A new concept paper from experts at Western Resource Advocates and Water Balance Consulting shows that flexible water conservation pools can help get the Colorado River through dry years like this one.
The Colorado River’s two major reservoirs are approaching historic lows, threatening the infrastructure that delivers water and hydropower to communities across the West. The current tools to address the problem are limited.
The guidelines for managing the river expire this year. There are several management alternatives being considered that incorporate new flexible conservation pools.
A new concept paper shows how these pools can protect the Colorado River Basin and minimize conflict in critically dry years.
Imagine that you’re about to overdraw your checking account. Would you transfer money from your savings to avoid overdraft fees? Cut back on your spending?
Water managers on the Colorado River are faced with a similar problem, and few people are happy with the options available.
The Colorado River Basin just experienced its warmest winter on record. Snow water equivalent, or the amount of water in snowpack, is on track to be one of the lowest on record. An unprecedented March heat wave quickly melted much of what little snow was available to feed the river. And the West is projected to continue getting hotter and drier in the coming years.
The Colorado River Basin isn’t dealing with a temporary water shortage, it’s bankrupt.
The river’s two major reservoirs — Lake Powell and Lake Mead — were constructed with a much bigger river in mind. Today, these reservoirs are approaching historic lows, threatening the infrastructure that delivers water and power to communities across the West. The Bureau of Reclamation forecasted that Lake Powell could drop below 3,500 feet, or the level needed to protect hydropower production, this summer if no actions were taken.
We are about to overdraw the account, resulting in significant consequences for the West.
Figure 2. Diagram showing schematic of Glen Canyon Dam elevations at which Lake Powell’s waters can be released downstream, and the volumes of water defined by these elevations. Active storage between 3370 and 3500 ft is not realistically accessible for continuous downstream release without risk to engineering infrastructure at the dam and powerplant. Hydroelectricity cannot be produced below 3490 ft, and 3500 ft has been established as a minimum safe level for intake through the penstocks.
Under current management guidelines, Reclamation only has two options to put more water in Lake Powell, and both come with drawbacks. The first is to release water from upstream reservoirs into Lake Powell. This is a stopgap measure — like drawing on your savings account to cover an unexpected expense. There are limits to how much water can be moved and how often. Upstream reservoirs must be allowed to refill after the water is transferred to Lake Powell.
The second option is to reduce Lake Powell releases. However, holding too much water in Lake Powell could trigger litigation from the Lower Basin states as soon as this fall, claiming that the Upper Basin is violating the Colorado River Compact.
Reclamation announced in late April that it will be using both options simultaneously keep water levels in Lake Powell from dropping below 3,500 feet. The agency plans to release between 660,000 and 1 million acre-feet of water from an upstream reservoir while reducing Lake Powell releases by 1.48 million acre-feet. While Reclamation is trying to protect the river with limited tools, the Basin states are not thrilled with the plan. The Upper Basin was quick to point out that increased releases from upstream reservoirs will have significant impacts on local economies and is not an action that can be taken year after year. Meanwhile, the Lower Basin says withholding additional water in Lake Powell could lead to the Upper Basin violating the Colorado River Compact.
The plan also might not work. It is expected to keep Lake Powell just above 3,500 feet — dangerously close to the hydropower intakes. This could potentially draw air into the intakes, damaging equipment and resulting in a complete loss of hydropower production.
The river’s current management guidelines are clearly no match for climate change. We are drawing down our savings in the hope of just barely making ends meet. It might not be enough, and it’s not something we can afford to do every year.
A NEW WAY FORWARD
The river is undergoing dramatic changes. What if we had a new management tool that allowed us to change with it?
WRA worked with Kevin Wheeler at Water Balance Consulting to find out.
We found that flexible water conservation pools can help maintain critical reservoir elevations and minimize the need to release large volumes of water from upstream reservoirs, while also not exasperating compact compliance issues.
We looked at the Intentionally Created Surplus (ICS) program — an existing water conservation program in the Lower Basin — to explore how this might work.
Currently, the ICS program allows water users in the Lower Basin to save water and store it in Lake Mead through actions like increasing irrigation efficiency or fallowing farmland. There is a little over 3 million acre-feet of ICS water currently being stored in Lake Mead.
This water has the potential to provide enormous benefit to Lake Powell as well, but there are institutional barriers to moving it. The water level in Lake Mead is currently used to determine how much water is released to the Lower Basin. Under the current guidelines, moving ICS water out of the reservoir would lower Lake Mead and impact Lower Basin shortages.
The key to solving this problem is creating a conservation pool that is “operationally neutral,” allowing saved water to be moved between reservoirs without impacting Lower Basin shortages or affecting compact compliance. This would allow ICS water to be stored in Lake Mead or Lake Powell — wherever it is needed to protect infrastructure and river health.
There is no infrastructure on the Colorado River to physically move water upstream; however, water can be transferred between reservoirs through adjustments to dam releases and careful accounting. For example, reservoir releases from Lake Powell could be physically reduced by 1 million acre-feet to “move” 1 million acre-feet of ICS water upstream from Lake Mead to Lake Powell. Releases from Lake Powell could later be increased by 1 million acre-feet to physically transfer the water downstream back to Lake Mead.
Because this water is operationally neutral, it would not be considered when calculating Lake Mead water levels and so moving it would not affect Lower Basin shortages. It also would not affect the 10-year Lee Ferry average. On paper, it would be as though there was no reduction in Lake Powell releases to “move” water upstream. This avoids exasperating compact compliance issues. This is in contrast to the operations Reclamation is undertaking this year, which will result in actual decreased Lake Powell releases, affect the 10-year Lee Ferry average, and bring compact implications as a result.
Our analysis shows that if a flexible conservation pool had been available this year, it could have significantly reduced the need to pull additional water from upstream reservoirs — helping to address concerns raised by the Upper Basin states. It also would have minimized compact compliance implications — helping to address issues raised by the Lower Basin.
The guidelines for managing the river expire this year, and there are several new management alternatives on the tablethat incorporate flexible conservation pools. Our analysis shows how these pools could work to protect the river and our communities in critically hot and dry years like this one.
Drawing down our savings isn’t going to work in the long term. We need sustainable solutions to ensure the infrastructure that delivers water and power to the West can function in dry years.
A person looks out over the Colorado River near Page, Arizona on November 2, 2022. The seven states that use its water are caught in a standoff about how to share the shrinking supply. They say they want to avoid a court battle, but some states are quietly preparing for that outcome. Alex Hager/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Scott Franz):
May 8, 2026
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
A federal hydrologist appeared to be momentarily at a loss for words Thursday as he described how dire the latest forecast has gotten for how much water will flow through the Colorado River Basin this summer.
“Really no good news this winter,” Cody Moser with the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center said before taking a long pause on a webinar.
Moser went on to describe how just 800,000 acre-feet of water is projected to flow into Lake Powell, the upper basin’s largest reservoir, through July. That’s 13% of its average supply. It would also be the lowest summer inflow in the reservoir’s history. The projected flows into Powell have dramatically decreased over the last two months.
The worsening outlook is driven by record-low snowpack around the west and a March heat wave.
“We did see a cool down and a wetter April, but it pales in comparison to this five, six month stretch of just record warm and dry weather that we’ve seen,” he said.
Falling water levels at Lake Powell recently prompted the Interior Department to take emergency measures to prop it up. The goal is to stop it from getting so low that it can no longer produce hydroelectricity for several states in the west. Some forecasts have it reaching that level as soon as this summer.
The rescue plan involves taking a massive amount of water from the Flaming Gorge reservoir on the Wyoming-Utah border upstream and sending it down to Powell.
Meanwhile, there’s been some recent activity in the stalled negotiations involving how the water should be shared and conserved among the seven states depending on it.
The upper basin states have been at an impasse with the lower basin states over how much each basin should have to cut back its use.
Last week, Nevada, California and Arizona made a new short-term pitch for how to avert an ongoing crisis in water shortages.
The states said they would conserve as much as an additional one-million acre feet of water per year through 2028.
Colorado’s water negotiator gave the new pitch a tepid response Monday.
Becky Mitchell said in a statement that the proposal is a “good first step,” but it would be “unsustainable.”
“While the lower division states have made progress, more is needed to protect the Colorado River system now and into the future,” she said. “These differences highlight the urgent need to come back together with the help of a mediator.”
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
From the Rockies to the Cascades to the Sierra Nevada, mountainsides across the West are sparsely covered by the snow that usually blankets the high country well into the summer.
That snowpack is like a savings account that the West draws on when the hot, dry months arrive. It moistens the landscape as it melts, lessening the risk of severe wildfire. The runoff feeds into river basins, and the swelling waterways provide power to hydroelectric dams, irrigation to farmers and drinking water to cities.
This year, Western states are heading into the summer with a desperately low balance — threatening wildfires, drinking water, crops, electricity and more.
“This has been an extremely poor year,” said Sharon Megdal, director of the Water Resources Research Center, a research unit at the University of Arizona. “This has gotten a lot of people concerned and alarmed.”
While a late-season storm brought heavy snow to parts of the Rockies this month, the region remains in a deep snowpack deficit.
As warmer weather arrives, states are preparing for a dangerous wildfire season across the drought-stricken West. Farmers and cities are bracing for potential cutbacks in their water allocations from rivers that have less to give. Fisheries managers are watching for low river flows that could threaten vital salmon runs. And worsening conditions could threaten the supply of hydropower that provides cheap, clean electricity to many Western states.
A hot, dry winter
Across nearly the entire West, states spent the winter waiting for snow that rarely arrived. Ski resorts lost millions of visitors as they struggled to stay open. Then in March, a record-breaking heat wave settled across the region, shrinking the already paltry snowpack.
“It’s unheard of,” Megdal said. “Things were already looking bad in January, but if you follow the projections, they had to keep revising the numbers downward because the snow just never came and we had this hugely hot period in March.”
Westwide SNOTEL basin-filled map May 10, 2026.
The federal National Water and Climate Center produces a real-time map showing the snow water equivalent in river basins across the country — a measurement of how much moisture is being held in those mountaintop savings accounts.
The majority of the West is bright red, indicating that snowpack is at less than 50% of the median level for this time of year. Yellow and orange cover most of the remaining areas, showing regions that are still well below the median.
The most recent U.S. Drought Monitor map shows most of the country in abnormally dry or drought conditions, aside from the Great Lakes region and some other parts of the Midwest.
West Fork Fire June 20, 2013 photo the Pike Hot Shots Wildfire Today
Wildfire
For many Western states, the most imminent threat from the dry winter is the prospect of a dangerous wildfire season.
Already, wildfires in Nebraska have burned hundreds of thousands of acres, shattering records and setting the stage for a record wildfire year.
The wildland fire outlook maps produced by the National Interagency Fire Center show above-normal fire risk spreading across much of the West by June and July.
“There’s a lot of red on the map,” said Matthew Dehr, wildland fire meteorologist with the Washington state Department of Natural Resources.
Dave Upthegrove, Washington’s public lands commissioner, said his agency is preparing for fire season as normal but with a heightened awareness that this summer could be demanding. He’s focused on educating residents about the risks, noting that 90% of wildfires in Washington are caused by humans.
“What we’re likely to see are wildfires moving more quickly through forests,” he said. “When we do have a large fire event, it’s likely to move faster, be more significant.”
He also noted that this year is Washington’s fourth consecutive year of drought conditions, making trees more susceptible to diseases and pests and compounding wildfire risk.
Dehr said spring rains could provide a bit of a buffer before the heat of July and August, but a recent stretch of sunny weeks has yet to provide relief.
Upthegrove noted that the challenging conditions across much of the West could make it more difficult for states to send wildfire crews to each other’s aid, if many states are battling big blazes simultaneously.
“As the climate crisis pushes a forest health crisis pushes a wildfire crisis, it’s going to stress the whole system, not just in our state,” he said.
Low water supplies
Many Western states also rely on snowpack to feed rivers that provide irrigation for farming and the water supply for cities. In particular, the Colorado River provides water for tens of millions of people across seven states, a region that has grown even as the river’s supply has dwindled in recent decades. Reservoirs that were full at the turn of the century are now nearing critically low levels.
“There hasn’t been enough flow in the river to meet all these expected demands, even in the good years,” said Megdal, the water researcher. “We’ve used up our savings and storage, so now what do we do?”
Water allocations for states, tribes and farmers in the region are governed by a complicated and fiercely contested system known as the Colorado River Compact. In recent years, cutbacks due to the low supply reduced the water allocation for central Arizona, including all of the water for agricultural users.
“It’s turning out to be very hard to get the states to agree on how to slice up a much smaller pie,” Megdal said. “There are scenarios that are not zero probability that are catastrophic to the region.”
If the states are unable to reach an agreement, allocation for the river’s diminished water will be determined by federal regulators under the “law of the river.” Cutbacks imposed by the feds could fall heavily on central Arizona, Megdal said, cutting the supply for Phoenix, Tucson and some tribal nations.
Such uncertainty in the Colorado River basin and elsewhere “leaves farmers making planting decisions now without knowing whether sufficient water will be available to carry crops through harvest,” the American Farm Bureau Federation wrote in an April report.
The lack of water could force farmers to remove trees or vineyards, the Farm Bureau noted, or reduce cattle herds if the parched landscape does not supply enough forage.
Meanwhile, rivers running at a slow trickle could reduce the hydroelectric power produced by dams across the West. Across 13 Western states, hydropower accounts for nearly a quarter of electrical generation.
The Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona, which forms Lake Powell, produces about 5 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year, enough to power nearly half a million homes. But the lake level may soon fall below a threshold from which the dam can no longer generate power.
“Hydropower is so incredibly important because it has been the lowest-cost power for many in the West,” Megdal said. “There are big implications for the energy grid and the cost of electricity.”
This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Utah News Dispatch, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
Created by Imgur user Fejetlenfej , a geographer and GIS analyst with a ‘lifelong passion for beautiful maps.’ It highlights the massive expanse of river basins across the country – in particular, those which feed the Mississippi River, in pink.
May 1, 2026 seasonal water supply forecast summary.
Click the link to read the article on the Tucson.com website (Tony Davis). Here’s an excerpt:
May 8, 2026
Very dry and warm weather in the winter and early spring means Colorado River flows into Lake Powell will hit record lows this summer, a new federal forecast says. The past winter brought record-low snowpack in the mountains of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming that feed the Colorado. March brought record heat that caused the snows that had fallen to melt prematurely. The result is that runoff from the melting snow into the river will bring April through July flows into Powell to only 13% of average, says the federal Colorado Basin River Forecast Center, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That would make the spring-summer runoff into Powell the lowest of its kind since Lake Powell was created in 1963 by the construction of Glen Canyon Dam. The total amount of water expected to reach Powell is 800,000 acre-feet from April through July.
Arizona is preparing for a legal battle over its rights to Colorado River water.
Following an extraordinarily dry winter along the river basin and what’s expected to be an exceptionally hot and dry spring across the West, where high temperatures in March have already blown past records, the pressure to maintain access to the state’s fair share of river water is growing.
The Colorado River is a vital source of drinking water for 40 million people in the seven basin states, Mexico and 30 Native American tribes, and provides water for farming operations and hydroelectricity.
Reaching a water usage agreement is imperative to the basin states as the river’s water supply continues to decline, as it has done for the past 25 years due to a persistent drought spurred on by climate change.
On Monday, the Arizona Governor’s Office announced that it had retained the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell to represent the state in possible litigation among the Colorado River Basin states and the federal government.
Sullivan & Cromwell is an international firm based in New York City that has represented big names like Microsoft, BP, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase. The state is using some of the $3 million it put into its Colorado River legal defense fund last year to retain the law firm.
The Governor’s Office doesn’t expect to take any legal action until June at the earliest, but wants to be prepared for the possibility, especially if the dispute ends up before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Lower Basin states — Arizona, Nevada and California — and the Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming — have been negotiating an updated water usage agreement for more than two years.
But so far the states have blown past two deadlines to do so — one in November and one in February — and are quickly approaching October, when the existing usage agreement expires.
If the states can’t reach an agreement before that, the federal government will implement one of its draft plans, all of which would place an outsized burden on the Grand Canyon State.
That’s because the Central Arizona Project, a series of canals that supplies Colorado River water to the Valley and the Tucson area, is one of the newest users of the river water, making it legally one of the first to be cut.
But so far, the Upper Basin states have refused to agree to any federally mandated water usage cuts of their own. While the Lower Basin states insist that every state take their fair share, Upper Basin states have argued that they’ve never used their full allotment and already face regular cuts and shortages based on physical availability of water.
Arizona has offered to reduce its Colorado River allocation by 27%, California by 10%, and Nevada by nearly 17%.
Negotiators for Arizona also insist that the Upper Basin states be held to the original 1922 Colorado River Compact that requires them to release a 10-year rolling average of at least 75 million acre-feet of water to the Lower Basin, in addition to one-half of the annual allotment owed to Mexico, for a total of about 80.2 million acre-feet.
An acre-foot of water represents enough to cover an acre of land to a depth of one foot, or about 325,851 gallons. That’s enough to provide three homes in Arizona a year of water, on average.
So far, the Upper Basin states have held to the original release agreement. But as water levels in the two major reservoirs on the river, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, continue to decline, it’s expected that the Upper Basin states will be unable to meet that requirement as early as 2027.
When the states entered into the original Colorado River Compact in 1922, they allocated 7.5 million acre-feet of water each year to be shared by the Upper Basin states and another 7.5 million to be used among the Lower Basin states.
Since then, the states have updated their water usage guidelines several times, even though the apportionments remain the same. But Lower Basin states face cuts mandated by the federal government during times of drought and Upper Basin states do not. In 2025, for the fifth year in a row, the federal government imposed drought-based cuts, and Arizona’s amounted to a loss of 512,000 acre-feet of water for the year.
Under current allocations, Arizona has rights to 2.8 million acre feet of water per year, and has implemented 800,000 acre feet in reductions per year. In contrast, Colorado has rights to 3.8 million acre feet a year, although it uses an average of 1.9 million acre feet, annually.
However, Colorado doesn’t always get that full allotment, because it relies mostly on melted snowpack for its water, which varies from year to year. This year’s snowpack levels are historically low, forcing water providers in the Upper Basin to place restrictions on usage based on availability and state law.
Upper Basin states argue that they regularly deal with annual shortages based on physical availability and the state laws that govern how the Upper Basin water is shared, with average annual shortages of about 1.3 million acre feet.
The Lower Basin states have undertaken significant conservation efforts for Colorado River water since 2014 and have reduced their consumption from 7.4 million acre-feet in 2015 to just over 6 million in 2024.
The Upper Basin states have increased their usage in the past five years, from 3.9 million acre-feet in 2021 to 4.4 million in 2024. The federal government’s draft plans allow for the Upper Basin states to use even more water.
Gov. Katie Hobbs’s proposed budget for this year would put another $1 million toward the Colorado River Legal Defense fund, and lawmakers earlier this month gave preliminary approval to doing just that.
Even as Arizona prepares for a legal battle, the state plans to continue attempting to reach an agreement with the other river basin states, according to the Governor’s Office.
“Governor Hobbs is committed to working with the federal government and other Colorado River states to deliver a negotiated settlement that protects Arizona’s fair share of water and stabilizes the system,” spokesman for Hobbs Christian Slater said. “However, it’s critical that Arizona be prepared to defend ourselves in court if an agreement cannot be reached or the Law of the River is violated.”
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
“We’re seeing things never seen before, in all the records that we’ve kept in the last 100 plus years,” Jones said. “I mean, we’ve not seen that here in the valley.”
He believes they’ve already seen high flows in the river back in March, when it usually happens in June. The city of Clifton primarily gets its water from the Colorado River, either pumped directly from the stream or fed through Grand Valley Irrigation. If the irrigation system runs out of water, Jones said residents may turn to treated drinking water for their lawns, which could put constraints on treatment plants.
“Our treatment plants can’t handle that demand if everybody starts wanting to water their lawns with our water,” he said.
From left, J.B. Hamby, chair of the Colorado River Board of California, Tom Buschatzke, Arizona Department of Water Resources; Becky Mitchell, Colorado representative to the Upper Colorado River Commission. Hamby and Buschatzke acknowledged during this panel at the Colorado River Water Users Association annual conference that the lower basin must own the structural deficit, something the upper basin has been pushing for for years. CREDIT: TOM YULSMAN/WATER DESK, UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO, BOULDER
Click the link to read the article on the Tucson.com website (Tony Davis). Here’s an excerpt:
May 5, 2026
The federal government has agreed to pump more than $450 million into programs to carry out additional Colorado River water conservation, Arizona Department of Water Resources chief Tom Buschatzke said Monday. The spending is necessary to make the new proposal from Arizona, Nevada and California work, Buschatzke and other water officials said Friday in releasing their offer to save 700,000 to 1 million acre-feet of river water through 2028. A million acre-feet is the equivalent of approximately 10 years’ worth of Colorado River deliveries to Tucson Water. The U.S. Interior Department proposed that the money be spent, and the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, which must sign off on all federal expenditures, approved it, Buschatze said at a news briefing Monday afternoon on the new plan from the three Lower Colorado River Basin states…J.B. Hamby, California’s Colorado River commissioner, said later Monday that what Buschatzke said is also his understanding of the federal government’s position. The federal funding offer would require the Lower Basin states to engage in a cost-sharing effort to contribute money to the water-saving scheme, Buschatzke said.
To get to the river and listen, there is an intricate web of management issues, antiquated infrastructure, and century-old legal disputes to thrash through. Unless you’ve gone outside in the Southwest lately. A 26-year drought is sucking the river dry, and unprecedented heat is rapidly evaporating this year’s record-low snowpack.
These two conditions are leading to low water levels at Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the nation’s two largest reservoirs. That, in turn, jeopardizes critical water infrastructure for a large swath of the West.
Reporting on this issue from the front lines, the growing margins of Lake Powell returning to Glen Canyon, made this reality strikingly clear. The river’s returning are only a portion of this watershed story. There are major questions about how the Colorado River will make it past Glen Canyon Dam in a rapidly drying future. Whether you love or hate Lake Powell, this is not an issue of recreation; it is about water equity for millions of people, desert ecosystems, and wildlife.
A 1,500-word story is painfully insufficient to explain the breadth of this issue that threatens an entire watershed. Writing a book is starting to feel sane! Of course, I do not make this easy for myself, always crawling around in the desert and floating around the watershed. But there is good reason to take the long view. As I write Riverside (Torrey House Press 2027), my life will continue its pulse between the river and writing flash floods. My PFD is on tight. Thanks for hopping aboard.
Here are some photos taken throughout the watershed as I reported on the Colorado River for Sierra.
Low tide on Powell Reservoir. Photo credit: Morgan Sjogren
A river returns. Almost 50 miles of the San Juan, once inundated by Powell Reservoir, are flowing free. Photo credit: Morgan Sjogren
The humpback chub have inhabited the Colorado River watershed for 5 million years. The next 12-months might be their most critical to survival. Photo credit: Morgan Sjogren
The Little Colorado River, a Grand Canyon tributary, is a critical stronghold for the humpback chub. Photo credit: Morgan Sjogren
With such low flows, the Colorado River Basin will likely turn to pumping groundwater. The threat to springs affects the river’s baseflows, which are significantly supported by groundwater and springs.
“There’s not economic adjustments that the birds can make. A payout doesn’t help the birds that use those habitats.”––Jennifer Pitt, Colorado River program director for Audubon. Photo credit: Morgan Sjogren
Last year, Colorado River Indian Tribes (CRIT) granted the Colorado River legal personhood under tribal law. Photo credit: Morgan Sjogren
“The final words of any story are transmitted from a laptop, but the writing process all happens out here, with the watershed.” — Morgan Sjogren
The Hoover Dam is a powerhouse! With an impressive output of about 3 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, it provides enough energy to light up about 1 million households in Nevada, Arizona, and California, ensuring the lights stay on un the Southwest. Photo credit: USBR
Click the link to read the article on The Havasu News website (Alan Halaly). Here’s an excerpt:
May 1, 2026
In a Thursday joint statement, the Upper Colorado River Basin states of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming called for “immediate mediation” in the yearslong deadlock with the Lower Colorado River Basin states of Nevada, California and Arizona. They offered no details about who could fill that role or which entity would pay for the costs.
“Time is short, but structured negotiations through mediation offer a new path for authentic discussions,” New Mexico’s Upper Colorado River Commissioner Estevan López said in a statement. “Even at this late stage, we should pursue every opportunity to reach a workable agreement.”
[…]
Asked about how a mediator could differ from the federal government’s intervention or the appointment of a so-called “water master” at the U.S. Supreme Court, Entsminger said states are unlikely to view a mediator’s decision-making as binding.
“It’s certainly not litigation; it’s not even arbitration,” Entsminger said. “It’s more of a marriage counselor.”
[…]
Colorado River Board of California Chairman JB Hamby said in a Tuesday statement that his state proposed a mediation process last year. California officials see the need for both long- and short-term solutions, and mediation could push the Upper Basin toward “verifiable water contributions,” Hamby added.
“Effective mediation requires common ground, and the system cannot wait,” Hamby said. “Current conditions require immediate, measurable water reductions from every state.”
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
The Bureau of Reclamation has adjusted the release schedule from Navajo Dam due to downstream maintenance activities. On Tuesday, May 5th at 4:00 AM, the release will increase from 450 to 500 cubic feet per second (cfs). A further increase to 550 cfs is planned for Thursday, May 7th 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 Reclamation’s Navajo Dam website at https://www.usbr.gov/uc/water/crsp/cs/nvd.html
The Colorado River flows through Las Colonias Park in Grand Junction, Colo. on April 22, 2026. The river reached an extremely low level due to heavy diversion upstream and record low snowpack. CREDIT: LUKE RUNYON/THE WATER DESK
With drought and high temperatures putting unprecedented pressure on water users throughout Colorado, from cities to agriculture, there’s one segment that can be affected first — and maybe worst — when it comes to a lack of water: rivers themselves and the ecosystems that depend on them.
As cities enact water restrictions and farmers and ranchers prepare for the worst, impacts of the water shortage are readily apparent in a chronically dry stretch of the Colorado River between Palisade and the confluence of the Gunnison River that is critical habitat for endangered fish, known as the 15-mile reach.
The Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program works to return water to this stretch of river in the Grand Valley, but because of this year’s historically dry conditions, the program could have only 16,000 acre-feet, half its typical amount of water for fish.
Beyond that guaranteed amount, the program mostly uses water-sharing agreements that can secure additional acre-feet to boost flows — but only when other users don’t need the water and can voluntarily loan it. This year finds nearly everyone who depends on the Colorado River and its tributaries in dire straits.
Ruedi Reservoir, above Basalt, on the Fryingpan River, April 22, 2026. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith
There won’t be any surplus water for fish in the Historic Users Pool, which is stored in Green Mountain Reservoir and is the largest source of water to potentially augment fish flows. A pool of water in Ruedi Reservoir that is available in four out of five years isn’t there, and the program could get only about 340 acre-feet from a pool in Wolford Reservoir upstream of Kremmling that typically has up to 6,000 acre-feet.
“It is really clear to me that we do not have enough tools in our toolbox to be able to manage for conditions like we have this year in the 15-mile reach,” said Julie Stahli, recovery program director. “We are so far outside the bounds of what we have ever seen before, that it’s really just hard to be able to make any good decisions.”
Stahli said she anticipates the program can contribute about 75 cubic feet per second through mid-July, at which point they will drop it down to 50 cfs, a bare-bones amount that is just enough to keep the riverbed wet.
This map shows the 15-mile reach of the Colorado River near Grand Junction, home to four species of endangered fish. Map credit: CWCB
“That is what we are anticipating being able to have for the entirety of the season in the 15-mile reach,” she said.
Side channels on the Colorado River ran dry early during spring runoff on April 22, 2026. Cobble bars and muddy banks emerged as the river receded near Dos Rios Park in Grand Junction, Colo. CREDIT: LUKE RUNYON/THE WATER DESK
As flows plummet, fish could become stranded in pools that are disconnected from the rest of the river, and program managers say they will try to prevent fish from using that stretch of river during times when flows are predicted to be at their lowest. Crews could use netting to keep fish out of the reach or close the flow of water that returns fish to the river after they accidentally enter an irrigation canal, which would keep them in the stretch of river above the diversion that has more water.
“Our main goal at this point is just to keep fish out of that reach,” Stahli said. “There is not a whole lot of attractive habitat in there right now for fish. Flows dropped so early in the season. We’re already seeing some pretty dire conditions in April.”
For several days in April, flows fell to just over 50 cfs, among the lowest levels in recorded history and far below the recovery program’s target flow for April in a dry year of 1,240 cfs. According to Stahli, the river’s flow at that low point could be solely attributed to recovery-program water that it had released from upstream reservoirs.
The goal of the recovery program when it was created in 1988 was to protect the humpback chub, razorback sucker, bonytail and Colorado pikeminnow, while also allowing the seemingly opposing goal of developing more water. An aim of the program was to allow farms and cities to continue using water and even expand their use without violating the Endangered Species Act.
Credit: The Land Desk
And the program has had some success, with one of the four species — the humpback chub — being downlisted from endangered to threatened in 2021. (The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has also proposed downlisting the razorback sucker.) These fish evolved over millions of years and are only found in the Colorado River basin. In today’s highly engineered and managed river ecosystem, they live mostly in just a few key locations in the Upper Basin, including the 15-mile reach, and in parts of the Yampa and Green rivers. Grand Junction’s minor league baseball team has adopted the charismatic fish as its team name and mascot; last year it was the humpback chubs, and now it’s the razorback suckers.
But the program has had trouble meeting target minimum flows in the 15-mile reach, even though upstream water development has not kept pace the way it was expected to. A main culprit is climate change, which has robbed the river of about 20% of its flows during the 21stcentury.
“We just don’t have the tools as a society to be able to handle what’s happening right now in any cohesive way,” Stahli said. “This isn’t an endangered fish problem; this is an everyone problem.”
Palisade High School students released razorback suckers and bonytails they helped raise into the Colorado River on Friday, May 1. The two species live only in the Colorado River Basin and are endangered. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Why is the river dry?
The reach is just downstream of large Grand Valley agricultural diversions, which are used to grow crops such as corn, alfalfa and the famous Palisade peaches, and which can take a combined 1,950 cfs from the river. At certain times of year, there can be more water in the Grand Valley’s canals than there is in the nearby Colorado River. Collectively, they are the biggest agricultural diversion from the Colorado River on the Western Slope.
“There has been so much diversion and damming of the river farther upstream,” said Bart Miller, healthy rivers director at environmental group Western Resource Advocates. “There are a lot of uses right there, and you’re seeing the impacts of all the Front Range diversions. [The 15-mile reach] is a pinch point in the system based on all the water development we’ve done.”
Water rights for the environment and recreation were latecomers to the legal system. It wasn’t until the 1970s — nearly 100 years after the most-senior agricultural rights on the Western Slope were established — that Colorado began protecting the value of water in streams with its instream flow program. Under Colorado’s system of water law, those who use water by taking it out of the river — including farmers, cities and industry — usually have the oldest rights, giving them first use of the resource. There’s nothing illegal about drying up a river.
“It’s like you’re running in a race and it’s four laps around the track,” Miller said. “The folks with the instream, recreational, environmental values are there at the starting line, but they’re held back for the first two or three laps. Everyone else is already running. And that’s why the environment often ends up in a really bad place.”
A Palisade High School student puckers up and prepares to kiss a fish goodbye on Friday, May 1 at Riverbend Park in Palisade. About 1,500 juvenile razorback suckers and bonytail, two species of endangered fish that students helped raise in a hatchery, were released into the 15-mile reach of the Colorado River. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
‘April hole’?
It’s not totally unheard of to have a small window of diminished streamflows in April. In a phenomenon known as the “April hole,” irrigation demands in the Grand Valley ramp up, while the needed water remains frozen solid as high-country snowpack. This problem remedies itself within a couple weeks as the snow begins melting. But this year, little snowpack remained by April and water managers think spring runoff at Cameo, where the big Grand Valley diversions are located, peaked during the March heatwave.
Kate Ryan is executive director of the Colorado Water Trust, which works to put water back into streams through temporary water sharing agreements with agricultural, municipal and industrial water users. Although the Water Trust is still finalizing contracts for this year, Ryan said she expects the Water Trust to add about 4,700 acre-feet of water to the 15-mile reach by leasing water from Ruedi Reservoir owned by the town of Palisade, and oil-and-gas company QB Energy.
In past years, water from this project has been released between the end of July and beginning of October. But that timing may change if the recovery program is trying to keep fish out of the reach.
“We will make sure that we deliver water at a point that complements the work of the recovery program,” Ryan said.
The Water Trust has also used the Colorado River Water Conservation District’s water marketing program — where acre-feet are available for purchase — to restore water to streams. But the River District board at its April meeting voted to freeze all new contracts, which are usually doled out first come, first served, while staff figures out the best use of the limited water supply.
The move was part of a series of drought mitigation actions aimed at easing shortages for water users. The board last month also approved a system for prioritizing water sectors, with keeping water in rivers at the bottom of the list: municipal and domestic water needs over agricultural and industrial needs; and agricultural and industrial needs over in-channel uses such as those that benefit the environment, endangered fish and recreation.
The Water Trust this week sent a letter to some water managers recognizing the historic drought and acknowledging that many of its temporary water sharing agreements, which pay water rights holders to leave water in streams, may not operate this year because their agricultural partners may not have enough water for their own use. Projects are voluntary and happen only in years when participants have enough water to share and it can benefit a stream.
But the letter also said there may be others who are interested in using their water rights to help prop up a stream this year.
“There is just so much uncertainty right now that we are trying to be as flexible and responsive as possible,” Ryan said.
Palisade High School students released two species of endangered fish into the Colorado River on Friday, May 1, 2026. Target flows for these fish in the 15-mile reach are often not met. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Recovery-program officials said this year they will double down on other actions that benefit endangered fish, including removing nonnative predator species such as smallmouth bass and stocking the river with hatchery-raised fish. On Friday, students at Palisade High School released 1,500 young razorback suckers and bonytails that they helped raise into the Colorado River at Riverbend Park in Palisade.
Recovery-program staff said managing the 15-mile reach this year is about preventing the worst impacts and seeing what lessons can be learned from one of the driest years on record.
“It is just new terrain,” said David Graf, instream flow coordinator for the recovery program. “I think we are just flying by the seat of our pants in a lot of ways trying to do triage management as opposed to really adapt.”
For now, one of the few ways to add water back to a depleted river remains borrowing it from other, more senior users.
“I think until our water suppliers and state government hear from people that the environment really is a priority, not just the recovery program and need to support endangered species, but also for communities and local economies across the board, it’s going to stay that way,” Ryan said.
Bicycling the Colorado National Monument, Grand Valley in the distance via Colorado.com
If someone were to be dropped from another planet into the North Fork Valley in western Colorado today, they would be forgiven for assuming there is not a water crisis. A thick carpet of green covers the valley floor, the irrigation canals are filled to the brim, trees are leafing out, the river is running and Paonia Reservoir is almost full, and the mountains are still graced with snow.
I didn’t even come from outer space — I think — and I find the contrast between the news reports of water shortages and restrictions and the on-the-ground situation here to be quite jarring. Is it possible that April precipitation has averted the calamity?
A green hay field on a mesa in the North Fork Valley in western Colorado. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Yes, a series of storms, some quite abundant, have moved through the Upper Colorado River Basin, boosting snowpack and soothing the desiccated earth. It has certainly felt cooler and wetter than normal, but that was mostly an illusion brought on by the abnormally dry winter and the searing March heatwave. And it hasn’t been nearly enough to offset the warm winter and the lack of snow, as the graphs below indicate.
As for the full ditches, I guess you could attribute that to a “make hay while the water is available” sort of ethos. You might as well douse the fields and fill ponds while spring runoff is in full swing and the river still runs, knowing that it may not last beyond June. Meanwhile, Paonia Reservoir’s relatively healthy levels are the result of the Fire Mountain irrigation canal — which relies on reservoir water — being shut down for emergency repairs.
Meanwhile, there is a conspicuous absence here in this agricultural hotspot: There are no blossoms or fruit on apple, cherry, peach, or pear trees. The March heatwave sparked a spectacular orchard super-bloom. That was followed by a devastating freeze that killed all of the fruit, even in orchards where extreme preventative measures were taken, and even “burned” the leaves on some trees. Wacky weather indeed.
The North Fork of the Gunnison’s May 1 snowpack this year is tied for the lowest on record with 2012.
The Animas River watershed did get enough of a boost to bring snowpack levels back up above 2002’s for this date. Source: NRCS.
Even with the recent storms, the Upper Colorado River Basin snowpack remained at record-low levels as of May 1. The previous low year (from 40 years of SNOTEL records) was 2012, with 2002 and 2018 not far behind. Source: NRCS.
🐟 Colorado River Chronicles 💧
Phil Lyman, the former and hopeful Utah politician, recently posted this on Facebook:
Just to sum it up: He’s knocking a federal program that pays willing farmers to voluntarily cut off irrigation to their fields in order to conserve water in an effort to balance Colorado River demand with the shrinking supplies. And he’s blaming it all on California.
Lyman’s general sentiment is not new, nor is it uncommon among water users in the Upper Basin states. In fact, it’s basically a cliché. Since I was a kid I’ve heard folks saying something along the lines of: If we don’t use the water, it’ll just run on down to California, where those L.A. folks will guzzle it up to fill their swimming pools and water their golf courses. It’s a rather simplistic view, and one that doesn’t account for the realities of water law or the way the Colorado River system works. In other words, it’s just plain wrong, and a candidate for Congress — as Lyman is — should know better.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
The Colorado River and its users have a problem: Demand for the water exceeds supply, and the supply is continually shrinking. Since boosting supply is not a feasible option, demand — i.e. consumptive use — must be reduced significantly. While everyone must make cuts, agriculture is the river’s largest water user by far, meaning that sector is going to have to make the largest cuts, by volume. This isn’t about demonizing farmers or alfalfa, it’s not about whether Californians or Utahns are more deserving of the water. It’s simple math.
The farm fallowing program is one way to cut consumption quickly by paying willing farmers to voluntarily forego irrigating some or all of their fields on a year-by-year basis. It’s not ideal, but it is legal, voluntary, and can save junior water rights holders, including cities and towns throughout the watershed, from being forced to shut off their water intakes. And in no way is farm fallowing exclusive to Utah. It’s occurring all over the place.
Let’s do a little fact-check of Lyman’s other points:
Farm fallowing in Utah is being done to benefit California, which “demolished its water storage infrastructure.” No and no. The goal here is to leave a little more water in the river, to keep the whole system from collapsing. Any amount conserved in one place will potentially benefit all other river users, as well as the river itself. Foregoing irrigation on a Utah farm, for example, could help keep the taps on in St. George or some other Utah community that relies on the river. Dams have been removed in California, most significantly four structures on the Lower Klamath River. But those were primarily for hydropower production, not irrigation or water storage, and they are far removed from the Colorado River or any associated water storage.
“Paying farmers not to feed us to bail out California’s failures …” Actually, the feds and state and other programs mostly are paying farmers not to grow alfalfa or hay, which feed cattle, and it has nothing to do with California’s “failures.” Indeed, California grows a lot of alfalfa, too, but it also grows all kinds of vegetables — far more than in Utah.
If the water saved in Utah does make it to the Lower Basin and California, then the biggest beneficiary would be … farmers. Most of the water in the Lower Basin goes to the Imperial Irrigation District, where it is used for farming. Those farmers have also been part of the federal fallowing program, and have managed collectively to reduced their Colorado River water consumption by about nearly 1 million acre-feet since 2003.
Lyman calls for eliminating or restructuring federal farm fallowing programs. I’m curious if he’s talked to the farmers about this, especially the ones who may lose their water and be forced to fallow anyway. Isn’t it better to get paid not to grow something than to not get paid for it?
“… fight to end federal policies that separate water from the people who depend on it. Water rights are property rights.” We all depend on water; the California farmers depend on water just as much as Utah farmers do. Furthermore, the California farmers also own their land, they have some of the most senior water rights on the Colorado River, and according to the “Law of the River,” they could likely go to court to force many Utah farmers to stop irrigating altogether, without compensation. The farm fallowing program does not separate water from the farmers, it simply pays them to temporarily forego irrigation.
“… end the war on farm water.” Look, there is not enough water in the Colorado River for everyone. Everyone will have to take cuts, but irrigated agriculture is the biggest user by far, and therefore will have to make cuts in order to balance supply and demand. It’s simple math: All of Las Vegas and southern Nevada use less than one-tenth of the water that goes to the farms in the Imperial Irrigation District.
“… propose that the federal government build and operate desalination plants in California to free up Colorado River water for Utah …” Desalination will likely be a part of the West’s water future, especially for coastal urban areas. But building the plants, and processing and transporting these kinds of volumes of water, would be outrageously expensive and energy-intensive, which would be especially harmful to farmers, who rely on cheap water.
***
The Bureau of Reclamation recently decreased Glen Canyon Dam releases from about 8,200 cfs to a steady 7,000 cfs (without the usual nighttime reductions). This appears to be the lowest sustained releases since the dam was built, and if continued throughout the entire year would lead to only 5 million acre-feet of annual releases, which would make the Lower Basin states even more grumpy and litigation-happy than they already are.
But not to worry, the feds are still on course to release 6 MAF for the water year, because they released about 10,000 cfs during January and February. Still, it’s going to change the complexion of rafting in the Grand Canyon, for sure, and it is certainly pushing the boundaries of the Grand Canyon Protection Act.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
Snow falls on the Abajo Mountains in southeastern Utah as seen from near Dove Creek, Colorado. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
The Lower Basin States of Arizona, California, and Nevada today advanced a plan to stabilize the Colorado River through 2028, responding to declining reservoir levels, record low inflows to Lake Powell, and increasing risk of reaching critical elevations at both Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Earlier in the post-2026 process, the Lower Basin took a significant step by proposing 1.25 million acre-feet in annual reductions, with an additional 250,000 acre-feet from Mexico, totaling approximately 1.5 million acre-feet per year.
This proposal builds on that foundation with an expanded system conservation program across the Lower Basin with an estimated contribution of at least 700,000 acre-feet. In total, the plan identifies up to 3.2 million acre-feet of water savings to the system through 2028.
The proposal is an integrated package addressing Lake Powell releases, Upper Initial Unit operations, Lower Basin reductions, additional conservation, use of Intentionally Created Surplus, and system infrastructure improvements. Lower Basin contributions are contingent on these coordinated operations to ensure system stability as well as appropriate funding.
“With this proposal, the Lower Basin is putting forth real action to stabilize water supply along the Colorado River. We’re putting forward additional measurable water contributions for the system. Without that, the system will continue to decline,” said JB Hamby
“This proposal is about moving from ideas to implementation,” said John Entsminger. “It pairs real measurable water contributions with sensible dry-condition operations at Lake Powell and across the Upper Initial Units. Now is the time for every water user in the Basin to double down on water conservation as we face historically dry hydrology.”
“This proposal reflects the creativity and commitment of water users across the Lower Basin who continue to step forward with solutions that support the river,” said Tom Buschatzke. “We have shown that collaborative, voluntary efforts and reductions that are certain can produce meaningful water savings.”
The Lower Basin states recognize the Upper Basin’s call for mediation and are open to that process. However, current conditions require immediate, measurable water reductions from every state. The Lower Basin states stand ready to engage in a meaningful process for long-term solutions while encouraging the Upper Basin to step forward now with verifiable water contributions to help stabilize the system and support a near-term, seven-state bridge.
The Lower Basin states confirmed that the proposal preserves legal accountability under the Colorado River Compact, including Upper Basin delivery obligations, while maintaining a clear path toward a broader agreement among all seven Basin States.
The plan has been advanced to the federal government for consideration as part of the ongoing post-2026 planning process and is intended to provide a near-term bridge through 2028 while long-term operating guidelines are finalized.
Implementation of key elements of the proposal, including expanded system conservation, will require federal partnership. The proposal remains subject to approval by the Arizona Legislature and relevant California and Nevada water agency governing boards.
Colorado River. Photo credit: Central Arizona Project
May 1, 2026
The situation on the Colorado River is dire. Flows have reached historic lows and water saved in major storage reservoirs is approaching critical elevations. To date, solutions to the crisis have been elusive, with lengthy litigation looming as the seven states that share the river have been unable to agree on an appropriate remedy to the situation. That is why today’s announcement that the Lower Division States of Arizona, California and Nevada have come together to announce a bridge proposal that will support the entire Colorado River system through 2028 represents a welcome lifeline and cause for hope. This three-state proposal is a two-year, comprehensive package that will commit a minimum of 3.2 million acre-feet of Lower Division water savings in Lake Mead by 2028
The proposal is a bridge, a pathway to future operations that extend beyond the expiration of the existing river operating guidelines at the end of 2026. However, this massive sacrifice by the Lower Division States is only possible by implementing the entire proposal, which requires a series of critical actions by the federal government. The federal government must commit the remainder of Colorado River drought funding to offset impacts to Lower Division users, create a tribal pool to meet federal responsibilities to tribal communities, and use the reservoirs upstream of Lake Mead for their foundational purpose — meeting water delivery obligations to the Lower Division. Congress built those upstream dams for the purpose of releasing water and meeting minimum obligations to the Lower Division under the Colorado River Compact during an extended drought like the one we face today and now, the dams must be used as mandated by Congress.
Today’s announcement is the latest in a series of actions by the Lower Division States to preserve the stability of the Colorado River system. Lake Mead would be in the mud if not for Lower Division water users leaving water in the lake to protect the system, and every drop that has been left in Lake Mead is benefiting Lake Powell and the Upper Division by allowing for less water to be released downstream.
But Lower Division actions alone cannot protect the entire system from extraordinarily dry years. This year is an example where, despite the Lower Division’s ongoing reductions and contributions, Lake Powell needed additional emergency action.
While this new Lower Division bridge requires no action from the Upper Division states, it is well past time that the Upper Division States agree to be part of the solution by committing to verifiably conserve water and end their out-of-touch demand that the Upper Division be allowed to increase their total uses from a shrinking system.
The Central Arizona Project applauds the Lower Division States for developing the proposal and urges the federal government to speedily approve this emergency effort to bridge the river system through 2028.
The Center for Biological Diversity, the San Carlos Apache Tribe and the Lower San Pedro Watershed Alliance today filed a notice of their intent to sue the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over the Copper Creek Exploration Project near Mammoth, Arizona. The groups say the agencies violated the Endangered Species Act by allowing mining exploration drilling that threatens Mexican spotted owls and other imperiled wildlife.
“Federal officials were warned that Mexican spotted owls are in the area but pushed this mining project ahead anyway and skipped steps required by law,” said Russ McSpadden, a Southwest conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The Endangered Species Act is supposed to protect imperiled wildlife before damage is done, not after agencies brush aside the evidence and greenlight industrial drilling. This mining project is clearly illegal and it must be stopped.”
Today’s notice focuses on Mexican spotted owls, rare birds who depend on the rugged canyon and forest habitat of the Southwest. Federal data estimates there are roughly 1,300 known owl territories in the U.S., representing only a few thousand birds in small, fragmented and declining populations. Mexican spotted owls have been protected as threatened under the Endangered Species Act since 1993.
“The Lower San Pedro watershed is one of Arizona’s most important wildlife corridors, and this exploration project is pushing industrial disturbance into a landscape that is already under pressure,” said Melissa Crytzer Fry, chair for the Lower San Pedro Watershed Alliance. “When agencies ignore clear evidence and fail to follow the law, local communities are left to defend the river, the habitat and the species that make this place irreplaceable. We shared trail camera images with the BLM showing Mexican spotted owls in the area and were utterly ignored.”
The groups say the BLM approved the drilling project last summer despite receiving photographs showing Mexican spotted owls in the area. The agency still concluded the species was “not present” and failed to initiate consultation with the Fish and Wildlife Service, as required by the Endangered Species Act.
The Copper Creek project is already underway, bringing industrial drilling, bright lights, heavy noise, truck traffic, surface disturbance and groundwater pumping into sensitive habitat in and around Copper Creek Canyon, an important tributary of the Lower San Pedro River. These public lands and waterways support significant wildlife resources, including habitat for one of the Southwest’s most vulnerable owl species, and require management based on the best available science.
The notice letter also challenges the agencies’ analysis of harms to the threatened yellow-billed cuckoo, saying they failed to adequately assess how exploration-related groundwater pumping and noise could affect the bird’s habitat in the Lower San Pedro watershed. Cuckoo rely on healthy streams for habitat and prey during their nesting season.
The agencies failed to analyze how extensive helicopter surveying of the project area may harm both Mexican spotted owls and yellow-billed cuckoos. Aerial surveillance requires helicopters to fly extremely close to the ground, causing loud noise and surface disturbance that can be disruptive to wildlife.
Copper Creek Canyon. Photo credit: Russ McSpadden/Center for Biological Diversity
This story was produced by Circle of Blue, in partnership with The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
KEY POINTS
Glen Canyon Dam, completed in 1963, was not designed to be operated at extremely low water levels in Lake Powell.
The decline of Lake Powell is putting hydropower generation and downstream water deliveries at risk.
The Bureau of Reclamation, the federal water manager, is studying options for retrofitting Glen Canyon Dam.
In the span of U.S. history certain years are turning points, milestones in the nation’s story. 1776. 1865. 1929. 1968. Circumstance and consequence conspire to make it so.
For the Colorado River and those who rely on it, 2026 is on the verge of similar prominence. Circumstances in the basin today are that urgent.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
A slow-developing water supply calamity, decades in the making, has boiled over, like a cold war turning hot. Extreme heat in March – triple-digit temperatures never witnessed that early in the year – obliterated a meager snowpack. The basin’s big reservoirs, the supposed buffers against short-term drought, were already uncomfortably low after a quarter-century of declining river flows. They will drop even lower. The amount of water flowing this summer into Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir, will be one of the smallest ever measured, barely a trickle.
“This is unprecedented, but it’s not unpredicted,” said Eric Balken, executive director of the Glen Canyon Institute. “I like to say that this is the most predicted disaster of all time.”
Lake Powell is formed by Glen Canyon Dam, a striking 710-ft tall concrete arch braced against ruddy sandstone walls. It plugs the Colorado just after the river enters Arizona. Meant to ensure water deliveries to the lower basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada, Glen Canyon Dam was finished in 1963 to complement the Colorado River’s audacious engineering that distributes water through mountains and uphill to the largest cities in the Southwest and to the region’s most productive farmland. When full, Lake Powell holds enough water to flood the entire state of Virginia to the depth of one foot.
Climate change and water demand that still exceeds supply have flipped the engineering script. Lake Powell is less than 25 percent full today. Glen Canyon Dam, instead of being a guarantor of water, is now the most significant water chokepoint in the basin. The hard-won asset has become a glaring liability.
The back of Glen Canyon Dam circa 1964, not long after the reservoir had begun filling up. Here the water level is above dead pool, meaning water can be released via the river outlets, but it is below minimum power pool, so water cannot yet enter the penstocks to generate electricity. Bureau of Reclamation photo. Annotations: Jonathan P. Thompson
The reversal of fortune is because of how Glen Canyon Dam was designed. The dam was never meant to be operated at the extremely low water levels that Lake Powell is rapidly approaching. Doing so for extended periods of time could damage the pipes that move water through the dam, according to the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that manages the structure.
Reclamation is now studying its options for retrofitting Glen Canyon Dam to accommodate a lower Lake Powell. It expects to release those findings later this year or in early 2027. As any home remodeler knows, renovating an aging structure is neither quick nor cheap, especially when failure could have disastrous consequences.
In the short term, Reclamation is relying on operational band-aids for Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell. With the consent of the seven states in the basin – Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming – the agency took unprecedented action this month to prop up the reservoir. Releasing more water from upstream reservoirs and holding back more in Powell will delay Glen Canyon’s infrastructure reckoning. But that day will soon come, and Reclamation’s answer to the dam’s engineering problems will have far-reaching implications – not only for the reliability of the basin’s water supply, but also for its power customers, ecology, and recreation economy.
An Assessment Deferred
Dams are difficult to manage under any circumstance. Management is even more troublesome when operators must balance multiple, conflicting objectives. In Glen Canyon’s case those objectives are water supply, flood control, hydropower generation, and releasing water to protect the ecology downstream in the Grand Canyon – namely, beach-building and threatened native fish like the humpback chub. This is in addition to ensuring the safe operation of the dam itself.
How to operate Glen Canyon Dam and Hoover Dam, its larger downstream sibling, is what the seven basin states and Reclamation are attempting to figure out right now. The current agreement covers operations through 2026. Reclamation published a draft environmental impact statement, or EIS, in January that would impose severe cuts on water users in the lower basin, particularly Arizona, in part to protect Glen Canyon Dam’s fragile infrastructure.
For that reason, water users in the lower basin and elsewhere support an engineering fix for Glen Canyon Dam. Many were incredulous that Reclamation did not include an assessment of dam modifications in its draft environmental analysis.
“This EIS could have been a great avenue to look at real changes at Glen Canyon Dam that could solve the water delivery problem and some of the ecological problems, too,” Balken said.
Patrick Dent is the assistant general manager for water policy at the Central Arizona Project (CAP), which delivers Colorado River water to the densely populated center of the state. He said that CAP does not favor any particular fix – only one that provides dam managers with more flexibility.
“Our primary interest is that they could release water at a lower lake level,” Dent said.
The Gila River Indian Community, which receives Colorado River water through CAP, told Reclamation that the agency has a duty to safeguard the tribe’s water rights, which are at risk if the dam cannot release enough water. “The United States must take action to fix Glen Canyon Dam,” Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis wrote in a March 2026 letter.
The Colorado Water Conservation Board, which represents that state’s water interests, said it supports a reevaluation of Glen Canyon Dam, but “in a separate action” from the EIS.
Becki Bryant, a Reclamation spokesperson, said the agency will release an appraisal study assessing three dam modification alternatives at the end of this year or in early 2027. Any action beyond the study, she said, requires congressional authorization and funding.
Illustration from the report, “Antique Plumbing & Leadership Postponed” from the Utah Rivers Council, Glen Canyon Institute and the Great Basin Water Network. Courtesy of Utah Rivers Council
‘Antiquated Plumbing’
The tool for managing the dam’s multiple objectives, which are a legislative requirement as well as a practical necessity, is the water held in Lake Powell, said David Wegner, a scientist who has worked on Glen Canyon policy for more than four decades. But even water has limits when the engineering is inadequate. “Sadly, these dams were not built for multiple objectives,” Wegner said. And Glen Canyon was certainly not built for extremely low water, he added.
The problem with Glen Canyon is what a coalition of environmental groups calls the dam’s “antiquated plumbing.” The groups – Glen Canyon Institute, Great Basin Water Network, and Utah Rivers Council – published a report in August 2022 that outlined these engineering deficiencies.
Water can exit Glen Canyon in only three ways. One is the spillways, a pressure-release valve for flooding, which are located at elevation 3,648 feet, near the top of the dam. They are irrelevant today. Lake Powell rests 122 feet below them.
The main exit point is through the eight penstocks, the 15-foot diameter tubes that move water through the turbines to generate hydroelectricity. The penstocks are incapacitated when Powell drops below 3,490 feet. (The lake today is 36 feet higher than that level.) If the lake falls below what is known as minimum power pool, hydropower generation also ceases.
If that happens, water must be released through four 8-foot diameter pipes called the river outlet works. Smaller than the penstocks, the river outlet works are located at elevation 3,370. Below that elevation water cannot be released from Powell, a status known ominously as “dead pool.” (Functionally, the river outlet works may be useless at elevation 3,394, Reclamation says.)
The environmental groups identified two limitations with the river outlet works. One is that they were not designed to be operated full-time. They are a role player, not the star. The other is that their smaller size means less water can pass through them. That’s a problem because the upper basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming are required to send a set amount of water downstream to the lower basin, according to the 1922 Colorado River Compact that divided the river.
The flow restrictions imposed by the river outlet works, if they had to be used full time, means that the upper basin could violate the compact, which could mean water cutbacks imposed by the lower basin.
“It’s just so counterintuitive that the tool that was designed to meet this delivery obligation” – the construction of Glen Canyon Dam – “is now going to be the roadblock that may prevent the delivery obligation from being met,” said Balken of the Glen Canyon Institute.
The engineering problems are not a new discovery. Wegner, who was with the Bureau of Reclamation at the time as its Grand Canyon environmental studies manager, helped lead a 1987 National Academies report on Glen Canyon. The report recommended that the Interior Department consider the “installation and operation of multiple outlet structures” at Glen Canyon, which would give dam managers more flexibility with water releases.
Glen Canyon’s structural problems were substantiated in 2023, when Reclamation used the river outlet works during an experimental “high-flow” release of water to flush sediment downstream and rebuild eroding Grand Canyon beaches.
The high-volume release caused pitting, or cavitation, within the river outlet works, a risk that was heightened due to the physics of water when Lake Powell is low. Reclamation coated the pipes with epoxy as a temporary fix to prevent more damage, a process that took several months. The agency has since used two small-scale physical models at its Technical Service Center in Denver to test dam operations at low water levels and the effect on infrastructure.
Reclamation acknowledged the limitations of the river outlet works in a technical memopublished in March 2024 by Richard Lafond, director of the agency’s Technical Service Center. The memo’s conclusions were endorsed by the top decision-makers in Reclamation’s Upper Colorado River Office.
“Long term operation of the river outlet works will result in accelerating regular operation and maintenance tasks,” LaFond wrote. Reclamation should “not rely on the river outlet works as the sole means for releasing water from Glen Canyon Dam.”
Wegner put it in starker terms. If the river outlet works had to be relied upon and the pipes began to erode again, then Reclamation could potentially lose control of water flows.
“Potentially that could fail,” Wegner said, meaning an inability to control water releases through the dam if the pipes are structurally compromised. “And if that fails, now you have a catastrophe on your hand and you have limited options to manage that catastrophe.”
In other words, there would be no way to release water downstream into the Grand Canyon and into the lower basin.
Neither Quick Nor Easy
What fixes are possible? Reclamation received $2 million from Congress in the fiscal year 2022 budget for an appraisal study.
Reclamation outlined three engineering possibilities in a 2023 presentation, most of which centered on preserving hydropower generation as Lake Powell declines.
One possibility is a new, lower intake that uses the existing power generation turbines. An intake located deeper in the reservoir would allow Glen Canyon to pass water in what is currently dead pool. But it would entail “increased risk from penetration through the dam.”
The second would connect new power generation equipment to the river outlet works.
The third option is tunneling through the canyon wall and installing a new underground power station. This would also provide more flexibility for water releases.
Reclamation also included three operational or policy changes for power production, including investing in wind and solar to offset hydropower declines.
Other ideas that seemed kooky and fringe just a few years ago – draining Lake Powell and filling Lake Mead first; changing the basin’s water accounting system – are now being discussed throughout the basin with more seriousness and candor.
Beyond that presentation, Reclamation has not said much publicly about dam modification. The agency declined an interview request to discuss Glen Canyon Dam’s engineering problems.
Whatever direction Reclamation chooses – an option outlined above or something new – the process will not be quick or easy. Any change to Glen Canyon must go through an environmental analysis and public comment period. Congress will have to authorize actions and appropriate the funds. Construction alone will take years.
Wegner, who was the staff director for the House Natural Resources Water and Power Subcommittee from 2008 to 2014, knows the difficulty and sees a lack of leadership. “There’s nobody in Washington who has been willing to lead the charge trying to get Congress to provide authorized funding to do this sort of work.”
‘Reservoir Triage’
Because Reclamation is not confident it can operate the river outlet works for an extended run, the agency is focused on keeping Powell above elevation 3,500 feet.
Protecting 3,500 feet comes with all sorts of baggage. It preserves hydropower generation, which power customers appreciate. But in effect the redline at that elevation strands some 4.4 million acre-feet in Lake Powell. (Only 3.7 million acre-feet is technically accessible with the current plumbing.) Some have called this elevation a “de facto” dead pool. Thus, the agitation in the lower basin for a plumbing system within the dam that provides access to this water.
Balken said that downstream water deliveries, not preserving hydropower, should be Reclamation’s biggest concern.
“When these decision makers are talking about Glen Canyon Dam from only a hydropower perspective, I think it’s missing the larger point, which is the dam is about to become the biggest roadblock of water deliveries that the basin has ever seen,” Balken said.
Flaming Gorge Reservoir, on the Green River, straddles the Wyoming-Utah border south of Rock Springs. The Flaming Gorge dam, on the Utah side, was completed in 1964 and is a critical component of the Colorado River water storage system. The Green River, the chief tributary to the Colorado River, originates in the Wind River Range, flows to Flaming Gorge Reservoir, then connects with the Colorado River in Canyonlands National Park in Utah.
To avoid the infrastructure risks of dropping below 3,500 feet, Reclamation has started to take extraordinary action. The agency has two emergency levers it is pulling. One is to hold more water back in Lake Powell. Reclamation cut water releases to the legal minimum this year, something it has never done. The other is releasing more water from Flaming Gorge, a reservoir upstream that is in better shape.
As Balken describes it, “This is reservoir triage.”
These emergency actions have serious side-effects. Upstream, Flaming Gorge is expected to lose 35 feet of elevation by next spring, once the extra water has been released. That will hurt the recreation economy of northeastern Utah and southwestern Wyoming – fewer boat ramps in the water, less fishing access.
These upstream releases have limited utility, Wegner said. “You can do that once or twice. But you got to then depend upon Mother Nature refilling those reservoirs upstream.”
Hoover Dam at low water. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Downstream, Lake Mead will drop quickly and it too will approach a level in which hydropower generation at Hoover Dam severely drops. Algal blooms in a warmer, shallower lake could be a problem. “They’re going to be robbing Mead to pay Powell,” Balken said.
Trying Not to Hit Bottom
The idea of dead pool – when Lake Powell can no longer release water – was almost inconceivable when the reservoir was designed and filled. The official device for measuring Lake Powell’s elevation ends at the top of the penstocks, at elevation 3,477.5 feet. According to Reclamation’s 2024 technical memo, “This is an indication that reservoir elevations below minimum power pool” – 3,490 feet – “were not anticipated.”
Cavitation at the Glen Canyon Dam, the cause of the emergency in 1983 via Flow Science.
Reclamation finished filling the reservoir in 1980. Three years later, after an intense El Niño winter, the dam’s upper limits were tested. Floodwaters in the summer of 1983 nearly broke the dam. Such volumes are almost inconceivable now.
In a typical year, Lake Powell would be rising in late April, flush with the deposits of snowmelt from headwater basins in the Rocky Mountains. Not this year. The snowpack peaked in many basins in late February or early March. What little snow there was has already melted. As of April 28, Lake Powell inflows are projected to be just 16 percent of average. Lake level forecasts from mid-April showed a long downward slope for the next 12 months. Those projections were what triggered the emergency release of water from Flaming Gorge and the reduction in Lake Powell releases.
Scientists have been warning about circumstances like this for years. In a defining period for the basin, all the predictions of water supply shocks in the Colorado River from the past two decades are coming to pass.
“We should have been prepared for this,” Balken said.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Click the link to read the article on the Tucson.com website (Tony Davis). Here’s an excerpt:
April 26, 2026
It’s time to bring in a mediator to handle the prolonged dispute over managing the Colorado River between the Upper and Lower Colorado River Basin states, representatives of the four Upper Basin states say.
“The proposal for mediation attempts to address the current deadlock between Upper Basin and Lower Basin approaches and begin to deal with the basin’s dire hydrologic conditions.” said the Upper Colorado River Commission, which represents Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.
“The commissioners believe a structured mediation process can support authentic negotiations and collective action to address the Basin’s operational challenges,” the commission said in a news release last week.
The request for a mediator to handle this dispute follows about two years of fruitless negotiations among the various state representatives. There have been several major sources of dispute, but the biggest one has been over how the two basins should split the cuts in river water use that would be needed to bring human demand in line with shrinking supply…The Upper Basin states’ request comes not long before the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is supposed to announce its plan for managing the river, in the absence of an agreement among the basin states. A new plan is necessary because the river’s current operating guidelines expire Sept. 30…
The request for mediation also comes as the river’s condition continues to deteriorate. Hot, dry weather has held down water flows in the river for most of the year, and there’s a risk that spring-summer runoff into Lake Powell will be the lowest on record since Lake Powell started filling in the 1960s.
Click the link to read the article on the Summit Daily website (Ali Longwell). Here’s an excerpt:
April 20, 2026
With a historic drought hitting the Colorado River basin, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is making preparations to slow releases from the river’s largest reservoir while increasing withdrawals from an Upper Basin reservoir.
“Given the severity of the risks facing the Colorado River system, it is imperative that we take action quickly to protect a resource that supplies water to 40 million people and supports vital agricultural, hydropower production, tribal, wildlife and recreational uses across the region,” said Andrea Travnice, the Bureau of Reclamation’s assistant secretary of water and science in a Friday, April 17 news release…
As a result, the Bureau of Reclamation is anticipating that inflow to Lake Powell will be 29% of the historical average, which it reports is one of the lowest on record. If water levels fall below a certain elevation — below 3,490 feet or roughly 15% of its capacity — it can impact operations, regional power and water supplies as well as reduce hydroelectric power generation. The Bureau is projecting it could hit this minimum power pool level by August. As of April 19, Lake Powell and Lake Mead were 24% and 32% full, respectively.
View below Flaming Gorge Dam from the Green River, eastern Utah. Photo credit: USGS
The Colorado River carves through mud left behind from Lake Powell when the reservoir was at full pool, near Hite, Utah in October 2022. (Alexander Heilner/The Water Desk with aerial support from LightHawk)
This year’s historic winter of low snow might feel novel. But recent years give some insight into just how dry the West’s most important river system can get. This season’s scant snowpack is melting rapidly, and turning up memories of other notably dry years.
Prolonged drought conditions and warming temperatures since 2000 have produced severe single-year droughts in 2002, 2012, 2018 and 2020 in the river’s headwaters states of Colorado, Wyoming and Utah. As severe drought years continue to put the Southwest’s water infrastructure to the test, communities in the region are grappling with how best to understand and adapt to a changing climate.
2002 stands as the worst drought on record for the Colorado River, measured as the flow into one of its biggest reservoirs, Lake Powell on the Utah-Arizona border. It’s possible 2026 could break that record. Back then the year acted as a wake-up call to the region’s water leaders, spurred important policy changes, and reshaped attitudes around conservation.
We asked Colorado River experts Eric Kuhn, Jeff Lukas and Jim Lochhead to share five important takeaways from the 2002 drought, and what to know as we enter the warmer, drier months of 2026.
1. Reservoirs have memory
Reservoirs act as batteries for water availability, charged by inputs such as snowmelt, streams, rivers and precipitation.
“What you did two or three years ago can affect your water supply now,” said Eric Kuhn, former general manager for the Colorado River Water Conservation District. “So in a good year, if you are conserving, you are actually helping the system out for the next drought.”
The 2002 drought prompted municipal utilities to rethink their reservoir usage.
“Water managers and agencies have absorbed several lessons from 2002, including holding something back. They’re operating the reservoirs a little differently,” said Jeff Lukas, an independent climate and water researcher who has lived on Colorado’s Front Range for 40 years.
By conserving reservoir water, municipal utilities can maintain water storage for less abundant water years of the future. But as dry conditions have dogged the entire Colorado River basin for more than a quarter-century, the system’s buffer is gone.
“The biggest issue is that Lake Powell and Lake Mead were relatively full in 2002,” Kuhn said. Now, both Lake Powell and Lake Mead are at critically low levels, and the water scarcity is increasing the likelihood of multi-state litigation.
In 2002, drought was dealt with on a local level; water utilities were not thinking about drought in terms of the entire river system, but instead how to regulate municipal water use. This year’s dry conditions are pushing the whole region to the brink.
2. Conservation can make a big difference, if it is mandatory
Individual contributions to water conservation, adhering to local outdoor watering restrictions for example, can make a difference. Prompted by the 2002 drought, a 2004 University of Colorado study aimed to measure the effectiveness of water restrictions put in place by water providers on the state’s populated Front Range.
The study followed municipal water providers Thornton, Aurora, Westminster, Fort Collins, Boulder, Louisville, Lafayette and Denver Water, comparing 2002 usage to average water usage in 2000 and 2001. Researchers determined that water restrictions are most effective when mandatory. Mandatory restrictions in Lafayette reduced water usage by as much as 53%, according to the study.
The same study found that under mandatory restrictions, savings of expected water use per capita was as successful as 56%, while voluntary restrictions only measured up to 12%.
Outdoor watering represents a big slice of a city’s water budget, and 2002 showed utilities that in times of crisis people can rein in their use.
“Everyone should realize that they can make a small contribution to the solution,” Kuhn said. “Even though their individual contribution might be miniscule, when you add up all their neighbors and other people, it’s not miniscule. It’s very, very big.”
Watering a lawn once or twice a week, and not during peak hours, is a practical way to conserve water while keeping grass alive.
3. This is not a one-off year
It’s easy to shrug off a dry year and hope for wet weather’s return. But the long-term trends are concerning.
“This is really the 26th year of extreme drought,” said former Denver Water CEO Jim Lochhead. On a larger scale, the seven Colorado River basin states—Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming—have been preparing for worsening drought conditions since the shock of 2002. But river policy hasn’t kept pace with the aridification, leaving the region’s largest reservoirs at near record lows.
The Colorado River flows through canyons in northern Arizona in October 2020. (Ross Rice/The Water Desk & LightHawk)
“This has been a slow moving train that I think the states have known was coming, and they have frankly failed to do anything about it,” said Lochhead, who also represented the state of Colorado amid interstate Colorado River negotiations in the 1990s and early 2000s.
The Colorado Climate Center anticipates droughts to increase in severity and frequency, a trend that is only expected to continue in Colorado and across the Southwest as warming temperatures upend the water cycle.
“We should be managing and thinking about water, using water, as though it were always a drought,” Lukas said.
4. Communities have more practice dealing with drought, but still struggle
Drought conditions in 2002 led some municipal water utilities to organize and create incentives for conservation, and transformed the urban landscape, swapping grass for more drought-tolerant plants. Those water restrictions allowed municipal water providers to curb water demand while steadily growing in size. However, there is still room for improvement in disproportionately affected communities.
According to Lochhead, urban areas need to prioritize heat reduction in neighborhoods that have fewer trees in order to lessen the impacts of drought and warming temperatures. Using scarce water supplies to encourage tree-planting and increase shade should remain a priority.
“I think we need to work with those communities to enhance some landscaping,” Lochhead said. “Whether it’s the homeless population, whether it’s just kids that are out, whatever it may be, those areas are where they’re pretty hard hit by heat.”
Farmers and ranchers are used to riding the highs and lows of western weather. But extremely dry years like 2002, and now 2026, can push their operations to the limits.
“This is going to be a really tough year,” Lukas said. “You’re going to have a lot of people selling off their herds and taking insurance out because of low crop yields.”
The majority of Colorado’s annual water supply is used for irrigation, so any proposed restrictions can be costly for the agricultural community. “There are going to be a lot of farms and ranches that just can’t operate because they don’t have any water,” Lochhead said. “There are going to be some significant economic consequences.”
5. Stay aware, even if things seem bleak
For Lukas, this year and its predecessors test our expectations about what nature can provide.
Even in periods of prolonged drought, there are wet years. “Judging from history, that tends to put everyone back on their heels, a little complacent,” Lukas said, but maintaining water storage relies on year-to-year vigilance, not complacency.
Another primary concern during drought years is wildfire. With less moisture in the soil, dry vegetation acts as fuel for wildfire, which becomes harder to contain under hot and dry conditions.
“I worry a lot less about municipal water supply than I do about wildfire,” Lukas said. Many of Colorado’s notably dry years have also recorded severe and destructive wildfires.
It comes at no surprise that worsening drought falls in line with worsening wildfires. “Climate change is delivered to people through changes in the hydrologic cycle,” Kuhn said, so being aware of water usage now is just as, if not more important as it was in 2002.
This story was produced and distributed by The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
The federal government ordered Flaming Gorge water released and cuts to Lake Powell releases, to prevent collapse.
Last week, the federal government ordered emergency measures to prevent water levels at Lake Powell from falling so low that Glen Canyon Dam, which created the reservoir, could no longer generate power or deliver water downstream. Without this intervention, models showed that the reservoir could drop below safe operating levels in August, meaning that the river would not have a reliable way to flow past the dam. This would threaten water and power supplies for millions of people across the Southwest, as well as the flow of water through the Grand Canyon.
Westwide SNOTEL basin-filled map April 24, 2026.
Across the Colorado River Basin, an extremely low snowpack combined with a record-shattering March heat wave, have left water managers with few other options. The region’s reservoirs were already depleted from years of relying on wet winters to balance the growing demand with the ongoing drought.
Flaming Gorge Reservoir, on the Green River, straddles the Wyoming-Utah border south of Rock Springs. The Flaming Gorge dam, on the Utah side, was completed in 1964 and is a critical component of the Colorado River water storage system. The Green River, the chief tributary to the Colorado River, originates in the Wind River Range, flows to Flaming Gorge Reservoir, then connects with the Colorado River in Canyonlands National Park in Utah.
“This is a short-term solution,” said Jenny Dumas, water attorney for the Jicarilla Apache Nation, which sits near the border of Colorado and New Mexico. “It’s going to take time to recover these reservoirs before we can do this again. So while we can exhaust our reserves to avoid system collapse this year, it means reserves won’t be there next year.”
This is not the first time water managers have turned to Flaming Gorge to stabilize the larger river system. In 2022, the federal government ordered the reservoir to release 550,000 acre-feet to stabilize the downstream river system, which disrupted recreation and rattled upstream communities. This time, Reclamation has authorized releases of up to 1 million acre-feet. Over the next year, a third of the reservoir’s storage is expected to be gradually released. By September, water levels are projected to drop about 12 feet.
Flaming Gorge Reservoir stores water from the Green River in Wyoming, and is shared by Wyoming and Utah. Ted Wood/The Water Desk
“This is an unprecedented release volume — more than double the last time,” said Amy Haas, executive director of the Colorado River Authority of Utah, who briefed communities bracing for the releases at Flaming Gorge Reservoir. “We really just don’t know the actual impacts of these releases to surrounding communities, and our water users are struggling. My goodness, we are on target to become one of the worst water years on record. The forecasts are stunning to all of us.
The amount of water projected to flow into the river from snowmelt is rapidly declining. Over the first two weeks of April, forecasts for Lake Powell fell by 500,000 acre-feet. The spring forecast is shifting so quickly, some experts believe the releases from Flaming Gorge may need to increase.
“I think it’s a target, and they’re going to have to revise it,” said veteran water manager and researcher Eric Kuhn, who co-authored a paper last September predicting this kind of shortage and calling for action. “It’s many river miles from Flaming Gorge to Lake Powell. What are the transit losses?”
“Also, when March looked like June, what are June and July going to look like?” he added. “I could easily see that 1 million becomes 1.5 million acre-feet by March of 2027.”
Kuhn sees the emergency actions as a sign of broader failure to address the underlying issues that led to the current situation. “The Department of Interior no longer acknowledges that the fundamental problem is climate change. We’re dealing with the symptoms of the disease. We’re not dealing with the underlying problem,” he said. “The law of the river was written for a river that no longer exists from a hydrologic standpoint.”
In a meeting Tuesday, Upper Basin state commissioners acknowledged the need for emergency action but warned that this was not a long-term solution.
“I want to make darn sure people understand … the incredibly difficult, heartbreaking decisions that are having to be made with the lives of generations of cattle production, and farming communities in the Upper Basin states,” particularly in Utah, said Gene Shawcroft, Utah’s Colorado River commissioner.
Wyoming Commissioner Brandon Gebhardt reported that 13,000 acres of agricultural land in the South Piney drainage on the eastern slopes of the Wyoming Range had been cut off from water, adding that even some of the state’s oldest and most senior water rights — some dating to 1898 — will likely be impacted.
“We expect three of the five Flaming Gorge boat ramps in Wyoming will be rendered unusable, and low reservoir levels will have long-lasting negative impacts on reservoir fisheries,” said Gebhardt. “We recognize what we are approving today will have significant negative impacts on our water resources, local economies and recreation.”
Map of the San Juan River, a tributary of the Colorado River, in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, USA. Made using USGS National Map data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47456307
Shortage is affecting more than agriculture and recreation. The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, for example, reported its sacred springs going dry, affecting ceremonies, and the tribal farm will have to operate with just 14% of its normal water supply. Meanwhile, the Jicarilla Apache Nation said it received just 25% to 35% of its contracted water allocation, leaving tribal leaders uncertain about whether they can divert enough water from the Navajo River to meet the community’s domestic needs.
With no sign of long-term agreement on how to manage the river past September, legal tensions among the basin states remain high.
Arizona’s Department of Water Resources released a statement agreeing with plans to order upstream releases to stabilize Lake Powell but also warning that the revised downstream releases were “substantially less than required under the 1922 Colorado River Compact,” referencing the foundational legal document dividing the river. “Failure to comply,” the release stated, “is itself a serious development that Arizona will assess and respond to accordingly.”
Upper Basin state commissioners plan to hold a special meeting to revisit the issue and vote on whether to continue emergency actions past August after assessing water levels and determining whether or not the releases are working.
Regardless of the possible legal battles, the reduced water in the river, infrastructure limits and political gridlock have left basin communities feeling uncertain about their future water security. After the planned releases from Flaming Gorge, if next winter brings another dry year, it is unlikely that upstream reservoirs will have enough water to stabilize Lake Powell.
The basin needs more than emergency actions, Dumas said. “We really want to emphasize the need for serious and permanent changes in how we use and manage the river to adjust to current and future hydrology.”
This story was produced by High Country News, in partnership with The Water Deskat the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
Illustration from the report, “Antique Plumbing & Leadership Postponed” from the Utah Rivers Council, Glen Canyon Institute and the Great Basin Water Network. Courtesy of Utah Rivers Council
Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Public Radio website (Caroline Llanes). Here’s an excerpt:
April 21, 2026
The agency announced on April 17 that it would release between 600-thousand and one million acre feet of water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir on the Wyoming-Utah state line over the course of the next year. In addition, Reclamation will reduce the amount of water it sends from Lake Powell through Glen Canyon Dam, decreasing flows downstream through the Grand Canyon and into Lake Mead. Through September 2026, the agency will reduce its annual release volume from about 7.5 million acre feet of water to just 6 million acre feet.
Westwide SNOTEL basin-filled map April 23, 2026.
The drought contingency actions come in response to a water year that has been incredibly dire for the Western United States and the Colorado River Basin. Snowpack has been at record lows for much of the winter, which is bad news for a region that relies on snowmelt for much of its water use. The forecast for runoff into Lake Powell from the entire Upper Basin is forecast to be just 23% of normal. The agency estimates that these combined actions will boost Lake Powell’s elevation by 54 feet over the course of the year, bringing it to 3,500 feet in April 2027. Currently, Lake Powell’s elevation is about 3,528 feet. 3,490 feet is the elevation at which hydropower can no longer be produced at Glen Canyon Dam. Any lower, and water will not be able to enter the hydroelectric turbines. Instead, the water has to go through what’s called “river outlet works,” which are tunnels that bypass the turbines to get the water downstream to the Colorado River.
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
Seth Arens, a hydrologist at the Western Water Assessment, said Glen Canyon Dam was not designed to have the river outlet works as the primary way to get water out of the reservoir.
“When the Bureau of Reclamation has used those river outlet tubes, most of the times they’ve used them, there’ve been some damage to those tubes,” he said. “They’ve had to repair damages after relatively short uses, you know, a scale of weeks dumping water out of those.”
Environmental attorney Chris Winter said it’s clear Reclamation has to take emergency actions to protect its own infrastructure. But, he said the plan leaves a lot of uncertainty and unanswered questions.
“We’re not going to be able to release a whole bunch of water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir (next year) because that water will have been released this year, and it’s not going to refill if we get another dry year,” he said. “Releases of water from Upper Basin storage units, that’s like a one-time thing, unless we happen to get some wet years in the future.”
View below Flaming Gorge Dam from the Green River, eastern Utah. Photo credit: USGS
Flaming Gorge is currently about 82% full. Reclamation estimates that its plan will bring the reservoir down to about 59% of its full capacity over the next year. Other Upper Basin reservoirs are not part of the plan at the moment, due to poor forecasted inflows and low water levels. Blue Mesa Reservoir in Western Colorado is currently 47% full and Navajo Lake on the Colorado-New Mexico state line is 63% full. Winter said reducing flows out of Glen Canyon Dam could also lead to legal issues. The Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico have not reached a deal with the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada on how to allocate water—and take cuts to usage in the midst of a changing climate—over the next 20 years. On top of that, reducing flows this year would mark a fulcrum point: the first year that the amount of water at Lees Ferry, just below Glen Canyon Dam, falls below the averages set by the Colorado River Compact of 1922.
Click the link to read the article on the KJZZ website (Alex Hager). Here’s an excerpt:
April 21, 2026
The nation’s second-largest reservoir will get a boost to keep water levels from dropping too low, but the fix won’t last long…The Bureau of Reclamation will take water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir in Utah and Wyoming and send it downstream to Lake Powell. The agency, which manages major dams and reservoirs across the Western U.S., will also ratchet back the amount of water released from Lake Powell. The efforts are mainly focused at keeping Glen Canyon Dam running smoothly. If water levels drop much further, Lake Powell’s surface will fall below the intakes that pull water into hydropower generators within the dam…Water levels had been forecast to drop below the hydropower intakes level as soon as this summer…
Illustration from the report, “Antique Plumbing & Leadership Postponed” from the Utah Rivers Council, Glen Canyon Institute and the Great Basin Water Network. Courtesy of Utah Rivers Council
Reclamation’s plan will likely stave off catastrophe at Glen Canyon Dam, but it will do little to solve the problem that imperiled it in the first place. Climate change has left the river with less supply, and humans have not been able to adequately rein in demand.
“This action that’s being taken is a band-aid solution for a gaping wound,” said Eric Balken, executive director of the nonprofit Glen Canyon Institute. “It’s a short-term measure that does not get at the root of the problem, which is over consumption of water.”
The Grand Canyon survey party at Lees Ferry. Left to right: Leigh Lint, boatman; H.E. Blake, boatman; Frank Word, cook; C.H. Birdseye, expedition leader; R.C. Moore, geologist; R.W. Burchard, topographer; E.C. LaRue, hydraulic engineer; Lewis Freeman, boatman, and Emery Kolb, head boatman. Boatman Leigh Lint, “a beefy athlete who could tear the rowlocks off a boat…absolutely fearless,” later went to college and became an engineer for the USGS. The Grand Canyon survey party at Lees Ferry in 1923. (Public domain.)
It’s been a record dry winter across the West — and it’s making an already bad situation on the Colorado River even worse. If water levels get any lower, Lake Powell and the dam that holds it back could be in dire straits. So now, the federal government is stepping in to prop up water levels. But, as KJZZ’s Alex Hager reports, it could be a Band-Aid solution to a much bigger problem. Hager joined The Show to explain.
LAUREN GILGER: Good to have you. So, what’s the situation on Lake Powell right now after this really dry winter? Kind of a worst-case scenario almost.
ALEX HAGER: Well, right now water levels there are forecast to drop to dangerously low levels as soon as this summer. And when I say dangerous, that means we would start to see some of the infrastructure in Glen Canyon Dam, which is up in Page, Arizona, start to fail. So water levels are on track right now to drop below the intakes for the hydropower turbines that sit inside the dam. That means it would become difficult or impossible to spin them and make electricity for 5 million people across seven states. If water drops a little bit further than that, it might not be able to pass through the dam at all. We are already looking at — you know, if it falls below that hydropower intake, it could only travel through this little-used set of backup pipes. We don’t know that it could carry enough water through. You start to have all of these problems. So we are seeing some actions to prevent that from happening now.
LAUREN GILGER: OK. So tell us about those actions. This is the federal government sort of taking control of at least this aspect of it. What are they going to do?
ALEX HAGER: That’s right. The federal government is stepping in. It is kicking into action something of an emergency backup plan. It’s been done before, but it is definitely a backup plan. And they’re going to shuffle some water around. There is another big reservoir up in Utah and Wyoming called Flaming Gorge, and they’re going to release extra water from Flaming Gorge, send it down the Colorado River to help fill up Lake Powell. At the same time, they’re going to start tightening the tap on Lake Powell, meaning that less water comes out of it. That water will — less of it will flow into the Grand Canyon downstream to Lake Mead and downstream to us.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
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
A bad year in the Colorado River Basin – barring a truly miraculous spring, probably the worst in recorded history. It is bad enough so the Bureau may have to stop creating power from the Glen Canyon powerplant by this coming fall. At that point, the only way to get water downriver from Glen Canyon Dam will be dribbling it through four outlet tubes that the Bureau is now wishing it had built differently (better) 65 years ago. And praying for enough precip to push the level back above the danger point for the turbines.
Meanwhile the negotiations between the seven basin states about the future distribution of the water remained at an impasse. One might think that a really bad year might generate some new thinking, but the two Basins are still debating Compact numbers like 7.5 million acre-feet for the Lower Basin with a river that might produce less than 5 maf this year, and maybe not much more than that more frequently in the future.
It should be obvious by now that any further negotiation between the states needs to have an independent facilitator guiding the discussion, pushing both factions to disassemble their own non-negotiables. A hard-ass facilitator speaking on behalf of river reality. [ed. emphasis mine]
It seems likely that we will go into the 2027 water year this fall with some new ‘interim plan’ for operating the river system for the water year that begins in October – probably some mix-and-match from the Bureau’s five alternatives proposed last year and ‘EISed’ while the seven states fiddled. The real purpose of the new interim plan will be to keep the infrastructure of the river system viable – dancing with the dead pool. This will probably impose serious delivery shortages on those below the Powell and Mead Reservoirs (meaning the Lower Basin), and also drop the Upper Basin’s rolling 10-year total closer to the 75 million acre-feet (maf) that will cause the ‘compact call’ threat to rear its ugly head.
Year-to-year might be the most honest approach now, anyway, getting a habit of feeling our way forward carefully, with our eyes wide open – woke, one might say. The managerial ‘need for certainty’ in projections may not be part of the future we’ve imposed on ourselves.
But that’s a good place to let the present sit and settle, and go back to the unfolding saga of the ‘Era of Conquest’ in this update of Fred Dellenbaugh’s Romance of the Colorado River. You may remember that in the last post here, I related that the Bureau of Reclamation, feeling much loved for the Boulder Canyon Project that watered, fed and powered a massive regional development in Southern California, came out of World War II ready to do the same for the Compact’s Upper Basin, in response to a mandate in the Boulder Canyon Project Act that a plan be developed for the development of the rest of the river.
There was, however, already quite a lot of development going on in the Upper Basin – at least in the state of Colorado, beginning in the 1930s, simultaneous with the Boulder Canyon Project.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
To establish context – the whole Colorado River Basin was experiencing its first serious modern-times drought, even as the Great Depression was settling over the whole nation. After the ‘pluvial’ of water abundance in the first three decades of the 20th century, which convinced the water mavens that the river would deliver a dependable-enough flow of nearly 18 maf, the basin experienced its first 5 maf flow in 1933; by the end of the 1930s, there was reason to doubt that the river would ever again average 18 maf.
But Colorado had a special problem to resolve about Colorado River water distribution: the transdivide situation. I will not bore you again with my opinion of the imperial arrogance in randomly laying down straight line state boundaries in a region of great geographic and geological diversity. But what this created in the irrelevant rectangle called Colorado was like a blanket laid over a fence – the fence being the Continental Divide. West of the Divide, precipitation that fell (mostly snow in the winter) all ran off toward the Pacific Ocean in the Colorado River tributaries. East of the Divide, it all ran off toward the Atlantic in the Platte, Arkansas and Rio Grande Rivers. Because the weather mostly rode in on the prevailing westerlies, considerably more precipitation fell on the West Slope than fell on the East Slope. But the vagaries of cultural and economic development put most of the population and economic growth on the East Slope – ‘80 percent-20 percent’ is the rough ratio frequently used to describe the imbalance between water and population in the blanket dropped over the fence.
The distribution of water on both sides of the ‘blanket’ was governed by the appropriation doctrine as stated in the Colorado Constitution: all the water in the state belongs to the people of the state, subject to appropriation for individual use, and the right to divert ‘shall never be denied’ – with seniority among users determining the right to use the water in times of shortage. And by the turn of the century, challenges in water court had established the right to divert water from one basin to another.
As the drought of the 1930s settled in, farmers on the East Slope began to experience serious pressures on the water supply. And consistent with the optimism and technological advances of the early 20th century, this was not regarded as a fact of life to be acknowledged and adapted to, but as a problem to be addressed – in this situation, by moving water from the West Slope. A major task – but Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ efforts to alleviate the Great Depression offered the possibility of some help, through new agencies like the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the Public Works Administration.
So when the Colorado General Assembly gathered early in 1933, two water project bills were in the hopper: one to divert an unspecified quantity from the Upper Colorado River in the Grand Lake area to the South Platte River basin, and one to divert an unspecified quantity from the Gunnison River to the Arkansas River basin.
Inhabitants of the West Slope, however, knew nothing about this until they read about it in the newspapers. And they were even more surprised that summer when construction actually began on two transdivide projects: the Denver Water Board began constructing a system of small canals high in the Fraser River headwaters (Upper Colorado tributary) to bring water to the Moffat railroad tunnel pilot bore, which the Water Board had leased from the railroad – an unused but already dug ‘pipe’ to the northern Denver area. And the sugar-beet industry led by Great Western Sugar was doing the same collection system in the headwaters of the Roaring Fork River above Aspen for diversion into a small tunnel to the Arkansas River basin. Both of those enterprises were self-funded.
All of this precipitated a regional West Slope meeting in Grand Junction of ‘water people’ – county commissioners and attorneys who were also all ranchers or farmers – at which a ‘Western Colorado Protective Association’ (WCPA) was formed, and a letter was drafted to the state engineer expressing concern that the proposed and in-process projects threatened the future development of the West Slope, and requesting inclusion in all future discussion of them.
The situation as the West Slope people saw it was not a ‘water grab.’ The leadership in the WCPA knew that the East Slope irrigators and city-builders were exercising a constitutional right in appropriating ‘the people’s water’ on the West Slope. They also knew that most of the Colorado River water left the state’s West Slope in an unmanageable snowmelt flood anyway, and it might as well go through a tunnel to the Front Range as through Grand Junction and on to – well, soon, on to enviable storage behind the great dam being built far downstream rather than its historical destiny of flowing on into the salty sea unused.
Storage! That was the key to the West Slope’s chief water problem, which was water available throughout the growing season for finishing as well as starting crops. West Slope engineers had been drafting up a number of reservoir-and-irrigation projects to present to the Bureau of Reclamation, but dams are expensive, and all of the proposed reservoirs served mountain-valley populations too small to pass the Bureau’s cost-benefit analyses.
So the concept of ‘compensatory storage’ for water lost through transdivide diversions became the WCPA’s central focus. And despite their small population, the WCPA had two good cards to play. One was the fact that New Deal federal funding distributed to the states had to be for projects approved by the entire state; the transdivide diversions that needed federal assistance needed for the basin of origin to be as happy as the basin of destination.
A image shows a guest column by Rep. Edward Taylor that appeared from the Steamboat Pilot in 1921. Graphic credit: Northern Water
The other card was a congressional representative, Edward Taylor, whom they had returned to Congress for 12 terms by 1933, and who had over that quarter-century ascended to chairmanship of the subcommittee that controlled the Interior Department budget in the powerful House Appropriation Committee. Congressman Taylor launched the WCPA’s ‘defensive offensive’ by saying that any project seeking federal assistance for a transdivide diversion would have to provide, as part of their project, an acre-foot of compensatory storage for the West Slope for every acre-foot to be diverted.
That was a large and very expensive demand. Taylor exempted Denver and its Moffat project from the mandate – because, he said, we all want to see ‘our capital city’ grow unrestricted. More likely, he knew that Denver could fund its own project and would at best just ignore him; he was not their congressman, and the Denver Water Board at that point was coming under the domination by their attorney, Glenn Saunders, a city-builder who envisioned a water supply for a ‘thousand-year city,’ most of which he thought would have to come from the West Slope. He just wanted the hicks to stay out of his way. (Not an exaggeration at all.)
Taylor could, however, impose his acre-foot-for-every-acre-foot demand on those seeking federal Public Works Administration funds or Bureau of Reclamation assistance. And that set up what is really an interesting story of people working out difficult problems they’ve imposed on themselves in draping a blanket over a fence and calling it a state, then adopting a wide-open appropriations doctrine for the distribution of a limited resource statewide. It’s a story with many moving parts that we don’t really have time for here in depth; I will note, however, that the whole story is told in my Water Wranglers book, the story of the development of Colorado’s share of the Colorado River. (Out of print, but copies supposedly in all Colorado libraries.)
The principal players in the story were the Western Colorado Protective Association (WCPA), led by Frank Delaney, a lawyer-rancher, and D.W. Aupperle, a Grand Junction lawyer and fruit grower; the South Platte Water Users Association (SPWUA), led by Charles Hansen, a newspaper editor in farm country and a couple lawyer-farmers; and of course the Bureau which wanted to do a big transdivide diversion to the South Platte River. And what turned out to be the ‘wild card,’ Congressman Taylor.
A seemingly endless series of meetings began between the WCPA and the SPWUA with the Bureau in attendance. There was fundamental agreement that, first, the East Slope had legal right to appropriate West Slope water, and second, that the East Slope owed the West Slope some compensation for diverting part of the West Slope’s base for future development. The challenge was arriving at the amount of compensation. The SPWUA wanted to divert more than 300,000 acre-feet from the Colorado River, for what became the Colorado-Big Thompson Project, but they did not see how (even if they could get some New Deal PWA financing) they could afford to also create that much West Slope storage. But the WCPA felt bound to support their congressman – without whom they really had no card to keep them in the game. Frustration and ire grew on both sides – compounded by having to travel back and forth either on the slow trains or drive on roads that were really ‘country’ (a major West Slope chronic complaint).
Finally, in the spring of 1936, Frank Delaney of the WCPA suggested a compromise. If the Bureau and SPWUA wanted to rush into construction, it would have to be Taylor’s acre-foot-for-an-acre-foot mandate. But if they could delay their project until the Bureau did a thorough study of what the loss of 300,000 af of free-flowing water (most of it annually leaving the state unused anyway) would be to the West Slope, and how much storage would actually compensate the West Slope users for that loss of spring runoff, the West Slope would accept that number (and work on getting Cong. Taylor to accept it).
The ‘Delaney Resolution’ broke the stalemate. The Bureau men spent months poring over existing rights and land maps (long before computers and spreadsheets), and came up with a need for 152,000 acre-feet of compensatory storage: 52,000 af to make sure that the Shoshone power plant water right above Glenwood Springs could be met year round (which would also ensure enough late season water for the Grand Valley farms and orchards), and 100,000 af for future irrigation and domestic water development.
That cut Taylor’s demand in two – and the Bureau planned to add a powerplant to the dam that would significantly reduce what the SPWUA would have to pay back. During this period, Taylor – an old man – was actually too sick to participate, and the Delaney Resolution was adopted for the Colorado-Big Thompson Project. (Taylor would die in office in 1941 – still believing that an acre-foot-for-every-acre-foot was what should be adhered to.)
Graphic credit: RogerWendell.com
The compromise process was codified as ‘Senate Document 80,’ part of the Colorado-Big Thompson Project Act passed in 1937. Senate Doc. 80 became part of all subsequent transdivide project planning – except where Denver was concerned; it wasn’t until the veto of Denver Water’s Two Forks Project half a century later that Denver Water finally conceded to take West Slope needs into account in its transdivide projects.
That process of working through a significant challenge to mutual benefit stands, in at least my mind, as one of the highlights of the Era of Conquest in the Colorado River region – a period not without occasional efforts measuring up to the often naive but high-minded vision driving the developers’ ‘romancing of the river’ – to bring deserts into bloom, to reshape unfriendly environments to accommodate individuals and their families willing to work at it. It is too easy to condemn that from this side where we reap the harvest of all the mistakes involved that they didn’t know about until they had made them.
Next post, we’ll look at what happened to that carefully forged intrastate resolution when serious Colorado River planning came to the Compact’s Upper Basin. Meanwhile – pray for monsoons, or just a good rainy spell.
Colorado transmountain diversions via the University of Colorado
A high desert thunderstorm lights up the sky behind Glen Canyon Dam — Photo USBR
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral website (Debra Utacia Krol). Here’s an excerpt:
April 17, 2026
Key Points
The Colorado River system’s water storage has dropped to 36% of its capacity due to a warm winter and ongoing drought.
Water levels in Lake Powell are projected to fall below the minimum needed for hydropower generation by this fall.
Federal officials are considering moving water from other reservoirs and reducing downstream releases to prevent a shutdown at Glen Canyon Dam.
Within charts listing projections of water levels, inflow and outflow, and anticipated releases for 15 reservoirs in the Colorado River Basin, one message was clear: The river is in dire straits and conditions likely won’t get better anytime soon. The warmest winter on record, coupled with an ongoing drought, has produced dismal conditions for the West’s water lifeline, conditions reflected by the Bureau of Reclamation in its April 24-month report. The system’s storage has plunged to about 36% of its capacity, the agency said in a statement. More alarming in the near term is the threat to hydropower production at Glen Canyon Dam. Water levels in Lake Powell would drop too low to operate the turbines by fall, according to the latest projections, unless the federal government steps in…The situation at Lake Powell raised red flags: The giant reservoir’s “minimum probable inflow,” a measure of winter runoff, is projected to total just 2.78 million acre-feet, or 29% of the historical average, one of the lowest on record, the agency said. By September, projections show the reservoir could decline to below 3,490 feet above sea level, the minimum needed to power the turbines at Glen Canyon Dam that supply electric service to about 5.8 million households and businesses in the region…
Reclamation said it would consider all tools that are available to avoid water levels below 3,500 feet, including a plan to move water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir in Utah and reduce downstream releases from Powell. Flaming Gorge would give up between 660,000 acre-feet up to 1 million acre-feet over the next year. Lake Powell will release about 1.48 million acre-feet less than planned. The move will lower water levels in Lake Mead and potentially reduce Hoover Dam’s hydropower generating capacity by as much as 40%, and would impact recreation throughout the Lower Basin…
The Arizona Department of Water Resources said in its March drought report that most of the state’s snowpack is gone, melted during Arizona’s warmest March on record. The Arizona Drought Monitoring Technical Committee also published its latest three-month drought map, which showed most of the state listed as enduring exceptional drought conditions, the driest level.
Difficult decisions for the Colorado River are starting to be made.
In what will be a defining year for the struggling watershed, the federal agency that manages the basin’s dams took unprecedented actions on Friday to store more water in Lake Powell in order to preserve hydropower generation and protect water-delivery infrastructure at Glen Canyon Dam that the agency says is at risk of damage due to low reservoir levels.
The April 17 announcement from the Bureau of Reclamation will also set in motion events that could result in first-ever lawsuits from Arizona, California, or Nevada against their upstream neighbors over water supply from the shrinking Colorado River.
The Central Arizona Project, which delivers Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson, called Reclamation’s actions “a band-aid” and urged the agency to release even more water from upstream reservoirs into Powell. CAP, because it has lowest water-rights priority in the lower basin, is the most vulnerable to proposed water cuts that would attempt to align water supply with demand.
“There is no time to delay,” Patrick Dent, CAP’s assistant general manager for water policy, told Circle of Blue two days before the announcement.
The Bureau of Reclamation will make two moves to support Lake Powell, the huge reservoir formed by Glen Canyon Dam that is less than 25 percent full and shrinking.
Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico are asking the federal government to pause some releases from Flaming Gorge Reservoir, which straddles the border between Wyoming and Utah. The reservoir, pictured here in 2021, is the third-largest in the Colorado River system.
Reclamation’s first move is to release more water from Flaming Gorge, an upstream reservoir that is 82 percent full. With the consent of the four upper basin states, between 660,000 acre-feet and 1 million acre-feet will flow from Flaming Gorge into Powell over the next 12 months.
Reclamation previously used upstream reservoirs to prop up Powell in 2022-23, when some 463,000 acre-feet were released. These extra releases are supposed to be recovered if water supply conditions turn favorable. If more dry years are ahead, then the upstream releases will have been a one-shot intervention.
The agency’s second move is to hold back more water in Powell. Using authority granted in a 2024 decision, the agency will cut Powell’s water releases from 7.48 million acre-feet to 6 million acre-feet. This is the first time that Reclamation has invoked its Section 6(E) authority.
Water supply conditions in the basin worsened each month this year as hot, dry weather drained a meager snowpack that is on a downward trend due to manmade climate change. A heat wave in late March was the most extreme on record in the Southwest for that time of year. Inflows into Lake Powell this year are projected to be the lowest ever measured, breaking a record set in 2002.
The water elevation at Powell currently sits at 3,526 feet. Reclamation has stated that it will do what it can to prevent the reservoir from dropping below 3,500 feet. Hydropower generation stops at 3,490 feet. Without Reclamation’s announced interventions, that level is expected to be breached by August.
With the two interventions, Powell is projected, with average weather conditions, to remain above 3,500 feet by April 2027, but just barely. If the next 12 months continue to be hot and dry, more emergency actions might be necessary.
The back of Glen Canyon Dam circa 1964, not long after the reservoir had begun filling up. Here the water level is above dead pool, meaning water can be released via the river outlets, but it is below minimum power pool, so water cannot yet enter the penstocks to generate electricity. Bureau of Reclamation photo. Annotations: Jonathan P. Thompson
If Powell were to drop below 3,490 feet, water would have to be released through a smaller set of pipes called the river outlet works. Reclamation has said that using these pipes for extended periods of time is untested and risks damaging them.
Reducing outflows from Powell will have two effects. One is that Lake Mead, located downstream, will shrink more quickly, as will its hydropower output. Boating access will be more difficult.
The other consequence is the specter of litigation. The 1922 Colorado River Compact requires the four upper basin states – Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming – to deliver 75 million acre-feet over 10 years. Add in the upper basin’s share of the water required for Mexico and the figure rises to roughly 82.5 million.
Cutting Powell outflows this year to 6 million acre-feet will likely push the 10-year total below the required threshold.
Reclamation is not focusing on the legal implications, says James Eklund, a partner at Taft Law.
“Reclamation is essentially telling the basin states, ‘We are going to protect our billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure, including Glen Canyon Dam, and if you believe that violates your compact entitlement, you know where the courthouse is’,” Eklund, a former Colorado River commissioner for Colorado, wrote to Circle of Blue.
States in both upper and lower basins have already set aside money for potential litigation or are considering it.
Still, a legal right does not necessarily mean the water is available, Eklund cautions. “No court can conjure acre-feet that aren’t in the reservoir.”
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
April 19. 2026
The multitude of water managers tasked with overseeing the drying Colorado River systemstand at a dire crossroads. As a years long stalemate in negotiations persists between the seven states that share the river, it’s become increasingly likely that the federal government will impose its own long-term plan, choosing from a range of proposals officials have outlined in recent months. But experts and water managers across the 250,000-square-mile Colorado River basin are raising the alarm about the five plans, questioning if any of them hold up under the new climate reality. They say the federal plans won’t keep the system from crashing in critically dry years — which are becoming more frequent — and could wreak chaos on the pivotal lifeline for 40 million people in the American Southwest.
“In every one of those alternatives, under what they call critically dry hydrology, the system is failing,” said Andy Mueller, the general manager of the Colorado River District, a taxpayer-funded agency based in Glenwood Springs that works to protect Western Slope water. “And critically dry hydrology is what we have continued to see consistently in the basin in the last 25 years and what we should expect going forward.”
[…]
In extremely dry years, the longer-term plans under consideration by Reclamation would allow the water levels of the system’s two main reservoirs to repeatedly fall below minimum power pool. Federal officials then would be forced to make recurring emergency cuts to the water supplies of the three states downstream of the reservoirs, creating uncertainty for millions of people and a massive agricultural industry…Letters from a number of Colorado entities — including the Northwest Colorado Council of Governments, irrigation districts, the Western Slope’s Club 20 and county commissions from a vast swath of the state — urged federal officials to present at least one plan that would hold up in extremely dry years.
“Sound science dictates that Colorado River management must evolve to handle a permanently drier future,” Tina Bergonzini, the general manager of the Grand Valley Water Users Association, wrote in her comments to the bureau. “The current federal preference for predictability is an atmospheric impossibility given that studies indicate rising temperatures have already slashed river flows by a fifth.”
[…]
The conflict on the Colorado is likely one of the world’s first major water policy overhauls to grapple with the reality of climate change, said Brad Udall, a senior water and climate research scholar at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Center. In the past, Colorado River managers made operational tweaks and short-term deals to address drought. This time, it’s different.
“We’re not looking at an incremental step here,” Udall said. “We’re looking at a complete redo of how we operate this resource that affects 40 million people.”
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Sometimes it feels like there are two parallel Southwestern United States out there.
One is naturally arid, is getting hotter and hotter by the year and is gripped by the most severe drought of the last millennium or more. Its water lifeline, the Colorado River system, is on the brink of collapse, and communities and farmers from Wyoming to Calexico are facing painful mandatory water cutbacks this summer.
And then there’s the other one, a sort of fantasy world, or maybe just an oblivious one, in which new water diversion projects like the Lake Powell Pipeline remain on the table, state leaders prepare to go to legal war to protect their states’ profligate water consumption, and a developer is breaking ground on a 2,300-acre “city within a city” called Halo Vista in North Phoenix.
Halo Vista’s developers are billing it as a companion development to TSMC’s $165 billion semiconductor fabrication facility complex. It will wrap around the industrial campus (thus the “halo” in the name), and plans call for some 30 million square feet of industrial, retail, office, research, and healthcare spaces along with 9,000 or more residential units.
“You have to think about all the people at full build-out who’ll work in this area — about 60 to 80,000 people,” Greater Phoenix Economic Council President Christine Mackay told AZFamily. “They’ll work in the Halo Vista science and technology park. They need restaurants, hotels, places to live — and places to shop for what they need.”
Historically, Arizona’s economy was said to run on five Cs: copper, cotton, citrus, cattle, and climate. Copper is still going fairly strong, most of the citrus groves have given way to housing developments, alfalfa has surpassed cotton, and the beef-cattle have been replaced by dairy factories. Now another C — computer chips — is being added to the mix, as the Phoenix-area experiences a semiconductor manufacturing boom and a coinciding data-center buildup.
The tech industry’s expansion is adding economic diversity, making the city somewhat less vulnerable to 2008-like financial breakdowns. But as Halo Vista demonstrates, it is also feeding Phoenix’s dominant economic force, the Growth Machine. And both the Growth Machine and the data center/semiconductor boom need water, and quite a lot of it. This, in turn, increases Phoenix’s exposure to future water shortages, which seem more and more likely with each passing day.
According to TSMC’s draft environmental assessment, the first phase of its Phoenix fabrication plants will initially use about 4.75 million gallons of water per day, or 5,320 acre-feet per year, which would jump to about 19,400 acre-feet yearly if and when all three phases are built out. But the company says it will eventually install a recycling system that will bring that number down considerably. The 9,000 residential units in Halo Vista would use about 2,800 acre-feet per year (based on Phoenix’s current per-capita water consumption multiplied by a rough estimate of 20,000 people occupying those residences). Halo Vista’s other industrial and commercial properties will consume an unknown additional amount of water.
So let’s say the whole development, including the “fabs,” will use about 25,000 acre-feet per year — less if the water efficiencies are realized, more if Halo Vista’s tech district includes data centers or other water-intensive industries.
That’s a lot of water, or a drop in the bucket, depending on how you look at it.
On the one hand it is equal to about one-fourth of Nevada’s total consumptive use from the Colorado River. Yes, the city of sin and excess only uses about four times more water than the TSMC/Halo Vista “city” will use.
On the other, it’s far less than the alfalfa farms in Maricopa County — in which Halo Vista is located — use for irrigation each year, which totals something like 500,000 acre-feet.1 And yet, Halo Vista/TSMC, once all built out in 20 years or so, will have a significantly larger economic output than a bunch of hay fields (which isn’t the only measure of value or even the most important one, and yet, well, water does flow uphill to money).
So yes, it is possible to sidestep water concerns by pulling out the “what about alfalfa” comparison. But it’s also not all that productive.
Halo Vista, which is being built on a plot of uncultivated state land in the desert, is not displacing an alfalfa farm’s water use. Rather, it represents a new water use piled on top of existing consumption. The water will come out of Phoenix’s municipal system, and therefore officially has an “assured and adequate” 100-year water supply, which is necessary in Arizona for this sort of development.
Yet there’s nothing assured about Arizona’s water future. Phoenix’s water comes primarily from high priority rights on the Salt and Verde Rivers, and from the Colorado River via the Central Arizona Project. But those rights will hardly matter if the rivers dry up: This year’s Salt River Basin meagre snowpack had vanished by March 1, spring runoff peaked weeks ago, and flows are rapidly falling. Meanwhile, the Central Arizona Project has relatively low priority rights, meaning it will be the first to take cuts as the river shrinks.
In other words, aridification and the Colorado River crisis pose an existential threat to Phoenix’s tech boom and, well, Phoenix, itself, which is one of the reasons Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs is preparing for a bitter legal fight with the feds and the Upper Basin states over the Colorado River.
The good news for the developers and the semiconductor makers is that agriculture continues to use a lot of water in Arizona. And where there is large consumptive use, there is also more room for increased efficiencies and, if it comes to it, “buying and drying” the farms for their water — which has its own negative consequences. The bad news is that the shortages to come may very well exceed the amount that could be wrung out of the existing farms.
Halo Vista, which is on a 20-year buildout schedule, is far from the only major water- and energy-guzzling development on slate for the increasingly arid West. And maybe it’s not realistic to expect all such development to come to a screeching halt simply because the water may run out sometime in the future. After all, climate change could cause more precipitation; maybe in 20 years we’ll be worrying more about flooding than desiccation.
But you would think that planners and policymakers and the developers would at least act in line with our current reality, where resources, especially water, are limited. Halo Vista-esque projects should be required not just to certify an “assured” 100-year supply, but they also should have to offset new consumption with cuts somewhere else, whether it’s paying for farmers to install drip irrigation or funding treated wastewater recycling projects.
Continuing to consume water at current rates is one thing. Adding new uses on top of our current overconsumption is quite another.
***
And so it begins. It looks like residents of the small Arizona community of Kearney may lose their water altogether later this summer, making developments like Halo Vista look even more surreal.
The town sent this emergency memo out to residents in April:
Kearney sits in Arizona’s “Copper Triangle” along the banks of Gila River and in the proverbial shadow of the Hayden copper smelter smokestack. The town was established by the Kennecott Mining Company in 1958 to house residents displaced from Ray, Sonora, and Barcelona as the mine’s gaping Ray mine pit gobbled up the communities. Resolution Copper’s proposed Oak Flat mine is also nearby, as is Faraday’s proposed Copper Creek project.
Kearney has a maximum allotment of 610 acre-feet of water from the Gila River. This year, however, extreme drought conditions have brought the allotment down to just .76 acre-feet, forcing the town to impose severe restrictions on use to try to make it last until the monsoon arrives.
As for all the mines surrounding Kearney? I’m guessing their dealing with their own water issues, but I’d also wager that they’re allowed a heck of a lot more than three-fourths of an acre-foot.
Condors perched on steel girders some 450 feet above the Colorado River. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
🐟 Colorado River Chronicles 💧
In the comment section on the last Land Desk dispatch, reader wkarls reported on the Colorado River’s flows during a recent raft trip on the Grand Canyon. It got me to thinking about how low those flows might go and what that could mean.
I’ve only boated down the Grand Canyon once, back in October and November of 1995 with a group of slightly crazy Salida rafting folks. It was a beautiful, terrifying, sublime — if somewhat debauched — experience. During the trip, releases from Glen Canyon Dam — which make up about 95% of the flow in the Grand Canyon — fluctuated between 11,000 and 16,000 cubic feet per second, a number that was bolstered downstream after a good rainstorm moved through, turning the river that intimidating blood-and-chocolate-milk color. That seemed like plenty of water to me; it was certainly enough to generate waves big enough to toss our little rafts about like toys (did I mention it was scary as hell?).
Somewhat surprisingly, the releases were about the same in September of last year, bouncing between 10,000 and 16,000 cfs, which appears to have been an effort to get the annual flows past Lees Ferry up to about 7.5 million acre-feet to keep the Upper Basin in compliance with the Colorado River Compact’s non-depletion obligation. Then, on Oct. 1, the beginning of the 2026 water year, releases plummeted. This spring they’ve been in that 7,000 to 9,000 cfs range that wkarls mentioned.
That’s in line with the Bureau of Reclamation’s plan to release just 6 million acre-feet from the dam this water year: 6 million acre-feet per year averages out to about 8,200 cfs. That’s also right in line with the Grand Canyon Protection Act’s operating criteria, which set a minimum allowable release during the day (between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.) at 8,000 cfs, while the minimum nighttime release is 5,000 cfs.
So, given all of that, we can assume that the flows shouldn’t drop much below current levels this summer. Of course, if conditions are worse than expected, then the reservoir could drop to 3,500 feet earlier than anticipated, which could force dam operators to further curtail releases to “defend” minimum power pool. If so, then you might see nighttime releases drop as low as 5,000 cfs. If that’s not enough, then I suppose dam operators would have to go to a run-of-the-river scenario, where flows could plummet to 2,000 or 3,000 cfs, which would make rafting quite interesting.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
Colorado River at/around Lees Ferry in autumn 2024, when Glen Canyon Dam releases were around 8,000 cfs.
Colorado River at/around Lees Ferry in autumn 2024, when Glen Canyon Dam releases were around 8,000 cfs.
Colorado River at/around Lees Ferry in autumn 2024, when Glen Canyon Dam releases were around 8,000 cfs.
Long-term drought has reduced Colorado River system storage to about 36 percent of capacity, and the combination of the lowest snowpack on record and record-breaking March heat has further intensified drought conditions across the Basin. These compounding factors are creating elevated risks to essential water and power infrastructure that supply water to more than 40 million people, underscoring the need for immediate action.
Lake Powell’s water year minimum probable inflow is forecasted at just 2.78 million acre-feet—29% of historical average and one of the lowest on record. Reclamation’s April “24 Month Study” projects Lake Powell may decline to below 3,490 feet—the minimum power pool level—by August 2026 without major intervention. If Glen Canyon Dam declines below 3,490 feet, water releases would be only through the river outlet works, which could cause operational issues, uncertainty for users, downstream impacts, instability in regional power and water supplies, and a reduction in power generation.
Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum met with Governors for the seven basin states, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, and their designees again today to discuss the concerning hydrology and plans for operations.
“I am grateful for the Governors and their teams working diligently to find a solution to the complex challenges created by these unprecedented drought conditions which require immediate action,” said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. “Interior and Reclamation continue to coordinate with the basin states, tribes, Mexico and basin stakeholders as we make the decisions necessary to operate and protect the system.”
To stabilize the system, Reclamation is moving quickly and initial plans include adding up to about 2.48 maf of water to Lake Powell by moving water from the upstream Flaming Gorge Reservoir and by reducing releases from Lake Powell. [ed. emphasis mine]
Through the 2019 Drought Response Operating Agreements, Reclamation is intending to release 660,000 acre-feet to 1 maf from Flaming Gorge Reservoir from April 2026 through April 2027. In addition, Reclamation is intending to reduce the annual release volume from Lake Powell to Lake Mead by 1.48 maf—from 7.48 maf to 6.0 maf—through September 2026 by utilizing section 6E of the Record of Decision from the final 2024 Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement for near-term Colorado River Operations.
Together, these actions are expected to increase Lake Powell’s elevation by approximately 54 ft to at least elevation 3500 feet by April 2027. Through the current, ongoing DROA process, the basin states, tribes and partners continue to provide feedback related to the proposed releases. A final decision will be coming next week.
Flaming Gorge Reservoir now holds about 3.1 maf of water, which is 83% full. These actions are expected to lower the reservoir’s elevation by roughly 35 feet over the next year to approximately 59% of capacity. This will have no effect on contracted water rights at Flaming Gorge or Lake Powell. No additional releases from the other upstream initial units of the Colorado River Storage Project Act—Blue Mesa and Navajo reservoirs—are planned at this time, due to their low water levels and poor forecasted inflows. [ed. emphasis mine]
“Given the severity of the risks facing the Colorado River system, it is imperative that we take action quickly to protect a resource that supplies water to 40 million people and supports vital agricultural, hydropower production, tribal, wildlife, and recreational uses across the region,” said Assistant Secretary – Water and Science Andrea Travnicek. “As we weigh current conditions and prepare for future operations by working with states, tribal nations and stakeholders, the Department of the Interior and Reclamation remain fully committed to taking the actions necessary to reduce impacts on water deliveries, safeguard critical infrastructure, and preserve as much operational flexibility as possible.”
Basin-wide impacts
Reclamation acknowledges that the proposed reduced releases from Lake Powell will accelerate the downstream decline of Lake Mead, with the potential for up to an additional 40% reduction to Hoover Dam’s hydropower generating capacity as early as this fall. Reclamation and its lower basin partners are collaborating to conserve water in Lake Mead and maintain its water levels, even as releases from Lake Powell are planned to decrease.
The initial proposed drought response actions may also impact recreation across multiple sites. At upstream reservoirs, boating access may be reduced earlier in the season than normal. In the Grand Canyon, lower flow rates will affect rafting conditions, and fishing may be more challenging. At Lake Mead National Recreation Area, reduced water levels may further limit boating access. Reclamation is working with reservoir recreation management partners now and as the summer progresses.
The 2026 operational challenges come at a time of transition as the existing agreements that guided the operations of the Colorado River for the last two decades are set to expire at the end of the year. As we approach the new water year on October 1, the seven basin states have not reached consensus on a new operating framework. With time running out, there is a need for extraordinary collaboration for 2027 and beyond. In the absence of a consensus and following the completion of the NEPA process, the Interior Department will be prepared to determine operations for Post 2026 later this summer to provide certainty and stability for the Colorado River Basin.
To learn more about the Interior Department’s or Reclamation’s activities around the Colorado River, please visit the Colorado River Basin website.
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Elkhead Reservoir is taking center stage following a winter of historically low snowfall, leaving water managers with hard decisions and water users with a high degree of uncertainty. Courtesy Photo/Colorado Parks & Wildlife
A historically dry winter is setting up what water officials describe as one of the most challenging runoff seasons in recent memory, with operations and allocations at Elkhead Reservoir expected to play a critical role in stretching limited supplies across Northwest Colorado….That challenging outlook [ed. snowpack and streamflow in 2025] and lessons learned from past years with low snowfall are key focal points in early planning and coordination among water managers, particularly for reservoirs like Elkhead, which serves irrigators, municipalities and environmental needs in the Yampa River Basin…Calahan said warm, dry conditions have dramatically accelerated snowmelt, raising the likelihood of a runoff season that arrives early, fades quickly and leaves water managers facing difficult decisions for a wide range of stakeholders…In a more typical year, gradual warming allows the snowpack to melt slowly, sustaining river flows well into summer. This year, however, that prolonged runoff is not materializing, which is already increasing pressure on stored water supplies. While late spring storms or summer monsoons could provide some relief, officials do not expect conditions to return anywhere near an average water year. That uncertainty leaves reservoir managers balancing how much water to store versus how much to release to meet downstream demand.
Aerial image of entrenched meanders of the San Juan River within Goosenecks State Park. Located in San Juan County, southeastern Utah (U.S.). Credits Constructed from county topographic map DRG mosaic for San Juan County from USDA/NRCS – National Cartography & Geospatial Center using Global Mapper 12.0 and Adobe Illustrator. Latitude 33° 31′ 49.52″ N., Longitude 111° 37′ 48.02″ W. USDA/FSA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
From email from Reclamation :
April 14, 2026
Reminder Navajo Reservoir Spring Operations MTG Tuesday April 21st from 1-3pm. The meeting will be entirely virtual; members of this list should have received a Teams invite. If you did not and would like to attend email cfelletter@usbr.gov for a meeting invite.
Reclamation conducts Public Operations Meetings three times per year to gather input for determining upcoming operations for Navajo Reservoir. Input from individuals, organizations, and agencies along with other factors such as weather, water rights, endangered species requirements, flood control, hydro power, recreation, fish and wildlife management, and reservoir levels, will be considered in the development of these reservoir operation plans. In addition, the meetings are used to coordinate activities and exchange information among agencies, water users, and other interested parties concerning the San Juan River and Navajo Reservoir.
The Atlas Uranium Mill near Moab as it appeared in May of 1972. Source: DOCUMERICA: The Environmental Protection Agency’s Program to Photographically Document Subjects of Environmental Concern.
The Trump administration has formally cancelled the proposed withdrawal of more than 160,000 acres in the Upper Pecos River Watershed from new mining claims and mineral leasing.
Prompted by local advocacy and New Mexico’s congressional delegation, the Biden administration began the process of protecting the watershed and surrounding mountains east of Santa Fe in 2024. But the Trump administration nipped the process in the bud shortly after taking office by cancelling scheduled public meetings. Now it has officially ended the withdrawal.
For the past several years, Comexico LLC, a subsidiary of Australia-based New World Resources, has been working its way through the permitting process to do exploratory drilling at what it calls its Tererro mining project on more than 200 active mining claims in the watershed. It has met with stiff resistance from locals and regional advocacy groups, partly because mining has a dark history in the Pecos River watershed. In 1991, a big spring runoff washed contaminated mine and mill waste from a long-defunct mine into the upper Pecos River, killing as many as 100,000 trout. That prompted a multi-year cleanup of various mining sites.
The withdrawal wouldn’t have stopped the project outright, because it doesn’t affect existing, active, valid claims. Yet it would have stopped the company from staking more claims and would make it more difficult to develop the existing ones (especially if they haven’t established validity).
I have a saying I coined while writing River of Lost Souls that goes like this: Mining is hard. Putting the earth back together again afterwards is a hell of a lot harder.That’s probably especially true when it comes to mining and milling uranium, given that along with all the other nasty byproducts of mining, it also leaves behind radioactive material. The point was recently driven home by two events:
Meanwhile, over at the cleaned up Durango uranium mill site (now a dog park), the Department of Energy’s most recent verification monitoring report finds that natural uranium flushing in the groundwater beneath the site is happening slower than expected. There’s no reason for concern at this point: Researchers are still confident that uranium concentrations will drop below the compliance goal within the allotted 100-year time period.
I mention it here because of the time-scale involved: The Atlas mill in Moab stopped operating more than 40 years ago, and the cleanup has dragged on for close to two decades. The Durango mill shut down for good in 1963; the massive, years-long, multi-million-dollar cleanup was completed in 1991. And researchers expect it to take another 65 years for the groundwater contamination to finally get back to acceptable levels.
It’s just something to keep in mind when considering new uranium mines and mills.
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
🐟 Colorado River Chronicles 💧
One of the more frustrating things about the Colorado River crisis is that the federal government, which controls the big dams and most of the extensive plumbing system on the river, has hardly given even a clue as to what it might do when Glen Canyon Dam reaches the critical minimum power pool mark as early as this summer.
Will they shut down the hydropower turbines and route all releases through the river outlets, possibly compromising the outlet tubes’ — and the dam’s — structural integrity? Will they “defend” minimum power pool by cutting back releases, thereby putting the Upper Basin in violation of the Colorado River Compact? Or will they drain Upper Basin reservoirs in an effort to maintain minimum power pool while also keeping releases at a level that will keep Lake Mead from dropping too precipitously? Maybe they’ll use the bunker-busting bombs intended for Iran to very quickly blast bypass tunnels through the canyon walls to render the dam obsolete?
The answer is still a mystery, but Interior Secretary Doug Burgum finally hinted coyly about the government’s potential approach (Interior oversees the Bureau of Reclamation, which runs most dams). The Arizona Star’s venerable environmental reporter Tony Davis reports that Burgum told a Tucson roundtable this week:
Okay, I don’t know what that means, exactly, but at least they’re planning to do something. The last statement hints at their intent to defend the minimum power pool on Glen Canyon Dam (lest they’ll lose power generation altogether). We’ll probably learn more during the Glen Canyon Monthly Operations Call in the coming week or two. So stay tuned.
As long as we’re on the subject of the federal government doing something about the Colorado River, when’s Trump going to order his people to open the giant faucet up in Canada and send water gushing down to the Southwest?
This won’t come as a surprise to many people, but it’s now official: March 2026 was the hottest March on record by a lot in the Southwest and beyond. The Upper Colorado River Basin’s average temperature for the month was 46.5° F, or more than 13° higher than the 1895-2026 median. The graph below makes it very clear that the place has been getting hotter over the past fifty years, with the only real break coming in March 2023, when snow was piling up in the mountains.
March 2026 was the hottest March since 1895 by far in the Upper Colorado River Basin. Source: NOAA.
The March scorcher followed the warmest winter and first half of the water year (Oct-March) for most of the West.
The result is clear: Even though precipitation accumulation wasn’t terribly far below normal, the snowpack was. The April 1 snowpack across Colorado was at a record low level, according to this year’s snow course, which is done by manual measurement and so goes back much farther than SNOTEL measurements.
The April 1 snowpack this year was lower than in 1977, 1981, and 2002, the worst winters of the last nine decades, at least. Source: Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies and NRCS.
Early April storms have helped keep the snow around a bit longer in the mountains, but has done little to bolster the snowpack. It’s still at historically low levels.
Water Managers anticipate flows in the San Luis Valley’s rivers and creeks will be very low in spring and summer 2026.
The Colorado Division of Water Resources Division 3 Engineer’s April 6 10-day report forecasted the total annual flow of the Rio Grande at the Del Norte gage will be 270,000 acre-feet, which is 42 percent of the long-term average. For reference, flows of the Rio Grande at Del Norte in 2018 totaled 280,400 acre-feet. The forecasted flow of the Conejos River system is 110,000 acre-feet, which is 37 percent of the long-term average. The snow water equivalent on April 9 for the Upper Rio Grande Basin was 12 percent of the median for 1991-2020.
The National Weather Service is forecasting hot temperatures along with below average precipitation into the summer. The irrigation season began on March 23 on the Rio Grande and March 16 on the Conejos River. As such, on-stream reservoirs are required to pass all inflows to satisfy the needs of downstream senior water rights holders. Given the low amount of snow, the exceptionally warm spring temperatures, and the anticipated summer drought conditions, it is possible that local rivers reached peak flow in March.
Rio Grande operations
The operators of reservoirs on the Rio Grande will time their releases of irrigation water to coincide with the canals being in priority to allow water to reach farmers. It is anticipated that many of the canals will only be in priority to divert water for a short time window, in some cases only days or weeks. As such, releases of irrigation water will begin in the next week.
The Santa Maria Reservoir Company will begin releasing stored irrigation water into North Clear Creek on April 14 at a rate of 200-300 cfs for 10 days. Additional releases will continue as farmers call for water. Rio Grande Reservoir will also begin releasing stored irrigation water into the Rio Grande on April 14 for approximately 20 days. The rate of the release will start at 100-150 cfs and increase up to 350-450 cfs. After deliveries are complete, releases will be limited to the natural inflows. As such, boatable flows on the Rio Grande may diminish as early as mid-May.
Entities including Colorado Parks and Wildlife, the San Luis Valley Water Conservancy District, and the Rio Grande Water Conservation District store water in reservoirs in the Upper Rio Grande Basin and call for releases for their operations in accordance with their water rights decrees.
Where possible, releases by these organizations will be prioritized during hot periods to supplement the natural flow of the Rio Grande and the South Fork of the Rio Grande to reduce high water temperatures to protect the health of fish. Unfortunately, there may not be sufficient water to keep temperatures below thresholds for responsible fishing. As such, anglers are encouraged to check temperature gages and not engage in catch and release fishing if water temperatures reach exceed 70 degrees. Temperature is measured at the 30 Mile Bridge, Wagon Wheel Gap, Del Norte, and South Fork Gages and can be viewed at the Colorado Division of Water Resources’ website (dwr.state.co.us). [ed. emphasis mine]
Platoro Reservoir. Photo credit: Rio de la Vista
Conejos River operations
Platoro Reservoir is passing inflows, which were 10 times higher than average for much of March because of rapid snowmelt. The Conejos Water Conservancy District allocated 6,500 acre-feet of project water to the irrigators. Unfortunately, river flows are currently too low to carry that water to farmers’ headgates and water will not be released unless river flows improve. It is likely that the river will have dry up points below Highway 285. Anglers are encouraged to check temperature gages below Platoro Reservoir and near Mogote before engaging in catch and release fishing.
Links to Stream Gages with Temperature Measurements:
Heather Dutton is district manager for the San Luis Valley Water Conservancy District, which provides leadership to the San Luis Valley water community, a forum for learning and development, and the service of well augmentation in five counties in the San Luis Valley. More by Heather Dutton
A tourist visits the lower reaches of Flaming Gorge Reservoir in Utah in September 2021. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)
Click the link to read the article on the Wyofile website (Dustin Bleizeffer):
April 10, 2026
The outlook for the Colorado River, and Lake Powell in particular, continues to worsen due to an historically warm winter and dismal snowpack.
Projections show that Lake Powell on the Utah-Arizona border could drop low enough this year that it stops producing hydroelectric power at the Glen Canyon Dam. If it drops even lower, the dam is in danger of structural failure.
Wyoming relies on some of that hydroelectric power, according to state officials. The state will also play a major, legally obligated role in trying to help prevent such a catastrophe. Primarily, the Bureau of Reclamation will release extra water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir — potentially 1 million acre feet, which is more than a quarter of its storage capacity of about 3.8 million acre-feet.
In addition to recreation and economic impacts at Flaming Gorge on the Wyoming-Utah border — boat ramps may be rendered inoperable — Wyoming officials worry about potential mandatory water use reductions in the southwest corner of the state, as well as potential legal entanglements over a seven-state negotiation that has so far failed to resolve how stakeholders will share the pain of a declining Colorado River.
Buckboard Marina owner Tony Valdez, seen here Sept. 26, 2022, says he’s made continual adjustments to boat docks to keep up with lowering water levels at Flaming Gorge Reservoir. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)
Adding to frustrations and fears, the water crisis is so severe and crashing so rapidly that stakeholders can’t even track — with confidence — its extent.
“Even though these projections are painting an incredibly dire picture for us, we need to be mindful that runoff might even be worse than what’s being projected,” Wyoming Senior Assistant Attorney General Chris Brown said Friday, adding that dry soil throughout the region is a wildcard in water calculations. “It’s bad. It’s incredibly bad what we’re seeing in the Upper [Colorado River] Basin right now.”
Brown joined Wyoming State Engineer Brandon Gebhart Friday at a Wyoming Colorado River Advisory Committee meeting to provide an update on the crisis (click here to see a slidedeck presented at the meeting).
“The information we’re getting is evolving just about as quickly as the hydrology is declining, so we’re trying to react to what we’re seeing in almost real time,” Brown said. “We don’t know what’s actually going to happen.”
This graphic depicts the “probable” water year for the Colorado River Basin in 2026. (Bureau of Reclamation)
An extra release from Flaming Gorge, which will begin on or before May 1, is a certainty, according to Wyoming water officials. That’s because the reservoir was specifically built to serve as a sort of water bank to ensure legally obliged deliveries to downstream states Nevada, Arizona and California. Among four storage reservoirs in the upper basin, Flaming Gorge has the most — and the most legally unrestricted – water to send downstream to Lake Powell.
“It’s the low-hanging fruit,” Brown said. “It’s the biggest, by far, and it’s got the most available water.”
But this year, even considering decreased releases from Lake Powell to help maintain Glen Canyon dam’s functionality, “anything we do as far as upstream [extra water] releases is not going to be enough,” Brown said.
Flaming Gorge Reservoir on the Utah side near the dam in September 2021. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)
Banks of Lake Powell, Arizona in March 2026 | Page Buono
Click the link to read the article on the American Rivers website (Page Buono and Sinjin Eberle):
March 18, 2026
The situation is clear: the precipitation outlook in the Colorado River Basin is dire, the river cannot sustain the demands placed on it, and this year we’re likely to face unprecedented management decisions with potentially catastrophic consequences.
Despite decades of warnings and years of negotiations, there remains no clear blueprint for how the West can live with less water. That future is no longer hypothetical—it is already here.
Lake Powell’s drastically low water levels are evident in the discoloration of ancient cliffs that were submerged for decades, often referred to as “the bathtub ring” in March 2026 | Page Buono
We often talk about the Colorado River and drought in ways that can feel removed, impersonal, abstract, and buried in jargon. But beneath the stories, there are real lives, livelihoods, ecosystems, and traditions that make the region what it is, and that are very much at stake.
West Drought Monitor map April 7, 2026.
On March 3, for example, the US Drought Monitor released their latest report, revealing that “snow water equivalent” is less than 70% of normal across the Central Rockies, and less than 50% in the Four Corners.
But it isn’t just one fire in one year – throughout the Southwest and in California, regions are experiencing some of the largest, most catastrophic wildfires in history, and they’re occurring much more frequently.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Today, Governors Jared Polis (D-Colo.), Mark Gordon (R-Wyo.), Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-N.M.) and Spencer Cox (R-Utah) released a statement on the proposed draw down of Flaming Gorge and other upper basin reservoirs:
“This is an unprecedented year on the Colorado River, and likely will be one of the worst on record. A dry year like this reminds us of why it is critical that all who rely on this resource learn to live within its means and adapt our uses accordingly.
The Upper Division States of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, are actively and strictly regulating water uses. Because of such diminished runoff, existing state laws in the Upper Division States require water users to face cuts to water rights dating back to the 1800s – these cuts are mandatory, uncompensated, and will have significant impacts on water users, including Upper Basin Tribes, and local economies.
It is critical that any releases made by the federal government from Flaming Gorge and other upstream reservoirs are in compliance with existing agreements, particularly the 2019 Drought Response Operations Agreement between the Bureau of Reclamation and the Upper Division States and governing law and done for the purpose of protecting Lake Powell. We must have a clear understanding of how these proposed releases will effectively protect elevations at Lake Powell. Once the releases conclude, we expect that all water released from Flaming Gorge and other upstream reservoirs will be fully recovered.
Further, any releases must be appropriately sized. Years like this one remind us that appropriate water storage helps us survive the dry years, and that we must be prepared not only for this year but future dry years, as well as average years.
As we continue to comply with commitments to our water users and the Law of River, we recognize the impacts of water shortages and water releases from Upper Basin reservoirs on local communities – not only related to future water supply availability, but also how they affect jobs and local recreational and other economies. We recognize the need to live within the available supply and expect other communities to do so as well.”
The Colorado River flows near Hite, Utah on July 4, 2022. The river’s water supply is shrinking, and states are caught in a standoff about how to cut back on demand. Alex Hager/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Scott Franz):
April 8, 2026
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
Last month’s record breaking heat across the Mountain West led to the worst snowpack on record in Colorado and Utah, along with a significantly downgraded forecast for the upcoming supply of Colorado River water.
Cody Moser with the federal Colorado Basin River Forecast Center said in a monthly briefing Tuesday [April 7, 2026] that just 1.4 million acre feet of Colorado River water is expected to reach Lake Powell through July. That’s less than a quarter of what’s considered normal.
It’s also much lower than the 2.3 million acre feet Moser’s office projected a month ago, before the heat wave in the West melted away an already meager supply of snowpack.
“With record low snow pack, we have well below normal water supply forecasts,“ he said. “In many cases, our April through July (water) volume forecasts rank in the lowest five on record when compared to historical observations.”
The forecast for how much water will reach Flaming Gorge Reservoir also dropped more than 20% since the last monthly projection. Flows for the Yampa River are also projected to be near the record low.
Moser added it’s likely some rivers and streams in western Colorado have already reached their peak runoff for the year.
He said the water supply forecasts could improve if wet conditions arrive, or decline even further if the West remains dry.
The worsening river forecasts arrive as the seven states that use the waterway remain at an impasse this spring over how to share and conserve the water in the future.
If states can’t reach a deal, the Interior Department is expected to identify its preferred option for how to manage Lake Powell and Lake Mead after the current operating guidelines expire this fall.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told Arizona radio station KTAR News this week that the worsening spring runoff conditions are going to “require everybody to dig in and take bigger cuts than they want, and we haven’t reached that spot yet.”
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, center, speaks during a gathering with governors from six states in the Colorado River basin on Friday, Jan. 30, 2026. Photo credit: Lowell Whitman/Department Of Interior
Click the link to read the article on the Tuscon.com website (Tony Davis). Here’s an excerpt:
April 8, 2026
U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, pressed Monday to spell out how he’ll handle the Colorado River’s water crisis, wouldn’t get specific but said repeatedly that “nobody will be happy” with how his department will split a rapidly dwindling supply of river water among the seven states, including Arizona, that want a piece of it. Speaking at a roundtable in the Tucson area populated by a host of public lands industry leaders and University of Arizona President Suresh Garimella, Burgum pledged to hand down a decision this month on the first of two crucial, divisive issues his office is confronting regarding the river. That decision will be how much water the Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation will release from its upstream reservoirs in the four Upper Colorado River Basin states to head off a potential calamity in which Glen Canyon Dam, forming the boundary between the Upper and Lower Basins, would no longer receive enough water to continue generating electricity that serves customers in seven Western states.
The white bathtub ring clinging to the sandstone walls of Glen Canyon is more than a marker of a receding lake; it is a physical manifestation of a century-old accounting error. PHOTO BY BOB HEMBREE (MARCH 2019)
The white bathtub ring clinging to the sandstone walls of Glen Canyon is more than a marker of a receding lake; it is a physical manifestation of a century-old accounting error. For decades, the conventional story of the Colorado River’s decline has been framed as a tragic stroke of bad luck. The narrative, popularized in modern classics like Cadillac Desert, suggests that the framers of the 1922 Colorado River Compact simply did their best with a limited record of “eighteen years of streamflow measurement” taken during an unusually wet “binge.”
However, emerging historical research and systems analysis tell a more complicated and troubling story. In their definitive study, Science Be Dammed, authors Eric Kuhn and John Fleck argue that the crisis we face in 2026 was not an accident of nature but a predictable consequence of “selective science.” The decision-makers of 1922 were not victims of ignorance; they were sophisticated professionals who chose to ignore inconvenient data in favor of a political vision that required the river to be larger than it actually was.
Eugene Clyde LaRue measuring the flow in Nankoweap Creek, 1923. Photo credit: USGS
The Inconvenient Hydrologist
As the seven basin states gathered at Bishop’s Lodge in Santa Fe to carve up the river, they were joined by Eugene Clyde (E.C.) LaRue, a hydrologist for the U.S. Geological Survey. [Eric Kuhn responding to my X post, “Actually LaRue was never allowed to attend a Commission meeting. He asked, but Hoover said no.] LaRue presented the commissioners with a conclusion that threatened the very foundation of their negotiations. His data, which included early gauge records and historical flood markers, suggested that the river’s long-term average was approximately 15 million acre-feet (maf)
LaRue explicitly warned the commission that the period between 1905 and 1922 was a hydrological anomaly. Had the negotiators included the drier records from the late 1890s, the estimated annual flow would have dropped significantly. As Kuhn and Fleck note, the decision-makers had at their disposal a relatively thorough, almost modern picture of the river’s hydrology. They chose to ignore it because accepting LaRue’s science might have left them with a flow too low to reach the compromises necessary to develop the West.
Members of the Colorado River Commission, in Santa Fe in 1922, after signing the Colorado River Compact. From left, W. S. Norviel (Arizona), Delph E. Carpenter (Colorado), Herbert Hoover (Secretary of Commerce and Chairman of Commission), R. E. Caldwell (Utah), Clarence C. Stetson (Executive Secretary of Commission), Stephen B. Davis, Jr. (New Mexico), Frank C. Emerson (Wyoming), W. F. McClure (California), and James G. Scrugham (Nevada) CREDIT: COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY WATER RESOURCES ARCHIVE via Aspen Journalism
Paper Water and the System Trap
By sidelining LaRue and enshrining a “paper water” figure of 16.4 million acre-feet into the Law of the River, the commissioners fell into a classic “system trap.” They created a legal stock of water rights that far exceeded the river’s physical flow. This inflated number was essential to the “reinforcing loop” of 20th-century growth. It provided the legal certainty needed to secure federal funding for massive infrastructure projects like the Hoover Dam and the Glen Canyon Dam.
This intentional overestimation created a massive “information delay.” For eighty years, the system appeared stable only because the Upper Basin states were slow to develop their shares, allowing their “unused” water to flow downstream. This masked the fundamental deficit, leading to a state of “overshoot” in which the regional economy came to depend on water that did not exist. Professor Rhett Larson describes the resulting legal framework as a system of “calling shotgun” that was excellent for settling a desert but is catastrophic for managing one in a time of scarcity.
The End of the Delay
Today, the “delay” has finally ended, and the “inconvenient science” of 1922 has become the undeniable reality of 2026. The river’s source is being further depleted by “aridification,” a process climate scientist Brad Udall describes as a “sponge above our head” that evaporates moisture before it can reach the streamflow. We are now witnessing the collision of a 100-year-old legal fiction with a 21st-century climate reality.
The current impasse between the Upper and Lower Basins is a symptom of “policy resistance,” where every actor is incentivized to protect their “paper” share even as the “wet” water disappears. As Professor Andrea Gerlak observes, if a system has 25 years to produce an agreement and fails, there is likely something fundamentally wrong with the system itself. Solving the crisis at Lake Powell will require more than engineering; it will require a paradigm shift that finally aligns our laws with the river’s actual physical limits.
The All American Canal, the largest diversion on the Colorado River, passes through Winterhaven, CA on its way to the Imperial Valley. The Colorado River is seen flowing next to it.
April 2, 2026
In the southeast corner of California, 300-foot-tall sand dunes rise from a sunbaked landscape dotted with ocotillo and creosote bushes. Summer temperatures here regularly exceed 110 degrees, and annual rainfall is comparable to that of the Sahara Desert. Despite its unforgiving terrain, more than 180,000 residents live in Imperial County, one of the country’s most productive agricultural regions and more recently a magnet for data center development and lithium extraction proposals. This has all been made possible by turn-of-the-20th century canals that carve up the region, supplying it with more than a million gallons of Colorado River water every minute.
“We’ve often called it the lifeblood of Imperial Valley,” said Robert Schettler, a spokesperson for Imperial Irrigation District, the area’s public utility, which manages the region’s over 3,000 miles of drains and canals. “If something were to happen to that river, we would all have to pack up and leave.”
Something is happening to the Colorado River. Over the past century, its average water supply has fallen by nearly a third due to prolonged drought and climate change. Experts predict that decline will continue, threatening cities, tribes and farms that depend on the river’s flow, from Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico to Arizona, Nevada and Northern Mexico. Most of the Colorado River’s water starts as snowpack in the Rocky Mountains, but after the American West experienced the warmest winter ever recorded, snow levels are now at historic lows, prompting experts to warn that 2026 may be one of the river’s driest years yet.
That could spell disaster for Imperial County, whose harsh desert landscape of windblown sand and rugged burnt-orange mountains was transformed more than a century ago into productive, gridded farmland dotted with small cities such as Brawley, El Centro and Calexico…Imperial Valley’s agricultural industry consumes by far the largest share of water in the region, about 97% of the 3.1 million acre-feet managed by the Imperial Irrigation District every year…Those ambitious and largely successful conservation efforts have come at a cost. Much of the water used by farmers historically flowed into the nearby Salton Sea, but as farmers have reduced their water use, less runoff has reached the man-made lake, accelerating an existing environmental crisis Over the last three decades, the Salton Sea has shrunk by more than 60 square miles, exposing a dry lakebed laden with pesticides, particulate matter and heavy metals. Those contaminants are carried as dust through the air into nearby communities, contributing to a childhood asthma rate triple that of the national average. Now, farmers such as Brian Strahm, whose family has been growing crops in the area for four generations, are concerned they may have to decrease their water use further. That may prove difficult since farmers have already put in place many efficiency measures, Strahm said…Farmers say cuts could seriously harm the area’s already struggling economy. In addition to being the county with the highest percentage of Latinos in California, Imperial has among the highest unemployment rates of any county in the country, at nearly 19%. For those who do find work, the agricultural industry offers a lifeline, accounting for one out of every six jobs in the region.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Coloradans often hear that the Colorado River crisis is happening somewhere else. Headlines focus on Lake Mead, Lake Powell, and the Lower Basin, while Colorado is portrayed as a responsible headwaters state doing its part. Yet that narrative misses a deeper truth. The Colorado River crisis is not only about drought or downstream shortages. It is also about how the river is managed. In that sense, Colorado shares responsibility with every basin state.
Colorado’s water system is built on ‘prior appropriation’. The rule is simple: “first in time, first in right.” The earliest water users receive priority when supplies run low. This framework helped farmers, cities, and industries expand across the West during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, creating stability in a region where water determines survival.
However, the system was designed for a different climate and a by-gone West. It also encouraged states and water users to claim more water than the river could supply, contributing to the overallocation of the Colorado River. Legal analyses of the Law of the River show that the basin was effectively overburdened by water claims decades before climate change began reducing flows.
Today, climate change is altering the river itself. Scientists estimate that warming temperatures have already reduced Colorado River flows by roughly 20 percent. Federal water managers warn that declines could continue as temperatures rise. In a river system that is already legally overcommitted, treating water rights as fixed privileges can deepen instability rather than prevent it.
Colorado sits at the center of this challenge. As the largest contributor of water in the Upper Basin, the state must balance many competing demands. Front Range cities continue to grow. Western Slope agriculture depends on reliable irrigation. Rivers and aquatic ecosystems are under stress. Yet much of Colorado’s water policy still assumes shortages are temporary and that legal priority alone will determine who receives water. That mindset often encourages defensive politics rather than shared problem-solving.
Conflicts between upstream and downstream states are often described as unavoidable. In reality, much of the tension stems from the priorities of management. Upper Basin states emphasize uncertainty about future river flows, while Lower Basin states focus on delivery obligations and infrastructure investments, according to recent reports on Colorado River governance. Each group is acting logically within the current system. The problem is that the system frequently rewards delay and legal conflict rather than cooperation, as researchers studying collaborative governance in the basin have found.
Colorado has an opportunity to change that pattern. One promising approach is collaborative adaptive management. This framework begins with a simple idea: uncertainty is normal in complex systems. Instead of assuming managers already know the right solution, adaptive management relies on monitoring conditions, learning from outcomes, and adjusting policies over time. With collaboration of states, tribes, farmers, cities, and environmental groups conflict can be reduced and management decisions can improve.
Some elements of this approach already exist in Colorado, including experimental reservoir operations and voluntary conservation programs. However, research on collaborative drought science planning in the Colorado River Basin shows that these efforts remain limited and politically fragile.
Equity must also be part of Colorado’s leadership. For decades, Tribal nations and many rural communities have carried the environmental costs of water development while urban growth captured much of the benefit, a pattern highlighted in research on environmental justice and Indigenous governance. Tribal nations, many of which hold some of the most senior water rights in the basin, remain underrepresented in major water decisions. Adaptive governance recognizes that whose knowledge it is that counts, matters. Incorporating Indigenous knowledge, local experience, and community-based monitoring can strengthen decisions and build trust in governance. Research shows that when affected communities help shape policies, those policies are more likely to be trusted, followed, and sustained over time.
Importantly, collaborative management does not mean abandoning Colorado water law or taking away private rights. Instead, it means updating water governance so users can share risk and adapt together as conditions change. The alternative – waiting for wetter years or relying on courts to resolve disputes – ignores both climate science and political reality. Climate projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicate that the American Southwest will likely remain hotter and drier for decades. Planning for a return to twentieth-century river flows is increasingly unrealistic.
Critics argue that collaboration takes too long when the crisis is already severe. Colorado has already tried temporary agreements, emergency negotiations, and federal pressure. Those approaches have not produced lasting solutions. Short-term deals may stabilize reservoirs for a season, but they do little to address the deeper management problems driving the crisis. Without stronger cooperation, the basin risks repeating the same cycle of shortage and conflict.
Colorado has long prided itself on practical problem-solving and environmental leadership. The state now has an opportunity to apply those values to its most important river. Policymakers should strengthen collaborative water governance, ensure meaningful Tribal participation, and support conservation policies that reward flexibility rather than litigation.
Coloradans also have a role to play. Public participation in basin planning, engagement with watershed organizations, and pressure on elected officials can help shift water policy toward long-term climate adaptation rather than short-term crisis response.
The Colorado River begins in our mountains. Leadership today means recognizing that rules built for a wetter past may no longer work in a hotter future – and choosing cooperation before the river forces the decision for us.
Anderson, Patrick J., Jeanne E. Godaire, Daniel K. Jones, William J. Andrews, Alicia A. Torregrosa, Meghan T. Bell, JoAnn M. Holloway, et al. 2025. “Collaborative Drought Science Planning in the Colorado River Basin.” U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2025-1041. https://doi.org/10.3133/ofr20251041.
Birnbaum, Simon. 2016. “Environmental Co-governance, Legitimacy, and the Quest for Compliance: When and Why Is Stakeholder Participation Desirable?”. Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 18, no. 3, 306–323.https://doi.org/10.1080/1523908X.2015.1077440
Hite, Kristen, Pervaze A. Sheikh, and Charles V. Stern. 2025. “Management of the Colorado River: Water Allocations, Drought, and the Federal Role”. Congressional Research Service Report R45546.https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45546.
Holling, C. S. 1978. Adaptive Environmental Assessment and Management. New York: Wiley.
Kuhn, Eric. 2024. “The Risks and Potential Impacts of a Colorado River Compact Curtailment on Colorado River In-Basin and Transmountain Water Rights Within Colorado.” Colorado Environmental Law Journal, 35.https://scholar.law.colorado.edu/celj/vol35/iss2/4.
Sullivan, Abigail, Dave D. White, and Michael Hanemann. 2019. “Designing Collaborative Governance: Insights from the Drought Contingency Planning Process for the Lower Colorado River Basin.” Environmental Science & Policy, 91: 39-49. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2018.10.011.
David is a Colorado Certified Water Professional and environmental scientist dedicated to protecting aquatic systems through rigorous data analysis, public service, and responsible resource management. He holds a bachelors degree in Biology from Western Colorado University and will graduate soon from the University of Denver with a Masters Degree in Environmental Policy and Management.
Click the link to read the article on Ken’s Substack (Ken Neubecker):
March 27, 2026
The February 14 deadline for the seven Colorado River Basin States to come up with an agreement on future management of the river is long gone, and still no agreement in sight. The deadline for submitting comments on the Bureau of Reclamations Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) is also past. Reclamation didn’t have a “preferred alternative”, which is not normal. They were hoping the States would have an agreement so that could become the preferred alternative. So they are left with their suite of six alternatives. All six are fraught with what Reclamation calls “decision making under deep uncertainty” (DMDU, they love acronyms).
That is an understatement.
No one seems to be very happy with any single proposed alternative. Some are calling for a new DEIS, or at least a Supplemental DEIS. This would only push any deadline further down the road. Reclamation is caught between a rock and a hard place.
The only real alternatives that they can implement without full approval by the States are No Action and the Basic Coordination Alternative. Both would be disastrous. They would simply be going back to how things were done prior to the 2007 Interim Guidelines and even earlier policies, none of which reflect the needs of the Colorado River we have today.
Westwide SNOTEL basin-filled map April 4, 2026.
Adding to that is the very dry record low snowpack in the Rockies. This annual winter snowpack is the ultimate water storage reservoir for the entire basin, from Pinedale, Wyoming, to Yuma, Arizona. It is what puts water into the two great reservoirs, Lakes Powell and Mead, that the Lower Basin desert states of California, Arizona and Nevada depend on. It is the only real reservoir that the needs of the arid Upper Basin states, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming depend on. This year that snowpack reservoir is as low as it has ever been, even eclipsing the former record year of 2002 when all this mega-drought started. The recent heat dome setting up over the Four Corners area is melting and sublimating what little snowpack there is fast.
Lakes Powell and Mead are already at very low levels, and the 1.7 maf projected inflow from spring runoff is looking smaller every day. Reclamation predicts that the water level in Lake Powell will drop to a point where no hydropower can be generated, power pool, by as soon as late July or at least in December. That, in effect, could be dead pool, with very limited releases from the lower “river outlet” tunnels. In effect, the flows from Lake Powell will become run of the river, what comes in is what goes out. No more storage for expected water deliveries downstream except what they might risk in lowering Lake Mead even more.
Needless to say this has sparked a war of words between the Upper and Lower Basins, with the Lower Basin being particularly vitriolic. As the February 14 deadline passed, JB Hamby of California declared “The 1922 Colorado River Compact requires the Upper Basin to deliver an average of 8.25 million acre-feet (maf) annually to the Lower Basin and Mexico. That delivery obligation is fixed in law, even if the river produces less water.” Arizona has gone even further, declaring in TV ads that the water delivery is not only an obligation, but a “guarantee” for delivery.
Huh??? Fixed in law and a guarantee? The reality of the river disagrees. The requirements of the Compact are, yes, written in law. On paper. It is “paper water”, not real, or “wet” water. Colorado’s commissioner Becky Mitchell was more to the point, if less vitriolic, “We are being asked to solve a problem we didn’t create, with water we do not have.” At least someone understands the reality of the situation.
John Wesley Powell, the hero of the Colorado River was invited as the honored guest and keynote speaker at the second International Irrigation Congress, held in Los Angeles in 1893. He was held in high regard by the many boosters, speculators and people hoping to cash in with irrigated farms all across the Colorado River basin. After listening to what they were saying, Powell pocketed his prepared remarks and said,
“When all the rivers are used, when all the creeks in the ravines, when all the brooks, when all the springs are used, when all the canyon waters are taken up, when all the artesian waters are taken up, when all the wells are sunk or dug that can be dug in all this arid region, there is still not sufficient water to irrigate all this arid region.”
The delegates didn’t want to hear that. As they booed him off the stage he added,
“I tell you gentlemen that you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights for there is not sufficient water to supply the land.”
Powell was right, but the boosters didn’t listen. Many still aren’t listening. Agricultural dreams have faded and new dreams of housing developments and data centers are taking their place. The boosters, in both Basins, are still booing reality off the stage. Dreams continue to grow as the river continues to shrink.
I read of fears that the Upper Basin will take advantage of Lower Basin cuts by taking more themselves. Really? From where? That vast winter snowpack reservoir that is expected to “guarantee” so much water for the Lower Basin, to refill Powell and Mead, is the same shrinking reservoir that the Upper Basin depends on. Upper Basin diversions are being curtailed every year, not expanded. There isn’t enough water. The Upper Colorado River Commission’s “Amended 2016 Upper Division States Depletion Demand Schedule”, published in June 2022, was used in BOR’s modeling of Upper Basin demands, but the optimistic projections of that report have never born fruit. The report is a projection of potential future depletions from the Upper Colorado River, but they are just that, projections. And relatively modest ones at that. The report begins with a resolution of the Commission that states,
WHEREAS Depletion Demand Schedules issued by the Commission are not a prediction of future water use or depletions. The Depletion Demand Schedules are estimates that presume the continuation of the observed historically available supply and other demand drivers used for planning purposes and are useful for modeling purposes.
It is simply and estimate based on “observed historically available supply”. Observation and history have made some changes to any anticipated future depletions. The report cites 5.7 maf as the current historical use as of 2022, with potential for increased depletions up to 5.8 maf in 2020 and 6.6 maf by 2070. In reality the annual depletion has dropped to 4 maf or less. With continued aridification and dwindling snowpack Upper Basin depletions will likely stagnate, if not decline. That is just the reality.
Under Colorado law, and constitution, the right to divert water to a beneficial use “shall never be denied”. What that means, as I stated in the previous post, is that anyone can dig a ditch or throw a small pump into any stream and divert water. New applications for water rights are filed every month with the Water Courts, and their decrees will likely be granted. That is again, all on paper. The reality is they probably won’t get much if any water. When the river is flowing high in the spring it is a “free river”, meaning anyone can stick in their straw for a drink. But as soon as the first senior call is placed all that stops, and senior calls are happening earlier and earlier every year. And the local Water Commissioners, the ones who can shut down diversions, are getting busier.
The 1922 Compact has a fairly senior right on all streams and rivers in the Upper Basin. So far, the non-depletion requirement for flows averaging 75 maf over a ten year running average hasn’t been breached. Lake Powell will probably hit power pool or worse before then.
The difference between the demands, hopes, and fantasies of paper water and the hard reality of actual wet water are growing starker every winter and have been since the three giant reservoirs, Powell, Mead and the winter snowpack, have shrunk over the past 25 years. Nature doesn’t care much about paper, reports, lawyers or the dreams of boosters past and present. She always wins in the end.
And as Becky Mitchell, said, litigation won’t create any new water.
A correction/addition to my previous post about misunderstandings on the Colorado River
I need to make a correction on my previous post. The three large Upper Basin’s reservoirs, Flaming Gorge, Blue Mesa and Navajo do provide some water for Upper Basin use, especially Navajo, which provides water to the San Juan-Chama diversion to the Rio Grande basin and Albuquerque. It supplies on average 91 kaf of diverted water. It is expected that there will be no diversion this year. Navajo also provides water for Tribal use to the Navaho and Jicarilla Apachie. Downstream flows from Flaming Gorge, the largest of the three can provide smaller amounts for hay fields in Browns Park and the melons in Green River, but that’s pretty small too. Blue Mesa releases can benefit the Gunnison Tunnel diversions and Redlands downstream, but both are well senior to the Compact.
I knew better.
The main storage of the three reservoirs is still primarily as that Compact compliance savings account, and they will be called upon soon to bolster the levels of Lake Powell, where the inflow from runoff projection is dropping below 2 maf. If things keep going like this for another few weeks it will likely be lower.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Rio Grande levy near Alamosa, November 2024. Photo credit: The Alamosa Citizen
The theme this year was “Where Water Connects Us: Past Meets Present in the San Luis Valley”. Paul Formisano and the staff and volunteers from the Salazar Rio Grande del Norte Center delivered a varied, timely and interesting agenda!
San Luis People’s Ditch March 17, 2018. Photo credit: Greg Hobbs
Ken Salazar set the stage for the sessions, reminding attendees that, “Early settlers knew the only way to bring prosperity to the valley was to do it collectively as the early acequias did.”
Upper Rio Grande snowpack March 29, 2026. Credit: NRCS
The first session was titled, “State of the Rio: The 2026 river outlook general basin and compact projections” and the general consensus from the speakers was, as Brad Udall recently said about the Upper Colorado River Basin, “There is no historical analog,” for these conditions. Snow drought is front and center in the San Luis Valley these days.
Upper Rio Grande accumulated precipitation March 29, 2026. Credit: NRCS
Precipitation in the basin started out the water year in great shape due to a big rain event in early October. Since then there have been modest accumulations but has flattened out since late February to date.
Colorado SNOTEL basin-filled snowpack map March 28, 2026. Credit: NRCS
Division Engineer Craig Cotten started off his presentation with the basin-filled snowpack map for Colorado. He joked that, “The good news is, the Rio Grande is not the worst in the state.” It is not a good year as far as #snowpack and many SNOTEL locations are already melted-out.
Slide credit: Craig Cotten
Projected streamflow is not looking good and the forecast will likely be worse when the April 1, 2026 numbers are released by the NRCS. However, streamflow right now is looking okay, there is a lot of water in the #RioGrande at this time for example. That means that the little snowpack in the basin is already coming off.
Slide credit: Craig Cotten
Reservoir storage is in good shape (as a percent of average) except Sanchez Reservoir which has been drawn down for maintenance and repairs.
Current compliance numbers for the Rio Grande Compact from Craig Cotten. Photo credit: Chris Lopez/Alamosa Citizen
Colorado’s Rio Grande Compact compliance numbers heading into the scary diversion season are a positive. There is no debt owed to New Mexico and Texas. With the early onset to runoff season the State Engineer allowed irrigation to start on March 23, 2026. Current estimated streamflow for the Rio Grande at Del Norte (the compact USGS gage used for the river) is 305,000 acre-feet which carries a compact obligation of 76,000 acre-feet to New Mexico and Texas. For the Conejos River the estimated upper index annual flow is 165,000 acre-feet and the downstream obligation is 27,500 acre-feet. However, water levels are going to drop in the unconfined aquifer significantly this year due to low flows in the river. The situation in the aquifer is bad and it is going to get worse.
Cotten updated the attendees about the Rio Grande Compact lawsuit status. It is mostly a fight between Texas and New Mexico and the latest stipulated agreement has been approved by the Special Master. The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to approve the agreement.
Nathan Coombs, in keepting with the symposium theme said, “I believe we’re going to be alright this season we’re going to survive. People in the San Luis Valley are working together and we’re going to get through it.”
Slide credit: Heather Dutton
Heather Dutton gave an overview of reservoir operations for 2026. It is possible that all irrigation water will be released in April and May. She added, “If you’re going to fish the streams emphasize fishing in the morning and visit one of our valley breweries in the afternoon. It’s going to be tough year for all of us. Please keep the farmers in mind.”
Reclamation informed attendees about the current status of the Closed Basin Project. Project priorities are:
Colorado’s compact deliveries
Mitigation for construction and pumping
Eliminate Colorado’s Rio Grande Compact deficit
Other beneficial uses/irrigation
Slide from Amber Pacheco
The session “Twenty years of subdistricts” illustrated how the well owners have been working together over the years to determine a solution to the declining unconfined aquifer. Because groundwater is not separate from surface water the lowered levels in the aquifer affect surface streamflow in the Rio Grande. Valley pumpers have formed several sub-districts fashioned around the different hydrology in areas of the aquifer and are retiring some wells and taking land out of production. Another strategy used has been o develop augmentation plans to offset pumping. All of the strategies involve fees to sub-district members. There is extensive coverage of the issue on Coyote Gulch if you are interested in taking a trip down memory lane.
Slide credit: Rachel James
The session “Flowing together: Agriculture, rivers, and communities in partnership” was an overview of collaboration between the City of Alamosa, the West Side Ditch, and Rio Grande Headwaters Restoration Project on the river at the east side of Alamosa. It included a new headgate for the ditch company and will include a new levy orientation and access to the river from Cole Park. The speakers emphasized that it would not have happened without collaboration and the emphasis on creating a win for all stakeholders. For example, Bill Schoen credited the Rio Grande Headwaters Restoration Project for finding funding for the new headgate which is often a problem for mutual ditch companies. Daniel Boyes of the Restoration Project said that the new headgate helps fish and safety for boaters.
Rio Grande, Colorado | National Park Service
The final session before the keynote was “Perspectives on valley recreation” where access to public lands and the value of building a recreation economy to bolster valley opportunities were discussed. While 39% of Colorado’s agricultural output is from the valley economic activity is seasonal. The discussion centered around bringing tourism to the valley to improve the outlook for employment and economic growth.
The keynote speaker was Ben Golfarb and it was a real treat. I never tire of learning about “Nature’s Engineers” and the amazing effect this keystone species has on hydrology and habitat. Trapped extensively by fur traders to enable the fashion industry in the 19th century the species was nearly extirpated from the North American West. Along with a torrent of information and photographs, Goldfarb informed attendees that the native tribes did not participate in trapping because of their understanding of beaver’s role in the arid lands.
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
River managers need to conserve around 1.7 million acre-feet in Lake Powell to keep the reservoir from dropping below hydropower turbines this year, according to federal government projections. The Bureau of Reclamation, a federal agency that manages dams on the Colorado River, has estimated that reservoir levels could fall below required elevations for hydropower production before August as record-low snowpack turns into pitiful flows in streams and rivers.
“The situation is dire, the stakes have never been higher, and the reservoirs have never been drier,” Estevan Lopez, New Mexico’s negotiator on interstate Colorado River matters, said during a meeting of the Upper Colorado River Commission on Tuesday [March 24, 2026].
The back of Glen Canyon Dam circa 1964, not long after the reservoir had begun filling up. Here the water level is above dead pool, meaning water can be released via the river outlets, but it is below minimum power pool, so water cannot yet enter the penstocks to generate electricity. Bureau of Reclamation photo. Annotations: Jonathan P. Thompson
If water levels fall below required levels for hydropower production, dam managers will be forced to release water through bypass tubes, which are not designed for sustained, high-volume flows. With too much use, the bypasses could fail, turning the dam into a massive plug in the river and shutting off downstream flows. To keep Powell above those critical levels, federal officials can either fill it with water from upstream reservoirs, including some in Colorado, or they can reduce the water it drains from Powell and sends to the Lower Basin (California, Arizona and New Mexico). States are already expressing their views on how those operations should work. Upper Colorado River basin states, including Colorado, want the federal government to achieve the conservation requirement by reducing water releases to downstream states, at least in part. Upper Basin states say upstream reservoirs aren’t enough to save Powell without cuts to Lower Basin water deliveries. Draining the upstream reservoirs could also leave the system without backup supplies in the event of another dry year…The three primary reservoirs that could prop up Powell are Flaming Gorge in Wyoming, Navajo Reservoir in New Mexico, and Blue Mesa Reservoir near Gunnison, Colorado. Of the three, only Flaming Gorge is large enough to contribute the entire 1.7 million acre-feet on its own, and that would require draining the reservoir to halfway full. Blue Mesa and Navajo already stand at around halfway full, and the two reservoirs likely could not provide the water to save Lake Powell even if both were entirely drained.
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
American White Pelican and Double-crested Cormorant at Bill Williams Wildlife Refuge along the Colorado River, Arizona. Photo: Gary Moore/Audubon Photography Awards
Click the link to read the article on the Audubon website (Jennifer Pitt):
March 20, 2026
Audubon and partners cut through the conflict with a unique, basinwide perspective, championing the river’s health for the people and birds that rely on it.
The winter of 2025-2026 has not been kind to the Colorado River. Record-warm temperatures day after day across the mountains that feed the river have led to record-low snow levels. All indications are that spring snowmelt feeding the river will be scant.
That is a huge problem, because Colorado River reservoirs, which historically held vast water reserves, are already depleted, with Lake Powell at 25% and Lake Mead at 34% of capacity. This is bad news for people and birds relying on water from the Colorado River. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation), the federal agency managing the dams, projects that Lake Powell’s water levels could fall low enough to threaten Glen Canyon Dam’s infrastructure, downstream water delivery, hydropower, and native wildlife in the Grand Canyon including the California Condor and the Western Yellow-billed Cuckoo, among others.
As this crisis plays out, Reclamation has the difficult job of re-tooling systemwide, long-term dam operations on the Colorado River (often referred to as the “Post-2026 Guidelines”). Existing rules, first set nearly two decades ago and tweaked repeatedly to keep up with the declining Colorado River (the result of a warmer and drier climate), expire at the end of this year. As anticipated under this timeline, Reclamation issued a Draft Environmental Impact Statement (Draft EIS) in late January which laid out potential alternatives for federal management and solicited comments from stakeholders. This Draft EIS embraced uncertainty as a central planning condition as they tested different approaches under a broad range of hydrologic conditions. For a long time, the expectation was that the seven U.S. states sharing the river (Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming) would develop a consensus-based proposal for Reclamation, but that hasn’t happened and talk of litigation has increased.
Southwestern Willow flycatcher
Reclamation must now figure out next steps. The agency does have legal authorities, but those legal authorities were crafted long ago and do not necessarily spell out how to take meaningful action in this historic crisis. That threatens the water supply for more than 35 million people including the major cities of the American Southwest, Tribes, millions of acres of irrigated farms and ranches, as well as the Colorado River itself and every living thing that depends on its habitats, including hundreds of bird species like the Southwestern Willow Flycatcher, Yuma Ridgway’s Rail, and Summer Tanager.
This is a graph of snowpack above LakePowell using 104 snow measuring stations. It was 9 inches of water on March 7, now 6 inches. Other dry years shown.There is no historical analog to this — Brad Udall
Audubon submitted formal comments in response to the Draft EIS, joining conservation partners to weigh in on what comes next for Reclamation’s consideration (read our comment letter here). Dozens of comments were submitted by the Colorado River Basin states, water users, and other stakeholders making their case with Reclamation that their water uses need to be protected at the expense of others. In its comments Audubon emphasized the need to stabilize the Colorado River system from its headwaters to its delta—a unique, basinwide perspective that urges Reclamation to manage risks for people and nature rather than deferring hard decisions until emergency conditions force action. Our comment letter focused on constructive engagement noting the Draft EIS’s strengths in its analytical foundation while identifying and describing targeted refinements that would help ensure the Final EIS fully informs decision-makers about risks and real-world consequences. Specifically, Audubon calls for:
Clarity and predictability
Flexible, adaptive tools for conserving, storing, and managing water
Environmental stewardship embedded into operations
Meaningful and voluntary Tribal participation
Pathways for advancing in-basin mitigation and resilience-building opportunities
Pathways for advancingbinational cooperation with Mexico
Over the next few months, Reclamation still has an opportunity to persuade the Colorado River Basin states into consensus. Whether or not they are successful (and we hope they are), sometime this summer we expect Reclamation to issue a Final EIS that includes refinements to the Draft as well as an indication of their preferred alternative for Colorado River operations. In the meantime, it is urgent Reclamation also prepare for the water supply emergency that is unfolding in 2026.
For much of the last century, Reclamation was a leader in developing the southwestern United States by harnessing the Colorado River and delivering its water across the land. Today, Reclamation must lead in a new way, helping everyone and everything that depends on the Colorado River live with the river we have in a warmer, drier world.
The sun rises over Lake Powell in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, in Page, Arizona. Lake Powell, a critical Colorado River reservoir, is only at a third of its capacity as drought conditions in the Southwest worsen. CREDIT: ECOFLIGHT
Click the link to read the article on the AZMirror website (Caitlin Sievers):
March 23, 2026
Arizona is preparing for a legal battle over its rights to Colorado River water.
Following an extraordinarily dry winter along the river basin and what’s expected to be an exceptionally hot and dry spring across the West, where high temperatures in March have already blown past records, the pressure to maintain access to the state’s fair share of river water is growing.
The Colorado River is a vital source of drinking water for 40 million people in the seven basin states, Mexico and 30 Native American tribes, and provides water for farming operations and hydroelectricity.
Reaching a water usage agreement is imperative to the basin states as the river’s water supply continues to decline, as it has done for the past 25 years due to a persistent drought spurred on by climate change.
On Monday, the Arizona Governor’s Office announced that it had retained the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell to represent the state in possible litigation among the Colorado River Basin states and the federal government.
Sullivan & Cromwell is an international firm based in New York City that has represented big names like Microsoft, BP, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase. The state is using some of the $3 million it put into its Colorado River legal defense fund last year to retain the law firm.
The Governor’s Office doesn’t expect to take any legal action until June at the earliest, but wants to be prepared for the possibility, especially if the dispute ends up before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Lower Basin states — Arizona, Nevada and California — and the Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming — have been negotiating an updated water usage agreement for more than two years.
But so far the states have blown past two deadlines to do so — one in November and one in February — and are quickly approaching October, when the existing usage agreement expires.
If the states can’t reach an agreement before that, the federal government will implement one of its draft plans, all of which would place an outsized burden on the Grand Canyon State.
That’s because the Central Arizona Project, a series of canals that supplies Colorado River water to the Valley and the Tucson area, is one of the newest users of the river water, making it legally one of the first to be cut.
But so far, the Upper Basin states have refused to agree to any water usage cuts of their own, while the Lower Basin states insist that every state take their fair share.
Arizona has offered to reduce its Colorado River allocation by 27%, California by 10%, and Nevada by nearly 17%.
Negotiators for Arizona also insist that the Upper Basin states be held to the original 1922 Colorado River Compact that requires them to release a 10-year rolling average of at least 75 million acre-feet of water to the Lower Basin, in addition to one-half of the annual allotment owed to Mexico, for a total of about 80.2 million acre-feet.
An acre-foot of water represents enough to cover an acre of land to a depth of one foot, or about 325,851 gallons. That’s enough to provide three homes in Arizona a year of water, on average.
So far, the Upper Basin states have held to the original release agreement. But as water levels in the two major reservoirs on the river, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, continue to decline, it’s expected that the Upper Basin states will be unable to meet that requirement as early as 2027.
When the states entered into the original Colorado River Compact in 1922, they allocated 7.5 million acre-feet of water each year to be shared by the Upper Basin states and another 7.5 million to be used among the Lower Basin states.
Since then, the states have updated their water usage guidelines several times, even though the apportionments remain the same. But Lower Basin states face mandatory cuts during times of drought and Upper Basin states do not. In 2025, for the fifth year in a row, the federal government imposed drought-based cuts, and Arizona’s amounted to a loss of 512,000 acre-feet of water for the year.
Under current allocations, Arizona has rights to 2.8 million acre feet of water per year, and has implemented 800,000 acre feet in reductions per year. In contrast, Colorado has rights to 3.8 million acre feet a year, although it uses an average of 1.9 million acre feet, annually.
The amount of water that Colorado has access to can be unpredictable because it relies mostly on melted snowpack for its water, which varies from year to year. This year’s snowpack levels are historically low.
The Lower Basin states have undertaken significant conservation efforts for Colorado River water since 2014 and have reduced their consumption from 7.4 million acre-feet in 2015 to just over 6 million in 2024.
The Upper Basin states have increased their usage in the past five years, from 3.9 million acre-feet in 2021 to 4.4 million in 2024. The federal government’s draft plans allow for the Upper Basin states to use even more water.
Gov. Katie Hobbs’s proposed budget for this year would put another $1 million toward the Colorado River Legal Defense fund, and lawmakers earlier this month gave preliminary approval to doing just that.
Even as Arizona prepares for a legal battle, the state plans to continue attempting to reach an agreement with the other river basin states, according to the Governor’s Office.
“Governor Hobbs is committed to working with the federal government and other Colorado River states to deliver a negotiated settlement that protects Arizona’s fair share of water and stabilizes the system,” spokesman for Hobbs Christian Slater said. “However, it’s critical that Arizona be prepared to defend ourselves in court if an agreement cannot be reached or the Law of the River is violated.”
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):
March 18, 2026
Some notes on the current state of the Colorado River…
I’m preparing for a panel discussion this evening in Albuquerque. I promised – three-finger promise, Scout’s honor, which still means something to me – that I wouldn’t use any swear words., either in the blog post or the panel discussion.
The state of the water
Per the latest numbers from my colleague/collaborator/friend Jack Schmidt, Lake Powell currently holds 1.57 million acre feet of water above the protect-the-infrastructure no-go line of elevation 3,500.
Storage at this point in the year is similar to 2022, when we began a hair-about-to-be-on-fire drill as Interior raced to figure out how to protect Glen Canyon Dam because of newly understood (or newly publicly understood) risks of dropping below minimum power pool and using the dam’s outlook works. That constraint still holds.
The forecast this year is a catastrophe compared to 2022: 1.75 million acre feet for the 2026 runoff season, compared to 3.8 maf in the 2022 runoff season. [ed. emphasis mine]
The result, according to the most probable forecast from Reclamation, is that absent some sort of action (see governance below) Powell will drop below 3,500 in September, and stay that way until the spring runoff in 2027.
According to the min probable forecast, which is realistic given the looming heat-pocalypse, we hit 3,500 by July and stay there forever (by which I mean as far as the current 24-month forecast runs – as the late Jim Morison wrote, the future’s uncertain and the end is always near).
The state of the governance
The state of the governance nests two separate by closely linked problems: near term actions and long term rules.
Near term actions
Protecting Glen Canyon Dam from that 3,500 no-go line requires coming up with a least 2 million acre feet of water over the next two years – to get us past that spring 2027 problem described above. There are two ways to do this. The first is to release a bunch of water from upstream, primarily Flaming Gorge Reservoir. How much? Dunno. The second is to cut releases from Glen Canyon Dam, reducing flows through the Grand Canyon and into Lake Mead. How much? Dunno, though we may find out soon.
The current rules, adopted in response to the challenges of 2022-23, allows releases from Glen Canyon Dam to drop this year to 6 million acre feet, which effectively gets 1.5 million of the needed 2 million feet from Lake Mead by reducing releases thereto. Another 500,000 in releases from upstream reservoir gets you 2 million acre feet, with room to do more if the hydrology gets even worse – which it might.
Longer term actions
The longer term stuff is where, as a student of governance, this gets really interesting for me. As a citizen of the basin, I am inclined to swear words at the dysfunction that has left us with no long term plan beyond the end of this year. But I Scout’s honor promised, so shifting to the “student of governance” schtick gives me a view from nowhereway to approach this dispassionately, without the, y’know, words that would have made Mr. Vinatieri, my Scoutmaster, disappointed in me.
Others have chronicled the failure of the seven U.S. Colorado River Basin states to come to a consensus agreement on a set of river operating rules, we need not repeat that here, other than to note that what we have here is a classic case of what has been called the tragedy of the anticommons. This is a situation where many people or entities – in this case the states of the Colorado River Basin – each have the power to block a solution that might be to the benefit of the community as a whole. In this case, each of the seven states of the Colorado River Basin have blocking power over solutions that would prevent the reservoirs from crashing.
See above: the reservoirs are crashing and we have no plan to prevent it because any proposal that might prevent it has been blocked by one or more states that object.
The reason behind this is a set of rules written beginning in the 1920s governing the river – the Colorado River Compact and a series of ad hoc additions that followed – that attempted to lay out rules for managing the river but failed to include functional processes for modifying the rules when they proved inadequate to changing the situation. We’re now stuck with a system under which each of the seven basin states has blocking power over any attempt to change the rules.
This violates one of the fundamental institutional design principles identified by the late Elinor Ostrom, who taught us so much about how we succeed or fail in overcoming the tragedy of the commons: “How will the rules … be changed over time with changes in the performance of the resource system, the strategies of participants, and external opportunities and constraints?” We have to have rules about how we rewrite the rules. We lack that.
Despite this, we have succeeded in the past, in a series of rule-writing exercises that began in the late 1990s, by depending on principled actors at the state level recognizing that they needed to balance their need to protect their own community’s water supplies against the need to solve problems at the scale of the basin as a whole.
My personal values on this question are both instrumental (things that I think are in the best interests of myself and my community) and deontological (things that I think are fundamental moral principles). The second first: I think we have ethical obligations to those upstream and downstream of us in shared river basins. This is, for me, fundamental. The second is instrumental – I think compromise is in the best interests of my community’s water supply and therefore its future, because if we end up in litigation and the system crashes, we stand to lose a lot more than if we compromise, are willing to act on our obligations to our downstream neighbors by using less ourselves.
The last two years of increasingly hostile negotiations among the states make clear that behavior that recognizes those principles is gone, replaced by interpersonal bickering and a game of chicken driving the basin toward litigation (effectively hoping to manage the basin by convincing a judge of our preferred interpretation of ambiguous rules written a century ago) and reservoir collapse.
Thar be dragons.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Sunlight glimmers on the Colorado River near Page, Arizona on Nov. 2, 2022. Alex Hager/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Scott Franz):
March 20, 2026
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
Critical negotiations about the future of the Colorado River took a two week hiatus last month after the seven states in the basin missed a key Valentine’s Day deadline for striking a deal, New Mexico’s water negotiator said Thursday.
Estevan López said talks resumed March 2, and the upper and lower basin states are using a short-term pitch from Nevada as a starting point.
“Right now, we’re in discussions with the lower basin about a potential short-term agreement,” Lopez told New Mexico’s Interstate Stream Commission.
Nevada is proposing to increase water releases from upper basin reservoirs like Flaming Gorge by at least 500,000 acre feet to help prevent Lake Powell from dropping too low.
The latest forecasts predict that Powell could drop enough to stop producing hydropower by December.
In return, lower basin states would agree to cut their water use by 1.25 million acre feet “until system conditions have meaningfully improved.”
López said upper basin states had a counter proposal and talks about it were scheduled on Thursday afternoon.
“The hydrology right now is incredibly dire,” López said. “So we’re beginning for this year, for the remainder of this water year, we’re suggesting that there needs to be a release from the upper initial units, most likely Flaming Gorge, since that’s the reservoir that’s largest and has the most water. And we are anticipating that there will be a release of half a million acre feet from Flaming Gorge to prop up Lake Powell.”
Meanwhile, the Interior Department is reviewing thousands of comments it received on a range of options for how to manage the vital waterway.
The alternatives were published in January and could result in a variety of scenarios, ranging from significant water reductions in lower basin states to creating new incentives for states to conserve water.
And after the states missed two deadlines to reach an agreement, it’s becoming increasingly likely the federal government will try to piece together its own plan before the current guidelines expire in the fall.
Water negotiators are also facing a worsening water supply forecast with record low snowpack across the West.
A map shows how much water is predicted to arrive at certain locations in the Colorado River basin as of a March 1 forecast.
Cody Moser with the federal Colorado Basin River Forecast Center said last week just 2.3 million acre feet of Colorado River water is expected to reach Lake Powell through July. That’s about a third of what’s considered normal.
“You’ll notice it’s not a pretty picture here with lots of reds,” he said as he presented a color coded map of how much water is expected to reach certain locations in the river basin. “That’s 50 to 70% of normal April through July runoff. Those maroon colors are 30 to 50% and we even have some of those pinks, which indicates less than 30% normal seasonal spring runoff.”
An attorney for New Mexico’s Interstate Stream Commission said Thursday the state expects the Interior Department to identify a preferred option for managing the dwindling river by July. The current operating guidelines for Lake Powell and Lake Mead expire in the fall.
The seven U.S. states that make up the Colorado River basin are struggling to agree on how best to manage the river’s water as its supply dwindles due to climate change and a period of prolonged drought. Their negotiations, which are not open to the public, missed a Feb. 14, 2026, deadline the federal government had established, after which federal officials said they would impose their own plan.
The federal government has not yet done so, but the prospect of such an action is not good news for the nearly 40 million people who depend on the Colorado River for water, energy, agriculture and recreation, nor for the estimated US$1.4 trillion in economic activity the river supports.
But compromise on Colorado River management is possible and, in fact, was achieved to curb California’s water use in the 2000s, to negotiate an interim agreement to coordinate operations at the Lake Mead and Lake Powell reservoirs in 2007, and to enact contingency plans to manage drought in 2019. But this time around, circumstances are different.
The negotiators for the states had long-standing relationships and built trust by frequently communicating outside formal meetings and seeking to listen to and understand other states’ perspectives, even if they didn’t agree.
The states also agreed to use the bureau’s computer model for analyzing scenarios of climate change and management decisions. That meant all the negotiators were looking at the same data when delving into possible options. And the political and social environment was less polarized than today.
The current situation
In this round of negotiations, federal leadership has been lagging. The Department of the Interior has not made clear what the consequences might be for the states if they fail to agree. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has been without a permanent commissioner since President Donald Trump retook office in January 2025.
The states are fractured into subgroups, according to whether they are in the river’s Upper Basin – Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico – or the Lower Basin, which includes Arizona, Nevada and California. Each basin group holds strong positions and has generally been unwilling to shift.
Each basin group is using a different set of assumptions for the bureau’s computer model to explore options. And the discussion often gets stuck on details, which prevents progress toward broader agreements.
But those relatively new challenges to Colorado River compromise are not an excuse for failure.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, center between flags, meets with governors and representatives of the seven Colorado River basin states in January 2026. U.S. Department of the Interior via X
A way forward?
The current negotiations have all been done behind closed doors. From talking with people involved in the negotiations, we understand the negotiators have been left to set their own agendas and meeting plans and conduct their own communications and follow-up, with no formal facilitators.
It’s reasonable to expect the negotiators to be ready to represent their states’ interests, working through an incredibly complicated landscape of hydrology, climate and management scenario modeling, water law and administration, and politics. But we believe it’s unreasonable – and unrealistic and unfair – to expect them to also be experts at designing and facilitating an effective process for sorting out their differences.
Federal officials are not necessarily the best people to run the process either. And if the agency that ultimately needs to approve any deal is the one leading the process, real or perceived biases about the states or key issues in the agreement could further complicate the discussions.
We believe that agreement between the seven states is still possible. It may be less effective to bring in a third-party facilitator at this stage in the negotiation process, though, because of the degraded trust, hardened positions and shortage of time.
A more hopeful possibility is that the bureau adopts short-term rules that would give the states another chance to negotiate a longer-term deal – ideally with an unbiased third-party facilitator for support.
A collaborative and consensus-based planning process in the Yakima River Basin in Washington state in the early 2010s is evidence that while nobody gets everything they want in a negotiated agreement, “if they can (all) get something, that’s really the basis of the plan,” as a Washington state official told The New York Times.
We are two and a half decades into the Southwest’s most severe drought of the last 1,200 years, and this winter’s snow dearth is one of the most extreme on record.
Without an April-May miracle, human-caused climate change likely will finally catch up with the Colorado River—and the 40 million people who rely on it—in the form of a full-blown crisis later this year.
“Drought” may be too hopeful a word, since it implies an eventual end. Most climate scientists refer to the phenomenon as “long-term aridification,” caused by a lack of rain and snow and warming temperatures.
The West has just experienced its warmest winter since record-keeping began in 1895. The average October-through-December temperature in some parts of the region has been more than 8° F warmer than the 20th-century mean. This is a huge anomaly.
In Gunnison County, Colorado, one of the colder places in the nation, the average minimum temperature for that four-month stretch was about 19° F. That doesn’t seem so bad until you realize that back in 1990, another dry, warm winter, the corresponding measure was 13.6° F. For the Upper Colorado River Basin, the average minimum temperature for that four-month stretch was about 26° F, the warmest on record.
The warmer temperatures tinker with the health of the watershed.
This water year, which began Oct. 1, started out with record-high precipitation in some areas, most of which fell as rain. That helped fend off severe drought conditions. But what really counts is the mountain snowpack, which serves as a giant natural reservoir that supplies at least 70% of the Colorado River’s water each year. Warm temperatures have left some areas snow-free even in parts of Wyoming, where the white stuff normally would be piled high in March.
The diminishing snow has, in turn, shrunk the Colorado River. The “natural” flow—or an estimate of how much water the river would carry without upstream diversions or human consumption—has been below 15 million acre-feet (MAF) at Lees Ferry during 20 of the last 26 years, with an average flow of 12.25 MAF during that time.
This matters, because when the Colorado River Compact of 1922 parceled out the river’s waters, the river was assumed to carry an average annual flow of at least 16.5 MAF. Demand has significantly exceeded supply for the last 26 years, forcing the drawdown of the watershed’s big savings accounts, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, to about one-third of their capacity.
Meanwhile, to comply with the Colorado River Compact of 1922—the document that serves as the Ten Commandments for the management of the river’s waters—the Upper Basin States must release, on average, at least 7.5 MAF from Glen Canyon Dam each year.
Given that the Upper Basin states need a bunch of water to keep their cities and farms from drying up, and that an additional 800,000 acre-feet evaporates or seeps into the underlying rocks at Lake Powell each year, you can see how the warming climate wreaks havoc on the math of the Colorado River.
The entire river system now teeters on the brink, and this year’s snow drought may be what pushes it over the edge.
The back of Glen Canyon Dam circa 1964, not long after the reservoir had begun filling up. Here the water level is above dead pool, meaning water can be released via the river outlets, but it is below minimum power pool, so water cannot yet enter the penstocks to generate electricity. Bureau of Reclamation photo. Annotations: Jonathan P. Thompson
The Bureau of Reclamation’s latest forecast says Lake Powell’s surface level is likely to drop below the minimum level needed for power production later this year. This so-called “deadpool” would not only mean the end of hydropower production, it would also force all of the dam’s releases to go through the river’s 8-foot-wide, steel outlet tubes, which were not made for sustained use. This could compromise the tubes and the dam itself.
It’s possible that the dam would even be shifted to a run-of-the-river operation, in which releases equal the amount of water flowing into the reservoir, minus evaporation and seepage. That would almost certainly result in water shortages downstream, at the very least for the Central Arizona Project, which serves the Phoenix metro area.
This quandary didn’t sneak up on us.
The seven Colorado River states and the federal water managers can’t agree on who should make what cuts in consumption. The feds, meanwhile, haven’t gotten around to re-engineering Glen Canyon Dam or creating a bypass around it that would enable the water to keep flowing. It’s almost as if they’ve been paralyzed by the belief that dry winters were just a minor glitch.
Now, as the spring runoff gets underway, it has become clear that nature won’t save us: We have no choice but to live within increasingly meager limits.
Jonathan Thompson is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a longtime journalist and author about the West.
