Water from the Colorado River flows into the Central Arizona Project on August 5, 2025. Ted Cooke spent much of his career at the agency, and some water leaders worried that he would bring bias from that job into a new federal role. Alex Hager/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC.org website (Alex Hager):
September 18, 2025
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
The Trump Administrationโs nominee to run the Bureau of Reclamation is withdrawing from the process. Ted Cooke, a longtime water manager in Arizona, said he was asked to step back by the White House.
Cooke had been nominated to serve as commissioner of the federal agency that oversees the Colorado River. He faced pushback from some politicians and water officials who worried that he might bring bias into the position.
โI was a political casualty,โ Cooke told KUNC on Wednesday.
The seven states that use the Colorado River are stuck in tense talks about how to share its water in the future. They are split into two camps: the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico, and the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada.
Negotiations ahead of a 2026 deadline appear to be making little progress, and federal water officials can help push states towards agreement. If they canโt reach a deal in time, the federal government can step in and make those decisions itself. After Cookeโs nomination in June, some policymakers in the Upper Basin quietly expressed concern that he might favor the Lower Basin during that process.
Top water officials in the Upper Basin were tight-lipped in their opposition, but multiple sources with knowledge of the situation told KUNC that Cooke would face a difficult path to confirmation.
In a June meeting, Utahโs top Colorado River negotiator, Gene Shawcroft, briefly touched on the Trump Administrationโs pick to run Reclamation.
โI hesitate to use the word disturbing, but it is a little disturbing,โ Shawcroft said. โThat is concerning to us for a variety of reasons, and Iโll probably leave it at that.โ
Water levels sit low in Lake Powell near Bullfrog, Utah on September 15, 2025. Negotiations to manage the shrinking reservoir and the rest of the Colorado River system may be more difficult without federal leadership. Alex Hager/KUNC
Cooke spent more than two decades working for the Central Arizona Project, which brings Colorado River water to the Phoenix and Tucson areas. Any new plan for managing the Colorado River is likely to include cuts to demand, and Cookeโs former employer is generally among the first entities to lose water under any plan for cutbacks.
Water experts around the region said he was a qualified expert, and Cooke himself denied that he would bring a bias to his new position.
A panel of officials from the lower basin states at the Colorado River Water Users Association in Las Vegas, on Dec. 13, 2018. From left, Thomas Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources; Ted Cooke, General Manager, Central Arizona Project; Peter Nelson, chairman, Colorado River Board of California; and John Entsminger, General Manager, Southern Nevada Water Authority.
โI donโt really appreciate being pre-judged by folks saying, ‘oh heโs just going to be a Lower Basin or an Arizona partisan,’โ Cooke told KUNC in June, shortly after his nomination. โI call that projection. If this is what someone else would do in my shoes, then I feel sorry for them. But itโs not necessarily where Iโd be coming from.โ
Cooke said he was recently contacted by a White House staffer who asked him to withdraw from the nomination process for a certain reason, but Cooke declined to share that reason.
โI’ve since learned from other folks that I know, and I know lots of people, that that reason was pretty much a BS reason to basically get me out of the running,โ Cooke said. โBecause there were certain objections that had been raised from some of the states with which I would be dealing.โ
Cookeโs withdrawal means that the top federal Colorado River agency will remain without a permanent leader. The seat has already been vacant for eight months. That may make seven-state negotiations more challenging. State water leaders have saidthat the threat of federal action can make it easier to find agreement.
While the top Reclamation role goes unfilled, other federal water officials appear to be filling the gap. Scott Cameron, a longtime federal official who currently serves as the Department of the Interiorโs acting Assistant Secretary for Water and Science, told a room of water experts in June that he was intimately involved with those seven-state talks.
As for Cooke, he said he plans to stay in the Colorado River space.
โIf this door is shut, there’s lots of other open doors,” he said. “It’s disappointing, don’t get me wrong, but I’m not going to sulk or be mad or develop a resentment about it. Whatever happened, happened.โ
San Luis Valley center pivot August 14, 2022. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
September 12, 2025
Woes of the Colorado River have justifiably commanded broad attention. The slipping water levels in Lake Powell and other reservoirs provide a compelling argument for changes. How close to the cliffโs edge are we? Very close, says a new report by the Center for Colorado River Studies.
But another cogent โ and somewhat related โ story lies underfoot in northeastern Colorado. Thatโs the story of groundwater depletion. There, groundwater in the Republican River Basin has been mined at a furious pace for the last 50 to 60 years.
Much of this water in the Ogallala aquifer that was deposited during several million years will be gone within several generations. In some places it already is. Farmers once supplied by water from underground must now rely upon what falls from the sky.
In the San Luis Valley, unlike the Republican River Basin, aquifers can be replenished somewhat by water that originates from mountain snow via canals from the Rio Grande. The river has been delivering less water, though. It has problems paralleling those of the Colorado River. Changes in the valleyโs farming practices have been made, but more will be needed.
In a story commissioned by Headwaters magazine (and republished in serial form at Big Pivots), I also probed mining of Denver Basin aquifers by Parker, Castle Rock and other south-suburban communities.
Those Denver Basin aquifers, like the Ogallala, get little replenishment from mountain snows. Instead of growing corn or potatoes, the water goes to urban needs in one of Americaโs wealthier areas.
Parker and Castle Rock believe they can tap groundwater far into the future, but to diversify their sources, they have joined hands with farmers in the Sterling area with plans to pump water from the South Platte River before it flows into Nebraska. This pumping will require 2,000 feet of vertical lift across 125 miles, an extraordinary statement of need in its own way.
Like greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere, these underground depletions occur out of sight. Gauges at wellheads tell the local stories, just like the carbon dioxide detector atop Hawaiiโs Mauna Loa has told the global story since 1958.
Coloradoโs declining groundwater can be seen within a global context. Researchers from institutions in Arizona, California, and elsewhere recently used data from satellites collected during the last two decades. The satellites track water held in glaciers, lakes, and aquifers across the globe. In their study published recently in Science Advances, they report that water originating from groundwater mining now causes more sea level rise than the melting of ice.
โIn many places where groundwater is being depleted, it will not be replenished on human timescales,โ they wrote. โIt is an intergenerational resource that is being poorly managed, if managed at all, by recent generations, at tremendous and exceptionally undervalued cost to future generations. Protecting the worldโs groundwater supply is paramount in a warming world and on continents that we now know are drying.โ
This global perspective cited several areas of the United States, most prominently Californiaโs Central Valley but also the Ogallala of the Great Plains.
In Colorado, the Ogallala underlies the stateโs southeastern corner, but the main component lies in the Republican River Basin. The river was named by French fur trappers in the 1700s, long before the Republican Party was organized. The area within Colorado, if unknown to most of Coloradoโs mountain-gawking residents, is only slightly smaller than New Jersey.
A 1943 compact with Nebraska and Kansas has driven Coloradoโs recent efforts to slow groundwater mining. The aquifer feeds the Republican River and its tributaries. As such, the depletions reduce flows into down-river states.
Farmers are being paid to remove land from irrigation with a goal of 25,000 acres by 2030 to keep Colorado in compliance. So far, itโs all carrots, no sticks. Colorado is also deliberately mining water north of Wray to send to Nebraska during winter months. This helps keep Colorado in compact compliance. So far, these efforts have cost more than $100 million. The money comes from self-assessments and also state and federal grants and programs.
In some recent years, more than 700,000 acre-feet of water have been drafted from the Ogallala in the Republican River Basin. To put that into perspective, Denver Water distributes an average annual 232,000 acre-feet to a population of 1.5 million.
Hard conversations are underway in the Republican River Basin and in the San Luis Valley, too. They will get harder yet. Sixteen percent of all of Coloradoโs water comes from underground.
The Colorado River has big troubles. Itโs not alone.
Part II: South Metro cities starting to diversify water sources: Castle Rock and Parker 25 years ago were almost entirely dependent upon groundwater. They are diversifying, and one plan is to import water from far down the South Platte River Valley.
The Republican River basin. The North Fork, South Fork and Arikaree all flow through Yuma County before crossing state lines. Credit: USBR/DOIRio 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=11218868Water stored in Coloradoโs Denver Basin aquifers, which extend from Greeley to Colorado Springs, and from Golden to the Eastern Plains near Limon, does not naturally recharge from rain and snow and is therefore carefully regulated. Courtesy U.S. Geological Survey.The South Platte River Basin is shaded in yellow. Source: Tom Cech, One World One Water Center, Metropolitan State University of Denver.Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Ted Cooke and Tom Buschatzke: Photo credit: Arizona Department of Water Resources
Click the link to read the article on the EENews.net website (Jennifer Yachnin). Here’s an excerpt:
September 17, 2025
The White House plans to pull back its nomination of a former a veteran Arizona water official to lead the Bureau of Reclamation, leaving the agency without permanent leadership nine months into President Donald Trumpโs second term. Ted Cooke, a former top official at the Central Arizona Project, told POLITICOโs E&E News on Wednesday that he has been informed his nomination will be rescinded.
โThis is not the outcome I sought, and Iโll leave it at that,โ said Cooke in a message.
[President] Trumpย tapped Cookeย to lead the agency in June, and the selection drew praise from both environmental advocates and some state officials who pointed to Cookeโs knowledge of the Colorado River Basin. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources had not yet considered Cookeโs nomination. Interior and Reclamation have been involved in negotiations for a new long-term operating plan among the seven states that share the Colorado River…Although it is not unusual for Reclamation to be without permanent leadershipย until late in the first yearย of a new president term, the Colorado River negotiations put more pressure on the White House to fill the post.ย
Cooke spent more than two decades at the Central Arizona Project before stepping down as its general manager in early 2023, which distributes Colorado River water to Maricopa, Pinal and Pima counties.
A new report finds that Lakes Mead and Powell, the nationโs largest reservoirs, could store just 9 percent of their combined capacity by the end of next summer.
Consumption of Colorado River water is outpacing natureโs ability to replenish it, with the basinโs reservoirs on the verge of being depleted to the point of exhaustion without urgent federal action to cut use, according to a new analysis from leading experts of the river.
Theย analysis, published Thursday [September 11, 2025], found that if the riverโs water continues to be used at the same rate and the Southwest sees another winter as dry as the last one, Lakes Mead and Powellโthe nationโs two largest reservoirsโwould collectively hold 9 percent of the water they can store by the end of next summer. After enduring decades of overconsumption of the riverโs water, the lakes would have just under 4 million acre feet of water in storage for emergencies and drier years when demand canโt be met. Every year, roughly 13 million acre feet is taken from the river for drinking water and human development across the region, with conservative forecasts estimating roughly 9.3 million acre feet of inflow next year.ย
The report is stark in its assessment of the situation: Current Colorado River levels require โimmediate and substantial reductions in consumptive use across the Basinโ or Lake Powell by 2027 would have no storage left and โwould have to be operated as a โrun of riverโ facilityโ in which only the inflow from the river could be released downstream.ย
โThe River recognizes no human laws or governance structures and follows only physical ones,โ the reportโs authors wrote. โThere is a declining amount of water available in the Colorado River system, primarily caused by the effects of a warming climateโlonger growing seasons, drier soils, and less efficient conversion of the winter snowpack into stream flow. Although American society has developed infrastructure to store the spring snowmelt and make that water available in other seasons to more completely utilize the variable runoff, the Colorado River watershed produces only a finite volume of water, regardless of how many dams exist.โ
The lifeblood of the American Southwest, the Colorado Riverโs water flows from Wyoming to Mexico, enabling the regionโs population and economies to develop. The damming of the river has diverted water to booming metropolises like Los Angeles and Phoenix while also supporting the U.S.โs most productive agricultural areas and powering some of the its largest hydroelectric dams. In total, the river supplies seven states, 30 tribes and 40 million people with water.
The compact that divvied up the riverโs water a century ago overestimated how much actually flowed through it, and climate change has diminished the supply even further. The melting snowpack that runs off mountains in the spring to feed the river has declined, shrinking the river and its storage reservoirs during decades of drought. The seven states that take Colorado River water are divided into two factions engaged in tense conversations about its future and how cutbacks should be distributed. Current guidelines for managing the river in times of drought are set to expire at the end of next year, and new ones are legally required to take their place, but negotiations between states, tribes and other stakeholders over the sharing of the necessary cuts in water usage are at an impasse.
But if current conditions persist, further cutbacks on the river wonโt be able to wait until those negotiations are finished, the reportโs authors find, and they urged the Department of the Interior โto take immediate action.โ
โLetโs hope that we are all wrong and that it snows like hell all winter and runoff is wonderful and we buy ourselves some time and additional buffer,โ said Kathryn Sorensen, director of research for Arizona State Universityโs Kyl Center for Water Policy and one of the reportโs co-authors. โBut of course, it never makes sense to plan as if itโs going to snow, and we have to deal with what is a realistic but not worst-case scenario and take responsible actions.โ
Adding to the issue is the status of the infrastructure that enables the river to be diverted and stored for use. For example, the researchers write, it was thought that anything above whatโs known as โdead poolโโa water level below the reservoirsโ lowest outlets that can pass water through the damsโwas โactive storage.โ But testing last year from the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency overseeing the river and its dams, found that those outlets can only be safely used at water levels higher than previously thought and cannot be used for long durations.
Margaret Garcia, an associate professor at ASUโs School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, who was not a part of the study, said the analyses makes clear the โreality of dead pool is within sightโ for the basinโs reservoirs, even without considering the possibility of having an extremely dry year.
She likened the reservoirs to having a savings account with a bank. โWhen you have a savings account, you have some time to scramble and figure things out,โ Garcia said. โBut if youโve already drawn down your savings account and then [youโre laid off] and you never filled it back up at least a little bit, youโre in for a really tough situation.โ
And just like a savings account, Garcia said, a reservoir isnโt much good if it canโt generate hydropower or store water.
Sorensen said the secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum, has broad authority to act to protect critical infrastructure in both of the riverโs basins. The question is what those actions should be.
โThe solutions are there,โ she said. โThe solutions are known. Theyโre just extraordinarily painful to implement. โ
State negotiators have worked this year to determine how to manage the river after 2026, Sorensen said, but the buffer of water stored in reservoirs โthat weโre relying on to kind of get us through the negotiations and these difficult times is potentially much smaller than maybe was commonly understood.โ
โNo one comes out of this unscathed,โ she said.
From left, Western States Ranches Agricultural Operations Manager Mike Higuera, Conscience Bay Research Program Officer Dan Waldvogle and Colorado State University researcher Perry Cabot. The three held a field day and ranch tour in August for other local ranchers to learn about water conservation and deficit irrigation. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
As reservoir levels continue to plummet at the end of another dismal water year, some agricultural water users are asking Colorado lawmakers to consider a bill next session that would make it easier for them to get credit for conserving water.
It would be the next step in creating a conservation pool in Lake Powell that the Upper Basin states could use to protect against water scarcity.
Over the past decade, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming have dabbled in programs that pay willing participants to use less water on a temporary basis. But so far, that saved water has flowed downstream unaccounted for. Changes to state laws would be needed to allow state officials to shepherd conserved water into a Lake Powell pool.
โOur message is simple: Protect Colorado agriculture by enabling voluntary, compensated water conservation without causing injury to other water users,โ Dan Waldvogle told state legislators at an August meeting of the Water and Natural Resources Committee in Steamboat Springs. โGive us credit for the water we save and guarantee that conserved consumptive use is fairly and fully compensated โฆ . The 2026 legislative session is our last best chance to take action and control our future.โ
Waldvogle was speaking on behalf of the Colorado Farm Bureau and Rocky Mountain Farmers Union. He also works for Conscience Bay Co., a Boulder-based real estate investment firm that owns a cattle-ranching operation in Delta County known as Western States Ranches.
But allowing the state to shepherd conserved water resurrects old concerns for some on the Western Slope. They say it could open the state to speculators and interstate water markets, with Colorado water users selling their water to the highest bidder in the Lower Basin, which includes California, Arizona and Nevada.
โWeโre saying you should not pass a standalone shepherding law or conserved consumptive use law that would allow and enable the state engineer to do that without having a thorough discussion with all stakeholders and encoding in legislation important sideboards and protections for our agricultural industry and our community,โ Colorado River Water Conservation District General Manager Andy Mueller told lawmakers at the August meeting.
State Engineer Jason Ullmann said in an email that he does โnot have authority to require water conserved through voluntary programs to bypass other Colorado water usersโ headgates unless it is necessary to meet Coloradoโs compact obligations.โ The bypassing of other usersโ headgate to deliver water to a point downstream is more commonly known as shepherding.
The General Assembly would need to pass legislation in order to give him that authority, many stakeholders believe.
Western States Ranches near Eckert enrolled some of its fields in the 2024 System Conservation Pilot Program. The ranch was paid about $278,000 to save about 550 acre-feet of water. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
The conservation conversation comes at a pivotal time for water users on the Colorado River, which remains wracked by drought and climate change. The most recent projections from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation show water levels at Lake Powell potentially falling below the threshold needed to make hydropower by November 2026. The reservoir is currently about 28% full.
State Sen. Dylan Roberts, a Democrat who represents several Western Slope counties including Eagle, Garfield, Grand, Moffat, Rio Blanco, Routt and Summit and is the chair of the Water and Natural Resources Committee, told Aspen Journalism that as of now, no bill to address shepherding or future conservation programs is in the works in Colorado. But that may be because the seven states that share the Colorado River are still hashing out how reservoirs will be operated and how cuts will be shared when the current guidelines expire next year.
The potential path forward.
At the beginning of this summer, negotiators from the seven basin states agreed to a concept that would share water based on flows in the river and not on demands, but talks have since stalled. Federal officials have given the states a Nov. 11 deadline to come up with the outline of a deal.
โI remain fully committed to reaching consensus, but I want to be candid, especially with you all,โ Becky Mitchell, Coloradoโs lead negotiator, told lawmakers. โThe discussions with my counterparts have been and continue to be challenging. I understand why this discussion is so challenging for our Lower Basin counterparts. They have developed a reliance on water that is above their apportionment that is simply not there.โ
Colorado and the other Upper Basin states have been tiptoeing into voluntary conservation pilot programs since 2015, and the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan allowed for a 500,000-acre-foot conservation pool in Lake Powell. Late last year, Upper Basin officials offered up a 200,000-acre-foot pool in Powell as part of negotiations, and some type of future voluntary conservation program for the Upper Basin appears increasingly likely.
The System Conservation Pilot Program, which first ran from 2015 to 2018, was rebooted in 2023 and paid water users in the Upper Basin to cut back in 2023 and 2024. Over two years, the program doled out about $45 million to conserve just over 100,000 acre-feet of water across the four states.
A main criticism of the SCPP was that the conserved water was not tracked to Lake Powell, even though one of the programโs stated intents was to boost levels in the nationโs second-largest reservoir. In some cases, the water was probably picked up by a downstream water user, with no net gain to Lake Powell. This is the issue that new state legislation could remedy. Until now, the experimental conservation programs were allowed with temporary approvals from state officials.
โWe want action,โ Waldvogle said. โAnd I think the way I define action is for [lawmakers] to move forward in developing a program in order to really catalyze our communities into these discussions. To really develop all the sideboards necessary to have a program is going to take a longer time frame.โ
Western States Ranches
Conscience Bay owns about 3,800 acres on parcels scattered throughout Delta County, 3,000 of which the company says are irrigated. About 3,200 of these total acres are clustered in Harts Basin near Eckert, making up the headquarters of the companyโs reaching operation known as Western States Ranches. The ranch participated in the SCPP in 2024, with water to some fields shut off June 1 and others July 1. The ranch saved about 550 acre-feet, or 7% of its water, according to ranch managers.
Ranch representatives see participation in these early voluntary conservation programs as a way to have some control over their operations should water cuts become mandatory in the future. They say they are interested in innovative ways to adapt to water scarcity, and they partnered with Colorado State University scientists to study the effects on forage crops of taking irrigation off their fields that were enrolled in SCPP in 2024.
โWe wanted to figure out how this is going to affect us, and if we are required to do this in the future, we want to have the knowledge to make good decisions,โ said Mike Higuera, agricultural operations manager of Western States Ranches. โWe assume that we are going to have to conserve water in this game.โ
Western States Ranches in Delta County participated in the 2024 System Conservation Pilot Program. The ranch is working with Colorado State University researchers to learn what happens when water is removed from fields. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Western States Ranches hosted an August field day in Eckert with the Western Landowners Alliance for other local farmers and ranchers to learn about drought-resilient ranching and share the findings from CSU researchers.
The ranchโs participation in SCPP has resurrected fears that the owners, who began purchasing the Delta County properties in 2017, are speculating โ buying up land for its senior water rights and hoarding them for a future profit. With a water-conservation program in the Upper Basin all but guaranteed, some worry that Western States Ranches could be looking to profit off sending their water downstream.
The question came up at the August field day when a Paonia-area rancher said he had heard the ranch owners were speculators. Conscience Bay representatives have always denied that accusation.
โI can tell you there are a lot better ways to make money,โ Higuera replied.
According to SCPP documents, the ranch was paid $278,372 for their water in 2024. Higuera said that amounted to about 10% of their revenue last year, with cattle sales making up the other 90%.
Colorado in recent years has tried to tackle the thorny issues of how to fairly roll out a conservation program while prohibiting speculation. Defining what speculation is and who is a speculator is slippery and hinges on determining the water rights purchaserโs intent โ a nearly impossible thing to know or police with 100% certainty. The bottom line of the stateโs existing anti-speculation policy is that water-rights owners must put that water to beneficial use.
Ultimately, a 2021 workgroup failed to find consensus about ways to strengthen protections against speculation and a drought task force failed to provide recommendations about conserved consumptive programs for lawmakers, underscoring the difficulty of protecting the stateโs water without infringing on private property rights. Some agricultural producers balked at laws that could restrict their ability to make money by selling their land and associated water rights.
At the heart of speculation concerns is the fear of large-scale, permanent dry-up of agricultural lands. Mueller has long cautioned that conservation programs, if not done carefully, could disproportionately impact rural agricultural communities. Although SCPP was open to all water-use sectors, all of Coloradoโs participants in SCPP in 2023 and 2024 were from Western Slope agriculture.
โAny program that we have must be designed for our stateโs best ability to support the longevity of agriculture and the vitality of our communities, and weโve got to be thoughtful and precise,โ Mueller said.
This equipment in a field on Western States Ranches helps figure out how much water crops use. The ranch partnered with Colorado State University researchers to track what happens to a forage crop when water is removed mid-way through the irrigation season. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Paying for programs
Another big question about Upper Basin conservation remains: How will it be paid for?
SCPP in 2023 and 2024 was funded with money from the federal Inflation Reduction Act. The bill that could have authorized SCPP again in 2025 is still stalled in the House. Over 2023 and 2024, the program doled out about $45 million to water users in the Upper Basin and saved about 101,000 acre-feet.
Without overhauling the Westโs system of water rights, voluntary, temporary and compensated conservation programs are one of the only carrots to entice agricultural water users โ who account for the majority of water use in the Colorado River Basin โ to cut back. But they are expensive, and itโs unclear how future long-term conservation programs would be funded.
Coloradoโs entire congressional delegation in early August sent a bipartisan letter to federal water managers, in an effort to shake loose $140 million in funding that was promised for projects addressing drought on the Western Slope in the final days of the Biden administration and then frozen by the Trump administration.
U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., addressed the question at a Colorado Water Congress meeting in Steamboat Springs in August.
โWeโre now not going to have a great federal partner for a while, Iโm afraid, and weโre going to have to figure out how to rely on each other and do it in more imaginative ways than maybe we have in the past,โ Bennet said.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. โ Through ongoing increased sampling efforts on the Colorado River and nearby bodies of water, Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) Aquatic Nuisance Species (ANS) staff have detected adult zebra mussels in the Colorado River and a nearby lake in Grand Junction.
โWhile this is news we never wanted to hear, we knew this was a possibility since we began finding veligers in the river,โ said CPW Director Jeff Davis. โI canโt reiterate this enough. It was because we have a group of individuals dedicated to protecting Coloradoโs water resources that these detections were made. It is because of these same dedicated individuals and our partners that we will continue our efforts to understand the extent of zebra mussels in western Colorado. โ
On Thursday, Aug. 28, the Aquatic Animal Health Lab (AAHL) notified Robert Walters, CPW Invasive Species Program Manager, that suspect veligers (the microscopic larval stage of zebra mussels) collected from West and East Lake, west of 31 Road within the Wildlife Area section of James M. Robb-Colorado River State Park, had tested positive for zebra mussel DNA. During a follow-up survey on Tuesday, Sept. 2, staff discovered suspected adult zebra mussels in the lake.
Surveys were also conducted in the side channel, where water from the lake is released before flowing into the Colorado River. During these subsequent surveys, additional suspect adult zebra mussels were found in the side channel and in the Colorado River where the side channel meets the mainstem of the river.
Visual identification of the samples from the lake, channel, and river was performed by ANS staff. Samples were then sent to the AAHL for DNA confirmation. On Monday, Sept. 8, the AAHL confirmed the samples collected are adult zebra mussels.
With this discovery, the Colorado River is now considered an โinfestedโ body of water from the 32 Road bridge downstream to the Colorado-Utah border. This is the first time adult zebra mussels have been detected in the Colorado River.
A body of water is considered โinfestedโ when a water body has an established (recruiting or reproducing) population of invasive species; in this instance, multiple zebra mussel life stages have been found in that body of water.
The following bodies of water have the designation of an โinfestedโ body of water:
Highline Lake at Highline Lake State Park (2022)
Mack Mesa Lake at Highline Lake State Park (2025)
West and East Lake at the Wildlife Area Section of James M. Robb – Colorado River State Park (2025)
Colorado River from 32 Road bridge downstream to the Colorado-Utah border (2025)
Private body of water in Eagle County (2025)
The Colorado River remains โpositiveโ for zebra mussels from the confluence of the Roaring Fork River to the 32 Road bridge.
No detections of zebra mussels have occurred between the headwaters of the Colorado River and the confluence of the Roaring Fork River.
CPW, in collaboration with our partners at the local, state and federal levels, will continue our increased sampling and monitoring efforts from the headwaters of the Colorado River in Grand County to the Colorado-Utah border.
โWe wonโt give up,โ said CPW Invasive Species Program Manager Robert Walters. โOur priority remains utilizing containment, population management and education to protect the uninfested waters of the state.โ
CPW will continue to evaluate options for the future containment and mitigation of Highline Lake, Mack Mesa Lake, and West and East Lake. CPW does not intend to treat the mainstem of the Colorado River due to multiple factors, including risk to native fish populations and critical habitat, length of the potential treatment area, and complexity of canals and ditches that are fed by the Colorado River.
Since sampling efforts began in mid-April, CPW has collected 427 water samples from various locations in the Colorado River. Of those samples, CPW has confirmed six samples to contain zebra mussel veligers. ANS staff has also collected 41 samples from the Eagle River and 42 samples from the Roaring Fork River. There have been no detections of zebra mussel veligers in the samples from the Eagle and Roaring Fork rivers.
Private Body of Water in Eagle County treatment During the week of August 25, CPW ANS staff treated a privately owned body of water in western Eagle County using EarthTec QZ, an EPA-registered copper-based molluscicide. In follow-up surveys conducted during the weeks of Sept. 1 and Sept. 8, staff observed positive initial results, having found dead adult zebra mussels in multiple areas around the body of water. CPW staff will continue to routinely monitor the water to evaluate its effectiveness.
Oh, Shell No! The Colorado Parks and Wildlife Aquatic Nuisance Species team is asking for your 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 inspect your body of water. You can request sampling of your body of water by CPW staff at Invasive.Species@state.co.us.
โDespite these additional detections, it remains critical for the continued protection of Coloradoโs aquatic resources and infrastructure to fully understand the distribution of zebra mussels in western Colorado,โ said Walters. โWe can only achieve this with the assistance and participation of the public.โ
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.
Prevent the spread: Be a Pain in the ANS With the additional discoveries of adult zebra mussels, it is even more important for everyone to play their part in protecting Coloradoโs bodies of water and preventing the spread of invasive species. Simple actions like cleaning, draining and drying your motorized and hand-launched vessels โ including paddleboards and kayaks โ 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 ofย aquatic nuisance speciesย and tips to properlyย clean, drain and dryย your boating and fishing gear by visiting our website. Tips for anglers and a map of CPWโs new gear and watercraft cleaning stations areย available here.
EPA intends to retract a Biden-era regulation for fourย PFASย in drinking water.
Report on childrenโs health highlights MAHA concern withย fluorideย in drinking water.
GAO finds that the outcomes from Biden-eraย environmental justiceย focus are unknown.
Defense spending and harmful algal bloom bills move throughย Congress.
And lastly, Reclamation will do more analysis on anย ag-to-urban Colorado River water transferย in Arizona.
โFollowing the completion of studies on fluoride, CDC and USDA will educate Americans on the appropriate levels of fluoride, clarify the role of EPA in drinking water standards for fluoride under the Safe Drinking Water Act, and increase awareness of the ability to obtain fluoride topically through toothpaste.โ โ Excerpt from the MAHA Commissionย strategyย for improving childrenโs health.
By the Numbers
$1 Billion: Federal aid to livestock producers who were affected by wildfire and flooding in 2023 and 2024. The funds, announced by USDA, are intended to offset higher feed costs.
News Briefs
PFAS RegulationโฆAnd Others The EPA says it will attempt to retract its regulation of four PFAS in drinking water, a rule that was established during the Biden administration.
The agency will keep federal drinking water limits on two forever chemicals: PFOA and PFOS. But it wants to drop federal regulation of four others: PFHxS, PFNA, PFBS, and Gen X.
The EPA is also not defending the rule in court, asking judges to invalidate it, Bloomberg Law reports.
Utilities are challenging the rule on procedural grounds as well as objecting to its cost for small systems. Public health groups point out that federal law has โanti-backslidingโ provisions to prevent existing drinking water limits from being weakened.
The agency signaled its intention to scrap limits on the four PFAS in the Unified Agenda, a semiannual listing of the federal governmentโs regulatory plans.
Other water-related regulatory actions mentioned in the agenda: perchlorate in drinking water, a definition of the โwaters of the United Statesโ that are subject to Clean Water Act permitting, and expanding the area in which oil and gas wastewater (a.k.a โproduced waterโ) can be reused.
It instructs the department to provide clean drinking water from an alternative source to any household on a private well that is contaminated with PFAS due to military activities.
The bill also directs the military secretaries to assess water-supply risk at their bases. Each secretary will identify the three most at-risk bases under their command and develop a strategy to reduce water-supply risk.
The Senate, meanwhile, passed a bill that reauthorizes a federal program for harmful algal bloom research and monitoring.
Arizona Injection Well Management The EPA granted Arizonaโs application to oversee permitting for wells that inject fluids and waste underground in the state.
Studies and Reports
Water and Childrenโs Health The Make America Healthy Again Commission released its strategy for improving childrenโs health.
The 20-page document refers to drinking water as a pathway for contaminants. But it provides vague direction on solutions. Federal agencies โwill assess ongoing evaluations of water contaminants and update guidance and prioritizations of certain contaminants appropriately,โ it states.
Several contaminants are called out. Fluoride, a favored enemy for the MAHA movement, is one. Others are pharmaceuticals and PFAS. Farm chemicals are indirectly cited, in a sentence that asks the USDA to research water quality and farm conservation practices. At the same time, EPA is directed to reduce permitting requirements to โstrengthen regional meat infrastructure.โ
The report is undermined by actions other federal agencies are taking โ approving new chemicals for commercial use, cutting research and enforcement budgets, not defending PFAS regulations.
Evaluating Environmental Justice Push To help poor and disadvantaged communities overcome histories of pollution, racism, and poverty, the Biden administration ordered that they receive 40 percent of the benefits of certain federal spending. Donald Trump ended this Justice40 initiative in his first month in office.
What did the program achieve?
Thatโs hard to say, according to an audit by the Government Accountability Office.
Looking at three agencies that were key players in the program โ EPA, Interior, and USDA โ the audit concluded that, though they modified grant programs, provided assistance, and began to track outcomes, โoverall results of agency actions are unknown.โ
On the Radar
Arizona Water Transfer Following a court order for a more-thorough analysis, the Bureau of Reclamation will conduct an environmental impact assessment of an ag-to-urban transfer of Colorado River water that it already approved.
Queen Creek, a fast-growing Phoenix exurb, purchased water from GSC Farm, in La Paz County, on the opposite side of the state. The assessment will also consider the effects of moving the water to Queen Creek via the Central Arizona Project canal.
Cities and counties in western Arizona sued to block the water transfer.
Two virtual public meetings will be held on October 1 to gather comments. Log-in details are found here.
Senate Hearing On September 17, the Environmental and Public Works Committee will hold an oversight hearing on the Army Corps of Engineers.
House Hearings On September 16, an Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee will hold a hearing on weather modification. The subcommittee is led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who incorrectly blamed Hurricane Helene on a โtheyโ who control the weather. She introduced a bill in July to ban geoengineering, cloud seeding, aerosol injection, and other methods of altering the weather. Carbon emissions, however, are not explicitly mentioned.
Also on September 16, an Energy and Commerce subcommittee will hold a hearing on appliance efficiency standards, which Republicans and the president have criticized as limiting customer choice, even though they reduce water and energy consumption.
Federal Water Tap is a weekly digest spotting trends in U.S. government water policy. To get more water news, follow Circle of Blue on Twitter and sign up for our newsletter.
The San Juan Riverโs Navajo Dam and reservoir. Photo credit: U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
From email from Reclamation (Conor Felletter):
The Bureau of Reclamation has scheduled a decrease in the release from Navajo Dam to 500 cubic feet per second (cfs) from the current release of 650 cfs for Tuesday September 16, at 4:00 AM.
Releases are made for the authorized purposes of the Navajo Unit, and to attempt to maintain a target base flow through the endangered fish critical habitat reach of the San Juan River (Farmington to Lake Powell). The San Juan River Basin Recovery Implementation Program recommends a target base flow of between 500 cfs and 1,000 cfs through the critical habitat area. The target base flow is calculated as the weekly average of gaged flows throughout the critical habitat area from Farmington to Lake Powell.
This scheduled release change is subject to changes in river flows and weather conditions. If you have any questions, please contact Conor Felletter (cfelletter@usbr.gov or 970-637-1985), or visit Reclamationโs Navajo Dam website athttps://www.usbr.gov/uc/water/crsp/cs/nvd.html
This November, voters in the Town of Pagosa Springs will decide if they want to raise the sales tax within town limits to fund critical sewer repairs and a wastewater treatment plant. On Aug. 19, the Pagosa Springs Town Council approved the second reading of an ordinance calling for the coordinated election and setting the language appearing on the ballot…
The townโs Public Works Department, in conjunction with an assessment by Roaring Fork engineering, has concluded that the overall system is rated as โpoorโ to โfair,โ with the challenges including an aging pipe system (50 years of age on average) with one-third of the total system rated as needing โcritical repairs or failing.โ Most of the challenges stem from the 500-foot elevation gain the sewage must travel before it arrives for treatment at PAWSDโs Vista plant, the website indicates. The town has estimated that it will cost between $80 million and $100 million to make the system healthy and efficient, with $15 million needed โimmediatelyโ to repair the aging pipes just to keep the current system operational. After considering other options to fund the needed repairs and upgrades, such as raising rates on wastewater customers or raising property taxes, both town staff and the council determined that the sales tax option was โthe most efficientโ way to obtain the funding needed. Town Manager David Harris has stated that a 1 percent sales tax increase within the town would generate an estimated $3.6 million in the first year and take an estimated 25 years to generate all the funds necessary to complete the project, if the town decides to build its own treatment plant.
The Colorado River District is working to buy the water rights to the Shoshone hydroelectric power plant for $99 million from Xcel Energy to ensure they exist in perpetuity, due to their importance in helping assure a sizable amount of Colorado River water continues flowing downstream at times of low water levels rather than being diverted. It is pursuing an instream flow right to protect the flows associated with the rights at times when the plant isnโt operating, and so the flows will continue should the plant ever close.Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
Front Range utility giant Denver Water has thrown its support behind the effort by Coloradoโs entire congressional delegation to get the Bureau of Reclamation to release previously announced drought-mitigation funding for 15 Colorado water projects, including $40 million to help acquire the Shoshone hydroelectric plant water rights on the Colorado River. In a Sept. 5 letter to the bureauโs acting commissioner, David Palumbo, and Scott Cameron, acting assistant Interior secretary for water and science, Denver Water CEO/Manager Alan Salazar voiced the utilityโs support for the funding for 15 Colorado projects selected for the bureauโs Upper Colorado River Basin Environmental Drought Mitigation funding opportunity. The money is part of a category of funding also known as โBucket 2โ or โB2E.โ
[…]
In the waning days of the Biden administration, the Bureau of Reclamation announced the Shoshone funding and tens of millions of dollars of funding for other water projects in the state. Among the other projects are about $25.6 million for drought mitigation in southwest Colorado, about $24.3 million for the Grand Mesa and Upper Gunnison watershed resiliency and aquatic connectivity project, $4.6 million for the Mesa Conservation District and Colorado West Land Trust to work on drought resiliency on local conserved lands, and $2.8 million for the Fruita Reservoir Dam removal project on Piรฑon Mesa. Most of that funding has been frozen under the Trump administration, although it did eventually agree to release nearly $12 million to the Orchard Mesa Irrigation District for water projects that were among the projects previously announced for funding…
Of particular interest particularly for West Slope water interests is the Shoshone funding. The Colorado River District is trying to close a $99 million deal with Xcel Energy to buy what are large and senior water rights associated with the plant in Glenwood Canyon. Those rights, due to their seniority, have helped protect flows into the canyon and downstream, and the river district wants to protect those water rights and their associated flows in cases when the plant isnโt operating, and should it eventually shut down. The federal funding is key to the fundraising effort to buy the water rights. The river district has proposed dedicating the Shoshone water rights to the Colorado Water Conservation Board for instream flow use, Salazar noted in his letter.
Lincoln Creek, just above its confluence with the Roaring Fork River, on June 14, 2017. Passersby had left rock piles in the clear, warm, and shallow stream.
About 200 fish were found dead on Aug. 18 on the banks of Grizzly Reservoir, a popular fishing and camping site near Aspen. Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials determined that naturally occurring metals had become toxic for rainbow trout the agency had stocked in the reservoir. Kendall Bakich, an aquatic biologist with CPW, is part of a team measuring the concentration of metals in the reservoir. She said this new metal toxicity is part of a growing trend.
โI would probably say across the world, but certainly across North America, there’s rivers that are becoming more impacted by heavy metals from natural sources, due to climate change,โ Bakich said.
Human-caused climate change has led to warming temperatures and drought, increasing the concentration of naturally occurring metals in bodies of water and creating deadly conditions for fish. Bakich said the main culprit in this case was copper, to which fish are especially sensitive. That copper comes from a body of heavy metals at the top of Lincoln Creek, which feeds into Grizzly Reservoir and eventually into the Roaring Fork River.
From email from the Center for Colorado River Studies:
September 11, 2025
While Colorado River Basin attention is focused on negotiating post-2026 operating rules, a near term crisis is unfolding before our eyes. If no immediate action is taken to reduce water use, our already-thin buffer of storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead could drop to just 9 percent of the levels with which we started the 21st century.
Water consumption in the Basin continues to outpace the natural supply, further drawing down reservoir levels. While Basin State representatives pursue the elusive goal of a workable and mutually acceptable set of post-2026 operating rules, our review of the latest Bureau of Reclamation data shows that the gap between ongoing water use and the reality of how much water actually flows in the Colorado River poses a serious near term threat. Another year like the one we just had on the Colorado River would nearly exhaust our dwindling reserves.
In a report issued today, we look at total mass balance in the system โ reservoir storage, inflow, and water use โ to help clarify how much water the Basin actually has to work with if next yearโs snowmelt runoff is similar to 2025, and the risks if we do not take near term action to reduce our use. The findings are stark.
Jack Schmidt,ย Director, Center for Colorado River Studies, Utah State University, former Chief, Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center
Anne Castle,ย Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy and the Environment, University of Colorado Law School, former US Commissioner, Upper Colorado River Commission, former Assistant Secretary for Water and Science, US Dept. of the Interior
John Fleck,ย Writer in Residence, Utton Transboundary Resources Center, University of New Mexico
Eric Kuhn, Retired General Manager, Colorado River Water Conservation District
Kathryn Sorensen,ย Kyl Center for Water Policy, Arizona State University, former Director, Phoenix Water Services
Katherine Tara,ย Staff Attorney, Utton Transboundary Resources Center, University of New Mexico
A flume and ditch is covered with silt, mud, rocks and debris along the White River following run-off damage from rains after the Lee Fire in Rio Blanco County.
Colorado Division of Water Resources/Courtesy photo
Irrigation ditch structures can be seen buried under mud in rural Rio Blanco County. Some livestock ponds are contaminated with ash and are unusable for animals. Residents posted post-rain videos last week of black, mucky water crossing roads, surging through culverts, rushing down bar ditches and running onto fields.ย Colorado Parks and Wildlife reports some fish have died in the White River on the northwest edge of the Lee Fire burn scar after heavy rains that pushed silt and ash into the river…With every rainstorm, there is another chance for flash flooding and debris flows, said Rio Blanco County Commissioner Callie Scritchfield.
An irrigation ditch is filled in with sediment and debris on Piceance Creek in Rio Blanco County due to run-off damage after the Lee Fire.
Colorado Division of Water Resources/Courtesy photo
[Suzan] Pelloni, a Realtor in Meeker, said ranchers and landowners are helping each other as best they can right now, such as sharing heavy equipment.
โThey are pooling resources. They are working together to try and help the immediate needs of the neighbor,โ Pelloni said.
Pelloni highlighted some example immediate concerns for the rural landowners ranging from water tanks where electricity service repair is delayed to a ranch where both summer and winter grazing lands were burned. Looking at the big picture, Pelloni said ranchers may have to sell cattle early or sell more cattle than anticipated, and ranchers who supplement their income with guided hunting likely will lose income this fall too…In the meantime, theย White River & Douglas Creek Conservation Districts ย soil conservation agency, along with the Bureau of Land Management and Rio Blanco County, are hosting weekly question-and-answer sessions on Thursday afternoons continuing on Sept. 11 and 18. The meetings provide resources to assist with questions for residents in need of recovery recommendations and financial and technical recovery resources.
Amid tense negotiations over the Colorado Riverโs future, Nevada leaders came together Thursday to focus on the stateโs strategy to meet the climate and drought crisis threatening Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam.
Democratic Rep. Susie Lee, whose district falls within the boundaries of Lake Mead and half of the Hoover Dam, brought together regional water and hydropower leaders to highlight mounting needs the state faces during her third annual Southern Nevada Water Summit at the Springs Preserve.
Before water was piped from the Colorado River to Las Vegas, the burgeoning community relied entirely on groundwater from the Las Vegas Springs located on the site where the Springs Preserve now sits.
That water soon dried up after demand from the growing city depleted the aquifer. Now water managers are working to ensure Lake Mead โ which provides nearly 90% of the cityโs water โ does not meet the same fate.
The summit comes at a critical time as states run against a mid-November deadline to reach a consensus on how the river and its reservoirs should be managed after current guidelines expire at the end of 2026. If states canโt reach a deal ahead of the deadline, the federal government will likely step in and make those decisions for them.
โThe reality is itโs a really tough set of negotiations right now, so weโre meeting pretty regularly,โ said Southern Nevada Water Authority Deputy General Manager Colby Pellegrino.
โThereโs a lot of work that still needs to be done. We are nowhere close to agreement,โ Pellegrino said.
Still, itโs an improvement from December when representatives from Lower Basin states โ Nevada, Arizona, and California โ and Upper Basin states โ Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming โ left a major water summit in Las Vegas without even speaking to each other.
Upper and Lower Basin states have largely quarreled over which portion of the basin should decrease its water use, and by how much.
States did come closer to a consensus after a breakthrough proposal in July to share the waterway based on the actual flow of the river, as opposed to projected flows and historical agreements. The proposal is still in play, said Pellegrino.
โI personally think itโs really good public policy for us to pursue something like that. Itโs very responsive to current conditions. It does a decent job of creating some equity between the Upper Basin and Lower Basin,โ Pellegrino said.
โBut weโve got a long way to go to see if we can agree on the details,โ she continued.
Water flows in the Colorado River are shrinking due to climate change, and the reality of what that means for states reliant on the river is becoming more stark.
Earlier this month, federal officials announced they would continue water allocation cuts on the Colorado River for the fifth consecutive year following a persistent drought thatโs drained Lake Mead.
Lake Meadโs elevation is currently at about 1,054 feet above sea level โ 175 feet below whatโs considered full. Based on water storage, the reservoir is at 31% of capacity.
Nevada is ahead of the game when it comes to preparing for those reductions, said Pellegrino.
Nevada receives less than 2% of Colorado River water each year, the smallest share of any state in the basin. Those limitations have forced Nevada to become a conservation pioneer.
Southern Nevada hasnโt used its full allocation of Colorado River water for years. Conservation efforts have helped Southern Nevada use 36% less water from Lake Mead than it did two decades ago, according to the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA).
Even under the most severe water shortage, the Southern Nevada Water Authority would be able to access its share of the river thanks to major infrastructure projects, including Intake 3 โ the โthird strawโ โ and the Low Lake Level Pumping Station.
โOur intake and our infrastructure allows us to deliver water to this valley even when water cannot be released from Hoover Dam,โ Pellegrino said.
Other water infrastructure projects in Nevada have been funded by the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act, which allocated 10% of revenue derived from land sales to the Southern Nevada Water Authority.
To date, SNPLMA has generated more than $368 million to fund Nevadaโs water priorities and infrastructure needs. Pellegrino said SNWA will continue leveraging that funding to support water conservation, infrastructure upgrades, long-term drought planning, and environmental restoration.
Additional sources of federal funding have also been a major contributor to water conservation on the Colorado River, said Lee.
The congresswoman highlighted the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $4 billion in investments for drought mitigation along the Colorado River Basin. She also highlighted the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law which provided $141 million for water conservation projects in Southern Nevada, including funding for the Las Vegas Wash, which carries millions of gallons of treated wastewater to Lake Mead.
That funding allowed California, Arizona and Nevada to collectively reduce water use by at least 3 million acre-feet through the end of 2026, stabilizing Lake Mead for several years.
Another major issue created by lower water levels at Lake Mead is the loss of hydropower productivity. Hoover Dam generates half the power that it did in 2000 due to consistently lower water levels in Lake Mead.
If Lake Mead falls another 20 feet, Hoover Damโs capacity to generate electricity would be slashed by 70% from its current level.
The break point for hydropower is 1,035 feet. At that level, 12 older turbines at Hoover that are not designed for low reservoir levels would be shut down. Only five newer turbines installed a decade ago would continue to generate power.
There is a way to fix the problem, said the Colorado River Commission of Nevadaโs director of hydropower Gail Bates.
Replacing the 12 older turbines would maintain power generation even at low levels, however it would require significant investment.
โWeโre really getting to the point where theyโre urgently needed. Bad news is the cost. They cost about $8 million each to install. So itโs a very heavy investment,โ Bates said.
During the summit, Lee and Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto said they are working together to advance the Help Hoover Dam Act, a bill that would unlock some $50 million in stranded funding for the dam from an orphaned federal account.
The funds had been set aside for pension benefits for federal employees, but advocates for the bill say Congress funds pension benefits through other means and that the funds could be spent on dam upgrades if the Bureau of Reclamation was given the authority to do so.
โThe dam is turning 100 years old in 2035 and the Bureau of Reclamation is estimating that it will require about $200 million in upgrades. This is money thatโs just sitting there stranded. It would be so good to free that up so we can make those investments,โ Cortez Masto said.
Nevada Current is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nevada Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Hugh Jackson for questions: info@nevadacurrent.com.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Itโs common for summer to be Utahโs dry season. But 2025 took things to another level. The main culprit was the missing monsoon โ or as assistant state climatologist Jon Meyer designated it, a โnon-soonโ…Salt Lake City received just 0.35 inches of rain from June 1 to Aug. 24 โ putting it on pace for the cityโs fourth driest summer on record. That included 48 straight days with zero precipitation at the airport during the peak of summer heat from early July to mid-August. Thatโs the cityโs longest such streak since 1963, and its sixth longest on record. Other Utah communities fared even worse. By Aug. 24, Bountiful, Provo and Logan were all on track for their driest summers on record. Meteorological summer runs from June through August…
Some monsoon moisture finally broke through in the last week of August. Communities from Salt Lake City to St. George to Logan got more rain in that one week than theyโd received the entire summer up to that point. Still, it wasnโt nearly enough to claw Utah out of its summer deficit…Salt Lake City ended up with 1.1 inches of rainfall from June to August. Thatโs around half of its historical average from 1991-2020 and low enough to make it the cityโs 29th driest summer in records that date back to 1874. Elsewhere, the late monsoon offered even less of a boost. Provo ended the season with less than a half-inch of rain, its third driest summer on record. Alta Ski Area in Little Cottonwood Canyon also ended up having its third driest summer, with just 1.29 inches of rain. And despite more than quadrupling its summer rainfall total in the final days of the month, Bountiful still ended the season with just under an inch of rain, making 2025 the cityโs sixth driest summer on record. Ultimately, the late rains merely moved Utah from extremely dry to very dry, said National Weather Service senior meteorologist Monica Traphagan…Even in southern Utah, where the monsoon was a bit stronger, St. George ended up with only 0.66 inches of rain for the season โ far below its historical average of 1.73 inches. And more than half of the summer rain St. George received came in the final days of August…
The seasonal forecast for fall doesnโt offer much optimism, either. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrationโs outlook calls for above-average temperatures and below-average precipitation across the state through November.
From left, Bryan Daugherty with Pitkin County Environmental Health, Matthew Anderson and Chad Rudow, both with the Roaring Fork Conservancy. The three spent Wednesday, Aug. 13 taking water quality samples at 14 sites from Lincoln Creek, the Ruby Mine outflow and the mineralized tributary. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
High above Aspen at 11,400 feet, past the ghost town of Ruby, at the end of a rough dirt road surrounded by willows and ramshackle cabins, Lincoln Creek runs clean and clear.
The mountain stream is barely more than a trickle at its headwaters, but it still supports fish that dart and hide in the cool shadows. But just a few hundred yards downstream, the creek begins to turn foul.
First by what appears to be a small tributary or groundwater that flows into the creek and leaves a white residue on the rocks, an indication of aluminum. Then comes the runoff from the abandoned Ruby Mine, which leaves a hardened orange crust on the ground where it joins the creek. Just downstream of the mine is the site where experts say the majority of the aluminum, copper, zinc and iron contamination is entering Lincoln Creek: the โmineralized tributary.โ
Although itโs hard to pinpoint the exact source โ the entire mountainside above the creek on the east side is stained orange, suggesting the widespread presence of metals โ a group of scientists, government officials and local nonprofits are ramping up efforts to better understand the workings of the Lincoln Creek watershed and what can be done to improve its water quality.
On Wednesday [August 13, 2025], a team from the Roaring Fork Conservancy and Pitkin County spent the day collecting water quality samples from Lincoln Creek, the Ruby Mine discharge, the mineralized tributary and points downstream. It was the third time this summer scientists have collected water samples from the creek, and it is part of an overall effort with Colorado Parks and Wildlife and University of Colorado Boulder to test and monitor the area.ย
โI think one of our big goals is really to continue to fill in the data,โ said Chad Rudow, water quality program manager with the Roaring Fork Conservancy. โAs I like to tell people, science takes time. To even apply statistical analysis to it, you need to have a fair bit of data.โ
Matthew Anderson, left, a water quality technician with the Roaring Fork Conservancy, and Bryan Daugherty with Pitkin County Environmental Health take samples from Lincoln Creek on Aug. 13, 2025. The creek has such high concentrations of some metals that it is toxic to aquatic life. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Local residents, government agencies and environmental groups have long been concerned about Lincoln Creek, which, according to a report from the Environmental Protection Agency, is toxic to aquatic life. The tributary of the Roaring Fork River has been under increased scrutiny in recent years as fish kills and discoloration of the water downstream of Grizzly Reservoir have become more frequent.
โWeโre worried about the aquatic health of the river,โ said Bryan Daugherty, environmental health specialist with Pitkin County. โThere certainly could be human impacts if it got really bad, but at this point itโs really the aquatic life that weโre concerned with.โ
Since early 2024, the ad hoc Lincoln Creek Workgroup has been meeting to figure out what to do about the contaminated creek. Bolstered by a state grant of $100,000, the group is increasing water quality testing. The team of scientists has grown the number of testing sites this year from seven to 14 and are focusing current efforts on whatโs happening above Grizzly Reservoir.
Pitkin County Healthy Rivers, whose mission is to maintain and improve water quality and quantity in the Roaring Fork River basin, is playing a crucial role by securing grant money and working with consultant LRE Water on phase II of the data collection and modeling project, which will cost $207,000. Colorado Parks and Wildlife staff have also set up conductivity loggers, which measure how well water conducts electricity, and trail cameras to take photos of Lincoln Creek.
โItโs definitely a team effort with a lot of different groups playing an important role in adding different pieces to the overall puzzle,โ Rudow said.
The uppermost reaches of Lincoln Creek run clean and clear, and support aquatic life. Just a few hundred yards downstream, metals contamination begins to enter the creek. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
The outflow from the Ruby Mine produces an orange crust on the ground. The mine drainage flows into Lincoln Creek. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Highly acidic concentrations
The process of metals leaching into streams can be both naturally occurring and caused by mining activities. In both cases, sulfide minerals in rock come into contact with oxygen and water, producing sulfuric acid. The acid can then leach the metals out of the rock and into a stream, a process known as acid rock drainage, which is happening in other mountainous regions of Colorado and around the West.
Prior to mining, snowmelt and rain seep into natural cracks and fractures, eventually emerging as a freshwater spring (usually). Graphic credit: Jonathan Thompson
The metals concentrations from acid rock drainage seems to be increasing in recent years and may be exacerbated by climate change as temperatures rise. But because the vast majority โ 98.5% of the copper, according to the EPA report โ of the contamination is from natural sources and not related to the Ruby Mine, the EPA is not authorized to clean it up. That leaves local and state agencies, and nonprofit organizations to fill the gap.
Wednesdayโs testing revealed a pH of 7.29 on the upper reaches of Lincoln Creek (7 is considered neutral); 6.4 below the Ruby Mine and 3.2 below the confluence of the mineralized tributary. The pH scale is logarithmic, meaning a decrease of one whole number equals a 10-fold increase in acidity.
โThe highly acidic concentrations that weโre seeing up here is part of the process thatโs speeding up mobilizing the metals from the rock into the stream system,โ Rudow said.
Scientists also collected data about dissolved oxygen, water temperature and salinity. The water samples are then shipped to a lab in Fort Collins, which tests for metals concentrations.
Rudow and others also used Wednesdayโs trip to the high alpine as a chance to scout spots for an upcoming synoptic survey. At the request of LRE, scientists will pick a day this fall to take water quality samples and flow measurements at points along the entire length of the creek to better understand the sources of contamination. But only year-round tributaries โ not seasonal snow-fed seeps โ will be included.
โWeโre pushing that into September because what we really want to focus on for that project is those year-round streams that are coming into Lincoln Creek,โ Rudow said. โ(LRE) is going to take all of this data and ultimately build a model to show whatโs going on in the creek and how these different inputs are influencing the creek.โ
Water quality sampling in 2024 focused on Grizzly Reservoir and points downstream to better understand the impacts of a dam repair project. Last summer the reservoir was drained for work on the dam, and a slug of sediment-laden, orange-colored water was released downstream, alarming Aspen residents.
Matthew Anderson, a water quality technician with the Roaring Fork Conservancy, takes a sample of water from the mineralized tributary on Aug. 13, 2025. Experts have determined this is a major source of the metals contamination on Lincoln Creek. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Grizzly Reservoir, a forebay that collects water to send through the Twin Lakes Tunnel to the Front Range, sits in the middle of the Lincoln Creek watershed and connects water users on both sides of the Continental Divide. The reservoir was drained during the summer of 2024 so the dam could get a new face. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Both sides of the divide
The water quality issues on Lincoln Creek bind together water users on both sides of the Continental Divide. Lincoln Creek feeds into the Twin Lakes Reservoir and Canal Companyโs transmountain diversion system, in which Grizzly Reservoir is used as a collection pond before sending water through the Twin Lakes Tunnel to the Front Range, where it is used primarily in cities, including for drinking water. Colorado Springs Utilities owns about 55% of the water in the Twin Lakes system, while about 35% goes to the Pueblo area.
A map of the Independence Pass Transmountain Diversion System, as submitted to Div. 5 Water Court by Twin Lakes Reservoir and Canal Co.
Twin Lakes President Alan Ward, who also works as a water resources manager for Pueblo Water, is a member of the Lincoln Creek workgroup. Each organization contributed $5,000 toward the LRE Phase II work.
Ward said next summer Grizzly Reservoir will be drained again so Twin Lakes can work on the damaged outlet works that release water downstream to Lincoln Creek. To avoid another sediment release, the company will create a small basin with cofferdams where the last 10-12 acre-feet at the bottom of the reservoir can settle out before sending it downstream or through the Twin Lakes Tunnel.
Ward said impacts to drinking water arenโt much of a concern for the east side of the divide because the water from Lincoln Creek is diluted by the 141,000-acre-foot Twin Lakes Reservoir, which stores water from multiple sources.
โI think for us the concerns are more on Lincoln Creek itself because Grizzly Reservoir is right in the middle of it,โ Ward said. โWe just want to stay really engaged on this to figure out the water quality issues and how they impact Grizzly Reservoir itself and if there are ways to mitigate the problem.โ
Lake Pleasant (pictured), located north of Phoenix, serves as the Central Arizona Projectโs water storage reservoir, as well as being a popular recreational amenity. Water shortages are impacting Colorado River basin reservoirs such as Lake Mead in Nevada and Lake Powell, which stretches across northern Arizona and southern Utah. Environmental changes throughout the Southwest are presenting challenges to maintaining flows. Photo courtesy of Central Arizona Project
Arizona cities are joining together under one banner to advocate for Arizona in ongoing Colorado River talks…At a discussion on Wednesday, Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego emphasized the need to get these negotiations right for the sake of Arizonaโs future.
โFor political reasons as well as drought, it [the river] is under threat, and we have to come together and tell the story of the really important work that we as the cities in the Central Arizona Project service territory are doing to protect our water,โ Gallego said.
She is one ofย 23 Arizona mayors in the bipartisan coalitionย so far…The goal of the new Arizona coalition is to unite Colorado River water users and showcase the stateโs ongoing water conservation efforts. Brenda Burman is the executive director of the CAP.
โI think when people have looked into our state from the outside, they havenโt seen us standing together. Theyโve seen us making our own announcements, and thatโs not how we feel, so we wanted to have a chance to be able to show it,โ Burman said.
Burman said the coalition is only in its first phase and will expand to include other Arizona water users, like farms.
Extensive farmland receives irrigation water and 80 percent of the Arizona population receives municipal water through the Central Arizona Project, a massive distribution system in the state that Brad Udallโs father and uncle worked to establish. Accelerating evaporation in diversion systems such as this is a top concern resulting from climate change. Credit: Colorado State University
Can I just make a little confession: I donโt like constantly writing about the Republicansโ relentless attacks on Americansโ public lands, the agencies that oversee them, and the regulations designed to protect them. Iโd much rather be delivering some good news, or pondering some historical mystery or old maps, or explaining the complicated workings of the Colorado Riverโs plumbing, the power grid, or oil and gas drilling.
And yet, the Trump administration and the GOP simply wonโt let up, so neither can I. For those of you who come here for not-so-gloomy content, please stick around. The nightmare has to end sometime. Doesnโt it? (And just to be clear, much more heinous things are happening outside the public lands/environmental sphere like, you know, the loss of democracy and the rapid slide into authoritarianism โ but this is the Land Desk, so Iโll stick to land coverage, mostly.)
The latest developments include:
In an unprecedented move, House Republicans this week voted to wield the Congressional Review Act to โdisapproveโ Bureau of Land Management Resource Management Plans in Alaska, Montana, and North Dakota.ย It is the first time the CRA โ which allows Congress to revoke recently implemented administrative rules โ has been used to eviscerate an RMP. Thatโs in part because RMPs are not considered โrules,โ according to aย January opinionย by the Interior Departmentโs Solicitor. The Senate is expected to vote on the resolutions soon. These plans provide a framework for managing large swaths of land and authorize the BLM to permit mining, drilling, grazing, and other activities. They endeavor to balance the agencyโs multiple-use mandate with environmental protections, guiding resource extraction and development away from sensitive areas and toward more appropriate ones, for example. They can take years to develop, and incorporate science, legal considerations, court orders, tribal consultation, and input from local officials and the general public.ย
Overturning the three RMPs in question would reopen: 2 million acres in Montanaโsย Miles City Field Office planning areaย to future coal leasing; 4 million acres to coal leasing and 213,000 acres to oil and gas leasing in North Dakota; and 13.3 million acres in Alaskaโs Central Yukon planning area to oil and gas leasing and mining claims. The Alaska move would also revive the Ambler Access Project, a proposed 211-mile road through the Brooks Range foothills and the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve that would provide mining companies access to copper and zinc deposits.ย
But it also throws management of these planning areas, covering some 30 million acres, into question. While the Miles City resolution only targets a court-ordered, coal leasing-specific amendment to the RMP, the others include the entire RMPs, and donโt say anything about whether the agency is supposed to revert back to the older โ sorely outdated (the 2024ย Central Yukon RMPย replaced a 1986 version) โ RMPs, or simply try to manage the land without RMPs (which they are not authorized to do). The CRA not only revokes the โrules,โ but also bans the agency from issuing a rule in โsubstantially the same form.โ That will severely limit the BLM in efforts to replace the revoked RMPs, and could hinder it from issuing any permits or authorizations at all.ย
Using the CRA in this way (as if RMPs were โrulesโ) also blows a cloud of uncertainty over every other RMP implemented since 1996, when the CRA was passed. First off, it makes other Biden-era RMPs subject to being revoked by Congress. More broadly, if Resource Management Plans are deemed subject to the CRA, wrote Interior Solicitor Robert Anderson in January, it would create โuncertainty as to whether post-1996 RMPs have ever gone into effect, which also raises questions as to the validity of implementation decisions issued pursuant to these plans โฆโย
Prior to the House vote, 31 law professors and public land experts called on Congress to refrain from using the CRA to revoke RMPs. โThe resulting uncertainty could trigger an endless cycle of litigation,โ they wrote, โeffectively freezing the ability of the BLM and other agencies to manage public lands for years, if not decades to come.โ
The Interior Department has been on a bit of a tear recently, especially when it comes to blocking solar and wind projects and encouraging fossil fuel extraction, especially coal.ย Over the last month, the department has:
Fast-tracked theย environmental impact statementย for Canyon Fuel Companyโs application to expand the Skyline Mine in Utah via lease modifications.
Approved Navajo Transitional Energy Companyโs bid toย expandย its Antelope Coal Mine in the Powder River Basin to an additional 857 federal acres.
Moved forward with coal lease sales in Utah (the Little Eccles tract as requested by Canyon Fuel Company) and Montana (at the Navajo Transitional Energy Companyโs Spring Creek Mine).
The Trump administration is moving to rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule, which limits new roadbuilding in parts of the National Forest that are currently roadless. It would open up nearly 45 million acres of public land to new roadbuilding and, by extension, new logging, mining, and drilling, including in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. Coloradoโs and Idahoโs state-specific roadless rules would be spared from this move. At least for now.ย
Itโs important to remember that this rule didnโt and doesnโt shut down roads โ of which there are alreadyย far too many criss-crossing our public landsย โ it just keeps new ones from being built. Thatโs important because roads are, well, pretty darned bad for forests and deserts and everywhere else.ย
Roads fragment landscapes, they enhance erosion, and liberate dust to be carried away by the wind, degrading air quality. Vehicles traveling on the roads leak oil and other nasty fluids, while also spewing exhaust and disrupting the natural sounds of the wild. Aย studyย found that a toxicant used to protect car-tires is winding up in streams, killing salmon. Most problematic: a backcountry road serves as a giant hypodermic syringe, injecting humanity and accoutrements deep into the backcountry, where they can do more damage to otherwise difficult-to-access, sensitive areas.ย
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued new restrictions on the Land and Water Conservation Fund yesterday, possibly hampering the programโs effectiveness.Still, it could have been worse.
Congress established the LWCF in 1964 to further conservation and enhance recreation by using offshore oil and gas drilling revenues to acquire private land in or near national parks, wilderness areas and forests, and then making it public. It has been popular with both parties, and in 2020, Congress passed the Great American Outdoors Act with bipartisan support, permanently funding the LWCF to the tune of $900 million annually and creating a separate account for national park and public lands maintenance. After the billโs sponsor, Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo.,ย showed Trump a photoย of a spectacular parcel acquired by the fund in Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, the president agreed to sign the bill into law.
Initially Trump and Burgum wanted toย divert hundreds of millions of dollarsย from the fund and use it to maintain infrastructure in national parks and other public lands. But they backed off, perhaps because they knew congressional Republicans would bear the brunt of the backlash. Instead, Burgum tacked a bunch of restrictions on how the funds can be used, which could slow or nix proposed land acquisitions.
A while back I mentioned the new surfing wave on the Animas River in Farmington and how that has been rendered un-surfable by low streamflows. I donโt have any good news to report on that, but I do have a link to a live webcam of the surf wave, which is pretty cool and a good way to check in on the lower Animas River from anywhere at anytime!
๐ค Data Center Watch ๐พ
Some readers have asked what they can do about data centers, AI, and their profligate energy and water use. There arenโt any easy answers. You canโt exactly boycott data centers unless youโre willing to remove yourself from the modern age. After all, virtually the entire digital world requires data centers to operate, including me sending you this newsletter. Abstaining from AI might be a little easier, except that youโre often using it without knowing, simply because the tech companies employ it as a default (try doing a Google search and youโll see that the first result is usually an AI-generated answer; you can opt out by adding โ-aiโ after your search query, but youโre still using a data center).
I would recommend learning as much as you can about the technology and how much water and power each one uses. This piece from The Conversation provides a good breakdown of some of these things, and is a good place to start.
Hereโs a crazy one: Texas firm BorderPlex Digital Assets is looking to build what they say will be a $165 billion data center complex in Doรฑa Ana County, New Mexico. Holy frijole, thatโs a lot of cash (all of the property in neighboring El Paso County is currently valued at $95 billion, according to El Paso Matters.
The developers are claiming Project Jupiter, as itโs called, would create 750 new jobs, use minimal amounts of water, and would be powered by a dedicated, on-site microgrid. But the details are sparse on exactly how they would cool the facilities (which is the where most of the water use comes from) and what their electricity generation sources would be. Solar? Natural gas? Nuclear?
Seems like these details should be made public before the county commissioners enter into a deal with the developers in which they would issue industrial revenue bonds and exempt the facility from property taxes in exchange for a $300 million payment. El Paso Matters has more on the plan.
Rocky Mountain Community Radioโs Caroline Llanes spoke with Chris Winter to find out what the report says about the basinโs future. Winter is the executive director of theย Getches-Wilkinsonย Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and the Environment at the University of Colorado, Boulderโs School of Law…
Llanes: Let’s start by talking a little bit about the Bureau of Reclamation’s 24-month study projections. What is the agency saying about the Colorado River Basin in this study?
Projected Lake Powell end-of-month physical elevations from the latest 24-Month Study inflow scenarios.
Projected Lake Mead end-of-month physical elevations from the latest 24-Month Study inflow scenarios.
Winter: Yeah, so the latest projections are quite dire, and it’s not good news. So the Bureau typically says, โhere’s what the reservoir levels are.โ And then it says, โover the next 24 months, we’re going to do our best to guess or estimate what those levels might be over time.โ And so this year in particular has been a really bad year for runoff and the Colorado River Basin, and that’s because of course we had a low snow year, especially for lots of areas on the Western Slope of Colorado and other areas. So, because we had less snow this year, that’s generating less runoff into the Colorado River and into Lake Powell. And so as a result of that, the reservoir levels are going down, because we’re withdrawing using more water than is going into the systemโso, a basic supply-demand problem. The Bureau’s report basically starts saying, โhere’s the elevation of Lake Powell and Lake Mead based on the water year that we’ve had so far,โ and I think that’s something, you know, somewhere around 3,555 feet, which is quite low, that number doesn’t mean a lot to a lot of folks, but those of us who focus on the Colorado River all the time are like, โwow, that’s not a good number,โ and that’s quite low for the reservoir levels in Lake Powell.
Llanes: Did they make any policy recommendations or (provide) actions for the states in the basin to take?
Winter: Yeah, so the report itself doesn’t make recommendations on how to change management of the system in response to this. This is really just a technical report that estimates how much water will be in the system over the next 24 months, but there’s preexisting operating guidelines in place from 2007. The reservoir levels, and the predicted reservoir levels, trigger under those operating guidelines, certain restrictions. And those restrictions generally require reductions in releases of water to lower basin and water users, states like California and Arizona. And so I think we’ve all been assuming that those restrictions are gonna kick in any way. So this isn’t really a lot of really new information on that front, but this report certainly clarifies that. But I think what it really does now is it places a lot of importance on the negotiations that are taking place among the states with the federal government to figure out how to allocate water in the future and especially what’s at stake and what kind of timelines we’re working with.
40 miles from Ridgway, high in the San Juans a water diversion structure diverts water into a pipe that then fills the storage reservoir for Ridgway’s water treatment plant.ย When a massive storm tore through the drainage in August 2024, it destroyed the townโs main water diversion system. More than a year later, construction is finally underway on a new, more resilient setup to keep clean water flowing. Town Manager Preston Neill says the storm caused an โunbelievable amount of waterโ to surge down Beaver Creek. The force of the water filled the diversion point and part of the Ridgway ditch with mud, boulders, and debris. The creek widened, undercut the diversion, and rerouted itself below the level of the townโs intake infrastructure, making it impossible for water to reach the townโs storage reservoir. Town staff said it was the most severe change to the creek in over 40 years.
โThe Creek and the Ridgway ditch are no longer aligned,โ Neill said in an interview with KVNF. โThat just became buried in feet of boulders and mud and other debris.โ
The town is now building an entirely new diversion system designed to withstand future high-flow events. Construction began in mid-August 2025, almost exactly one year after the flood. Neill says that timeline reflects the complex process of coordinating with state and federal agencies and securing funding. The bulk of the estimated $3 million project is being covered by outside sources. The Natural Resources Conservation Service is expected to reimburse up to 75% of construction costs, with the rest split betweenother agencies (both state and federal) and the Town of Ridgway. All engineering and pre-construction work has been reimbursed at 100% by federal funds.
The points and counterpoints are in: Coloradoโs water heavyweights have laid out their arguments about the future of a powerful Colorado River water right ahead of a state hearing in mid-September.
A Western Slope coalition led by the Colorado River District and Front Range groups โ Aurora Water, Colorado Springs Utilities, Denver Water and Northern Water โ are debating a potential change to water rights tied to the Shoshone Power Plant in Glenwood Canyon. The influential water rights, owned by an Xcel Energy subsidiary, impact how water flows across the state.
The Western Slope wants to add an environmental use to the water rights, which currently allow Xcel to use the water for hydropower, mining, milling, manufacturing and other purposes. Itโs part of the coalitionโs broad plan to keep the Colorado Riverโs โstatus quoโ flows at Shoshone Power Plant long into the future.
Front Range water managers and providers are concerned that their water supplies could be impacted, especially if the Colorado River District is overestimating the amount of water that should head west toward Shoshone, near Glenwood Springs, rather than east to growing Front Range cities.
Each side has insinuated that the other is swaying its estimate of past water use to send more water to their part of the state.
Graphic credit: Laurine Lassalle/Aspen Journalism
โWe do not contest the environmental benefits. Protecting flows in Glenwood Canyon is valuable,โ said Aurora Water in a rebuttal statement filed Friday. โAuroraโs participation in this hearing is not about securing any sort of โwindfall,โ as some have wrongly alleged. That claim is baseless and pure projection. Our sole position is that Shoshone should be preserved as it has historically operated โ no more, no less.โ
Thirteen entities submitted rebuttalย statements, totaling 367 pages,[to] the Colorado Water Conservation Board. Itโs part of the stateโs multistep review process in advance of the hearing at the boardโs next meeting, Sept. 16-18.
For western Colorado communities, the Shoshone water rights impact their economies, quality of life and environments. Shoshoneโs water rights are old enough that they have priority over other, more recent water rights in dry periods under state law. Over the past century, these communities have grown up relying on the power plant to send water westward โ toward their farm diversions and rafting corridors โ as it generates electricity.
For Front Range communities, the stakes are similar. Water providers rely on water from western Colorado to support growing cities, industries and farms. And in some cases, their water rights come in second to Shoshoneโs under the โfirst in time, first in rightโ water administration system.
With high stakes on either side, Fresh Water News is breaking down some of the key questions in the debate.
What is an instream flow right?
An instream flow right is meant to help preserve the natural environment. In 1973, Colorado lawmakers allowed a state agency, the Colorado Water Conservation Board, to use water rights to keep water in rivers, streams and natural lakes through the Instream Flow Program.
At the time, Coloradans were concerned about stretches of streams that dried up when mountain runoff slowed while demand from humans โ cities, farms and industries โ continued. Shallower, slower streamflows impact habitat and food sources for native species while sometimes creating better habitat for their competitors.
The program aims to keep water in streams and natural lakes to reduce these impacts. Since 1973, the state has appropriated instream flow rights on nearly 1,700 stream segments covering more than 9,700 miles. In Shoshoneโs case, the instream flow right would apply to a 2.4-mile stretch of the Colorado River between the point where Shoshone takes water out of the river and the point where it releases that water back into the river channel.
Whatโs this state-led process?
The state-led process will determine whether the water rights attached to the Shoshone Power Plant can be used to protect instream flows.
Colorado lawmakers designated the Colorado Water Conservation Board, a state water policy agency, as the sole entity that can own and operate instream flow rights. The agencyโs board of directors is reviewing testimony, environmental analyses, and other materials as part of a standard, 120-day review process for proposed instream flow rights. The board is scheduled to make its final determination at its September meeting.
The Colorado River District kicked off the review period in May when it formally proposed adding an instream flow right to Shoshoneโs water rights. Under the districtโs proposal, the district would own the title to Shoshoneโs water rights, but the state would manage it in perpetuity.
After the hearing, the proposed Shoshone environmental water right would also need to go through a water court process.
What is this โhistorical useโ debate about?
In order to legally change Shoshoneโs water rights to include environmental use, state officials need to know how much water has been used under Shoshoneโs water rights in the past.
Shoshoneโs 1905 water right allows the power plant to divert up to 1,250 cubic feet per second of water. A second, more recent, water right allows the plant to divert 158 cfs. But the amount of water that is actually used to generate power at Shoshone fluctuates or has paused because of facility maintenance.
Calculating past use is complicated. BBA Water Consultants, hired by the Colorado River District, looked at Shoshoneโs operations from 1975 through 2003. The plantโs 29-year average historical use was 844,644 acre-feet, according to the consultantsโ preliminary analysis.
They excluded years after 2003 because Shoshone had significant outages totaling 1,466 days over 19 years compared with 89 days during the study period.
Some Front Range water users say this estimate is too high or that more recent years should have been included.
Aurora Water said the Western Slope group used โcherry-picked dataโ and the historical use was closer to 538,204 acre-feet, a 36% difference.
Are there other disagreements?
In short, yes. The oft-repeated refrain in water deals is โthe devilโs in the details.โ
Colorado Springs Utilities raised concerns in its rebuttal about adding an environmental use to Shoshoneโs more recent, or junior, water right, which currently allows water to be used for manufacturing and power generation. The Colorado River Districtโs plan would expand the junior right and potentially cause a water-administration ripple effect that would impact the utilityโs water supplies.
Denver Water was concerned about historical use. It and Aurora Water also took issue with how the environmental water right would be owned and managed under the Colorado River Districtโs proposal. State lawmakers gave the CWCB exclusive authority to hold and use instream flow rights, but the River Districtโs plan encroaches on that authority by saying the district will hold the title, but the state agency will manage the right.
Northern Water shared many of these concerns, requesting that the state delay its decision.
For its part, the Colorado River District said everyone agrees on the main issue โ adding an environmental use to the Shoshone water rights โ but that the objectors โmisstate the lawโ and are trying to distort the parameters of the stateโs upcoming decision.
The district says the water court decides how much water is at stake, saying the water providers should leave โhistorical useโ up to the court. It has also suggested the state stay neutral on the historical use amount.
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
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
From email from the Arizona Department of Water Resources (Doug Maceachern):
September 2, 2025
Itโs time to set the record straight regarding the negotiations among Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico and Colorado regarding the post-2026 Colorado River operations.
Amid the backdrop of prolonged drought and declining flows of the Colorado River, the seven states have the unenviable task of balancing the amount of water Mother Nature provides and the stressors related to the use of that water for 40 million people and millions of acres of farmland.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
Discussions among the seven basin states continue, but finding common ground has been extremely challenging. The United States has told the seven basin states that if an agreement is not reached by November 11, 2025, they will move forward with an alternative. The terms and conditions of that alternative have not been disclosed. There is still an opportunity to avoid the path of federally imposed operating guidelines and the legal entanglements that would likely follow. But the clock is ticking.
However, Arizona, California, Nevada, and our partners in Mexico have not been idle. Over the last decade, we have reduced our water use so that the elevation of Lake Mead, the primary storage reservoir supplying water to our three states and Mexico, is over 100 feet higher because of those water-use reductions. That is over two trillion gallons of water. Arizonaโs contribution to that success story? Nearly a trillion gallons of that total entirely on our own.
Those reductions have been painful, but they have not been enough to sustain the river. Moving forward, all seven states must do more.
That outcome requires bold thinking, sacrifice, and a willingness to share in protecting the Colorado River by all seven states that benefit from its bounty. The tool to achieve that goal is simple: reduce water use.
Arizona, California, and Nevada have put forth a Post 2026 operational proposal that requires mandatory, certain and verifiable water-use reductions of additional billions of gallons of water by the three Lower Basin states.
To the contrary, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico have not agreed, nor have they proposed, any mandatory, certain and verifiable reductions in their water use. Not. One. Single. Gallon. Instead, they propose that water-use reductions needed to save the Colorado River come solely from Arizona, California and Nevada.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Crystal Dam, part of the Colorado River Storage Project, Aspinall Unit. Credit Reclamation.
From email from Reclamation (Conor Felletter):
September 4, 2025
On Saturday, September 6, 2025 at 6pm MT, Reclamation will decrease releases from Crystal Dam to 1,450 cfs from the current release of 1,500 cfs. Gunnison Tunnel diversions remain at 1025 cfs. Gunnison River flows in the Black Canyon/Gunnison Gorge, currently ~460 cfs, are anticipated to decrease to ~410 cfs. This schedule will remain in effect until a new notification is issued. Scheduled releases are subject to changes with changes in river flows and weather conditions.
Releases are made for the authorized purposes of the Aspinall Unit, and to maintain target base flows through the endangered fish habitat along the Gunnison River between Delta and Grand Junction.
Contact Conor Felletter (cfelletter@usbr.gov or 970-637-1985) for more information regarding Aspinall operations.
Up until late August, this summer has been particularly dry, both for the Denver region and for the West Slope, the source of half of Denver Waterโs supply. And that combination has translated into a heavy workload for the utilityโs largest reservoir, the 257,000-acre-foot Dillon Reservoir in Summit County.
Dillon Reservoir in Summit County is Denver Waterโs largest reservoir. Photo credit: Denver Water.
A summer largely bereft of the monsoon rains (which bolster our water supply and reduce water use by our water-smart customers) combined with long stretches of days above 90 degrees pushed up demand among the 1.5 million people Denver Water serves.
The dry summer situation also triggered calls for more water from farmers and ranchers who have senior water rights that put them at the front of the line for receiving water from the South Platte River system. Denver Waterโs supplies are also constrained on the north side of its system, as ongoing work on the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project requires the utility reduce the amount of water it stores in that reservoir during the project.
Dillon Reservoir provides Denver Water with a supplemental supply to use when the amount of water available from its south system source, the South Platte River, is not enough to meet demands.
That all combined to make Denver Water more heavily reliant on Dillon Reservoir than usual, forcing the utility to push higher volumes from Dillon through the Roberts Tunnel to the Front Range.
โA lot of factors combined to see us lean hard into our Dillon supplies this summer,โ said Nathan Elder, manager of supply for Denver Water. โWe know this impacts recreation, both what we release into the Blue River below the reservoir and the water levels for the marinas at Dillon Reservoir. We try very hard to maintain good conditions for recreation at Dillon, but this summer posed challenges.โ
The Dillon Marina at Dillon Reservoir. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Overall, the amount of water flowing into Dillon was at just 70% of normal in the April-through-July stretch. July alone saw just 48% of typical flows into the reservoir โ thatโs 20,000 acre-feet below average, about the capacity of Antero Reservoir west of Fairplay.
The situation serves as a reminder for Denver Water customers to stay smart about water use.
Especially amid a hot, dry summer, customers should make sure to follow watering rules and skip irrigation during rainy periods. And they should consider landscape changes that replace thirsty turfgrass with plants that need less water.
Yet, despite relentless dry periods covering July and most of August, Denver Water customers did a good job managing irrigation. They used water at a rate of just about 2% above the five-year average, and just 1.6% above the longer term, 2000-2024 average.
These plants from Resource Centralโs Garden In A Box program are water-wise and interesting throughout the year. Photo credit: Denver Water.
But even as Denver Water customers kept demands low by historical standards, the combination of conditions saw water levels in Dillon fall below levels optimal for the marinas at the reservoir by the end of August.
Typically, Denver Water tries to keep the surface of Dillon Reservoir at 9,012 feet in elevation through Labor Day. But this year, levels will fall a few feet below that.
And water volumes flowing out of Dillon into the Blue River โ flows important to rafters and anglers โ also fell significantly. Since late July, those outflows were about 100 cubic feet per second, about half of normal for this time of year. In August they dropped even further, to 75 cubic feet per second.
The overall picture began to improve slightly in late August, as the state benefited from a cooling trend and bursts of rainfall. The cooler, wetter weather in the metro area cut Denver Water customersโ demand for water in the Denver region, easing the need to pull as much water from Dillon.
Even so, the tough summer means Denver Water will likely enter the new, 12-month water year, which begins Oct. 1, with its reservoirs, including Dillon, at below-average elevations.
That puts the onus on the upcoming winter season to come through with a good snowpack, never a sure thing.
โWeโll hope to see water demands fall in September and then look to a good snowpack in the winter and spring,โ Elder said.
โBut weโll be starting from behind. We hope we can make up the gap in reservoir storage with a wet winter and spring. And weโll need our customers to help us with smart water practices.โ
Summerโs officially over. Meteorological summer, that is. And damn what a dry and hot and smoky summer it was.ย It wasnโt one of those summers with superlative maximum temps: The mercury in Death Valley only climbed to 124 on a couple of occasions this summer, for example, far off the record high. But in most places the average temperatures for the months of July and August were far higher than normal.
Phoenixโs max temp hit 118ยฐF on two occasions this summer and 117ยฐF once. More significant, though, was the relentlessness of the heat, and the lack of much monsoon relief. The result was significantly higher average temperatures than normal. National Weather Service.
Meanwhile, almost everywhere in the West was cursed with below normal precipitation. The monsoon was late, and when it finally did arrive, it was a dud. At least it has been so far. Not only were rainfall amounts lower than usual, but the soil was so dry that it sucked up a lot of the moisture before it reached the rivers. That has meant that the typical August streamflow jumps never really materialized, especially in the Colorado River Basin. The fish arenโt doing so well. Heather Sackett of Aspen Journalismย reportsย that the Crystal River, along with the rest of the Roaring Fork, Gunnison, and White/Yampa River Basins are hurting, prompting officials to institute voluntary fishing and floating closures.
About 82% of the West is in drought, with about 47% suffering from severe to exceptional drought. The hardest hit areas include northwestern Colorado and southwestern Wyoming (aka the Colorado River headwaters), southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico, and the Idaho panhandle.
The combination of factors has resulted in low inflows into and steep declines in water storage in Lake Powell. The reservoir โ which is both a barometer of the Colorado Riverโs health and the Upper Basinโs savings account โ is now at about the same level as it was in early September of 2021. It both complicates and adds urgency to negotiations over how to split up the Colorado River in a warmer, dryer world.
Letโs look at some graphics:
What a difference a year makes. At the end of last summer, most of the West was fairly healthy, moisture-wise, and a wet September, October, and November further improved the situation. But after that, things started drying out and warming up, desiccating large swaths of the region, with only northern California, southern Oregon, and the plains getting a reprieve. Source: U.S. Drought Monitor.
These hydrographs for the Animas River in Durango, the Chaco River just above its confluence with the San Juan, and the Rio Grande through Albuquerque, show that the monsoon did, in fact, arrive, albeit dreadfully late and bringing nothing but chips and cheap bean dip (a potluck metaphor, by the way). The Chaco River ballooned from bone dry to raging river (off the charts!) in a matter of hours, but was nothing but a muddy trickle a couple days later. The Animas also got a boost, but nothing close to as big as it normally gets this time of year. For once, the Rio Grande looks the best, with flows jumping from zero to about 300 cfs, before plateauing around 120 cfs for several days now.
A couple of decent storms basically kept the Animas from drying up entirely, but not much more than that.
It looks like the Chaco River went from very, very dry to about 600 cfs (it literally jumped off the chart at 460 cfs, soโฆ.) and did so in the form of a wall of water.
The Rio Grande in Albuquerque was dry until the monsoon managed to kick it up to a not-dry 120 cfs or so.
Of course, these charts could turn around at any time. The monsoon may just be getting started, and will end up bringing steady, autumn rain and sustained higher streamflows with it. The biggest floods of the region have typically come in September and October, usually as tropical storms make their way inland and dump their load on the Interior West, think Oct. 1911 or Sept. 1970. That could happen again.
Even multiple deluges wonโt reverse the Lake Powell deficit thatโs built up this year, however. This water yearโs actual inflows into the reservoir have been below normal for nearly every month, and were especially low in August. But more alarming are the unregulated inflows, which are an estimate of how much water would be flowing into the reservoir if there were no diversions or reservoirs upstream. This can look a bit weird, since in some months the estimate is a negative number.
During August, about 255,000 acre-feet ran into Lake Powell. This was just 58% of normal. But thatโs more than 254,000 acre-feet more than it would have been without upstream reservoir releases.
Note that the unregulated inflow volume tends to be higher than the actual inflow volumes during spring runoff (when upstream reservoirs are holding water back) and lower during the summer (when upstream reservoirs are releasing water for irrigation and so forth). The unregulated inflows have been lower than normal all water year so far.
The negative numbers shouldnโt be taken literally โ I donโt know what that would look like. Itโs just showing that without upstream reservoir releases, the flows would have gotten pretty meager in August during the pre-dam days.
Lake Powellโs storage is at its second lowest level ever for the end of August. An average or below average winter could further drain it to critical levels by next year.
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
EPA withdraws a proposed rule to reduceย wastewater pollution from slaughterhouses.
EPA will seek to cut federal protections forย wetlands.
USDA will prepare an environmental impact statement for repealing theย Roadless Ruleย that shields national forests and grasslands from logging and road building.
New Mexico and Texas agree toย Rio Grande lawsuitย settlement.
CBO reports onย U.S. agricultureโs greenhouse gas emissions.
EPA proposes allowing Wyoming to manage its ownย coal-waste program.
Interior Department completes work onย soil burn severity assessmentย for a large fire north of the Grand Canyon.
And lastly, the Department of Energy supports a feasibility study for what would be one of the countryโs largest pumped storage hydropower projects.
โThe seven states need to recognize that there is pain and sacrifice all over the place and try and get past that visceral perception and figure out what they can do to work together to provide water reliability for the 40 million people who depend on the Colorado River.โ โ Scott Cameron, senior adviser to the interior secretary, speaking at a meeting of the Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Work Group on August 20. Cameron, who said he is โcautiously optimisticโ about a seven-state deal on managing the river before the current operating rules expire at the end of next year, said the basin needs to look for strategies to reduce consumption and โto facilitate transfers and exchanges.โ
By the Numbers
10 Percent: Share of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions generated by agriculture, according to a Congressional Budget Office report. The main pollutants in this total are nitrous oxide, a byproduct of fertilizer, and methane, which comes from livestock manure and cow burps.
$21 Million: Research and development funding from the Department of Energy for hydropower projects. The largest portion ($7.1 million) is to investigate the feasibility of a massive pumped storage hydropower project proposed for Navajo Nation land. Pumped storage toggles water between a lower and upper reservoir, a system that functions like a battery. New Mexico State University is the co-investigator for Carrizo Four Corners, the 1,500-megawatt pumped storage project that could provide 70 hours of energy storage, far more than the several hours of storage provided by the largest lithium-ion batteries.
News Briefs
Slaughterhouse Waste The Environmental Protection Agency will not strengthen wastewater discharge rules for meat and poultry producers. The rules were proposed during the Biden administration.
To justify the action, the agency cited its desire to lower food prices and reduce industry operating costs.
The Biden-era rule intended to reduce the volume of pollutants that enter waterways from some 3,879 slaughterhouses nationally. Those pollutants include nitrogen, phosphorus, organic matter, fecal coliform, and grease. They contribute to harmful algal blooms and low-oxygen dead zones in rivers, lakes, and coastal ecosystems.
A Narrow Wetlands Definition The EPA is preparing to release a rule by the end of the year that would shrink the number of wetlands with federal protection under the Clean Water Act, E&E News reports.
According to a slide presentation seen by E&E, the agency โwould regulate wetlands only if they meet a two-part test: They would need to contain surface water throughout the โwet season,โ and they would need to be abutting and touching a river, stream or other waterbody that also flows throughout the wet season.โ
The changes are in response to a 2023 Supreme Court ruling that provided narrower, but undefined criteria for determining which water bodies have federal protection.
Rio Grande Settlement By signing a settlement agreement, New Mexico, Texas, and the Justice Department are closer to ending a long-running dispute over water rights from the Rio Grande and the groundwater pumping that affects river flows, Inside Climate News reports.
โThe settlement package includes new formulas to calculate how much water each entity is owed; an agreement for New Mexico to reduce groundwater depletion, and changes to the operating manual for the Bureau of Reclamationโs Rio Grande Project.โ
Roadless Rule The U.S. Department of Agriculture is pushing ahead with its attempt to undo a 24-year-old rule that prevents logging and road building in โroadlessโ areas of national forests and grasslands.
Rescinding the Roadless Rule, which was adopted in the last month of the Clinton administration, will affect more than 44 million acres, mostly in 10 western states.
The department will prepare an environmental impact statement for its intent to repeal the rule. It argues that more local control over land management decisions are needed.
Comments are due September 19. Submit them via http://www.regulations.gov using docket number FS-2025-0001.
Studies and Reports
Dragon Bravo Fire Burn Severity An Interior Department team completed an evaluation of the soil burn severity of the Dragon Bravo Fire, which has burned across more than 149,000 acres north of the Grand Canyon.
The fire severely burned the soils on just over 2 percent of the acres. Another 26 percent was moderately burned. The most severe burns cook the soil, which increases surface runoff after storms. Erosion and downstream floods can be the result.
Emergency Alert System Improvements The Federal Communication Commission is beginning the process to assess and potentially upgrade the nationโs emergency alert systems that local agencies use to inform residents about natural hazards like floods and fires.
The commission is taking public comments through September 25. Submit them hereusing docket number 25-224.
Wyoming Coal Waste The EPA wants to grant more states the authority to regulate waste products from burning coal for electricity. Wyoming is the latest state to seek this power, called primacy.
The agency is proposing to approve Wyomingโs bid to oversee its coal ash permitting program.
A public meeting will be held October 30. Public comments on the proposed approval are due November 3. Details are in the above link.
Three states currently have primacy. North Dakotaโs application is being reviewed.
Federal Water Tap is a weekly digest spotting trends in U.S. government water policy. To get more water news, follow Circle of Blue on Twitter and sign up for our newsletter.
At the town of Kremmling board of trustees meeting on Aug. 20, members approved an emergency declaration for watering restrictions due to ongoing drought conditions. The following Level 1 restrictions are in effect:
Even-numbered addressesย (street numbers ending in 0, 2, 4, 6, 8) may use municipal water for outside irrigation and other outdoor purposes only onย even-numbered daysย of the month.
Odd-numbered addressesย (street numbers ending in 1, 3, 5, 7, 9) may use municipal water for outside irrigation and other outdoor purposes only onย odd-numbered daysย of the month.
Town Parks will be watered no more than every third day.
โThe restrictions are necessary because of a dry summer and our aging water treatment plantโs inability to keep up with current demands,โ stated town manager Jen MacPherson.ย โThey are important for residents to follow because we are in a position where we can hopefully prevent additional restrictions if everyone pulls together and cuts back now.โ
Every year, millions of tons of salt flows down the Colorado River. The Colorado Department of Agriculture works with local irrigation companies and agricultural producers to limit the amount drawn from Coloradoโs farming industry. On Thursday [August 14, 2025], members of the Department of Agriculture and others toured different areas around Palisade from a lined canal to a peach orchard to see what methods are being used to limit how much salt the Grand Valley washes into the river. Colorado Department of Agriculture Salinity Program Coordinator Paul Kehmeier explained that the soils around the Grand Valley contain salt that can be washed into the river by irrigating fields too deeply.
โIt doesnโt really feel like it this morning, but weโre actually standing on the bottom of an ocean right now,โ Kehmeier said. โThe waterโs gone, but all the salt from the ocean is still here. When the water from the Colorado River gets in contact with it, it dissolves the salt and the salt gets into the water and itโs carried down on the river.โ
Kehmeier said the salt content in the river in Colorado is still low, but more gets dissolved along the riverโs course and there is a large amount by the time it reaches the Lower Colorado Basin states. In the 1970s, the federal government passed legislation to reduce the salt level in the river…Cindy Lair, the Colorado Department of Agriculture deputy director for conservation services division and climate resilience specialist, said over time the federal government shifted to allow states to take the lead in reducing salt levels in the river by providing grant funding. The types of projects that can reduce salinity include things like lining canals and helping farmers use more efficient irrigation systems that donโt soak down below the root level of the crops.
Laying pipe near Crawford, Colorado. Photo credit: USBR
This image was taken during the peak outflow from the Gold King Mine spill at 10:57 a.m. Aug. 5, 2015. The waste-rock dump can be seen eroding on the right. Federal investigators placed blame for the blowout squarely on engineering errors made by the Environmental Protection Agencyโs-contracted company in a 132-page report released Thursday [October 22, 2015]
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
August 31, 2025
Three million gallons of acidic mine drainage flooded into the Animas River basin 10 years ago, turning the southern Colorado river a mustard yellow and makingย international headlines. Caused by federal contractors working to treat pollution from the Gold King Mine, theย accidental release of water laden with heavy metalsย prompted the creation of a Superfund site and a reckoning with lingering environmental harms from the areaโs mining legacy, including hundreds of abandoned mines high in the San Juan mountains. A decade later, community members andย Environmental Protection Agencyย staff are still grappling with the long-term cleanup of the areaโs mines and tailings piles. Forty-eight of themย now make up the Bonita Peak Mining District Superfund siteย outside Silverton. They continue to leak heavy metals into local waterways and soils.
โWeโre pleased that the EPA is at the point where in the next 18 months, weโre going to see some decisions made about how those sites are cleaned up,โ said Chara Ragland, the chair ofย the siteโs community advisory group.
Cement Creek photo via the @USGS Twitter feed
Studies have since shown that the Aug. 5, 2015, Gold King spill hadย little long-term environmental impactย because the water already contained so many heavy metals from runoff and other mines. Locals hope the federal Superfund cleanup process will improve water quality in the Animas River basin so that it will be cleaner than before the Gold King incident.
The โBonita Peak Mining Districtโ superfund site. Map via the Environmental Protection Agency
Current drought conditions across the state of Colorado, with San Miguel County outlined in black, as of Aug. 26. The Town of Telluride implemented outdoor water restrictions on Monday, Aug. 25, due to ongoing drought conditions and limited water availability locally. (Map courtesy of the U.S. Drought Monitor)
The Town of Telluride implemented outdoor water restrictions beginning Monday, Aug. 25, due to ongoing drought conditions and limited water availability locally. All water utility customers for the Town of Telluride, including Lawson Hill, Hillside and Sunnyside, are required to follow an irrigation schedule, with outdoor watering only permitted on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Watering must take place between 7 p.m. and 8 a.m. Irrigation systems should be set to 70-75% of normal water use, and all exterior water features must be turned off. No users are permitted to truck in additional water…Additionally, restaurants and businesses should serve water only upon request, and people are requested to fix any leaks immediately. Water audits and monitoring of water bills for excessive use can also help people regulate their use. Property owners who have landscaping that has been installed since spring 2024 can apply for additional permission to water. The public works department will review variances for new or modified landscaping on a case-by-case basis…
Although monsoonal rains have recently brought some moisture to the local area, it is still very dry. On the Western Slope, drought conditions remain dire, with several zones in northwestern Colorado in the category of โexceptionalโ drought. Exceptional is the most severe category of drought and is often linked to hydrologic and agricultural issues.
โThe ongoing lack of precipitation has been to blame for that, and it was very hot last week,โ Allie Mazurek, engagement climatologist at the Colorado Climate Center, told the Daily Planet. โWe have an elevated wildfire risk.โ
[…]
Over 7% of Colorado remains under exceptional drought, and 1.86 million people are experiencing some type of drought, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Drought Monitor, published on Aug. 28. Exceptional drought typically happens about once every 50 years, although parts of Colorado also experienced exceptional drought in 2023. San Miguel County is faring slightly better than much of the Western Slope, although all of the county is under at least severe drought, and the eastern edge is under extreme drought…
Locally, the San Miguel River, measured at the Placerville gauge, ended up at 62% of normal total streamflow volume for the April through July period, and the Uncompahgre River at Ridgway Reservoir was at 66%. The Animas at Durango was also at 62% of median, and the Dolores was at 52%. Some of these streamflows are historical lows…This yearโs observed streamflow for the Dolores and Animas is only in the ninth percentile out of more than 100 years of observation…For the most current information on Tellurideโs Water Conservation Program, visitย bit.ly/totwaterย or follow @townoftelluride on social media.
The Crystal River was running under 8 cfs on Aug. 24, 2025. This section of river is downstream of big agricultural diversions and ditches owned and maintained by the Town of Carbondale. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Streamflows on the Western Slope have plummeted over the last month, sending water managers scrambling to boost flows for endangered fish and ranking it among the driest years in recent history.
According to the Natural Resources Conservation Service, the Roaring Fork River basin ended the month of July at 28% of average streamflows. The Colorado River headwaters was at 42% of average; the Gunnison River basin was at 34% of average and rivers in the White/Yampa/Green River basin in the northwest corner of the state were running at 24% of average. Prior to this weekโs rains, the Crystal River near the Colorado Parks and Wildlife fish hatchery was running at 7.5 cfs, or 10% of average.
โWeโve been seeing pretty widespread well-below-normal flows across the entire upper Colorado River basin due to extremely dry conditions starting back in December,โ said Cody Moser, a senior hydrologist with the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center.
For most of August, the Crystal River near fish hatchery was running at less than 15 cfs. These extremely low conditions plus water temperatures above 71 degrees Fahrenheit, prompted CPW to implement on Aug. 15 a full-day voluntary fishing closure on the Crystal from mile marker 64 on Highway 133 to the confluence with the Roaring Fork. This section of the Crystal is downstream from big agricultural diversions and ditches owned and operated by the town of Carbondale.
The upper Roaring Fork River and its tributaries are also suffering the consequences of low flows. On Aug. 25 the Colorado Water Conservation Board placed a call for the minimum instream flow on a seven-mile section of the Roaring Fork through Aspen, between Difficult and Maroon creeks. The call was released the next day after rain boosted flows above the 32 cfs minimum amount.
The CWCB is the only entity in the state allowed to hold instream flow water rights, which are intended to preserve the natural environment to a reasonable degree. Itโs not uncommon for the CWCB to place calls for this stretch in late summer and it did so in other years, including 2012, 2018, 2020, 2021 and 2022.
Low flows have also affected recreation at the North Star Nature Preserve, a popular area for paddle boarders east of Aspen. On July 24, Pitkin County implemented a voluntary float closure โ asking people to launch at South Gate instead of Wildwood โ which occurs when the river falls below 60 cfs.
โAt low water levels, users are at risk of touching bottom, which could damage the riparian habitat and would be considered trespassing,โ a Pitkin County official said in an email.
Before this weekโs rainfall, the Roaring Fork above Aspen hovered around 30 cfs.
Streamflows across the Western Slope are often at some of their lowest points of the year during the late summer and early fall when snowmelt has waned and irrigators are still drawing from streams. But this summerโs lack of precipitation and low soil moisture were the main drivers of dry streams. Much of the Western Slope is in extreme or exceptional drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
โThe biggest factor is the dry spring conditions and layered on top of them a much drier than normal summer,โ said Peter Goble, assistant state climatologist. โWe will be watching those base flows but also soil moisture levels as we go into fall and early winter to see if those pick back up.โ
Dry soils that suck up snowmelt before it makes it to streams can mean a normal snowpack translates into below-normal runoff.
This section of the Colorado River at the boat launch near Corn Lake dipped to around 150 cfs in lake August. Known as the 15-mile reach, this stretch of river should have at least 810 cfs to meet the needs of endangered fish. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Stressed out fish
Another area hard hit by low flows is the 15-mile reach of the Colorado River between Palisade and the confluence with the Gunnison River. The chronically dry section is home to multiple endangered fish species and is downstream from some of the biggest agricultural diversions from the Colorado River in the state. Each year water managers work together to time voluntary releases from upstream reservoirs to boost late-season flows for the fish.
But even with many entities working with the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program, a 2022 memo from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that during the irrigation season of dry years, flows did not meet the 810 cfs target 39% of the time.
This year, flows have not been above 810 cfs since July 9. And although flows in the 15-mile reach have been climbing since Aug. 23, โ up to about 650 cfs on Aug. 27 โ nearly all the water in the reach before this weekโs rain was attributable to upstream reservoir releases specifically intended for endangered fish. Without releases for the recovery program, flows in the 15-mile reach could have dipped as low as 30 to 50 cfs.
โFrom my standpoint itโs amazing how a dry year just makes it really hard to get down even a third of that flow target,โ said Bart Miller, healthy rivers director with Western Resource Advocates. โItโs a challenging time for water users, but a super challenging time for fish. For the fish itโs a huge stressor.โ
This map shows the 15-mile reach of the Colorado River near Grand Junction, home to four species of endangered fish. Map credit: CWCB
This year there was about 29,175 acre-feet earmarked for endangered fish, according to a presentation by program staff. But by Sept. 1 nearly all this water was scheduled to be used up. The nonprofit Colorado Water Trust has stepped in to lease an additional 5,000 acre-feet out of Ruedi Reservoir. The water is owned by the town of Palisade, the Colorado River Water Conservation District and QB Energy. The releases of about 100 cfs are projected to begin Aug. 27 and continue through mid-October, said Danielle Snyder, a water resources specialist with the Colorado Water Trust.
โThis particular stretch is very critical for the health of the ecosystem,โ Snyder said. โWe saw a lot of benefit for both the community and the environment and we thought this would be a great opportunity given we have the capacity and funds to provide water to that region.โ
The CWCB will also lease an additional 2,350 acre-feet for fish flows.
Locally dwindling streamflows have big implications downstream. Projections released earlier this month from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation show the nationโs two largest reservoirs โ Lake Powell and Lake Mead โ continuing to drop. Lake Powell could drop below the level needed to make hydropower by late 2026. As proof of how dry the month of July was across the basin, inflow to Lake Powell was just 12% of normal.
One bright spot in an otherwise bleak forecast is that parts of the Western Slope are finally seeing some relief from the hot and dry summer with rain this week. But it probably wonโt be enough to make up for the months-long lack of precipitation.
โWe have been dry for six-plus months so I donโt imagine it will have a significant impact long term, but itโs nice to finally see some precipitation in the forecast and observed over the last day or two,โ Moser said.ย
Under the 1922 Colorado Compact, the Upper Division states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming share the river with the Lower Division states of Arizona, California and Nevada, with each Division apportioned 7,500,000 acre-feet of water annually. Over eighty percent of the water of the Colorado River originates as snowpack in the Upper Division, so sharing of the Riverโs flows is accomplished through Article 3.d of the Colorado Compact, which provides that the Upper Division States will not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry, which is in Arizona just below Lake Powell, to be depleted below an aggregate of 75,000,000 acre-feet for any period of ten consecutive years. Under a 1944 treaty, the Republic of Mexico is entitled to 1,500,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water each year. Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the largest reservoirs in the United States, hold Colorado River water for delivery to the states and Mexico and are operated under the authority of the Secretary of the Interior (Secretary) through the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
The U.S. Supreme Courtโs ruling Arizona v. California, 373 U.S. 546 (1963) determined that Arizona entitled to divert 2.8 million acre-feet per year of Colorado River water in normal years. This is an important supply, constituting approximately 36% of Arizonaโs total water use.
Glen Canyon Dam, which forms Lake Powell, was completed in 1963, and thereafter Lakes Powell and Mead were operated under guidelines finalized in 1970, called the Long Range Operating Criteria (LROC). In 2007, in response to several years of drought and declining reservoir levels, the Secretary, in collaboration with the Colorado River states and other stakeholders, adopted a new set of operating guidelines. The 2007 Guidelines were designed to help stabilize water levels in Lakes Powell and Mead, to provide certainty regarding shortage conditions and to incentivize conserving water in Lake Mead by providing flexibility in deliveries to certain entities through the creation of โassigned waterโ (also commonly known as โIntentionally Created Surplusโ). The 2007 Guidelines expire on December 31, 2025 but its provisions generally remain in effect through the end of 2026. The 2007 Guidelines include three important aspects of Colorado River management that impact all who share the river. These are:
The amount of water the Secretary releases annually from Lake Powell into Lake Mead under different reservoir conditions.
Broadly speaking, the goal of these releases is to equalize the amount of water in Lakes Powell and Mead. Releases are based on water levels in Lake Powell relative to water levels in Lake Mead among other factors.1
2. The conditions under which the Secretary declares a shortage of Colorado River water in the Lower Division and of the amount of shortage assessed to each state.
A shortage is declared in the Lower Division when the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation annual August 24-Month Study projects that Lake Mead will be at or below elevation 1,075โ on the following January 1.
Arizona is shorted 320,000 acre-feet of water below Lake Mead elevation 1,075โ and above 1,050โ , 400,000 acre-feet of water below elevation 1,050โ and above 1,025โ and 480,000 acre-feet of water below elevation 1,025โ. Nevada takes shortages at these levels proportional to its 300,000 acre-foot allocation and no shortages are defined at these reservoir levels for Californiaโs allocation of 4.4 million acre-feet.
3. The terms under which entities can voluntarily create and hold volumes of assigned water in Lake Mead.
Assigned water is created and held in Lake Mead under the Secretaryโs authority to allocate surplus water under Article II(B)(2) of the consolidated Supreme Court decree in Arizona vs California and via treaty with Mexico. It is assigned to and held by an individual entity separate from the priority system of water allocation to which all other water in Lake Mead available for delivery in the Lower Division is subject.2
As of 2024, the Central Arizona Water Conservation District, the Gila River Indian Community, the Colorado River Indian Tribes, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the Imperial Irrigation District, the Southern Nevada Water Authority and the Republic of Mexico hold accounts of assigned water in Lake Mead.
Generally, water in Lake Mead available to but not ordered by one Colorado River contract entitlement holder can be ordered by another for delivery. Thus, for assigned water to be held in Lake Mead, several entities with contracts to Colorado River water must agree to forego their rights to order the same water over all of the years that the assigned water is held in Lake Mead. These entities signed a Forbearance Agreement in which they agreed not to order another entityโs assigned water under certain conditions. The Forbearance Agreement expires on December 31, 2025 but forbearance provisions for assigned water created through intentional conservation that exists as of that date continue through 2036 and through 2056 for assigned water created through other means.
Despite the efforts taken through the 2007 Guidelines, and due to chronic over-allocation of the river and continuing drought, water levels in Lakes Powell and Mead are at or near historic lows. To address continuing declines in water storage, various entities in Arizona, California and Nevada entered into several agreements including the 2019 Lower Basin Drought Contingency Plan, the 2021 500+ Agreement and the 2023 System Conservation Agreement. Through these agreements the states committed to:
Voluntarily leave specified volumes of water in Lake Mead as Drought Contingency Plan contributions 3ย through the year 2026.
The voluntary contribution of water totals 192,000 acre-feet per year for Arizona between Lake Mead water levels below 1,090โ and above 1,045โ and totals 240,000 acre-feet per year below 1,045โ.
The voluntary contribution of water totals 8,000 and 10,000 acre-feet per year for Nevada at these levels. California did not agree to voluntary contributions of water at Lake Mead water levels above 1,045โ.
2. Through the year 2026, voluntarily leave some water in Lake Mead as unassigned water.
Unassigned water in Lake Mead belongs to no one entity and bolsters the supply of water available through the priority system to all Colorado River contract entitlement holders in the Lower Division (referred to as โSystem Conservationโ).
The states agreed to leave approximately three million acre-feet of unassigned water in Lake Mead. The federal government paid various entities with entitlements to Colorado River water, such as municipal water providers, agricultural interests, Tribes and mining companies to leave this water in Lake Mead.
The Secretary agreed to take affirmative actions to create or conserve 100,000 acre-feet per annum or more of Colorado River system water to contribute to conservation of water supplies in Lake Mead.
For unassigned water to be left in Lake Mead, several entities with contracts to Colorado River water must agree to forego their rights to order the same water. However, in the case of System Conservation, the water is held in Lake Mead only in the year the conservation takes place and subsequently becomes available the next year for delivery through the priority system. A group of entities, including the Director of Water Resources on behalf of the State of Arizona, signed various forbearance agreements in which they agreed not to order another entityโs conserved water. In these cases, forbearance is only required in the same year in which the system conservation activity takes place. These agreements expire at the end of 2026.
If no new set of operational guidelines is in place, upon expiration of the 2007 Guidelines and the Forbearance Agreements:
Rules for annual releases of water from Lake Powell into Lake Mead revert to the guidelines set forth in the LROC.
Generally, annual releases from Lake Powell to Lake Mead are set at 8.23 million acre-feet as an objective subject to Secretarial discretion and other factors. Arguably the Secretary has more discretion under LROC to set annual releases than under the 2007 Guidelines, which more precisely define releases based on relative water levels in Lakes Powell and Mead.
2. The specified shortages assessed to Arizona and Nevada under the 2007 Guidelines become moot and shortage determinations revert to the Secretaryโs authority, which has been broadly interpreted in times of shortage by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1963 decision, Arizona v. California.
Under LROC, the Secretary has authority to โdetermine from time to time when insufficient mainstream water is available to satisfy annual consumptive use requirements of 7,500,000 acre-feetโ after consideration of various factors.
โข When insufficient water is available,
oย Deliveries through the Central Arizona Project are cut to the extent necessary to meet the demands of more senior Colorado River rights or entitlement holders in Arizona, California and Nevada.
oย If after these cuts there still remains insufficient water available to meet the demands of more senior Colorado River contract entitlement holders, the shortage provisions of Article II(B)(3) of the decree in Arizona v. California become effective, meaning that the rights of the Chemehuevi Indian, Cocopah Indian, Fort Yuma Indian, Colorado River Indian and Fort Mohave Indian Reservations are satisfied first, without regard to state lines, in order of their priority dates, and then present perfected rights are satisfied according to priority.
3. Some, but not all, forms of assigned water can no longer be created.
Creation of assigned water in Lake Mead through extraordinary conservation activities can no longer occur.
Creation of assigned water through importation of non-Colorado River system water and through certain tributary water into the Colorado River mainstem can continue to occur.
Creation of a special class of assigned water, called Developed Drought Supply, can continue to occur. Developed Drought Supply water can only be created during declared shortages and must be delivered in the same year it is created.
Rights to hold and deliver existing assigned water continue through 2036 for assigned water created through extraordinary conservation activities and through 2057 for assigned water used for Drought Contingency Plan contributions, and created through tributary water importation, non- Colorado River system water importation and Developed Drought Supply water.
Colorado River contract entitlement holders could theoretically continue to voluntarily leave water in Lake Mead as unassigned water, either compensated or not, but the expiration of the forbearance agreements means that another entity could simply order that same water for delivery.
Deliveries of Colorado River water to the Republic of Mexico are governed under a 1944 treaty and subsequent treaty minutes. Through various treaty minutes Mexico agreed to cuts to its deliveries under certain shortage conditions. These treaty minutes also allow Mexico to create assigned water in Lake Mead. The provisions regarding cuts to Mexican deliveries during shortage and the creation of Mexican assigned water expire at the end of 2026, though Mexico can continue to hold and request delivery of existing assigned water under generally the same terms and conditions that govern assigned water created by the Lower Division states through extraordinary conservation activities and used for Drought Contingency Plan contributions.
What Expiration of the 2007 Guidelines and the Forbearance Agreements Means for Arizona
Absent additional guidance from the Secretary or an agreement among the seven states that share the Colorado River, and assuming continued poor hydrology and runoff, water levels in Lakes Powell and Mead will continue to decline and Arizona can expect potentially very deep cuts to the Colorado River water imported into central Arizona via the Central Arizona Project. Eventually cuts could be deep enough to impact higher priority water users in Mohave, La Paz and Yuma Counties.
If less than 82,500,000 acre-feet of water is delivered to the Lower Division over any ten consecutive years, the United States and the Upper Division may have to contend with a legal demand from the Lower Division under Article 3.d of the Colorado Compact, which states that the Upper Division States โwill not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depleted below an aggregate of 75,000,000 acre-feet for any period of ten consecutive years.โ The Lower Division asserts that the Upper Division is also responsible to deliver half of the obligation to Mexico, bringing the total ten-year obligation to 82,500,000 acre-feet. Under continued poor hydrology and runoff, it is likely that the ten-year consecutive total will fall below 82,500,000 in 2027. [ed. emphasis mine]
1ย If Lake Powell were drawn down too far while Lake Mead remained relatively full, the risk that deliveries at Lee Ferry would be depleted below an aggregate of 75,000,000 acre-feet over ten consecutive years would increase, which would put the Upper Division at risk of failing to meet Colorado Compact requirements. At the same time, keeping Lake Mead relatively full avoids deep water shortages in the Lower Division. A goal of equalization between the reservoirs balances these risks.
2 Though, holders of Priority 1-3 entitlements would likely contest the Secretaryโs authority to cut their deliveries while withholding assigned water from the priority system.
3ย If assigned water is chosen as the form of DCP contribution, it remains recoverable above elevation 1,110 until 2057.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
Hard times in the Colorado River region. A near-average snowpack dissipated into an inflow into Powell Reservoir of only 40 percent of average; dry soils in the headwaters and high deserts, and increased evaporation and plant transpiration in a warming world are taking big tolls. And the negotiators for the seven Basin states, trying to work out a river management plan to replace the failing current management strategies, with the 30 Indian nations and Mexico looking over their shoulders, are continuing toโฆ negotiate. Trumpโs Interior Department officials have given then until November to negotiate a draft plan for beyond 2026.
Projected Lake Powell end-of-month physical elevations from the latest 24-Month Study inflow scenarios.
Meanwhile the Bureau of Reclamation has issued its annual 24-month projection, and it has no good news. Its worst case scenario โ the one everyone looks at โ suggests that, barring a huge winter this year, Powell Reservoir might drop to the elevation at which it can no longer produce hydropower by late fall 2026 โ at which point it cannot even make large deliveries downstream, because all the water would then have to go through four antique tubes never meant to carry that much water 24/7. This could undermine the best-laid plans of the negotiators, should they achieve a plan, with no ability to move sufficient water past Glen Canyon Dam until the reservoir filled back up to the power level. No plans have been announced for creating a Glen Canyon Dam bypass.
All the news dribbling out of the negotiations indicate that the negotiators persist in carrying forward the Colorado River Compactโs division of the river into Upper and Lower Basins. Do they not see that this is no longer necessary, or even desirable โ nothing but a cause of conflict and contention?
When representatives from the seven Colorado River Basin states gathered in Washington in January 1922, six of the states knew what they wanted: they wanted a seven-way division of the consumptive use of the riverโs waters that would transcend on the interstate level the appropriation doctrine all seven states adhered to intrastate.
They wanted this because southern California, the seventh state, was growing so fast, and already using so much of the riverโs water, that the other six knew they would be losers in a seven-state horse race to appropriate the riverโs water. The representatives all accepted the first-come first-served appropriation law as holy writ within their states, but saw its limits when looking at the whole river and the regional challenge of uneven development.
California sat down with the other six states because at that point, the other six states held a big card: California needed a interstate river to control floods and โrationalizeโ the flow and distribution of the riverโs water, rather than watching an uncontrolled flood of snowmelt โwasteโ most of the water to the ocean. And California knew that Congress would provide for that big dam only if all seven states were sure they would have a share of the water, once the river was controlled. So California had to participate in setting long-term limits on itself in order to get what it needed in the short term.
But after several days of trying to work out that seven-way division, the compact negotiators gave up in frustration. Each negotiator had come with estimates of his stateโs future water needs based on potentially arable land, mining-generated industry, possible urban development. Not really knowing what the future would bring did not dim their estimates at the turn of the 20th century, with the imperial impetus to โcreate our own realityโ just kicking into high gear. But by the time the seven negotiators had laid out their statesโ envisioned water needs, the basin-wide total was half again even the Bureau of Reclamationโs rosiest estimates of Colorado River flows. And no one wanted to cut their estimates, go home to tell their governor and legislators heโd had to diminish the stateโs envisioned future by a quarter or so.
Several of the frustrated negotiators thought they should abandon the whole idea of an interstate compact, but the federal representative and chairman, Herbert Hoover โ himself an engineer eager to see the big dam built โ persuaded them to stay with the idea for the rest of the year. They convened for some hearings around the west in the summer, and had a tour of the proposed big dam sites. But then Hoover and Coloradoโs representative to the commission, Delph Carpenter, began circulating the idea of a two-basin division to break the impasse over the seven-way division, and Hoover was able to convene a November charrette to work until a compact was done.
Toward the end of an eleven-day marathon at a resort near Santa Fe, with 18 transcribed sessions and who knows how many informal barroom and hotel room caucuses, Chairman Hoover summarized their situation:
“We finally reached, in effect, this general conclusion as to the form of the compact, and that was that none of the figures and data in our possession, or within the possibility of possession at this time were sufficient upon which we could make an equitable division of the waters of the Colorado River [in perpetuity]โฆ.ย [W]e make now, for lack of a better word, a temporary equitable division, reserving a certain portion of the flow of the river to the hands of those men who may come after us, possessed of a far greater fund of information; that they can make a further division of the river at such a time, and in the meantime we shall take such means at this moment to protect the rights of either basin as will assure the continued development of the river. (Text from the 12thย of 18 transcribed November meetings, boldface added)“
That was the Colorado River Compact as seen in process by the commission chairman: โa temporary equitable divisionโ to be refined and finished when โa greater fund of informationโ about both the riverโs flows and the flow of the future was known. No one โ with the probable exception of Delph Carpenter โ was very happy with the Compact the commissioners took home to their states. Arizona refused to ratify it, and it took several years to get it through the other six state legislatures. But the U.S. Congress was actually somewhat eager to develop the river, making its desert lands available for development, and decided that six of the seven states on board was good enough. The Boulder Canyon Project Act was passed in 1928, and Hoover โ then President โ was able to launch construction of not just the huge Hoover Dam, but Parker Dam as the holding bay for the Metropolitan Water Districtโs 250-mile aqueduct, and the Imperial Dam and All-American Canal to carry water to the Imperial and Coachella Valleys โ a major regional development that really set a course for the 20thย century.
Enabling that, and what followed over the next four or five decades, did achieve the Compact goal to โsecure the expeditious agricultural and industrial development of the Colorado River Basin,โ probably the major goal stated in its preamble (Article I) for most of those involved. But a century later we can say pretty definitely that its โtemporary equitable divisionโ (still apparently regarded as permanent), has not achieved most of the other goals listed in the preamble. It did not โprovide for the equitable division and apportionment of the use of the waters,โ either in the division between Basins explicit in Article III(a) nor in the relationship between the two Basins stated in Article III(d); it obviously did not โpromote interstate comityโ; and the two-basin division did not โremove causes of present and future controversies.โ If anything, the Compact created controversies with badly written sections like Article III(c) on the Mexican obligation, and Article III(d) on interbasin โobligations.โ (If you would like to review the Compact, you can find it here.)
More to the point โ it is possible now to achieve what the 1922 commissioners originally wanted: an equitable seven-way division of the use of the river with a share for Mexico, which renders the two-basin โtemporary divisionโ irrelevant and burdensome.
The seven-way division has been effected, not through interstate negotiation but through the โcontinued development of the riverโ; today, the seven states and Mexico all know, practically to the acre-foot, what has evolved as their share of the river as we have known it โ the 14.6 million acre-foot average flow of the development period, the 1930s through the 1990s.
Allotments for the three Lower Basin states were set by the Boulder Canyon Project Act in 1929 as acre-foot portions of the Compact allotment of 7.5 maf, and confirmed by the Supreme Court in its 1963-4 Arizona v. California decision. Mexico received its share, 1.5 maf, in a 1944 treaty negotiated through the U.S. State Department. And the four Upper Basin states negotiated a compact for their share of the river in 1948 โ by then known to be a variable quantity, usually less than the Compactโs allotment of 7.5 maf, so they divided their fluctuating share by percentages.
Native America in the Colorado River Basin. Credit: USBR
The โfederal reserved rightsโ of the Basinโs 30 Indian nations โ barely given a โplaceholderโ in the Compact โ have been shoehorned in as state responsibilities through the 1952 โMcCarran Amendmentโ to a resource bill; this says that all federal reserved water rights, for all public lands as well as the Indian reservations, have to be adjudicated in the state water courts. The โequityโ of this is questionable; some states have only a few Indian nations; Arizona has 22 of them. Most of the Indian nations that have not already achieved some water rights are working on โsettlementsโ out of court, negotiating with those who have been using water for which the Indians had a prior claim (dating from the creation of their reservation) for water and money with which to develop the water they can get. The federal government puts up much of the money for the development of Indian water rights; there is still a long way to go in correcting this long-standing dereliction and shame, but there has been more activity in the past couple decades than in the previous century.
The point being โ nearly everyone knows with some accuracy how much water they have had to use from the Colorado River โ in the 20th century. Hardly anyone is happy with the resulting numbers, but we also all know that this is all the water there is โ or was, in the 20th century. The river has been divided among the states and nations, de facto, if not yet de jure.
The structural deficit refers to the consumption by Lower Basin states of more water than enters Lake Mead each year. The deficit, which includes losses from evaporation, is estimated at 1.2 million acre-feet a year. (Image: Central Arizona Project circa 2019)
The alarming draw-down of the riverโs major reservoirs in the early 21stcentury to date has been only partially caused by the โdroughtโ and permanent climate-related aridification. The bulk of the draw-down has been a โstructural deficitโ stemming from the Lower Basin statesโ blithe refusal to incorporate their โsystem lossesโ โ evaporation and transpiration, riparian losses, etc โ and their portion of the Mexican share into their allotments, preferring to let the amenable Bureau release them as โsurplusโ from Powell and Mead storage โ a surplus that has not existed since the Central Arizona Project began to come on line after 1985, along with increased Upper Basin uses (still well below its โCompact allotmentโ). The Compact failed to include system loss provisions โ probably around 12-14 percent of the water that flows from the headwaters snowpack.
The good news there is that, in the planning for river management beyond 2026, the Lower Basin states have agreed to absorb the โstructural deficitโ and their share of the Mexican obligation into their river shares. The Upper Basin users have already absorbed their system losses by the time the Bureau moves Lower Basin water out of Powell.
It is not rocket science to lay out the seven-states-plus-Mexico division of the waters in a chart, a feat impossible in 1922, but largely accomplished de facto by the Compactโs century mark โ a chart without any reference to the โtemporary equitable divisionโ into two basins. If we were to eliminate the two-basin division form our future management plans, we would unload quite a lot of unnecessary baggage. We would be much closer to thinking of the Colorado again as one river, with one set of challenges for everyone, rather than this โCold Warโ between Upper and Lower.
The big challenge comes in trying to fit that division of the 14.6 maf river of 1930-2000 into the river we have today โ ~12.5 maf, and dropping incrementally but steadily.
If we lived in a fair, just and moral universe, resolution of management guidelines for the future of the one river would just be a matter of applying basic high school math: if a stateโs allotment (including a proportionate share of system losses) of a 14.6 maf river is X maf, what will be that stateโs new allotment if the riverโs volume drops to 12.5 maf? Or to 11.5 maf by 2050? Easy: you just convert the stateโs allotment to a percentage of the 14.6 maf river, and multiply those percentages by 12.5 maf, or whatever the flow has dropped too. Do that for all users and, presto, thereโs everyoneโs new 21st-century allotment, learn how to live with it โ
Wups. Uh-oh. One can already hear the โharrumphingโ firing up in the Imperial Valley: what about our senior water rights?! If you say we have to take the same cuts as everyone else, weโll see you in court!
The Interior Departmentโs current acting assistant secretary for water and science, Scott Cameron, actually spoke to that eventuality or probability in a meeting of water mavens in Arizona: โHaving senior water rights is a wonderful thing, but having senior water rights does not give you a free pass to ignore whatโs happening in the greater community.โ
Whatโs happening in the greater community is diminishing flows for everyone due to a warming, drying climate that is everyoneโs and no oneโs fault โ a problem of a different order of magnitude from the issues the senior-junior appropriation doctrine developed to resolve. If Asst. Secretary Cameronโs perception (unusually perceptive from an official in the Trump administration) were to prevail as federal policy, it might facilitate a serious discussion in the arid West about how far and how high a body of law should be applied, that originated for working out squabbles between neighbors โ with โfirst-come first-servedโ the one-size-fits-all resolution. A resolution that is usually transcended locally in dry times with โgentlemenโs agreementsโ to share the pain between neighbors who have also become friends.
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 westerners who convened for the 1922 compact commission wanted to suspend at the interstate level the appropriation doctrine they all adhered at home, for good reasons involving the uneven pace of regional development. We are now confronting a reduced volume of water for everyone, caused by a changing climate that is no oneโs and everyoneโs fault. Is this not a problem on a scale with the problem that convened a Compact commission a century ago to suspend โ or more accurately, maybe, transcend โ the appropriation doctrine at the interstate level?
Well โ we keep getting news every day about the fairness, justice and morality of our small sector of the universe. Pray for rain; itโs more likely.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral.com website (Kate Gallego, Chad Franke, Tom Kiernan and Manuel Heart). Here’s an excerpt:
August 25, 2025
Key Points
The Colorado River, a vital resource for millions, has reached a critical tipping point, thanks to drought and overuse.
The river needs urgent, collaborative action and flexible solutions for long-term water security.
Failure to reach agreements risks costly litigation and uncertain outcomes.
Reservoirs like Lakes Mead and Powell are again approaching record lows, and every water user is being affected…Against this backdrop, we urgently need unified action. We must proactively adjust our plans given the Colorado Riverโs changing water supply. We must confront the crisis with urgency and collaboration to build a workable water future for the broad network of Colorado River interests.ย To succeed, comprehensive, forward-looking solutions must replace the current crisis-to-crisis management approach…
Solutions must be rooted in flexibility, innovation and cooperation โ and acknowledge both the urgency of todayโs water supply shortages and the need for long-term water reliability and resilience.ย Doing so will require the immediate development of durable agreements โ not just between Upper and Lower Basin states, but also among the states, U.S. and tribes, and between the U.S. and Mexico โ that re-balance water demands with the riverโs shrinking supply…Creating comprehensive, forward-looking solutions also requires immediate engagement with tribes, water users and other stakeholders. Their input is needed to tailor flexible strategies that meet the needs of different water users across various basin geographies, including the mountain headwaters, the Colorado Plateau and the desert Southwest…Without such tools and agreements, the Colorado Riverโs future will be decided by the courts following litigation that inevitably breeds a failure of dialogue, delays progress and leads to costly, drawn-out battles. At the end of that road lies a loss of local control as well as uncertain and harmful outcomes to water users throughout the basin.
Glen Canyon Dam May 2022. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
August 18, 2025
The words โurgencyโ and โimmediate actionโ were used by Trump administration officials on Aug. 15 in releasing the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation 24-month study for the Colorado River Basin.
The study sees a high probability of water levels of Lake Powell falling to within 48 feet of the minimum power pool by January. That elevation, 3,490 feet above sea level, is the reservoirโs lowest level at which hydroelectricity can be produced. That has not happened since soon after Powell began filling after completion of Glen Canyon Dam in 1966.
โThis underscores the importance of immediate action to secure the future of the Colorado River,โ said David Palumbo, acting commissioner for the agency.
Scott Cameron, the acting assistant secretary for water and science in the Department of Interior, had similar words of warning to the seven states that share use of the river.
โAs the basin prepares for the transition to post-2026 operating guidelines, the urgency for the seven Colorado River Basin states to reach a consensus agreement has never been clearer,โ said Cameron. โWe cannot afford to delay.โ
The announcement cited โunprecedented droughtโ but made no mention of climate change. This seems to be a theme. [ed. emphasis mine]
Cameron, at the Getches-Wilkinson Centerโs annual water seminar in Boulder during June, talked for 24 minutes without once mentioning climate change. He even answered a question about climate change without using the phrase. He did seem to acknowledge it, saying that in the โreal worldโ there is less water than before, โand that is probably not going to change a whole bunch.โ
Might the situation be even worse than what Bureau of Reclamation has projected will be most likely?
A bias of optimism
On Aug. 14, a day before the bureauโs release of the 24-month study, John Fleck and others posted an analysis on Fleckโs Inkstain that warned the study would likely be overly optimistic.
The problem, explained Fleck and his co-authors, is that the โassumptions underlying the study do not fully capture the climate-change driven aridification of the Colorado River Basin.โ
The precipitation received from October through July in the Colorado River Basin fits in with a theme that is best understood when coupled with rising temperatures, which produces greater evaporation and transpiration. Image/Western Water Assessment
The bureau uses a 30-year average in predicting what lies ahead. However, using the hydrology of the Colorado River Basin since the 1990s no longer provides the same usefulness in predicting what lies ahead during the next 24 months. The climate is changing too fast.
In that paper, Milley and his co-authors argued that human-induced climate changes were altering the means and extremes of precipitation, evapotranspiration, and the rates of runoff in rivers. As such, they contended, using the old models to guide water management no longer worked as well.
In their posting at Inkstain, Fleck and his coauthors โ Anne Castle, Erick Kuhn, Jack Schmidt, Kathryn Sorensen and Katherine Tara โ noted that the Bureau of Reclamationโs 24-month study a year ago found that the โmost probableโ level for Powell would be 3,593 at the end of July 2025.
It was 38 feet lower than the projection. It had been another so-so or worse winter and then an early, warm spring.
This, they said, illustrated the bias toward optimism in the models used by the agency. That bias had been detailed in a 2022 study of past projections by a team led by Jian Wang of the Utah State Center for Colorado River Studies.
โMost probableโ in the Bureau of Reclamation projections occupied a band of 80% likelihood. The bureau also issues maximum and minimum probable scenarios.
Fleck and his team contend that the bureauโs โminimum probable scenario has become the most valuable in providing a reliable indicator of the futureโ for Colorado River flows.
This past winter was mediocre, near average snowfall in some basins but among the worst in the San Juans. Spring was warm or more in many places, and rains in July were almost entirely absent.
The preliminary estimated inflow into Powell for April through July was 41% of the average from 1991 through 2020, according to the bureauโs most-probable study. During July, runoff slipped to 12% of that 30-year average.
Might fortunes soon be reversed? Not likely in months ahead, said Fleck and his team. They noted this summerโs weak monsoon for most of the upper basin coupled with the seasonal outlook by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Together, they point to a warmer and drier than average fall.
โItโs a good bet that this trend will continue at least through winter,โ they wrote.
As it stands, levels in Lake Mead, downstream from Powell, will necessitate cuts in the lower-basin as required by several agreements reached between 2007 and 2019. Arizona is to see an 18% cut and Nevada a 7% cut in their annual apportionments. Mexico is to get 5% less than its annual allotment. In acre-feet, thatโs 412,000 for Arizona, 21,000 for Nevada, and 80,000 for Mexico.
A new agreement
The big story continues to be what agreements the seven basin states can achieve in recognition of the inadequacy of past agreements given reduced flows.
Drought as conventionally understood is part of the story, but only a part. A 2017 study by Jonathan Overpeck and Brad Udall, โThe 21st Century Hot Drought and Implications for the Future,โconcluded that between a third and a half of reduced flows in the Colorado from 2000 to 2014 could be attributed to the rising greenhouse gas emissions. They spoke about โmegadrought,โ a word now common in Colorado River discussions, as is โaridification.โ
This year has brought more studies that strengthen the evidence. Included is a study published just last week in Nature, that identifies new ways that the warming climate has altered the hydrology of Colorado and other southwestern states. See: โWhy rain and snow skip the Southwest.โ
In 2018, an agreement among the states was reached regarding how to deal with drought. It was universally recognized as an interim agreement, with a final agreement to be reached in advance of a 2026 deadline. That deadline is now close at hand.
That impending deadline was alluded to in the comments of the federal officials.
โHealth of the Colorado River system and the livelihoods that depend on it are relying on our ability to collaborate effectively and craft forward-thinking solutions that prioritize conservation, efficiency, and resilience,โ said Cameron, Interiorโs undersecretary, in the Aug. 15 announcement.
In June, Cameron had called on the Colorado River Basin states to submit details of a preliminary operations agreement by mid-November and share a final seven-state proposal by mid-February 2026. The plan would be to reach a final decision in the summer of 2026 with implementation beginning in October 2026.
Non-government organizations issued statements also calling for the states to figure out a way forward.
โThis is not just a crisis. Itโs also a call to action to use remaining time wisely to replace our current, reactive, emergency-based management framework with new, long-term solutions,โ said John Berggren, the regional policy manager for Western Resource Advocates. โWe canโt litigate our way out โ we must collaborate forward.โ
For many months, all reports suggested that the four-upper basin states โ who speak with one voice in these negotiations โ and the three lower-basin states remained far apart. A story on June 27 in the Las Vegas Review Journal described the meetings as โtenseโ and โdeadlocked.โ
Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico along with Colorado constitute the upper basin. Arizona, Nevada and California make up the lower basin.
Becky Mitchell, Coloradoโs representative in the negotiations, told a forum in Silverthorne covered by Big Pivots in May that hydrologic risk must be shared between the upper basin and the lower-basin states.
The Blue River flowing through Silverthorne just below Dillon Dam in May 2025. Photo/Allen Best
This sore spot has long festered. The Colorado River Compact of 1922 specified that the upper basin states โwill not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depletedโ below an aggregate of 75 million acre-feet for any 10 consecutive years. The location is between Glen Canyon and the Grand Canyon.
But what if the river fails to deliver that much water? Upper basin states have delivered that volume so far, but thatโs mostly because Wyoming, in particular, has not developed what was expected 100 yeas ago.
Those who had originally gathered in Santa Fe in 1922 to negotiate the compact had understood drought, but only as a temporary thing. They had no extensive long-term perspective โ and chose to ignore what evidence was at hand, according to a 2019 book by Fleck and Kuhn, โScience be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River.โ
Coloradoโs beef and that of other upper-basin states has been that the two big dams on the river provided certainty for the lower-basin states to get water. However, the headwaters states have no certainty. They must live with what Mother Nature provides. They have balked at cutting water use to provide certainty for downstream states. They want the risk shared.
Natural flow proposal
In June came the first public word of what may have been a breakthrough. It is called the โnatural flow proposal.โ As explained by Tom Buschatzke, the director of Arizona Water Resources, to the Arizona Republic in a story on June 18, the idea is to focus less on who gets what and more on what the river can realistically provide.
โWe do have to recognize what the hydrologic risks are to us,โ he said after presenting the idea to a committee,โ and we have to kind of find an equitable way to share those risks.โ
That idea being discussed would employ a rolling three-year average of the natural flow of the river. Natural would be defined as the volume if there were no diversions and impoundments.
Buschatzke โ a frequent visitor at the Colorado River forum sponsored by the University of Coloradoโs Getches-Wilkinson Center each June โ pointed out that the goal would be to spread the pain equitably, not equally. The lower basin would need more water than the upper basin, which has still to develop all the water allocated it in the 1922 compact.
โIt is not 50-50,โ he told represents at the June 17 meeting. โI wonโt try to speculate on what the number might be.โ
California uses the most water of any state in the Colorado River Basin, partly for its cities along the Pacific Coast but a substantial amount for agriculture in the Imperial Valley. Photo December 2015/Allen Best
A few weeks later, John Entsminger, Nevadaโs representative in interstate talks, similarly was vague about details. โItโs not something where I can tell you what the score is in the third inning: the baseball game is still being played,โ he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Details remain sparse, he added.
โEverybodyโs pretty much accepted that weโve got to come up with a new formula for dividing the river,โ Mark Squillace, an environmental law professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, told the Las Vegas newspaper. โThe devilโs in the details about getting the numbers right.โ
According to the best information that Big Pivots was able to obtain, there is still no agreement about what the percentage should be, although it is not 50-50.
Mitchell, Coloradoโs representative on the Upper Colorado River Commission (and its acting chair), told the Review-Journal that the 2007 guidelines that provide the management map of the riverโs operations โare not ustainable, because the water is just not there. Itโs not in storage, and itโs not in the river.โ
For a late-June story in Politicoโs E&E, Mitchell described the natural flows idea as a math problem. โThe concept under discussion is that Powell would release a certain percentage of volume of the average of the last few years of natural flows, as measured at Lee Ferry,โ she said.
E&E described a more complex challenge.
โThe theory โ the premise of sharing the river based on how much water would travel downstream without dams or diversions or other human interventions โ is actually a complex mathematical problem, rife with potential pitfalls and technical issues.โ
This idea of basing releases from Lake Powell likely would take several years to implement. As such, it would not immediately impact levels in the reservoir.
As for the minimum power pool at Powell, thatโs the level at which hydroelectricity can no longer be generated. Some 16 municipal and cooperative electrical utilities in Colorado get power from the dam. Those amounts tend to be smaller, about 5% or less, although important if the utilities are stretching to achieve decarbonization goals.
The greatest value of Glen Canyon is that if the Western grid has a blackout, the grid can be restarted with hydropower from the dam.
And too, the role of Congress
As administrator of the two big dams in the basin and several smaller ones, the federal government must figure out how to manage them consistently with the agreements among the states. It is also the formal administrator among the lower-basin states.
At the conference in Boulder, Cameron clearly said the federal government wants the states to figure out the solution. However, he also said that if the states cannot come to agreement, the federal government, as the administrator of the infrastructure, has authority to set policy, too.
And finally, he mentioned that the whole package may need to go to Congress, as was the case with the Colorado River Compact. It was approved in 1929. (Arizona had refused to endorse the compact until much later).
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Lake Powell at Wahweap Marina as seen in December 2021. Dwindling streamflows and falling reservoir levels have made it more likely that what some experts call a Colorado River Compact โtripwireโ will be hit in 2027. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
Climate change appears to have driven an ongoing 25-year shortfall in winter rains and mountain snows across the U.S. Southwest, worsening a regional water crisis thatโs also related to hotter temperatures and growing demand. Multiple studies now suggest that human-caused climate change is boosting an atmospheric pattern in the North Pacific that favors unusually low winter precipitation across the Southwest.
This weather pattern โ known to scientists as a negative mode of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or PDO โ is one phase of a slow-moving swing between warm and cool temperatures in the northeast and tropical Pacific Ocean. The PDOโs monthly value for July was the lowest in 171 years of data (see Fig. 1 below).
Climate change was already implicated in warming temperatures that pull more moisture from the landscape and shorten periods of mountain snow cover, thus exacerbating the impacts of dry spells. But scientists had previously assumed that the PDOโs variations over decades, which affect the rainfall and snowfall itself, were largely natural.
A study published in Nature on Wednesday, August 13, finds that emissions of climate-warming greenhouse gases and tiny sun-blocking particles called aerosols have driven long-term PDOchanges over the last few decades, depriving the Southwest of much-needed winter rain and snow.
Using new techniques to extract signal from noise in model output, the researchers found that โobserved PDO impacts โ including the ongoing multidecadal drought in the western United States โ can be largely attributed to human activity.โ [ed. emphasis mine}
Figure 1. Monthly variations in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation from 1854 to present. Most months since 1998 have registered negative PDO values. Last monthโs reading of -4.00 (July 2025) was the lowest value in the entire 171-year dataset, and the current stretch of 67 consecutive months of negative PDO values is the longest on record. (Image credit: NOAA/NCEI)
For the past quarter-century, precipitation across the Southwest has been on par with the driest periods in modern history. As the landscape dries, sunshine is able to warm it more effectively, helping boost temperatures even more and worsening the drying effects on the rivers, reservoirs, and landscapes crucial for the Southwestโs growing population.
Until now, those temperature effects were believed to be the main human-caused climate factor in the mix.
But scientists looked more closely at the PDO in part because of its relationship to a better-known pattern, the El Niรฑo and La Niรฑa oscillations in the tropical Pacific that influence weather across the world. Shorter-term La Niรฑa events, lasting 1 to 3 years, are more common and can be stronger when the longer-term PDO phase is negative, and both of these patterns strongly favor drier-than-usual winters across the Southwest.
During the last 25 years, La Niรฑa has been in place for 12 winters versus just eight winters for El Niรฑo, a tilt that has helped to reduce winter precipitation in the Southwest. The latest outlook from NOAA predicts a near-even chance of La Niรฑa conditions yet again in 2025-26.
Figure 2. La Niรฑa causes the jet stream to move northward and to weaken over the eastern Pacific. During La Niรฑa winters, the Southwest tends to see warmer and drier conditions than usual. Since La Niรฑa 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)
The Southwestโs largest two reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, were both running at less than a third of capacity as of August 3, and total inflow for the water year ending this summer was expected to be only about 50% of average.
In recent years, the Southwestโs normally scorching heat has intensified to levels that are smashing record after record. On August 7, Phoenix reached 118 degrees Fahrenheit, the highest reading ever observed there so late in any summer in data going back 130 years.
Experts in the Phoenix area have documented a major spike in heat mortality over the past decade, as population and vulnerabilities increase along with the heat itself. More than a thousand heat-related deaths were recorded in 2023 and 2024 alone.
"Phoenix is experiencing record-breaking, prolonged extreme heat driven by climate change, pushing the city into uncharted territory with growing risks to health, infrastructure, and daily life." via weather.com/news/climate…
Even more disconcerting is what the new work suggests for the Southwest going forward. The Nature study warns that as long as human-produced greenhouse gases and aerosols continue to produce these effects, โthe PDO will remain persistent in its negative state, driving continued precipitation deficits in the western U.S.โ
Confounding expectations
The puzzling behavior of the Pacific over the last several decades has drawn increasing scrutiny, especially since itโs long been expected that 21st-century warming would lead to an El Niรฑo-like pattern. Instead, the Pacific has behaved in the opposite fashion. Itโs been unclear why model projections of the PDO have been off track for so long.
โI donโt think weโve untangled all this yet, but I think this opens up new possibilities for what models are missing,โ said Jeremy Klavans of the University of Colorado Boulder, lead author of the Nature paper.
Figure 3. A schematic showing where sea surface temperatures are generally above and below average during the positive (warm) phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. The โwarmโ refers to the horseshoe-like arc of warmer-than-average readings from the Gulf of Alaska along the west coast of North America and into the eastern tropical Pacific, where it often coincides with an El Niรฑo event. Since 2000, most years have featured the opposite pattern, with the horseshoe in blue instead of red and the eastern Pacific often in a La Niรฑa mode. (Image credit:ย Adapted by NOAA Climate.govย from original by Matt Newman based on NOAA ERSSTv4 data.)
Figure 2. La Niรฑa causes the jet stream to move northward and to weaken over the eastern Pacific. During La Niรฑa winters, the Southwest tends to see warmer and drier conditions than usual. Since La Niรฑa 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)
Plucking the signal of climate change out of decades of noise
The large year-to-year and decade-to-decade variability in the PDO makes it hard to detect subtle but important longer-term trends. Moreover, climate models tend to exaggerate the peaks and valleys in the PDOโs natural variability.
Scientists increasingly study questions like the PDOโs recent behavior using model ensembles โ dozens of simulations from the same model for the same period, with tiny variations in the starting-point data that account for inherent uncertainty in models and observations. Klavans and colleagues found that at least 70 simulations were needed in order for a model ensemble to extract the longer-term climate-change influence from the natural variations. Their project ended up drawing on 572 ensemble members from 13 separate models.
Like a sound mixer at a recording studio boosting an instrument that would otherwise be drowned out, the researchers amped up the strength of the PDOโs longer-term climate change signal while retaining its shorter-term variability. After this adjustment, the models ended up doing a much better job of replicating the recent multi-decade drop in winter precipitation across the Southwest. This finding suggests that the fainter, longer-term signal, obscured until now, is actually a crucial part of whatโs happening.
Based on prior work in the Atlantic Ocean, it appears that the climate-change impact on the PDO stems from greenhouse gas increases as well as the global evolution of sun-blocking air pollution over the last few decades.
โWeโve now demonstrated the signal-to-noise problem in both the North Atlantic and North Pacific,โ Klavans said. In both cases, the signals of longer-term climate change in atmospheric patterns were getting drowned out by the noise of natural variability. The techniques employed to get around this problem are helping to reveal strengths in model performance that can now be accessed, according to Klavans: โWe think this example is just scratching the surface of what models can tell us more broadly about regional climate impacts.โ
The biggest El Niรฑo events can sometimes push the PDO into a positive mode that can persist for years or decades, but the strong El Niรฑo of 2023-24 didnโt accomplish that feat. Next time around, Klavans will be watching intently: โIf the eastern equatorial Pacific starts warming, if we get an El Niรฑo-like response, does it flip the PDO?โ
More sleuthing bolsters the case
Another recent paper, published last month in Nature Geoscience, reinforces the idea that climate change itself has pushed the Southwest into a lower-precipitation mode since the 1980s. Using a variety of model simulations, the authors show that sun-blocking aerosol emissions appear to have teamed up with the influence of human-produced warming in the tropics to favor persistently high pressure in the North Pacific. In turn, this negative-PDO-like pattern has helped steer wintertime precipitation away from the Southwest.
Climate scientists refer to these chains of events as โforcingsโ, meaning that something other than natural variability has driven, or forced, changes to weather and climate. Forcings can be anything from a one-time massive volcanic eruption to decades of sun-blocking pollution or centuries of greenhouse-gas emissions.
โThe main takeaway is that thereโs this forced signal in historical droughts for the Southwest since 1980, not only in temperature but also in the precipitation changes,โ said lead author Yan-Ning Kuo of Cornell University.
Thereโs been some research suggesting that the long-expected climate-change trend toward El Niรฑo-like patterns in the Pacific could finally emerge later this century as the world continues to warm. But even if that occurs, โit is unlikely to substantially alleviate the currently projected future drought risk,โ Kuo and colleagues warn in their new paper.
โFor the longest time, we chalked these precipitation changes up to natural variability,โ said Cornellโs Flavio Lehner, a co-author on the paper. โI think weโre revisiting that, and it heightens the stakes. If indeed the forcings continue to act in this way, then precipitation decline in the Southwest may continue. It makes a much stronger case for human influenceRead: Wet winter wonโt fix Colorado River woes
Clues from 6,000 years ago
Yet another just-published study โ this one looking back thousands of years โ suggests that a warming planet itself, even without human-added greenhouse gases, can help push the PDO into its drier-in-the-Southwest mode for many years. This paper, also published in Nature Geoscience last month, focuses on the mid-Holocene period, about 6,000 years ago.
At that point, Earthโs 23,000-year precession cycle (basically a wobble around Earthโs rotation axis) had lined up Northern Hemisphere summer with perihelion, the planetโs closest approach to the Sun. As a result, winters were generally colder and summers warmer than today. Also, the current Sahara Desert had been layered with vegetation for millennia; it would be hundreds of years more before it would start morphing into the arid landscape that โSaharaโ brings to mind.
Although the causes were different from today, the climate was relatively warm across the world, making this study period useful for shedding light on whatโs happening now, said the studyโs lead author, Victoria Todd of the University of Texas at Austin.
When a set of 23 paleoclimate simulations from 17 models replicated this period, they produced a long-lived negative-PDO-like pattern. This matches up with winter precipitation records for the Southwest, inferred from new leaf-wax isotope records from sites in New Mexico and Colorado that extend back 12,000 to 14,000 years.
โWe found that Northern Hemisphere warming in the past, and what we see in the future projections, really does keep the North Pacific in this persistent sea surface temperature pattern that resembles the negative phase of the PDO, and that this drives long-term drought in the Southwest U.S.โ Todd said.
Todd and co-authors end their paper with a stark warning that captures the mood of all three recent studies:
โmodels may be underestimating the severity of future winter precipitation changes and the future risk of drought in the Southwest United States.โ
Clara Deser, a senior scientist at the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research and a longtime researcher on variability and change in the Earth system, is among the coauthors on the papers led by Klavans and Kuo. โI still think there is a role for both natural variability and anthropogenic [human-related] influences on PDO trends over the past 30 years or so,โ Deser said. โBut the new research (which comes from independent lines of evidence) is pointing to a relatively larger role for the latter compared to the former.โ
Dive deeper: What exactly does โdroughtโ mean?
The term โdroughtโ is often used in multiple and overlapping ways that can get confusing. When precipitation is below average for an extended period, thatโs meteorological drought. When such a dry period affects soils and crops, itโs agricultural drought, and when it hits water supplies, itโs hydrological drought. More recently, the term ecosystem drought has come into use, referring to more general landscape drying.
The U.S. Southwest has dealt with all of these unwelcome guests over most of the last quarter-century. A number of high-profile studies have classified the period since 2000 as a megadrought, which refers to an intense, multi-decade drought โ in this case, an especially stark one in its impacts on the environment and society.
An analysis led by Park Williams (University of California, Los Angeles) deemed the period from 2000 to 2021 as the worst megadrought in at least 1,200 years for a broad region from southern Idaho and Oregon to northwest Mexico.
What about the drought subtypes? Precipitation has fallen persistently short of average in this megadrought period, with 17 out of 25 water years from 1999-2000 to 2024-25 running drier than the 20th-century average. Looking purely at meteorological drought, this has been a prolonged, high-impact event, yet itโs not completely unprecedented. Across the Southwest climate region (Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah), total water-year precipitation from 1999-2000 through 2024-25 averaged 13.53 inches, according to NOAA. These values were actually a touch lower during several periods in the mid-20th century, including 13.42 inches from 1942-43 through 1966-67.
Figure 4. Average water-year precipitation (October through September), 1895-96 through 2024-25, for the Southwest region (the Four Corners states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah). Annual amounts are in green; the running five-year average is in red. The lowest five-year averages occurred in the mid-1950s and the early 2000s. The linear precipitation trend (not shown) is about 0.04 inch per decade, or about 0.52 inch from 1895-96 through 2024-25. (Image credit: NOAA/NCEI)
Itโs all too clear what has pushed this dry period into truly historic territory: a warming climate. Distinctly hotter temperatures across the Southwest โ rising about 2.6 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 130 years, close to the rate of global-scale warming โ have drawn more and more moisture out of the landscape.
Figure 5. Average annual temperatures (October through September), 1895-96 through 2024-25, for the Southwest region (the Four Corners states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah). (Image credit: NOAA/NCEI)
In their 2022 study noted above, Williams and colleagues based their worst-megadrought designation on soil moisture, reconstructed over the past 1,200 years using proxy data from tree rings, whose width corresponds closely to annual moisture.
We canโt know for sure how much rain or snow fell across these 1,200 years. But Williams and colleagues estimated that without human-caused climate change, โthe turn-of-the-twenty-first-century drought would not be on a megadrought trajectory in terms of severity or duration.โ Based on model output, they attributed 42% of the 22-year drought (as defined by soil-moisture loss) to climate change. One could imagine that percentage going higher if the most recent PDO-related research above were taken into account.
The Bureau of Reclamation recently released its August 24-month study of the Colorado River, its projected water supplies, and the effect on reservoir levels and water cutbacks. Itโs a doozy that, according to the Bureau, reaffirms the โimpacts of unprecedented drought,โ and necessitates continued water-use reductions for Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico.
Thing is, it may actually be even worse than the feds predict.
Hereโs the chart for Lake Powell, showing reservoir levels for July, and projected levels for the maximum, minimum, and most probable inflow scenarios. Check it out:
Projected Lake Powell end-of-month physical elevations from the latest 24-Month Study inflow scenarios.
A couple of details struck me right off the bat. The first is that in order for the maximum scenario to come to fruition, there would have to be a big surge of flow in the Colorado River upstream from Lake Powell in October, November, and December (see how the blue line departs from the others in October?), followed by a massively snowy winter. Itโs possible, but seems pretty unlikely, given that inflows and water levels almost always drop in the fall and winter.
The second is that even in the minimum flow scenario, they are predicting that next yearโs spring runoff will increase lake levels by about eight feet, whereas this year the runoff only boosted the level by four feet. So even the worst case scenario is better than the most recent reality. For the most probable scenario to work out, meanwhile, this coming winter would have to be far snowier than this past one โ possible, but I wouldnโt bank on it.
Now, I donโt really know what Iโm talking about here. But John Fleck, Anne Castle, Eric Kuhn, et al, most certainly do. And they wrote a piece warning that the Bureau of Reclamationโs forecasts historically tend toward the optimistic. โWhatever you see in Reclamationโs report of the โMost Probableโ reservoir levels for the next two years,โ they write on Fleckโs Inkstain blog, โwe must prepare for things to be much worse.โ
They remind readers that last year, Reclamation predicted Lake Powell would most probably be up to 3,593 feet above sea level by the end of this July. In fact, it was at 3,555 feet (and has dropped another four feet since then). So, yeah, Rec was way the heck off, and it certainly wasnโt the first time. Fleck and company say this is because the study does not โfully capture the climate-change driven aridification of the Colorado River Basin.โ
This all matters because Reclamation bases water deliveries and cuts on these studies. And if they have an โoptimistic bias,โ then it could affect planning, and may lead to Lake Powellโs levels dropping far faster than predicted, which could in turn lead to another โChallenge at Glen Canyonโ a la 1983, albeit due to too little water rather than too much.
It has once again prompted the Utah Rivers Council, Glen Canyon Institute, and Save the Colorado to call for the feds to overhaul the river outlet tubes and provide a bypass outlet for Glen Canyon Dam that will allow water to be released safely when levels drop below the minimum power pool.
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
Thunderheads at sunset over the Four Corners Country. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
It always began with a hot summerโs day in late July or early August. The sun beating down from a cloudless noontime sky, the high growl of lawnmowers harmonizing in the distance, the pungent smell of freshly cut grass. Stillness. Maybe a bit of loneliness, too, as the other neighborhood kids are off at their other parentโs house, or at summer camp, or whatever. Maybe my brother will take me fishing with him. Put the worm on the hook, toss it into the murky pool upstream from the bridge, grow impatient and decide to catch the little bullheads instead. Mottled sculpin, actually. The riverโs low this time of year, low enough to drag an old log in and ride it downstream for a bit till it bucks us off and we scramble to stand up on the slippery rocks in the current, and thatโs when we notice the sun is not so bright and look up to see towering thunderheads all billowy above Smelter Mountain and the breeze kicks up prickly sand and throws it at us and suddenly itโs not hot anymore and itโs time to get home before the rain and the lightning, even though our jeans and shirts and TG&Y sneakers are soaking wet already.
We jog through the park and up the hill and another block to the house and I stay out in the yard to await the storm. The wind bends the big maple and elm and ash trees, threatens to tear another branch off the old apricot, rushes through my hair. The sky, now, is dark grey, almost cobalt blue. A flash of lightning โฆ one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three โ- boom! Itโs getting close. And then the first drop of rain hits my outstretched hand, big and cold, and I run onto the porch to revel in the petrichor and the tempest to come.
Butte and monsoon sky, Southeastern Utah. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
It is the monsoon season in the Southwest, which, once upon a time, meant that a violent thunderstorm would arrive every afternoon, bringing huge amounts of precipitation in a short period of time, perhaps in the form of hail or sleet, leading to gully busters and flash floods and overflowing gutters and a spike in the riverโs flow. Then the clouds would move on, the sun would return for the last hour or two of the day, and steam would rise from the pavement, giving the arid town a glimpse of sultriness.
It has always been my favorite time of year, especially in Durango and the Animas Valley. Thereโs just something about the combination of colors: The slate-blue sky against the desert-varnish-striped Entrada sandstone against the deep red Cutler and Chinle formation against the emerald green of irrigated hayfields. And the weird patterns the storms follow as they move through the valley. Downtown can be deluged, while just north or south of town stays bone dry.
Horses, sky, Ute Mountain. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
But then, each part of the West is special during the monsoon: The mountains are downright frightening, especially when youโre rushing to summit a peak before the storm and you look over to see your companionโs hair standing on end. Canyon Country can be a blast, so long as youโre in an elevated area where you can watch the water spill off sandstone cliffs and race through sandy arroyos and you donโt have to drive back across that arroyo to get to work or something. And down in Tucson and Phoenix it often provides extra excitement in the form of dust clouds, then crazy lightning and thunder displays, followed by torrents that provide a bit of relief from the searing heat.
This year, however, the monsoon has so far failed to arrive. In fact, over the last decade or so, it seems to have been far less reliable generally than it was in my youth. Memory, however, is fallible, especially when it comes to recalling weather patterns from the distant and even not so distant past. So I checked the records, and they verify that Iโm not totally fabricating things here.
Durangoโs online records only go back to 2000, so they donโt do me much good. Instead, I relied on Mesa Verde National Park, which has records back to the 1920s (but tends to be drier than Durango). Based on a random sampling from each decade, it would appear that the monsoon nearly always delivers in parts of July and August, with normal monthly precipitation totals of 1.4โ and 2.05โ respectively. However, my memory of nearly daily storms was off: Even way back when I was a kid, it only rained every three days or so, sometimes less often. Meanwhile, the more recent past hasnโt been quite as bad as I thought. The July-August precipitation totals were below normal for six of the last ten years, and above normal during the other four. Not great, but not catastrophic.
Still, August is more than halfway over and the two month total so far is only .27โ of precipitation, all of which fell in July.
Dark sky, road, ball. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
***
The result, naturally, is lower-than-normal streamflows (which were already down due to the lack of snow last winter and above-normal temperatures). This isnโt only bad for us terrestrial water users, but also harms fish and other aquatic life, especially when accompanied by high water temperatures. The Yampa River in northwestern Colorado, for example, is running at just 56 cubic feet per second at the USGSโs Deerlodge Park gauge, which is not good. But more concerning is that the water temperature has been shooting up to 81ยฐ F during the day. Trout start to struggle at around 70ยฐ.
๐ซฃ Correction ๐
Remember the Monkeywrenching essay I wrote last week? I have been informed by a very reliable source, eyewitness, and possible accomplice โ who will remain anonymous, of course โ that I was wrong about my father and companions burning a single billboard near Silverton. Hereโs how it really unfolded:
The Colorado River flows near Parker, Arizona on August 5, 2025. The Colorado River Indian Tribes want to give the river the same legal rights as a person, taking millennia of cultural values and putting them into law. Alex Hager/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
August 20, 2025
This story is part of ongoing coverage of water in the West, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
In far western Arizona, the dusty beige expanse of desert stretches as far as the eye can see. Under the baking summer sun, which regularly pushes temperatures above 110 degrees in the summer, even scrubby desert bushes can struggle to survive.
But in the middle of that desert, the Colorado River creates a striking strip of green.
The river winds through the valleys and deserts of the Southwest, carrying Rocky Mountain snowmelt hundreds of miles away, giving life to places like Parker, Arizona. Itโs home to the Colorado River Indian Tribes โ one of 30 federally recognized tribes in the Colorado River Basin, but one of the few whose land includes a stretch of the river itself.
โIt’s our lifeblood,โ said Dillon Esquerra, a member of the tribe who serves as its water resources director. โIt’s who we are. It’s part of our identity.โ
People in this community have deep cultural ties to the river that go back millennia. Many of those people, Esquerra said, have a close personal relationship with its life-giving water.
โWe look at it as something that nurtures us,โ he said, โSo we have to protect it.โ
Dillon Esquerra, water resources director for the Colorado River Indian Tribes, poses in the ‘Ahakhav Tribal Preserve near Parker, Arizona on August 6, 2025. โ[The Colorado River] is our lifeblood,โ he said. โIt’s who we are. It’s part of our identity.โ Alex Hager /KUNC
Now, the Colorado River Indian Tribes, often referred to as CRIT, is trying to take those long-held cultural ideas and put them into law. They are planning to establish legal personhood status for the Colorado River, giving it some of the same rights and protections a human could hold in court. No government, tribal or otherwise, has given these kinds of rights to the Colorado River before.
The effort comes at a critical juncture in the riverโs future. Climate change means thereโs less water in the river each year, and steady demand from cities and farms is stretching that supply thin. The regionโs indigenous people have largely been shut outfrom decisions about its management, despite a long history of using โ and living alongside โ the river long before it was divided and allocated according to the laws of white settlers.
CRIT, in essence, is trying to work within those laws to get some representation for a river that it sees as a living, beleaguered individual.
People along the river
The people of CRIT are river people. Itโs in their name. The traditional name of the Mohave, Hamakhav, means โpeople along the river.โ
CRIT itself is a relatively modern construct, a reservation established by the U.S. government that puts four different ethnic groups under the umbrella of one tribal government. The tribeโs current reservation lands were originally occupied by the Mohave people, then the Chemehuevi. In the 1940s and 1950s, Hopi and Navajo people were relocated to the reservation from further north.
What many of those people share, especially those who grew up on CRITโs riverside reservation, is a deep reverence for the Colorado River.
The Colorado River flows into Parker, Arizona on August 5, 2025. The river holds deep cultural importance to the people of the Colorado River Indian Tribes. “We’re supposed to be the stewards of these gifts from our creator,” said Anisa Patch, a tribal council member. Alex Hager/KUNC
In our culture, the river is precious,โ said Anisa Patch, a member of the CRIT tribal council who is among those pushing for legal personhood status. โWe’re supposed to be the stewards of these gifts from our creator. That’s what was taught to us by my grandmother, our aunts, our other relatives. It’s in the stories.โ
Patch explained that personhood is a way to take those deeply-held cultural and spiritual values and put them into a lasting, enforceable code โ one that will stay in writing across generations and changes in political leadership.
โWe want to have a stake in the ground to stand firm on,โ she said. โTo say that you have to recognize this is something not just personal to us, but something of cultural significance, something of significance to life itself for a lot of people.โ
A river at a crossroads
CRITโs decision to declare personhood status for the Colorado River is a timely one.
The river is used by nearly 40 million people and a massive agriculture industry across seven states. That includes major cities like Denver and Los Angeles, as well as farms that send produce to grocery shelves across the nation. It has been cut and divided and redirected in ways that exemplify humanityโs attempts to defy the design of nature. The Colorado River is stored in reservoirs that represent historic feats of engineering. Its water is pumped hundreds of miles through tunnels and canals that carve through deserts and mountains.
With the river portioned out by a complicated web of physical and legal infrastructure, CRITโs leadership worries that there isnโt much water left for the river itself, nor the plants and animals that rely on it.
โWe’ve taken, we’ve taken, we’ve taken, we’ve taken from this river,โ said Amelia Flores, CRITโs chairwoman. โWe’re not giving back. We’re not being reciprocal and giving back.โ
The sun rises over a boat dock on the Colorado River near Parker, Arizona on August 6, 2025. Boaters visiting the Colorado River Indian Tribe’s land and riverside casino resort provide an economic benefit to the community. Alex Hager/KUNC
Right now, the Colorado River is at a crossroads. Policymakers are negotiating a new plan to share its water after the current rules expire in 2026, and they are facing calls to implement painful, permanent cuts to some areasโ water supplies.
A Supreme Court decree, Arizona v. California, recognized CRIT as having the most senior water rights on the lower Colorado River, and among the most senior in the entire basin. That means CRIT has some of the most legally untouchable water rights along the lower half of the Colorado River, making the tribe the last to face cutbacks in times of shortage.
Longstanding legal precedent means the fast-growing Phoenix area would likely be the first to face cutbacks. As that possibility settles in, cities and municipalities in the nationโs 10th-largest metro area are knocking on CRITโs door, looking to lease some of the tribeโs water. The tribeโs land is about 130 miles west of Phoenix, straddling the Arizona-California border.
Tribal leaders said the new legal protections would serve two purposes: a symbolic one and a practical one. The first is about sending a message.
As those Phoenix-area cities come to do business with CRIT, those legal protections would force outside governments and water agencies to sign deals acknowledging the nuanced importance of the river.
โIt’s not just going to be an economic transaction,โ said John Bezdek, a water attorney employed by the tribe. โIt’s going to be one that talks about the river, the needs of the community and how those are intertwined.โ
Colorado River water flows through La Paz County, Arizona on August 6, 2025. The Central Arizona Project canal carries water from near the Colorado River Indian Tribes reservation to Phoenix and Tucson. Cities in the Phoenix area may look to the tribe in search of more water amid the threat of mandatory cutbacks to their existing Colorado River supplies. Alex Hager/KUNC
The second purpose, Bezdek said, is more practical.
Tribal council members are considering setting up a fund for the river, and anybody leasing water from the tribe would have to pay into it in order to do business. That money could be used for habitat restoration along the river, like improving wetlands, setting up ponds for migrating birds or expanding a nature preserve on the reservation. It could also boost tribal membersโ access to the river by funding new parks or designated swimming areas.
The money could also be used to teach tribal youth about the importance of the Colorado River.
โWe want to keep that essence alive as much as we can,โ Flores said. โAnd if the essence is in this Western way of thinking, then so be it, because the next generation coming up may not have that cultural tie, that religious tie to the river.โ
Beyond the Colorado River
While legal personhood for the Colorado River would be new, the idea of giving rights to an element of nature has been around for a while.
CRITโs effort is part of the โrights of natureโ movement, which has seen tribal and non-tribal governments around the world try to establish protections for the waters, lands and plants that are important to them.
Flores said the idea for Colorado River personhood came from a series of trips to New Zealand, where she canoed the Whanganui River with the indigenous Mฤori people. They achieved legal personhood for the river in 2017 after one of New Zealandโs longest-running court cases.
Cases like the Whanganui, and a handful of similar legal efforts in the United States, can provide some insights on what might happen with this historic rights of nature declaration on the Colorado River.
Amelia Flores, chairwoman of the Colorado River Indian Tribes, poses near the tribe’s government offices on August 6, 2025. Tribal leaders view legal personhood as a way to put their cultural values and reciprocal relationship with the river into law. Alex Hager/KUNC
Erin OโDonnell, a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne in Australia, researches water law with a focus on the global rights of nature movement. OโDonnell said those rights can be a โpowerful transformative process to shift human relationships with rivers,โ but also a โsword that can cut both waysโ by inciting legal backlash, especially in the U.S.
OโDonnell cited a 2019 case in which the city of Toledo, Ohio, established a โbill of rightsโ for Lake Erie, and was promptly sued by a farming corporation. Not long after, the bill of rights was struck down in court for being โunconstitutionally vague.โ
โWe have seen significant backlash in the United States,โ OโDonnell said. โA real rejection of the idea that nature should have rights, and a kind of fear-based reaction that says, โI’m going to sue to dismantle these rights and make them invalid before they can be weaponized against me.โโ
OโDonnell said that tribal rights of nature declarations are often perceived differently, though, because they are focused on humansโ relationship with nature, not just legal rights. In cases like CRITโs, she said, granting legal personhood to a river can start to change the way that people outside the river think about its water and health.
โThe most successful examples of rights of nature around the world have been the ones that are indigenous led,โ OโDonnell said. โThey tend to be the ones that get less backlash. Not necessarily no backlash, but certainly a lot less.โ
New Zealandโs Whanganui River, which directly inspired CRITโs legal push, OโDonnell said, is โan outstanding example of almost no backlash.โ
Cars exit the Colorado River Indian Tribes reservation on August 5, 2025. Tribal leaders said they would use legal personhood rights to fund habitat improvements along the river and education programs for the community’s youth. Alex Hager/KUNC
The biggest questions about how CRITโs declaration will play out have to do with how the riverโs new rights will be deployed in court.
The Colorado River will only have legal personhood under CRIT tribal law, which only applies to the water that it has the legal right to use and lease.
So, if a faraway water user, outside of tribal land, does something to the river that impacts the stretch running through CRITโs land, can they be sued? OโDonnell said that it depends a lot on how the new law is written.
Bezdek said CRIT does not plan to use legal personhood status to go after a person or entity that is harming the river outside of tribal lands, which would fall outside of tribal law.
But, OโDonnell said, creating legal personhood for the Colorado River could leave the door open to lawsuits. Another case in the U.S. gives us clues about how that might play out.
In 2018, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe in Minnesota recognized the rights of manoomin, or wild rice. Courts have mostly interpreted those protections narrowly and havenโt held faraway entities liable for harm to the water rice needs to grow. That example, OโDonnell said, shows it would be difficult for similar cases on the Colorado River to succeed.
New tools for an uncertain future
How CRITโs plans will shape the broader debate over the future of the Colorado River remains to be seen. Tribes have largely been excluded from negotiations about sharing its water. Many of them have directly called for greater inclusion in todayโs talks. For the most part, tribes still do not have a formal role in the state and federal discussions that will shape the riverโs next chapter.
A personhood declaration may not directly change that, but one tribal law expert says itโs worth trying anyway.
โWe have to recognize that what has happened to date hasn’t really worked, but the river is still in decline,โ said Heather Tanana, a member of the Navajo Nation and a law professor at the University of Denver. โWe’re still over-allocating and over-using, so turning to new ideas, new tools, definitely should be explored, and rights of nature is one of those.โ
Tanana said rights of nature can change the way people think about the natural world at a time when the Colorado River faces complicated, unprecedented challenges.
d Dillon Esquerra, water resources director for the Colorado River Indian Tribes, watches water flow into an irrigation canal near Parker, Arizona on August 6, 2025. “โAs far I’m concerned,โ he said, โWe’ve always looked at the river as a person.โ Alex Hager/KUNC
Only one tribe in the U.S. has succeeded in giving rights of nature to a river. The Yurok tribe secured legal personhood for the Klamath River, which runs through Oregon and California. Amy Bowers Cordalis, a Yurok member and lawyer for the tribe, said it was a โ100% good ideaโ for CRIT to pursue legal personhood.
โTribal rights of nature is a really important step in bringing social, economic and environmental justice to tribes,โ Cordalis said. โBecause it is a declaration of the tribeโs relationships with the natural environment. Itโs a critical step into bringing those values and rights into modern U.S. law.โ
Cordalis said the Yurok Tribeโs personhood declaration has had impacts outside of the courtroom. Putting tribal wisdom and ecosystem health at the forefront of decision making gave people โtremendous hope.โ
โHowever, CRIT decides to approach this,โ Cordalis said. โIf itโs consistent with their values, their sovereignty, the future they want to create, then it is a positive step in the right direction.โ
While rights of nature may be a modern legal tool, the values they represent go back generations.
Dillon Esquerra, CRITโs water resources director, stood amid the tall reeds and grasses of the ‘Ahakhav Tribal Preserve, a backwater of the Colorado River, where native plants and animals thrive across more than 1,200 acres of protected habitat. In the background, birds chirped and cooed. Under the waterโs surface, fish flitted in and out of clustered aquatic plants.
โAs far as I’m concerned we’ve always looked at the river as a person. It’s an entity,” said Esquerra. “It’s what we rely on to survive, you know. It is a person to us. It’s a living, breathing person.โ
โItโs a really scary time to be living in the basin and trying to help with water management at a time where thereโs so much fear and stress,โ she said.
Directing the Colorado River Program, Hawkins will lead teams working within seven U.S. states, 30 tribal nations and Mexico. Programs range from on-the-ground conservation projects to basinwide policy issues and interstate negotiations.
Colorado water officials announced Wednesday a rough plan to figure out how the state would handle an unwelcome specter in the Colorado River Basin: forced water cuts.
Mandatory water cuts are possible under a 103-year-old Colorado River Compact in certain circumstances, mainly if the riverโs 10-year flow falls too low. Itโs a possibility that is one or two โbad yearsโ away, some experts say.
Colorado, however, does not have a clearly defined plan, or regulations, for how exactly it would handle such forced water cuts. Itโs time to start preparing, according to state engineer Jason Ullmann, Coloradoโs top water cop.
Over the years, Coloradans on both sides of the Continental Divide have asked about these โcompact administration regulations,โ Ullmann told state lawmakers during the Water Resources and Agriculture Review Committee hearing Wednesday in Steamboat Springs.
โWeโve heard those questions,โ Ullmann, director of the Division of Water Resources, said as hundreds of water professionals listened at the Colorado Water Congress Summer Meeting.
If the riverโs flow falls below a 10-year rolling average of about 82.5 million acre-feet, the Lower Basin states โ Arizona, California and Nevada โ could demand that the Upper Basin send more water downstream based on the 1922 Colorado River Compact. In the water world, this is often called a โcompact call.โ
The Upper Basin states โ Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming โ argue that the trigger is actually 75 million acre-feet because of a difference in legal opinions about how the basin states should meet their obligations to share Colorado River water with Mexico.
That 10-year average flow was forecast to be about 82.8 million acre-feet by September 2026. If the flow falls below the tripwire, it would cause a legal mire that could take years to sort out.
State officials said Colorado is in compliance and expects to remain so in the future. If a compact call ever happened, it would be a historic first for the Colorado River Basin.
Colorado officials would need to be able to send more water downstream. But the state doesnโt have regulations to say who cuts back, where the water comes from, when cuts happen or how it would track the water to make sure it would end up where it needed to go.
State officials have debated whether they should even have these discussions in light of larger basin negotiations over water use. Some people wanted to focus the stateโs resources on the negotiations. Others feared that finding water supplies that could be cut would weaken the stateโs stance that it has no extra water to spare.
Based on Ullmannโs remarks, the state is shifting its next course of action: many, many feedback meetings with communities.
This is pretty big news, said state Sen. Dylan Roberts, a Frisco Democrat, asking for more details about the timeline.
This winter and spring, state officials will reach out to key water user groups to host small listening sessions to hear their thoughts on the need for compact administration regulations, Ullmann said.
After that, the state will hold broader public meetings to get more input.
โItโs not something that we intend on doing in a vacuum,โ Ullmann said. โItโs important for everybody in the state of Colorado that this would be a very transparent question.โ
The state has already started on another key task when it comes to managing mandatory water cuts: improving how the Western Slope measures its water diversions.
โYou canโt manage what you canโt measure,โ Ullmann said.
Western Slope water users do already measure their use, but the measurements are not as advanced or consistent as in other river basins where Coloradans already curtail their use to meet interstate water sharing obligations, he said.
The state has already made progress on improving measurement rules and requirements in northwestern Colorado, southwestern Colorado and the Gunnison River area. Water diversions along the Colorado River in western Colorado are next up, a process that will wrap up in November.
Colorado could also adapt to the prospect of forced cuts by creating a โconservation pool,โ like a savings account that could be tapped in the event of a compact call, according to other water experts who spoke to lawmakers.
Some pinned their hopes on the stateโs Colorado River negotiators who have been charged with reaching a seven-state agreement for how to manage the basinโs major reservoirs after the current operating rules expire in 2026.
โWeโre not going to have a compromise unless they [the Lower Basin] waive compact compliance threats. We just canโt enter into any agreement with that,โ said Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River District.
Those negotiations have been stalled over fundamental issues like how to cut back on water in the basinโs driest water years.
Coloradoโs Colorado River Commissioner, Becky Mitchell, told lawmakers Wednesday that the discussions continue to be challenging. Negotiators have until November to share more information about a seven-state agreement with the federal government.
โWhether or not we reach a seven-state consensus, all of us will be forced to deal with this reality in one way or another,โ Mitchell said. โBut today, what weโre hearing from our counterparts is they may be unwilling to reduce their uses in some dry years. It appears they believe that this gap should somehow be filled by the Upper Basin water, using any means necessary.โ
Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Politics website (Eugene Buchanan). Here’s an excerpt:
Tribal leaders are pushing for a seat at the negotiating table, where allocation and management of the Colorado River will be determined.ย The representatives from tribal nations joined a panel discussion called โColorado River: The Emerging Role of Tribes in the 2026 Negotiations,โ moderated by the Nature Conservancyโs Western Colorado Water Project Director Celene Hawkins, at the Colorado Water Congress in Steamboat Springs. During the panel, water executives from several of the 30 tribes relying on the Colorado River Basinโs water talked about their challenges and successes in managing the precious resource. While Native American Tribes hold significant water rights in the Colorado River Basin, their role in the systemโs management is limited. Key hurdles, they said, include funding to implement water programs, infrastructure improvements, and water accountability…
โIn the past, tribes have been treated as an afterthought when it comes to water issues and negotiations,โ said Lisa Yellow Eagle. โBut now weโre having open, honest dialogue.โ
Native America in the Colorado River Basin. Credit: USBR
The Colorado River Water Conservation District spans 15 Western Slope counties. Voters across the district are considering a mill-levy increase that would raise the River Districtโs budget by $5 million, funding a variety of water-related projects.
Colorado River District/Courtesy image
The Colorado River District Board of Directors unanimously approved and adopted a new five-year strategic plan at its quarterly meeting on July 15โ16, 2025. The new Strategic Plan outlines a clear vision and action-oriented roadmap for advancing the Districtโs mission to lead in the protection, conservation, use, and development of the water resources of the Colorado River Basin for the benefit of West Slope water users.
The newly adopted plan is the product of a year-long collaborative effort between the Board, staff, and strategic consultants. Through surveys, interviews, retreats, and intensive staff workgroup sessions, the plan identifies focused priorities and initiatives aligned with the evolving water challenges facing the West Slope.
โThis plan is the result of close collaboration between our Board, staff, and consulting team, and it charts a strong course for the next five years,โ said Marc Catlin, Board President of the Colorado River District. โIt positions the River District to act as a leader, respond quickly to change, and deliver real, lasting benefits to West Slope communities.โ
The new Strategic Plan is built around three key focus areas: Community Protection, Trusted Resource, and Recognized Leader on Colorado River Matters. It outlines goals and actionable steps to address the water needs of western Colorado in a hotter, drier future, protect water resources for agriculture and local communities that rely on them, and reinforce the River Districtโs role as a trusted, data-informed voice in water policy across the district and the basin. The plan also includes efforts to support core organizational services and retain staff, ensuring that essential day-to-day work continues alongside new strategic priorities.
โThe Strategic Plan is a collaborative, working strategy that affirms our commitment to our constituents and communities,โ said Amy Moyer, the Districtโs Chief of Strategy. โImplementation is already underway, and weโre building internal structures to ensure that the initiatives are aligned with the realities of Coloradoโs water future.โ
To support implementation, the River District plans to develop internal workgroups for each focus area and track progress through regular updates to the Board each July, with quarterly updates embedded into staff reports throughout the year. The River District extends its gratitude to the Board and all who contributed to the planning process. The complete 2025-2030 Strategic Plan is available at ColoradoRiverDistrict.org.
There was a very interesting session on Day 2, “Tools and Techniques in Agricultural Water Conservation“. During the session Eaโmon OโToole (Ladder Ranch) made this point: There needs to be a streamlined process for storage less than 15,000 AF. Let’s construct storage high in the mountains so the conserved water doesn’t evaporate from Lake Mead. He also mentioned that there is no way to shepherd conserved water downstream.
In defense of the irrigation methods on his ranch he added: I create habitat with flood irrigation. For me the ducks, etc. are just as important as my crop.
As of Tuesday, the Animas River was running noticeably low โ at 35% normalcy for this time of year, according to a recentย SnoFloย report. According to U.S. Geological Surveyย data, the streamflow on Tuesday was at 153 cubic feet per second, and its gauge height was measured at 2.17 feet. Last week, the flow sat around 199 cfs, with the water height resting near the 2.24-foot level, representing a small piece of a larger decline seen historically across the riverโs history…
Aquatic wildlife can be impacted by low river levels, said John Livingston, spokesman with Colorado Parks and Wildlife. One effect of low water levels is an overgrowth of riverbed vegetation. Algae, in an attempt to get closer to the sun, may grow thicker and taller than usual, Livingston said. In the Animas River, blue-green algae blooms, also called cyanobacterial harmful algal blooms, are the most likely culprits of this overgrowth, he said.
Colorado River water flows through La Paz County, Arizona on August 6, 2025. The Central Arizona Project is among the agencies facing cutbacks on water supply while the river is under shortage conditions. Alex Hager/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
August 15, 2025
This story is part of ongoing coverage of water in the West, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
The latest projections for the Colorado River are out, and they paint a picture of more dry conditions and dropping reservoirs.
The river supplies water to nearly 40 million people across the Southwest, and itโs stretched thin by climate change and steady demand. New data from the Bureau of Reclamation shows low inflows and dropping water levels at the nationโs two largest reservoirs โ Lake Powell and Lake Mead. This is just the latest bad news in the midst of a megadrought going back more than two decades.
Projected Lake Mead end-of-month physical elevations from the latest 24-Month Study inflow scenarios.
Projected Lake Powell end-of-month physical elevations from the latest 24-Month Study inflow scenarios.
The river will enter 2026 in a โTier 1 Shortage,โ under which Arizona and Nevada will face mandatory cutbacks to their water supply. While they put some water users in an uncomfortable pinch, those cutbacks arenโt raising the same alarm bells they once did. Dry conditions and water reductions have become a sort of new normal. Shortage conditions for the lower Colorado River basin were first declared in 2021, and have been in place since.
On the ground, the agencies that have to deal with these cutbacks seem to be adapting. Major water users tout their conservation efforts. The towns and cities that are most likely to face permanent reductions to their water use are putting hundreds of millions of dollars into systems that will steel them against smaller water deliveries in the future.
This 2023 diagram shows the tubes through which Lake Powell’s fish can pass through to the section of the Colorado River that flows through the Grand Canyon. Credit: USGS and Reclamation 2023
Meanwhile, further upstream, dropping levels at Lake Powell are creating a near-term crisis. The new federal water data shows the reservoir ending this year only 27% full. If it drops much lower, the reservoir could fall below the pipes which allow water to flow through hydropower generators inside the dam โ jeopardizing electricity generation for about five million people across seven states. The new data shows that could happen as soon as November 2026.
The back of Glen Canyon Dam circa 1964, not long after the reservoir had begun filling up. Here the water level is above dead pool, meaning water can be released via the river outlets, but it is below minimum power pool, so water cannot yet enter the penstocks to generate electricity. Bureau of Reclamation photo. Annotations: Jonathan P. Thompson
Policymakers who can shape the regionโs long-term response to dry conditions have been facing mounting calls for action. They are under pressure to come up with new rules for managing the river in the long-term before the current guidelines expire in 2026.
Cynthia Campbell, who directs a water policy research center at Arizona State University, said instead of urgently working on a long-term plan, those policymakers seem to have spent the past few years โgamblingโ on the idea that water might come back and reverse the crisis at major reservoirs.
โIf they were betting on that,โ she said, โThen they’re losing, because it is continuing to march on. Mother Nature is continuing to march on, and we’re continuing to see declines in the system.โ
While some small glimmers of hope have emerged from negotiations, water managers from the seven states that use the Colorado River seem stuck at an impasse.
โWe have yet to see any courage in the sense of making choices that will bolster long-term system reliability,โ said Campbell, who formerly served as a top water lawyer for the city of Phoenix. โThere seems to be an unwillingness on the collected parties to do that, and that is not good news.โ
Climate scientists say the riverโs dry conditions are unlikely to turn around anytime soon. A warming, drying climate is sapping the region of its water at every turn, and significant reductions to demand are likely the only solution to that new reality.
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
August 15, 2025
Drought and long, hot summer days are sucking Western Coloradoโs rivers dry, parching farm fields and fueling the massive wildfires proliferating across the region. A chunk of northwestern Colorado in the last week plunged into exceptional drought โ the most dire category recorded by the U.S. Drought Monitor. The swath of affected land represents 7% of the state and covers most of Garfield and Rio Blanco counties, as well as parts of Moffat, Mesa, Delta, Routt and Pitkin counties…Exceptional drought is expected to occur once every 50 years, [Russ] Schumacher said. So far this summer, the afternoon monsoon rains that provide relief have been largely absent from the Western Slope. The higher-than-normal temperatures and a lack of rain have sapped the rivers in the Western half of Colorado. Streamflows statewide are at only half of the median recorded between 1991 and 2020,ย according to National Water and Climate Center data. The lack of water has limited fishing and rafting opportunities, reduced agricultural irrigation and threatened river environments…Nearly half of Colorado is experiencing some level of drought, according to newย data released Thursday by the U.S. Drought Monitor. More than 1.4 million people live in that drought-impacted area, which encompasses the entire western half of the state, parts of metro Denver and some areas of southern Colorado…
This summer has been one of the driest on record for the stateโs critical Colorado River basin, similar to 2018 and 2021, said Calahan of the Colorado River District. Drought in those years made the Colorado River look more like a creek than a river and promptedย a 120-mile-long fishing banย on its mainstem…Streamflow in the basin is worst on its western flank and best on its eastern side near the headwaters, he said…The [Colorado River] district is speaking weekly with irrigators across the region to best divvy up the water that remains. Low flows are being supplemented by releases from reservoirs…A lack of water in the Eagle River near Vail prompted local water authorities to warn of a potential coming water shortage. Flows on the river near Avon were about half of normal โ and the third-lowest recorded on the stream gaugeโs 26-year record, said Siri Roman, the general manager of theย Eagle River Water and Sanitation District…Thirteen of the 14 stream gauges with historic data in the Upper San Juan basin were reporting flows below or extremely below normal on Wednesday.ย The Animas River in Durangoย was flowing at 153 cubic feet per second โ a fraction of the median of 499 cfs for the day across 113 years of data, and close to the historic low for that date of 137 cfs…Several stream gauges in the basin were recording record daily lows, like the San Juan River in Pagosa Springs and on Vallecito Creek…On the opposite side of the state, the Yampa River basin, too, is struggling. The river above Stagecoach Reservoir was flowing at less than half of the 36-year median.
The 24-Month Study projects future Colorado River system conditions using single-trace hydrologic scenarios simulated with the Colorado River Mid-term Modeling System (CRMMS) in 24-Month Study Mode. The Most Probable and Probable Minimum 24-Month Studies are released monthly, typically by the 15th day of the month. The Probable Maximum 24-Month Study is released alongside other 24-Month Studies in January, April, August, and October.
Initial Conditions: The 24-Month Study is initialized with previous end-of-month reservoir elevations.ย
Hydrology: In the Upper Basin, the first year of the Most Probable inflow trace is based on the 50thย percentile of Colorado Basin River Forecast Center (CBRFC) forecasts and the second year is based on the 50thย percentile of historical flows. To represent dry and wet future conditions, the Minimum Probable and Maximum Probable traces use the 10thย and 90thforecast percentiles in the first year and the 25thย and 75thย percentiles of historical flows in the second year, respectively. The Lower Basin inflows are based only on historical intervening flows that align with the Upper Basin percentiles.ย
Water Demand: Upper Basin demands are estimated and incorporated in the unregulated inflow forecasts provided by the CBRFC; Lower Basin demands are developed in coordination with the Lower Basin States and Mexico.ย
Policy: 2007 Interim Guidelines, 2024 Supplement to the 2007 Interim Guidelines, Lower Basin Drought Contingency Plan, and Minute 323 are modeled reflecting Colorado Riverย policies. For modeling purposes, simulated years beyond 2026 assume a continuation of the 2007 Interim Guidelines including the 2024 Supplement to the 2007 Interim Guidelines (no additional SEIS conservation is assumed to occur after 2026), the 2019 Colorado River Basin Drought Contingency Plans, and Minute 323 including the Binational Water Scarcity Contingency Plan. With the exception of certain provisions related to ICS recovery and Upper Basin demand management, operations under these agreements are in effect through 2026. Reclamation initiated the process to develop operations for post-2026 in June 2023, and the modeling assumptions described here are subject to change.
Reclamation will continue to carefully monitor hydrologic and operational conditions and assess the need for additional responsive actions and/or changes to operations. Reclamation will continue to consult with the Basin States, Basin Tribes, the Republic of Mexico and other partners on Colorado River operations to consider and determine whether additional measures should be taken to further enhance the preservation of these benefits, as well as recovery protocols, including those of future protective measures for both Lakes Powell and Mead.
For more detailed information about the approach to the 24-Month Study modeling, see the CRMMS 24-Month Study Modepage. All modeling assumptions and projections are subject to varying degrees of uncertainty. Please refer to this discussion of uncertainty for more information.
Projections
The latest 24-Month Study reports for each study can be found at the links below:
WASHINGTONโฏโ The Bureau of Reclamation released the August 2025 24-Month Study, reaffirming impacts of unprecedented drought in the Colorado River Basin and pressing the need for robust and forward-thinking guidelines for the future. The study provides an outlook on hydrologic conditions and projected operations for Colorado River reservoirs over the next two years and sets the 2026 operating conditions for Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
โThis underscores the importance of immediate action to secure the future of the Colorado River,โ said Reclamationโs Acting Commissioner David Palumbo. โWe must develop new, sustainable operating guidelines that are robust enough to withstand ongoing drought and poor runoff conditions to ensure water security for more than 40 million people who rely on this vital resource.โ
Lake Powellโs elevation on Jan. 1, 2026, is projected to be 3,538.47 feetโapproximately 162 feet below full pool and 48 feet above minimum power pool. This places the reservoir in the Mid-Elevation Release Tier, with a planned release of 7.48 million acre-feet of water for water year 2026, October 1, 2025, through September 30, 2026. If hydrologic conditions worsen, the water year release volume may be reduced in accordance with the 2024 Record of Decision for the Supplement to the 2007 Interim Guidelines.
Lake Mead is projected to stay in a Level 1 Shortage Condition, with an expected elevation of 1,055.88 feetโ20 feet below the Lower Basin shortage determination trigger. This condition necessitates significant water reductions as indicated by the 2007 Interim Guidelines and the Lower Basin Drought Contingency Plan in the United States and Minute 323 and the Binational Water Scarcity Contingency Plan in Mexico. This calls for Arizona to contribute 512,000 acre-feet, about 18% of its annual apportionment, Nevada to contribute 21,000 acre-feet or 7%of its annual apportionment, and Mexico to contribute 80,000 acre-feet or 5% of its annual allotment.
Current guidelinesโincluding the 2007 Interim Guidelines, 2019 Drought Contingency Plans, and international agreements Minutes 323 and 330โare all set to expire at the end of 2026, leaving a critical void that must be filled with comprehensive strategies that address current and future challenges.
โAs the basin prepares for the transition to post-2026 operating guidelines, the urgency for the seven Colorado River Basin states to reach a consensus agreement has never been clearer. We cannot afford to delay,โ said Department of the Interiorโs Acting Assistant Secretary for Water and Science Scott Cameron. โThe health of the Colorado River system and the livelihoods that depend on it are relying on our ability to collaborate effectively and craft forward-thinking solutions that prioritize conservation, efficiency, and resilience.โ
In June, Cameron called on the seven Colorado River Basin states to submit the details of a preliminary operations agreement by mid-November and share a final seven state agreement on that proposal by mid-February 2026, with the goal of reaching a final decision next summer to begin implementation in the 2027 operating year.
In the meantime, near-term operating guidelines approved last year provide additional strategies to reduce the risk of reaching critical elevations at Lake Powell and Lake Mead. These short-term tools, available through 2026, include conserving 3 million acre-feet or more of water in the Lower Basin and the potential to reduce release from Lake Powell. Under the Drought Contingency Plan, Upper Basin drought response operations could also include sending additional water to Lake Powell from upstream reservoirs.
โThese short-term tools will only help us for so long,โ Cameron emphasized. โThe next set of guidelines need to be in place. We remain committed to this effort and will continue to invest in infrastructure improvements and system water reuse and conservation efforts as we move forward toward viable solutions.โ
The Department and Reclamation continue meeting regularly with the basin states and Tribal Nations to collaborate on the Post-2026 Operating Guidelines as part of their continued commitment to ensuring water security and promoting long-term sustainability in the Colorado River Basin. For more information on the August 2025 24-Month Study, visit https://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/g4000/riverops/24ms-projections.html.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
From email from Western Resource Advocates (John Berggren):
August 15, 2025
Western Resource Advocates released the following statement in response to the August 24-Month Study by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which determines reservoir operations and Lower Basin shortages for the coming Water Year, and projects future conditions in the Colorado River system for the next two years.
“This study confirms what weโve known for decades: the Colorado River is overallocated with demands outpacing supplies. We face continued shortages, emergency measures, and the limits of our current agreements, all which are set to expire in the next 12 months. It further sounds the alarm that the Colorado River is drying out and Western states need to act now to protect this vital waterway and its tributaries.”
– John Berggren, Ph.D.
The Colorado River provides drinking water for one in ten Americans and after years of persistent drought, declining snowpack, and rising temperatures, the river continues to face a historic and growing imbalance where demand overwhelms available supply. It is operating under extreme stress and at the edge of a critical management transition.
โThis is not just a crisis. Itโs also a call to action to use remaining time wisely to replace our current reactive, emergency-based management framework with new, long-term solutions. We canโt litigate our way out โ we must collaborate forward. A negotiated agreement among all the Colorado River sovereigns and stakeholders will be more comprehensive, more adaptable, and more responsive to our communities throughout the Basin.โ
Change is the only constant on the Colorado River. Its water carved the Grand Canyon, its flows fluctuate seasonally, its path is altered by a network of dams and pipelines, and its water is dwindling as climate change dries out the West. The River is a dynamic and living system with real limits, yet early agreements treated it like a simple water delivery pipeline.
“Going forward, itโs essential for all water stakeholders and decision makers to take an honest look at the Basinโs hydrology and accelerate coming together around a set of proactive solutions to keep the river healthy.ย Decisions made in the coming months will determine whether we can meet the needs of our communities and protect the river for future generations and for the fish, wildlife, and recreationists that depend on it. The time to lead is now.”
Thank you for fighting climate change in the West with us.
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck, Anne Castle, Eric Kuhn, Jack Schmidt, Kathryn Sorensen, and Katherine Tara):
As we await Fridayโs (Aug. 15, 2025) release of the Bureau of Reclamationโs Colorado River 24-Month Study, we need to remember a painful lesson of the last five years of crisis management: whatever you see in Reclamationโs report of the โMost Probableโ reservoir levels for the next two years, we must prepare for things to be much worse.
A year ago, Reclamationโs โMost Probableโ forecast told us to expect Lake Powell to hold 10.36 million acre feet of water at the end of July 2025, with a surface elevation 3,593 feet above sea level. Actual storage in Powell at the end of July was 7.46 maf, 2.9 million acre feet less, and the reservoir is 38 feet lower, than the โMost Probableโ forecast.
Four years ago, one of us (Eric Kuhn) wrote this, which is helpful in understanding what is happening:
“The problem: the assumptions underlying the study do not fully capture the climate-change driven aridification of the Colorado River Basin.”
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
In 2022, a Utah State Center for Colorado River Studies team led by Jian Wang (including one of us, Schmidt) took this on in more technical detail โ Evaluating the Accuracy of Reclamationโs 24-Month Study of Lake Powell Projections. The finding provided technical support for an intuition water managers already had: the 24-Month Study has an optimistic bias.
Produced monthly, Reclamationโs 24-Month Study includes three scenarios: Most Probable, Minimum Probable, and Maximum Probable. The Study includes 18 pages of data and forecasts for twelve Colorado River system reservoirs, from Fontenelle and Flaming Gorge in the north to Mohave and Havasu in the south, projecting things like elevation, storage, inflows, releases, evaporation, and hydropower production each month for the next two years.
“Projections for reservoir elevations during the next few months are based on predictions of reservoir inflow using a widely accepted watershed hydrologic model run by the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center. The input data for that model are observed snowpack in the watershed, soil moisture, and anticipated precipitation and temperature. Projections for reservoir elevations beyond the immediately proximate winter, a year or more in the future (โsecond year projectionsโ), are based on statistical probabilities calculated using analyses of past inflows during a 30-year reference period.”
The resulting model runs represent a wide range of uncertainties, which are captured in three resulting scenarios:
Most Probable: the middle of the range
Maximum Probable: the 90th percentile scenario, meaning that 10% of the model runs predict even wetter hydrology and 90% predict drier.
Minimum Probable: the 10th percentile scenario, meaning that 10% of the model runs predict even drier hydrology and 90% predict wetter.
The problem, implicit in the argument Milly et al. made nearly two decades ago, is that a 30-year reference period is no longer a reliable indicator of what we should expect in the future. It represents a river we no longer have. This is not to suggest any bias or partiality on the part of Reclamation, but merely that the algorithms and modeling used to produce the 24-Month Study have proven in recent years to be skewed more toward the the past than the true-to-life. Our response needs to reflect that reality.
Because of the changing conditions in the Colorado River Basin, the Minimum Probable scenario has become the most valuable in providing a reliable indicator of the future. Actual flows and reservoir levels have been tracking the minimum probable forecast since March of this year. As we enter the fall of 2025, with the weak summer monsoon for most of the Upper Basin coupled with weak La Niรฑa conditions persisting through the fall and early winter, and NOAAโs seasonal outlook pointing to a warmer and drier than average fall, itโs a good bet that this trend will continue at least through mid-winter. The Basin should be prepared for minimum probable conditions, with a clear possibility that actual conditions could be worse than the 10th percentile scenario. The basin community needs to be ready to respond with the necessary water use reductions now to protect the Colorado River system on which we all depend.
