avoiding overwatering lawns or irrigating during rainfall
Voluntary conservation is key, as cutting back now could help the community avoid stricter, mandatory restrictions later this summer.
If conditions change, additional stages of the program may be implemented. Higher stages could make the current voluntary measures enforceable or even lead to a ban on all outdoor irrigation, though that has not yet been necessary in Parachute.
Future restrictions will be announced publicly and community members can stay up to date by following the town of Parachute’s social media accounts, like their Facebook at facebook.com/townofparachute/, downloading the “Town of Parachute” mobile app or visiting the town’s utilities page at parachute.gov/o/top/page/utilities.
For more questions on the program or water usage, contact Parachute Town Hall at 907-285-7630.
Colorado River May 2023 swelled from low elevation snow runoff.
Click the link to read the article on the KJCT website. Here’s an excerpt:
July 28, 2025
On Monday, the Colorado Basin Roundtable had a meeting to discuss the state of the Colorado River. The Roundtable discussed the potential Shoshone stream flow acquisition. The area of interest is the 2.4 miles in Glenwood Canyon. It is important for Western Colorado because of its stream flow rate that mimics the current water rates used for hydropower. Wildlife organizations did habitat studies on it, and they show it improves the natural environment.
Another topic of discussion was the basin hydrology. With a limited snowpack this year, there is less water. The biggest concerns people had in the meeting related to that was the stress of many systems struggling from prolonged drought and aging infrastructure. Lindsay DeFrates, Deputy Director of Communications for the Colorado River District, said, “The Colorado Basin Roundtable is a great example of a room where a bunch of different stakeholders from agriculture, recreation, environment, municipal, industrial, water users all come together to talk about those solutions. It’s never an easy conversation. And we can’t forget about zebra mussels. Zebra mussel veligers were found at the Silt Boat Ramp and near New Castle.
We left the Colorado River a couple months ago to explore the Trumpsters’ effort to use the public lands in the river basin to ‘unleash American energy’ and return us to the glorious age of cheap petroleum – and why it’s not happening. At that time, the seven states in the river’s basin were in a stalemate over a management plan to replace the cobbled together ‘interim’ management guidelines that expire next year. The Trumpsters’ have not interceded noticeably in this situation, since it appears to require complex and sustained thought.
Unfortunately, the stalemate is still the basic situation. As a couple water mavens put it, we’re all still waiting for the black smoke coming out of the chimney to turn white. The Basin’s state representatives are meeting together regularly though, with input from the First People, and reports from the meetings suggest that the participants have all agreed to ‘work with the river we have, not the river we wish we (still) had’ (if we ever actually did have it) – the Colorado River Compact’s river. So a little review here today, to remind us where this puts us….
Members of the Colorado River Commission, in Santa Fe in 1922, after signing the Colorado River Compact. From left, W. S. Norviel (Arizona), Delph E. Carpenter (Colorado), Herbert Hoover (Secretary of Commerce and Chairman of Commission), R. E. Caldwell (Utah), Clarence C. Stetson (Executive Secretary of Commission), Stephen B. Davis, Jr. (New Mexico), Frank C. Emerson (Wyoming), W. F. McClure (California), and James G. Scrugham (Nevada)
CREDIT: COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY WATER RESOURCES ARCHIVE via Aspen Journalism
The Colorado River Compact was created in 1922 for a river that had been, for a couple decades, running flows guesstimated to average 18 million acre-feet (maf) annually. The compact commissioners thought they were being conservative in only dividing 15 maf among themselves, and assumed that ‘those men who may come after us, possessed of a far greater fund of information’ would be dividing up even more water after resolving a share for Mexico and resolution of the Indian rights.
The river then played desert trickster and stopped running those big flows, shortly after Congress passed the Boulder Canyon Act to reconstruct the Colorado River through the subtropical deserts below the canyons. By the end of the 1930s drought that followed, the states’ water leaders knew the numbers in the Compact division might have been for a river that no longer existed, if it ever really had. But they persisted with the Compact, in the spirit of the unnamed quasi-mythical G.W. Bush administration official: ‘We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.’ The next half century was invested in creating our own imperial reality for the Colorado River – until we began to run into more ‘natural’ realities than we’d anticipated….
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 unimperial reality today is a river whose annual flow since the turn of the century has dropped to an average around 12.5 million acre-feet (maf), two-thirds the size of the Compact’s river. That is ‘the river we have’ – and we are aware of the extent to which our superimposed imperial reality on the Colorado River region (and on the whole planet) has caused a lot of this unanticipated loss of water.
Exactly what it means when the basin-wide negotiators say they are working with that ‘river we have’ has not been revealed. One bad sign, however, viewing it from ‘outside the box,’ is their persistence in thinking of the river as divided into a four-state Upper Basin and a three-state Lower Basin, a construct destined by a competitive appropriation culture to devolve into chronic conflict – which it has.
Much of the conflict has revolved around the foggily written Article III(d) of the Compact, stating that the Upper Basin ‘will not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depleted below an aggregate of 75,000,000 acre-feet for any period of ten consecutive years.’ This could be most rationally interpreted as a warning to the Upper Basin to just be careful to not develop to the point of using more than their 7.5 maf/year (which the four states have not even come close to doing) and cutting into the Lower Basin’s 7.5 maf in dry periods. Or it could be irrationally interpreted as a delivery obligation that the Upper Basin had to deliver regardless of the natural state of the river, even if an extended drought forced the upper states to short themselves in order to deliver the required 7.5 maf.
Looking upstream at the Boulder Dam (now called Hoover Dam) under construction. “Boulder Dam, looking upstream August 31, 1933 2345” is written at the bottom of the photo. Via UNLV
Given a history of tension among the states based on how fast California was growing, the obvious choice between those interpretations was to believe the worst. Their intent in convening the compact commission had been to prevent a ‘seven-state horse race’ to appropriate water for their futures; they wanted a seven-state division of the use of the river’s water that would override interstate appropriative competition. But they didn’t know enough about either the river or their own fantasy-infused futures to do that desired division. The two-basin division has come to be regarded as a stroke of genius, good for all time, when in fact it was just an expedient measure – one wouldn’t be wrong to call it a ‘desperate measure’ – to cobble together something that would persuade Congress that the states were enough on the same page so Congress could put up the money for a big control structure (Hoover Dam).
But in their haste in pasting together the two-basin compact, they appeared, through Article III(d), to make one basin ‘junior’ to the other, subject to a ‘compact call’ in an extended drought – or at least that is how everyone chose to interpret it. The 2007 ‘Interim Guidelines’ began to address that (perceived) inequity by imposing cuts on the Lower Basin states when Mead and Powell Reservoirs dropped to dangerous levels, but on not the Upper Basin (leaving their shortages up to the erratic river). But interstate ‘seniority’ played a big role in the size of cuts for each Lower Basin state, belying the notion that the Compact would protect states from interstate appropriative competition.
So what could today’s negotiators be doing instead? There is actually a constructive and useful way to divide a desert river into two ‘basins,’ based on the nature of the desert river. All rivers are surface water that is leaving – maybe reluctantly – the land it flows through; it is leaving the land because the land and its life were not able to put the water to use in support of life or to hold it as groundwater in an aquifer. Even much of the groundwater that doesn’t get used by the plants does not escape leaving the land with the river; isotopic analysis indicates that over the course of a year more than half of all the water in surface streams is groundwater trickling back in.
Ephemeral streams are streams that do not always flow. They are above the groundwater reservoir and appear after precipitation in the area. Via Socratic.org
This is not to say that a river is nothing but a drainage ditch – an earlier Army Corps of Engineers perspective that messed up a lot of rivers, trying to make the drainage more efficient by straightening channels. All rivers have a much more complex relationship with the land they are flowing through than just ‘drainage.’ Most rivers have their origins in highlands – mountains or other significant uplands – where steep slopes or fast snowmelts produce too much water to sink into whatever soil there might be; this generates surface flows that become small streams confluing to form larger streams and rivers. Through hyporheic exchange, surface streams either gain groundwater from the land they flow through when that land has a higher water table than the stream level (a gaining stream), or they lose water to the riparian areas along the river when the water table there is lower than the stream level (a losing stream – although, since the water it loses nurtures life in the riparian area, I think hydrologists should consider calling it a ‘giving stream’).
For rivers in humid regions, there is adequate precipitation throughout the river’s basin so the rivers will usually gain more from the land they pass through than they will lose (or ‘give’); they are gaining streams that grow from both surface and ground water until they discharge it all into the seas. But a desert river like the Colorado, on the other hand, is a dependable gaining stream only in its highland headwaters, where the Colorado River accumulates 85-90 percent of its entire water supply from the Southern Rockies, Wind River and Wasatch Mountains above ~8,000 feet elevation. This water-producing region is less than 15 percent of the whole basin. (That ‘division contour’ is more accurately an ‘ecotone,’ a blurry edge zone, in the 7,500-8,500 feet range.)
Below the ~8,000 foot elevation, the river’s tributaries flow first into the high orographic ‘cold deserts’ (steppes) of western Colorado, southwestern Wyoming and eastern Utah. Most of its tributaries have been ‘stepping down’ through the mountain region in a series of canyons alternating with floodplains, all of it the water’s work – and all of it the beautiful erosion and deposition that draws and holds us here. As they drop into the high desert, they get into a serious canyon-cutting project through the Colorado Plateau, up to a mile deep – a mystery story in itself that I’ve written about before. After more than five hundred miles of canyons winding through the Plateau, the river flows out into the subtropical Mojave and Sonora ‘hot deserts,’ and thence – only occasionally now – emptying what’s left into the Gulf of California.
Super Bloom along UT-128 during the last road trip with Mrs. Gulch May 2023.
But once they drop out of its headwaters highlands, desert streams and rivers like the Colorado and its tributaries become losing (giving) streams; they get little new precipitation below the ~8,000 foot contour. The occasional exception is the desert cloudburst that manages to penetrate the desert’s heat shield, dumping a huge rain that mostly runs off the desert land in a quick, destructive flood, filling dry arroyos and stream beds for a few dangerous hours. Or a rare winter snowfall that melts and sinks in, activating flora and small fauna that have lain inactive for long periods, instigating pilgrimages from hundreds of miles away just to see the desert in bloom.
The ‘natural’ Colorado River (the river before the 20th century CE) became a ‘big river’ for two or three months a year, in the May-July period when its mountain snowpack released the majority of the river’s water into its tributaries and ground storage. But once the snowpack was gone, the natural river became an increasingly modest flow, fed largely by groundwater, and as it wandered through the desert regions, it gave what water it had to riparian life (a process that intensified as humans began ‘broadening’ its riparian areas through irrigation systems), or into desert aquifers – and a lot of it just evaporated or transpired back into the atmosphere (losses that increased as humans spread more of it out in reservoirs and fields).
There were probably years (like our current water year) in which the last of the natural river’s water never made it through its lush delta to the sea in the autumn. It is not unusual for a desert stream to completely disappear in its desert; some 40 surface streams and rivers flow into the Great Basin, and most of them just disappear after spreading their limited beneficence en route.
The natural and logical ‘two-basin’ division for a desert river like the Colorado, then, would be into a ‘water production region’ and a ‘water consumption region.’ With the exception of mountain mining or resort towns, and the mountain flora and fauna, nearly all the users of Colorado River water live below that ~8,000 foot division. They are all in the same boat, trying to figure out how best to share a ‘losing river’ when its flows drop into the desert regions where they live.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
The Colorado River Compact ignores this natural division of the river. The clumsy division into the four-state Upper Basin and three-state Lower Basin is done according to state boundaries, which have no geographic or hydrographic relevance to the Colorado River Basin. The state boundaries also include a lot of heavily developed land outside the natural river basin that can lay claim to Colorado River water as part of the state – and they have population and wealth concentrations that enable them to move that water out of the basin through tunnels. ‘We are an empire, and when we act’ et cetera et cetera.
The Compact division is especially problematic for the Upper Basin. A quarter to a third of the Upper Basin area is the river’s major water production area, scattered among the mountains of the four states above the ~8,000-foot contour, and the rest of the Compact’s Upper Basin is part of the river’s water consumption region. The Compact makes no such distinction, and all the water above the Upper-Lower division point near Lee’s Ferry is presumed to be the Upper Basin’s – minus the annual ‘delivery obligations’ of 7.5 maf for the Lower Basin and half of the 1.5 maf for Mexico. Given that the river’s annual flows vary between 5 and 20 maf, this makes the Upper Basin’s Compact allotment of 7.5 maf annually a fantasy.
Acknowledging the desert nature of the Colorado River suggests a rather radical, but common sense two-basin management strategy for the Colorado River, addressing two main challenges: first, to work out an equitable division among all users for the use of the water that flows into the ‘water consumption region’; and second, for all water consumption region users to collaborate on optimizing (not ‘maximizing’) the flow out of the ‘water production region’ and into the deserts.
And a third challenge (which should be first) would be to transcend (abandon) the Compact’s two-basin division, the artificiality of which just gets in the way of desert-river reality at best, and at worst fosters a competitive rather than collaborative attitude between the two basins.
And that’s enough for today. We will look more closely at those challenges next time – unless the negotiators have come up with a brilliant breakthrough to parse out. Don’t hold your breath….
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
A satellite view of Mesa, Arizona, showing a handful of the 91 energy- and water-intensive data centers in the greater Phoenix metro area. Source: Google Earth.
When I first read a recent headline in Matthew Yglesias’s Slow Boringnewsletter, I assumed it was a sort of joke to rope me into reading. “There’s plenty of water for data centers,” it said, reassuringly. “Probably the last worry you should have about either water or AI.”
Unfortunately, he wasn’t joking. But he opened his piece with a line that should have warned his readers to take everything else he said with a grain of salt:
Before I continue with my rant, I’d just like to encourage Yglesias to do a little more thinking about water scarcity before writing about it. Oh, and also, maybe consider spending a little bit of time in the water-starved West before committing punditry about it. (This is the same guy who tweeted that Sen. Mike Lee’s proposal to sell off public land was “pretty reasonable” and an “okay idea on the merits”).
Yglesias acknowledges that data centers use water, and that more data centers will lead to more water consumption. But it’s okay, he says, because “We’re not living on Arrakis, and rich countries are not, in general, abstemious in their water usage.”
No, we are not on Arrakis, but have you seen the lower reaches of the Colorado River or even the mid-reaches of the Rio Grande lately? It’s looking pretty Dune-like if you ask me.
Well, sure, Yglesias argues, but even in those places, people are doing frivolous things with water, like filling up their Super Soakers or using it to make ice cubes for their cocktails. Yes, he used those actual examples. Never mind that the potable water used each day by a single Microsoft data center in Goodyear, Arizona, could yield more than 35 million ice cubes or fill about 223,000 Super Soakers. That would be one big, drunken water fight.
Yglesias also notes that agriculture, especially growing alfalfa and other feed crops for cattle, is an even larger water consumer than Big Tech. True, for now. And he writes:
His logic appears to be: People are currently using a lot of water for all sorts of things — frivolous or otherwise. So, it should be fine to use a lot more water for data centers in perpetuity, since water is “sufficiently plentiful.” This is the sort of thinking that got the Colorado River Basin into its current mess, in which there actually may not be enough water to drink very soon if its collective users don’t change their ways. Adding a fleet of water-guzzling hyperscale data centers to places like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Tucson, where water is anything but “sufficiently plentiful,” will only exacerbate the crisis.
Researchers have tried various methods to determine how much water a single ChatGPT query or AI-assisted Google search uses as compared to, say, streaming a Netflix video or writing a standard e-mail. So far the estimates diverge wildly. An early calculation came up with a whopping 500 ml for each AI query, but the estimates have since gone down. The difficulty is due in part to the fact that water use data isn’t always publicly available, and also because data centers’ water use can vary depending on location, as do their carbon footprints.
What is clear is this: Data centers use large quantities of both energy and water, no matter where they are. The massive server banks churning away in warehouse-like buildings on the fringes of Phoenix and Las Vegas, and even in rural Washington and Wyoming, each gobble as much electricity as a small city to process AI queries, cryptocurrency extraction, and other aspects of our increasingly cloud-based society. The harder they work, the hotter they get, and the more power and water they need to cool off to the optimum operating temperature of between 70° to 80° F.
Evaporative or adiabatic cooling, where air is cooled by blowing it through moistened pads (i.e. high-tech swamp coolers), works well in arid areas like Phoenix, Tucson, or Las Vegas. They use less energy than refrigerated cooling, but also use far more water.
Data centers can also indirectly consume water through their energy use, depending on the power source. Thermal coal, nuclear, or natural gas plants need water for cooling and steam-production (some of this water may be returned to the source after use, except with zero-discharge facilities); natural gas extraction uses water for hydraulic fracturing; and solar installations can require large amounts of water for dust-suppression and cleaning. This explains how Google’s data centers withdrew 8.65 billion gallons of water globally in 2023 1.
A 2023 study found that a single Chat GPT-3 request processed at an Arizona data center uses about 30 milliliters of water, compared to 12 ml per request in Wyoming. That doesn’t seem like much (it’s less than a shot-glass) until you consider that there are at least 1 billion ChatGPT queries worldwide per day and growing, using a total of some 8 million gallons of water daily, worldwide. And, training the AI at an Arizona data center would use about 9.6 million liters — or 2.5 million gallons — of additional water.
Another estimate finds the average data center uses between 1 million and 5 million gallons of water per day, onsite, which would be far more than the aforementioned Goodyear center (56 million gallons/year), but in line with a planned Google data center in Mesa, Arizona. When Google was first planning the facility back in 2019, the city of Mesa guaranteed delivery of nearly 1 million gallons of water per day. If they reach certain milestones they can use up to 4 million gallons daily, or about 4,480 acre-feet per year.
Now multiply those numbers by the more than 90 data centers of various sizes and water and energy intensity in the Phoenix area, alone, which would amount to somewhere between 14 million to 450 million gallons per day. No matter how you add it up, they collectively are sucking up a huge amount of water and power, and enough to strain even Yglesias’s purported “sufficiently plentiful” supplies (which do not exist in Arizona, by the way).
The average Phoenix-area household uses about 338 gallons of water per day, or almost 123,000 gallons per year. One of these big data centers, then, could guzzle as much water as some 10,000 homes. And yet housing developments in groundwater-dependent areas on Phoenix’s fringe must obtain 100-year assured water supply certification before they can begin building. The same is not the case for data centers.
According to Open ET maps, a 75-acre alfalfa field in Buckeye (western Phoenix metro area), uses about 156 acre-feet — or 50.8 million gallons — per year. That’s far less than the 28-acre Apple Data Center in Mesa consumes. Of course, there are the equivalent of about 3,470 alfalfa fields of that same size in Arizona (260,000 acres), meaning the total water consumption of hay and alfalfa is still greater than that of data centers. But it shows that while replacing an alfalfa field with houses would result in a net decrease in water consumption, replacing those same fields with data centers would substantially increase consumption.
And don’t forget that the 75-acre alfalfa field produces about 690 tons of alfalfa per year, which could feed quite a few dairy cows, which in turn would produce a bunch of milk for making cheese and ice cream. Just saying. Maybe it’s time to update the old saying: “I’d rather see a cow than a data center.”
Data centers aren’t going away. After all, they are the hearts and brains of the Internet Age. Many of us may wish that AI (not to mention cryptocurrency), which are more water- and energy-intensive than other applications, would just up and vanish. But that’s probably too much to ask for. Besides, AI, at least, does have real value.
So what can be done to keep the data center boom from devouring the West’s water and driving its power grid to the snapping point? Here’s where Yglesias had a good point: Policymakers and utilities should adjust water and power pricing for large industrial users, i.e. data centers, to discourage waste, incentivize efficiency and recycling, and push tech firms to develop their own clean energy sources to power their facilities.
It’s imperative that utilities force data centers to pay their fair share for infrastructure upgrades made necessary by added water or power demand, rather than shifting those costs to other ratepayers, as is usually the case. Arizona should make data centers prove out their water supply, just like they do with housing developments. Plus, states should stop trying to lure data centers with big tax breaks, which ultimately are paid for by the other taxpayers. And local governments and planners should subject proposed data centers to the highest level of scrutiny, and not give in to promises of jobs and economic development if it means sacrificing the community’s water supply or the reliability of the power grid.
Proper policy isn’t a cure all, by any means. But it could mitigate the impacts of the imminent data center boom. Meanwhile, Mr. Yglesias, I will reiterate that the West, at least, does not have plenty of water for data centers, and I will continue to worry about them guzzling up what little water remains.
📖 Reading Room 🧐
The Land Desk is reading all of y’all’s great responses to last week’s open thread about forms of resistance. Check it out and weigh in if you haven’t already.
Len Necefer has had some really strong pieces on his All At Once by Dr. Lennewsletter recently, including this one musing about the opportunities for the Navajo Nation to build a recreation economy on the San Juan River (great idea!). He writes about how strange it is that he, a Navajo Nation citizen, must get a permit from the BLM to raft the river, when it borders his homeland (and is at the heart of Diné Bikeyah). I also like that he sees boating/recreational opportunities along the entirety of the river, not just from Sand Island to Clay Hills Crossing. I’ve always thought it would be super cool to boat the reaches between Farmington and Bluff (actually, I’ve always wanted to boat from Durango to Farmington to Bluff).
Another Substack that’s been getting my attention is Time Zero, a podcast and Substack on “the nuclearized world.” The Wastelanding series is about the legacy of uranium mining and milling on the Colorado Plateau, the Navajo Nation, and on Pueblo lands. Very powerful stuff.
The Colorado Sun’s Shannon Mullane has a good story about the Southern Ute Tribe finally getting some of its Animas-La Plata water, which was the whole reason the last big Western water project, as it’s known, was finally built.
1 This is not the same as consumption, which is the amount of water withdrawn minus the amount returned to the source.
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
On July 22, after months of uncertainty about the impact of federal funding cuts and tariffs, Gunnison City Council received an update on the future of the water treatment plan project. Gunnison Public Works Director Pete Rice addressed the council with a report on funding, design and construction of the proposed plant on the Van Tuyl Ranch. The water treatment plant, estimated to cost $50 million and be one of the largest infrastructure developments in city history, is divided into three projects. The first project covers the construction of a raw water intake and three separate wells at the VanTuyl Ranch. The second and third projects focus on the water delivery system and water treatment facility. With the first project nearing approval from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the city is expected to finalize its design this fall and begin construction before the end of 2025. The treatment plant initiative stems from the 2021 water master plan and a potable water evaluation. Gunnison currently relies on nine wells to source its drinking water. The system is outdated and no longer permitted by the state. Because all of the wells pull water from the same aquifer, drinking water is vulnerable to contamination and extended drought conditions. The proposed plant will allow Gunnison to pull water from the Gunnison River, in addition to the aquifer…
The first project includes the construction of a raw water intake and three separate wells. The proposed intake will be 18-feet deep alongside the Gunnison River, and cylindrical intakes will extend halfway into the river. The first project is expected to be approved by the EPA in the next four weeks, and begin construction this year with well drilling extending into 2026. The project is projected to cost $4 million, with $900,000 covering design, and $3 million going toward construction. The entire construction cost is funded by $1.75 million in congressionally directed spending, and $1.5 million from a Colorado Water Conservation Board grant. Four additional grants covered roughly $850,000 in design costs. The City of Gunnison will pay the remaining $25,000. Once complete, the water intake will have little impact on outdoor recreation, including boating and fishing, Rice said. However, construction will likely disrupt those activities for an estimated two to three months. It is currently unknown if construction can take place in the winter to minimize impact on summer recreation. Project two focuses on a complex network of pipes that will connect the raw water intake and wells, and deliver water directly to the water treatment plan. The third project is the construction of the water treatment plant itself. Rice said the second and third project design is estimated to be completed between winter 2025 and spring 2026, with construction lasting into 2029. The two projects will cost $2.7 million for design, and $40 million for construction. The majority of design costs are already funded by six grants, while the construction costs are set to be discussed at upcoming council meetings.
The Shoshone hydro plant in Glenwood Canyon. The Shoshone hydropower plant in Glenwood Canyon. The CWCB will hold a hearing on the water rights associated with the plant in September. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
Front Range asked for Colorado Water Conservation Board neutrality on historic use of Shoshone water rights
In an effort to head off concerns about the state’s role in a major Western Slope water deal, a Western Slope water district has offered up a compromise proposal to Front Range water providers.
In order to defuse what Colorado River Water Conservation District General Manager Andy Mueller called “an ugly contested hearing before the CWCB,” the River District is proposing that the state water board take a neutral position on the exact amount of water tied to the Shoshone hydropower plant water rights and let a water court determine a final number.
“Although we believe this would be an unusual process, the River District believes it would address the primary concern (i.e., avoiding the state agency’s formal endorsement of the River District’s preliminary historical use analysis) that we heard expressed by your representatives at the May 21, 2025 CWCB meeting regarding the Shoshone instream flow proposal,” Mueller wrote in an email to officials from the Front Range Water Council.
The River District worked with CWCB staff to draft the proposal, but it may not go far enough to address Front Range concerns.
The River District, which represents 15 counties on the Western Slope, is planning to purchase some of the oldest and largest non-consumptive water rights on the Colorado River from Xcel Energy for nearly $100 million. The water rights, which are tied to the Shoshone hydropower plant in Glenwood Canyon, are essential for downstream ecosystems, cities, endangered fish, and agricultural and recreational water users. As part of the deal, the River District is seeking to add an instream flow water right to benefit the environment to the hydropower water rights.
The effort has seen broad support across the Western Slope. The River District has raised $57 million toward the purchase from at least 26 local and regional partners. The project was awarded a $40 million Inflation Reduction Act grant in the waning days of the Biden administration, but those funds have been frozen by the Trump administration.
“These water rights are foundational to the Colorado River,” said Amy Moyer, chief of strategy at the River District. “It’s the number one project for the Western Slope. It’s the top priority to move forward.”
Critically, because its water rights are senior to many other water users — they date to 1902 — Shoshone can force upstream water users to cut back. The Shoshone call has the ability to command the flows of the Colorado River and its tributaries upstream all the way to the headwaters.
The twin turbines of Xcel Energy’s Shoshone hydroelectric power plant in Glenwood Canyon can generate 15 megawatts. The River District is proposing that the CWCB remain neutral on the issue of the plant’s historic water use. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
Putting a precise amount on how much water the plant has historically used is a main point of contention between the River District and the Front Range Water Council, a group that includes some of Colorado’s biggest municipal water providers: Denver Water, Colorado Springs Utilities, Aurora Water and Northern Water. These entities take water that would normally flow west, and bring it to farms and cities on the east side of the Continental Divide through what are called transmountain diversions. About 500,000 acre-feet of water annually is taken from the headwaters of the Colorado River and its tributaries to the Front Range.
Estimates by the River District put the Shoshone hydro plant’s average annual use at 844,644 acre-feet using the period between 1975 and 2003 — before natural hazards in the narrow canyon began knocking the plant offline regularly in recent years.
But Front Range Water Council members say this estimate is flawed and could be an expansion of the historical use of the water right. They have requested a hearing at the September CWCB meeting to hash out their concerns.
“The preliminary analysis that has been presented appears to expand historic use and creates potential injury,” Abby Ortega, general manager of infrastructure and resource planning at Colorado Springs Utilities told the CWCB at its May meeting.
Determining past use of the Shoshone water rights is important because it will help set a limit for future use. While changing the use of a water right is allowed by going through the water court process, enlarging it is not. The amount pulled from and returned to the river must stay the same as it historically has been.
As part of the River District’s deal to buy the water rights, the CWCB — which is the only entity in the state allowed to hold an instream flow water right — must officially accept the water right and then sign on as a co-applicant in the water court change case.
But Front Range water providers said that doing so would amount to an endorsement of the River District’s historical use estimate, which would mean taking a side in the Front Range versus Western Slope disagreement.
“If you agree to accept the right and as I understand it, the instream flow agreement, you’re agreeing to be a co-applicant, which risks you accepting their analysis,” said Alexandra Davis, an assistant general manager with Aurora Water, at the CWCB’s May meeting.
Some members of the Front Range Water Council have asked that the CWCB remain neutral during the water court change case. In May 9 and June 9 letters to the CWCB from Marshall Brown, general manager of Aurora Water, he said the CWCB shouldrefrain from endorsing any specific methodology or volume of water.
“… [T]he CWCB should remain neutral in the water court proceedings and defer to the court’s determination of the appropriate methodology and volumetric quantification,” the May 9 letter reads.
The River District’s offer does just that: It proposes that the CWCB should not take a position regarding the determination of historical use of the Shoshone water rights.
“We heard the issues that are most front and center from these entities,” Moyer said. “And so we are trying to find a path forward that works for everyone.”
But even if Front Range Water Council members are in favor of the proposal, it is unlikely to result in a cancellation of the hearing. CWCB Executive Director Lauren Ris said in an email that under the board’s rules, they are required to hold a hearing. And Jeff Stahla, public information officer at Northern Water, said they will still be asking for the hearing to proceed.
Spokespeople from Colorado Springs Utilities, Aurora Water and Denver Water all declined to comment on the River District’s proposal because it was marked as confidential.
Some members of the Front Range Water Council have concerns beyond CWCB neutrality that could be addressed at the September hearing.
In a May 14 letter to the CWCB, Denver Water’s CEO Alan Salazar said the water provider also wants to carry over some provisions from existing agreements like the Shoshone Outage Protocol. This agreement has an exception in cases of extreme drought that allows Denver Water to keep taking water if its reservoirs fall below certain levels and streamflows are low. Denver Water added that by omitting the last two decades of Shoshone water use, the River District’s study period is skewed, and that using an upstream stream gauge to measure historical use is improper.
The hearing is scheduled for the next CWCB board meeting Sept. 16-18. The board can approve or disapprove the acquisition of the water rights, or make changes to the proposal and adopt the amended proposal. The board is required to take action at the September hearing unless the River District approves an extension. Pre-hearing statements are due by Aug. 4.
CWCB board members Brad Wind, who is general manager of Northern Water, and Greg Johnson, manager of resource planning at Denver Water, recused themselves from the July 17 CWCB board meeting discussion of the Shoshone water rights and plan to recuse themselves from future Shoshone discussions and decisions.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Amidst the roar of rapids and the serenity of the Grand Canyon, “About Damn Time” by filmmaker Dana Romanoff, chronicles the journey of trailblazing boatwomen who, guided by legacy and determination, challenge a male-dominated world, protect sacred rivers, and pass the oars to the next generation. Dories—delicate, hand-crafted wooden boats—are known as the ballerinas of the river. They first danced on the Colorado River in the 1970s, introduced by environmentalist Martin Litton to immerse people in the Grand Canyon’s majesty and rally support against damming and destruction. Today, as the fight over Colorado River rights intensifies, river guides carry on this legacy, advocating for the protection of the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River, and its sacred places. Powerful, poetic, and action-packed, About Damn Time takes viewers on an exhilarating journey through churning rapids and serene starry nights. Along the way, it delves into the rich history and inspiring presence of boatwomen who are reshaping the river-running world for generations to come. A Stept Studios, Vault Rentals & Lockt Film presented by OARS Directed & Produced by Dana Romanoff Supported by American Rivers You might also like: A Guide to Fighting for Wild Rivers: • A Guide to Fighting for Wild Rivers | Pres… Martin’s Boat – A Film by Pete McBride: • Martin’s Boat – A Film By Pete McBride Dory Land: • Dory Land | Presented by OARS OARS has been providing whitewater rafting, hiking & multi-sport vacations since 1969 and we learned from decades of experience how to create magical nature-based experiences for you, your family, your friends or your business—the beauty of a pristine wilderness setting, combined with real-life adventure and thrills, captivating companionship and the chance to get away from it all. Find out more at our website: https://www.oars.com
Deadlocked for months in tense, closed-door meetings, Colorado River states may be one step closer to an agreement. Representatives from each of the seven Western states have agreed to discuss a new path forward — one that could more firmly ground Colorado River policy in hydrological reality as snowpack fails to deliver, reservoirs decline and fears mount…The proposal, presented for the first time publicly at a meeting in Arizona on June 17, would base the release of water from Lake Powell on a three-year average of the “natural flows” of the river. Water released from Lake Powell ends up in Lake Mead, the source of roughly 90 percent of Southern Nevada’s supply…The natural-flow proposal, while details remain sparse, would be a stunning departure from guidelines minted in 2007, which some argue don’t take into account declining water availability.
This 2023 diagram shows the tubes through which Lake Powell’s fish can pass through to the section of the Colorado River that flows through the Grand Canyon. Credit: USGS and Reclamation 2023
Federal officials reported Tuesday that the water level in Lake Powell, one of the main water storage reservoirs for the Colorado River Basin, could fall low enough to stop hydropower generation at the reservoir by December 2026.
The reservoir’s water levels have fallen as the Colorado River Basin, the water supply for 40 million people, has been overstressed by rising temperatures, prolonged drought and relentless demand. Upper Basin officials sounded the alarm in June, saying this year’s conditions echo the extreme conditions of 2021 and 2022, when Lake Powell and its sister reservoir, Lake Mead, dropped to historic lows.
The seven basin states, including Colorado, are in high-stakes negotiations over how to manage the basin’s water after 2026. One of the biggest impasses has been how to cut water use in the basin’s driest years.
“You can’t reduce what doesn’t come down the stream. And that’s the reality we’re faced with,” Commissioner Gene Shawcroft of Utah said in the statement. “The only way we’re going to achieve a successful outcome is if we’re willing to work together — and not just protect our own interests.”
Lake Powell is seen in a November 2019 aerial photo from the nonprofit EcoFlight. The Upper Basin states are proposing two pools of stored water in Lake Powell: A Lake Powell protection account and a Lake Powell conservation account. Credit: EcoFlight
Lake Powell, located on the Utah-Arizona border, collects water from Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, part of Arizona and tribal reservations in the Colorado River’s Upper Basin. Glen Canyon Dam releases the reservoir’s water downstream to Lake Mead, Native American tribes, Mexico, and Lower Basin states, including Arizona, California and Nevada.
Lake Powell and Lake Mead make up about 92% of the reservoir storage capacity in the entire Colorado River Basin.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s July report, called a 24-month study, shows the potential for Lake Powell to decline below two critical elevations: 3,525 feet and 3,490 feet.
It could drop below 3,525 feet in April 2026, which would prompt emergency drought response actions. That’s in the most probable scenario, but the federal agency also considers drier and wetter forecast scenarios. The dry forecast shows that the reservoir’s water levels would fall below this elevation as soon as January.
Lake Powell would have to fall below 3,490 feet in order to halt power generation.
Planning for emergency water releases
In 2021 and 2022, officials leapt into crisis management mode and released water from upstream reservoirs — including Blue Mesa, Colorado’s largest reservoir — to stabilize Lake Powell’s water levels.
The July 24-month study triggered planning for potential emergency releases, called drought response operations, at Lake Powell, and Flaming Gorge, Blue Mesa and Navajo reservoirs, said Chuck Cullom, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission.
“The Upper Division States and Reclamation have been monitoring the risks to Lake Powell since January 2025 due to the declining snowpack and runoff, and are prepared to take appropriate actions as conditions evolve through 2025 and spring of 2026,” he said in an email to The Colorado Sun.
The back of Glen Canyon Dam circa 1964, not long after the reservoir had begun filling up. Here the water level is above dead pool, meaning water can be released via the river outlets, but it is below minimum power pool, so water cannot yet enter the penstocks to generate electricity. Bureau of Reclamation photo. Annotations: Jonathan P. Thompson
At-risk hydropower
Hydroelectric power generation takes a hit with lower water levels at Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Reclamation’s dry conditions forecast says Lake Powell could fall below 3,490 feet by December 2026, and Lake Mead’s water level could fall below a key elevation, 1,035 feet, by May 2027. At that point, Hoover Dam would have to turn off several turbines and its power production would be significantly reduced, said Eric Kuhn, a Colorado water expert.
In more typical or unusually wet forecasts, neither reservoir would fall below these critical elevations in the next two years, according to the report.
Lake Powell and other federal reservoirs provide a cheap and consistent source of renewable energy. Without that, electricity providers would have to look to other, more expensive sources of energy or nonrenewable supplies. Some of those costs can get handed down to customers in their monthly utility bills.
Output capacity of the dam’s turbines decreases in direct proportion to the reservoir’s surface elevation. As Lake Powell Shrinks, the dam generates less power. Source: Argonne National Laboratory.
Glen Canyon’s hydropower is normally pooled with other power sources to serve customers in Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Texas and Utah. Its power generation has already been impacted: Fourteen of the lowest generation years at the dam have occurred since 2000.
A strong monsoon season this summer could help elevate the water levels in the major reservoirs, as could a heavy winter snowpack in the mountains this coming winter.
“If next year is below average, then we’re setting ourselves up for some very difficult decisions in the basin,” said Kuhn, former general manager of the Colorado River District and author of “Science Be Dammed,” a book about the perils of ignoring science in Western water management.
Arizona power house at Hoover Dam December 2019. Each of the 17 hydroelectric generators at Hoover Dam can produced electricity sufficient for 1,000 houses. Photo credit: Allen Best/The Mountain Town News
An interstate legal mire
Kuhn has also been tracking the releases from Lake Powell with big, interstate legal questions in mind.
If the river’s flow falls below a 10-year total of about 82.5 million acre-feet, it could trigger a legal mire. In that scenario, the Lower Basin could argue that the Upper Basin would be required to send more water downstream in compliance with the foundational agreement, the 1922 Colorado River Compact.
Some Upper Basin lawyers disagree about the terms of when states, like Colorado, would be required to send more water downstream. That’s a big concern for water users, including farmers and ranchers, who say they already don’t have enough water in dry years.
From 2017 to 2026, the 10-year cumulative flow is expected to be about 83 million acre-feet, Kuhn said.
“We’re OK through 2026,” Kuhn said. “But under the most probable and minimum probable [forecasts], it’s almost a certainty that the flow will drop below 82.5.”
Lake Powell’s ecosystems feel the strain
Bridget Deemer, a research ecologist for the U.S. Geological Survey, keeps her eye on how lower water levels impact ecosystems in Lake Powell.
In a recent study, she found that low dissolved oxygen zones grow larger as water levels fall and more sediment gets backed up in the reservoir over time. This sediment can spur more decomposition, which uses up oxygen in the water.
The zones can cut down on fish habitat. Fish don’t want to be in the warm surface waters of the lake, but as they search for their preferred temperature and food source, they can end up in an area with low oxygen, Deemer said.
The effect is greatest right below Glen Canyon Dam. In 2023, there were 116 days when the oxygen was below 5 milligrams per liter, which is the threshold for trout. At 2 to 3 milligrams per liter, the fish can die.
Deemer also studies how these zones are impacted by algae blooms.
Lake Powell researchers noted toxic algae blooms around the Fourth of July and last fall. They don’t know definitively what caused either bloom event, but research does show that warming water temperatures and increased nutrients are two leading causes of harmful algae blooms.
These blooms can impact fish, people, pets or anything that ingests the algae.
“In general, Lake Powell is doing well,” she said. “Its waters are really clear without a lot of nutrients and algal growth. These blooms are smaller scale and localized.”
This U.S. Drought Monitor (USDM) week saw improvement in drought-related conditions across areas of the Southeast, South, Midwest, central and northern Plains, Intermountain West, and Desert Southwest, where short-term precipitation accumulations (past 30-day period) have helped to improve drought-related conditions. For the week, the most significant rainfall accumulations were observed across northern Kansas and areas of the Midwest including Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana where accumulations ranged from 3 to 10+ inches, with the highest accumulations observed in northeastern Kansas. On the map, improving conditions over the past 30 to 60 days led to reduction in areas of drought in the Plains states, Kansas to North Dakota, as well as across drought-affected areas across the Midwest. Elsewhere, short-term dryness led to widespread expansion of areas of Abnormally Dry (D0) across the Southeast states including the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and the Florida Panhandle. In the South, drought conditions continued to improve in Texas, including in the Trans-Pecos region in western Texas where short and mid-term composite drought indicators are showing improving conditions in terms of precipitation, soil moisture, and vegetation health. In the West, conditions were generally dry regionally, however, some isolated monsoon thunderstorms provided a much-needed boost in moisture (2 to 3 inch accumulations during the past week) to drought-affected areas of east-central and southeastern Arizona as well as lesser accumulations observed in central and northern Arizona. In terms of reservoir storage in the West, California’s reservoirs continue to be at or above historical averages for the date (July 22), with the state’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Shasta and Lake Oroville, at 105% and 117% of average, respectively. In the Southwest, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is reporting (July 21) Lake Powell at 31% full (47% of average for the date), Lake Mead at 31% full (52%), and the total Colorado system (July 20) at 39% of capacity (compared to 45% of capacity the same time last year)…
On this week’s map, improvements were made in the region, namely in central northern Kansas, southeastern Nebraska, and South Dakota, where shorter-term precipitation (past 30-60 days) was normal to above normal. Additionally, these areas were showing improvements in other drought indicators including soil moisture, streamflow activity, and crop-related vegetation health indices. Conversely, conditions degraded on the map in areas of central South Dakota as well as in northern North Dakota, where dry conditions have prevailed during the past 30 to 60 days. For the week, light-to-heavy rainfall accumulations (ranging from 1 to 10 inches) were observed, with the heaviest amounts impacting northern Kansas and southeastern Nebraska. Below-normal average temperatures (ranging from 1 to 8 degrees F) were logged across most of the entire region…
Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending July 22, 2025.
Out West, generally dry conditions prevailed over much of the region with the exception of isolated areas of the Four Corners states, which observed monsoon-related thunderstorm activity with accumulations ranging from 1 to 4 inches. The storms led to targeted improvements on the map in Arizona. Likewise, isolated areas of the Pacific Northwest and eastern Plains of Montana and Wyoming observed isolated shower activity with accumulations generally of < 2 inches. On the map, persistent dry conditions led to expansion of areas of drought in southeastern Idaho, western Wyoming, and in eastern and southwestern Montana. For the week, average temperatures were mainly below normal with anomalies ranging from 2 to 10 degrees F and the greatest departures logged were observed in eastern Montana…
On this week’s map, improvements were made in the Hill Country and Trans-Pecos regions of Texas in response to improving conditions during the past 30-90 days. In these regions, targeted improvements were made in all drought categories (D1-D4). In Tennessee, a mix of degradations and improvements were made on the map in isolated areas of central and eastern Tennessee. For the week, average temperatures were generally above normal in eastern areas of the region, with anomalies ranging from 2 to 8 degrees F. Conversely, the western extent of the region, including much of Texas and Oklahoma, experienced temperatures ranging from 1 to 5 degrees F below normal. Texas reservoirs are reported to be 80% full, with many in the eastern part of the state in good condition (over 90% full), while numerous others in the western portion of the state continue to experience below-normal levels, according to Water Data for Texas (July 23). In terms of streamflow activity (July 23), the U.S. Geological Survey is reporting well above normal streamflows (>90th percentile) across areas of central and eastern Texas, eastern Oklahoma, and north-central Tennessee, while areas of the Texas Gulf Coast and South Texas Plains, northern Louisiana, and southern Mississippi are experiencing below normal levels (1st to 24th percentile range)…
Looking Ahead
The NWS Weather Prediction Center (WPC) 7-Day Quantitative Precipitation Forecast (QPF) calls for relatively dry conditions across the western U.S., areas of the South, and southern Plains. Elsewhere, light-to-moderate accumulations are expected across areas of the central and northern Plains, Northeast, and the Gulf Coast region of the South and Southeast. The Climate Prediction Center (CPC) 6-10-day outlooks call for a moderate-to-high probability of above-normal temperatures across most of the conterminous U.S. with the exception of portions of California and Maine where below-normal temperatures are forecasted. In terms of precipitation, there is a low-to-moderate probability of above-normal precipitation across the Pacific Northwest, northern portions of the Intermountain West, central and northern Plains, Gulf Coast region, and much of the Eastern Seaboard…
US Drought Monitor one week change map ending July 22, 2025.
By measuring the gravitational pull of water for more than two decades, NASA satellites have peered beneath the surface and measured changes in the groundwater supplies of the Colorado River Basin for years 2002 to 2024. Credit NASA
By measuring the gravitational pull of water for more than two decades, NASA satellites have peered beneath the surface and measured changes in the groundwater supplies of the Colorado River Basin for years 2015 to 2024. Credit: NASA
By measuring the gravitational pull of water for more than two decades, NASA satellites have peered beneath the surface and measured changes in the groundwater supplies of the Colorado River Basin. In a recent analysis of the satellite data, Arizona State University researchers reported rapid and accelerating losses of groundwater in the basin’s underground aquifers between 2002 and 2024. Some 40 million people rely on water from the aquifers, which include parts of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming.
The basin lost about 27.8 million acre-feet of groundwater during the study period. “That’s an amount roughly equal to the storage capacity of Lake Mead,” said Karem Abdelmohsen, an associate research scientist at Arizona State University who authored the study.
About 68 percent of the losses occurred in the lower part of the basin, which lies mostly in Arizona. The research is based on data collected by the GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) and GRACE-FO (GRACE Follow-On) missions. The data were integrated with output from land surface models, such as NASA’s North American Land Data Assimilation System, and in-situ precipitation data to calculate groundwater losses.
The conclusions were similar to those arrived at by Arizona State University Global Futures Professor Jay Famiglietti in an analysis of the Colorado River Basin published in 2014, when his team was at the University of California, Irvine. “If left unmanaged for another decade, groundwater levels will continue to drop, putting Arizona’s water security and food production at far greater risk than is being acknowledged,” said Famiglietti, previously a senior water scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the principal investigator of both studies.
The maps above underscore the accelerating rate of groundwater loss detected by the GRACE missions. In the first decade of the analysis, between 2002 and 2014, parts of the basin in western Arizona in La Paz and Mohave counties and in southeastern Arizona in Cochise County lost groundwater at a rate of about 5 millimeters (0.2 inches) per year. Between 2015 and 2024, the rate of groundwater loss more than doubled to 12 millimeters (0.5 inches) per year. [ed. emphasis mine]
1950 – 2023
Two key factors likely explain the acceleration, the researchers said. First, there was a global transition from one of the strongest El Niños on record in 2014-2016 to a period when La Niña reasserted control, including the arrival of a “triple-dip” La Niña between 2020 and 2023. La Niña typically shifts winter precipitation patterns in a way that reduces rainfall over the Southwest and slows the replenishment of aquifers.
Second, there was an increase in the amount of groundwater being used for agriculture. “2014 was about the time that industrial agriculture took off in Arizona,” Famiglietti said, noting that large alfalfa farms arrived in La Paz and other parts of southern Arizona around that time. Dairies and orchards in southeastern Arizona likely impacted groundwater supplies as well, he added. Other “thirsty” crops grown widely in the state include cotton, corn, and pecans. Data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Cropland Data Layer(CDL) shows that these crops are common in several parts of southern Arizona, including Maricopa, Pinal, and Cochise counties.
Irrigated agriculture consumes about 72 percent of Arizona’s available water supply; cities and industry account for 22 percent and 6 percent, respectively, according to Arizona Department of Water Resources data. Many farms use what Famiglietti described as “vast” amounts of groundwater in part because they use a water-intensive type of irrigation known as flood irrigation (or sometimes furrow irrigation), a technique where water is released into trenches that run through crop fields. The long-standing practice is typically the cheapest option and is widely used for alfalfa and cotton, but it can lead to more water loss and evaporation than other irrigation techniques, such as overhead sprinklers or dripping water from plastic tubing.
Captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8, shows desert agriculture in La Paz and Maricopa counties on July 12, 2025. CDL data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture indicates that most of the rectangular fields around Vicksburg and Wenden are used to grow alfalfa, while the fields around Aguila are typically used for fruits and vegetables, such as melons, broccoli, and leafy greens. Some of the alfalfa fields in Butler Valley (upper part of the image) have gone fallow in recent years following the termination of leases due to concerns from the Arizona State Land Department about groundwater pumping.
The satellite image above, captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8, shows desert agriculture in La Paz and Maricopa counties on July 12, 2025. CDL data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture indicates that most of the rectangular fields around Vicksburg and Wenden are used to grow alfalfa, while the fields around Aguila are typically used for fruits and vegetables, such as melons, broccoli, and leafy greens. Some of the alfalfa fields in Butler Valley (upper part of the image) have gone fallow in recent years following the termination of leases due to concerns from the Arizona State Land Department about groundwater pumping.
The new analysis found some evidence that managing groundwater can help keep Arizona aquifers healthier. For instance, the active management areas and irrigation non-expansion areas established as part of the Arizona Groundwater Management Act of 1980 lessened water losses in some areas. The designation of a new active management area in the Willcox Basin in 2025 will likely further slow groundwater losses. “Still, the bottom line is that the losses to groundwater were huge,” Abdelmohsen said. “Lots of attention has gone to low water levels in reservoirs over the years, but the depletion of groundwater far outpaces the surface water losses. This is a big warning flag.”
NASA supports several missions, tools, and datasets relevant to water resource management. Among them is OpenET, a web-based platform that uses satellite data to measure how much water plants and soils release into the atmosphere. The tool can help farmers tailor irrigation schedules to actual water use by plants, optimizing “crop per drop” and reducing waste.
Climate change is warming the North Pacific Ocean, leading weather patterns that drive drought in the U.S. Southwest to persist decades longer than they have in the recent past.
The drought in the Southwestern U.S. is likely to last for the rest of the 21st century and potentially beyond as global warming shifts the distribution of heat in the Pacific Ocean, according to a study published last week led by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin.
Using sediment cores collected in the Rocky Mountains, paleoclimatology records and climate models, the researchers found warming driven by greenhouse gas emissions can alter patterns of atmospheric and marine heat in the North Pacific Ocean in a way resembling what’s known as the negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), fluctuations in sea surface temperatures that result in decreased winter precipitation in the American Southwest. But in this case, the phenomenon can last far longer than the usual 30-year cycle of the PDO.
“If the sea surface temperature patterns in the North Pacific were just the result of processes related to stochastic [random] variability in the past decade or two, we would have just been extremely unlucky, like a really bad roll of the dice,” said Victoria Todd, the lead author of the study and a Ph.D student in geosciences at UT Austin. “But if, as we hypothesize, this is a forced change in the sea surface temperatures in the North Pacific, this will be sustained into the future, and we need to start looking at this as a shift, instead of just the result of bad luck.”
Currently, the Southwestern U.S. is experiencing a megadrought resulting in the aridification of the landscape, a decades-long drying of the region brought on by climate change and the overconsumption of the region’s water. That’s led to major rivers and their basins, such as the Colorado and Rio Grande rivers, seeing reduced flows and a decline of the water stored in underground aquifers, which is forcing states and communities to reckon with a sharply reduced water supply. Farmers have cut back on the amount of water they use. Cities are searching for new water supplies. And states, tribes and federal agencies are engaging in tense negotiations over how to manage declining resources like the Colorado River going forward.
“Planners need to consider that this drought, these reductions in winter precipitation, are likely to continue, and plan for that,” said Tim Shanahan, an associate professor at UT Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences and co-author of the study.
The research began with decades-old sample cores taken from lakes in the Rocky Mountains. Using modern geochemical techniques, Todd was able analyze drought conditions during the mid-Holocene period 6,000 years ago, a period in Earth’s history when the Northern Pacific warmed and the Southwestern U.S. experienced hundreds of years of drought.
But the sample cores suggest the drought was much worse than previously thought by scientists. Through a series of climate models, the researchers found vegetation change in the tropics darkened the Earth’s surface so that it absorbed more of the sun’s heat. That led to a warming of the North Pacific that was similar to the PDO that drives drought in the Southwest, but in this case, the drying lasted for centuries. “As soon as we saw that, you know, we started thinking about what’s happening today,” Todd said.
For the past 30 years, the PDO has been in its negative phase, which leads to drought in the Southwest by reducing winter precipitation and the runoff from mountain snowpack that fills many of the region’s rivers and recharges groundwater aquifers.
Using an ensemble of historical and future climate models forecasting climate and precipitation patterns until 2100, they found the PDO-like negative phase continues through this century. But unlike the mid-Holocene period’s warming, which was brought on by vegetation change, today’s is driven by greenhouse gas emissions. Certain models revealed that the change in the ocean pattern was less about vegetation absorbing solar radiation, Todd said, and more about warming in general.
The study also revealed that current climate models are underestimating drought conditions, Todd and Shanahan said, and they hope to find better ways to approximate aridity going forward.
Drought that continued until the end of the century would have major implications for water resources in the Southwest and how they are managed. The region currently sustains some of the country’s biggest cities and most productive agricultural areas.
Brian Richter, president of the water research and education group Sustainable Waters and a water researcher not involved in the study, said the research further proves the drought in the Southwest is more intense than previously thought and is not going away any time soon.
“Doesn’t it suck that every time the science improves, the outlook for the climate and water looks worse?” he said.
In many ways, Richter said, what people are seeing on the ground is outpacing science. Five years ago, he said, farmers would say they’ve been through droughts before, and this one would soon pass. Now, he said, their tone has changed to “This is a different kind of a drought.”
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
In response to last week’s dispatch on a potential new Colorado River sharing deal, Save The World’s Rivers! tweeted this compelling — but, for some, potentially opaque — tweet:
I say “opaque” because at first glance it might seem strange that a 50/50 split of the river’s waters between the Upper Basin and the Lower Basin would lead to ecological disaster. But it could, if, during a period of extremely low flow years, the 50% sent downstream was so low that it reduced daily flows through the Grand Canyon to a level that could not support fish or the ecology.
I’ve written about the faulty math of the Colorado River Compact many times here. Yet the assumptions of the river’s flow and the math are hardly the only, or largest, problems with the document. Most egregious was the exclusion of tribal nations from the original negotiations and the compact, itself, even though they collectively are entitled to a significant portion of the river’s waters. Under the compact, the tribal nations’ water rights must come out of the respective states’ allotments — that reduces tribes to subdivisions of the states, which they are not. They are sovereign nations and their water rights are negotiated with the federal government.
The other very big problem is that the compact never once considers the river, or the ecology that depends upon it. Instead, it apportions all of the water in the river and then some to “beneficial use,” which does not include environmental or even recreational uses. The compact also states that “the use of its waters for purposes of navigation shall be subservient to the uses of such waters for domestic, agricultural, and power purposes.” If we consider river-running and Lake Powell boating to be navigation, then the compact also deprioritizes those uses, i.e. recreation.
Because all of the Lower Basin’s water must flow through the Grand Canyon, the Lower Basin’s water rights serve as sort of de facto instream water rights through the canyon. In other words, the more water the Imperial Irrigation District and other Lower Basin users demand for irrigating alfalfa, the more water there is for fish and other critters in the Grand Canyon (including river runners). So, if the states were to strike a deal that might allow the Upper Basin to send only a trickle to the Lower Basin, it would also result in a mere trickle flowing through the Grand Canyon.
The thing is, the fish and even the river runners don’t really care much about the annual volume of water in the river, they care more about the daily streamflow. And that is currently regulated by a separate set of rules aside from the Colorado River Compact that were implemented in the 1990s.
But first, let’s go back in time to the years before there was a Glen Canyon Dam. Back then, the Colorado River through Glen Canyon, Marble Gorge, and the Grand Canyon was truly wild. Seasonal streamflow fluctuations were extreme, swinging from as low as 3,000 cubic feet per second in late summer, fall, and winter, to 80,000 cfs or more during spring runoff and late summer monsoonal floods. The water was often laden with orange-red sediment, and in the summer its temperature might reach 80° F or higher, giving it a viscous, dirty-bathwater feel. It may not have been great for swimming in, but the native fish reveled in it.
The completion of Glen Canyon Dam in 1963 changed all of that. Annual flows were evened out to build up storage in Lake Powell while also meeting Colorado River Compact obligations. Seasonal fluctuations were also no more, and the silt-free, murky green water emanating from the dam was a near-constant 46° F. Daily fluctuations of streamflow, however, could be erratic and downright manic, depending on the power grid’s need for more juice.
Before there was a Glen Canyon Dam, the Colorado River ran wild and free, often topping out at Lees Ferry at or above 100,000 cubic feet per second, which is ginormous. After the dam was completed, managers withheld flows to fill up the reservoir. Then, in 1983, they withheld too much water, and a massive spring runoff threatened the dam itself, forcing managers to release nearly 100,000 cfs once again and providing a wild ride for Grand Canyon river runners. After the 1996 operations plan was implemented, occasional high-flow releases occurred to help move sediment through the Grand Canyon in an effort to benefit the riparian ecology and build new beaches. But they still pale in comparison with pre-dam high flows. Data source: USGS.
During the first few decades after the dam was completed, the hydropower plant operators had ample leeway to “follow the load” by modulating the flow of water through the turbines. This occasionally caused huge fluctuations in the flow of water through the Grand Canyon. On one July day in 1989, for example, about 3,471 cfs was running through the dam at 5 a.m., a meagre flow by the Colorado’s standards. By 3 p.m., it had jumped to 29,000 cfs—the maximum flow through the turbines—to generate juice to the burgeoning number of air-conditioners on the Southwest power grid. This must have wreaked havoc on river runners in the Grand Canyon, who might have tied up their boats during high flow, only to find them beached out several hours later (or vice versa, depending on how far downriver they were). It probably wasn’t so good for the fish, either.
In the early ‘80s, dam operators wanted to maximize the potential for following the load by also installing turbines in the river outlets so they could generate even more power by releasing more water, which likely would have exacerbated daily fluctuations. The proposal was shot down following intense opposition, and sparked an effort to develop a more river-friendly plan for managing the dam.
Congress passed the Grand Canyon Protection Act in 1992, and in 1996 Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt signed off on the Glen Canyon Dam Operations plan, selecting the “Modified Low Fluctuating Flow” alternative — a compromise between environmental and power-generating interests — and creating an adaptive management working group. The annual releases would remain the same (8.2 million acre-feet), but it imposed minimum and maximum release rates and maximum fluctuation rates, along with adding in occasional high-flow events meant to simulate pre-dam seasonal fluctuations. This limited Glen Canyon Dam’s flexibility as a hydroelectric plant, but it was far better for the downstream river and its users.
A profile of the Colorado River with potential future dam and reservoir sites. From the 1916 USGS paper “Colorado River and its utilization,” by E.C. La Rue.
Yet in the ensuing three decades, power-generation has often taken precedent over downstream ecological health, and the Grand Canyon’s riparian environment remains imperiled. (As long as we’re talking about ironies: A portion of revenues from Glen Canyon Dam’s power sales fund endangered fish recovery efforts.)
Whether a new deal to share the Colorado River becomes an ecological disaster would seem to depend less on the annual volume released from Glen Canyon Dam than it does on the daily and seasonal operations of the dam. And I would add this to the above tweet: It would be the second ecological disaster for the Grand Canyon; the first was the construction of Glen Canyon Dam, itself.
The back of Glen Canyon Dam circa 1964, not long after the reservoir had begun filling up. Here the water level is above dead pool, meaning water can be released via the river outlets, but it is below minimum power pool, so water cannot yet enter the penstocks to generate electricity. Bureau of Reclamation photo.
As long as we’re talking streamflows … here’s a hydrograph of the Animas River in Durango for the last year (July 17, 2024-July 17, 2025) and for the same time period during the previous year. You can see that spring runoff this year was lower, and less drawn-out than in 2024, and that the current streamflow is about 25% lower than it was on this date last year. Hopefully the monsoon will arrive soon and boost flows, at least for a bit.
🤯 Trump Ticker 😱
While everyone is going bananas over the Trump/Jeff Epstein brouhaha, the Trump administration is putting its fossil fuel fetish on garish display. This includes:
Yesterday the Interior Department said it would subject proposed solar and wind developments on public lands to elevated scrutiny in an effort to end “preferential treatment for unreliable, subsidy-dependent wind and solar energy.” Meanwhile these guys have been eliminating environmental reviews for and public input on oil and gas and mining projects. So who’s getting preferential treatment now?
Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is trying to block the state of Colorado from pushing dirty coal plants to close as part of its effort to reduce air pollution and, well, comply with EPA air quality regulations. CPR’s Sam Brasch has the story, and reports that Colorado’s not about to take this one lying down.
And, the EPA continues to defy its name by extending the deadline for compliance with regulations for managing coal combustion waste, or CCW. Coal combustion waste is the solid stuff left over from coal burning, like ash, clinkers, and scrubber sludge, and it contains copious quantities of nasty stuff like mercury, arsenic, boron, cobalt, radium, and selenium. This is an enormous waste stream, and is piled up outside coal plants and in coal mines all over the West. Check out this map from Earthjustice to see where the coal waste depositories are near you!
And finally, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, in an Economist column, wrote that climate change is “not an existential crisis,” merely a pesky little “by-product of progress.” He said he was willing to take the “modest negative trade-off” of climate change—along, presumably, with the heat waves, wildfires, and devastating floods—”for this legacy of human advancement.” It’s almost as if they like pollution! It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic.
😀 Good News Corner 😎
Colorado has new wolf pups! Yes, Colorado Parks and Wildlife has confirmed three new wolf families have joined the Copper Creek Pack with new pups, though they have not released the number of pups in each family. This is good news, indeed.
“Like so many Coloradans, I’m thrilled to hear of new wolf families and puppy paws on the ground,” said Alli Henderson, southern Rockies director at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a written statement. “The howl of wolves rising once more in this iconic landscape signals real progress toward restoring balance in Colorado’s wild places.”
For more background and history on wolves, check out my essay from a little while back on wolves, wildness, and hope. But you’ll have to sign up as a paid subscriber to read it, since the archives are behind the paywall!
La Plata Electric Association (LPEA) has signed a new 10-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with Ptarmigan Resources and Energy Inc. for locally generated hydropower from the Vallecito Dam, reinforcing the cooperative’s commitment to clean, reliable, and community-focused energy.
Effective April 1, 2026, through March 31, 2036, the agreement will provide approximately 5.8 megawatts of renewable capacity onto LPEA’s system – enough to power around 2,500 homes per year. It’s the first time LPEA has been able to purchase power directly from Vallecito, thanks to new flexibility under its evolving power supply strategy.
“This is a win for our members and our mission,” said LPEA CEO Chris Hansen. “For the first time, we’re contracting directly with a local hydropower provider right in our backyard.”
The hydropower facility at Vallecito Dam, located northeast of Bayfield, has long provided clean energy to the regional grid. However, LPEA’s previous long-term wholesale power contract limited its ability to work with independent producers like Ptarmigan.
“This project is exactly what we envision for the future of energy for our members: affordable, responsibly generated power produced right here in our community,” said Nicole Pitcher, LPEA Board President. “It’s meaningful that the same water sustaining our ranches and farms and bringing joy to recreationists will also be generating clean energy for homes across our service territory.”
“Selling power locally is a win-win,” said Sam Perry, CEO of HydroWest (contracted by Ptarmigan to oversee plant operations). “With this new partnership, Vallecito can provide consistent, renewable energy and grid stability to LPEA.”
This PPA follows LPEA’s launch of a competitive Request for Proposals (RFP) earlier this year, seeking additional long-term energy resources to serve its load after 2028.
I’m a little slow getting to this one, thanks mostly to being consumed by the whole public land sale brouhaha, but better late than never.
After years of bickering, wrangling, fighting, and digging in their heels, representatives of the seven Colorado River Basin states may have finally agreed on a “revolutionary” way to split up the river’s waters: They’re going to base it on how much water is actually in the river at any given time.
So, apparently, in this world, “revolutionary” is a synonym for the most common sense, obvious, and, really, necessary way to do things.
More specifically, the Upper Basin would release a percentage of the rolling three-year average of the“natural flow”* at Lee Ferry from Glen Canyon Dam, making it available to the Lower Basin. That’s opposed to the current model, where the Upper Basin is required to release at least 75 million acre-feet every ten years (or 7.5 MAF per year on average)**
Let’s pause for a moment and use an analogy to reflect on how short-sighted and dumb that original approach was. [ed. emphasis mine] Say someone has a potato farm and they die, leaving the farm to their two children, Upper and Lower, who must determine how to divide the farm and its yield between them. They look back at their parent’s ledgers, and determine that the farm has produced at least 15 tons of potatoes annually during the previous few years.
So they agree to divide it in half, with 7.5 tons going to each of them each year. But Upper will actually live on the farm, and has the keys to the lock on the gate, so they add into their Potato Farm Compact a clause that requires Upper to not prevent Lower from taking 75 tons of potatoes from the farm during every 10 year period.
This works out fine as long as the farm produces 15 tons per year. But what happens if you signed the Compact during an abnormally productive period, and the long-term average yield was far lower than 15 tons? Or what happens as the soil becomes less fertile and the irrigation water becomes more scarce and production drops far below 15 tons per year? Under the agreement, Upper still has to allow Lower to take 7.5 tons annually, leaving Upper with far less, maybe even nothing during a string of bad years. Obviously, this is untenable. And, just as obviously, it would have made far more sense for Upper and Lower to simply divide each year’s harvest in half and each take 50% of whatever the total might be. Just as obviously, that would have been the smartest way to divide up the Colorado River in the first place. Of course, a river is not a potato crop.
To determine how much potatoes you have, you just put them on a scale. Determining the “natural flow” of the Colorado River is far more difficult, and requires inputting:
data from 29 upstream streamflow gauges/gages;
historic outflow and pool elevations from 12 main-stem and 12 off-stream reservoirs;
upstream consumptive uses and losses.
While that doesn’t sound so complicated, gathering all of these inputs — reservoir evaporation, for example, or the exact amount consumed by agriculture — can require separate calculations and guesswork of their own.
Note that the would-be signatory’s of this deal haven’t agreed on what the “fixed percentage” would be, and that there still would be an unspecified “lower limit” to the annual release from Lake Powell. Those could both be sticking points in finalizing this plan. Source: Arizona Reconsultation Committee June meeting.
But the states wouldn’t be coming up with this from scratch. The Bureau of Reclamation already calculates the river’s natural flow at Lees Ferry along with Lake Powell’s unregulated inflow. As you can see from the graph below, the river has not consistently delivered 15 million acre-feet per year, forcing the Upper Basin to deplete their savings account (Lake Powell) in order to meet its Colorado River Compact obligations.
This shows the estimated natural flow of the river — or what it would deliver without any upstream dams, diversions, or human-related consumptive use — at Lees Ferry, several miles downstream from Glen Canyon Dam. The natural flow is calculated using upstream streamflow gages, consumptive use, and calculated reservoir evaporation. Source: Bureau of Reclamation.
If the supply driven concept is implemented, it will base Glen Canyon Dam releases on a fixed percentage of the previous three-year moving average. For example, the average of water years 2022, 2023, and 2024 was 13 million acre-feet. If the Upper Basin and Lower Basin were to each take 50%, then the Glen Canyon release this year would be 6.5 million acre-feet (plus something for Mexico, presumably, although this isn’t clear. I highly doubt the Lower Basin will settle for just 50%, given that it has far more people, more agriculture, and is just thirstier, overall, but let’s go with that figure since it’s what’s in the Colorado River Compact, sort of.
The Lower Basin states use far less water now than they did a decade or so ago, thanks in part to forced cuts and in part to general conservation measures. The increase between 2023 and 2024 is probably due to the fact that 2023 was an unusually wet year in most of the Colorado River Basin, meaning farmers and other irrigators needed less water. Source: Colorado River Accounting and Water Usage Report, Lower Basin, Bureau of Reclamation.
That would actually work: The Lower Basin states’ consumptive use last calendar year was about 5.8 million acre-feet, so they’d have enough to use, and a little on top for evaporation from reservoirs (which is not included in the Lower Basin’s accounting). It would leave the Upper Basin enough for consumption and some extra for reservoir storage.
But if you go with the previous three years (‘20,’21,’22), you end up with an average of just 9 million acre-feet, 50% of which would be a measly 4.5 million acre-feet, forcing downstream users — namely the Central Arizona Project, since their rights are junior to California’s — to take deep cuts. And it would leave the Upper Basin just enough to meet their needs, meaning they’d have to draw down Lake Powell or other reservoirs to fulfill their obligations.
Another tricky scenario would be if three decent water years were followed by an extremely dry year. Releases from Lake Powell could significantly exceed inflows, which might deplete the reservoir enough to bring it down to minimum power pool, which is no bueno.
While this may be the closest the states have come to reaching some sort of consensus on how to run the River beyond 2026, it seems as if there is still many sticky details to work out. How are they going to agree on a fixed percentage? What will the minimum release be? And how will that fly with the Upper Basin during years such as 2002, when the natural flow at Lees Ferry was a mere 5.8 million acre-feet? Time’s running out.
Now for some more data for your pondering pleasure:
The Upper Basin states use far less water than the Lower Basin, but the Lower Basin has generally been reducing overall use, while the Upper Basin has remained steady or even increased consumption, with Colorado overtaking Arizona in 2023. Note: The Arizona figure only includes the Lower Basin. Arizona also consumes about 13,000 acre-feet of Upper Basin water each year, down significantly from pre-2019, when up to 40,000 acre-feet was withdrawn from Lake Powell for steam generation and cooling at the now shuttered Navajo Generating Station. Source: Bureau of Reclamation.
The Imperial Irrigation District in southern California remains the River’s largest single water user, and one of the most senior water rights holders, using most of the water for alfalfa and various food crops. However, it has cut its consumption considerably over the years, in part thanks to state and federal programs that pay farmers not to irrigate. It’s not clear how long these programs and the payments can last, however. Nevada is included on this list because nearly all of the state’s Colorado River allocation is drawn from Lake Mead and goes to the greater Las Vegas area. Also note that it is only number 8 on this list. Source: Bureau of Reclamation.
Agriculture has been and remains the biggest single user of Colorado River water, by far. Of that amount, alfalfa and other hay crops take up the lion’s share.
This passage, from David Starr Jordan’s Fish Commission Bulletin 1889: Report of Explorations in Colorado and Utah During the Summer of 1889, remains relevant today:
Uggh. Fire season is getting ugly. The Dragon Bravo Fire blew up and burned the historic Grand Canyon Lodge on the North Rim. The Deer Creek Fire, burning near Old La Sal, Utah, just west of the Colorado state line, has grown to almost 12,000 acres and exhibited some erratic behavior (see video above). Just northeast of there, the Wright Draw and Turner Gulch fires have forced the closure of Hwy. 141 and numerous evacuations in the Unaweep Canyon area outside Gateway (the community of Gateway is not yet threatened). The South Rim Fire at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison is now at 4,000 acres. The Laguna Fire west of Abiquiu Reservoir in New Mexico has reached 15,200 acres. And the air in the West is basically full of smoke.
Here’s hoping for rain and lots of it, sans lightning, please.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
This one’s from “A notice of the ancient ruins of southwestern Colorado, examined during the summer of 1875,” by W.H. Holmes. The text is the beginning of the description of the sketch.
The latest Bureau of Reclamation 24-month studies show a clear risk of Lake Powell dropping below minimum power pool in late 2026, with Lake Mead dropping to elevation 1,025 by the summer of 2027. This should be hair on fire stuff.
The “clear risk” here is based on Reclamation’s monthly “minimum probable” model runs – what happens if we have bad snowpacks next year, and the year after? These are probabilistic estimates, not predictions. But the whole point of Reclamation doing this is so that we can be prepared. We need a robust public discussion about what our plan is if we end up on this fork in the hydrologic road.
The warning signs are clearly there in Jack’s analyses. Frustrated by the delay in the traditional metrics we use for measuring and monitoring the Colorado River, Jack’s been doing routine updates on reservoir storage contents. The traditional metrics we use – the Upper Basin Consumptive Uses and Losses Reports, the Lower Basin Decree Accounting Reports, the Natural Flow Database – have significant lags. The reservoir data is there in real time, integrating how much the climate system provides and how much humans use. The data here are all public. Jack’s value add is to sum them up and slice and dice the resulting data structures.
The somewhat arcane but incredibly useful framework he’s been using his his recent analyses is the period of accumulation, when reservoirs rise as river flows exceed human uses above them and extractions below them, following by the period of decline, when we’re drawing down the reservoirs. This is a tool, or a way of thinking, that we could use in real time to adjust our behavior, noting bad reservoir conditions and reducing our use. This is not something our water allocation framework is well suited to do.
The Negotiations
For more than a year, those involved in the delicate interstate negotiations over future Colorado River water allocation rules have repeatedly asked that we give them space to have the hard conversations they need to have in private. The results, or lack thereof, have done nothing to earn our trust.
The potential path forward.
When Arizona’s Tom Buschatzke moved the up-until-then super secret “supply driven” allocation concept into public view a month ago, it seemed like a good sign along two dimensions. First, the idea of basing the amount of water delivered from Upper Basin to Lower Basin past Lee Ferry on actual hydrology, on a percentage of how much water the climate is actually providing, seemed like an eminently reasonable approach. Second, Buschatzke was talking about this in public.
Folks from the Upper Basin followed suit, and a round of positive press followed.
But as this shifts from the brief sunshine of public statements back to the closed door negotiations, any glimmer appears dim indeed.
The problems were already visible in that brief, glorious bit of sunshine of public discussion last month.
There are two critical questions that need to be settled to make this work. The obvious one is the number – what percentage of the three year natural flow are we talking about shepherding down past Lee Ferry? The second is more subtle: What happens if the Lee Ferry flow falls short of that number?
Speaking to the Arizona Reconsultation Committee, Buschatzke was clear that whatever percentage number they settled on would be an Upper Basin “delivery obligation” at Lee Ferry. Becky Mitchell, speaking on behalf of Colorado, (but effectively as the de-facto Upper Basin voice, the role the other Upper Basin states seem to have for all practical purposes ceded to her) said (per Heather Sackett’s excellent reporting) it was in no way to be considered a delivery obligation.
When I suggested in a blog post that Upper Basin states might need to curtail water users in order to ensure the agreed-upon-percentage (whatever that is) is met, I got an angry call informing me that the Upper Basin was considering no such thing.
What this makes clear is that the same disagreement over the irreducibly ambiguous legal question in Article III of the Colorado River Compact – does the Upper Basin have a Lee Ferry delivery obligation or not? – is simply being shifted to a new modeling framework.
Never mind the equally intractable question of what the Lee Ferry don’t-call-it-a-delivery-obligation percentage might be. I don’t know anything more than gossip, but the gossip suggests the attempt to settle on a number, or even a range of numbers that Reclamation might model as part of its NEPA analysis, also is not going well.
If I was talking to Alex Hager today, I would no longer describe a glimmer of hope.
The Failure Mode
One of the most useful questions I learned to ask as a reporter covering water involved drilling down to the question of what happens when scarcity finally bites. What is the failure mode? Who actually doesn’t get water? How does that work? [ed. emphasis mine]
The combination of Jack’s analysis and Reclamation’s latest 24-month study suggests that we need to be asking that question in the near term. When Powell approaches minimum power pool, and Mead drops below 1030, whose water use will be curtailed to protect the system? If your answer involves a defense of why your own water supply should not be reduced, you’re doing this wrong. Everyone needs to be realistic about their risk of a legal outcome different from their agency lawyer’s position. But we also need to recognize moral obligations here, to find ways to share in this shrinking river. How are we going to come together, as a community, to respond?
The longer term argument also needs to begin to take this form.
Let us imagine going to the Supreme Court to settle the question of whether the Upper Basin does or does not have a legal delivery obligation under Article III of the Colorado River Compact to deliver 75 million or 82.5 million acre feet per year past Lee Ferry. If you lose that litigation, what is the failure mode? Who actually doesn’t get water? If your groupthink has convinced you that this is not a meaningful question, that you’re sure to win, and the other basin is the one that needs to be thinking about failure modes, you need a second opinion, to get out of your groupthink bubble.
Whatever “bring it on” enthusiasm for litigation you’re hearing from your groupthinkers needs to be tempered by an honest discussion about what happens to your communities’ water supplies if you lose.
I’ll also make a modest pitch here for a need to recognize moral obligations, to find ways to share this shrinking river.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
In early July, Denver Water’s reservoirs filled nearly to the brim, holding the most water they’ll hold this year.
Nearly full reservoirs are certainly good news for Denver Water and the 1.5 million people who rely on the water stored in them every day. But for the utility’s water watchers, 2025’s “peak storage” moment was a letdown — and even a warning of sorts.
Dillon Reservoir, Denver Water’s largest reservoir is a popular spot for recreation. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Why?
Initial forecasts had suggested more water might run downhill, enough to fill the reservoirs and also provide extra water that could spill and boost river flows. But dry conditions in Colorado’s high country during April, May and June sapped that extra runoff, as drier soils and warmer air soaked up the potential excess.
“We thought we were going to have some excess water to play with this year,” said Nathan Elder, Denver Water’s manager of water supply. “But as it turned out we just barely saw enough runoff to fill our reservoirs.”
This year’s quick turn from abundant supplies to just-enough-to-almost-fill is another reminder that even in years when overall snowpack is reasonably good, such as this past winter, we can’t take water supplies for granted. That’s even more apparent in an era of climate change, when warming temperatures and longer dry spells can quickly shrink projected water supplies.
And as the hot summer irrigation season begins on the Front Range, it’s a reminder to residents to be thoughtful with outdoor water use: Adhere to watering rules, turn off irrigation systems during wet stretches, and think about changes to your landscape that, over time, will reduce watering needs.
And, keep in mind, half of Denver Water’s supply comes from the West Slope, where a dry spring is making supplies tight.
“Back on April 1, we thought we were going to be ‘filling and spilling,’” Elder said. “But we saw streamflow forecasts really drop and even in the Colorado River Basin, where we had a solid snowpack, it did not translate into the supplies we expected.”
The Snake River as it flows through Keystone toward Dillon Reservoir. Photo credit: Denver Water.
At least one key reason for the swift turn from a forecast for “filling and spilling” to just enough runoff to fill Denver Water’s reservoirs was lack of precipitation — just 50% to 70% of normal — in April, May and June in the mountainous counties of Park, Grand and Summit where Denver Water collects supplies.
That dry spell helped drive runoff down, especially in the South Platte Basin. The amount of spring runoff flowing to Strontia Springs southwest of Denver has been only 46% of normal, below an already weak forecast of 60%. Inflows into Dillon have also been lower than expected, just 75% of normal after forecasts of 100%.
As a result, Denver Water’s supply reservoirs peaked July 1, at just 95% of capacity and are now being drawn down as summer watering season gets into full swing. (One caveat: The peak storage number would have been a bit higher, closer to 97%, but for a storage limitation at Gross Reservoir while construction activities continue on the expansion project there.)
Denver Water hopes to see its reservoirs hit 100% of their storage capacity every year. This year’s shortfall across the reservoir system was about 7,500 acre feet, enough water to supply more than 15,000 households for a year.
“We missed filling by a relatively small amount, but we never know if this is a short-term situation or the start of the next drought,” Elder said. “We have filled up those saving accounts and now our reservoirs only go down from here with the peak of the heat season. So, we ask customers to stick to our rules and water with care.”
In addition to the lower-then-expected peak storage numbers, Denver Water also faces another “substitution year” on the West Slope.
That is a technical way of saying Denver Water must release water from its West Slope reservoirs to make up for a shortage of water in the federally operated Green Mountain reservoir downstream from Dillon Reservoir. The water will serve downstream water users on the Colorado River.
Substitution years are uncommon, usually required once or twice per decade. But, at least in recent years, that’s changing, with such “water refunds” from Denver Water required in 2021, 2022 and now, 2025.
“That is another thing that, like the spring dry-up in the mountains, we didn’t expect this year,” Elder said.
But other aspects of the state’s weather in recent months have been more positive.
Big rains in the metro region in May and June kept water usage down and sent a lot of water down the South Platte River to farmers and communities. That supply boost helped reduce calls for Denver Water to bypass additional water, leaving it in the streams, to meet those downstream demands.
“Those storms really helped us out; we haven’t had to run big exchanges and send our reservoir water down to meet those needs,” Elder said.
The wet weather locally also cut down on outdoor watering, as customers paid attention to weather and shut off sprinklers. June water use in Denver Water’s service area was just 94% of average, a system-wide water savings of 1,600 acre feet compared to anticipated demands during June.
Finally, as water watchers do every year about this time, we look to the monsoon season to bring helpful afternoon rainstorms in July and August, which can also drive down water demand.
“The less we can draw on our reservoirs,” Elder said, “the better chance we can fill up again next season.”
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (Jack Schmidt Center for Colorado River Studies, Utah State University):
July 14, 2025
Water stored in the reservoirs of the Colorado River represents the account balance from which we draw water for use. The amount in the account is especially important during dry times when the demand by water users throughout the Basin exceeds income to the account, primarily snowmelt runoff, and is met by account withdrawals.
The annual cycle of reservoir hydrology includes two seasons – a relatively short season when reservoir storage increases and a relatively long season when storage decreases. In wet years, the season when storage increases typically begins in March or early April and may last until late July. In dry years, this season might not begin until May and end in mid-June. During the rest of the year, the Basin’s reservoirs are progressively depleted.
Snowmelt in 2025 was low, similar to what it was in 2012 and 2013; in early June, the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center predicted that this year’s unregulated snowmelt inflow to Lake Powell will end up being 54% of the recent 30-yr average. In the 21st century, only 2002, 2018, and 2021 had lower inflows to Powell. Not surprisingly, the amount of water that accumulated in the Basin’s reservoirs during the 2025 snowmelt season was also unusually low. There are a few ways to consider the Basin’s reservoirs. We can consider every reservoir for which data are readily available[1]; we can consider the major reservoirs actively managed by Reclamation[2]; or, we can consider just Lake Powell and Lake Mead (hereafter, Powell+Mead). Considering only Lake Powell or only Lake Mead doesn’t tell us much, because all of the Rocky Mountain snowmelt is first stored in Lake Powell and subsequently transferred to Lake Mead. In 2025, the 46 Basin reservoirs gained only 0.55 million af (acre feet) of water, of which only 0.28 million af accumulated in the 12 federal reservoirs and only 0.11 million af accumulated in Powell+Mead. That is a very small amount, especially compared to 2023 and 2024 (Fig. 1). That accumulation is being quickly consumed. By 1 July 2025, all of the 2025 accumulation in Powell+Mead had been released downstream or evaporated.
Figure 1. Graph showing reservoir storage in different parts of the Colorado River Basin since 1 January 2023. Total storage in March 2023 was the lowest in the 21st century. Storage significantly increased due to 2023 snowmelt, but the accumulation from the 2024 snowmelt was entirely lost. This will also happen in the coming months. On 30 June 2025, active storage in 42 reservoirs upstream from Lake Powell was 8.58 million af, active storage in Lake Mead was 8.05 million af, and storage in Lake Powell was 7.88 million af.
In contrast to previous dry years, however, today’s account balance is unusually low, about the same as in late July 2021 (Fig. 2). Depending on how you think about the reservoir system, today’s contents are between 34 and 45% full in relation to their condition at the beginning of the 21st century (Table 1).
Figure 2. Graph showing reservoir storage in different parts of the Colorado River Basin since 1 January 1999. On 30 June 2025, total basin storage was comparable to what it was in late July 2021
Table 1. Present storage contents of reservoirs in the Colorado River Basin in relation to past conditions.
Storage contents, in million acre feet
on 30 June 2025
Last time storage was as low
Present storage as a percentage of storage in late July 1999
entire Basin (n=46)
26.8
25-Jul-21
45%
federal reservoirs (n=12)
23.64
4-Sep-21
42%
Powell + Mead
15.93
20-Nov-21
34%
The implications for Lake Powell depend on whether Reclamation decides to emphasize water storage in Lake Powell or in Lake Mead, and whether water presently in Flaming Gorge reservoir will be released to supplement storage in Lake Powell. As of June 30, 32% of the reservoir storage in the Basin was in 42 reservoirs upstream from Powell, 30% was in Mead, and 29% was in Powell (Fig. 1). if past management practices prevail, storage upstream from Powell will be quickly reduced, and storage in Powell and Mead will be reduced more slowly. If Reclamation emphasizes storage in Lake Powell by reducing releases to Lake Mead through the Grand Canyon, hydropower production at Glen Canyon Dam will be maintained and the risk of entrainment of smallmouth bass through the turbines will be reduced. But this management approach will cause Lake Mead to fall more quickl, thereby reducing hydropower production at Hoover Dam and perhaps the quality of water withdrawn to southern Nevada. Water storage can’t be maximized in both reservoirs at the same time. Indeed, we are living in dry times!
[2] There are 12 included in Reclamation’s monthly 12-month study reports (Taylor Park, Blue Mesa, Morrow Point, Crystal, Fontenelle, Flaming Gorge, Navajo, Vallecito, Lake Powell, Lake Mead, Lake Mohave, and Lake Havasu).
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Caitlin Hayes):
July 10, 2025
In the late 2010s, when Flavio Lehner worked for the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, water managers often asked him about the drought in the Southwest. Was the low precipitation simply an unlucky draw in the cycle of long-term weather variations? What role did climate change play? Most importantly, was the drought there to stay?
No one had answers, but Lehner began pursuing them.
Now a study by Lehner and his team, published July 9 in Nature Geoscience, shows that climate change and aerosols have indeed led to lower precipitation in the Southwest and made drought inevitable.
The research is the first to isolate the variables of human-caused climate change and air pollution to show how they directly affect the region’s precipitation; the study predicts that drought conditions will likely continue as the planet warms.
“What we find is that precipitation is more directly influenced by climate change than we previously thought, and precipitation is pretty sensitive to these external influences that are caused by humans,” said Lehner, the senior author. He is now an assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University.
A trend towards lower precipitation in the Southwest started around 1980, with the onset largely attributed to La Niña-like conditions, a climate phenomenon that results in cooler surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean. The new research shows that even if El Niño-like conditions had prevailed instead, the Southwest would not have experienced a corresponding increase in precipitation.
“In our models, if we see a warming trend in the tropical Pacific, we would expect more precipitation in the Southwestern United States, but that’s not the case here,” said first-author and doctoral student Yan-Ning Kuo.
“On top of the El Niño and La Niña sea surface temperature trends, there’s a uniform warming trend because of historical climate change, as well as emissions from anthropogenic aerosols, that both create a certain circulation pattern over the North Pacific. Those two factors prevent the precipitation for the Southwestern U.S. from increasing, even under El Niño-like trends.”
Lehner said the results point to a bigger shift in the connection between the weather in the tropical Pacific and in the U.S., due to climate change and aerosols.
“What we call a teleconnection from that region to the Southwestern U.S. is changing systematically,” he said, “and these external influences really modulate that relationship, so it doesn’t behave exactly how we expect it to behave.”
There is some good news. Researchers expect that the concentration of aerosols – which includes the emissions from vehicles and industry – will drop as China and other countries in East Asia implement policies to improve air quality. But Lehner said warming temperatures may offset those improvements.
“Most experts expect the world as a whole to reduce air pollution, and globally, it’s already going down quite quickly. That’s good news on the precipitation side,” Lehner said. “At the same time, the warming is going to continue as far as we can tell, and that will gradually outweigh those benefits, as a warmer atmosphere tends to be thirstier, gradually drying out the Southwest.”
The researchers were able to determine the role of climate change and aerosols by eschewing prevailing climate models that in recent years have not been able to accurately reflect the sea surface temperatures observed in real-time. The team designed their own simulations that allowed them to plug in data from satellites and statistical models to understand the impact of each contributing factor.
Lehner said the research offers new methods for approaching questions about climate change’s impact on weather patterns, while also specifically helping water managers and other stakeholders in the Southwest plan for the future.
“In the Southwest, people really depend on what little water there is – every drop in the Colorado River, for example, is accounted for through water rights,” he said. “I am excited to go back and show the results to people who need them.”
Co-authors include Isla R. Simpson, Clara Deser and Adam Phillips from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR); Matthew Newman from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); Sang-Ik Shin from NOAA and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences; and Julie M. Arblaster and Spencer Wong from Monash University.
The study was supported by NOAA, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes.
Click the link to read the article on the BBC website (Will Grant). Here’s an excerpt:
July 13, 2025
After the thirtieth consecutive month without rain, the townsfolk of San Francisco de Conchos in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua gather to plead for divine intervention. On the shores of Lake Toronto, the reservoir behind the state’s most important dam – called La Boquilla, a priest leads local farmers on horseback and their families in prayer, the stony ground beneath their feet once part of the lakebed before the waters receded to today’s critically low levels…
“We’re currently at 26.52 metres below the high-water mark, less than 14% of its capacity.” — Rafael Betance, who has voluntarily monitored La Boquilla for the state water authority for 35 years
Now, a long-running dispute with Texas over the scarce resource is threatening to turn ugly. Under the terms of a 1944 water-sharing agreement, Mexico must send 430 million cubic metres of water per year from the Rio Grande to the US. The water is sent via a system of tributary channels into shared dams owned and operated by the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC), which oversees and regulates water-sharing between the two neighbours. In return, the US sends its own much larger allocation (nearly 1.85 billion cubic metres a year) from the Colorado River to supply the Mexican border cities of Tijuana and Mexicali. Mexico is in arrears and has failed to keep up with its water deliveries for much of the 21st Century…
Many in northern Mexico believe the 1944 water-sharing treaty is no longer fit for purpose. Mr Ramirez thinks it may have been adequate for conditions eight decades ago, but it has failed to adapt with the times or properly account for population growth or the ravages of climate change.
Pagosa Country could see above-normal temperatures and above-normal precipitation in mid-July, according to the National Weather Service (NWS) Climate Prediction Center’s outlook for July 14-18.
That aligns with Pagosa Weather’s July 8 forecast that suggests, “Weak monsoon activity will ramp up next week,” though the organization notes later in its forecast, “The 8-14 day period… Weak monsoon activity will ramp up. We’ll see more showers and thunderstorms most afternoons, but I don’t see any big soakings on the horizon.”
Drought
According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, all of Archuleta County continued to be in drought as of July 1 — the most recent drought map available. The northwest portion of the county is listed as being in moderate drought, most of the county in severe drought and 10.64 percent of the eastern portion of the county in extreme drought…
Colorado Drought Monitor map July 8, 2025.
River conditions
The San Juan River in Pagosa Springs was running at 41.9 cubic feet per second (cfs) as of noon on Wednesday, July 9, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The July 9 median streamflow for July 9 is 255 cfs, according to the USGS, with the mean flow for the same date being 447 cfs. According to 89 years of data, the lowest river flow on July 9 came in 2002, when the river’s streamflow was at 16.4 cfs. The highest streamflow for that date came in 1995, when the river was at 2,290 cfs. Pagosa Weather’s Shawn Prochazka notes the current river conditions can be fatal for fish.
Earlier this week I was gazing with some amount of wonder at the Watch Duty fire map. Wildfires were cropping up in nearly every corner of the West, from the slopes of Navajo Mountain to the forests southwest of Window Rock; from the Gila Wilderness to two large blazes in southwestern Utah; from the Madre Fire north of Santa Barbara to the Gothic Fire in Nevada.
Oddly, however, Colorado seemed to be dodging fire season, despite ongoing drought conditions. That all changed a couple of days later, as blazes were sparked — mostly by lightning, it seems — along both rims of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, on the Uncompahgre Plateau, and outside Buena Vista. Meanwhile, the Deer Creek Fire raced through 4,000 acres of forest and brush on the slopes of the La Sal Mountains just over the Utah border in just a matter of hours.
This isn’t surprising. Even in a not-so-dry year one would expect to see smoke in the air in July, especially when hotter than normal temperatures (Arches National Park recorded 106° F on July 10) combine with afternoon thunderstorms that bring a lot of lightning but not much rainfall.
But it does seem a little bit odd to be worrying about wildfires when, not far away, people and houses are literally being carried away by floodwaters. First came the horrible and heartbreaking tragedy in Texas’ Hill Country. Then, just a day or two later, more than three inches of rain fell over a couple of hours on the South Fork wildfire burn scar in southern New Mexico, sending mud-and-debris filled flash floods careening through the community of Ruidoso, killing three and damaging hundreds of houses and infrastructure.
Ruidoso can’t seem to catch a break from climate change-exacerbated disasters. In April 2022, the McBride Fire ripped through the area, killing two people and destroying more than 200 homes. Then, last June, the South Fork and Salt Firestogether burned nearly 25,000 acres and some 1,400 structures. Shortly thereafter heavy rains on the burn scar led to major flash flooding in the town.
This time there was even more rain in a shorter period of time, sending a massive wall of water down the Rio Ruidoso. In less than an hour, the river’s flow jumped from about 7 cubic feet of water per second, to 5,200 cfs (with the gage height leaping from 1.45 feet to 18.42 feet). That’s the highest flow by far since records began in 1958, and 700 cfs higher than last year’s post-fire flood. It turned the creek into a destruction machine.
Since record keeping began in 1954, the Rio Ruidoso did not even get close to 3,000 cfs until 2008. Since then it has exceeded that level four times, setting new records in both 2024 and 2025, which is likely because of increased runoff from the South Fork fire burn scar. Source: USGS.
But folks of a certain political bent think something else entirely is to blame: Deep-state “weather weapons” and cloudseeding. And they are serious enough about it that they are vandalizing weather radars and threatening to kill folks who work in the weather modification field. This WIREDarticle gives a good overview of the conspiracy theories at work.
It’s obviously a crock of cuckoo, for so many reasons. Deep state? Weather weapon? Targeting both red Texas and deep blue New Mexico? Yeah, no. Let’s say you do buy into all of that, then you might want to consider the questionable efficacy of said weather weapon.
Cloud-seeding graphic via Science Matters
Western water managers and ski areas have been trying to wring more snow from storms via cloudseeding for decades. Maybe, just maybe they’ve been able to increase precipitation from select storms by a as much as 10%, although that’s difficult to ascertain. And yet, they have not been able to end the megadrought that has seized the Southwest for two-and-a-half decades, they have not been able to concoct enough storms to fill Lakes Powell and Mead, and they have not delivered endless powder days to Rocky Mountain ski resorts.
Anyway, this is just an excuse to link to this old video on Project Skywater, which was the Bureau of Reclamation’s 1970s effort to use cloudseeding to increase snowpack in the Colorado River Basin to meet growing demands for water. It was a big, well-funded project. It didn’t yield much in the way of results. Nevertheless, it was the impetus for the San Juan Avalanche Project, which brought a herd of snow experts to Silverton to do a comprehensive study of avalanches and the potential impacts all of that new cloudseeding-yielded snow would bring.
Sorry for the poor production quality of the video, but it’s almost as old as I am, so what do you expect? Besides, it’s got a cool soundtrack.
🤯 Crazytown Chronicle 🤡
It’s funny, back in 1971, the Interior Department (via its Bureau of Rec) was putting out informative videos about attempted weather modification. Now they are spewing MAGA-cult propaganda that shouts Kim Jong Un. Oh how our public lands overseer has fallen! It refers to Trump as the “most iconic” president ever. Whatever the frack that means. Oh, also, expect an “iconic” fireworks show over Mt. Rushmore next year.
📈 Data Dump 📊
After pondering population growth and development in Kanab, Utah, in the last dispatch, I figured I’d take a look at where in the West folks are moving to in the post-COVID era. The answer: Arizona. Specifically Pinal County, which had the highest net in-migration rate1 from 2023 to 2024, and Maricopa County, which had the largest number of net in-migrants. San Juan County, Colorado, is also in the top 20 for migration rates, but that wasn’t exactly due to a massive population influx to the mountain town. It had a net in-migration of just 20 people, which is a lot in a county of 800 people.
Keep in mind this is not the population growth rate, which includes births and deaths, but just the migration rates (though the two closely correspond).
Many of these counties are the usual suspects, but there are some surprises. San Miguel (Telluride), Eagle (Vail), Hinsdale (Lake City), and Dolores (Rico) counties, all in Colorado, have some of the highest rates of out-migration in the West. These same counties had relatively high net in-migration between 2021 and 2023. The cause of the exodus is not clear, though it might have to do with high housing prices, which plague all of these places.
Pinal County’s appeal is probably related to it becoming an electric vehicle, battery, and other high-tech manufacturing hub in recent years, boosted by Biden-era incentives. Congress and Trump killed many of those incentives with their recent budget reconciliation bill, possibly jeopardizing at least some of the new firms and jobs. It will be interesting to see if the 2024 migration trends can continue. Neighboring Maricopa County continues to draw tens of thousands of new residents and air-conditioning-dependents each year, never mind that the mercury hit 118° F a couple of days ago.
On Thursday, July 3, Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) Aquatic Nuisance Species (ANS) staff discovered a large number of adult zebra mussels in a privately owned body of water in western Eagle County.
“This news is a direct result of increased sampling efforts, ” said CPW Director Jeff Davis. “This discovery is a significant step toward identifying a potential source of zebra mussels and advancing our efforts for eradication. It would not have been possible without the commitment to protect Colorado’s bodies of water by our Aquatic Nuisance Species staff.”
During the survey, staff discovered evidence of and collected samples of suspected adult zebra mussels in various locations. Visual identification of the samples was performed by ANS Staff and samples were sent to Aquatic Animal Health Lab (AAHL) for DNA confirmation.
CPW staff is currently evaluating options for the next steps in eradicating zebra mussels from the body of water.
“Understanding the current extent of zebra mussels in western Colorado is a critical step in stopping their spread into new locations,” said CPW Invasive Species Program Manager Robert Walters. “Every new detection puts us one step closer to achieving this desired outcome.”
CPW, in collaboration with our partners at the local, state and federal levels, will continue our increased sampling and monitoring efforts. We also appreciate the willingness of private businesses and individuals who allow our staff to access their properties to conduct surveys.
In addition to the discovery found in western Eagle County, CPW also identified additional zebra mussel veligers in the Colorado River near New Castle, Highline Lake and Mack Mesa Lake at Highline Lake State Park.
Colorado River On July 3, CPW Aquatic Animal Health Lab (AAHL) confirmed three additional zebra mussel veligers in samples collected in the Colorado River between Glenwood Springs and Silt. Samples were collected on June 16 and taken to the ANS laboratory where the additional zebra mussels veligers were found. These samples were then sent to AAHL for DNA confirmation.
With the additional detections in sample results, the Colorado River is now considered “positive” for zebra mussels from the confluence of the Roaring Fork River to the Colorado-Utah border.
Since sampling efforts resumed in May, CPW has collected 225 water samples from various locations along the Colorado River, stretching from the headwaters in Grand County to the Colorado-Utah border. In addition to the samples from the Colorado River, ANS staff has collected 25 samples from the Eagle River and nine samples from the Roaring Fork River. There have been no detections of zebra mussel veligers in the samples from the Eagle and Roaring Fork rivers. To date, no adult zebra mussels have been detected in the Colorado, Eagle or Roaring Fork rivers.
Highline Lake On June 10, CPW ANS staff collected plankton samples from the patrol dock and inlet at Highline Lake as part of routine increased sampling efforts. ANS laboratory technicians identified one suspected zebra mussel veliger in each sample. The samples were sent to AAHL where they were genetically confirmed as zebra mussels.
“While we had maintained hope that our eradication efforts at Highline Lake would be successful, we have always known this was a lofty goal. This is the primary reason we have continued the implementation of the containment watercraft inspection and decontamination program at Highline Lake,” said Walters.
With Highline’s current designation as an infested body of water, boaters are reminded of the following protocols in place since 2023.
Boats launching at Highline Lake will be subject to inspection and decontamination protocols before launching.
All boats must be clean, drained and dry before launching at Highline Lake, or they will be decontaminated.
Upon exiting the lake, all boats will be inspected and decontaminated, and boaters will be issued a green seal and a blue receipt indicating the boat was last used on a body of water with a known aquatic nuisance species.
Mack Mesa On June 10, CPW ANS staff collected plankton samples in the area near the fishing pier at Mack Mesa Lake, located at Highline Lake State Park. ANS laboratory technicians identified one suspected zebra mussel veliger in the sample. The samples were sent to AAHL where the zebra mussel veliger was genetically confirmed.
On July 8, additional samples collected from Mack Mesa indicated additional zebra mussel veligers. With these additional detections, Mack Mesa is now considered “positive” for zebra mussels.
CPW is continuing to evaluate options for the future management of Highline Lake and Mack Mesa based on the latest sampling results.
Prevent the spread: Be a Pain in the ANS Everyone has a part to play in preventing the introduction and spread of invasive species in Colorado. Simple actions like cleaning, draining and drying your motorized and hand-launched vessels — including paddleboards and kayaks — and angling gear after you leave the water can make a big difference to protect Colorado’s waters.
Learn more about how you can prevent the spread of aquatic nuisance species and tips to properlyclean, drain and dry your boating and fishing gear by visiting our website. Tips for anglers and a map of CPW’s new gear and watercraft cleaning stations are available here.
CPW also encourages those who use water pulled from the Colorado River and find any evidence of mussels or clams to send photos to Invasive.Species@state.co.us for identification. It is extremely important to accurately report the location in these reports for follow-up surveying.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) is an enterprise agency, relying primarily on license sales, state parks fees and registration fees to support its operations, including: 43 state parks and more than 350 wildlife areas covering approximately 900,000 acres, management of fishing and hunting, wildlife watching, camping, motorized and non-motorized trails, boating and outdoor education. CPW’s work contributes approximately $6 billion in total economic impact annually throughout Colorado.
Millions of dollars in federal funding has been released to continue restoring lands and streams in the fire-scarred Upper Colorado River Basin watershed in and around Grand Lake and Rocky Mountain National Park.
The roughly $4 million was frozen in February and released in April, according to Northern Water, a major Colorado water provider and one of the agencies that coordinates with the federal government and agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service to conduct the work.
Esther Vincent, Northern Water’s director of environmental services, said the federal government gave no reason for the freeze and release of funds.
The amounts and timing of the freeze and release are being reported here for the first time.
U.S. Congressman Joe Neguse, who represents Grand County, did not respond to a request for comment regarding the funds.
The news comes as tens of millions of dollars in federal grants and budget allocations are being cut in Colorado and across the country as part of the Trump administration’s reorganization of federal agencies and associated budget cuts.
In June, Gov. Jared Polis’ office released an accounting of federal money that has flowed to state agencies. That analysis showed the agencies were able to retain $282 million in funding, but that $76 million had been lost, and another $56 million is at risk.
It’s unclear how much funding that flows through federal agencies to other Colorado entities and nonprofits such as those in the Upper Colorado River Basin, has been lost.
The U.S. Forest Service did not respond to a request for comment. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation declined to comment on the funding actions.
In Grand County, $761,000 has been released from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to help move forward on a broad-based effort by the Kawuneeche Valley Restoration Collaborative, according to Northern Water. The valley has been damaged by drought, failing irrigation systems and overgrazing by wildlife and is a critical piece of the Colorado River’s upper watershed. The collaborative, established in 2020, is a major partnership of seven entities, including Northern Water, Grand County, the Nature Conservancy and Rocky Mountain National Park.
East Troublesome Fire. Photo credit: Northern Water
The $3.3 million in East Troublesome fire funding that has been released through the U.S. Forest Service will help restore the watershed around Grand Lake and land in Rocky Mountain National Park. The fire began in October 2020 and burned nearly 200,000 acres, making it the second largest fire in Colorado history.
The fire burned land that constitutes a sprawling water collection area for Northern Water, a major water provider that pipes Colorado River water from Grand County, under the Continental Divide and east to the Front Range, where it serves roughly 1 million residents of northern Colorado and hundreds of farms.
Steve Kudron, former mayor of Grand Lake who now serves as its town manager, said restoration work in both projects is critical to the economy and health of the historic tourist town, which lies at the western edge of Rocky Mountain National Park.
“The biggest concerns that we had were closing parts of the forest because there hasn’t been sufficient cleanup. Some mountainsides are unstable,” he said. “It’s the funding that makes it safe for the public to go into those areas. That’s why it was important to get the funding back.”
Click the link to read the article and listen to the Valley Pod on the Alamosa Citizen website:
July 9, 2025
A draft agreement settling the long-running Rio Grande Compact lawsuit dealing with New Mexico’s delivery of water to the Texas border is on the one-yard line and should be pushed across the goal line come fall, says Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser.
Weiser was on a two-day tour of the San Luis Valley this week when he gave an update on the lawsuit to members of the Rio Grande Basin Roundtable. All three compact states – Colorado, New Mexico and Texas will be party to the settlement.
Earlier this week, Special Master D. Brooks Smith scheduled a hearing for the week of Sept. 29 on the parties motions toward a settlement.
The states had worked out a previous agreement to the 2013 case, only to have the federal government object when the proposed settlement was presented to the U.S. Supreme Court. This time, said Weiser, the federal government’s role has been addressed.
“We’re on track,” Weiser said during a recording of The Valley Pod. “We have a settlement that properly has the federal government in its place and resolves the concerns which were mostly between New Mexico and Texas.”
Listen here to the full Valley Pod episode with AG Phil Weiser.
Colorado has nine interstate water compact agreements, including the Colorado River Compact which dominates the headlines. At the Rio Grande Basin Roundtable meeting, Conejos Water Conservancy District Manager Nathan Coombs asked Weiser how the state and local water users could collaborate on more “creative ways” in administering the river compacts.
“We all agree with keeping our compacts whole. But I would ask what are some of the processes we could go through to make them more vehicles for the water users within the state as we see this drying?” Coombs said.
On The Valley Pod, Weiser addressed the Valley’s efforts to recover the Upper Rio Grande Basin’s confined and unconfined aquifers.
“We will have to continue looking at this situation of groundwater and have to keep asking ‘How do we best manage this precious resource?’ I don’t have any immediate views on what to do in the face of the challenging hydrology. I do believe we have to keep thinking hard about a series of strategies that include ‘How are we most smartly storing water, how are we re-using water, and how are we conserving water?’”
Weiser, a two-term attorney general, is a candidate for governor, seeking the Democratic Party nomination in 2026. In The Valley Pod episode he talks more about his candidacy as well as the 27 different lawsuits Colorado has been party to in the past six months in challenging the Trump Administration.
“This is an extraordinary moment unlike any in history,” Weiser said.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
During June, much of the region experienced above average temperatures and below average precipitation. Record low precipitation fell across parts of northern Utah and southwestern Wyoming while much above average precipitation was observed in southern Utah and southwestern Colorado. As of July 1, seasonal snowmelt was completed with many mountain locations melting out 1-2 weeks earlier than average. Seasonal streamflow volume forecasts remained below to much below normal with the inflow to Lake Powell forecasted to be 42% of average. Regional coverage of drought expanded significantly from 53% in early June to 63% on July 1, driven largely by expansion of drought in Utah. Drought conditions are likely to persist or worsen as NOAA seasonal forecasts suggest above average regional temperatures and below average precipitation for Wyoming during July to September.
Above average June precipitation was observed in southern Utah, eastern Wyoming and the majority of Colorado. Much of Utah and Wyoming and northwestern Colorado received below average precipitation during June. Parts of southern Colorado and southern Utah received twice the average June rainfall while some locations in northern Utah and southwestern Wyoming observed record low June rainfall totals. Average June rainfall is typically low in the Intermountain West and areas of southern Utah and southwestern Colorado with 150-400% of average June rainfall observed total rainfall amounts of 1-2 inches.
June temperatures were above average for much of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, except for eastern Colorado and Wyoming where temperatures were up to two degrees below average. The warmest temperatures were observed in Utah, northwestern Colorado, and western Wyoming where June average temperatures were in the top 10% of all observations since 1895.
As of July 1st, snowpack was melted out across the region and snowmelt occurred earlier than average across all basins except the Tongue River Basin in northern Wyoming. In Colorado, snowmelt occurred only a few days early in the Arkansas and South Platte River Basins, around a week early in the Animas, Colorado Headwaters, Dolores, Gunnison and Yampa River Basins, two weeks early in the San Juan River Basin and nearly four weeks early in the Rio Grande River Basin. In Utah, snowmelt was only a few days early in the Bear River Basin, 1-2 weeks early in the northern Utah, Price, Sevier and Virgin River Basins and 24 days early in the Escalante River Basin. In Wyoming, snowmelt occurred earlier than average in all basins except the Tongue River Basin, with the Belle Fouche, Cheyenne and Snake River Basins melting out 2-3 weeks early.
Regional drought coverage expanded from 53% in early June to 63% as of July 1 with all of Utah and about half of Colorado and Wyoming experiencing drought. Extreme (D3) drought conditions expanded in western Colorado but were removed from southwestern Utah and southeastern Wyoming where above average June precipitation was observed. Drought worsened by one to two classes in northern Utah and southwestern Wyoming, but drought conditions improved in portions of eastern and southern Colorado and southern Utah. In eastern Wyoming, drought conditions improved by one to three drought classes.
West Drought Monitor map July 8, 2025.
Seasonal streamflow volume forecasts remained below to much below average with the final forecasts of the year ranging from 33% of average for Utah’s Bear and Virgin River Basins to 86% of average in Wyoming’s Shoshone and Yellowstone River Basins. For nearly all regional river basins, streamflow volume forecasts significantly decreased from April 1 to June or July 1. The evolution of the Yampa River seasonal streamflow forecast exemplifies a pattern seen across the Intermountain West. After a near average winter snowpack, the April 1 forecast indicated an average seasonal streamflow volume, but by July 1, the Yampa River forecast declined to only 51% of average. Much below streamflow volume forecasts (<60% of average) were issued for the Colorado Headwaters, Dolores, San Juan and Yampa River Basins in Colorado, the Bear, Duchesne, Green, San Juan, Sevier, Virgin and Weber River Basins in Utah, and the Green, North Platte and Powder River Basins in Wyoming. The inflow forecast for Lake Powell was a paltry 42% of average on July 1.
ENSO neutral conditions currently exist in the eastern Pacific Ocean and remain most likely throughout the forecast period. The NOAA seasonal precipitation forecast for July-September suggests an increased probability of below average precipitation for Wyoming and northeastern Colorado. The seasonal temperature forecast suggests a high probability of above average temperatures for the entire region.
A houseboat docks on the mudflats near Wahweap Marina during the summer of 2021, when reservoir levels dropped perilously low. Jonathan P. Thompson photo
If Lake Powell is like a big thermometer gauging the hydrologic health of the Upper Colorado River Basin, then it’s running a high fever.
In one case, the fever analogy is a bit too literal: The National Park Service has detected high concentrations of cyanotoxins in the reservoir around the mouth of Antelope Canyon, and is warning folks to limit their exposure to the water. Warm water is one of the drivers of cyanotoxin growth.
The surface level peaked out on June 19 at 3,562 feet above sea level, with about 7.8 million acre-feet of storage (or about one-third of its capacity). That means the big, white “bathtub” ring on the sandstone cliffs has grown by about 27 feet in the past year, re-revealing some landforms and rendering some boat ramps unusable. Levels will continue to drop throughout the summer.
This is because more water is leaving the reservoir via downstream releases and evaporation than is flowing into it. Reservoir inflows during June were a mere 883,000 acre feet, or about 41% of the median inflows. That’s far lower than the last two years and is only marginally higher than in 2002, 2018, and 2021, some of the worst years on record. And with the water year three-fourths of the way done, only 4.2 million acre-feet has flowed from the Colorado River and its upstream tributaries into the reservoir, setting the stage for a water year total of just about 5.5 million acre-feet — or 2 million acre-feet less than the minimum release from Glen Canyon Dam.
The only good news is that temperatures at the reservoir mostly have been in the 80s or 90s for the past several weeks, which is about normal for this time of year. Oh, and another sorta-kinda silver lining: As the reservoir levels drop, the surface area decreases, reducing the rate of evaporation. Yay?
Inflow volumes at Lake Powell have been pretty skimpy this water year, with June of 2025 delivering just 41% of the median flows for that month. 1983 was the biggest water year on record since Glen Canyon Dam was completed in 1963, and 2002 was the lowest inflows.
Meanwhile, many of the Colorado River’s users continue under the illusion that the Colorado River Compact and the Law of the River will trump nature and the reality of diminishing flows.
Take the Imperial Valley in southern California. The Imperial Irrigation District is the single largest water user on the river, consuming some 2.3 million acre-feet during the 2024 calendar year to grow various food crops and a lot of alfalfa. That’s about seven times more Colorado River water than all of southern Nevada’s casinos, hotels, golf courses, and homes consume.
Bales of alfalfa in the Imperial Irrigation District of southern Calfornia, grown with Colorado River water. Photo by Brian Richter
But it’s also about 200,000 acre-feet less than the irrigation district consumed in 2013. That’s in part because some farmers are being paid to not irrigate or to irrigate less, often meaning they must fallow their fields, at least temporarily. And some of those farmers have chosen to lease their land — about 13,000 acres — to solar companies for utility-scale energy installations, allowing them to continue to make money off the land without further depleting the Colorado River.
Thanks to Dustin Mulvaney for tipping us off to this resolution on Bluesky.
That irks the Imperial Irrigation District’s board, which recently passed a resolution“opposing the continued expansion of utility-scale solar projects on active or historically farmed agricultural land” in the district. “Our identity and economy in the Imperial Valley are rooted in agriculture,” said IID Board Chairwoman Gina Dockstader, in a written statement. “Solar energy has a role in our region’s future, but it cannot come at the cost of our farmland, food supply, or the families who depend on agriculture. This resolution is about protecting our way of life.”
The resolution doesn’t carry any legal weight, but the IID has a lot of influence, and could easily push the county to ban or heavily restrict solar installations on farmland as dozens of other counties across the nation have done.
Granted, taking land out of agriculture and irrigation has consequences. It can become a weed-choked, dust-spawning expanse. In the Imperial Valley, irrigation runoff feeds the Salton Sea. And, of course, you lose food production and farmworker jobs.
Nevertheless, the resolution seems somewhat short-sighted. It is based on the assumption that the IID will be able to flex its senior water rights in perpetuity, and never have to give up significant amounts of irrigation. It robs farmers of their private property rights, their ability to diversify their income sources, and an opportunity to conserve increasingly scarce water.
And, if the solar installations aren’t built there, they are likely to end up on public land in desert tortoise and other wildlife habitat that could require the removal of hundreds or even thousands of Joshua trees. Worse, it might result in new natural gas or even coal plants to meet the burgeoning demand for power driven by the proliferation of energy- and water-intensive data centers.
And on that note, there’s Kanab, in south central Utah. I’ve driven through Kanab many a time, but usually I just roll on through, finding more of interest in Ordervilleor Fredonia or even Colorado City and Hildale. I mean, Orderville does have “Ho-Made Pies,” or so the sign declares, and was founded as a bastion of the United Order, the tenets of which were communalism, cooperation, and equal distribution of wealth.
Kanab, meanwhile, was notable to me only as the home of former Utah state representative Mike Noel, who was a Wise Use/Sagebrush Rebel leader of the early 2000s, and I wasn’t going to stop in for a cup of coffee — er, a soda — with the guy. So I failed to notice that the little community was not only growing, but sprawling into the surrounding red-rock desert in the form of upscale resorts and housing communities and even a brand new town. A friend sent me this video, which enthusiastically offers details:
There is, for example, Catori Canyon “a premium housing development & luxury gated community” that “redefines modern indoor-outdoor living.” Prices start at $450,000 — for a bare lot. It also predictably has a pickleball court, which is what I think they mean when they say it “isn’t just home — it’s a lifestyle.” I call that real estate propaganda.
And Ventana Resort, which is on state trust lands and is described by the Utah Trust Lands Administration as an “ambitious project that includes townhomes, affordable housing, nightly rentals, single-family homes, and even a hotel.” The Kane County Water Conservancy District, headed by the aforementioned Mike Noel, had hoped to build a golf course on the land, but pickleball — yes, the development has courts — and four swimming pools won out, apparently. The townhomes are expected to begin at $650,000, according to the Southern Utah News.
The new town? It was originally just a huge subdivision called Willow Preserve Estates, which received county approval (after the county had denied its proposed public infrastructure district). But apparently the developers weren’t content with the limits of the subdivision approval, so they petitioned the state to incorporate their own municipality called Willow, which would allow them to approve their own PID with higher housing density. Kane County commissioners are miffed. If the state approves the municipality, it will include 1,200 to 1,400 home sites along with commercial areas on a big parcel of land east of Kanab and just south of Hwy 89.
That’s a lot of homes; Kanab has about 2,000 households, and that doesn’t count Catori Canyon or Ventana Resorts, let alone Willow. And, if you’re like me, you’re wondering where these folks — along with the other developments with their swimming pools and lawns — are going to get their water.
It appears the answer is: wells. Kanab currently supplies its 5,000 residents with several groundwater wells and springs. Willow will likely get its water from Kane County Water Conservancy District’s Johnson Canyon system, which is also fed primarily by groundwater. Which is to say, they aren’t taking it directly out of the Colorado River system, but they are taking it indirectly from the system, since groundwater and surface water is all connected. Plus, aquifers all over the Colorado River Basin are being depleted by over-pumping. Pulling more out of them is not sustainable.
But that’s not all. Kanab is also about to be home to two new ultra-exclusive resorts in a similar vein as Amangiri, the posh place frequented by the Kardashians and located just outside the (past and possibly present) polygamist community of Big Water, Arizona.
Canyon Country, my friends, is rapidly being gentrified.
Kaia, by Outdoor Citizen, bills itself as a “new ultra-luxury RURAL EB-5 investment opportunity.” That is, if you’d like to migrate to America, just fork out a million or so bucks for one of the 40 planned residences in Johnson Canyon outside Kanab and, voila!, you have permanent U.S. residency. In Europe they call that a “golden passport.” The project’s developer is FirstPathway Partners, whose sole purpose is to facilitate these EB-5 visas.
Kaia, by Outdoor Citizen, bills itself as a “new ultra-luxury RURAL EB-5 investment opportunity.” That is, if you’d like to migrate to America, just fork out a million or so bucks for one of the 40 planned residences in Johnson Canyon outside Kanab and, voila!, you have permanent U.S. residency. In Europe they call that a “golden passport.” The project’s developer is FirstPathway Partners, whose sole purpose is to facilitate these EB-5 visas.
Kaia’s website says the development …
Yeah, the BLM land might be protected for now. But a warning to the rich folks that might want to invest: Utah politicians are leading the charge to turn that lovely “Greenbelt” of public land over to housing developers. So instead of those fetching red rocks, you might one day have a view of a subdivision out your giant front window. And if Sen. Mike Lee and his ilk can’t sell the public land straight out, the Trump administration might just fast-track a uranium or coal mine, AI-crunching data center, or oil and gas development in that greenbelt just a few hundred meters from your luxury home.
Late light on Glen Canyon rock formations. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Mapping the Grand Canyon. In this photo we have Claude Birdseye (right) – expedition leader and Chief Topographic Engineer of the USGS, and Roland Burchard (left) – expedition topographer. Photo credit: USGS
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
June 30, 2025
Becky Mitchell and Doug Kenney had much to say at Crested Butte. Just as important may have been what they did not say.
The apple cart of the Colorado River has been upset for 25 years, and Doug Kenney and Becky Michell were on stage June 24 at the Crested Butte Public Policy Forum to talk about the bruised apples.
There’s broad understanding that what worked in the past won’t work in the future. As to what will work — ah, well, that has yet to be resolved. “So far, we haven’t really been able to pull the demands down as quickly as supplies have been going down,” said Mitchell.
Adding tension to the conversation is another so-so or worse spring runoff in the river. Despite a decent snow year in northern Colorado, yet another early, warm and mostly drier-than-usual spring has produced an anemic projected runoff of a little over 9 million acre-feet. Average runoff into Lake Powell has been 12 million in recent years. The compact governing the river between the three lower-basin states and the four upper basin states assumed at least 20.
Douglas Kenney. Photo credit: University of Colorado Boulder
Kenney directs the Western Water Policy Program at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Getches-Wilkinson Center. The program puts on a conference each June that is considered one of several must-attend events for those drawn to the unceasing drama about Colorado’s namesake river.
The river and its tributaries provide water for farms almost to Kansas and Nebraska and, on the west side, to 23 million people crowded along the Pacific Ocean in southern California.
In Crested Butte, Kenney said that unlike other people in Colorado River discussions, whether they represent environmental or agriculture organizations, he enjoys a rare freedom. “I tell people sometimes, I don’t have a dog in the fight, and by that, I just mean I don’t have to represent an interest.”
Then he added: “That’s not entirely true.” He went on to confess that when he sees the Colorado River “sometimes it gives me goosebumps. And I’m not a goosebumps sort of guy.”
Colorado’s Becky Mitchell had a hearty laugh at the 2024 Getches-Wilkinson Center’s Colorado River conference. Photo/Getches-Wilkinson Center
Mitchell shared that she was a “solid B student” who had grown up in Hawaii before arriving in Colorado to pick up two degrees at the Colorado School of Mines. She worked primarily as a consulting engineer before becoming the director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board. In 2024, Gov. Jared Polis named her to a new position in Colorado government: the state’s negotiator on Colorado River issues. Unlike others in such roles, she’s not a lawyer.
“Often I think of everything as a math problem,” she said. “And a lot of what you see with the Colorado River is a math problem. It’s kind of simple math, almost like just addition and subtraction, not even algebra or multiplication.”
The two provided a high-level, yet sometimes detailed overview of the Colorado River during their hour on stage. However, students of the Colorado River, especially about the dramas, might have wanted another hour and the opportunity to ask additional questions.
For example, what do they make of the so-called “natural flow proposal” that was first formally discussed at a public meeting earlier that day in Arizona. As reported by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, this would base the release of water from Lake Powell on a three-year average of the “natural flows” of the river.
In their comments at Crested Butte, Mitchell and Kenney both broadly identified the need for the river to be shared in ways aligned with what Mother Nature is delivering, not a century-old compact.
Later, at a different meeting, Mitchell had this to say: “What we know today is that for any approach to work, it must be supply driven, perform well under both dry and varying hydrologies, and adapt to uncertain future conditions fundamental to this ‘divorce,’ or how we call it in Colorado, the conscious uncoupling.’”
Others might have asked Mitchell about the tensions behind the closed-door sessions — and the things that Kenney mentioned she could not really talk about in a public forum.
Or about the amount of water used to grow hay, including alfalfa, and other fodder crops for livestock. A 2020 study published in Nature Sustainability found that 55% of the water in the Colorado River Basin altogether goes to crops to feed primarily cattle. In the upper basin, it’s much higher.
Mitchell and Kenney did talk about Mead and Powell, the two big reservoirs in the basin, as all Colorado River conversations must.
“Those are the two biggest reservoirs in the United States, and they happen to fall on a river that’s not even one of the top 20 biggest rivers in the U.S. in terms of volume,” observed Kenney. The reservoirs were close to full 25 years ago. Now, they’re two thirds empty. “Optimists would say one-third full,” he said.
If you have more water going out than you have coming in, he explained, you have a mass balance problem. “That’s happening 8 out of 10 years. More water leaves than is coming into the reservoirs under guidelines adopted in 2007. Those interim guidelines govern operations, including how much water is released from the reservoirs and when.
“When we talk about Big River issues right now, the Big River issue is getting the system into balance and bringing back the sustainability of the system,” Kenney explained.
Management of the reservoirs was premised on meeting demand. To be more precise, demands of the lower-basin states. Until relatively recently, the lower-basin states were taking an average 10 million acre-feet even if the river delivered only 5 to 10 million acre-feet for the entire basin. Having two big reservoirs upstream allowed them to ignore the winters of scant snow in the headwaters and the rising spring temperatures that spiked evaporation and transpiration.
The first big shock was in 2002, when the river delivered only 3.8 million acre-feet. That was bad, very bad. But the reservoirs still had a lot of water. And there had been bad snow years before. In 1934, for example, the river delivered only 3.9 million acre-feet. And in 1977, a cold but uncommonly snowless winter, it had delivered 4.8 million acre-feet.
By May 2022, Lake Powell had dropped to the lowest levels since the 1960s, when it began filling after construction of Glen Canyon Dam. Photo/Allen Best
A big snow year did not soon follow 2002, so the states, guided by the Bureau of Reclamation, came up with a sort-of short-term set of solutions called the 2007 Interim Guidelines. Those guidelines remain in effect but are to be replaced with new guidelines. That’s a way of saying how the river is to be managed and, more precisely, who gets what and when. They’re called the post-2026 guidelines.
As were the 2007 guidelines, these will be interim, because the hydrology of the Colorado River Basin is not static. It is changing, with some concern that the river, already slimmed down from its 20th century average, will continue to shrink. The Colorado River Compact that was devised in 1922 to apportion the river’s waters assumed somewhere around 20 million acre-feet. This century the average has been 12.5 million acre-feet.
“The math problem is becoming worse,” said Kenney.
It will likely worsen. Some scientists have projected a further decline in decades ahead, conceivably to an average 10 million acre-feet or less.
How to shrink demands to correspond with the shrinking river?
Mitchell offered some thin optimism. Demands have ceased to rise. They have actually declined. The lower-basin states have reduced their take from the river to 7.5 million acre-feet.
That’s what the compact apportioned. But again, the compact from 1922 was flawed. It assumed more water than the river has delivered. Because of the two big reservoirs in the deserts of Utah and Arizona, the lower-basin states have been able to get their 7.5 million acre-feet (and more, until relatively recently). Arizona and California take way more than half of the river’s harvest. And because the upper-basin states were not taking their full allocation, they could get away with it without causing harm.
The 21st century combined with the aridification caused by rising temperatures have forced the issue. Even so, the reckoning has come slowly. The lower basin states did not reduce demand to stay within the compact until forced to by a declared shortage in August 2021.
While the decision was not a surprise to veteran Colorado River watchers, it vaulted the Colorado River troubles high into the national consciousness. The story ran on the front page of the New York Times: “In a First, U.S. Declares Shortage on the Colorado River, Forcing Water Cuts.” Arizona farms took the brunt of this declaration, but as the Times noted, wider reductions loomed as climate change continues to affect flows into the river.
The upper-basin states have been averaging 4.4 to 4.5 million acre-feet, far less than the 7.5 million acre-feet apportionment in the compact. How much they take depends upon how much it snows and rains.
“We have highs and lows because of hydrology. That can shift a lot. A really good example is from 2021 to 2022. Our use was 4.9 (million acre-feet), and then it went down to 3.9 the following year. That wasn’t because we’re amazing people.”
It was, Mitchell explained at Crested Butte, as she does in all of her talks, because the upper basin is limited by what Mother Nature actually delivers. The upper basin has no big dams upstream to serve as an aqua bank account. It has to moderate demand based on what kind of snow — and rain — year occurs.
Some 92% of all the water in the Colorado River originates in the upper basin states, including the Yampa River, seen here emerging from Cross Mountain Canyon in northwest Colorado. Photo/Allen Best
When there’s insufficient water, the state engineer in Colorado and his district engineers cut off water users, mostly ranchers irrigating grasses.
The compact struck among the four-upper basin states in 1948 used a more common-sense approach for how to allocate the 7.5 million acre-feet in the 1922 compact. It allocated the water among the four states based on proportions. Colorado gets a little more than half — and uses most of it. Wyoming has never come close to developing its share. Regardless, the rule of percentages makes sense for an uncertain hydrology.
“We realized real quickly that Mother Nature reigned supreme,” said Mitchell. I would be in big trouble if I said the lower basin should do the same. I think they should, but they’re not there yet.”
Mitchell used an analogy to describe the difficult transition for the lower basin. It is much harder to take candy from a baby after they have it,” she said.
“It’s going to be hard for them, and my heart goes out to them. But we have an example up here of how it works. Seniors work with juniors,” she explained, using the shorthand for senior and junior water uses under the prior appropriation system governing water use in Colorado and most Western states. Ag works with environment interests, utilities with agriculture, and so on. They cut deals in advance of water-short years.
“We have examples of how to make it work. You have a budget. You have to work within it. That’s the deal. And sometimes that budget might fluctuate.”
“We’ve not lost all of our junior water-right holders in Colorado because of one bad year or two bad years or three bad years, in a row, because we figure out how to make it work. And what we are saying to the lower basin is figure out where the deals are to be made.
And she drew upon her childhood for another dynamic.
“What my mom always said is, you can have anything you want, but you can’t have everything you want.”
Translated to the lower basins, that means “you can’t have chip factories and the largest agriculture in the world and golf courses and pools and Scottsdale and whatever. You can have the capability to have a strong economy, a sustainable system. You just can’t have it all.”
The federal government, through the Bureau of Reclamation, an agency housed within the Department of Interior, built the dams. Reclamation manages the dams. As Mitchell said, they turn the spigots. The onus is on the states to create a solution, an agreement of how to share the shrinking river, but the federal government could step in, if forced to. Mitchell said the feds don’t want to.
“They really want a consensus deal with the seven states,” she said. That’s a hard thing, because there’s no way to do this without change. The math is the math. The facts are the facts. There’s not the 50 million acre-feet in these reservoirs that there were when these (2007) guidelines started. And so the consensus is harder.”
Mitchell said she wouldn’t disparage those who created the now obviously flawed 2007 guidelines. Climatologists had suggested only a 3% probability of the runoff that has happened since then would come to pass.
“What we’re trying to create through this federal process is something that can handle all the hydrologies. How do we all suffer when the river is suffering? How do we all benefit when the river is flush? And what does benefit look like? That’s different in the upper basin than in the lower basin.”
The federal government in this case has been nudging the states toward agreement.
“They’re trying to say, ‘You know, you might be able to open up different project funding if you guys can get to a deal.’ We know we need a deal. I’m not going to promise you that we’re going to get there, but it is a goal. And (the federal agencies) are part of that goal. They don’t want to make the hard decisions of cutting people off. They are the water masters in the lower basin. They can turn the valves, and that’s their role.”
Added Kenney: “Typically the states are happiest when the federal government is silent, (but) sometimes it’s helpful to have a federal government that is throwing out some ultimatums and some deadlines and some threats.”
In the last six months, the federal involvement in the negotiations has grown, and it might grow yet. But a big part of the process — as Mitchell had said — is that the states need to be coming up with their wish list for Congress for consideration next spring.
“So there is a federal role,” Kenney summarized. “It evolves based on how the states are doing. But the tradition is you want the feds to stay away until it’s time for someone to write the check.”
MItchell had the last word. She again pointed to the meager runoff from this year’s upper-basin rivers, source of 92% of the river’s water. Runoff is projected at a little more than 5 million acre-feet into Powell, which is to release 7.48 million acre-feet to the lower basin.
Again, it’s a match problem. And it could get worse.
“If next year looks anything like this year, or even as a 12 million acre-foot river, actions absolutely have to be taken., and those actions are going to be greater than anybody has put on the table voluntary.”
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 clock is ticking for seven states to figure out how they’ll share dwindling water in the Colorado River for the foreseeable future. In a meeting at the Utah State Capitol Thursday [June 26. 2025], the river’s four Upper Basin state commissioners further embraced the idea of a “divorce” with their Lower Basin neighbors — an idea also floated at a meeting in eastern Utah last week, as reported by Fox 13.
“Today we stand on the brink of system failure,” said Becky Mitchell, the commissioner for Colorado. “We also stand on the precipice of a major decision point.”
…negotiations between the four Upper Basin states, which includes Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico, have been in a standstill with the remaining three Lower Basin states for more than a year. The Interior Department’s acting assistant secretary for water and science, Scott Cameron, has met with leadership in the seven states that use Colorado River water since April, working to broker a deal.
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
“We all have to live in the physical world as it is,” he said, “not as we might hope it will be.”
On Thursday, Cameron presented water managers with a deadline. The Interior Department plans to release a draft environmental impact statement evaluating different alternatives for the river’s future in December, which will then open to public comment. The department will make its final decision on how to proceed by June of 2026.
“The goal is to essentially parachute in a seven-state deal as the preferred alternative,” Cameron said.
For that to work, the states will need to reach an agreement by Nov. 11. By Feb. 14, they’ll need to hand over the details of their plan. Whatever the states decide on, Cameron reminded commissioners, will likely take an act of Congress and new policy adopted by most of the affected states’ legislatures…
The idea of framing the future relationship of the river users as a “divorce” was first pitched by the Lower Basin states, Mitchell said. Under that proposal, the Upper Basin states would release water from Lake Powell based on the average natural flow measured at Lee’s Ferry, a point just downstream of the reservoir and upstream of both Grand Canyon National Park and Lake Mead.
“If done correctly,” Mitchell said, “it should provide the opportunity for the Upper and Lower basins to manage themselves, with the only real point of agreement being the Powell release.”
On the evening of June 24, the GWC’s Doug Kenney joined Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s lead negotiator on Colorado River matters, at the Crested Butte Public Policy Forum for a conversation about current and future Colorado River issues. Well over 100 people packed the Center for the Arts for the public event that in previous years has featured speakers as varied as Ted Turner, Sandra Day O’Connor, and the GWC’s Senior Fellow Anne Castle.
The primary focus of discussion was how “big river” issues—that is, the changing rules determining how Colorado River supplies are shared amongst the seven states—impact the availability of water on Colorado’s West Slope. This required a review of the three numbers in the basin that increasingly are out of step: the amount of water entering the system each year through snowmelt and rain; the amount of water consumed by water users throughout the basin; and the amount of consumptive use that has been promised to water users in the Colorado River Compact and other laws. This mismatch of supplies, demands and allocations is not a new problem, but is of particular urgency now as Lakes Powell and Mead are two-thirds empty, the EIS process for new determining new reservoir operations is well underway, and the current year runoff is shaping up as one of the worst in decades.
The conversation was led by Julie Nania, an icon in Crested Butte for her work with High Country Conservation Advocates in protecting Mt. Emmons—the so-called “Red Lady”—from development into a molybdenum mine, as well as her service on the Board of Directors of the Upper Gunnison Water Conservancy District and as Executive Director and Faculty Chair of the Coldharbour Institute based at Western Colorado University. Julie began her career at Colorado Law (class of 2011), which included a post-graduate fellowship with the GWC from 2013-2014 working on tribal water rights. Julie stands as a great example of the GWC’s ongoing influence in protecting the resources and places that we all value.
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
Water runs down a spillway at the Shoshone hydro plant in Glenwood Canyon. Rockfalls, fires and mudslides in recent years have caused frequent shutdowns of plant operations. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
{The Colorado Water Conservation Board] unanimously agreed Tuesday to hear out Front Range water operators’ concerns about a Western Slope plan to purchase historic Colorado River water rights.
The Colorado River Water Conservation District, which represents 15 Western Slope counties, negotiated a $99 million deal to purchase water rights tied to the century-old Shoshone Power Plant, owned by a subsidiary of Xcel Energy.
The River District and the Front Range groups — Aurora Water, Denver Water, Colorado Springs Utilities and Northern Water — all want to maintain the historical flows past Shoshone to provide predictable water supplies long into the future. They mainly disagree about the amount of water involved. Front Range providers say, if the number is too high, it could hamper their ability to provide water to millions of people.
In June, the Front Range water managers asked the Colorado Water Conservation Board to hold a hearing to air concerns. That hearing will be held during the board’s meeting, Sept. 16-18.
“We look forward to the hearing, and we appreciate the effort and the time that you and the staff have put into this effort,” Andy Mueller, the River District’s general manager, said during the board meeting Tuesday. “[We] look forward to finishing this in September.”
The decision Tuesday also opened up a seven-day period, ending July 9, for others to ask to join the September hearing. The board will share updates with the public on its website.
The hearing is part of a larger [CWCB Instream and water court] process to decide whether Shoshone Power Plant’s water rights can become an environmental water right, called an instream flow right. These rights aim to keep water in rivers to help aquatic ecosystems.
Photo: 1950 “Public Service Dam” (Shoshone Dam) in Colorado River near Glenwood Springs Colorado.
In this case, the environmental water right would focus on a 2.4-mile stretch between Shoshone’s intake dam, which takes water out of the Colorado River, and the end of its penstocks, which return all of Shoshone’s water to the river. The power plant is tucked into Glenwood Canyon along Interstate 70 a few miles east of Glenwood Springs.
At times, the power plant sucks nearly all of the Colorado River’s flow — depending on the amount of water in the river above the dam — through its turbines before returning it to the river channel. When this happens, the 2.4-mile stretch immediately below the dam is reduced to a narrow channel of water.
The environmental flow right would allow water managers to keep more water in that stretch of the river to help fish and other aquatic species. If approved, it would be the largest, most influential instream flow right in the state’s portfolio. The Colorado water board has until Sept. 18 to make its decision.
The Colorado River District wants to purchase the water rights as part of a larger plan to permanently shore up water supplies for Western Slope communities, which have long worried that Shoshone’s flows could change if Xcel decided to shut down the power plant or sell the water rights.
The district has a purchase agreement with Xcel Energy to buy the rights and lease the water back to Xcel to generate electricity. One of the terms of the deal is getting the instream flow use approved by the state.
The Front Range water providers and water managers want to prevent any changes to Shoshone’s water rights from harming their water supplies.
Shoshone’s water rights are like the bottom blocks in a game of Jenga: change to the rights could cause ripple effects statewide, in part, because of their age, location and amount of water.
Shoshone’s oldest water right can impact up to 10,600 other upstream water rights because of the plant’s geographic location, according to the Colorado Division of Water Resources. Those junior water users include Front Range water managers, like Denver Water and Northern Water, that send water to millions of people.
Colorado transmountain diversions via the State Engineer’s office
The Front Range water operators want to resolve their concerns about the historical flows through Shoshone during the instream flow approval process this summer.
The Colorado River District says their questions can be resolved during the subsequent water court proceedings, where opposing parties will have another opportunity to voice their concerns and make sure their water supplies aren’t negatively impacted.
“We are deeply concerned that the Front Range entities requesting this contested hearing are asking the CWCB to encroach on the jurisdiction of water court,” the district said in a prepared statement Tuesday.
Rifle ranch owners John Powers, left, and plant ecologist Lisa Tasker talk about the Rifle Creek restoration project at a tour of the property on June 3. The project has replaced invasive species with native plants. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
The banks of a previously degraded 1-mile stretch of Rifle Creek are now thick with willows and cottonwoods, and have signs that deer, elk and beavers are once again frequent visitors.
This summer marks 10 years since an ambitious, multiphase riparian restoration project began on John Powers’ ranch, located north of Rifle and off Colorado 325. Since 2016, the property has been a worksite of the Colorado Natural Heritage Program, which has cataloged species; replaced invasive Russian olive, thistles and weeds with native trees, flowers, shrubs and grasses; and trained the next generation of scientists and conservationists on how to restore the health of a stream.
On June 3, Powers, who is a self-described lover of the outdoors, along with friend and associate Janna Six, as well as interns from CNHP, hosted a public-outreach day with conservation professionals who worked on the project, including representatives from local governments, agencies and nonprofit organizations, for a tour of the project. Powers called it a living lab for education and hopes it can serve as a demonstration project for other ranches in the area that want to control erosion.
A decade ago, the banks of the creek were severely eroded — bare of vegetation in places and steep. Part of the reason for these conditions is the upstream Rifle Gap Reservoir, which was completed in 1967. Sediment collects behind the dam, meaning the water released downstream is clean and erosive, cutting into the streambanks. The three-phase project sought to remedy that.
“Rifle Creek used to be shallow, allowing horse-drawn hay wagons to cross it,” Powers said in a written response to questions from Aspen Journalism. “After the Rifle Gap Reservoir was built, severe erosion occurred downstream, making creek banks vertical and 12-15 feet deep.”
Powers said the goals of the project are to improve the habitat for songbirds, pollinators and wildlife; increase carbon sequestration, including cultivating healthy soil and minimizing erosion; and maintain the economic benefits of a working ranch while enhancing the ecological condition of the riparian area.
Small cottonwoods and other native trees have fencing to protect them from wildlife and livestock until they get established. The riparian restoration project on the Powers Ranch near Rifle planted thousands of native trees, shrubs and grasses. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
The thousands of native plants were put in over a three-year intensive effort by volunteers and interns, led by plant ecologist Lisa Tasker. Some are protected by fencing from wildlife and livestock until they become established, and are watered with a drip irrigation system.
“My hope is that I live long enough that I won’t be able to see one side of the creek from the other side of the creek,” Powers told tour participants.
David Anderson, director and chief scientist at CNHP, said conditions on the ranch have changed dramatically for the better over the past decade due to the restoration work.
“We’re seeing a lot more birds now that there’s some woody structure,” he said. “There’s just a whole different suite of wildlife that can utilize the riparian area there now.”
Anderson added that with the new vegetation providing shade to cool the stream, conditions for native fish will improve.
Sprinklers have replaced flood irrigation on part of the Powers Ranch property near Rifle. This summer marks the 10th year since the beginning of a creek restoration project on the ranch. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Restoration tactics take time
Rivers and wetland habitats comprise a small amount of Colorado’s land area, but they are of outsize importance to wildlife. Improving the health of Rifle Creek is a focus of the Middle Colorado Watershed Council, a nonprofit organization that works to protect and improve watershed health. Between 2015 and 2019, the creek was the subject of a watershed assessment, which looked primarily at water quality.
The council has also been implementing the goals of its Riparian Restoration Implementation Plan, which spans the entire Colorado River watershed from Glenwood Springs to DeBeque. But the stretch of Rifle Creek from below Rifle Gap Reservoir to its confluence with the Colorado River is a main concern.
“We won’t be able to restore the whole thing right away,” said Kate Collins, executive director of the council, referring to plans to conduct additional restoration work along Rifle Creek beyond the Powers ranch. “But what we want to do is identify certain projects that are either the most urgent or perhaps they are the most low-hanging fruit — in other words, there’s the best opportunity for restoration.”
The health of many streams across the Western Slope is impacted by erosion, invasive species and agriculture. Collins said the tactics for fixing them are often low-tech, such as replacing invasives with native plants.
“Some of these techniques are being widely used, and this Rifle Creek project could be a model for others,” she said, referring to the Powers ranch restoration project.
Rifle Creek in 2015 before the riparian restoration project. The banks of the creek were severely eroded. CREDIT: JOHN POWERS
Future plans for the ranch include another bio blitz in 2026 in which CNHP interns will document as many species of plants and animals on the ranch as possible over a 24-hour period and compare the results to their bio blitzes in 2016 and 2017.
Powers and Anderson are also interested in potentially building what are called beaver dam analogs (BDAs), which are human-made structures that mimic beaver dams, helping to slow streamflow and keep water on the landscape. These temporary wood structures usually consist of posts driven into the streambed with willows and other soft materials weaved across the channel between the posts. Environmental groups and local governments are using BDAs to improve stream health and wildlife habitat.
“We’re really interested in doing some of those,” Anderson said. “I hope that maybe next year or in another subsequent year that we’ll work with the interns to build some of those structures right in Rifle Creek.”
For Powers, the Rifle Creek restoration on his ranch has been a passion project that keeps a riparian area thriving, as well as adapting to climate change and a future with less water. Collins sees the project as a step toward reconnecting the community to its local waterway.
“(Rifle Creek) is a vital part of what runs through that town and that community, and it’ll be exciting to see what positive ecological changes those bring about to virtually everything else,” Collins said…
The Southern Ute Indian Tribe plans to begin drawing water from Lake Nighthorse this summer, becoming the first entity to use the reservoir for non-testing purposes since the reservoir’s completion in 2009. The Southern Ute Tribal Council approved the annual use of a portion of its Animas-La Plata Project water in Lake Nighthorse for “future industrial uses,” including energy development, in February 2024, according to the tribal newspaper, The Southern Ute Drum.
“This is a historic and exciting moment for the Southern Ute Indian Tribe – the Tribe is finally utilizing some of its ALP water rights that it has fought for over a long period,” the Drum reported. “The Tribe plans to continue developing its water resources for the benefit of the Tribe and its members in the future.”
[…]
Lake Nighthorse stores 123,541 acre-feet of water. The tribe holds a 44,662 acre-foot annual allocation from the A-LP, with 38,108 acre-feet stored in Lake Nighthorse, according to a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation spokesperson. The tribe’s claim represents about 35% of the water stored in the reservoir, according to the Drum…The tribe currently uses 6,553 acre-feet annually from its Animas River allocation under the A-LP, according to the Bureau of Reclamation.
Four major Front Range water agencies have requested a state hearing to fully air their objections to a Western Slope plan to purchase historic, coveted Colorado River water rights.
The Colorado River Water Conservation District, which represents 15 Western Slope counties, is leading the effort to purchase the $99 million water rights tied to the century-old Shoshone Power Plant, owned by a subsidiary of Xcel Energy. The district wants to buy the rights to protect historical water resources for Western Slope communities long into the future.
Aurora Water, Denver Water, Colorado Springs Utilities and Northern Water also want to maintain the historical flows past Shoshone which provides stability for their water supplies. They just disagree over the numbers, namely how much water is included in the deal. If the number is too high, it could throw a wrench in their water systems.
The state’s water board, the Colorado Water Conservation Board, will decide during a special meeting Tuesday whether to grant the hearing requests.
“If, as the River District asserts, the status quo will be maintained, this acquisition can be a win-win for both the Front Range and the West Slope,” wrote Marshall Brown, general manager of Aurora Water in a letter on June 9. “However … we have significant concerns.”
The Colorado River District already has passed a few hurdles in its years long effort to purchase the powerful water rights for Shoshone, located just east of Glenwood Springs.
It has a purchase agreement with Xcel Energy. A diverse array of Western Slope cities, agricultural groups, the Colorado legislature and others have promised millions of dollars toward the asking price.
Democratic and Republican Congressional representatives from Colorado have spoken in support of the purchase. U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd, a Republican from Grand Junction, asked Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum to release the funds in a committee meeting this month.
120 days to decide
The district is moving on with its next step: working with the state to use the water rights to help protect the environment. This is where the concerns over historical flows come in.
The River District wants Shoshone’s rights to be used to keep water in the Colorado River near the power plant in Glenwood Canyon to benefit aquatic ecosystems when the power plant isn’t generating electricity.
The additional environmental use would secure the flow of water past the power plant, even if the plant goes out of commission — maintaining the status quo flows permanently. That water could otherwise be used further upstream.
The Colorado Water Conservation Board, faces a September deadline to decide whether to approve this new environmental use, called an instream flow right.
The four Front Range water managers were the only entities to submit notices within that 20-day window.
They want to recalculate how much water has been used at Shoshone in past decades before the matter goes to water court, where opposing parties will have another opportunity to voice their concerns and make sure their water supplies aren’t negatively impacted.
Collectively, the four agencies help deliver water to over 3 million people along the Front Range cities and northeastern plains.
In its letter, Aurora Water said the river district’s estimate could overstate historic use by up to 300,000 acre-feet. One acre-foot roughly equals the annual water use of two to three households. The utility did not respond in time for publication.
Northern Water is concerned about its ability to fill Green Mountain Reservoir in Summit County, which depends in part on downstream water rights, like Shoshone’s. The reservoir delivers water to the Western Slope, including to a 15-mile stretch of the Colorado River that provides vital habitat for endangered and threatened fish.
Colorado Springs Utilities’ letter said a too-high estimate could cut into the amount of water the provider can divert from the Blue River and the Homestake Water Project, which directs water from the Western Slope to the Eastern Slope.
Denver Water cited similar concerns, saying the proposal, as is, will change the “status quo” in ways that would harm the utility’s ability to provide water to over 1.5 million people during severe or prolonged drought.
Colorado Springs and Denver Water declined to comment further, referring to their written letters.
If the Colorado Water Conservation Board approves the hearing request, people will have until July 9 to ask to join the hearing process, said Rob Viehl, chief of the Stream and Lake Protection Section at the Colorado Water Conservation Board. The board will share updates with the public on its website and decide the date of the hearing during its meeting Tuesday.
Shoshone hydroelectric generation plant Glenwood Canyon via the Colorado River DistrictShoshone Falls hydroelectric generation station via USGenWebThe blown-out penstock in 2007 at the Shoshone plant. Photo credit: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen JournalismXcel truck at Shoshone plant. Photo credit: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen JournalismThe penstocks feeding the Shoshone hydropower plant on the Colorado River in Glenwood Canyon. Photo credit: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen JournalismThe Shoshone plant and boat ramp on the Colorado River. Photo credit: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen JournalismThe Shoshone hydro plant in Glenwood Canyon, captured here in June 2018, uses water diverted from the Colorado River to make power, and it controls a key water right on the Western Slope. Photo credit: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen JournalismShoshone Hydroelectric plant. Photo credit: The Colorado River DistrictThis historical photo shows the penstocks of the Shoshone power plant above the Colorado River. A coalition led by the Colorado River District is seeking to purchase the water rights associated with the plant. Credit: Library of Congress photoPhoto: 1950 “Public Service Dam” (Shoshone Dam) in Colorado River near Glenwood Springs Colorado.View of Shoshone Hydroelectric Plant construction in Glenwood Canyon (Garfield County) Colorado; shows the Colorado River, the dam, sheds, a footbridge, and the workmen’s camp. Creator: McClure, Louis Charles, 1867-1957. Credit: Denver Public Library Digital CollectionsThe twin turbines of Xcel Energy’s Shoshone hydroelectric power plant in Glenwood Canyon can generate 15 megawatts. The plant was down for about a year and a half, according to the Colorado Division of Water Resources. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen JournalismWater runs down a spillway at the Shoshone hydro plant in Glenwood Canyon. Rockfalls, fires and mudslides in recent years have caused frequent shutdowns of plant operations. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen JournalismThe Shoshone hydro plant in Glenwood Canyon. The River District has made a deal with Xcel Energy to buy the water rights associated with the plant to keep water flowing on the Western Slope. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
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 — all for free.
People care about and use public lands for many reasons. From hunters and anglers to miners and ranchers, hikers and mountain bikers—there 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 country’s 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 country’s 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 — essentially for free. When rivers are damaged from land uses on public lands, we all pay the price — literally; we all pay more in taxes and utility bills to clean up the water.
What happens on the public’s land also happens to the public’s 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 agencies’ missions since their inception over a century ago. For example, The Organic Act of 1897[1] that created the US Forest Service stated:
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, it’s great he’s removing Forest Service land from the pool of land eligible for “disposal.” 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 — parcels that wouldn’t 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. That’s 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;
swaths of BLM land near Naturita and Nucla, Colorado;
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 Park’s boundaries (within five miles of Springdale and Rockville);
the lower slopes of Jumbo Mountain near Paonia;
parcels on Las Vegas’s fringe, along with tracts around Mesquite and Moapa that the Freedom Cities folks have their eyes on;
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 “population centers” 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 doesn’t explain what the hell he means by “FREEDOM ZONES,” except to imply that he wouldn’t let any foreigners buy the land(?). Lee once again doesn’t mention a damned thing about affordable housing, meaning he’s just fine with public lands being used for luxury developments or even multi-million dollar mansions.
Oh, and then there’s that little aside about the Byrd Rule. Yeah, that might get in Lee’s 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 “Big Beautiful” 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 it’s not the only or even the worst thing the MAGA folks are inflicting on the American public’s 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.
🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫
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 — with ebullient spikes in 2005, 2008, 2011, 2019 — 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 West’s 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, we’ve 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 Powell’s 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 river’s users and what’s actually in there continues to grow. Which is to say, we’re still f&$#ed, and getting even more so with each passing year.
In fact, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s 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, that’s 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: I’m 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 – so I would argue – 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 – 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 the’real realities’ we have to ultimately confront and learn to live with, real realities whose consequences for what we have been doing are measurable, documentable – 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 ‘climate crisis,’ ‘social inequity,’ ‘resource depletion’ (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 I’ve fixed it, and the Republicans sit in the dark and applaud….
Okay – moving on. I’ll 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 don’t 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 – well, I’m 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 ‘occasional representative,’ I mean I occasionally feel represented by Congressman Hurd, a definite improvement over the Repugnican Lauren Boebert whom he replaced.) But – now he’s got me almost as confused as Trump gets us all on tariffs.
Hurd’s bill to the House is for a ‘Productive Public Lands Act’ (‘PPL Act’). In Hurd’s own words: ‘This 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.’ This is a direct legislative response supporting Trump’s trumped-up ‘national energy emergency,’ announced his first day in office with an executive order titled ‘Unleashing American Energy.’ One ‘First Day’ promise he did keep. We will look at more closely at the ‘national energy emergency’ in the next post (if it is still part of official reality).
Meanwhile, however, at about the time my post about Hurd’s PPL Act was appearing in your inbox, Hurd announced that he was introducing in the House, as a bipartisan legislation proposal, the bill that Colorado Democrat Senator [Michael Bennet] had just introduced in the Senate, for a ‘Gunnison Outdoor Resources Protection Act’ (‘GORP Act’).
The GORP Act, if passed, according to Senator [Bennet’s] website description, ‘will protect over 730,000 acres of public lands in Western Colorado, safeguarding the region’s local economy, world-class recreation, ranching heritage, wildlife habitat, and clean air and water.’ It’s a true mulitple-use bill, in the spirit of the FLPMA, that includes:
Enlargement of existing wilderness areas into undeveloped land around their edges;
‘Protection Areas’ designated to protect the natural and undeveloped character of public lands;
‘Recreation Management Areas’ to provide for sustainable management of both motorized and unmotorized recreation;
‘Special Management Areas’ set aside for ‘broadly conserving, protecting, and enhancing the natural, scenic, scientific, cultural, watershed, recreation and wildlife resources’;
A ‘Rocky Mountain Scientific Research and Education Area’ in the upper East River valley, above and below the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab in Gothic;
‘Wildlife Conservation Areas’ to conserve and restore wildlife and 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 ‘locking up’ a large quantity of public land for a diversity of uses valued in the local economy and culture – with no accommodation for the ‘national energy emergency.’ The GORP bill includes practically everything the ‘Productive Public Lands’ 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 – and certainly not from the congressman who put the ‘Productive Public Lands’ bill before the House. I’ve submitted a question to Congressman Hurd asking for his rationale, in submitting one bill that essentially contradicts another bill he had submitted. I’ve received no answer yet, but will pass it along when I do.
The simplest explanation – maybe just simplistic, fitting the Trumpty-Mumpty era – is that Rep, Hurd knows that the ‘Productive Public Lands’ bill will probably be passed by the Republican-majority House (the usual one or two vote ‘landslide’), 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, I’ve 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. Hurd’s PPL Act would throw out.
And the amended Sage Grouse Resource Management Plan deserves a defense, in what’s 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 ‘enviro-populist’ 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 – but that won’t 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 ‘Gunnison Public Lands Initiative’ that has been evolving since 2014. The ‘GPLI’ 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 – 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 – mainly the BLM and Forest Service – 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 ‘citizen initiatives’ 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 ‘no action, continue current management’ alternative; there is usually a ‘heavy industrial’ alternative that the environmental and recreational users don’t like, a ‘heavy recreation and preservation’ alternative that the loggers and miners don’t like, and gradations between leading to a ‘preferred alternative’ 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 ‘Gunnison Outdoor Resource Planning Act’ 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 ‘Productive 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 ‘Unleash American Energy.’
Next time, we will take a deeper look at the unleashing of American energy on our public lands. (And after that, I promise, it’s back to the river – 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.
There’s 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 it’s 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 don’t account for climate change, they’re proposing a new system that divides the river based on how much water is in it today.
“We finally have an approach that at least allows a glimmer of hope that the laying down of arms is possible,” 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 — Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico — 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 “natural flows” in the river — basically, how much water would flow through it if human dams and diversion weren’t in the way.
States would still have to negotiate the exact percentage of those “natural flows” 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.
“This 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,” Fleck said. “It says, ‘Look, we all have to share this river. We have to do some math about how much water it really has.’”
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 state’s water leaders gather to discuss Arizona’s position in multistate talks. Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, described the plan as “innovative.”
“I was very pessimistic that we were on a path towards litigation,” he said. “I’m more optimistic now that we can avoid that path if we can make this work.”
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.
“It is still just a concept,” Buschatzke said. “We haven’t agreed to anything at this point, but we agreed to test it.”
Colorado, which often speaks on behalf of all four Upper Basin states, appears cautiously supportive of the plan.
“Colorado remains committed to developing supply-driven, sustainable operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead,” Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s top water negotiator, wrote to KUNC in a statement. “The natural flow approach is one way to achieve this, if it is done right.”
Colorado and its allies initially dug in their heels on a very specific interpretation of the 1922 Colorado River compact, arguing that they shouldn’t have to take new cutbacks to their water supplies since they feel the impacts of climate change-fueled shortages more than their downstream neighbors.
“There 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,” Mitchell wrote.
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 Reclamation’s Navajo Dam website at https://www.usbr.gov/uc/water/crsp/cs/nvd.html
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. They’re calling it the “supply-driven” solution, Arizona Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke said, and it links the required water deliveries out of Glen Canyon Dam to what might naturally be flowing downstream at Lees Ferry if the dam weren’t 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. It’s intended as a fair way of adapting — and shrinking — the region’s 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 what’s fair has appeared distant. The Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada have the bulk of the region’s population and farm production, and have fully developed and then started to cut back on the half of the river’s 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 — a share that no longer fully exists. They have balked at cutting their existing uses to meet the compact’s requirement that they send at least half of the river’s flow of a century ago now that a changing climate has exposed the folly of the compact’s 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 dam’s 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 West’s 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 basin’s large dams, if Lake Mead falls another 20 feet, Hoover Dam’s capacity to generate electricity would be slashed by 70 percent from its current level.
If there is a reason not to be especially alarmed it’s this: Hoover is just a small piece of the region’s electric power infrastructure. Federal dams along the Colorado River account for just over 4 percent of Arizona’s generating capacity, for instance.
Still, the cheap electricity is a lifeline for tribes and small rural electric providers. And the dam’s 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 “bad news for us,” 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 year’s 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 Hoover’s 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.
“Reclamation is assessing the cost-benefit analysis of replacing some of the older style turbines and the timeline for installation,” the agency wrote in a statement to Circle of Blue. “Ordering new turbines is a lengthy process as they have to be designed, model tested, built and ultimately installed.”
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 dam’s 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 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 Dam’s 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 state’s allocation of Hoover’s 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 Hoover’s 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 region’s 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.
“The beauty of hydropower is that it’s great for helping to stabilize and regulate the grid,” 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 year’s levels. According to Aspen Journalism’s 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 year’s 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 Journalism’s streamflow tracker.According to the National Resources Conservation Service’s 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.
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 April’s forecast of 67%. Lake Powell is currently about 33% full.
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 can’t 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 CAP’s 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 CAP’s board of directors overlapped with Cooke’s time as general manager, said she had “great admiration” for Cooke.
“He’s thorough, he’s deliberative, he looks for solutions, and boy, we need to find solutions right now,” said Megdal, who now directs the Water Resources Research Center at the University of Arizona. “My 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.”
John Entsminger, Nevada’s top water negotiator, called Cooke’s appointment a “great choice,” and cited his work in shaping the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan. If confirmed, Cooke will likely be in the same negotiating rooms as Entsminger.
“There are times when [the Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner] has to level pretty realistic threats at everybody,” Entsminger said. There’s also times when they have to be the mediator… I think Ted has both of those skills. I’ve seen him be pretty pointed, and I’ve seen him drive compromise.”
The seven states working on the next set of rules for managing the Colorado River are currently split into two caucuses – 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.”
“I assume that he would recuse himself from decisions that could affect the CAP – which is just about any decision in the basin,” Kuhn wrote to KUNC. “None the less, his nomination is a plus for Arizona and the Lower Division States.”
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 Cooke’s, 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 River’s estimated “natural flow” 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 basin’s business – 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 Boulder’s 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 I’m told was a topic of some of the hallway conversations. But Tom Buschatzke’s reveal at yesterday’s 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 shouldn’t be quite so hush-hush given, y’know, 40 million of us stakeholders.
The full slide deck from the Colorado River C-SPAN Arizona Reconsultation Committee is useful. Reclamation’s Dan Bunk, for example, shared a slide slowing the latest “min probable” forecast (hilarious typo – “min problem” now corrected) showing the system tanking – dropping below minimum power pool at Powell – 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.)
