On Saturday, June 6, the Colorado River District, in partnership with the Colorado Water Conservation Board, began to release water from Wolford Reservoir as part of a collaborative effort to protect hundreds of water users who depend on the Colorado River from being curtailed due to exceptional drought conditions.
Extremely low snowpack and a warm winter, along with extreme heat in March, prevented the full storage of a critical water supply known as the Historic Users Pool (HUP) which is held in Green Mountain Reservoir (GMR), just north of Silverthorne. Without the protection provided by this supply, hundreds of entities, including towns, HOA’s, and local water districts could have faced curtailment in early June.
The success of this initiative depended on the cooperation of Grand Valley water users, who agreed to temporarily reduce the senior Cameo demand below its full legal limit so these protections could be implemented for other Colorado River water users. By voluntarily curtailing a portion of their own irrigation use, these districts helped keep upstream users whole and delayed a senior call on the river that would have otherwise required the curtailment of HUP beneficiaries.
“Irrigation entities across the Grand Valley chose to reduce water use early in the summer to help build the storage we rely on that was sorely lacking (almost non-existent) due to the warm and dry winter conditions that left us with very little snowpack,” said Roblee Talbott, president of the Orchard Mesa Irrigation District Board of Directors. “What we gained in storage will help carry us further into the season than originally anticipated. Beyond that, we’ve committed to work together to ensure we can finish crops later in the season. While this decision represents some very real risks for the family farms and ranches that sustain our local economy and food supply, it also reflects the strong spirit of collaboration in our Grand Valley agricultural irrigation community.”
“This year has reminded us how connected Western Slope communities truly are,” said Siri Roman, General Manager of the Eagle River Water and Sanitation District. “We are grateful to the Grand Valley water users who voluntarily reduced irrigation to help support upstream communities during these challenging conditions. As drought impacts become more prevalent, we all have a responsibility to use water wisely and support the long-term health of our communities, agriculture, and rivers. In the Eagle River Valley, we are actively working to reduce our outdoor water use and encouraging our customers to make lasting landscaping changes that will decrease water demand for years to come.”
“Having access to this program has been extremely important for our community in western Grand County, and we are grateful for the willingness of the Colorado River District and their partners to work with us,” said Brenda Kellen, board member for the Blue Valley Metropolitan District. “Without this support, we would have struggled to have access to adequate water supplies for our residents this summer. We recognize the challenges involved in managing and protecting water resources, and we appreciate the cooperation and partnership with CRWCD and water users from Grand County to Grand Junction.”
West Drought Monitor map June 16, 2026.
“The drought conditions affecting Colorado this year are creating immense challenges across the state,” said Lauren Ris, Director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board. “The CWCB was pleased to support this effort that demonstrates how partners can work together to develop creative, collaborative solutions that help address immediate drought impacts while providing multiple benefits for water users and the environment. As conditions continue to evolve, we remain committed to working with communities throughout Colorado to explore innovative approaches that strengthen drought resilience and help meet critical water needs.”
“Our duty is to help protect West Slope water users during exceptionally difficult conditions like the ones they are facing this year, and we have been navigating a complex and rapidly changing situation to determine how a limited supply of water can do the most good for the most people,” said ColoradoRiver District General Manager Andy Mueller. “These releases are designed to help a broad array of water users, but they are not a substitute for ongoing conservation. We expect that beneficiaries will do their part by reducing demand where possible, including cutting outdoor domestic watering to one day per week.”
At its April 2026 meeting, the Colorado River District Board of Directors approved $450,000 from the Community Funding Partnership program for use in emergency drought response efforts. The Colorado Water Conservation Board also committed just over $585,000 to the effort at its May meeting in recognition that the releases will be multi-beneficial, supporting in-stream flow benefits, along with municipal, domestic, and irrigation needs. These funds will support the release of over 15,000 acre-feet of water currently stored in Wolford and Ruedi Reservoirs to protect both municipal and agricultural users along the Colorado River and its major tributaries from Grand County to the Grand Valley. These releases will also support in-stream flow needs providing fishery benefits that mitigate high water temperatures and the loss of aquatic habitat due to critically dry conditions.
As of June 17, the HUP was a little more than half full with approximately 40,800 acre-feet of water stored.
The initial release from Wolford Reservoir, which began on June 6, is currently around 9 cfs, and is intended to specifically protect the indoor water uses in Summit, Grand and Eagle counties. Between now and next spring, approximately 3,000 acre-feet of water is available for this purpose from both Wolford and Ruedi Reservoirs.
An additional 12,000-acre-feet of water will also be made available for irrigation and agricultural production in the Grand Valley throughout the summer until supplies run out.
The Colorado River District appreciates the support of the leadership and staff of the Division 5 engineer’s office in the implementation of this effort, as well as the work of the Colorado Water Conservation Board staff and directors to expedite funding, a temporary loan for instream flow use, and emergency substitute water supply plan approval.
Colorado River Basin in Colorado via the Colorado Geological Survey
Hite Marina and boat ramp on what once was the northern end of Lake Powell. Jonathan P. Thompson photo via The Land Desk.
Click the link to read the article on the Grist website (Jake Bittle):
June 23, 2026
Desalination. Pipelines. Cloud seeding. Those are just a few ideas for how the Trump administration should save the desiccated waterway.
The crisis on the Colorado River is simple: The seven Western states that border the essential waterway use more water than it contains. Chronic overuse [ed. allowed and caused by the “Law of the River”] has drained its two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, and a two-decade drought cycle has pushed them to the point of collapse.
The dream solution to this crisis is an agreement among all involved to use less water. Such a deal would decide who must reduce consumption, which means asking which cities would ban irrigating lawns and washing cars and which farmers would rip up their fields.
This has proven impossible. The states have been trying to work this out since the last dry spell, in 2022, but talks have ended in frustration and name-calling. The main sticking point is between the Upper Basin states, led by Colorado and Utah (along with Wyoming and New Mexico), and the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada. Each side believes the other has a legal and a moral responsibility to cut usage during dry years. The stalemate means the Trump administration must design a schedule of restrictions ahead of a crucial deadline in September. So far, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has balked at resolving the quarrel.
Instead, the administration is turning to a far less controversial plan: Throw money at the problem. The Interior Department and Congress are pondering a slew of projects that could increase supply — a reversal of President Trump’s zeal for cutting federal grants. The seven state governors have sent Washington a “wish list” of over $50 billion, and several startups have their hands out as well.
Federal investment makes sense given the scale of the problem and the intractable impasse, said Jennifer Pitt, the Colorado River program director at the National Audubon Society and an expert on the governance of the river.
“It is something easier for people to agree on,” she said. “This is a slow moving crisis, but it is a crisis, and we do see the federal funding come in to address crises in other parts of the country. Just because this is a slow moving one doesn’t make it any less worthy.”
During a Senate committee hearing last week, the Interior Department’s top water official, Andrea Travnicek, said the agency has yet to vet the wish list. She didn’t offer a specific funding request, and urged lawmakers to be “thoughtful” about how they spend taxpayer money. But senators in both parties seemed to encourage new investments. “The basin should not be forced to choose between stabilizing the present and negotiating the future,” said Senator Martin Heinrich, a Democrat from New Mexico.
The possibility of new funding marks a return to the policy of Joe Biden’s administration. During the last extreme drought in 2022, the Interior Department paid farmers billions to leave their fields fallow, but that money, from the Inflation Reduction Act, has almost run dry.
The difference now is that the roster of proposals is far more ambitious, and some far less certain to bolster the basin’s water supply. They range from desalination plants and desert groundwater pipelines to forest ecosystem restoration.
Here are a few of the major solutions state officials and companies are proposing.
The Claude “Bud” Lewis Desalination Plant in Carlsbad, California. Photo by Robert Marcos
Desalination
As the Colorado River crisis has deepened, some cities in the Southwest have eyed desalination, which extracts salt from sea water. A company called Poseidon Water opened such a plant in San Diego in 2015 and tried for decades to open another in Los Angeles. The wish list to the Interior Department requests as much as $6 billion to build one across the border in the Mexican state of Baja California to supplement Arizona’s vanishing Colorado River supplies.
The Interior Department also signed an agreement in early June with San Diego’s water agency that explains how that plant would help. Rather than sending treated seawater inland, states would pay the city to take less from the Colorado River. Arizona stands to lose the most water during drought years, and it would be the most likely to participate in that exchange.
But desalination is expensive, requires enormous amounts of electricity, and state-of-the-art industrial technology. The Poseidon facility cost $1 billion, but San Diego has diversified its water portfolio so much that it no longer needs all the water it must purchase from the plant. Trading water could help it offset some of that cost.
Taming tech and power
Nevada uses less water than any state on the river and has cut usage in Las Vegas by replacing grass with artificial turf. It is now seeking money to slake some of its last thirsty industries: power plants and data centers. These facilities need a fraction of what agriculture requires, but they dominate usage in the Silver State.
The state’s wish list includes $300 million to retrofit its largest natural gas plant and reduce water consumption by an amount equivalent to more than 3,000 average homes. It also seeks $650 million to install zero-water cooling systems in airports, schools, and industrial facilities. These closed-loop systems, which recirculate the same cooled water or, in the case of data centers, blast hot servers with cold air, have become more popular in Western states amid concerns about the tech boom’s growing thirst.
A cloud seeding generator is located in Grand Mesa. The Colorado Water Conservation Board administers the state’s weather modification program, which permits cloud seeding operations. Colorado Water Conservation Board/Courtesy photo
Squeezing rain from the clouds
Whereas Lower Basin states like Arizona and California can draw from the Colorado River’s big reservoirs on demand, northern states at its headwaters only receive the rain and snow that feed it.
These Upper Basin states have been trying for decades to engineer more precipitation, with support from Washington, D.C. It sounds futuristic, but cloud seeding — spraying salt or silver iodide into clouds, forcing them to release water they might otherwise retain — has proven fairly effective on a small scale. Utah spends a few million dollars each year doing this, and officials say it could boost annual snowpack by as much as 10 percent.
In addition, a few startups are pitching cheaper and more scalable versions of this technology. Rain Enhancement, a Florida-based outfit, says it has brought about 15,000 homes’ worth of rain to a river tributary in Utah this year; another, Rainmaker, says it can produce 1,000 times that much by 2031. That’s enough to close the supply gap on the river. That promise is fanciful, but these companies could secure federal funding from an administration that loves the tech industry.
Mining a hoard of desert groundwater
The West teems with companies that have promised miracles, from building a 300-mile pipeline to tapping a hoard of groundwater in Nevada. But perhaps no project has had a longer and more turbulent history than Cadiz, a proposal, almost 30 years old, to export groundwater from an aquifer in the Mojave Desert.
This has drawn vicious opposition from environmentalists and the late California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who called it a “grave threat” to the desert. Cadiz experienced several setbacks during the Biden administration: It lost a federal permit, California ended its pipeline lease, Arizona declined to support it, and its stock price fell to almost zero. But Susan Kennedy, its CEO, says Cadiz is flowing again with a funding agreement from the Interior Department to study exchanges between Cadiz and the Colorado River.
The company still needs to finish two pipelines, one to the Central Valley and another to the aqueduct that carries Colorado River water to California. It also must build a plant to remove contaminants in the water, but Kennedy believes she can have the tap running by 2028.
“This isn’t a competition; it’s an all-of-the-above situation,” she said of the situation on the river. That may be so, but the seven states did not include Cadiz on the wish list sent the Interior Department.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
“Colorado River Negotiators” in Cataract Canyon. No clue how the gal in the Earth First! shirt slipped in there? Photo credit: Wild Words
Click the link to read the article on the Wild Words website (Morgan Sjogren):
On Monday, June 15, a new cadre of representatives from seven Colorado River Basin states convened below Cataract Canyon for water negotiations. The open-air meeting was held in an eddy flanked by a thick layer of the Dominy Formation.1 Silt tumbled into the banks in low runoff conditions as the Upper Basin (Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico) and Lower Basin (California, Arizona, Nevada) prepared statements about how to reduce over-consumption of the shrinking Colorado River.
The impromptu Colorado River standoff theater was not real. It was a beach game intended to explain water overallocation. That it still resulted in imaginary litigation speaks loudly to this moment in history. The ability to take this lunchtime activity a little too literally was also because the participants were members of Glen Canyon Institute and guides for Holiday River Expeditions. These shenanigans took place in the final hours of a five-day river trip in Cataract Canyon to support GCI’s ongoing efforts for the restoration of Glen Canyon.
The group was certainly highly astute to Colorado River current events to throw down such an intricate dialogue on the spot. Instead of making a list of the very real solutions to distribute Colorado River water to forty million people, the group recognized what is literally standing in the way: seven state representatives who are just as responsible for the looming potential for a Colorado River crash as Glen Canyon Dam.
The basin-wide impasse is by far the most frustrating aspect of explaining the current problems and future management of the Colorado River. The potential solutions are abundant, even obvious. Everyone in the basin needs to use less water.
Other critical changes, like giving all thirty Colorado River-connected tribes a seat at the negotiating table and updating the 1922 Colorado River Compact to actually meet river flows where they are at in 2026 (an average of 12.5 million acre-feet down from 15 million acre-feet a century ago), are long overdue. Not to mention, ensuring the Colorado River’s right to flow, in line with the Colorado River Indian Tribe’s legal personhood status for the river under their Tribal law.
Beyond the dam, is the Colorado River’s most glaring problem, both concealed and amplified by the water crisis-–is this what democracy is supposed to look like? And what can a citizen of the Colorado River watershed actually do about it?
Despite this broken system, advocacy, especially in the long-term, can move the needle. Until recently, opposition to Glen Canyon Dam was viewed by some as a fringe environmental cult.
Yet Glen Canyon Institute has maintained a constant presence on the front lines of this issue. Since 1996, GCI “embarked upon a multi-year campaign to protect and restore Glen Canyon and reverse the decline of Grand Canyon’s fragile ecosystem.” The Fill Mead First plan takes a hard look at the long-term realities of keeping two major reservoirs, Powell and Mead, more than half empty. Then, in 2024, the Bureau of Reclamation made an announcement that opened minds (and some hearts) to consider that Glen Canyon Dam is a major part of the current problem.
Through persistent love and devotion of these advocacy efforts, awareness for the recovery of Glen Canyon continues to gain momentum. So does dealing with Glen Canyon Dam’s outdated infrastructure which is becoming more mainstream and realistic everyday. In a recent letter, the Lower Basin states urged the Bureau of Reclamation to make dam modifications.2
While it is electrifying to be on the pulse of a major change that stands to benefit Glen Canyon and the lower Colorado River, the current negotiation process is still a dystopian nightmare circus.3
Holiday named a new raft Dominy to spur conversation among guests. Some of us felt superstitiously avoidant of this boat during the rapids. Photo credit: Wild Words
Did I mention mud? Our put-in situation at Mineral Bottom on the Green River was enhanced by recent emergency releases and fish management pulse flows from Flaming Gorge Dam. Holiday’s guides insist this put-in is more challenging than the old North Wash Boat Ramp, which is now repaired and fodder for a different story. Photo credit: Wild Words
For some folks, like myself, this shit show is so fascinating that we are keen to immerse ourselves in the muck. However, even if you care deeply for the Colorado River, this can be overwhelming, especially amid the persistant horrors of this era. Naturally, our instinct may be to turn away. This came up during a riverside policy talk on the trip led by GCI’s projects and development manager Anna Penner and me. With so much going on and the constant information overload online, it is important to trust your gut instinct and give yourself space away from the news. Just don’t pull your heart from the Colorado River itself. [ed. emphasis mine]
The Colorado River carries hope. The side effects of drought, overallocation, and indecision is the steady return of a free flowing Colorado River and Glen Canyon emerging from a shrinking reservoir. I’ve written before that many of us were too late to experience Glen Canyon before the dam, but we are now right on time to witness its resurrection. Cataract Canyon is an ideal place to experience the changes in motion. From muddy sediment-rich river flows and returning rapids to strongholds of native plants like box elders and seep willows propagating in tributary canyons.
Photo credit: Wild Words
For one guest, Tom, these watershed moments for Glen Canyon are major bookends in his life. As a young lad, his family crossed the old Hite Ferry at Dandy Crossing in their station wagon during a road trip. They then drove up the rock-rutted and sandy North Wash, sans road, before it became Highway 95. He also boated on Lake Powell in 1965, before it filled completely, and vividly recalls seeing the fully exposed Hole-in-the-Rock site. Now age seventy seven, Tom and his lifelong friend Paul make time every year to return to the Colorado River with GCI. He has been a member for twenty-one years
Photo of Dandy Crossing: Photo credit: Cindy Stafford
North Wash travel. Credit: Cindy Stafford
This was Aaron’s first Cataract River trip, and a deserved reward for living with my Colorado River obsession. His perpetual and ever-widening smile affirmed how important quality time with the river is, now and always. Post-trip, he told me his favorite part of the trip was “watching the swirling eddy lines at sunset, while sitting on the beach with the group.”
Right now, we are all in an eddy. The decisions made, or not, in 2026 will ripple beyond our lifetime. But so will our unrelenting love for the river and the water that sustains life in the West. Impossible dreams, like the EarthFirst! symbolic crack in the dam, may come to life in yet unimagined ways, so long as we do not give up.
Glen Canyon Institute 2026 river trip group photo. Photo credit: Wild Words
Charles L. Bernheimer. Credit: “Path of Light” — Morgan Sjogren
To this, I pause and take another swig of whiskey and muddy water. This spring, I had more than one interview with so-called major environmental groups that sounded more like public relations agents for Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell.
Lee continued:
Exhausting? Perhaps. But better tired than apathetic. With tin cups filled with muddy water, this moment asks us to stand with all who have defended the Colorado River in the past and will continue on into the future. Protecting what we love is a journey without end.
To support efforts to restore Glen Canyon and ensure continued water deliveries below Glen Canyon Dam, consider becoming a supporter of Glen Canyon Institute.
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1 The reservoir sediment left behind as Lake Powell drops is not so affectionately named in reference to Floyd Dominy, the former Bureau of Reclamation Director responsible for the creation of Glen Canyon Dam. Some of us have thoughts about this. I am saving these for my next book, Riverside, to be published by Torrey House Press in 2027.)
by Marcus Reichley, Cronkite News June 10, 2026 Cronkite News offers an audio version of this story using an automated voice created by AI. Errors in pronunciation, pacing and intonation may occur. If you notice an error please contact cronkitenews@asu.edu.
WASHINGTON – The chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee warned Arizona and two other states that rely on the Colorado River on Wednesday that they will lose access to hundreds of millions in conservation aid if they pursue litigation over water rights.
Roughly $354 million is still available under a 2022 climate law. But the funds expire at the end of September.
“States that choose to sue their fellow basin states over Colorado River operations should not expect Congress to reward that decision with additional federal funding,” Sen. Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah – one of the four Upper Basin states, said at the outset of a hearing on the stalemate among the seven states that share the river. “Federal taxpayers should not be asked to subsidize litigation among the states.”
Glen Canyon Dam holds back Lake Powell on Nov. 2, 2022. States upstream and downstream of the dam have different ideas about how to manage the amount of water released from the reservoir, which has become a key sticking point in ongoing negotiations about the Colorado River’s future. (Photo by Alex Hager/KUNC)
Arizona, California and Nevada have been at odds with Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming over how to divide the dwindling water supply when the most recent 19-year deal expires at the end of 2026.
The funds Lee threatened to block are a key element of the Lower Basin’s most recent proposal from May 1, which relies on the funding to incentivize voluntary water conservation as an alternative to mandatory cuts.
The $354 million comes from the Inflation Reduction Act signed in 2022 by President Joe Biden, which set aside $4 billion for drought mitigation and compensation for voluntary conservation. Funds that remain unused when the current fiscal year ends Sept. 30 will revert to the Treasury.
He chastised officials in the Lower Basin states for, among other things, taking out newspaper ads attacking Upper Basin states.
Negotiators appeared to be “preparing actively for litigation,” he said – and in fact, key officials in both camps have told Cronkite News in recent days they are preparing for that possibility.
Congress “will not be a bystander in this process,” Lee said, noting that under the Constitution, Congress holds approval authority over any long-term interstate compact.
He also expressed sympathy with the Upper Basin’s stance, warning that any proposal asking those states to absorb greater operational burdens without regard to the river’s existing legal framework “will face a difficult path forward” in Congress.
The chairman framed the moment as a failure of collective will, cataloguing a string of missed deadlines. “The basin can no longer afford to wait,” he said.
After Lee delivered his rebuke, Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego, a Democrat, pressed the Trump administration from the opposite direction.
Gallego asked Andrea Travnicek, assistant secretary for water and science at the Department of the Interior, how the department plans to weigh Arizona’s economic stakes as it finalizes its decision.
“The Colorado River is a lifeline for Arizona,” Gallego said, noting the state is home to the most advanced semiconductor manufacturing hub in the Western Hemisphere and that the success of its industries are essential to the nation.
“The technological industries, the domestic food supply, and energy security are all top priorities for the United States, including the president’s agenda,” he said.
Travnicek said the department cannot accept either the May 1 proposal from the Lower Basin nor the latest Upper Basin proposal as they currently stand.
“We have some concerns and areas where we think that there should be adjustments,” she said.
She confirmed that the Interior Department is coordinating with the Energy Department and U.S. Department of Agriculture, among other agencies. She said an interagency water subcabinet meeting will be held Thursday.
The hearing laid bare the tension that has made a seven-state deal so elusive, with senators from both basins on hand.
Travnicek fielded pressure from both directions without committing to either.
The stakes are straightforward and very high.
Decades of drought have pushed water levels to dangerously low levels even as demand and population grow. The river now provides barely half the amount of water each basin has been legally entitled to draw.
“Delay carries its own consequences,” Lee said, “and the basin can no longer afford to wait.”
At its June 11 meeting, the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD) Board of Directors authorized the district manager to enter stage two drought when the appropriate trigger points are reached, which staff predicted will be in the near future. District Engineer Justin Ramsey explained to the board that, based on water levels in Hatcher Reservoir and the San Juan River, the district was still in drought stage one, but was “just a couple inches away” from having to enter stage two according to the district’s drought management plan. Both the San Juan River and Lake Hatcher are sources for the water processed at PAWSD’s water treatment plants.
Ramsey predicted that the district would likely enter drought stage two within a week, adding that Hatcher Reservoir is losing between a quarter and a half inch in water level a day and a drop of 3 inches would place the district in drought stage two. He requested that the board authorize District Manager Andrew Connor to move the district into drought stage two once the trigger points are reached, avoiding a need for the board to have a special meeting in the near future to authorize the move.
THE NEWS:Sen. Mike Lee, the ultra-MAGA Utah Republican, failed once again to diminish public lands protections when his bid to use the Congressional Review Act to revoke Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument’s management plan expired before getting a vote.
THE CONTEXT: This spring, Lee and Rep. Celeste Maloy, also a Utah Republican, introduced a joint resolution of disapproval in both houses of Congress aimed at repealing the 2024 management plan. That started the clock ticking on a 60-day time-limit for a simple majority vote to overturn the plan. The deadline passed on June 11 without any action, meaning that any effort to toss the plan now would be subject to the Senate filibuster, so would need 60 votes to pass — a highly unlikely prospect.
Had the resolution passed, the national monument’s management would have reverted back to the weak and inadequate 2020 Trump I-era plan, which allowed more grazing, more damaging “vegetation management,” and more off-road vehicle use. Plus the 2020 plan only covered the 1 million acres left in the national monument after Trump removed about 900,000 acres from its boundaries, meaning almost half of the national monument would in a sort of management limbo.
This would have sown chaos and confusion, yet it wouldn’t have diminished the national monument or the protections that were baked into the establishing proclamation. The monument boundaries would have remained intact, along with the prohibition on new oil and gas drilling, mining claims, and other energy development.
Nevertheless, it clearly was intended as an attack on the national monument and the attendant protections, which have been a sore spot for Utah sagebrush rebel-leaning politicians since Bill Clinton established it under the Antiquities Act 30 years ago this September. What Maloy or Lee hoped to actually achieve with the attack is a little less clear, even if it had hit its target.
Maloy likely was trying to brush up on her anti-federal-land-management credentials before what could be a bruising primary. Her challenger is notorious sagebrush rebel Phil Lyman, who led an illegal OHV-ride down the archaeologically rich Recapture Canyon in 2014 to protest what he called “federal overreach.”
So far, Maloy is winning the fundraising race by a healthy margin. Utah Political Watchreports that the Defend our Values Super PAC run by former Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, just donated $900,000 to Maloy’s campaign. The American Conservation Coalition PAC, which says it “helps elect leaders who champion American energy dominance, environmental conservation, and cutting-edge innovation,” has spent over $150,000 in support of Maloy, as well. Maloy isn’t exactly living up to the conservation part of that, but I’m not sure the PAC folks care too much about it, either.
And then there’s Lee. Sometimes it feels as if he’s taking up the tasks Project 2025 guided the Trump administration to execute, but that the administration has backed off from because of how deeply unpopular they have turned out to be. It’s almost as if the administration is tasking Lee with feeding some red meat to the MAGA base, but also is setting him up to fail.
Rock climber in Unaweep Canyon, Colorado (not a wilderness area). Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
THE NEWS: The U.S. Interior Department is launching a “review” of rock climbing management and wilderness study area policies. On June 15 it opened the 60-day public comment period on its proposals to establish “a consistent approach to recreational rock climbing management across designated wilderness areas,” and to evaluate whether “existing wilderness study areas and lands with wilderness characteristic policies should be updated, clarified, or revised.”
THE CONTEXT: Any time the Trump administration decides to “review” something, it pays to be wary, since more often than not the review leads to the evisceration of some sort of environmental protection. They tend to couch it in euphemisms, however, such as this bit from an Interior press release: “… Interior is focused on expanding outdoor recreation opportunities, removing unnecessary barriers to access, and use, and managing public lands in a way that benefits the American people.”
Wilderness areas are designated by Congress and are governed by a set of specific rules that can’t be altered by the administration. However, the question of whether installing fixed climbing bolts and anchors is permitted or not is vague and has shifted over the years (what is clear is that power drills cannot be used to install them). The administration is looking to clear this up, and to allow fixed anchors in wilderness areas as long as they follow certain guidelines.
Wilderness study areas share many of the same qualities and protections as wilderness areas, but have not been designated as such by Congress. In 1976, Congress tasked the BLM with identifying potential wilderness areas within its domain and make recommendations regarding them. Those that were identified and fit certain criteria but not designated became wilderness study areas, or WSAs. There are currently 491 wilderness study areas covering over 11 million acres. Look at a map of areas that have large swaths of BLM land — particularly in Utah — and you’ll almost certainly find a few.
The Federal Land Policy Management Act directed the BLM to manage the WSAs “in a manner so as not to impair the suitability of such areas for preservation as wilderness”and prevent “unnecessary or undue degradation.” In other words, you couldn’t build a permanent road through a WSA because that would preclude it from being designated as a wilderness area later.
This leaves room for agency interpretation. The current BLM policy, carried out in accordance with a 2012 manual, is to “continue resource uses on land designated as WSAs in a manner that maintains the area’s suitability for preservation as wilderness.” Under that policy, the agency almost certainly would not permit a road through a WSA, because that would preclude it from being designated as a wilderness area later. And, according to the memo, it most likely would not allow motorized or mountain bike use in a WSA.
The current administration is unlikely to get away with allowing permanent roads in WSAs. However, given its language about removing barriers to access, one can expect it to apply a broader and more permissive interpretation of the non-impairment standard to its policies. This might mean allowing motorized vehicle or mountain bike use within WSAs on existing trails, for example, or even some logging or small-scale mining, so long as the agency officials could convince themselves that it would be cleaned up later.
Finally, the BLM also has a policy for managing lands with wilderness characteristics that are not WSAs or designated wilderness areas. The administration is reviewing this policy, as well.
Interior announced all of these policies in one press release, but you need to comment on them individually. Here’s how:
For the fixed anchors and other climbing management changes in wilderness areas, go to the Federal Register page and follow the instructions, or go directly to the regulations.gov page and click on “Comment.”
For changes to wilderness study area management, go to the Federal Register page, and read the instructions, or go directly to the regulations.gov page and click on “Comment.”
For changes to lands with wilderness characteristics management, go to the Federal Register page, and follow the instructions, or go directly to the regulations.gov page and click on “Comment.”
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
🐟 Colorado River Chronicles 💧
Guest Commentary: A Fair Allocation for the Colorado River
by Levi Tenen
This summer is the last chance for seven Western states to allocate the Colorado River voluntarily before the federal government steps in1. Gridlock persists: Lower Basin states (California, Arizona, and Nevada) have offered to reduce their water usage the most, but they believe that Upper Basin States (Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Utah) ought to reduce their usage as well if the region dries up too much.2 The Upper Basin states reject this proposal, refusing to reduce the amount of water that was allotted to them under previous agreements.3 The federal government has proposed solutions of its own, all of which seem to favor the Upper Basin states.4
The debate raises fundamental questions: how should resources be allocated in times of scarcity, and do past agreements matter today? From my research in ethics, I think there is an answer, and one that has not been noticed by others. Justice demands that Upper Basin states give up some of their allotted, promised water, but Lower Basin states must greatly limit their water usage and—the new idea—Lower Basin states ought to pay for the extra water they receive.5
To see why, consider a thought experiment from philosopher Jeremy Waldron6: Imagine you and I own ranches in an arid region. We drill wells on our respective properties and enjoy plentiful water. Good times come to an end, however, when a drought sets in and my well runs dry. Unable to relocate, I am stuck in a dire circumstance. Due to the geography of the area, however, you continue to have a surplus of water. What, if anything, do you owe me? Without anyone else around to help me, are you obligated to share your water? The answer is yes, to an extent. It would be wrong, for instance, if you prevented me access to your well just to let the water go unused, leaving me to die. It would also be wrong if you kept me from your well so that you could build a nice new pool, or even so that you could increase your wealth by adding many more head of cattle, all while I perish nearby. Put simply, in times of scarcity and desperation, justice limits a person’s property rights. Justice will never require you to endanger yourself, but more modest sacrifices can become obligatory.
What most people miss, however, is that obligations often fall onto the recipients of aid. Return to the above case. First, even though water is scarce, other resources may not be. So, while you are obliged to give me water, if I have money, labor, or something else to give in return, I ought to do so. It would be unfair, after all, for me to hold onto large amounts of disposable wealth and take your water, leaving you altogether worse off and me only better off.
Secondly, even though I receive water from you, I cannot use it however I want. For, I do not have the right to an endless amount of your water. The water you owe me is only for the basic conditions of life, not for wasting away or for self-serving, economic growth. So, I mustn’t add more cattle to my ranch or build a pretty fountain in my courtyard. Indeed, if scarcity persists, I need to reduce my water consumption greatly, scaling back my ranch operations. To do otherwise would be to limit your future opportunity unjustly.
Carried over to the Colorado River, this much then seems clear: Upper Basin states ought to give some of their unused water to Lower Basin states, even though they all previously agreed to allocate that water to the Upper Basin. The scarce and desperate times limit the past agreements, particularly because the scarcity was unforeseen. And make no mistake: the Lower Basin states are facing dire times. Tens of millions of people in those states depend on the river for drinking water.7 Moreover, 70% of the water goes to food production, with the majority going towards crops in Lower Basin states.8 Running out of water is an existential threat to the cities and peoples in the Lower Basin, and it is a threat to food security the nation over.9
However, the Lower Basin states ought to purchase the water from Upper Basin states and they need to minimize their burden on those states, even if that means ceasing new housing developments and industrial projects. Perhaps if the Lower Basin states add these conditions to their offer, negotiations will move forward and the Upper Basin will accept their share of the burden: sending some of their allotted water downstream.
Levi Tenen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Virginia Wesleyan University. He grew up in Arizona and conducts research at the intersection of Ethics, Political Philosophy, and Environmental Law.
Click the link to read the article on the Getches-Wilkinson Center website (Jack Schmidt,1 Anne Castle,2 Eric Kuhn, 3 Kathryn Sorensen,4 Katherine Tara5
June 18, 2026
In the next few weeks, we will share a few graphs and charts that we find informative in understanding today’s water supply crisis on the Colorado River. This short paper concerns the present status of reservoir storage.
IN BRIEF
In 2026 and for only the third time in the 21st century, there was no accumulation, and no recovery, of total Basin live storage6 during the snowmelt season. Nor was there any accumulation or recovery of total live storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead during the 2026 snowmelt season. Total Basin live storage (hereafter, total Basin storage) is all the water available in the Colorado River Basin’s reservoir “savings account” and stored in reservoirs within the watershed.7 On June 1, total Basin storage was 22.94 million acre feet (maf), only 1.62 maf above the previous minimum of March 20238 and less than 2 years supply at the current rate at which water is consumptively used or lost in the Basin. Total Basin storage will almost certainly drop to less than the previous record minimum by March 2027.
THE PRESENT CONDITION
On June 1, 2026, total Basin storage in 46 reservoirs in the Colorado River Basin was 22.94 maf, 9 39% of the content of those same reservoirs in late August 1999, the last time those reservoirs were relatively full.10 On June 1, Lake Mead held 33% of the Basin’s active storage, 32% was in 42 reservoirs upstream from Lake Powell, 25% in Lake Powell, and 10% in Lake Mohave and Lake Havasu. The combined live storage in Lake Mead and Lake Powell was 28% of the total live storage of those two reservoirs in late summer 1999.11
Why Total Basin Storage?
Most policy analysis of reservoir storage in the Colorado River Basin focuses on Lake Powell and Lake Mead or, alternatively, on all federally managed reservoirs in the Basin. These reservoirs are the focus of ongoing negotiations among the Basin states and will be impacted by impending management decisions by the federal government. On June 1, 89% of total Basin storage was held in 12 federally managed reservoirs.12 Slightly more than 60% of live storage upstream from Lake Powell was held in 8 federally managed reservoirs.
Total Basin storage is the total amount of water stored in reservoirs in the Colorado River watershed. In addition to the 12 federally managed reservoirs, Basin storage includes federal project reservoirs managed by other entities and non-federal reservoirs managed by municipal water providers and water conservation and conservancy districts. Some of the non-federal reservoirs act as forebays that facilitate trans-basin diversions to the Colorado Front Range or Utah’s Wasatch Front. Water stored in these non-federally managed reservoirs is not subject to current or proposed federal operating guidelines. In the Upper Basin, however, water stored in the non-federally managed reservoirs is one determinant of total Upper Basin consumptive use.Therefore, the status of storage in all the Basin’s reservoirs is an indicator of the overall condition of the Colorado River reservoir system and its ability to buffer continued declining inflow. Transfer of water from one reservoir to another, such as the on-going transfer from Flaming Gorge Reservoir to Lake Powell, does not affect total Basin storage. Although such management policy is critical to protecting dam infrastructure and maintaining realistically accessible storage in Lake Powell, 13 such policy merely shifts the location of the Basin’s deck chairs. What matters is whether the ship is sinking. [ed, emphasis mine]
Accumulation Period And Depletion Period
In terms of reservoir storage, we have previously distinguished two periods of the year – the period of reservoir rise (i.e., accumulation period) and the period of reservoir decline (i.e., depletion period).14 In terms of total Basin storage, the 2-3 month long accumulation period typically begins in mid-April, although it has begun as early as mid-March (Supplemental Table 1). The accumulation period typically ends in early July but has sometimes ended in early June and as late as early August. In rare cases, as discussed below, there has been no accumulation. The depletion period typically occurs from mid-summer until the following spring and lasts 9-10 months.
BASINWIDE STORAGE SHOWS CONTINUED DOWNWARD TREND DESPITE PERIODIC WET WINTERS
Basin Reservoirs in Spring 2023 Were at an Unprecedented Low.
Figure 1 shows total live storage in 46 reservoirs during the past 3.5 years. The minimum amount of water in those reservoirs was on March 14, 2023, immediately before snowmelt began from the winter 2022/2023 snowpack. At that time, the Basin’s reservoirs only held 21.32 maf. Total Basin storage had not been that low since May 1965 when the newly constructed Colorado River Storage Project reservoirs were beginning to fill.15
Figure 1. Graph showing total storage in 46 reservoirs in the Colorado River Basin since January 1, 2023. The minimum amount during this period occurred in mid-March 2023, when total storage was less than at any time since late May 1965. The amount of increase or decrease in total Basin storage during the accumulation and depletion periods of each year are shown. Updated to June 14, 2026.
Snowmelt in 2023 was unusually large for the 21st century, and reservoir storage significantly recovered. The 8.38 maf increase in reservoir storage during the 2023 accumulation period was the second largest single-year increase of the 21st century and resulted from the second largest unregulated inflow to Lake Powell of the 21st century.16 The Basin’s reservoirs were subsequently drawn down by only 2.15 maf between July 13, 2023, and April 17, 2024, the smallest depletion period since at least 2010. Unregulated inflow to Lake Powell in Water Year (WY) 2024, primarily due to the 2024 snowmelt season, was typical of the 21st century,17 and the Basin’s reservoirs recovered 2.45 maf. Because Basin reservoir recovery exceeded the drawdown during the preceding 2023-2024 depletion period, Basin storage reached its highest recent peak at the beginning of the 2024-2025 depletion period.18
The gains of 2023 and 2024 were subsequently lost between summer 2024 and today, because depletion exceeded accumulation. In spring 2027, total Basin storage is likely to be less than it was in March 2023.
In early July 2024, the multi-year downward turn of reservoir storage began. The Basin’s reservoirs were depleted by 3.60 maf during the 2024-2025 depletion period, more than 1 maf greater than the preceding accumulation. Unregulated inflow to Lake Powell in WY2025 was the fourth driest of the 21st century19, and the Basin’s reservoirs only accumulated 0.55 maf, a small amount. Despite hard-fought, politically contentious, and economically expensive system conservation and assigned water efforts as well as a wet fall in the southern part of the Basin, the Basin’s reservoirs were depleted by 4.00 million af during the 2025-2026 depletion period.20 The most probable unregulated inflow to Lake Powell in WY2026 is forecast to be 3.40 maf, the second lowest inflow of the 21st century.21 There will be no accumulation this year.22
As of June 1, 2026, the Basin’s total storage was only 1.62 maf more than total storage at its record-breaking low in March 2023. It is likely that Basin storage in spring 2027, before the 2027 accumulation season begins, will be lower than at any time since 1965, because depletion during the 2016-2027 period will probably exceed 1.62 maf.23
The depletion of reservoir storage that began in summer 2024 occurred despite a significant effort to reduce Lower Basin water use. Water use in California and Arizona in Calendar Year (CY) 2025 was the lowest and third lowest, respectively, since CY2010, and use in those two states in CY2024 was the fourth lowest since CY2010. Water use in Arizona in CY2026 is forecast to be the lowest since CY2010. Upper Basin use in CY2024 was typical for the period CY2010-CY2024; Upper Basin use data for CY2025 are not yet available.
Despite each spring’s snowmelt inflow, each part of the Basin’s reservoir system that stores water – Lake Mead, Lake Powell, and the reservoirs upstream from Lake Powell – has declined since their recent maximums in summer 2024.
Lake Mead typically peaks between January and March and then declines until August (Fig. 2). This pattern contrasts from that of Lake Powell and of reservoirs further upstream. The winter peaks of Lake Mead in 2024, 2025, and 2026 have been progressively lower each year, and the summer minimums have also been lower each year. In 2026, Lake Mead peaked on February 28 and lost 1.23 maf between March 1 and June 1 and will probably continue to drop during the rest of summer. On June 1, 2026, Lake Mead stored only 0.34 maf more than its recent minimum of January 1, 2023.24
Figure 2. Graph showing live storage in Lake Mead, Lake Powell, in 42 reservoirs upstream from Lake Powell, and in Lake Mohave and Lake Havasu since January 1, 2023. Updated to June 14, 2026.
In the last two years, Lake Powell has dropped more than other reservoirs. Lake Powell lost more than 4 maf of stored water since early July 2024. In 2026, Lake Powell steadily declined from the beginning of the year until May 7 and stabilized following the onset of snowmelt runoff, increased releases from Flaming Gorge Reservoir, and reduction of releases at Glen Canyon Dam.25 On June 1, decline in Lake Powell resumed. The total live storage in Lake Mead and Lake Powell on June 1 was 13.38 maf, significantly less than the capacity of either individual reservoir.
Total storage in 42 reservoirs upstream from Lake Powell also declined during the past 3.5 years. Those reservoirs rise every spring and typically recover until sometime in June or July. Presently, many reservoirs in the headwaters of the upper Colorado River are still rising, 26 as are Fontenelle and Big Sandy in the upper Green River Basin. However, total reservoir storage in the Gunnison and Green River watersheds is already at its lowest of the year. Total reservoir storage in the San Juan River watershed has been declining since mid-April but is not yet at its lowest point for the year.
OVERALL TRENDS IN BASIN STORAGE DEMONSTRATE RATCHET EFFECT IN FULL FORCE
In the context of the entire 21st century, Basin storage significantly dropped during two multi-year dry periods, 2000-2004 and 2020-2022 (Fig. 3).27 In other years, the bounty of snowmelt was temporarily stored but completely consumed in subsequent years. The resulting pattern for the 21st century is jagged, but the overall trend in storage has been relentlessly downward, because Basin average uses and losses have consistently exceeded average inflows. We call this pattern the Ratchet Effect, because a rachet is a mechanical device that only allows movement in one direction, in this case towards ever declining Basin storage and deeper into crisis.28 Despite laudable efforts to maintain balance through system conservation and assigned water programs, the ship continues to sink.
Figure 3. Graph showing live storage in the Basin’s reservoirs since January 1, 1999. We call this pattern the Ratchet Effect of declining Colorado River Basin storage in the 21st century. Updated to June 14, 2026.
SUPPLEMENTAL TABLE
Supplemental Table 1. Beginning and end dates of the reservoir storage accumulation period for the entire watershed and for Lake Powell plus Lake Mead. The volume in storage for each date is indicated. The value at the beginning of the accumulation period is the minimum storage at the end of the preceding 9-10 month depletion period. Numbers in bold brackets are the accumulation, in millions of acre feet. Tan shading indicates years that were among the five driest of the 21st century. Blue shading were years that were among the five wettest of the 21st century.
1 Center for Colorado River Studies, Utah State University, former Chief, Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center.
2 Getches-Wilkinson Center, Univ. of Colorado Law School, former US Commissioner, Upper Colorado River Commission, former Assistant Secretary for Water and Science, US Dept. of the Interior.
3 Retired General Manager, Colorado River Water Conservation District.
4 Kyl Center for Water Policy, Arizona State University, former Director, Phoenix Water Services.
5 Staff Attorney, Utton Transboundary Resources Center, University of New Mexico.
6 Live storage is all water stored in reservoirs that can be vacated by gravity, no matter how difficult or slow would be the process of withdrawing that water. Active storage is all water stored above minimum power pool, and inactive storage is water stored between dead pool and minimum power pool. These definitions differ from those used in previous papers that we have written. In past papers, we used the term active storage to refer to what we now refer to as live storage. This change is made to be consistent with terminology of Bureau of Reclamation.
7 We do not consider reservoirs that store Colorado River water but are located beyond the watershed boundary, such as Horsetooth or Twin Lakes Reservoirs in Colorado.
8 As discussed below, the March 2023 minimum was the lowest total Basin storage since May 1965 when the reservoirs of the Colorado River Storage Project were beginning to fill.
10 The total amount of water in the 46 reservoirs on August 24, 1999, was 59.52 maf. The only previous periods when total Basin storage exceeded that amount were for ~4.5 months between June 9 and October 24, 1983, and during parts of summer 1984, 1985, 1986, and 1998 The largest amount of live storage in these reservoirs was 63.61 maf on July 15, 1983.
11 Total live storage in Lake Mead and Lake Powell peaked at 47.70 maf on September 19, 1999, and was 13.38 maf on June 1, 2026.
12 The contents of these 12 reservoirs are reported in Reclamation’s 24-Month Study reports and include Taylor Park, Blue Mesa, Morrow Point, Crystal, Fontenelle, Flaming Gorge, Vallecito, and Navajo that are upstream from Lake Powell, as well as Lake Powell, Lake Mead, Lake Mohave, and Lake Havasu. The contents of the latter two reservoirs, as well as Morrow Point and Crystal, do not change much during the year.
15 The 12 federal reservoirs had 18.93 maf of active storage on March 14, 2023, and were at their lowest since early May 1965.
16 The largest single-year accumulation of Basin storage was in 2011, when storage increased 8.78 million af. Unregulated inflow in WY2011 was 15.97 maf, and natural flow in WY2011 was the largest of the 21st century (WY2011 = 20.16 million af). Unregulated inflow to Lake Powell in WY2023 was 13.42 million af, and natural flow of the Colorado River in WY2023 was 17.41 million af, the third largest of the 21st century.
17 Unregulated inflow was 7.98 million af, 2% less than the average for the 21st century (2000-2026). Natural flow at Lees Ferry in WY2024 (11.88 million af) was 1.5% less than the 21st century average.
18 Total Basin storage was 29.99 million af on July 6, 2024, the largest peak since mid-January 2021.
19 WY2025 unregulated inflow was 4.69 million af. Natural flow at Lees Ferry was 8.50 million af, the fifth driest of the 21st century.
20 J. C. Schmidt et al. 2026. Lake Powell and Lake Mead are moving in opposite direction – what gives? https://qanr.usu.edu/coloradoriver/news/blog-2026-2-9. Here, we are arbitrarily ending the 2025-2026 depletion period on June 1, 2026, when the 2026-2027 depletion period begins.
21 June 24-Month Study.
22 The only other years in the 21st century when there was no accumulation of total Basin storage were 2002 and 2012.
23 The median drawdown of the Basin’s reservoirs since 2010 during each depletion period has been approximately 3.6 maf, and the smallest previous depletion was 2.15 maf. There have only been six years when Basin-wide reservoir depletion was less than 3.0 million af: 2023-2024 (2.15 million af), 2022-2023 (2.19 million af), 2014-2015 (2.61 million af), 2016-2017 (2.75 million af), 2019-2020 (2.82 million af), and 2011-2012 (2.93 million af).
24 Active storage in Lake Mead on January 1, 2023, was 7.32 million af.
25 Lake Powell only gained 0.12 million af between May 7 and May 31.
26 These reservoirs include Granby, Dillon, Ruedi, Green Mountain, Taylor Park, and Ridgway.
27 J. C. Schmidt et al. 2023. The Colorado River water crisis: its origin and the future. WIREs Water 10.1002/wat2.1672.
Anglers flock to Flaming Gorge Reservoir on Memorial Day weekend. Kokanee salmon and trophy-sized lake trout draw tens of thousands of visitors to the reservoir each year, supporting a recreational economy in southwestern Wyoming and northeastern Utah. (Hannah Romero/Green River Star)
Click the link to read the article on the WyoFile website (Dustin Bleizeffer and Hannah Romero):
June 4, 2026
As campers with boats flocked to Buckboard Marina at the start of Memorial Day weekend, Tony Valdez was busy issuing refunds and repairing broken boat ramps. One older Green River man, who walked with two canes, left with his money refunded for the season after discovering he could not safely make it down to the boat slip. Due to dropping water levels at Flaming Gorge Reservoir, the ramp is now buckled, angling up and down like a pitched roof.
“It’s devastating, not just to me, it’s all the marina owners,” said Valdez, who owns Buckboard Marina, south of Green River. “It’s a big loss, and this is a big loss to the community.”
Along the cliffs and shoreline, darker and lighter lines of rock and sand trace the water’s elevations, showing where the water hits when the marina is full, where it hovered this spring and where it dropped after an initial “flush.” Valdez estimates the reservoir has dropped by 7 feet since April.
But that’s not the worst of it. Valdez anticipates that by the end of this summer, the reservoir will be as low as it’s ever been.
Why the drain?
For all its charm as a beloved recreation spot and its utility as a local economic driver, Flaming Gorge Reservoir owes its existence to a legal compact that essentially regards it as an insurance policy in times of drought.
Its primary purpose, according to federal officials and Colorado River Compact scholars, is to serve as a backup water bank to help maintain the Colorado River system. Specifically, Flaming Gorge and a handful of other reservoirs in the upper Colorado River Basin states of Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico are key to ensuring a minimum flow of 7.5 million acre-feet of water, on a running 10-year average, at Lees Ferry just downstream of Lake Powell, a massive man-made reservoir straddling the Utah-Arizona border.
Today, after more than 20 years of drought intensified by human-caused climate change, the Colorado River is in crisis, putting at risk massive agricultural irrigation operations that consume about 80% of its water. This past winter saw historically low snowpack in the Upper Colorado River Basin — a primary source for the river’s flow.
This annotated 1963 photo of the Glen Canyon Dam shows the minimum level of Lake Powell, below which would render the dam’s power generation components inoperable. (Bureau of Reclamation)
Combined with record heat in March, Lake Powell is at risk of dropping below Glen Canyon Dam’s “minimum power pool,” the point at which it can no longer produce hydroelectric power, according to water officials. If it falls even lower, the dam, which holds back Lake Powell, could be at risk of structural damage or unable to allow water to flow downstream.
The situation triggered a drought response operations agreement that calls for restricting releases from Lake Powell and an order to draw extra water from Flaming Gorge upstream. In total, water managers will release about 1 million additional acre-feet of water from Flaming Gorge in April 2026 through April 2027.
“These actions are expected to lower [Flaming Gorge’s] elevation by roughly 35 feet over the next year to approximately 59% of capacity,” the bureau said in April.
“The elevations are real critical,” Valdez said. At Buckboard Marina, high water has hovered between 6,030 and 6,040 feet above sea level over the past 50 years, he said. Dropping 35 feet could expose 400 feet of shoreline in some places, including marinas with boat ramps, he said.
Dropping water levels in the Flaming Gorge Reservoir by 35 feet could expose over 400 feet of shoreline in some places, including marinas with boat ramps, according to Buckboard Marina owner Tony Valdez. (Hannah Romero/Green River Star)
If the water elevation continues to retreat, it could reach a point where boats can’t be brought in or out.
“By September, this thing is going to be down to 6,000 feet. That’s it,” Valdez said. “Next year, if it goes below that, there’s no more marina here.”
Setting a course
Water managers set a course in April to “stabilize” Flaming Gorge’s outflow to about 1,100 cubic feet per second, representing the rate needed to achieve the 1 million acre-feet of extra water release, according to the bureau. On top of that, there are two previously planned “flushes” from the Gorge. The first, in early May, temporarily increased the outflow to about 8,600 cubic feet per second to enhance the proliferation of razorback sucker larvae, and a second 72-hour flush beginning June 8 will temporarily increase the outflow to about 4,600 cubic feet per second to discourage the proliferation of smallmouth bass.
So far, Flaming Gorge has dropped from about 3 million acre-feet in April (or 82% capacity) to about 2.83 million acre-feet as of May 25. Meanwhile, water managers warn, “This release plan is subject to change depending on evolving river conditions and weather forecasts.”
Click to enlarge: This chart depicts water storage levels at Flaming Gorge Reservoir. (Bureau of Reclamation)
Those evolving conditions include forecasted versus actual flows from streams feeding the system. For example, those “unregulated” or natural flows are forecasted to be much lower than normal: 70,000 acre-feet of water into Flaming Gorge during May (28% of average), 175,000 acre-feet in June (45% of average) and 84,000 acre-feet (42%), according to the Bureau of Reclamation.
Water officials caution that water flowing from the Flaming Gorge Dam could change, and that those recreating on the Green River below should monitor release schedules at this website. The bureau also noted, “Water will be colder than usual and will run high and swift during periods of elevated releases.”
Water floats recreation economy
Buckboard Marina went through a similar drop in water a few years ago. The Bureau of Reclamation began pulling water from the Flaming Gorge in 2021, and by 2022, the marina’s water level was at an all-time low. While the reservoir recovered somewhat in 2023 thanks to a good year for moisture, Valdez said, the reservoir has continued to decline since then.
Buckboard Marina owner Tony Valdez stands next to a stake that indicates the extent of lowering water levels at Flaming Gorge Reservoir Sept. 26, 2022. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)
Kokanee salmon and trophy-sized lake trout draw tens of thousands of visitors to Flaming Gorge each year, supporting a recreational economy in southwestern Wyoming and northeastern Utah. But as the lake is drawn down, water recedes from shallow shorelines and fish are forced into a smaller space, essentially shrinking the fishery toward the dam side of the reservoir.
One of Valdez’s primary concerns is that water levels could drop below the ideal elevation for kokanee to spawn in the reservoir.
“I think people don’t realize the economic value it brings,” he said. “It is a big deal when you lose your kokanees.”
Valdez has already lost money this year just from people being concerned about water levels. He estimated that the marina lost roughly $30,000 in cancellations when discussions about releasing water began as early as February.
Other problems also start to arise as the water drops. The marina will lose access to drinking water at 6,010 feet, below their floating pump that supplies potable water. It’s only 7 feet away from the current level.
“That’s scary to me,” Valdez said.
The marina can truck in water from Rock Springs, but it costs about $1,200 to bring in 8,000 gallons, which lasts about two weeks. For Valdez, it feels “asinine” to lose water at a marina.
“Why would we run out of water on a lake?”
Water levels also impact the location of the fuel dock and fuel lines extending to it. If the reservoir sinks too low, it could cost up to $100,000 to adapt, he said.
Drawing down water levels quickly — as happened in early May — can damage marina structures. After the 2021-22 drawdown, Valdez said he spent about $130,000 in repairs.
Buckboard Marina owner Tony Valdez shows a boat ramp that now angles up steeply before dropping down after the reservoir’s water levels dropped several feet. (Hannah Romero/Green River Star)
This time, he’d hoped to keep up. He and a group of 10 men worked to keep pace with the dropping water levels, repairing and modifying ramps. It wasn’t enough.
“The drop was dramatic enough to break all of our approaches, our bridges, our stuff, so it broke a lot of the welds, broke a lot of the structured steel, because it just vertically dropped too fast for the weight,” he said.
When structures go from water to land that quickly, the weight is too much for them to hold up, Valdez said.
“I’m re-rigging everything, and this is only a temporary fix ’til September, because that’s when the season ends.”
The marina should remain mostly functional until the summer season ends, he said. But with extra water releases set to continue through the winter, the lake could drop another 10 to 12 feet by the spring.
“We’re getting into numbers that I don’t even want to talk about,” Valdez said. “I mean, there’s no marina.”
What’s next?
“The guy with the boots on the ground that watches this every day,” as Valdez describes himself, can see what water managers can’t, and he questions whether official numbers and estimates match reality.
“It’s hard to watch this when it’s out of your hands.”
Valdez is critical of the 1922 compact, doubting the legal rationale of sending Wyoming water to places like Arizona. He also wonders about the role of local industries — refineries, coal-fired power plants and trona mines — that use large amounts of water, and the idea of adding more industrial facilities that require even more water, like data centers.
“We don’t have the water to give away,” Valdez said.
Aerial photo of the Glen Canyon Dam near Page, Arizona. Photo by Alexander Heilner/The Water Desk, with aerial support by LightHawk.
Bryan Seppie, general manager for the Joint Powers Water Board for Sweetwater County, Rock Springs and Green River, agrees. “The poor hydrology this past winter has affected most all water users in some form or another,” he said.
His board monitors the Colorado River system closely. Just upstream from Flaming Gorge, the Bureau of Reclamation reduced releases from Fontenelle Reservoir due to poor inflow projections. Although the water will still be enough for river users, the low summer flows will have a negative impact.
“Low river flows typically result in higher water temperatures, which generally leads to higher levels of moss/algae and overall lower water quality,” Seppie said in an email.
What about recovery?
Valdez wonders: What’s the plan to allow the reservoir to bounce back?
Wyoming State Engineer Brandon Gebhart and his staff have warned for months that although Flaming Gorge can serve as a backup to Lake Powell this year, it drains the Gorge’s ability to play a similar role next year, or the year after. It takes time for Mother Nature to replenish the bank.
“The big thing that nobody is talking about is the recovery,” Valdez said. “Where is the recovery of our water?”
This year’s drain on Flaming Gorge began at a low point. The reservoir hadn’t fully recovered after the last major pull. Rather than starting at a high point of 6,040 feet, the marina was at about 6,024 feet, he said.
“There’s no recovery plan,” he said. “We can’t just let them keep taking. I mean, where’s this end?”
Rings line the shore of Flaming Gorge Reservoir, showing the drop in the water level at the popular recreation spot that spans the Wyoming-Utah border. (Hannah Romero/Green River Star)
If there is no grace period for the reservoir to replenish and officials want to take even more in the near future, starting from such a low elevation point, it will be “devastating,” Valdez said.
“The water going down is not the end of the world, it’s the recovery in a timely manner that really matters,” he said. “I can’t preach recovery enough.”
Watching people come to the marina and seeing how happy they are still motivates Valdez to keep going. Despite the drawdown, there’s nowhere else he’d rather be.
“We’re not going to run away. We’re not going to give up,” he said. “We’re going to fight.”
Here’s the release from the Blue River Watershed Group (Reyna Schedler):
As drought conditions continue to shape water management decisions across Colorado, Blue River Watershed Group is hosting a free public forum to help community members better understand how current operations and water management strategies are affecting the Blue River Watershed and the local community.
The Summit County Drought Response Event will bring together representatives from state and federal agencies, local water providers, water utilities, and local governments to discuss current drought conditions, reservoir operations, water supply management, and the challenges facing communities throughout the region.
The event will take place on Tuesday, June 23, 2026, from 5:30–7:30 p.m. at the North Branch Library in Silverthorne. Attendees will hear directly from water experts working across Summit County’s water systems and will have opportunities to ask questions throughout the evening.
The program will begin with an overview of current drought conditions and watershed impacts, followed by presentations from agency and water provider representatives. The evening will conclude with an open community question-and-answer session featuring participating speakers and local water providers.
Event Focus
Presentations will address:
Current drought conditions and outlook for the Blue River Watershed
Status of water operations and reservoir management
Impacts on local rivers, water supplies, and watershed health
Regional coordination among water providers and agencies
Opportunities for community engagement and education
Featured Speakers
Troy Wineland – Event moderator, introductions, and current drought overview
Christina Pearson, Colorado Division of Water Resources
Nathan Elder, Denver Water
Kyle Whitaker, Northern Water
Marc Baldo, Bureau of Reclamation
Nick Harris or Maria Pastore, Colorado Springs Utilities
Will Stambaugh, City of Golden
Local water providers will also participate in the community Q&A session.
Event Details
What: Summit County Drought Response Event
When: Tuesday, June 23, 2026, 5:30–7:30 p.m.
Where: North Branch Library, Silverthorne, Colorado
Who Should Attend: Community members, water users, elected officials, business owners, educators, recreation stakeholders, and anyone interested in learning more about drought conditions and water management in the Blue River Watershed
The Blue River Watershed Group is a community-led nonprofit working to promote, protect, and restore a healthy Blue River watershed through cooperative community education, stewardship, and resource management. We focus on the entire watershed, which drains an area of about 680 square miles covering all of Summit County and portions of Grand and Lake Counties.
Recently, my colleagues at High Country News and I had a bit of a kerfuffle over whether the place on the Colorado River that divides the Upper Basin from the Lower Basin was called Lee Ferry, Lee’s Ferry, or Lees Ferry. Our esteemed copyeditor, Diane Sylvain, was beating herself up for letting a “Lee Ferry” sneak into an article I wrote, when the HCN style guide says it should be “Lees Ferry.”
I pointed out that it was fine, since “Lee Ferry” is an accepted spelling, as is “Lee’s Ferry.” This prompted a sharp rebuke: “Its name is Lees. … Dissenters can use apostrophes on their own time.”
Great. Now I’ve been labelled as a copyedit dissenter. That hurts. But it also sent me down a wormhole on this whole Lee Lees Lee’s Ferry thing, not in an effort to catch any copyeditors out, not as an act of dissent, but just because I’m curious about how we got to where “Lees Ferry” is the accepted spelling, in defiance of apostrophes and, perhaps, history. In the process I learned a lot about one of the coolest spots I know.
Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk
Honestly, I wish we could use a different name altogether for this place of convergence in the far reaches of northern Arizona, something grander and more suited to the landscape, to the condors that ply the skies over the Marble Canyon, to the towering Vermillion Cliffs, and the way the light plays off the stone and dances across the ripply waters of the Colorado River, a dim echo of the geological turmoil that occurred here. Lees Ferry is where the Wingate sandstone of Glen Canyon gives way to the Kaibab limestone of Marble Canyon, where the deep gorge of the Paria River meets up with the Colorado, and — more arbitrarily — where the Upper Basin of the Colorado River meets the Lower Basin.
The geologic transition influenced the topography, making this one of the few places in the region that people and their horses and wagons can reach the Colorado River safely without winches and ropes or parachutes.
Hopi people probably forged the first footpaths to the river from the east, making their way down the giant limestone ramp. Much later, the Escalante-Dominguez expedition of 1776, searching for a return route to Santa Fe, stumbled upon this place, naming it San Benito de Salsipuedes1. “The entire terrain from San Fructo up to here is very troublesome,” the friars wrote, “and altogether impassible when it contains a little moisture from snow and rain.” They also said the land was “pleasingly jumbled,” which seems a perfect descriptor. Some of the Spaniard colonists tried to cross the river, but found that the water was too deep and the current too swift — although they managed to survive. They had to exit the canyon and continue upstream for miles before finding a way across.
A section of Don Bernardo Miera y Pacheco’s map from the Escalante-Dominguez expedition showing what is now known as Lees Ferry.
Paiute guide Naraguts led explorer Jacob Hamblin to the crossing in the 1860s, putting it, figuratively, on the Euro-American maps. And in 1871, a man named John Doyle Lee and his wife Emma settled near the mouth of the Paria and, with a boat abandoned by John Wesley Powell, established a ferry river crossing just upstream from the confluence of the Paria River, naming the place Lonely Dell.
Lee was the adopted son of Brigham Young and had been a Church of Latter Day Saints leader. However, the church excommunicated him after he helped lead the Mountain Meadows Massacre in southwestern Utah, which resulted in the killing of more than 100 non-Mormon white settlers. Whether he chose to go to the remote Lonely Dell to escape prosecution for mass-murder or was exiled there isn’t really clear. Either way, it didn’t work out: Federal marshals arrested him in 1874. In a jail-house interview with the Philadelphia Times the following year, Lee said he had 18 wives, 63 children, 100 grandchildren, and one great grandchild. He also refused to implicate Brigham Young for his role in the massacre. Lee was tried, convicted of first-degree murder, and executed by firing squad in 1877.
Emma Lee continued operations at the ferry until 1879 (meaning she ran it for longer than her husband). Then Warren Johnson and sons ran the enterprise on behalf of the LDS Church, followed by James Emmet and the Grand Canyon Cattle Co., followed again by Johnson and sons for Coconino County. The ferry was finally shut down in 1928 after an accident killed three people. The Navajo Bridge downstream was under construction at the time and would have displaced the ferry, so it would have been abandoned anyway.
John Lee’s notoriety and his conviction didn’t dissuade folks from using his name to refer to the ferry and the place — although it could be argued that it’s named after Emma, not John.
George F. Cram maps from 1879 and 1900 show “Lee’s Ferry” at the confluence of the Paria and the Colorado rivers, but an 1881 version of Cram’s map calls it “Lees Ferry.” Newspaper articles in 1899, 1905, and 1935 refer to the place as “Lee’s Ferry,” as does an 1884 Rand McNally map. It goes like this up until the 1930s, with mapmakers and others generally using both Lee’s and Lees, depending, perhaps, on the typesetter’s fondness for apostrophes. Another theory (albeit likely false): “Lees” is actually the plural form, not the possessive without the apostrophe, so as to give both Emma and John credit for starting and running the ferry. Whatever the case, by the 1940s “Lees Ferry” had edged out “Lee’s Ferry” as most cartographers’ preferred form.
It seems, then, that we have come to the end of this journey, and that “Lees Ferry” is the most acceptable spelling, whether or not it’s grammatically correct. But then along comes “Lee Ferry” to throw it all out of whack.
In 1916, Eric C. LaRue wrote a paper on “The Colorado River and its Utilization” for the U.S. Geological Survey, which is the arbiter of place names. In it, he refers to the place where the Paria River meets the Colorado River as “Lee Ferry.” Except then, five years later, the USGS installed a Colorado River streamflow gage just upstream of the Paria River confluence and called it “Lees Ferry.”
Does this settle it? Nope. Because in 1922, the Colorado River Compact was hammered out. This is the foundational document of the “Law of the River,” and it partitioned the Colorado River watershed into the Upper Basin and Lower Basin states and parceled out its waters to each. The dividing line between the two? Lee Ferry. No, the authors did not accidentally omit the “s” in “Lees.” In its definition-of-terms section, the Compact says: “The term ‘Lee Ferry’ means a point in the main stream of the Colorado River one mile below the mouth of the Paria River.” Yet, the ferry established by John and Emma Lee — along with the USGS streamflow gage — are located above the mouth of the Paria River (because sediment from the Paria can mess up measurements and, possibly, ferries).
A passage from he U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s 1946 report, “The Colorado River: A Natural Menace Becomes a Natural Resource,” in which they use both “Lees Ferry” and “Lee Ferry” and explain the difference between the two. Source: USBR.
While these two points on the map are close enough together to be considered the same place, there is a significant distinction when it comes to accounting for the water in the Colorado River: By putting the dividing point (Lee Ferry) below the mouth of the Paria, it includes the Paria River in the Upper Basin, and includes those flows in the 75 million acre-feet every ten years the Upper Basin is obligated to allow to flow past Lee Ferry. To determine the flow at Lee Ferry, the USGS adds the measurement from the Lees Ferry streamflow gage to the one from the Paria River gage.
It’s about as clear as a sediment-choked Colorado River now, isn’t it? Here it is in a slightly more concise version:
Lees Ferry = Lee’s Ferry ≠ Lee Ferry
Lees Ferry is the most widely accepted term for the geographical location at and around the confluence of the Colorado River and Paria River in northern Arizona. It’s probably derived from “Lee’s Ferry,” as the USGS typically drops apostrophes from possessive place names for reasons unknown. Lees Ferry also refers to the USGS Colorado River streamflow gage located just upstream from the mouth of the Paria River.
Zipline at the USGS Lees Ferry streamflow gage, not to be confused with Lee Ferry, which is the point that divides the Colorado River’s Upper Basin from the Lower Basin. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Lee Ferry is the correct term for the point one mile downstream from the mouth2 of the Paria River that divides the Colorado River’s Upper Basin from the Lower Basin. The Colorado River Compact mandates that the Upper Basin “will not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depleted below an aggregate of 75,000,000 acre-feet for any period of ten consecutive years.”
The streamflow at Lee Ferry is determined by adding the measured flow at the Lees Ferry streamflow gage to that at the Paria River gage just upstream from the Paria River’s mouth.
So, if one is writing about the Upper Basin’s non-depletion obligation, they should use “Lee Ferry.” If they are writing about the historical settlement, the general place, or the streamflow gage, they should write “Lees Ferry.”
🌵 Public Lands 🌲
THE NEWS: MAGA Sen. Mike Lee, of Utah, is back on his anti-public-lands crusade, this time with an underhanded attempt to repeal the wildly popular 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which protects some 45 million acres of U.S. Forest Service land from roadbuilding and logging3. And yes, Mike Lee is related to the aforementioned convicted mass murderer John D. Lee, though I’m sure that has nothing to do with this.
THE CONTEXT:Lee had a busy week. First, he went ballistic on social media after the Trump Defense Department removed the Church of Latter Day Saints from its list of Christian religious denominations (it’s still a recognized faith, but lost the “Christian” label). Apparently he was worried Mormons would be left out of Pete Hegseth’s white Christian Nationalist holy wars.
Then, ol’ Jell-O-Social Lee snuck a last-minute amendment into the bipartisan Wildfire Prevention Act that would not only kill the Roadless Rule, but also prevent a similar rule from being implemented later. The Senate’s energy and natural resources committee voted to advance the amended legislation along party lines. Next it will be subject to a full Senate vote.
Lee’s amendment “just blows up” the bipartisan support for the larger Wildfire Prevention Act, said a clearly dismayed Sen. Martin Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat. The larger legislation, introduced by Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., aims to increase forest thinning and other vegetation treatments as well as prescribed burns on Forest Service and BLM land. It would also guide the agencies to develop strategies for using “livestock grazing as a wildlife risk reduction tool.”
The jury is certainly still out on the efficacy of forest thinning as a wildfire hazard mitigation method. As for livestock grazing? Yeah, probably not, unless all vegetation is eaten down to bare dirt. And once all of the native grasses are gone, it opens the door to cheatgrass, which is especially flammable. Then there’s the question of whether wildfires are really a bad thing — but we’ll leave that debate for later.
Lee claims his motives are pure, and that the Roadless Rule is hampering access for fire prevention and fighting efforts. That’s not true. While the rule generally prohibits roadbuilding and timber harvesting in inventoried roadless areas, it makes exceptions for both if they are deemed necessary for wildfire hazard mitigation or to fight fires. In a public hearing, Sen. Alex Padilla, D-California, pointed out that 240,000 acres of inventoried roadless areas in his state alone had been treated for wildfire hazard mitigation treatment, proving Lee wrong. And the Trump administration, for better or worse, has lagged on forest thinning: A Center for Western Priorities analysis found the Forest Service treated 35% less acreage in 2025 than it did under Biden in 2024.
In fact, building more roads increases access to remote areas. Since most fires are started by humans, it follows that putting more humans into a forest makes it more likely that forest is going to be ignited by an errant spark, cigarette, campfire, or a hot catalytic converter in some tinder-dry grass. So if you really want to prevent wildfires, consider closing some of the thousands of miles of existing roads across public lands.
It’s not clear what Lee hopes to accomplish with these inane, and often futile moves, but what he has done is given strength and energy to the environmental movement. His bid last year to sell off public lands to real estate developers not only flopped, but enlarged the constituency opposing land transfers of any kind. His latest assault on public lands has riled up the hook and bullet crowd, who don’t want roads and timber operations sullying game habitat and streams. And his amendment may very well kill the wildfire bill’s chances at passing, disrupting the efforts of his right-wing colleagues.
Maybe Lee’s inherent extremism forces him to lash out at bipartisanship and pragmatism, in general. After all, he got into the Senate by unseating the late Sen. Bob Bennett, a conservative Republican who lost favor with the more extreme wing of his state’s party by attempting to broker a compromise on public lands in Utah.
It’s tempting to blame Lee’s zealotry on genetics, given that he is the great-great-grandson of John D. Lee, who was convicted and executed for his role in the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, when a group of Mormon militia members killed about 120 gentile emigrants as their wagon train made its way from Arkansas to California. The attack came during a time of heightened tension and conflict between the LDS church and the federal government.
Water and climate scientist Brad Udall speaks at the annual Colorado Law Conference on Natural Resources at the University of Colorado Boulder June, 2014. Udall has been one of the loudest voices calling for audacious leadership on issues of climate and the Colorado River. Photo credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
The problem with that theory is that John D. Lee’s direct descendants — who likely number in the thousands by now — also include Stewart and Morris Udall, influential Western Democratic politicians and public lands champions. Stewart served as Interior Secretary under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and Morris was an Arizona congressman for three decades. Stewart’s son Tom represented New Mexico in the House and Senate, and Mo’s son Mark, a Colorado Democrat, served in the Senate and House as well.
Those Udalls were (and are) Democrats and environmentalists and, according to some takes, “staunch liberals.” But they were also old-school Western politicians who valued pragmatism over ideology and values over party, everything Mike Lee is not. Lee could learn a lot from his kin.
🛢️ Hydrocarbon Hoedown 📈
I’ve written here often about how the Trump administration is handing out drilling permits to petroleum companies like Shriners throwing candy at a parade. Over the last six months, for example, the BLM has issued drilling permits at a rate of 500 per month; you’d have to go back to the George W. Bush administration to see the agency acting at a more rapid pace. But the administration is supplicating itself even more to the fossil fuel industries in a different realm: leasing as much public land to oil and gas companies as they possibly can.
Earlier this month, for example, the Bureau of Land Management auctioned 114,439 acres of public land in Wyoming to the oil and gas industry. Next week, the BLM will put a whopping 160,268 acres in Colorado on the auction block, which could open 174 parcels in Arapahoe, Garfield, Jackson, Mesa, Moffat, Rio Blanco, Routt, and Weld counties — including prime elk habitat — to drilling. And in December, the agency is looking to auction nearly 79,000 acres on the Arizona Strip, despite the fact that there are no known petroleum reserves there.
The public comment period is long gone for those lands, but another planned December sale in Colorado is still subject to your input. This time the BLM is looking to sell 114 parcels on nearly 127,000 acres. The parcels are scattered around the state, with the biggest chunk east of Trinidad, including a block along the Purgatoire River. More than 2,000 acres in and around the HD Mountains in southwestern Colorado — including one big swath south of Chimney Rock — are also going on the block.
Parcels in Archuleta County, Colorado, the BLM plans to put on the oil and gas lease auction block in December (outlined in black). To comment on the proposal, click on this link.
1I’ve seen different translations for “Salsipuede,” including: “you can get out” and “get out if you can.” It seems that the latter is most accurate, given that a “San Benito” is a cassock worn by errant friars. They also called the place “distressful.”
2This is not at a fixed point, as the mouth of the Paria River has migrated from north to south over the years, thanks to sedimentation and so forth.
3The original rule covered nearly 60 million acres, however, as the rule was battered around the courts and political playing field in the years after its implementation, Colorado and Idaho petitioned to create state-specific rules for inventoried roadless areas in their states. That means that any rescission of the rule, whether it’s administratively by the Trump administration or via Lee’s amendment, would not affect Colorado or Idaho roadless areas.
The new conveyor system moved concrete across the gap where the spillway channel will be to the far side of the dam. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
June 14, 2026
…it remains unclear whether Denver Water will ever be able to fill the reservoir to its new full capacity as a yearslong court battle lumbers on between the utility and environmentalists. Months of mediation between the parties have failed. Denver Water is now asking a federal appeals court to reverse a lower court judge’s 2025 order barring the utility from filling the expanded reservoir and ordering the yearslong federal permitting process to be redone. A panel of three judges for the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is scheduled to hear arguments in the case on July 31 in Santa Fe…
U.S. District Court Judge Christine Arguello in 2024 found that federal regulators violated environmental protection laws when they failed to properly analyze the environmental impact of the project or consider reasonable alternatives to the dam expansion that would be less harmful. She later issued the order against filling the reservoir. Environmental groups argued in court, and in their filings, that regulators failed to evaluate how siphoning more water from the drought-stricken Colorado River would impact the basin as a whole. And the groups charged that they failed to weigh other project options that wouldn’t require the clear-cutting of a half-million trees or risk damage to wetlands. The case has drawn the attention of other Front Range water providers, lawyers from across the county and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — all of which have filed briefs in the appeals case…
While the dam structure itself is complete, at least a year of work remains to fully finish the project, Martin said. Construction crews must finish the spillway and place the final topper foot of concrete on the completed dam structure. Divers will place a gate between the reservoir’s water and the dam’s intake tubes. But the crews on site will diminish in the coming months, from up to 500 workers a day to closer to 100. On the morning of June 3, crane operators already worked to remove from the dam crest the heavy machinery that was necessary to build the main structure.
Roller-compacted concrete will be placed on top of the existing dam to raise it to a new height of 471 feet. A total of 118 new steps will make up the new dam. Image credit: Denver Water.
A rainstorm over southern Colorado. Photo: Abby Burk
Click the link to read the article on the Audubon website (Abby Burk):
May 7, 2026
Drought in Colorado isn’t abstract—it’s shaping decisions right now, from headwater streams to major reservoirs. And this year, the signals are hard to ignore. At the same time, conversations about water are tightening. There’s more concern and more sensitivity—especially around anything tied to water availability.
Snowpack across the Upper Basin has dropped to record or near-record lows. By early April, snow water equivalent in many areas fell to a fraction of normal, and snow cover reached the lowest levels observed in the satellite record. At the same time, this winter ranked among the warmest on record—reducing snow accumulation, accelerating melt, and increasing evaporative losses. These patterns are consistent with the impacts of climate change across the Colorado River Basin, where rising temperatures are diminishing snowpack reliability and reducing overall runoff efficiency.
June 1, 2026 seasonal water supply forecast summary.
Those conditions are now reflected in forecasts. Runoff across the Upper Basin watersheds is expected to be among the lowest on record, with sharply reduced inflows into Lake Powell. Meanwhile, Lake Powell and Lake Meadcontinue to sit near historic lows—leaving very little buffer in the system.
Even where spring storms have brought some relief, the underlying deficitremains. Dry soils, warm temperatures, and reduced snowpack mean less water ultimately reaches rivers.
This is not just a dry year. It’s a system under compounding stress.
Why This Matters: Ecological Drought
Ecological drought helps explain what those conditions mean on the ground.
That definition matters because it expands how we think about drought.
It’s not just about precipitation. It’s about how drought moves through a system:
From snowpack to soil moisture
From soil moisture to vegetation and habitat
From ecosystems to the services people depend on
Modern droughts are also changing. They are becoming hotter, longer, and more widespread, with impacts amplified by both climate conditions and human water use.
And those impacts don’t stay contained.
Ecological drought is fundamentally about connected systems. When ecosystems cross critical thresholds—losing wetland function, shifting vegetation, or degrading habitat—those changes feed back into water supply, with wide-ranging implications to agriculture, wildfire risk, and community stability.
What it Looks Like Right Now
In Colorado, ecological drought is showing up as a shift in timing, duration, and connectivity.
Even with recent moisture:
Peak river flows are shorter and less effective
River baseflows drop earlier
Floodplains connect less often
Wetlands and side channels dry sooner
These aren’t always dramatic changes—but they compound, especially when they occur in back-to-back years, reducing recovery time.
That’s a critical shift. Drought is no longer just episodic. It’s increasingly persistent, with ecosystems spending less time in recovery and more time under stress.
Birds Are Early Indicators
For birds, these shifts are immediate.
Migratory species depend on wetlands that function like stepping stones across the landscape. When those wetlands shrink or disappear earlier, habitat becomes compressed.
Riparian birds like the Northern Yellow Warbler and Song Sparrow rely on dense, water-supported vegetation during breeding season. Earlier drying reduces both cover and food availability.
And beneath all of this, food webs shift. Aquatic insects emerge differently under drier conditions, creating mismatches with nesting cycles.
Birds are often the first to show us what’s changing—but they’re not the only ones affected.
People Are In This System, Too
Ecological drought makes one thing clear: this is a single, connected system responding together. The same processes that shape habitat also shape outcomes for people. Soil moisture influences forage conditions for agriculture. Water timing and availability affect the reliability of community supplies. River flows support recreation and local economies, while connected floodplains help reduce risk and support recovery after disturbance.
This is what we mean by ecosystem services—the benefits people receive from functioning natural systems. When those systems are strained or begin to break down, those benefits decline as well.
What This Means for the Basin
The science is pointing to something bigger than a single dry year.
The Colorado River Basin is increasingly operating in a warmer, drier regime, where snowpack is less reliable and variability is higher. Recent conditions mirror some of the most consequential low-flow years in recent history—and they are becoming more frequent.
At the same time, current operating guidelines are set to expire, and the decisions made now will shape how the system responds to these conditions going forward.
What’s needed is a shift—from reactive, year-to-year crisis management to more durable and flexible operations; from short-term fixes to sustained investment in long-term resilience; and from fragmented efforts to stronger alignment across states, Tribes, and water users.
There is growing recognition that solutions must include conservation, efficiency, infrastructure, and watershed health—including restoration that improves how water is stored and functions across the landscape. Without that kind of alignment, risks will continue to compound—ecologically, economically, and socially.
A Clearer Lens for What’s Ahead
Ecological drought is not a new agenda. It’s a way to understand how drought actually works in today’s world—how water shortages move through ecosystems, how impacts cascade, and how those impacts ultimately reach people.
It connects snowpack to rivers, rivers to habitat, and habitat to communities. And it underscores something essential: when ecosystems are pushed beyond their limits, the consequences don’t stay ecological—they become systemic.
That’s why this matters now. Because the question in front of us isn’t just how we respond to this year’s drought. It’s whether we’re building a system that can function—ecologically and socially—under the conditions we know are coming (or are here).
The country’s most severe drinking water problems, from high levels of contaminants and foul-smelling water to pipe breaks, low water pressure, and expensive rates, are generally found in the thousands of small systems that serve dozens of people up to a few thousand.
These systems are public health crises waiting to emerge, said Denise Schmidt, director of water at the Environmental Policy Innovation Center, a group that works with water utilities on infrastructure funding.
Though some are perpetually struggling, small water systems, especially those serving low-income communities, are encountering a fresh set of economic and political hurdles in their quest for safe drinking water.
In recent industry surveys, small utilities report that accessing financing to repair and upgrade their systems is becoming increasingly difficult. Their credit ratings are deteriorating, making borrowing more expensive. The rates they charge customers are not covering the cost of providing water service, thus digging a long-term financial hole. Extreme weather is burdening them with unexpected and daunting repairs to their reservoirs, treatment plants, and pipe networks. Federal water quality mandates for PFAS and lead pipe replacements, though both providing public health benefits, are an added cost.
Small systems, in effect, are walking a precarious path. They are trying to survive today while also staring at a gathering wave of necessary replacements to aging pipes and treatment plants.
The Trump administration and Republican allies in Congress, meanwhile, are casting more obstacles. The White House’s tariffs have increased the price of equipment and materials. And the House’s fiscal year 2027 budget would cut the main federal water infrastructure program by about a quarter.
“I don’t think people realize how big this wave is and how much it’s going to cost,” said Blake Anderson, president and founder of Mogollon Water Management, a company that operates and maintains 11 small water systems in northeast Arizona. “The utilities that were built in 1970 now are 56 years old. There was a lot of development that happened back then. And all of these waves are going to start crashing.”
Negative Outlook
Crashing sounds are gaining strength.
Last year, for the first time, S&P Global, a credit rating agency, lowered the financial outlook for small water and wastewater utilities from stable to negative. Large and medium utilities remained stable.
The increased pessimism for small water utilities is due to stiffening financial headwinds, said Malcolm D’Silva, an associate director at S&P, which rates roughly 1,700 water and wastewater utilities. Ninety-one percent of the agency’s credit downgrades last year were for small systems, he said. Credit downgrades increase the cost of borrowing.
D’Silva narrated a story in two parts. One is the “expense squeeze.” Costs are rising across the board. First from the post-Covid inflation and supply chain shortages, and now from the Trump administration’s tariffs. Half of the utilities that responded to the American Water Works Association’s annual survey said that tariffs had “moderate or considerable” pressure on equipment and materials costs. At the same time, revenue is not keeping up. In the same survey, only 43 percent of utilities said they charged customers enough to fully cover service costs.
The second part is managerial. Small systems typically do not have the technical expertise, staff, or budget to analyze their infrastructure and apply for funding in the way that larger utilities do. Some might keep only paper records of their pipe networks. The smallest systems have volunteer board members or staff that might also oversee the fire department and run a business.
The positive news is that last year might have been the bottom for small systems, D’Silva said. S&P is seeing some improvement in the first half of 2026, with the rate of downgrades slowing. More utilities have instituted rate increases to fill budget holes, D’Silva said.
Federal Question Mark
Just as one hole is closing, however, another might be opening.
Every year the White House lobs a spending plan toward Capitol Hill and members of Congress decide whether those numbers are a good idea. For fiscal year 2027, the Trump administration proposed a roughly 90 percent cut to the two state revolving funds, the main federal sources of water infrastructure funding.
Congress usually sustains the state revolving funds, which have broad support. But this budget cycle could be different.
A House spending bill cuts the revolving funds by about 24 percent combined. The House Appropriations Committee approved the bill on June 3.
The bill provides $1.2 billion for the Clean Water State Revolving Fund (27 percent cut) and $911 million for the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund (19 percent cut). The Senate has not yet introduced its version.
The Environmental Policy Innovation Center, or EPIC, tracks state revolving fund expenditures and project proposals in 15 states. At Circle of Blue’s request, EPIC analyzed small system and very small system requests for drinking water funding. By EPA’s definition, small systems serve fewer than 10,000 people and very small systems fewer than 3,300.
The data indicate high demand from these systems. Some 61 percent of projects seeking drinking water funding were small or very small. However, only about a third of these proposed projects advanced to the next step in the funding process. This “highlights significant unmet infrastructure needs,” EPIC analysts wrote.
Water infrastructure funding needs and the status of the revolving funds were a point of discussion during a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on May 20.
Jessica Kramer, the head of the EPA Office of Water, defended the administration’s proposed cuts. Her justification: the states have $14.8 billion in uncommitted state revolving funds, those sitting in coffers for more than a year without being allocated. That money should be distributed first, she argued.
“It doesn’t do any good to get the money to the states if the states aren’t actually getting it out to the communities that need it,” Kramer said.
Schmidt, the EPIC water director, had a different view. Two issues are being wrapped into one, she said. If state administrative capacity to review and approve applications is the problem, then focus on that. But don’t use it to rationalize disinvestment in an otherwise successful decades-long infrastructure program.
“Uncommitted does not mean unneeded,” Schmidt said. “Cutting moves us farther from the solution.”
The View from Arizona
The financial pressures that populate D’Silva’s and Schmidt’s spreadsheets are the on-the-ground reality for Blake Anderson.
Anderson is the president and founder of Mogollon Water Management, a company that operates and maintains 11 small water systems in the White Mountains of northeastern Arizona. Mogollon oversees the smallest of the small – systems ranging in size from 29 service connections to roughly 1,100.
These are not the sophisticated, professionally managed systems that you would see in Phoenix or Flagstaff.
“They’re volunteer board members and they’re aware that there’s some sort of money for water out there but they don’t know where it is, or if they do know, they aren’t sure how to go about applying and accessing it,” Anderson said, describing the challenges for small systems in securing grants and loans.
“Most of them have never done a capital improvement project over $50,000,” he added. “And so there is not institutional knowledge in how do you manage a federally funded program or a state funded program? How do you go about securing engineers or contractors? What are the proper procurement practices?”
One school of thought for solving the small systems problem is that there should be fewer of them. By connecting with larger systems or forming regional partnerships, small utilities could grow into medium-sized utilities with favorable economics: more customers to cover expensive infrastructure costs, better credit ratings, money to hire knowledgeable staff.
Research from Manny Teodoro at the University of Wisconsin indicates that the target size for utility consolidations should be about 20,000 service connections, or about 60,000 people. At that point the most serious water quality violations become far less common and operating costs become more reasonable.
Where might funding for consolidations come from? States like California have dedicated programs, though even those are facing funding shortfalls. Another source is federal: the state revolving funds that House Republicans want to cut.
At the Yampa Town Board meeting last week, Andi Schaffner with the Bear River Reservoir Company presented plans and cost estimates for a Stillwater Reservoir project that would lead to removal of its storage restriction. The plan consists of two phases involving installation of a strain and a sand filter to alleviate seepage into the dam’s embankment, the primary concern that led to the storage restriction designation…Currently, the town of Yampa owns 112 shares in Stillwater Reservoir, or about 2% of the reservoir. Phase 1 of the project consists of a blanket drain and filter collar and is estimated to cost $730,717. Phase Two of the project will be stabilizing the channel and the removal of the culvert and the flume, at a total estimated cost $209,874. Schaffner said that the team at Bear River Reservoir Company has spent hours on engineering and studies at the reservoir in order to determine the best solution for the dam. “We finally opted for the least expensive fix, which is what we’re working on right now,” said Schaffner…The project has received a significant amount of grant funding despite higher than anticipated bids, including a $202,000 loan from the Colorado Water Conservation Board. This loan was the primary expected cost for the town of Yampa, and is expected to be approved with an increase to $404,000 ahead of the project’s notice to proceed with the contractor on July 13. The project is expected to be completed by the end of October. The Colorado Water Conservation Board loan is 30 years with 1.85% interest, or $3.40 per share per year. For the town of Yampa’s 100 or so shares, this amounts to $381 a year. Schaffner did not expect any more expenses besides an assessment of the shares which amounts to about $5.
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
In response to extreme drought conditions throughout northwestern Colorado, the Colorado River District, in partnership with the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB), is offering up to 420 acre-feet of supplemental agricultural water from Elkhead Reservoir for irrigators in the Yampa River Valley. Modeled on the successful joint CWCB-River District program implemented in 2021, this effort will provide additional supplies during critical times of agricultural production.
“The drought conditions this year have been exceptional and unpredictable,” said Colorado River District’s Director of Asset Management, Hunter Causey. “And it’s that kind of unpredictability that hits small family farms and ranches the hardest. The Yampa Valley, the western slope, and our entire region depend on local agriculture to drive economies, produce local food, and preserve landscapes. While a program like this cannot solve the drought problem at large, we can be strategic in how we use our available supplies and support our constituents wherever possible.”
“The challenges posed by this year’s drought call for creative solutions and strong partnerships,” said Lauren Ris, CWCB Director. “This project reflects what can happen when local water users and water management agencies work together to respond to emerging needs. We’re pleased to support this collaborative effort in the Yampa Valley and remain committed to working with communities across Colorado to explore creative, locally driven solutions that help address drought impacts and strengthen drought resilience.”
Program Structure:
Water will be allocated using a lottery with an initial round of allocations of up to 50 AF per applicant, totaling 420 AF.
Any water remaining after the lottery will be awarded equally to initial round applicants that expressed a need beyond 50 AF. If there is any remaining water, it will be available on a first-come, first-served basis and will need to be contracted at no cost with the District.
Successful participants in the lottery will need to enter into a no-cost contract with the River District for direct delivery and/or use of the District’s Elkhead water through administrative exchange.
In the event there is a mainstem Yampa River call and to the extent that lessees are out-of-priority, water will be released at the diversion rate plus transit losses.
Water will be available for delivery or exchange beginning on July 10, 2026.
At current agricultural water marketing rates, the total project will cost $18,375. On June 4, the Colorado River District Board of Directors agreed to make $4,594 available from the Board’s previously authorized CFP expenditures for the District’s 2026 Drought relief effort. The CWCB has committed to providing the remainder of the funds – approximately $13,781.
Applications are due by June 26th, and a lottery will be conducted for the initial round of contracts on July 1st. Available augmentation water is limited. Those interested in applying should contact the Colorado River District’s Director of Asset Management, Hunter Causey, at hcausey@crwcd.org or visit HERE for more information.
Glen Canyon Dam forms Lake Powell on the Colorado River near Page, Ariz. Officials from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation are holding back water and releasing water from an upstream reservoir to prop up levels in Lake Powell. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Federal officials announced on Thursday that they plan on using a shorter-term framework for future Colorado River management so they can be more responsive to changing conditions and reservoir levels.
Acting Commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Scott Cameron said at an annual conference on water policy that the agency will be using a 10-year framework, issuing new operational guidelines every two years. In the absence of a seven-state deal for sharing shortages and managing reservoirs, river management now falls to the federal government — an outcome nearly everyone had hoped to avoid.
“We would love to have a 20-year deal or a 30-year deal but, frankly, we haven’t even been able to get the seven states to agree on what a two-year deal would look like,” Cameron said. “Given the highly unusual hydrological situation in the basin … we think it makes sense to take a second look at decision making every couple of years.”
As part of the required process under the National Environmental Policy Act, Cameron said Reclamation will release a final Environmental Impact Statement with its “preferred alternative,” in mid-to-late summer. It will lay out a more detailed 10-year operations plan for the nation’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, and will include short-term operational guidelines for 2027 and 2028. He said the plan provides a stable, transparent and adaptable framework for river management.
Scott Cameron is the acting commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. He announced Thursday the federal agency is planning to release a river management plan in mid-to-late summer that includes a 10-year framework, with new operational guidelines every two years. CREDIT: U.S. BUREAU OF RECLAMATION
“We want to pay more attention to what’s actually happening in the river and what’s happening in terms of the elevation of the reservoirs,” Cameron said. “We want to manage conservatively during low inflow periods and hopefully be able to transition to recovery as conditions improve across the basin to keep the system stable and resilient.”
Cameron left the door open for a return to future management by the states and added that if they eventually come to an agreement, it could supplant the federal plan.
Cameron’s update came at the Colorado Law Conference on Natural Resources at the University of Colorado Boulder, hosted by the Getches-Wilkinson Center and the Water & Tribes Initiative. Water managers from around the basin gathered at the Wolf Law School in the midst of one of the worst droughts on record that threatens the water supply for about 40 million people in the American Southwest. Record hot temperatures and one of the worst snowpacks since measuring began resulted in streamflows that peaked much lower than normal and, in some reaches, a month early. Reclamation’s most recent projections put spring runoff into Lake Powell at just 800,000 acre-feet, which would be 13% percent of normal and the lowest on record.
On top of the abysmal hydrologic conditions, the basin is also in the midst of a management crisis. The Upper Basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) and Lower Basin states (California, Arizona and Nevada) after two years of negotiating have failed to reach a consensus on how they will share future cuts and have blown past deadlines to come up with a plan. The current guidelines, which have determined shortages and releases since 2007, expire at the end of the year. But for all intents and purposes, water managers need a new plan in place by the start of the new water year on Oct. 1.
Some of the problem still centers around the 1922 Colorado River Compact, which allocated half of the river’s flows (7.5 million acre-feet a year) to each basin. But this framework no longer applies under 21st century conditions, which has seen flows decline by 20% due to climate change. Despite indications a year ago that the states were moving to a supply-driven model based on each year’s snowpack and available water — rather than a fixed allocation of water — a new management framework the states can agree on has remained out of reach.
Colorado representative Becky Mitchell and Nevada representative John Entsminger speak at a conference on Colorado River policy in Boulder on Friday, June 5, 2026. The federal government is set to release a plan for future river management in mid-to-late summer. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Beyond the band-aid
The feds’ operating plan for the first two years may be based on a proposal submitted by the Lower Basin states in early May, in which they propose to cut another 700,000 acre-feet of water per year through 2028, on top of the 1.5 million acre-feet they had already promised. California and Arizona will each take another 300,000 acre-feet of cuts and Nevada will take a cut of 100,000 acre-feet. The proposal does not include any mandatory conservation from the Upper Basin.
Federal officials responded in a May 28 letter with adjustments to make the proposal feasible, including the requirement that the Lower Basin states help pay for the 700,000 acre-feet of conservation. In the past, conservation programs have depended heavily on federal funding.
Becky Mitchell, who represents Colorado in the negotiations among the states, said during a Friday panel that the feds’ plan was a starting point but raises some concerns. Constantly renegotiating an operating plan every two years would be hard to fathom, she said.
“How do we fund and finance if we’re constantly renegotiating?” Mitchell said. “And how do we create the certainty that the 40 million people deserve?”
The feds have already stepped in this spring to prevent the worst consequences of the exceptionally dry winter and keep water levels at Lake Powell from falling below the threshold for making hydropower at Glen Canyon Dam. They are releasing up to 1 million acre-feet from Flaming Gorge Reservoir to prop up Powell and holding back Powell releases by about 1.5 million acre-feet. Cameron conceded, however, that these are temporary, stop-gap measures meant to address a critical situation.
“I think we succeeded in making everybody unhappy and everybody mad, which maybe means we’re doing the right thing in terms of Lake Powell,” Cameron said.
The Upper Basin states, including Colorado, are exploring ways to contribute water to a pool in Lake Powell as a means of maintaining higher water levels and an insurance policy against drastic cuts. But officials have not budged from their position that the Upper Basin is limited in what it can do and that cutting Lower Basin overuse is the primary solution to the Colorado River crisis.
Brad Udall, a water and climate scientist at Colorado State University whose presentation kicked off the conference, asked water managers not to waste this unique opportunity to redo 100 years of law and policy around how to manage a critical resource. And he directed a plea at the Upper Basin, saying that they, too, are part of the problem.
“We need everybody with a shoulder to this wheel,” Udall said. “We understand that the Upper Basin is different. We understand that they don’t have (large upstream) reservoirs and that every year people suffer. But we need you to help. Please help us.”
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
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 InkStain website (John Fleck):
June 1, 2026
I’ve been on a “Colorado River sabbatical” of late, but I took a peek last week at Reclamation’s latest 24-month study. Holy moly things have gotten bad since the last time I looked!
Those not on sabbatical already know all of this, but to keep Lake Powell above a surface elevation of 3,500 feet, Reclamation is:
increasing releases out of Flaming Gorge on the Wyoming-Utah border
dropping releases out of Lake Powell to 6 million acre feet this year
Even with those two “hail Mary” moves, Lake Mead is projected in the “most probable” scenario to drop to elevation 1,020 by summer 2027. Under the “minimum probable” forecast, Mead drops all the way to elevation 1,008 in 2027.
We are on the brink, as a group of my colleagues explains in a new analysis out this morning (Monday June 1, 2026), of a system crash:
Even a wet year, my friends conclude, would only provide a short reprieve from the need to significantly reduce consumptive use.
Building on a similar analysis done last September (I was a co-author on that one), the authors attempt to overcome one of the shortcomings of the traditional Colorado River accounting systems, which is to treat any water above “dead pool” as usable storage. This is not the case, with clear do-not-cross lines in the reservoirs that are maintained for technical reasons well above the bottom, defined by my colleagues as…
One of the reasons for my “sabbatical” is, frankly, an agonized frustration with the abject failure of Colorado River governance at the basin scale, and a desire to turn my attention to the local level, which is where the problem solving responsibility seems to rest right now. Each community needs to be having a serious conversation right now about the specifics of its Colorado River water supply, and how it intends to go about using less. Blaming other people for using too much isn’t particularly useful at this point, we seem to have chosen to hand that set of questions (the rule-based part of “who is entitled to how much”) over to the courts, and who knows what that process holds. We know the answer for everyone is “use less water”, and each community needs to be getting on with that conversation.
A large crowd listens to a presentation at the University of Colorado Boulder law school about securing powerful new water rights on Colorado’s West Slope to benefit the health of the Colorado River. Scott Franz/KUNC
June 5, 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.
Water negotiators, river enthusiasts, Native tribes and lots of lawyers convened at the University of Colorado Law School on Thursday to take stock of the future of the dwindling Colorado River.
Here are five things KUNC’s water and environment reporter learned on the first day of the gathering.
There’s a thirst for treating the river as more than something to be consumed, and monetized and stretched out
Dale Sinquah, a tribal council member for Arizona’s Hopi tribe, is among a growing number of people who view the Colorado as a living being that should have the same rights as a person.
“If you look at it at that level and you allow it to, then it starts changing the ways in which you think about it, and maybe your actions,” he said.
Late last year, the Colorado River Indian Tribes of Arizona and California voted to give their namesake waterway the same legal rights as a person, saying the ‘living being’ deserves more protection while it’s being threatened by overuse and drought.
Sinquah said he had mixed reviews of the discussions at the water conference halfway through the first day.
“I’m kind of wondering if we’re stuck in that mode where you know personal interest (is winning) instead of how do we fix this as a whole, as a group,” he said. “It works better when you work together as a group.”
There’s still no finalized federal plan for the river yet, and the White House could have the final say…
Scott Cameron, the acting commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation overseeing the operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead, said the Interior Department is expecting to publish a short term operating plan for the reservoirs by “mid-summer.”
He said the plan would have to be renegotiated every two years and could be replaced at any time with one that the seven states can agree on.
“The good news is that the White House is very interested in what’s going on with the Colorado, so we’ll probably have to brief the White House on the (Secretary of the Interior’s) decision before it’s final,” Cameron said.
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
River negotiations are ongoing, but details are scarce…
First governors from all seven states in the river basin were summoned to Washington, DC, ahead of the Feb. 14 deal deadline they missed.
Then, after that didn’t work, came the Microsoft Teams meeting.
Scott Cameron, the acting commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum recently talked with the seven governors again on the virtual meeting platform.
“The fact that he is trying to wrangle his gubernatorial colleagues twice, I think, indicates how seriously Secretary Burgum takes what’s happening in the Colorado River,” Cameron said.
However, no deal has yet to materialize as the states remain at an impasse, and some in the upper basin have called for a different mediator to intervene.
June 1, 2026 seasonal water supply forecast summary.
One thing is clear.
Forecasts for the river have gotten worse in recent months. And there was an acknowledgement that the status quo is not sustainable.
Graphic via Holly McClelland/High Country News.
Could the feds get more involved in the management of upper basin reservoirs like Flaming Gorge? The answer is murky…
The audience asked Cameron, the Bureau of Reclamation official, about his thinking on how Interior should manage four large reservoirs in the upper basin that are collectively known as the upper initial units (they include Flaming Gorge on the Wyoming-Utah border).
Flaming Gorge is currently being partially drained so water can be sent down to Lake Powell so it doesn’t get so low that it stops producing hydropower.
Cameron said the Interior Secretary could exert more control over the reservoirs in the future in the event of an “emergency.”
“And what an emergency is, I think, is probably in the eyes of the beholder,” he said. “Now, you put four or five lawyers in a room. You’ll probably get nine answers on how much discretion the secretary has or doesn’t have in the upper initial units.”
Parts of the lake that have only recently been uncovered are full of old beer cans and other relics of boating escapades, including sunken boats.
But deeper down, Podmore shared photos of Native artifacts that have survived decades of being submerged.
New ecosystems are also taking shape.
The Colorado River Basin spans seven U.S. states and part of Mexico. Lake Powell, upstream from the Grand Canyon, and Lake Mead, near Las Vegas, are the two principal reservoirs in the Colorado River water-supply system. (Bureau of Reclamation)
Doug Kenney at the Getches-Wilkinson Center 2026 Conference on the Colorado River June 5, 2026. Photo credit: Allen Best
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
June 7, 2026
Doug Kenney, principal organizer of annual gathering in Boulder, talks about how the growing tensions among basin states pose challenges in setting the agenda
The Colorado River has always had a magnetic appeal to the public consciousness. John Wesley Powell and his crew were instant national heroes after they emerged from the Grand Canyon in 1869.
That interest continues to this day. Bathtub rings are an absorbing visual, an easy way to communicate declines in the two biggest reservoirs in the basin, Mead and Powell. The river is being hammered by a warming climate and archaic governance of the shared resource.
This provides much to chew on, and that discussion continued again on June 4-5 at the Colorado River Conference hosted by the Getches-Wilkinson Center at the University of Colorado Law School. Organizers reported 373 people were registered to attend in person and another 132 remotely, a record for both. This surpasses a record set last year.
Afterward, Big Pivots sat down with Doug Kenney, the principal organizer of the conference, to take stock of what had just transpired. He directs the Western Water Policy Program and chairs the Colorado River Research Group.
What year did this conference begin? What was the thinking that gave birth to it?
I believe 1983 was the first one. This was mostly a creation of Larry MacDonnell, (the first director of the Natural Resources Law Center, a position he held from 1983 to 1994).
Larry pursued a dual mandate of researching key issues but also of trying to involve the public and other constituencies. A conference was a natural thing to do. We are an educational institution.
I’ve done the last 30 or so of them, but Larry got it started,
It seems like two or three, maybe three years ago, the tribes became a major presence in attendance and on the agenda. How did this come about?
Mostly through our professional networks. We knew people who were associated with the (Colorado River Basin) Water and Tribes Initiative. They wanted to broaden their reach and their influence. At the same time, we’ve here always wanted to involve tribal interests in what we do, going back to the work of David Getches and Charles Wilkinson.
We decided we’d try co-hosting a conference. It’s a partnership, and like all partnerships, it grows over time. But it’s working pretty well, I think.
Am I wrong? Was I missing something? I didn’t notice much of tribal presence in the agenda or participation until just a few years ago.
We’d usually maybe have one tribal speaker sprinkled in the program somewhere, but it was pretty hit and miss, in part I think because you kind of need a critical mass of involvement from the tribal community for other tribes to feel like this is a place that they’d be taken seriously and that they’d be welcomed. It wasn’t a slow linear growth to where we’re at today. There was a pretty dramatic shift four or five years ago.
How new is the Water Tribal Initiative?
They’ve been around I think for about a decade. They’re co-managed by Matt McKinney, who wasn’t here, and Daryl Vigil.
Native America in the Colorado River Basin. Credit: USBR
It’s not a national thing, but the Colorado Basin has 30 different tribes. That’s a pretty big number of tribes to keep track of. It’s a network as much as it is anything, and every so often they try to get together. They consider this conference their big convening. They also get to get together at CRWUA (Colorado River Water Users Association, which holds an annual conference during December in Las Vegas).
They have also produced a few research reports. This week they talked about their report on tribal sovereignty. And they have particular initiatives within the Water and Tribes Initiative, such as universal access to clean water. They are pushing, mostly through federal legislation, to provide assurances that all tribes have access to clean water.
Do they have a strong benefactor?
I don’t think so, but they have a very broad base of funders and supporters. A lot of water agencies, a lot of people, and a lot of organizations that know tribes have been treated poorly and that tribes have legitimate interests in the basin but (know) that many tribes just don’t have the resources to do this without some assistance.
As I’ve attended most years since 2002, I have noticed some ebbs and flows. There were some empty seats this afternoon, but the seats were mostly occupied through the first day and a half, and that’s somewhat different than, say, 10 years ago. What explains the ebb and flow?
I attribute that mostly to two things: one is this partnership with the Water and Tribes Initiative. The other thing is the fact that we’re talking about the Colorado River, which by every measure is in a crisis. It’s easier to get people’s attention when you’re talking about a crisis than when you’re talking about something that’s still not that serious. That’s part of it.
We used to be in another building. This is clearly a better facility for audience and speakers alike. That helps us attract a larger audience. We’ve had good foundation support, good funders. It takes a lot of money to do this, but we’ve had funders that see value in it. That has allowed us to make this a bigger event.
The conference is always the first week of June, so when do you begin rough-drafting the agenda?
Usually January. In some years it’s easier than others. This year was the most difficult. It was the easiest year in terms of attracting an audience. The hardest year in terms of putting the program together.
Everyone’s mad at each other, and everyone is — I can’t tell you all the back stories. Becky Mitchell said something today about how it’s hard to negotiate and prepare for litigation at the same time. She’s right. And I was thinking to myself, it’s hard to bring people together to talk at a conference while acknowledging the fact that they’re all mad at each other, and some of them are about to sue each other, and some can’t be in the same room with each other because they’re that angry, and some will be deeply offended if someone else is there.
It’s one of these years that there’s just so many delicate issues and angry folks — and angry for legitimate reasons; I’m not discounting that. But it’s been a really challenging year.
Your answer anticipates my next question, but I’ll ask it nonetheless. If memory serves me, a few years ago you had representatives of all seven basin states at the same table. This year you had two. I guess it’s fair to say that agenda setting has become more politically sensitive.
Every year for the last four or five years we’ve given all seven principals, all seven states, an opportunity to sit at the same table and have a discussion. In every passing year it becomes more difficult to do that.
Commissioner to the Upper Colorado River Commission Becky Mitchell, center, speaks on a panel with representatives of each of the seven basin states at the annual Colorado River Water Users Association conference in Las Vegas Thursday, December 15, 2022. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
You have seen this at CRWUA as well. Some years they had to divide into two sessions, upper and lower basin sessions. For awhile we were thinking of just having a lower basin session. The lower basin folks were happy to do that, but the upper basin folks weren’t as comfortable. We (also) thought about a different part of the session or a different location.
Ultimately we came to the conclusion that everyone could agree if it would be a conversation, not a posturing or confrontational thing. (Having) one upper basin person and one lower basin person, that was a format that could work. That’s what we did (with Becky Mitchell from Colorado and John Entsminger of Nevada). Anything more elaborate than that I don’t think was viable this year. It’s a really delicate time.
In terms of conferences devoted to the Colorado River do you have rivals for what you’re doing? Are there other places in Arizona or California, for example, that are kind of like must-go sessions?
There are two must-attend Colorado River conferences each year, and this is one of them. CRWUA (in Las Vegas) is the other one.
We specifically try to be different than CRWUA. We’re the opposite end of the calendar, roughly six months away. CRWUA is in many respects much more of a social event. We try to be more academic and about policy, with serious talk about serious issues. CRWUA, just like us, ebbs and flows from year to year in terms of what it looks like. But we try to be a little more hard-hitting and less of a, you know, take-the-family-and-have-a-vacation sort of event. I don’t mean to sound like I’m negative on CRWUA. I think we’re the perfect compliment.
Aside from that, there are some meetings such as CLE, Continuing Legal Education. It always has a Colorado River event. This year was quite good. Many other years, it’s not as strong. For practicing attorneys, that’s something that they want to go to every year, because they can get some credits there.
Still another one in New Mexico that’s held each year kind of commemorates the signing of the compact.
How do you measure success? I’m sure you constantly ask that question of yourself.
You understand the challenge of it all. We can measure success by the size of the crowd and that they mostly seemed to have a good time. In that sense, that’s success.
The other side of that is that we’ve been focused just on the Colorado River issues for the last five or six of these, and things have only gotten worse on the river. Obviously, we don’t think we’re to blame for that. But clearly, there’s no great success story that we can lay credit to either.
So I think we’re successful in that we promote conversation and the exchange of ideas, and we shine a light on new and innovative ideas, and we give a voice to people who sometimes don’t have a voice. This is where the tribes come into play again.
Some elements I think are successful, but in the very big scope of things, the issues that we’ve been addressing in our conference aren’t getting any better. It does force me to think about (and question) whether there is a better way for us to make a difference. I don’t know what that would be, but I do think about that a lot.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
The Trump administration is attacking public lands again, this time in an apparent effort to open more special places to off-road vehicles. Late last Friday, Trump issued an executive order revoking a Nixon-era policy aimed at ensuring “that the use of off-road vehicles on public lands will be controlled and directed so as to protect the resources of those lands, to promote the safety of all users of those lands, and to minimize conflicts among the various uses of those lands.”
No, this does not mean unfettered swarms of ATVs will be kicking up dust on your favorite public lands next week. But it does bolster the off-road vehicle lobby’s effort to open up motorized access to federal lands, and takes away one of the long-term planning tools used by land management agencies to protect those places from off-road vehicle use and abuse.
In the nearer-term, Trump’s order could end or diminish the ban on OHVs in national parks, allowing the vehicles to travel backroads in, say, Capitol Reef National Park. This might not sound so bad: If a three-ton SUV can drive there, why not let a smaller side-by-side or four-wheeler on the same road?
The answer lies in the nature of the newer OHVs, namely “side-by-sides” or razors, which more closely resemble souped-up dune buggies than conventional SUVs. While some people use OHVs as mere modes of transportation, the vehicles are more commonly treated and utilized like recreational playthings — very powerful, fast, and noisy toys that tend to travel in herds. They therefore bring their own type of impacts.
Alpine Loop Backcountry Scenic Byway near Lake City, Ouray, Powderhorn, Ridgway, Silverton Credit: ColoradoDirectory.com
Anyone who has traveled on or hiked around the Alpine Loop in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado on a busy summer day has likely experienced these particular impacts first-hand. Those roads were first opened up to OHVs in the early 2000s. Since then Alpine Loop traffic numbers have exploded, with at least half of the motorized traffic made up of OHVs.
Law enforcement officers now spend a disproportionate amount of time and energy trying to keep the OHV drivers on designated routes and in compliance with traffic laws. OHV crashes, often resulting in serious injury, are not uncommon. And each summer several riders surrender to the temptation to illegally leave the road — these are off-road vehicles, after all — and rip across the tundra, causing irreversible damage. Unlike regular vehicles, OHVs tend to travel in herds, spewing exhaust and kicking up dust, their collective buzzing reaching far beyond the roads on which they travel. It has become almost impossible during the high season to completely escape the incessant din of OHVs on the Alpine Loop, even in wilderness study areas.
This same phenomenon could now be coming to a national park near you.
The administration claims it eliminated the policy because it was outdated, vague, and redundant, because Congress has since passed a host of other laws protecting public lands from OHVs and other uses. The order goes on to say:
This makes very little sense. Sure, the restrictions on OHVs could hamper energy or timber development if it required destructive off-road vehicle use, but you’re not going to haul a drill rig into the backcountry on a side-by-side. And the idea that a hiker might feel “banned” from a trail because they couldn’t ride get there on an OHV is just silly.
The dubious statement reeks of the rhetoric of the crowd that claims that motorized vehicle restrictions are locking folks out of public lands, and therefore are discriminating against the type of people who drive these vehicles. But the discrimination claim simply does not fly. Mountain bikes are banned from wilderness areas, from a majority of trails in national parks, from some trails on BLM land, and are not allowed to ride off-trail on all federal land. This has nothing to do with the people who ride the bikes, or even the funny clothes they tend to wear, and everything to do with the vehicles’ potential impacts.
Trump probably did this at the behest of the Blue Ribbon Coalition and the likes of Sen. Mike Lee, who has pushed legislation that would open up national parks to OHVs. Maybe he’s trying to garner support from somewhere, given his terrible favorability ratings. Or perhaps he’s trying to appease the motorized crowd, which is probably a bit miffed that their drug of choice — gasoline — is so damned expensive thanks to Donny’s dumb war. Maybe he’s even trying to increase national park entry fee revenues so he can funnel it to his ballroom/drone-port or his White House UFC fight.
Near Hite with the Henry Mountains. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
🐟 Colorado River Chronicles 💧
It pretty much goes without saying that if next winter is as bad as this past winter, in terms of mountain snowpack, then the collective users of the Colorado River and its infrastructure will be toast — at least figuratively (maybe literally, too?). Now, my favorite team of Colorado River wonks1 [Anne Castle, Jack Schmidt, Eric Kuhn, Kathryn Sorensen, Katherine Tara] have crunched the latest water numbers, and they’ve found that even a nearly “normal” winter won’t stop depletion of “reasonably accessible storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, leading to “devastating consequences.”
Back in 1999, the Colorado River’s storage system, which consists of Lake Powell, Lake Mead, and several other smaller reservoirs in the Upper and Lower basins, was almost full, holding about 60 million acre-feet of active, or available, storage. This provided a robust savings account that could be tapped during the inevitable dry spells on the notoriously fluctuating river system.
The reserve, however, was not adequate for the megadrought — or long-term aridification — that started in 2000 and continues today. Instead of following the usual up-down cycle, the Colorado River’s flows began a downward trend that is on track to hit its lowest point so far this water year, while consumptive use stayed more or less steady. Demand exceeded supply more years than not, drawing the savings account down significantly. That has forced the Bureau of Reclamation to take extraordinary measures, such as reducing downstream releases and tapping upstream reservoirs, to keep Lake Powell’s surface level from dropping below 3,500 feet, or what I call de facto dead pool 2.
Thanks in part to extra releases from Flaming Gorge Reservoir in May, Lake Powell’s surface level climbed slightly to 3,528 feet last month. Given that spring runoff in the Upper Basin has peaked and most tributary flows are decreasing, we can expect that number to start dropping, perhaps precipitously, at least until the monsoon arrives.
The wonks wanted an idea of how things might play out in the slightly longer-term, so they modeled two scenarios:
In the first scenario, they assume that the Colorado River’s natural flow, or the estimated amount of water in the river without human consumption or interference, will be similar to water year 2025, when the mountain snowpack was below average but not nearly as slim as this year. They also assume that consumptive uses will remain at the lowest levels in recent years.
Natural flow: 8.5 MAF at Lees Ferry + .70 MAF from Grand Canyon and Virgin River = 9.20 MAF Consumptive use: 3.56 MAF Upper Basin (includes evaporation and other losses) + 8.23 MAF Lower Basin + Mexico (incl. evap and other losses) = 11.79 MAF Deficit and resulting reservoir drawdown: 2.59 MAF Realistically accessible storage (RAS) remaining in Mead, Powell, and Flaming Gorge: 3.63 MAF
For the second, they plug in snowpack/flow numbers similar to those from water year 2023, which was a huge winter. Consumptive use would be about the same as in 2023.
Under the first scenario, the BoR will almost certainly have to go to a run-of-the-river situation on Glen Canyon Dam to defend 3,500 feet. That would mean releases would be approximately equal to inflows minus evaporation and seepage from the reservoir, and might drop to 3,000 to 4,000 cubic feet per-second or even lower. In the summer of 2002 inflows at times dropped below 1,000 cfs. This would turn the river through the Grand Canyon into a relative trickle, and cause a significant drawdown of Lake Mead.
The second scenario would be far better, but is far from an enduring solution. At best it would buy a little time, perhaps enough for the feds to build bypass tunnels around Glen Canyon Dam to allow for sustained releases below 3,500 feet. If it were followed by another three or four 2023-like winters, then things would start to look pretty darned good.
But if it were followed by just one more dry year it would bring everything back to today’s rather dire situation.
Since there’s no way to bolster supplies, the only way out of this mess is to continue to slash demand. The paper’s authors write:
Oof.
As long as we’re on the topic, the BoR recently released its Lower Basin accounting report for 2025, which tallies up consumptive uses in the basin. As you can see from the following graphs, which the Land Desk whipped up using the BoR data, the Lower Basin uses significantly less water now than it did in 1999, just before the current megadrought began. Upper Basin consumptive use figures for 2025 are not yet available. The following figures do not include reservoir evaporation, conveyance losses, or Mexico’s use.
All three Lower Basin states have substantially reduced Colorado River water consumption since 1999. However, more cuts will be needed if current climatic and streamflow trends continue. Data: USBR, Graphic: The Land Desk
🤖 Data Center Watch 👾
Has Enchant Energy finally found a raison d’être? The Farmington-based company was created in 2019 to try to save the San Juan coal-fired power plant from retirement by retrofitting it with carbon capture equipment. Enchant would then sell the carbon to oil producers in the Permian Basin, while also receiving generous federal tax credits. Basically they wanted to turn the power plant into a taxpayer subsidized carbon dioxide factory. It flopped for various reasons. Now the San Juan plant — and all of its pollution — are no more. We suspected Enchant Energy had met a similar fate.
But then I received a press release letting me know the not-so-up upstart is not dead, but has instead signed a letter of intent with Creekstone Energy to capture carbon from the tech firm’s proposed hyperscale Delta Gigasite data center in Delta, Utah. As is often the case, Creekstone touts all of the renewable energy it plans on building for its center, but the first phase will be powered by natural gas, which emits carbon dioxide.
Enchant hopes to capture the carbon from the gas plant and convert it into marketable fuel. The company has apparently given up on trying to give coal-burning a slightly more climate-friendly veneer (after all, Trump has declared coal to be “clean” and “beautiful”). Instead, it looks like they’re jumping on the data center bandwagon, along with wannabe nuclear reactor developers and the like.
Who knows, maybe this is the thing that finally gives Enchant some meaning. But we’re not holding our breath. After spending gobs of money on lobbying, pulling in some hefty federal grants, then failing spectacularly with the San Juan generating bid, Enchant partnered with another firm and tried to buy the Intermountain coal plant in Delta to use it to power its own data center. That didn’t work, either.
Dolores Canyon solar project outside of Cahone, Colorado, with Airproduct’s apparently defunct helium plant on the right. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
🔋Notes from the Energy Transition 🔌
Yes, the energy transition may have run into some stumbling blocks, i.e. the Trump administration’s hatred for anything that might compete with coal and oil and gas, but it’s still quietly underway. For example, out by the aforementioned, defunct San Juan coal plant, DESRI recently broke ground on two utility-scale solar installations: the 170-megawatt Foxtail Flats solar-plus-battery storage array; and the 100-MW Four Mile Mesa solar-plus-storage project.
That’s some pretty serious generating capacity and adds to the existing San Juan solar facility nearby. Los Alamos County has signed on to purchase power from Foxtail Flats, and Meta will be drawing electricity Four Mile Mesa via PNM to power its data centers.
Both of the new facilities are under development on Ute Mountain Ute tribal land.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
In last week’s comments, ncoffey94 asked what kind of bike I ride. It’s a 2023 Niner RLT, with an aluminum frame, carbon fork, and SRAM Apex parts. It’s nothing fancy and isn’t super light. But I dig it for riding on the roads, dirt, and even singletrack. It’s got 40 mm tires, so isn’t so great in the sand, and with no suspension I don’t do big drops or super-cobbly stuff. But it sure is nice having just one bike for all uses.
Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson.
1Anne Castle, Jack Schmidt, Eric Kuhn, Kathryn Sorensen, and Katherine Tara.
2 Water can no longer be released through the penstocks and hydropower turbine below 3,500 feet, forcing dam operators to rely on the lower river outlets for all downstream water releases. Those outlets are not engineered for sustained, long-term use, however, and could be damaged. The feared scenario looks kind of like this: The penstocks are closed; the river outlets release water faster than reservoir inflows; the reservoir surface level drops down to, say, 3,450 feet; the river outlets get damaged so must be shut down altogether, trapping the remaining water behind the dam and halting all releases until the water climbs back up to 3,500 feet. This would effectively dry up the Grand Canyon and cause Lake Mead to start plummeting as well. Of course, no one wants this to happen, so BoR is doing all it can to defend 3,500 feet, making that level the effective dead pool, even though technically 3,370 feet (the river outlet elevation) is the actual dead pool.
Click the link to read the article on the Associated Press website (Susan Montoya Bryan). Here’s an excerpt:
May 27, 2026
In a brief order Tuesday, the court accepted the recommendation of a special master to move forward with agreements first proposed last year by New Mexico, Texas and Colorado. The settlement calls for reducing groundwater pumping along the dwindling river and retiring water rights from irrigated farmland in southern New Mexico. The states held up the proposal as a promise to restore order to an elaborate system of storing and sharing water between two vast irrigation districts in southern New Mexico and western Texas.
“We’re very excited to be redirecting resources from costly and lengthy litigation to solutions on the ground,” Hanna Riseley-White, director of the Interstate Stream Commission, said Wednesday…
Those solutions will include everything from long-term fallowing programs and more efficient irrigation infrastructure to developing new sources of water, like tapping brackish supplies or importing water, and improving stormwater management so more runoff can be captured and stored.
The energy-efficient desalination system produces fresh water without chemical additives and transforms leftover salts into useful materials.
Big takeaways
A new desalination method produces drinking water from seawater without chemical additives.
The solar-powered system uses specially engineered black metal to absorb sunlight.
Its self-cleaning surface separates and collects salts, instead of dumping them as harmful brine waste.
From the salts, the system can extract lithium, a key material for rechargeable batteries.
The approach could help address global water shortages and growing mineral demand.
The United Nations estimates that 2.2 billion people lack safely managed drinking water, and communities from California to the Middle East rely on desalination plants to convert ocean water to fresh water. Common desalination techniques, such as reverse osmosis and thermal distillation, are energy-intensive, require pre- and post-water treatment, and leave behind a concentrated saltwater byproduct called brine. The brine byproduct wreaks havoc on sea life when it’s deposited back into the ocean by raising the salt level and lowering oxygen in the water.
But a novel approach developed at the University of Rochester offers a way to overcome these drawbacks. Researchers at URochester’s Institute of Optics developed a new solar-thermal desalination process to produce fresh water in an energy-efficient way that does not leave behind brine and requires no chemical additives to pre-treat the water. A team led by Chunlei Guo, a professor of optics and of physics and a senior scientist at URochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics, describes their method in a paper published in Light: Science & Applications.
Vials of l-r: seawater, Great Salt Lake water, nickel and phosphorus waste, and desalinated water along with evaporated salt are pictured in the lab of University of Rochester professor Chunlei Guo April 8, 2026. Guo and his team have a paper coming out in Light: Science and Applications that describes new solar-powered ocean water desalination devices he engineered that feature his superwicking laser-etched black metal. The devices are highly efficient compared to current desalination methods and the new process doesn’t produce the brine waste that current methods do. The process takes ocean water (they collected smaples from three continents) and breaks it down into fresh water and salts. // photo by J. Adam Fenster / University of Rochester
The technology uses solar panels made of black metal etched with femtosecond lasers to make the surface super light-absorbing and superwicking—or extremely attractive to water. The panels have a laser-treated active region that pulls a thin layer of water across the surface, absorbs nearly all solar radiation, distills the water, and deposits the leftover salts and minerals into the panel’s untreated sides or “passive” region so that the salt does not clog the active region and disrupt continuous desalination.
Leveraging the ‘coffee ring’ effect
Guo says other researchers have developed solar-thermal desalination techniques that work well in lab experiments using simulated seawater made of only water and sodium chloride. As the water evaporates, the sodium chloride crystallizes in a grainy and porous fashion allowing water to pass through to dissolve the salt. The solar panels, meanwhile, can be easily cleaned.
But real ocean has a much more complex composition, and these systems tend to encounter issues when tested in the field. Unlike sodium chloride, many other components in seawater, such as magnesium- and calcium-based materials, crystallize in a crusty and non-porous fashion on the solar panel’s surface, clogging it. Eventually, water can no longer seep through. This is the same phenomenon as your shower head clogging over time or your teapot lined with scales, except that seawater contains hundreds of times more salts than your tap water.
To keep their solar panel surface from gumming up similarly, Guo’s team precisely etched the black metal’s grooves so the various salts and minerals in ocean water would simply slough off. They also leveraged a physical phenomenon that has plagued clumsy javaphiles for centuries: the coffee ring effect.
“If you drop coffee on a surface, eventually the water evaporates, and there’s a ring left at the outer edge that is the concentrated coffee particles,” says Guo. “We use that same principle to advance the salts to the passive region.”
Testing their solar-thermal desalination technique using samples of water from the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans, Guo and his team were able to make the surface self-cleaning. In other words, it extracted freshwater and directed the remaining salts to the passive region where they could be later collected without reducing the panel’s efficiency.
Vials of l-r: seawater, Great Salt Lake water, Nickel(II) sulfate (NiSO4) and Copper(II) chloride wastewater, and desalinated water along with evaporated salt are pictured in the lab of University of Rochester professor Chunlei Guo April 8, 2026. Guo and his team have a paper coming out in Light: Science and Applications that describes new solar-powered ocean water desalination devices he engineered that feature his superwicking laser-etched black metal. The devices are highly efficient compared to current desalination methods and the new process doesn’t produce the brine waste that current methods do. The process takes ocean water (they collected smaples from three continents) and breaks it down into fresh water and salts. // photo by J. Adam Fenster / University of Rochester
Turning waste into resources
One of the new desalination method’s distinct advantages is that instead of leaving behind brine that must be disposed of or processed, it extracts nearly 100 percent of the salts in solid form. This could not only produce an abundant supply of table salt, but it could also be used to extract more precious minerals, including lithium, which is used in the lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles and other electronics.
In a related paper in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A, Guo and his colleagues show how they can use the same superwicking solar panels to separate lithium from the rest of other salts in desalination. Embedding nanoparticles made of hydrogen titanate in the tiny grooves of the black metal surface isolates the lithium from other salts and minerals.
“Mining lithium from the earth has proven to be very taxing from an energy and environmental standpoint, so pulling lithium directly from saltwater could be a very important future route,” says Guo.
Using water samples from Great Salt Lake, the researchers extracted about 50 percent of the lithium from the salts left behind by the desalination process.
Guo says now that the superwicking desalination technology has been demonstrated in proofs of concept on small-scale devices, he sees the technology inherently scalable, capable of improving global access to drinking water and building more sustainable supply chains for precious minerals.
The National Science Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Worldwide Universities Network supported this research. Guo’s colleagues from the Institute of Optics who contributed to the research include Senior Scientist Subash Singh, alumnus Ran Wei ’24 (PhD), PhD students Luheng Tang and Tainshu Xu, and Mingjiang Ma.
Each stage of a big construction project has its own challenges and puzzles to solve along the way. Raising Gross Dam is no different.
Denver Water is raising the height of the dam by 131 feet, with the final 22 feet going up this spring in two sections that are separated by a giant gap. The Gross Reservoir Expansion Project, which began construction in 2022, is designed to nearly triple the reservoir’s storage capacity. Major construction work resumed in April following a winter break.
And this year’s construction puzzles included:
How to move concrete across a 160-foot gap between where the concrete is made and where it’s placed?
And, how do you move construction vehicles across that same gap when work on the first section is finished?
“We are building the top of the dam in two sections because we need to leave a 160-foot gap in the middle of the dam for the spillway channel,” said Casey Dick, Denver Water’s deputy program manager for the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project.
Denver Water is building the last 22 feet of Gross Dam in two sections. The photo shows the left side at its new height. The right side’s last 22 feet will be finished in June. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Spillway channels are safety features on dams that allow water to safely flow out of a reservoir if needed due to flooding rains or exceptionally high and rapid snowmelt.
Raising the dam’s last two major sections, while leaving a 160-foot gap between them, meant coming up with a new way to move concrete across the construction site.
On the lower portion of the dam, crews worked on one continuous structure, which allowed trucks and equipment to easily move from one side of the dam to the other, and to move concrete from the batch plant down a large chute to where it was put into place.
However, with the final 22 feet going up in two sections, construction crews had to find a way to deliver concrete from the batch plant and across the 160-foot spillway gap as the first section went up.
The solution to this puzzle? A series of conveyors positioned in the middle of the dam that tilted higher as the first section rose higher.
“Building the new conveyor system is just another example of all the ingenuity we go through out here to build the dam,” Dick said. “With each new phase, there are new challenges that our team has to figure out.”
The new conveyor system moved concrete across the gap where the spillway channel will be to the far side of the dam. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Construction crews finished placing roller-compacted concrete on the dam’s left side on May 12.
But once that was done, crews faced the second challenge: How do you move the equipment off the finished, 22-foot higher section of the dam, across the spillway gap, down to where they are needed to complete the second section?
Short answer: If you can’t go over, go around.
Cranes lifted equipment off the higher section of the dam to the road, where the machines convoyed about 4.5 miles around to the other side using the dam’s access road.
A crane lifts a piece of equipment off the dam. Because of the new spillway gap, equipment was driven across the dam’s access road to get into position on the other side of the dam. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Construction on the final 22 feet of the second side of the dam began at the end of May and is expected to be completed in June.
Once the second section is done this summer, a year’s worth of remaining work includes: finishing the top of the dam, building safety walls; constructing the actual spillway; building a bridge over the spillway and completing the stilling basin at the bottom of the dam.
This view from the bottom of the dam shows the new baffle blocks on the bottom of the stilling basin. The baffle blocks reduce the energy of the water that flows down the spillway. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Full construction on the dam raising project is expected to wrap up in mid-2027.
“There are hundreds of logistical challenges throughout this project, but our team has been able to meet every one of them along the way,” Dick said. “We’re making good progress so far in 2026 and are looking forward to getting a lot of work done in the coming months.”
The Gross Reservoir Expansion Project involves raising the height of the existing dam by 131 feet. The dam will be built out and will have “steps” made of roller-compacted concrete to reach the new height. Image credit: Denver Water
A mini-sandstorm partially obscures the Bullfrog Marina on Lake Powell. Dropping reservoir levels are forcing officials to move the marina to a deeper part of the lake. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Maybe sitting next to the wall of plate glass windows was not the smartest move, I thought, as a sienna-colored cloud of sand lifted up from the lakeside and made its way in my direction. I had just tucked into my $16 grilled chicken sandwich at the Anasazi Restaurant at Bullfrog Marina on Lake Powell when the wind kicked up, sandblasting the windows and causing a sizable milk crate to slide back and forth along the railings of the patio outside. It was an eerie scene. Had this been an apocalyptic cli-fi film set in a calamitously aridified West, this would have been the moment when a pterodactyl-like creature smashed through the window and plopped down all bloody and sandy in my plate of fries, an omen of the horrors to come.
It was not, however, a film. The dystopian scene was real as was the aridification, though it did not include any prehistoric creatures — only a handful of staff and other diners who, much to my dismay, seemed utterly unperturbed by the sandstorm and the havoc it was wreaking on a set of outdoor furniture. And, outside, a few ravens who seemed delighted to frolic in the gusts’ updrafts.
When we think of climate change’s effects, we might imagine communities inundated by rising seas, unhoused folks exposed to ever more severe heat waves, or entire towns wiped out by megafires. I was here at Bullfrog to see how a warmer and drier climate is affecting the communities, infrastructure, and economies that rose up around and depend upon Lake Powell-based recreation.
Bullfrog is the largest and most extensive marina on Lake Powell’s northern end. It has a 48-room hotel, the aforementioned restaurant, a gas station and convenience store, an RV park, and other lodging, along with its own school, which this year had four students in grades K-6. The population of some 50 to 100 consists mostly of employees of the National Park Service and Aramark, the private concessionaire that runs the reservoir’s marinas and other facilities. Nearby Ticaboo, which lies outside Glen Canyon National Recreation Area but also relies on Lake Powell recreation, has another 50 to 100 residents. The nearest incorporated town is Hanksville, some 67 miles to the north.
Bullfrog Creek along the southern end of the Burr Trail and Bullfrog Bay on Lake Powell in the distance. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Bullfrog lies at the end of the road on a bay at the mouth of Bullfrog Creek, where the water is shallower than on the main channel of the Colorado River, making the marina and its facilities more vulnerable to dropping water levels. While the main boat ramp is still being used, it will likely become unusable later this summer as the reservoir’s surface levels falls toward 3,500 feet. In coming weeks, the entire floating marina will be towed across the reservoir to deeper water adjacent to Halls Crossing Marina; Bullfrog’s fuel and boat rental docks have already been moved. The ferry between Bullfrog and Halls Crossing isn’t functional at low water levels, so is expected to be out of commission for the rest of this year, making for a 145-mile car trip between the facilities at Bullfrog and the boat ramps and marina at Halls Crossing.
I visited Bullfrog on a Sunday in mid-May. Because I needed to do some internet-related work early on Monday morning, I stayed in the hotel. I initially regretted not staying in the campground, since it was mostly empty and had a strong cell phone signal, but when the tent-shredding winds and skin blasting sands kicked up I was happy to be ensconced in more secure lodging, especially given the relatively reasonable price.
It was the high tourist season elsewhere in Canyon Country. The trailhead parking lots at Capitol Reef National Park were all full or overflowing that morning as I drove through, and Torrey had been busy during my stay there for a writing conference. As I slowly made my way down the Notom Road and Burr Trail, stopping frequently to gaze at the curves and crevices in the Waterpocket Fold and for a quick bike ride, I saw maybe a half-dozen other vehicles.
Waterpocket Fold. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Waterpocket Fold detail. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Bullfrog, meanwhile, was decidedly quiet. The hotel was nearly empty. Only a few sites in the RV park were occupied, and I later saw that most of the sites were out of order and closed. A couple of dozen cars, at the very most, were parked on the only operable boat ramp. The shelves on the little convenience store were sparsely stocked, and a box of Triscuits was going for $7.50 — though there was no cheese to accompany them — and gas was selling for $5.17. In May of 2000, the Bullfrog District received 33,000 visits, according to National Park Service statistics; in May 2025 only 10,886 visitors passed through the entrance gate. Current numbers aren’t yet available, but I imagine this year’s visitation will be far lower. And once the boat ramp ceases to function, I imagine the numbers will plummet further.
Boats, redrock, and snowy Henry Mountains at Bullfrog Marina. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
The National Park Service is planning to build a new, deeper-water boat launch at Stanton Creek, a couple of miles from central Bullfrog, where the marina can be moved permanently. The project is expected to cost some $73 million, and won’t be completed this year. It’s a type of climate adaptation, I suppose, though one can’t help wonder how long the fix will last if the reservoir’s levels keep dropping.
Meanwhile, Bullfrog’s future is in doubt. A series of especially snowy winters in the high country might be enough to bring Bullfrog back from the edge of obsolescence. Maybe they won’t even need the Stanton Creek site. On the other hand, just one more below-average snowpack year could doom Lake Powell altogether. If Colorado River flows don’t increase substantially in the next year or two, the Bureau of Reclamation will have little choice but to build tunnels to bypass Glen Canyon Dam and effectively drain the reservoir in order to keep water running into the Grand Canyon and on to Lake Mead.
The question then would be whether Bullfrog could (or would even want to) adapt to a different sort of tourism.
The place might try to cater to hikers and small-watercraft users looking to check out newly revealed parts of Glen Canyon that have been inundated for the last several decades. And it could lure travelers exploring the greater region’s backcountry, though it’s not clear that type of visitor is going to be interested in the type of accommodations and services Bullfrog currently offers. Maybe it will just become a destination for disaster-tourist voyeurs looking to see the effects of climate change in real-time. Or, perhaps Bullfrog will become another Hite Marina, which the shrinking reservoir has left high and dry, its boat ramp separated from the lake by some six miles, the store and campground permanently shuttered and gated off.
Sightseers at Hite Overlook gazing down at the “Dominy Formation” of silt left behind by the receding waters of Lake Powell. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Hite Marina and boat ramp on what once was the northern end of Lake Powell. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
The last time I visited Bullfrog was in the late 1980s. My dad, my brother, and I camped at Halls Crossing, then woke up and rode the ferry across the lake. From there we made an epic loop around and over the Henry Mountains along the then-unimproved Burr Trail and another gnarly road in our 1967 Pontiac Catalina. It took at least eight hours and involved some extensive road-building to keep the boat-like vehicle from bottoming out. Anyway, I remember Bullfrog as being a bustling resort with a sort of spring break party vibe, relative to the more bare-bones Halls Crossing. Of course, those were the glory days for Lake Powell, when the reservoir was full, and at the end of a bone-jarring drive across the desert one could stop at the Hite Marina for refreshments.
That night I listened to the sand batter the sliding glass door of my hotel room. The next morning, the reservoir’s placid waters reflected dawn’s first light, and the distant sandstone dunes seemed to glow from within. And to the north, a fresh coating of snow covered the craggy slopes of the Henry Mountains, promising a little bit of relief from these dry and trying times.
Henry Mountains. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
📸 Parting Shots 🎞️
Early light, the Colorado River canyon, and the Henry Mountains from the White Canyon drainage. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Apache Plume and canyon in Utah. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
May 26, 2026
Dissonance exists between life-close-to-normal policies regarding urban water use and the growing crisis on the river
Casually surveying the urban landscapes in much of Colorado’s Front Range, you’d never know that the Colorado River — the source for roughly half the water of the cities — has deteriorated to its most pitiful shape of perhaps the last century.
Oh, yes, some utilities — notably Denver Water and Aurora Water, which together serve 1.9 million residents — have imposed rigorous stage-one drought watering restrictions. Outdoor irrigation is allowed twice per week and never during the heat of day. Other water utilities that tap Colorado River water, however, have asked only for voluntary cutbacks, if any at all.
Jeff Lukas via the Western Water Assessment.
Jeff Lukas, a water consultant with several decades invested in climate change work, says this seeming aloofness of some cities will not persist indefinitely. That is certainly true if the record heat and abnormal dryness of the past winter continues into 2027. They may have no choice.
“I think Front Range cities will be asked, whether nicely or not, to reduce their Colorado River diversions,” said Lukas in a May 11 webinar. “The mechanism for that is unclear, but I think it’s going to happen.”
Water rights of the Front Range cities — and many of those on the Western Slope, too — are junior to the Colorado River Compact. It was negotiated in 1922, making diversions more recent than that junior.
Problems in the basin were becoming apparent in the 1990s. The warming climate in this century has provoked changes. By all accounts, they have not been enough.
Lukas, as a dendrochronologist at the Institute of Alpine and Arctic Research in Boulder 20 years ago, was teasing out evidence from tree rings to understand the climates of the Colorado River Basin during the last 1,200 years.
Later, as a scientist with the Western Water Assessment, Lukas co-authored (with Liz Peyton) a 2020 report called Colorado River Basin Climate and Hydrology: State of the Science. That 500-page report integrated more than 800peer-reviewed studies to help water managers understand physical processes, climate risks, and forecasting tools across the basin.
In 2024, with the state climatologist, Russ Schumacher, and several others, Lukas turned out the 100-page volume called “Climate Change in Colorado.”
Based in Lafayette, Lukas now works as a consultant. At Lukas Climate Research and Consulting, he specializes in the overlapping areas of climate hazards, water resources, and ecosystems.
Lukas, in a presentation he titled “Running dry on the Colorado River: The roots of the crisis & its implications for the Front Range,” explained the big picture and Colorado’s Front Range part in it.
Defined by the Continental Divide, Colorado has an inverse relationship between its eastern and western slopes. About 90% of the state’s residents live to the east, nearly all at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, whereas 80% of the state’s precipitation originates on the west side, in the headwaters of the Colorado River and its tributaries.
Snow from the Gore Range and other “islands” of precipitation in Colorado provide 50% to 60% of the water in the Colorado River. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Colorado itself provides 50% to 60% of the water in the entire Colorado River, depending upon the year. This year has been a terrible year everywhere in the basin, Colorado included.
Lukas explained that “islands of moisture” provide nearly all the water in this 244,000-square-mile basin. The high mountains constitute these islands. Some places deliver more than others. Buffalo Pass, near Steamboat, famously has had prodigious volumes of snow. This snow, when melted, can produce 50 inches of water.
It takes 20 inches or more of precipitation in these mountain islands to produce meaningful runoff. Even then, it doesn’t all end up in the Colorado River. In Colorado and the three upper-basin states, he said, 16% of the rain and snow that falls becomes water in the Colorado River. In the hotter lower basin, the figure is 3%.
“The atmosphere takes back most of what it giveth, even in the wetter upper basin,” he said.
Evaporation and transpiration are the pickpockets of this water. Heat produces evaporation, and we’ve had plenty of that this year.
Temperatures during November through April were the warmest on record in Colorado for that span of months. March heat was exceptional. This produced runoff in the rivers that in most cases may surpass that of May or June, the traditional times for peak runoff. Peak runoff has been trending earlier by several weeks during the last few decades, but this was a leap of about two months.
Runoff for April through July — a time that normally accounts for 70% to 80% of annual streamflows — this year will likely deliver no better than 20% to 40%. In its May report, the Bureau of Reclamation said April flows into Lake Powell were 40% of the average during the last 30 years and it expects flows in May to sink to 9% of that average.
Can it get any worse? Count on it, said Lukas.
“We should expect not every year to look like 2026 from here on out, but more years in the future will look like 2026. And somewhere down the pipe, not as far in the future as we would like, there will be a year worse than 2026 for the Colorado River.”
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
This is so very different from what was assumed by the delegates from the seven basin states who gathered in 1922 in Santa Fe to apportion the Colorado River.
The role of reservoirs
Taking the big, long-term view, Lukas pointed out that the overall story of the Colorado River is one of modifications needed to suit human uses. “It’s all about smoothing out the natural variability in the availability of water over space and over time.”
Reservoirs are the primary means by which humans have been able to “smooth out the natural variability.”
The Colorado River Basin has 60 million acre-feet of storage. That’s four times the annual flow. Five-sixths of the storage capacity is found in the desert in two vessels: lakes Mead and Powell. The headwaters have many reservoirs but they are relatively small. The total storage capacity is 2,000 times more than the volume of Dillon Reservoir.
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
Since 2000, stored water in those two big buckets, Mead and Powell, has declined from 49 million acre-feet to 16 million acre-feet as of May. Of that, 9 million lies at elevations below the lowest outlets. These are called dead pools.
Those delegates in 1922 who crafted the Colorado River Compact, the legal document that provided the basis for nearly all these dams and aqueducts subsequently built, assumed annual flows of 17 million to 18 million acre-feet. They were overly optimistic. The 20th century average was 15.2 million acre-feet.
Now comes the 21st century, and the average at Lee Ferry has dipped to 12.2 million acre-feet. This has implications for the Front Range cities but also farms. If Colorado must reduce its diversions to accord with the compact, those rights dated before 1922 will be exempt from reductions. The giant transmountain diversions have come more recently, as have many of the diversions for towns and cities on the Western Slope.
Accumulating evidence fingers human-caused climate change with large amounts of responsibility for declined flows. Lukas said his rule of thumb is that the role of greenhouse gases overall are responsible for two-thirds of lower flows.
Colorado statewide annual temperature anomaly (°F) with respect to the 1901-2000 average. Graphic credit: Colorado Climate Center
As for the mechanics of this shift, rising heat is one important “knob,” said Lukas. As the atmosphere warms, it reduces “runoff efficiency” even more, sending water into the atmosphere instead of into streams and then rivers. Accumulating evidence fingers human-caused climate change with responsibility for most and possibly all of increased temperatures.
Precipitation has declined about 5% since 2000, with a larger reduction in spring, an important time of year to get moisture. Here, the link to the warming climate is less clear. “It seems increasingly likely that climate change is changing the dynamics of storm tracks and the persistence of, say, high-pressure systems over the interior West,” said Lukas. “That is, at least in part, responsible for why we’ve had less precipitation since 2000.”
The Colorado River, though, had problems even before the warming climate began throwing sharp elbows in water volumes. The reservoirs of the Colorado River Basin were 92% full in 1999, a wet decade overall. Even then, however, the Colorado River had ceased to reach the Pacific Ocean. There were too many straws inserted.
Less than 12% of the river’s flow goes to urbanized and industrial uses. Lukas pointed out that cities have become more efficient in their use of water. The rule of thumb for Denver and other Western cities is that one acre-feet of water meets the needs of a three households on an annual basis. That compares with two households a few decades ago.
Mining of fossil fuels and minerals uses a small amount. Evaporation from reservoirs and rivers and other “system losses” accounts for about 15%.
That takes us to agriculture. It uses 75% of the river’s water in the Colorado River for irrigation on 5 million acres. Some of that land lies outside the basin itself. That includes the South Platte and Arkansas River valleys of eastern Colorado.
Over half of that water — about 9 million acre-feet — gets used to grow feed for livestock, mainly alfalfa and pasture grass.
Might cities want to cut deals with farmers to “share” the water? This discussion has been underway for at least 15 to 20 years. Some pilot projects in Colorado and elsewhere have been launched to see what this might look like. A strong proponent has been James Eklund, a water attorney in Denver. Others question how this is done and, for that matter, whether we want to do it. But certainly, water for urban uses has higher monetary value than growing hay to feed cattle.
Why the restraint of cities?
As for the Front Range cities, the big question is whether they are planning for a river that produces even less than it does now.
In 2024, Andy Mueller, the general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, suggested the need to start planning for a river that may deliver less than 10 million acre-feet in coming decades. Some thought then that the state engineer, Jason Ullman, needed to start sorting through this matter of junior vs. senior rights. Jim Lochhead, a former water attorney on the Western Slope and later CEO of Denver Water, pushed back, saying it was premature given the huge amount of work that would be required. See: “Heading for the Colorado River Cliff,” Big Pivots, Oct. 20, 2024.
At the Zoom session on May 11, I asked Lukas about the modest watering restrictions by Front Range water providers. He had previously described mixed signals from the water utilities. If 2027 is dry again, expect more uniformity around drought restrictions. “But it’s pretty weird right now,” he said.
With the attention to the Colorado River in the news media, it seemed like a perfect opportunity for the water utilities to mount more aggressive campaigns. Any idea why they had not, I wondered.
The utilities, he said, are reluctant to deliver regulations that produce discomfort around outdoor water-use restrictions. They don’t want to do this unless absolutely necessary.
Part of this is because of experiences during the covid epidemic. A lesson to public servants during that time made them more reluctant to push the public to do things they don’t want to do. “You only want to exercise that authority, that public legal authority, sparingly and only when it’s clear that is what is really necessary.”
Revenue was another consideration. Water infrastructure is expensive, and the money to pay for it comes from charges for water use. By imposing limits, you reduce revenue and hence must charge more for water. The conundrum is that reducing use doesn’t necessarily mean you pay less. In some cases, less water may require more infrastructure. This is a hard message to convey.
“What you’re seeing is a dissonance between the circumstances and what’s happening, at least this year,” he said.
Or at least right now. We have had rainy weather in May. Some meteorologists think we may end up with healthy rainfall this summer. If instead the summer is like the winter, very hot and dry, I expect the utilities might pick up their game.
View of Shoshone Hydroelectric Plant construction in Glenwood Canyon (Garfield County) Colorado; shows the Colorado River, the dam, sheds, a footbridge, and the workmen’s camp. Creator: McClure, Louis Charles, 1867-1957. Credit: Denver Public Library Digital Collections
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
May 22, 2026
For more than a year, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has withheld $40 million awarded to the Colorado River District for the purchase of the water rights attached to Xcel Energy’s aging Shoshone Power Plant in Glenwood Canyon. The release of the federal funding brings the total amount secured for the purchase to $97 million — just shy of the $99 million needed for the project. For years, the river district — a taxpayer-funded agency based in Glenwood Springs that works to protect Western Slope water — has worked to purchase the rights from the utility. Its leaders want to ensure that, even in dry years, the billions of gallons of water the rights command continue to flow west through the canyon and to the communities, wildlife habitats and farms downstream. The district and other Western Slope entities feared the certainty of the flows would be threatened if another purchaser — like a Front Range utility — were able to snag the rights first. The purchase is a “once-in-a-generation” investment in securing Western Slope water supplies, said Andy Mueller, the general manager of the Colorado River District, in a news release Friday. The federal dollars will add to the $20 million contributed by the Colorado Water Conservation Board and the $37 million raised by the district from Western Slope governments, organizations and irrigators.
“This award is a major breakthrough in our coalition’s effort to permanently secure historic flows on the Colorado River,” he said…
The federal funding brings the Shoshone water rights deal — originally inked in 2023 — one step closer to completion. Xcel Energy still needs approval for the sale from Colorado’s public utility regulators, and the river district m
The cover of a new book I’ve just published, Storm in My Head, a collection of poetry written over the 60 years I’ve been living in the headwaters of the Colorado River, since 1966 — George Sibley
This is the cover of a new book I’ve just published, Storm in My Head, a collection of poetry written over the 60 years I’ve been living in the headwaters of the Colorado River, since 1966. My 60-year celebration. Those of you who prefer your literature in sprints and strolls over the marathon essays I impose on you might enjoy this book. I’m in the process of getting it distributed, and it may eventually be in a bookstore near you or on Amazon; but for the time being, if you are interested, an email to me, george@gard-sibley.org, will initiate a response on how to get a little money to me (10 bucks plus shipping) to get an inscribed copy wending its way to you.
End of advertisement – back to the river….
Romancing the River – Elephants in the River
The Colorado River situation is moving toward replacing the existing ‘Interim Guidelines’ for managing the river system with a new set of interim guidelines for managing the river system. This new set is devised mostly by the Bureau of Reclamation, which is growing a little desperate to avoid the embarrassment of having its river system cause the flow of the river to stop – ‘dead pool’ – behind one or another of its big dams, in a river management system built for a considerably larger Colorado River – now as mythic a river as the biblical four that flowed out of the Garden of Eden.
All this makes me think I’ll briefly abandon my historical update of Frederick Dellenbaugh’s Romance of the Colorado River, and try to sort through what has been happening recently in the present, most of which we’ve been reading or hearing about in the media.
Reports on the river’s flow after the Weirdest Winter Ever (at least in recorded time) have just gotten worse and worse; now the anticipated inflow to Powell Reservoir is 13 percent of the thirty-year average, from tributary runoffs that peaked as much as two months earlier than the usual early June. The Bureau of Reclamation’s 24-month projection indicates that, if last year’s releases from Powell were replicated this year, they might have to stop generating power by late summer to protect the power turbines – which in effect declares the remaining quarter of the reservoir’s potential storage ‘dead pool,’ since the only other way past Glen Canyon Dam is through four outflow tubes of questionable viability that the Bureau would like to use as little as possible.
The Bureau will address this with two emergency measures: first, by bringing a large quantity of stored water down the Green River from Flaming Gorge Reservoir, and second, by cutting releases from Powell Reservoir by close to two million acre-feet (maf) – which in turn will leave Mead Reservoir lower and diminish its power generation. This is an emergency plan that can nowise be considered long-range planning.
The Lower Basin states in turn have bumped up their willingness to take more shortages for the next couple years by roughly doubling shortages they have already agreed to accept – if the feds will pay them something for not using water that is not there. Their earlier cuts were basically just enough to finally start taking out of their individual allotments the system losses (mostly evaporation) they have been dismissing, with Bureau cooperation, as being met through ‘surplus flows’ that effectively disappeared when the Central Arizona Project came online in the 1990s.
The four Upper Basin states have responded by suggested that it might be time to bring in a facilitator or mediator to conduct the seven-state negotiations on future management planning. This launched an episode of fussing between the Lower and Upper Basins as to who first had that idea, with the other basin objecting to it. But no one seems to be totally opposed to the idea at this point, and it might happen.
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
But basically it all seems to be in reaction to an ‘emergency’ water year, with no advance on more long-range planning – and there is no reason to believe that this year in just a one-shot emergency like the 1977 water year. It is just the most extreme year in an extreme period – the past quarter century – that is probably the shape of the future in the Colorado River region, and there are no more Flaming Gorge reservoirs to draw down for the next emergency year….
It’s probably important to remember a distinction: there is a river, the Colorado River, and we have overlaid on that river a management systemfor managing the river’s water for its human uses, a system whose parts either store water or distribute stored water to users. But we do not directly ‘manage’ the river itself, which runs according larger ‘operators’ – to global climate factors that we can inadvertently change but do not directly control, to what is happening to precipitation that falls in the river’s watersheds, and to how much what lives on the land (including us) interacts with the flow both on and below the land surface.
That last point – the water ‘on and below the land surface’ – strikes me as very important but largely ignored in the stalemated negotiations. You remember the metaphor of ‘the elephant in the room’: a big thing that everyone in the room is trying to ignore because to acknowledge it is to open a can of worms? (Sorry, mixing metaphors here.)
Well, we have ‘elephants in the river’ – or rather maybe in the ‘box’ containing the sacred Law of the River, through which we try to manage to the river. That’s the box that we’re all supposed to be ‘thinking outside of.’ Beginning to work ‘outside the box’ on anything will open a can of worms, but… are we going to have any choice, further down the road when it will be even harder if the elephants in the river continue to be ignored?
Trying to think in an integrated way of the water under the land as well as that on the land is one of our elephants in the river. We need to keep in mind the distribution of the freshwater all land-based life depends on (basically a solar-distilled three percent of the ocean’s water). In our times more than half of the freshwater on the planet is ‘banked’ in mountain glaciers and the ice sheets of the polar regions and Greenland – although this fraction is gradually diminishing under the changing climate. Of the remaining 35-40 percent, most of it is groundwater – water that soaks into the land, nurturing nearly all of the plant life that is the foundational food, fuel and housing supply for the animal kingdom (including us). This leaves only a small fraction of the water on the surface – lakes, wetlands, streams and rivers – and this is also a diminishing fraction, as the warming climate increases sublimation and evaporation from all waters exposed to the sun’s increasing power.
Typical water well
Yet that is also the fraction of freshwater over which nearly all the human squabbling is happening. For a long time, until the last century-plus, that was all the water that most of the animal kingdom could access, but now we have – and use, not wisely – pumps that make the groundwater accessible too.
We also know that most of that small fraction of surface water is pretty intimately connected to the groundwater. A river is not just a drain for water that failed to soak into the ground; as a river runs through its low-elevation course in a watershed, it constantly interacts with the groundwater, gaining water when the land is wet and the ground is full of water, and giving water to the land, as gravity permits, when the land is dry.
Healthy mountain meadows and wetlands are characteristic of healthy headwater systems and provide a variety of ecosystem services, or benefits that humans, wildlife, rivers and surrounding ecosystems rely on. The complex of wetlands and connected floodplains found in intact headwater systems can slow runoff and attenuate flood flows, creating better downstream conditions, trapping sediment to improve downstream water quality, and allowing groundwater recharge. These systems can also serve as a fire break and refuge during wildfire, can sequester carbon in the floodplain, and provide essential habitat for wildlife. Graphic by Restoration Design Group, courtesy of American Rivers
This knowledge ought to drive us toward thinking of groundwater and surface water as a single water source – not just our awareness that pumping the land dry will also diminish the river, but also our awareness that irrigating the chronically dry lands from the streams and rivers not only grows more plants and animal foods that the dry land could – but some of that irrigation water also sinks below the root zone to recharge the groundwater. The city of Gunnison, where I live, bought a ranch adjacent to the city because the city leaders knew enough about alluvial water to know that their groundwater supply (several relatively shallow wells) depended on keeping that ranch under irrigation from the river — water mostly cleaned by the ground it passes through.
But back to the Colorado River, the fraction of the water that does not soak into the land is a larger fraction than you would find in gentler lands primarily because most of the water falls on mountains in winter as snow, which melts in a relatively short time period as the weather warms, too fast for all of it to sink into land that is often too steep or too rocky for absorbing it anyway. But even in that ‘runoff period,’ scientists are learning that a lot of the water in the stream in the ‘spring flood’ season is groundwater flowing in from saturated lands.
Despite knowing all this, however, we persist in fighting over the fraction of freshwater that flows in the river’s watersheds through the year in the Colorado River region (natural basin plus out-of-basin extensions), and pay little in a basin-wide way to the use and abuse of groundwater. Only Colorado – to the best of my knowledge – has tried statewide to legally integrate the use of surface waters and groundwater: since 1969 all groundwater users had to acquire water rights, in the same priority system with surface water users. And – before there was easy access to computers and spreadsheets – all groundwater uses going back almost a century were also integrated into that priority system, a massive ‘can of worms’ to negotiate.
What’s been happening in Colorado for 35 years then is the beginning of the intelligent management of an integrated surface-and-groundwater supply – apparently far too intelligent for the Trumpish agri-industrialists of the two largest Colorado River water users, Southern California and Arizona. Arizona was forced to develop a groundwater management plan (1970) for the areas of Arizona that would be served by the federal Central Arizona Project, in order to get Congress to pass the project; but the rest of the state has been pumping groundwater at prodigious rates, with surface subsidence as evidence of collapsing emptied aquifers that are lost forever. Most of California’s groundwater overpumping is up in the Central Valley, not ‘served’ by the Colorado River, but as Colorado River flows inexorably diminish in a warming world, there will be growing temptations to pump in the Imperial and Coachella Valleys.
I have not found figures for the amount of unregulated groundwater ‘mining’ that goes on in the Colorado river region, but the number and volume of aquifers that have collapsed and been lost due to water-mining would probably go a long way toward filling Mead and Powell Reservoirs. And if you pause for a second and think about it, storing water underground is probably better than storing it in open reservoirs under a desert sun.
That is not the only elephant in the Colorado River – and most of them lead back, one way or another to the Colorado River Compact. The ‘temporary’ two-basin division that has clearly become toxic. Acknowledgement that the compact commission’s original goal of a seven-state division is not just possible now, but has been realized, to everyone’s discontent, making the two-basin division nothing but a battleground. Acceptance of the fact that the diminished river will continue to diminish so long as we continue to put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere faster than the planet can absorb them. Acknowledgment of the fact that as the planet warms, surface storage in big desert reservoirs is a bad idea that will get worse. Acceptance of the fact that the reconvening of a compact commission is overdue, to formalize the seven-state division and its appropriative consequences. And maybe the biggest worm-can of all: are some reasonable, even moral, limits on the appropriation doctrine possible?
We’ll look at some of these other elephants in future posts here – which I think is where the ‘romance of the Colorado River’ is today. I also think we will never have a workable resolution to our current river-system problems until we take on the elephants and bump our own consciousness of water in the arid regions up a notch from the naive ‘conquest of the desert.’
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Click the link to access the report on the Frontiers in Environmental Science website (Laura M. Norman, Michael M. Pollock, Francina Dominguez, Michael A. Crimmins, David Lawrence5 and Michael Dettinger). Here’s the abstract:
Drylands across the globe are experiencing intensifying water scarcity, land degradation, and hydroclimatic extremes. This review integrates evidence from multidecadal field studies, hydrologic monitoring, geomorphic and ecological assessments, remote sensing, and land–atmosphere science to evaluate how restoration influences key components of the terrestrial water cycle. Low-tech natural infrastructure in dryland streams (NIDS)—including check dams, leaky weirs, one-rock dams, and gabions—has emerged as a promising but under-synthesized nature-based solution for restoring hydrologic function in these environments. We describe the mechanisms through which these interventions modify runoff detention, infiltration, sediment and alluvial storage, shallow-groundwater recharge, vegetation recovery, and surface-energy partitioning, and we summarize outcomes across diverse dryland settings. Findings consistently show increased water residence time, enhanced soil-moisture storage, expanded riparian vegetation, extended flow duration, and shifts toward greater latent-heat flux—producing localized cooling and strengthened ecohydrological feedbacks. Building on these localized effects, we articulate a hypothesis that links the spatial extent of restoration, the density of NIDS per unit drainage area, and the magnitude of the latent-to-sensible-heat contrast generated by wetter post-rainfall conditions. Specifically, we hypothesize that when NIDS are implemented at densities permitted by topography and across areas large enough to maintain elevated soil moisture after storm events, the resulting increases in latent heat flux, surface cooling, and boundary-layer moistening may enhance moisture convergence and boundary-layer development, potentially increasing the likelihood or stability of convective precipitation, analogous to how reductions in these processes have contributed to regional drought intensification. These land–atmosphere feedbacks remain untested at scale but represent an important research Frontier. By integrating hydrologic, geomorphic, ecological, and atmospheric perspectives, this review provides a comprehensive framework for considering how low-tech, landscape-scale interventions can strengthen watershed resilience and contribute to climate-relevant nature-based solutions.
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 KVNF website (Brody Wilson). Here’s an excerpt:
May 19, 2026
A special mid-year West Slope Water Summit brought together water managers and community leaders to address a dire water year. Projected inflows into Lake Powell are expected to be well below half of normal — and negotiations over the river’s future remain unresolved.
A special mid-year West Slope Water Summit convened this week in Montrose — called early because the situation couldn’t wait until November. Montrose County Commissioner Sue Hansen organized the gathering after attending the Colorado River District’s State of the River address. She told attendees it was time to step up the urgency.
“This year is the first year that I am not optimistic,” Hansen said. “This is unprecedented and perhaps sobering for all of us.”
[…]
“The Lower Basin has put out, maybe you guys have heard of this, bridge proposal a couple weeks ago that in my opinion is a joke,” she said.
Her frustration centers on the math. The proposal calls for reducing water use by 3 million acre-feet over two years. But Flinker says that’s nowhere near enough — the river needs cuts of at least that much every single year. At the heart of the standoff is a hard reality. There is currently much less water in the river than we have been using, and no one anticipates that changing any time soon.
As Flinker puts it, “Well, I can speak for myself and you probably have the same opinion. Who wants to reduce their water usage? Right? No one. And the Lower Basin has used over 10 million, close to 11 million, acre-feet out of this river every year, much above their allocation. They don’t want to use less – especially when it’s not a little less – it’s like half, right?”
On Friday, May 22, 2026, Congressman Jeff Hurd announced the release of a $40 million award to the Colorado River District for the purchase and permanent protection of the Shoshone Water Rights. The final approval of $40 million award brings the total amount of funding secured to $97 million of the $99 million needed for the purchase. The process now moves into the contracting phase during which the River District will work with the Bureau of Reclamation to finalize the terms of the award.
Colorado River District General Manager Andy Mueller offered the following remarks regarding the broad, bi-partisan support of this project from our federal, state and local representatives:
“This award is a major breakthrough in our coalition’s effort to permanently secure historic flows on the Colorado River. This funding would not have been possible without the leadership of Representative Jeff Hurd. His unwavering advocacy within the Administration helped secure this once-in-a-generation investment in a project that is vital to the prosperity of rural communities, farmers and ranchers on the Western Slope.
Senator Michael Bennet demonstrated valuable foresight appropriating Inflation Reduction Act funding to address the growing water challenges facing the Colorado River Basin. His leadership helped deliver this historic investment in long-term water security and protect our state’s namesake river for generations to come.
As founders of the Colorado River Caucuses in both the Senate and House, Senator Hickenlooper and Representative Neguse fought for these dollars by developing and strengthening coalitions across divides – both geographical and political. By advocating for the Shoshone Water Rights Project in Colorado and Washington, they helped deliver a durable and permanent solution for the entire Colorado River system.
Shoshone Hydroelectric Plant back in the days before I-70 via Aspen Journalism
A double rainbow arches over the Painted Wall in Black Canyon at Gunnison National Park. Photo Credit: Dave Showalter
From email from Reclamation (Andrew Limbach):
May 20, 2026
The Aspinall Unit spring peak operation has been tentatively scheduled for Wednesday, May 27th. A final notification of the release schedule will be sent out that will include time of day ramped releases.
Pursuant to the Black Canyon Decree section 31.5.2.1 for peak flows during a “dry” hydrologic year the Black Canyon will have a 24-hour peak flow of 730 cfs.
The purpose of this release is to satisfy the Black Canyon Decree spring release. Due to the maintenance outage ending on May 20th and unseasonably early peak runoff of the North Fork, this spring peak release timing was chosen to coincide with equal or greater inflows to Blue Mesa Reservoir.
Contact Andrew Limbach (alimbach@usbr.gov or 970-248-0644) for more information regarding Aspinall operations or the Operation Group meeting.
A warming climate is increasing the risk to water infrastructure.
The U.S. recorded a record number of billion-dollar weather disasters in the last three years.
Weather hazards, combined with aging infrastructure and rising costs, are raising the cost of supplying water.
When the Eaton Fire blitzed central Los Angeles County in January 2025, the foothills community of Altadena sat in its path.
Burning more than 14,000 acres in and around the southern edge of Angeles National Forest, the fire concentrated its structural damage in an area of Altadena served by Las Flores Water Company, a small drinking water provider.
By the time the flames were extinguished, the water company sustained substantial losses that its customers will cover with expensive surcharges. The Eaton Fire destroyed the private utility’s two reservoirs and about three-quarters of its customers’ homes. More than a year later, effective April 1, the utility instituted a $3,000 surcharge per household, to be paid on the water bill in $50 increments over 60 months. Residents with savings can make a single $2,600 payment upfront.
Failure to pay means either a dramatic household or business disruption. Water service will be cut off. For Las Flores, the funds are intended to be a lifeline, keeping the utility from bankruptcy as it repairs its reservoirs while maintaining day-to-day operations until more residents return and revenue rebounds.
For residents whose lives have already been upended, the surcharge also represents an unwelcome expense.
“Such an action is not taken lightly, and we recognize that the imposition of this flat fixed fee may have economic consequences for some of you,” John Bednarski, the board president, wrote in a September 2025 letter to customers.
These consequences of a climate-related emergency in the Los Angeles foothills are emblematic of the terrible toll being exacted nationwide not just on land and property, but also on essential duties of government, like supplying water. Las Flores is just one calamity among many in recent years. The number of weather disasters causing more than $1 billion in damages in the United States is climbing. According to Climate Central, the last three years have had the highest number of billion-dollar disasters. The vicious storms, floods, freezes, and droughts have destroyed homes and killed hundreds of people. They are also endangering water supply and reliability as well as municipal and residential financial well-being.
Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina, in 2024, wrecked dozens of water and wastewater systems and prompted $861 million in state and federal funds to rebuild them. The Hermit’s Peak-Calf Canyon Fire outside Las Vegas, New Mexico, in 2022, so damaged a watershed with ash and debris that the city’s water treatment plant could not function. It is being replaced thanks to a congressional appropriation. Persistent drought today threatens southern Texas, where Corpus Christi nears a water catastrophe due to depleted reservoirs.
A warming planet is magnifying these and other physical risks to water infrastructure while also increasing the cost of recovery. This environmental upheaval is set against a backdrop of increasing economic pressures for water utilities and challenging financial conditions for their customers.
Aging pipes and treatment plants need to be replaced. By one estimate the national need for drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater over the next 20 years is $3.4 trillion, or $168 billion annually in capital spending. New federal regulations for lead and PFAS are an expensive outlay. Additional costs since the pandemic came first in the form of supply chain snarls and rapid inflation, then moved higher with the Trump administration’s tariffs. Rising interest rates and more costly energy and treatment chemicals – all these factors add up. The result is that utilities have raised customer water rates, which have outpaced overall inflation for years. Water and sewer bills rose 24 percent over the last five years in 50 large cities, according to Bluefield Research.
Utility leaders have taken notice of the headwinds. Among the top challenges identified in this year’s State of the Water Industry survey from the American Water Works Association were aging infrastructure, securing financing, rising cost of treatment, and extreme weather.
“Climate variability is one of the most significant and challenging risks to water supplies and water sector infrastructure,” the report notes.
Management failures in the face of environmental pressures have financial consequences. Earlier this month, S&P Global Ratings downgraded the credit rating for Corpus Christi’s municipal utility from AA- to A. The lower rating will increase borrowing costs for the city just when it needs money to navigate a water-supply crisis. To justify the downgrade, the ratings agency cited the city’s drought risk, water restrictions, and high capital needs to acquire additional water supplies. Corpus Christi is planning at least $1 billion in water infrastructure and supply investments, which include groundwater pumping, brackish groundwater treatment, recycled water, and potentially seawater desalination. The city’s two main reservoirs are 8 percent of capacity combined as of May 15.
State and federal dollars often fill the breach after a weather disaster. But the need is far greater than the available funds. North Carolina awarded $861 million in state and federal grants to 217 drinking water and wastewater projects after Hurricane Helene. But more than $600 million in applications were not able to be fulfilled, according to Gov. Josh Stein.
“We need substantially more federal support,” Stein said on May 14 while visiting Canton, a town in western North Carolina that was flooded during Helene. With $24.5 million in state and federal funds, Canton is rebuilding its water and sewer infrastructure.
Canton is one of the lucky ones. The increasing number of weather disasters for water utilities comes at a time of federal disengagement and funding uncertainty, note Rebecca Anderson and Shannon M. McNeeley of the Pacific Institute.
The Trump administration cancelled a multibillion-dollar FEMA grant program for climate-resilient infrastructure before being ordered by a U.S. district judge to reinstate it this spring. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the Biden-era law that provided an extra $43 billion for water infrastructure, expires this year with no replacement in sight. A federal pandemic-era program to assist low-income households with their water bills has also expired. Water utilities are urging Congress to resume the program so that they can upgrade their systems without worrying that the cost will burden their poorest customers. House Democrats introduced the Water Access and Affordability Act in April to reauthorize the program.
“Without sufficient federal disaster mitigation and recovery funding, states and communities shoulder a disproportionate share of response, recovery, and preparedness costs,” Anderson and McNeeley write. “This burden is often especially heavy for small and rural water systems with limited revenue.”
Floods, droughts, wildfires, and hurricanes have always wrought destruction and water-supply desperation. Superstorm Sandy, in 2012, knocked out wastewater plants in eight states, leading to the release of some 11 billion gallons of raw and partially treated sewage. In New York City alone, the damage to wastewater facilities totaled more than $100 million.
But with the rising number of disasters and the increasing intensity of storms and droughts, more financial demands are challenging not just individual water utilities but assumptions about who is at risk.
No utility, even those on apparently solid financial footing, should be complacent, said Greg Pierce, a California water system expert at the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation. Just look at Las Flores Water Company and its neighbors in Altadena.
Before the Eaton Fire, “none of these systems were on anyone’s list of small or underperforming systems, even within Los Angeles County,” he said.
Lake Powell is formed by Glen Canyon Dam. In a concept pitched by a conservation organization, a flexible pool of water could be moved between Upper Basin reservoirs to wherever it’s needed most. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
An environmental organization is floating a concept that could help the Colorado River system during extremely dry years like this one and keep the nation’s two largest reservoirs above critical thresholds.
Boulder-based Western Resource Advocates has released a concept paper that explores the idea of a flexible pool of water that can be moved wherever it’s needed most among the basin’s biggest reservoirs.
Water users in the Lower Basin states — California, Arizona and Nevada — currently have about 3.2 million acre-feet stored in Lake Mead through voluntary conservation and efficiency measures. Water users bank water in this pool, known as the Intentionally Created Surplus, and can take this water back out again to use under certain circumstances.
The paper’s authors — John Berggren, a regional policy manager with Western Resource Advocates, and Kevin Wheeler, principal and engineer with Water Balance Consulting — used the ICS pool as an example to explore how the idea would work. They say that if the ICS pool could be moved from Lake Mead to Lake Powell, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation could have a buffer to more easily protect Glen Canyon Dam infrastructure, minimize the need for large releases from upstream reservoirs and reduce the risk of litigation among the seven basin states that share the Colorado River.
“If you took a million or two million acre-feet out of Mead in the form of a conservation pool and moved it to Powell, then you could protect Powell without having to do all the DROA and the 6e releases,” Berggren said. “This is a perfect year where we would like to have the flexibility to move this water wherever it’s needed most, in this case in Powell.”
Berggren is referring to the actions that the federal government is taking this year: releasing up to 1 million acre-feet from Flaming Gorge Reservoir to prop up Powell, as well as reducing releases down to just 6 million acre-feet from Powell instead of the originally expected 7.48 million acre-feet. Projections from Reclamation show the reservoir falling below 3,500 feet by this summer if these actions aren’t taken, jeopardizing the ability to make hydropower at Glen Canyon Dam.
This is a pivotal moment for the Colorado River Basin’s 40 million water users, with a historically bad snowpack and streamflows pushing reservoir levels to new lows and management into crisis mode. The seven states that share the river have not been able to reach an agreement for how reservoirs will be operated and shortages will be shared after the current framework expires this year. The feds are poised to step in with their own management rules, but the actions they are allowed to legally take may not go far enough to keep the system from crashing.
Graphic credit: Aspen Journalism
An invisible pool
Berggren’s paper lays out a surplus pool that would be flexible and “operationally neutral,” and would be separate from the rest of the stored water in both reservoirs. That means it wouldn’t count toward calculations of how much water is in Lake Powell or Lake Mead for the purpose of determining how water shortages would be shared.
There isn’t a way to physically move water upstream, but according to WRA, water could be transferred between reservoirs through adjustments to dam releases and careful accounting. A pool could be “moved” from Mead to Powell by holding back water in Powell. It could be moved back to Mead by increasing releases from Powell.
The concept paper does not advocate for taking such actions this year, presenting them as a potential strategy to be used under a new river management framework that is being hashed out between the states that share the river and the federal government.
“There are a lot of concerns about operational neutrality, but we’re trying to show that it’s actually not that scary and can provide benefit with less risk than the current options,” Berggren said.
Reservoir levels in Mead currently determine how deep cuts to the Lower Basin states are; as Mead is drawn down, it triggers deeper cuts. Some water experts have said the ICS pool allows Lower Basin water users to game the system. By leaving their water in the ICS pool, it keeps reservoir levels artificially high and lets water users avoid taking deeper cuts. If the ICS pool had remained separate from the rest of Lake Mead, shortage triggers and mandatory conservation would have happened earlier.
Making this pool “operationally neutral,” or invisible to reservoir operations, fixes this issue.
In a proposal submitted to the federal government May 1, the Lower Basin states expressed support for this concept, but they did not lay out a plan to implement it.
“The goal is to achieve operational neutrality of ICS,” the submittal reads. “The Lower Division States will continue to determine when and how to convert ICS to operational neutrality at higher elevations in Lake Mead.”
They also said the long-term goal is to create an operationally neutral common pool of new water savings to be strategically deployed at low elevations to help delay and offset additional reductions to the Lower Basin.
Some experts say there are concerns and unanswered questions about these types of pools. The dividing line where water delivery is measured from the Upper Basin (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) to the Lower Basin is Lee Ferry, just downstream of Lake Powell. Water measured at this location determines whether the Upper Basin remains in compliance with the 1922 Colorado River Compact. Moving water between reservoirs would have to deal with this issue.
“You would just have to agree on the rules of when is it considered a delivery at Lee Ferry and when isn’t it a delivery at Lee Ferry,” said Colorado River expert and author Eric Kuhn.
Another problem is that removing the ICS pool from reservoir accounting would leave a 3.2-million-acre-foot hole in Lake Mead that would need to be filled.
“It’s hard to get there because there isn’t a way to make ICS operationally neutral unless you impose the shortages that would occur if the ICS weren’t there,” said Kathryn Sorensen, director of research and professor of practice at the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University. “I don’t know how else you can do it. You have to pay the piper.”
The infamous bathtub ring around Lake Mead can be seen in this photo of the intakes at Hoover Dam in December 2021. A conservation organization says flexible pools could be used to “move” water from Lake Mead to Lake Powell, where water levels could be critically low this year. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Lower Basin proposal
Last week, the Lower Basin states submitted a proposal to Reclamation to operate the reservoirs through 2028 that includes more conservation. This short-term deal could provide a temporary fix while states continue to hammer out a long-term strategy to share the river.
The Lower Basin states are proposing to cut another 700,000 acre-feet of water per year through 2028, on top of the 1.5 million acre-feet they had already promised. California and Arizona will each take another 300,000 acre-feet of cuts and Nevada will take a cut of 100,000 acre-feet. The proposal does not include any mandatory conservation from the Upper Basin.
“It was a monumental undertaking in a very short time frame to come up with all of this,” said JB Hamby, California’s lead negotiator. “We need a bridge to the future, and we welcome and look forward to an opportunity for a full seven-state deal where all states are part of the solution.”
The Lower Basin proposal also says that this year’s release from Flaming Gorge to prop up Powell should be as close to the maximum amount of Reclamation’s rangeof 1 million acre-feet as possible. The proposal also calls for increasing releases from Lake Powell if hydrology and projected reservoir levels improve.
“The intent under improved hydrology is to share the benefits of improved hydrology between both basins,” the proposal reads.
Colorado’s negotiator, Becky Mitchell, said in a prepared statement that the Lower Basin’s proposal for water-use reductions is a good first step but they still call for too much water to be released out of Lake Powell and other Upper Basin reservoirs.
“The Lower Division States’ proposal would also drain the Upstream Initial Units with limited opportunities for recovery,” Mitchell’s statement reads. “Lake Powell should properly be viewed as a savings account for the Lower Basin: The Lower Basin’s own resiliency depends upon it. The entire Basin should support sustainable, supply-driven operations at Lake Powell that rebuild storage.”
Upper Basin officials have proposed a mediator to help move the needle on talks about future management to try to get to a seven-state deal.
Berggren said that although the concept of a flexible, floating pool doesn’t solve the basic supply-and-demand problem on the Colorado River, it’s still an important tool for future management.
“There are a bunch of other things needed, including Lower Basin users and Upper Basin users using less water overall,” Berggren said. “This is just one component. But it helps provide some benefit in dry years like this one.”
As the keynote speaker at the Arkansas River Basin Water Forum in Salida, Upper Colorado River Commissioner Rebecca Mitchell spoke about the Colorado River crisis and water-use negotiations among the seven Colorado River Basin states. Photo credit: Joe Stone/Heart of the Rockies Radio
As the keynote speaker at the Arkansas River Basin Water Forum in Salida, Upper Colorado River Commissioner Rebecca Mitchell spoke about the Colorado River crisis and water-use negotiations among the seven Colorado River Basin states.
Following a warm winter with the lowest snowfall on record, Colorado faces a dire water-resource challenge. Mitchell acknowledged these unprecedented conditions and repeatedly avowed hydrologic reality in the Colorado River Basin as the basis for administering water use.
The 1922 Colorado River Compact governs water allocations in the Colorado Basin and delineates Upper Basin states – Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico – and Lower Basin States – Nevada, Arizona and California.
Negotiated during one of the Basin’s wettest known climate patterns, the Compact allocates 7.5 million acre-feet of Colorado River water to the Upper Basin states. The Lower Basin allocation is 7.5 million acre-feet from the Upper Basin plus a million acre-feet from Lower Basin tributaries.
“Let’s look at the numbers,” Mitchell said. “Even in the most recent years … with reservoirs near the brinks of collapse,” Lower Basin water use was almost 11 million acre-feet in 2021, 2.5 million acre-feet more than the Lower Basin’s allocation. That overuse is based on “a very flawed legal opinion,” not science.
By contrast, the Upper Basin states cut usage by almost a million acre-feet from the previous year, using less than 4 million acre-feet, or 3.5 million acre-feet less than their allocation.
Mitchell also compared annual water flows into Lake Powell with the amount of water that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation released from Lake Powell. “Sixteen out of 20 years, more water left Lake Powell than came in. That mass balance equation simply doesn’t work.”
Those excessive water releases “were not tied to what was happening with hydrology,” she said. “They were tied purely to the reservoir elevations” established by the 2007 Interim Guidelines “and releases that were desired by the Lower Basin.”
Other numbers Mitchell cited include reservoir levels for recent years in which the Lower Basin states used more than their water allocations under the Compact.
In 2000, “you can see Powell is about 86% full. And you look at where we are in 2025, and we’re predicted to be in an even worse situation at the end of this year. … This didn’t work. You see a steady decline.”
The Interim Guidelines “incentivized pulling down Meade so more water would come from Lake Powell. That put us in the situation that we are in today,” Mitchell said. “These guidelines didn’t respond to real world hydrology. They incentivized use – unsustainable use … and they prioritized one basin over the other” – i.e., the Lower Basin over the Upper Basin.
As a result, “two countries are struggling. Forty million people are struggling. Thirty tribes haven’t been at the table before this, (and they) deserve to be. This wasn’t the way to get security for the Western United States.”
The solution, she emphasized, is having flexibility to adapt to changing conditions across the entire Colorado Basin by planning for variable operations. Colorado’s Prior Appropriation (Priority) System, embedded in the Colorado Constitution, requires that flexibility.
Colorado’s Priority System has produced a system of year-round real-time administration of water use based on legal priority.
“You all know the Priority System,” Mitchell said. “There is a priority system in the Lower Basin” that “has been used … yeah, zero times. …
“I think the truth is important, and facts are important. Science is important. … (The Lower Basin’s) overuse essentially put us in the situation that we are in today. … We’re in this together. But we have to pivot to that.
“And we have to engage the tribal nations and Mexico. We can’t do this the way that we have done it before. … One user is not more important than the other users, one side of the Basin is not more important than the other side of the Basin.”
Upper Basin states, led by Colorado, have proposed multiple collaborative, science-based approaches to resolving the Colorado River crisis, but “the Lower Basin is coming up with yet another one of their own plans that involve our resources. …
“They’re irresponsible. They’re not doing enough.” Their rhetoric “puts all of us at risk. And I think we have the responsibility to do better. … One of the things that we’ve always done is really look at what we can do based on the resources that we have – the systems that we already work under.”
Mitchell insisted that the Upper Basin states had put on the table “a generous rule curve of releases from Powell” as well as upstream reservoirs like Blue Mesa and Flaming Gorge.
“Now that we know a year like this is possible, we need to factor that in and be prepared for that. … We have to figure out how do we save in the good years so we can get through the years like this year? …
“I was just in Grand Junction. I had grown men come to me crying. They know this year is going to suck. Literally. And if we don’t acknowledge that as part of our path forward, then we’re really not acknowledging who we are, and we’re also not acknowledging what needs to be done.”
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
Here’s the release from the St. Vrain and Left Hand Water Conservancy District (Sean Cronin):
April 20, 2026
Agreement affirms no new on-river dam while preserving valuable water rights for communitybenefit
The St. Vrain and Left Hand Water Conservancy District has reached an agreement with Save the World’s Rivers that reaffirms a new path forward for its Coffintop Reservoir water rights—one that does not include construction of a large on-river dam.
The District was created in 1971, in part, to build Coffintop Reservoir on South St. Vrain Creek west of Longmont and upstream of Lyons, through a planned partnership with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. While the reservoir itself was never built, two water storage rights associated with the Coffintop Reservoir project remain legally valid today.
As a governmental entity, the District holds the Coffintop Reservoir water rights not for its own benefit but for the community’s. In 2024, as required under Colorado water law, the District filed a routine six-year diligence application in water court to maintain those rights. The filing prompted an environmental group, Save the World’s Rivers, to submit a statement of opposition, opening discussions between the two organizations about the future use of the Coffintop water rights.
“The Water Court process is complex, and at the onset we were uncertain what Save the World’s Rivers hoped to achieve through it,” said Sean Cronin, the District’s Executive Director.
“We are always watching proponents of dams,” said Gary Wockner, Executive Director of Save the World’s Rivers. “At the appropriate time, we seek to identify ways proponents can achieve their mission while not creating a new dam. We were generally aware of the good work being done by the District, but concerned about their plan to build Coffintop Reservoir and dam.”
Through dialogue, the District and Save the World’s Rivers found common ground. Cronin noted, “I met with Gary several times, and I gained respect for his organization’s objectives, and I appreciated his willingness to come to the table and talk through complicated issues.” Save the World’s Rivers learned that the District had been working for more than 10 years with the City of Longmont, Town of Lyons, Boulder County Parks and Open Space, local environmental organizations, and food producers to develop a strategy to best utilize the Coffintop Reservoir water rights – without building the actual reservoir.
The District and Save the World’s Rivers reached an agreement through the court process, under which the District agreed to forgo using the Coffintop Reservoir water rights for any new on-river reservoir, including Coffintop Reservoir, and for the expansion of any existing on-river reservoir. Instead, the District will return to water court with plans to use the water rights at alternative locations and in ways that align with community needs, and environmental and water management goals.
“It became clear through discussions that the District shared values around avoiding a new on-river dam while still meeting its mission,” said Wockner. “That made an agreement possible,” Wockner said.
District leaders emphasized that the water rights are held for public benefit and that the original Coffintop Reservoir concept no longer reflects the highest and best use of the resource.
“This is something we and our communities have contemplated for decades,” said Christopher Smith, President of the District’s Board of Directors. “The Coffintop project, as envisioned more than 50 years ago, no longer fits today’s needs or values.”
For more than a decade, the District has worked with community partners to explore alternatives that could use the Coffintop water rights, while also supporting increased stream flows during low-flow periods. The District’s development and implementation of these alternatives is moving forward with engagement from important partners, including the Town of Lyons and City of Longmont.
Town of Lyons Mayor Hollie Rogan welcomed the agreement. “St. Vrain Creek is the lifeblood of our town, and a large dam upstream was never embraced by our community,” she said. “We’re pleased the District will not pursue Coffintop Reservoir and look forward to continued collaboration.”
Longmont Director of Water and Waste Service Chris Huffer noted the long history between the City and the District. “The challenges around water have only grown more complex over the last 50 years,” he said. “The District has a solid water plan, and the City is an eager partner in realizing the greatest potential of these water rights.”
The South Platte River Basin is shaded in yellow. Source: Tom Cech, One World One Water Center, Metropolitan State University of Denver.
Reclamation 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.
Upper Colorado River Basin Snow Water Equivalet and Total Percent Averages are from the 30 year average calculated from data between 10/01/1990 and 09/30/2020. Graphic credit: Water-Date.com
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. 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.
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
“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 — https://wildwords.substack.com
A coalition of organizations, tribes, utilities and governments from across the Colorado River basin is asking the federal government for at least $2 billion to address the near-term impacts of the escalating drought and water supply crisis in the West.
“Water Year 2026 is unfolding as one of the most challenging hydrologic years in more than a century of recordkeeping, with exceptionally low snowpack and river runoff and continued stress on an already depleted reservoir system,” wrote the coalition. “Difficult decisions around water supplies will be needed to address the severe shortages and operational risks that threaten the basin and the stability of the entire system.”
The letter was signed by 70 groups that represent water users and interests in all seven states that comprise the Colorado River basin: Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, California and Nevada. The river flows from its headwaters in Grand County down 1,450 miles to the Gulf of California in Mexico, providing water to nearly 40 million people across the seven states, two counties and the 30 tribal nations that fall within the basin. The newly-formed coalition asks Congress to find funding for additional resources to “sustain and scale” the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s existing drought mitigation investments needed to stabilize the system “in a manner that ensures the Basin will do more than simply endure from crisis to crisis.” It requests that the $2 billion be invested in tools that bolster conservation, efficiency and smart, targeted augmentation to develop new water supply sources.
Anna Vargas, of Manassa, Colorado, is a sixth-generation resident of the San Luis Valley who is deeply embedded in local water management initiatives. She hasn’t drunk her own tap water in years out of fear of contamination. Credit: Jacob Spetzler/Inside Climate News
In the San Luis Valley, the ongoing megadrought and a record-low snowpack are draining groundwater and increasing its concentrations of toxic metals. There are few protections for residents drinking from private wells.
Julie Zahringer hears a common refrain at her environmental laboratory in Alamosa, Colorado: A customer has been drinking well water on family land where they’ve lived for years, but recently noticed it has changed. They want to know why.
“All of a sudden it looks different, tastes different, there’s odor, there’s color,” said Zahringer.
Zahringer’s SDC Laboratory is one of the few testing water in the San Luis Valley, an 8,000-square-mile, high-altitude desert in south-central Colorado. She has tested thousands of wells during more than 30 years in the field.
Residents of the valley, which has large Hispanic populations and a high poverty rate, have been concerned about naturally occurring heavy metals in their water for decades, she said. But in the past five years, the rate of change has accelerated.
“Every year it just seems like this is the climax of it, and the next year, it gets worse,” said Zahringer. “This year, we’re looking at probably the worst as far as water quality.”
San Luis Valley Groundwater
The San Luis Valley relies on surface water from the Rio Grande and a massive aquifer system, one of the largest in North America, to drive its agricultural economy. But the aquifer is severely overallocated, losing an estimated 1.2 million acre-feet of water between 1976, when tracking began, and 2013—equivalent to more than five times what the city of Denver consumes each year. This year, the aquifer could hit another record low, as Colorado’s snowpack, which recharges the state’s aquifers, is at the lowest level since record-keeping began in 1941.
San Luis, CO – MAY 5, 2026: The sun sets over agriculture fields in San Luis, Colorado on Tuesday, May 5, 2026. The primary agriculture in the valley are potatoes and livestock. The Rio Grande recharges the aquifer which is the source of water for the entire San Luis Valley, including agriculture, which is the industry which economically sustains the area. The amount of water necessary for large scale agriculture is also the primary reason for the aquifer’s depletion. (Photo by Jacob Spetzler/Special to Inside Climate News)
Manassa, CO – MAY 5, 2026: A water control gate controls flow in an irrigation ditch in Manassa, Colorado on Tuesday, May 5, 2026. (Photo by Jacob Spetzler/Special to Inside Climate News)
Researchers are finding that as groundwater levels drop, the remaining water can contain higher concentrations of carcinogenic heavy metals.
The valley’s well water users, many of them in historically underserved communities, are increasingly concerned about what’s in their drinking water. But with little governmental oversight of private wells or resources to help track and manage quality, they have few options to make it safe.
Shifting Chemistry
Anna Vargas, a sixth-generation resident of the San Luis Valley, remembers making snowmen often as a child, and her mother talking about the daily rains during the summer monsoon season. Now, monsoon season barely exists here, Vargas said.
“As the years have gone by, there’s less rain, less snowfall. I’ve lived in the valley long enough to see the changes in weather patterns,” says Vargas, project manager with the SLV Ecosystem Council. “We depend a lot on snowpack, and we have hardly any this year. It’s concerning for all of us in the Rio Grande basin…The heavy metals will just become more concentrated.”
Map of the San Luis Valley
Heavy metals like arsenic, tungsten, uranium, manganese and selenium occur naturally in rocks and soils and come up with groundwater that is pumped to the surface. With drought, Zahringer said, they can become a problem.
“We’re not seeing a dilution of any of the contaminants…so anything that’s in the geologic makeup is just really concentrating,” said Zahringer, whose tests have documented contaminant levels rising in the wells during dry periods.
Alamosa, CO – MAY 5, 2026: Julie Zahringer, owner and laboratory director of the Sangre de Cristo (SDC) Laboratory, poses for a portrait in her office in Alamosa, Colorado on Tuesday, May 5, 2026. The SDC Laboratory is the only source of water testing in the San Luis Valley. The company tests water for both private well owners and municipalities as well as water used in agriculture. (Photo by Jacob Spetzler/Special to Inside Climate News)
In addition, as aquifer levels drop during droughts—and due to overpumping—its geochemistry shifts, says Kathy James, Ph.D., associate professor with the Colorado School of Public Health. Users reaching deeper into the ground to access the remaining water can draw small amounts of water connected to geothermal sources or underground reservoirs of hot water, which can have high arsenic concentrations, into the drinking supply. Even in small amounts, this can increase arsenic concentrations to dangerous levels. James notes that these relationships are complex and non-linear, however, and additional research is needed.
Zahringer’s estimates mirror these results: Of all the well waters her lab tests in southern Colorado, about 25 percent exceed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s maximum contaminant level for arsenic in drinking water.
Zahringer said that some customers come to her lab on referrals from their primary care physicians trying to determine the root cause of elevated levels of heavy metals in their bloodstream. Her own well water is high in arsenic, but her filtration system thoroughly treats it before it enters her house.
“I’m in a unique situation where I’m educated and vigilant, and I have the resources to test and make sure it’s OK,” said Zahringer. “A lot of my neighbors, I know they’re just drinking it right out of the ground.”
Half of the U.S. population relies on groundwater for drinking, irrigation, industry and livestock. Much of it is pumped through public water systems, which must limit contaminants to comply with the federal Safe Drinking Water Act, in addition to state requirements that may be more stringent. But private wells, which are the main source of drinking water for 15 percent of Americans and about a third of San Luis Valley residents, are not regulated or monitored. In effect, about 51 million Americans are responsible for monitoring the safety of their own drinking water.
In the San Luis Valley, residents are asking more questions about how their water is impacting their health, crops and cattle, Vargas said, making it easy for her to recruit some of the more than 800 private well owners involved in James’s study.
“We filled it up so fast that that just shows how much the community members wanted their wells tested,” says Vargas.
After a few months of recruiting, the study group was nearly at capacity.
Later, neighbors would stop her at the grocery store to tell her about their results: manganese, arsenic, uranium or other contaminants were often above the EPA thresholds.
Today, many residents in Vargas’s community have turned to bottled water. “They just don’t know if they can drink the water,” she said.
“As those contaminants are increasing, we are going to start to see these rural areas really can’t afford these treatment plants and mitigation for it,” said Zahringer. “We’re dealing with a lot of really small communities that are really struggling to pay for their water testing, let alone to build these new plants.”
San Luis Valley is one of the poorest rural areas of Colorado, with an estimated 21.4 percent poverty rate. Even if well users can access a water test, consistent filtration remains an economic burden.
San Luis, CO – MAY 5, 2026: Water from a natural spring pours out of a pipe in the town of San Luis in the San Luis Valley, Colorado on Tuesday, May 5, 2026. (Photo by Jacob Spetzler/Special to Inside Climate News)
San Luis, CO – MAY 5, 2026: The town of San Luis in the San Luis Valley, Colorado on Tuesday, May 5, 2026. (Photo by Jacob Spetzler/Special to Inside Climate News)
Household reverse osmosis systems can remove up to 99 percent of contaminants, including arsenic. But they are expensive—often costing thousands of dollars to install and hundreds more annually to maintain—and can waste up to 80 percent of the water that passes through them. And because the San Luis Valley has moderately to extremely hard water, compounds and metals accumulate much faster on filtration systems, requiring replacement more than twice as frequently as in areas with soft water.
“I come from a rural and impoverished community, and my community members can’t always be changing out these filters for this reverse osmosis filtration system,” Vargas said.
Researchers at Arizona State University are planning to field test a new type of filter that removes a range of heavy metals from hard water systems without losing water in hopes of providing more accessible water quality mitigation for residents. Alireza Farsad, a postdoctoral research scholar at ASU who founded AmorPH2O, the company developing the filter, expects it to be commercially available next year.
Meanwhile, Vargas and James have presented the water quality study results to local county commissioners and talked with state lawmakers about the increasing concentrations of heavy metals.
But, for now, the issue has seen little action beyond testing.
San Luis, CO – MAY 5, 2026: Shirley Romero Otero, a local activist and teacher poses for a portrait in town of San Luis, Colorado on Tuesday, May 5, 2026. As an educator and activist Romero Otero has spent decades organizing for land and water rights in the San Luis Valley. (Photo by Jacob Spetzler/Special to Inside Climate News)
For Shirley Romero Otero, a local educator and activist who helped implement James’s study, water quality in the San Luis Valley is an issue of environmental justice. She says the valley, home to the state’s largest native Hispanic population, is often left out of policymaking conversations.
“Those folks in Denver that make those decisions for testing and resources need to pay attention…We are part of Colorado. We should have equality when it comes to testing and finding out what the hell is really going on,” says Otero, who lives in San Luis, the state’s oldest continuously occupied town, which has fewer than 600 residents.
“Regardless of socioeconomic status, political affiliation or racial geographic areas, water is the most precious resource that we have. It is the lifeblood of every community. You don’t have water, you die. It’s that simple.”
San Luis , CO – MAY 5, 2026: An acequia flows into San Luis, Colorado on Tuesday, May 5, 2026. Acequias are traditional community-managed irrigation ditches that channel water from rivers and streams to farms and towns. (Photo by Jacob Spetzler/Special to Inside Climate News)
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 AZCentral website (Brandon Loomis). Here’s an excerpt:
May 14, 2026
Key Points
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is now seeking a 10-year water-sharing plan for the Colorado River states, adjusting cutbacks every two years.
A worst-case scenario being modeled could slash water shares for Arizona, California and Nevada by 40%.
The Lower Basin states have proposed their own conservation plan, which could cover the first two years of the new federal framework.
Unable to get Colorado River states to hash out a new 20-year deal to share in worsening water shortages, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has told them it’s now aiming for a 10-year plan with prescribed cutbacks to be reassessed every two years. Federal officials informed the seven states of their new preference late last week, and Arizona’s lead negotiator made it public on Wednesday, May 13, during a meeting of a committee representing the cities, tribes and other water users who meet to develop a unified state position.
The shift to what could effectively become five two-year plans carries both opportunities and risks for Arizona. On the one hand, state Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke said, it means a proposal that the Lower Basin states — Arizona, California and Nevada — recently submitted to boost their conservation through 2028 could cover the first two-year term if federal officials agree. That would keep water moving through the Central Arizona Project Canal, an economic lifeline that is at risk under some other scenarios. On the other hand, a move to bite-size plans “has us in a room negotiating for the next 10 years,” Buschatzke said at a meeting of the Arizona Reconsultation Committee. “That’s not something that creates the certainty that we’ve heard some people desire.”
[…]
New rules are necessary because the shortage-sharing guidelines that covered the last 20 years expire this fall — and because the river keeps shrinking along with a paltry snowpack in the Rocky Mountains. A deepening shortage has increased the stakes, keeping a consensus deal out of reach…In pitching their new 10-year “framework,” federal officials also informed the states that they intend to at least model the potential effects of a 3 million acre-foot annual reduction to what the three Lower Basin states could pull from Lake Mead. That worst-case scenario would slash 40% from what the century-old Colorado River Compact promised those Lower Basin states, and it could dry up the CAP Canal. It’s nearly twice the reduction that those states offered in their recent proposal…A 10-year program with a broad menu of potential guidelines that update every two years allows flexibility to adapt to both the changing hydrology and the potential for a political breakthrough on a consensus deal, [Alex] Smith said.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
In this special episode, SNWA General Manager John Entsminger joins City Cast Las Vegas Podcast host Jesse Merrick to discuss how the aging Law of the River is colliding with a modern climate. 🎧: https://t.co/uTIfvvnCKbpic.twitter.com/n6Jio3BBFD
— Southern Nevada Water Authority (@SNWA_H2O) May 13, 2026
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.
The dusty Acequia Madre de Cañon de Chama, pictured above April 28, 2026, will soon divert Rio Chama water toward historic orchards the San Joaquín del Rio de Chama Land Grant first planted more than 200 years ago, thanks to a new agreement between the land grant and the Santa Fe National Forest. (Photo courtesy Leonard Martinez)
Click the link to read the article on the Source NM website (Patrick Lohman):
May 5, 2026
A dusty acequia in northern New Mexico, which more than 200 years ago diverted water from the Rio Chama, will soon spring to life again, nourishing freshly planted orchards of plums, apples and apricots.
That’s the idyllic scene envisioned through a new agreement between the Santa Fe National Forest and heirs of the San Joaquín del Rio de Chama Land Grant. The parties say the “memorandum of understanding” they signed in late March marks the potential thawing of more than a century of tension between New Mexico land grants and the federal government.
The agreement, which the Santa Fe National Forest Service provided to Source NM through a public records request, identifies the acequia restoration as a “project of mutual interest.” It also recognizes the land grant as a consulting partner to the Forest Service and provides it greater input into the land’s future use.
Leonard Martinez, president of the land grant, told Source NM that the nine-page agreement is a “historic document,” one that marks the first such formal agreement between land grants and the Forest Service. He said he’s spent nearly every day since the agreement was signed clearing the historic irrigation canal and working to reconnect it to the Rio Chama.
San Joaquin de Chama President Leonard Martinez said he has spent most every day since signing the memorandum of agreement digging out the old path of the acequia in the Cañon de Chama. (Photo courtesy Leonard Martinez)
If all goes well, he will open the headgates of the Acequia Madre de Cañon de Chama later this summer, sending Chama River water to irrigate a cover crop of alfalfa. Within five years, he hopes to replant historic orchards.
When that happens, he said, he hopes the “heirs who have left us,” many of them still buried in a cemetery near the headgates, will approve of his efforts.
“That’s the key here,” he said. “We want to put our orchards and our fields back in.”
Santa Fe National Forest spokesperson Claudia Brookshire told Source NM that the agreement resulted from trust established through informal talks and individual projects.
“The Forest Service has long been willing to work with land grants,” Brookshire said in an email. “But the lack of a formal framework, combined with trust barriers, made it difficult to begin projects on national forest system lands.”
The Santa Fe National Forest is in early discussions to develop similar agreements with two other land grants, Brookshire said.
In 1806, Spanish Governor Joaquín del Real Alencaster charged 44 families with stewardship of a 470,000-acre swath of what was then the New Mexico Territory. By 1860, according to the land grant, more than 800 residents established roots there, cultivating land within the river valleys, pasturing livestock and gathering resources from the surrounding common lands, known as the “ejido.”
But after multiple lawsuits and land re-surveys over the ensuing decades, the federal government and land speculators acquired the land and evicted the residents. By 1905, the federal government recognized only about 1,500 acres of land along the Rio Chama as belonging to the land grant, but even that parcel ended up in the hands of the Rio Arriba Land and Cattle Company.
The parcel west of Abiquíu, known as the Cañon de Chama, remained the company’s property for decades before the federal government ultimately acquired it, as well. Today, all of the original San Joaquín del Rio de Chama Land Grant belongs to the Santa Fe National Forest or Carson National Forest.
Land grant heirs like Martinez have fought for more than a century to reassert their rights over the land, including seeking Forest Service permission to visit and care for the cemetery where their ancestors are buried.
The heirs ultimately received a Forest Service easement in 2013 to access the cemetery. Since then, Martinez and other land grant leaders have continued to pressure the Forest Service for more access, particularly to the Cañon de Chama, which heirs describe as culturally and historically significant.
Martinez told Source NM that the agreement is a result of trust built through the cemetery easement, he said, as well as guidance from the New Mexico Department of Justice’s Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo Division.
The NMDOJ created the division in 2003 to oversee and address concerns related to the provisions of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ushered in the United States’ government’s problematic land title confirmation process and stripped the San Joaquin land grant heirs of hundreds of thousands of acres of communal land.
New Mexico Rep. Miguel Garcia (D-Albuquerque) has spent much of his 30 years in office advocating for land grant heirs, including seeking recurring state funding and greater recognition of the historical injustice of the federal government’s land seizure.
While he said the new agreement represents a “great leap forward” and commended Martinez and others for their efforts, he said his ultimate goal remains for the Forest Service to return land it now controls to the land grants.”
“These land grants that lost these common lands have not ceded their right to that land,” he said. “They have not given up that hope.”
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
