#Breckenridge and #Gypsum Join Effort to Secure Shoshone Water Rights — Lindsay DeFrates (#ColoradoRiver District) #COriver #aridification

Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism

December 15, 2025

The effort to permanently protect the historic Shoshone water rights gained additional momentum as two more west slope communities committed funding in their 2026 budgets toward the Colorado River District’s $99 million purchase agreement with Xcel Energy. The Town of Breckenridge has pledged $100,000, and the Town of Gypsum has committed $15,000, underscoring the importance of reliable Colorado River flows for communities from the headwaters to the state line and beyond.

By committing financial support for the Shoshone Water Rights Preservation Project, Breckenridge and Gypsum join a large and growing coalition of Western Slope partners working to safeguard flows that support local economies, healthy rivers, and long-term water security for Colorado.

Breckenridge circa 1913 via Breckenridge Resort

“The Shoshone water rights are a cornerstone of the Colorado River system and a critical part of protecting our quality of life in the high country,” said Breckenridge Mayor Kelly Owens. “Breckenridge is proud to stand with partners across the West Slope and headwaters region to keep water in the river, support our outdoor recreation economy, and protect this vital resource for generations to come.”

“Look, in Gypsum we see it every single day, our local ranches, our jobs, our families all depend on the Eagle and the Colorado running strong and flowing,” said Gypsum Mayor Steve Carver. “Backing Shoshone just makes sense. It gives us some certainty when water gets tight. We’re happy to jump in with everybody else and keep that water right here on the Western Slope.”

The Shoshone Water Rights Preservation Coalition, led by the Colorado River District, now includes 35 local governments, water entities, and regional partners across the Western Slope, as well as support from across the state. Together, these partners have committed over $37.3 million toward the $99 million purchase price, in addition to state and federal investments to protect a critical piece of Colorado’s water security.

“Communities across the West Slope continue to step up together in a powerful way,” said Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River District. “Support from Breckenridge and Gypsum reflects a shared understanding that Shoshone is about more than one community or region. It’s about working together to keep the Colorado River and its tributaries flowing for the environment, agriculture, recreation and local communities across Colorado that rely on this water.”

Shoshone Hydroelectric Plant back in the days before I-70 via Aspen Journalism

The Shoshone hydroelectric plant, located in Glenwood Canyon, holds nonconsumptive senior water rights that date back to 1902. These rights are essential for supporting flows in the Colorado River, benefiting agriculture, recreation, rural economies, and water users across the West Slope and beyond.

In December 2023, the Colorado River District entered a purchase and sale agreement with Xcel Energy to acquire and permanently protect the water rights, with plans to negotiate an instream flow agreement with the Colorado Water Conservation Board. This agreement would safeguard future flows, regardless of the Shoshone plant’s operational status.

In January 2025, the Bureau of Reclamation awarded $40 million in federal funding through a program authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act. The River District continues to work with the Bureau and remains optimistic that the project’s broad support and clear public benefit will secure the necessary federal funds to complete this once-in-a-generation investment.

Learn more about the Shoshone Water Rights Preservation Project & Coalition at KeepShoshoneFlowing.org.

The Colorado River Water Conservation District spans 15 Western Slope counties. Colorado River District/Courtesy image

As states draw #ColoradoRiver water, what’s left for the river? — AZCentral.com #COriver #aridification

Aldo Leopold, Colorado River delta, Baja California, Mexico Credit: Courtesy Aldo Leopold Foundation and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives

Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral.com website (Brandon Loomis). Here’s an excerpt:

December 15, 2025

Key Points

Seven states and 30 tribes that depend on the Colorado River are looking for ways to share a shrinking resource, but environmental groups fear little will be left for the river itself.

A wetlands at the end of the river and a fishery at its midpoint show what can happen when water is managed to preserve nature’s needs.

Growing demand on the river and competing interests, including electric power providers, could force negotiators for the states to confront difficult decisions.

CIÉNEGA DE SANTA CLARA, Mexico — The rusty observation tower at the edge of this wastewater-fed marsh offers an osprey-eye view of two possible futures for the parched and overworked Colorado River. To one side, the marsh spreads across more than 20 square miles of pools and islands choked with cattails and phragmites, convoys of pelicans descending and splashing down for a rest on their journey south from the Great Salt Lake or other western waters. Dragonflies hover below, while a fish hawk circles above, scanning the open water between the reeds. This is a vision of a future in which partners across the Western United States and Mexico save enough water that they can spare some for nature, even if it means irrigating it with the salty dregs. On the tower’s other side, boundless flats of sand and cracked mud spread to the horizon across what was, prior to the river’s damming a century ago, one of Earth’s great green estuaries.

Colorado River Dry Delta, terminus of the Colorado River in the Sonoran Desert of Baja California and Sonora, Mexico, ending about 5 miles north of the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California). Date: 12 January 2009. Source http://gallery.usgs.gov/photos/10_15_2010_rvm8Pdc55J_10_15_2010_0#.Ur0mcvfTnrd. Photographer: Pete McBride, U.S. Geological Survey

Jennifer Pitt leaned against a rail atop the tower and scanned that dusty horizon. A century ago, she said, the river had meandered so widely and soaked so much verdant ground there that the naturalist Aldo Leopold had written in “A Sand County Almanac” that “the river was nowhere and everywhere,” unable to “decide which of a hundred green lagoons offered the most pleasant and least speedy path to the Gulf (of California).”

Now the Grand River’s delta supports just a handful of green lagoons, all fed either by wastewater or by targeted environmental irrigation. Pitt leads the Audubon Society’s Colorado River program. She has toiled for decades alongside American and Mexican conservationists to rebuild slivers of living delta from what’s left of the water after dams, farm ditches and growing cities divert most of the great river along its 1,450-mile route from the Rocky Mountains toward its dry mouth on the Sea of Cortez near here. A century ago, the river would have wandered a soaked delta teeming with birds, jaguars and legendary biodiversity. Now, a wastewater marsh must do the ecological heavy lifting.

Jennifer Pitt and Brad Udall at the Getches-Wilkinson Center/Water and Tribes Initiative conference June 5, 2025. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

“If we can’t prioritize taking care of a place like this, I fear for our ability to take care of ourselves,” Pitt said.

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

The next few months will be a turning point in efforts to preserve a measure of nature here and across the river’s length, as the seven U.S. states that split the bulk of the water struggle to reach a new deal among themselves that could also determine how much water is available to nurse a remnant of the river’s own environment. Federal officials have said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is prepared to impose his own cuts if the states can’t reach their own deal, and have said they need a negotiated plan by late winter to avoid that outcome. More than two decades of “megadrought,” unprecedented in U.S. history, have left little wiggle room for year-to-year operations. Reservoirs that were near their 58.48 million-acre-foot capacity in 2000 began the 2026 water year on Oct. 1, with just 21.8 million acre-feet behind the dams. Each acre-foot contains about 326,000 gallons and is roughly enough to support three households for a year, though the bulk of the water flows to the region’s farms.

Jennifer Pitt, the National Audubon Society’s Colorado River program director, paddles a kayak through a restoration site. (Source: Jesus Salazar, Raise the River)

Coyote Gulch’s excellent EV adventure: #CRWUA2025

I’m heading to Las Vegas this morning for the 2025 Colorado River Water Users Association annual conference. Follow along on the CRWUA Twitter Feed.

I am using Turo for my EV rental this trip. I was able to snag a Tesla Model Y. The combination of the Model Y, the Tesla charging network, and the integration with the Tesla navigation system can’t be beat for these EV road trips.

Dancing With Deadpool on the #ColoradoRiver: Edging closer to the Colorado River cliff — Allen Best (BigPivots.com) #COriver #aridification

Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):

December 12, 2025

New ‘book’ explores the evolving thoughts about an increasingly dire situation

To put that into perspective, the Colorado River Compact assumed an average 16.5 million acre-feet at that site, Lees Ferry. The river this century has produced far less. Since 2020, the river flows have declined even more, to an average of 10.8.

September 21, 1923, 9:00 a.m. — Colorado River at Lees Ferry. From right bank on line with Klohr’s house and gage house. Old “Dugway” or inclined gage shows to left of gage house. Gage height 11.05′, discharge 27,000 cfs. Lens 16, time =1/25, camera supported. Photo by G.C. Stevens of the USGS. Source: 1921-1937 Surface Water Records File, Colorado R. @ Lees Ferry, Laguna Niguel Federal Records Center, Accession No. 57-78-0006, Box 2 of 2 , Location No. MB053635.

Might it get worse?

“Dancing With Deadpool,” a new product from the Colorado River Research Group, delivers the short answer.

“Another year or two of low inflows and we will completely blow through the cushions provided by reservoir storage,” says the document’s executive summary. The word “crisis” litters the 64-page production. It has eight chapters written by 22 authors from Colorado and three other Colorado River Basin states.

The Colorado River has fascinated journalists since at least the 1980s. Then, the river was still delivering water to Mexico’s Sea of Cortez but troubles were evident on the horizon. The river now, except for specially engineered releases from upstream dams, disappears entirely after crossing into Mexico.

Since 2022, the Colorado River had become a national story. Empty seats at the annual Colorado River Water Users Association conference in Las Vegas have disappeared, press credentials harder to secure.

The tension even in the last year has grown. The river runoff this year was only 55% of long-term average. The seven basin states remain at an impasse about solutions proportionate to the problem.

“We have now entered a new era: Dancing with Deadpool,” says the report.

Deadpool is the point at which reservoirs can release no water. In 2022, that moment seemed imminent as sandstone walls of Glen Canyon were exposed directly to sunlight after being submerged since shortly after Lake Powell began filling. Then a miracle winter arrived, water levels in the two big reservoirs, Powell and Mead, rose once again, the emergency receded.

Now the crisis is back — and looming larger.

You can scare yourself to death with what-ifs, but we may need something akin to a miracle to avoid full-blown crisis. We cannot have another winter and then runoff like 2002-2003. Or, as several authors point out, runoff like we had in 2025.

As it is, we need another miracle winter, something akin to what diehard Denver Broncos fans remember as “the drive” in a 1987 playoff game. John Elway led his football team 98 yards down the field in Cleveland to tie the game with 37 seconds left. They won in OT.

Brad Udall and Jonathan Overpeck warn against too much optimism. Mother Nature can be stingy. She has been in the past, with one drought period as long as 80 years during the last 2,000 years. Now, the evidence grows that our monkeying with Mother Nature has produced this drought.

In 2017, Udall and Overpeck issued the results of their study that showed that warming alone was responsible for roughly half of the reduced natural flows of the Colorado River, at that point 17%. They delivered a new phrase: “hot drought” as distinguished from “dry drought.” The warmer temperatures were robbing the Colorado River Basin of water.

Precipitation in the basin has also declined 7% in the 21st century, as compared to the 20th century. In their chapter, Udall from Colorado State and Overpeck now at the University of Michigan (but with a summer cabin in San Miguel County), cite two new studies that together provide evidence “suggesting” complicity of humans. Greenhouse gases explain the declined precipitation, too.

As science is never 100%, Udall and Overpeck use cautious language. The studies, they say, “strongly suggest we are in for extended dry periods in the Colorado headwaters in the decades ahead.”

If there is less water, then isn’t the solution simple? Use less!

Easy to say. And for the last 20 years, efforts have been made to nibble away at uses. Cities have been working to make less water-intensive urban landscapes popular. But the far larger story lies in agriculture.

In Colorado and the three upper basin states, for example, about 70% of all the Colorado River water (after trans-basin diversions for irrigation are accounted for) goes to agriculture. How can ag use less water?

Two of the chapters work on this. A trio of academics from Wyoming and one from Colorado take aim specifically at the upper basin states. “The relevant questions are not whether or when cuts will happen, but how deep will they go, how will they be distributed, and how well can the consequences be mitigated?” they ask.

The four upper-basin researchers argue that evidence already exists for success. With creativity and collaboration, they say, farmers and ranchers can sustain crop and livestock production even as water becomes scarce. They get into the details, talking about adjustments of cow-calf operation, for example, to reduce water-dependent needs. They call for more research into limited irrigation, crop switching and other practices.

Two other academics, both from Arizona State, take a somewhat broader view, acknowledging the challenge.

“In a landscape of poor choices, in a failing river system in which all solutions are deeply unpopular to some or other powerful constituency, potentially harmful to one community or another or inordinately expensive and founded on unreliable funding, it is at least worth considering another option,” write Kathryn Sorensen and Sarah Porter.

They see cuts of up to 4 million acre-feet in the basin annually being necessary. Again, that’s about 25% of what those who created the Colorado River Compact expected would be annual flows for the seven basin states.

How to get there? They introduce a new concept, “economic water productivity,” a measure of the value of water. Instead of buy and dry programs, they see need for a federally financed effort to pivot uses through incentives to reduce water use on those agricultural lands.

Similar buy-down of high-volume irrigated agriculture is underway in two groundwater depletion areas in Colorado, the San Luis Valley and the Republican River Basin. Some federal money is providing help in the latter basin. They contend federal money will be needed, and lots of it, to pay for this big pivot in the Colorado River Basin. That, they say, would be fitting, because it was federal money that financed the infrastructure for this hydraulic empire.

GRACE TWS trend map. (a) The time series of nonseasonal GRACE/FO TWS (km3/year) over UCRB and LCRB for the period (4/2002–10/2024). (b) Spatial variation in TWS trends for the Colorado River Basin for the investigated period (mm/year) (c) Time series comparison of the change in storage ΔS/Δt derived from the water balance equation (Equation 1) and GRACE/FO. ΔS/Δt calculated from GRACE/FO TWS anomalies in km3. The light shading represents uncertainties.

As for groundwater, that part of the Colorado River story has been generally overlooked. A study released several months ago found that nearly two-thirds of storage — both surface and groundwater — lost from 2002 to 2024 in the Colorado River actually came from groundwater depletion, mostly in Arizona.

Whoa!

“Simply shifting unsustainable surface water uses to unsustainable groundwater uses does nothing to address the core mismatch of supplies and demands,” observes Doug Kenney, who directs the Western Water Policy Program at University of Colorado Law School.

Other contributors dissect the complexities of what would seem to be simple, common sense solutions. For example, Eric Kuhn, the former general manager of the Colorado River District, works through the concept of water sharing among the states based on a percentage basis. The Colorado River Compact divides water between the upper and lower basins, a mistake in retrospect although even in 1922, when it was adopted, there had been an argument for using a percentage.

Later, when the upper-basin sates adopted a compact among themselves, they did use a percentage basis.

Kuhn goes deep into the history, as he has done with book-writing (“Science be Dammed,” 2019, with John Fleck) to sort through the thinking of this idea over the last century. It came up again earlier this year as the seven basin states tried to figure out how to share the river given the changed realities. The states, however, could not agree on what percentages should be used for sharing. It may have been just too much of a transformational change for some states to accept, he says.

However, the idea may come back if the stalemate between the upper and lower basins of the Colorado River ends up in the federal courts. Or failing that, what exactly would federal intervention look like? That’s an impolite question, but one of those what-ifs that must be wondered about. (For the record, the water people I know seem to have high regard for people in the Department of Interior in charge of looking after the Colorado River).

The large story here is that the states, with enormous aid from the federal treasury, created the infrastructure and expectations of water that no longer exists and, as per the studies of scientists, will almost certainly not return within the lifetimes of any of us. What, then, should be the federal role in defining the future balance? Once again, might the dismantling of Glen Canyon Dam be such a wild idea after all?

Thoughts in this book will likely be part of the conversations next week in Las Vegas when representatives of the seven basin states gather, as they always do, at the Colorado River Water Uses Association conference. Might a hallway conversation lead to a breakthrough?

Like huge snowstorms in the Rockies and then cool temperatures during runoff, there might be miracles, but I wouldn’t count on it. This deadpool dance might end sooner than anybody actually likes.

Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0

The Erosion of the Colorado River “Safety Nets” is Alarming — Doug Kenney (#ColoradoRiver Research Group) #COriver #aridification

Graphic credit: Colorado River Research Group from the report “Dancing with Deadpool”

Click the link to access the report Dancing with Deadpool on the Getches-Wilkinson Center website (Doug Kenney¹):

The rapid loss of storage in Lakes Mead and Powell is certainly deserving of the attention and angst it has generated and continues to generate, but it is the tip of larger trends altering the landscape of risk in the basin. The dismantling of many other “safety nets,” defined broadly, is happening at a pace far surpassing the already unprecedented declines in reservoir storage. Presumably that’s not an immediate problem if new post-2026 rules are able to recover and protect storage in Mead and Powell (and some of the other upstream facilities), but does anyone have that much faith in the power of new reservoir operating rules to combat the forces that have brought us to this point? What about when we have a 10 million acre-feet/year river?

From Groundwater to Governance

Perhaps the most obvious of those other diminishing safety nets is groundwater. Data on groundwater reserves throughout the basin is spotty at best. One approximation of a truly regional assessment comes from a creative use of satellite-based tools—namely NASA’s GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) system that can detect tiny changes in gravitational forces associated with the fluctuating mass of aquifers losing (or gaining) storage. Those findings paint a truly disturbing picture. Despite the familiar (and troubling) images of bathtub rings emerging at Mead and Powell, researchers using GRACE data now estimate that, from 2002 to 2024, nearly two-thirds of storage—both surface and groundwater—lost in the Colorado River Basin actually came from groundwater depletions.² Significant groundwater losses have occurred throughout the basin, but the problem is particularly acute in Arizona and is likely to accelerate as shortages in Central Arizona Project (CAP) deliveries are likely offset by groundwater pumping—an ironic outcome given that CAP was originally proposed as the solution to groundwater mining in the region. Simply shifting unsustainable surface water uses to unsustainable groundwater uses does nothing to address the core mismatch of supplies and demands.

A very different and multi-faceted trend undercutting the regional safety nets is happening within the federal government, where federal agencies, programs and science programs are being systematically dismantled under the guise of “efficiency.” It’s hard to understate the significance of these actions, as it is the federal government that, presumably, has the scope, mandate and resources to oversee the entirety of the River and the full diversity of its roles and values. Interior Department agencies in 2025, like much of the overall federal bureaucracy, have been tasked to achieve significant staffing reductions, and to eliminate (or significantly scale back) spending on key water conservation programs—including programs under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and WaterSMART.³

Additionally, agencies across the federal landscape have mobilized to coerce and shut down climate-related science and scientists, despite the nearly universal acknowledgment among water managers of the central role of climate change in the unfolding crisis.⁴ Collectively these efforts constitute a systematic effort to discredit and hide the primary cause of the broken water budget, while sabotaging the most effective coping mechanisms available. As members of the research community, the Colorado River Research Group (CRRG)unfortunately has a front-row seat to this culling of the people and programs essential to long-term data collection and analysis. It defies logic, and is dangerous.

Unfortunately, hostility toward the people and programs essential to responding to the Colorado River crisis is not the full extent of federal obstruction. One largely unappreciated threat to the water budget resulting from federal policy shifts comes from efforts to “re-carbonize” (and accelerate) water-intensive energy generation, in part to meet the demands of AI, a particularly troubling trend given that the previous emphasis on renewable energy generation and enhanced energy conservation was one of the few positive trends working to repair the regional water budget.⁵ Attempts to weaken or dismantle bedrock environmental laws, such as NEPA and the Endangered Species Act, are an additional wildcard likely to inflict irreparable harm on already strained species and ecosystems.⁶

Given the turmoil at the federal level, it’s tempting to absolve the States for stubbornly clinging to a policy making system reliant on 7-state dealmaking, but that would ignore the reality that the governance of the river has been a problem for decades. A seemingly never-ending series of crisis-inspired negotiations, held in largely secretive forums without direct tribal involvement or tools for meaningful public or scientific engagement, is an uninspired way to manage and protect the economic, cultural and environmental heart of the American Southwest. The river is too big and too important to govern in such an ad hoc and primitive manner. [ed. emphasis mine]

That this approach mostly ”worked” to keep deliveries flowing for so long—except, of course, for the tribes and the environment—rested, in part, on the accepted norm that decisions would emerge collaboratively from the States and would not spill over to the federal courts. But even that governance safety net is eroding, as the States seem to be increasingly resigned—and almost “comfortable”—with the notion that the resolution of existing conflicts may not emerge from a negotiated 7-state agreement. For those parties and viewpoints that have historically been left out of the state-dominated processes and the resulting agreements, then maybe this prospect is welcome. But all would concede that would be a stunning outcome with ramifications that are difficult to predict.

Ever since the Arizona v. California experience, the use of litigation to resolve interstate (and/or interbasin) conflicts in the basin has been a third rail issue, and for very good reasons. As shown by the basin’s earlier foray into Supreme Court action, the process would undoubtedly be lengthy, expensive, and likely to create as many issues and questions as it resolves. It certainly wouldn’t reduce risk, as the states, and the water management community more broadly, would lose control over the process of managing the shared resource. In fact, judicial intervention might be the impetus to trigger yet another traditionally feared decision pathway to be invoked—a Congressional rewrite of river allocation and management—either before or after the litigation concludes. In this setting, the extreme disparity in political influence—as measured by the number of Congressional representatives—between the Upper and Lower Basin is an obvious concern, as is the realization that congressional involvement means the future of the Colorado now becomes a national issue and, potentially, a bargaining chip to be used in the political logrolling necessary to enact legislation in dozens of otherwise unrelated areas.

Screenshot from Kestrel Kunz’s presentation at the CRWUA 2023 Annual Conference.

Rowing in the Wrong Direction

Managing water in the arid and semi-arid West is often more about risk than water. From the seniority concept in prior appropriation to the sizing of infrastructure based on low probability events, the goal of water management is often to clearly define and then minimize the risks of running out. Given that, you’d think that the communities dependent upon Colorado River water would be more committed to protecting (and enhancing) the safety nets that are increasingly critical as storage in Lakes Mead and Powell—the basin’s primary risk management tools—increasingly flirt with deadpool. But at the basin scale, that’s typically not what I see. Sure, individual water managers serving major cities or districts have their own risk management plans focusing on everything from new infrastructure to market solutions, but that’s far from a comprehensive or integrated approach, and safety nets designed by and for the “established players” only deepen the inequities that increasingly divide the Colorado River community.

There’s a lot of work left to do in this basin, both prior and after the 2026 deadline. Viewing the problems through the lens of risk management is not a bad place to start. But if doing so, it’s also not a bad idea to remember that poor risk management often comes at expense of diminished equity—an indispensable element of an equitable apportionment. Numerous examples around the world remind us that water scarcity can be the impetus for joint problem-solving in a spirit of camaraderie and mutual support, or it can sharpen and refine alliances that further distance the powerful from the weak. In this regard, I’m inclined to think we are rowing in the wrong direction. ●

Footnotes

¹ Director, Western Water Policy Program, Getches-Wilkinson Center, University of Colorado Law School; and Chair, Colorado River Research Group.

² Abdelmohsen, K., Famiglietti, J. S., Ao, Y. Z., Mohajer, B., & Chandanpurkar, H. A. (2025). Declining freshwater availability in the Colorado River basin threatens sustainability of its critical groundwater supplies. Geophysical Research Letters, 52, e2025GL115593. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025GL115593.

³ Finding accurate data on federal workforce reductions is challenging; see Competing numbers emerge on federal workforce reductions. Between “incentivized retirements,” RIF (reduction in force) layoffs, recently resumed terminations of employees losing court-ordered protections, remaining planned cuts, and the ongoing hiring freeze, the total workforce of the Department of Interior could drop by over a third in 2025. The Interior Department is taking steps to implement layoffs – Government Executive. Similarly, data on efforts to reduce agency budgets is difficult to compile, particularly given the complex back and forth between the administration, Congress, and, increasingly, the courts. The President’s 2026 budget request cuts Reclamation’s budget approximately by a third (Fiscal-Year-2026-Discretionary-Budget-Request.pdf (see page 28 and Table 2); Briefly: Budget proposal defunds Western water conservation grants – Water Education Colorado). Overall, proposed cuts to the Department of Interior total over $5 billion, or 30.5% of the 2025 enacted budget (Table 2). To this point, that request has not been embraced by Congress.

⁴ For example, within NOAA, the administration’s 2026 budget request “terminates a variety of climate-dominated research, data, and grant programs,” and “cancels contracts for instruments designed for unnecessary climate measurements,” while also cutting National Science Foundation support of research “with dubious public value, like speculative impacts from extreme climate scenarios” (Fiscal-Year-2026-Discretionary-Budget-Request.pdf; see pages 24-25, and 38).

⁵ Data Center Energy and Water Use Trends Explained – Circle of Blue

⁶ Regulatory Tracker – Environmental and Energy Law Program

Historic Step Forward to Secure Environmental Flows in the #ColoradoRiver — Hannah Holm (AmericanRivers.com) #COriver #aridification

Colorado River, Colorado | Sinjin Eberle

Click the link to read the article on the American Rivers website (Hannah Holm):

December 11, 2025

On the evening of November 19, a packed conference room in the Denver West Marriott erupted in cheers when the Colorado Water Conservation Board approved one of the largest ever dedications of water for the environment in Colorado’s history. This new deal, if completed, will ensure that water currently running through the aging Shoshone Hydropower Plant on the Colorado River, deep in the heart of Glenwood Canyon, will keep flowing through the canyon when the plant eventually goes off-line. It’s not a sure thing yet – water court wrangling over the details and financial hurdles remain. But the Board’s action was a crucial step forward.

Currently, when the plant is running full steam, 1,400 cubic feet/ second (think 1,400 basketballs full of water passing by every second) is diverted out of the river into a tunnel and then into massive pipes visible against the canyon walls, where the power of falling water spins turbines to generate electricity. The water is then returned back to the river. Under the new deal, when the plant stops operating (it is over 100 years old and vulnerable to rockfall), the water would instead stay in the river, vastly improving conditions for fish and the bugs they eat in the 2.4-mile reach between the diversion and the powerplant’s return flows. The dedication of the plant’s water rights to that stretch of river would bring benefits that ripple hundreds of miles up and downstream because of the crucial role these water rights play in controlling the river’s flow through Western Colorado.

Shoshone Power Plant, Colorado | Hannah Holm

In Colorado, as in most of the West, older water rights take priority over newer ones when there’s not enough water to satisfy everyone’s claims. On the Colorado River, the Shoshone Hydropower rights limit the amount of water that can be taken out of the river upstream by junior rights that divert water from the river’s headwaters through tunnels under the Continental Divide to cities and farms on the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains. The new deal to enable the Shoshone rights to be used for environmental flows would preserve those limitations on transmountain diversions in perpetuity.

Upstream from the power plant, near the ranching town of Kremmling, Colorado, the river carries less than half the water it would without the existing transmountain diversions. This stresses fish populations and the iconic cottonwood groves that line the river. The Shoshone rights downstream prevent these diversions from being even larger. Because the power plant returns all the water it uses to the river without consuming it, the water continues to provide benefits downstream from the plant to rafters, farms, cities and four species of endangered fish that exist only in the Colorado River Basin. Securing these flows for the future is particularly important as climate change continues to reduce the river’s flow, which has already declined by roughly 20% over the past two decades.

The people cheering in the hearing room represented cities, towns, counties and irrigation districts from up and down the Colorado River. Their entities had pledged ratepayer and taxpayer dollars to help secure the rights in the complex transaction spearheaded by the Colorado River Water Conservation District. Environmental organizations, including American Rivers, Audubon, Trout Unlimited and Western Resource Advocates, were also parties to the hearing and supportive of the deal, but were vastly outnumbered.

The Coloradans cheering in that room were there because their constituents’ livelihoods, clean drinking water and quality of life depend on a living Colorado River. American Rivers is proud to stand with them and will continue advocating for the completion of this historic water transaction.

The Year in Water, 2025 – Power Shift — Brett Walton (circleofblue.org) #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Click the link to read the story map on the Circle of Blue website (Brett Walton). Here’s the Colorado River section:

December 9, 2025

The year is ending with the Colorado River at a critical juncture.

The big reservoirs Mead and Powell remain perilously low and the seven states that share the basin have been unable to agree on cuts that would reduce their reliance on the shrinking river.

Reservoir operating rules expire at the end of 2026. If no agreement is reached the federal government could step in, or the states could take their chances in court. It’s a risky move that no one in principle seems to want. Yet brinkmanship and entrenched positions have stymied compromise.

The basin’s Indian tribes, which collectively have rights to more than a quarter of its recent average annual flow, are adamant that their interests – and more broadly, the river itself – be protected. “Any progress made in the negotiations to date is merely rationing a reduced supply, not actively managing and augmenting it as a shared resource with strategies and tools that can benefit the entire basin,” the leaders of the Gila River Indian Community wrote on November 12.

The Colorado River Indian Tribes, whose riverside reservation includes lands in Arizona and California, voted in November to extend legal personhood to the river under tribal law.

Native America in the Colorado River Basin. Credit: USBR

Think Natural Flows Will Rebound in the #ColoradoRiver Basin? Think Again — Jonathan Overpeck and Bradley Udall #COriver #aridification

From the report Colorado River Insights, 2025: Dancing With Deadpool (Jonathan Overpeck and Bradley Udall):

Jonathan Overpeck is a climate scientist and Dean of the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan; prior to moving to Michigan, he lived and worked in Colorado and Arizona for over 25 years.

Bradley Udall is a Senior Water and Climate Research Scientist/Scholar, Colorado Water Center, Colorado State University.

Basin status update

Back in 2017, we published a peer-reviewed research paper (Udall and Overpeck, 2017) asserting that climate warming was a principal cause of the then eighteen-year Colorado River drought, a drought that had already seen a 17% reduction in natural flows of the river. We expressed confidence that warming would continue to eat away at these flows until the warming (due to greenhouse gas emissions, high confidence) ceased and suggested that increases in precipitation would likely not be able to compensate for the long-term impact of rising temperatures. We used the term “Hot Drought” to distinguish this period from the “Dry Droughts in the 20th century. This important concept continues to be researched and confirmed (King et al, 2024, Zhuang et al, 2024). Now, eight years later, as the warming has continued unabated and may be accelerating (Hansen et al, 2025, Ripple et al., 2025), it has become clearer than ever that precipitation declines have also played an important role in causing the worst drought in at least 1200 years (Williams et al., 2022). More troubling, however, is new evidence that human caused climate change is not only driving a steady increase in temperature but is also the main culprit behind the precipitation declines as well.

This is clearly bad news, but there is a silver-lining. But first, let’s review where we are with respect to the unprecedented 21st century Colorado River drought, and the new evidence suggesting the situation is worse than we first thought.

Figure 1 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

Each year one of us updates a figure³ that was first published in our 2017 paper showing the status of the Colorado River drought and its climate drivers. We’ve included this figure here, updated through the September 30th end of the 2024-25 water year (Figure 1). The combined volume of water stored in Lakes Mead and Powell has continued its decline to less than 15 maf (million acre-feet), the 26-year average naturalized flow of the Colorado River at Lees Ferry is now 12.2 maf, well below the 16.5 maf mainstem apportionments assigned to the seven Colorado River Basin states and Mexico. Critically, the 6 years since 2020 have averaged 10.8 maf/year, the same as the then-unprecedented low flows during 2000-05 at the start of this record-setting drought.

Matching the long slow decline in naturalized flows over the last century has been a similar long slow decline in precipitation in the Upper Basin of the Colorado (Figure 1, Panel C). Superimposed on this long trend are two notable drought periods with lower-than-average precipitation: one in the 1950’s-60’s and now the on-going current drought, at 26-years and counting, a multidecadal “megadrought” and the longest drought in the Colorado River Basin instrumental record. Mirroring the century-long declines in precipitation and naturalized flows is a long-term warming trend that started to accelerate in the 1970’s and that is clearly linked to on-going global warming (Williams et al., 2020, Masson-Delmotte et al., 2021). Whereas the former drought of record, in the 1950’s and 60’s, was defined almost entirely by precipitation deficit (Figure 1, left gray shaded area), the current megadrought is being driven by a precipitation deficit compounded by relentless warming (Figure 1, right gray shaded area).

The impact of a warming climate

As we highlighted in earlier peer-reviewed papers (e.g., Vano et al., 2014, Udall and Overpeck, 2017), warming exacerbates drought in multiple ways. A warming atmosphere can hold progressively more water, and thus as the atmosphere warms it can evaporate more water. At the same time, a warmer atmosphere can cause soils and vegetation to lose more water to the atmosphere via evapotranspiration, especially as the warming atmosphere also causes the growing season in the Upper Basin of the Colorado to become longer (Das et al., 2011; Udall and Overpeck, 2017). Hot, dry springs in the basin bring on early melt and green-up (Hogan and Lundquist, 2024, Lin et al., 2022). Drier soils and vegetation thus mean less water that can eventually end up in the river, and incidentally also explains why the West I experiencing more wildfire (Abatzoglou and Williams, 2016). Atmospheric warming also leads to snow loss, a shorter snow-cover season, and an associated loss of solar radiation reflectivity – this drives further warming and yet more evapotranspiration (Milly and Dunne, 2020; Ban et al., 2023).

Large changes in groundwater supplies in both the Upper and Lower Colorado River Basins have been noted from soil moisture to deeper layers since 2002 (Abdelmohsen et al., 2025, Chandanpurkar et al., 2025). It is becoming increasingly clear that dry summer soils can persist into the fall and winter soaking up snowmelt the following spring thereby reducing runoff (Das et al., 2011, Lapides et al, 2022).

Precipitation declining

Estimates vary, but it appears that up to half of the observed roughly 20% reduction in Colorado flows are likely related to the steadily warming temperatures of the Colorado River headwaters region (Udall and Overpeck, 2017; Xiao et al., 2018; Milly and Dunne, 2020, Bass et al, 2023). Moreover, since 2017 it has become increasingly clear that the other major cause of the flow reductions is a sustained decrease in precipitation (Figure 1, Panel C). Until recently, the big question is whether the observed 7% post-1999 decrease in precipitation relative to the 20th century average was due primarily to natural multidecadal climate variability or human-caused climate change. We now have good reasons to suspect the latter, and this translates to mostly bad news.

Megadrought country

It is now more clear than ever that the southwest United States, including the headwater regions of the Colorado River, is megadrought country. Tree-ring and other paleoclimatic sources reveal that multiple droughts lasting two or more decades took place over the last 2000 years (Meko et al, 2007; Gangopadhyay et al., 2022), and a good case has now been made for the current drought being among the most severe in at least 1200 years in large part because of the unprecedented amplifying effect of warming temperatures during the current sustained period of reduced precipitation (Williams et al., 2020; 2022).

However, there is another important lesson to be gleaned from the rich paleoclimatic record of pre-20th Century droughts and megadroughts. Given that global temperatures were likely significantly cooler prior to the last 50 years then they are now (PAGES 2k Consortium, 2019), it follows that themany long Upper Colorado Basin droughts that took place over the last 2000 years preceding the current drought were likely due much more to precipitation deficits alone. This means that we have good evidence that precipitation deficits exceeding those of the current on-going drought in both magnitude and duration are not rare, and that the current drought could see not just warmer temperatures in the future (a sure bet), but also even larger and longer precipitation deficits. It is thus critical that we consider what is presently causing the precipitation decline in the headwaters region of the Colorado River, and from that get a better sense of what’s most likely ahead. And for motivation, since we wrote our 2017 paper, new evidence has emerged that drought-dominated periods – likely driven mostly by precipitation declines for the reason noted above – as long as 80 years have occurred in the last 2000 years in the Upper Basin of the Colorado River (Gangopadhyay et al., 2022).

The cause of precipitation decline

Could we be in for an even longer period of reduced precipitation than the last quarter. century in the years to decades ahead? The answer depends on knowing the cause of the on-going precipitation decline, and there are two primary possibilities. The first is natural climate variability in the climate system, which can cause periods of lower precipitation to oscillate irregularly with periods of higher precipitation. Thus, if the recent period of low precipitation is due to natural climate variability, there could be periods of greater precipitation returning to the Colorado headwaters, although these wet periods would be increasingly unlikely to offset the drying impact of the steadily increasing temperatures. The second potential cause of on-going precipitation deficit is an anthropogenically-forced trend in precipitation decline due to increasing human emissions of greenhouse gases and reductions in Asian, mostly Chinese, aerosols to the atmosphere.5 Such an anthropogenic trend would likely portend continued low precipitation into the future, in synch with continued warming.

One well-known source of natural variability in precipitation in the Colorado River Basin is decadal and longer variation in the sea-surface temperature patterns of the North and tropical Pacific Ocean, giving rise to what is called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). A peer-reviewed research paper just published (Klavans et al., 2025) reviews the scientific literature and notes that decadal and longer variability in the PDO has long been thought to have arisen from atmosphere-ocean interactions internal to the natural climate system and has in turn caused decadal and longer precipitation variability downstream over western North America. The PDO is strongly correlated with La Nina, and both are known to be associated with a dry Southwest US (Seager and Ting, 2017; Lehner et al., 2018; Hoerling et al., 2023, Seager et al., 2023). Klavans et al., 2025 also presents convincing new evidence that anthropogenic forcing in the form of human emissions of greenhouse gases and reductions in atmospheric aerosols is now the primary driver of the same elevated sea-surface temperatures and this forcing is thus the primary cause behind the precipitation decline that has been observed since the start of the on-going Colorado River megadrought. In other words, human-driven climate change has caused the PDO oscillation to lock into its negative dry phase and this situation is likely to persist into the future.

A second new paper (Todd et al., 2025) highlights that higher Northern Hemisphere temperatures from about 11,000 to 6,000 years ago, in this case due to well-understood changes in the Earth’s orbit, caused a negative PDO-like Pacific warming that in turn forced western U.S. precipitation to lock into a multi-millennia-long dry phase. This new research thus provides yet more confidence that the odds will favor lowered precipitation in the Colorado River headwaters for as long as human-caused warming persists. Both new research papers (Todd et al., 2025; Klavans et al., 2025) also note that state-of-the-art climate models underestimate the role of human-caused climate change in driving persistent drought in the region containing the headwaters of the Colorado River. Natural decadal and longer climate variability clearly caused the many droughts and megadroughts of the last 2000 years, but looking ahead today, it appears that human-caused climate change is likely to exert a stronger influence, and this will mean a higher likelihood of continued lower precipitation in the headwaters of the Colorado River into the future.

Conclusion: bad news, good news

To sum it up, since 2017 we now know quite a bit more about how climate change is altering the flows of the Colorado River. Whereas eight years ago we were able to confidently anticipate that human-caused atmospheric warming alone would continue to reduce flows in the river, we now have a better, though still emerging, understanding of how human emissions of greenhouse gases are likely to also cause a continued reduction in precipitation in the headwaters of the Colorado River. Whereas we have known since 2017 that additional future climate warming will cause continued and even larger flow reductions, two new carefully crafted studies strongly suggest we are in for extended dry periods in the Colorado headwaters in the decades ahead.

As we hinted earlier, is important to recognize that the news is not all bad, and there is indeed a silver-lining to our improved understanding of why the natural flows of the Colorado are declining, and what this means for the future. We can say with confidence that human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases are having an increasingly negative impact on the flows of the Colorado River, a river that serves over forty million people and region that has an annual economy in excess of $1.4 trillion (James et al., 2014). This climate change impact will continue to worsen, but because humans cause it, humans can halt it. This is good to know as we work to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere that are causing the climate change. The Colorado River will benefit.

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Footnotes

³ https://coloradoriverscience.org/Current_conditions#The_Colorado_River_.274-panel_plot.27

⁴ NOAA’s nClimGrid dataset indicates that over the Upper Colorado River Basin there has been a 7% annual precipitation reduction during 2000-26 compared to 1897-1999. This reduction is not evenly spread over the seasons, however; reductions in the fall (SON), winter (DJF), spring (MAM) and summer (JJA) are 3%, 0%, 11% and 12%, respectively. Fall and winter precipitation for snowpack has thus been close to normal while spring and summer has been much reduced.

⁵ Sulfate aerosols are emitted in large quantities when sulfur in fossil fuels is burned. These shiny particles can end up high in the atmosphere where they reduce anthropogenic warming by reflecting sunlight. But near the surface their sulfur-based precursors cause serious human health problems and thus many countries in the last few decades have tried and succeeded in reducing these emissions. China, notably, has made great strides in reducing these emissions but the unfortunate side effect is increased warming, especially in the Pacific Ocean downwind. It is believed that this aerosol cleanup (also underway in ocean shipping) is causing at least some of the accelerated global heating now underway including the additional heating in the northern Pacific contributing to precipitation reductions in the Southwest US.

Report: Colorado River Insights, 2025: Dancing with Deadpool — #ColoradoRiver Reseach Group (Getches-Wilkinson Center) #COriver #aridification

Click the link to access the report on the Getches-Wilkinson Center website:

In a collection of essays and research summaries, eleven members of the Colorado River Research Group (with eight guest contributors) touch on issues as diverse as plummeting reservoir storage, climate change trends, risk management, agricultural water conservation, equity, and governance, all against the backdrop of the need to fashion post-2026 reservoir operating rules.

Download the report here:
Colorado River Insights, 2025: Dancing with Deadpool

Contents

Chapter 1. Colorado River Reservoir Storage – Where We Stand
Jack Schmidt, Anne Castle, John Fleck, Eric Kuhn, Kathryn Sorensen, and Katherine Tara

Chapter 2. Think Natural Flows Will Rebound in the Colorado River Basin? Think Again.
Jonathan Overpeck and Brad Udall

Chapter 3. The Erosion of the Colorado River “Safety Nets” is Alarming
Doug Kenney

Chapter 4. Water Equity in the Colorado River Basin
Bonnie Colby and Zoey Reed-Spitzer

Chapter 5. The Tale of Three Percentage-Based Apportionment Schemes
Eric Kuhn

Chapter 6. A Humbly Proffered Proposal to Aid the Colorado River System: Conservation Easements & Land Purchases
Kathryn Sorensen and Sarah Porter

Chapter 7. Facing the Future: Can Agriculture Thrive in the Upper Basin with Less Water?
Kristiana Hansen, Daniel Mooney, Mahdi Asgari, and Christopher Bastian

Chapter 8. Towards a Basinwide Entity: Moving from Vision to Action
Matthew McKinney, Jason Robison, John Berggren, and Doug Kenney

Contributors

Colorado River Research Group (CRRG) Members

Bonnie Colby, Professor, University of Arizona.

John Fleck, Writer in Residence, Utton Transboundary Resources Center, University of New Mexico.

Kristiana Hansen, Professor, Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, University of Wyoming.

Doug Kenney, Director, Western Water Policy Program, Getches-Wilkinson Center, University of Colorado Law School; and Chair, Colorado River Research Group.

Eric Kuhn, Retired General Manager, Colorado River Water Conservation District.

Matthew McKinney, Co-director, Water & Tribes Initiative; Senior Fellow, Center for Natural Resources & Environmental Policy, University of Montana; Fulbright Specialist 2025-2027.

Jonathan Overpeck, Dean, School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan.

Jason Robison, Professor of Law and Co-Director, Gina Guy Center for Land & Water Law, University of Wyoming.

Jack Schmidt, Director, Center for Colorado River Studies, Utah State University, and former Chief, Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center.

Kathryn Sorensen, Kyl Center for Water Policy, Arizona State University; and former Director, Phoenix Water Services.

Brad Udall, Senior Water and Climate Research Scientist/Scholar, Colorado Water Center, Colorado State University.

Guest Contributors

Mahdi Asgari, Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, University of Wyoming.

Christopher Bastian, Professor, Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, University of Wyoming.

John Berggren, Regional Policy Manager, Western Resource Advocates.

Anne Castle, Senior Fellow, Getches-Wilkinson Center, University of Colorado Law School; former US Commissioner, Upper Colorado River Commission; and former Assistant Secretary for Water and Science, US Department of the Interior.

Daniel Mooney, Associate Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Colorado State University.

Sarah Porter, Director, Kyl Center for Water Policy, Arizona State University.

Zoey Reed-Spitzer, Research Assistant, North Carolina State University (formerly University of Arizona).

Katherine Tara, Staff Attorney, Utton Transboundary Resources Center, University of New Mexico.

Here’s the preface:

Welcome to the Colorado River Research Group’s (CRRG) inaugural Colorado River Insights report. This publication marks a new (and still evolving) direction for the CRRG, transitioning away from the group-authored policy briefs of the past to more personal “Individual Submissions” that allow members to be more focused, direct and sometimes prescriptive than in the past efforts authored jointly and requiring unanimous consent. While each of the Individual Submissions (i.e., Chapters) that follows is unique in structure and tone and detail, each member was given the same charge: to speak directly about issues on the river where they have been directing much of their current focus, and where feasible, to identify a path forward on those issues. Given this approach, each Individual Submission is truly individual—or, in several cases, the product of small groups—and thus should not be attributed to the entire body, although in practice there is usually very little internal conflict on any of the major themes featured throughout these pages. One byproduct of this approach is that it shines a light on some of the CRRG’s most glaring holes in terms of disciplines and substantive expertise, helping to steer us to new potential members (and guest contributors) and, perhaps, new approaches. Unless or until that happens, we readily acknowledge that our collective snapshot of current and emerging basin issues is far from comprehensive. But how could it be? That’s an impossible standard for a river as vast in size, importance and complexity as the Colorado.

We are hopeful that this new approach can be helpful in better funneling the knowledge emerging from the research community into the hands of decision-makers, journalists, NGOs, water users, and other concerned parties in a more hands-on position to implement the changes needed to restore the economic and environmental sustainability of the River. Clearly, we are in an era screaming for new ideas and new approaches; the status quo isn’t working. — Doug Kenney, CRRG Chair

Water across the West at risk as President Trump targets national monuments: A new study found that about 83% of water passing through public lands uses monument designation for its only protection — Wyatt Myskow (High Country News)

*RuggyBearLA Photography* ***RuggyBearLA / via Flickr***

Click the link to read the article on the High Country News website (Wyatt Myskow):

December 9, 2025

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is republished here through a partnership with Climate Desk.

The 31 national monuments designated since the Clinton administration, which could be downsized as the Trump administration pushes to open more public lands to extractive industries, safeguard clean water for millions of Americans, according to a new analysis from the Center for American Progress.

Using geospatial data to quantify the miles of rivers and watersheds within the studied national monument boundaries, as well as the number of users who depend on that water, the report found that the water supplies for more than 13 million Americans are directly provided by watersheds within or downstream of these national monuments. About 83% of the water passing through these public lands has no other protection besides the monument designations, it found.

National monuments protect more than 21,000 miles of waterways across the U.S., nearly twice as much waterway mileage as the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System, the analysis also determined.

The report comes as the Trump administration weighs downsizing or revoking the designation of some national monuments.

Corn Springs Chukwalla Mountains California. By Michael Dorausch from Venice, USA – Corn Springs CA, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41004589

In March, the Trump administration announced it would eliminate California’s Chuckwalla and Sáttítla Highlands national monuments before removing language from a White House fact sheet announcing that decision. The following month, The Washington Post reported that the administration was considering downsizing or eliminating six national monuments, and in June, the U.S. Department of Justice issued an opinion that the president has the power to rescind national monument designations, backtracking on a decades-old determination on the matter.

Stone and evening light, Bears Ears National Monument, Utah. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

During Trump’s last term, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, established by the Obama and Clinton administrations, respectively, were shrunk to fractions of their original sizes, but they were restored by President Joe Biden after he took office.

If national monuments are downsized or eliminated, the areas surrounding a waterway will lose protections from extractive industries, including oil and gas drilling, mining and grazing. Contamination from those industries could seep into streams and, in turn, rivers. Those industries also use water, sometimes vast amounts in arid regions, further reducing the supply that flows to nearby communities. (In certain cases, some mining and grazing are already permitted on national monument lands, but the activities are limited in scale and more regulated than they are outside the monuments.)

“Landscapes and waterways go hand in hand,” said Drew McConville, a senior fellow for conservation policy at the Center for American Progress and a co-author of the report. “The clean water depends on what comes into them from natural lands … Just protecting the wet stuff itself doesn’t guarantee that you’re keeping [water] clean and durable.”

The portion of historically marginalized communities living within the watersheds of the national monuments is greater than the average for watersheds nationally, it found. Twenty-three of the monuments studied are also found in regions expected to face water shortages due to climate change in the coming decades, making the arid regions downstream even drier.

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, for example, protects 2,517 miles of waterways, according to the analysis, and nearly 90% of the watersheds within the monument are expected to see declines in their water levels. The monument straddles the Upper and Lower Colorado River Basins, with the Paria and Escalante rivers flowing within its boundaries and Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir, just to its south.

The monument is often thought of as a sparse, arid region, which it is, said Jackie Grant, the executive director of Grand Staircase Escalante Partners, a nonprofit focused on protecting the monument that has spent $11 million to protect the Escalante River watershed and all its tributaries. It remains vital to the Colorado River System, which millions of people in the Southwest rely on. Grand Staircase-Escalante helps slow water from the Paunsaugunt Plateau in Bryce Canyon National Park, much of which starts as snowpack in the park before melting and flowing downstream.

“People don’t think of water when they think of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument,” Grant said. “So when we can bring this view of water and how important it is to the protection of the monument, it helps us put another building block in our case for supporting the monument, because not only is it important for the animals, the native plants, the geology and the paleontology, water plays a huge role in the monument, and the monument protects the water itself.”

The Antiquities Act of 1906 was signed into law by Theodore Roosevelt, for “… the protection of objects of historic and scientific interest” through the designation of national monuments by the President and Congress. National monuments are one of the types of specially-designated areas that make up the BLM’s National Conservation Lands. Some of the earliest national monuments included Devils Tower, the Grand Canyon, and Death Valley. They were initially protected by the War Department, then later by the National Park Service. More recently, the BLM and other Federal agencies have retained stewardship responsibilities for national monuments on public lands. In fact, the BLM manages more acres of national monuments in the continental U. S. than any other agency. This includes the largest land-based national monument, the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah featured here. National monuments under the BLM’s stewardship have yielded numerous scientific discoveries, ranging from fossils of previously unknown dinosaurs to new theories about prehistoric cultures. They provide places to view some of America’s darkest night skies, most unique wildlife, and treasured archaeological resources. In total, twenty BLM-managed national monuments, covering over five million acres, are found throughout the western U. S. and offer endless opportunities for discovery. Photos and description by Bob Wick, BLM.

Stretching across 1.87 million acres of public land, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is one of the country’s most expansive national monuments, protecting scores of wildlife as well as archeological resources in southern Utah. But a nine-billion-ton coal deposit is buried in the center of the monument along with deposits of minerals, including uranium and nickel. The Trump administration has long touted boosting the country’s coal production, and has established a pro-mining agenda this year.

“It’d be very easy to contaminate either one of those rivers if mining were to take place in the center section of the monument,” Grant said.

Margaret Walls, a senior fellow at Resources for the Future who has studied national monuments but was not part of this study, said national monuments are designated to protect cultural or historical landmarks, and it can be forgotten that they can also serve purposes like safeguarding water. Though she noted that even if monument protections are loosened, the areas remain federal lands, and their changes in status do not guarantee they will be developed.

“We don’t protect waterways the way we do land,” Walls said, “we’re going to get those water benefits by protecting the land.”

Created by Imgur user Fejetlenfej , a geographer and GIS analyst with a ‘lifelong passion for beautiful maps.’ It highlights the massive expanse of river basins across the country – in particular, those which feed the Mississippi River, in pink.

The latest Intermountain West briefing is hot off the presses from Western Water Assessment

Click the link to read the briefing on the Western Water Assessment website:

December 8, 2025 – CO, UT, WY

A hot and dry November left the Intermountain West with much below average snowpack conditions. November temperatures were four degrees above average region-wide and much of Utah and Wyoming baked under mean temperatures that were six to ten degrees above average. High temperatures coupled with mostly below normal precipitation caused low snow water equivalent (SWE) and worsening drought conditions.

November precipitation was much below average for much of the region, especially in Wyoming, northern Colorado and northern Utah, which received less than half of normal precipitation. Much above average November precipitation was observed in southern Utah and eastern Colorado. Record dry Novembers were observed at thirteen locations in Wyoming, ten locations in Colorado and five locations in Utah. Despite dry November conditions, regional water year precipitation is near to above average except for eastern Colorado and southeastern Wyoming.

November was an extremely warm month, especially in western Wyoming, where monthly temperatures were more than eight degrees above average. The entire region observed November temperatures that were at least four degrees above average, with all of Utah, nearly all of Wyoming and western Colorado experiencing temperatures that exceeded six degrees above average. Record warm October conditions were observed in western Colorado, southwestern Wyoming and throughout Utah.

Record low SWE conditions exist at many locations in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. A hot and dry November left most regional river basins with SWE conditions at less than 50% of average, with the least snow in the Six Creeks near Salt Lake City, where December 1st SWE is 22% of median. Slightly better SWE conditions exist in southern Colorado and southern Utah.

Regional drought coverage expanded slightly during November, increasing from 51% five weeks ago to 54% on December 2. Eastern Colorado and eastern Wyoming remain drought-free, but drought emerged along the northern Front Range and adjacent plains. Coverage of drought in Utah dropped below 100% for the first time in five months. Utah and Colorado were last free from drought six years ago, while the current drought in Wyoming began five years ago.

West Drought Monitor map December 2, 2025.

A NOAA La Niña Advisory is still in effect as eastern Pacific Ocean temperatures are below average. Weak La Niña conditions are expected to transition (60% probability) to neutral conditions by early 2026. The NOAA December Precipitation Outlook suggests above average precipitation for most of Wyoming. For the winter months (Dec-Feb), there is an increased probability for above average temperatures in Utah and southwestern Colorado. In Wyoming, there is an increased probability for above average precipitation and below average temperatures.

Record high temperatures drive record low snowpack. On December 1, record low SWE conditions were present at 52 regional Snotel sites in northern Colorado, northern Utah, and across Wyoming. Despite very low snowpack conditions, water year precipitation is above average for the region, except in northern Colorado. During early October, daily precipitation records were set in Utah and Colorado, including widespread flooding in southwest Colorado. Due to the tropical origin of those storms, nearly all precipitation fell as rain. Contrasting precipitation, water year temperatures are much above average with record high temperatures observed in parts of western Colorado, eastern Utah, and southwestern Wyoming. Consequently, the current snow drought is primarily the result of high temperatures rather than low precipitation. While October precipitation generally fell as rain in regional mountains, above average precipitation has increased soil moisture, which could help to bolster the efficiency of runoff in 2026.

Romancing the River: Why am I ‘Romancing’ It? — George Sibley (SibleysRivers.com) #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

The Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas – it’s not quite this bad between the two Colorado River Basins.

Click the link to read the article on the Sibley’s Rivers website (George Sibley:

December 2, 2025

Negotiations among the Magnificent Seven representing the seven states of the Colorado River region begin to resemble the ongoing negotiations between the military and diplomatic representatives for North and South Korea, where negotiations for something beyond an armistice have been going on for more than sixty years. Here, as there, the negotiations have reached a stalemate, and both sides are now engaged in an information war. Between the two Koreas, this war takes the form of everything from huge arrays of speakers blasting pop music across the demilitarized zone to smuggled USB drives with movies and TV shows. Here, it is mostly just propaganda bombs tossed over our ‘DMZ,’ the Grand Canyons, about each side’s virtue and the other side’s obstinacy, depending on their regional media’s love of conflict and tendency to support the home team. The missed November deadline has been seamlessly replaced – as we all suspected it would be – by a February deadline. But otherwise – nothing new on that front. We can just hope it doesn’t go on for another fortysome years.

So I’m going to take advantage of the stalemate to ask the reader to think about a bigger picture that may be more interesting. It stems from a comment from my partner Maryo, from whom I learn too much to dismiss anything she says. ‘Why are you “romancing the river”?’ she asked the other day. ‘Romance is such a cheapened concept today – bodice-ripping stories of ridiculous antagonistic love. You’re undermining the value of your work, calling it a “romance.”’

‘Well,’ I said – figuring that if she feels that way, maybe my readers raise the same question – ‘maybe one of the things a writer ought to try to do is restore the value of words and the concepts they once represented that have become devalued through misuse.’ Spoken like a true Don Quixote, another old man who took arms, sort of, against abuse of the concept of ‘romance.’

I do think that one of the things that ‘civilization’ does in civilizing us is to simplify things for us, including words whose complexity and depth embrace concepts, ideas and feelings that can be inconvenient to an orderly civilized society. A ‘romance,’ from the medieval era on into the early 20th century, was a story of an adventure in pursuit of something mysterious, exciting, challenging, something beyond everyday life. That could be the pursuit of a love relationship that was life-changing (and maybe life-endangering) for its participants – Tristan and Isolde, Launcelot and Guinevere, Romeo and Juliet, Bonnie and Clyde.

But on a much larger scale, the romantic adventure can be establishing a relationship with anything outside of ourselves that intrigues or challenges us. The relationship can emerge with a place, a house, a horse, a car, a continent, a river, an idea, as well as another person, anything that intrigues us, wakes up our imagination – arational or prerational relationships that make the civilizing forces nervous. The relationship can run the quick dynamic spectrum from arational love to its flip side arational hate, through all the intermediary love-hate variations. It can also have a mythically selective or even creative attitude toward the gray-zone relationship between ‘truth’ and fact. Which leads those trying to develop an orderly civilization to dismiss anything (ad)venturing into the mythic as a lie. It just seems simpler that way.

The Powell survey on its second trip down the Colorado River, 1871. Photo credit: USGS

The first comprehensive study of the Colorado River region was uncivilized enough to state upfront its romantic origins: Frederick Dellenbaugh’s Romance of the Colorado River. Dellenbaugh’s book (available online for a pittance) delved as deeply as was possible at that time into both the First People prehistory in the region and the early history of the Euro-American invasion, from the Spanish trying to work their way up the river from its contentious confluence with the Gulf of California (‘Sea of Cortez’ to them) to the trappers imposing the first major Euro-American change on the river, stripping its tributaries of their beavers which increased the size and violence of the river’s annual spring-summer runoff of snowmelt. But the heart of the book is John Wesley Powell’s explorations to link the upper river and the lower river through its canyons.

Dellenbaugh, as a seventeen-year-old, accompanied Powell on his second Colorado River expedition, a ‘baptism under water’ (often literally) that shaped his ‘romantic’ vision. In his ‘Introduction,’ after observing that most of the great rivers that humans encountered in exploration and settlement gradually became like foster parents to those who settled along them, carrying goods for them and generally watering and growing their settlements, he says of the Colorado:

Dellenbaugh’s Romance was published in 1903. That same year, another great southwestern writer, Mary Hunter Austin came out with her Land of Little Rain, a fascinating collection of her explorations in the deserts of the lower Colorado River region. In that book she offered what might be a cautionary note about ‘romancing the river,’ in an observation about a small Arizona tributary of the Colorado River, ‘the fabled Hassayampa… of whose waters, if any drink, they can no more see fact as naked fact, but all radiant with the color of romance.’

I will now indulge my tendency to take a ‘tectonic’ look at history – looking for large chunks colliding or grating together or subducting under each other. I see the history of our engagement with the Colorado River dividing into three ‘tectonic romances’: first, the Romance of Exploration, which is chronicled in a couple different ways by those two explorers, Dellenbaugh and Austin; their 1903 publications summarize that age and put a semi-colon at the end of the period, as it were.

Second, the Romance of Reclamation: 1903 also marks the year the U.S. Reclamation Service came into being, an organization created almost specifically for settling the Colorado River deserts. Civilized people on both sides of the question would deny that there was any ‘romance’ to reclamation, but one early Bureau engineer would publicly disagree, writing in 1918 about ‘the romance of reclamation’:

C.J. Blanchard of the U.S. Reclamation Service authored that steaming verdure. The Service at that time was under the U.S. Geological Survey, a scientific organization disciplined to the ‘look before you leap’ methods of science, discerning the reality of a situation and adapting to that; but the Reclamation Service, frustrated by the seasonal flood-to-trickle flows of the Colorado, thought that changing that reality (through storage and redistribution) was a more promising route than adapting to it, and so was on its way to becoming independent of the USGS when Blanchard wrote his ‘romance of irrigation’ for an educational journal called The Mentor(thanks, Dave Primus, for calling it to my attention).

Members of the Colorado River Commission, in Santa Fe in 1922, after signing the Colorado River Compact. From left, W. S. Norviel (Arizona), Delph E. Carpenter (Colorado), Herbert Hoover (Secretary of Commerce and Chairman of Commission), R. E. Caldwell (Utah), Clarence C. Stetson (Executive Secretary of Commission), Stephen B. Davis, Jr. (New Mexico), Frank C. Emerson (Wyoming), W. F. McClure (California), and James G. Scrugham (Nevada)
CREDIT: COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY WATER RESOURCES ARCHIVE via Aspen Journalism

The best-known document of the Romance of Reclamation was of course the Colorado River Compact – a document in which the romance of reclamation overrode any relationship to ‘naked fact’ about the river and its flows, a situation that is now biting our collective ass. Yet an Arizona water maven said recently that any Bureau of Reclamation solution to the seven-state impasse would have to cleave closely to the Compact…. The history of the Romance of Reclamation has been written in the gaggle of Congressional acts, court decisions, treaties, regulations and directives that make up the ‘Law of the River’ (recitations of which never seem to include the 1908 Winters Doctrine allocating assumed water to federal reservations, including to the First Peoples).

The end of the Romance of Reclamation would be in the 1960s, pick your date: publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964, passage of the Environmental Policy Act in 1969 – a decade in which the general American perception of the West underwent a sea change, from seeing it as a workplace for producing the resources to feed the American people and industries, to seeing it as a great natural playground to which America’s predominantly urban population could go to recharge, with a resulting desire to protect it from the very industrial consumption that supported the American ‘lifestyle.’.

This was the dawn of the third romantic epoch in our relationship with the river (and the continent in general) – the Romance of Restoration and Revision, driven by a belief that we have sinned against capital-N Nature – with many naked facts as evidence – and can only expiate our sins by preserving what remains of the nonhuman environment, restoring what we can of the damage we’ve done, and revising our own systems for consuming nature (e.g., renewable energy).

Aesthetics are at the root of our romance with capital-N Nature, aesthetics best served by the (increasingly rare) opportunity to be alone with and ‘silent on a peak in Darien,’ as Keats put it. We have a large (and growing) number of excellent writer[s] who work to elaborate on that aesthetic – Ed Abbey first, Craig Childs, Heather Hansman, Kevin Fedarko, to name a few.

But the aesthetic yearning to ultimately ‘put it back the way it was’ does not extend to other equally naked facts, like the dependence of the outdoor recreation industries on the creation of big mountain-highway traffic jams pumping big quantities of carbon and nitrogen gases into the already overladen atmosphere, as we all load up our cars with expensive gear to go off to commune with Nature. Or the naked fact that maintaining civilization-as-we-know-it for 300 million people involves a lot of nonrewable extraction from Nature that it will be very difficult to move away from entirely – unless we figure out how to control our breeding.

Just as significant achievements were achieved under the Romance of Reclamation, so significant achievements have been achieved under the Romance of Restoration and Revision – the setting aside of millions of acres of still-sort-of-wild land, instream flow laws, increasingly responsible forest management, et cetera. But we are clearly still in the early transition – half a century later – to a more realistic romance with restoring and revising to a kinder gentler relationship with the nonhuman systems of nature. And right now, we are experiencing a major counter-attack from the societal forces whose aesthetics still imagine a ‘working landscape’ of derricks, mines and other industrial-scale harvests, all suffused with the ‘smell of money,’ societal forces that believe the best of times were before we woke up to the increasingly fragile finitude of our planet under the burden of us. Let’s all go back and make America great again!

The back of Glen Canyon Dam circa 1964, not long after the reservoir had begun filling up. Here the water level is above dead pool, meaning water can be released via the river outlets, but it is below minimum power pool, so water cannot yet enter the penstocks to generate electricity. Bureau of Reclamation photo. Annotations: Jonathan P. Thompson

I cannot now imagine when and how this third epoch of our romance with the river will end. I think this aesthetic romance might peak with the ‘breaching’ of Glen Canyon Dam, an action that has taken on a somewhat mythic quality for today’s river romantics. I don’t think we will tear it down – let it stand as a monument to…something. But I suspect that even the Bureau of Reclamation is exploring some way of tunneling around it at river level, as we continue to flirt with the disaster of dead pool behind the dam. It will not be easy, due to the silt already piled up at the dam – but really, nothing is going to be easy anymore; that blessed civilization is now in the rear-view mirror.

I’m going to take advantage of the lull in the short-term news about the river’s management for maybe the next decade, to take a look at each of these three epochs of ‘romancing the river’ and their relationship to the ‘naked facts’ of the river – mostly see if there might be something there we’ve overlooked that might help us move forward in our ever-emerging relationship of this ‘First River of the Anthropocene.’ Onward and outward.

Federal money is still in President Trump’s limbo. Rural #Utah is antsy about its water projects — KUER

Price, Utah Main Street and historic theater. By Millman5429 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=122348071

Click the link to read the article on the KUER website (David Condos). Here’s an excerpt:

December 3, 2025

Price Mayor Michael Kourianos drew an imaginary line in the air between two scrubby desert hills. His hand traced the path of a planned 100-foot dam for a new reservoir just north of the city in Carbon County. The project, which Kourianos described as vital to the area’s future, would provide irrigation to farmers and shore up the city’s water supply. It’s a big deal in a drought-prone area, and it could be built within five years, he said — if the federal funding that’s supposed to pay for it doesn’t disappear.

“I’m very much worried about that,” Kourianos said. “That could be at risk. That’s the unknown.”

To finish the project’s environmental impact study by next spring, he said the city and county had to scrape together about $215,000. That was after they were told there were no more federal funds to help with it due to the Trump administration’s recent cuts. The next step will be designing the reservoir, which he said is supposed to be paid for by the Natural Resources Conservation Service, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The agency is set to pay 75% of construction costs, too. In all, the project will cost around $200 million. For a city of 8,216 people, that’s just not in the budget…

Price’s reservoir isn’t the only one threatened. In January, for example, the Biden administration awarded more than $70 million to 10 proposals in Utah and another $50 million to four on the Navajo Nation and Ute tribal land within the state’s watersheds. The projects range from improving wetland habitat for endangered fish to removing invasive plants, such as Russian olive trees, from riverbanks. It was part of a $388.3 million effort to improve drought resilience across the Colorado River Basin with money from the Inflation Reduction Act. Just a few days after the money was awarded, however, President Donald Trump took office and paused it. Several months later, recipients are still waiting…One of the impacted proposals is a collaboration between the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources and conservation organizations Trout Unlimited and The Nature Conservancy that would pay people to voluntarily leave water in the Price River rather than use it.

State ramps up water measurement on Western Slope: Grant program will fund measuring devices as state anticipates compact administration, further scarcity — Heather Sackett (AspenJournalism.org)

This Parshall flume measures the water in the Alfalfa Ditch on Surface Creek near Cedaredge. The Colorado Division of Water Resources estimates there are 2,800 diversions of more than 1 cfs without measuring devices across the Western Slope. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Journalism website (Heather Sackett):

December 5, 2025

The state of Colorado is ramping up an effort to measure water use on the Western Slope, developing rules and standards and rolling out a grant program to help water users pay for diversion measurement devices.

With input from water users, officials from the Colorado Division of Water Resources are creating technical guidance for each of the four major Western Slope river basins on how agricultural water users should measure the water they take from streams. The state is now doling out $7 million from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to eligible water users with faulty or missing devices to install structures such as flumes, weirs and pumps at their point of diversion.

Map of the Gunnison River drainage basin in Colorado, USA. Made using public domain USGS data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69257550

Colorado River Basin in Colorado via the Colorado Geological Survey

San Juan River Basin. Graphic credit Wikipedia.

White River Basin. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69281367

Twenty-five percent of the funding is earmarked for each of the four river basins: Gunnison (Division 4); Colorado River mainstem (Division 5); Yampa-White-Green (Division 6); and San Juan-Dolores (Division 7). The first round of funding will go to Divisions 6 and 7, and applications close at the end of January. The goal is to have all the projects complete by 2029.

Measurement rules for Divisions 6 and 7 have been finalized and are in effect; rules for Division 4 are in the draft phase, and state officials are accepting comments until Dec. 19 on the draft rules in Division 5.

With thousands of diversions from small tributaries across rural, remote and mountainous areas, figuring out precisely how much water is used in Colorado has historically been challenging. According to state officials, there are about 2,800 diversions of more than 1 cubic foot per second from Western Slope rivers and streams that are not currently being measured. Historically, the state has required measuring devices on only diversions that have been involved in calls. When a downstream senior water rights holder is not getting the full amount of water they are entitled to, they can place a “call,” which forces junior upstream water users to cut back.

This Parshall flume measuring device is being installed on a ditch on Morrisania Mesa near Parachute. The state of Colorado has $7 million in federal funds to distribute to water users to install measuring devices on their diversions from waterways. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

Compact compliance

The push for more-accurate measurement comes at a time when there is increasing competition for dwindling water supplies, as well as growing pressure on the Colorado River’s Upper Basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) to conserve water. Whether through forced cuts under the terms of the 1922 Colorado River Compact or through a voluntary conservation program that pays water users to cut back, the state will almost certainly face future cuts to its water use.

According to Jason Ullmann, who is the state engineer and director of the division of water resources, accurate and consistent water measurement is a prerequisite for making basinwide cuts related to the compact.

“While we’ve always been in compliance with the [1922 Colorado River] compact, we haven’t had to do a West Slope-wide administration,” Ullmann said. “We just don’t want to be in the position of having to do that on an emergency basis. We want to be proactive and provide people consistent and reliable standards for what we expect and work with them to get to a point where we do have that more accurate measurement network before that happens.”

Although the Colorado River Compact splits the river’s water evenly between the Upper Basin and the Lower Basin (California, Arizona and Nevada) with 7.5 million acre-feet each annually, the agreement says nothing about what happens when there’s not enough water to meet these allocations. A “compact call” is a theoretical legal concept, whose definition is hotly debated among water managers.

One way it could play out is that the Upper Basin states would have to cut off some water users in order to send enough water downstream to meet their obligations to the Lower Basin. If that happens, Colorado would need a plan for who gets cut off first. Under the strict application water law known as prior appropriation, the oldest water rights get first use of rivers and junior water rights are the first to be cut.

Michael Cohen, a senior fellow at the Pacific Institute, where he has written about the uncertainties of water use and measurement in the Upper Basin, said collecting better data will help water managers figure out where cuts should come from.

“Moving forward, it looks more and more likely that there’s going to be some kind of compact call,” Cohen said. “Then the state of Colorado, as well as the other Upper Basin states, need to figure out how they’re going to enforce that kind of call.”

This Parshall flume was installed in the Yampa River basin in 2020 and replaced the old rusty flume seen in the background. The state of Colorado is working toward creating measurement rules and installing measurement devices across the Western Slope. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

Managing scarcity

But compact compliance is not the only reason that water measurement is needed. Scientists have shown that climate change has contributed to a 20% decline in flows from the 20th century average, and that every 1 degree Celsius of warming results in a 9% reduction in flows. The combination of climate change and a historic drought means that rivers that had never before experienced shortages or calls have started experiencing them in recent years. In the past few years, the Yampa and White rivers, in the northwest corner of the state, have had first-ever calls and have been designated “over-appropriated,” meaning there’s more water demand than supply at certain times.

“Even if you toss the compact situation out, it’s just the practical reality that we’re seeing less snowpack and we have more calls,” Ullmann said. “We’re just in need of improving that measurement accuracy because of the need for administration.”

John Cyran, an attorney who worked on developing the measurement rules for the South Platte River basin and is now a senior attorney with the Healthy Rivers department of Boulder-based environmental group Western Resource Advocates, uses the analogy of a pizza party with too-few pizzas where hungry partygoers are allowed only two slices each to illustrate how measurement is needed in times of scarcity.

“Just like sharing a shrinking pizza or Thanksgiving pie, our water supply is declining,” Cyran said. “The pie is getting smaller. So it is increasingly important to make sure that people don’t take more than their share. But we can’t manage what we don’t measure.”

Tightening up water measurement across the Western Slope could also help Upper Basin water managers as they grapple with a future conservation program that pays water users to cut back and then stores that water in a pool in Lake Powell. A criticism of past pilot programs was that the saved water was not tracked to Lake Powell. Water users downstream of a conservation project could pick up the extra water, with no guarantee that any of it reached the reservoir. Measurement rules and devices could help ensure that this conserved water is “shepherded” to Lake Powell.

Measurement is the first step toward management of a scarce public resource, Cyran said.

“The first step is measuring how much water is being diverted,” Cyran said. “The next step is management – making sure that folks only divert their share and that water we conserve stays in the stream and is not diverted by another user.”

Colorado River Basin map via the Babbit Center for Land and Water Policy/Lincoln Institute of Land Policy

A weird water year so far: Abundant rain, sparse snow: Plus: National park shenanigans in #Utah — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org) #snowpack

The drought situation has improved markedly in the Southwest since the end of the last water year, especially in the Four Corners area. Source: National Drought Monitor.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

December 2, 2025

⛈️ Wacky Weather Watch⚡️

We are now two months into the water year — and a couple of days into meteorological winter — and so far both are pretty weird. On the one hand, much of the West is covered by one of the scantest snowpacks for early December in decades. On the other, it’s also been one of the wettest beginnings to the water year in recent memory.

Graph of 2026 water year snowpack levels for the Animas River watershed (which this year reflects that for most of western Colorado and the Upper Colorado River Basin), along with every year since 2000 that has started as sparsely or more so than this year. Note that the 2008 snowpack in the Animas was just as meagre in early December as it is this year. Then the snows came with a vengeance, leading to one of the biggest winters on record as well as a very healthy spring runoff that lasted well into July.

While snow levels are paltry, the weather gods have delivered plenty of precipitation to the region. While that has helped ease drought conditions, it is no substitute for a healthy snowpack.

Adding to the uncanniness has been the wave of generous storms that have dumped up to a foot of snow on Colorado ski areas and snarled traffic, leading to at least two multi-car pileups on I-70 and shutting down other arteries — yet still failing to bring snowpack levels to anywhere near “normal.”

It’s a big ol’ mixed bag, in other words. The big October deluges eased the drought in much of the region, but the warm temperatures and snow drought don’t bode well for next spring’s runoff. Meagre early winter snowpacks can make and have made dramatic comebacks (e.g. water year 2008 in southwestern Colorado), and another storm is moving into the region as I write this, yet the National Weather Service’s is predicting an abnormally warm and dry winter for much of the Southwest.

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

The Grand County commissioners’ “Access and Capacity Enhancement Alternative” plan aimed at increasing visitation at Arches National Park was just the tip of an iceberg, it seems. Yesterday (Dec. 1), Commissioner Brian Martinez presented the plan to a group of state and federal officials at a closed State of Utah and National Park Service Workshop in Salt Lake City.

Moab seeks bigger crowds? — Jonathan P. Thompson

The meeting’s purpose, according to the official agenda, is:

This may sound fairly innocuous (and maybe it is). But given some of the players, it may also be the latest volley in Utah’s long-running effort to seize control of public lands. The meeting was run by the Interior Department’s associate deputy secretary, Karen Budd-Falen, and Redge Johnson, who leads Utah’s Public Lands Policy Coordinating Office.

Budd-Falen built her legal career on fighting federal agencies, including the Interior Department, and was part of the Sagebrush Rebellion and the Wise Use movements that endeavored to turn federal land over to states and counties and to weaken regulations on the extractive industries. Johnson, meanwhile, was a driving force behind the state’s effort to take control of 18.5 million acres of Bureau of Land Management land in the state.

A Sagebrush Rebel returns to Interior — Jonathan P. Thompson

An anti-BLM sticker (referring, presumably, to the federal land agency, not the Black Lives Matter movement) at another Phil Lyman rally against “federal overreach” and motorized travel closures in southeastern Utah back in 2014. Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk

It’s not clear what is meant when they say the meeting is aimed at achieving Trump’s agenda. As far as national parks go, the administration has been rather chaotic: Freezing hiring, laying off thousands of staff (only to rehire some of them), slashing budgets, and allowing visitors to run roughshod over the parks during the government shutdown.

It sure looks like they are trying to cause the parks to fail, which would give them an excuse to further privatize their functions. Private for-profit corporations already run the lodges, campgrounds, and other services inside many parks. That’s why, during the shutdown, concessionaire-run campgrounds within parks continued to operate, while all of the government-run functions, such as entrance-fee-collection, were shuttered. In this way a false contrast was created between the functional privately-run operations and the dysfunctional public ones; visitors during that time would be excused for preferring the former.

The timing of this meeting, purportedly to receive input from gateway communities, is kind of odd. I have to wonder whether the Interior Department consulted local elected officials before raising entry fees for foreign visitors to $100 at Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks in Utah, along with Grand Canyon, Acadia, Everglades, Glacier, Grand Teton, Rocky Mountain, Sequoia & Kings Canyon, Yellowstone, and Yosemite National Parks.

The Southwest’s tourism industry is highly reliant on international visitors. Visitation from abroad is already down, thanks mostly to the Trump administration’s “America First” creed and its general hostility to the rest of the world. Singling out foreign travelers for these higher fees — even if only at the most popular parks — is likely to dampen visitation from abroad even more, which will ripple through Western economies.

Grand County’s bid to cram even more visitors into Arches National Park won’t be too effective if would be visitors don’t even make it to the United States …

🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭

This is just another old map that caught my attention, in part because it’s a reminder of how extensive the railroad network was, even in the rugged parts of Colorado, back in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This one shows the Denver & Rio Grande rail lines in 1893.

Autumn Rains Delay Basin-wide Reservoir Depletion — Jack Schmidt (Center for #ColoradoRiver Studies) #COriver #aridification

Click the link to read the article on the Center for Colorado River Studies website (Jack Schmidt):

In Brief
Unusually wet conditions in the Basin in October and November 2025, combined with reduced releases from some reservoirs, led to a basin-wide increase in storage for the two-month period. The combined contents of Lake Powell and Lake Mead increased during the two months for only the second time since 2010, and storage in the San Juan River basin increased by 19%, especially in Vallecito and Navajo Reservoirs. These changes were a welcome respite from the relentless depletion of storage that has dominated the last few years. Nevertheless, the upcoming winter snow season is predicted to be below average, and total active storage in the Basin is less than a 2 year supply when compared with recent Basin-wide consumptive uses and losses.

Total precipitation (inches) from 9-15 October 2025 with gridded data from the PRISM Climate Group and observations from the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow (CoCoRaHS) network. Credit: Russ Schumacher/Colorado Climate Center

The Details

The rains of October and November 2025 slowed depletion of the Colorado River’s reservoirs due to increases in stream flow and reduced reservoir releases in some places. Water levels rose in a few reservoirs, and autumn’s rains provided a small bit of flexibility for water managers at the beginning of what is likely to be a below-average winter snow season.

As of November 30, the Basin’s 46 reservoirs held 24.63 million af (acre feet) of active storage[1], of which 90% was in 12 federal reservoirs,[2] including 15.00 million af in Lake Powell and Lake Mead (hereafter, Powell+Mead) and 4.88 million af in 8 federal reservoirs upstream from Lake Powell (Fig.1). This amount of storage is similar to conditions in early 2022, a situation that was described at that time as a crisis. If we divide the total active storage in the Basin’s 46 reservoirs by the basin-wide total annual rate of consumptive use and loss that was 12.7 million af in 2024, the basin-wide reservoir water supply would sustain Basin-wide use for less than 2 years. We continue to live at the doorstep of crisis.

Figure 1. Graph showing active storage in Colorado River basin reservoirs between January 1, 2021, and November 30, 2025. Credit: Jack Schmidt/Center for Colorado River Studies

Basin-wide reservoir storage stabilized in October and November, because Powell+Mead storage stabilized and storage in the San Juan River basin increased. Total Inflow to Lake Powell exceeded releases for more than one week between October 11 and October 18, when Lake Powell increased by 105,000 af[3] which is a 1.6% gain (Fig. 2). Approximately 40% of the total inflow came from the San Juan River, and the monthly October inflows were the largest since 2015. The gain in storage in Lake Powell during this weeklong period exceeded depletions during the rest of the month, and Lake Powell gained approximately 52,000 af during the month. Lake Powell lost 147,000 af in November.

Figure 2. Graph showing inflow and outflow from Lake Powell and active storage between October 1 and November 30, 2025. Total monthly flow at Lees Ferry, representing the total releases from Lake Powell, were 490,000 af in October and 501,000 af in November. Credit: Jack Schmidt/Center for Colorado River Studies

In contrast, the autumn rains did not significantly increase inflow to Lake Mead, because most of the inflows come from scheduled releases from Lake Powell. These reservoir releases were supplemented by 101,000 af of inflows downstream from Lees Ferry[4] and 8000 af from the Virgin River.[5] The most significant changes in Lake Mead occurred at the end of November when releases from Hoover Dam were significantly reduced (Fig. 3).

Figure 3. Graph showing inflow and outflow from Lake Mead and active storage between October 1 and November 30, 2025. Total monthly flow inflow of the Colorado River, representing the total releases from Lake Powell and inflows within Grand Canyon, were 574,000 af in October and 550,000 af in November. Reservoir releases from Hoover Dam were 485,000 af in October and 415,000 af in November. Withdrawals and return flows of the Southern Nevada Water Authority were not included in these data. Credit: Jack Schmidt/Center for Colorado River Studies

Together, total active storage in Powell+Mead increased by 63,000 af during October,[6] and decreased by only 38,000 af in November (Fig. 4).[7] More significant than the gains, however, was that the the pace of reservoir depletion was significantly slowed. Storage in Powell+Mead increased by approximately 25,000 af in October and November, only the second time since 2010 that total storage in these two reservoirs increased during these two months.[8]

Figure 4. Graph showing active storage in Lake Powell, Lake Mead, and in Powell+Mead between January 1, 2023, and November 30, 2025. Credit: Jack Schmidt/Center for Colorado River Studies

Reservoir storage in the San Juan River basin increased more than in any other part of the Colorado River Basin. Five San Juan basin reservoirs increased by 197,000 af in October and November, mostly in Navajo and Vallecito Reservoirs.[9] Not much happened elsewhere, however. The 21 reservoirs of the upper Colorado River watershed lost 57,000 af during October and November, and 16 reservoirs in the Green River watershed lost 10,000 af during the same period.

[1] Active storage in 46 reservoirs are reported by Reclamation at https://www.usbr.gov/uc/water/hydrodata/reservoir_data/site_map.html.

[2] Taylor Park, Blue Mesa, Morrow Point, Crystal, Fontenelle, Flaming Gorge, Vallecito, Navajo, Lake Powell, Lake Mead, Lake Mohave, and Lake Havasu.

[3] Inflow to Lake Powell was computed as the sum of mean daily discharge of the Colorado River at Gypsum Canyon near Hite (gage 09328960), Dirty Devil River above Poison Springs near Hanksville (09333500), Escalante River near Escalante (09337500), and San Juan River near Bluff (09379500), as reported by the U.S. Geological Survey. Outflow from Lake Powell was computed as the mean daily discharge of the Colorado River at Lees Ferry (09380000), because stream flow is measured 15 miles downstream from the dam and includes ground-water seepage around the dam. Lake Powell storage increased between October 10 and October 20, as reported by Reclamation.

[4] Inflows within Grand Canyon were calculated as the difference between measurements of the Colorado River at Lees Ferry (09380000), Colorado River above Diamond Creek near Peach Springs (09420000), and Diamond Creek nr Peach Springs (09404208).

[5] Virgin River below confluence Muddy River near Overton (09419530)

[6] Between October 1 and November 1, 2025, active storage in Lake Powell increased 52,000 af and 11,000 af in Lake Mead.

[7] Between November 1 and November 30, active storage in Lake Powell decreased by 147,000 af and increased by 109,000 af in Lake Mead.

[8] During the previous 15 years between 2010 and 2024, total storage in Powell+Mead increased by 36,000 af in 2011. During the other 14 years of that period, the median depletion of Powell+Mead was 436,000 af.

[9] Storage in Navajo Reservoir increased 126,000 af between October 9 and November 8 and increased by 114,000 af in October and November. Active storage in Vallecito Reservoir gained 68,000 af in October and November. At the end of November, Navajo Reservoir was 60% of its 1.65 million af capacity. Vallecito Reservoir was 77% of its 125,400 af capacity.

Map of the San Juan River, a tributary of the Colorado River, in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, USA. Made using USGS National Map data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47456307

Study: Something’s gotta give on the #RioGrande: #ClimateChange and overconsumption are drying up the Southwest’s “other” big river — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Sandhill cranes and some mallard ducks roost on a sandbar of the Rio Grande River at sunset on Jan. 22, 2025 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Copyright Credit © WWF-US/Diana Cervantes.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

November 21, 2025

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

The Colorado River and its woes tend to get all of the attention, but the Southwest’s “other” big river, the Rio Grande, is in even worse shape thanks to a combination of warming temperatures, drought, and overconsumption. That’s become starkly evident in recent years, as the river bed has tended to dry up earlier in the summer and in places where it previously had continued to carry at least some water. Now Brian Richter and his team of researchers have quantified the Rio Grande’s slow demise, and the conclusions they reach are both grim and urgent: Without immediate and substantial cuts in consumption, the river will continue to dry up — as will the farms and, ultimately, the cities that rely on it.

The Rio Grande’s problems are not new. Beginning in the late 1800s, diversions for irrigation in the San Luis Valley — which the river runs through after cascading down from its headwaters in the San Juan Mountains — sometimes left the riverbed “wholly dry,” wrote ichthyologist David Starr Jordan in 1889, “all the water being turned into these ditches. … In some valleys, as in the San Luis, in the dry season there is scarcely a drop of water in the riverbed that has not from one to ten times flowed over some field, while the beds of many considerable streams (Rio la Jara, Rio Alamosa, etc.) are filled with dry clay and dust.”

Rio Grande Streamflow Mystery: Solved? — Jonathan P. Thompson

San Luis Valley farmers gradually began irrigating with pumped groundwater, allowing them to rely less on the ditches (but causing its own problems), and the 1938 Rio Grande Compact forced them to leave more water in the river. While that kept the water flowing through northern and central New Mexico, the Rio Grande’s lower reaches still occasionally dried up.

Then, in the early 2000s, the megadrought — or perhaps permanent aridification — that still plagues the region settled in over the Southwest. [ed. emphasis mine] Snowpack levels in the river’s headwaters shrank, both due to diminishing precipitation and climate change-driven warmer temperatures, which led to runoff and streamflows 17% lower than the 20th century average, according to the new study. And yet, overall consumption has not decreased.

“In recent decades,” the authors write, “river drying has expanded to previously perennial stretches in New Mexico and the Big Bend region. Today, only 15% of the estimated natural flow of the river remains at Anzalduas, Mexico near the river’s delta at the Gulf of Mexico.” Reservoirs, the river’s savings accounts, have been severely drained to the point that they won’t be able to withstand another one or two dry winters. As farmers and other users have increasingly turned to groundwater pumping, aquifers have also been depleted. The situation is clearly unsustainable.

Something’s gotta give on the Rio Grande, and while we may be tempted to target Albuquerque’s sprawl, drying up all of the cities and power plants that rely on the river wouldn’t achieve the necessary cuts.

Source: “Overconsumption gravely threatens water security in the binational Rio Grande-Bravo basin” by Brian Richter et al.

It will come as little surprise to Western water watchers that agriculture is by far the largest water user on the Rio Grande — taking up 87% of direct human consumption — and that alfalfa and other hay crops gulp up the lion’s share, or 52%, of agriculture’s slice of the river pie. This isn’t necessarily because alfalfa and other hays are thirstier than other crops, but because they are so prevalent, covering about 433,000 acres over the entire basin, more than four times as much acreage as cotton.

Source: Overconsumption gravely threatens water security in the binational Rio Grande-Bravo basin

This kind of math means farmers are going to have to bear the brunt of the necessary consumption cuts — either voluntarily or otherwise. In fact, they already have: Between 2000 and 2019, according to the report, Colorado lost 18% of its Rio Grande Basin farmland, New Mexico lost 28%, and the Pecos River sub-basin lost 49% (resulting in a downward trend in agricultural water consumption). Some of this loss was likely incentivized through conservation programs that pay farmers to fallow their fields. But it was also due to financial struggles.

Yet even when farmers are paid a fair price to fallow their fields there can be nasty side effects. Noxious weeds can colonize the soil and spread to neighbors’ farms, it can dry out and mobilize dust that diminishes air quality and the mountain snowpack, and it leaves holes in the cultural fabric of an agriculture-dependent community. If a field’s going to be dried up, it should at least be covered with solar panels.

Think like a watershed: Interdisciplinary thinkers look to tackle dust-on-snow — Jonathan P. Thompson

Another possibility is to switch to crops that use less water. This isn’t easy: Farmers grow alfalfa in the desert because it’s actually quite drought tolerant, doesn’t need to be replanted every year, is less labor-intensive than other crops, is marketable and ships relatively easy, and can grow in all sorts of climates, from the chilly San Luis Valley to the scorching deserts of southern Arizona.

Alfalfaphobia? Jonathan P. Thompson

Still, it can be done, as a group of farmers in the San Luis Valley are demonstrating with the Rye Resurgence Project. This effort is not only growing the grain — which uses less water than alfalfa, is good for soil health, and makes good bread and whiskey — but it is also working to create a larger market for it. While it’s only a drop in the bucket, so to speak, this is the sort of effort that, replicated many times across the region, could help balance supply and demand on the river, without putting a bunch of farmers out of business.

Photo credit: The Rye Resurgence Project

***

Oh, and about that other river? You know, the Colorado? Representatives from the seven states failed to come up with a deal on how to manage the river by the Nov. 15 deadline. The feds had mercy on them, giving them until February to sort it all out. I’m not so optimistic, but we’ll see. Personally, I think the only way this will ever work out is if the Colorado River Compact — heck, the entire Law of the River — is scrapped, and the states and the whole process is started from scratch, this time with a much better understanding of exactly how much water is in the river, and with the tribal nations having seats at the table.

⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️

There are a bunch of wannabe uranium mining companies out there right now, locating claims and acquiring and selling claims and touting their exploratory drilling results. But there are only a small handful of firms that are actually doing anything resembling mining. One of them is the Canada-based Anfield, which just broke ground on its Velvet-Wood uranium mine in the Lisbon Valley, even without all of the necessary state permits.

Now Anfield says it has applied for a Colorado permit to restart its long-idle JD-8uranium mine. The mine is on one of a cluster of Department of Energy leases overlooking the Paradox Valley from its southern slopes, and was previously owned and operated by Cotter Corporation. The mine has not produced ore since at least 2006. Anfield says it will process the ore at its Shootaring Mill near Ticaboo, Utah, which has yet to get Utah’s green light.

🏠 Random Real Estate Room 🤑

Look! Affordable housing near Moab! Sure, it’s a cave, but it’s only $99,000. Oh, what’s that? $998,000? They’re selling a cave for a million buckaroos? But of course they are. To be fair, it’s not just a cave. It’s several of them, plus a trailer. Crazy stuff.

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

A work train in the Animas River gorge just below Silverton. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868

#Drought news: Water Year 2025 Recap for the Intermountain West: Drought Persists in the Western Intermountain West; Dry Winter More Likely Amid La Niña — NOAA #ENSO

Click the link to read the article on the NOAA website:

November 20, 2025

Key Points

Start of Water Year 2026: Leading up to the start of Water Year (WY) 2026, drought conditions improved across the eastern Intermountain West, but drought expanded and intensified across western areas of the region. Storage for Lake Powell and Lake Mead reached a 30-year low for the date as of October 25, 2025.

Water Year 2025: Precipitation was lower than average in western portions of the region, and greater than average in eastern parts of Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Much of the Intermountain West experienced warmer-than-average temperatures.

Water Year 2025 Impacts: Hot and dry conditions led to large fires in several states. Lack of precipitation, early snowmelt, and warm spring temperatures harmed crop production and forage in many areas.

La Niña Winter Ahead: La Niña conditions are present and favored to continue into early winter. La Niña typically brings warmer and drier winter conditions to the southern region of the Intermountain West. A transition to El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) neutral is favored for the January-March 2026 time frame. Neutral conditions mean neither El Niño or La Niña are influencing weather patterns.

This update is based on data available as of Thursday, November 20, at 7 a.m. MT. We acknowledge that conditions are evolving.

Conditions at the Start of Water Year 2026

The start of the new water year (beginning October 1, 2025) brought intense rainstorms and flooding in parts of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. However, due to warmer-than-average temperatures, combined with lower-than-average precipitation across Water Year 2025, much of the region still remains in drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

At the start of Water Year 2026, drought conditions were split across the Continental Divide, with no drought in much of the eastern extent of the Intermountain West region. Over Water Year 2025, drought conditions persisted or intensified across western portions of Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico, as well as statewide across Arizona and Utah.

Flaming Gorge Reservoir started Water Year 2026 at near-average storage levels, but many other reservoirs remained below average, including Lake Mead, Lake Powell, and Elephant Butte Reservoir. Greater-than-average runoff is needed to increase reservoir levels next spring.

Moving into winter, soil moisture levels are better than they were in November 2024, with root zone soil moisture in headwater basins for the Upper Colorado River and the Rio Grande River experiencing a mix of wetter-than-average conditions at some locations and drier than-average conditions at others, according to both SPoRT-LIS modeled data and SNOTEL station data.

Storage is below average for most Bureau of Reclamation–managed reservoirs in the headwaters of the Upper Colorado River Basin. As of November 18, 2025, Lake Powell is at 44% of typical storage, the lowest observed level for this date in the last 30 years.

Storage is also below average for Elephant Butte Reservoir in the Rio Grande Basin, at 11% of average as of November 18, 2025.

With La Niña conditions anticipated to persist from December to February, snowpack is more likely to be lower than average during these months. However, all La Niñas differ, and there is uncertainty around how this season will play out. La Niña conditions are expected to weaken into El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) neutral conditions from January to March 2026.

Water Year 2025 Brings a Mix of Drought Degradation and Recovery

52-week U.S. Drought Monitor Change Map, showing where drought improved (green and blue), remained the same (gray), and intensified (yellow and orange) from October 8, 2024 to October 7, 2025. Conditions were largely split across the western and eastern sides of the region, with 1- to 4-class degradations in the west and 1- to 2-class drought recovery in the east. Source: National Drought Mitigation Center.

November 2025 Reservoir Storage Levels

Lake Powell’s storage declined over Water Year 2025. While Lake Mead’s storage at the end of Water Year 2025 was similar to Water Year 2024, both years had low reservoir levels, with storage near only 50% of average. Source: U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Interactive Reservoir Dashboard.

Intermountain West Water Year 2025 Summary

Water Year 2025 (October 1, 2024–September 30, 2025) brought varied drought conditions to the Intermountain West. Drought largely worsened west of the Continental Divide and improved to the east of the Continental Divide.

Drought intensified and spread in Utah, Arizona, and western portions of Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico. Over the summer, portions of western Colorado and the southern border of Arizona and New Mexico reached Exceptional Drought (D4), according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

Above-average temperatures (+ 1-3 ºF) were widespread across the region in Water Year 2025, with some isolated areas being even hotter.

Water year precipitation for the region was variable, with a wet-dry split along the Continental Divide. The Southwest Monsoon season was slow to start this year, but precipitation ramped up at the end of August for Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. Utah had a weaker than usual summer rain season, and Salt Lake City experienced its fourth driest summer on record.

Utah: Total water year precipitation was below average across the entire state in 2025. The driest areas were in the south-central region of the state, and in Juab and Tooele Counties in Western Utah. Water Year 2025 was among the top five driest years on record for many portions of the state.

Arizona: Arizona received lower-than-average precipitation. Stations in some southeastern counties measured total water year precipitation among the lowest 10% on record, with some counties recording their 5th driest water year on record. August 2025 was the 16th driest August on record for the state. Yuma County was the only area with above-average precipitation, with the 9th wettest August on record for the county.

Colorado: Precipitation conditions were split between western and eastern Colorado. The western side of the state saw total water year precipitation between 50-90% of average. The eastern side of the state was unusually wet. Parts of Lincoln and Kit Carson Counties received over 130% of average precipitation.

New Mexico: Water year precipitation followed a diagonal split across the state. Temperatures were warmer than average for two-thirds of the state, and near average in counties to the northeast. The western and southern areas were drier than average (50-80% of average), and the eastern half of the state was wetter than average (100-150%). Hidalgo, Grant, and Catron Counties experienced the driest water year conditions in the state. Meanwhile, multiple counties on the eastern side of the state received 130-150% of average precipitation.

Wyoming: Total water year precipitation varied across Wyoming, ranging from 50-70% of average in parts of Sweetwater County to 120-130% of average in Converse County. Much of the state received 80-100% of average precipitation.

April 1, 2025 snow water equivalent (SWE) was 81-96% of average for many headwater basins in the Upper Colorado, but runoff efficiency was low and yielded below-average streamflows in many reaches. The Colorado Climate Center attributed low runoff efficiency to early snowmelt and below-average spring snowfall. April 1, 2025 snowpack was much lower than average for the headwaters of the Rio Grande basin, located in southern Colorado, with SWE at ~56% of average for the basin.

Dry conditions and high evaporative demand led to several large fires in the Intermountain West during the 2025 fire season, including the 145,000+-acre Dragon Bravo Fire in Arizona and 137,758-acre Lee Fire in Colorado (5th largest fire in Colorado history).

Near- to Below-Average Precipitation West of the Continental Divide

Percent of average precipitation for Water Year 2025 (October 1, 2024–September 30, 2025), compared to historical conditions from 1991-2020. Tan and brown hues indicate below-average precipitation. Green hues indicate above-average precipitation. Gray and white hues indicate near-average precipitation. Parts of eastern Colorado and New Mexico received 110-150% of average precipitation during Water Year 2025, but the western two-thirds of the region and much of Wyoming received lower than average precipitation. Source: WestWide Drought Tracker, Western Regional Climate Center. Data from PRISM.

Departure from average water year average temperature (October 1, 2024–September 30, 2025) in degrees Fahrenheit, compared to historical conditions from 1991-2020. The majority of the Intermountain West experienced higher than average temperatures (red hues), with parts of Utah hitting 3-4 ºF above average. Source: WestWide Drought Tracker, Western Regional Climate Center. Data from PRISM.

Water Year 2025 Impacts

High evaporative demand, warmer-than-usual temperatures, lower-than-usual precipitation, and dry soils contributed to dry fuel conditions and large fires across many parts of the Intermountain West. Across the region, earlier snowmelt and warm temperatures led to longer-than-usual fire seasons.

Wildfire impacts across the Intermountain West varied by state during Water Year 2025. Arizona and Colorado experienced record-breaking fires, including the 145,000+ acre Dragon Bravo Fire in Grand Canyon National Park and 137,000 acre Lee Fire–Colorado’s 5th largest wildfire on record. Meanwhile in Wyoming, the number of wildfire incidents increased, but acres burned decreased compared to Water Year 2024.

By April 2025, conditions were so dry in Utah that the governor declared a drought emergency.

Dry conditions, early snowmelt, and warm spring temperatures negatively impacted crop production in portions of all states across the Intermountain West. Poor forage conditions likewise harmed grazing in many areas, leading to curtailed grazing seasons or herd reductions.

La Niña Outlook

As of November 17, 2025, La Niña conditions are present and expected to continue through December to February, with a transition to El Niño Southern Oscillation–neutral conditions likely from January to March.

Every La Niña is different. For the Southwestern U.S., La Niña is typically associated with a greater statistical likelihood of warmer, drier conditions during winter months.

Other variables also influence winter precipitation, and not all La Niñas are associated with below-average winter precipitation in the Intermountain West.

A Weak La Niña Is Here, ENSO-Neutral Forecast Early Next Year

Official NOAA El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) Outlook, showing the probability (percent chance) of La Niña (blue), El Niño (red), or ENSO-neutral (gray) conditions for three-month periods over the next year. Taller bars indicate a greater likelihood of occurrence, shorter bars indicate a lower likelihood of occurrence. La Niña conditions are present as of October 2025, and the official outlook favors ENSO-neutral conditions beginning in January and lasting through the remainder of the water year. Source: National Weather Service Climate Predication Center.

Additional Resources by State

More local information is available from the following resources:

Your state climatologist

Your state page on Drought.gov:

Arizona

Colorado

New Mexico

Utah

Wyoming

National Weather Service Drought Information Statements:

November 7, 2025: Riverton, Wyoming Weather Forecast Office

November 4, 2025: Salt Lake City, Utah Weather Forecast Office

November 3, 2025: El Paso, Texas/Santa Teresa, New Mexico Weather Forecast Office

Western Water Assessment 2025 Water Year Summary

More state information is available from the following resources:

Arizona: Interactive Drought Dashboard; State Climate Office

California: California Water Watch; California Department of Water Resources – Drought; California State Climatologist

Colorado: Water Conditions Monitoring Committee; Colorado Climate Center Drought Dashboard

Nevada: Living with Drought in Nevada; Nevada Division of Water Resources – Drought; State Climate Office

New Mexico: Office of the State Engineer, Drought page; New Mexico Climate Center

Utah: Department of Natural Resources, Drought page; Utah Climate Center

To report or view local drought impact information:

Condition Monitoring Observer Reports (CMOR)

CoCoRaHS Condition Monitoring Reports

Elise Osenga
University of Colorado Boulder/Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), NOAA/National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS)

Meredith Muth
NOAA National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS)

Erinanne Saffell
Arizona State Climate Office, Arizona State University

Dave Simeral
Desert Research Institute, Western Regional Climate Center

Jon Meyer
Utah Climate Center, Utah State University

Paul Miller
Colorado River Basin Forecast Center, National Weather Service

Special Thanks

This Drought Status Update was issued in partnership between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)/National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) and partners across the Intermountain West. NIDIS is an interagency program within the Climate Program Office, which is part of NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research.

No quick fix for #Aspen #drought conditions — The Aspen Daily News

West Drought Monitor map November 25, 2025.

Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Daily News website (Lucy Peterson). Here’s an excerpt:

November 18, 2025

The city of Aspen’s drought response committee is recommending the city maintain a stage 2 water shortage that was declared in August. Monsoonal moisture and cooler temperatures that came since Aspen City Council activated the stage 2 restrictions have helped drought conditions, but not changed them, according to an information memo sent to city council this week. As of Nov. 6, Aspen and Pitkin County remained in severe and extreme drought categories, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

“Pitkin County has experienced its second driest year to date (January — September 2025) in 131 years of record with a precipitation deficit of 6.84 inches from normal,” the memo states.

Data collected from a National Weather Service station at the city’s water treatment facility recorded 1.52 inches of rain in August and 1.89 inches of rain in September. It brought the city’s precipitation deficit to 3.43 inches. Water demand typically decreases in Aspen during the winter when irrigation systems are turned off, but it is when streams are at their lowest point in the year, according to the memo. Councilman John Doyle, a staunch supporter of water conservation, said restrictions are especially important now as ski seasons get shorter and less snow falls…The stage 2 water shortage declaration came two months after the city declared a stage 1 water shortage with a goal to cut overall water consumption by 10% within city limits. Well below-average stream flows led the city to enact the second stage of water shortage, which represents severe drought conditions…The city relies primarily on streamflow from Castle and Maroon creeks for its water supply. It depends on consistent release of water from snowmelt. The city’s stage 2 water restrictions are mandatory. Watering of any lawn, garden, landscaped area, tree, shrub or other plant is prohibited from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Household watering schedules are also mandatory.

Map of the Roaring Fork River drainage basin in western Colorado, USA. Made using USGS data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69290878

Scientists study variability in snowfall, wetter #snowpack: #Climate models show #Colorado ski season shortening by 10 days — #SteamboatSprings Pilot & Today

University of Utah graduate student Joey Bail works to remove snow from the mid-mountain instruments operated by Storm Peak Laboratory in February 2025 at Steamboat Resort. The station measures dust on snow, which can increase snow melt rates.
Storm Peak Laboratory/Courtesy photo

Click the link to read the article on the Steamboat Pilot & Today website (Suzie Romig). Here’s an excerpt:

November 22, 2025

Changing snowpack trends in the West are bringing more variability to snow conditions and more moisture to the snowpack, threatening the future number of light and fluffy powder days. Increasing variability was the predominant message from a panel of snow experts during the presentation “Stories of a Changing Snowpack” hosted by nonprofit Yampatika on Nov. 13 in Steamboat. The panel, including representatives from the Storm Peak Laboratory and Airborne Snow Observatories, presented in-depth data and answered audience questions about how changing weather and climate conditions are affecting snowfall and snowpack impact to recreation and water supplies in northwest Colorado.

“We are seeing earlier snowmelts, heavier snow, more variability,” said Atmospheric Science Professor Gannet Hallar, Ph.D., who directs the Storm Peak Lab which sits atop the Steamboat Resort.

Hallar said across the Western states, scientists are confirming decreases in snow-water equivalent, according to measurements taken April 1, increasing spring temperatures and dust — factors that cause snow to melt. She explained the snowflake formation science behind how even small increases in winter temperatures can make a large difference in snow quality…Earlier spring runoff, hydrograph changes and increased variability of snowpack creates challenges for everything from sufficient river flows for endangered fish species to the timing of reservoir releases to agricultural irrigation, Burchenal said. Hallar said dust on snow measurements and understanding how dust on snow impacts melt timing is important because some scientists have documented that a large dust storm may lead to a 10- to 14-day earlier snow melt off…Allen and Hallar discussed the value of snowmaking additives such as Snomax, made from a protein derived from a naturally occurring microbe, used to provide nuclei for artificial snow making.

“This allows more significant volumes of snow to be produced at lower temperatures, with less water and energy.” according to the website for Snomax International. “This substantially increases the efficiency of the snow-making system, while at the same time delivering a consistent snow quality even during the most extreme temperature fluctuations.”

Westwide SNOTEL basin-filled map November 23, 2025.

#Colorado Basin River Forecast Center Water Year in Review, An Overview of Operational Changes, Improvements, and Investigations over the course of Water Year 2025 #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Click the link to read the report on the NOAA website. Here’s an excerpt:

1.2.2 Water Year 2025 Snowpack Accumulation and Water Supply Forecast Evolution

Early season snowpack accumulation through the first week of January throughout the Upper Colorado River Basin and Great Basin ranged from near to slightly above normal throughout much of central Colorado and the headwaters of the Green River Basin and much of far northwestern Utah. Snowpack accumulation values were below normal in the San Juan and Dolores River Basins. In the Lower Colorado River Basin, early season snowpack accumulation was essentially non-existent, with the highest snowpack amounts observed in the northern portion of the Virgin River Basin at 10% of average. Other areas were at, or very close to, 0% of normal (Figure 4).

Snowpack is a dominant driver of seasonal water supply forecasts. As a result of relatively near normal snowpack conditions throughout much of the Upper Colorado River Basin and Great Basin regions and generally dry soil moisture conditions, official January Forecasts ranged from near average throughout much of the wetter portions of Colorado to approximately 70% of average throughout much of Utah and the San Juan River Basin (Figure 5).

Generally dry conditions continued through February, with numerous NRCS SNOTEL stations located in the southern portion of the Upper Colorado River Basin and Great Basin regions their lowest precipitation accumulation on record for the December through February period. These record setting conditions corresponded with generally well below average water year precipitation values from October through February (Figure 6).

It is important to note that while some areas saw beneficial It is important to note that while some areas saw beneficial precipitation, particularly in the Green River Basin, warmer than normal temperatures at the end of January and into early February resulted in snowmelt at lower elevation zones (Figure 7).

These generally dry conditions resulted in below normal water supply forecasts throughout the CBRFC’s area of responsibility. Snowpack accumulation over the Colorado River Basin and Great Basin region typically peaks near April 1st. Snowpack conditions varied throughout the Colorado River and Great Basin regions, but were generally near to slightly above average in the northern portions of the Green and Yampa River Basins, and Colorado River headwaters. Drier conditions were apparent throughout much of the Gunnison and San Juan River Basins, as well as central and southern Utah. Lower Colorado River Basin snowpack conditions remained essentially at zero. Many NRCS SNOTEL locations indicated snow water equivalent (SWE) amounts that were near average (Figure 8).

However, while peak SWE values at NRCS SNOTEL locations generally located at higher elevations indicated near normal peak snowpack conditions, CBRFC modeled SWE at lower and middle elevation zones over major contributing areas showed below to well below normal SWE conditions (Figure 9).

As a result of generally below normal SWE conditions and dry soil moisture conditions, April official forecasts ranged from near normal in portions of the Colorado River Headwaters, to approximately 50% of normal in the Dolores and San Juan River Basin. The official April forecast for Lake Powell was 67% of normal.

The #ColoradoRiver is Not Going to Wait for Politics — John Berggren (WesternResourceAdvocates.org) #COriver #aridification

Click the link to read the article on the Western Resource Advocates website (John Berggren):

November 21, 2025

The states that share the Colorado River have failed to agree on how to protect it, leaving 35 million people without a clear path forward. We still have a chance to protect the river – but we must act now. Our communities need a plan that responds to climate change, proactively prepares for water shortages, promotes conservation across the Basin, and protects river health.

One in 10 Americans depend on a healthy Colorado River. For the last two years, their future has been hotly debated behind closed doors.

The states that share the river have failed to agree on how to protect it, missing a critical deadline to provide a plan for managing the river – leaving our communities high and dry.

It’s time to put the river before politics. Our communities need results and a plan that saves water across the West.

One in 10 Americans, along with countless fish and wildlife, depend on a healthy Colorado River. For years, our future has been hotly debated by a handful of state officials behind closed doors. The river has faced escalating threats from climate change and unsustainable water demands. River flows are declining, and our two major reservoirs are less than one-third full. That is why it was so disappointing when officials finally emerged from two years of negotiations empty-handed.

The guidelines for managing the Colorado River expire in 2026, and the Bureau of Reclamation has been working with the Basin states, Tribes, and stakeholders on a new plan for the dry years ahead. Reclamation gave the states until Nov. 11 to outline their framework for the new guidelines with the details due Feb. 14.

What is the hold up? The Colorado River Basin states are divided into two camps — the Lower Basin (Arizona, California, and Nevada) and the Upper Basin (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming). The two Basins are at odds over a variety of fundamental issues, including who should take water shortages, how much these should be, and whether shortages are mandatory or voluntary. The Lower Basin has agreed to take the majority of the shortages in most years, but there is significant disagreement over who bears responsibility for the remaining shortages. Both Basins argue that the other is responsible. The threat of interstate litigation over the river looms large. These court battles would take decades to resolve, cost millions of dollars, and plunge the region into a state of uncertainty — all while the river system continues to crash.

The states held numerous confidential meetings in an attempt to reach an agreement while communities throughout the West anxiously awaited the outcome. On Nov. 11, the states released a joint statement that offered a commitment to continue negotiating, but little else.

The Colorado River is not going to wait for process or politics. Drought and climate change are reshaping the West. The window to secure the river’s future is closing fast.

Decision makers need to start making real progress. If we have another dry year like this one, water demands could exceed the river’s natural flow by 3.6 million acre-feet, which is enough water to sustain over 7 million families for an entire year. Such a shortfall could mean water levels in Lake Powell drop so low that Glen Canyon Dam can no longer produce hydropower and it raises serious concerns about whether the dam can safely operate at all.

This problem is too big for one state or sector to solve on its own. Everyone in the Basin must do more to save water and protect the river. Every drop matters.

Decision makers are trying to solve a complex problem with difficult trade-offs, but the challenges will only grow with each passing day. We simply can’t do our best work if we wait until the last minute. A plan that is hastily put forward at the eleventh hour leaves little room for public input or creative solutions. Instead, it risks perpetuating a status quo that hasn’t been working for anyone.

We must allow time to incorporate input from the 30 Basin Tribes, many of whom have long been excluded from key negotiations and lack access to clean water. We also need to leave room to build in solutions that protect the health of the river that sustains the West.

The future of our region — from families in Denver to raft guides in Moab to communities on the Navajo Nation to farmers in Yuma — depend on a healthy river.

We need a plan for the dry years ahead, and we need it now. While state negotiations remain important, the Bureau of Reclamation cannot let the ongoing impasse stand in the way of meaningful solutions. Reclamation must press on and work with Tribes and stakeholders across the West to develop robust and equitable guidelines that protect the river we all depend on.

At WRA we are continuing to advocate for policies that:

Base management decisions on the best available science, including how much water is actually flowing in the river

Expand water conservation efforts across the Basin and create flexible water storage accounts so that we can store water to protect river health and meet our needs in dry years

Ensure Tribes have meaningful opportunities to shape decisions on the river and can access their fair share of the river’s water

Invest in projects to maintain the river’s infrastructure, incentivize water conservation, build water security, and restore irreplaceable fish and wildlife habitat

Enable ongoing collaboration across the region

Adopt policies that prioritize the health of the river so that future generations can build a life in the West

The next few months will determine the future of the river for years to come. By the end of this year, Reclamation is expected to publish a draft environmental impact statement analyzing alternatives for managing the river. This will be followed by a public comment period where you can make your voice heard. Reclamation’s final record of decision is expected late next summer.

We are up against hard deadlines enforced by the federal government and Mother Nature. The clock is ticking. We still have a chance to protect the river — but we must act now.

The #Colorado Water Conservation Board Approves Historic Agreement to Safeguard #ColoradoRiver Water Rights — Lindsay DeFrates (Colorado River District) #COriver #aridification

This historical photo shows the penstocks of the Shoshone power plant above the Colorado River. A coalition led by the Colorado River District is seeking to purchase the water rights associated with the plant. Credit: Library of Congress photo

Click the link to read the release on the Colorado River District website (Lindsay DeFrates):

The acceptance of the Shoshone water rights marks a landmark partnership between the State of Colorado and the western slope.

Today, Wednesday, November 19, the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) voted unanimously to accept the joint offer by the Colorado River District and Public Service Company of Colorado (PSCo) of a perpetual interest in the use of the Shoshone Water Rights for instream flow purposes.

Once confirmed by water court, this acquisition will create the largest environmental water right in the state’s history and permanently protect the historic flow of the Colorado River.

“The importance of today’s vote cannot be overstated as a legacy decision for Colorado water and the western slope. It secures an essential foundation for the health of the Colorado River and the communities it sustains,” said Andy Mueller, General Manager of the Colorado River District. “We continue to be impressed by, and thankful for, the broad coalition of voices that have come together in support of protecting the Shoshone Water Rights. Without them, we would not have been able to meet this historic milestone.”

“Today, the CWCB demonstrated its deep commitment to Colorado’s water security by taking bold, permanent action to protect our namesake river. We are proud to stand with the State and with our many partners across the West Slope in securing these flows for the benefit of all Coloradans,” said Sen. Marc Catlin, president of the Colorado River District Board of Directors. “This agreement strengthens water security for hundreds of communities within our state and represents a proactive, durable solution for the 40 million people who rely on the Colorado River downstream. The Shoshone Water Rights Preservation Project keeps the river as whole as possible, keeping water in its natural basin and safeguarding this lifeline for generations to come.”

The board’s decision today was the final step in the instream flow acquisition process that began with the formal offer in May 2025. Following a contested hearing in September – requested by four Front Range water entities – the Colorado River District and PSCo granted the CWCB additional time to continue deliberations and fully consider the historic proposal and partnership at their November meeting.

35 entities filed for party status in support of the Shoshone Water Rights ISF proposal. These include West Slope towns and counties, water districts, as well as local and regional non-profits. Over 400 positive public comments were also submitted over the summer.

“Today’s decision by the CWCB is a tremendous step forward for the health of the Colorado River and the communities that rely on it,” said Senator Dylan Roberts. “The Shoshone Permanency effort reflects years of collaboration and a shared commitment to protecting our headwaters, and I’m grateful to all the partners who brought us to this point. There is still important work ahead, but this vote positions Colorado to take advantage of the years of effort and protects these flows for generations to come.”

“The Shoshone water rights are a lifeline for western Colorado,” said Mesa County Commissioner Bobbie Daniel. “Our farmers, ranchers, recreation enthusiasts, and energy producers depend on this water, and we are proud to see the CWCB support this project. These flows are the future of our families and communities, and now, more than ever, it is critical that we are doing everything we can to protect them.”

Xcel Energy provided the following statement: “Xcel Energy recognizes the significant collaboration and effort that brought us to today’s decision by the Colorado Water Conservation Board. We appreciate the engagement from all parties throughout this process and look forward to continuing the work ahead. This agreement represents an important step in ensuring reliable, clean energy for the communities we serve while supporting responsible stewardship of Colorado’s water resources.”

The CWCB also issued their own press release, which is available on their website here: https://cwcb.colorado.gov/category/news-articles

In December 2023, the Colorado River District and Public Service Company of Colorado (PSCo), a subsidiary of Xcel Energy, entered into a $99 million Purchase and Sale Agreement (PSA) to acquire the historic Shoshone Water Rights, senior (1902) and junior (1929) non-consumptive rights that stabilize flows on the upper Colorado River. The PSA is the product of decades of work by the statewide Shoshone Water Right Preservation Coalition.

To close the transaction, the PSA requires four conditions: execution of an Instream Flow Agreement with the CWCB (approved today), receipt of a water court decree approving the change of water rights, securing commitment of full project funding ($99 million), and approval from the Colorado Public Utilities Commission. So far, the Shoshone Water Rights Coalition has secured commitments of over $57 million from West Slope entities, the State of Colorado, and the Colorado River District’s Community Funding Partnership. The Bureau of Reclamation awarded the project $40 million through the Inflation Reduction Act Funds in January 2025 – those funds remain under review by the current administration.

Today’s CWCB decision fulfills that critical Instream Flow Agreement requirement, moving the project significantly closer to final completion and the permanent protection of the Shoshone flows. The River District, PSCo, and the CWCB will be initiating the water court process to add instream flow use to the Shoshone water rights. The River District and its full coalition of supporters will also be turning their focus on fully securing the previously awarded federal funds.

The #Colorado Water Conservation Board votes yes on Shoshone: The #ColoradoRiver District will retain some control over management of powerful water rights — Heather Sackett (AspenJournalism.org) #COriver #arification

River District General Manager Andy Mueller speaks to the Colorado Water Conservation Board in front of a packed house Wednesday. The board voted unanimously to accept water rights tied to the Shoshone hydropower plant to benefit the environment. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Journalism website (Heather Sackett):

November 20, 2025

In a historic move Wednesday evening, the state water board voted unanimously to accept water rights tied to the Shoshone hydropower plant, a major step toward securing those flows in perpetuity for the Western Slope.

The Colorado Water Conservation Board said the Shoshone water rights, which are some of the oldest and most powerful on the mainstem of the Colorado River, can be used to benefit the environment.

“The Shoshone acquisition makes a lot of sense to me, and I’m very proud to be a part of the work that everybody’s put into it,” said Mike Camblin, who represents the Yampa, White and Green river basins on the CWCB. “I hope that our children and our grandchildren look back and realize we made the right decision on this.”

The Glenwood Springs-based Colorado River Water Conservation District plans to purchase the Shoshone water rights for $99 million from Xcel Energy, but the district first needed the approval of the CWCB, which is the only entity in the state allowed to hold instream-flow water rights to benefit the environment. Because the water is returned to the river after it runs through the hydroplant’s turbines, downstream cities, irrigators, recreators and the environment all benefit.

River District General Manager Andy Mueller called it a fantastic day in Colorado history.

“I think that was the right decision for the Colorado River and the right decision for our whole state,” Mueller said. “I think the state for generations to come, centuries in the future will benefit from having that water in the Colorado River.”

Importantly, the instream-flow agreement approved by the board says that the Western Slope, along with the CWCB, will retain some control over exercising the rights. The River District and its constituents drew a hard line in the sand regarding this point and said they would walk away from the deal if they had to cede control solely to the CWCB.

Though not totally unprecedented, co-management is a departure from the norm, as the CWCB has never shared management of an instream-flow water right this large or this powerful with another entity.

In attendance at Wednesday’s CWCB meeting in Golden were representatives of ditch companies, elected officials and water managers from across the River District’s 15-county area. Some of the attendees said during their public comments that if the River District didn’t retain some control over the water rights, they would pull their funding and withdraw their support from the Shoshone campaign.

Mesa County Commissioner Bobbie Daniel said the joint-management proposal is a safeguard that ensures that Western Slope interests are not pushed aside. Mesa County has committed $1 million toward the purchase of the water rights.

“The Shoshone call is one of the great stabilizing forces on the river, a heartbeat that has kept our valley farms alive, our communities whole and our economy steady, even in lean years,” Daniel said. “If a joint management is not adopted, Mesa County will withdraw its support for this acquisition. It’s not out of anger or politics, but because anything less would fail the people that we serve.”

The Shoshone hydropower plant in Glenwood Canyon has some of the oldest and most powerful nonconsumptive water rights on the Colorado River. A broad coalition of Western Slope entities support the River District purchasing the rights. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

Blow to the Front Range

The CWCB’s decision was a blow to Front Range water providers, who objected to the River District’s having a say over how to manage the water rights, even though they supported the overall goal of protecting flows for the environment. Denver Water, Northern Water, Aurora Water and Colorado Springs Utilities argued that the CWCB has exclusive authority over the rights, according to state statute.

Critically, because the Shoshone plant’s water rights — one that dates to 1902 for 1,250 cubic feet per second and another that dates to 1929 for 158 cfs — are senior to many other water users, they have the ability to command the flows of the Colorado River and its tributaries upstream all the way to the headwaters. This means that the owners of the rights can “call out” junior Front Range water providers with younger water rights that take water across the Continental Divide via transmountain diversions and force them to cut back.

The fact that Front Range water providers take about 500,000 acre-feet annually from the headwaters of the Colorado River is a sore spot for many on the Western Slope, who feel the growth of Front Range cities has come at their expense. These transmountain diversions can leave Western Slope streams depleted.

The Shoshone call pulls water west much of the time. But the Front Range parties wanted assurances that during extreme droughts or emergency situations, the call would be “relaxed,” allowing them to take more water to their cities’ millions of customers.

Alex Davis, assistant general manager with Aurora Water, said the CWCB should retain the ability to relax the call as a “backstop” under extremely rare circumstances.

“It is asking that in those emergency situations, the board has the ability to step in and say: We’re going to do what we think is best for the state of Colorado,” Davis said.

The agreement approved by the board lays out a collaborative process to consider a call relaxation, with a stakeholder panel of water managers from both sides of the divide. The specific wording of this agreement was hashed out during Wednesday’s meeting, with lawyers representing the CWCB and River District conferencing to tweak language and make edits.

Colorado Water Conservation Board member representing the Arkansas River basin Greg Felt, left, talks with River District General Manager Andy Mueller Wednesday after the board voted to accept the Shoshone water rights for instream flow purposes. The move represents a major step toward securing those rights in perpetuity for the Western Slope. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

The CWCB had been set to decide on the Shoshone rights at its meeting in September, but the River District granted an eleventh-hour 60-day extension so they could address issues raised by the board and try to negotiate a consensus with the Front Range parties.

Despite all the detailed arguments laid out by the parties, thousands of pages of technical and legal documents, and hours of testimony and public comment over the September and November CWCB meetings, the board’s scope of decisionmaking remained narrow: Should the CWCB accept a perpetual interest in the Shoshone water rights and will these rights preserve the natural environment to a reasonable degree?

In the end, the board decided yes, and also determined that it did, in fact, have the authority to allow the River District to co-manage the Shoshone water rights alongside it.

“I really think it’s pretty incredible that there’s no objection to the environmental aspects of this flow and the purpose of this water right for environmental purposes,” said CWCB Director Taylor Hawes, who represents the mainstem of the Colorado River where the Shoshone plant is located. “(The River District is) donating that water right. It seems like they should have a say. And while I realize this case is unique, I don’t see anything in the statute or the rules that prohibits us from doing this.”

But the fight to keep Shoshone flowing west is not over for the River District. The CWCB, River District and the water rights’ current owner, Xcel, now plan to file a joint application in water court to make the deal official by adding the instream-flow use to the water rights.

The water court process will decide another contentious issue that is sure to again highlight disagreement between the Western Slope and Front Range as they compete for the state’s dwindling water resources: precisely how much water is associated with the water rights, a number based on the plant’s past use.

“I also very much understand the concerns of both sides of the divide in not wanting the other side to have a windfall,” Hawes said. “That has been kind of the heart of all of this. And I hope we can all trust that the water court’s process will give us a result where we don’t have to worry about that. Everyone’s concerns will be addressed in that process.”

View of Shoshone Hydroelectric Plant construction in Glenwood Canyon (Garfield County) Colorado; shows the Colorado River, the dam, sheds, a footbridge, and the workmen’s camp. Creator: McClure, Louis Charles, 1867-1957. Credit: Denver Public Library Digital Collections

The #Colorado Water Conservation Board says “yes” to $99M Western Slope plan for Shoshone Power Plant’s water rights — Shannon Mullane (Fresh Water News) #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Shoshone Falls hydroelectric generation station via USGenWeb

Click the link to read the article on the Water Education Colorado website (Shannon Mullane):

November 20, 2025

In a momentous decision for the Western Slope, state water officials unanimously approved a controversial proposal to use two coveted Colorado River water rights to help the river itself.

Members of the Colorado Water Conservation Board voted to accept water rights tied to Shoshone Power Plant into its Instream Flow Program, which aims to keep water in streams to help the environment.

The decision Wednesday is a historic step forward in western Colorado’s yearslong effort to secure the $99 million rights permanently. But some Front Range water providers pushed back during the hearings, worried that the deal could hamper their ability to manage the water supply for millions of Colorado customers.

For the state, the two water rights will be a crown jewel in its five-decade environmental effort to help river ecosystems. It’s one of several steps in the agreement process, and it could take years before the river feels that environmental benefit.

“The Shoshone acquisition makes a lot of sense to me, and I’m very proud of the work that everybody’s put into it,” said Mike Camblin, who represents the Yampa and White river basins on the Colorado Water Conservation Board. “I hope that our children and our grandchildren look back at this and realize we made the right decision.”

Over 100 Colorado water professionals and community members gathered in Golden for a six-hour hearing about the environmental proposal, brought forward by the Colorado River District, which represents 15 counties on the Western Slope.

The small hydropower plant off Interstate 70 near Glenwood Springs has used Colorado River water to generate electricity for over a century. But the aging facility has a history of maintenance issues, and Western Slope water watchers have long worried about what happens to the rights if it were to shut down for good.

The Colorado River District wants to add the environmental use as part of a larger plan to maintain the “status quo” flow of water past the power plant, regardless of how long it remains in operation.

Western Slope communities, farms, ranches, endangered species programs and recreational industries have become dependent on those flows over the decades and broadly supported the district’s proposal.

From left, Hollie Velasquez Horvath, Kathy Chandler-Henry, and Andy Mueller, general manager of the River District, at the kickoff event Tuesday [December 19, 2023] for the Shoshone Water Right Preservation Campaign in Glenwood Springs. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

“I’m good. I’m much more relaxed now,” Andy Mueller, the district’s general manager, said after the vote Wednesday. “The reality is, we have set up our state, through this instream flow agreement, for success for centuries on the Colorado River.”

Some powerhouses in Colorado water support the general permanency effort but oppose parts of the agreement. Northern Water, Colorado Springs Utilities, Denver Water and Aurora Water said the proposal would give the Colorado River District too much sway in decisions that would impact them.

These water managers and providers are responsible for delivering reliable water to millions of people, businesses, farms and ranches across the Front Range. Any change to Shoshone’s water rights could have ripple effects that would affect over 10,000 upstream water rights, including some held by Front Range water groups.

The negotiations over the agreement continued throughout the meeting. Board members had about 24 hours to review a stack of documents marked with tweaked phrasing and proposed edits.

Both sides are concerned that the other could get a water windfall through the agreement, said Taylor Hawes, who represents the Colorado River on the board. Those concerns can be addressed in the next step of the process: Water Court.

“That has been the heart of all of this,” Hawes said. “I hope we can all trust that the water court’s process will give us a result where we don’t have to worry about that.”

Who will control the flow of water?

The Colorado Water Conservation Board was supposed to make its final ruling on the environmental use proposal in September. Then Public Service Company of Colorado, the Xcel subsidiary that owns the rights, and the Colorado River District filed an 11th-hour extension to delay until the meeting Wednesday.

That’s, in part, because they needed more time to address a central conflict in the agreement: Who makes the final decisions when managing the powerful rights?

Shoshone uses two rights to access the Colorado River: one for 1,250 cubic feet per second that dates back to 1905, and a right to 158 cubic feet per second that dates back to 1940.

They amount to a big chunk of water. Plus, these rights can be used year-round, and they supersede more recent, junior rights like several held by Front Range water providers.

Under the agreement, the water rights will be co-managed by the Colorado River District and the Colorado Water Conservation Board.

Western Slope parties were adamant about this. Several speakers said they would pull their funding, and there would be no agreement if the River District did not have a say in how the water rights would be used.

“If joint management is not adopted, Mesa County will withdraw its support for this acquisition,” Bobbie Daniel, Mesa County Commissioner, said. “It’s not out of anger or politics, but because anything less would fail the people that we serve.”

The Front Range groups said the state should make the final decision if Colorado River District staff and CWCB staff disagreed over how to manage the water rights. They argued the board has exclusive authority under state law.

Alex Davis with Aurora Water said her team was pushing for a “hammer” — an entity, preferably the state, that could force water providers on either side of the Continental Divide to come to the negotiating table or that could make the final decision, especially in times of crisis.

Aurora pulls about 25,000 acre-feet of water from the Western Slope, through mountain tunnels and into its water system each year, she said. (An acre-foot of water is about what two to three households use in a year.) But when Shoshone is using its 1905 water right to its fullest, nearly all of Aurora’s transmountain diversions are turned down or turned off.

The city might want to ask Shoshone to use less water to provide some relief in an emergency. The agreement seems to give the Colorado River District a veto, Davis said.

“By the River District having that decision-making power, it may lead to less incentive on the West Slope side in those emergency situations,” Davis said in an interview with The Sun. “That’s what we were worried about.”

Colorado Water Conservation Board members decided to continue with the co-management approach, saying they were not giving up authority or working outside of state statute by doing so.

Mueller said the agreement is a win for the river and the entire state. It will protect endangered fish and a critical 15-mile stretch of habitat near Grand Junction. It includes exceptions that will protect cities during multi-year droughts and emergency situations, he said.

“The CWCB and the River District can act together for the best interest of the state,” Mueller said in an interview. “We’ll have to earn some trust in that realm over the years, but I’m quite convinced we can do it.”

About that $99 million bill…

The Colorado River District has entered into a $99 million agreement with Xcel Energy to buy the Shoshone water rights.

The state’s decision to accept Shoshone’s water rights into its environmental program met one of four key closing conditions of that purchase agreement, Amy Moyer, chief of strategy for the Colorado River District, said.

The deal still needs approval by Colorado’s Public Utilities Commission. It’ll be weighed in Water Court, where Western Slope and Front Range representatives will wade through another thorny issue: What has Shoshone’s “status quo” water use been over the last century?

The Colorado River District and its Western Slope supporters need to pay up. Although they’ve pulled together over half the asking price, they’re still waiting to hear about whether a request for federal funding will be approved.

If the deal passes those hurdles, then the resulting purchase and instream flow agreement will go on indefinitely. It will provide more predictability for water users across the state, and it will continue to factor into how Colorado communities grow, officials said Wednesday. “We’re making some very far-reaching decisions here,” Nathan Coombs, the board’s Rio Grande Basin representative, said. “I still think this is the right choice right now with the information we have.”

More by Shannon Mullane

Photo: 1950 “Public Service Dam” (Shoshone Dam) in Colorado River near Glenwood Springs Colorado.

The #Colorado Water Conservation Board Votes to Advance Shoshone Water Rights #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Shoshone Hydroelectric Plant back in the days before I-70 Library of Congress

Click the link to read the release on the Colorado Water Conservation Board website:

November 19, 2025, Golden, CO – This evening, the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) voted to approve the long-anticipated Shoshone water rights acquisition, to secure two water rights associated with the Shoshone Power Plant, including one of the state’s most significant Colorado River water rights, for permanent instream flow protection. The vote launches the next phase of the process, including water court, and begins the work of preserving and improving the 2.4-mile reach of the Colorado River between the Shoshone Power Plant Diversion Dam and Tunnel and the Shoshone Power Plant Discharge Outlets.

“Securing one of the state’s most significant Colorado River water rights for permanent instream flow protection is a momentous achievement,” said Lauren Ris, CWCB Director. “This outcome reflects a tremendous amount of work, from extensive technical analysis and stakeholder engagement to thorough regulatory review and legal preparation. This careful evaluation ensures our investment delivers long-term benefits for the river and for Coloradans.”

The agreement passed on a unanimous vote, with two directors recused. The decision follows the Colorado River District’s authorization of an extension from the September hearing to the November Board meeting, allowing additional time for review of the information presented and continued efforts to achieve a negotiated resolution of contested issues.

“I want to thank all the people who have worked so hard to inform this decision for the Board and the diverse range of stakeholders who earnestly engaged,” said Dan Gibbs, Executive Director, Colorado Department of Natural Resources. “Acquiring the Shoshone water rights for instream flow use is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to preserve and improve the natural environment of the Colorado River. But I also want to stress that the state is committed to ensuring that the historical use of the water rights is maintained at the status quo and we are committed to participating in any process to settle and resolve these issues for all water users. I am confident in our ability as a state and as a water community to come together in a way that is beneficial to all.”

Over the last two months, the CWCB and the Colorado River District met with Front Range entities and other interested parties to work toward resolving the issues raised at the September hearing. The next step in the process is the filing of an application in water court, for approval of the change of water rights to include instream flow use in a way that will not cause injury to decreed water rights.

This milestone follows significant commitments from the Colorado River District, local partners, and the CWCB, including the State’s $20 million Projects Bill contribution, to secure the long-term future of the Shoshone water rights.

This map shows the 15-mile reach of the Colorado River near Grand Junction, home to four species of endangered fish. Map credit: CWCB

Muddied waters in Glenwood Canyon: Purchase of Shoshone hydroelectric water rights might get snagged by messy realities of state water law — Oliver Skelly (BigPivots.com) #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Shoshone Hydroelectric Plant. Photo/Allen Best

Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Oliver Skelly):

November 18, 2025

Colorado water transfers rarely come easily. State water law ensures that every last drop of water is accounted for, litigated, and litigated some more.

It is no surprise then that the attempted Shoshone purchase by the Colorado River Water Conservation District has snagged on a couple of thorny legal and policy issues. Whether those issues will prove fatal to the purchase will be taken up at a meeting tomorrow afternoon, Nov. 19, in Golden.

The Shoshone rights

The transferred water rights from Xcel Energy to the Glenwood Springs-based River District have huge implications. Xcel uses the water rights for hydroelectric production at the Shoshone plant in Glenwood Canyon. The hydro plant produces relatively little power. As in real estate, though, location matters entirely.

Xcel’s water rights of 1902 and 1929 are senior to most other water rights upstream of Glenwood Canyon. They are also high-volume water rights, at 1,250 and 158 cubic feet per second, respectively. Additionally, they are entirely non-consumptive, meaning that all water taken out of the river (to spin the turbines) soon returns to the river for downstream use. As such, they have tremendous power to influence flows along the entirety of the Colorado River through Colorado.

If Xcel were to cease making electricity there, junior users upstream could divert more water. Many of those users would be the state’s transmountain diversions, which extend from Rocky Mountain National Park to Independence Pass. They benefit farmers and now mostly cities from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs. Any water that is diverted to the Front Range, however, is water that does not flow westward.

Because of this, both the River District and the Front Range diverters have had their eyes on those water rights for decades. What happens at Shoshone matters greatly both on the Western Slope, where the river naturally flows, and on the Front Range, where some of the river is now diverted.

Will the River District get that water right? It plans to keep the senior, high-volume hydropower water rights but also add an environmental instream flow right to the original decree, a class of water right approved by state legislators in 1973.

The district has already inked a purchase-and-sale agreement with Xcel and has raised $57 million of the $99 million price. It has been promised an additional $40 million from the Bureau of Reclamation, although the Trump administration has now frozen that money.

The Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB), a state agency responsible for water policy and funding, plays several major roles. In addition to agreeing to contribute $20 million, the CWCB has the sole authority under state law to own instream flow rights. For this deal to work, the River District also needs the agency’s board approval. That approval would seem to be a given because of the board’s commitment of $20 million to the purchase. But there are complications.

Not so simple

You are likely not shocked that Front Range water providers have not been thrilled with this pending transfer. In June, they asked the CWCB to hold a hearing to express their concerns.

At a September 19^th meeting held on the campus of Fort Lewis College in Durango, the two primary parties testifying fell along predictable geographical lines: the Front Range (water providers) and the Western Slope (River District). CWCB staff also presented findings.

The question before the CWCB was a simple one: Does the acquisition “preserve the natural environment to a reasonable degree?” If the answer is yes, the water right is suitable as an instream flow right. By law, the board must consider 11 factors when making this determination. These factors are found in the instream flow law’s implementing regulations and range from whether this transfer will cause injury to other water users, the impact on interstate water compacts, and the cost of the transaction.

At the hearing, a host of messy realities surfaced. The first came after the CWCB staff presentation on the environmental importance of the 2.4-mile instream flow segment (i.e., whether the acquisition would in fact “preserve the natural environment to a reasonable degree”) in Glenwood Canyon.

The Front Range and Western Slope parties then trumpeted the many but competing public benefits afforded by the Shoshone rights: rafting in Glenwood Canyon, orchard irrigation at Palisade, hospitals in Aurora.

Public interest…in Colorado?

Nearly all other Western states have incorporated some form of public interest requirement during water transfers. Although a difficult term to pin down, public interest reviews involve the consideration of public goods, such as healthy rivers or recreational amenities. The presiding bodies, when evaluating transactions, must weigh the private interests against the broader public benefits (or lack thereof).

Colorado has no requirement. In 1995, the Colorado Supreme Court found the public interest theory conflicts with the prior appropriation doctrine. Without any legislative developments or a judicial about-face, that is that.

So, if we don’t have a public interest review, why the parade of testimony?

The most obvious answer is politics. When seeking approval (or denial) from an administrative body, it’s not a bad bet to show pretty pictures and tell compelling stories. But “politics” in this context can also be seen as a sub-in for those public interest principles.

The eighth factor governing the CWCB’s deliberations requires consideration of the “effect of the proposed acquisition on the maximum utilization of the waters of the state.” Maximum utilization and the public interest, although not direct parallels, both share a principle of the “greatest good.”

This backdoor introduction of the public interest gave listeners a glimpse of what the judicially disapproved principle might look like in Colorado water transfers.

Whose right is it, anyway?

That introduction at the hearing spurred perhaps the trickiest legal and policy issue of the day: Who has authority to enforce the instream flow agreement? That is, who can make the legal call instructing other water users to forgo their diversion so that the instream flow right gets its full water allocation. Is that a Western Slope political entity, the River District, or the statewide agency, the CWCB?

And if it is the CWCB, does it have authority to grant its enforcement power to the River District? While the law appears to say yes, the River District can be granted authority, there is enough ambiguity in the 1973 law to perhaps send this to Colorado Supreme Court.

The policy question, however, quickly returned parties to the realm of the public interest.

The Front Range parties, arguably the most averse to any sniff of public interest requirements, ironically now found themselves supporting the idea that the broader public benefits should be under consideration.

They contended that the CWCB should preserve its discretion to use and operate the instream-flow right. That, they said, would be sound public policy. Or if you will, “in the public interest.”

Meanwhile, the River District, as the purchasing party and longstanding practitioners of Colorado water law, understandably wants to get what they are paying for: full control over exercising their water rights. Retaining enforcement powers under the agreement was, in fact, “the one sword that the West Slope” was prepared to fall on.

Filings from both parties on Monday suggest that there is ongoing disagreement on this issue, meaning the CWCB will have a big decision to make.

The Colorado River flows through Glenwood Springs, paralleled by Interstate 70 and the Union Pacific tracks, at sunset in March 2024. Photo credit: Allen Best

Can’t you just compromise?

The next display of messiness came when it was time for the Board to apply the 11 factors.

To those listening, it was quickly apparent that such a contested hearing had not been before these board members before. Few of the directors seemed to understand how each factor was to be applied to the proposal in front of them. Although no fault of the board members, the misalignment between their understanding of their roles and the consequences of the decision to be made felt almost incommensurate.

That unpreparedness may have resulted in the Board’s parting directive to the parties to “compromise”: surely a favorable idea aimed at inspiring creative strategies and good faith negotiating.

But in the adversarial world of Colorado water law, what might result from this directive?

Such directives are common enough in water disputes. Recently, in the case of the Gross Reservoir expansion, a federal court, the 10^th Circuit, told Denver Water and Save the Colorado to do the same.

In matters of purely Colorado domain, however, such directives are normally reserved as an outcome of the water court process. Ordering it before litigation seemed premature, perhaps even subversive.

The parties’ reactions were revealing here. The Front Range interests will certainly see it as a tally in their favor because it suggests the River District needs to move away from its hardline position. Perhaps their aversion to the public interest doctrine is not so set in stone, after all.

For the River District, it is hard not to imagine some frustration. This was a contracted-for acquisition under Colorado’s longstanding, private property water rights regime. But here, too, the water is muddy. Recall that the CWCB is providing 20% of the purchase price. What kind of leverage, tacit or otherwise, does that commitment provide?

Nov. 19^th hearing

These are all difficult questions, and they are being asked amidst a backdrop of high stakes, interstate Colorado River negotiations. Answering them will be no easy feat, and as the filings on Monday indicate, those questions remain unanswered. Whether it is indeed a “compromise” at the CWCB meeting on Wednesday, Nov. 19, or back to the drawing board for the River District is anyone’s guess. But the uncomfortable positions and contortions on display at the contested hearing gave an insightful glimpse into the messy realities of today and stress tests of the future for Colorado water law.

Oliver Skelly is a 2025 graduate of the University of Colorado Law School, a former river guide, and follower of Western water happenings. He has worked at various law practices around Colorado and is now clerking for a judge on the Western Slope.

Colorado transmountain diversions via the State Engineer’s office

#Silverthorne to increase rates and fees related to water, stormwater management — The Summit Daily

Click the link to read the article on the Summit Daily website (Town of Silverthorne):

November 17, 2025

Starting Jan. 1, 2026, the metered water service rate for a normal rate building from $19.55 per equivalent residential unit per month to $22 per equivalent residential unit per month.

Also effective Jan. 1 2026, the town will increase its water system development fees by $276 per equivalent residential unit. This will bring the one-time fee to connect new development to the town’s water from $9,200 to $9,476.

“That’s really just to keep up with inflation,” Finance Director Laura Kennedy said. “Despite the fact that we are growing as a town, water usage really hasn’t grown as much as we’ve seen the number of units come on.”

Residential storm water management fee will also increase, taking the fee from $7.50 per month to $7.57 per month. The sewer opportunity fee — which is applicable to properties outside of town that receive sewer services from the town or will receive service because of a planned annexation — will increase in 2026 as well from $2,700 to $2,750.

Shareholders sue Uncompahgre Valley Water Users Association — The #GrandJunction Daily Sentinel

This photo from the Uncompahgre Valley Water Users Association website shows some of its water infrastructure. The association is facing a lawsuit from some of its shareholders who say they aren’t getting a fair share of their irrigation water.

Click the link to read the article on the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel website (Dennis Webb). Here’s an excerpt:

November 14, 2025

Some shareholders have sued the Uncompahgre Valley Water Users Association, contending they aren’t receiving their fair share of irrigation water and their livelihoods are being harmed…The plaintiffs have been “deprived of consistent and proportional water deliveries during critical irrigation periods since 2022,” which is when new association management took over, the suit says. Over that period plaintiffs also have been deprived of water owed to them based on priority water rights, the suit says.

“These failures have occurred even in years with above-average snowpack and available water. Despite Plaintiffs’ repeated requests to the UVWUA to correct these deficiencies, Plaintiffs continued to receive disproportionate, inconsistent, and insufficient water deliveries during the 2025 irrigation season,” the suit says…The suit says the plaintiffs have experienced problems including weeks without delivery during planting and growing seasons. One plaintiff, Tom Gore, reported going 60 days last year without expected water deliveries. Another, Frank Gilmore, has been able to run only two irrigation pipes simultaneously instead of the normal five and has lost entire cuttings of hay. Delayed irrigation last year left a third of plaintiff Dan Varner’s newly reseeded 34-acre hayfield unproductive, requiring costly reseeding, the suit says. It says the impacts to shareholders have included things such as failed crop rotations, increased cattle feed costs, reduced soil health, and loss of profit from hay and sweet corn yields…

The plaintiffs are shareholders receiving water from the Ironstone Canal system, one of the project’s primary delivery systems. The suit says the association’s delivery practices have deprioritized the Ironstone system and intentionally favored the East Canal system instead. The suit says that last March, Pope admitted in a meeting that the association was intentionally and disproportionately routing water to the East Canal system before delivering to Ironstone System shareholders, contrary to historical practice. It says that in July, Pope also acknowledged that the delivery of 10 cubic feet per second of priority water rights had been mismanaged that irrigation season. Pope said that corrective action would be taken, but as of August, the association had failed to restore full delivery of that water, the suit says. The suit says the association also has failed to regularly maintain association ditches by burning or clearing debris.

#Colorado’s #UncompahgreRiver project turns problems into opportunities — Hannah Holm (AmericanRivers.org)

Uncompahgre River, Colorado | Hannah Holm

Click the link to read the article on the American Rivers website (Hannah Holm):

November 12, 2025

The Uncompahgre River flows from Colorado’s San Juan mountains through the towns of Ouray and Ridgway and then into Ridgway Reservoir, which stores water for farms and households downstream. The river is beautiful, but also troubled; runoff from old mines carries heavy metals into the river, and it is pinched into an unnaturally straight and simple channel as it passes from mountain canyon headwaters into an agricultural valley.

As the river moves through the modified channel, it carves deeper into the valley floor and less frequently spills over its bank. As a result, the local water table has dropped, and riverside trees such as cottonwoods have died, impoverishing this important habitat. Water users on the Ward Ditch at the top of the valley were also struggling with broken-down infrastructure, making it difficult to access and manage water for irrigation. This confluence of challenges created a landscape of opportunity for the Uncompahgre Multi-Benefit Project, which addresses environmental problems along the river and water users’ needs, while also improving water quality and reducing flood risks downstream.

The Project, managed by American Rivers, took an integrated approach to restoring a one-mile stretch of the river, which included replacing and stabilizing the Ward Ditch diversion, notching a historic berm to reconnect the river to its floodplain, and placing rock structures in the river that both protect against bank erosion and improve fish habitat. Meanwhile, ditch and field improvements make it easier to spread water across the land for agriculture and re-establish native vegetation.

In addition to the direct benefits this project delivers for on-site habitat and landowners, the enhanced ability of the river to spread out on its floodplain, both through the ditch diversion and natural processes, also provides downstream benefits. As the water slows and spreads across the floodplain during high flows, its destructive power to erode banks and damage infrastructure downstream is diminished. The same dynamics enable pollutants and sediment from upstream abandoned mines or potential wildfires to settle out before the river flows into the downstream reservoir.

With construction wrapping up in November 2025, the transformation of this stretch of river and its adjacent floodplain is nearly complete. Fields of flowers and fresh willow plantings are replacing invasive species and dead cottonwoods, and new pools, sandbars, and riffles are providing instream habitat, complementing other organizations’ work to remediate old mines upstream. As a bonus, when the water level is right, the reach has become an inviting run for skilled whitewater boaters.

Northern Water again delays filling Chimney Hollow Dam over uranium issues — Michael Booth (Fresh Water News)

Chimney Hollow Dam construction site. Photo credit: Northern Water

Click the link to read the article on the Water Education Colorado website (Michael Booth):

November 13, 2025

Northern Water will further delay an initial partial filling of its new Chimney Hollow Reservoir into next year to allow time for expanded groundwater tests in the area to make sure unexpected uranium leaching inside the planned pool would not migrate to other supplies.

After spending years permitting and constructing the dam west of Loveland, Northern Water was surprised in June that routine water quality tests ahead of the filling go-ahead found natural uranium leaching out of rocks exposed from a quarry used for dam fill. Initial water fill-up was then delayed for testing, to see how long the leaching might last, and how the uranium would be diluted when water diverted under the Continental Divide by the Colorado-Big Thompson system eventually fills Chimney Hollow.

Now Northern Water says it needs more time to test groundwater outside the reservoir to provide background levels of naturally occurring uranium, and determine whether a filled reservoir would “influence” nearby groundwater with uranium-tainted water. A Northern Water spokesperson used “influence” rather than “leaking” to describe what engineers would be watching.

“Influence or mixing of surface and groundwater can vary greatly, depending on many factors, scenarios and even locations,” spokesperson Amy Parks said. “Without adequate baseline data, we are not able to assess those future conditions, so this short delay allows us to do that work.”

Map from Northern Water via the Fort Collins Coloradan.

Similar-sized Carter Lake Reservoir is just over a ridge that makes up the east edge of Chimney Hollow.

“At this time, due to the existing bedrock, we do not think that migration of water from Chimney to Carter is likely. However, additional monitoring will help us ensure that can be detected in the future,” Parks said.

Filling of a small portion of the reservoir had been planned for this month, but now is “expected in early 2026,” according to the agency.

The 12 Northern Water members that bought into the project, including the cities of Broomfield and Loveland, are already paying for construction bonds through their rates. The delay in filling the reservoir is not expected to affect their finances, the utility said.

Members were not scheduled to receive Chimney Hollow water for years. “This doesn’t affect water deliveries or anything that project participants have been expecting, so it’s a good time” to widen testing protocols, Parks said in an interview.

“It’s really just an abundance of caution and making sure we’re putting the health and safety of our public and neighbors into priority, and making sure we’re crossing our t’s and dotting our i’s before we take that step of adding water,” she said.

What mitigation is necessary remains unknown

Northern Water still does not know the scale of mitigation required to keep uranium in Chimney Hollow water at safe levels. The agency earlier this year said it believed uranium leaching would decrease over time as stored water stopped penetrating farther into the naturally occurring seams. Excavators have now capped some unused construction materials that will eventually be underwater with a clay layer that will prevent some leaching.

If uranium levels in the filled pool do not drop far enough, other mitigation measures could include a water treatment plant or system below the reservoir, Parks said. Northern Water does not yet have a cost estimate on how much the testing, delays or treatment will cost, until more testing is complete, she said.

Engineering and testing teams decided “it’s best to delay this for a few months to make sure that we have the groundwater samples from the reservoir, from around the reservoir, before that water goes in there,” Parks said. “We just want to make sure that any water that goes into the reservoir now doesn’t influence groundwater around it.”

Chimney Hollow was built to store 90,000 acre-feet of water for 11 northern Colorado communities and water agencies and the Platte River Power Authority. The project was meant to “firm” or store water rights Northern Water owns in the Windy Gap project near Granby, which collects and pumps Colorado River water into the Adams Tunnel for Front Range buyers. Windy Gap and Chimney Hollow allow the Front Range communities to take advantage of their water rights in wet years when Lake Granby is too full to contain their portion of the river. Northern Water has also suffered setbacks this year on its other major project, the proposed $2.7 billion twin-reservoir Northern Integrated Supply Project. Some members of NISP, a slightly different list than Chimney Hollow members, are warning they will pull out of the two-dam and pipeline construction plan after decades of permitting because costs have risen too high and delays raise uncertainty.

More by Michael Booth

#Colorado Parks and Wildlife continues increased zebra mussel sampling on the #ColoradoRiver with multi-agency effort

A Colorado Parks and Wildlife Aquatic Nuisance Species staff member looks for adult zebra mussels on a rock from the Colorado River on Oct. 29. That day, over 70 individuals from Parks and Wildlife and its partner agencies and groups searched Western Slope rivers for signs of zebra mussels. Colorado Parks and Wildlife/Courtesy Photo

Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Parks & Wildlife website (Rachael Gonzales):

November 13, 2025

GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. — On Oct. 29, over 70 people from multiple partner agencies and groups joined Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) for a one-day sampling effort on the Colorado River. From the headwaters in Grand County to Westwater, Utah, volunteers from nine agencies spent the day floating the river in search of adult zebra mussels.

Similar surveys were conducted on the Eagle and Roaring Fork rivers, as well as the tail end of the Gunnison River near the confluence of the Colorado River.

The rivers were divided into smaller sections to simplify the identification of potential zebra mussel habitat and maximize the amount of surveying that could be done in each section. Stopping at points along the way, teams conducted shoreline surveys by inspecting rocks and other hard surfaces where zebra mussels may attach.

Staff and volunteers sampled approximately 200 locations, covering over 200 miles between the four rivers.

Through this sampling effort, CPW confirmed a single adult zebra mussel in the Colorado River near Rifle. During surveys following the large-scale effort, CPW Aquatic Nuisance Species (ANS) staff discovered additional adult zebra mussels within Glenwood Canyon.

With these new findings, the Colorado River is now considered infested from the confluence of the Eagle River down to the Colorado-Utah border.

“Although it is disappointing to have found additional zebra mussels in the Colorado River,” said Robert Walters, CPW’s Invasive Species Program Manager, “this survey achieved its primary objective of gaining a more comprehensive understanding of the extent of the zebra mussel population in western Colorado.”

To date, no zebra mussels — adult or veliger — have been found in the Colorado River upstream of the confluence with the Eagle River.

Mudsnails next to a coin. Adult mudsnails are about the size of a grain of rice. Photo credit: City of Boulder

As a result of the one-day sampling effort, CPW also confirmed the presence of New Zealand mudsnails in the Roaring Fork River. While New Zealand mudsnails have previously been identified in the Colorado, Gunnison and Eagle rivers, this is the first time they have been detected in the Roaring Fork River.

“We could not have pulled off such a massive effort without our partners. These partnerships are instrumental in the continued protection of Colorado’s aquatic resources and infrastructure from invasive mussels,” said Walters.

CPW would like to thank the following agencies and groups who also participated in the one-day sampling effort, in addition to our federal partners at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Reclamation:

City of Grand Junction

Eagle County

Mesa County

Orchard Mesa Irrigation District

Roaring Fork Conservancy

Utah Department of Natural Resources

“It’s not just our federal, state and local partners that play a role in understanding the extent of zebra mussels in the Valley, but also the general public,” Walters continued. “That is why we are continuing to ask for the public’s help.”

If you own a pond or lake that utilizes water from the Colorado River or Grand Junction area canal systems, CPW would like to sample your body of water. You can request sampling of your body of water by CPW staff at Invasive.Species@state.co.us.

In addition to privately owned ponds and lakes, CPW also encourages those who use water pulled from the Colorado River and find any evidence of mussels or clams to send photos to the above email for identification. It is extremely important to accurately report the location in these reports for follow-up surveying.

CPW will continue sampling through Thanksgiving, focusing on smaller ponds in the Grand Valley.

Prevent the spread: Be a Pain in the ANS
Simple actions like cleaning, draining and drying your motorized and hand-launched vessels — including paddleboards and kayaks — and angling gear after you leave the water can make a big difference to protect Colorado’s waters.

Learn more about how you can prevent the spread of aquatic nuisance species and tips to properly clean, drain and dry your boating and fishing gear by visiting our website. Tips for anglers and a map of CPW’s new gear and watercraft cleaning stations are available here.

Ute traditions inform water #conservation in the Shining Mountains — The Sopris Sun

“As a people, we value water,” says Lorelei Cloud. “We know that water is sacred. We also know that water is alive. It has a spirit.” Photo Credit: Hans Hollenbeck

Click the link to read the article on The Sopris Sun website (Annalise Grueter). Here’s an excerpt:

November 12, 2025

“If we take care of that water, we know that water is going to take care of us,” stated Lorelei Cloud, who has spent a lifetime advocating for water conservation and access. Cloud, a former vice chairman of the Southern Ute tribe, was also the first tribal member on record to serve on the Colorado Water Conservation Board. On Thursday, Nov. 6, The Arts Campus at Willits (TACAW) hosted Cloud and a fellow trustee of The Nature Conservancy (TNC) Colorado, Johnny Le Coq, for a presentation on their respective backgrounds and water conservation work. The event, sponsored by Roaring Fork Conservancy and TNC, was a special installment of the Brooksher Watershed Institute. Lawyer Ramsey Kropf, who has decades of experience in representing Indian water rights cases in the Colorado and Klamath River basins, emceed.

After some brief introductions, Cloud opened the evening by sharing the history of her people. The Roaring Fork Valley is part of ancestral Ute territories. Though the Utes, who referred to themselves as “Nuche,” or “the people,” and called their home the “Shining Mountains,” were seasonally nomadic before the arrival of colonial miners, Cloud shared that her people do not have a traditional migration story as some Indigenous peoples do. What the Nuche have is a creation story that ties them intrinsically to the soaring peaks and waterways of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Cloud explained that the seasonal nomadic moves of the Nuche were not considered to be migration but normal shifts, demonstrating respect and care for the ecosystems…

“We believe that we are one and the same with nature,” Cloud said, elaborating that other species and even elements like water are akin to souls.

Federal land and Indian reservations in Colorado

#Utah, 6 other states hopeful to secure new #ColoradoRiver deal after missing key deadline — The Deseret News #COriver #aridification

Rebecca Mitchell, John Entsminger, Estevan Lopez, Gene Shawcroft, JB Hamby, Tom Buschatzke at the Getches-Wilkinson Center/Water and Tribes Initiative Conference June 6, 2024. Photo credit: Rebecca Mitchell

Click the link to read the article on the Deseret News website (Carter Williams). Here’s an excerpt:

November 12, 2025

Utah and the six other Colorado River states reached a tentative agreement to continue working together on a plan to share the river’s water, but failed to secure a consensus plan ahead of an important Tuesday deadline. Utah, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Wyoming, all of which rely on the river for water, agreed to continue to meet until they have a “framework solution” by mid-February 2026, said Gene Shawcroft, chairman of the Colorado River Authority of Utah.

“We were able to have enough of a framework put together that the federal government agrees with us that the framework can be continued to be refined in order for us to have a deal by the middle of February,” he told reporters in a negotiations update briefing on Wednesday…

The basin states have had agreements in place on how Colorado River water has been allocated for over a century, and the post-2026 plan seeks to be the largest operational update since a 2007 plan to address how water is stored and pulled from Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the nation’s two largest reservoirs. Its users agree that prolonged drought and low reservoir conditions remain persistent challenges facing the river, but there’s still division on how to handle the discrepancy between water needs and what’s available in the system within one of the fastest-growing regions of the country. Lower Basin states have called for mandatory reductions during dry years. In a public letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum on Tuesday, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs and other Arizona leaders called it “alarming” that Upper Basin states, including Utah, “have repeatedly refused to implement any volume of binding, verifiable water supply reductions.”

[…]

Upper Basin states don’t believe those types of cuts are necessary because they use less water than Lower Basin states, largely because of how water rights are allocated, favoring senior rights holders like California, Shawcroft said. These are the types of arguments still holding up a long-term deal.

“The major sticking point is there’s a whole lot less water in the system than we anticipated, or there’s historically been,” he said. “The question is, how do you divide a pie that’s significantly smaller than it has been, when everyone’s used to getting that big piece of the pie?”

The Colorado River Compact divided the basin into an upper and lower half, with each having the right to develop and use 7.5 million acre-feet of river water annually. (Source: U.S. Geological Survey via The Water Education Foundation)

#ColoradoRiver Basin states miss another deadline to agree on water plan — AspenPublicRadio.org #COriver #aridification

Colorado River near Moab, Utah. Photo: Mitch Tobin/WaterDesk.org

Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Public Radio website (Caroline Llanes). Here’s an excerpt:

November 12, 2025

There’s still no plan for how the seven states that use water from the Colorado River will allocate the scarce resource after 2026. Tuesday, November 11, marked a deadline set by the federal government for the states to share a framework for new operating guidelines—another deadline that’s come and gone with no agreement. The river’s supply has drastically decreased since the original Colorado River Compactwas signed in 1922, due to climate change and overallocation of water. In 2007, the states agreed to interim operating guidelines, but those expire in 2026. Because Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the basin’s two biggest reservoirs, are federal projects managed by federal agencies, those agencies will need to do an environmental review and public comment period, as required by law. The federal government needs input from the states in a timely fashion to complete the review and public comment process, in order to have new rules in place by October 2026. On Tuesday night, the seven states, along with the Department of Interior and Bureau of Reclamation, issued a statement on the negotiations…

“A supply-based proposal is the only way to move forward,” [Becky Mitchell] told attendees at the Colorado River District’s Across Divides conference on October 3. “We all have to be responding to supply.”

That means that the new guidelines should be based on actual streamflows, rather than demand from water users.

“We need to set aside building an operations plan that meets the needs as they are currently,” she said. “We need to let go of that dream and be able to figure out how to respond, and I think that’s been a bit of a struggle.”

No deal on #ColoradoRiver: Seven states fail to reach agreement by feds’ Nov. 11 deadline — Heather Sackett (AspenJournalism.org) #COriver #aridification

Lake Mead and the big “bathtub ring” as seen from next to Hoover Dam. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Journalism website (Heather Sackett):

November 12, 2025

Water managers from the seven states that share the Colorado River have blown a deadline given to them by the federal government to come up with a rough plan on how the drought-stricken river will be shared in the future.

The Upper Basin (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) still cannot find agreement with the Lower Basin (California, Arizona and Nevada) about how the nation’s two largest reservoirs — Lake Powell and Lake Mead — will be operated and how cuts will be shared in dry years.

In June, Scott Cameron, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s acting assistant secretary for water and science, said federal officials would need to know the broad outlines of a plan from the states by Nov. 11. Despite frequent meetings in recent months, negotiators were unable to hammer out a deal by Tuesday, leaving future management for the water supply for 40 million people in the Southwest cloaked in uncertainty.

Instead, the states, the Interior Department and the federal Bureau of Reclamation released a short joint statement Tuesday afternoon, noting that serious and ongoing challenges face the Colorado River.

“While more work needs to be done, collective progress has been made that warrants continued efforts to define and approve details for a finalized agreement,” the statement reads. “Through continued cooperation and coordinated action, there is a shared commitment to ensuring the long-term sustainability and resilience of the Colorado River system.”

Wahweap Marina at Lake Powell when water levels were at near-historic lows in 2021. The seven states and the federal government must figure out how to share the Colorado River after the current guidelines expire in 2026. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

Environmental groups disappointed

The failure to come up with a plan by the deadline has sparked criticism from the basin’s environmental groups.

“I’m really disappointed with how yesterday played out; the states did not have anything to meet the Nov. 11 deadline,” said John Berggren, a regional policy manager with Western Resource Advocates. “The fact that they didn’t have a basic framework for how to manage the system after 2026 is really unfortunate, and I think they missed a good chance to put forward something that we can all consider and examine as a basin.”

Representatives from the seven states have been in talks for two years about how to manage the river after the current guidelines expire. After a long standoff without much progress throughout 2024, state representatives in June offered a glimmer of hope for a way forward, floating a concept for sharing the river based on natural flows at Lee Ferry, the dividing line between the Upper and Lower basins, instead of water demand. But that hope evaporated like water off Lake Mead, with negotiators reportedly deadlocked again by the end of the summer.

A statement from environmental groups Great Basin Water Network and Living Rivers called the Nov. 11 deadline arbitrary and ineffectual, and said the inaction symbolizes the overall dysfunction on the river and in government. They chastised the states and federal government for the lack of transparency and lack of public participation surrounding negotiations.

“The states don’t deserve the kid-glove treatment any longer,” Kyle Roerink, executive director of the Great Basin Water Network, said in a prepared statement. “They have a behavioral problem as much as they do a hydrology problem. Any entity that wants to increase use is unfit to manage our most precious resource.”

A group of influential environmental organizations, including American Rivers, National Audubon Society, Environmental Defense Fund, The Nature Conservancy, Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, Trout Unlimited and Western Resource Advocates, released a joint statement Wednesday saying that they were deeply disappointed the states did not find consensus and that federal leadership will be essential.

The statement called for solutions that ground management decisions in the best available science, expand conservation programs, modernize infrastructure and ensure that Native American tribes — which have underutilized rights to a large share of the river’s water — play a meaningful role in shaping the river’s future.

“We understand the extraordinary complexity of this challenge and the difficult tradeoffs the states are working hard to navigate — but the river isn’t going to wait for process or for politics,” the statement said. “Drought, intensified by increasingly extreme conditions, is reshaping the basin, and the window to secure the river’s future and move beyond crisis-driven policymaking is closing fast.”

Since the turn of the century, the Colorado River basin has been locked in the grip of a megadrought. Climate change has robbed Western rivers of their flows, with the basin seeing a 20% decline from the 20th century average, according to scientists. Those factors, as well as unrelenting water demands, have pushed Lake Powell and Lake Mead to record-low levels in recent years and thrown river management into crisis mode.

The current negotiations between the seven states are aimed at replacing the 2007 Interim Guidelines, which lay out how the reservoirs will be operated and shortages shared, and which expire at the end of 2026. New guidelines would need to be in place by the beginning of the next water year, Oct. 1, 2026, leaving little time to complete the required National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review process.

The 2007 guidelines set annual Powell and Mead releases based on reservoir levels and do not go far enough to prevent them from being drawn down during consecutive dry years. In 2022, Lake Powell flirted with falling below a critical elevation to make hydropower, and may be headed there again next year if conditions don’t improve.

(Left to right) John McClow, Rebecca Mitchell, Gene Shawcroft, Tom Bucshatzke at the Colorado Water Congress 2022 Annual Summer Conference. Colorado representative Becky Mitchell, second from left, and Arizona representative Tom Buschatzke, farthest right, speak on a panel at Colorado Water Congress in 2022. The positions of the two states have emerged as one of the main sources of disagreement between the Upper Basin and Lower Basin. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

Sticking points

Over the past few months, the positions of two of the states — Colorado and Arizona — have emerged as one of the main sources of disagreement. Water from the Colorado River has fueled the exponential growth in recent decades of Arizona’s cities, which are the economic and political powerhouse of the state, along with some of the most productive farmland in the basin. But Arizona’s reliance on the junior water rights of the Central Arizona Project means it is first on the chopping block for cuts.

Arizona representatives have said that the deepest cuts should be shared basinwide, including by the Upper Basin. Gov. Katie Hobbs and other state lawmakers said in a Nov. 11 letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum that Arizona’s Colorado River allocation is important to the nation’s growth and independence and that Colorado River reliability is a matter of national security. The letter highlighted how the state plays a critical role in manufacturing semiconductors and information-technology products.

“With such high stakes for Arizona and the nation, we find it alarming that the Upper Basin states have repeatedly refused to implement any volume of binding, verifiable water supply reductions,” the letter reads. “This extreme negotiating posture — four of the seven basin states refusing to participate in any sharing of water shortages — has led to a fundamental impasse that is preventing the successful development of a seven-state consensus plan for the management of the Colorado River.”

The Lower Basin has committed to a 1.5 million acre-foot reduction, which accounts for evaporation and transit losses.

This shows that Colorado’s Western Slope is the biggest supplier of water to the Colorado River. Source: David F. Gold et al, Exploring the Spatially Compounding Multi‐Sectoral Drought Vulnerabilities in Colorado’s West Slope River Basins, Earth’s Future (2024). DOI: 10.1029/2024EF004841

Water managers from Colorado — which is the de facto leader of the Upper Basin with a 51.75% share of the water allocated to the four Upper Basin states — have pushed back on the notion that their states should contribute to cutbacks in water use since their water users already suffer shortages in dry years and the four states have never used their entire allocation of the river, while the Lower Basin overuses its share. Colorado representative Becky Mitchell has repeatedly said that any cuts the state makes must be voluntary, not mandatory.

However, the Upper Basin states have been experimenting for years with conservation programs that pay water users to cut back, most recently in 2023 and 2024 with the federally funded System Conservation Pilot Program. In a proposal submitted in March 2024, the Upper Basin states offered up a potential conservation pool in Lake Powell of up to 200,000 acre-feet a year, and most water users accept that some type of future conservation program for the Upper Basin is inevitable.

What happens now?

Federal officials had previously set a second deadline of Feb. 14, 2026, for the states to present details of a plan. They have repeatedly said that if the seven states fail to come up with an agreement, Reclamation will exercise its authority to protect critical reservoir levels. That could include releases from upstream reservoirs to prop up Powell and Mead, including releasing water from Colorado’s Blue Mesa Reservoir on the Gunnison River.

Reclamation is moving forward with its NEPA process and said in early October that it plans to have a draft environmental impact statement by the end of the year. Representatives from the bureau were not available for comment Wednesday due to the government shutdown. Cameron has said that the alternatives analyzed in the EIS will be broad enough that they would capture any seven-state agreement, which they could then plug in as the preferred alternative — assuming the states come up with something.

“The basin states remain committed to collaboration grounded in the best available science and respect for all Colorado River water users,” Mitchell said in a prepared statement. “We are taking a meaningful step toward long-term sustainability and demonstrating a shared determination to find supply-driven solutions.”

#ColoradoRiver: States miss their deadline on a deal, but they’re still talking, #Utah and the federal government aren’t giving details or a new timeline — Annie Knox (UtahNewsDispatch.com) #COriver #aridification

Click the link to read the article on the Utah News Dispatch website (Annie Knox):

November 11, 2025

Utah and six other states along the Colorado River blew past their deadline Tuesday to reach a new deal on managing the dwindling river, but negotiations aren’t over.

“We will continue to engage with our partners across the Basin to develop a framework that protects water users and the system as a whole,” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said Tuesday afternoon on the social media site X.

The river contributes 27% of Utah’s water supply, and provides water to 40 million people across the U.S. and Mexico. Drought, overuse and hotter temperatures tied to climate change have all combined to shrink its flow.

The federal government had said it would step in and make its own plan if states failed to reach broad consensus by Tuesday, but the states agree they don’t want that to happen, Cox said.

“While the Basin States did not finalize an agreement today on post-2026 Colorado River operations, our commitment to a state-led path remains,” the governor said.

The U.S. Department of the Interior did not respond to questions from Utah News Dispatch Tuesday evening about the timeline and whether it would intervene. The current agreement runs through late 2026.

The federal agency and Utah’s negotiator Gene Shawcroft issued the same prepared statement, saying the talks yielded “collective progress.” They did not give any details on sticking points.

The seven states, the Department of the Interior and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which manages water in the West, all “recognize the serious and ongoing challenges facing the Colorado River,” their statement says. “Prolonged drought and low reservoir conditions have placed extraordinary pressure on this critical water resource that supports 40 million people, tribal nations, agriculture, and industry.”

They said the states and federal agencies share a commitment to ensuring the river’s long-term sustainability.

“While more work needs to be done, collective progress has been made that warrants continued efforts to define and approve details for a finalized agreement,” the statement says.

The four Upper Basin states — Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming — and the Lower Basin states of Nevada, Arizona and California presented competing plans to the federal government last year.

The Upper Basin states have sought to fend off mandatory cuts in dry years, saying they generally use much less than they’re allocated. The Lower Basin states have insisted that all seven absorb cuts in dry years.

In part to prepare for the possibility of mandatory cuts, Utah has been investing in measuring and monitoring water use in recent years.

In 2023, the Legislature set aside $1 million for a Colorado River measurement infrastructure project and $650,000 in ongoing yearly funding, according to the Utah Division of Water Rights.

The Metropolitan Water District of Southern #California issues statement on continued efforts to negotiate new rules for #ColoradoRiver operations #COriver #aridification

Click the link to read the release on the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California website:

Nov. 12, 2025

Metropolitan General Manager Deven Upadhyay issues the following statement regarding the seven Colorado River Basin states continued efforts to reach consensus on post-2026 rules governing operation of the Colorado River:

“The only path to developing a sustainable Colorado River is through collaboration and consensus. We are grateful that the seven states that rely on the river remain at the table, along with the federal Department of Interior, but more work needs to be done, and quickly.

“The work ahead will require every state and water user to look beyond just their own needs and work toward the greater good of the Southwest. If reductions in water use are shared equitably across the Basin, no one state or sector will bear the burden alone.

“Metropolitan remains committed to forging such a consensus, and we look forward to the opportunity to participate in the ongoing discussions in a meaningful way. An agreement that includes tools allowing for smart water management, like flexible storage in Lake Mead and opportunities for shared investments across states, will minimize the pain of living with the new, lower flows of the Colorado River. If we focus on building solutions – rather than legal arguments – we can develop new guidelines that allow water users to have access to the water they need, when they need it most.”

“Metropolitan is preparing to live with less imported water in urban Southern California, building on decades of lower water use. But we cannot solve the problem alone. We cannot lose our access to the Colorado River entirely. Our region – home to half of the people and half of the economic activity in the Basin – relies on the river. And we are committed to its success.”

Learn more about Metropolitan and the Colorado River.

#ColoradoRiver wins personhood status from Arizona tribal council — AZCentral.com #COriver #aridification

Farming is a cultural legacy and economic driver for the Colorado River Indian Tribes. Photo © Brett Walton/Circle of Blue

Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral website (Debra Utacia Krol). Here’s an excerpt:

November 10, 2025

The Colorado River Indian Tribes have formally accorded personhood status to the Colorado River, creating a powerful new mechanism to protect the eponymous river that makes life possible in their arid homelands. The resolution was approved by the CRIT Tribal Council on Nov. 6 in Parker. The nearly 4,300-member tribe has long been alarmed at the state of its life-giving waterway, CRIT Chairwoman Amelia Flores wrote in a statement shared with The Arizona Republic.

“The Colorado River is in jeopardy,” she said. The tribe, which holds the largest quantity of senior water rights in the state, regards the river as a living being, so the resolution codifies that belief and the tribe’s commitment to protecting its needs and ability to provide water for future generations.

Colorado River talks hit crunch time. What’s at stake for California water? — Rachel Becker (CalMatters.org)

sUdall/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

By Rachel Becker, CalMatters

November 10, 2025

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

The clock is ticking down to a federal deadline Tuesday for California and six other Western states to reach the broad strokes of a deal portioning out supplies from the parched Colorado River.

Officials at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the federal stewards for the river under the Department of the Interior, have threatened to impose their own plan if the states can’t agree how to manage the river after 2026, when the river’s current rulebook expires.

Dire projections that another dry year could send the basin’s major reservoirs plummeting to alarmingly low levels have ramped up the urgency, and the tensions.

But, after two years of fraught negotiations, the states remain at an impasse. Those in the river’s lower basin — California, Arizona, and Nevada — are clashing with Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico upstream. A key point of contention is how much each basin must scale back their use of the overtapped river as climate change further squeezes supplies.

“We’ve been in a holding pattern, and we need to land this plane by Tuesday,” J.B. Hamby, California’s chief negotiator as chairman of the Colorado River Board of California, told CalMatters.

California’s dependence on the Colorado River raises the stakes. The state takes more than half of the power generated at Lake Mead’s Hoover Dam, and more water from the main stem than any other in the basin. Half a million acres of alfalfa, winter vegetables and other crops in the Imperial Valley all rely on the Colorado River, which also supplies urban Southern California via the Metropolitan Water District.

But California has also been relatively impervious to shortages on the river, with senior water rights long seen as bulletproof. Now, the questions hanging over the last days of negotiations are — how real is the threat of missing the deadline? And what exactly would the consequences be for California?

Blown deadlines on the Colorado River

For decades, federal officials have threatened to intervene if states in the Colorado River basin fail to reach agreement. The threat — and the inevitable lawsuits water suppliers fear would follow — have motivated major deals that now govern the river’s operations.

Actual federal intervention is far rarer — though the U.S. government has stepped in in the past, on a smaller scale.

In the early 2000s, Southern California was forced to stop using surplus Colorado River water when other states began clamoring for their fair share. The Interior Department set a deadline of December 31st, 2002 for California’s water agencies to cut a deal weaning themselves off the surplus water, or face immediate cutbacks.

The Imperial Irrigation District — by far the biggest user of Colorado River water in California — balked. So the Interior Secretary cut California’s supplies, leading to court battles and, ten months later, a deal.

But deadlines and threats seem to have lost their teeth in recent years, when states in the Colorado River basin have blown deadline after deadline, with little federal response.

Last week, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs urged the Trump administration to be more assertive. “As we approach critical deadlines, we need the Trump administration to step in, exert leadership and broker a deal,” she said in remarks prepared for a water conference.

Elizabeth Koebele, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, said negotiations may have become too contentious for deadlines to matter. She attributed it to fracturing relationships between the basin states as devastatingly dry conditions on the river ratchet up the stakes.

“We have less water, and it’s caused more rippling problems,” Koebele said. “You’re cutting a smaller pie, for more people.”

A strike against storage

The Veteran’s Day deadline isn’t the final deadline; it’s an interim milestone as federal officials race to lock in a plan before the current rulebook expires.

Scott Cameron, now acting head of the Bureau of Reclamation, said at a conference in June that in the absence of a deal, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum was prepared to take charge as water master. The position gives him the power to declare the river in shortage and call for cutbacks in the lower basin.

But the Trump administration declined to specify what exactly it might do. “At this stage, all parties should remain focused on the difficult but necessary work required to reach a seven-state agreement,” an unidentified Interior Department spokesperson said, in an emailed statement.

If there is still no plan by late 2026, the rulebook could revert to one from the 1970s, according to an analysis by Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy.

That worries Metropolitan Water District’s Bill Hasencamp, because it would upend Metropolitan’s ability to continue banking water in the Colorado River basin’s Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the country, for dry spells.

The water giant imports water from Northern California and from the Colorado River to supply 19 million people in six Southern California counties.

Right now, Hasencamp, manager of Colorado River resources at Metropolitan, says that the district has socked away about 1.5 million acre-feet of water in the reservoir over the last 20 years. It’s enough to supply 4.5 million households for a year.

Metropolitan saves Colorado River water in Lake Mead when water from Northern California reservoirs is abundant, and draws on these stores when state supplies dry up. But, under the 1970s-era rules, suppliers would no longer be able to add water to this savings account. Metropolitan would need to use its banked stores over the next ten years, or risk losing the water.

Hasencamp estimates that banked water could disappear more quickly if California faces greater cuts.

“Under a new regime, the feds — if things get dry enough — could cut us back,” Hasencamp said. “We could access that storage, but we might need it to offset cuts on the river that could come to us. So it’s a very undesirable situation.”

Ultimately, experts agree that the most undesirable situations, and the greatest risks to the basin states, will likely come from nature itself.

The Colorado River is in the grips of a megadrought; Brad Udall, a senior water and climate research scientist at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Institute, called August’s projections for reservoirs Lake Powell and Mead “beyond awful.”

Udall said the latest projections for the reservoirs remain dire. One scenario shows “both Powell and Mead entering uncharted territory by (the) end of Water Year 2026,” Udall said in an email.

“That’s the new reality,” Cameron, the acting head of Reclamation, said at a meeting in Arizona over the summer. “There are real risks to both the lower basin states and the upper basin states if we don’t collectively do something differently than we’ve done in the past.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

The #ColoradoRiver is nearly out of time — and excuses: If the seven basin states can’t lead, Washington and the courts will — James Eklund (BigPivots.com) #COriver #aridification

People at Lake Powell May 25, 2022. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (James Eklund):

November 11, 2025

If the seven basin states can’t lead, Washington and the courts will. The West deserves better than to surrender its future out of inertia and pride.

The River at a Crossroads

Today, November 11, the seven states that share the Colorado River face a deadline they’re unlikely to meet. The Department of the Interior has asked them to agree on the bones of a post-2026 management plan — the rules that will decide who gets cut, when, and by how much as the river keeps shrinking.

If they fail, Washington will write the rules for them. And if Washington falters, unelected judges will. Either way, the West loses control of its own destiny. That’s not leadership; that’s abdication.

The Lower Basin is braced for federal action. The Upper Basin is bracing for blame. Both are right to be worried — and both are missing the point. The river doesn’t care about politics or priority dates. It only responds to snow, sun, and science.

Hydrology Has Changed; Leadership Hasn’t

We built the Colorado River system for a climate that no longer exists. Reservoirs that once promised endless growth now sit half-empty — Lake Powell at roughly 29%, Lake Mead near 31%. The math is unforgiving: less water is coming in than going out.

Yet our governance still pretends otherwise. The Law of the River — that tangled mix of compacts, decrees, and deals — assumes a river of at least 16.5 million acre-feet. Nature is now giving us perhaps 12, maybe less. We’re overdrawn every year, and the overdraft is accelerating.

This isn’t a failure of hydrology; it’s a failure of adaptation. The West has always been proud of its self-reliance, but we’re behaving like a bureaucracy waiting for someone else to make the hard call. We need leaders, not hall monitors.

And if you want to know what failure of adaptation looks like, glance halfway around the world. Tehran, Iran, a city of more than eight million, is on the brink of evacuation. Its reservoirs are nearly dry, some below 10% capacity. Rainfall has fallen 40% below average. Iran’s president recently warned that if the skies don’t open, the capital may have to be moved. Moved. Imagine Washington, D.C. abandoned because the Potomac went dry. That’s not science fiction — that’s what happens when water governance waits too long to face reality. The Colorado River isn’t there yet, but the trajectory rhymes. Tehran is a mirror we should study before it shows our reflection.

The Blame Game vs. Shared Responsibility

At Arizona State University’s recent Law of the Colorado River: The View from the Lower Basin conference, one thing was clear: the Lower Basin has its legal arguments loaded and ready. So does the Upper Basin. Both are preparing for a fight neither side can win.

Arizona’s governor calls the Upper Basin’s stance extreme; the Upper Basin counters that it can’t conserve water that isn’t there. California points to its billions in saved water and asks why others won’t match it. Colorado replies that it’s already living within its snowpack. Every argument is technically correct — and collectively disastrous.

Finger-pointing won’t refill a reservoir. The real crisis isn’t between the basins; it’s between the past and the future. The river is shrinking faster than our imagination.

The Case for State-Led Solutions

We know how to do this. We’ve done it before. In 2019, when both Lakes Mead and Powell were circling the drain, the Basin States pulled together the Drought Contingency Plan. It wasn’t perfect, but it kept the system alive long enough for the recent recovery years to matter. That’s proof we can still ride together when it counts.

Utah and Wyoming are finally taking first steps toward real demand-management programs — voluntary, compensated conservation that could bank water in Powell. They’re six years too late, but they’re at least facing forward. The Lower Basin, to its credit, has cut deeply — usage there is down to about 5.9 million acre-feet, the lowest since 1983. The economies of Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles didn’t collapse. They adapted. That’s the model.

A state-led deal is the only way to keep Western hands on the reins. Federal control would be blunt; court control, brutal. Every day we delay, we invite both. The West should never outsource its destiny to Washington or to a judge in black robes who’s never stood in an irrigation ditch with a shovel.

The Call of the Saddle

This river built the modern West. It carved our canyons, powered our farms and ranches, lit our cities, and defined our sense of possibility. But it can’t survive our paralysis.

The next agreement — whatever we call it — won’t be about dividing abundance. It will be about managing scarcity with grace and intelligence. That means each state giving up a little sovereignty to save the system that sustains us all. It means governors and commissioners finding the courage to sign something imperfect but real.

Our basin remembers how to ride — hell, we practically invented it. The horse is saddled. The trail is narrow. And the storm is moving in fast.

Either we climb back on together, or we’ll watch someone else take the reins.

L to R, Anne Castle, Don Coram, James Eklund, and Jim Pokrandt

James Eklund is a Colorado water lawyer, rancher, former director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, and formerly Colorado’s Colorado River principal. He advises public and private clients across the West on water, land, and natural-resources issues at Taft/ Sherman & Howard.

Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65868008

The dried-out subdivisions of Phoenix — Tony Davis (High Country News)

*The Tartesso housing development at the edge of the desert in Buckeye, Arizona.* ***Caitlin O’Hara/High Country News***

Click the link to read the article on the High Country News website (Tony Davis):

October 6, 2025

On the far edge of suburban Phoenix, a giant concrete arch spans the Central Arizona Project, dubbed a “Bridge to Nowhere” by developers and neighborhood activists alike. Nobody can use it; even pedestrians are barred by a chain-link fence sporting a huge “Road Closed” sign. To the bridge’s north, the desert sits as raw as ever.

The bridge was built in recent years to connect an existing subdivision to the planned North Star Ranch and its proposed 9,600 homes. North Star was to be the latest of many new master-planned communities in Buckeye, one of the fastest-growing cities in one of the nation’s fastest-growing metro areas.

But now, this development is on hold over concerns that there’s not enough groundwater to supply the community. And it’s not the only project: High Country News found that almost half a million homes, including thousands in North Star, are currently on pause, far more than developers or local elected officials have acknowledged publicly.

Developments like North Star have long represented the future of housing for local developers and prospective homebuyers. Phoenix has sprawled endlessly in every direction since World War II, a beacon of the Sun Belt. The city’s rampant growth has transformed former agricultural fields and open desert into homes and tested the bounds of the water supply in Maricopa County, which usually ranks as one of the nation’s fastest-growing counties. The proposed new developments would stretch past the White Tank Mountains, a low-slung collection of peaks that has long served as Phoenix’s unofficial western boundary, making them the most remote developments yet.

But then, in June 2023, state modeling studies concluded that Phoenix and the surrounding areas had “reached the anticipated limits of growth on groundwater supplies,” and the Arizona Department of Water Resources (ADWR) made the stunning decision to stop issuing new water supply certificates to developments served by groundwater in the city’s outer ring of suburbs. Nowhere on Phoenix’s edges did this moratorium hit harder than in Buckeye, where many of the halted projects were slated to be built.

The decision stemmed from a provision in the state’s pioneering 1980 Arizona Groundwater Management Act that required metro areas and developers to prove that new subdivisions have enough water to last 100 years.

A slew of sensational headlines followed. The New York Times said it likely signaled the “beginning of the end to the explosive development that has made the Phoenix area the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country,” a prediction echoed by other outlets. The number of homes halted due to unsustainable reliance on groundwater is a striking indication of how widespread the practice has become — and of the state’s determination to rein it in.

The moratorium’s impacts heightened a political crisis that had been building in Phoenix for years as the demand for cheap housing and the limits on its water supply collided. Not only did the moratorium come during the worst drought to hit the Southwest in at least 1,200 years, it also hit in the midst of a nationwide housing crisis that has impacted even the Phoenix area, once a bastion of affordability. Developers and their supporters argue that it has caused real economic harm to homebuyers, because they say growth has stopped where the housing is most affordable. But the moratorium could also encourage denser growth in the city — something urban planners say would be healthy for Phoenix and also preserve desert habitat, conserve water and bolster the sense of community.

In the two years since the moratorium began, the housing and water pressures on the area have only increased. Phoenix has become trapped between a demand for affordable homes that meet people’s expectations for a good middle-class life and what government officials say is the dwindling amount of water available to supply those homes. And decision-makers have splintered along partisan lines, seemingly intractably, divided over the best way forward. Republican legislators have pushed hard for bills that would ease or lift the moratorium, while Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs, whose administration introduced it, and most Democratic legislators have continued to stand by it.

Phoenix is at an inflection point, Tom Buschatzke, Arizona’s water chief, said at a June 2023 press briefing announcing the new restrictions. The question remains: In which direction will Phoenix tip?

Locals call this bridge over the Central Arizona Project canal in Buckeye, Arizona, the “Bridge to Nowhere.” Caitlin O’Hara/High Country News

ONCE A QUIET FARMING COMMUNITY, Buckeye has rapidly mushroomed; town officials say about 125,000 people live here today, making it about 19 times larger than it was in 2000. That’s nothing, though, compared to the future growth already approved by the Buckeye City Council — enough new development to push the city’s population to more than 1 million.

State officials and local governments like Buckeye’s have routinely enabled this kind of growth through zoning and planning policies that treat sprawl as a way of life. Homes built within the urban core typically use less land, consume less water and require less infrastructure. Although they’re more expensive to build due to land costs, their urban location preserves desert habitat. But development on the edges has long been seen as the quickest, simplest way to meet people’s housing needs.

“In Phoenix, land development has always been as natural as breathing,” Andrew Ross observed in his 2011 book Bird on Fire, one of the few works that has ever taken a critical look at the region’s growth practices. “Any corner of the landscape is a parcel, begging for a contract; each building is a renovation opportunity, every open space a ‘vacant lot,’ awaiting its approver, and, with a little backing, it could be you.”

Efforts to rein in sprawl have run into economic — and political — walls. Growth-related industries such as construction and real estate account for a substantially larger share of the area’s economic base than they do in the U.S. as a whole — nearly 19% compared with 14.3% nationally. In 2000, the Sierra Club led a high-profile ballot initiative to compel Arizona cities to form growth management plans and impose urban growth boundaries on all cities with more than 2,500 people. A sizable majority of voters favored it initially, but the effort ultimately crashed at the polls, crushed by the real estate industry’s over $4 million opposition campaign.

Kathleen Ferris, a former state water director who is now a senior researcher studying water supply issues at Arizona State University, takes a particularly cynical view of the local attitude toward development — the “god of growth,” as she calls it.

An architect of the 1980 law that, years later, would halt North Star Ranch and the hundreds of thousands of other new suburban homes, she sees the restrictions as a protection against the worst of Arizona’s past excesses. “We are not going to have growth without water,” she said. “We will have water in hand before growth is allowed.”

Today, Ferris, at 76, is a key player in the ongoing struggle over the city’s water issues — one part water lawyer, one part researcher and one part crusader. She regularly talks with legislators and gives ADWR a piece of her mind about pending bills and regulations. As a water expert and a prominent voice speaking against groundwater-based development, her presence has become almost obligatory in discussions of Arizona’s water troubles.

Kathleen Ferris has spent her career working toward water security in Arizona as the state’s population doubled. Caitlin O’Hara/High Country News

In 1980, her presence loomed even larger: She was at the center of Arizona’s seemingly intractable groundwater wars. Back then, when lawmakers were drafting the bill that would ultimately spawn the current moratorium, the state’s groundwater levels were already nearing a crisis point: There were essentially no limits on groundwater pumping in any sector of the state’s economy, which was booming with the same intensity as it is today. Cities, farms and mines were at one point pulling at least 1.9 million more acre-feet a year out of the state’s aquifers than rainfall and snowmelt could replenish. In some areas, the aquifers were so depleted that they were collapsing, causing the land to sink and subside.

Around 200 miles of earth fissures caused by this subsidence have been mapped across Arizona. In both rural and suburban areas, earth fissures have undermined and closed roads, power lines, irrigation canals and sewer systems. In 2007, a horse fell into a 10-foot-deep, 15-foot-wide fissure in suburban Phoenix and died before it could be rescued.

Arizona already had a well-earned national reputation as a haven for land fraud. Legendary swindlers like Nathan Waxman, the self-proclaimed godfather of land fraud, were behind the sale of lots without any water supplies, roads or a clear understanding of who even owned the land. In the 1960s and 1970s, Waxman, working secretly with some of Arizona’s most prominent businessmen, “had scammed millions of dollars from Easterners who thought they were buying a retirement home rather than a chunk of barren desert,” reporters for the Arizona Project wrote.

“It just seemed horrible to me,” Ferris recently recalled. “Growth was really starting to happen big-time in Arizona. We were using way too much groundwater.”

In late 1979 and into 1980, then-Gov. Bruce Babbitt and more than a dozen lobbyists and legislators gathered in a downtown Phoenix law office for a closed-door meeting to hammer out details of what would become the state’s Groundwater Management Act. Ferris, one of the state’s preeminent groundwater authorities, and one of her staff members were the only women in the room.

Ferris was a few months shy of 31, but she was already regarded as an authority on groundwater. She had been intimately involved in day-to-day negotiations and politicking over the groundwater law. She spent countless mornings and evenings with Babbitt, the law’s prime architect, sifting through the bill’s fine points and hashing out the details.

As director of the Arizona Groundwater Management Study Commission, she spent nearly two years during the late 1970s traversing the state, seeking public comments on how to cobble together a new law regulating groundwater pumping. The committee’s recommendations would form the basis of the negotiations over the 1980 law.

Congress authorized construction of the $4 billion Central Arizona Project (CAP) in 1968, hoping to ease the groundwater deficit and deliver Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson. It was still under construction in the late 1970s, but a report commissioned by then-State Water Engineer Wes Steiner predicted that CAP would only bring in enough river water to fill two-thirds of central Arizona’s total overdraft — even if substantial farmland was retired.

Ferris agreed. She worked with Babbitt to orchestrate a quiet, successful effort to induce then-Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus to threaten to cut off federal funding for finishing CAP’s construction unless Arizona enacted a groundwater law.

But at one spring 1980 meeting, Bill Stephens, an attorney for the Arizona Municipal Water Users Association, made it clear that his group had strong objections to the assured water supply rule. And his association, which represented water utilities in Phoenix and its largest suburbs, had plenty of influence. Many of its members were already formalizing contracts to buy very expensive CAP water, and Stephens felt the rule was unfair.

“We were late in the negotiations, and I just remember Babbitt saying something like ‘I guess we’re going to have to put the issue aside. We’re not going to resolve this one,’” Ferris said.

“I just lost it,” Ferris recalled. “Tears were starting to flow down my face. I gathered up my books and my papers, and I walked out of the room. I was demoralized; I was so sad. I just had to get out of the room. I left while all those men were sitting around the table watching me.”

Within days, though, cooler heads prevailed. Ferris’ supporters among the negotiators convinced her to stay. If she walked out, it would permanently sink the bill. Some crafty negotiating got the cities back on board with the assured supply provision.

The law’s “over-arching objective” — explicitly spelled out — was to reduce and manage groundwater use in key areas of the state, including the Phoenix and Tucson metros. But only in recent years has that law actually stopped any development on a large scale — first in 2019 in Pinal County, a much smaller but also fast-growing slice of suburbia to Phoenix’s southeast — and now the city’s desert suburbs.

After the law was passed, Ferris became the first chief counsel of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, which the law created, then the director. These days, she sits on a water policy council that Gov. Katie Hobbs appointed shortly after taking office.

Kathleen Ferris holds a copy of the 1980 Arizona Groundwater Management Act at her office in Paradise Valley, Arizona. Caitlin O’Hara/High Country News

WHEN NEWS BROKE OF THE STATE’S 2023 BAN on new groundwater-based subdivisions, sparking apocalyptic national coverage, local and state officials switched into defense mode.

“It seems in some ways like there’s criticism for us for doing planning and smart development,” Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego told the Arizona Republic after the ADWR moratorium was announced. “It is a strength, not a weakness. We are planning ahead. We have a very simple principle: Water first, then development.”

While the moratorium is unlikely to stop the area’s runaway growth — 80,000 lots had already been approved — the initial response far downplayed the number of homes on hold, according to a High Country News review of state records.

Developers had filed for confirmation that they had enough water to move ahead on roughly 300,000 home lots when the state decision came down. Another 162,000 home lots on state-owned land from Phoenix west to Buckeye also remain undeveloped due to water shortfalls, ADWR records show. Arizona’s Constitution mandates that such lands be sold or leased to help fund public schools, meaning it’s usually developed with housing. But the application process for the assured water supply certificates started in the 2000s and never came through. The development plans were halted.

Among the biggest developments currently on hold are Teravalis and Belmont. Both have been in the works more than two decades. The aftereffects of the 2008 real estate crash delayed them, but they had recently been revived.

Teravalis, at 100,000 homes on nearly 37,000 acres, heralds itself as “the community of your future” and “the nation’s next premier master planned community.” Its website is packed with photos of sunset-drenched saguaros and chollas, and it promises to reduce water use by promoting native landscaping and to set aside 7,000 acres as natural open space, parks and trails. To its west runs Sun Valley Parkway, a seldom-traveled, 30-mile-long four-lane road, itself long known as the Road to Nowhere. Belmont would be only a little less grandiose, building 80,000 homes on 24,000 acres in unincorporated Maricopa County, along with data centers and autonomous vehicles, according to a 2017 press release.

In 2022, developers began construction on 8,000 homes in Teravalis that already had a guaranteed water source. Some are now listed for sale; model homes are already up and the first homes could be occupied by early 2026. But since none of the other planned homes were certified prior to the ruling, the rest of the project is on hold.

THE MORATORIUM CAME AS A COLLECTIVE SHOCK to the Phoenix-area homebuilding industry. But it shouldn’t have: For more than two decades, Arizona water officials had been sending out warnings, echoed by Ferris’ high-profile criticism. Time after time, they concluded that far less groundwater was available for proposed subdivisions than the developers claimed.

Belmont’s original developers, for example, wanted permission to use 39,000 acre-feet of groundwater per year. But back in 2003, ADWR determined that barely half that amount was physically available. Around the same time, Tartesso’s developer asserted that 26,000 acre-feet was available, while ADWR said it was actually only about 19,000 acre-feet. Similar discrepancies arose around proposed developments across the West Valley.

Then, in 2021 and 2022, ADWR told the developers of several subdivisions, including Festival Ranch and North Star Ranch, that it was finalizing a computer model for the West Valley area that showed the subdivisions’ groundwater demands likely exceeded known supplies.

But then-Gov. Doug Ducey’s Republican administration was said to have prevented the model’s public release. The day after Gov. Hobbs took office in January 2023, Ferris urged the new governor to release the study in an opinion piece for the Arizona Republic. Hobbs did so six days later. Alarm bells began to go off for developers and builders.

The moratorium that ADWR declared five months later “had pretty devastating impacts to housing,” homebuilder lobbyist Spencer Kamps told an ADWR advisory committee meeting a few weeks after its release. “We are the only land use that does meet the 100-year requirements,” since apartment, commercial and industrial development were not covered by the 1980 law.

Emilie Myth and her dog, Piper, at home in September. Caitlin O’Hara/High Country News

He estimated that developers and homebuilders were sitting on at least $2 billion worth of investments in infrastructure in the Buckeye area, including roads and sewer and water lines, along with the Bridge to Nowhere. His estimate rose to $4 billion as the moratorium continued. Kamps also said it contributed to rising housing costs as well, adding to the existing 45,000-unit housing shortage in the metro area.

The moratorium has also intensified the isolation of suburban areas where new development had been planned. Emilie Myth moved to Tartesso, a subdivision of Buckeye, well over three years ago. She had been living in Torrance, south of Los Angeles, but found herself stressed by the cost and concerned about the safety of her neighborhood. Late one night, for example, she found a woman sleeping in her garage and was barely able to wake her and get her to leave.

So she moved to Tartesso, where the mortgage for a four-bedroom house costs the same as the rent for her one-bedroom apartment back in California: about $1,600 a month.

The downside is being marooned on a service-less island. Tartesso, with its 3,400 homes housing 10,000 residents, is about 10 miles east of the nearest gas station and 20 miles west of the nearest place to buy groceries. A convenience store is expected to open a few miles away at the end of this year. The only food service available comes from the handful of food trucks that spend evenings in one of Tartesso’s many parks. Similarly, North Star Ranch would lie an hour’s drive north of downtown Buckeye. Just south at one of Festival Ranch’s subdivisions, there’s a lone restaurant attached to a golf course, and a single Subway outlet and convenience market at the development’s entrance. The nearest grocery store is a Safeway 20 miles east.

The Festival Ranch housing development in Buckeye, Arizona. Caitlin O’Hara/High Country News

Yet, in some ways, Myth enjoys the isolation. “I like the quiet,” she said. “The only things you hear are cars going by, people talking and dogs barking, whereas in cities it was traffic, 24-7.

“I never felt at peace.”

But it’s been an adjustment, too. She grew up in South Sacramento, where she could take the bus to the movies or walk to the convenience store to get a candy bar. “What do kids do around here? What do teenagers do around here?” she wondered. “I just feel like as a kid I could be more independent than a child is here.”

The very thing she struggles with now contributes to her new neighborhood’s low cost: Since World War II, homebuilders have hopped over the urban fringe and alfalfa and cotton fields to develop the vast swaths of cheap desert land beyond them. This made the housing more affordable; denser construction would have cost more per unit, as would including commercial services.

Buckeye, for example, is among the handful of areas in the Phoenix area where homeowners can find a new home for under $400,000, a study by longtime Phoenix economic consulting firm Elliott D. Pollack and Co. found. Between June 2019 and June 2025, the median home price in Maricopa County jumped 65% to nearly $474,000, according to one real estate company, putting home ownership out of reach for much of the working class. In a 12-month stretch, though, more than a quarter of the 2,700 homes that sold for less than $400,000 were in Buckeye. According to Pollack, “There are few suitable alternatives for affordable homes in the region if Buckeye cannot continue to develop homes.” Pollack’s study was commissioned by the Home Builders Association of Central Arizona.

Other reports, though, suggest that the moratorium may have had less of an impact than developers claim. There are dozens of homes listed in Tartesso, Festival Ranch and Buckeye in general for under $400,000. And a variety of other factors affect housing prices, according to a recent study from ASU’s Kyl Center for Water Policy: federal interest rates, inflation, supply chain interruptions, migration patterns, remote work, labor markets, inventory and local, state and federal government policies and regulations.

For example, the single-family, low-density zoning that covers most of the metro area can discourage lower-cost housing development and increases the cost of infrastructure such as roads and utilities. Macroeconomic influences account for much of the housing costs and availability, the study found. “In the absence of economic studies, it is difficult to say whether or how the (ADWR) moratorium might impact housing affordability.”

But it does mean that residents like Myth will likely continue to live in suburban isolation. “In a lot of ways, it sucks,” said Myth. “I understand why the governor wants to do that. We don’t want to turn off water for some people and have other people have it. But at the same time, when I moved here, I was told there is going to be more housing soon and eventually there will be a grocery store. That looks like it’s not going to happen for decades now.”

Some Tartesso homeowners told HCN they were leaving, or at least considering it, due to the long bus rides for schoolchildren and the onerous drives to get basic groceries. Not Myth, though. “I’ll probably stay here,” she said, since anywhere else, her mortgage bill could easily double.

Clouds catch the last light of the day behind a sign for the Tartesso development in Buckeye, Arizona. Caitlin O’Hara/High Country News

WITH TIME, THE FIGHT OVER THE MORATORIUM has hardened along familiar lines. Republican legislators have essentially accused ADWR of waging war against affordable housing, while ADWR and its backers say they’re standing firm on behalf of the state’s 45-year-old tradition of responsible groundwater management. A complicated history and a challenging present, distilled into a simple fight: affordability versus environment.

Duane Schooley Jr. bought two houses in Tartesso to rent out at first back in 2018 and 2019 because “we figured that Arizona was going to be a hot spot.” But Schooley, a local Republican party activist, is now openly disdainful of the state’s decision to stop allowing new homes to be built on groundwater supplies. He even doubts the state’s talk of a water shortage.

“When I moved here, it was all farmland, all of it,” Schooley recalled “Now, you have the Walmarts, the Boeings, the distribution centers. You displaced 1.3 million square feet of farmland for a concrete warehouse. Where did the water rights go? How much water were they using?” ADWR’s model found, however, that even those kinds of reductions in water use — moving away from farming, cutting back water use — hadn’t been enough.

Arizona officials are “playing with fire” and are “kind of short-sighted” by stopping so much development simply because of water, he added. “It seems kind of heavy-handed.”

Homebuilders began looking for a way around the moratorium just weeks after it was implemented. Industry representatives argued that developments that had been in process should be allowed to move forward, but state legislation on that got nowhere. After that and other efforts to overturn the moratorium failed, they pushed for a bill to allow new subdivisions to be built on retired farmland, since homes generally guzzle less water than cotton fields. The Legislature passed it in 2024, but Hobbs vetoed it after ADWR officials claimed it could actually lead to more water use in those areas. Developers have also challenged the accuracy of the forecasts made by ADWR’s groundwater model, saying its forecasts make faulty assumptions about where wells would be placed, overestimate future demands and underestimate supplies. Their consultant prepared an alternative model that projected groundwater supplies would more than suffice for 100 years. ADWR, however, pushed back on its findings.

For now, the department has focused instead on extending the responsibility to restrict groundwater use to some cities as well, by requiring them to cut groundwater use once renewable supplies arrive. While the rule’s backers say this provision is essential for reducing dependence on native groundwater, homebuilders and Republican legislative leaders have claimed it is an illegal “tax.” (ADWR has denied this, saying that it isn’t a tax.)

In early 2025, the Home Builders Association of Central Arizona joined two lawsuits against ADWR. One was filed on their behalf by the Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank. This complaint challenged ADWR’s decision to stop issuing certificates for development, while the other, which was filed along with the Arizona Senate and House of Representatives, went after the requirement that cities importing renewable water cut groundwater use by 25%.

The Goldwater Institute lawsuit alleges that ADWR lacked the authority under state law to impose its moratorium in the first place, arguing that ADWR’s rules have become “insurmountable obstacles” to obtaining state certification of a 100-year supply.

In response, ADWR filed to have that lawsuit dismissed. “What is at stake in this lawsuit is the ability of the state to protect the Arizonans that are here today, by ensuring that their water supplies don’t run out or water levels fall to alarming depths of 1,000 feet due to new groundwater pumping,” Buschatzke, a defendant in the Goldwater lawsuit, wrote in an op-ed. “The Goldwater lawsuit would create a policy directive to rubber-stamp new developments if water was available beneath them, while forcing ADWR to ignore any potential impacts to neighboring homeowners or communities.”

The various factions have found one area of compromise, however: Legislation was passed this summer that could allow several hundred thousand new homes to be built on farmland. New subdivisions can only be built if they use as much as 1.5 acre-feet of groundwater per acre of developed land — enough water to serve three Phoenix-area homes for a year but far less than the farms themselves would have used.

But the new law won’t help the hundreds of thousands of planned homes in Buckeye and other suburbs in the desert. Instead, it focuses on developments that are less likely to move quickly.

Developers of master-planned communities want to build in lush desert mountain landscapes because they are selling atmosphere, said Sarah Porter, director of ASU’s Kyl Center. “They are designed from top to bottom, and everything is beautifully designed for a look, to work well together. It’s very hard to do that in an old farming town.”

A roofer works on a home in a housing development in Buckeye, Arizona, in September. Caitlin O’Hara/High Country News

WHATEVER THE OUTCOME of the various debates and lawsuits, Phoenix’s future growth ultimately depends on the public’s willingness to pay. “For enough money, people can dig a trench between Phoenix and the ocean to bring water. It might cost a trillion dollars, but it can be done,” said Brett Fleck, a water resources manager for the city of Peoria, northwest of Phoenix. “It’s not about running out. It’s about: Are you willing to pay for what it costs?”

Even relatively straightforward solutions are expensive and quickly run into problems. The city of Buckeye, for instance, agreed in early 2023 to pay $80 million to buy rights to 5,926 acre-feet of groundwater a year — enough to serve more than 17,000 homes annually — from a company that represents farms west of Phoenix. The town of Queen Creek spent $30 million for about 5,000 acre-feet from farms in the same area a year earlier.

In July, ADWR allowed the cities to take the water. But they still need the Central Arizona Project’s permission to put the water into the canal to bring it about 60 miles to the Phoenix area. That won’t be easy, since the water will require costly treatment: Much of it is contaminated with unsafe levels of naturally occurring arsenic and nitrates from crop fertilizers. If it’s put in the canal untreated, it would make water flowing to other houses and farms unusable.

And the CAP canal itself may very well be carrying less water soon. It has delivered renewable Colorado River water supplies to the state’s hot, dry interior since 1985, but with officials of the seven river basin states locked in tense negotiations over how to apportion the water supply from the oversubscribed river, the prospect of cuts looms large. Water officials of five Phoenix-area suburbs that get Colorado River water told HCN that they may have to scale back their future growth plans if the region sustains a significant cut to CAP deliveries.

Another proposal is to raise the Bartlett Dam on the Lower Verde River northeast of Phoenix so it can store an additional 323,000 acre-feet of water for metro-area cities in central Arizona. But one projection estimated it will cost about $1 billion, needs congressional authorization and wouldn’t go online until the late 2030s. The city of Phoenix is considering a facility that would treat upward of 80 million gallons of wastewater per day to make it drinkable — projected to cost $4 billion to build, and that’s a decade away.

Former Gov. Ducey proposed spending more than $1 billion for seawater desalinization plants on the Gulf of California and a pipeline to ship the treated seawater 200 miles north to the CAP canal. Ducey proposed this billion-dollar allocation toward the cost of such a project to the Arizona Legislature in 2022, but major state revenue shortfalls in 2024 led to a more than $400 million cut to the funding, leaving the prospect for water imports uncertain at best.

Myth would like to see some of these options considered more seriously. Why not, she asks, if the question is having enough water for people to drink and to bathe and to live?

“I would say that we are not being as imaginative about water as we could be,” she said. “If we could pipe oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, why can’t we pipe water from the Great Lakes here, or bring water up from the Sea of Cortez and treat it up here?”

Tom Berry at home in the Festival Ranch housing development in Buckeye, Arizona in September. Caitlin O’Hara/High Country News

But for some residents the moratorium has offered unexpected benefits. They have come to love their subdivisions marooned in the desert and dread the revival of the growth machine. Tom Berry began thinking of moving to Arizona more than a decade ago but dismissed Phoenix’s rural suburbs as an option. “I thought, ‘Who in their right mind would ever live out there?’ It was so remote.” But after years living in a booming neighborhood of northern Peoria west of Phoenix, he grew concerned about all the development he could see coming. “It was really going to impact our lifestyle.” So he drove to Festival Ranch “on a whim,” and bought a new home there in September 2021. Like many Festival Ranch residents, he was delighted that the state had blocked North Star Ranch.

“(The city is) enamored with the high growth rate of Buckeye,” he said. “It is growth at any cost, and too bad if you already live here.”

Just across the Sun Valley Parkway from his neighborhood lies the huge White Tank Mountains Regional Park, he noted. The parkway drive passes through open desert where cattle that graze on neighboring state land occasionally break through fences and stroll onto the road. Authorities have posted signs between Festival Ranch and Surprise warning drivers to “Watch for cattle.”

“So one of my friends said, ‘How about we put signs on the fenceline facing the desert that says ‘Watch for cars?’” Berry said.

A few streets over, Billy Ryan, a 39-year-old paramedic and Phoenix-area native whose four-bedroom house lies a block away from the bridge, was also cautiously celebrating the halt on new homes.

“I don’t want any development up there. It’s more traffic, more people, more everything,” said Ryan. “The whole reason I moved out here was to get away from that.

“You go five miles down the road and you’re in open desert. You see snakes and bugs. There’s nothing to the north of us, to the east or to the west. We’re kind of like an island,” he added. “If you like being outside, in nature, it’s ideal.”

Still, he tempers his relief at the indefinite delay imposed on the North Star Ranch project with the intuitive awareness of someone born in the state that “you can’t stop progress.

“It will happen,” he said. “The developers always get their way. At the same time … if people want to develop here, they need to find a better way to get the water.

“I don’t know where they are going to get the water, it is a finite resource, to be sure. But at the end of the day, developers are the ones with cash. If not this election cycle, not now, four years later, five years later, 15 years later, it will get done.”

Development meets the desert in suburban Phoenix, Arizona. Caitlin O’Hara/High Country News

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

This article appeared in the October 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Dried out in Phoenix.”

How is #Colorado’s response to invasive mussels going? Funding and public education are key, experts say — Shannon Mullane (Fresh Water News)

Adult Zebra mussel. Photo credit: Colorado Parks and Wildlife

Click the link to read the article on the Water Education Colorado website (Shannon Mullane):

October 23, 2025

Colorado is in its first year of responding to a zebra mussel infestation in a big river, the Colorado River. State staff say they have what they need to handle the high-priority needs — they just need their funding to stay off the chopping block.

The fast-reproducing mussels, or their microscopic stage called veligers, were first detected in Colorado in 2022. Since then, the state’s aquatic nuisance species team and its partners have been working to monitor water, decontaminate boats, and educate the public to keep the mussels from spreading. That effort logged a serious failure this summer when state staff detected adult zebra mussels in the Colorado River, where treatment options are limited.

CPW sampling on the Colorado River found zebra mussel veligers. The river is now considered “positive” for zebra mussels from its confluence with the Roaring Fork River to the Utah state line. CREDIT: PHOTO COURTESY OF COLORADO PARKS & WILDLIFE

“We’re continuing to sample the Colorado from below the Granby Dam all the way out to the [Utah-Colorado] state line,” said Robert Walters, who manages the invasive species program for Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

Adult zebra mussels, about the size of a thumbnail with a zebra-striped shell, reproduce quickly and can clog up pipes, valves and parts of dams, costing millions of dollars to remove. They also suck up nutrients, out-eating other native aquatic species, and their razor sharp shells cause headaches for beachgoers.

The state’s first adult zebra mussel showed up in Highline Reservoir near Grand Junction in 2022. But even after the lake was drained and treated, the mussels appeared again.

Then this year in July, the mussels showed up in a private reservoir in Eagle County near the Colorado River. And in September, specialists found adult zebra mussels in a stretch of the Colorado River itself.

Colorado has been working to keep these invasive species out of its waters since 2007, when a task force was created to coordinate management efforts.

In 2008, Colorado approved a law that makes it illegal to possess, import, export, transport, release or cause an aquatic nuisance species to be released.

Now, the program completes over 450,000 inspections each year, according to Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s website. The teams have intercepted 281 boats with zebra or quagga mussels attached.

But their treatment options are limited on the Colorado River. CPW does not intend to treat the main stem of the Colorado River due to multiple factors, including risk to native fish populations and critical habitat, the length of the potential treatment area and complex canal systems, the agency said in a mid-September news release.

The goal continues to be educating the public — including lawmakers who are scheduled to hear an update on the zebra mussel issue during the Oct. 29 Water Resources and Agriculture Review Committee meeting.

“What I think that we really need to help us more effectively tackle this issue is a higher level of public awareness,” Walters said.

The first year of infestations

For invasive species teams, the first year involves a lot of monitoring, according to Heidi McMaster, the invasive species coordinator for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

She’d know: She has helped Reclamation with its response to invasive species, like quagga mussels.

Quagga mussels were discovered in Lake Mead, Lake Mojave and Lake Havasu on the Colorado River in January 2007. The mussels were later confirmed in Lake Powell in 2013, according to the Bureau of Reclamation.

Hoover Dam with Lake Mead in the background December 3, 2024.

Colorado River water from Colorado’s mountains eventually collects in Lake Powell before flowing through the Grand Canyon to downstream states, Lake Mead and Mexico.

“I would think that the first response is probably panic, especially if people are not prepared for it,” McMaster said. “Once that initial panic wears off, it is tapping into the existing resources, the preparedness plans that state or managers have on how to deal with it.”

During the first year, specialists are looking at existing rapid response plans, vulnerability assessments and communication plans. They take samples and track life cycles to try to understand how the mussels reproduce, how environmental conditions impact breeding and what kinds of treatments might work to stop the spread.

In the Southwest and along the Colorado River, the temperature of the water allows invasive species to breed multiple times a year, McMaster said. Each one can produce a million larvae. Not all survive: There are turbulent waters, areas with fewer nutrients, and other threats, like predators. But if they grow to adulthood they can layer on top of each other on underwater surfaces.

If left unchecked, invasive mussels could clog up pipelines that carry cooling water to turbines used to generate hydroelectric power. Without the cooling effect of the water, the turbine would “burn up” and power generation would shut down, McMaster said.

The goal at the end of the first year is mainly to inform the public. That means repeating the “clean, drain, dry” refrain as often as possible to anyone moving watercraft from one body of water to another, she said.

After that, a successful first-year response will also include setting up inspection and decontamination stations. Then, specialists move onto treatment options, McMaster said.

At Hoover Dam and Lake Mead, on the Nevada-Arizona border, managers took an aggressive treatment approach to avoid damage to the dam, she said. They used UV lights to stun and temporarily paralyze the microscopic veligers so they cannot attach inside the dam.

“Prevention is still the No. 1 goal,” McMaster said.

It’s the cheapest and least risky option, she said. Once an invasive mussel species arrives in an area, however, the costs can ramp up exponentially into the millions of taxpayer dollars. The goal is always to keep them at bay as much as possible, she said.

“They might be in the state of Colorado,” McMaster said, “but if you look at the overall percentage of uninfested areas, that’s still a lot of maintenance that’s not having to happen.”

Pest control on a private lake

On July 3, Colorado Parks and Wildlife staff discovered adult zebra mussels in a privately owned lake in western Eagle County, according to a news release.

CPW also identified additional zebra mussel veligers in the Colorado River near New Castle, Highline Lake and Mack Mesa Lake at Highline Lake State Park, the release said.

There were too many mussels in the Eagle County lake to count, Walters said in late August. Any hard structure in the lake and any underwater rocks were relatively covered in adult mussels, he said.

An invasive species specialist said in July that they believed the lake was an upstream source of the mussels in the Colorado River, and that an outlet from the lake was bringing zebra-mussel-infested water into the Colorado River, according to news reports.

Walters said that has not been confirmed.

“We are just continuing to try to monitor,” Walters said during an interview Aug. 29. “What I can say is that, to the best of our knowledge, there currently is no connection from this privately owned body of water into any of the river systems of the state.”

The state’s team spent about eight hours on Aug. 25 treating the lake with a copper-based molluscicide, a substance used to kill mollusks, he said.

Staff also sampled the private lake’s water Aug. 27 to make sure the treatment’s concentration was at the right level and planned to continue monitoring and treating the water throughout September, Walters said.

No boats or other watercraft were entering or exiting the lake, he said.

“It’ll be a long time before we know if it was truly effective at eradicating the zebra mussels,” he said.

Zebra mussels. Photo credit: Colorado Parks & Wildlife

The state focuses its monitoring efforts on public waters, mainly those with high recreational use. Motorboats and other types of boats are the main way the mussels spread, he said.

However, that doesn’t mean the teams don’t survey private ponds and lakes, Walters said.

After the state discovered zebra mussel veligers in the Colorado River and Grand Junction area, they started asking landowners if they could survey private lakes, ponds, gravel pits and more near the river. They often survey privately owned recreational areas, like water skiing clubs, he said.

“We have been trying to work with those private landowners to allow us access to come out and sample them for invasive species,” Walters said.

We need to keep our existing funding

But with thousands of private and public water bodies in the state, CPW alone is never going to be able to monitor all of them as frequently as the high-risk water bodies, he said.

The staff normally work in teams of two to inspect reservoirs and lakes. They pull fine mesh nets through the water to try to find microscopic veligers. They do shoreline surveys to look for razor sharp shells and other signs of invasive species.

On a small pond, the process can take one to two hours. On a big reservoir like Blue Mesa, Colorado’s largest reservoir, it would take six to eight hours, he said.

“I don’t think that there is ever going to be capacity to monitor every public and private body of water in the state of Colorado. And I don’t think that that’s ever going to be our expectation,” Walters said.

The aquatic nuisance species program has more resources than ever, but there’s always room for more, Walters said.

“At this time, we feel like we do have a good amount of resources to be able to sample the waters that we consider to be the highest priority,” he said.

Formerly, the team was based in Denver. Now, the state has established a traveling team to cover the Western Slope and another focused on the Grand Junction area.

They don’t need more authority to monitor private water bodies, he said.

“What we need is to continue to receive the funding that we are receiving today, and hope that does not get threatened if there’s any sort of budget cuts that are considered,” Walters said.

Aquatic nuisance species stamp sales cover about $2.4 million, or 50%, of the program’s annual funding needs. All motorboats and sailboats must have this stamp before launching in state waters, according to the CPW website.

Colorado state law calls on federal agencies, like the Bureau of Reclamation and U.S. Forest Service, to cover the other half of the funding needs since many high-risk waters in Colorado are federally owned or managed.

How are other water providers responding?

Zebra mussels go with the flow. They naturally move downstream with the river’s current, but boats traveling from one lake to another can carry them upstream.

That has upstream water managers, like Northern Water and Denver Water, keeping a close eye on developments along the Colorado River.

The Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District works with the federal government to transfer Colorado River water on the Western Slope through a series of reservoirs, pump stations and tunnels — called the Colorado-Big Thompson Project — to farmland and over 1 million residents from Fort Collins across northeastern Colorado.

Horsetooth Reservoir looking west from Soldier Dam. Photo credit: Norther Water.

Zebra mussels are such prolific reproducers they can clog up water delivery pipelines, the main concern for a water manager like Northern Water, spokesman Jeff Stahla said.

The C-BT project is no stranger to invasive species. In 2008, quagga mussels showed up in several reservoirs, including Grand Lake, Lake Granby and Shadow Mountain Reservoir. Another reservoir, Green Mountain, was also positive for quagga mussels in 2017.

All of the lakes are mussel-free and delisted, Stahla said. Now they’re tightening up security.

“The biggest task we can right now is to inspect those boats going into the reservoirs to make sure that they’re not going to be causing the problem,” he said.

Dillon Reservoir in Summit County is Denver Water’s largest reservoir. Photo credit: Denver Water.

Denver Water, which serves 1.5 million people in Denver and nearby suburbs, is also focused on inspecting and decontaminating boats.

“It’s a little unnerving. That’s for sure,” Brandon Ransom, recreation manager for Denver Water, said. “It’s certainly not welcome news that anybody in the state wants to see.”

The water provider also transfers Colorado River water through mountain tunnels and ditches to Front Range communities. Not only are the invasive mussels a concern for gates, valves, pipes and tunnels, they also cause problems for recreation. The shells are sharp enough to cut feet and the decaying mussels and old shells “smell to all heck,” Ransom said.

They haven’t launched new prevention efforts in response to zebra mussels reports, but that’s because the provider and its partner agencies already had fairly controlled boat launch and inspection procedures, he said.

A view of part of Eleven Mile State Park in Park County, Colorado. The view shows the Eleven Mile Canyon Dam and part of the Eleven Mile Canyon Reservoir. By Jeffrey Beall – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=154086653

They already intercepted adult zebra mussels on boats this year, he said. The latest catch was at Eleven Mile Reservoir in early October.

They’re trying to get the word out to people to make sure their boats and gear are clean, drained and dry. The zebra mussels like to hide in dark cavities, particularly around motors.

The good news is that Denver Water’s reservoirs, pipelines and tunnels on the Western Slope are upstream from the main infested areas, Ransom said.

“It doesn’t help me sleep at night, let’s put it that way,” he said. “We know that it’s closer and closer, and we’re trying to be extra vigilant when it comes to prevention in our waters.”

More by Shannon Mullane

Black Eyed Peas could replace water thirsty crops on the Western Slope — KVNF

Black-eyed peas, in and out of the shell. By Bubba73 (Jud McCranie) – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40953002

Click the link to read the article on the KVNF website (List Young). Here’s an excerpt:

October 6, 2025

Black eyed peas could replace water thirsty crops on the Western Slope. That’s the hope of Srinivassa Pinnamaneni, Ph. D, at Colorado State University’s College of Agricultural Sciences in Fruita, Colorado. Pinnamaneni, said the project was initiated in his brain after seeing the decrease in pinto beans in the state. He said in the last three decades the crop has decreased from almost 300,000 acres to currently 25,000 acres in Colorado. He said most farmers have replaced pinto beans with corn, in part due, to more pests and diseases plaguing the bean crops.

“We want to introduce a new crop that saves water at the same time increases on farm returns and also take care of soil health. So the crop that came into my mind is black eyed peas. They have same duration, like 85 to 95 duration like pinto beans. And you farmers need not change any machinery for growing black eyed peas,” said Pinnamaneni.

Prior to the pilot program on the Western Slope, Pinnamaneni reached out to Trinidad Benham in Nebraska for a contract on the black eyed peas raised by Mike Ahlberg of Delta, Colorado.

“I went there to Gering, Nebraska to get the seeds and this spring I gave them to Mike Ahlberg, who planted them on Memorial Day and harvested on 13th of September.”

The researcher said Ahlberg’s pinto beans yielded around 30 hundred weight while the black eyed peas, they gave 25 hundred weight. He also noted that the current price of pinto beans nationally is $28 dollars to anywhere between $24 to $28 dollars per hundredweight. Trinidad Benham Corporation has made a contract with Ahlberg to buy the black eyed peas at $49 nine dollars per hundredweight.

“Luckily, they are trying to send the semi this week to ship these beautiful peas back to their processing plant at Sterling, Colorado,” Pinnamaneni said.

He said next year the Colorado Department of Agriculture will once again fund the project that could improve both soil health and save water.

Rainfall brings #ColoradoRiver drought relief, but concerns for next year’s water supply remain — Cassie Sherwood (WaterDesk.org) #COriver #aridification

The Colorado River fills Glen Canyon, forming Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir. The reservoir could drop to a new record low in 2026 if conditions remain dry in the Southwestern watershed. (Alexander Heilner/The Water Desk with aerial support from LightHawk)

Click the link to read the article on The Water Desk website (Cassie Sherwood):

November 4, 2025

This story is produced and distributed by The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.

Heavy autumn rains brought relief to drought-plagued portions of the Southwest, but across the Colorado River basin ongoing water supply concerns still linger amid tense policy negotiations and near record-low reservoir storage.

Even after accounting for the heavy rain, 57% of the Colorado River watershed remains in severe drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. More than 11% of the basin is in extreme drought.

A less than average upcoming snow season combined with a dry spring or early summer in 2026 could create conditions for another low runoff year. The Colorado River’s headwaters saw a weak snowpack last winter, which contributed to one of the worst spring runoff seasons on record in 2025. Drought conditions spread and worsened into summer throughout the southern Rocky Mountains.

Peter Goble, Colorado’s assistant state climatologist, explained that the recent rainfall “certainly recharged soils,” in some watersheds.

Flows on the Animas River at Durango. Water Year 2026 is shown in black in comparison to past years. From https://climate.colostate.edu/drought/#streamflow

Streamflow in the Animas River and Rio Grande increased significantly following the October rains and flooding. Rain in southwest Colorado, particularly around Pagosa Springs, brought flooding that damaged homes and downtown businesses. Rain gauges near the San Juan Mountains recorded 7 to 10 inches of precipitation from October 9-15.

“We would love to see this rain come over a more steady incremental period,” Goble said. “But oftentimes it is these flooding events that kind of put the kibosh on a drought more locally.”

The flooding erased drought designations on the Drought Monitor map in those localized areas, but basinwide drought conditions tell a different story. Dry soils, depleted reservoirs and winter weather forecasts continue to cause water managers to worry.

Even with the recent rain, soils in many parts of the Colorado River basin remain dry. Soil absorbs moisture almost like a sponge. When the soil moisture is low, spring runoff soaks into the soil, saturating the ground first. Soils that are more saturated lead to more water filtering into streams and reservoirs when runoff occurs, making the process more efficient.

“We’re still going to need a good snowpack in order to be set up nicely, but this (rain) improves our outlook for the efficiency of that snowpack,” Goble said.

La Niña causes the jet stream to move northward and to weaken over the eastern Pacific. During La Niña winters, the Southwest tends to see warmer and drier conditions than usual. Since La Niña conditions are more common during the negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a negative PDO is likewise associated with warmer, drier conditions across the Southwest. (Image credit: NOAA)

Federal forecasts show the possibility of a mild La Niña through February. The climate pattern occurs when Pacific Ocean waters cool down and alter global weather conditions. La Niña patterns often impact the amount of snowpack accumulation in the coming year. The southern part of Colorado is often drier in a La Niña year while northern areas, around Steamboat Springs, typically see snowier conditions.

The stakes for an above average runoff next year are high. The two biggest reservoirs in the country, Lake Powell and Lake Mead have steadily declined over the last 25 years. Powell is currently at 29% of its capacity and Lake Mead is at 32%. A lessened runoff could push them dangerously low.

While the rain slightly alleviates local drought, it’s “only a drop in the bucket when it comes to refilling Lake Powell and Lake Mead,” Goble said. “We’re still going to see those regional water shortages persist.”

Glen Canyon Dam holds back the waters of Lake Powell, which has reached critically low levels in the last three years. The reservoir serves downstream water use in Arizona, California, Nevada and Mexico. (Mitch Tobin/The Water Desk)

If water levels continue to decline in these larger reservoirs, the dams’ infrastructure is threatened and the hydropower turbines can’t be used. Lake Powell, for example, has different outlets installed so water can be released in low conditions, however they are not designed to be the main outlet source. New federal projections show it’s possible Powell’s levels could drop low enough to cease hydropower production as early as October 2026, if conditions remain dry.

“They could reach levels they have never reached before and potentially reach catastrophic levels,” said John Berggren, regional policy manager for Western Resource Advocates.

In response to extremely low water conditions, it’s possible water from upstream reservoirs in Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico could be released to support Powell’s hydropower turbines.

“We are seeing a new normal because of climate change, because of aridification,” Eric Kuhn said, former general manager of the Colorado River District, on the state’s Western Slope. In 2022, the basin saw similar drought conditions.

“We are back where we were just a few years later,” Kuhn said. “The system is slipping away.”

The basin states are also engaged in negotiations for new operating guidelines for the Colorado River, set to be in place by 2027. Given the ongoing drought conditions, water experts say the two reservoirs cannot wait for new guidelines.

“Don’t forget the short term problem while you are focused on a long-term agreement,” Kuhn said. A recent research paper, co-authored by Kuhn, highlights the need for urgent consumptive cuts basinwide. “We have got to figure out what’s going to happen next year if next year happens to be dry.”

#Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs rips Upper Basin States’ ‘extreme negotiating position’ on #ColoradoRiver — Tucson.com #COriver #aridification

Click the link to read the article on the Tucson.com website (Tony Davis). Here’s an excerpt:

November 5, 2025

Gov. Katie Hobbs blasted officials of the four Upper Colorado River Basin states for what she called their “extreme negotiating position” in refusing to offer curbs on their water use to help save the depleted river.

“This river is shared by seven states, and it benefits seven states. Therefore there must be water conservation efforts in all seven states within the Colorado River Basin,” Hobbs said Wednesday in Tucson at a gathering of the National Water Resources Association Meeting Leadership Forum.

Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs. Photo credit: Arizona Office of the Govenor

“Yet as I stand before you today, after years of negotiations and meeting after meeting after meeting, and time running short to cut a deal, we have yet to see any offer or real, verifiable plan to conserve water from the four Upper Basin States who rely upon this shrinking river,” Hobbs said in a talk at Loew’s Ventana Canyon resort on the northeast side…

The seven states this century have been using far more river water for farms, homes and businesses than is provided by Mother Nature, with the overuse now reaching 3.6 million acre-feet a year, or more than one-fourth of the river’s annual average flow. Those annual flows have declined at least 20% since the turn of the century due to drought and human-caused climate change, many scientists have said. The Upper Basin states have so far not retreated from their position that they see no reason to conserve any additional water because they say many of their farmers, in particular, have already suffered many shortages in recent years when flows in the river and its tributaries aren’t enough to satisfy demand. The Upper Basin states also note that they use significantly less water than they have rights to use under the 1922 Colorado River Compact, while the Lower Basin states typically use more than their allocated rights, particularly when evaporation of water in the Lower Basin’s stretch of river and its tributaries is considered…In a brief interview Wednesday, Hobbs noted that Arizona has one of the fastest growing economies in the US and that could be undercut by an unfavorable CAP allotment. Hobbs went on to say the state maintaining a leadership role in the chip manufacturing industry is not only an economic issue, but also one of national security because some of the most advanced computer chips in the U.S. are being manufactured here. In her speech Hobbs said, “We see time and time again, Arizona, California and Nevada coming to the table, offering significant water cutbacks, and seeing nothing from the Upper Basin.

Fig. 1. The Colorado River Basin covers parts of seven U.S. states as well as part of Mexico. Credit: U.S. Geological Survey

The Weminuche Wilderness at 50 — and a way forward for public lands: The creation of Colorado’s wilderness area was remarkably nonpartisan — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

A photo illustration of the Grenadier Range in the Weminuche Wilderness. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

October 28, 2025

Editor’s note: Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at the San Juan Citizens’ Alliance celebration of 50 years of the Weminuche Wilderness, Colorado’s largest wilderness area at nearly 500,000 acres. Congress passed the legislation establishing the Weminuche in 1975, and it now covers some of the most spectacular landscape in the nation. This is an adapted version of the talk I gave (with a lot fewer umms and uhhs in it).

As I’m sure you all are aware, our public lands have been under attack for a while now, but especially in the last nine months, from both the Trump administration and from the Republican-dominated Congress.

This all out assault has given me many reasons to worry about the fate of some of my favorite places. I have worried about Sen. Mike Lee, the MAGA adherent from Utah, selling off Animas Mountain or Jumbo Mountain to the housing developers; I have fretted about Trump shrinking or eliminating Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante, or Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon national monuments and opening them to the latest uranium mining rush; and I worry that regulatory rollbacks and the administration’s “energy dominance” agenda will make the San Juan Basin and the Greater Chaco Region more vulnerable to a potential new natural gas boom driven by data center demand for more and more power.

But one place I haven’t worried (as much) about being attacked by the GOP and Trump is the Weminuche Wilderness. That’s not because I think Trump or Lee are above messing with wilderness areas. They aren’t. In fact, just this week they opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge up to oil and gas leasing. Still, the Wilderness Act is one of the few major environmental laws these guys haven’t gone after directly — at least so far.

But more than that, the reason I feel the Weminuche is less vulnerable to MAGA attacks is because I am confident that even the most die-hard anti-environmentalist sorts understand that an attack on the Weminuche would be an attack on this region and its identity. The Weminuche has simply become ingrained in the collective psyche of southwest Colorado and beyond. If the feds were to try to open it to logging or drilling or mining or any other sort of development, there would be a widespread, deep revolt from this entire region, even from many a Trump voter.

In part, that’s because of how special the place is, with or without a wilderness designation. But it also has to do with the way the wilderness was established, and the widespread local support it ultimately garnered.

Not long after the Wilderness Act of 1964 was signed into law, federal and state agencies and residents of southwestern Colorado began talking about establishing a wilderness area in the remote San Juan Mountains. Areas such as the Silverton Caldera had been heavily mined, and no longer qualified for wilderness designation (even if the mining industry and local communities would have allowed it).

But the heart of the San Juans in and around the Needle and Grenadier ranges certainly fit the bill. In 1859, Macomb expedition geologist J.S. Newberry described the San Juans as a “thousand interlocking spurs and narrow valleys, [which] form a labyrinth whose extent and intricacy will at present defy all attempts at detailed topographical analysis. Among these are precipices, ornamented with imitations of columns, arches, and pilasters, which form some of the grandest specimens of nature’s Gothic architecture I have ever beheld. When viewed from some nearer point they must be even awful in their sublimity.”

“Awful” might be a bit harsh, but sublime? Indeed. That this should become a wilderness must have seemed like a no-brainer.

Nevertheless, the process to designate the Weminuche was no slam dunk. It took a half decade of wrangling and debate and boundary adjustments and congressional committee sausage-making. What to me is most remarkable, however, looking back on the process from our current, politically polarized era, is that the debates were not partisan. And even though there were differing opinions on where the boundaries should be drawn or even whether there should be any wilderness at all, the conversation was just that: a conversation, and a civil one at that.

Proposals were forwarded by the Forest Service and the Colorado Game & Fish Department. Meanwhile, the Citizens for the Weminuche Wilderness — made up of local advocates, ranchers, scientists, business people, and academics — came up with its own proposed boundaries.

My father chronicled some of the back and forth in an insert he put together and edited for the Durango Herald in 1969 called “The Wilderness Question.” It includes his editorials and news stories, but also opinion pieces from a variety of residents.

Looking back, it is a truly striking document. First off, there’s the fact that the Forest Service’s original proposal would have excluded Chicago Basin — now considered the heart of the wilderness area and a Mecca for backpackers and peak-baggers (and their attendant impacts) — and the City Reservoir trail and surrounding areas. They were left out, in part, because there were hundreds of mining claims in those areas, and the mining industry remained interested in them, despite their remoteness and difficult access.

The citizens group, however, was having none of that, and demanded that both areas be included in the wilderness area. Carving these areas out would be like cutting the soul from the place. Ranchers weighed in, as well. James Cole, who was described as a “prominent Basin rancher,” wrote this for the Herald supplement: “The La Plata County Cattlemen are in favor of the proposed Weminuche Wilderness Area … We would like to see Weminuche Creek and Chicago Basin, which the forest service would like to exclude, included in the Wilderness Area.”

It may seem odd, today, to see a livestock operators’ group advocating for morewilderness than even the feds wanted, but it makes a lot of sense. Not only are many ranchers conservation-minded, but their operations were unlikely to be affected by wilderness designation, since grazing is allowed in wilderness areas. It’s actually far stranger to see southeastern Utah ranchers become some of the most zealous opponents of Bears Ears National Monument, since its establishment didn’t ban or restrict current grazing allotments.

Fred Kroeger, a lifelong Republican1 and local water buffalo, who for years pushed for the construction of the Animas-La Plata water project, supported wilderness designation because it would protect the region’s water. (My grandparents, who were Animas Valley farmers and Republicans also supported the designation).

John Zink was a rancher, businessman, fisherman, and hunter and member of the citizens’ committee. In the Herald supplement he wrote that the proposed Weminuche Wilderness, “offers outdoor lovers an opportunity to support another sound conservation practice.”

He continued:

“For me it won’t be many years until slowed feet and dimmed eyes make the south 40 the logical place to hunt, and when the time comes, I expect to enjoy it. But a new and younger generation of outdoor lovers will then be climbing the peaks and wading the icy streams. I ask all outdoor enthusiasts to support the proposed Weminuche Wilderness Area, so each new generation may enjoy it much as it was when Chief Weminuche led his braves across this fabled land.”

That’s not to say everyone was in favor of the citizens’ proposal, but opposition was almost always on pragmatic, not political or ideological grounds. Probably the most strident opposing opinion piece in the Herald supplement came from an engineer at the Dixilyn Mine outside of Silverton, who didn’t want his industry shut out of any potentially mineralized areas, including Chicago Basin. Less than two decades later, the mining industry would be all but gone from the San Juans — and it had nothing to do with wilderness areas or other environmental protections.

John Zink’s son, Ed, who would go on to become a prominent businessman, pillar of the community, and the driving force establishing Durango as a cycling hub, asked that some areas, including the trail to City Reservoir, be excluded from the wilderness to accommodate the rights of “riders of machines.” He was talking about motorbikes back then, but would later focus more on mountain bikes. Zink, a staunch Republican, was undoubtedly bummed when the City Reservoir trail was included in the wilderness area, per the citizens’ proposal.

Nevertheless, a few years later, when I was about eight years old, I went on one of my earliest backpacking trips up the trail with Zink (who was my dad’s cousin), along with his sons Tim and Brian, nephew Johnny, and my dad and my brother. We hiked for hours without seeing anyone else — and without hearing the buzz of any motorized vehicles. Ed didn’t seem to miss his motorcycle one bit, nor did he or other motorized groups file lawsuits to try to block or shrink the wilderness, as is common practice today.

Ed would later be instrumental in establishing the Hermosa Creek wilderness area north of Durango, a compromise bill that left Hermosa Creek trail open to mountain bikes and motorbikes. Again, he worked from a pragmatic mindset: He wanted to protect the watershed from which his irrigation and drinking water came, and the forests that sustained game and wildlife, while also retaining recreational access.

When Congress finally passed the bill establishing the Weminuche, it went with the citizens’ group proposal and then some, designating 405,000 acres of federal land as a wilderness area and including Chicago Basin and City Reservoir. The Weminuche Wilderness was expanded in 1980 and again in 1993.

In the years since, public lands protection and conservation have become more and more politicized, along with just about everything else. The pragmatism of the 1970s has been abandoned in favor of ideology; public lands, somehow, have become a pawn in the culture wars. I’m sure both parties share some of the blame, but judging from their actions of late, the MAGA Republicans have become the staunchly anti-public lands conservation party — and bear absolutely no resemblance to the old school Republicans who fought for wilderness designation 50 years ago. Hell, for that matter, some Republican politicians don’t even resemble their selves from just a couple of decades ago.

The death of the pragmatic Western Republican: Extremism is killing the old-school GOP — Jonathan P. Thompson

Trump’s going to go away some day, and the attacks on public lands will probably ease off. But they won’t stop altogether. Humans’ hunger for more stuff and minerals and energy will undoubtedly put pressure on the places we hold dear, maybe even on the Weminuche. But polarization and political partisanship will only hamper our ability to save these places. Our only hope is to, somehow, recover some of the civility, the non-partisanship, and the pragmatism that fueled the designation of the Weminuche in 1975.

I have no idea how we’ll get there, but I do hold out hope. I really have no choice. I’ll leave you with some words written by my father, Ian Thompson, in the “Wilderness Question” insert in 1969:

“The Wilderness effort we are engaged in at the time is, in one respect, a pitifully futile struggle. Earth’s total atmosphere is human-changed beyond redemption, Earth’s waters would not be recognizable to the Pilgrims. Earth’s creatures will never again know what it is to be truly “wild.” The sonic thunder of man’s aircraft will increasingly descend in destructive shock waves upon any “wilderness area” no matter how remote or how large. No, there is no wilderness, and throughout the future of humanity, there will be no wilderness. We are attempting to save the battered remnants of the original work of a Creator. To engage in this effort is the last hope of religious people.

“The child seen here and there in “The Wilderness Question” would have loved Wilderness. There is tragedy in that knowledge. Hopefully we will leave him a reasonable facsimile of Wilderness. In the last, tattered works of Creation this child might find the source of strength necessary to love America and the works of man. If we care enough to act.”

*Nowhere in the several-page insert are political parties mentioned, most likely because people were less inclined to identify themselves according to political party, but also because environmental preservation was not at all partisan at the time. I mention their affiliations here to further demonstrate the way the discussion transcended party politics.

Speaking of the Weminuche: It looks like wolves may have made their way into the wilderness area. Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s most recent Collared Gray Wolf Activity map shows that the wolves have been detected in the San Juan, Rio Grande, Uncompahgre, and Gunnison River watersheds in the southwestern part of the state. Since the minimum mapping unit is the watershed, it’s not clear that the wolves have for sure ventured into the Weminuche. But it is certain that they have been recorded in the San Juan Mountains. It seems only a matter of time before they cross into New Mexico and maybe even Utah.

When Trump was elected for the second time, I figured there was no way he could make public lands grazing any less restrictive. After all, presidential administrations of all political persuasions have famously — or infamously — done very little to restrict grazing or to get it to pay for itself (the BLM’s grazing fee has remained at $1.35 per AUM, the mandated minimum) for decades. But, alas, the U.S. Agriculture Department recently announced its plan to “Fortify the American Beef Industry: Strengthening Ranches, Rebuilding Capacity, and Lowering Costs for Consumers.”

The plan, as you may imagine, looks to expand public lands grazing, among other things. And it was released at about the same time as Trump encouraged folks to eat Argentinian beef, since he seems to have developed a sort of crush on Argentina President Javier Milei.

I’ll get into the details of the USDA plan and offer some thoughts on it in the next dispatch. In the meantime, you can dive into my deep dive on public lands grazing here, though you have to be a paid subscriber (or sign up for a free trial) to get past the paywall.

The West’s Sacred Cow Public land grazing makes it through another administration unreformed — Jonathan P. Thompson

West’s Sacred Cow part II: Indian Creek case study Plus: Monarchs in trouble, Wacky weather, Living in f#$%ed up times — Jonathan P. Thompson

Windom, Eolus, and Sunlight — Weminuche Wilderness via 14ers.org

Coyote Gulch enjoying a lunch break at the top of Windom Peak or Sunlight Peak in the Weminuche Wilderness with a hiking buddy, 1986ish.

#California’s 2025 use of #ColoradoRiver water is on track to be the lowest since 1949 — John Fleck (InkStain.net)

Lower Basin water use since 1964. 2025 data provisional, based on USBR projections Oct. 29, 2015.

Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):

October 31, 2025

California’s projected use of Colorado River water this year, 3.76 million acre feet as of Reclamation’s Oct. 29 modeling runs, would be, as near as I can tell, the state’s lowest use since 1949.

Also notable:

Nevada’s 197,280 acre feet would be the lowest since 1992.

The two lowest years in Imperial Irrigation District’s history (my dataset goes back to 1941) were last year and this year.

This will be the third year in a row that Arizona’s main stem use has been below 2 million acre feet. The last time that happened (three consecutive years below 2maf) was in the 1980s.

Total take by the US Lower Basin states is projected to be 5.917 million acre feet, the lowest total US main stem use since 1983.

A few things to note.

First, the tenuous fabric of the Basin States negotiations is predicated right now, in part, on the Lower Basin cutting 1.5 million acre feet of annual use. They’ve already done that.

Second, the current cuts are enabled by significant federal payments to compensate the water agencies for their cuts. As my colleagues and I wrote back in September, counting on that money in the future would be unwise.

Third, the economies of Arizona, southern Nevada, and southern California are chugging along just fine right now. As I have written in the past, having less water does not mean scary doom. We can do this.

A note on the data:

The projection of total 2025 use by Lower Basin water users is based on model runs done by the Bureau of Reclamation every few days. It’s a rich source of data, with detailed accounting of the various conservation programs being run by the Lower Basin agencies. PDF here.

The comparison with prior years is based in part on the Lower Basin accounting reports, prepared each year since 1964. For prior years, I have a dataset I got years ago from the technical staff at the Metropolitan Water District of California, who had pieced together California numbers back to 1941. (Thanks, Met!)

Protecting the peak on the #CrystalRiver: Scientists studying tree rings as first step toward instream-flow safeguards — Heather Sackett (AspenJounalism.org)

Riparian ecologists David Cooper, left, and David Merritt take stock of the tree root crowns collected from the banks of the Crystal River the last week in October. They will take the trunks back to the lab in Fort Collins to study the tree rings, the first step in understanding how floods impact riparian vegetation. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Journalism website (Heather Sackett):

October 31, 2025

Over three sunny-but-cool October days, a team of scientists and volunteers dug up and hauled away the root crowns of trees along the Crystal River, a first step toward a potential strategy to protect flows on one of the last free-flowing rivers in Colorado.

David Cooper, a senior researcher on wetland and riparian ecology at Colorado State University, studies how spring floods affect riparian vegetation. His van was full of the tree samples that he would take back to the lab in Fort Collins to study their rings.

“We want to know the year the plant was established because once we know the year the plant was established, then we could relate that to the flow record that’s recorded by gauges,” Cooper said. “Then we can speak to the role of floods, which is important for the public to understand and for river managers to understand.”

The banks of the Crystal just upstream from Redstone are lined with narrowleaf cottonwood and blue spruce. Cottonwoods in particular need the rushing flows of spring runoff for their seeds to germinate and have evolved to disperse their seeds just after the high point of snowmelt each year. The seeds, carried along the wind by a bit of fluff, land in the bare, wet, mineral soil of streambanks where some of them take root.

Peter Brown with Rocky Mountain Tree Ring Research takes a core sample from a tree on the banks of the Crystal River. A type of instream flow water right that protects peak flows could help maintain spring floods, which are essential for growing new cottonwoods. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

Cooper’s work, which is estimated to cost $26,300, was commissioned by a subcommittee of the Crystal River Wild and Scenic and Other Alternatives Feasibility Steering Committee, which is looking at different tools that could be used to protect the river. The Crystal, which flows about 40 miles from its headwaters in the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness through the towns of Marble, Redstone and Carbondale before its confluence with the Roaring Fork, is one Colorado’s last undammed major rivers.

Environmental and recreation advocates and local municipalities, as well as many residents of the Crystal River Valley, have long sought to protect the river from future dams and diversions — infrastructure projects that have left many other Western Slope rivers depleted.

Those who want to protect the Crystal River have for the past few years been exploring the best ways to do that. Although proponents say a federal Wild and Scenic designation would do the best job of protecting the river, that has been met with resistance from some property owners, leading the steering committee to explore other options, in addition to pursuing Wild and Scenic.

Scientists dug up this root crown next to the Crystal River in order to study the tree rings and how they relate to flood years. The Crystal River Wild and Scenic Instream Flow Subcommittee is looking at how to protect spring peak flows in the river. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

Instream-flow subcommittee

After a year’s worth of meetings with a facilitator, the steering committee chose to pursue three potential ways forward: a “peaking” instream-flow water right; an intergovernmental agreement; and a federal Wild and Scenic designation. None of the methods would preclude the others; there could eventually be layers of protections for the Crystal.

The instream-flow subcommittee, which includes representatives from American Whitewater, and local governments and residents, is exploring how to keep water in the river by using the Colorado Water Conservation Board’s instream-flow program.

The CWCB is the only entity allowed to hold water rights that keep water in rivers and are designed to preserve the natural environment to a reasonable degree. A “peaking” instream-flow water right would keep in the stream all of the water not claimed by someone else during years with high spring runoff, thereby maintaining these periodic floods, which are essential for growing new cottonwoods.

The idea is that if these peak spring flows are already spoken for by the environment, they can’t be claimed by future reservoir projects, which also tend to capture water at the height of spring runoff and store it for use later in the year.

“If you want to be a little more objective about it, it’s an argument for or against floods and natural river processes,” said David Merritt, a riparian ecologist and former instream flow coordinator for the U.S. Forest Service who has worked on other instream-flow projects around the state. “The dam goes in, it’s going to interrupt that and you’ll end up with a different ecosystem.”

If there is less water available to develop, it could make a particular river less attractive for building a reservoir, said Laura Belanger, a senior policy adviser with Western Resource Advocates. The environmental nonprofit has worked on these types of peak instream-flow projects in the Gunnison River basin.

“Infrastructure is expensive, so you need to get a certain yield out of it,” Belanger said. “That could potentially make a project not be cost effective and not have sufficient yield to be pursued. … Around the state, so much water is already claimed, and so, for a lot of new reservoir projects, the peak is the only thing that’s available.”

So far, this tool for protecting the peak is little used, but there are three recent examples on streams that drain the Uncompahgre Plateau: Cottonwood Creek, Monitor Creek and Potter Creek. In 2024, these three creeks secured an instream-flow water right for their spring peak flows in years with high runoff. All three still allow for some amount of future water development.

“They don’t kick in every year; they’re definitely unique,” Belanger said. “It doesn’t kick in until you hit a certain high flow and then it protects the hydrograph all the way up and then back down to a certain value.”

Wetland and riparian ecologist David Cooper, left, and campaign director at Wilderness Workshop Michael Gorman look for the best place to cross the Crystal River. Scientists and volunteers collected tree root crowns from the riverbanks the last week of October, the first step in understanding how floods impact riparian vegetation. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

Subcommittee still looking at Wild and Scenic

The steering committee’s work, including the tree-ring study, is funded by Pitkin County Healthy Rivers, by the Mighty Arrow Family Foundation, and in-kind donations from Western Resource Advocates and American Whitewater. But the majority of the funding – $99,699 according to Hattie Johnson, southern Rockies restoration director with American Whitewater and member of the instream flow and Wild and Scenic subcommittees – is through the state’s Wild and Scenic Rivers Fund.

The CWCB generally advocates for using state mechanisms such as the instream-flow program to protect rivers because it would rather avoid a federal Wild and Scenic designation. With increasing competition for dwindling water supplies, the state has been reluctant to support Wild and Scenic designations, which could lock up water and prevent it from being developed in the future.

The U.S. Forest Service determined in the 1980s that portions of the Crystal River were eligible for designation under the Wild & Scenic River Act, which seeks to preserve, in a free-flowing condition, rivers with outstandingly remarkable scenic, recreational, geologic, fish and wildlife, historic, and cultural values. Wild and Scenic experts say the “teeth” of the designation comes from an outright prohibition on federal funding or licensing of any new Federal Energy Regulatory Commission-permitted dam. A designation would also require review of federally assisted water resource projects.

Any designation would take place upstream from the big agricultural diversions on the lower portion of the river near Carbondale.

The subcommittee that is still looking at a Wild and Scenic designation has hired a facilitator team from the Keystone Policy Center to help the group produce a report of its findings at a cost of about $45,000. And the instream-flow subcommittee has also hired Ecological Resource Consultants to do a sediment-impacts study, which is set to begin before winter and is estimated to cost about $30,000.

Wild and Scenic subcommittee chair Michael Gorman said members have taken a deep dive into policy and legislation, and have learned a lot from stakeholders along the river.

“We’ve got more work to do and we’re excited to have the skilled facilitators at Keystone to help us compile what we’ve learned about how Wild and Scenic legislation ties into our specific priorities on the Crystal River,” Gorman said in a prepared statement. “We look forward to having a report that we can share with our community and inform future discussions.”

Uranium Monitoring, Testing and Modeling Continue — Northern Water E-Waternews October 2025

From email from Northern Water:

Northern Water and Chimney Hollow participants are committed to keeping our customers, stakeholders and end users, as well as the general public, informed as we gather additional information on the discovery of uranium at the Chimney Hollow Reservoir construction site. Collecting data and modeling are crucial steps in the development of mitigation strategies, and we are actively working to learn more by evaluating test results from field investigations and modeling scenarios.

Before making mitigation decisions, we want to make sure we have all the information to evaluate operational and treatment options. We are following a rigorous process, starting with geochemical characterization and scoping studies, to inform mitigation alternatives analyses and ultimately select a final approach. Following these steps allows us to make informed decisions, evaluate trade-offs and determine the best path forward. 

Northern Water has been testing how the uranium minerals leach into water and what concentration to expect when the reservoir fills and its operation begins. To allow time for additional data collection and investigations to advance, we have elected not to fill the reservoir as quickly as initially planned. A small amount of water (less than 2 percent of total capacity) will be moved into Chimney Hollow Reservoir in November 2025. During this time, additional water quality data will be collected and used to evaluate the performance of model simulations, and required dam safety monitoring will begin. Even as the reservoir fills, no water will be released as further assessments are underway and mitigation options continue to be evaluated.

Because the mineralized uranium is coming from materials quarried at the site, excess (unused) rock from construction has been buried under a layer of water-sealing clay. The clay cap will effectively minimize uranium leaching from these materials.

We expect uranium leaching from the dam to decrease over time because there is a finite quantity of soluble uranium at the site. The duration of the leaching process is not yet fully understood and will depend on how the reservoir is operated over time. While the discovery of mineralized uranium has caused Northern Water and the Chimney Hollow participants to modify our plans, it is an issue that can be safely managed. The new reservoir remains an important part of securing water supply needs for Northern Colorado and its future. Please visit the Water Quality page on our website for more information and a list of Frequently Asked Questions.

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Download the report here: Colorado River Insights, 2025: Dancing with Deadpool

Contents

Contributors

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December 8, 2025 – CO, UT, WY

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Compact compliance

Managing scarcity

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🌵 Public Lands 🌲

🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭

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The Details

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⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️

🏠 Random Real Estate Room 🤑

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Key Points

Conditions at the Start of Water Year 2026

Water Year 2025 Brings a Mix of Drought Degradation and Recovery

Intermountain West Water Year 2025 Summary

Near- to Below-Average Precipitation West of the Continental Divide

Water Year 2025 Impacts

La Niña Outlook

A Weak La Niña Is Here, ENSO-Neutral Forecast Early Next Year

Additional Resources by State

Special Thanks

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Who will control the flow of water?

About that $99 million bill…

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The Shoshone rights

Not so simple

Public interest…in Colorado?

Whose right is it, anyway?

Can’t you just compromise?

Download the report here:
Colorado River Insights, 2025: Dancing with Deadpool

Nov. 19^th hearing