Click the link to read the article on The Aspen Times website (Ryan Spencer). Here’s an excerpt:
April 11, 2026
An unprecedented March heatwave has forecasters shrinking already-low estimates for how much water will flow into the Colorado River during spring runoff, which is already well underway this year. The latest models show that the Colorado River is projected to deliver only about 1.4 million acre feet of water — roughly one-fifth of normal — to Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir. Colorado River Basin Forecast Center hydrologist Cody Moser said during a water briefing on Tuesday, April 7, that if those projections were to bear out, it would be the third lowest amount of water delivered to Lake Powell in the reservoir’s 63 year history.
“We are on the extreme end of things,” Moser said. “We had a huge heatwave at the end of March with significant snowmelt.”
Westwide SNOTEL basin-filled map March 1, 2026.
At the start of March, snowpack across the Colorado River Basin and projections for the spring runoff were already low, raising concerns of water shortages and an early start to what could be a dangerous fire season across the West. Then came a “very dry March” with a record-shattering heatwave that melted large amounts of the snowpack from the “most crucial areas for spring runoff,” Moser said. Nearly all of these areas had less than 50% of average precipitation in March, and have seen less than half of the average precipitation since October, he said.
A map of the Colorado River Basin shows that dozens of snow telemetry sites across the seven-state basin had the lowest snowpack on record at the start of April 2026. Credit: NRCS
Averaged across Colorado, March was an “astonishing” 13 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the 20th century average, almost 10 degrees warmer than the 1991-2020 average and more than 4 degrees warmer than any previous March, according to the state’s monthly climate summary. Large parts of the mountains experienced record-breaking temperatures lasting for days on end and leading to a rapid melt-off of the state’s already historically-low snowpack. Colorado started April with a snowpack that state climatologists said was the worst in at least the past 75 years. Colorado’s snowpack peaked in early March — a full month earlier than normal — at 8.5 inches of snow-water equivalent, or roughly half of the 30-year median, according to the state’s snow telemetry data. Normally, the state’s snowpack peaks on April 8, but by the time that date rolled around this year, the data show the statewide snowpack had declined to just 3.6 inches of snow water equivalent. That’s less than half what it was a month earlier, and just 23% of normal for that point in the season.
Banks of Lake Powell, Arizona in March 2026 | Page Buono
Click the link to read the article on the American Rivers website (Page Buono and Sinjin Eberle):
March 18, 2026
The situation is clear: the precipitation outlook in the Colorado River Basin is dire, the river cannot sustain the demands placed on it, and this year we’re likely to face unprecedented management decisions with potentially catastrophic consequences.
Despite decades of warnings and years of negotiations, there remains no clear blueprint for how the West can live with less water. That future is no longer hypothetical—it is already here.
Lake Powell’s drastically low water levels are evident in the discoloration of ancient cliffs that were submerged for decades, often referred to as “the bathtub ring” in March 2026 | Page Buono
We often talk about the Colorado River and drought in ways that can feel removed, impersonal, abstract, and buried in jargon. But beneath the stories, there are real lives, livelihoods, ecosystems, and traditions that make the region what it is, and that are very much at stake.
West Drought Monitor map April 7, 2026.
On March 3, for example, the US Drought Monitor released their latest report, revealing that “snow water equivalent” is less than 70% of normal across the Central Rockies, and less than 50% in the Four Corners.
But it isn’t just one fire in one year – throughout the Southwest and in California, regions are experiencing some of the largest, most catastrophic wildfires in history, and they’re occurring much more frequently.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Today, Governors Jared Polis (D-Colo.), Mark Gordon (R-Wyo.), Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-N.M.) and Spencer Cox (R-Utah) released a statement on the proposed draw down of Flaming Gorge and other upper basin reservoirs:
“This is an unprecedented year on the Colorado River, and likely will be one of the worst on record. A dry year like this reminds us of why it is critical that all who rely on this resource learn to live within its means and adapt our uses accordingly.
The Upper Division States of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, are actively and strictly regulating water uses. Because of such diminished runoff, existing state laws in the Upper Division States require water users to face cuts to water rights dating back to the 1800s – these cuts are mandatory, uncompensated, and will have significant impacts on water users, including Upper Basin Tribes, and local economies.
It is critical that any releases made by the federal government from Flaming Gorge and other upstream reservoirs are in compliance with existing agreements, particularly the 2019 Drought Response Operations Agreement between the Bureau of Reclamation and the Upper Division States and governing law and done for the purpose of protecting Lake Powell. We must have a clear understanding of how these proposed releases will effectively protect elevations at Lake Powell. Once the releases conclude, we expect that all water released from Flaming Gorge and other upstream reservoirs will be fully recovered.
Further, any releases must be appropriately sized. Years like this one remind us that appropriate water storage helps us survive the dry years, and that we must be prepared not only for this year but future dry years, as well as average years.
As we continue to comply with commitments to our water users and the Law of River, we recognize the impacts of water shortages and water releases from Upper Basin reservoirs on local communities – not only related to future water supply availability, but also how they affect jobs and local recreational and other economies. We recognize the need to live within the available supply and expect other communities to do so as well.”
The Colorado River flows near Hite, Utah on July 4, 2022. The river’s water supply is shrinking, and states are caught in a standoff about how to cut back on demand. Alex Hager/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Scott Franz):
April 8, 2026
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
Last month’s record breaking heat across the Mountain West led to the worst snowpack on record in Colorado and Utah, along with a significantly downgraded forecast for the upcoming supply of Colorado River water.
Cody Moser with the federal Colorado Basin River Forecast Center said in a monthly briefing Tuesday [April 7, 2026] that just 1.4 million acre feet of Colorado River water is expected to reach Lake Powell through July. That’s less than a quarter of what’s considered normal.
It’s also much lower than the 2.3 million acre feet Moser’s office projected a month ago, before the heat wave in the West melted away an already meager supply of snowpack.
“With record low snow pack, we have well below normal water supply forecasts,“ he said. “In many cases, our April through July (water) volume forecasts rank in the lowest five on record when compared to historical observations.”
The forecast for how much water will reach Flaming Gorge Reservoir also dropped more than 20% since the last monthly projection. Flows for the Yampa River are also projected to be near the record low.
Moser added it’s likely some rivers and streams in western Colorado have already reached their peak runoff for the year.
He said the water supply forecasts could improve if wet conditions arrive, or decline even further if the West remains dry.
The worsening river forecasts arrive as the seven states that use the waterway remain at an impasse this spring over how to share and conserve the water in the future.
If states can’t reach a deal, the Interior Department is expected to identify its preferred option for how to manage Lake Powell and Lake Mead after the current operating guidelines expire this fall.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told Arizona radio station KTAR News this week that the worsening spring runoff conditions are going to “require everybody to dig in and take bigger cuts than they want, and we haven’t reached that spot yet.”
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, center, speaks during a gathering with governors from six states in the Colorado River basin on Friday, Jan. 30, 2026. Photo credit: Lowell Whitman/Department Of Interior
Click the link to read the article on the Tuscon.com website (Tony Davis). Here’s an excerpt:
April 8, 2026
U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, pressed Monday to spell out how he’ll handle the Colorado River’s water crisis, wouldn’t get specific but said repeatedly that “nobody will be happy” with how his department will split a rapidly dwindling supply of river water among the seven states, including Arizona, that want a piece of it. Speaking at a roundtable in the Tucson area populated by a host of public lands industry leaders and University of Arizona President Suresh Garimella, Burgum pledged to hand down a decision this month on the first of two crucial, divisive issues his office is confronting regarding the river. That decision will be how much water the Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation will release from its upstream reservoirs in the four Upper Colorado River Basin states to head off a potential calamity in which Glen Canyon Dam, forming the boundary between the Upper and Lower Basins, would no longer receive enough water to continue generating electricity that serves customers in seven Western states.
The white bathtub ring clinging to the sandstone walls of Glen Canyon is more than a marker of a receding lake; it is a physical manifestation of a century-old accounting error. PHOTO BY BOB HEMBREE (MARCH 2019)
The white bathtub ring clinging to the sandstone walls of Glen Canyon is more than a marker of a receding lake; it is a physical manifestation of a century-old accounting error. For decades, the conventional story of the Colorado River’s decline has been framed as a tragic stroke of bad luck. The narrative, popularized in modern classics like Cadillac Desert, suggests that the framers of the 1922 Colorado River Compact simply did their best with a limited record of “eighteen years of streamflow measurement” taken during an unusually wet “binge.”
However, emerging historical research and systems analysis tell a more complicated and troubling story. In their definitive study, Science Be Dammed, authors Eric Kuhn and John Fleck argue that the crisis we face in 2026 was not an accident of nature but a predictable consequence of “selective science.” The decision-makers of 1922 were not victims of ignorance; they were sophisticated professionals who chose to ignore inconvenient data in favor of a political vision that required the river to be larger than it actually was.
Eugene Clyde LaRue measuring the flow in Nankoweap Creek, 1923. Photo credit: USGS
The Inconvenient Hydrologist
As the seven basin states gathered at Bishop’s Lodge in Santa Fe to carve up the river, they were joined by Eugene Clyde (E.C.) LaRue, a hydrologist for the U.S. Geological Survey. [Eric Kuhn responding to my X post, “Actually LaRue was never allowed to attend a Commission meeting. He asked, but Hoover said no.] LaRue presented the commissioners with a conclusion that threatened the very foundation of their negotiations. His data, which included early gauge records and historical flood markers, suggested that the river’s long-term average was approximately 15 million acre-feet (maf)
LaRue explicitly warned the commission that the period between 1905 and 1922 was a hydrological anomaly. Had the negotiators included the drier records from the late 1890s, the estimated annual flow would have dropped significantly. As Kuhn and Fleck note, the decision-makers had at their disposal a relatively thorough, almost modern picture of the river’s hydrology. They chose to ignore it because accepting LaRue’s science might have left them with a flow too low to reach the compromises necessary to develop the West.
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
Paper Water and the System Trap
By sidelining LaRue and enshrining a “paper water” figure of 16.4 million acre-feet into the Law of the River, the commissioners fell into a classic “system trap.” They created a legal stock of water rights that far exceeded the river’s physical flow. This inflated number was essential to the “reinforcing loop” of 20th-century growth. It provided the legal certainty needed to secure federal funding for massive infrastructure projects like the Hoover Dam and the Glen Canyon Dam.
This intentional overestimation created a massive “information delay.” For eighty years, the system appeared stable only because the Upper Basin states were slow to develop their shares, allowing their “unused” water to flow downstream. This masked the fundamental deficit, leading to a state of “overshoot” in which the regional economy came to depend on water that did not exist. Professor Rhett Larson describes the resulting legal framework as a system of “calling shotgun” that was excellent for settling a desert but is catastrophic for managing one in a time of scarcity.
The End of the Delay
Today, the “delay” has finally ended, and the “inconvenient science” of 1922 has become the undeniable reality of 2026. The river’s source is being further depleted by “aridification,” a process climate scientist Brad Udall describes as a “sponge above our head” that evaporates moisture before it can reach the streamflow. We are now witnessing the collision of a 100-year-old legal fiction with a 21st-century climate reality.
The current impasse between the Upper and Lower Basins is a symptom of “policy resistance,” where every actor is incentivized to protect their “paper” share even as the “wet” water disappears. As Professor Andrea Gerlak observes, if a system has 25 years to produce an agreement and fails, there is likely something fundamentally wrong with the system itself. Solving the crisis at Lake Powell will require more than engineering; it will require a paradigm shift that finally aligns our laws with the river’s actual physical limits.
March was…not helpful. NOAA CBRFC's April 1st (50% exceedance) forecast now has Lake Powell April-July inflows at 1400 KAF, 22% of average. Only 2002 (963 KAF) and 1977 (1208 KAF) ended up with lower inflows than that. If dry conditions continue through spring, 2026 could drop below 2002.
The next Aspinall Unit Coordination Meeting for the Aspinall Unit & Gunnison River will be heldThursday, April 23rd, 2026 at 1:00 pm.
This meeting will be held virtually via Microsoft Teams. There will not be an in-person meeting location for this meeting. The link to the Teams meeting is below.
Reclamation conducts Public Operations Meeting three times per year to gather input for determining upcoming operations for the Aspinall Unit & Gunnison River. The meeting agenda will include updates on current snowpack, forecasts for spring runoff conditions and spring peak operations, the weather outlook, and planned operations for the remainder of the year.
Contact Andrew Limbach (alimbach@usbr.gov or 970-248-0644) for more information regarding Aspinall operations or the Operation Group meeting.
Click the link to read the discussion on the USBR website:
The Colorado Basin River Forecast Center (CBRFC) geographic forecast area includes the Upper Colorado River Basin (UCRB), Lower Colorado River Basin (LCRB), and Eastern Great Basin (GB).
Water Supply Forecasts
April 1 water supply forecasts are well below normal and summarized in the figure and table below. Snowpack and soil moisture are the primary hydrologic conditions that impact the water supply outlook, while future weather is the primary source of forecast uncertainty.
Water Year Weather
The 2025–26 meteorological winter (December–Februrary) was the warmest winter on record for vast swaths of the CBRFC area. In March, an extraordinarily anomalous high pressure system — of a strength that is more typical of July — impacted the Southwest. This ridge brought summertime temperatures at a time when most mountainous areas are usually still building a snowpack.
Across the region in mid-to-late March, temperature records were smashed for several days on end. In Flagstaff, AZ, 11 days reached or surpassed the previous March high temperature record of 73°. Shockingly, on two days the mercury climbed to 83° and 84° , significantly surpassing the April high temperature record of 80° . At 8,710 feet above sea level in Alta, UT, where March high temperatures average in the 30s, temperatures reached at least 60° on eight days. Nine days of at least 100° were observed in Phoenix, AZ, including the earliest 100° day on record. The depth and duration of this heat wave was unprecedented in the period of record. It will likely go down as one of the most extreme weather events to ever impact the CBRFC area.
The same ridge of high pressure that brought searing temperatures to the low elevations and snowmelt across high elevations also resulted in very dry air and no precipitation. Numerous SNOTEL sites across the CBRFC area observed their driest March on record.
The water year as a whole tells a different story. In October, several rounds of heavy rain tied to decaying tropical storms brought record flooding to portions of AZ, southern UT, and southwest CO — making it one of the wettest Octobers on record. Water year-to-date (October–March) precipitation is highly variable, ranging from well below normal across much of Colorado and Utah’s mountains, to near/above normal in the Upper Green River Basin and portions of the LCRB. The figures and table below summarize March temperatures and water year 2026 precipitation.
Snowpack Conditions
Snow water equivalent (SWE) has been tracking at or near record low much of the season. An extremely dry March and significant snowmelt during the last half of the month led to historically low April 1 snow water equivalent conditions across the region. An NRCS-Utah Snow Survey Special Report states that “at no time since systematic snowpack measurements began around 1930 has April 1 snowpack been this low in the state of Utah, and 2026 SWE is roughly five times lower than the previous record low”. A similar analysis performed by the Colorado Climate Center concluded that “this has been the worst year for Colorado snowpack in recorded history, and most locations have less than half of the previous record low”.
UCRB and GB April 1 snow covered area is 25-30% of the 2001-2025 median, which is also the lowest on record for early April dating back to 2001. 1 April 1 CBRFC model SWE conditions are generally less than 30% of normal across the UCRB and GB. SWE conditions are summarized in the figure and table below.
Soil Moisture
CBRFC hydrologic model soil moisture conditions impact water supply forecasts. Basins with above average soil moisture conditions can be expected to experience more efficient runoff from rainfall or snowmelt while basins with below average soil moisture conditions can be expected to have lower runoff efficiency until soil moisture deficits are fulfilled. The timing and magnitude of spring runoff is impacted by snowpack conditions, spring weather, and soil moisture conditions.
Mid-November 2025 soil moisture conditions were below normal across most areas as a result of warmer and drier than normal weather during the 2025 water year. Higher elevation soil moisture/baseflow conditions typically don’t change much during winter months as snow is accumulating. However, this has not been the case this winter. Model soil moisture conditions as a percent of average have improved across most basins as a result of snowmelt and precipitation falling as rain instead of snow. CBRFC hydrologic model soil moisture conditions are shown in the figures below.
Upcoming Weather
Mild and unsettled weather is expected over the CBRFC area into the middle of April, with a few chances for rain showers and very high elevation snowfall. Above average temperatures will dominate the period. The 7-day precipitation forecast and the Climate Prediction Center (CPC) 8–14 day temperature and precipitation outlooks are shown in the figures below.
Climate Prediction Center precipitation and temperature probability forecasts for April 14–20, 2026.
The All American Canal, the largest diversion on the Colorado River, passes through Winterhaven, CA on its way to the Imperial Valley. The Colorado River is seen flowing next to it.
April 2, 2026
In the southeast corner of California, 300-foot-tall sand dunes rise from a sunbaked landscape dotted with ocotillo and creosote bushes. Summer temperatures here regularly exceed 110 degrees, and annual rainfall is comparable to that of the Sahara Desert. Despite its unforgiving terrain, more than 180,000 residents live in Imperial County, one of the country’s most productive agricultural regions and more recently a magnet for data center development and lithium extraction proposals. This has all been made possible by turn-of-the-20th century canals that carve up the region, supplying it with more than a million gallons of Colorado River water every minute.
“We’ve often called it the lifeblood of Imperial Valley,” said Robert Schettler, a spokesperson for Imperial Irrigation District, the area’s public utility, which manages the region’s over 3,000 miles of drains and canals. “If something were to happen to that river, we would all have to pack up and leave.”
Something is happening to the Colorado River. Over the past century, its average water supply has fallen by nearly a third due to prolonged drought and climate change. Experts predict that decline will continue, threatening cities, tribes and farms that depend on the river’s flow, from Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico to Arizona, Nevada and Northern Mexico. Most of the Colorado River’s water starts as snowpack in the Rocky Mountains, but after the American West experienced the warmest winter ever recorded, snow levels are now at historic lows, prompting experts to warn that 2026 may be one of the river’s driest years yet.
That could spell disaster for Imperial County, whose harsh desert landscape of windblown sand and rugged burnt-orange mountains was transformed more than a century ago into productive, gridded farmland dotted with small cities such as Brawley, El Centro and Calexico…Imperial Valley’s agricultural industry consumes by far the largest share of water in the region, about 97% of the 3.1 million acre-feet managed by the Imperial Irrigation District every year…Those ambitious and largely successful conservation efforts have come at a cost. Much of the water used by farmers historically flowed into the nearby Salton Sea, but as farmers have reduced their water use, less runoff has reached the man-made lake, accelerating an existing environmental crisis Over the last three decades, the Salton Sea has shrunk by more than 60 square miles, exposing a dry lakebed laden with pesticides, particulate matter and heavy metals. Those contaminants are carried as dust through the air into nearby communities, contributing to a childhood asthma rate triple that of the national average. Now, farmers such as Brian Strahm, whose family has been growing crops in the area for four generations, are concerned they may have to decrease their water use further. That may prove difficult since farmers have already put in place many efficiency measures, Strahm said…Farmers say cuts could seriously harm the area’s already struggling economy. In addition to being the county with the highest percentage of Latinos in California, Imperial has among the highest unemployment rates of any county in the country, at nearly 19%. For those who do find work, the agricultural industry offers a lifeline, accounting for one out of every six jobs in the region.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Rubble and a cone-shaped butte at Pierre’s Site, a Chacoan great house about ten miles north of Chaco Culture National Historical Park. The area around the site would be re-opened to new oil and gas leases under the Trump administration’s proposal to revoke a Biden-era “buffer zone” around the park. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
The News: The Trump administration is formally proposing to revoke the Biden-era ban on new oil and gas leases within the 10-mile buffer zone around Chaco Culture National Historical Park in northwestern New Mexico. The Bureau of Land Management is accepting public comments for just seven days, with the input period ending April 7.
The Context: When President Theodore Roosevelt wielded the brand new Antiquities Act in 1907 to create Chaco Canyon National Monument, he drew the boundaries around what is now known as “downtown Chaco,” a handful of structures including the 800-room Pueblo Bonito, constructed between the 9th and 12th centuries by ancestors of today’s Pueblo people.
That was merely the center of the Chacoan world, however, which extended over 100 miles outward into the Four Corners region. No one knows if this was a political empire, a religious or cultural society, or a school of architecture, but it is clear that the dozens of Chacoan outliers or “great houses,” along with thousands of smaller sites, shrines, and architectural features with unknown function, did not exist in isolation. They were part of a cultural tapestry woven into the natural landscape. The national monument, in other words, was vastly incomplete, which is especially concerning given that it lies in would become one of the nation’s most heavily drilled oil and gas fields.
Wall at Twin Angels Great House, a Chacoan outlier along the Great North Road with an oil and gas well pad and tanks visible in the background. This site is well outside the 10-mile Chaco buffer zone. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
That’s not to say that Chacoan sites are devoid of protections. The park itself is off-limits to all oil and gas development. Pierre’s Site and several other outliers are part of the Chaco Culture Archaeological Protection Sites Program, and all sites on federal land are shielded by the Archaeological Resources Protection Act and Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, which requires oil companies to conduct a cultural inventory of all land in the path of development. If the surveyors happen upon a “significant” site, the well pad or road or pipeline must be relocated, if possible, at least 50 to 100 feet away, a process known as “identify and avoid.” Tribes are supposed to be consulted in these cases, as well, though their concerns aren’t always considered.
But “identify and avoid” misses a great deal.
“Even though agencies try to mitigate the impact, it isn’t enough because you’ve literally destroyed the context in which those things exist,” Theresa Pasqual told me several years ago when I was writing about Indigenous resistance to drilling around Chaco. She is the former director of Acoma Pueblo’s Historic Preservation Office, and a descendant of the Pueblo people who occupied the Four Corners region for thousands of years. “Most of our pueblos are still transmitting their migration history through oral means. So when you have development that begins to impact many of these sites — that range in size from the grandeur of Chaco Canyon or Mesa Verde to very small unknown sites that still remain un-surveyed and unknown to the public — they are literally destroying the pages of the history book of the Pueblo people.”
Pierre’s Site, a Chacoan great house about nine miles north of the park’s boundary, illustrates this concept. The site is made up of a collection of thick-walled stone structures built among and in harmony with distinctive shale and sandstone buttes and bluffs. That “page,” or the structures and their immediate surroundings, has been kept intact by the aforementioned protections. But a cluster of well pads, along with pumpjacks, tanks, and associated infrastructure sit less than a half-mile away, and they are visible — and their whir-pop-whir sounds audible — from the site. They not only affect the way one experiences Pierre’s, but also have surely erased some of the important context.
Rubble at Pierre’s Site. Jonathan P. Thompson photo
Pierre’s lies along the Great North Road—the most prominent and visible of several such “roads” in the region—an architectural feature that stretches directly north of Chaco Canyon for 30 miles or more. It may have been a symbolic path through time, connecting old worlds with new, or a reminder of the power Chaco-central wielded over its outliers, or a giant arrow pointing people to a holy place. Chaco scholar Paul Reed calls it “a landscape monument on a large scale.” Yet little effort has been made to protect it. Oil field roads and pipelines cross it in dozens of places, and workers have bulldozed well pads right on top of it, erasing the subtle signs that it was ever there. If something so significant can get plowed under, how many more subtle features—shrines, corn fields, plant-gathering sites, ceremonial areas, flint-knapping spots—have been destroyed indelibly?
It was with the greater context in mind that in 2023, after years of consideration, public meetings, and analysis, President Joe Biden signed Public Lands Order 7923, which withdrew about 336,000 acres of public land from oil and gas leasing for 20 years. Tribal nations with ties to the cultural landscape, environmental advocates, and archaeologists had sought the withdrawal to provide a buffer zone around the national historical park and to add a layer of protection to the associated sites within 10 miles of the park’s boundaries.
Map of the 10-mile buffer zone. Source: All Pueblo Council of Governors.
The withdrawal was incomplete, in that it still covered only a tiny slice of the greater Chaco landscape. Several significant outliers, along with about 20 miles of the Great North Road, remained unprotected. Chaco is also in the middle of what’s known as the Checkerboard, a hodgepodge of land ownership and jurisdictions, which complicates the withdrawal, since it only applies to BLM land. The Checkerboard lies within the Navajo Nation’s borders, but it is not reservation land, and it includes Bureau of Land Management land, state lands, private lands, and Indian allotments, which exist in a sort of limbo between private, tribal, and federal land.
The Navajo Nation initially supported the withdrawal, but when tribal leadership changed, so did its stance. In response to pressure from allotment owners within the buffer zone, who worried that their royalties from drilling would be threatened, the Buu Nygren administration turned against the buffer. While leasing is still allowed on those allotments within the withdrawal area, an oil and gas company is less likely to drill there because they can’t “pool” the allotment resources with those of neighboring federal parcels.
Pumpjack and Haystack Mountain as seen from the “Acropolis” at Pierre’s Site, with “Downtown Chaco” in between (but out of view since it’s in a canyon). This view looks directly south down the Great North Road, which is aligned with the meridian stretching from Haystack Mountain to Mount Wilson in the San Juan Mountains in Colorado. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Project 2025, the right wing’s playbook for the Trump administration, directly called for the Chaco buffer zone’s elimination, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has been toying with the idea for the last year. Finally, on the last day of March, the administration opened a one-week public comment period, on the proposal to either revoke the buffer zone altogether, or to reduce it to a five-mile radius around the park, which would leave out Pierre’s and other significant sites.
The All Pueblo Council of Governors, Indigenous and environmental advocates, archaeology groups, and New Mexico’s congressional delegation all pushed back on the Trump administration’s move and called for the current buffer zone to be retained.
The Trump administration announced it will move the U.S. Forest Service headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City as part of a “sweeping restructuring of the agency to move leadership closer to the forests and communities it serves.” The shake-up includes:
Moving about 260 employees from Washington HQ to Salt Lake City, and shuffling around another 2,600 staffers;
Eliminating its region-based organizing structure and shifting it to one centered around 15 state-level offices. This will include shuttering regional offices, some of which will be retained for other purposes;
Closing 57 research and development stations, while retaining 20, eight of which are in Western states;
As for firefighting, a Forest Service press release noted:
Administration officials say the overhaul is aimed at making the agency, which is a branch of the U.S. Agriculture Department, more nimble and efficient. Yet it has not provided an analysis of how such a vast restructuring would accomplish those goals, or how much money it would save. It comes about a year after the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, fired about 3,400 Forest Service employees, or more than 10% of the agency’s total workforce.
It’s all part of a larger departmental overhaul designed to “bring the USDA closer to its customers,” according to a USDA memorandum from last year. Customers? Do they mean the extractive industries? The American people? Or what? Either way, it seems like strange terminology for a government agency to be using.
In reality, as Christine Peterson reports in High Country News, the overhaul is doing little except sowing confusion and concern among agency staffers and observers.
These maps show where the new state offices will be after the reorganization is complete. Source: USDA.
Which research facilities will survive the overhaul (below). Source: USDA.
As I’ve written here before, I don’t see moving public land agencies out of Washington to be an unmitigated disaster in and of itself. And contrary to some takes, it won’t automatically lead to wholesale clearcutting of the West’s forests. Forest Service and BLM higher-ups don’t need to be close to Capitol Hill or the White House to do their jobs, especially in the Zoom age. And it wouldn’t hurt to get the Forest Service Chief or the BLM Director out on the landscapes they oversee a bit more often, where perhaps they can see the consequences of projects or policies they may sign off on. Utah may be a questionable location, given the state’s leaders hostility toward public land management, but Salt Lake City is a fairly progressive place, and the likes of Sen. Mike Lee will have just as much access to agency leaders in D.C. as they would in SLC.
That said, if such a move is not done correctly, it can be disastrous. Take Trump’s first-term relocation of the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado, in 2019. That led to a de facto agency housecleaning; many senior staffers chose to resign or move to other agencies rather than uproot their lives and families and move across the country, and only a handful of workers ended up in the Colorado office, which shared a building with oil and gas companies. A vast storehouse of institutional knowledge and expertise was lost, and virtually nothing was accomplished.
We’re likely to see the same sort of dynamic playing out with this move, even though SLC is larger, more cosmopolitan, and has a bigger airport than GJC. Plus, the USFS overhaul is far more than a mere HQ move. Shuttering nearly 60 research and development facilities, many of which are tied to universities or colleges, will have a major impact, even if their functions and staff are moved elsewhere. Ditto with the regional-to-state office shuffle (the point of which is what, exactly?).
And, this is all happening as the administration makes a push to return the Forest Service to its timber plantation era, which ran from the 1950s through the ’80s. During that time, logging companies harvested 10 billion to 12 billion board-feet per year from federal forests, while for the last 25 years, the annual number has hovered below 3 billion board-feet. Now, Trump, via his Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production order, plans to crank up the annual cut to 4 billion board-feet by 2028. How? By declaring an “emergency” that allows the agency and logging companies to bypass environmental laws. Never mind that the infrastructure and demand don’t necessarily exist to carry out this plan.
Rollins issued a memo last year declaring that the threat of wildfires, insects and disease, invasive species, overgrown forests, the growing number of homes in the wildland-urban interface, and more than a century of rigorous fire suppression have contributed to what is now “a full-blown wildfire and forest health crisis.” And she expanded the “emergency situation” acreage from 67 million acres under Biden, to almost 113 million acres, or 59% of all Forest Service lands, opening it up to streamlined forest “management,” aka timber operations.
🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫
I’m calling it: The Dolores River in Dolores reached peak spring runoff of 1,090 cubic feet per second on March 26. If this holds (and, yes, there is a chance that April showers will bring big May flows), then it will be the earliest peak on record by far. This is more an indication of how intense and unusual the end-of-March heat wave was than of how scant the snowpack was. It was the fourth lowest peak flow on record, behind 2002, 1977, and 2018.
The good news: The April 1 storm gave the snowpack a big boost. The bad news: In most places the snow water equivalent remains below that of the same date in 2002, which had been the worst snow year on record. The same pattern is evident in other San Juan Mountain river basins, but the picture looks a little better at higher elevation SNOTEL stations. Source: USDA NRCS.
Silverton, Colorado’s weather watcher Fred Canfield reports on a welcome burst of moisture at the high country burg in early April, writing:
Parting Cheeseburger Query
Four years ago, I asked you kind readers (or at least the ones that were around back then), for your recommendations on the best independent bookstores and green chile cheeseburgers in the West so I could add them to the Land Desk Green Chile Atlas. I know, it’s kind of weird to combine the two, and I apologize to all vegan booksellers that this pairing may offend (but I will add that vegan burgers are included, too).
Now I figured I’d come back and not only remind you that the Atlas exists, but also ask for updates, new book or green chile-related finds. So fire away!
Coloradans often hear that the Colorado River crisis is happening somewhere else. Headlines focus on Lake Mead, Lake Powell, and the Lower Basin, while Colorado is portrayed as a responsible headwaters state doing its part. Yet that narrative misses a deeper truth. The Colorado River crisis is not only about drought or downstream shortages. It is also about how the river is managed. In that sense, Colorado shares responsibility with every basin state.
Colorado’s water system is built on ‘prior appropriation’. The rule is simple: “first in time, first in right.” The earliest water users receive priority when supplies run low. This framework helped farmers, cities, and industries expand across the West during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, creating stability in a region where water determines survival.
However, the system was designed for a different climate and a by-gone West. It also encouraged states and water users to claim more water than the river could supply, contributing to the overallocation of the Colorado River. Legal analyses of the Law of the River show that the basin was effectively overburdened by water claims decades before climate change began reducing flows.
Today, climate change is altering the river itself. Scientists estimate that warming temperatures have already reduced Colorado River flows by roughly 20 percent. Federal water managers warn that declines could continue as temperatures rise. In a river system that is already legally overcommitted, treating water rights as fixed privileges can deepen instability rather than prevent it.
Colorado sits at the center of this challenge. As the largest contributor of water in the Upper Basin, the state must balance many competing demands. Front Range cities continue to grow. Western Slope agriculture depends on reliable irrigation. Rivers and aquatic ecosystems are under stress. Yet much of Colorado’s water policy still assumes shortages are temporary and that legal priority alone will determine who receives water. That mindset often encourages defensive politics rather than shared problem-solving.
Conflicts between upstream and downstream states are often described as unavoidable. In reality, much of the tension stems from the priorities of management. Upper Basin states emphasize uncertainty about future river flows, while Lower Basin states focus on delivery obligations and infrastructure investments, according to recent reports on Colorado River governance. Each group is acting logically within the current system. The problem is that the system frequently rewards delay and legal conflict rather than cooperation, as researchers studying collaborative governance in the basin have found.
Colorado has an opportunity to change that pattern. One promising approach is collaborative adaptive management. This framework begins with a simple idea: uncertainty is normal in complex systems. Instead of assuming managers already know the right solution, adaptive management relies on monitoring conditions, learning from outcomes, and adjusting policies over time. With collaboration of states, tribes, farmers, cities, and environmental groups conflict can be reduced and management decisions can improve.
Some elements of this approach already exist in Colorado, including experimental reservoir operations and voluntary conservation programs. However, research on collaborative drought science planning in the Colorado River Basin shows that these efforts remain limited and politically fragile.
Equity must also be part of Colorado’s leadership. For decades, Tribal nations and many rural communities have carried the environmental costs of water development while urban growth captured much of the benefit, a pattern highlighted in research on environmental justice and Indigenous governance. Tribal nations, many of which hold some of the most senior water rights in the basin, remain underrepresented in major water decisions. Adaptive governance recognizes that whose knowledge it is that counts, matters. Incorporating Indigenous knowledge, local experience, and community-based monitoring can strengthen decisions and build trust in governance. Research shows that when affected communities help shape policies, those policies are more likely to be trusted, followed, and sustained over time.
Importantly, collaborative management does not mean abandoning Colorado water law or taking away private rights. Instead, it means updating water governance so users can share risk and adapt together as conditions change. The alternative – waiting for wetter years or relying on courts to resolve disputes – ignores both climate science and political reality. Climate projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicate that the American Southwest will likely remain hotter and drier for decades. Planning for a return to twentieth-century river flows is increasingly unrealistic.
Critics argue that collaboration takes too long when the crisis is already severe. Colorado has already tried temporary agreements, emergency negotiations, and federal pressure. Those approaches have not produced lasting solutions. Short-term deals may stabilize reservoirs for a season, but they do little to address the deeper management problems driving the crisis. Without stronger cooperation, the basin risks repeating the same cycle of shortage and conflict.
Colorado has long prided itself on practical problem-solving and environmental leadership. The state now has an opportunity to apply those values to its most important river. Policymakers should strengthen collaborative water governance, ensure meaningful Tribal participation, and support conservation policies that reward flexibility rather than litigation.
Coloradans also have a role to play. Public participation in basin planning, engagement with watershed organizations, and pressure on elected officials can help shift water policy toward long-term climate adaptation rather than short-term crisis response.
The Colorado River begins in our mountains. Leadership today means recognizing that rules built for a wetter past may no longer work in a hotter future – and choosing cooperation before the river forces the decision for us.
Anderson, Patrick J., Jeanne E. Godaire, Daniel K. Jones, William J. Andrews, Alicia A. Torregrosa, Meghan T. Bell, JoAnn M. Holloway, et al. 2025. “Collaborative Drought Science Planning in the Colorado River Basin.” U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2025-1041. https://doi.org/10.3133/ofr20251041.
Birnbaum, Simon. 2016. “Environmental Co-governance, Legitimacy, and the Quest for Compliance: When and Why Is Stakeholder Participation Desirable?”. Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 18, no. 3, 306–323.https://doi.org/10.1080/1523908X.2015.1077440
Hite, Kristen, Pervaze A. Sheikh, and Charles V. Stern. 2025. “Management of the Colorado River: Water Allocations, Drought, and the Federal Role”. Congressional Research Service Report R45546.https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45546.
Holling, C. S. 1978. Adaptive Environmental Assessment and Management. New York: Wiley.
Kuhn, Eric. 2024. “The Risks and Potential Impacts of a Colorado River Compact Curtailment on Colorado River In-Basin and Transmountain Water Rights Within Colorado.” Colorado Environmental Law Journal, 35.https://scholar.law.colorado.edu/celj/vol35/iss2/4.
Sullivan, Abigail, Dave D. White, and Michael Hanemann. 2019. “Designing Collaborative Governance: Insights from the Drought Contingency Planning Process for the Lower Colorado River Basin.” Environmental Science & Policy, 91: 39-49. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2018.10.011.
David is a Colorado Certified Water Professional and environmental scientist dedicated to protecting aquatic systems through rigorous data analysis, public service, and responsible resource management. He holds a bachelors degree in Biology from Western Colorado University and will graduate soon from the University of Denver with a Masters Degree in Environmental Policy and Management.
Click the link to read the article on Ken’s Substack (Ken Neubecker):
March 27, 2026
The February 14 deadline for the seven Colorado River Basin States to come up with an agreement on future management of the river is long gone, and still no agreement in sight. The deadline for submitting comments on the Bureau of Reclamations Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) is also past. Reclamation didn’t have a “preferred alternative”, which is not normal. They were hoping the States would have an agreement so that could become the preferred alternative. So they are left with their suite of six alternatives. All six are fraught with what Reclamation calls “decision making under deep uncertainty” (DMDU, they love acronyms).
That is an understatement.
No one seems to be very happy with any single proposed alternative. Some are calling for a new DEIS, or at least a Supplemental DEIS. This would only push any deadline further down the road. Reclamation is caught between a rock and a hard place.
The only real alternatives that they can implement without full approval by the States are No Action and the Basic Coordination Alternative. Both would be disastrous. They would simply be going back to how things were done prior to the 2007 Interim Guidelines and even earlier policies, none of which reflect the needs of the Colorado River we have today.
Westwide SNOTEL basin-filled map April 4, 2026.
Adding to that is the very dry record low snowpack in the Rockies. This annual winter snowpack is the ultimate water storage reservoir for the entire basin, from Pinedale, Wyoming, to Yuma, Arizona. It is what puts water into the two great reservoirs, Lakes Powell and Mead, that the Lower Basin desert states of California, Arizona and Nevada depend on. It is the only real reservoir that the needs of the arid Upper Basin states, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming depend on. This year that snowpack reservoir is as low as it has ever been, even eclipsing the former record year of 2002 when all this mega-drought started. The recent heat dome setting up over the Four Corners area is melting and sublimating what little snowpack there is fast.
Lakes Powell and Mead are already at very low levels, and the 1.7 maf projected inflow from spring runoff is looking smaller every day. Reclamation predicts that the water level in Lake Powell will drop to a point where no hydropower can be generated, power pool, by as soon as late July or at least in December. That, in effect, could be dead pool, with very limited releases from the lower “river outlet” tunnels. In effect, the flows from Lake Powell will become run of the river, what comes in is what goes out. No more storage for expected water deliveries downstream except what they might risk in lowering Lake Mead even more.
Needless to say this has sparked a war of words between the Upper and Lower Basins, with the Lower Basin being particularly vitriolic. As the February 14 deadline passed, JB Hamby of California declared “The 1922 Colorado River Compact requires the Upper Basin to deliver an average of 8.25 million acre-feet (maf) annually to the Lower Basin and Mexico. That delivery obligation is fixed in law, even if the river produces less water.” Arizona has gone even further, declaring in TV ads that the water delivery is not only an obligation, but a “guarantee” for delivery.
Huh??? Fixed in law and a guarantee? The reality of the river disagrees. The requirements of the Compact are, yes, written in law. On paper. It is “paper water”, not real, or “wet” water. Colorado’s commissioner Becky Mitchell was more to the point, if less vitriolic, “We are being asked to solve a problem we didn’t create, with water we do not have.” At least someone understands the reality of the situation.
John Wesley Powell, the hero of the Colorado River was invited as the honored guest and keynote speaker at the second International Irrigation Congress, held in Los Angeles in 1893. He was held in high regard by the many boosters, speculators and people hoping to cash in with irrigated farms all across the Colorado River basin. After listening to what they were saying, Powell pocketed his prepared remarks and said,
“When all the rivers are used, when all the creeks in the ravines, when all the brooks, when all the springs are used, when all the canyon waters are taken up, when all the artesian waters are taken up, when all the wells are sunk or dug that can be dug in all this arid region, there is still not sufficient water to irrigate all this arid region.”
The delegates didn’t want to hear that. As they booed him off the stage he added,
“I tell you gentlemen that you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights for there is not sufficient water to supply the land.”
Powell was right, but the boosters didn’t listen. Many still aren’t listening. Agricultural dreams have faded and new dreams of housing developments and data centers are taking their place. The boosters, in both Basins, are still booing reality off the stage. Dreams continue to grow as the river continues to shrink.
I read of fears that the Upper Basin will take advantage of Lower Basin cuts by taking more themselves. Really? From where? That vast winter snowpack reservoir that is expected to “guarantee” so much water for the Lower Basin, to refill Powell and Mead, is the same shrinking reservoir that the Upper Basin depends on. Upper Basin diversions are being curtailed every year, not expanded. There isn’t enough water. The Upper Colorado River Commission’s “Amended 2016 Upper Division States Depletion Demand Schedule”, published in June 2022, was used in BOR’s modeling of Upper Basin demands, but the optimistic projections of that report have never born fruit. The report is a projection of potential future depletions from the Upper Colorado River, but they are just that, projections. And relatively modest ones at that. The report begins with a resolution of the Commission that states,
WHEREAS Depletion Demand Schedules issued by the Commission are not a prediction of future water use or depletions. The Depletion Demand Schedules are estimates that presume the continuation of the observed historically available supply and other demand drivers used for planning purposes and are useful for modeling purposes.
It is simply and estimate based on “observed historically available supply”. Observation and history have made some changes to any anticipated future depletions. The report cites 5.7 maf as the current historical use as of 2022, with potential for increased depletions up to 5.8 maf in 2020 and 6.6 maf by 2070. In reality the annual depletion has dropped to 4 maf or less. With continued aridification and dwindling snowpack Upper Basin depletions will likely stagnate, if not decline. That is just the reality.
Under Colorado law, and constitution, the right to divert water to a beneficial use “shall never be denied”. What that means, as I stated in the previous post, is that anyone can dig a ditch or throw a small pump into any stream and divert water. New applications for water rights are filed every month with the Water Courts, and their decrees will likely be granted. That is again, all on paper. The reality is they probably won’t get much if any water. When the river is flowing high in the spring it is a “free river”, meaning anyone can stick in their straw for a drink. But as soon as the first senior call is placed all that stops, and senior calls are happening earlier and earlier every year. And the local Water Commissioners, the ones who can shut down diversions, are getting busier.
The 1922 Compact has a fairly senior right on all streams and rivers in the Upper Basin. So far, the non-depletion requirement for flows averaging 75 maf over a ten year running average hasn’t been breached. Lake Powell will probably hit power pool or worse before then.
The difference between the demands, hopes, and fantasies of paper water and the hard reality of actual wet water are growing starker every winter and have been since the three giant reservoirs, Powell, Mead and the winter snowpack, have shrunk over the past 25 years. Nature doesn’t care much about paper, reports, lawyers or the dreams of boosters past and present. She always wins in the end.
And as Becky Mitchell, said, litigation won’t create any new water.
A correction/addition to my previous post about misunderstandings on the Colorado River
I need to make a correction on my previous post. The three large Upper Basin’s reservoirs, Flaming Gorge, Blue Mesa and Navajo do provide some water for Upper Basin use, especially Navajo, which provides water to the San Juan-Chama diversion to the Rio Grande basin and Albuquerque. It supplies on average 91 kaf of diverted water. It is expected that there will be no diversion this year. Navajo also provides water for Tribal use to the Navaho and Jicarilla Apachie. Downstream flows from Flaming Gorge, the largest of the three can provide smaller amounts for hay fields in Browns Park and the melons in Green River, but that’s pretty small too. Blue Mesa releases can benefit the Gunnison Tunnel diversions and Redlands downstream, but both are well senior to the Compact.
I knew better.
The main storage of the three reservoirs is still primarily as that Compact compliance savings account, and they will be called upon soon to bolster the levels of Lake Powell, where the inflow from runoff projection is dropping below 2 maf. If things keep going like this for another few weeks it will likely be lower.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
The record-breaking hot and dry winter and early spring has continued through March in Colorado’s mountains and plains. Snow gauges and weather stations throughout Northern Water’s collection and distribution areas have collected data showing the lack of precipitation in the region this year.
On April 9, the Northern Water Board of Directors will use the data collected this year and more to determine the annual quota for allottees of Colorado-Big Thompson Project water. Unlike many irrigation systems, the C-BT Project is designed to provide water to supplement the native supplies available in a given year, using water collected in previous seasons. If there is a bright spot this season, it’s that C-BT Project reserves are above their average levels over the life of the project for this time of year.
If you would like to provide comment on the quota send an email to quota@northernwater.org or offer a comment at the April 9 Board meeting.
Colorado-Big Thompson Project map. Courtesy of Northern Water.
Colorado is in a severe drought, and simple indoor water conservation measures can lead to big savings when everyone pitches in.
Free and easy
Turn the water off while brushing your teeth or washing your face.
Limit showers to 5 minutes (or try to shorten them by 1-2 minutes).
Only run your dishwasher and washing machine with a full load.
Turn off the kitchen faucet when handwashing dishes.
“A drought is a great time to teach kids, or anyone, about the importance of conserving water,” said Greg Fisher, Denver Water’s manager of demand planning. “Simple lifestyle changes can become lifelong habits.”
Fixing leaks
Across the U.S., Americans waste about 1 trillion gallons of water every year through water leaks and spend about 10% of their water bill on wasted water, according to the EPA.
The biggest water waster in the home is the toilet. The EPA reports that an average leaking toilet can waste about 200 gallons of water every day.
This toilet has a small, almost undetectable leak through its pink, circular flapper on the bottom of the tank. Some leaks can be detected by listening to hear if water is coming into the tank after it’s done filling. Faulty flappers are a leading cause of toilet leaks. Photo credit: Denver Water. Photo credit: Denver Water.
In addition to checking for toilet leaks, inspect all water sources in your home, including faucets, showers, water supply lines for dishwashers, washing machines, swamp coolers and ice machines.
Small leaks can add up over days and weeks. A small leak of 10 drops per minute can waste 300 gallons of water per year. Not only can these leaks add to your water bill, but they can also damage your home.
Denver Water offers rebates to help customers replace old toilets with newer, more efficient models that can save thousands of gallons of water every year. Image credit: Denver Water.
When buying new appliances and fixtures, purchase products that carry an Energy Star or WaterSense label, an indication that the product uses less energy or water compared to products that don’t carry those labels.
Replacing faucet aerators is an easy way to save water. New aerators slightly reduce the flow of water without impacting the performance of the faucet. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Wastewater is aerated as it flows over steps at Aurora’s Prairie Waters Project, which treats wastewater to drinking water standards. Credit: Jerd Smith
Colorado homeowners and businesses are already planning for a brutally dry summer. They should also be planning for an expensive one, as Denver and other cities prepare to impose drought fees to encourage conservation and to buffer their budgets against millions of dollars in lost water sales as customers cut back.
Denver Water, which announced Stage 1 drought restrictions last week, said its preliminary estimates suggest $30 million to $70 million may be lost as a result of restrictions. It has annual revenue of $488.5 million. Denver Water is Colorado’s largest water utility, serving more than 1.5 million people in the city of Denver and across the southern and western suburbs.
The agency said its surcharges will be designed to penalize high-volume outdoor water use, while keeping the price for drinking, cooking and bathing water unchanged.
ts surcharge prices, if approved by the board this month, will vary depending on how homeowners and businesses use water indoors and outside. A low surcharge for a conservation-minded homeowner who doesn’t do much, if any, outdoor watering might be just $7 per bill, according to the agency, but the drought fee could rise to $76 a month on a residential bill where outdoor water use is high.
Denver Water spokesperson Todd Hartman said via email that the agency will use a portion of its cash reserves to offset the lower water sales and other costs associated with the drought. It has also taken steps to reduce other costs, such as leaving job vacancies open longer.
Colorado experienced record-low mountain snows this year and a scorching hot spring, which has the thin snowpack melting sooner than normal. Reservoir storage is stable for this year, at roughly 80% of average across the state. But heavy water use could drain those reservoirs too quickly, potentially causing major shortages next year if this winter is as dry as last winter’s was, officials have said.
To protect reservoir storage, cities want customers to reduce water use by 10% to 20%.
They’re hoping the surcharges will help them reach those goals.
Chris Goemans, a professor in the agricultural and resource economics department at Colorado State University, said the drought fees are an important tool in water conservation, and can have a lasting impact on water use if they go on for a long period of time.
For several years after the deep drought Colorado experienced in 2002, for instance, water providers saw a lingering “drought shadow” where users continued to tighten their spigots, even after the drought fees were removed, according to research by Goemans, and others.
“They can promote lasting change,” he said.
Not every city will use the fees. Colorado Springs has permanent three-day-per-week watering rules and does not plan to impose a surcharge, at least not this year, spokesperson Jennifer Jordan said. She said the city’s drought plan allows surcharges only when reservoir storage is below 1.5 years on April 1. Right now, the system has three years of storage available.
And Aurora has only used them once before, in 2023, but took them off almost immediately when big rains came, according to Aurora Water spokesperson Shonnie Cline.
Cline said the severity of this drought is forcing the city to gear up for unprecedented times.
“We always thought that 2002 was the worst possible year, but we are expecting something worse this year,” she said.
Castle Rock will impose surcharges, if its council approves them in the coming weeks, but it is taking a different approach because its customers live with a water system based on what are known as water budgets, according to Mark Marlowe, director of Castle Rock Water.
Its customers already are limited every year in how much water they can use during the lawn-watering season, an amount that is based on home and lot size. A small home with a small yard is allocated less water each year and typically has a smaller bill than a large home with a large yard, which is given more water and pays a larger bill.
This year, Castle Rock will reduce everyone’s water budget. If homeowners exceed those lower budgets, they will be hit with a higher fee than normal.
To help offset that and keep its conservation message top of mind, Castle Rock envisions drought surcharges of $6.91 per thousand gallons initially and rising to $10.31 if the drought deepens, Marlowe said.
Is there any good news here? Maybe. City officials said if customers cut back as much as they are being asked to, say 10% to 20%, their bills might not change at all because they are using less water.
An Xcel truck outside the Shoshone hydropower plant in Glenwood Canyon. Denver Water has enacted with water rights owner Xcel to implement a call reduction agreement, which lets the Front Range water provider divert more water for a limited time. CREDIT: BRENT GARDNER-SMITH/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Facing an abysmal snowpack and spring runoff, the state’s largest Front Range water provider has enacted an agreement that lets it take more water from the Western Slope for a limited time.
On March 18, Denver Water put the Shoshone call reduction agreement into effect with water rights owner Xcel Energy, which allows Denver Water to divert more water from the headwaters of the Colorado River in an attempt to alleviate shortages. The agreement reduces the call at the Shoshone hydroelectric plant in Glenwood Canyon by half, from 1,408 cfs to 704 cfs.
The call reduction can only be implemented when two drought conditions are met: an April to July streamflow forecast for the Colorado River measured at the Kremmling stream gauge must be at 85% or less than average and the forecasted storage for the 10 largest Denver Water reservoirs for July 1 must be at or below 80% full.
The March water supply outlook from the National Resources Conservation Service for the Colorado headwaters from Kremmling to Glenwood Springs was 56% of normal. Experts expect conditions to have worsened when the April forecast comes out next week.
This winter is shaping up to be one of the worst on record and since water supplies depend on snowmelt, municipal water providers have been quick to implement cutbacks this spring. Last week, Denver Water declared a Stage 1 Drought and will impose two-day-a-week outdoor watering restrictions this summer.
“In the wake of the worst snowpack conditions in some 50 years of records at Denver Water, we began exercising the Shoshone Relaxation Agreement with Xcel Energy starting March 18,” Denver Water’s Media Relations Coordinator Todd Hartman said in an email. “We have taken this step only one other time under the 2007 agreement with Xcel (2013) and we don’t do so lightly.”
According to the agreement, Denver Water will be able to divert additional water until May 20.
The water provider, which serves about 1.5 million people on the Front Range, gets roughly 50% of its supply from the Colorado River basin and brings it across the Continental Divide through a highly engineered system of tunnels and reservoirs that facilitate the so-called transmountain diversions.
The Shoshone water rights, which date to 1902, are some of the largest and most powerful on the mainstem of the Colorado River in the state. They can command the river’s flows all the way to its headwaters, ensuring water keeps flowing downstream on the Western Slope.
When the plant’s turbines are spinning, it can “call” for its full water right, effectively forcing upstream water users with junior rights – like Denver Water – to cut back. And because the water is returned to the river after it runs through the plant’s turbines, Shoshone benefits downstream cities, irrigators, recreators and the environment on the Western Slope.
Colorado River Basin in Colorado via the Colorado Geological Survey
GOTHIC, Colorado, April 1, 2026 — The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) reports that, as of late March, spring 2026 snowpack surrounding its Gothic, Colorado, campus was at its lowest level recorded in more than 50 years of observations. In the absence of recent climate change, these conditions likely would occur only once every 200 to 1,000 years.
This new analysis by RMBL Principal Research Scientist Ian Breckheimer, PhD, draws on long-term field datasets and 40 years of satellite imagery that track the seasonal disappearance of mountain snowpack — a vital water resource for the ecosystem and the primary source of water in the drought-stricken Colorado River.
According to Breckheimer’s findings, at most sites in the Gunnison Basin, the 2026 snowpack levels and timing of snowmelt are far outside the historic range of variability:
Gunnison Valley slopes and lower elevations: a 1-in-60- to 300-year event
Crested Butte valley bottoms: a 1-in-300- to 400-year event
Mid-slopes of Flat Top Mountain and surrounding areas: a 1-in-500- to 1,000-year event
When accounting for recent climate change, which has caused snowpack to melt 3 to 5 days earlier each decade since 1993 at many sites, the likelihood of this year’s low snowpack level increases. However, it is still rare, with an estimated chance of occurring just once in 25 to 50 years. Moreover, at mid-elevations (between 8,000 and 9,000 feet), low snowfall and warm temperatures have combined to completely melt the current year’s snowpack 35 to 50 days earlier than the historical average. Although storms this week are bringing significant new snow to the higher peaks in the Gunnison Basin, sites where snowpack has already disappeared (most sites below 9,000 feet elevation) will receive mostly rain from this event.
“This is not the new normal,” says Breckheimer, “but it is exactly the kind of extreme event that will test how prepared our ecosystems and communities are for increasing variability.”
The research underscores the importance of long-term ecological observation. RMBL, which sits at an elevation of nearly 10,000 feet in Gothic, Colorado, hosts one of the most well-studied mountain ecosystems in the world, with decades of continuous data on snowpack, hydrology, and ecological response. These datasets make it possible to place current conditions into historical context and estimate how common they might be with and without recent observed climate change.
The implications extend beyond the Gunnison Valley. Snowpack dynamics directly influence water availability, wildfire risk, ecosystem health, and agricultural systems across the western United States. Understanding when and how these extremes occur is critical for forecasting and planning.
“This kind of insight is only possible because of long-term, place-based science,” says RMBL Executive Director Jeni Blacklock. “What we are seeing this year highlights both the value of these datasets and the urgency of continuing to invest in them.”
The findings were first presented during RMBL’s public Après Science talk series, which connects scientists and the public around emerging research in mountain ecosystems. A video of the talk, held on March 25, as well as supporting materials, will be released in the coming weeks. Sign up at rmbl.org/newsletter-sign-up to receive updates delivered via RMBL’s monthly e-newsletter.
Still image of the upper East River Valley from billy barr’s webcam, taken March 30, 2026, courtesy of Ian Breckheimer
About the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory Founded in 1928, RMBL is among the oldest and most respected field stations in the United States. Located in Gothic, Colorado, RMBL supports more than 200 scientists and students each summer and hosts one of the most extensive collections of long-term ecological data in the world.
Media notes:
Media contact: Suzanne Ennis, RMBL communications manager. Email: suzanne@rmbl.org
Additional slides and data visuals available upon request
Video of presentation available soon
Interviews available with Ian Breckheimer and RMBL leadership
L to R: Jennifer Rudgers, Stephanie Kivlin, Aimée Classen, and Lara Souza at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory site in Colorado. Photo provided
Click the link to read the paper on the Getches-Wilkinson Center website (Eric Kuhn, Anne Castle, Carlos de la Parra, John Fleck, Jack Schmidt, Kathryn Sorensen, Katherine Tara). Here’s the abstract:
March 26, 2026
Since 1945, the United States and Mexico have managed common interests on their two largest shared rivers systems, the Colorado and the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande, under the terms of the 1944 international treaty that was designed from the beginning with tools to adapt to changing hydrologic and societal conditions. A recent emergency agreement on the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande illustrates what is possible, and with old river management rules on the Colorado both within the United States and between the United States and Mexico about to expire, we are at a moment of opportunity for meaningful change. The core problem on the Colorado River, which we address in the analysis that follows, arose from decisions made in the first half of the 20th century to allocate fixed volumes of water. As usage patterns and hydrology change in the 21st century, fixed volumes no longer work. [ed. emphasis mine] A shift to a percentage-based split between the United States and Mexico on the Colorado River, based on the river’s actual natural flow, would provide a solid foundation for the two countries’ joint management of the Colorado in the decades to come.
Study reach in the Cliff-Gila Valley, showing the three study transect locations for this work: upstream perennial (UP), seasonally dewatered (SD) and downstream perennial (DP); major irrigation diversion sites and the approximate regions where the channel was seasonally dewatered by diversions in normal and extremely dry years. The dewatered region is magnified in the inset figure to show the position of the Fort West ditch overflow channel. USGS gaging station 09430500 is located at the upstream end of the valley. Gila River flows from north to south.
Click the link to access the research paper on the Wiley Online Library website (Ellen Soles, Martha Cooper, Laurel Saito). Here’s the abstract:
In arid regions with limited water supplies like the Colorado River basin of the southwestern United States, flow regimes and water availability are major controls on native riparian ecosystems resilience, persistence and function. In this paper, we share a case study that uses a long-term dataset of topographic, vegetation and groundwater data collected over water years 2011–2021 to demonstrate how secondary channels formed during high flow events enhance groundwater-dependent riparian ecosystem resilience, favouring native over non-native vegetation. In the Cliff-Gila Valley of southwestern New Mexico, channelization and levee construction between 1940 and 1980 profoundly altered the floodplain and channel of the Gila River, a Colorado River tributary. During subsequent large floods, river anastomosis (branching) left a network of secondary channels across the floodplain. Long-term data show that these channels improve vegetation access to groundwater, facilitating regeneration and expansion of diverse native groundwater-dependent vegetation. Data also show that even the lowest perennial flows (0.4–0.6 m3 s−1) sustain rates of groundwater recession favourable to successful native riparian seedling recruitment in the topographic lows created by secondary channels. Alluvial groundwater recedes more sharply in a reach seasonally dewatered by irrigation diversions, but seepage through diversion structures and unlined ditches maintains shallow groundwater levels. This case study demonstrates that even in arid regions, robust native groundwater-dependent riparian areas can co-exist with human water demands when large floods can move across broad floodplains and create topographic complexity. [ed. emphasis mine] The study also highlights the importance of long-term datasets for documenting ecosystem resilience to floods, drought and ongoing climate change.
Colorado’s top-25 March heat waves since 1951, defined as 4-day averaged statewide temperatures. Colorado’s warmest heat wave (set last week, March 18-21) eclipsed its previous warmest heat wave (March 23-26, 2004) by nearly 5°F. Data from NCEI nclimgrid via the Colorado Climate Center
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
March 30, 2026
It was weird, it was wacky. This string of summer days in Colorado that arrived around the first day of spring was extraordinary. Will it change us in some fundamental way?
It’s not like 9/11, the day we saw people jumping from the skyscrapers in New York City to escape an even more cruel death by fire. We knew instantly that the world was different and in a very big way.
But doesn’t this anomaly deserve more than a shrug of the shoulders? As summer arrived in the last days of winter, I heard several people say, “Well, enjoy this nice weather” as you passed through their doors. A well-intentioned pleasantry but detached from a vital truth. Nice weather for Arizona maybe, but this was Colorado.
Winter had altogether been very, very warm. November was the third warmest November on record across Colorado. December the warmest. February also broke records.
Then came March. Alamosa, a town at 7,543 feet in elevation in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, notched 11 record highs during March going into the last weekend. This included nine in a row from March 18-26. Of special note was the record high of 83 degrees recorded on March 21. It broke the old record by 7 degrees. It also was a higher temperature than has ever been recorded in Alamosa in April.
Crested Butte had a high temperature of 68, a full 10 degrees higher than the old record for that date.
Dates of first 90°F or warmer day in Fort Collins from 1895-present. The blue dashed line shows the 1991-2020 mean 90°F or warmer day, which is June 9. Data from ACIS.
Fort Collins got to 91 degrees, also 10 degrees more than the old record for that date. It was the highest ever mark for March — but also higher than anything ever recorded in April, whose record remains 89 degrees. The average first day for 90 degrees in Fort Collins is June 15.
Allie Mazurek, of the Colorado Climate Center staff, posted a report on Thursday morning that defines in numbers what she calls an event “impossible to ignore.” Included in her presentation is the chart atop this essay that shows how anomalous this four-day streak of heat was compared to others in Colorado during March.
This heat was nearly uniform across Colorado. “There were far more stations in the state that broke all-time monthly high records for March than did not,” wrote Mazurek. “To see monthly records shattered by more than 5 degrees F across numerous stations is truly remarkable. The kind of heat that we saw last week across Colorado is more typical of June or even July.”
Remarkable about theheat in Colorado was not only its intensity but its longevity across four days (March 18-21). “Over that period, several locations set new monthly records every one of those days, with each day being warmer than the last.”
March maximum temperature records at various long-term weather stations throughout Colorado. Data from ACIS.
This heat comes at a particularly bad time. The thin snowpack was already melting. The deepest snowpack in Colorado’s mountains has traditionally occurred in early May, because of accumulations at higher elevations.
That assumes a normal of some sort — although it is questionable whether “normal” has any true meaning given how fast the climate is now changing. So take this for what it’s worth: the statewide snowpack this past week sat at 38% of the 1991-2020 median. And what must be noted here — as with the temperature records that were broken — is that we have had an exceptional increase of heat in Colorado in the last 25 years.
Notable in the lifetimes of baby boomers in Colorado were the winters of 1976-77 and 1980-81. This year’s meager runoff will almost certainly surpass those dry years. New is the heat.
High-pressure heat domes can be predicted but are notoriously challenging to forecast weeks or months in advance. They also remain rare, but the warming atmosphere makes them more likely.
“We do have high pressures every year across the West,” said Mark Wankowski, a meteorologist at the Pueblo office of the National Weather Service. “This one was extremely early.”
Writing from Colorado Springs last weekend in an essay in The Atlantic titled “There’s No Way the West Will Have a Normal Summer,” Rebecca Boyle explained that the heat wave was created by a “a bizarrely strong ridge of high pressure in Earth’s atmosphere.” This ridge suppressed cloud formation and brought in warmer air. “Such atmospheric ridges are more common in the summer, but this one would be unusually intense even for that season.
Kaitlyn Trudeau, a senior researcher at the science nonprofit Climate Central, told Boyle this was the strongest ridge ever observed in March. Climate Central has developed a prediction model that assesses how much a warming trend or record high can be attributed to human-caused climate change. According to this model, the western high temps were five times more likely because of elevated greenhouse gas emissions.
I feel rattled by this heat. You may remember the high-pressure cooker that broiled the Pacific Northwest in June 2021. Temperatures spiked to 116 degrees in Portland. People in apartments that were not air conditioned died from the heat. In Multnomah County, the location of Portland, 72 deaths were attributed to heat. Farther north, in British Columbia, the town of Lytton went up in flames after several days of intense heat, including a temperature that reached 121 degrees Fahrenheit.
After that heat, the Colorado Public Utilities Commission asked Xcel to assess how well it could respond to somewhat similar heat in Colorado. The company concluded it had the resources.
But this week, in the wake of the intense spring heat, the PUC commissioners were clearly worried, part of a growing concern about “resource adequacy.” Will Xcel be able to meet critical electrical needs if another heat dome arrives in Colorado this summer? The commissioners asked Xcel to return with strategies for reducing demand from big industrial customers if demand for cooling spikes.
Colorado Drought Monitor map March 24, 2026.
Curious about an on-the-ground perspective from this heat and sparse snow, I called Paul Bonnifield in Yampa. A drought map colors that part of northwest Colorado mahogany, beyond extreme drought and in the realm of “exceptional.” What did exceptional drought look like to him?
Yampa lies at the headwaters of the Yampa River, between the Gore Range and the Flattops. It has a bucolic setting, a place of hay meadows and grazing cattle. Lying upstream are a couple of reservoirs on the edge of the Flattops.
It’s not uncommon for snow to remain on the ground at Yampa, elevation, 7,900 feet, in late March. Not this year. “The ground is hard, just dry, dry, dry,” said Bonnifield.
Bonnifield grew up a few miles away at Phippsburg, a railroad town, and he worked on the railroad himself in addition to spending time teaching and writing at a college in Oklahoma. He’s now in his late 80s and can put this year’s anomalous heat and drought into perspective.
“We are in serious trouble,” he said. “I’ve never seen it like this before.”
Less water will mean less hay production in Egeria Park, where this photo was taken about eight years ago. Photo/Allen Best
Unless a miracle arrives in the form of spring rain and snow, ranchers in Bonnifield’s area — called Egeria Park — will have to decide what to do with their cattle. There’s not enough water to grow grass. There will be wildfire smoke besotting the sky, dampening tourism. And as for river rafting downstream on the Yampa – not likely. Steamboat Spring has already imposed watering restrictions for lawns.
Denver Water this week adopted lawn-watering restrictions for its customers in Denver as well as those in surrounding jurisdictions. It has 1.5 million customers, directly and indirectly, in the metro area.
Nathan Elder, the utility’s manager of water supply, reported to board members on Wednesday that snowpack levels are at historic lows and melting earlier and more rapidly.
Denver Water diverts water from rivers and creeks on both sides of the Continental Divide. In Grand and Summit counties, at the headwaters of the Colorado River, the snowpack was 53% of normal and the lowest on record for the date, Elder said. The South Platte River has it even worse, just 40% of normal.
“These are really unprecedented snowpack conditions,” he said at the meeting on March 25. During the previous week — the week of the heat dome —Denver had lost 25% of its snowpack in the areas it collects water, he reported.
Denver Water is asking the 1.5 million households and businesses that get water from the utility to refrain from starting to irrigate lawns, including this one in southeast Denver, until mid-May. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Can it get worse? Well, yes, it could. “It’s well documented that, in part, due to climate change, the runoff generated from a given snowpack has declined when compared to the past,” said Elder. “So we can expect even less water from this already low snowpack.”
Might a miracle arrive? After the drought and heat of 2002, metro Denver was stressed. Then, on St. Patrick’s Day 2003, three feet of snow fell. In the San Luis Valley, monster rainfall last fall swelled the Rio Grande, leaving water in the soil that will help even now as farmers begin preparing their fields for early plantings.
NOAA projects continued likelihood of above normal temperatures and below-normal precipitation across Colorado, including Denver’s collection area, during April.
Denver aims to reduce water use 20% by its customers in Denver and in outlying suburbs. It will permit lawn watering two days per week and then after 6 p.m. or before 10 a.m. It is also urging customers to refrain from watering their lawns until mid-May. That’s not an easy ask when it feels like June in March. In April, Denver Water’s board members will be asked to approve “drought pricing.”
Russ Schumacher, the state climatologist in Colorado, is called upon frequently to give programs to water organizations and others. This past week he gave a presentation to the Fort Collins Chapter of the Colorado Renewable Energy Society.
“Wildfire certainly is top of mind,” he said while showing a time-lapse video of a wildfire called High Park Fire that occurred west of Fort Collins in 2012.
Dry and hot temperatures leave Russ Schumacher, the state climatologist, apprehensive about potential wildfires this year. Above photo is from the Longmont area in August 2020, a hot and smoky year when wildfires continued almost into November. Photo/Allen Best
Global warming is a simple proposition, he said.
“If you put a pot of water on your stove you’re not going to be able to predict all those individual bubbles or exactly when it’s going to start boiling,” he explained. “But you know that when you turn that heat on, the water’s going to get warmer and it’s going to continue to warm the more heat that you add. So the physics of climate change is actually rather similar in that regard.”
And, of course, adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere traps heat, which heats the planet. “When you add heat to something, then it warms.”
Colorado has had outliers of heat before. The Dust Bowl during the mid-1930s was a time of heat and drought. More hot and dry arrived in the 1950s.
This chart shows snowpack in Colorado. The heat dome caused rapid melting of snow. In the San Luis Valley, heavy rains of last October may allow farmers to survive better than during 2002.
Dry has not changed. The hot has changed. What used to be an extremely hot year in Colorado is now a fairly average year or just slightly-above-average year, said Schumacher.
Citing NOAA data, Schumacher showed a sharp rise of almost 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1980. The heat has been most acute in the summer and fall — although, obviously, recent months spoil that easy narrative.
With a moderate rate of emissions, we can expect another 2.5 to 3 degrees of warming by around 2050. That expectation comes with a disclaimer about uncertainty. It’s a best guess.
Precipitation has been more complicated than temperature in Colorado. As for the future, it remains a puzzle. Could be more, could be less. Either way, it will be impacted by temperatures.
“If it’s warmer, if it‘s windier, it’s less humid, the air is thirstier for water from the soils, crops, forests, reservoirs, wherever.” Schumacher said. “As it gets warmer, that evaporative demand goes up. The air is thirstier for water, and this has big implications for drought and water supply and water resources.”
Might warming occur more slowly? That’s possible, and a possibility tied strongly to whether global emissions of greenhouse gases can be abated. Given the current political climate in the United States, a key player in world politics, this low-emissions scenario looks highly unlikely. More likely are the heat domes.
Like the pot of water on the stove that Schumacher described, we’re certain to see more heat bubbles. Hard to tell where and when they will be, but there will be more of them. That leaves me distinctly uncomfortable. In Colorado I have felt 104 degrees. I cannot fathom the 118 degrees of Portland.
Colorado statewide annual temperature anomaly (°F) with respect to the 1901-2000 average. Graphic credit: Colorado Climate Center
With far less snowpack in the high country this year and an anemic runoff forecast, the Uncompahgre Valley is positioned for a terrible irrigation season. Water users association Manager Steve Pope did not mince words.
“This is the worst year on record so far for snowpack. Looking at the fact that it’s pushing 90 degrees outside in March, we aren’t going to be able to expect much of a runoff,” Pope said on Wednesday, one week before water deliveries begin on April 1, ” … There is no good news.”
The Uncompahgre Valley Water Users Association will only be delivering allocations to shareholders of 50% to start, and, if water models remain consistent, will cut delivery to 40%. No pump contracts can be filled this year, although there will be credits for next year for paid accounts. Shareholders who pump directly from an association canal or lateral must register pumps and install meters and regulating valves for the deliveries. As well, people are being asked to reconsider lawns and large-scale landscaping to conserve every drop possible for agriculture…
Runoff projections within the Uncompahgre Basin are worrying. The Colorado River Basin Forecast Center operates SNOTEL sites that measure snowpack and snow water equivalent, the amount of water the snow holds. Ideally, there would be robust snowpack and SWE, as well as weather conditions conducive to slower melt, leading to prolonged runoff. That isn’t the case this year…2026 is on track to turn out even worse than 2002, the leanest water year this century — but even 2002 was bookended with decent water years before and after…Pope said the Colorado River Basin Forecast Center is projecting a 50% chance of the local watershed seeing about 53,000 acre feet of runoff…The water users association can’t really rely on natural flow from the Uncompahgre River this year, Pope said, but he does anticipate enough to fill Ridgway Reservoir. Beyond that, however, “it’s not very promising.” Overall weather conditions compound the problem of so-so snowfall during the winter: it’s been warmer far up in the high country, too. Pope said that at the 12,200-foot elevation Swamp Angel study site maintained by the Silverton-based Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies, it’s only been getting down to a few degrees below freezing at night. (This site had a measured snow water equivalent of 13.4 inches as of March 15.)
“If it’s not freezing at night, there’s nothing to slow the runoff down. They said the dust isn’t as bad this year. That is somewhat of a silver lining. We haven’t had the wind, so the dust isn’t quite as bad,” said Pope. Dust accelerates snowmelt.
With the quicker snowmelt and earlier drying out of pasturelands, runoff volumes in creeks are hitting levels now that usually occur a month later in the spring, leading area ranchers to activate irrigation ditches weeks earlier than usual. Runoff flowing down Fish Creek, the primary water source for the city of Steamboat Springs, is almost one month ahead of the historical average. At 9 p.m. March 21, the flow displayed by the U.S. Geological Survey gauge on Fish Creek near the Fish Creek Water Plant east of Steamboat Springs showed 62 cubic feet per second. That volumetric flow rate is usually seen on April 18, according to gauge records from 1966 to 2025…“Over the last two years, it’s definitely running sooner than average,” said Frank Alfone, general manager at Mount Werner Water and Sanitation District. “It just means the possibility of having to release from Fish Creek Reservoir earlier in the season because there is less water in the creek.” The water gauge on Fish Creek historically records a peak seasonal flow of 464 cfs on June 8, but this summer the peak will occur much sooner than average. For waterfall fans, that also means highly visited Fish Creek Falls figures to be at peak flow three to four weeks sooner than its average early June date, Alfone noted…Fish Creek Reservoir on Tuesday was sitting at 47% of fill capacity, a normal level for this time of year, and that percentage continues to increase, Alfone noted. As a major year-round water source for the community, Fish Creek Reservoir water managers do not want that level to drop below 30%, Alfone said.
The Pinto Valley Mine, processing area, and tailings depositories in the Globe-Miami mining district. Pinto Creek is to the viewer’s left. Source: Google Earth.
Pinto Creek used to run year-round. Bubbling up from springs and occasional snowmelt in the Pinal Mountains of central Arizona, it nourished a riparian ribbon of green through the rocky, arid landscape, shaded by sycamores, willows, and alders, until it empties into Theodore Roosevelt Reservoir. Gila topminnow, longfin dace, and roundtail chub plied its waters. Even during drought years it reliably delivered at least 1,000 acre-feet of water at its Magma Weir gauge, and in wet times as much as 39,000 acre-feet annually might flow along its bed.
Then, a little over a decade ago, something odd happened. The flow volume plummeted from 4,147 acre-feet in 2013 to just 482 acre-feet in 2014, and ever since the once year-round stream has run only intermittently and at similarly diminished levels. Towering trees along its banks have died and toppled, and the green swath has lost much of its color. It’s possible that long-term aridification simply caught up with the little stream, as 2013 was a dry year. But there’s a more likely culprit: In October 2013 Capstone Copper Corporation acquired the nearby Pinto Valley Mine, a massive, open pit copper and molybdenum operation that had just emerged from several years of dormancy, and resumed heavy groundwater pumping from its Peak Well field.
While correlation is not causation, the Tonto National Forest saw enough evidence of a link to ask the Arizona Department of Water Resources to put the brakes on the mine’s groundwater pumping. Failing to do so would harm the Forest Service’s instream Pinto Creek water right — along with the downstream riparian ecosystem it supports. The state did nothing and the Forest Service dropped the complaint and approved the mine’s expansion in 2021.
The Land Desk has often looked at mining’s effects on water quality.1 But the Pinto Valley case highlights the fact that mines can also affect water quantity — and vice versa, as water scarcity can limit mining operations. It warrants a closer look during these water-constrained times, when water consumption by everything from data centers to golf courses to alfalfa farms has attracted more scrutiny.
A mining operation goes through water in two ways. First, the mine itself, whether underground or open pit, can act like a well. Dig a hole into the earth, and groundwater will flow into it. While gravity can drain this flow in underground mines burrowed into the sides of mountains, the water must be pumped from open pit and underground shaft mines, a practice known as dewatering, which can take large amounts of water out of the aquifer. Capstone says it pumps about 400 gallons per minute from its pit.
This draws down groundwater wells and can dry up springs and diminish streamflows. Without dewatering, you end up with something like the Berkeley Pit, which is now a 50-billion-gallon, acidic and contaminated lake that’s about 900 feet deep. Because this water is usually contaminated by acid mine drainage, it often can’t be reused without some treatment, and dumping it into a stream or back into the aquifer is also problematic.
A mining operation also requires significant amounts of water for dust control, mineral processing, slurrying, and other uses. Capstone’s 2024 sustainability report says its Pinto Valley Mine withdrew a total of 8,932 acre-feet — or 2.9 billion gallons — of groundwater and surface water.
West Drought Monitor map March 24, 2026.
The company has not released its 2025 data yet, but in financial filings reported that the Pinto Valley Mine had to slash mine production and mill throughput by about 37% in 2025 due to “unplanned downtime driven by water constraints due to the drought conditions in central Arizona.” The company is trying to address this by reducing per-ton water usage by 20%, but that may not be enough given the extreme drought conditions spreading across the Southwest.
A central clearing house or database of mine water use in Arizona does not exist, but various sources can help paint a picture of how much water the mining industry in the state uses (I’ll look at other states in a future dispatch).
Safford Mine Complex: Consumptive water use increased from 3,624 acre-feet per year to 6,099 af/yr following a 2020 expansion, according to the Arizona Department of Water Resources 2025 Safford supply and demand report. Municipal uses in the Safford Basin use about 6,000 acre-feet per year, while agriculture — primarily for cotton, pecans, pistachios, and alfalfa — consumes about 138,301 acre-feet annually.
Freeport-McMoran reported to the AZDWR that in 2023 it withdrew 22,490 acre-feet of groundwater for its Sierrita Mine south of Tucson. The cost? $3.50 per acre-foot. That’s about one penny for 1,000 gallons of water.
Freeport-McMoran’s Morenci Mine, one of the nation’s largest copper operations, uses about 14,000 acre-feet per year on average, according to the AZDWR. The mine imports much of its water from the Black River, a tributary to the Salt River, under a lease with the San Carlos Apache Tribe for a portion of its Central Arizona Project allocation.
The following chart is from an Arizona Department of Mines & Mineral Resources report from 2010 by Dr. Madan M. Singh. It’s a nice, comprehensive look at how much water the state’s major mines used in the preceding years. Current use is likely about the same, except that now there are additional mines (the Pinto Valley Mine was not operational in 2010, which is why it’s missing).
Source: Water Consumption at Copper Mines in Arizona, by Dr. Madan M. Singh, 2010.
So, according to Singh’s report, Arizona’s largest mines used a total of 55,659 acre-feet per year during the 2000s. Add the Pinto Valley Mine (8,932 af) and Safford Mine (6,099 af) and you get about 70,600 acre-feet per year, or 23 billion gallons annually.
That’s a lot of water, but it pales in comparison to many other uses. Arizona alfalfa, alone, probably uses more than 1.5 million acre-feet (based on 6 af water/acre over 280,000 planted acres, according to the USDA). “Turf facilities” guzzled some 157,000 af in 2024, according to the AZDWR, while power generation used 86,053 acre-feet. TSMC’s north Phoenix chip manufacturing facility is projected initially to use about 19,000 acre-feet of water annually.
In other words, when Arizona’s water cops come looking for the big water users, the mines probably won’t be at the top of their list. Since most mines rely on groundwater, Colorado River water shortages may not affect them too much, at least in the near future.
Still, some mines, including ASARCO’s Mission Mine, do pull some water from the Central Arizona Project, which could be hit hard by the Colorado River crisis as early as next year. And, as the Pinto Valley Mine situation last year demonstrated, continued aridification and relentless pumping could lead to groundwater shortages at the mines, forcing them to reduce production even as they work to become more water-efficient.
Prospective mines could face serious challenges, as well. Resolution Copper estimates its contentious Oak Flat mine would use between 15,700 acre-feet and 20,000 acre-feet per year. Others, however, say this is too low; one study says it would likely be closer to 50,000 acre-feet annually, based on the per-ton water consumption for copper at other Arizona mines. Resolution has said it would rely at least partly on Central Arizona Project water, the security of which grows shakier with each passing year. It’s hard to imagine that there will be any water available for new users by the time that mine is up and running if current climatic trends continue.
That may be what Faraday Copper had in mind when it signed a letter of intent to acquire the San Manuel copper mine in southern Arizona. While Faraday said it would be reopening the long-shuttered operation and combining it with its proposed Copper Creek venture nearby, it may also be eying the substantial water rights BHP Copper holds for the San Manuel Mine. Those could come in handy if and when the Copper Creek facility is developed.
Regardless, however, one thing is clear: Any new mine is going to rob the springs, the streams, and the wildlife and communities that rely on them of at least some of their precious water. [ed. emphasis mine]
1 In 1993, when the Pinto Valley Mine was operated by Magma Copper, a large rain event “overwhelmed the mine’s water management capabilities,” causing the reservoir to overflow the tailings pile, tear out a levee, and carry hundreds of tons of tailings and millions of gallons of contaminated water into Pinto Creek. The creek was found to have low pH (high acidity) and high concentrations of cadmium, copper, lead, mercury, and zinc, resulting in significant fish die off, specifically of desert or Gila Mountain suckers.
Click the link to read the article on the Pagosa Springs Sun website (Clayton Chaney). Here’s an excerpt:
March 26, 2026
It was warmer last week in Pagosa Country than any other time on record, as the area saw five consecutive days of record high temperatures set from March 18-22. According to forecasts posted by Shawn Prochazka with Pagosa Weather, a new record high for the month of March was set on Wednesday, March 18, at 74 degrees and again on Thursday, March 19, at 76 degrees. The previous record high for the month of March was set in 1907 and 1940 at 73 degrees. Record highs for the month continued on Friday, March 20, with temperatures reaching 79 degrees. The previous record for that date was 68 degrees, set in 1997. Prochazka also notes that record high temperatures were set on Saturday, March 21, at 77 degrees, and on Sunday, March 22, at 74 degrees…
Snowpack
According to data from the Natural Resource Conservation Services (NRCS), as of 11 a.m. on Wednesday, March 25, Wolf Creek Pass at 10,930 feet had a snow water equivalent of 12 inches, compared to that date’s median of 27.3 inches. That amount is 44 percent of that date’s median snow water equivalent. The San Miguel, Dolores, Animas and San Juan river basins as a whole are listed at 21 percent of its 30-year median snowpack. The Wolf Creek summit had the second highest current snow water equivalent in the San Miguel, Dolores, Animas and San Juan river basins, and the Upper Rio Grande basin, behind the Black Mesa site with 12.2 inches of snow water equivalent as of press time Wednesday…
Colorado Drought Monitor map March 24, 2026.
Drought
According to the most recent map released by the U.S. Drought Monitor on Thursday, March 19, 100 percent of Archuleta County remains in moderate drought stage, with 22.04 percent of the county being in a severe drought stage. Areas that are in a severe drought stage lie along the eastern border of the county with Conejos County. Meanwhile, 12.88 percent of the state is in an extreme drought stage, and less than 1 percent of the state is in an exceptional drought stage. That includes portions of Pitkin, Eagle, Summit, Lake and Park counties…
River flows
According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), as of 11 a.m. on Wednesday, March 25, the San Juan River in downtown Pagosa Springs had a flow rate of 595 cubic feet per second (cfs). The record high flow for that date was recorded in 2004 at 860 cfs, while the record low was recorded in 1964 at 42 cfs. The median flow for that date is 165 cfs, and the mean flow is 239 cfs. The Piedra River near Arboles was flowing at a rate of 434 cfs as of 11 a.m Wednesday, March 24, according to the USGS. The median flow for that date is 339 cfs, and the mean flow is 457 cfs. The record high flow for that date was recorded in 1993 at 1,400 cfs, while the record low was recorded in 1964 at 45 cfs.
River managers need to conserve around 1.7 million acre-feet in Lake Powell to keep the reservoir from dropping below hydropower turbines this year, according to federal government projections. The Bureau of Reclamation, a federal agency that manages dams on the Colorado River, has estimated that reservoir levels could fall below required elevations for hydropower production before August as record-low snowpack turns into pitiful flows in streams and rivers.
“The situation is dire, the stakes have never been higher, and the reservoirs have never been drier,” Estevan Lopez, New Mexico’s negotiator on interstate Colorado River matters, said during a meeting of the Upper Colorado River Commission on Tuesday [March 24, 2026].
The back of Glen Canyon Dam circa 1964, not long after the reservoir had begun filling up. Here the water level is above dead pool, meaning water can be released via the river outlets, but it is below minimum power pool, so water cannot yet enter the penstocks to generate electricity. Bureau of Reclamation photo. Annotations: Jonathan P. Thompson
If water levels fall below required levels for hydropower production, dam managers will be forced to release water through bypass tubes, which are not designed for sustained, high-volume flows. With too much use, the bypasses could fail, turning the dam into a massive plug in the river and shutting off downstream flows. To keep Powell above those critical levels, federal officials can either fill it with water from upstream reservoirs, including some in Colorado, or they can reduce the water it drains from Powell and sends to the Lower Basin (California, Arizona and New Mexico). States are already expressing their views on how those operations should work. Upper Colorado River basin states, including Colorado, want the federal government to achieve the conservation requirement by reducing water releases to downstream states, at least in part. Upper Basin states say upstream reservoirs aren’t enough to save Powell without cuts to Lower Basin water deliveries. Draining the upstream reservoirs could also leave the system without backup supplies in the event of another dry year…The three primary reservoirs that could prop up Powell are Flaming Gorge in Wyoming, Navajo Reservoir in New Mexico, and Blue Mesa Reservoir near Gunnison, Colorado. Of the three, only Flaming Gorge is large enough to contribute the entire 1.7 million acre-feet on its own, and that would require draining the reservoir to halfway full. Blue Mesa and Navajo already stand at around halfway full, and the two reservoirs likely could not provide the water to save Lake Powell even if both were entirely drained.
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
American White Pelican and Double-crested Cormorant at Bill Williams Wildlife Refuge along the Colorado River, Arizona. Photo: Gary Moore/Audubon Photography Awards
Click the link to read the article on the Audubon website (Jennifer Pitt):
March 20, 2026
Audubon and partners cut through the conflict with a unique, basinwide perspective, championing the river’s health for the people and birds that rely on it.
The winter of 2025-2026 has not been kind to the Colorado River. Record-warm temperatures day after day across the mountains that feed the river have led to record-low snow levels. All indications are that spring snowmelt feeding the river will be scant.
That is a huge problem, because Colorado River reservoirs, which historically held vast water reserves, are already depleted, with Lake Powell at 25% and Lake Mead at 34% of capacity. This is bad news for people and birds relying on water from the Colorado River. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation), the federal agency managing the dams, projects that Lake Powell’s water levels could fall low enough to threaten Glen Canyon Dam’s infrastructure, downstream water delivery, hydropower, and native wildlife in the Grand Canyon including the California Condor and the Western Yellow-billed Cuckoo, among others.
As this crisis plays out, Reclamation has the difficult job of re-tooling systemwide, long-term dam operations on the Colorado River (often referred to as the “Post-2026 Guidelines”). Existing rules, first set nearly two decades ago and tweaked repeatedly to keep up with the declining Colorado River (the result of a warmer and drier climate), expire at the end of this year. As anticipated under this timeline, Reclamation issued a Draft Environmental Impact Statement (Draft EIS) in late January which laid out potential alternatives for federal management and solicited comments from stakeholders. This Draft EIS embraced uncertainty as a central planning condition as they tested different approaches under a broad range of hydrologic conditions. For a long time, the expectation was that the seven U.S. states sharing the river (Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming) would develop a consensus-based proposal for Reclamation, but that hasn’t happened and talk of litigation has increased.
Southwestern Willow flycatcher
Reclamation must now figure out next steps. The agency does have legal authorities, but those legal authorities were crafted long ago and do not necessarily spell out how to take meaningful action in this historic crisis. That threatens the water supply for more than 35 million people including the major cities of the American Southwest, Tribes, millions of acres of irrigated farms and ranches, as well as the Colorado River itself and every living thing that depends on its habitats, including hundreds of bird species like the Southwestern Willow Flycatcher, Yuma Ridgway’s Rail, and Summer Tanager.
This is a graph of snowpack above LakePowell using 104 snow measuring stations. It was 9 inches of water on March 7, now 6 inches. Other dry years shown.There is no historical analog to this — Brad Udall
Audubon submitted formal comments in response to the Draft EIS, joining conservation partners to weigh in on what comes next for Reclamation’s consideration (read our comment letter here). Dozens of comments were submitted by the Colorado River Basin states, water users, and other stakeholders making their case with Reclamation that their water uses need to be protected at the expense of others. In its comments Audubon emphasized the need to stabilize the Colorado River system from its headwaters to its delta—a unique, basinwide perspective that urges Reclamation to manage risks for people and nature rather than deferring hard decisions until emergency conditions force action. Our comment letter focused on constructive engagement noting the Draft EIS’s strengths in its analytical foundation while identifying and describing targeted refinements that would help ensure the Final EIS fully informs decision-makers about risks and real-world consequences. Specifically, Audubon calls for:
Clarity and predictability
Flexible, adaptive tools for conserving, storing, and managing water
Environmental stewardship embedded into operations
Meaningful and voluntary Tribal participation
Pathways for advancing in-basin mitigation and resilience-building opportunities
Pathways for advancingbinational cooperation with Mexico
Over the next few months, Reclamation still has an opportunity to persuade the Colorado River Basin states into consensus. Whether or not they are successful (and we hope they are), sometime this summer we expect Reclamation to issue a Final EIS that includes refinements to the Draft as well as an indication of their preferred alternative for Colorado River operations. In the meantime, it is urgent Reclamation also prepare for the water supply emergency that is unfolding in 2026.
For much of the last century, Reclamation was a leader in developing the southwestern United States by harnessing the Colorado River and delivering its water across the land. Today, Reclamation must lead in a new way, helping everyone and everything that depends on the Colorado River live with the river we have in a warmer, drier world.
Lake Dillon, a reservoir in Colorado’s Summit County, is owned and managed by Denver Water and supplies water to people living in Metro Denver. It is Denver Water’s largest reservoir and provides about 40% of Metro Denver water. A 23-mile-long trans-basin diversion pipeline, called the Harold D. Roberts Tunnel, carries water from the reservoir under the Continental Divide to Denver. Photo credit: Colorado State University
Each day during the winter and spring, one of the first things I look at is the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s website that shows the current status of the snowpack in Colorado’s mountains.
Maybe that sounds like the strange habit of a state climatologist, but I’m far from the only one. Why? Because the snow that falls in our state’s mountains will, when it melts in the spring and summer, become a large portion of the water supply for tens of millions of people.
Those people aren’t only here in Colorado, but are in other states, Tribal nations, and Mexico, drawing their water from the rivers that originate in Colorado. Mountain snow is essential for our winter recreation industry, for farms and ranches that grow our food, for drinking water, for ecosystem health, and much more.
It hasn’t been a pretty sight when I have opened that USDA website each morning this winter. In an average year, our mountains get a lot of snow: In places like the Park Range, the West Elk Mountains or the San Juans, a typical year brings hundreds of inches of snow, carrying more than 40 inches of liquid water. This year, we struggled to get half that. Now, after an unprecedented heat wave in March, the snow is already disappearing quickly.
Figure 1: Map of annual average precipitation over 1991-2020 in Colorado, with color scale matching the colors in the state flag. Data from the PRISM Climate Group. Credit: Colorado Climate Center
As of March 25, averaged across 115 stations in Colorado’s mountains, the snow water equivalent was just 38% of the 1991-2020 average. (The snow water equivalent is the amount of water stored in the snowpack.) This represents the lowest snowpack in more than 40 years – and possibly ever – in Colorado’s mountains. Conditions haven’t been any better along the Front Range and Eastern Plains, which have also lagged far behind the average amount of snowfall.
Figure 2: Statewide snow water equivalent from the SNOTEL network, as of March 25, 2026. The median over 1991-2020 is shown with the green line, the historical range is shown from red (low) to blue (high), and this year is shown in the black line. From USDA/NRCS.
There have been other major snow droughts in the past, notably the winters of 1976-1977 and 1980-1981, that threatened the ski industry and resulted in record-low streamflow on some of Colorado’s rivers. But this snow season has been unrivaled in its warmth. The first five months of the water year – from October through February – were Colorado’s warmest on record by a large margin. And it’s almost certain that we are in the midst of the warmest March on record as well.
The warmth has been remarkably persistent, as relentless ridges of high pressure have prevented the usual snowstorms from moving into the state. The Fort Collins weather station at Colorado State University recorded an astonishing 43 days with a high temperature of 60°F or above during climatological winter (December through February). The previous record, from records dating back to the late 19th century, was 22. Starting March 18, Fort Collins had temperatures higher than had ever been observed in March, four days in a row. This was capped by a high of 91°F on March 21; there had never previously been a 90-degree day in Fort Collins before May.
Figure 3: Number of winter days with high temperatures of 60°F or above at the official Fort Collins weather station on the CSU campus. Winter 2025-2026 had 43 days, far more than the previous record of 22 in 1980-1981. Credit: Colorado Climate Center
Records for March were smashed across the state and the western U.S., at both low and high elevations. One thing we do as state climatologists is put current conditions into historical context, as usually with some investigation, it’s possible to find a past analog to what we’re experiencing now. But the intense and prolonged heat has been unlike anything previously observed in March.
This, of course, is occurring in the context of a long-term trend toward warmer conditions, both globally and locally, largely attributable to increases in greenhouse gases. Per data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, nine of the 11 warmest years in Colorado records have occurred since 2012, and Colorado has now warmed by 3°F since the 1890s. Droughts come and go, and they have always been a challenge in Colorado and the West. But warming is making them more likely and more intense. In other words, climate change is water change.
When above-average temperatures and precipitation deficits stack up over the course of months, we start to see drought conditions develop or worsen. The impacts of drought are wide-ranging and include economic and agricultural repercussions. Farmers and ranchers may face lower crop yields and higher costs of feeding livestock. A snow drought like this winter’s can reduce outdoor recreation opportunities and hurt the state’s tourism industry. Drought years also tend to be years with more and larger wildfires.
Drought impacts can be felt a long distance from where the precipitation deficits occur. For example, southeastern Colorado received decent precipitation this winter, but low snow in the mountains hundreds of miles away near Leadville means less water on the Arkansas River, an important source for farmers in southeastern Colorado.
As each winter progresses, even if the mountain snowpack isn’t looking great, we can always look ahead to March and April as the time when big storms are possible and the deficits can be made up. Unfortunately, this year has been just the opposite: Instead of much-needed snowstorms, we’re in an unprecedented March heat wave that is accelerating the melting of what little snow is there. The chances of getting back into the range of average have dwindled away, and if the weather pattern doesn’t turn around in April, we may be headed for uncharted territory for Colorado water.
The snow drought was evident in Park City, Utah, on Feb. 9, 2026. This golf course is normally used for cross-country skiing in winter. Mario Tama/Getty Images
Across much of the Western United States, winter 2026 was the year the snow never came. Many ski resorts got by with snowmaking but shut down their winter operations early. Fire officials and water supply managers are worried about summer.
Where I live in Boise, Idaho, temperatures hit the low 80s Fahrenheit (high-20s Celsius) in mid-March. The same heat dome sent temperatures soaring to 105 F (40 C) in Phoenix.
Ordinarily, water managers and hydrologists like me who study the Western U.S. expect the mountain snowpacks to be at their fullest around April 1. Snowpacks are natural reservoirs of water that farms and communities depend on through the hot, dry summer. Their snow water equivalent, meaning the amount of liquid water in the snowpack, is seen as a bellwether for water supplies.
But the 2026 water year has been anything but ordinary. In fact, its snow drought has few historical analogs.
Data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service shows that out of approximately 70 river basins across the Western U.S., only five are at or above the 1991-2020 median snow water equivalent for this time of year. Most of those are clustered around the Yellowstone region of western Wyoming and eastern Idaho.
By contrast, 11 basins have less than 25% of the 1991-2020 median, and more than half are below 50%. The headwaters of critically important rivers, including the Colorado, the Columbia and the Missouri, are peppered with basins that are far below historical averages.
Just because the Western U.S. is in a snow drought doesn’t mean it isn’t getting precipitation. Temperatures have been high enough since the start of the water year in October that a lot of what normally would have fallen as snow fell as rain instead.
The West experienced a very warm December at all but the highest elevations, but strong storms also drenched large parts of the region. Washington state was swamped with rain that triggered flooding and melted the existing snowpack.
The total area of the Western U.S. with snow cover has been exceptionally low compared to the years 2001 to 2025. National Snow and Ice Data Center
Temperatures in January were less extreme but still warmer than historical averages. However, precipitation in January was far below the 1991-2020 average throughout much of the region. February brought precipitation conditions closer to historical averages, but temperatures were much warmer than normal.
The Western U.S., therefore, got a triple whammy: Two of the three critical snow-accumulation months were too warm, and the third was too dry.
Water worries ahead
So what does this mean for water supplies and river flows?
Water managers in Wyoming and Washington are already signaling that some water rights holders – cities, irrigation districts, individual farms and industries can take limited amounts of water from rivers, canals and aquifers – can expect to receive less than their full allotment of water in 2026. It’s not unreasonable to expect other states to soon follow suit.
Throughout the Western U.S., water rights are administered according to the Doctrine of Prior Appropriation – those who hold the oldest legitimate claims to water from a river, reservoir or aquifer are entitled to receive their allotments first.
Junior water rights holders who may be at risk of receiving less than their full allotment of water likely have difficult decisions ahead related to the planting and management of their crops. The challenges are compounded by the likelihood of increases in fertilizer and transportation costs associated with the ongoing war in Iran.
Another big concern is whether the historic snow drought is setting up the West for a bad fire season. That’s still an open question.
Rain has meant moisture is available now for plants to grow, but the lack of snowpack that normally keeps meltwater flowing through summer raises concerns about whether those plants will dry out, leaving them ready to burn.
Fire is a historically important feature of the forest and rangeland ecosystems of the West, and these ecosystems are to some degree adapted to large swings in conditions from year to year and season to season.
Because precipitation across much of the West is close to historical averages, there is snow in some of the highest-elevation mountains. And at lower elevations, some of the precipitation that fell as rain likely remains in the soils.
Snowmaking kept slopes skiable amid high temperatures in March 2026 in Breckenridge, Colo., but it wasn’t hard to find dry, exposed land nearby. Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images
Weather conditions in the late spring and summer – how much rain falls and how hot and dry conditions become – will play critical roles in determining the shape forests and rangelands will be in for fire season.
What this winter suggests about the future
The record-low snowpack may be a harbinger of what a warmer future will look like in the region. Many researchers have investigated how climate change will influence snowpacks and water supply throughout the Western U.S., but questions and critical challenges remain.
The San Juan River near Navajo Dam, New Mexico, Aug. 23, 2015. Photo credit: Phil Slattery Wikimedia Commons
From email from Reclamation:
March 20, 2026
Reclamation conducts Public Operations Meetings three times per year to gather input for determining upcoming operations for Navajo Reservoir. Input from individuals, organizations, and agencies along with other factors such as weather, water rights, endangered species requirements, flood control, hydro power, recreation, fish and wildlife management, and reservoir levels, will be considered in the development of these reservoir operation plans. In addition, the meetings are used to coordinate activities and exchange information among agencies, water users, and other interested parties concerning the San Juan River and Navajo Reservoir. The next meeting will be held virtually on April 21st
The sun rises over Lake Powell in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, in Page, Arizona. Lake Powell, a critical Colorado River reservoir, is only at a third of its capacity as drought conditions in the Southwest worsen. CREDIT: ECOFLIGHT
Click the link to read the article on the AZMirror website (Caitlin Sievers):
March 23, 2026
Arizona is preparing for a legal battle over its rights to Colorado River water.
Following an extraordinarily dry winter along the river basin and what’s expected to be an exceptionally hot and dry spring across the West, where high temperatures in March have already blown past records, the pressure to maintain access to the state’s fair share of river water is growing.
The Colorado River is a vital source of drinking water for 40 million people in the seven basin states, Mexico and 30 Native American tribes, and provides water for farming operations and hydroelectricity.
Reaching a water usage agreement is imperative to the basin states as the river’s water supply continues to decline, as it has done for the past 25 years due to a persistent drought spurred on by climate change.
On Monday, the Arizona Governor’s Office announced that it had retained the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell to represent the state in possible litigation among the Colorado River Basin states and the federal government.
Sullivan & Cromwell is an international firm based in New York City that has represented big names like Microsoft, BP, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase. The state is using some of the $3 million it put into its Colorado River legal defense fund last year to retain the law firm.
The Governor’s Office doesn’t expect to take any legal action until June at the earliest, but wants to be prepared for the possibility, especially if the dispute ends up before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Lower Basin states — Arizona, Nevada and California — and the Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming — have been negotiating an updated water usage agreement for more than two years.
But so far the states have blown past two deadlines to do so — one in November and one in February — and are quickly approaching October, when the existing usage agreement expires.
If the states can’t reach an agreement before that, the federal government will implement one of its draft plans, all of which would place an outsized burden on the Grand Canyon State.
That’s because the Central Arizona Project, a series of canals that supplies Colorado River water to the Valley and the Tucson area, is one of the newest users of the river water, making it legally one of the first to be cut.
But so far, the Upper Basin states have refused to agree to any water usage cuts of their own, while the Lower Basin states insist that every state take their fair share.
Arizona has offered to reduce its Colorado River allocation by 27%, California by 10%, and Nevada by nearly 17%.
Negotiators for Arizona also insist that the Upper Basin states be held to the original 1922 Colorado River Compact that requires them to release a 10-year rolling average of at least 75 million acre-feet of water to the Lower Basin, in addition to one-half of the annual allotment owed to Mexico, for a total of about 80.2 million acre-feet.
An acre-foot of water represents enough to cover an acre of land to a depth of one foot, or about 325,851 gallons. That’s enough to provide three homes in Arizona a year of water, on average.
So far, the Upper Basin states have held to the original release agreement. But as water levels in the two major reservoirs on the river, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, continue to decline, it’s expected that the Upper Basin states will be unable to meet that requirement as early as 2027.
When the states entered into the original Colorado River Compact in 1922, they allocated 7.5 million acre-feet of water each year to be shared by the Upper Basin states and another 7.5 million to be used among the Lower Basin states.
Since then, the states have updated their water usage guidelines several times, even though the apportionments remain the same. But Lower Basin states face mandatory cuts during times of drought and Upper Basin states do not. In 2025, for the fifth year in a row, the federal government imposed drought-based cuts, and Arizona’s amounted to a loss of 512,000 acre-feet of water for the year.
Under current allocations, Arizona has rights to 2.8 million acre feet of water per year, and has implemented 800,000 acre feet in reductions per year. In contrast, Colorado has rights to 3.8 million acre feet a year, although it uses an average of 1.9 million acre feet, annually.
The amount of water that Colorado has access to can be unpredictable because it relies mostly on melted snowpack for its water, which varies from year to year. This year’s snowpack levels are historically low.
The Lower Basin states have undertaken significant conservation efforts for Colorado River water since 2014 and have reduced their consumption from 7.4 million acre-feet in 2015 to just over 6 million in 2024.
The Upper Basin states have increased their usage in the past five years, from 3.9 million acre-feet in 2021 to 4.4 million in 2024. The federal government’s draft plans allow for the Upper Basin states to use even more water.
Gov. Katie Hobbs’s proposed budget for this year would put another $1 million toward the Colorado River Legal Defense fund, and lawmakers earlier this month gave preliminary approval to doing just that.
Even as Arizona prepares for a legal battle, the state plans to continue attempting to reach an agreement with the other river basin states, according to the Governor’s Office.
“Governor Hobbs is committed to working with the federal government and other Colorado River states to deliver a negotiated settlement that protects Arizona’s fair share of water and stabilizes the system,” spokesman for Hobbs Christian Slater said. “However, it’s critical that Arizona be prepared to defend ourselves in court if an agreement cannot be reached or the Law of the River is violated.”
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):
March 18, 2026
Some notes on the current state of the Colorado River…
I’m preparing for a panel discussion this evening in Albuquerque. I promised – three-finger promise, Scout’s honor, which still means something to me – that I wouldn’t use any swear words., either in the blog post or the panel discussion.
The state of the water
Per the latest numbers from my colleague/collaborator/friend Jack Schmidt, Lake Powell currently holds 1.57 million acre feet of water above the protect-the-infrastructure no-go line of elevation 3,500.
Storage at this point in the year is similar to 2022, when we began a hair-about-to-be-on-fire drill as Interior raced to figure out how to protect Glen Canyon Dam because of newly understood (or newly publicly understood) risks of dropping below minimum power pool and using the dam’s outlook works. That constraint still holds.
The forecast this year is a catastrophe compared to 2022: 1.75 million acre feet for the 2026 runoff season, compared to 3.8 maf in the 2022 runoff season. [ed. emphasis mine]
The result, according to the most probable forecast from Reclamation, is that absent some sort of action (see governance below) Powell will drop below 3,500 in September, and stay that way until the spring runoff in 2027.
According to the min probable forecast, which is realistic given the looming heat-pocalypse, we hit 3,500 by July and stay there forever (by which I mean as far as the current 24-month forecast runs – as the late Jim Morison wrote, the future’s uncertain and the end is always near).
The state of the governance
The state of the governance nests two separate by closely linked problems: near term actions and long term rules.
Near term actions
Protecting Glen Canyon Dam from that 3,500 no-go line requires coming up with a least 2 million acre feet of water over the next two years – to get us past that spring 2027 problem described above. There are two ways to do this. The first is to release a bunch of water from upstream, primarily Flaming Gorge Reservoir. How much? Dunno. The second is to cut releases from Glen Canyon Dam, reducing flows through the Grand Canyon and into Lake Mead. How much? Dunno, though we may find out soon.
The current rules, adopted in response to the challenges of 2022-23, allows releases from Glen Canyon Dam to drop this year to 6 million acre feet, which effectively gets 1.5 million of the needed 2 million feet from Lake Mead by reducing releases thereto. Another 500,000 in releases from upstream reservoir gets you 2 million acre feet, with room to do more if the hydrology gets even worse – which it might.
Longer term actions
The longer term stuff is where, as a student of governance, this gets really interesting for me. As a citizen of the basin, I am inclined to swear words at the dysfunction that has left us with no long term plan beyond the end of this year. But I Scout’s honor promised, so shifting to the “student of governance” schtick gives me a view from nowhereway to approach this dispassionately, without the, y’know, words that would have made Mr. Vinatieri, my Scoutmaster, disappointed in me.
Others have chronicled the failure of the seven U.S. Colorado River Basin states to come to a consensus agreement on a set of river operating rules, we need not repeat that here, other than to note that what we have here is a classic case of what has been called the tragedy of the anticommons. This is a situation where many people or entities – in this case the states of the Colorado River Basin – each have the power to block a solution that might be to the benefit of the community as a whole. In this case, each of the seven states of the Colorado River Basin have blocking power over solutions that would prevent the reservoirs from crashing.
See above: the reservoirs are crashing and we have no plan to prevent it because any proposal that might prevent it has been blocked by one or more states that object.
The reason behind this is a set of rules written beginning in the 1920s governing the river – the Colorado River Compact and a series of ad hoc additions that followed – that attempted to lay out rules for managing the river but failed to include functional processes for modifying the rules when they proved inadequate to changing the situation. We’re now stuck with a system under which each of the seven basin states has blocking power over any attempt to change the rules.
This violates one of the fundamental institutional design principles identified by the late Elinor Ostrom, who taught us so much about how we succeed or fail in overcoming the tragedy of the commons: “How will the rules … be changed over time with changes in the performance of the resource system, the strategies of participants, and external opportunities and constraints?” We have to have rules about how we rewrite the rules. We lack that.
Despite this, we have succeeded in the past, in a series of rule-writing exercises that began in the late 1990s, by depending on principled actors at the state level recognizing that they needed to balance their need to protect their own community’s water supplies against the need to solve problems at the scale of the basin as a whole.
My personal values on this question are both instrumental (things that I think are in the best interests of myself and my community) and deontological (things that I think are fundamental moral principles). The second first: I think we have ethical obligations to those upstream and downstream of us in shared river basins. This is, for me, fundamental. The second is instrumental – I think compromise is in the best interests of my community’s water supply and therefore its future, because if we end up in litigation and the system crashes, we stand to lose a lot more than if we compromise, are willing to act on our obligations to our downstream neighbors by using less ourselves.
The last two years of increasingly hostile negotiations among the states make clear that behavior that recognizes those principles is gone, replaced by interpersonal bickering and a game of chicken driving the basin toward litigation (effectively hoping to manage the basin by convincing a judge of our preferred interpretation of ambiguous rules written a century ago) and reservoir collapse.
Thar be dragons.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
It was early June, and we sat out in the shade in our backyard in Silverton, Colorado, wearing short-sleeves and shorts and drinking cold beverages under a cloudless blue sky. That, in itself, made the day memorable. Blizzards are as likely on Memorial Day as barbecues in this mountain town, elevation 9,318 feet, and sweater-free days usually don’t come along until July.
The winter of 2001-2002 had been unusually mild and a warm April and May had melted what little snow had fallen; the Animas River’s spring runoff had peaked at historically low levels a couple weeks earlier. I, for one, wasn’t too worried. By then it was understood that the climate was warming, and that it could wreak havoc on the planet, but the idea of rising sea levels and devastating heat waves felt pretty abstract in the Colorado high country. Besides, as an amateur historian, I had read accounts of similarly dry and warm winters from the San Juan Mountains’ past: In 1879, the snow was all melted from the highest peaks by May (giving way to the Lime Creek Burn that summer); sleighing was impossible” on Silverton’s streets during the 1890-91 winter; and the newspaper ran a photo of a water wagon suppressing dust on Greene Street on New Year’s Day, 1918, during “one of the most delightful winters ever experienced.”
Vallecito Reservoir during Missionary Ridge Fire via George Weber Environmental.
This, it seemed, was just another one of those occasional weird years, so we figured we might as well enjoy it. Then someone noticed what looked like puffy cumulonimbus cloud rising up in the gap formed by the Animas River gorge. It wasn’t a cloud at all, but a billowing tower of smoke from the Missionary Ridge Fire, ignited that afternoon on a slope about 35 miles south of where we sat. Over the coming weeks, the blaze would eat through 73,000 acres of parched scrub oak and aspen and conifer forest, along with 83 structures. It eclipsed the 26,000-acre Lime Creek Burn as the state’s largest wildfire on record, but lost the title to the Hayman Fire (138,114 acres) that was burning at the same time across the state.
Aerial view from the south of Hayman Fire June 30, 2002. Road traversing from left to right is U.S. Highway 24. Town of Manitou Springs is in lower part of photo, Colorado Springs to the right. Garden of the Gods park defined by three upright orange rock formations in right center just below smoke line. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
And it was then that we realized this was no normal abnormality, and that 2002 would go down as the Water Year of our Discontent: dry, smoky, and catastrophic for irrigators and river rafters alike.
This year is shaping up to be even more dire. Indeed, with temperatures in Silverton climbing into the 60s this week, I’m sure a few people have shed some layers and soaked up the sun — in March. Now, however, we know that this is no anomaly, but part of a long-term trend toward aridification, most likely caused or at least exacerbated by climate change. Call it the “new normal” if you’d like, but just remember the words of Bruce Cockburn: “The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.”
I wanted to wait until April to give this assessment, on the off chance that the weather might shift radically in the last days of March in a way that might give us all some hope. While anything’s still possible, I’ve seen enough to bet that, unfortunately, we may already have seen peak snowpack in many places, making this the driest water year on record by far. And besides, I wanted to get the spring runoff “predict the peak” streamflow contest going before, well, the streamflows actually peaked.
A crappy snow year does not necessarily lead to a nasty fire season, since so many other factors come into play. The same can sort of be true about the peak of the spring runoff. That’s more about timing: A fast melt after a dry winter can result in a bigger, albeit short-lived, peak, than a slow melt of a relatively abundant snowpack. The river’s average flows across the entire water year are much more closely tied to snowpack, but those can also be affected by a big monsoon season.
Still, looking back at similar years in the past can help with predicting flows this year. I’m going to focus on the Animas River in Durango, because it’s my home river, it is unimpeded by dams or major upstream diversions, and it is a good proxy for a lot of other Southwestern rivers, since its headwaters are located in the same mountain range as those of the Rio Grande, the Gunnison, the Dolores, the San Miguel, the San Juan, and the Uncompahgre rivers. If the runoff is weak in the Animas, it is also likely to be weak in all of those other rivers.
The snowpack graph shows that the current heat wave has really taken a toll, and probably launched the spring runoff.
Here’s the temperature graph for the Animas watershed. You can see that it reached a record high for the date of 42.8° F. That doesn’t seem too warm until you consider that the median temperature for March 18 is about 25° F. Probably more significant than this one little blip is the fact that daily temperatures have far exceeded “normal” on dozens of days this winter. Also note the contrast with 2002 (the darker green line).
When you talk to Colorado climate folks and old-timers with good memories, you’ll often hear that the 1977 water year was even drier than 2002. Unfortunately, SNOTEL records typically go back only to the early 1980s, so it’s difficult to make a good apples-to-apples comparison. But by looking at the “natural flow” of the Colorado River, which is the calculated estimate of how much the river would carry without any human intervention, it appears that 1977 was, indeed, the driest winter across the Upper Colorado River Basin since at least 1900.
However, historic Animas River flow data suggest that 2002 was actually drier in southwestern Colorado.
Here’s the average annual daily flow for the Animas. Note that there are several years missing between 1898 and 1911; apparently the USGS did not record flows during those years.
Average stream flows on the Animas River have trended downward over the last century and some, but the river has struggled through extreme dry years in the past. Source: USGS.
Because that graph isn’t so easy to read, here’s a table showing the eleven lowest average daily flow water years. Note that in 1927 they only had 92 records, potentially skewing the results. The 2002 and 2018 water years were lower than in 1977. If snowpack levels correlate with annual average flows, then we could expect this year’s to be around 200 cfs, which is pretty damned dismal.
When I took a look at the peak streamflows for the Animas, I was a bit taken aback to see that in 2002 it topped out above 1,000 cfs, which is more than I would have expected.
Then I saw the date: It peaked in September, after the monsoon arrived, not in the spring. The 2002 spring runoff actually topped out on May 21 at 880 cfs, which was far lower than the 1977 spring peak.
Based on all of that, my Animas River peak streamflow prediction is a bit wacky, but I’m standing by it: It will top out at 700 cfs on April 15.
The rest of the Land Desk community will have a chance to predict the peak starting next week, when I’ll announce the terms, the river gauges in the contest, and the prizes for the winner(s). Most likely it will only be open to paid subscribers, so the time to upgrade is now!
We might as well get even more depressed. Here’s the snowpack graph for the Upper Colorado River Basin, showing 2026, 2002, and 2018 — i.e. the dismal years. Note that the spring melt has begun in earnest. If it continues at this rate, runoff will be over by early May.
And here’s the natural flow graph for Lees Ferry on the Colorado River. Natural flow is the calculation of how much water would be in the river at that point if there were no human diversions or consumptive use upstream. If you compare this to the historic streamflows on the Animas River, you’ll notice that there is a correlation, but it’s not direct. For example, 1977 was the driest year on record for the Colorado River as a whole, with a total volume of just 5.4 million acre-feet, which is about half what the Lower Basin alone was using throughout the 1990s.
The ten lowest years on record are:
1977: 5.4 MAF
2002: 5.9 MAF
1934: 6.6 MAF
2021: 7.2 MAF
1954: 8.3 MAF
2012: 8.4 MAF
2018: 8.5 MAF
2025: 8.5 MAF (provisional)
1981: 8.6 MAF
1931: 8.9 MAF
It looks like we could be in that 5.4 MAF territory once again. That wasn’t a huge deal in 1977, since it was an anomaly. It is a big deal now.
And just so you know, it’s not just the Colorado River watershed that’s in trouble. Even California, which got pummeled by atmospheric rivers, is losing its snow rapidly.
📖 Reading (and watching) Room 🧐
The Upper Basin and Lower Basin may not have come up with a deal yet on how to save the Colorado River’s massive plumbing system, but they are looking for solutions. One of them is creating an Upper Basin conservation pool. Like a lot of issues related to the rivers, it’s a slightly complicated one. But Heather Sackett of Aspen Journalism gives a really great rundown. She’s always a must-read for those looking to understand what’s going on with the Colorado.
🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭
The current heat wave is breaking records across the West. Here’s a little sampling:
If you want a quick and comprehensive look where those records were broken during the last day, week, or month, check out coolwx.com/record. In the side panel you can click on the United States and the time period you wish to see and it will show an animation of all of the records. It looks kind of like this:
Sunlight glimmers on the Colorado River near Page, Arizona on Nov. 2, 2022. Alex Hager/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Scott Franz):
March 20, 2026
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
Critical negotiations about the future of the Colorado River took a two week hiatus last month after the seven states in the basin missed a key Valentine’s Day deadline for striking a deal, New Mexico’s water negotiator said Thursday.
Estevan López said talks resumed March 2, and the upper and lower basin states are using a short-term pitch from Nevada as a starting point.
“Right now, we’re in discussions with the lower basin about a potential short-term agreement,” Lopez told New Mexico’s Interstate Stream Commission.
Nevada is proposing to increase water releases from upper basin reservoirs like Flaming Gorge by at least 500,000 acre feet to help prevent Lake Powell from dropping too low.
The latest forecasts predict that Powell could drop enough to stop producing hydropower by December.
In return, lower basin states would agree to cut their water use by 1.25 million acre feet “until system conditions have meaningfully improved.”
López said upper basin states had a counter proposal and talks about it were scheduled on Thursday afternoon.
“The hydrology right now is incredibly dire,” López said. “So we’re beginning for this year, for the remainder of this water year, we’re suggesting that there needs to be a release from the upper initial units, most likely Flaming Gorge, since that’s the reservoir that’s largest and has the most water. And we are anticipating that there will be a release of half a million acre feet from Flaming Gorge to prop up Lake Powell.”
Meanwhile, the Interior Department is reviewing thousands of comments it received on a range of options for how to manage the vital waterway.
The alternatives were published in January and could result in a variety of scenarios, ranging from significant water reductions in lower basin states to creating new incentives for states to conserve water.
And after the states missed two deadlines to reach an agreement, it’s becoming increasingly likely the federal government will try to piece together its own plan before the current guidelines expire in the fall.
Water negotiators are also facing a worsening water supply forecast with record low snowpack across the West.
A map shows how much water is predicted to arrive at certain locations in the Colorado River basin as of a March 1 forecast.
Cody Moser with the federal Colorado Basin River Forecast Center said last week just 2.3 million acre feet of Colorado River water is expected to reach Lake Powell through July. That’s about a third of what’s considered normal.
“You’ll notice it’s not a pretty picture here with lots of reds,” he said as he presented a color coded map of how much water is expected to reach certain locations in the river basin. “That’s 50 to 70% of normal April through July runoff. Those maroon colors are 30 to 50% and we even have some of those pinks, which indicates less than 30% normal seasonal spring runoff.”
An attorney for New Mexico’s Interstate Stream Commission said Thursday the state expects the Interior Department to identify a preferred option for managing the dwindling river by July. The current operating guidelines for Lake Powell and Lake Mead expire in the fall.
The city of Montrose held a groundbreaking Monday marking the start of a major upgradereaking Monday marking the start of a major upgrade to its wastewater treatment plant, a facility that has operated with much of its original equipment since it was built in the 1980s. The project will replace outdated equipment and install new infrastructure to meet current and future water quality standards set by state and federal regulators. Mayor Dave Frank said the plant’s equipment has become difficult to maintain.
“The equipment in our wastewater treatment plant is original to the building of the wastewater treatment plant,” Frank said. “So when something breaks, they’re having to find parts in museums and junkyards in order to repair the equipment that we currently have.”
[…]
The plant treats sanitary sewage in accordance with federal and state standards, releasing treated water back into the Uncompahgre River. The project will replace existing equipment with newer versions and install a tank for biological phosphorus removal. Wastewater Treatment Plant Superintendent Hyrum Webb said the phosphorus removal addition is a proactive step.
“We want to get ahead of the curve on removing phosphorus out of the water before we’re required to by the state,” Webb said. “It gives us some incentive points to help out with future permitting, and it’ll be cheaper now than when the state mandates us to do so.”
Frank said water quality going back into the river is a priority…The project is expected to take approximately 18 months to complete. The total cost is estimated at $40 million, which will be funded through bonds and reserve funds.
An example of lawn space free of non-native turf grass and filled with native plants that consumer far less water. Courtesy photo
Click the link to read the article on The Vail Daily website (David O. Williams). Here’s an excerpt:
March 15, 2026
Eagle County water officials are urging property owners to voluntarily scale back water usage in a big way this spring and summer, reducing outdoor watering of landscaping in order to avoid fines and to keep water providers from having to declare a water shortage. The idea is to keep people in tiers one and two for outdoor water use – 95% of which does not return to local streams and rivers — and that one of the best ways to do so is water-wise landscaping, or basically tearing up non-native turf grass and going with native plants that require far less outdoor watering…The Eagle County Conservation District runs a program called Beyond Lawn that will assess your yard, give you some ideas on how to minimize turf, how to go with water-wise native plants, reconfigure your irrigation system, find like-minded landscapers, and make sure fines and surcharges from your water provider aren’t part of your future this summer. Beyond Lawn’s wait list is available to join online. There is also a do-it-yourself workshop being held in conjunction with Walking Mountains and the Climate Action Collaborative at 5:30 p.m., Thursday, April 16…
If not exactly a turf war, water officials’ war on turf could gain significant new teeth as Eagle County reworks its land-use codes, according to Snyder, which currently allow for anywhere between 3,000 and 6,500 square feet of irrigated turf for new homes.
“We think that’s excessive,” Snyder said. “(So we’re) putting forward recommendations to narrow that down to 500 square feet, which is still a nice backyard. The hope would be that with new builds, the county and others would pursue land-use code changes that actually would say, ‘this is reasonable.’ And then it gets really hard to overwater 500 square feet.”
Old land-use codes that allowed up to 12,000 square feet of non-native turf have led to people using 60,000 gallons a month (extreme tier five). That kind of water use reduces the shared supply for everything from drinking water to fighting wildfires, and district officials say massively overwatered yards are not any more fire-resistant.
Click the link to read the article on the Pagosa Springs Sun website (Clayton Chaney and Randi Pierce). Here’s an excerpt:
March 19, 2026
Shawn Prochazka is also predicting more record high temperatures to have been set Wednes- day, March 18 (the high temperature reached was not available by press time that day); today, Thursday, March 19; and tomorrow, Friday, March 20. Prochazka predicted temperatures being 25 degrees above normal. Prochazka also notes that the record high for the month of March is 73 degrees, which was set March 19, 1907, and March 23 and 25, 1940. Warm and dry weather is expected to stick around throughout the weekend and into next week, with Prochazka indicating the next chance for precipitation possibly starting around March 25…Temperatures are expected to stay above freezing throughout the weekend in Pagosa Springs as a high of 82 degrees is forecast for Friday, March 20, with a low of 37 degrees and clear skies in the evening…
The drought conditions in the area have also worsened, with the U.S. Drought Monitor showing that 100 percent of Archuleta County was in moderate drought as of March 10, up from 47.89 percent of the county being in moderate drought and 100 percent of the county being abnormally dry the previous week…Snowpack also continues to fall below median levels in the region and across the state. As of Wednesday, the San Miguel, Dolores, Animas and San Juan river basins sat at 45 percent of the March 18 median. The Wolf Creek summit SNOTEL site, which sits at an elevation of 10,930 feet, was at 56 percent of the day’s median, while the Upper San Juan site, which sits at 10,140 feet, was at 49 percent of the day’s median.
On Tuesday, due to the recordbreaking warm temperatures and low snowpack across Colorado, Governor Jared Polis activated the state’s Drought Task Force and Phase 2 of Colorado’s Drought Response Plan. Acting on recommendations from the state’s Water Conditions Monitoring Committee and partner agencies, the task force will help the state bet- ter understand and elevate the local, regional and sector-specific impacts of worsening drought conditions, a press release from the state explains.
“Colorado is experiencing thewarmest year so far in our 131-year record, and one of the driest,” Polis said. “Activating the Drought Task Force will help ensure we are protecting one of our most precious resources by closely tracking impacts, supporting communities and coordinating better as we prepare for the year ahead.”
The Drought Task Force, last activated in 2020, brings together senior leadership from key state agencies, including the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, Colorado Department of Agriculture, Department of Local Affairs, and the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, according to the press release. It further explains that the group assesses drought conditions statewide, elevates local impacts to state leadership, and can convene regional or sector-specific workgroups to gather information and share resources…
As of noon on Wednesday, March 18, the San Juan River at Pagosa Springs was running at a flow of 286 cubic feet per second (cfs), above the median flow for March 18 The median flow for March 18 sits at 121.5 cfs, with a historical low for the date being 39 cfs and the historical high being 1,040 cfs.
The seven U.S. states that make up the Colorado River basin are struggling to agree on how best to manage the river’s water as its supply dwindles due to climate change and a period of prolonged drought. Their negotiations, which are not open to the public, missed a Feb. 14, 2026, deadline the federal government had established, after which federal officials said they would impose their own plan.
The federal government has not yet done so, but the prospect of such an action is not good news for the nearly 40 million people who depend on the Colorado River for water, energy, agriculture and recreation, nor for the estimated US$1.4 trillion in economic activity the river supports.
But compromise on Colorado River management is possible and, in fact, was achieved to curb California’s water use in the 2000s, to negotiate an interim agreement to coordinate operations at the Lake Mead and Lake Powell reservoirs in 2007, and to enact contingency plans to manage drought in 2019. But this time around, circumstances are different.
The negotiators for the states had long-standing relationships and built trust by frequently communicating outside formal meetings and seeking to listen to and understand other states’ perspectives, even if they didn’t agree.
The states also agreed to use the bureau’s computer model for analyzing scenarios of climate change and management decisions. That meant all the negotiators were looking at the same data when delving into possible options. And the political and social environment was less polarized than today.
The current situation
In this round of negotiations, federal leadership has been lagging. The Department of the Interior has not made clear what the consequences might be for the states if they fail to agree. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has been without a permanent commissioner since President Donald Trump retook office in January 2025.
The states are fractured into subgroups, according to whether they are in the river’s Upper Basin – Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico – or the Lower Basin, which includes Arizona, Nevada and California. Each basin group holds strong positions and has generally been unwilling to shift.
Each basin group is using a different set of assumptions for the bureau’s computer model to explore options. And the discussion often gets stuck on details, which prevents progress toward broader agreements.
But those relatively new challenges to Colorado River compromise are not an excuse for failure.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, center between flags, meets with governors and representatives of the seven Colorado River basin states in January 2026. U.S. Department of the Interior via X
A way forward?
The current negotiations have all been done behind closed doors. From talking with people involved in the negotiations, we understand the negotiators have been left to set their own agendas and meeting plans and conduct their own communications and follow-up, with no formal facilitators.
It’s reasonable to expect the negotiators to be ready to represent their states’ interests, working through an incredibly complicated landscape of hydrology, climate and management scenario modeling, water law and administration, and politics. But we believe it’s unreasonable – and unrealistic and unfair – to expect them to also be experts at designing and facilitating an effective process for sorting out their differences.
Federal officials are not necessarily the best people to run the process either. And if the agency that ultimately needs to approve any deal is the one leading the process, real or perceived biases about the states or key issues in the agreement could further complicate the discussions.
We believe that agreement between the seven states is still possible. It may be less effective to bring in a third-party facilitator at this stage in the negotiation process, though, because of the degraded trust, hardened positions and shortage of time.
A more hopeful possibility is that the bureau adopts short-term rules that would give the states another chance to negotiate a longer-term deal – ideally with an unbiased third-party facilitator for support.
A collaborative and consensus-based planning process in the Yakima River Basin in Washington state in the early 2010s is evidence that while nobody gets everything they want in a negotiated agreement, “if they can (all) get something, that’s really the basis of the plan,” as a Washington state official told The New York Times.
We are two and a half decades into the Southwest’s most severe drought of the last 1,200 years, and this winter’s snow dearth is one of the most extreme on record.
Without an April-May miracle, human-caused climate change likely will finally catch up with the Colorado River—and the 40 million people who rely on it—in the form of a full-blown crisis later this year.
“Drought” may be too hopeful a word, since it implies an eventual end. Most climate scientists refer to the phenomenon as “long-term aridification,” caused by a lack of rain and snow and warming temperatures.
The West has just experienced its warmest winter since record-keeping began in 1895. The average October-through-December temperature in some parts of the region has been more than 8° F warmer than the 20th-century mean. This is a huge anomaly.
In Gunnison County, Colorado, one of the colder places in the nation, the average minimum temperature for that four-month stretch was about 19° F. That doesn’t seem so bad until you realize that back in 1990, another dry, warm winter, the corresponding measure was 13.6° F. For the Upper Colorado River Basin, the average minimum temperature for that four-month stretch was about 26° F, the warmest on record.
The warmer temperatures tinker with the health of the watershed.
This water year, which began Oct. 1, started out with record-high precipitation in some areas, most of which fell as rain. That helped fend off severe drought conditions. But what really counts is the mountain snowpack, which serves as a giant natural reservoir that supplies at least 70% of the Colorado River’s water each year. Warm temperatures have left some areas snow-free even in parts of Wyoming, where the white stuff normally would be piled high in March.
The diminishing snow has, in turn, shrunk the Colorado River. The “natural” flow—or an estimate of how much water the river would carry without upstream diversions or human consumption—has been below 15 million acre-feet (MAF) at Lees Ferry during 20 of the last 26 years, with an average flow of 12.25 MAF during that time.
This matters, because when the Colorado River Compact of 1922 parceled out the river’s waters, the river was assumed to carry an average annual flow of at least 16.5 MAF. Demand has significantly exceeded supply for the last 26 years, forcing the drawdown of the watershed’s big savings accounts, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, to about one-third of their capacity.
Meanwhile, to comply with the Colorado River Compact of 1922—the document that serves as the Ten Commandments for the management of the river’s waters—the Upper Basin States must release, on average, at least 7.5 MAF from Glen Canyon Dam each year.
Given that the Upper Basin states need a bunch of water to keep their cities and farms from drying up, and that an additional 800,000 acre-feet evaporates or seeps into the underlying rocks at Lake Powell each year, you can see how the warming climate wreaks havoc on the math of the Colorado River.
The entire river system now teeters on the brink, and this year’s snow drought may be what pushes it over the edge.
The back of Glen Canyon Dam circa 1964, not long after the reservoir had begun filling up. Here the water level is above dead pool, meaning water can be released via the river outlets, but it is below minimum power pool, so water cannot yet enter the penstocks to generate electricity. Bureau of Reclamation photo. Annotations: Jonathan P. Thompson
The Bureau of Reclamation’s latest forecast says Lake Powell’s surface level is likely to drop below the minimum level needed for power production later this year. This so-called “deadpool” would not only mean the end of hydropower production, it would also force all of the dam’s releases to go through the river’s 8-foot-wide, steel outlet tubes, which were not made for sustained use. This could compromise the tubes and the dam itself.
It’s possible that the dam would even be shifted to a run-of-the-river operation, in which releases equal the amount of water flowing into the reservoir, minus evaporation and seepage. That would almost certainly result in water shortages downstream, at the very least for the Central Arizona Project, which serves the Phoenix metro area.
This quandary didn’t sneak up on us.
The seven Colorado River states and the federal water managers can’t agree on who should make what cuts in consumption. The feds, meanwhile, haven’t gotten around to re-engineering Glen Canyon Dam or creating a bypass around it that would enable the water to keep flowing. It’s almost as if they’ve been paralyzed by the belief that dry winters were just a minor glitch.
Now, as the spring runoff gets underway, it has become clear that nature won’t save us: We have no choice but to live within increasingly meager limits.
Jonathan Thompson is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a longtime journalist and author about the West.
Lake Powell, on the Colorado River, is seen from the air in 2019. The Upper Basin states are planning how to potentially fill a dedicated pool in the nation’s second largest reservoir. CREDIT: ECOFLIGHT
With a Lake Powell conservation pool nearly guaranteed for the future of Colorado River management, the four Upper Basin states are exploring and refining the ways they could fill it.
Conservation by those states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) could be one of the keys to reaching a deal among the seven states that share the Colorado River and an important part of the framework for managing the drought-stricken river after this year. The water saved by the Upper Basin states could be stored in Lake Powell as a means of maintaining higher water levels and as an insurance policy against drastic cuts.
This type of pool isn’t yet being used in Lake Powell; it would have to be established by an agreement among the seven states. An agreement in the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan allowed for a 500,000 acre-foot Upper Basin storage pool in Lake Powell, but so far, the states have not utilized this and the agreement expires this year.
The Upper Basin and Lower Basin (California, Arizona and Nevada) have been at an impasse for more than two years about how the nation’s two largest reservoirs — Lake Powell and Lake Mead — will be managed and shortages shared in the future. The situation has never been more dire: The current guidelines for river management expire at the end of the year, while record-low snowpack is expected to push reservoir levels below critical thresholds. The seven states have blown past two deadlines to come up with a plan, and the federal government is gearing up for emergency actions to manage reservoirs.
The crux of the disagreement between the two basins has been over who should take shortages in drought years. The Lower Basin has committed to 1.5 million acre-feet of reductions annually and wants cuts beyond that to be shared by the Upper Basin. The Upper Basin says its water users already take cuts in some years because streams run dry by midsummer and any contributions they make must be voluntary.
TThe main boat ramp at Wahweap Marina was unusable due to low water levels in Lake Powell in December 2021. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is projecting that the reservoir will fall below critical thresholds later this year. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Contribution not conservation
Some Upper Basin officials have made a slight shift in the way they now talk about a pool in Lake Powell. No longer referred to as a conservation pool, it is called a “contribution” pool, reflecting the different methods — not only conservation of agricultural water — of contributing water to a Lake Powell pool.
Traditionally, the Colorado River basin states have turned to programs that pay irrigators to voluntarily leave fields dry for a season or two as the primary way to cut water use. With agriculture representing the majority of water use in the Upper Basin, it’s often the low-hanging fruit when it comes to water savings.
But at least two Upper Basin states are turning to other methods to contribute water to a Lake Powell pool.
For example, New Mexico can contribute water from Navajo Reservoir that it leases from a tribe. In Colorado, the method is less straightforward, but officials say the state is prioritizing and expanding existing programs and projects that save water.
“When you talk about things like turf removal, water-loss prevention, watershed restoration, forest-health efforts that are happening on the ground, those are benefits not only to Colorado but to the entire system,” said Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s lead negotiator in talks among the seven states that share the Colorado River. “So we’re trying to figure out: How do we acknowledge all of that work?”
Raymond Langstaff, a rancher and president of the Bookcliff Conservation District, irrigates a parcel north of Rifle. The state of Colorado explored the feasibility of a demand management program that would pay irrigators to cut back, but did not implement one. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Utah touts pragmatic approach
Over its run in 2023 and 2024, the federally funded System Conservation Pilot Programdoled out $45 million to Upper Basin irrigators to cut their use by about 100,000 acre-feet. Utah water users received about $15 million of that in exchange for temporarily forgoing about 37,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water. The state put lessons learned with SCPP to use and is now in the second year of its own demand management pilot program, funded by $5 million from the state legislature and run by the Colorado River Authority of Utah.
The pilot program lets water users temporarily participate in a conservation program, and pays them $390 an acre-foot of water to do it. In 2025, Utah sent about 8,000 acre-feet downstream to Lake Powell under this pilot program, according to Marc Stilson, deputy director and principal engineer of the authority. There are a couple industrial water users and one municipal water user among the participants, but the majority are agricultural, he said.
“The pilot program is trying to iron out all these issues so that if we end up with some type of post-2026 commitment to do these types of voluntary conservation programs, we’re ready to do it,” Stilson said. “There is a very pragmatic approach in Utah looking at the big picture, and I think generally there is a sense that we have to adapt to changing conditions.”
Whether the program will continue after this year is unclear and could depend on whether the states reach a deal.
“We were anticipating that we’d have an agreement and that these types of programs would be part of that agreement,” Stilson said. “I think we just have to take a wait-and-see approach.”
Wyoming is also looking to traditional programs: State lawmakers are establishing a voluntary water conservation program. Wyoming state engineer and lead negotiator Brandon Gebhart did not respond to phone calls, emails or a list of questions from Aspen Journalism.
Boater on the San Juan River in May 2023. New Mexico officials say they can contribute water to a pool in Lake Powell through releasing water they lease in Navajo Reservoir. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
New Mexico seeks ‘more diverse’ ways to contribute water
The state of New Mexico plans to contribute to a Powell pool mostly through 20,000 acre-feet of Navajo Reservoir water, which it leases from the Jicarilla Apache Nation and can be released down the San Juan River. Along the way to Lake Powell, it boosts flows for endangered fish. Officials say because they can control when they release the water, it can be tracked with certainty to the reservoir.
“We all need to focus on more diverse ways of contributions, not just the classic conserved consumptive use,” said Ali Effati, Colorado River basin bureau chief for the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission.
Water managers say that automatically turning to agricultural water isn’t always reliable because as climate change continues to rob rivers of flows, even if senior water users want to participate in these types of conservation programs, they may not have any water to spare in dry years.
“That doesn’t mean that we have shied away from those sorts of activities, but to the extent that we can do our part without having to ask our agricultural community to cut water where they already take significant cuts almost annually, that’s just a preferable perspective,” said Estevan Lopez, lead negotiator for New Mexico.
Lopez said the likelihood of seeing a future Upper Basin contribution pool in Lake Powell is nearly 100% and that New Mexico will be ready, willing and able to contribute its share of water when the time comes.
“We have our percentage easily covered, plus a significant amount more,” he said.“We have our percentage easily covered, plus a significant amount more,” he said.
TThese hay bales stand ready to be collected on a ranch outside of Carbondale in July 2024. Upper Basin states have traditionally looked to agricultural to conserve water, but some are now turning to other ways to contribute water. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Colorado points to programs already in place
Colorado water users participated in both years of SCPP, but the state has been reluctant to take the leap into setting up its own program, despite being an early leader of the conservation conversation among the Upper Basin states.
In 2019, Colorado convened nine workgroups to explore the feasibility of a demand management program. The process included Colorado River water users from across the state and in multiple water-use sectors, who looked at how to set up a temporary, voluntary, compensated state program. But in 2022, the state water board shelved the studies without implementing a program, in favor of focusing on drought-resiliency initiatives.
Mitchell said the demand management feasibility investigation was an incredibly valuable exercise, but that there are still a number of open questions. Inaction on a demand management program doesn’t mean inaction on conservation overall, she said.
“The CWCB board voted to pause that investigation until there was clarity about whether any such program would be achievable, worthwhile and advisable and until there’s evidence that a demand management-esque program would benefit Colorado,” Mitchell said.
In 2023, Colorado lawmakers created a task force to again examine how the state could implement demand reduction and conservation programs. Water managers punted the issue again, failing to make recommendations to lawmakers on this topic, with some members saying conservation programs were “premature.”
The state still does not seem to have the policies in place to implement a large-scale, traditional conservation program in the near future. Mitchell said Colorado’s plan to contribute water to a Lake Powell pool is through the programs and projects already in place, many of which are funded through the state’s Water Plan grants.
At its March meeting, the CWCB approved more than $13 million for 38 projects across the state, according to a press release. They include things like urban turf replacement, creek and wetland restoration, outdoor water budgeting and wildfire ready action plans.
“Our strategy is to continue on with the programs that are already in existence, continue to fund conservation efforts that benefit all Coloradans as well as the entire system, continue to live within the means of the river and adapt our uses to align with available supply,” Mitchell said. “Because of all those programs already set up, we believe we have the majority of the structure in place.”
But Mitchell would not put a number on the amount of water that Colorado could contribute.
“We want to be a part of the solution when and how we are able to, but no, I’m not going to say we can do 100,000 acre-feet in a year like this,” she said.
Colorado River watchers may soon get some clarity around exactly how — and how much — Upper Basin states plan to contribute to a Lake Powell pool. On March 24, the Upper Colorado River Commission plans to consider projects to include in a “provisional accounting” memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, according to UCRC Director Chuck Cullom.
Some Upper Basin projects that are not traditional agricultural conservation programs may be counted under the MOU, allowing the states to “get credit” for the water they save through unconventional means. Cullom said the UCRC and Bureau of Reclamation will also soon have an accounting report of water-saving activities undertaken in 2025.
Mitchell said Colorado is still committed to a seven-state consensus agreement and wants to avoid litigation. But acknowledgement of what the Upper Basin is already doing to cut back on water use will be important.
“The MOU is one component where we would like to see some sort of real acknowledgement of what is occurring in terms of the way that we live within the means of the river and what our strict administration is doing,” Mitchell said. “As long as we are not acknowledged in what’s happening on the ground, I think we’re going to have struggles.”
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Denver Water depends on mountain snowpack for 90% of its water supply, which serves 1.5 million people in Denver and surrounding suburbs.
Snowpack as of March 16, 2026, was at or near record lows: The Colorado River Basin within Denver Water’s collection system was at 71% of normal. The South Platte River Basin within Denver Water’s collection area was 54% of normal. In Denver Water’s decades of records for its watershed collection areas, as of March 16, Colorado River snowpack ranked the third-worst on record, and the South Platte River snowpack remains ranked at the worst.
No matter what, Denver Water’s annual summer watering rules will always be in place during the irrigation season. And, it is likely that we will need to implement additional drought response measures this year. Denver Water’s response to drought conditions uses a layered approach, including the potential for additional watering restrictions, in order to preserve water supplies. Denver Water is developing recommendations on a potential drought response for the Board of Water Commissioners to consider over the next several weeks.
Since 2000, Denver Water’s response to dry conditions in previous years included issuing a Drought Watch (voluntary restrictions) in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2012 and 2013. In some of those years (2002, 2003, 2004, 2013), Denver Water levied additional drought restrictions as part of declaring a Stage 1 level response, which required mandatory reductions in outdoor water use.
Denver Water snowpack update for March 16, 2026
Conditions remain highly concerning. Poor snowfall combined with warm temperatures have left us roughly 3 feet to 4 feet of snow short of where we’d prefer to be in the Denver Water collection area at this time. To reach the normal spring snowpack peak, which typically occurs in April, we need to see an additional 7 feet to 7.5 feet of snow this spring.
Reservoir storage conditions are below average, but in reasonably good shape: as of March 16, 2026, the reservoirs were 80% full versus an average of 85% full for this time. Those levels are also temporarily affected by the need to keep Gross Reservoir low during construction to raise the dam, a project designed to increase the storage capacity of the reservoir.
Denver Water has been here several times over roughly 50 years of reliable records. On the positive side, we have experienced years that started dry and conditions dramatically improved in March, April and May. This year, however, we are running out of time to build the snowpack.
No matter what, Denver Water’s annual summer watering rules will always be in place during the irrigation season. Additional drought restrictions, voluntary or mandatory, will depend in part on how the rest of the snow season shapes up and will be aimed at preserving water supplies in case this unusually dry stretch deepens into a multiyear drought.
Comment from Greg Fisher, Denver Water’s manager of demand planning:
“Another weekend snowstorm was welcome, though it mainly benefited lower elevations along the Front Range. Unfortunately, mountain regions didn’t receive significant snow. The good news is that moisture we get in the Denver region should give our yards and landscapes a good dose of moisture, limiting the need for any watering this week,” said Greg Fisher, Denver Water’s manager of demand planning.
“Overall, we’ve had an extremely dry winter, and that continues this week — the last week of winter — with unusually warm temperatures expected across the region. That could lead to snow melt even at high elevations and highlights the need to conserve water and limit the pull on our reservoir storage. We continue to emphasize the need to keep irrigation systems off until mid-to-late May at the earliest, and to be prepared for outdoor watering restrictions this spring.
“It’s a good time to consider landscape changes to your yard, with plants and grasses that require far less water and are far more adapted to Colorado’s dry stretches. Such landscapes, once established, can get through dry stretches like this far easier, and with far less water, and still give your yard a colorful and vibrant look.”
Denver Water has many resources for homeowners looking for inspiration and information about landscapes that fit naturally into our dry climate. Click here for conservation and efficiency tips for outdoor irrigation and to get more details on ways to ColoradoScape your property, including through rebates for turf removal and a DIY guide for landscape changes, among many other potential water-saving steps.
This chart shows the cumulative snowpack on March 16, 2026, in the area of the Colorado River Basin where Denver Water captures its water supply. The snowpack is 71% of normal, which ranks third-lowest on record for March 16. Image credit: Denver Water.
This chart shows the cumulative snowpack on March 16, 2026, in the area of the South Platte River Basin where Denver Water captures its water supply. The snowpack is 54% of normal, which ranks as the lowest on record for March 16. Image credit: Denver Water.
To learn more about the work Denver Water employees do to monitor the snowpack, read this TAP story about Denver Water employees snowshoeing into the forest near the top of Vail Pass in late February 2026 to conduct a monthly “snow survey.”
Additional information on Denver Water’s drought planning can be found here. Additional information on Denver Water reservoir levels, customer water use and snowpack can be found in the Water Watch Report, which is updated regularly during winter, spring and summer.
Novedades de Denver Water sobre el deshielo de la montaña y el suministro de agua
Novedades sobre el deshielo de la montaña del 16 de marzo de 2026 para el área de recolección de agua de Denver Water.
Denver Water depende del deshielo de la montaña para el 90 % de su suministro de agua, el cual da servicio a 1.5 millones de personas en Denver y en los suburbios de alrededor.
En 16 de marzo de 2026, el deshielo de la montaña se encontraba cerca de niveles históricamente bajos: La cuenca del río Colorado dentro del sistema de recolección de Denver Water estaba al 71 % de lo normal. La cuenca del río South Platte dentro del área de recolección de agua de Denver Water estaba al 54 % de lo normal. En las décadas de registros de Denver Water sobre sus cuencas hidrográficas de recolección, al 16 de marzo el deshielo de la montaña en la cuenca del río Colorado ocupaba el tercer peor lugar y el deshielo de la montaña en la cuenca del río South Platte ocupaba el peor de todos.
Pase lo que pase, las reglas anuales de riego en verano de Denver Water siempre estarán vigentes durante la temporada de riego. Además, es probable que este año sea necesario implementar medidas adicionales de respuesta ante una sequía. La respuesta de Denver Water a condiciones de sequía utiliza un enfoque por niveles, que incluye la posibilidad de aplicar restricciones adicionales de riego para preservar el suministro de agua.
Denver Water está preparando recomendaciones para la Junta de Comisionados del Agua de Denver sobre una posible respuesta a la sequía en las siguientes semanas.
Desde 2000, la respuesta de Denver Water a condiciones secas en años anteriores incluyó la emisión de una alerta de sequía (restricciones voluntarias) en 2002, 2003, 2004, 2012 y 2013. En algunos de esos años (2002, 2003, 2004 y 2013), Denver Water impuso restricciones adicionales por sequía como parte de la declaración de una respuesta de Nivel 1, la cual exigía reducciones obligatorias en el uso de agua en exteriores.
Novedades sobre el deshielo de la montaña de Denver Water al 16 de marzo de 2026
Las condiciones siguen siendo motivo de gran preocupación. Las escasas nevadas, combinadas con temperaturas cálidas, han dejado aproximadamente entre 3 y 4 pies de nieve por debajo de lo que sería deseable en el área de recolección de Denver Water para esta época. Para alcanzar el pico normal de deshielo de la montaña en primavera, que por lo general se produce en abril, necesitamos ver entre 7 y 7.5 pies adicionales de nieve esta primavera.
Las condiciones de almacenamiento en los embalses están por debajo del promedio, pero razonablemente en buen estado: al 16 de marzo de 2026, los embalses estaban llenos al 80 %, frente a un promedio del 85 % para esta época. Estos niveles también se ven afectados temporalmente por la necesidad de mantener bajo el nivel del embalse Gross durante la construcción para elevar la presa, un proyecto diseñado para aumentar la capacidad de almacenamiento del embalse.
Pase lo que pase, las reglas anuales de riego en verano de Denver Water siempre estarán vigentes durante la temporada de riego. Las restricciones adicionales por sequía, voluntarias u obligatorias, dependerán en parte de cómo evolucione el resto de la temporada de nieve y estarán orientadas a preservar el suministro de agua en caso de que este período inusualmente seco se convierta en una sequía de varios años.
Comentario de Greg Fisher, gerente de planificación de la demanda de Denver Water:
“Le dimos la bienvenida a otra tormenta invernal este pasado fin de semana, aunque solo beneficiaron áreas con elevación bajas en el Front Range. Desafortunadamente, las regiones montañosas no recibieron cantidades de nieve significativas. Las buenas noticias es que la humedad que recibimos en la región de Denver le dio a nuestros jardines y paisajismos una buena dosis de humedad y así limitar el riego esta semana.
“Hemos tenido un invierno muy seco y estas condiciones continuaran esta semana, la última semana de invierno, con temperaturas inusualmente altas anticipadas a través de la región. Continuamos enfatizando la importancia de mantener sus sistemas de riego apagados hasta mediados o finales de mayo y estar preparados para posibles restricciones de riego esta primavera.”
Denver Water cuenta con muchos recursos para propietarios de viviendas que buscan inspiración e información sobre paisajes que se integren de forma natural en nuestro clima seco. Haga clic aquí para obtener consejos de conservación y eficiencia para el riego exterior y conocer más detalles sobre maneras de aplicar ColoradoScapes en su propiedad, lo que incluye reembolsos por la eliminación de césped y una guía para realizar cambios en el paisajismo por cuenta propia, entre muchas otras medidas para ahorrar agua.
Puede encontrar información adicional sobre la planificación ante sequías de Denver Water aquí (en inglés). Puede encontrar información adicional sobre los niveles de los embalses de Denver Water, el uso de agua de los clientes y el deshielo de la montaña en el informe Water Watch Report (en inglés), que se actualiza con regularidad durante el invierno, la primavera y el verano.
City water officials are sounding increasingly urgent alarms about Aurora’s water supply, warning that worsening drought conditions and poor snowpack could force early and potentially escalating restrictions this year. Aurora Water General Manager Marshall Brown told city leaders yesterday that the situation has deteriorated enough that staff will likely recommend a formal Stage 1 drought declaration as early as April 6, nearly a month ahead of the city’s typical seasonal watering restrictions. If approved by the City Council, new limits on water use would take effect April 7, officials said.
“Our water supply situation is actually bleak enough that, if things don’t improve, and we don’t get a community response that we need during a Stage 1 restriction, the forecast indicates we may be in a Stage 2 restriction by the end of the year,” Brown said. “That would be really dramatic.”
Aurora breaks water supply and restrictions into four categories:
Normal: Current permanent rules limit landscape irrigation from 10 a.m. – 6 p.m. for a maximum of three days per week.
Stage I: Considered when reservoir levels are lower, often reducing outdoor irrigation to two days per week.
Stage II: More stringent, potentially reducing irrigation to one day per week.
Stage III: Emergency conditions with severe restrictions, including no landscape irrigation.
The warning marks a notable shift from just weeks ago, when city leaders said conditions were concerning but not yet dire. Now, officials say a combination of record warmth, minimal precipitation and dwindling snowpack has pushed the system closer to critical thresholds. According to the latest Aurora Water report, conditions across Colorado remain deeply dry. More than 75% of the state is classified as abnormally dry, with over half in moderate drought and significant portions in severe to extreme drought. February and March so far have offered little relief, statewide water officials reported. Those trends are expected to continue. Long-range forecasts from federal agencies indicate warmer and drier-than-normal conditions through the spring, further reducing the likelihood of meaningful runoff to replenish reservoirs.
Lamar Fields, a tribal member, gathers blue corn to sample. With increasingly unreliable access to water, flexible crops like corn have become integral to the farm’s survival. To increase revenue, the farm built a mill to process crops like blue corn. Caitlin Ochs
For a century, the Colorado River has been managed in pieces. Legally and politically, it’s divided into two basins, with each state and community focused on securing its respective water supply. But that is not how a river functions. The Colorado River is an interconnected system, sustained by Rocky Mountain snowpack, rainfall and groundwater.
It is fragile, and under increasing stress. Two and a half decades into this century, the river that built the modern West has 20% less water flowing through it than it did on average in the last century. As heat and drought intensify, so do the stakes: Failure to recognize the severity of changing conditions, managing the river in parts without considering needs of the whole and inadequate planning for long-term shortages put the future of all the basin at risk.
For the last five years, I have documented how the Colorado River Basin’s farmers are navigating water shortages and uncertainty amid deep political divisions about the river’s future. This project, called American Adaptation, examines three agricultural communities whose survival is threatened by a shrinking river, examining what happens to people when policies and water management struggle to keep pace with a changing climate.
In one of the river’s northern watersheds, the Ute Mountain Farm and Ranch Enterprise is adapting its management as the water it relies on becomes less dependable. In central Arizona, farmers have returned to well water after becoming the first communities to have their supply cut off completely due to the basin-wide shortage. And in California’s Imperial Valley, the farms that receive the river’s largest water allocation are under growing pressure to share the burden of shortage.
Together, their stories illustrate the stakes — and rising tensions — of the current negotiations over the river’s future management. States, tribal nations and the federal government are reckoning with 100 years of developing water infrastructure based on assumptions of continuing abundance and expansion. These ideas — and the legal frameworks built around them — are colliding with the reality of a river with much less water than expected, raising complex questions about what the Colorado can sustain, how its water should be used and who will shoulder the necessary cuts.
The Dolores Project, located in the Dolores and San Juan River Basins in southwestern Colorado, develops water from the Dolores River for irrigation, municipal and industrial users, recreation, fish and wildlife, and hydroelectric power. It also provides vital water to the Dove Creek area, central Montezuma Valley area, and to the Towaoc area on the Ute Mountain Ute Indian Reservation. McPhee Dam and Reservoir is the principle storage feature of the Dolores Project which includes a system of canals, tunnels, and laterals to deliver water to over 61,000 acres of land. Photo credit: Kenny Browning/Flickr
When Water is Uncertain
On 7,600 acres painstakingly carved out of desert brush, the Ute Mountain Farm and Ranch, a tribally run enterprise of the Ute Mountain Ute nation, produces cattle, alfalfa, corn and wheat. Its operations are led by Simon Martinez, Eric Whyte and Michael Vicente, who have deep personal connections to the enterprise. Martinez helped build the dam for the reservoir that provides the farm’s water, while Whyte cleared desert brush and mapped where the fields would go. Vicente, as the lead irrigator, can account for every drop of water that’s used.
In good years, the farm’s circular fields flourish in brilliant green bursts. But the past decade has brought increasingly erratic access to water. Each spring, the local irrigation district announces potential cuts after assessing snowpack runoff and the available water stored in nearby McPhee Reservoir. In 2021, the farm received just 10% of its water allocation and was forced to leave 6,000 acres unplanted. In 2022, 30% of the water came in, and last year, 34%, which the farm was able to increase to 50% after leasing shares from other water users.
To survive, they adapted. Every year, the farm’s leadership creates numerous plans for different water scenarios. They have applied for grants, implemented low-flow nozzles in the irrigation system, installed small-scale hydropower generators. They joined a Land Institute pilot program to test crops that use less water.
On a day in late May [2022] when wildfire smoke obscured the throat of an ancient volcano called Shiprock in the distance, I visited the Ute Mountain Ute farming and ranching operation in the southwestern corner of Colorado. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
“We still haven’t thrown the towel in,” said Simon Martinez. “Nobody ever thought, when the reservoir was built, that there wouldn’t be enough water to supply the farms that have been put out here. It’s not only us; it’s happening all through southwestern Colorado.”
Low-water years leave their mark. Brush and scrub quickly reclaim unplanted fields. Employees laid off during dry years are hard to replace. During consecutive years of heat and drought, farms that rely on the basin’s many smaller reservoirs become even more vulnerable. As the number of dry years grows, it is increasingly uncertain how much shortage the Ute Mountain Farm and Ranch Enterprise can sustain in the long term, despite the farmers’ determination to adapt.
“We still haven’t thrown the towel in,” said Simon Martinez. “Nobody ever thought, when the reservoir was built, that there wouldn’t be enough water to supply the farms that have been put out here. It’s not only us; it’s happening all through southwestern Colorado.”
Low-water years leave their mark. Brush and scrub quickly reclaim unplanted fields. Employees laid off during dry years are hard to replace. During consecutive years of heat and drought, farms that rely on the basin’s many smaller reservoirs become even more vulnerable. As the number of dry years grows, it is increasingly uncertain how much shortage the Ute Mountain Farm and Ranch Enterprise can sustain in the long term, despite the farmers’ determination to adapt.
Arizona Rivers Map via Geology.com.
When Water Disappears
Hundreds of miles south, Will Clemens manages his uncle’s 2,100-acre farm, cultivating cotton, alfalfa and Bermuda grass. Farmers in this region operate with a year-round growing season punctuated by dust storms and summer monsoons.
In this intense environment, wells were the only water source before Colorado River water became available. Until the 1980s, farmers drew their water from deep underground, contributing to fissures, land subsidence and drying wells. The completion of the Central Arizona Project alleviated the pressure, delivering farmers cheap imported river water that was classified as lower priority and the first to be cut during shortages. Deliveries continued until 2022, when low water levels at Lake Mead triggered federal cuts, and central Arizona farms lost access. In response, Clemens’ local irrigation district drilled a dozen new wells.
Without the river, Clemens and his neighbors have seen the canals’ water drop. At times, their irrigation district will cut off water before a field is fully irrigated, or struggle to keep up with the farmers’ water orders. More pressure on groundwater raises questions about what is sustainable in the future. Large parts of Arizona have no legal limits on pumping water from the ground. Even areas with legally protected groundwater have failed to meet a safe yield goal set in the 1980s to balance groundwater taken each year with naturally replenished water by 2025.
Some central Arizona farmers are selling or leasing their farmland to solar developers, as water dwindles and energy demands grow. Miles up the road from where Clemens farms, sleek black grids of solar panels gleam next to green alfalfa. For years, Arnold Burruel, Clemens’ uncle, has been in talks with a solar developer about selling the land.
“I’ve been asking myself: Does America really need to be in the agriculture industry?” Burruel said. “America is not totally enamored with agriculture when it comes to pesticides, herbicides, groundwater, GMOs — all of the above. We are at a crossroads. Are we going to continue to farm the way we are farming and heavily subsidize growers that can’t make ends meet? Society has to come up with an answer.”
California uses the most water of any state in the Colorado River Basin, partly for its cities along the Pacific Coast but a substantial amount for agriculture in the Imperial Valley. Photo December 2015/Allen Best
When Water is Abundant
From above,the All American Canal forms a stark blue line, slicing through the Algodones Dunes. One of the world’s largest canals, it is fed by the Imperial Dam, which diverts up to 6.8 million gallons of water each minute from the Colorado River.
This is the only water source for 500,000 acres of Imperial Valley farmland. Farms here are protected by senior rights at low risk of cuts and receive regular releases from Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States. During summer months, the sun looms over the valley’s dusty, flat horizon, and temperatures often climb above 100 degrees. Despite decades of drought and growing water shortage, water has flowed uninterrupted to the Imperial Valley.
Fourth-generation family farmer Jack Vessey, who oversees a 10,000-acre produce operation, knows the canal system well. Growing up, he searched for places to swim on hot summer days.
“We take water seriously,” said Vessey, who added sprinkler systems, which are more efficient than flood irrigation. In recent years, the Imperial Irrigation District joined other communities throughout the basin in voluntarily cutting water through 2026 in exchange for federal funds. The district’s compensation was several hundred dollars more per acre-foot than other participants. But as funding set aside for Western water by the Biden administration is drawn down, it is unclear how much will be available to pay for future voluntary cuts.
Vessey is aware of the growing pressure on the river and the valley’s farms, but he emphasizes that the community has helped with shortages and is protective of its water.
“I have a responsibility for the people who work here to make sure we survive,” he said. “I have to be a little selfish at some point and say, ‘Keep giving us the water we need.’ I know we’ve got to do our part, but I can look in the mirror and say we are not wasting water, we are growing food people need.
“If it wasn’t for that canal coming off the Colorado River, this would just turn to desert.”
This project was supported by the National Geographic Society’s World Freshwater Initiative.
The hard news about the Colorado River since my last post here is not good; we had a storm that dropped around two feet of snow above the 8,000-foot elevation – well, maybe the 9,000-foot elevation. But that was followed by a couple weeks of ridiculously warm weather for February and early March, with more 50-degree weather forecast into the near future, and overnight lows often in the 20s, rather than down around zero. Forecasts for the runoff this year range around a third of the ‘historic normal,’ which is an increasingly meaningless number – and dangerous too, MAGA-thinking, keeping alive the hope that eventually the Colorado River will be great again if we just wait it out, or close our eyes and wish real hard, with real violence toward realists….
The Bureau bases its ‘averages’ on the recent 30-year average going by decades – so now the ‘long-term average’ is based on 1991-2020. Back as recently as 2019, it was based on the average from 1981-2010, which was more than a million acre-feet per year higher than the current 30-year average. God help us when we’re figuring in the decade of the 2020s into a 2001-2030 average – the new average would probably make this years runoff look better than it looks by the 1991-2020 average, but there’s certainly an element of delusion in that.
The ‘soft news’ about the Colorado River recently has been a declaration of ‘personhood’ for the river by the Colorado River Indian Tribes (CRIT). This is a lovely gesture by people who have been struggling for ‘personhood’ themselves for 150 years in the river’s region, and still are not quite at the table in negotiating over the river’s future, even though they have ‘used’ the river, often in fairly ‘civilized’ ways, for many hundreds if not thousands of years more than the white masters of the river.
But it seemed naive (or maybe just cynical) for the ‘lamestream media’ to ask if this declaration of personhood was going to ‘help save the river.’ We probably need to face the fact that, until we get serious about slowing down the warming of the planet, we can do nothing by way of nomenclatter to ‘help save the river’ – and even then, the best we could do would be to maintain the river where it is now, or at least not a whole lot worse – which is what’s going to happen if every year we continue to put more new greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than we did the year before. I do not see how considering the river a ‘person’ is going to change that much.
I think we should also consider that granting ‘personhood’ to another set of living ecosystems might be kind of anthropocentric. I can barely contemplate what goes into ‘riverhood,’ for example, but watching a stream one sees a system very much engaged in interaction with its whole neighborhood – giving water to the surrounding land when the land’s water table is low, and taking on water the land can’t hold when it is wet. ‘Riverhood,’ I infer, has aspects of sharing, giving and receiving, that might have things to teach us about improving ‘personhood,’ rather than operating on the assumption that all life on the planet would love to be reduced to ‘personhood’…. Just thinking out loud, sorry.
Graphic via Holly McClelland/High Country News.
Our real question today is whether we can ‘save the river system’ – the structure for storage and distribution we have laid over the river – a question with which we need to actually spend some constructive time. And that kind of leads into the second part of my second ‘era’ in updating Fred Dellenbaugh’s 1903 Romance of the Colorado River: the ‘Era of Conquest.’ (First, remember, was the ‘Era of Exploration and Discovery.’)
World War II, where I left the story last post, is a natural break in the Era of Conquering the Colorado River. Prior to World War II, we saw the Bureau do its greatest work: overseeing the construction of Hoover Dam, Imperial Dam and the All-American Canal under the Boulder Canyon Project, as well as Parker Dam to back up water for the 250-mile Colorado River Aqueduct to the West Coast cities. It is hard not to call it a masterpiece of regional urban-industrial development. In our six or eight thousand-year history of humans trying to create ‘civilizations’ to constructively deal with exploding populations, the Boulder Canyon Act stands tall as a public work, fitting for a state struggling to become a mass-society democracy (possible?) rather than putting people to work on massive tombs for the self-proclaimed ‘God of the Sun’ or maybe ‘The Son of God.’
Advocates for private-sector industry will be quick to say it could not have been done without the private contractors, ‘the Six Companies’ and most notably Henry J. Kaiser. Critics of private-sector industry will be as quick to say that the private sector has not produced very many large-scale industrial organizers like Henry J – who demonstrated than you can do big work and also take good care of the people doing it. He did not rest on his laurels but capitalized on that regional system with his Fontana steel and aluminum plants and Liberty Shipyards up the West Coast.
Green Mountain Reservoir, on the Blue River between Kremmling and and Silverthorne, was built for Western Slope interests. Photo/Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District via The Mountain Town News.
The war effort cut off most domestic development – but the Bureau of Reclamation did complete two dams on the Colorado River during the war years. One was the Green Mountain Dam and Powerplant on the Blue River high in the river’s headwaters, part of the equally massive Colorado-Big Thompson Project. More about this in the next post.
The other was a modest diversion dam below Parker Dam on the Lower Colorado: Headgate Rock Dam – for the Colorado River Indian Tribes! With all the tribes in the Colorado Basin feeling – righteously – left out of river development, one might think the Bureau would make a bit of a big deal about the fact that their first Colorado River project completed after the Boulder Canyon Project was a diversion dam for irrigating Indian agriculture. Yet I can find none of the usual historical and statistic evidence in the Bureau websites about the Headgate Rock Dam, like they have for all of the other Colorado River projects, each getting its own website. Possibly this is because the operation of the dam was turned over to the Bureau of Indian Affairs Office after construction was finished.
It is, however, an interesting story. The tribes along the river were farming like Nile Valley Egyptians, planting in the new layer of silt laid down annually by the snowmelt floods, crops that needed little further irrigation. That worked until the federal Indian agents started moving Hopi and Navajo bands onto their reservation in the 1860s – the reservations truly were ‘concentration camps,’ forcing the move to ‘civilized’ agriculture. This had moved the Indian agents to acquire some pumps round the turn of the century, to water land beyond the riparian floodplain. But when the gates on Hoover Dam were closed in the mid-1930s, that ended the annual snowmelt floods, also ending the traditional agricultural economy.
So the Bureau plotted out a gravity-flow diversion dam and canal in 1938, and began construction. But construction did not really accelerate until 1941, when in one of America’s most shamefully hysteric events 17,000 Japanese-Americans were ‘relocated’ to the Colorado River Indian Tribes (CRIT) reservation – undeniably a concentration camp at that point, if only for the concentration of people. But that added not just a lot of hungry mouths, but a proven workforce that joined the First People in working on the Headgate Rock Diversion Dam and the canal works to carry the water.
It would be both insensitive and naive to speak of a ‘happy ending,’ but as the interred Japanese did in many of the desert places they were sent to, their concentration camp became a very livable village system; some stayed on after the war, and today there is a memorial monument and periodic celebration commemorating the positive relationship that developed between two ‘unwanted peoples’ – the uprooted Japanese and the Indians who forcibly shared their homeland. A story that, for some reason, the Bureau is not interested in telling….
Meanwhile, however, the Bureau was not lying dormant. Immediately after the war’s end, the Bureau released what amounted to a smorgasbord of opportunities, under the title The Colorado River: A Natural Menace Becomes a National Resource. This proposed 134 possible projects for the development of the entire river basin for human uses – cautioning that there was not enough water in the river to build them all, thereby intruding the good old all-American element of interstate competition. Fifty-eight of those proposed projects were for the Lower Basin states, but the other 88 were for the Upper Basin states. If the pre-war Colorado River development had all been about the Compact’s Lower Basin states, the post-war development would begin with controlling the ‘natural menace’ in the Upper Basin states and putting the water to work.
The 1946 Bureau report divided the Upper Basin into three different divisions, based on the River’s three main tributaries above the canyons: there were 33 projects for the Green River Division out of Wyoming and Colorado but flowing mostly (but not entirely) through eastern Utah; 35 projects for the ‘Grand Division’ (the Upper Colorado-Gunnison Rivers, originating in Colorado but flowing into Utah (using the older name for the Upper Colorado); and 20 projects for the San Juan Division, most of whose tributary waters flowed out of Colorado’s San Juan Mountains but the river itself flowed mostly through northern New Mexico and southern Utah.
The Little Snake River is about to join the Yampa River on Oct. 8, 2020. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
An obvious challenge lay in the absence of any coordination between those natural divisions of the Upper Basin and the geographically-irrelevant state boundaries. Every major tributary except for the Gunnison River crossed at least one state boundary. The Little Snake River in the Yampa River Basin is the extreme example, crossing the Colorado-Wyoming border seven times.
Grand River Ditch in Rocky Mountain National Park. Photo credit: Greg Hobbs
Nonetheless, the first task for the Upper Basin, before the Bureau could go to work, was to divide the use of the waters among the states in an Upper Colorado River Basin Compact. This task was made the more difficult because the state boundaries bundled the relatively water-rich Upper Colorado River Basin with other drier river basins – the Platte, Arkansas and Rio Grande rivers in Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico; and the Great Basin in Utah. And water law – plus fervent belief in big-project technology – accommodated the notion of moving water from one river basin to another. The Grand Ditch from high on Colorado’s West Slope to the Poudre River on the East Slope was already being dug by the turn of the century. Unlike water for either agricultural or municipal uses within a basin, nothing flows back into the basin of origin from a transmountain diversion – a total depletion.
The task of dividing the use of the Upper Basin waters was also complicated by vague writing in the Colorado River Compact – Article III(d), stating that ‘the States of the Upper Division will note (sic) 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.’ Was this a caution to the Upper Basin states to make sure their uses did not start cutting into the Lower Basin’s shares? Or was it a mandate to those states to deliver that much water even if it meant cutting their own uses – essentially turning the Compact into a ‘senior water right’ to the Lower Basin?
This was not really foreseen as an issue in 1922, with a river that early 20th-century optimism assumed would run at around 18 million acre-feet (maf) forever. But after the drought of the 1930s and the middling flows of early 40s, plus the mid-war treaty with Mexico to deliver 1.5 maf across that border every year, it was evident to the Upper Basin state negotiators, who gathered in 1946 to work on an Upper Basin Compact, that the river might not always produce the 7.5 maf the Compact promised to them. Their preferred interpretation of the Compact’s Article III(d) would obviously be the ‘cautionary’ interpretation – don’t be the cause of the river flow declining. But they also knew that California and Arizona would interpret it as a ‘mandate’ – and since Congress would have to ratify their Compact, they chose to not ‘waken the bear,’ as California’s current governor would put it.
So rather than dividing the use of the Upper River’s hoped-for allotment of 7.5 maf in four set figures, like the Lower Basin has, they chose to divide it into percentages: 51.75% for Colorado (which provides around 70% of the river’s water), 23% for Utah, 13% for Wyoming, and 11.25% for New Mexico. They also chose to calculate their usage by their depletions of a stream’s flow rather than adding up consumptive uses, as the Lower Basin does. I will not pretend to know exactly how this works – except to note that a measure of depletions by users also includes evaporation and transpiration, while the Lower Basin’s measures allows such considerations to get lost in their calculations of usage. (The Bureau calculates Lower Basin evaporation and transpiration on a separate spreadsheet from recorded uses.)
Meanwhile, however -… Don’t you just love it when a writer intrudes ‘Meanwhile, however’ into an already complicated mess? This is my secondmeanwhile in this post, so it is probably time to give you a break, with only a teaser about the next step in this growing ganglia of complexity.
While the still somewhat beloved Bureau of Reclamation, creator of Hoover Dam and the New West, was just cranking up the mill for the development of the rest of the Colorado River Basin waters, the Upper Basin states had already been working out their separate peace over the transmountain diversion issue between the wet Colorado River basins of origin with low populations, and drier basins of destination with large populations across the mountains. This is a story that goes back to the 1930s, with the ‘New Deal’ federal government putting out large amounts of funding for public projects in all the states – but with the caveat that for any state to tap into that funding, the whole state had to want the project…. Stay tuned for the next thrilling episode in The West’s Romance with Conquest.
Colorado transmountain diversions via the State Engineer’s office
Snowpack in the Roaring Fork Valley basin is at 65% of normal as of March 13 — the lowest level recorded since the modern snowpack telemetric system started collecting data in 1981. The North Star Nature Preserve east of Aspen, typically snowcovered in March, was nearly bare on March 12. CREDIT: LAURINE LASSALLE/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Temperature and precipitation data in the Roaring Fork Valley shows that most of this winter has experienced above-average temperatures with below-average precipitation, making this season one of the hottest and driest on record.
“We notice [the lack of snow] because [it’s visible], but we keep on having these crazy-warm years, and at the end of the day, that’s what’s going to be the driver of change,” said Adam McCurdy, forest and climate director at Aspen Center for Environmental Studies (ACES). He predicts that big snow years will return, but that the long-term warming trend will continue in a way that’s “going to move spring runoff, it’s going to change water availability even if we, say, keep the same snowpack.”
According to NOAA’s Climate at a Glance tool, Pitkin County experienced its second warmest and 10th driest winter on record, with data going back as far as 1895, as average daily temperatures from November through February reached 26.9 degrees this winter, or four degrees above normal, behind the winter of 1906-07’s record high of 27.5 degrees. The county received 6.9 inches of precipitation, including rain and snow, behind 1903-04’s 3.55 inches, 1980-81’s 5.16 inches and 1976-77’s 5.21 inches.
February average temperatures at the Aspen-Pitkin County Airport reached a record high this year, at 31.6 degrees Fahrenheit, which is about six degrees above normal, according to data from the local National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) station, which began collecting climate data in 1998.
Although this winter’s lack of snow is striking, with measured levels reaching record lows, rising temperatures might be cause of greater concern as part of a larger trend, impacting spring runoff and local forests. Experts hope that precipitation this spring and summer can still bring the necessary moisture to mitigate current drought conditions.
Snowpack in the Roaring Fork Valley basin is at 65% of normal as of March 13, according to SNOTEL, which is the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s automated mountain weather network, and Aspen Journalism’s snowpack dashboard. It’s the lowest level recorded since the modern snowpack telemetric system started collecting data in 1981. At Independence Pass, snowpack reached 56% of normal on March 13, but state climatologist Russ Schumacher told Summit Daily on March 4 that monthly hand measurements, which go back nearly a century, show that this year’s snowpack at Independence Pass was among the lowest 3% of the 88 years on record.
The SNOTEL station at McClure Pass in 2023, when snowpack held 23.6 inches of snow water equivalent on March 13, well above the 8.3 inches on March 13, 2026. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
According to a climate sensor located at the city of Aspen’s water department in the Castle Creek Valley, where snowfall, temperature and precipitation data has been tracked since 1934, a total of 71.5 inches of snow fell from November through February, making this winter the driest in the past 30 years and the 12th driest on record, behind the winter of 1976-77, which received 47.5 inches of snow from November through February, and the 1980-81 season, when city records recorded 40.9 inches of snow. It’s worth noting that the station at the city’s water plant has moved locations over the years and changed its equipment in the 1980s, so comparisons using data collected before those changes may be skewed.
A total of 6 inches of precipitation, including rain and snow, fell on the Roaring Fork Valley between November and February, according to Gridded Surface Meteorological (or gridMET) data that goes back to 1979. That’s below last year’s 8.5 inches and represents 55% of the 30-year average, making the 2025-26 winter season the second driest, after 1980-81. Although precipitation has been below average, McCurdy said wide variations in rain and snow totals year over year are expected. “While this is an exceptionally dry winter precipitationwise, it’s not outside of the range of historic variability,” McCurdy said. “What we’re seeing temperaturewise is … certainly where we’re heading and we’ve seen it again and again. So I think that’s not just one data point, it’s another data point in a long-term trend.”
While this winter’s lack of snow is striking, rising temperatures might be cause of greater concern as part of a larger trend, impacting spring runoff and local forests. CREDIT: LAURINE LASSALLE/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Above-average temperatures are becoming more common
NOAA’s 2018 modeling trend shows that average daily temperatures from November through February in Pitkin County have increased by 0.3 degrees every 10 years, mostly driven by rising low temperatures that have gone up by 0.5 degrees every decade. According to the 2024 Colorado Climate Change Report from the Colorado Climate Center, annual average temperatures across the state warmed by 2.3 degrees from 1980 to 2022 and are expected to keep rising due to climate change. By 2050, statewide annual temperatures are projected to increase by 2.5 to 5.5 degrees compared with 1971-2000, and between 1 degree and 4 degrees compared with 2022, under a medium-low emissions scenario.
Colorado statewide annual temperature anomaly (°F) with respect to the 1901-2000 average. Graphic credit: Colorado Climate Center
“Colorado has warmed at a faster rate than the global average and is expected to continue to warm,” Peter Goble, assistant state climatologist at Colorado State University’s Colorado Climate Center, told Aspen Journalism. “Having said that, not every winter going forward is going to be as warm as this winter. And, in fact, I think this winter was so unusual that I think this winter will be considered a much-warmer-than-normal winter for some time to come.”
The impact of this warm and dry winter will be seen in the spring runoff as a much-lower-than-average peak runoff is to be expected, but summer conditions are still uncertain as experts hope for spring and summer precipitation that would lessen drought conditions. CREDIT: LAURINE LASSALLE/ASPEN JOURNALISM
The NOAA sensor at ASE recorded 94 days with above-average minimum temperatures out of the 120 days from November to February, and 89 days with above-average maximum temperatures, for a total of 81 days with both above-average minimum and maximum temperatures. In other words, about three-fourths of the days were warmer than normal. In comparison, November 2024-February 2025 had 54 days with above-normal temperatures.
Looking at the Roaring Fork Valley as a whole, gridMET data shows that this winter counted 92 days with above-average daily temperatures, above 2005’s 85 days. The GridMET dataset from scientists at the University of California Merced combines data from weather stations in a given area and uses modeling to generate surface climate datasets instead of relying on one specific weather station.
The data also shows that warm winters have become more frequent since the mid-1990s. According to gridMET data, which goes back to 1979, winters in the dataset in prior years with the highest number of days with above-average temperatures include 2018 and 1981, but 1981 was followed by a decade of mostly cooler temperatures and above-average precipitation. “On the other hand, 2018 and 2026 are both part of consistently hotter-than-average winters and, more recently, drier starts to the season,” according to ACES.
Although the entire state of Colorado is experiencing drought conditions, the upper Roaring Fork Valley has been experiencing “exceptional” drought conditions since Dec. 23, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, with about 28% of Pitkin County and 19% of Eagle County experiencing such conditions as of March 10. (“Exceptional” is the most severe level.) The Roaring Fork watershed is one of the only two places throughout the entire West to experience this level of drought.
Colorado Drought Monitor map March 10, 2026.
“One of the main reasons that, when you look at the U.S. Drought Monitor, the Roaring Fork Valley stands out is because of the mix of both short- and long-term drought conditions in place,” Goble said, adding that the Roaring Fork Valley was very hot and dry last summer, while other areas around the Colorado Rockies received some decent moisture. “The Roaring Fork Valley was already en route [to drought] going into this winter season,” he said.
Average daily temperatures, or the average of high and low temperatures, in the Roaring Fork River watershed have been 5 degrees above 1991-2020 historical average this winter (November-February), surpassing the previous record year of 1981, when temperatures were 4 degrees above normal. For February, average temperatures for the Roaring Fork Valley were the fourth highest on record, at 27.6 degrees.
Maximum and minimum temperatures are getting closer
On average, maximum and minimum temperatures recorded at ASE have both been approximately 6 degrees higher than normal in February. From November through February, maximum and minimum temperatures have also been roughly 6 degrees above normal. Last winter, maximum and minimum temperatures were, on average, 1 degree below normal.
GridMET data shows that, on average, maximum and minimum temperatures are getting closer, a trend that has been particularly noticeable in the past five to six years. The gap for November through February reached an average of 19.7 degrees for the Roaring Fork Valley, the lowest reading on record.
Rising low temperatures can affect the ability to make snow at ski resorts, as reported byAspen Journalism in 2019 and The Sopris Sun in January, while the need to rely on snowmaking to compensate for the lack of snow increases.
McCurdy explained that snowpack maintains and accumulates “cold content” during the winter and that low nighttime temperatures allow this thermal buffer to form and keep snowpack colder longer, preventing it from melting too fast.
“Before the snow starts to rapidly melt, the snowpack needs to become isothermic; in other words, the entire [snowpack] column is about 0 degrees Celsius [32 degrees Fahrenheit] and ready to melt,” he said. “Because of the warm winter [and the rising low temperatures], the snowpack is entering spring closer to isothermic, which could result in a pretty rapid melt-off.”
Historically, the gap between high and low temperatures averages 22.6 degrees. According to NOAA, 25.5 degrees separate high temperatures from low temperatures at ASE for this winter, lower than last year’s 26 degrees but higher than the nearly 25 degrees recorded in the winters of 2023-24 and 2022-23.
Possible impacts
“The real impact of this warm, dry weather will be seen in the spring runoff,” McCurdy said, adding that a much-lower-than-average peak runoff is to be expected.
He said most trees are dormant during the winter until spring runoff, when they pull up a lot of water to use for the rest of the summer, but if their water supply is low, they’re not going to be able to grow as much or be able to produce resins and chemical defenses to fend off things such as bark beetles and other invasive insects.
“Trees have a long hydrologic memory,” he said. “One year isn’t as impactful to them as some other species where they’ll build up water. They have deep roots. They can pull up groundwater, but by the same token, multiple years of drought is a hard hole for them to get out of.”
McCurdy said the aspen population, for example, has declined and dry winters tend to negatively affect them. “Assuming we don’t get more precipitation, we could lose more aspens.”
Pitkin County experienced its second warmest and 10th driest winter on record, with data going back as far as 1895, as average daily temperatures from November through February reached 26.9 degrees this winter. A sensor on Castle Creek recorded a total of 71.5 inches of snowfall from November through February, making this winter the driest in the past 30 years. While most of the terrain on Aspen Mountain is still covered enough for skiing, some slopes have begun to melt out. CREDIT: CURTIS WACKERLE/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Goble said the lack of snow will probably lead to below-normal water supplies and impact river recreation, and it could lead to higher fire danger. Major factors that contribute to a large wildfire season in Colorado are low snowpack, early snowmelt and a hot summer. As of early March, snowpack is certainly low and early spring runoff is expected, but the severity of summer conditions is still uncertain.
“Just because things have been dry recently doesn’t mean that we’ll continue to be dry in summer,” Goble said. “Large wildfires are not a guarantee yet at this point, but I do think that with the very low snowpack numbers that we have in place now, it’s a higher probability than a normal year.”
Although the entire state of Colorado is experiencing drought conditions, the upper Roaring Fork Valley has been experiencing “exceptional” drought conditions since Dec. 23. The Roaring Fork watershed is one of the only two places throughout the entire West to experience this level of drought. An almost snow-free south-facing hillside above the North Star Nature Preserve is shown here on March 12. CREDIT: LAURINE LASSALLE/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Although a change in the weather that would bring precipitation levels closer to average would not be unprecedented, it is also statistically unlikely.
“In our 47-year record, there is only a single year that had enough precipitation to dig us out of the hole we’re currently in. In 1995, from this point in February until the end of May, there were 22 inches of precipitation; that’s about double the average precipitation that normally falls over that period,” according to an ACES blog post. “Based on a model of total precipitation for this period, we have a roughly 1% chance of ending the year with a normal amount of precipitation.”
Goble agrees that the chances to get back to normal snowpack this year are slim. “We just don’t have enough winter left to make up the deficits that are already in place. It would take a record kind of mid-to-late March through April in order to get us back up to normal,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean that spring and summer precipitation isn’t important. If we have a wet spring or and we have a wet or cooler-than-normal summer, those types of things could mitigate some of the drought impact that we might otherwise see this summer.”
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
Click the link to read the article on the Tucson.com website (Tony Davis). Here’s an excerpt:
March 14, 2026
The record-breaking heat in this month’s forecast is likely to help push the Colorado River Basin to the edge of “disaster,” in which drastic cuts in water use will be necessary next year, experts say. The heat is almost certain to slash river flows even more than already expected after the snowpack in key sites above Lake Powell hit record lows this winter. The upshot: Lake Powell is likely to get less than one-third the water from the river that it would in an average April to July. The unusually low flows won’t be bad enough to push the basin into immediate disaster this year. But several experts said it is virtually inevitable that major cuts in river water use will be needed next year in Arizona and other Western states — unless the winter of 2026-27 is far cooler and wetter than the current one.
“We can survive this year, no problem. What’ll be interesting to see is if this year puts enough scare into the states to begin real serious rethinking about how we manage water,” said David Wegner, a retired U.S. Bureau of Reclamation planner and congressional staffer who now sits on a National Academy of Sciences board that reviews water issues.
The Bureau of Reclamation already projected, in February, that Lake Powell is likely to fall below the level at which the turbines at adjoining Glen Canyon Dam can generate electricity — 3,490 feet — by December 2026. Given the trend toward lower snowpack, higher temperatures and less runoff of water into the river, it’s very possible if not likely, that future forecasts will show the lake falling below 3,490 feet sooner than December. But most observers, including Kuhn and Wegner expect the bureau to try to forestall that possibility in advance by releasing extra water from reservoirs upstream of Lake Powell, led by Flaming Gorge reservoir at the Utah-Wyoming border. Powell is at the Arizona-Utah border.
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
March 6, 2026
Might the Colorado River runoff be as bad as 2002? March could bring snow and rain. Almost certainly it will bring warm temperatures.
What if March brings temperatures suitable for flip flops in places like Steamboat, Vail and Telluride? And what if the snow that does fall on the headwaters of the Colorado River is average or less?
Things could get much more grim in the Colorado River Basin this year, conceivably as bad as 2002. That year was memorable for the pitiful runoff, the peak barely discernible in Glenwood Canyon in April and May. Worse came in June when three fires erupted at very nearly the same time.
The Hayman Fire (2002) was the state’s largest recorded wildfire. Smoke from the massive blaze could be seen and smelled across the state. Photo credit to Nathan Bobbin, Flickr Creative Commons.
Bill Owens, who was then Colorado’s governor, toured the state by plane, visiting the Hayman fire that started near Colorado Springs, the Coal Seam Fire at Glenwood Springs, and the Missionary Ridge Fire north of Durango. “All of Colorado is on fire,” he said, a remark that some, concerned about impacts to tourism, derided as an overstatement. But within that statement was a certain truth.
This week, NOAA’s Colorado River Basin Forecast Center released its projected flows into Lake Powell. It doesn’t look pretty. Jeff Lukas, the principle at Lukas Climate Research and Consulting, assembled this graphic that shows how the projections visually compare to other years since 1991.
“Despite better snowfall in February, the most probable forecast remains bleak at 36% of average,” he said on LinkedIn. That, he added, would put runoff in the observed flows into Powell in 2012, 2013, 2018, 2021, and 2025. “In other words, a bad neighborhood,” he said.
An unusually wet and cool March through May would only get the inflow to 65% of average. On the other hand, it could go in the other direction. A warm and dry March could eviscerate the existing snowpack.
James Eklund, a water attorney and former director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, pointed out that the long-term average has been 6.7 million acre-feet. The March forecast projected runoff of around 2.3 million ace-feet.
Colorado transmountain diversions via the State Engineer’s office
“The river cares not about our legal arguments,” he said in a LinkedIn post, a reference to the intense squabbling about how to share a river that has been rapidly diminishing in average volume in the 21st century. Even in places like Arvada, people who don’t realize that they are watering their lawns and taking their showers with water imported from a Colorado River tributary do realize the Colorado River has problems.
The runoff could conceivably be worse than 2002. There’s a big difference, though. In 2002, the reservoirs held a great deal of water. Not completely full, but within a good water year of being full. Total runoff that year was 25% of average. Most years since then have been below average, leaving water levels of Powell within striking distance of deadpool.
From his post in the Glenwood Springs area, Eric Kuhn sees March storms having potential to bump up the runoff numbers. “This is one of those years where March could make a big difference. But when I look at the outlook for three or four weeks, it looks like March will definitely be above average in temperatures, which is not good news. I think it’s too soon to tell whether we will have average or below average precipitation. But warm temperatures will not be good to the snowpack.” [ed. emphasis mine]
This year’s runoff will add tension to the already fraught situation in the Colorado River Basin. Kuhn, a former manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, said he wouldn’t be surprised if the Bureau of Reclamation — an agency within the Department of Interior that oversees operation of the federal dams — finds it must release one million acre-feet less than the base 7.5 million acre-feet release.
This could trigger a legal fight. The Colorado River Compact imposes a requirement upon the upper Colorado River Basin states to deliver 75 million acre-feet on a rolling 10-year average. This would take the upper-basin states below that threshold.
That provision in the compact has been debated almost since Congress approved it in 1929. But, under the most aggressive interpretation by lower-basin states, this could put the upper-basin out of compliance. As such, this could be the year that puts the basin states on long road to a U.S. Supreme Court review.
A meager runoff this year will also put the Department of Interior into an uncomfortable position of having to make decisions. Kuhn says the federal agency’s water officials have traditionally tried to mediate disputes among the seven basin states. This year the agency might have to make decisions that leave people upstream and down unhappy.
“They could sit back (in former days) and say we are not going to take a position because we don’t want to upset either side. We have to work with both sides. Those days have come to an end, unfortunately.”
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Oh dear. You’d best get your skiing in now, because it looks like the spring melt will hit a lot earlier than usual. A big heat wave is on its way to the West, with the most unseasonably warm temperatures occurring in the Southwest and Four Corners regions, further dimming hopes for a spring snowpack-bolstering miracle. This could mean that mountain snowpack in the Colorado River Basin has already peaked, which would be dire for streamflows.
My apologies for bringing you more doom and gloom climate news. At least it’s cold in Alaska, though.
And that’s topping off the warmest winter on record in the Upper Colorado River Basin.
☘️ Annals of Alfalfa 🍀
As the Colorado River shrinks, the “simple” and “obvious” solutions to the crisis seem to multiply.
You know, it’s a lot of: “Whatchya gotta do is …. “
“… stop watering them golf courses.”
“… stop population growth.”
“… keep people from moving to deserts.”
“… shut down dem data centers!”
And then, the most common one: “ … stop raising cattle and hay in the desert.”
Kenny Torrella, who writes for Vox, brought up that last one on the social media platform Blue Sky recently:
While this fix holds more water (so to speak) than the preceding ones, it is not actually a solution — at least not a workable one.
There is only one obvious remedy for the Colorado River crisis, and that is for its collective users to consume less of the river’s water. Since irrigating alfalfa takes up a larger share of the river’s water than any other single use, it seems to follow that growing less of the crop would leave more water in the river. But this does not account for the way water law works.
Let’s imagine that California could designate alfalfa as an illicit crop and ban cultivation of it and other livestock forage crops. That would force a bunch of big farmers in the Imperial Valley — home of the largest single water user on the entire river — to tear up about 200,000 acres of water-guzzling alfalfa.
Problem solved? Not quite.
The Salton Sea (pictured above ) straddles the Imperial and Coachella valleys. (Source: Water Education Foundation)
The Imperial Irrigation District has senior rights to use a buttload of Colorado River water for “beneficial use,” which in this case means agriculture. Specific farmers may decide that without alfalfa, they’ll simply throw in the towel and stop irrigating altogether. But there’s no way the irrigation district as a whole is going to stop diverting that water without some sort of compensation, because while farmers pay the irrigation district a negligible amount for water, the irrigation district gets it virtually for free. That means the district is incentivized to continue using all of the water to which it has rights, and rather than leaving it in the river, they would most likely sell it to another farmer growing another crop. The result: No net reduction in water consumption.
Torrella’s claim that alfalfa’s water use gets “almost no air time” is a little off. I’ve written about it at least a zillion times at the Land Desk and at High Country News, but many a mainstream news outlet has done the same. Even the Paris Review had a pieceon it. The reason “growing less alfalfa” doesn’t show up in talks about negotiations over the Colorado River, or as an alternative in the feds’ proposed operating plan, is not because of “agricultural exceptionalism,” but because these aren’t crop-level negotiations.
The two Colorado River basins and the feds are currently looking at the macro level, and trying to hash out which basin will take what level of cuts, how those cuts will be determined, and what if anything will be done to fend off dead pool at Glen Canyon Dam. Only when all of that is settled can the individual states in each basin duke it out over respective consumption cuts, followed by the biggest users within each state. Finally, those users can make decisions about how to use their now smaller share of water, and really just about anything goes so long as it fits the definition of “beneficial use.”
Maybe they’ll continue to grow alfalfa using less water via deficit irrigation, maybe they’ll opt for a higher-value, less water-intensive crop like broccoli, maybe they’ll use it to grow cacti, but what counts is that they’ll be taking less water out of the Colorado River, regardless.
It’s not that the alfalfaphobes are wrong; it probably is a good idea to grow less alfalfa and fewer cows in the desert. For that matter, we should fallow golf courses, restrict urban growth, and take other steps to live within our means. But what’s needed now is an agreement on drastic and immediate cuts in water consumption. What that means for alfalfa or golf courses or Arizona suburbs will be dealt with later.
Now for a little data dump re alfalfa and other irrigated crops in Imperial County, California1:
$238,752,000: Gross value of alfalfa hay harvested in Imperial County, California, in 2024.
183,252: Harvested acres of alfalfa hay in 2024.
$1,300/acre: Per-acre value of alfalfa hay harvested in 2024.
6 acre-feet: Approximate amount of water required to irrigate one acre of alfalfa in the Imperial Valley for a year.
$20/acre-foot: Amount Imperial Valley farmers pay for water.
$134,822,000: Gross value of broccoli harvested in Imperial County in 2024.
$12,136/acre: Per-acre value of broccoli harvested in 2024.
3 acre-feet: Approximate amount of water required to irrigate one acre of broccoli in the Imperial Valley.
$259,861,000: Gross value of head and leaf lettuce harvested in 2024.
$9,012/acre: Per-acre value of head and leaf lettuce harvested in 2024.
2-3 acre-feet: Approximate amount of water required to irrigate one acre of lettuce in the Imperial Valley.
🐟 Colorado River Chronicles 💧
Today’s vocabulary term is: Present Perfected Rights, a term you may be hearing a lot more of in coming months.
Article VIII of the Colorado River Compact states:
Later, the Boulder Canyon Project Act of 1928 decreed that the “dam and reservoir” of the title (which would become Hoover Dam and Lake Mead) shall be used for the “satisfaction of present perfected rights … .”
That’s fine and good, but what are present perfected rights, or PPRs? The Compact never says what that term means. In fact, it wasn’t clearly defined until the Supreme Court laid it out in its 1964 Arizona v. California decision, a key document in the Law of the River:
Clear as mud, right?
Generally speaking, PPRs are the most senior rights on the Colorado River, they predate the Colorado River Compact, and are the last rights subject to curtailment in times of shortage. They are the “first” in the “first in time, first in right” summation of the prior appropriation doctrine, which is the foundation of Western water law.
Arizona v. California goes on to say that “in any year where there is fewer than 7.5 million acre-feet available for use in California, Nevada, and Arizona, the Secretary of the Interior must first supply water to the PPRs in order of priority, regardless of state lines.” Similarly, the Upper Basin’s PPRs will be the last to be cut if curtailments are necessary to meet its non-depletion/minimum-delivery obligation to the Lower Basin.
The Supreme Court required the Lower Basin to submit a list of its PPRs, and here they are from the document itself as submitted in 1967. Some of these, especially the tribal rights, were updated and added to later on.
The first set is for tribal nations in the Lower Basin only:
These are the top six non-tribal PPRs in the Lower Basin by order of size of diversion. There are many more smaller PPRs that are not listed here:
🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭
I’m not sure if I’ve featured this one before, but if so, it’s worth re-upping due to its heightened relevance this year. It’s the Open ET mapping tool, with ET standing for evapotranspiration. It uses satellite imagery to calculate evapotranspiration from individual fields, which is an indicator of how much irrigation is being used and what crop is being grown. Hovering over a field will bring up a chart showing ET for each month, the acreage, and the crop type.
Fewer families are booking spring break vacations to Colorado resort destinations, as weaker-than-normal ski conditions cause drops in reservations made later in the season. Amid the potential for a lower-revenue spring break tourism season, some Western Slope ski towns are focusing on promoting off-mountain activities for families. For most resort towns across Colorado’s western mountains, spring break is a strong period for tourism. Travelers from both in and out of state book trips to the mountains in hopes of hitting the slopes before the end of ski season, and businesses organize seasonal events to draw in visitors. This year’s near historically dry conditions, however, have meant fewer winter bookings to Colorado’s resort destinations — and spring break bookings are seeing the impacts…Colorado’s spring break season, though still bringing in bookings, will likely end with lower revenue for mountain destinations compared to previous years, Foley said. Soard added that the considerable decrease in bookings will likely also lead to impacts for the town’s sales tax collections.
