Eagle County is currently within the region of Colorado facing D4 conditions, which is the most extreme level of drought. Colorado Drought Monitor map August 25, 2026
Click the link to read the article on the Vail Daily website (John LaConte). Here’s an excerpt:
August 28, 2026
Upper Eagle Regional Water Authority now required to replace diversions with more water
On Aug. 14, the Colorado Division of Water Resources placed what’s known as a “call” on the Eagle River, meaning that any water user with junior water rights is now required to stop diverting, or replace their diversions with augmentation water. The call came as no surprise to water managers, and is not uncommon in drought years when the Eagle River between Gore Creek and Lake Creek reaches an average flow that is less than 85 cubic feet per second between May 1 and Sept. 30. That minimum average threshold was set in a court decree issued Oct. 7, 1981, which said that minimum streamflow is “required to preserve the natural environment to a reasonable degree on the Eagle River.” What is uncommon, said Tim Friday, director of water & utility resources for the Eagle River Water & Sanitation District, is the fact that the Colorado Division of Water Resources consulted with the district before placing the call on the Eagle River. The call could have been placed a month earlier, as the average minimum flow had dropped below 85 cfs back in July, but the Division of Water Resources stalled it a month in case flows came back up…The Eagle River Water & Sanitation District isn’t as affected by the call, as many of the water rights in the district are senior to the 1981 court decree, but the Upper Eagle Regional Water Authority, which also supplies water to many properties in Eagle County, has water rights that are junior to the 1981 decree…For more information about the instream flow rights on the Eagle River, visit Colorado’s Decision Support Systems website.
We have met briefly at at least one Colorado water conference (but it’s been a while). I was the Water Resources Analyst at Northglenn for a while, and now am the Water Resources Manager at Consolidated Mutual. But, on my own time, I’ve built something for Colorado water records that may be useful to you or your readers, and I’d rather you see it early. I would appreciate feedback and hopefully some exposure from your organization.
It’s the whole state in one place: all 177,301 decreed structures, 2,271 stream gages, diversion records, water court history, and the calls that administer them, across all seven divisions. Type an address and it shows you the ditches and rights around it. Open any ditch and you get its decrees, what it actually diverted year by year, and where it sits in line. Open a district and you get a straight-line diagram of who takes what, and where.
The piece I’m proudest of went live this week: for any structure, on any day, how much of its decree was actually in priority. Not whether a call was on — how many cfs of that particular ditch’s decree was in priority, counted by the hour, running back through the call record to 1950. I don’t know of anywhere else you can get that without building it yourself.
And it shows its work. Where DWR publishes its own day-by-day out-of-priority analysis, the page scores itself against DWR live, on the page: 98.7% agreement across about 86,000 structure-days, and it lands on DWR’s exact percent-of-day 90.9% of the time. Every page also states plainly what it can’t tell you. I’d rather your readers see the error bars than trust me.
A few things a reader could do with it in five minutes: find out whose ditch runs behind their house; see how many days their ditch was out of priority in the 2002 and 2012 droughts; or watch a senior downstream call reach up a tributary and shut off juniors sixty miles away.
I’d genuinely value your eye on it, and if you think it’s worth a mention to your readers, that would mean a lot. Happy to give you a walkthrough, or to run a specific question against the data if it would make a better post.
— John Crawford
(Water Resources Manager, Consolidated Mutual Water Company), but working independently on this project hydrohistorian.com.
Milkweed, sweet peas, and a plethora of other flora billow from Farmer’s Ditch in the North Fork Valley of western Colorado. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
It seems like every time the Colorado River and other Western water woes make national headlines, some pundit — usually from the East Coast — weighs in with their “simple” or “obvious” solution. And I get mad and start throwing things around the room, then type out some blistering rant riddled with epithets and insults.
Well, the Colorado River is in the news again, and with it have come the usual swarm of oversimplified hot-takes. The one that really got my goat this time is from Matthew Yglesias, who wrote a piece headlined: The Western water crisis has a simple solution: Stop giving the majority of the water away to farmers for almost nothing!
These things piss me off so much not because they’re wrong, but because there is no “simple” solution to the Western water crisis. That’s because the crisis itself isn’t simple, and saying that it has simple fixes implies that the folks who have spent a lot of time trying to solve the problem are a bunch of idiots, since they hadn’t come up with this solution already. It seems as if Yglesias and his ilk assume that the West is not only monolithic, but that we Westerners are a bunch of backwoods bumpkins who don’t understand the region’s own problems.
Who cares what these bozos believe, right? Right. But judging by the comments on Yglesias’ social media posts, a lot of other people are similarly deluded. So I figured his piece provides a nice opportunity to clear some things up.
West Drought Monitor map August 25, 2026
In fact, there is no single “Western water crisis.” The West is huge and is geographically, hydrographically, and ecologically diverse. While most, but not all, of the Western U.S. is in some stage of drought currently, not all of those places are experiencing a water crisis, per se. There is a Colorado River water crisis and a Rio Grande water crisis and a San Joaquin Valley water crisis, but those crises are not all the same.
The Colorado River crisis is multifaceted and manifests in different ways in different places and on different levels. The river itself is in crisis, in that stretches of the mainstem and its tributaries virtually dry up during summers like this one. Its users are facing a potential crisis, i.e. looming shortages, as in some of them are getting less water from the river than they did in the past. And the vast and complex plumbing system and legal framework that has been built up to harness and govern the river is perhaps facing the most immediate crisis: It is collapsing under its own weight and in many ways has become obsolete. Each of these is a distinct calamity, with its own twists, turns, causes, and bevy of potential solutions.
From his perch in the Northeast, however, Yglesias sees just one dimension, writing in the “nut graf” of his piece:
Uh, not quite.
Yes, irrigated agriculture is by far the dominant consumer of Colorado River water, accounting for 52% of overall consumption and 74% of direct human consumption. And yes, agricultural users typically and notoriously pay less for the water than municipal users. No, this is not dictated by federal law.
Agricultural users were among the first entities in the colonial-settler era to put large quantities of water to beneficial use, giving them the most senior rights to the largest quantities of water. The Imperial Irrigation District, for example, has senior rights to about 3 million acre-feet of Colorado River water, most of which is used for agriculture.
These water rights holders have a legal right to use a set amount of water each year. They are not leasing or purchasing the water from the federal government or anyone else. It’s essentially theirs, for free, as long as they are able to divert it from the river and put it to beneficial use.
San Luis People’s Ditch March 17, 2018. Photo credit: Greg Hobbs
Usually the water rights are held by irrigation districts, ditch companies, municipalities, corporations, or, in some cases, very large individual landholders. In the late 1800s, these entities built their own diversions, canals, and delivery systems. Construction was often financed by private investors and the individual irrigators, who held stocks, or shares, in the ditch company. Each share would entitle its holder to a set amount of water from the canal. The shareholder would pay an annual fee for each share to cover construction, maintenance, and operating costs.
The Bureau of Reclamation was established in 1902 to build larger scale dams, diversions, and canals to deliver water to users and to spur agricultural development in the arid West. Call it the nationalized version of an irrigation district, but on steroids. The federal government paid for the projects, but the irrigation districts and municipal water utilities they served were expected to pay back the costs over time. The taxpayers supposedly wouldn’t have to pay a dime. Yet as the years went by, and as the budgets of the projects skyrocketed, the terms of the paybacks were relaxed, especially for agricultural users. This effectively subsidized water delivery, which in turn lowered farmers’ costs.
The All American Canal, the largest diversion on the Colorado River, passes through Winterhaven, CA on its way to the Imperial Valley. The Colorado River is seen flowing next to it.
One of the Bureau’s big projects was the 80-mile-long All-American Canal, built in the 1930s to ferry Colorado River water to the Imperial Irrigation District and other users. The IID entered into a 50-year payback contract, which ended in 1994. The Bureau still owns the canal, but the IID operates and maintains it and other infrastructure that delivers Colorado River water to nine cities and some 500,000 acres of farmland.
The IID pays nothing for the Colorado River water itself. It does pay to operate and maintain its vast water delivery system, and offsets those costs by charging agricultural and municipal users just $20 per acre-foot for water it delivers, a bargain basement rate. In other words, Imperial Valley farmers do get cheap water, but so do Imperial Valley cities and even industry (which pays $85/af, also relatively affordable). IID also brings in about $160 million annually by selling water to the San Diego County Water Authority. The operating costs for the All-American Canal system are lower than, say, the Central Arizona Project’s, because the All-American Canal is gravity fed, whereas the CAP uses huge amounts of electricity to pump water uphill.
Similar setups exist across the Colorado River Basin. But each system is distinct, and each has its own mix of federal and private funding and operational scenarios and rates.
And here’s one of the main flaws of Yglesias’s argument: He assumes that there’s some all powerful actor out there that sets rates and standards for water from the Colorado River, although he himself clearly doesn’t know who or what that actor is (he always uses the passive voice, or the all-encompassing “you” in these cases). That’s because that entity doesn’t exist. While the feds could stop subsidizing agriculture, and should not build any more water projects, they don’t have the authority to step in and adjust water rates. States probably could set rates for groundwater, but they can’t charge the IID for exercising their water rights on the Colorado River.
Next, Yglesias pivots to pillorying alfalfa, because that’s in vogue these days. I’m not going to get into that too much, because I’ve written about it so many times here before, but this little bit is pretty funny:
Now, I’m no alfalfa apologist (nor am I an alfalfaphobe), but I feel like I should point out that most of the alfalfa grown with Colorado River water is used to feed dairy cows, which in turn produce milk and cheese and ice cream. Unless Yglesias is a vegan, he might want to consider that. He then argues that since alfalfa is relatively low-value (money wise) compared to Las Vegas casinos, Phoenix microchip factories, or housing, the water should be going to casinos, factories, and housing, not farms, which would presumably happen if farmers had to pay more for water (i.e. they’d go broke and be forced to sell).
First off, there is nothing novel or groundbreaking about this idea. Sprawl has been gobbling up farmland, and water rights, for decades in the West. Phoenix didn’t just grow into the desert, it also grew into citrus orchards and alfalfa fields, and will probably continue to build housing and data centers on what ag land remains. A different version of this concept, where a city or developer purchases a farmer’s water rights, but uses them somewhere else — a practice known as buy and dry — is also not uncommon.
This does not solve the water crisis. Instead of cutting consumption, which is what’s needed, it merely shifts the consumption from one use — agriculture — to other ones, such as housing and golf courses and chip manufacturing and data centers. This may wring more cash out of each acre-foot of water, but it doesn’t lower consumption. An acre-foot is an acre-foot, whether it’s going to alfalfa, a golf course, a neighborhood’s lawns, a data center or a swimming pool.
Besides, transitioning land out of agriculture comes with its own problems. We can argue forever about whether farming alfalfa or any other crop in the desert is appropriate, or of adequately high value, or whatever. We can argue that the Bureau of Reclamation should never have existed, and that irrigating the arid West should have been left to private entities operating in a free market. But the fact is, there is farming in the desert, those projects did end up subsidizing the agriculture industry, and communities, economies, cultures, and even new landscapes have emerged from and formed around those farms.
Photo of Crowley County by Jennifer Goodland
Taking vast swaths of land out of farming, whether to build houses or solar panels or to buy the water rights and use them somewhere else, has myriad consequences, many of them negative. Fields can become noxious-weed-clogged dust pits, the wildlife and ecosystems that have come to rely on irrigation runoff dry up, farm workers and families and the businesses that rely on them are displaced, communities’ economies are upended. As Madeline Wilson, an agricultural systems specialist for Colorado State University’s extension office pointed out at a 2024 panel on dust-on-snow, every field fallowed in the San Luis Valley for conservation purposes also represents a family. “We’re not just talking about drying up lands,” she said, “but the drying up of our economy.”
In no way does this mean that farms should be immune from curtailment. Indeed, because agriculture is the biggest user of Colorado River water, it will have to take the largest cuts in consumption. There is simply nowhere else from which the 4 million acre-feet or more of reductions per year needed to bring demand into line with dwindling supplies can come. But forcing farmers into bankruptcy by jacking up water rates (if there was a mechanism to do so), or prescribing “incredibly simple” policy solutions that don’t consider the complexities of the situation and its myriad moving parts or the on-the-ground impacts, isn’t the way to do it.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
The “root cause” of the Colorado River crises is not alfalfa or pecans or cotton or cattle, it’s not the prior appropriation doctrine or the low price of water, it’s not overpopulation, it’s not data centers or golf courses or lawns or bad forest management or lack of or too many reservoirs. The root cause is twofold. First, there’s scarcity. The Southwest is an arid place, and climate change-exacerbated warming is drying it out more: there is less precipitation; the precipitation we do get is falling as rain, not snow; the snow we get is melting faster; and evapotranspiration is happening at a higher rate. This all leads to less water in the streams, reservoirs, rivers, and even aquifers. Secondly, there’s the chronic and long-term failure to acknowledge the scarcity, and the stubborn refusal to adapt to it and adjust consumption accordingly.
Consumptive use of Colorado River water for the Lower Basin’s largest users over time. Source: Bureau of Reclamation.
There has been progress. Over the last two decades some of the biggest water users on the river have slashed their water use considerably, sometimes because they had no choice, in some cases because they were incentivized to do so, and in other cases they did it to get ahead of future cuts. Last year, for example, the Imperial Irrigation District used 900,000 acre-feet less than it did in 1999. By its count, it has conserved over 9 million acre-feet since 2003 by fallowing fields and deploying various efficiency measures. And yet they’ve done so while continuing to grow nearly $240 million worth of alfalfa annually. It will need to do more; everyone will. But it’s a pretty big start.
There is one simple solution to the Colorado River crises: Everyone on the river has to use less water. Period. This won’t come from pithy policy prescriptions or one-dimensional solutions. It will require the tribal nations, the states, and all of the water users in the basin to come together and find a new way to approach and think about and revere the lifeline of the Southwest.
Coming in September: The Land Desk News Feed! This will be a once-a-week roundup of the West’s most important headlines, journalism, and commentary, curated and summarized by yours truly. I’m thinking it will probably drop on Wednesdays, but haven’t settled on anything, yet. Most weeks it will come in addition to the regular two Land Desk dispatches, but some weeks it may take one of the others’ place (meaning you’d only get two newsletters that week so as to not clog up your inbox all the time!).
All paid and free subscribers should expect the first edition on Sept. 9.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
Church and Cerro Pedernal, Youngsville, NM. Jonathan P. Thompson photo
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (Karl Flessa):
August 20, 2026
In the classic Monty Python sketch, a customer returns to the pet shop where, just 30 minutes ago, he purchased a parrot. He complains that the parrot is dead. The shopkeeper tries to convince the customer the parrot is only resting or is stunned.
In the ensuing argument, the customer uses no fewer than eighteen euphemisms: “This parrot is definitely deceased…demised…passed on…no more…ceased to be…expired…gone to meet his maker…a stiff…bereft of life…rests in peace…pushing up the daisies…metabolic processes are now history…off the twig…kicked the bucket…shuffled off his mortal coil…run down the curtain…joined the bleedin’ choir invisible.”
Indeed, the parrot was nailed to its perch, already dead when the customer bought it.
The Compact and its subsequent agreements are as dead as that parrot.
The Compact is dead because it is founded on a false premise: a river that can produce the prescribed amount of water.
The Compact is dead because it is unjust: neither the Tribes nor nature participate in negotiations.
The Compact is dead because it doesn’t work. The Basin States are locked in battle; the Federal government tinkers and dithers.
In the longer version of the sketch, the shopkeeper goes to the back in search of a live replacement, returning to report “…we’re right out of parrots.”
So are we.
We need a new Compact.
Proposals are not lacking: proportional allocations, Tribal standing, a whole-basin approach, adjustments based on actual flows, a basin authority, nature’s fair share, interstate trading… .
What’s lacking is the courage to change. [ed. emphasis mine]
The Compact is a dead parrot.
Delph Carpenter’s original map showing a reservoir at Glen Canyon and one at Black Canyon via Greg Hobbs
The Yampa River at Deerlodge Park July 24, 2021 downstream from the confluence with the Little Snake River. There was a ditch running in Maybell above this location. Irrigated hay looked good. Dryland hay not so much.
A rare call has been placed on the main stem of the Yampa River as historic drought conditions continue to strain water supplies across Northwest Colorado, potentially curtailing more than 300 upstream diversions and prompting water managers to urge residents to conserve wherever possible. The call was placed Aug. 19 at the Lily Park Ditch No. 1, Pump Station No. 1, near the confluence of the Little Snake and Yampa rivers. The agricultural water right carries a priority date of May 28, 1923…Holly Kirkpatrick, public affairs manager for the Upper Yampa Water Conservancy District, said the call is only the fifth to occur on the main stem of the Yampa River below Stagecoach Reservoir…Kirkpatrick said well over 300 diversions upstream of the calling point could be subject to curtailment if they have priority dates junior to May 28, 1923. The call also applies to tributaries upstream of the Little Snake and Yampa river confluence. Some of those tributaries, however, may already have little or no natural streamflow available because of the severity of this year’s drought, she said. The Upper Yampa Water Conservancy District reported Aug. 20 that baseflows in tributaries across the basin remained below the 10th percentile, an indication of unusually low water levels. The district’s report showed the Yampa River below Craig flowing at 94 cubic feet per second, compared with a historical mean of 156 cfs for the date. In Steamboat Springs, the river was flowing at 58 cfs compared with a historical mean of 96 cfs. Reservoir releases are now supplying much of the water moving through the Yampa River, Kirkpatrick said.
Central Arizona Project map via Mountain Town News
Click the link to read the article on the KTAR website (Heidi Hommel). Here’s an excerpt:
August 26, 2026
The Upper Basin is on the verge of violating the Colorado River Compact for the first time in the agreement’s 104-year history, failing to send enough water downstream to the Lower Basin, Central Arizona Project President Terry Goddard told KTAR News 92.3 FM on Monday…Goddard said the new framework from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation that will guide operations through 2036 could make it worse…
“We have a violation of the compact either today or within the next month,” Goddard said.
The compact requires the Upper Basin to deliver 75 million acre-feet to the Lower Basin over any rolling 10-year period, averaging 7.5 million acre-feet a year. Goddard said the Upper Basin is falling short of that obligation for the first time in the compact’s history, releasing only 6 million acre-feet this year and running right at the 10-year threshold. [ed. As Ed Millard says, the action is not from the Upper Basin but from Reclamation]
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
A moisture index satellite image of Las Vegas, Nevada. Southern Nevada stands to lose as much as 71% of its Colorado River allotment under the Department of Interior’s operating guidelines for the river and its two largest reservoirs. Source: Copernicus Browser.
THE NEWS:The U.S. Interior Department on Friday handed down the operating guidelines for the Colorado River for the next two years, while also finalizing the 10-year decision framework that will guide these plans. And on Monday, Nevada filed a lawsuit challenging both the framework and operating plan, saying that potential shortages required by the plan could cause “cause devastating environmental, socioeconomic, and health and human safety impacts to southern Nevada and its citizens.”
THE CONTEXT: Interior, i.e. the Bureau of Reclamation, did two things. The first was to hand down a record of decision on the framework that will guide operating plans for the next decade, which I wrote about here, so I’ll skip the details this time.
They also released a more specific plan for the 2027 and 2028 operating years. In the new plan, the feds affirm their commitment to “defending” minimum power pool in Lake Powell, or a reservoir surface elevation of 3,490 feet. When the water falls below this level, water can no longer be released via the penstocks and hydropower turbines, so it must all go through the lower river outlet works, which weren’t designed for sustained use.
Notably, Reclamation plans to do this by “initially seeking to maintain a minimum elevation of 3,510 feet. This provides an operational buffer and provides additional flexibility in recognition of the operational risks associated with sustained operations below elevation 3,490 feet … .”
The current elevation is 3,518 feet, meaning it could reach that upper buffer zone of 3,510 feet in October if current levels of decline continue.
To prevent it from falling any further, Reclamation would cut back releases from Glen Canyon Dam, which in turn would cut flows through the Grand Canyon and into Lake Mead, which would pull down Mead’s levels and trigger mandatory cuts for the Lower Basin users. Under the new operating plan so far, these cuts aren’t as onerous as many feared, and actually match up with what the Lower Basin had proposed to do voluntarily. The deets:
The Lower Basin would receive 6.25 million acre-feet from the Colorado River, or 1.25 MAF below the Colorado River Compact’s allotment of 7.5 MAF.
Arizona would receive 2.04 MAF; California 3.96 MAF; and Nevada 250,000 AF.
This means Arizona would take a 760,000 AF cut; Nevada a 50,000 AF cut; and California a 440,000 AF cut.
Arizona takes the largest cut by percentage and volume because the Central Arizona Project, which delivers most of the state’s Colorado River water, has junior water rights to other big users on the river.
But if reservoir levels continue to drop, then Reclamation could impose further cuts on the Lower Basin, potentially slashing Nevada’s water deliveries by as much as 213,556 acre-feet, or about 71% of its total entitlement of 300,000 acre-feet. This would be truly disastrous for the Las Vegas metro area, which relies on the Colorado River for about 90% of its water. And it’s not like there are a bunch of alfalfa fields the city could “buy and dry” for the water rights.
The Southern Nevada Water Authority has managed to cut overall water consumptionover the last three decades, even as the population has soared, through system-wide efficiencies, incentives, tearing up ornamental grass, water recycling, and extra fees for water gluttons. Las Vegas still has room to conserve, but as Western water scholar John Fleck put it, there “is an absurdity to a plan that would require Las Vegas to cut 71%. That’s existential.”
Even more astonishing than the fact that the federal government is considering virtually drying up one of the Southwest’s major metropolises is their justification for doing so: To protect Glen Canyon Dam and keep it producing hydropower, even at greatly diminished levels, and — though it’s not stated — to keep lake-based recreation somewhat viable.
You have to remember that when the feds vow to defend the 3,500-foot level at Lake Powell, and when they refuse to even consider re-engineering Glen Canyon Dam to allow for releases at lower levels, either by rebuilding the outlet tubes or tunneling a bypass around the dam, they are also saying they are going to trap more than 4 million acre-feet of water behind the dam that could otherwise flow downstream into the Grand Canyon and Lake Mead. That’s enough water to fill Nevada’s entire allotment for more than 13 years that, instead, will be sitting in the reservoir and slowly evaporating.
Nevada’s lawsuit — which is against the federal government, not the Upper Basin states — alleges that the feds’ plan violates the Law of the River. It slams the plan for not explicitly calling for releasing more water from Upper Basin reservoirs to prop up Powell, does not require Upper Basin states to make any cuts, and fails to consider a long-term alternative or engineered solution alternative to address Glen Canyon’s infrastructure limitations. The plan also does not account for its potential impacts on hydropower production at Hoover Dam, which drops off steeply as reservoir levels decline (meaning that preserving power output at Glen Canyon could lead to a net reduction in combined output from the two dams).
Save the Colorado, a river advocacy group, came out in support of Nevada’s lawsuit in a written statement. “Las Vegas has one of the best water conservation programs in the entire U.S.,” said Gary Wockner, the group’s executive director. “Penalizing Las Vegas for water use is like penalizing an obese person who lost a lot of weight taking GLP1s.”
Rough Times at the national parks these days. In Bryce Canyon, a sudden thunderstorm left visitors stranded on trails and requiring rescue, with two of them transported to a hospital for hypothermia. It also unleashed some serious flash flooding. In Zion National Park, a rockslide narrowly missed a shuttle bus and forced the closure of a portion of the Zion Canyon Scenic Drive. And in Canyonlands, officials were searching for a missing individual in Horseshoe Canyon, a remote area north of the park’s Maze district. Temperatures in the area were in the 90s. In Death Valley, a French tourist died after his car got stuck in the mud on a remote road in 116° F heat.
The video below shows flooding near Tropic, Utah, downstream from Bryce Canyon National Park. Source: Garfield County Sheriff.
In May, I wrote about how climate change and aridification and a shrinking Lake Powell were coming for the Bullfrog Marina, on the northwest side of the reservoir. The water was simply getting too low for the marina to remain viable, so they were planning on moving it across the reservoir to Halls Crossing Marina.
At the time, it was not yet clear how lower water levels and the marina’s removal might affect visitation to the remote area. Now preliminary numbers are in:
67,277: Total recreation visitors to the Bullfrog District of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, January through July 2025
44,206: Total recreation visitors to the Bullfrog District, January through July 2026.
That’s a decrease of over 23,000 visits, or a 34% drop. Even more dramatic is the drop in overnight stays in July, from over 47,000 in 2025 to just 17,000 in 2026. Then did folks make the long drive over to Halls Crossing, instead? It appears that some of them may have once the marina was moved, but overall this year visitation is also down on the northeast side of the reservoir.
18,023: Total recreation visitors to the Halls Crossing District of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, January through July 2025.
15,099: Total recreation visitors to the Halls Crossing District, January through July 2026.
That’s a decrease of 2,944 visits, or a 19% drop. This may not all be related directly to the dropping lake levels. Horseshoe Bend, which is in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area but downstream from the reservoir, has also seen a significant drop off in visitors this spring and summer. In a future dispatch I’ll take a closer look at tourism numbers in general to get a better sense of how widespread the declines are.
And now for the images showing Bullfrog with the marina, and without. The first image is from August 2024, when the reservoir’s surface elevation was at about 3,580 feet. The marina was still there, and the boat ramps still made it all the way to the water. The second image is from August 2026, with a surface level of just over 3,518 feet. Look closely and you’ll see the marina is gone, and the ramps are high and dry.
Bullfrog Bay and Marina, August 2024. Source: Copernicus.
Bullfrog Bay and no marina, August 2026. Source: Copernicus.
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Stephanie Daniel):
August 24, 2026
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Boise State Public Radio, Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Northern Colorado, KANW in New Mexico, Colorado Public Radio and KJZZ in Arizona as well as NPR, with support from affiliate newsrooms across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
Three states are being required to cut their water use under a final plan for managing the Colorado River over the next two years, while the four upstream states are being asked to voluntarily conserve water.
The U.S. Department of the Interior released the Record of Decision for managing the river over the next decade and laying out more specific rules for the next two years. The plan is intended to protect Lake Powell and Lake Mead, which have fallen to historically low levels after years of drought.
Arizona, California and Nevada will have to collectively reduce their water use by 1.25 million acre-feet per year over the next two years, with additional restrictions possible if conditions worsen, according to the plan.
Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming are not subject to mandatory reductions; instead, those states are setting up programs to voluntarily conserve water.
“Under the proposed plan issued by the Department of the Interior, southern Nevada could lose more than 70 percent of its already meager Colorado River allocation while the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming are not required to contribute a drop,” Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo said in a news release on Monday.
Upper Basin officials say their water users already face reductions when drought leaves less water available and that the federal government doesn’t have authority to impose mandatory cuts in their states. But they say the Upper Basin is willing to contribute voluntarily.
“Not because we have to, or that we feel like we legally have to,” Colorado’s river negotiator Becky Mitchell said at a conference last week in Steamboat Springs, “but because the importance of this system and the survival of this system is a responsibility for everyone.”
The federal framework envisions up to 200,000 acre-feet of water per year in Upper Basin contributions when conditions allow. The federal government is dedicating $100 million to the Upper Basin to compensate farmers, cities or other water users to use less. Colorado, Wyoming and Utah are also setting up their own state programs to facilitate participation.
Colorado officials expect applications could open this fall and projects could start next year.
“Our position has been and continues to be that we’re going to be part of the solution,” said Amy Ostdiek, section chief for the Colorado Water Conservation Board at the Steamboat conference. “We’re going to do it in the ways that we can, at the times that we can, but we can’t provide water certainty for our neighbors downstream that we don’t have ourselves.”
Criteria for selecting projects, how water users will be compensated and how the Upper Basin gains credit for conserved water are still being worked out.
The Green River flows beneath the Flaming Gorge Dam in Utah. The federal government is sending water from the reservoir to prop up Lake Powell, something it could do in future dry years under a plan to manage the Colorado River. Ted Wood/The Water Desk
The federal plan also creates a potential “conservation pool” in Lake Powell, allowing the Upper Basin states to store a certain amount of conserved water.
John Berggren, a water policy analyst with the nonprofit Western Resource Advocates, has advocated for a conservation pool and said its inclusion in the federal framework is promising. However, exactly how it would work is not clear.
“How that pool operates, how the water is used, when it’s moved, if it’s moved, who decides that – all that is going to depend on future agreements,” he said.
Some key questions, he said, have to do with what the conserved water is credited towards, such as whether it’s used to offset shortages in the Lower Basin or help the Upper Basin fulfill their legal obligations to deliver water downstream.
The new framework also allows the Upper Basin to come to an agreement with the Interior Department to draw down a few reservoirs when Lake Powell nears getting too low for hydropower. That started happening this year, with water released from Flaming Gorge Reservoir in Wyoming.
A simple illustration of water income and water expenses in a human–water system. Water bankruptcy is the outcome of both insolvency and irreversibility conditions, i.e., when water use (expenditure) exceeds water supply (renewable and non-renewable assets) for an extended period resulting in irreparable damages to the underlying natural capital that contributes to water production and stability of the hydrological cycle.
Click the link to read the article on the Sibley’s Rivers website (George Sibley):
‘Amid chronic groundwater depletion, water overallocation, land and soil degradation, deforestation, and pollution, all compounded by global heating, a UN report today declared the dawn of an era of global water bankruptcy, inviting world leaders to facilitate honest, science-based adaptation to a new reality.’
Our Colorado River made their list of exemplary global ‘hot spots’ for bankruptcy, with the observation that ‘the Colorado River and its reservoirs have become symbols of over-promised water.’
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
You’ve seen the word ‘crisis’ used frequently this year in the countless morbid articles about the Colorado River. But the UNU Institute director Kaveh Madani argued that we are now ‘post-crisis’: the term ‘crisis’ implies a deviation from the normal, a disruption to be dealt with in order to get back to normal, but there is now, Madani says, no going back to what passed for ‘normal’ in the last century. [ed. emphasis mine]
The study indicates that we have drained too many aquifers, resulting in subsidence that destroys the aquifers for the rest of the geological age; we have lost high-storage wetlands to gullying and lowered water tables; we have spread too much surface water out to dry under an atmosphere heating up incrementally with every additional gallon of fossil fuel we burn; desertification spreads in our wake; et cetera, et cetera. As a result:
The report makes the case for a fundamental shift in the global water agenda—from repeatedly reacting to emergencies to “bankruptcy management.” That means confronting overshoot with transparent water accounting, enforceable limits, and protection of the water-related natural capital that produces and stores water—aquifers, wetlands, soils, rivers, and glaciers—while ensuring transitions are explicitly equity-oriented and protect vulnerable communities and livelihoods.
There is in this research paper the kind of lovely naivete that one finds in most of the analyses of Big Issues today (climate change, systemic racism, corporate personhood versus people, etc.); there is an underlying conviction that when the facts are all laid out, we will rationally accept that, yes, we are indeed in a bankrupt situation. And so we will all sit down together, like rational beings would, and work out ways to resolve the ‘reality deficit’ between what has been promised and what can be delivered.
This ignores the fact that, when we are first confronted with evidence of something so big in its threat to our way of life, that its correction might require creating a whole new way of life, our first response is to say, ‘this can’t be so.’ There has to be a mistake. And a long winding road leads on, into and through a morass of denial, anger, blames cast, responsibilities denied, hopeful negotiations and underlying despair – the whole medieval pilgrim’s Slough of Despond that must be negotiated before we might actually sit down together and work out some way of resolving the ‘reality deficit.’
There is, however, a kind of honesty in coming around to realizing – and acknowledging – that a system might be bankrupt. Bankruptcy is not necessarily the end song of what has become bankrupt, although it can be (Chapter 7 bankruptcy). It can instead be a time of operational or financial reorganization, aa time for acknowledging circumstances, conditions and misconceptions not originally taken into account that, accounted for, might enable a measure of eventual recovery and even success.
The seven Colorado River Basin states, still stuck in the zomboid Colorado River Compact, are not there yet, but the Bureau of Reclamation might be getting there. On the viable assumption that the seven states will not come up with a last-minute plan before the end of September and expiration of the Interim and Interim Interim Guidelines, they are preparing to institute a temporary plan that will maintain functionality in the river storage and delivery system, with (they hope) no embarrassing ‘dead pool’ episodes – which basically means getting and keeping as much water as possible in the two big reservoirs, Mead and Powell, and that can only happen at considerable cost to users below the big reservoirs.
The Bureau plan will not be carved in stone for forever like the Colorado River Compact; the Bureau will basically be planning operations for two-year periods, through the coming decade; every two years, the parties of interest will reconvene to review and revise the operating plan as circumstances require. This ‘adaptive’ approach makes sense in a bankruptcy situation in which the future is mostly unknown. [ed. emphasis mine]
The plan really has no surprises for anyone who remembers the 2022 bolt of reality that caused Bureau Commissioner Camille Touton to tell the water leaders in the seven states to immediately plan to voluntarily cut 2-4 million acre-feet (maf) of water use – basically a quarter of river use at that time – or the Interior Department would do it for them. That – in the centennial year of the Compact – is probably a good marker for the Bureau’s acknowledgement that we were beyond crisis, and slipping into bankruptcy.
The structural deficit refers to the consumption by Lower Basin states of more water than enters Lake Mead each year. The deficit, which includes losses from evaporation, is estimated at 1.2 million acre-feet a year. (Image: Central Arizona Project circa 2019)
That 2022 siren call was met by the Lower Basin states agreeing to finally take the Lower Basin system losses (evaporation, etc.) and their half of the Mexican obligation out of their river-use shares rather than out of Mead storage until the 2027 water year – provided they would be paid to do so. The absence of ‘surplus flows’ to take care of those losses – ~1.25 maf – from the coming online of the Central Arizona Project was a principal source of the draining of the big reservoirs, the so-called ‘structural deficit,’ 30 maf of storage gifted to the Lower Basin.
(A side note on this: The Upper Basin states, since a 1970 Law-of-the-River agreement, have been regularly sending downstream their 750,000 acre-feet for the Mexican obligation and absorbing as part of their whatever’s-left-over share of the river the ~400,000 acre-feet of Upper Basin system losses. The four states have never asked for or been paid for doing that.)
But that 1.25 maf of voluntary shortages was only a large fraction of the 2-4 maf of cuts the Bureau said needed to happen. So the Bureau’s original 2027-28 plan announcement in late July included cuts of up to 40 percent for the states below Mead Reservoir (Arizona, California and Nevada) – roughly equivalent to the 2022 request for 2-4 maf in cuts. The three downriver states countered that with an offer to permanently do the same 1.25 maf cut (with payment) for 2027-28 they were doing for 2025-26, with intimations of lawsuits if the Bureau pushed too far beyond that.
Arizona has led the countercharge from the states below Mead Reservoir – being the state with the most to lose, since the junior status of the Central Arizona Project means it would be practically shut down by 40 percent cuts in usage.
A letter to the Interior Department from Tom Buschatzky, Arizona’s Director of Water Resources, castigated the Bureau plan for making no mention of the Colorado River Compact and the Law of the River (LOTR). The letter insisted that Article III(c) and (d) of the Compact be executed to the letter as stated in the LOTR 1970 agreement: that a minimum of 8.23 maf be released from Powell Reservoir every year – the Compact commitment of 7.5 maf per year on average passing Lee Ferry, plus the Upper Basin’s share of the Mexican obligation (750,000 af/year).
In their August 21 announcement of the more detailed plan for 2027-28, the Bureau backed down from the 40 percent number, and now wants a 20 percent reduction in use for the two years – more in line with the Lower Basin’s willingness to continue taking care of its own system losses and Mexican share, but requiring some additional cuts – and avoided discussion of the Compact issue raised. It will, however, probably be pushing for more cuts in the 2028 discussions for the 2029-30 plan renewal; the Bureau still feels that it needs at least 3 maf in permanent cuts to begin any hope of turning the current near-bankruptcy around, and bringing demand in line with at least current supply.
The Bureau would also like the seven states to be reviewing, revising and executing the two-year plans consensually by 2036, rather than imposing it on them. But Arizona, according to the Buschatzky letter, wants a ‘longer, more comprehensive’ plan from the states, consistent with the LOTR, and ‘does not accept a framework that gives the federal government the discretion to select from a wide range of alternatives—including catastrophic cuts to the Lower Basin—every two years for the next decade.’
‘Bankruptcy management’ would seem to argue that the Colorado River Compact should be on the table along with everything else – including the nonexistence of the 18 maf river for which the Compact was written. A detailed analysis of the current situation by the ‘River Elders’ – the Kuhn-Schmidt-Castle group – suggested that ‘Basin water users must focus on solutions to the fundamental, wet-water math problem, rather than legal arguments over paper water.’ [ed. emphasis mine]
Nonetheless, Buschatzke’s letter states that ‘Arizona reserves the right to seek the resolution of its Compact rights in an appropriate judicial forum.’ The states are not yet willing to acknowledge the bankruptcy of the Compact – a Humpty-Dumpty that not all the patches and bandaids of the Law of the River can put back together for an ever-shrinking 21st century Colorado River.
That, more or less, is where the river system’s future sits as of August 21. There will – thanks to the Bureau – be a plan for moving carefully into the future, a two-year step at time. A big question is how hard the Bureau will begin to push for the 3-4 maf in permanent cuts by users necessary to stop the march into real dead-pool bankruptcy of the system – leading to another big question: whether the Compact nostalgitarians will push the system into dead-pool bankruptcy by suing the Bureau/Interior Department over paper water, tying things up in court for another several years.
Ah, the lovely Slough of Despond. There with Henry: ‘All day the sun has shone on the surface of some savage swamp, where the single spruce stands hung with usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate above, and the chickadee lisps among the evergreens, and the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath; but now a more dismal and fitting day dawns, and a different race of creatures awakes to express the meaning of Nature there….’ Bankruptcy, the Apocalypse – only the end for those who fail to see that something else is always struggling for a chance to be born; don’t put a period where God (or Nature) would put a comma (Gracie Allen). As Henry also observed, ‘The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake….’
Next post, I want to go back to the ‘desert river’ concept to think a little outside the (Compact) box.
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 release on the ADWR website:
August 21, 2026
After more than three years of difficult negotiations over post-2026 Colorado River Operations guidelines, Arizona and the Lower Basin states have created a level of stability for the Colorado River system with the adoption of the 2027-2028 operating guidelines in the Record of Decision. While the framework for years 3-10 continues to be of concern, we applaud the Department of the Interior for clarifying the decision-making process for operations beyond 2028. That outcome allows for continued negotiations for years 3-10 while preserving our ability to protect Arizona’s legal rights to Colorado River water.
We will continue to work with our partners in Arizona, the Lower Basin and Interior, to finalize the agreements necessary to implement the Lower Basin Plan. With the Record of Decision, the 2027-2028 Operating Guidelines and the supporting agreements in place, we can focus on a longer-term, equitable, basin-wide outcome that includes shared sacrifices along with our Upper Basin partners in an effort to avoid protracted litigation. The actions in the Lower Basin in recent decades to protect the system have demonstrated how much we can accomplish when we all join together as part of the solution. – Tom Buschatzke, Director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources
Tom Buschatzke. Photo credit: Arizona Department of Water Resources
Colorado River negotiators are seen at the 2025 Colorado River Water Users Association Annual Conference. From left to right: Becky Mitchell (Colorado), Tom Buschatzke (Arizona), Brandon Gebhart (Wyoming), and John Entsminger (Nevada). (Photo by Jeniffer Solis/Nevada Current)
Nevada officials filed a federal lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s order for cuts in water use Monday, marking a major escalation of tensions between the seven states that share the Colorado River. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court of Nevada, asserts that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s operating plan unlawfully authorizes the federal government to reduce the state’s allocation of the river by up to 71 percent annually sometime over the next 10 years. Such a cut would slash the state’s share of 300,000 acre-feet down to 86,444 acre-feet. Nevada’s use, after cashing in water recycling credits with its state-of-the-art system, came in at 198,000 acre-feet last year.
“There are four states upstream of us that are facing zero mandatory reductions,” said John Entsminger, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, in a Monday interview. “That is not going to balance the system. This is a system-wide problem. It requires system-wide solutions.”
Lawyers for the Colorado River Commission of Nevada, the water authority and the state as a whole requested an injunction to halt implementation until federal documents can reflect the toll water cuts would have on Southern Nevada’s $180 billion economy.
“This shortfall will cause devastating environmental, socioeconomic, and health and human safety impacts to southern Nevada and its citizens,” attorneys wrote. “Federal Defendants failed to consider such impacts in any meaningful way.”
While 2027 and 2028 will see allocation cuts that the Lower Basin states of Nevada, California and Arizona have already agreed to, the years 2029 to 2036 could bring much harsher reductions. Entsminger said he felt it was important for Nevada to have its own representation on the issue, but he added he would be surprised if California and Arizona don’t sign on to the lawsuit, considering officials remain aligned in their positions. No mandatory cuts will be imposed on the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming. Entsminger submitted a letter to all six Colorado River basin states Monday, saying the state’s decision to sue wasn’t made lightly but that “hiding from reasonable legal interpretations in order to defer hard political decisions helps no one over the long term and further endangers our shared resource.”
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Earlier that same day, the Department of Interior had issued its record of decision about how it would manage the key dams and hence the river during the two water years beginning in October. This came after Colorado and the six other basin states had failed during two years of negotiations to agree about how to share diminished river flows.
As even schoolboys in Kentucky likely know, the Colorado River has encountered severe problems since 2000. Flows in the river are down 20% and continuing to decline in direct proportion to rising temperatures. The two big reservoirs, Mead and Powell, have declined 75% in stored water.
The lower-basin states, which get their water from these two big reservoirs, had already cut their use significantly. The Department of Interior has ordered the three states to expect 1.25 million acre-feet less water from Mead during the next two years. It also expects the three states to figure out how to store 700,000 acre-feet over the next two years. Colorado and other upper basin states cannot expand water use.
Agriculture users, said Udall, will bear the brunt of these cutbacks. Municipal users — all the cities from Colorado’s Front Range to southern California get water from the river and its tributaries — will have to chip in with water savings. Infrastructure limitations of the two big dams, Hoover and Glen Canyon, when holding little water need to be resolved. For example, penstocks [river outlet tubes] on the two big dams were never designed for day-in, day-out use, as may be necessary with reduced amounts of water. And as for the hydroelectric production? Yes, it’s a small amount but important. It provides backup power.
The process created by the Interior Department — the Bureau of Reclamation is the key agency within Interior — requires new plans every two years for the next decade. Udall sees merit in this approach.
“When the negotiations started, the idea was that we’re going to get a 20-year plan. We got five two-year plans, which you might see as a setback, but I think we might have blundered into something actually useful, because it potentially is true adaptive management, where people get to pay attention repeatedly as this evolves.” [ed. emphasis mine]
Udall also sees strong dynamics producing solutions.
“I think we’re going to see a solution because the people who are involved in the negotiations are hard-working. They’re knowledgeable. They’re intelligent. They have super good relationships with each other. And they know that the chips are down. If they don’t solve it, the solution Mother Nature provides will be downright ugly. I think we will solve this. I actually do.”
When the breakthroughs will occur, Udall said he didn’t know. And he hedged his confidence with caution. “I won’t put bets on this.”
What is clear, though, is that Arizona will be key to solving the conundrum of 21st century flows being far less than 20th century expectations. The river in the last century average 15.2 million acre-feet. Even when it carried healthy volumes of water, though, the river had ceased to reach an embayment of the Pacific Ocean. Flows this century have declined and, since 2020, remarkably so: to an average of just 10 million acre-feet.
Flows will almost certainly decline further. Accumulating greenhouse gas emissions guarantee continued warming, producing reduced flows.
“Western water law is enormously complicated and really inhibits solutions,” he said. “We’ve made a whole bunch of policy mistakes through time, including permanent allocations, assuming way too much water, and enforcing or legalizing really unrealistic policies.”
Whether the framework created by the federal government for finding solutions will work, he said, will depend upon hydrology. In some circles optimism remains that the strong El Niño this year will produce improved precipitation and hence greater flows. And maybe it will, said Udall, but the record on flows during El Nino years has been all over the scattergram. A few very big years — 1983 and 1998 stand out — yes. But some real duds, too. In other words, this coming winter could conceivably be as bad as the past winter. Or, if not as bad, then will continue the downhill slide.
Now rewriting the rules
Udall also made the point that prior agreements were incremental in nature, unlike what the new federal rules represent.
“The rules in 2007 and 2019 were really hard fought, but they were incremental. They were truly incremental. What we’re looking at right now, it’s not incremental. It’s a complete rethink,” he said.
“I think people mistakenly thought that, given the successes in 2007, 2019, we would just kind of waltz our way to new rules. And I think that’s the wrong way to think about what’s going on. This is a really a different deal in 2026.”
This new paradigm imposed by the federal government, Udall went on to say, is the “first global instance where climate change is forcing a complete redo of water management. I think I can make a pretty good case for that.”
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
Udall has become well known at water meetings in Colorado and beyond, particularly during the last decade, in warning that communities and economic sectors dependent upon the Colorado River were headed for trouble. Climate change is water change, he began saying more than 20 years ago. And in 2014, he conducted research along with another scholar, Jonathan Overpeck, that showed the strong correlation between rising temperatures and reduced flows in the river. That science, he said, has strengthened.
Although living in Boulder, Udall in recent years has been affiliated with Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Center. There, he wears the title of senior water and climate research scientist/scholar.
However, Udall is also understood in terms of his family tree. He is a descendant of John D. Lee, the Mormon settler for whom Lee Ferry (also called Lees Ferry) is named. Located in Arizona, near the Utah border, it divides the Colorado River’s upper and lower basins.
Don’t make too much of being a John D. Lee descendant, he said. “He had 21 wives that we know of, and some have suggested he has 800,000 descendants. That might actually be part of the problem with the Colorado River.”
Ken Sleight the original Monkey Wrencher photo via Salon
As for his personal familiarity with the river, Udall divulged that he has rafted the Grand Canyon 45 times, at least some of those in the employ of Ken Sleight, best understood by readers of Edward Abbey’s “Monkey Wrench Gang” as the model for Seldom Seen Smith.
Arizona’s role
In Udall’s view, Arizona is central to solving this 21st century problem. The Central Arizona Project will “see a whole lot less water, but it’s not going to zero. I don’t know quite how that gets revolved, but that’s just so clear,” he said.
The Central Arizona Project delivers water from the Colorado River through 336 miles of canal to metropolitan Phoenix and ultimately Tucson, with farms along the way. It was authorized by Congress in 1968 and completed in 1993. Both his father, Morris, and his uncle, Stewart, were key figures in this. It can deliver 1.6 million acre-feet, the majority of the 2.8 million acre-feet that Arizona was scheduled to receive from the Colorado River under a 1964 court ruling.
As Udall pointed out, farms that got water from the project have received far less since cutbacks began in 2020. And now, more cuts for the farms — and cities — will be coming.
Given an hour for his presentation, far longer than his usual 20- or 30-minute slots, Udall had time to sketch some history, even taking time to define the universal way of measuring water quantities in the basin, the acre-foot.
“The reason that an acre-foot is used is farmers farm in terms of an acre,” he explained. “In the upper basin, you might put a foot or two feet of water on top of an acre to get a hay crop out. In the lower basin, near the Mexico border, you might put 10 feet of water on top of an irrigated field to get 10 different cuttings of alfalfa.”
Credit: The Land Desk
Thoughts about hay
Alfalfa came up in the Q&A. The question, in not so many words, was how to cut back water used to feed livestock. After all, agriculture uses about 75% of the water (after evaporation) in the Colorado River, and alfalfa and other feedstocks comprise a large portion of that. A full hour could have been devoted to that question — and likely left topics on the table. The tension inherent in this topic is revealed in how the Family Farm Alliance describes this push replace animal forage to crop switching: “crop shaming.”
“It’s easy to hate on alfalfa because people don’t eat it, but we kind of do, right? Dairy, ice cream, beef cattle. And the idea that you’re going to tell farmers not to grow alfalfa, which turns out to be a pretty good crop for them in their rotation, probably isn’t going to work very well. You’re probably far better off to say, ‘Hey, here’s your reduced allocation. You use it as you want,’” responded Udall
“I think most people in this room don’t care about corn. We very much care about alfalfa, and its water use, but I’m not sure trying to prohibit farmers from using a crop that’s key in their rotation and actually has some kind of interesting benefits is a suitable way to get there. “
Udall also mentioned the difficulties of crop switching.
“It’s been suggested that ag shift to higher value products that use less water. One way to do that is only grow stuff in the winter because growing in Yuma (Arizona) and Imperial (Valley) in midsummer is not a great idea. But when you ask a farmer to shift produce or products, you ask them to change marketing, you ask them to (change) labor, transportation, storage, equipment, knowledge. You ask them to change a lot of things, and arguably there’s a need to help this transition happen.”
This discussion, he concluded, is one that needs to be had but is very complicated. “It really is going to take a deep dive to figure out how to deal with this.”
You will be able to soon hear what Udall had to say (and see the slides he shared) at the Getches-Wilkinson Center’s site. The history lessons alone make it worth an hour.
A few other snippets:
• “The lower basin wants some contribution from the upper basin (in reducing use) maybe 5% or maybe 2%, but some kind of skin (in the game). And the upper Basin says no way. Until recently, the upper basin wanted to reserve the right to increase its use.”
• Our (Colorado delegate to the Upper Colorado River Commission) Becky Mitchell has recently been saying, you know, none of this gets us any extra water. And we need to move beyond this, and I applaud Becky for saying that.”
• Udall told a fascinating story about the Central Arizona Project. At the time the proposal for federal funding was before Congress, the Upper Colorado River Commission paid a Denver-based engineer to examine the numbers. That engineer’s conclusion: There’s not enough water for the Arizona project once the upper basin uses its full allocation (as defined in the Colorado River Compact of 1922). The number was 1.2 million acre-feet a year. And the two big reservoirs, Mead and Powell, have been losing 1.25 million acre-feet a year.
• The idea in 1968, said Udall, was that the federal government was going to figure out how to augment flows of the Colorado River. One of the ideas was to export water from the Snake River in Wyoming’s Jackson Hole to the Green River and hence the Colorado. Washington Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson and other members of Congress from the Pacific Northwest objected. And the augmentation that was part of the thinking never has happened.
Green River Basin
• On the first-in-time, first-in-right premise of Western water law. “You know, first-in-time, first-in-rank gets reinvented by 4-year-olds every day of the year throughout the world. I was here first; it’s mine. And most parents step in and say you’re going to share, right: But not Western water law. It was completely understandable in the 1800s, where you had a few users. But it’s really not so great in modern society. …
“You can’t have a case where 1,500 famers deprive 5 million people in Phoenix or 2 million people in the Front Range of water, of what I’ll call critical human water needs. It just isn’t going to work politically. Shared sacrifice would be a whole lot better way to deal with this.”
It’s pretty hard to cut back water use under Western water law, because if one user decides not to take water, the next user downstream can grab it. “If we’re trying to get water to Lake Powell, you have to rethink how this gets done.”
Colorado statewide annual temperature anomaly (°F) with respect to the 1901-2000 average. Graphic credit: Colorado Climate Center
• Temperatures have increased 3 degrees Fahrenheit since 1979. “Not a single year after 2000 is below the 20th century average,” he said of the Colorado River Basin. “Increased temps lead to increased evaporation. We think you can lose up to 5% flow (of water) per degree rise.”
Temperature increases have produced up to 15% increase in losses due to evaporation.
• As for precipitation, the last 27 years have been the worst 27 years since record-keeping began in 1895. The declines worsened beginning in around 2015.
A 1% decline in precipitation leads to a 2% decline in flows.
• As for Udall writing a book, as one audience member suggested, he said other authors have covered much of the same ground, even if he has a somewhat different angle. “I don’t know. I need an assistant!”
Brad Udall is pictured at Boulder Reservoir, which helps deliver water from the Upper Colorado River to the Front Range. Photo: Vance Jacobs/Colorado State University
The Bureau of Reclamation’s 10-year plan for managing Colorado River flows seeks to preserve enough water behind the Hoover Dam to sustain electricity generation. (Angus M. Thuermer Jr./WyoFile)
A federal drought plan for the Colorado River and its tributaries in Wyoming shouldn’t stop Wyoming from building a new dam and reservoir in Carbon County, two Western water experts say.
The Bureau of Reclamation plan for the sweeping basin focuses on maintaining enough water in Lake Powell and Lake Mead to generate electricity and prevent degradation of critical infrastructure, professors from Utah and Arizona said last week.
The 10-year framework to manage water storage and releases in the complex seven-state, two-nation system seeks to balance predictability and flexibility in two-year increments. It also acknowledges that the government has little to no authority over water use in headwater states Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico, said Sarah Porter, the director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute.
“One way of reading the final environmental impact statement,” Porter said, “is the Bureau’s determination that it doesn’t really have any authority to limit water use in the headwaters.” [ed. emphasis mine]
A controversial dam proposed on the West Fork of Battle Creek, which flows into the Little Snake River, above, and the Colorado River could still be built despite a drought that prevents Lake Powell and Lake Mead from filling. (EcoFlight)
Drought will likely cause agricultural stress in Arizona, Nevada and California, threatening the supply of winter vegetables and possibly other crops, she said.
“We probably won’t be eating as many salads,” she said, because Arizona is where winter lettuce is harvested. “It’s all grown in Yuma.”
More important for Wyoming might be that the Bureau of Reclamation’s final environmental impact statement recognizes the independence of headwater, or upper-division, states to essentially use water as they see fit. Efforts to conserve water in the Upper Basin “are not within the scope of this EIS,” the federal document states.
So while farmers downstream may see their traditional supplies cut, Wyoming forges ahead with plans for the 10,000-acre-foot West Fork dam and reservoir in Carbon County where 6,000 acre-feet a year would be poured onto fields for late-season irrigation on ranches.
Energy equation
The Bureau is imposing the plan after the seven states failed to agree on how to share Colorado River flows as drought crimps traditional allotments that were based on too-rosy estimates.
“We have the lowest reservoir storage we’ve ever seen,” said David Rosenberg, a Utah State University professor and water researcher. “We have very low inflows.”
He and Porter spoke in a Zoom webinar hosted by SciLine, a nonprofit that connects reporters with scientists.
The two called the Bureau of Reclamation plan a decision-making framework for distributing water in the three Lower Basin states — initially for two years.
“It doesn’t place the basin on a path to stabilizing the system at all,” Porter said. “It doesn’t resolve conflict at all. It doesn’t achieve the [long-term] things that the basin really needs at this point.” [ed. emphasis mine]
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)
But the plan is “a very clear statement,” Rosenberg said, “of how they’re going to protect infrastructure.”
That infrastructure includes the two major dams, associated power plants and canals that would become useless, even degraded, if the water levels in Powell and Mead drop below critical levels. With the plan, Rosenberg said, the Bureau states: “We’re still going to be generating hydropower.”
View below Flaming Gorge Dam from the Green River, eastern Utah. Photo credit: USGSBlue Mesa Dam. Photo credit: ReclamationThe outflow at the bottom of Navajo Dam in New Mexico. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Powell’s Glen Canyon and Mead’s Hoover dams can generate some $443 million of market-price electricity a year when operating fully, according to calculations from the Bureau of Reclamation and theU.S. Energy Information Administration. To keep those two reservoirs flush, the Bureau will release water from Wyoming’s Flaming Gorge Reservoir and from Colorado’s Blue Mesa Reservoir and New Mexico’s and Colorado’s Navajo Reservoir.
Beyond that, the Bureau’s plan targets the three Lower Basin states for reductions, depending on water in the river system and reservoirs.
Headwater states largely rely on stream and river flows determined by spring runoff. The at-risk region in Wyoming includes the Green River and its tributaries and the Little Snake River in Carbon County.
In contrast, the Lower Basin “gets all of its water, Colorado River water, from the reservoirs,” Porter said. It’s a lot more complicated to curtail Upper Basin use “than simply to not deliver water out of a reservoir,” she said. “And that’s a sore point with the Lower Basin.”
The two professors predicted a fight. “We expect they’ll be challenging this administrative process,” Porter said of the lower division states’ reaction to the Bureau’s EIS.
Compact call coming
There’s more on the horizon too.
“I also expect that within the next year and a half, or maybe two years, there will be what we call a compact call,” Porter said, “a demand from the Lower Basin for water that the Lower Basin contends the Upper Basin is obligated to deliver.
“That challenge will occur in the United States Supreme Court and that could take 10, 20, 30 years.”
Under the 1922 Colorado River Compact and associated agreements, the upper division states can’t diminish the flow from Lake Powell below 7.5 million acre-feet annually, calculated on a 10-year rolling average. That’s half what engineers originally calculated the watershed would produce; half belonging to the headwater states, half to the Lower Basin. That estimate is now considered to have been exuberantly optimistic. [ed. emphasis mine]
“We really need to figure out a way collectively to be reducing demand in the Colorado River by at least 3 million acre-feet out of the 15 million,” Porter said, “and that probably can’t all fall on the Lower Basin.
“The Lower Basin,” she said, “didn’t agree to be junior to the Upper Basin.”
If Upper Basin states don’t deliver the 7.5 million acre-feet past the Lee Ferry gauging station just below Lake Powell, headwaters curtailment will begin, starting with the most recent, or junior, water-right holders.
Until then, conservation in Wyoming will be voluntary, generally meaning that if an irrigator or other user forgoes their water right, they will need to be paid. In previous trial conservation programs, that has cost $500 an acre foot.
But a compact call by Lower Basin states would lead to curtailment — a mandatory cutting off of Upper Basin water use starting with the most recent, or junior, rights’ holders. Long-established ranches and irrigators hold senior rights while Wyoming municipalities and industries in the Green River Basin are likely among the first to be curtailed.
The proposed dam would be 264 feet high, 700 feet long and made out of concrete. (Major King for WyoFile)
Under the “Law of the River,” Wyoming has rights — on paper — to 14% of the Upper Basin’s 7.5 million acre-feet annually. That’s about 1 million acre-feet. But the state engineer estimated in 2010 that Wyoming’s rights amount to 847,000 acre-feet a year, according to the state’s 2010 plan for the basin. Wyoming uses 680,076 acre-feet and has rights to another 166,924, the latest plan states.
That makes the 100,000 or so Wyomingites who rely on or use Green River water relatively water rich compared to the 40 million down-streamers who rely on the river for some or all of their agricultural and municipal needs. In essence, 100,000 Wyomingites have rights to almost 1 million acre-feet while 39.9 million down-streamers divvy up 7.5 million acre-feet.
The implications go beyond the scarcity of your garden-variety salad.
“If there are big reductions in water supplies to those [Lower Basin] areas, there really will be impacts on our food supply nationally, not to mention other impacts,” Porter said.
Phoenix reclaims wastewater through a multi-step filtration process – settling, aeration, disinfection – turning it into clean water for parks, cooling, and natural restoration.
Recycling water
While the prospect of southwestern metropolises crashing headlong into ugly sewerage problems caused by the crisis would seem to loom, don’t put all your money into wag-bags and porta potties yet. The municipalities are figuring out how to cope.
“Those cities are making massive investments in advanced water purification to treat reclaimed water to potable to reduce reliance on annual deliveries of Colorado River water,” Porter said. “That access to other water supplies or other water management strategies isn’t really available to agricultural water users or, to a great extent, the tribes who are significant rights holders to Colorado River water.
“We may see impacts to cities really smoothed out and not be very disruptive,” she said. “If we do have disruptive impacts, they will probably fall on rural areas and tribal communities in the Lower Basin.”
And the existing plans and commitments, including a federal outline announced in late July 2026, don’t get close to achieving what’s needed to keep the river flowing. Here’s a look at the key issues making an agreement so hard to reach.
The Lower Basin states – Arizona, California and Nevada – have been using less water, even as their populations have grown.
They have proposed to further reduce water use in 2027 and 2028, and Mexico has, too. Those decreases, coming only from the Lower Basin states, would be the biggest-ever reductions of Colorado River water use, but they would amount to only about 3.7 million acre-feet over two years, about half what is likely needed.
If the winter of 2026-27 is like the winter the West had in 2025-26, the river and reservoirs will likely be at that point by mid-2027. A really good winter with lots of snow might push the timing out a year or two, but it won’t solve the problem: People are using a lot more water from the reservoirs than nature is replenishing each year with rainfall and snowfall.
The other key problem is evaporation. These massive reservoirs are in a hot, dry region. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that annual evaporation is about 1.5 million acre-feet. That’s about 10% of what the seven states expect to be able to use each year – and about half of the overall cuts in water use that would be needed to keep the river flowing.
Even if sufficient water were released from Lake Powell to Lake Mead to cover the Lower Basin’s and Mexico’s apportionments, Lake Mead would continue to decline because of evaporation.
What would deep cuts mean for people?
Farmers and ranchers in the Upper Basin have had less water available in 2026 because the winter was extraordinarily dry.
But if water levels at Lake Powell and Lake Mead fall too low to allow dam managers to release stored water, the effects would be on the Lower Basin.
Entities that receive water from the Central Arizona Project have junior priority in the Lower Basin. Central Arizona cities have years’ worth of groundwater they could access – not a forever supply, but enough to use for some years while they work on developing new water supplies.
If cuts go deeper, tribal and nontribal agriculture along the main stem would arguably take the hardest hit. They may have higher-priority rights, but if there’s no water they’re still in trouble. And there isn’t an alternative water supply for agriculture along the river’s main route.
Across the nation, people would notice higher costs and limited availability of some produce, especially in the winter. At times of year when those crops can’t grow in colder parts of the country, Yuma County, Arizona, and Imperial County, California, are key suppliers of vegetables. Other products would be affected too, including Desert durum wheat, a high-gluten wheat that is preferred for pasta.
What would those cuts mean for electricity?
The federal Bureau of Reclamation has made clear its commitment to continuing hydropower production by keeping reservoir elevations above the minimum level needed to generate electricity.
As a result, the reservoirs will likely not reach the point called “deadpool,” at which no water can move through the dam. But they may reach levels at which no water beyond what’s required to generate power – or what arrives as rain or snow – would flow downstream.
What are the states’ positions?
The Lower Basin states have said they would reduce water use by 1.6 million acre-feet a year, effectively handling the reduction due to evaporation. But the Lower Basin has remained insistent on the Upper Basin states’ sharing in additional conservation measures.
Without a negotiated way forward, there are two potential legal fights on the horizon, which could happen at the same time.
One is a Supreme Court fight over how to interpret the Colorado River Compact. It tends to take about a decade to resolve interstate water-sharing fights in the Supreme Court. If that happens, the region will face years of uncertainty regarding the amount of water available to different users.
At the same time, negotiators, tribes and others in the Lower Basin have made clear that they don’t agree with the approach to the crisis the Bureau of Reclamation announced in late July 2026. The specifics of how that plan will be carried out have not yet been released, but Arizona and Nevada have already threatened to sue.
I think it’s going to require federal leadership. In the 1930s a national effort set out to improve farming efficiency all around the nation, but especially in the South and West. Under the Bankhead-Jones Act of 1937, the federal government bought millions of acres of marginal farmland to take it out of production.
Farming is important, but not every acre of farmland should stay in production. If it’s a choice between making sure some water goes to cities or keeping every possible acre of farmland irrigated, we have to be able to discuss both options.
For Mead and Powell, fresh record lows. Data: USBR; Graph: Jack Schmidt
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (Jack Schmidt and John Fleck):
August 7, 2026
When Lake Mead’s elevation crossed the threshold of 1,040 feet above sea level in the spring of 1937, stretching upstream 100 miles behind Hoover Dam in the deserts of the Arizona Nevada border, it was national news.
So much water!
Kerrville Times, Kerrville Texas, May 13, 1937
As Mead drops past that threshold in the opposite direction in the summer of 2026, it’s telling a different story. So little water.
Two milestones in the last few days are worthy of note. The first is Lake Mead itself, which in the last two days dropped past the previous lowest levels in history set in 2022, meaning it is now the lowest it has been since the reservoir was first filled in the 1930s.
Lake Mead was at 7.012 maf yesterday (Aug. 6, 2026) (1040.5 ft). The previous record low was 7.018 maf (1040.58 ft) that was set on July 28, 2022. Thus, yesterday’s reservoir contents in Lake Mead are the lowest since at least May 1937.
Meanwhile, Lake Powell is now 85,000 af (1.51 ft) above its lowest historical amount since it was first filled in the 1960s.
But that does not fully capture the extent of the crisis. Total reservoir contents of all 46 reservoirs in the Reclamation data base (extending from Fontenelle and Grand Lakes to Lake Havasu) was at 21.27 maf on July 1, the lowest since at least May 29, 1965 (probably earlier, since the Reclamation data base doesn’t report many reservoir contents at that early date).
The vultures didn’t wait long to feed on the carrion of shrunken national monuments. Within days of President Donald Trump’s order slashing nearly 3 million acres from Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments, mining claims were filed within the former boundaries of both monuments with San Juan County and Kane County, respectively.
While Trump’s shrinkage did reopen that land to new mining claims and mineral leasing, it does not go into effect until Sept. 11, 60 days after the proclamations were issued. The claims have not officially been recorded with the Bureau of Land Management.
On July 14, Kimmerle Mining LLC out of Moab filed seven claims just within the eastern border of what had been Bears Ears National Monument just two days earlier. A few weeks later, Charles Rosequist filed two claims in the southwest corner of the GSENM, near Kaibab Gulch and the Vermilion Cliffs.
Kimmerle Mining, its principal Kyle Kimmerle, and other family members hold dozens of mining claims across southern Utah and western Colorado uranium country. The family firm became known for staking claims in what would become Bears Ears National Monument leading up to its designation, and for locating more after Trump’s first national monument shrinkage in 2017.
Just before Biden restored the boundaries in 2021, Kimmerle Mining staked five new claims within the national monument and acquired additional claims from another firm in the historic White Canyon mining district. Kimmerle Mining promptly filed for a permit to do exploration work there, but the BLM said they had to demonstrate the claims’ “validity,” or show that they contained “valuable minerals.” The process for doing so would cost up to $100,000. Shortly thereafter, Kimmerle joined the state of Utah’s lawsuit seeking to eviscerate the national monument, claiming that its establishment had caused him to lose out on mining profits.
And, in 2018, the Kimmerle family staked the Easy Peasy claims in the Cottonwood Wash drainage in what had been Bears Ears National Monument. The new claims are adjacent to those, in the Cheese & Raisins Hills area, which was mined historically for vanadium and uranium. The Shumway brothers staked claims there back in the 1930s, including the Big Hole Mine, and the ruins of an old vanadium mill are still visible nearby.
Remnants of a historic vanadium processing plant in the Cottonwood Wash drainage near where Kimmerle Mining filed seven mining claims in an area removed from Bears Ears National Monument. Jonathan P. Thompson photo
Whether the firm plans to mine the claims, or is just looking for more grounds for a future lawsuit in the event that the next administration restores the boundaries isn’t clear. They have been known to use mining claims to make political points: Late last year, Kimmerle Mining staked four 20.66-acre lode claims on the east slope of the Henry Mountains, naming them Trump I, Trump 2, Trump 3, and Trump 4.
Also in the shady mining moves around national monument shrinkage: Less than a week before Trump issued the proclamations, Energy Fuels CEO Ross Bhappu purchased 74,000 shares of the uranium mining and milling firm’s stock, and the company’s chairman Bruce Hansen bought 4,000 shares. Democratic lawmakers on the House Natural Resources committee are now investigating the trade and the possibility that the executives received privileged, non-public information from the Trump administration in advance of the shrinkage.
Energy Fuels owns and operates the White Mesa uranium mill in San Juan County, Utah, east of Bears Ears National Monument. The company lobbied the Obama administration prior to its original 2016 designation. Though the administration ultimately excluded Energy Fuels’ Daneros mine from the monument, the firm lamented the fact that seven miles of the mine’s one access road still fell within the boundaries.
In 2017 Energy Fuels lobbyists, including former U.S. Rep. Mary Bono, R-Calif., met with Trump administration officials, and requested that it “reduce the size of the (Bears Ears National Monument) to only those specific resource areas or sites, if any, deemed to need additional protection beyond what is already available to Federal land management agencies.”
In 2021, IsoEnergy acquired the Daneros Mine and other mining properties from Energy Fuels. But any ore mined in the former Bears Ears is likely to be processed at Energy Fuels’ White Mesa mill, so they stand to benefit from the shrinkage.
⛈️ Wacky Weather Watch⚡️
It wasn’t exactly a hurricane that hit Hurricane, but it was pretty darned destructive. This past weekend a huge storm pounded southwestern Utah, leading to arroyo-busting flash floods that turned the city’s streets into rivers of mud. The water gave a big boost to the Virgin River, which shot up from about 165 cubic feet per second to over 4,000 cfs in a matter of hours.
🐟 Colorado River Chronicles 💧
Lake Powell reached a grim benchmark this past weekend, when its surface elevation dropped to its lowest level since 1968, when the nation’s second largest reservoir was still filling up. In April of 2023, the level fell to 3,519.92 feet. On August 15 of this year, it reached 3,519.91 feet and is still falling at a rate of about two inches per day.
While not exactly surprising, the event launched many a news story in the mainstream media. And as is often the case with complicated issues like these — and the Glen Canyon Dam problem is not exactly simple or straightforward — some of the facts in these stories can be a little less than factual, and could use a bit of clarification.
The graphic showing reservoir levels at Lake Powell says that at 3,370 feet, known as dead pool, “Water no longer flows past the dam.” As Zak Podmore — who wrote the book on Lake Powell and deadpool — pointed out on X-Twitter, that is not quite right. What actually would happen is that the dam would become a run-of-the-river facility, meaning water released from the dam would be equal to water flowing into the reservoir (minus losses from seepage and evaporation). So the Grand Canyon would not go completely dry, though there would be times when flows are pretty darned low.
The piece notes: “About 6 million people across the Southwest rely on electricity from the dams [both Glen Canyon and Hoover].” This isn’t wrong, it’s just worded in a way that overstates the importance of these generators’ energy output to the Western power grid. Combined, the dams produce enough electricity annually to power some 550,000 households for a year. That power is sold at cost to municipalities, cooperatives, tribal nations, irrigation districts, and utilities across the West, which include it as part of their larger portfolios. The 6 million figure probably refers to all of the customers all of those entities serve; if the dams go down, these folks most likely wouldn’t notice except for a small jump in their power bills.
Humpback chub. National Park Service illustration by Joe Tomelleri.
Protect the Grand Canyon’s Humpback Chub A guest dispatch by Ron Rudolph
This month Lake Powell will shrink to a level last seen in 1968, a few months before the first astronauts orbited the Moon. The receding reservoir has forced the Bureau of Reclamation to abandon the practice of releasing cool water from the reservoir, a strategy used successfully to prevent smallmouth bass from becoming entrenched in Grand Canyon National Park below Glen Canyon Dam.1 The bass are an invasive species that can escape from Lake Powell and could imperil the Grand Canyon’s native humpback chub population, the most important remnant of a federally protected species that was once widespread throughout the Colorado River system.2 Scientists attribute steep declines in the humpback chub population in the upper Colorado River Basin largely to smallmouth bass predation.3
Sustaining the humpback chub population in the Grand Canyon is essential to prevent the species’ extinction. With cool water releases no longer feasible, protecting the humpback chub now requires a different approach. Increasing the delivery of sediment into the Grand Canyon may be the most effective remaining tool. Additional sediment transported from Lake Powell, either around or through Glen Canyon Dam, would increase turbidity, making it more difficult for smallmouth bass to establish a stable population.
The Bureau’s decision to halt cool water releases reflects the severity of the ongoing drought, which has reduced this year’s unregulated flow of the Colorado River to the second lowest since Glen Canyon Dam was completed 63 years ago.4 In April, the agency instituted unprecedented efforts to bolster Lake Powell, which were intended to preserve Glen Canyon Dam’s ability to generate hydropower.5 Despite those efforts, the Bureau’s July 24-month forecast of the minimum probable flow of water into Lake Powell anticipates Glen Canyon Dam will be unable to generate electricity from February 2027 through at least June 2028.6 In fiscal year 2025, Glen Canyon Dam generated enough electricity to supply the annual average needs of 269,000 U.S. households.7
Humpback chub evolved exclusively in the Colorado River system, the water often referred to as “too thick to drink and too thin to plow.” It developed exquisite adaptations to thrive in a volatile environment, driven by flash floods that can rapidly turn relatively clear water to an opaque reddish-brown, making it impossible to see one’s finger one inch below the surface. Its gills and mouth have protective flaps that prevent sediment from clogging them, its eyes are tailored to see in muddy water, and special sensory organs detect prey and plants, allowing the fish to breathe and eat in highly turbid conditions. In contrast, smallmouth bass evolved in clear lakes and streams, relying on their vision to obtain food.
Fortunately, the adult humpback chub population is flourishing in the western Grand Canyon where sediment from the annual monsoon season turns the river into a torrent of mud. From 2010 to 2024, the population grew about 160-fold, with the median population estimated at about 70,000.8 This resurgence caused the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to reclassify the species from being endangered — i.e., in imminent threat of extinction, under the Endangered Species Act — to a less serious status of threatened.9
Smallmouth bass were not present in the Grand Canyon prior to the construction of Glen Canyon Dam, but now occur occasionally in its western section. The largest smallmouth bass captured in the park – 15.2 inches – was found in the far western section of the Grand Canyon in 2006.10 The fact that humpback chub flourish in the western Grand Canyon while smallmouth bass do not underscores the importance of intense and sustained pulses of turbidity created by suspended particulates. These conditions appear to be a key factor in preventing smallmouth bass from becoming established.
Because Glen Canyon Dam traps most sediment before it can reach the Grand Canyon, the Bureau should commission a study to evaluate options for increasing sediment delivery from Lake Powell. A sediment bypass system, such as a pipeline around or through the dam, could provide the turbidity needed to suppress smallmouth bass in the absence of cool water releases. Given current hydrologic realities, such an approach may be the most effective long‑term strategy for protecting the humpback chub and preserving the ecological integrity of the Grand Canyon.
1 “Feds Nix Grand Canyon fish protection flows below Lake Powell,” Arizona Republic, August 7, 2026
2 Glen Canyon Adaptive Management Program — https://gcdamp.com/index.php/ Smallmouth_Bass_Page
3 U.S. Geological Survey, “Dropping the Bass: USGS science helps partners stop spread of invasive smallmouth bass in the Colorado River,” March 21, 2025
4 The Bureau of Reclamation’s July 2026 “Most Probable” 24-Month Study projects unregulated inflow for this water year at 3.501 million acre-feet. 2002 is the driest on record at 2.64 MAF
6 Bureau of Reclamation, July 2026 Probable Minimum 24-Month Study; https://www.usbr.gov/ lc/region/g4000/24mo_MIN.pdf. When Lake Powell drops below elevation 3,490, it can no longer generate hydropower. See Bureau of Reclamation, Final Environmental Impact Statement, Post-2026 Operational Guidelines and Strategies for Lake Powell and Lake Mead, Technical Appendix 15, Dams and Electrical Power Resources, page 15-11
7 In Fiscal Year 2025 Glen Canyon Dam generated 2,792,000,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity, according to the Western Area Power Administration’s Statistical Index — https:// http://www.wapa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/FY-2025-Statistical-Appendix.pdf, page 9. According to the U.S., Energy Information Administration, U.S. households use an average of 10,365 kWh annually. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3; avg monthly consumption 863; annual 10,365 kWh EIA https://www.eia.gov/electricity/ sales_revenue_price/pdf/table_5a.pdf
8 Dzul et al., “Integrating mark-recapture, catch, and expert habitat assessments to quantify recent increases in humpback chub abundance over a 200 km long river segment of the Colorado River in western Grand Canyon,” Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, July 2026. Dzul estimated with 95% confidence that the population was between 40,000–200,000
Department of the Interior releases Operating Guidelines and Record of Decision for the Colorado River. Photo credit: USBR
Click the link to read the release on the USBR website:
August 21, 2026
The Department of the Interior issued the 2027-2028 Operating Guidelines and the Record of Decision for the Post-2026 Colorado River Operations Final EIS, establishing a 10-year Decision Framework with a broad operational range that will be used to develop future operational guidelines for Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Together these decisions provide for reliable operations of the Colorado River system, delivery of vital water supplies, and protect critical federal infrastructure while preserving the flexibility necessary to respond to Basin states’ voluntary actions, consensus recommendations and the continued prolonged drought. The combined contents of Lake Powell and Lake Mead have not been this low since before Lake Powell began filling following the closure of the gates at Glen Canyon Dam in 1963, with both Lake Powell and Lake Mead hitting record lows the last few weeks.
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
“We are grateful for the Seven Basin States, the thirty Basin Tribes, Mexico, and many other basin stakeholders who have provided the feedback and voluntary arrangements necessary for the development of the 2027-2028 Operating Guidelines.” said Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum. “Forty million people, millions of acres of farmland and ranchland, industries that power the American West, and some of our nation’s fastest growing metropolitan areas depend on the Colorado River.”
The 2027-2028 Operating Guidelines respond to hydrologic conditions and provide flexible tools to protect critical infrastructure at Glen Canyon Dam and Hoover Dam. They were developed after extensive engagement with the seven Basin States and incorporate concepts from proposals from both the Upper and Lower Basins and Basin tribes.
These 2027-2028 Operating Guidelines:
Provide objective criteria to determine releases from Lake Powell based on actual hydrology and maintaining a minimum elevation of 3,510 feet to support continued operational reliability at Glen Canyon Dam.
Provides for reductions in deliveries of Colorado River water among the Lower Basin States of 1.25 million acre-feet in each year of the next two years. If the Lower Basin States implement their proposed sharing agreement, the reduction per State would be:
Arizona: 760,000 acre-feet
California: 440,000 acre-feet
Nevada: 50,000 acre-feet
Provide for Lower Basin States to voluntarily conserve and store at least 700,000 acre-feet of water over the two-year period to protect the system, in addition to the 1.25 million acre-feet per year of reductions.
Provide for the Upper Basin States to enter into an agreement, in consultation with Lower Basin States and Basin tribes, using the Secretary’s authorities to operate the Colorado River Storage Project Upper Initial Units (i.e. Aspinall (CO), Flaming Gorge (UT/WY) and Navajo (CO/NM) Reservoirs) to help protect Glen Canyon Dam infrastructure.
Provide tools and flexibility in the Lower Basin to respond to drought conditions by allowing water users to store water.
Provides for a Federally managed pool to help meet tribal firming obligations and provide limited offsetting to reduce tribal impacts.
Provide elevation triggers for coordination and consultations to determine additional actions, if necessary, to minimize operational risks to infrastructure, and manage risks to the urban, agricultural, and natural systems that rely on the Colorado River.
Reclamation also released today the August 2026 24-Month Study, determining the 2027 operations based on the new guidelines. Lake Powell will begin the October 1 water year between elevations 3,540 and 3,510 feet, placing operations in the Lower Elevation Infrastructure Protection Range with an expected water year release between 6.0 and 7.0 million acre-feet. Reclamation will begin the water year with lower releases between 6.0 and 7.0 million acre-feet in order to attempt to maintain an elevation of 3,510 feet or higher and will adjust releases through April to continue to maintain elevation 3,510 feet. The water year 2027 release volume will be determined in April. For Lake Mead, water deliveries to the Lower Basin States will be reduced by 1.25 million-acre feet for calendar year 2027.
The Decision Framework establishes an operational range that provides the flexibility to develop specific operating guidelines within the 10-year period while preserving the opportunity for Colorado River Basin negotiations to continue and, if successful, be incorporated into years three or four or longer for future operational guidelines. Operational elements include enhanced coordinated reservoir operations and expanded opportunities for the storage and delivery of conserved water in system reservoirs and other flexible water management tools. The Decision Framework prioritizes consensus agreements, voluntary actions, and a commitment to coordination and consultation throughout the period of adoption.
The Decision Framework anticipates operating guidelines in two-year periods and can be scaled longer depending on evolving Basin circumstances. This mechanism leaves room for the Basin States, tribes and stakeholders to adjust these parameters with their own voluntary actions and consensus whenever such agreements are reached.
“These decisions provide a water management strategy for Basin stakeholders to respond to the prolonged drought by incorporating flexible tools and voluntary actions while leaving room for consensus agreements,” said Assistant Secretary — Water and Science Andrea Travnicek. “The Department and Reclamation will continue to work with all Basin stakeholders to identify areas to maximize efforts throughout the Basin to modernize infrastructure, develop conservation programs, and identify innovative approaches to deliver water under changing conditions”.
Since the beginning of the Trump administration, President Trump has made delivering water to people a high priority. The administration has demonstrated a commitment to improving and enhancing water supply within the Colorado River Basin through investments in water storage, distribution, treatment, and improving water efficiency. Specifically in the Lower Basin investments over $3 billion have been made since January 2025.
In April 2026, the Secretary asked for feedback from the seven Basin States on potential water supply and conservation projects throughout the Colorado River Basin during a time of shortage. The administration continues to review the submittals and will work with the Basin States and Basin Tribes to identify opportunities to use available Working Families Tax Cuts funds, and other federal cost-share programs related to water storage and expansion and optimization; desalination and advanced water treatment; and water movement, exchanges and infrastructure.
Background
The NEPA process was initiated in June 2023. Over this three-year period the Department of the Interior and Bureau of Reclamation engaged extensively with Basin stakeholders and that input is reflected in the alternatives analyzed in the Final EIS and the Preferred Alternative of a Decision Framework that would guide future operational guidelines, released on July 31, 2026. The 2027-2028 Operating Guidelines and ROD released today further incorporate extensive feedback from Basin stakeholders. The Final EIS, ROD and 2027-2028 Operating Guidelines are available on Reclamation’s website.
For the past 26 years, the Colorado River Basin has been experiencing an unprecedented multidecadal drought, resulting in historically low runoff and reservoir levels. Conditions worsened during 2026, driven in part by the lowest observed snowpack on record during the winter of 2025-2026. Last week, Lake Mead reached a record-low elevation, highlighting the need for flexible operations that can respond to rapidly changing conditions across the Colorado River Basin.
A separate binational process addressing water deliveries to Mexico is nearing completion and the Department is committed to continued collaboration with Mexico. The Department will conduct all necessary and appropriate discussions regarding post-2026 operations and implementation of the 1944 Water Treaty with Mexico through the International Boundary and Water Commission in consultation with the Department of State.
The Colorado River provides water for more than 40 million people and generates hydropower for seven states. It serves as a vital resource for 30 tribes and two Mexican states, sustaining 5.5 million acres of farmland and agricultural communities throughout the West, while also supporting critical ecosystems and protecting endangered species.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
At a Breckenridge Town Council work session Tuesday, Aug. 11, council member Dick Carleton requested public works staff lead a longer discussion examining whether the section of river starting at Skelly Pond could be lined to keep more water above ground. Carleton said a group of “informed citizens” approached him with concerns over the lack of water flowing through town…Phelps plans to return to council Tuesday, Aug. 25, with information about what it would take to install a continuous liner through that stretch of river and to gauge the council’s interest in pursuing a design.
The river’s current state, like nearly all other bodies of water across the West, is closely tied to unprecedented drought conditions. Phelps said flows between the dredge pond all the way to Ski Hill Road have approached the lowest levels recorded during 42 years of recorded monitoring. The median flow for this time of year typically remains around 32 cubic feet per second, according to Phelps. In the last two weeks, flows have ranged from as low as 12 cfs to 22 cfs. Rain on Wednesday, Aug. 12, temporarily pushed the flow to about 22 cfs, but by the next day it had already fallen below 16 cfs.
Army Corps approves a permit for the Line 5 oil pipeline tunnel just as a state permit is invalidated.
NOAA finds that July was the warmest month in the country’s 132-year historical record.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service takes comments on draining farmland near protected prairie wetlands.
Two Senate Democrats introduce water system cybersecurity bill.
USGS reports on long-term changes in U.S. groundwater and surface water.
And lastly, the two big Colorado River reservoirs drop to all-time lows as the federal government prepares a new two-year operating plan.
“What can we do if the administration isn’t willing to allow us to use the [Glen Canyon Dam] bypass tubes for high-flow experiments, if that’s going to be off the table, at least for a while?” – Wayne Pullan, Upper Colorado regional director at the Bureau of Reclamation, discussing Trump administration constraints on using Glen Canyon Dam to assist threatened fish in the Grand Canyon and rebuild eroded beaches along that stretch of the Colorado River. Earlier this month, Reclamation decided against a short-term release of cold water from deeper in Lake Powell to disrupt non-native fish spawning because the release would have reduced hydropower generation. “We’re in a pinch point,” Pullan added. “A real pinch point.”
News Briefs
Line 5 Decision The Army Corps of Engineers approved a permit for Enbridge to build a tunnel beneath the Straits of Mackinac, a waterway that connects Lake Michigan to Lake Huron. The tunnel would house a new Line 5 oil pipeline.
The federal agency’s decision is not the final word. State permits for the tunnel are being litigated and reversed. On July 31, the Michigan Supreme Court invalidated a state Public Service Commission approval because the commission did not properly assess project impacts or need.
Cybersecurity Bill Some two weeks after Iranian hackers allegedly targeted U.S. water utilities, two Senate Democrats introduced a bill to bolster water system cybersecurity.
The Water Cyber Shield Act focuses on risk reduction. It requires water systems to assess their cybersecurity risks, develop a response plan, and submit them for state approval. The submitted information is exempt from FOIA.
The bill also requires the EPA to establish baseline cybersecurity standards that impose more burdens on higher risk water systems. It authorizes $300 million annually over five years to help drinking water systems identify and fix vulnerabilities, as well as $300 million annually for wastewater systems.
According to NOAA data, it was the hottest single month since record-keeping began at the end of the Gilded Age, in 1895.
The average temperature for those 31 days was 76.9 F, which was 3.3 F above the 20th century average. It was especially warm in the Intermountain West, where states are also observing record-low river flows. [ed.emphasis mine]
Water Trends The West and the High Plains are drying while the Upper Midwest and Northeast are getting wetter.
That is the broad pattern identified in a U.S. Geological Survey evaluation of large-scale groundwater and surface water changes between 1980 and 2020.
On the Radar
Colorado River’s Shrinking Reservoirs Both Lake Mead and Lake Powell now sit at their lowest levels since the manmade reservoirs were first filled.
The record-breaking plunge underscores the precarity of water supplies in the Colorado River basin. Because this year’s mountain snowpack has already melted, the reservoirs will likely set new lows through at least next April.
Lake Mead key elevations. Credit: USBR
Lake Mead is at 1,039 feet, four feet above the level at which hydropower generating capacity at Hoover Dam will drop by 70 percent.
Lake Powell rests at 3,519 feet. The Bureau of Reclamation is attempting to keep the reservoir above 3,500 feet to protect Glen Canyon Dam’s water supply and power-generating infrastructure.
Draining, or Not Draining, Prairie Wetlands The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service took comments on the process for draining waterlogged lands for farming in an important duck habitat in the northern plains where the government holds wetlands easements.
Formed by retreating glaciers, prairie potholes are shallow ponds in Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota that sustain most of North America’s waterfowl. To protect the habitat, the FWS began buying easements from farmers in 1959. Those easements prohibit draining the wetlands.
To grow crops on sodden land, farmers install drain tile – perforated pipes placed underground. Farmers whose land contains an easement can request the FWS calculate a distance beyond the wetlands where drain tile can be installed.
The agency wants to know how it should make those calculations.
Prairie-Pothole Region of North Dakota. Photo Credit: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
This past week, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation posted an attention-grabbing statistic. By dropping to less than 25% of its capacity, Blue Mesa Reservoir has lost its status as the state’s largest body of water. Lake Granby, itself just 62% full, now holds the title.
Recent best seller set in Iola and the West Fork of the Gunnison River. Click the image to read about it.
The ruins of Iola, a community flooded in the creation of Blue Mesa, are now visible. Parts of the Gunnison River snake through the lakebed in imitation of its historic path before the reservoir was dammed in the 1960s.
In a different year, the water storage unit that includes Blue Mesa might have helped replenish Lake Powell, the second-largest reservoir in the U.S., which now sits worryingly close to power pool. Power pool is the threshold when water levels drop too low to produce hydroelectric power…There’s no chance of Blue Mesa contributing much to Lake Powell this year, said Steve Pope, manager of the Uncompahgre Valley Water Users Association…The Uncompahgre Valley Water Users Association relies on water stored in the Blue Mesa, which is diverted downstream through the Gunnison Tunnel to irrigate tens of thousands of acres of farmland. The communities of Montrose, Delta and Olathe also rely on raw water from the tunnel for municipal use. The association typically has a secondary water supply from the Uncompahgre River, but Pope said that source is “nonexistent” this year. In anticipation of shortages, the association already limited users to 50% of their allocations this spring. Pope said he hoped no further restrictions would be necessary before Labor Day. Large row crop producers have already fallowed 30%-60% of their land in the valley, he said…
The Bureau of Reclamation has taken steps to avoid that scenario, said Caleb Foy, senior water resources engineer at the Colorado River Water Conservation District. Water managers were already anticipating a historically dry year this spring, when the window for the mountains to accumulate snowpack passed leaving the lowest amount ever recorded. Snowpack melts in spring to produce runoff, which feeds the Colorado River Basin. If the Bureau of Reclamation and water rights holders along the Gunnison River had not put restrictions in place, Blue Mesa might have been on a trajectory to drain past power pool, Foy said. The reservoir’s generators have an 86.4-megawatt capacity, enough to generate power for about 3,400 homes.
Lake Powell’s drastically low water levels are evident in the discoloration of ancient cliffs that were submerged for decades, often referred to as “the bathtub ring” in March 2026 | Page Buono (American Rivers)
Click the link too read the article on the Colorado Politics website (Marianne Goodland). Here’s an excerpt:
August 17, 2026
In the past 10 days, both Lake Mead on the Arizona-Nevada border and Lake Powell roughly 300 miles northeast on the Utah-Arizona line have recorded their lowest water levels since the reservoirs were first filled. Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir and which supplies water to Nevada, Arizona and California, measured 1,040.4 feet above sea level on Aug. 7. The level has continued to drop since then. On Monday, the reservoir measured 1,039.83 feet above sea level, nearly 190 feet below full and down about 2 feet over the past 30 days. A year ago, Lake Mead stood at roughly 1,054 feet.
Rarely seen back of the Hoover Dam prior to first fill
Hoover Dam, which created Lake Mead, was completed in 1935. The reservoir was last at full in 1983. If the reservoir loses another 4.76 feet, Hoover Dam begins to lose its ability to generate significant hydropower. At 895 feet, it reaches “dead pool” — a complete shutdown of Hoover’s hydropower system.
Lake Powell, the nation’s second largest reservoir and the water bank for Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, reached its lowest point in history on Sunday at 3,519.8 feet above sea level. A year ago, it stood at 3,551.33 feet above sea level.
Glen Canyon Dam construction. Credit: Sibley’s Rivers
Glen Canyon Dam, which created the reservoir, was constructed in 1966. The last time Lake Powell was close to full was in 1999. At 3,490 feet, Glen Canyon Dam also begins to lose its ability to generate hydropower. At 3,370 feet, the elevation known as dead pool, hydropower production would stop entirely.
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
Both reservoirs are fed by the Colorado River, which has been hit by what some called a thousand-year megadrought that has cut its supply from around 15 million acre-feet per year to 12 million…This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, according to Eric Kuhn, retired general manager of the Colorado River District.
“This was inevitable,” he told Colorado Politics. “All of the science has been pointing to this for 25 years.”
The Colorado River Basin spans seven U.S. states and is divided into Upper and Lower Basins. 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)
Climate change will almost certainly feature prominently in any multi-state litigation over the Colorado River. A court case over an almost-finished dam expansion may decide how.
Is climate change enough justification to stop the expansion of a reservoir that will take more water from the dwindling Colorado River?
That’s the central question in a lawsuit pitting the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Colorado’s largest water utility against a consortium of environmental nonprofits. The environmentalists say the Colorado River has no more water to give, while Denver Water, the utility whose Gross Reservoir would nearly triple in capacity, argues it is ensuring its customers can withstand droughts. The Corps contends it is not required to consider climate change or the downstream effects of its expansion of a dam to grow the reservoir.
The case in the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has the potential to ripple through Western water management as states, tribes, cities and the federal government struggle to find a compromise on how to steeply cut water use. Some see history repeating itself, with the Gross Dam expansion emblematic of the kind of thinking that helped put the West into the very water crisis the project is meant to buffer the region against.
“Does it make sense for major water projects like this to continue to move forward?” asked Sarah Matsumoto, an associate professor of clinical law at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and director of the Getches-Green Natural Resources, Energy, and Environmental Law Clinic. “I just don’t think it does anymore, without at minimum considering impacts of climate and impacts of overappropriation on the river.”
The Corps and Denver Water appealed that decision, arguing that construction of the dam expansion is nearly complete, and topping off the reservoir behind it is in the public’s best interest. There are no other alternatives to consider, the utility asserts. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires evaluating the impacts of projects that need federal approval, does not require the assessment of climate change, they contend.
“We believe that considering potential climate impacts to a project goes beyond the scope of any guidelines, practicability, or NEPA reasonableness analysis,” said U.S. Department of Justice attorney Kyle Glynn, representing the Army Corps, during oral arguments for the case before the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The expansion of Denver Water’s Gross Reservoir would hold an additional 77,000 acre feet of water diverted from the declining Colorado River, enough water for roughly 150,000 homes. Denver Water would get that water incrementally from an unused 1945 water right of 18,000 annual acre feet to ensure it can supply the growing metropolis of Denver and protect its water supplies during droughts.
The utility plans to only use its water right during wet years when it can stockpile water from excess supply. Of the 77,000 acre feet in diversions, 5,000 would be sequestered in an “environmental pool” that would enhance streamflows on South Boulder Creek and serve as additional storage for the cities of Boulder and Lafayette.
But environmentalists are not convinced there will be enough surplus water in the future for the utility to fill the reservoir. If the state is required to cut back its water use to address system-wide shortages on the Colorado River, reductions the seven states that depend on the river are currently negotiating, what happens to the over $800 million project, they wonder.
Those are the concerns driving the environmental groups, which sued over what they called an inadequate NEPA process and a failure to properly examine alternatives to the project. Natural resource professors watching the case share their concerns. The court’s decision, both say, could have far-reaching consequences for Southwestern states and nearly 40 million people who rely on the Colorado River, and could determine how climate change is considered in any future litigation.
Denver Water’s position is in direct contradiction with what Colorado is arguing in the current negotiations about how much water from the river states must give up, said Gary Wockner, founder of Save the Colorado, the environmental group that’s led the push against the Gross Reservoir expansion.
Colorado has maintained that it and other states close to the river’s headwaters should not have to make mandatory cuts because climate change is already limiting their supply by reducing river and stream flows. Should the negotiations over cuts to allocations from the river devolve so completely that states in the upper and lower halves of the Colorado River Basin sue one another, some water law experts believe climate change would figure prominently in the litigation.
“If the court supports Denver Water and says that Denver Water did not have to account for climate change to prove that they could operate the project, it sets a very difficult and perhaps powerful precedent, potentially undermining the state of Colorado’s position in the entire Colorado River negotiations,” Wockner said.
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.
Can a Dam’s Progress Block Climate Considerations?
On the last day of July, attorneys for the environmental groups, Denver Water and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers gathered before three justices on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in a courtroom in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Their oral arguments came nearly two years after senior federal judge Christine Arguello ruled in favor of the environmentalists, saying that “the cracked foundation of the Colorado River’s management system all but demands skepticism over any proposal that will affect the hydrology of the Colorado River basin.”
Arguello’s decision didn’t stop construction to expand the dam, but forced the parties to meet and agree on remedies. Those discussions failed, however, leading Arguello to issue an injunction to stop construction in April 2025. That was lifted due to safety concerns about the dam being left incomplete, but an injunction remained preventing the clearing of the forest below to make room for the additional water, or filling the added space behind the dam.
The Gross Reservoir expansion solves a problem Denver Water has been trying to address for 23 years, said Jessica Brody, general counsel for the utility, in the 10th Circuit last month.
Denver Water has a water storage imbalance between its two collection systems with 90% of its reservoir storage located in the utility’s South System compared to 10% in its North System. This storage imbalance creates vulnerability if there is a drought, mechanical issue or emergency that affects the South System. The storage imbalance is one of the reasons Denver Water is expanding Gross Reservoir. Image credit: Denver Water.
Denver Water’s storage and delivery network is divided into north and south systems, which are unconnected and imbalanced. The south system provides 80 percent of the utility’s water supply, and if it were to go down, the north system, which includes Gross Reservoir, could run out of water in just one year. That leaves the utility’s system vulnerable in times of severe drought, wildfires or other emergencies.
Despite construction being nearly done, Brody said, Denver Water has a dam it cannot fill because of the lower court’s opinion.
That decision was an “abuse” of the court’s power, she said, as the water rights at stake are under the jurisdiction of the state, not federal agencies. Plaintiffs never sought a preliminary injunction to stop construction, although they did when later mediation failed. Jurisdiction over the cutting of trees to make room for the expanded reservoir lies with the U.S. Forest Service and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, not the Corps, she said.
The arguments from Denver Water and the Corps seemed to resonate with the three justices presiding over the case, largely due to the fact the dam is nearly complete.
“Poor pun: It’s water over the dam, because it’s built,” said Judge Timothy Tymkovich. “So costs, and I think climate change, are off the table now.”
William Eubanks, the attorney representing the environmental groups, disagreed. The dam expansion is part of Denver Water’s Moffat Collection System project, which requires work in addition to the Gross Reservoir project, such as felling the trees.
And there is still the question of where the water will come from.
A central point for the lawsuit, he said, is that under the Clean Water Act, water infrastructure developers have to show a project can be built and fulfill the expected need—in this case, a reservoir with more water. That wasn’t done here, Eubanks said.
“With the Moffat Collection System project, Denver Water and the Army Corps have recklessly gambled with over $800 million of ratepayer money,” Eubanks said before the court. Neither the Corps nor the utility forecasted whether there would be enough surplus water in the Colorado River for Denver Water to fill its reservoir, he argued. “In effect, they’re building a giant bathtub, even though there’s likely no water to ever fill it.”
CU Boulder professor Matsumoto is one of 11 natural resource law experts who submitted an amicus brief to the court asking it to affirm the lower court’s decision.
This case, they wrote, is a “classic example of why we need NEPA”—illustrating the consequences of an agency permitting and approving a project without a full evaluation of other alternatives and whether the project was even feasible. The foundational U.S. environmental law was designed to push agencies to “fully appreciate the consequences of their actions before they move forward with those actions,” they wrote.
The Corps violated NEPA by limiting the number of alternatives it considered for the project and only examining impacts up to 50 miles downstream, not along the full course of the river, the brief noted.
“It just doesn’t make any sense for the amount of water that they’re getting,” said Mark Squillace, a natural resources law professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and another one of the professors part of the amicus brief. “It’s insane.”
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
A Complicating Compact
Since 1922, the Colorado River has been governed by its eponymous compact, which is now widely acknowledged to have overallocated the river by millions of acre feet of water. Under the compact, both the Upper Colorado River Basin, made up of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, and the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada, are entitled to 7.5 million acre feet of water, with another 1.5 million acre feet going to Mexico. But the river has averaged closer to 11 million acre feet since 2020—more than 6 million acre feet less than the total that has been allocated, according to the most recent federal data.
Though both basins get an equal share of the river, Article III(d) of the compact specifies that the Upper Basin “will not cause the flow of the river” to be depleted below an average of 7.5 million acre feet per year over any 10-year period downstream.
Failing to meet that requirement could trigger the Lower Basin to demand more water from the Upper Basin in what is known as a “compact call.” That unprecedented action could force severe water usage curtailments in the Upper Basin, and how that would affect users like Denver Water is unclear. The system is dangerously close to the hydrological conditions that could trigger a compact call.
It’s a known risk for this project, the professors say, but one that was ignored during permitting.
Gross Reservoir is far from the only new diversion proposed in the Upper Basin, which has never used its full allocation from the river, but sees that water as key to the region’s continued economic growth and prosperity. Over 1 million acre feet of diversions have been proposed across 30 projects in the Upper Basin. Many of those may not be developed, but they have become a sticking point in negotiations over the river’s future.
“Repeating the Same Mistakes”
As the lawyers argued in Santa Fe, news of a short-term federal proposalfor managing the Colorado River rippled across the basin. In the absence of a new consensus among the states over how to allocate the water, the federal government stepped in to manage the crisis.
Its track record on the Colorado River is deeply checkered.
The compact has served as the bedrock for a web of dams, reservoirs, canals and ditches built largely with federal funding and engineering prowess to distribute water across arid Western lands. The magnitude of this diffuse system and its overreliance on diverting and impounding water, experts say, is at least partially responsible for the severity of the West’s water crisis.
Building the Gross Reservoir Dam in the 1950s. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Some believed not everyone has learned the lesson. “We’re just repeating the same mistakes,” Squillace said. “A lot of it just results from a lack of imagination about a better way to do things.”
As water supplies shift, water utilities across the West are squeezing every last drop out of their systems through a range of modifications and adjustments to their infrastructure.
After the first of the West’s deep 21st-century droughts in 2002, Denver Water, which serves 1.5 million people across Colorado’s Front Range, decided it needed to act. The utility convinced the Army Corps of Engineers, which completed the original Gross Reservoir in the 1950s, that raising the dam to triple the amount of water it could impound would be the best course of action to combat drought.
Since then, Denver Water has also invested in water efficiency, which allowed it to better endure droughts from 2002 to 2026. Despite a growing population, water use is below the benchmarks from the 1970s, said Jeff Martin, Denver Water’s program manager for the reservoir expansion.
“We’ve really capitalized on most of our customer savings at this point,” he said. “Now, we need to shore up the rest of our need with the expanded reservoir.”
But a drier future is precisely what should preclude Denver Water and the Corps from seeing this project through, said Wockner with Save the Colorado.
“It’s nonsensical to be diverting more water out of rivers anywhere in the Southwest United States,” he said. “Because in many ways the climate change bullseye in the United States is on the Southwest and Colorado River Basin.”
The Colorado River, Wockner said, has no more water to give. But Martin sees room for more improvement in how the river is managed.
“I would be the first to say something needs to change there on how we use the river for all stakeholders, including some type of cuts throughout the system,” said Martin. “I’m not that decision maker though.”
Graphic credit: RogerWendell.com
The state, he said, controls Denver Water’s rights to the river. The utility has the right to use the water that may one day fill Gross Reservoir, he said, and has been planning to do so for decades.
Despite arguments that the water isn’t available, Martin has no doubt Denver Water will be able to one day fill the reservoir—if the courts allow it.
What Comes Next
The justices have given no indication of when a ruling on the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project will land.
If Denver Water loses its current appeal, the utility claims it will be unable to ensure a reliable water supply during times of drought, and the decision may deter developers from pursuing other ambitious projects to solve the West’s water problems, from new dams to expensive desalination plants.
In the Santa Fe courtroom, Teagen Blakey sat on a wooden bench watching the lawyers argue over a project that has loomed over more years of her life than it hasn’t.
President of The Environmental Group, a nonprofit from Colorado’s Front Range and one of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, Blakey grew up in the area around Gross Reservoir. She remembers sitting in community meetings as a teenager when the project was being permitted.
Despite the project’s impacts on Boulder County, the water won’t serve residents there, she pointed out. But the dam and reservoir expansions’ impacts will fall on the local population. At the site where Denver Water will clear the forest is a hike featuring a waterfall that would be submerged.
“It’s something you can’t quantify as a value,” she said.
With such a high cost to something so special, Blakey said, there must be certainty about the benefit it will provide.
South Platte River Basin via Wikipedia
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Tensions about water management are high on the Colorado River, even as water levels in reservoirs like Lake Mead drop to record lows and the west faces severe drought conditions…On July 31, the federal Bureau of Reclamation released a final environmental impact statement which outlines a potential framework for management of the river between 2027 and 2036. This framework would include mandatory water use cuts of up to a combined 3 million acre-feet per year for the lower basin states of California, Nevada and Arizona while seeking 200,000 acre feet in voluntary reductions from the upper basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. The impact statement and the associated National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) decision-making process still leave an opportunity for the states on the Colorado River to reach their own agreement about future water use…
Colorado is introducing a new near-term water contribution program designed to take advantage of federal funding to encourage voluntary, compensated reductions in Colorado River water use. At a webinar on Aug. 6, Amy Ostdiek, section chief for the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) interstate, federal and water information section, explained that this program is one of several parallel activities that the state is undertaking alongside the ongoing NEPA process. She explained that the Bureau of Reclamation has announced that $100 million in funding will be available to support the upper basin states in establishing water contribution programs that will provide “water that but for these actions would not be there” to the Colorado River. She noted that funding would likely support about two years of a program, based on previous project costs, and that, to participate and claim the funds, Colorado would need to act now to begin establishing a program. Ostdiek stated that establishing such a program would honor commitments the state has made in negotiations to making voluntary water use reductions and would show that “Colorado is committed to being part of the solution.”
Map of the San Juan River, a tributary of the Colorado River, in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, USA. Made using USGS National Map data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47456307
After years of analysis and stalled negotiations, the federal government last month finally laid out its proposal for managing the Colorado River’s biggest reservoirs for the next decade. The Bureau of Reclamation still needs to release its final decision and an operating plan for the next two years. But its final environmental impact statement provides a framework for how it intends to manage parts of the Colorado River system under its control…
It still might not be enough in a drying West
The Colorado River Basin has been mired in drought for more than two decades, and research shows that area will likely only get warmer and drier. The question that really matters is how the new plan operates in a dry world, said Jack Schmidt, senior research scientist at Utah State University’s Center for Colorado River Studies. The document gives Reclamation flexibility to respond to an uncertain, but likely drier, river basin. It doesn’t solve all issues, though. If drought conditions don’t improve, Reclamation said in its analysis that “even large and unprecedented reductions may be needed and may not be enough to stabilize storage” at Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
“The scary thing about all of this is that none of this solves the problem if the world keeps getting drier,” Schmidt said. “That should be taken as an enormous warning for the desperate need to reduce the impact of a warming planet and the drying of the Colorado River Basin.”
[…]
Reclamation’s framework sets a goal of 200,000 acre-feet of voluntary water conservation in Utah and other Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming. Gene Shawcroft, Utah’s Colorado River negotiator, said it will likely take Utah and its upstream neighbors three to five years to conserve that amount.
The largest reservoir in Colorado, Blue Mesa, is holding just over 240,000 acre-feet — “roughly about a third of the volume that we would typically expect to see in the reservoir in this time of year,” says Caleb Foy, senior water resources engineer at the Colorado River District. April-through-July inflow, 151,000 acre-feet, is the lowest unregulated inflow on record. This time of year, Blue Mesa is operated to maintain a minimum flow at the Whitewater gauge, far downstream, just above where the Gunnison joins the Colorado. A 2012 federal record of decision sets base-flow targets there — as low as 750 cubic feet per second, though June and July normally call for “upwards of just over 1,000 CFS at 1,050 CFS,” Foy says. Those flows exist to protect biology and recreation in the lower Gunnison, and endangered fish in the 18-mile reach of the Colorado below the confluence. This summer the Bureau of Reclamation, in consultation with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, other Gunnison Basin water users and the State of Colorado, “decided and agreed to lower the whitewater target down to 500 CFS.” It “isn’t certainly done lightly” Foy says: the cut preserves “nearly 500 acre-feet of storage per day” buying time against a Bureau forecast that Blue Mesa could drop below minimum power pool as early as October. Below that elevation the dam’s 86.4-megawatt plant (enough energy to supply at least 34,000 homes at full pool) — stops generating, and Foy says electrical output is already falling. Unlike Glen Canyon Dam, he is “not aware of any concerns” about operating below power pool.
A group of paddlers take a lunch break on the 15-mile reach of the Colorado River this week. Boaters had to occasionally drag their duckies and paddle boards through the shallows because of extremely low flows. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
On a hot and sunny morning in August, a group of nine paddlers pushed their duckies and stand-up paddle boards into the Colorado River at Harky’s boat launch in Palisade.
The goal of the float was to experience and document the river at one of the lowest levels it has ever seen. With flows hovering around 93 cfs, a bathtub ring showed on the rocks along the riverbank and rusty hunks of old farm equipment emerged from the streambed. Bright green algae grew between the rocks, and herons and ospreys hunted in the shallows.
In many places, paddlers got hung up on rocks and were forced to drag their watercrafts through the ankle-deep water. It took about four hours to float the roughly six-and-a-half miles from Palisade to Corn Lake, a trip that normally takes two to three hours with higher flows.
The trip was organized by Joel Sholtes, a water resources engineering instructor at Colorado Mesa University and a coordinator for the Grand Valley River Corridor Initiative.
“I knew that the river would kind of be on life support and maybe even dry up so I wanted to get out on the river with the people that were involved in managing its flow and experience the 15-mile reach at such a historically low level,” Sholtes said. “It just felt important to be on it and see it both from a habitat standpoint and from a user experience standpoint.”
Boaters got hung up on rocks in the 15-mile reach of the Colorado River during extremely low flows this week. The stretch of river between Palisade and the confluence of the Gunnison River is chronically dry. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
The Colorado River and its water users are now experiencing the consequences of the lowest winter snowpack on record, exceptionally hot temperatures and resulting low streamflows. The impacts are being felt across Colorado as farmers and ranchers have their irrigation water cut, cities and towns impose severe water restrictions on their customers and flows dwindle in stretches of river that are critical habitat for the ecosystem.
The stretch of the Colorado River between the large agricultural diversions in Palisade and the downstream confluence with the Gunnison River is known as the 15-mile reach. This chronically depleted section is also home to endangered fish. Water managers work each year to keep enough flows for fish by coordinating carefully timed releases from upstream reservoirs.
This map shows the 15-mile reach of the Colorado River near Grand Junction, home to four species of endangered fish. Map credit: CWCB
Grand Valley’s 15 mile-reach
This year’s historic drought makes keeping enough water in this reach more challenging than usual. The recovery program has pools of water dedicated to the fish in Lake Granby and Ruedi Reservoir that it releases specifically to boost flows in the 15-mile reach, but because of the dry conditions, less of that water is available. According to the Colorado Division of Water Resources, the average August flows in the 15-mile reach have been about 119 cfs this year, far below the 810 cfs target set by the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program.
The program’s Instream Flow Coordinator David Graf told water managers on a conference call Wednesday that the program is trying to keep 75 cfs in the river through the end of August. Graf said the program was responsible for about 70% of the water in the river during Tuesday’s float; without it, flows could have dipped to around just 25 cfs.
“We are so far below the recommended flows anywhere in the Colorado River basin right now,” Graf said. “Keeping water in there is valuable; it takes a village.”
Irrigators reduce diversions
Nearly all of the river’s flows are being diverted to the Grand Valley’s agricultural producers. Colorado River water transforms the valley’s desert into a ribbon of verdant peach orchards, vineyards, corn and alfalfa fields. The valley’s irrigation districts can collectively draw 1,950 cfs from the river, but this year, they have reduced that down to 1,450 cfs in an effort to save some water for later in the season.
“We collectively set the target flow lower for the sole purpose of extending to gain and accrue some storage,” said Jackie Fisher, manager of Orchard Mesa Irrigation District. “We had none at the beginning of the year and it became super critical to talk with our partners and say, what can we live on now because we knew we needed it two or three months later.”
The Grand Valley Irrigation Company canal on the left is the last big agricultural diversion on the Colorado River in the Grand Valley. It marks the beginning of the 15-mile reach. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Late summer is a crucial time for irrigators because the high flows of spring runoff have come and gone, but hot temperatures drive up the amount of water needed by crops. Irrigators often depend on releasing water stored in upstream reservoirs during this time to supplement low river flows. This year, spring runoff peaked weeks early and a pool of water in Green Mountain Reservoir known as the Historic Users Pool did not fill, which created far-reaching impacts.
HUP water is released mainly to satisfy farmers and ranchers in the Grand Valley, which hold the senior, commanding water rights on the river. The HUP also protects other water users, known as HUP beneficiaries, because without the releases from Green Mountain to supplement the Grand Valley, these other users could have to cut back.
Entities that own or lease stored water, like the Colorado River Water Conservation District, the Colorado Water Trust, Grand County and Northern Water, among others, have pitched in this year to contribute extra acre-feet to Grand Valley irrigators. But even with collaboration and water sharing, Grand Valley Water Users Association General Manager Tina Bergonzini said they cannot guarantee water deliveries to their farmers after September 1. Irrigation season typically goes through Oct. 31.
Low flows in the 15-mile reach of the Colorado River revealed a bathtub ring on the rocks lining the riverbank. Water managers strive to keep water in this section for endangered fish. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
“It probably sounds a little melodramatic to say, but it’s not: It’s literally the first time in 111 years that we’ve run out of water in the Grand Valley Water Users Association,” Bergonzini said. “I’ve done my best and my staff has done their best to make sure that our producers and our residents that are under our system are aware that we could get to the point that we have unreliable delivery.”
GVWUA irrigators have been on restriction all season and the association has been taking just 500 of its 730 cfs water right. Bergonzini said many of her producers have switched to less thirsty crops this year like triticale and Sudangrass, instead of corn and alfalfa, and have made adjustments to the way they irrigate to adapt to less water.
Heading into the fall with unreliable water is a scary scenario for some, Bergonzini said. It’s the time of year when some farmers plant winter crops and have a need for lots of water.
“We’ve tried to make sure everybody is prepared and that’s really all we can do,” she said.
Flows in the 15-mile reach were extremely low this week due to agricultural diversions and a historic drought. The reach is home to endangered fish. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
As water managers grapple with how to stretch this year’s meager flows as far as possible, Sholtes said from a recreation and quality of life standpoint, the Colorado River still provides so much value to the community – even when it’s barely flowing.
“I think it’s important to know that even in drought conditions, the river is accessible and enjoyable,” he said. “It’s my interest as a citizen in the Grand Valley, and as a scientist, to have a river that works for everyone, and to have growth and use that is compatible with the river ecosystem.”
Bicycling the Colorado National Monument, Grand Valley in the distance via Colorado.com
Denver Water is throwing its weight behind and spreading the word about a proposed ballot initiative that would ask voters to redirect a portion of state sales tax revenue on sleeping bags, hiking boots and skis to help fight wildfires, reduce risk of additional blazes, and restore mountain watersheds already damaged by fire.
It’s a rare move for the state’s largest water provider, which serves 1.5 million customers in the metro area, and has been hard hit by major blazes, with thousands of acres of land scorched and reservoirs filled with debris. Tens of millions of dollars have been spent restoring land in the South Platte River Basin, where major events, such as the Hayman Fire in 2002, devastated key mountain lands and the streams that feed its collection system.
“For us it is a major infrastructure need,” said Alan Salazar, Denver Water’s general manager.
Proposition 308 is not yet on the ballot. Signatures were submitted to the Colorado Secretary of State’s office July 27. The office has until Sept. 2 to review the signatures.
For the past 20 years, as deep droughts have periodically gripped the state, wildfires have emerged as a major threat to the mountain watersheds that deliver fresh water across the state, from Durango, to Aurora, Denver and Fort Collins.
Denver Water operates a special fire mitigation project each year in partnership with other state and federal agencies, known as Forests to Faucets. But even with this collaborative approach, there isn’t enough money or labor to do all the work on the ground, Salazar said.
Proposition 308 would provide about $175 million annually that would go toward water and land conservation, according to Aaron Citron, The Nature Conservancy’s Natural Resources Policy Adviser in Colorado. The Nature Conservancy is one of the backers of 308, alongside Conservation Colorado, the Trust for Public Land and Western Resource Advocates.
The money would be taken from state coffers in years when there is a budget surplus. Though the proposal is not a new tax, it could reduce the size of refunds taxpayers normally receive in years when there is a surplus.
“Four of the largest wildfires have ignited in the last six years, burning 1.5 million acres. That has brought these issues more into the public consciousness … We know we have to act now if we want to protect resources and wildlife,” Citron said.
The money would be controlled mostly by GOCO and the state Natural Resources department
If approved, Proposition 308 would give about half of the sales tax revenue generated, $83 million, to Great Outdoors Colorado and another $83 million to the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, to expand land and water conservation programs these agencies already operate. Another $4.3 million would go to promoting outdoor recreation and the remaining $4.3 million would be spent to increase families’ access to the outdoors.
The ballot measure would exempt taxes collected on some sporting goods from the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, or TABOR, in a process known as de-Brucing, which is named after Douglas Bruce, the architect of the 1990 TABOR amendment.
Aurora Water staff has recommended that the city also endorse the measure but no formal action has been taken by city council, according to spokeswoman Shonnie Cline.
Budget hawks, such as Jon Caldara, president of Denver’s Independence Institute, said the citizen initiative is likely a reflection of voter frustration with state lawmakers, who he says haven’t done enough to fund the state’s basic need for water infrastructure, public safety and roads.
“Whether it is water or transportation infrastructure, we’re seeing that people are getting tired of the legislature not budgeting for basic needs. We shouldn’t be surprised people are taking their funding back,” Caldara said.
Unlike Denver and Aurora, Northern Water has not endorsed Proposition 308, General Manager Brad Wind said. Its board will likely receive a briefing on the topic in September.
Northern, too, has been hard-hit by wildfires. It has spent upwards of $100 million to restore and better protect its sprawling watershed west of Rocky Mountain National Park, which was scorched by the East Troublesome and Cameron Peak fires in 2020. Still, Wind said, that cash has allowed them to do only the bare minimum.
“We’re just touching the higher risk areas,” Wind said, “The cost is immense. I can’t imagine any utility has the money to make the investments needed.”
How voters will respond to Proposition 308 in November isn’t clear. Salazar said he isn’t aware of any organized opposition yet, but several other initiatives are also headed for the ballot, making a long list of things for voters to consider.
“It appears to be a crowded ballot,” Salazar said. “We want to make sure that when people get to this they are not exhausted.”
No, Lake Powell’s not that close to actual dead pool — or the level at which water can no longer be released downstream. At least not yet. But it is now within 20 feet of de facto deadpool, or 3,500 feet, which is the surface elevation the feds have said they will “defend” to keep Glen Canyon Dam viable. Besides, in this case I’m using “deadpool” somewhat metaphorically to describe the current state of water on the Colorado River and the rest of the West, which is about as dire as “deadpool” sounds.
It’s normal for streamflows to drop in August as the last remnants of high-country snow disappear in the dog-days sun. But since most of the snow was gone by late June, and the monsoon has thus far dropped in only for brief, violent, and occasional visits, almost every creek and river in the West is flowing far below median levels for this time of year. The water is also unusually warm, which is bad for fish. The Animas River in Durango, for example has climbed up into the 70° F territory every day for the last several weeks.
In the Upper Colorado River Basin, irrigation ditches with junior water rights are getting shut down right and left, weeks earlier than normal and just ahead of the big harvesting season. It’s already been a tough summer for most farmers; if reliable rains don’t arrive soon it could get much worse.
Paonia Reservoir in western Colorado has become a run-of-the-river operation, leaving downstream irrigation ditches in the North Fork Valley virtually dry — though those with senior rights continue to flow, for now.
One of the scariest dry-time indicators of the summer so far was the Colorado River near Palisade, Colorado, which fell to 43 cubic feet per second in early August. To put that in context, McElmo Creek, which is basically a desert arroyo fed by irrigation runoff, has been running around 30 cfs for the last few weeks.
It’s important to note, however, that it’s not only drought, but also diversions, that are depleting the Colorado River. The river below Glenwood Springs, which is upstream of Palisade, has been running around 1,700 cfs. And major ditches — Cameco, Orchard Mesa, and Grand Valley canals — that pull water from the Colorado just upstream from the Palisade gage are together carrying some 2,000 cfs, meaning they are taking nearly all of the river’s water. Runoff from those ditches eventually runs back into the Colorado, bringing its flows back up somewhat before the river crosses the state line into Utah.
The Government Highline canal is pulling over 1,200 cfs from the Colorado River upstream of Palisade, and two other canals are drawing more than 500 cfs each, leaving the river almost dry for a segment in the Grand Valley. Source: Colorado Division of Water Resources.
The good news is that rains have started up again in southern Arizona (the National Weather Service’s Tucson office has issued a flash flood watch for tomorrow), and forecasters are predicting thunderstorms will be returning to the rest of the region soon. Hopefully they’ll bring nice, gentle, soaking moisture, and not just lightning and torrential flooding.
But let’s get back to our Lake Powell August update and some numbers:
3,520.8 feet: Surface elevation of Lake Powell on Aug. 10, 2026. This is still about 9 inches higher than the previous all-time low of 3,519.9 in April of 2023. But that was April and there was already a bunch of snow in the high-country that would soon boost reservoir levels. The reservoir has been declining at a rate of about 2 inches per day, but that’s likely to speed up unless there is significant upstream precipitation in the coming weeks. So it’s not far-fetched to think it will drop to 3,500 feet as soon as this October.
2,505 cubic feet per second: Lake Powell’s inflow on Aug. 10, 2026.
-387 cfs: Lake Powell’s unregulated inflow on Aug. 8, 2026. Yes, that is a negative number, which may seem impossible. But unregulated inflow is an estimate of what the inflows would be without supplemental releases from upstream dams. Which means that valuable water is being released from upstream dams to slow Lake Powell’s decline.
7,710 cfs: Total average daily release from Glen Canyon Dam on Aug. 10, 2026.
281,267 acre-feet: Total inflows in July 2026.
83,824 acre-feet: Total unregulated inflows in July 2026 (meaning nearly 200,000 acre-feet was released from upstream dams to supplement the flows).
24,164 acre-feet: Estimated evaporation from Lake Powell in July 2026.
482,092 acre-feet: Total releases from Glen Canyon Dam in July 2026.
-224,989 acre-feet: Lake Powell’s water deficit in July 2026 (inflows – evaporation – releases = deficit)
-422,432 acre-feet: Lake Powell’s water deficit using unregulated inflow (or what it would be without supplemental water from upstream reservoirs).
3.72 million acre-feet: Total Lake Powell inflows so far this water year. At this pace, the 2026 water year’s total inflows will be around 4.2 MAF.
159 acre-feet: Total cool mix releases from Glen Canyon Dam in July 2026. This is where cooler water is released through the river outlet tubes — bypassing the hydropower turbines — to stifle smallmouth bass reproduction downstream of the dam. These releases have become necessary because during low reservoir levels, the warm-water loving bass are more likely to get sucked through the dam into the river, where they compete with and prey on native fish and stocked trout. But the Associated Press reports that the Bureau of Reclamation will not be doing any cool water mixing this year, since it would further reduce already diminished hydropower production from the dam (I’ll dig deep into the hydropower issue in this Friday’s Land Desk dispatch).
It’s not just Lake Powell that’s being drained, of course. During July, Flaming Gorge Reservoir ran an 87,000-acre-feet deficit; Blue Mesa Reservoir ran a 55,000 acre-feet deficit (and it received supplemental inflows from Taylor Park Reservoir); and Navajo Reservoir ran a 77,000-acre-feet deficit. Meanwhile, downstream, Lake Mead’s surface level fell to 1,040.2 feet, which is an all-time low. Deadpool watch, indeed.
The Western wildfire view this morning as seen through the Watch Duty app. It’s a great tool, by the way, and even better if you fork out $25/year to become a member (which gives you weather radar and flight tracker powers). Source: Watch Duty
🔥 Wildfire Lookout 🔥
The wildfire situation in the West is just insane right now. It seems that every time one big blaze starts to die down and reaches containment, another one pops up and grows even larger. Under the Trump administration’s full-suppression regime — which seeks to extinguish every fire, even those in wilderness that don’t threaten homes or lives — it all becomes a giant and deadly game of whack-a-mole.
In Utah, for instance, the Cottonwood Fire reached 95% containment after burning through more than 97,000 acres; the Babylon Fire in Bears Ears National Monument then grew to 107,000 acres before being contained; and now the Widemouth 2 Fire has exploded to 121,226 acres, and has taken the lives of two firefighters aboard a helicopter that crashed this past weekend.
The Northwest is especially scary, with over 2 million acres burned so far this year. Current fires include the Big Grass Fire straddling the southern Oregon-Idaho border that had burned through more than 541,000 acres as of Monday morning; the Rowe Creek Complex northeast of Bend, Oregon, at 368,000 acres; the Grasshopper Fire, on the east slopes of Mt. Hood; and the Little Giant and Sinlahekin Fires in Washington, at 111,000 and 143,000 acres, respectively.
A small sampling of other active fires in the West:
The Bug Fire and Fred Mtn. Fire are burning along the California-Nevada border just north of Reno, and are forcing evacuations.
The Gold Mountain Fire in the San Juan Mountains north of Ouray, Colorado, is at 90% containment after burning nearly 40,000 acres. But to the east of it, the Elk Fire jumped in size to over 7,000 acres, and is forcing evacuations in Hinsdale County.
The Frijoles Fire in northern New Mexico east of Pojoaque blew up to 4,158 acres over the weekend, and is at 0% containment. It is burning in the Pecos Wilderness Area.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
Mexican Hat rock in southeastern Utah with Raplee Ridge in the background. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
The DRI Cloud Seeding Research Program uses ground-based generators, which are designed and built by DRI and can be operated remotely. Most cloud seeding operations, including those run by DRI, use a compound called silver iodide (AgI) to aid in the formation of ice crystals. Silver iodide exists naturally in the environment at low concentrations, and is not known to be harmful to humans or wildlife. When storm systems move through one of our cloud seeding project areas, a solution containing a small amount of silver iodide is burned from ground-based generators or released from aircraft. Upon reaching the cloud, the silver iodide acts as an ice forming nuclei to aid in the production of snowflakes. Credit: Desert Research Institute
Click the link to read the article on the KJZZ website (Alex Hager). Here’s an excerpt:
August 7, 2026
The Central Arizona Project runs a 336-mile-long canal system that carries water from the Colorado River across the desert and into the Phoenix and Tucson areas. Since 2007, it has been part of a collaborative effort to run cloud seeding equipment in the Rocky Mountains. The program brings together water users that benefit from faraway snowmelt — like CAP, water agencies in Las Vegas and Los Angeles and major farming districts in Southern California — and agencies that manage water near the snowy mountains themselves. Now, the future of CAP’s participation in that collaboration is in question. At a meeting of the CAP board of directors on Thursday, the cloud seeding program got caught in the middle of bigger water politics.
“I know we’ve been funding this for almost 20 years, and now everybody’s trying to cut us off,” said Barbara Seago, a CAP board member representing Maricopa County. “So my take is, why would we keep funding anything that benefits Colorado if they’re willing to cut us off?”
[…]
In recent years, water agencies in Arizona, California and Nevada have sent about $1.5 million per year to upstream cloud seeding work. Those agencies say it is a small part of the solution to the complicated, politically fraught issue of supply-demand imbalance along the Colorado River, but it is still worthwhile. Technical experts on CAP’s staff explained the program to the board as a way to benefit the Colorado River system overall, even if it is difficult to draw a straight line between dollars spent on cloud seeding and water that physically flows into Arizona’s reservoirs and canals.
“If we have more water on the ground in the watershed,” said Nolie Templeton, CAP’s Colorado River policy and analysis manager, “Then I think everybody in the watershed is going to benefit because more of that water will make it into our rivers and streams.”
Central Arizona Project map via Mountain Town News
More than 300 Mountain whitefish were found dead by Colorado Parks and Wildlife on the lower stretch of the Elk River nearly two weeks ago. The fish kill prompted an immediate response by CPW, which implemented a voluntary fishing closure that remains in place.
“While difficult to see, this type of event was expected given the extreme drought conditions this year,” said CPW Northwest Region Senior Aquatic Biologist Ben Felt. “Mountain whitefish are especially vulnerable to high temperatures and low dissolved oxygen levels. Implementing this closure allows CPW to continue protecting this important native species by reducing angler pressure in this area.”
[…]
The shutdown spanned from the Christina State Wildlife Area, about 9 miles north of Steamboat Springs, downstream to its connections with the Yampa River. The fish kill was discovered July 19, and CPW said the cause was extreme drought conditions. During its investigation, CPW measured river temperatures as high as 82 degrees…CPW said temperatures had likely exceeded 80 degrees in the days leading to the fish kill. The Mountain whitefish is one of two native sport fish in Colorado. The other is the cutthroat trout. The fish is endemic to the White and Yampa River watersheds. However, in recent years, due to consistent high temperatures, low dissolved oxygen levels and non-native predatory fish, the whitefish has struggled to survive in the Yampa River. A prior drought in 2002 significantly impacted the Mountain whitefish population. A mandatory fishing closure is in place for the Yampa River for the 0.6 miles between Stagecoach Dam and Stagecoach State Park. Two voluntary closures are also in place on the Yampa River. The first is from the northern boundary of Sarvis Creek State Wildlife Area — about 1.7 miles downstream of Stagecoach Reservoir — extending 3.3 miles through the Bureau of Land Management portion of the river. The second is from the upstream boundary of Chuck Lewis State Wildlife Area to the western edge of Steamboat’s city limit. There is also a low water warning at Yampa River State Park.
this 16 inch long Mountain whitefish (Prosopium williamsoni) was caught and released in the McKenzie River near the town of Blue River, Oregon on September 1, 2007. By Woostermike at English Wikipedia – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by OhanaUnited., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5099696
On July 13th, the Colorado River District, in partnership with the Colorado Water Trust and the Yampa River Fund, began releasing water from Elkhead Reservoir to mitigate the impacts of extreme drought and critically low streamflows in the Yampa River Valley. Beginning with a release of 10 cubic feet per second, the releases are part of the Yampa River Reservoir Release Program, a 2,000-acre-foot pool first established in 2021 with funding from the Colorado River District’s Community Funding Partnership. The program is designed to reduce drought-related pressure on agricultural producers while supporting river health and aquatic habitat.
“While we’re experiencing exceptionally difficult drought conditions, the story of 2026 is neighbors and water users working together. No single reservoir, organization or water user can solve this alone,” said Hunter Causey, Chief Engineer for the Colorado River District. “By coordinating releases, operations and water use across the basin, we can stretch a limited supply further and provide meaningful benefits for agricultural producers, local communities and the river.”
Below-average snowfall and persistent summer drought have reduced streamflows and increased water temperatures throughout the Yampa River Basin. Releases through the Yampa River Reservoir Release Program are intended to support agricultural water users, help delay or prevent a call on the river during periods of critically low flow, and benefit designated critical habitat for four endangered fish species. Releases are expected to increase in the coming weeks and continue through July.
“The Colorado Water Trust is an environmental nonprofit, and our work is keeping water in rivers,” said Blake Mamich, Programs Director for the Colorado Water Trust. “In a drought this deep, that same mission means showing up for agriculture. Coordinating closely with the River District and the Division of Water Resources, we can time these releases so a single pool of water helps irrigators extend a tough season and keeps water in Yampa for habitat and fish.”
“This is a difficult year for producers throughout the Yampa Valley, and we wanted to be part of a practical solution that helps the broader community,” said Yampa Basin rancher Matt Boeddeker of Lily Park Land & Cattle. “Water users across Colorado are making hard choices and working together to stretch limited supplies, and like them, we hope to help our neighbors complete critical irrigation and reduce the immediate impacts of drought.”
The Yampa River is primarily supplied by snowmelt from the Flat Tops and Gore Range and flows through agricultural areas of northwest Colorado before joining the Green River in Dinosaur National Monument. During dry years, coordinated releases from Stagecoach and Elkhead reservoirs supplement streamflows for agricultural water users, river habitat and endangered fish. The Colorado River District and its partners will continue to monitor streamflow, water temperature, irrigation demand, and habitat needs, and will adjust releases as conditions warrant.
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
Water users in the American Southwest confronted on Friday the strong possibility that cities and farms in the region must reduce Colorado River use by hundreds of billions of gallons after the Trump administration released a new management plan for the coming decade.
The document, published by the federal Bureau of Reclamation, outlines a 10-year management approach that could adjust to changing hydrological conditions that affect the river’s flow, with operations updatable every two years. The agency proposed cuts in water allotments originally suggested by Arizona, California and Nevada, which make up the river’s Lower Basin. Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, the region’s Upper Basin, could make voluntary conservation measures.
Interim guidelines and drought contingency plans agreed upon by the basin states in 2007 and 2019 are set to expire in 2027 and negotiations for a new agreement due this year have stalled, with the states missing repeated deadlines to come to a consensus.
But the Bureau of Reclamation operates much of the river’s infrastructure, including the Hoover and Glen Canyon dams, which form Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the nation’s two largest reservoirs. A federal record of decision finalizing operations on the river for the next two years will follow the final environmental impact statement Reclamation released Friday.
“This plan strikes a balance between flexibility and predictability for the Colorado River system that is vital to the 40 million people who rely on it given unprecedented hydrologic conditions and the potential for considerable impacts on water users,” said Andrea Travnicek, Interior’s assistant secretary for water and science, in a statement accompanying the plan’s release. “It also allows a new flexibility to respond to changing conditions and potential consensus.”
The agency is considering releases from Lake Powell, the reservoir near the border of Utah and Arizona that delineates the upper and lower basins, ranging from 5 million to 12 million acre feet to the downstream states (one acre foot can supply about two to four households for a year). The Lower Basin, including Mexico, could take steep cuts in their water allocations, potentially losing 1.5 million acre feet in both 2027 and 2028.
Under such a scenario, Arizona would lose 760,000 acre feet of its allotment from the river, California 440,000 acre feet and Nevada 50,000, following a proposal submitted by the Lower Basin.
But beyond 2028, Lower Basin cuts could reach up to 3 million acre feet.
The Arizona Department of Water Resources called that figure “unacceptable” in a statement published online. “Such reductions would devastate Arizona’s water users and its economy,” the agency said.
Reclamation appears to be seeking voluntary Upper Basin reductions of up to 200,000 acre feet, and discussed moving water from federally managed dams in the basin downstream, as hydrology allowed.
“The proposal responds to a fundamental reality: the Colorado River no longer reliably produces enough water to support all the uses and expectations built around it,” said JB Hamby, California’s Colorado River Commissioner, in a statement. “That challenge is shared across the Basin, and addressing it requires specific, measurable reductions in water use by every state.”
A spokesperson for the Colorado Department of Natural Resources said the state is “analyzing” the document.
Upper Basin governors said in a statement that they were “encouraged that new operating guidelines will better reflect existing water supply, which must underpin any practicable plan going forward.”
The Colorado River is perhaps the most climate-stressed waterway in the U.S. It provides water to between 35 and 40 million people across seven Western states, 30 tribes and two Mexican states as it wends its way through the Southwest, home to some of the country’s most arid and drought-stricken landscapes. Millions of Westerners also rely on the electricity the Hoover and Glen Canyon dams generate.
The 1922 compact between the river’s users assumed roughly 17.5 million acre feet of water was available to the two basins and Mexico, but the historical average of its natural flow has only been roughly 14.7 million acre feet. That number plummeted to an average of 11.2 million acre feet between 2020 and 2024, according to provisional data from Reclamation.
In that same time period, the agency calculated average use and evaporative loss across the basin at just over 13 million acre feet.
“The operational ranges that Reclamation put forward, they’re the right things that we need to be doing in order to fix the supply and demand imbalance,” said John Berggren, regional policy manager at Western Resource Advocates. “But it is just a range, and what they actually do over the next two years or within any given year, that will matter if they’re actually gonna be able to bring the system back into balance.”
Berggren hopes the short-term certainty this plan provides can unstick negotiations between the states.
“I hope [the basin commissioners] don’t just keep doing what they’ve been doing for the last two or three years, ’cause that clearly hasn’t worked,” he said. “I hope they try and take this opportunity to change things up. Let’s try something new and hopefully get to a seven-state agreement.”
Reclamation’s final environmental impact statement was initially supposed to codify the management plan the basin states have yet to agree on. Though deadlines for those negotiations have come and gone, Reclamation is still holding the door open for a deal, which is widely regarded as the most productive path to a durable long-term operating agreement for the river.
“Let’s try something new and hopefully get to a seven-state agreement.”
Negotiations are stalled over whether cuts should be mandatory across the entire basin. After overdrawing from the river for decades, the Lower Basin now uses less water than it is apportioned, according to federal accounting; it wants to see future cuts shared across the seven states. The Upper Basin, which has never used the full amount of water it is legally entitled to, has fiercely contested demands for it to make mandatory cuts, offering voluntary conservation measures instead. The states that make up that basin contend that variable environmental conditions, such as this year’s record-low snowpack, already limit how much water they use.
Even with some idea of federal management options in place, the absence of a seven-state agreement further increases the prospect of states dependent on the Colorado River suing one another in cases that would be adjudicated by the Supreme Court.
Still, proposing to manage the river in a way that is adaptive to hydrological conditions is “the kind of agreement that we are going to need to really think about long-term how do we live in this basin with much less water moving forward,” said Celene Hawkins, Colorado River program director at The Nature Conservancy.
Hawkins hopes this spurs a seven state agreement “so that, ultimately, we can do really good work for communities and for the river itself.”
A map being shown around El Paso County by suburban water agencies traces the path of the Loop, a complex $134 million pipeline and pumping project that would allow northern and eastern communities in the county to reuse aquifer water returning to Fountain Creek, and pipe along water rights they have bought up on the southern side of the county. (Provided by Woodmoor Water and Sanitation District)
On Monday evening [August 3, 2026], the Monument town council voted unanimously to begin exiting the multidistrict authority. The Loop is left with just two water district members of the original four after the decision…Proposed in 2022, the Loop would divert water flowing down Fountain Creek, pumping it northward and east around Colorado Springs to districts along the way. Billed as a way to break the reliance of communities on the nonreplenishing groundwater of the Denver Basin, the Loop was first estimated to cost between $160 and $190 million to construct…Town staff recommended the action after hearing that Donala Water & Sanitation District, one of the remaining partners, would also be voting to remove itself from the agreement soon…Cherokee Metro District pulled out of the project in 2024. Interim General Manager Kevin Brown previously told The Gazette the district had to divert resources to remove forever chemicals in its supply before a compliance deadline. Instead of the Loop, Cherokee was going to focus its efforts on securing access to water rights in the Upper Black Squirrel Creek Basin.
Water stored in Colorado’s Denver Basin aquifers, which extend from Greeley to Colorado Springs, and from Golden to the Eastern Plains near Limon, does not naturally recharge from rain and snow and is therefore carefully regulated. Courtesy U.S. Geological Survey.
Every so often it just seems like a good idea to drop out of the wrangling over the future of water in the arid west and – just go down to the river itself. A good friend abetted this by taking me along on a float down the lower Gorge of the Gunnison River. My friend was fishing; I was just along for the ride, and reflecting on my 60th anniversary of first moving to the Gunnison River valleys and the Colorado River Basin in 1966.
The Gunnison Gorge is a Bureau of Land Management Wilderness Area just downstream from the Black Canyon of the Gunnison River National Park. In 1966 I was – typically for a posturban American – unaware of where in the world I was, and didn’t know that the Gunnison River is one of the larger tributaries of the Colorado River, meeting the river in Grand Junction, Colorado, with a median contribution there of around 1.5 million acre-feet of water, with around another million acre-feet consumed by users in the Gunnison Basin, mostly for agriculture. This year, the river carries a fraction of that, less than a fourth of what passed for ‘normal’ through the 20thcentury.
Like most upper Colorado River tributaries, the Gunnison River alternates for most of its course between settled green mountain floodplain valleys, and canyons through which highways or railways might connect the valleys but otherwise humankind remains a visitor. The Gunnison’s Black Canyon is one of the steepest, deepest and narrowest canyons in the world, through which no highways or railways pass, and only a handful of adventurers float and swim through just to prove they can.
But the terrain levels out a little in the 14 miles of the Gunnison Gorge, creating long stretches of relatively broad slow-flowing stream, interrupted by rapids where side streams plunge in or rock falls have happened, creating a haven for fish and a gold-medal mecca for fishermen. Much of the Gorge is as narrow as the upstream canyon; dark rock walls on both sides rise steeply several hundred feet through most of it, with sand bars here and there for overnight camps and lunch stops. And everywhere in and along the river there are random rocks, ranging in size from a medicine ball to a small house; looking up the walls, one sees that more are awaiting some signal nudge to break off and fall, making one wonder what kind of mini-tsunami effect would happen if a raft were going by when a big one fell….
This is all what we call beautiful (recording it on our phones), but there is something else in these Gunnison canyons that goes beyond the pastoral scenic. You can get some of it in Connie Rudd’s sunrise image of the Black Canyon above. (Connie Rudd was superintendent of the Black Canyon National Park for a number of years.) The rock in the Black Canyon is not really black, but much of it is shadowed most of the time – not black so much as noir. The image shows the feature known as ‘The Painted Wall,’ due to its multicolored nature, but none of that is painted on; the river has exposed a cross-section of metamorphic rock that has been roiled, rolled, twisted, tilted, split and overturned, always under great pressure from earth layered on above and great heat from earth’s core hell. Rock that has had a hard life, not a comforting thought looking up at the walls from river level.
How did such a canyon system come to be? Gunnison Country geologist Tom Prather suggested that the Gunnison River, snowmelt from the already old Southern Rockies, had set its course looking as water does for the easiest routes through several hundred feet of fused volcanic ash from San Juan volcanoes to the south – on top of fused volcanic mud from the West Elk volcano to the north. And with its course already set in that stone, the forming river encountered the southern edge of a big blorp of metamorphic rock that was – well, just there. So rather than continuing to develop the open wide-V valley that most rivers are known for, the Gunnison River was captured by the hard rock with nothing to do but to cut an ever-deeper canyon that stayed steep and narrow with great hardrock walls in the Gunnison River’s Black Canyon and Gorge.
I am personally fascinated, in Rudd’s image, by how it shows the relative thickness of life as a layer contrasted with the geological layers. Look at the scrubby pinion-juniper and oak on the top of the Painted Wall. To call that layer of life on that mass of rock ‘skin-deep’ is almost an exaggeration. Our fossil-fueled efforts have expanded the layer of life to the seven miles or so above earth’s surface where we regularly fly, and the mile or so beneath the surface where we go to mine things we think we need, with nothing but microbial/incipient life above or below that. So life on earth occupies a layer 1/1,000th the diameter of the planet. If we remove fossil energy from the equation, the layer of earth and atmosphere occupied by life is probably measurable in thousands of feet rather than miles, less in total than a rounding error in the scale of the planet.
We’ve all heard the saying, ‘beauty is only skin-deep.’ But life is only skin-deep on the planet – ‘beauty’ is a term that works well in evaluations within that thin skin (as Connie Rudd’s image of the Painted Wall at sunrise is beautiful in its execution). But to be down in it, floating past rocks the size of small autos that came off those walls towering above – what’s there is some unarticulated and dynamic mystery beyond beauty. Maybe ‘awesome’ worked descriptively before that became a standard response to questions like ‘want to go for a beer?’ Maybe ‘Magnificent.’ ‘Stupendous.’ Or maybe just ‘brutal,’ if you’re floating along beneath it all; we don’t really get into its mystery until we’ve put it in terms in which we can feel something of the pain or ecstacy of what’s happened there.
Down in places like the Gorge that are beyond mere beauty and other ‘surface’ evaluations, I find my mind being stretched to the elastic limit over a concept like ‘nature.’ Or ‘god.’ The majority of us seem to be beyond a thoroughly churched ‘god’ (or panel of gods) as the creative force in the planet and its layer of life, but many of us seem to have just transferred to ‘nature’ that belief in some creative/destructive force larger than ourselves.
But it is not possible – for me, at any rate – to look up at these crumbling walls of tortured rock, some with trees struggling to grow in cracks in the rock until the roots split off the rock and tree and rock go in the river below with a wave that would smash a passing raft and its vacartioning passengers against the far wall – I can’t look at all of this and think of a loving ‘mother nature,’ a wisdom font of the sort we seem to want ‘nature’ to be, ultimately in charge of everything – that’s as hard as it is/was to look at ‘creation’ and imagine a ‘father god.’
Can we have creation without a designated creator – ‘god(s)’ or ‘nature’? All the ‘natural’ evidence I see points that way. In nature, life just happens, unfolds, evolves as it will or can: things just keep happening in what we call ‘nature,’ and when something happens, everything it happens to responds in some way – engages with it, absorbs or incorporates it, attacks it, tries to ignore it, sometimes succumbs to it, sometimes evicts it, and the whole incredible mishmash of life changing to adapt to things happening goes on. Sometimes what happens is something not happening, like a winter’s worth of snow not arriving, but it’s the same process: everything that this happens to responds in some way (some by also not happening)…. Life happens, and the living respond, and what happened (or didn’t) becomes part of life, in which things keep happening, on and on….
And to the extent to which old things happen in new places, to new groupings of living things with new responses and new outcomes, the process is creative, creation – sometimes creative destruction, but creation is not judgmental; creation just happens – as any mendicant poet or painter knows, trying to ‘look strange-eyed at the mindless world’ for the ‘dry sticks to turn to gold’ (thank you, Grendel).
That seems like the ‘nature of nature’ to me, and the nature of creation – and it has nothing to do with some set way that things are supposed to be. There’s no Garden of Eden/prelapsarian wilderness which we have destroyed or been ejected from; we still have all the indifferent wildness we can handle with the undomesticated Trumps, corporations and other weeds that grow out of the cracks of civilization’s pavement. American predatory capitalism is happening to the whole planet now, and everything on the planet, including its enshrouding atmosphere, is beginning to respond to that, seldom with appreciation.
Or so it seemed anyway, floating down the Gorge, in a protected wilderness park with nothing much to do but go with the flow and think about the life happening around me. One thing a water nerd like myself would of course think about, in thinking about the life happening around us, was the flow of the river that floated our raft. I knew the river was flowing at 300-350 cubic feet per second (cfs) through the Black Canyon and the Gorge; that flow was decreed as a year-round water right back in 2009 with priority to 1933 – along with an annual ‘spring flood’ flow for a short period usually in May, the volume depending on the depth of the mountain snowpack. Despite wilderness status for the Gorge and the ’natural’ appearance of everything there, the quantity of water flowing through is tightly controlled via releases from three dams upstream.
Aspinall Unit dams
A week or two after our float, the Bureau of Reclamation began cutting the flow to 200 cfs in response to the ‘creative destruction’ of the winter of 2026 that was happening. This reduction is happening mostly to protect the viability of the reservoirs from whence the water issues, but the river’s response to it will be to make some of the rapids in the Gorge more interesting (less water, more rock), and it may shut down the fishing (and some of the fish) as the remaining water warms to the point of endangering aquatic life.
We do have to face the fact that many, maybe most of our vaunted achievements as a civilization have not made life in the long run – even the medium run – better for ourselves and a lot of the rest of the planet’s life in a very basic way. And it seems to me we would probably do better at it if we could get away from the idea that some ‘god as a parent’ or ‘mother nature’ is going to show us The Way. The Way is still evolving, happening day by day, happening by happening. It’s truly dieu et la nature parmi nous, ‘god and nature among us’; someday maybe we’ll evolve enough to see that realizing either god or nature (making them real) is up to us, if we can come to collaborative execution as effective as our imagination. And we may do better there if we stopped looking and listening for god or nature as an already written book, and did more stopping, looking and listening for our own likely impacts before bulling ahead the way we usually do in the name of god or nature. Like it or not, we are probably writing the book, with a lot of the Old Testament chaos of false starts and backslides.
A line from a movie whose name I’ve forgotten came to my mind down in the Gunnison Gorge, a movie that ends (as I recall) in a lifeboat with the boat captain encouraging his rowers, ‘Pull for the horizon, boys; it’s better than nothing.’ A message of hope, as I remember, which should never be confused with optimism.
Okay – next post I’ll get back to the larger river and its challenges. Meanwhile, I hope all of you get some time to just irresponsibly drift this summer, like me in the Gunnison Gorge, and think about how life happens, and maybe some better responses we might all try to learn, better together.
ANOTHER SHAMELESS ADVERTISEMENT FOR MY POETRY BOOK
I am not optimistic
that things will get better
but still I hope
they will
hope
damned hope
hope damned
hope
the daisy game
is my game
petals to
the mettle
I can’t
not hope
An address by email to george@gard-sibley.org will get payment information and a book winging – okay, plodding its way to you.
Valley cities have spent years preparing for Colorado River shortages and say they are prepared to keep water flowing even under major federal cutbacks. Photo credit: Ted Wood/The Water Desk
Click the link to read the article on the KJZZ website (Alex Hager):
August 4, 2026
Colorado River shortages are no surprise. Climate change and drought have been steadily cutting into water supplies for about 26 years. Various plans to rein in demand have emerged throughout that time, and new cutbacks have been in the works for more than a year. The amount of water that each Valley city gets from the Colorado River varies significantly from city to city, but the majority receive at least some. Some cities are more prepared than others to weather today’s drier conditions, but most have at least some plan to deal with new Colorado River reductions. The Interior Department set the table for new cuts on Friday [July 31, 2026], laying out the framework of a plan that would allow the federal government to cut the Colorado River supply for Arizona, California and Nevada by up to 40%…A second announcement, which may come in the next few days, will deliver specifics about the size of cuts to the Phoenix area in 2027 and 2028.
Regardless of their scale, city leaders say they will be able to keep taps running.Like any good investor, most utility managers have focused on diversifying their portfolios. Essentially, the more different sources of water that flow to a city, the more it can tolerate cuts to one of those sources. In the Valley, that primarily means getting water from underground aquifers and the Salt River. Underground stores of water, pulled up by a system of wells, are carefully managed under state law and can give cities a backup in times of shortage on the surface. In some cases, water agencies have been taking excess water from the Colorado River for years and adding it to the underground stash, with the idea that it could be retrieved in times like these…In July, the Arizona Water Banking Authority announced that it will use its stored waterto make utilities whole in the event of cutbacks to their supplies from the Colorado River…Older, larger cities also tend to have more money for the kind of expensive engineering that can help diversify a water portfolio. For example, Phoenix is building a massive, high-tech water treatment plant that can safely recycle sewage back into purified drinking water. Major cities around the West are betting big on the technology to help withstand drought and climate change in the long term. Phoenix aims to send water from the $350 million facility into city pipes in early 2029. Cities that use water from the Salt River system are contributing to a multibillion-dollar expansion of Bartlett Dam, which holds back Bartlett Lake. In recent years, after particularly snowy winters, the river has provided more water than the reservoir can hold. A larger dam, cities say, would help them capture, store and use more water from the Salt River system in the future. For cities that lack diverse water portfolios and the kind of money needed for massive engineering projects, there’s a way for them to benefit from the cities that do. In April, as Colorado River cuts were becoming imminent, the city of Phoenix announced a new water transfer program called the “Secure Water Arizona Program”, or SWAP. Details are still emerging about how it would work, but it promises to connect cities that have water to cities that need water…Other water transfers, both in Arizona and across state lines, may be a big part of the long-term plan for cities and towns in the Valley. For example, farms may find it lucrative to sell some of their supplies to fast-growing cities in the metro that are willing to pay top dollar. Native American tribes, which often hold large, powerful legal rights to access the Colorado River, may also be willing to sell. A $5 billion settlement deal is currently in the works to give three Arizona tribes more access to their Colorado River water. If it passes, they could also gain the ability to lease their water to cities far from their reservations. Desalination, a high-tech process that can turn salty ocean water into pure, drinkable fresh water, has long been a tempting proposition for water-short cities. High costs and major logistical challenges mean that Arizona is unlikely to build its own desalination plant anytime soon, but a transfer program could allow it to benefit from an already-operational desalination facility. The Central Arizona Project and a handful of other water agencies around the region are exploring a deal to exchange water rights with a desalination facility in Carlsbad, California.
Lake Powell and Glen Canyon Dam. Photo credit: Western Resource Advocates
Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Politics website (Marianne Goodland). Here’s an excerpt:
July 31, 2026
Calling it a balanced approach that offers flexibility and predictability, the plan released by the U.S. Department of the Interior cuts the allocation of Arizona, California and Nevada, while sparing Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming for now…Under the plan, the Lower Basin states could face collective cuts up to 3 million acre-feet through 2036, “subject to hydrology,” according to a news release by the Department of the Interior. That’s enough water to serve more than 25 million people a year. The plan would also allow annual releases between 5 and 12 million acre-feet from Lake Powell, the basin’s second-largest reservoir. Under the 10-year federal framework, water management decisions will be made every two years…
Assistant Secretary for Water and Science Andrea Travnicek said in a statement Friday that the plan, known as a final environmental impact statement, “strikes a balance between flexibility and predictability for the Colorado River system that is vital to the 40 million people who rely on it, given unprecedented hydrologic conditions and the potential for considerable impacts on water users.”
Between 2020 and 2024, the average consumptive use in the Colorado River Basin was 13.1 million acre-feet. That is broken down by:
Upper Basin: 3.8 million acre-feet (29%)
Lower Basin: 6.5 million acre-feet (49%)
Mexico use: 1.4 million acre-feet (11%)
Evaporation: 1.4 million acre-feet (11%)
At the time the 1922 compact was signed, the seven states had a combined population of about six million — roughly the size of Colorado’s population today…
She said last month that she “has no idea what that process would look like, constantly negotiating every two years.”
“The basin is experiencing increased aridity due to climate variability, and long-term drought and low-runoff conditions are expected in the future,” wrote the Bureau of Reclamation in the summary. “These conditions will exacerbate the now widely recognized imbalance between water supply and demand in the basin. Robust and flexible guidelines are needed to manage the Colorado River system and its resources under a broad range of potential future hydrologic conditions.”
[…]
The two reservoirs are currently governed by guidelines established in 2007 that are set to expire this year, and many agree the plan has failed to protect the Colorado River system…The final proposal does not provide specifics for how water will be distributed across the basin, with the Bureau of Reclamation describing it as a “framework” that identifies key triggers and ranges for developing future operating guidelines at Lake Powell and Lake Mead. It sets up a plan to negotiate 2-year operating plans for the reservoirs through 2036…The final statement provides a range of alternatives, including the Bureau of Reclamation’s “preferred” option. Each alternative sets guidelines for how it will reduce or increase annual consumptive water use allocations from Lake Mead to the Lower Basin states; store and deliver water saved through conservation efforts; manage and deliver surplus water; manage activities and make cuts above Lake Powell; and more.
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 Pagosa Springs Sun website (Josh Pike and Randi Pierce). Here’s an excerpt:
July 29, 2026
Beginning July 22, area jurisdictions began rescinding Stage 2 fire restrictions, with Stage 1 restrictions remaining in effect in much of the area…On July 22, it was announced that improved fire weather conditions and near containment on the Ferris Fire had prompted Bureau of Land Management (BLM) officials to ease fire restrictions and reopen public lands within the Tres Rios Field Office. Effective July 22, Stage 2 fire restrictions were lifted on BLM-administered public lands managed by the Tres Rios Field Office, including Canyons of the Ancients National Monument…On Thursday, July 23, the Archuleta County Sheriff’s Office (ACSO) announced it had, in collaboration with the Pagosa Fire Protection District, rescinded Stage 2 fire restrictions effective immediately…The following day, Friday, July 24, the Town of Pagosa Springs announced it had rescinded Stage 2 fire restrictions effective that day…On Wednesday, July 29, the San Juan National Forest announced it would be rescinding Stage 2 fire restrictions effective 12:01 a.m. Thursday, July 30, on all National Forest System lands…
Colorado Drought Monitor map July 28, 2026.
According to the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS), areas in Archuleta County received from .91 inches to 3.15 inches of rain between July 15 and July 29. Despite the recent rains, the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD) remains in stage two drought restrictions, and the area remains in severe drought. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, 100 percent of Archuleta County remained in severe drought as of July 21, with 1.90 percent of the county — the northeast corner — falling under extreme drought. The week prior, 36.15 percent of the county fell under extreme drought…
According to the U.S. Geological Survey water monitoring gauge at the San Juan River in Pagosa Springs and the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center, although the San Juan has remained at a very low but generally steady level, it did appear to hit record low levels several times over the last week. According to the River Forecast Center, on July 24, the river hit about 19 cubic feet per second (cfs), below the 2002 low of 21. The following day, it hit about 17 cfs, below the 2002 low of 19 cfs. On July 28 at 11:15 a.m., the river was recorded running at 15 cubic feet per second (cfs), 0.5 cfs above the previous record low set in 2002.
Map of the San Juan River, a tributary of the Colorado River, in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, USA. Made using USGS National Map data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47456307
After Utah and six other states along the Colorado River failed to reach a deal on how to share its dwindling water supply, the federal government on Friday released its own 10-year outline.
Colorado River Collaborative
This article is published through the Colorado River Collaborative, a solutions journalism initiative supported by the Janet Quinney Lawson Institute for Land, Water, and Air at Utah State University. See all of our stories about how Utahns are impacted by the Colorado River atgreatsaltlakenews.org/coloradoriver
Under the proposal from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada would share in cuts of up to 3 million acre-feet per year. The framework doesn’t mandate cuts for Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.
Instead, it identifies a conservation goal for the Upper Basin — 200,000 acre-feet per year — about as much as Utah’s Deer Creek and East Canyon reservoirs together can hold. The plan would also allow for smaller annual releases from Lake Powell of down to 5 million acre-feet, compared to the current 6 million acre-feet, with new operating guidelines every two years.
Utah’s chief Colorado River negotiator, Gene Shawcroft, praised the proposal on Friday, telling reporters it recognizes the reality of the water available, not just the demand. But he emphasized it provides a broad framework, with the details to follow in coming days.
“I would just simply say, this is a bridge, not a destination,” Shawcroft said in a virtual news conference. “It certainly could be a bridge over troubled waters, but perhaps a bridge over no waters. We just aren’t quite sure.”
He and Amy Haas, executive director of the Colorado River Authority of Utah, were still reading through the 2,600 pages contained in the bureau’s environmental impact statement released Friday.
Haas said the state will know more about what it’s contending with when it gets a copy of a two-year operations plan for 2027 and 2028 in coming days, though the exact timeline wasn’t clear.
The Colorado River is pictured where if flows near Hite, just beyond the upper reaches of Lake Powell, on Friday, Sept. 19, 2025. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch)
The Colorado River provides water to 40 million people across the U.S. and Mexico, contributing 27% of Utah’s water supply. It’s shrinking because of drought, overuse and hotter temperatures linked to climate change.
This year’s record-high temperatures and lowest snowpack on record aren’t helping. Normally, Colorado River runoff is about 13 million acre-feet, Shawcroft said. Now it’s 3.5 million acre-feet.
He told reporters: “We’re in a dire situation.”
On Friday, Arizona’s Department of Water Resources called the proposal’s cuts for the Lower Basin “unacceptable,” saying such reductions would devastate Arizona’s water users and its economy.”
The agency described negotiations over many months as “an exercise in lowering expectations, particularly for a long-term, seven-state agreement on operating this vital river system.”
The disagreement could find its way into a courtroom soon. Arizona and Utah have both taken steps this year to build up litigation funds.
“For Utah, litigation is never our plan A,” Haas told reporters Friday. “Whether it’s a plan B, depending on the context of this document, that remains to be seen. But litigation is not going to get us anywhere on this river. It’s not going to get us more water.”
At issue in the negotiations is who absorbs necessary cuts. Upper Basin states argue they use less water than Lower Basin states, don’t have huge reservoirs to store water in dry years, and lack legal authority to place significant restrictions on water users.
Lake Powell and the Wahweap Marina are pictured near Page, Arizona on Sunday, Feb. 2, 2025. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch)
The proposal out Friday is adaptable and allows the states to keep negotiating, said Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum.
“This framework provides the flexibility to respond to changing hydrologic conditions while preserving the opportunity for the Basin States to continue working toward durable, consensus-based solutions,” Burgum said in a statement.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, in a joint statement with his counterparts in the other upstream states, said they’re encouraged that incoming operating guidelines “will better reflect existing water supply, which must underpin any practicable plan going forward.”
They went on to say that both the upper and lower divisions of the basin “are feeling the pain of severe drought. This is a reality that all states, and the federal government, will need to address practically, which is why a seven-state agreement will provide the best outcome for all water users in the Colorado River Basin.”
Water use is outpacing the river’s flows, and that overconsumption adds up. The combined amount of water in Lake Powell and Lake Mead is at its lowest point since before Glen Canyon Dam began to fill up in 1963, the bureau said in its Friday news release.
If water levels dip to critical lows, as forecasts suggest they could by late this year, the nation’s two largest reservoirs could fail to produce power. If their depths continue to slide, they’ll fail to send water downstream.
Conservation and recreation groups have called for an end to the gridlock, saying it’s dragging on in the background while hotter and drier conditions are driving up wildfire risks, air quality concerns and restrictions on the water supply.
Utah News Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Utah News Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor McKenzie Romero for questions: info@utahnewsdispatch.com.
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)
The federal government on Friday formalized a set of guidelines for managing water use in the Colorado River Basin over the next decade, if Colorado and six other Western states can’t come to an agreement on how to deal with declining flows caused in large part by climate change.
“The Department has a responsibility to ensure the Colorado River system remains reliable and resilient for the millions of Americans, communities and industries that depend on it,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a press release. “This framework provides the flexibility to respond to changing hydrologic conditions while preserving the opportunity for the Basin States to continue working toward durable, consensus-based solutions.”
Under the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s “preferred alternative” for the management of the river’s reservoir system, outlined in a extensive environmental impact statement, the burden of the most severe cuts would continue to fall on the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada, which could face mandatory cuts of up to 3 million acre-feet of water. The Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming would face only voluntary conservation targets totaling 200,000 acre-feet.
All seven states were parties to the Colorado River Compact, a 1922 agreement governing the use of water from the vital Western watershed. Today, the Colorado River provides water to an area inhabited by 40 million people across the Southwest, though agricultural uses account for the vast majority of consumption.
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
Since 2000, a megadrought caused largely by global warming — the region’s worst dry spell in at least 1,200 years — has stressed water supplies across the basin and pushed the Colorado River Compact to a breaking point. The last set of federal guidelines to address shortages, issued nearly 20 years ago, will expire Jan. 1, and the seven Colorado River Compact states failed to reach a new agreement before a federally imposed deadline in February.
The combined amount of water stored in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the Colorado River system’s two key reservoirs, fell this month to its lowest level since May 1957 — before Lake Powell, created by the Glen Canyon Dam, had even begun to fill.
Without a major turnaround in hydrologic conditions in the near future, water levels in Lake Powell are expected to fall by next spring to below “minimum power pool,” at which point the Glen Canyon Dam’s hydroelectric turbines would be unable to operate.
Negotiations over a comprehensive new agreement have led to an increasingly bitter dispute between the Upper Basin states — led by Colorado, the river’s headwaters state and by far the Upper Basin’s largest water user — and the Lower Basin states, especially Arizona, which has borne the brunt of the cuts imposed in recent years. Arizona is widely expected to launch a high-stakes legal challenge as soon as this summer, alleging Colorado and other Upper Basin states are failing to meet an obligation under the original Colorado River Compact to allow enough water to flow downstream.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis issued a joint statement Friday with the governors of the other three Upper Basin states, saying that “both the Upper and Lower divisions of the basin are feeling the pain of severe drought,” and that they were “committed to continued good-faith discussions with our counterparts.”
“Many hours of meetings and negotiations took place between the Colorado River Basin states and these discussions will continue,” the statement said. “Today’s framework does not represent a final solution, but enables the River to be managed in the short-term while the seven states and (the Interior Department) continue to negotiate a consensus solution.”
In the absence of a new agreement among the states, the Bureau of Reclamation says it will continue to update its new guidelines every two years until 2036.
Andrea Travnicek, the Interior Department’s assistant secretary for water and science, said the plan “strikes a balance between flexibility and predictability … given unprecedented hydrologic conditions and the potential for considerable impacts on water users.”
In a statement, Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado said he was “disappointed” by the failure to reach a new long-term agreement among the seven Colorado River Compact states.
“While a two-year operating plan is the bare minimum needed to operate the river, a long-term, consensus agreement that recognizes real hydrologic conditions is the only durable solution to bring certainty to the Colorado River,” Bennet said.
Colorado Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
You know the Colorado River crisis is serious when the Trump administration is willing to use hundreds of millions of dollars from President Biden’s climate law to help to solve it.
As of Wednesday night, federal officials had yet to release their plan for mandatory water cutbacks along the Colorado — a crucial water source for tens of millions of people and millions of acres of farmland across the American West. But with a plan expected later this week, details were starting to trickle out.
The L.A. Times’ Ian James reported that Trump’s Interior Department would accept a proposal submitted by California, Arizona and Nevada — the Lower Basin states — to slash their water use by 12%, 31% and 28%, respectively, through 2028. They’ll receive $350 million from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act to support water conservation.
The Upper Basin states — Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming — will get $100 million in conservation funding. But unlike their downstream neighbors, they won’t face mandatory water cuts. However much water they end up saving, that will be good enough.
It’s always possible the plan will change. I’m eager to see the final details.
While we wait, let’s hear from one of the West’s most thoughtful and well-informed Colorado River chroniclers.
That would be Zak Podmore, author of “Life After Dead Pool: Lake Powell’s Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River.” Earlier this week, he and I talked for an hour and took audience questions on Zoom; it was a great time. Thank you to everyone who joined us. Paid subscribers to Climate-Colored Goggles can scroll up to watch the full video.
Here are five lessons that stood out to me from our conversation — all of which are relevant to the high-stakes conflict playing out among the states.
1. We’re not doomed. Earth is resilient
My favorite thing about “Life After Dead Pool” is its hopeful message.
Most headlines about the Colorado River these days are gloomy. For instance, the last time Lake Mead and Lake Powell held as little water as they do right now was 1956 — before Lake Powell existed, meaning all the water was in Mead. Powell is currently 23% full; Mead is 27% full. These are the largest reservoirs in the United States.
A river returns. Almost 50 miles of the San Juan, once inundated by Powell Reservoir, are flowing free. Photo credit: Morgan Sjogren
But Podmore’s book flips the script, offering a firsthand look the amazing ecological recovery taking place as Lake Powell shrinks.
In and around the reservoir, which was flooded by Glen Canyon Dam more than 60 years ago, native vegetation is returning much faster than scientists thought possible — especially in narrow side canyons inundated by Powell. Exploring these remote, newly accessible places inspired Podmore to write his book.
“Instead of hearing the story that I grew up hearing — which was that Glen Canyon Dam had all these negative environmental consequences, it drowned this beautiful place — I was hearing these conversations from these researchers who were talking about the landscape that was coming back, and how excited they were about the way the ecology was recovering, and the way the endangered fish were expanding their habitat,” Podmore said.
“Instead of a story about being too late, it was a story about realizing that I was right on time, as we all are, to see the rebirth of Glen Canyon,” he added.
The Colorado River flows through Glen Canyon in 1958, before the dam was built. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)
2. Those who don’t learn from history…
Podmore starts the book by imagining what Indigenous life might have been like in and around Glen Canyon nearly 1,000 years ago — when the region had a far larger population than it does today.
He wanted to show that the Colorado River Basin’s human history began long before white settlement — and that even environmentalists have often ignored the watershed’s Indigenous past.
“I was definitely indoctrinated into the mainstream environmental school of thought as I was growing up,” he said. “I had a copy of the really famous book about Glen Canyon called, ‘The Place No One Knew,’ which was published by the Sierra Club in the ’60s and talked about how nobody cared enough about Glen Canyon to protect it. And then I realized later on that [the] title was very offensive, and [in fact] there were people who knew Glen Canyon very well and lived there for thousands of years, and who were displaced as the waters of Lake Powell started to fill, in the case of many Navajo families.”
Podmore’s opening scene describes a 10,000-gallon stone water tank built by Ancestral Pueblo farmers, the ruins of which were eventually buried by Lake Powell. The tank’s key feature: a drain at the bottom, so that irrigation could continue no matter how low water levels got.
Diagram showing critical reservoir levels at Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell. Land Desk diagram with data from the Bureau of Reclamation.
Lake Powell doesn’t have a drain at the bottom. It could certainly use one.
3. The Upper Basin states aren’t doing enough
If Powell’s water levels sink much lower, water won’t be able to pass through the dam’s hydropower turbines, which generate cheap electricity for communities across the West. That wouldn’t be a “dead pool” situation; water could still flow downstream to the Grand Canyon and Lake Mead through bypass tubes lower in the dam. But the bypass tubes are surprisingly frail and could break with sustained use.
Translation: We are frighteningly close to “de facto dead pool.” That’s why the Trump administration is ordering everyone to use less water.
Well, not everyone. California, Arizona and Nevada are willing to cut back dramatically, and federal officials seem happy to make them do it. The Upper Basin states — the ones upstream of Lake Powell — say they shouldn’t have to commit to mandatory reductions, in part because they already consume a lot less.
[ed. It is not possible to measure or marshall water to Lake Powell (lack of infrastructure, gaining and losing reaches, priority, no way to color water in the river). Inflows are calculated values, or the height of the column at the dam. The Upper Basin consumes a lot less than their allocation under the compact, so yes, much less than the Lower Basin. Here’s an AI recap of inflows to Lake Powell.]
In a New York Times opinion piece earlier this year, I argued that the Upper Basin states need to do more. Podmore agreed.
“It’s a tricky situation, because the Lower Basin has always used more water, and that’s a convenient argument for the Upper Basin,” he said. “But also, there’s more people in the Lower Basin. And the most productive agricultural land that’s irrigated with Colorado River water is located in the Lower Basin.”
“Even with the cuts that the Lower Basin has offered, we still have a long way to go to balance the water budget,” he added. “Everyone needs to pitch in.”
Farmland in California’s Imperial Valley, irrigated with Colorado River water. (Photo by Sammy Roth)
4. Alfalfa isn’t (always) the enemy
Farmers are often vilified for sucking up copious amounts of water — and with good reason. Irrigated agriculture consumes more than half the water in the Colorado River Basin, with alfalfa and other cattle feed accounting for a stunning 32% of overall water use. (This is one of several good reasons to eat fewer hamburgers.)
The Colorado River’s largest water user, by far, is California’s Imperial Valley, where farmers grow vegetables, alfalfa and other crops. There’s no sustainable future for the American West that doesn’t involve Imperial using less water.
But easy as it is to hate on Imperial, Podmore pointed out that when the Lower Basin uses water, that water stays in the river for a long time, supporting healthy ecosystems along the way. And because Imperial is very far downstream, water flowing to alfalfa farmers there carries huge environmental benefits.
“The way that water gets from the Rocky Mountains to the Imperial Valley — or to Los Angeles or Las Vegas or Phoenix — is through the Grand Canyon. It’s through Glen Canyon. It’s through Canyonlands National Park,” Podmore said. “It’s through all these important and beautiful places.”
“If the Lower Basin agrees to a bunch of cuts — if L.A. builds tons of desalination plants — that would in theory be good, because you have to divert less water from the river,” he added. But at the same time, “that means less water in the river.”
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
The Bureau of Reclamation has released the Final Environmental Impact Statement, which designates a preferred course of action for future management of Lake Powell and Lake Mead. The preferred alternative establishes an adaptive decision framework to be used to develop operating guidelines designed to ensure reliable operations in the Colorado River Basin while maintaining the flexibility to respond to changing conditions over a 10-year period through 2036. The framework also preserves the opportunity for the Basin to continue working towards consensus agreements, and if successful, be incorporated into future operations.
The framework will be used to develop operating guidelines for operations at Lake Powell and Lake Mead that can be adjusted for shorter and longer term periods.
“The Department has a responsibility to ensure the Colorado River system remains reliable and resilient for the millions of Americans, communities and industries that depend on it,” saidSecretary of the Interior Doug Burgum. “This framework provides the flexibility to respond to changing hydrologic conditions while preserving the opportunity for the Basin States to continue working toward durable, consensus-based solutions.”
The framework establishes the operational principles, sideboards—key thresholds and ranges for operational elements—and a process that will govern development and issuance of operating guidelines through 2036. Operational sideboards were chosen to ensure that the Department would have flexibility and environmental compliance to operate the system in a way that is responsive to actual hydrologic conditions and allows for the incorporation of Basin-wide innovative water management solutions. The sideboards, which are analyzed in the Final EIS, provide for annual releases from Lake Powell between 5.0 maf and 12.0 maf, Lower Basin shortages of up to 3.0 maf, the ability to store up to 8.0 maf and 3.0 maf of conserved water in Lake Powell and Lake Mead for future use, respectively, and the opportunity for voluntary Upper Basin conservation up to 200 kaf, subject to hydrology.
The Department would issue operating guidelines, within these sideboards, at anticipated 2-year periods, unless consensus-based agreements provide for a longer duration. It also establishes a structure under which operating guidelines will be developed, reviewed and periodically updated. This approach provides certainty regarding a decision process over the next 10 years while preserving the flexibility to adapt to changing conditions.
“This plan strikes a balance between flexibility and predictability for the Colorado River system that is vital to the 40 million people who rely on it given unprecedented hydrologic conditions and the potential for considerable impacts on water users,” saidAssistant Secretary for Water and Science Andrea Travnicek. “It also allows a new flexibility to respond to changing conditions and potential consensus.”
The Colorado River provides water for more than 40 million people and fuels hydropower resources in seven states. It serves as a vital resource for 30 tribes and two Mexican states, sustaining 5.5 million acres of farmland and agricultural communities throughout the West, while also supporting critical ecosystems and protecting endangered species.
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
Drought conditions over the past 25 years, combined with expectations of continued dry conditions, have made development of future operating guidelines for the Colorado River particularly challenging. The combined contents of Lake Powell and Lake Mead have not been this low since before Glen Canyon Dam began filling in 1963, and since 2000 water use has exceeded total system inflow in most years. The Colorado River Compact apportioned 7.5 million acre-feet to both the Upper and Lower Basins based on the estimated pre-compact average inflow (1906-1921) of approximately 18 million acre-feet. However, inflows from 2000 to 2024 have only averaged 12.9 million acre-feet and the unregulated inflow into Lake Powell this year as of July is estimated to be only 3.5 maf.
Between 2020 and 2024, the average consumptive use in the Colorado River Basin was 13.1 million acre-feet. That is broken down by:
Upper Basin Use: 3.8 million acre-feet (29%).
Lower Basin Use: 6.5 million acre-feet (49%).
Mexico Use: 1.4 million acre-feet (11%).
Evaporation: 1.4 million acre-feet (11%).
This Final EIS is the culmination of a NEPA process that was initiated in June 2023. Over this three-year period Reclamation engaged extensively with Basin stakeholders and that input is reflected in the alternatives analyzed in the Final EIS and the Preferred Alternative.
Reclamation received more than 18,000 comments, including 785 unique submissions from the public, tribes, states, federal agencies and others after releasing the draft EIS in January 2026. Reclamation evaluated substantive comments and updated the final EIS, with public input helping to shape the preferred alternative.
The Final EIS is available on Reclamation’s website.
The final EIS addresses only domestic river operations. A separate binational process addressing water deliveries to Mexico is nearing completion and the Department is committed to continued collaboration with Mexico. The Department will conduct all necessary and appropriate discussions regarding post-2026 operations and implementation of the 1944 Water Treaty with Mexico through the International Boundary and Water Commission in consultation with the Department of State.
Click the link to access the EIS on the Reclamation website. Here’s the abstract:
July 31, 2026
The Secretary of the Department of the Interior, acting through the Bureau of Reclamation, proposes the adoption of new guidelines and coordinated management strategies to address Lake Powell and Lake Mead through their full operating range to take effect when the current agreements expire in 2026. Management strategies will primarily focus on the operation of Glen Canyon Dam and Hoover Dam, but may include actions upstream and downstream of these facilities to protect critical reservoir elevations.
This Final EIS has been prepared to inform the Secretary’s timely adoption of a new set of guidelines that would be sufficiently robust and provide improved predictability to all water users and managers in the Colorado River Basin. This Final EIS has been prepared pursuant to the National Environmental Policy Act to address the formulation and evaluation of specific interim criteria and to identify the potential environmental impacts of implementing such criteria.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
To bolster the Colorado River’s flow downvalley through historic drought, water authorities will be increasing the flow out of the Ruedi Reservoir through August. That water will flow into the Fryingpan River…Water will then flow into the Roaring Fork River, then down the Western Slope, where populations in Grand Valley are in “dire need,” he said…
Green Mountain Reservoir (back in the day) is owned by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and located in Summit County north of Silverthorne along the Blue River. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Traditionally, the Western Slope relies heavily on the Green Mountain Reservoir — about 17 miles south of Kremmling — to sustain a steady Colorado River flow. But due to the state’s dry, warm winter, that reservoir struggled to fill over the spring. The administrators of Green Mountain Reservoir found that low water levels and fast releases were exacerbating a slow-moving landslide on its banks, so they limited how much water could be released out of the reservoir to half a foot a day…
Tim Miller, a hydrologist with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation that manages the levels at Ruedi Reservoir, said the reservoir played a similar supplemental role in 2002, when Colorado saw another historic drought. This year’s use of the reservoir is about 10 days ahead of then, he said.
A few miles north of Mt. Sopris, down another dirt road that leads to the Roaring Fork River, Wenning stopped his car at a small brick building near the riverbank: The Roaring Fork Well House. Nearby are three wells that draw from the Roaring Fork River, providing another source of municipal water. After the call on the Crystal in 2018, Carbondale water managers decided to reduce the town’s reliance on Nettle Creek by leaning more heavily on the Roaring Fork River, where the town also has water rights. Carbondale currently has installed three wells — each of which produces roughly the same amount of water as the Nettle Creek plant (around 300 gallons per minute). But, the town has permits for seven more wells. Shifting Carbondale’s focus to the Roaring Fork River makes sense, said Wenning. Since the Roaring Fork is a bigger river, it’s less affected by a low-snow year. The wells are also 40 feet deep, allowing them to access groundwater…
The Roaring Fork Treatment Plant lies at the edge of the Carbondale Nature Park. Inside the barn-like building, a loud whirring sound echoes through the cavernous interior. The town recently installed new cartridge filter technology at the plant, expanding its capacity to treat water from 0.5 million gallons to 1.4 million gallons per day. According to Wenning, the town plans to expand the plant’s capacity further to treat up to 2.3 million gallons per day from the Roaring Fork River alone — more than enough to meet Carbondale’s peak summer demand, even when some of the water treatment equipment needs repair or servicing…
Beyond the shift to a more resilient water source, water experts see more opportunity to boost capacity through conservation. Maggie McHugh, an engineer with Roaring Fork Engineering, helps communities in the Roaring Fork Valley adapt to climate change.
“We can’t put any more water into the system, but we can take less out,” she said. “That will be the ultimate goal, especially in years like this.”
Farmer Randy Friend grows corn in the Olathe area. He left the debris from last year’s crop on the ground as a form of mulch to try to retain moisture in this exceptionally dry year. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Fourth-generation Olathe farmer Randy Friend stopped his pickup truck next to a row of corn whose green leaves were limp and curling, with a gray tinge. Friend’s corn was stressed as the valley endured a July heat wave with temperatures nudging close to 100 degrees.
“I hate to see it looking like that with our water situation,” Friend said.
Next was a field of onions, a thirsty crop with a long growing season. The furrows between the dark-green sprouts were still damp, an indication the field was just irrigated that morning.
“Onions are our most expensive crop to grow and the most reward on a good year,” Friend said. “But they can also bankrupt you because they take so much more water.”
Friend farms corn, onions and forage crops for livestock as part of the Uncompahgre Valley Water Users Association, a vast expanse of farmland that extends from just south of Montrose to Delta, on Colorado’s Western Slope. Water from the Gunnison and Uncompahgre rivers, along with miles of tunnels, canals and ditches, transforms about 76,000 acres of high desert into lush green fields of corn, pinto beans, onions and alfalfa.
But this year, Uncompahgre Valley farmers are making tough decisions and developing new tools as they try to adapt to one of the hottest, driest years on record in the Upper Colorado River basin. Many are leaving fields dry, culling their cattle herds, switching to crops that use less water and relying on crop insurance payouts as the association faces a 50% cut to its irrigation water supply.
“I’ve been farming 30 years now, and this is by far the most extreme, biggest cut of water that I’ve ever had to deal with,” Friend said.
Some producers in the Uncompahgre Valley Water Users association have left some fields unplanted due to drought. The association has only about half its normal water supply this year. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
The Uncompahgre water users get about half of their water supply from Taylor Park Reservoir, at the headwaters of the Gunnison River, via the Gunnison Tunnel, a six-mile-long aqueduct that can bring up to about 1,175 cubic feet per second to the valley. The other half comes from the Uncompahgre River, a much smaller river basin that saw an abysmal end-of-season snowpack with just 14% of median April 1. That means the association has only about half its normal water supply for irrigation season.
“We’re limping along right now, but it’s going to be a challenging year,” said association manager Steve Pope. “We got to get our producers through Labor Day; we’re going to need the water then. It’s just a physical supply issue; the water just wasn’t there.”
With its water cut by half, many producers in the Uncompahgre Valley have chosen to irrigate only some of their fields, leaving others unplanted for the season. The district’s northwest area, which is where much of the valley’s row crops are grown, has been the hardest hit. Pope estimates those farmers are fallowing between 30% and 60% of their ground. Driving around the district revealed many fields that were brown and dry.
“There’s just a tremendous amount of land out there that’s just barren, and there’s nothing you can do about it,” he said.
This field in the Uncompahgre Valley Water Users Association district has been fallowed this season due to a lack of water. The state of Colorado announced Wednesday that it will set up a conservation program using federal dollars, which means more fields on the Western Slope could soon look like this. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Friend, an association board member, said he is fallowing about one-fourth of the land he farms and using about 30% to 40% of his acres to grow forage crops that use less water, such as sorghum-Sudangrass. But switching to drought-resistant plants is a strategy that doesn’t work for every grower. Friend also owns a feedlot so he can mix these drought-tolerant crops with higher-quality feed to make it work. Although some growers on the Western Slope are experimenting with alternative forage crops, such crops have yet to be grown on a large scale. Water-intensive alfalfa, with its high protein content, remains dominant.
Daris Jutten, a fifth-generation rancher in Ouray and Montrose counties, said the lack of water has prompted him to cut his herd back to the fewest cows he has ever had on his ranch. He has also left some of his alfalfa fields fallow.
West Drought Monitor map July 30, 2002.
West Drought Monitor map July 31, 2012.
West Drought Monitor July 31. 2018
West Drought Monitor map July 21, 2026.
“I’ve seen it bad before, but I’ve never seen it this bad,” Jutten said. “2002 was bad. 2018, 2012 were all bad. But they don’t even come close to what this thing is.”
The Uncompahgre River in Olathe was nearly dried up in July due to agricultural diversions and drought. The Uncompahgre Valley Water Users Association is the biggest agricultural water user in the Upper Colorado River Basin. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Colorado’s new conservation program adds pressure to cut water use
This year’s lack of water and a management crisis have brought the Colorado River system to the brink of collapse.
As the nation’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, plummet to new lows, water managers are taking emergency steps to keep Lake Powell levels high enough to produce hydropower at Glen Canyon Dam. At the same time, federal officials are crafting a plan for how the seven states that share the Colorado River will share shortages and how the reservoirs will be operated for the next two years.
Colorado’s new conservation program adds pressure to cut water use
This year’s lack of water and a management crisis have brought the Colorado River system to the brink of collapse.
As the nation’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, plummet to new lows, water managers are taking emergency steps to keep Lake Powell levels high enough to produce hydropower at Glen Canyon Dam. At the same time, federal officials are crafting a plan for how the seven states that share the Colorado River will share shortages and how the reservoirs will be operated for the next two years.
Upper Basin water managers have focused on the fact that their farmers and ranchers are affected first by a warming climate and are already experiencing shortages because the water simply isn’t there. The Upper Basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) suffer because there aren’t major reservoirs from which they can draw in dry years the way that the Lower Basin states (Arizona, California and Nevada) do. Both basins are increasingly expected to reduce consumption because supplies are shrinking and the Colorado River system as a whole must be managed within these new limits.
Onions are one of the water-intensive row crops grown in the Uncompahgre Valley. Farmers in the region are adapting to drought by fallowing fields and planting crops that use less water. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
On July 15, state officials announced the creation of a “near-term contribution program” that will pay water users to voluntarily cut back in 2027 and 2028, using $100 million in promised funding from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The Upper Basin states have a goal of saving 100,000 acre-feet by the end of September 2028, which marks the end of water year 2028. The saved water will need to have a home in Upper Basin storage buckets — Lake Powell, Navajo, Blue Mesa or Flaming Gorge reservoirs — but precisely how it will be used and how it will fit into broader Colorado River management are still unknown.
The program has been a long time coming, and the concept is not new to Colorado. Officials said they are incorporating the lessons learned from previous demand-management studies beginning in 2019, stakeholder input and recent pilot programs.
As the biggest agricultural user in the Upper Basin, the Uncompahgre Valley — drought-stricken as it is — is ideally located for these types of programs and is considered one of the lowest-hanging fruits when it comes to finding places to save water.
When Colorado’s contribution program is implemented next year, the association will be ready. Knowing that a program was inevitable, Western Slope water managers have been proactive, developing a data-mapping tool that can help the association adapt to drought.
UVWUA Manager Steve Pope stands at the spot where water from the South Canal dumps water from the Gunnison River into the Uncompahgre River. It’s then diverted to the west side of the valley where it irrigates fields and row crops. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Mapping tool helps plan conservation
With 550 miles of interconnected canals and laterals snaking through the valley, downstream irrigators often depend on reusing the water that runs off an upstream neighbor’s fields, and leaving a field dry could have unintended downstream consequences.
Developed by the Colorado River Water Conservation District and The Freshwater Trust, the tool can pinpoint where the greatest opportunities for water savings are, as well as how to avoid the worst consequences of fallowing ground. It can show what happens when efficiency improvements are made to the association’s century-old infrastructure and can show which ditches should be lined to provide the most bang for the buck to reduce seepage loss.
“From our perspective, it’s a great management tool because it allows us to track water through our system,” Pope said. “Let’s say there’s [a conservation] program, well, what would be the best farms to go to a deficit irrigation or fallow that would create the most (water savings), and you can target that.”
The tool is aimed at helping producers adapt to drought and can show which projects would result in the most water savings. Although the River District does not endorse a large-scale conservation program, it has long recognized that one was inevitable and has sought to mitigate the worst impacts to rural agricultural communities.
The intent of the tool is to help create a program that can maximize economic and environmental benefits as well as water conservation, said Raquel Flinker, director of interstate and regional water resources with the River District.
“It was always to provide data and analytics that would make whatever entity [is] creating a program design it in a way that seemed the most sensible,” Flinker said.
Some Uncompahgre Valley producers have participated in experimental programs that pay them to cut their water use, including the federally funded System Conservation Pilot Program, which took place in 2023 and 2024. Friend and a few others in the association enrolled in 2024 and were paid to reduce their water use. The association’s board has allowed their members to participate in conservation programs, but they remain somewhat controversial. An irrigation district in the Western Slope’s other big agricultural area, the Grand Valley, does not allow its members to participate.
Pope said instead of programs that pay farmers not to irrigate, he would rather see federal money pay for more efficiency upgrades to water-delivery systems such as lining ditches and improving headgates. The recently announced state program is meant to include a broad range of water-saving actions, but pilot conservation programs in the Upper Basin have always defaulted to paying irrigators to temporarily stop using water.
“The problem I see with it is if somebody enrolls and they sign off the year before, and then we don’t get any water and they are 50% fallowed anyway, did the program really generate any water?” Pope said. “It’s very difficult to measure the benefits of these types of programs when you have such an unreliable supply to begin with.”
Pope brings up an inherent contradiction about Upper Basin conservation: How can agricultural water users cut back when they already don’t have enough in drought years like this?
Despite the 100,000-acre-foot goal for the Upper Basin, Colorado leaders have long said they can’t commit to saving a specific amount of water. They said that figure can be reached only if sufficient federal funding is available and hydrologic conditions allow. And for now, the program remains short-term, while the effects of a warmer and drier climate appear likely to continue for the long-term.
“If this is the new normal, it’s going to get way more difficult,” Friend said. “If we have another winter like this last one, a lot of people are pretty worried about it.”
REMINDER: There’s just [2 days] left to comment on the Trump administration’s proposal to rescind ban on new oil and gas leases and mining claims within a 10-mile radius of Chaco Culture National Historical Park. The BLM is accepting public comment until July 29 on three alternatives: 1. keeping the ban in place; 2. shrinking the 10-mile buffer zone to just five miles; 3. eliminating the ban altogether. To comment, click on this link and then click on the “Participate Now” button at the top of the page.
🐓 Regulatory Capture Chronicles 🦊
Wall at the Twin Angel site, a Chacoan outlier that lies along the Great North Road. Note the oil and gas facility in the background. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
President Donald Trump’s proclamations virtually eliminating Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments this month listed several arguments purportedly justifying the shrinkage. One of those was that national monument protections aren’t necessary, because the land and antiquities in question are already protected by various federal laws. The same argument is used to justify revoking the mining-claim and mineral-leasing ban around Chaco Culture National Historical Park.
There is some truth in this: There is a suite of federal laws, from the Federal Land Policy and Management Act to the Endangered Species Act, that are intended to protect environmental and cultural resources on all federal land, whether it’s in a national monument or not. But those laws aren’t always adequate, and now the administration is actually working to weaken Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, which would be key to protecting the cultural sites in the former national monuments and the Chaco “buffer zone.”
When a mining or drilling company proposes a project on a mining claim or mineral lease on public land, the National Historic Preservation Act requires the jurisdictional agency to determine whether the proposed development might affect historic properties. If so, it triggers Section 106 of the law, which requires the agency to consult with tribal nations or other potential stakeholders, to identify potentially affected properties, and to work to avoid, minimize, or mitigate adverse effects on those properties.
Section 106, commonly referred to as “identify and avoid,” requires oil companies or other developers to conduct a cultural inventory of all land in the path of development. If the surveyors happen upon a “significant” site, the well pad, road, or pipeline must be relocated. This can prevent direct impacts to larger sites; you’re not likely to see a Chacoan great house bulldozed for a well pad, for example. But archaeological surveys can miss more subtle cultural features such as stone shrines, Chacoan “road” segments, or ancient cornfields. And the agencies aren’t likely to let a cultural landscape get in the way of the drill rigs or their “multiple use” mandate. Section 106 has not prevented gasfield roads from cutting across Chaco’s Great North Road in several places, nor has it kept several oil and gas wells from being drilled within a half mile of Pierre’s Site, a Chaco outlier within the 10-mile buffer zone.
Ruth Van Dyke, a professor of anthropology at Binghamton University cataloged the impacts of oil and gas development on the sound- and view-scapes at Pierre’s. “I found that, despite the due diligence agencies have exercised to protect the ground footprint of Pierre’s, there have been significant impacts,” she wrote. Twelve pumpjacks are visible from the Acropolis, and it’s likely that . When I visited a few years back, the whir-pop-pop-whir of the machines was irritatingly audible, affirming Van Dyke’s observation: “Rather than a sacred landscape and part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Pierre’s community had the feeling of an industrial park.” (While many people have pointed out that there’s scant recoverable oil within the buffer zone, there is plenty of natural gas, which could be targeted if and when commodity prices increase).
Given the inadequacies of Section 106 now, it has stunned historic preservation advocates to learn that the Trump administration’s Advisory Council on Historic Preservation is proposing to weaken the law even further by giving the agencies more power, while taking input away from the public and other stakeholders, including tribal nations.
That last clause is especially important when it comes to the lands cut out of the two Utah national monuments and the Chaco “buffer zone,” if it were to be rescinded as the administration proposes. We have seen that this for this administration, the quixotic quest for “energy dominance” outweighs nearly every other consideration, at least when it comes to public lands. That means that if the changes to Section 106 go through, we can no longer rely on that law to even partially protect the vast, numerous, and cultural sites and landscapes within Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and the Greater Chacoan Landscape. It makes the mineral withdrawals more important than ever.
Several years back, when writing about the Greater Chacoan Landscape, I spoke with Theresa Pasqual, former director of Acoma Pueblo’s Historic Preservation Office, about Chaco, the landscape, and how federal laws weren’t enough. I’ll leave you with a sagacious quote from her:
⛈️ Wacky Weather Watch⚡️
It’s feeling downright apocalyptic lately. We’ve had crippling drought, hellish temperatures, locust plagues, cataclysmic fires,pestilence, and all that was just prelude to an especially sporadic and violent monsoon, so far, which helped some firefighting efforts, but also unleashed flash flooding in Arizona, Utah, and Colorado.
The most severe flooding generally occurred on burn scars left by this season’s wildfires, but the intensity of the downpours also wreaked havoc in unburned areas, including Telluride and, most tragically, outside Bicknell, Utah, where a family of five was killed by a flash flood.
Here’s a rundown of some of the most notable flooding:
In Telluride, a downpour kicked off flash floods and debris flows that shut down the Tomboy Road (it remained closed as of Monday morning), temporarily closed Hwy 145, and inundated the Telluride Middle/High School, where three to four feet of mud and water blasted and oozed into the Palm Theatre.
The Cottonwood Fire burned through more than 97,000 acres in southwestern Utah before being mostly contained. Over the past several days, it has been the recipient of heavy rainfall, which have turned area streams, including the Beaver River, into raging, slate-gray-colored, debris-clogged torrents. The flooding closed down I-15 for a period of time, and forced the evacuation of parts of Beaver City. I should make some crack here about semiaquatic rodents that build dams, but I will refrain.
A cloudburst let loose on a year-old burn scar near the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, spurring major debris flows that covered roads with rocky detritus and forced the evacuation of about 20 people from a campground.
I-70 in western Colorado was shut down when water and mud washed onto the highway between New Castle and, appropriately, Silt, on Monday evening.
Flash flooding in the Prescott Valley in central Arizona was big enough to turn at least one large shipping container into, well, a ship floating down the road. The Prescott area remained under a flood watch on Tuesday and Tuesday night, while the Phoenix area was facing an extreme heat watch later this week.
Any amount of moisture is welcome on the drought-desiccated earth, but if the videos of raging rivers in what usually are nearly dry arroyos give you the idea that the water woes are alleviated, think again. So far these cloudbursts are just that: Short, intense, and isolated bursts of precipitation that get arroyos and debris flows running, but only cause quick spikes in nearby river streamflows. Yes, that’s better than nothing, but no, it’s not going to halt Lake Powell’s precipitous decline.
All of those Telluride-area storms, for example, only pushed the San Miguel River near Placerville to about 160 cubic feet per second for a few hours. That’s about double what it had been running at, but just over half of the median flow for this time of year.
We’re also seeing a lot of precipitation inequality. While Telluride and the surrounding mountains were hammered, locales to the southwest of there remained relatively dry. The Dolores River gage at Slick Rock (downstream from the burn area) remained at a steady and unblinking zero cfs, although just a little ways downstream the gage at Bedrock registered 100 cfs, which is pretty good for the Lower Dolores in July.
Still, this does appear to be only the beginning of the monsoon. If the past is any indication, then the storms are likely to become more frequent and more widespread, and hopefully a little less intense, in the coming weeks.
Meanwhile, in the Northwest, lightning has sparked dozens of blazes that are growing together into massive complexes. The Hay Creek Complex in Gilliam, Wasco, and Sherman counties in Oregon is up to 92,000 acres and the Rowe Creek Complex to the south of there is at about 143,000 acres with 0% containment as of Monday night. Further east, the Powder River Fire in Baker County near the Idaho border was up to 20,500 acres.
Razorback sucker. Credit: The Land Desk
🦫 Wildlife Watch 🦅
The Trump administration’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last week quietly downgraded Environmental Species Protections for the razorback sucker, a fish native only to the Colorado River Basin, from endangered to threatened.
“This remarkable fish is very abundant in the river channels of the Colorado Basin,” wrote David Starr Jordan in his 1889 report on the fish of Colorado and Utah. “It reaches a weight of 8 to 10 pounds and is largely used for food.” The razorback sucker, or Xyrauchen cypho, once thrived in the mid- and lower-elevation portions of the Colorado River and its tributaries. But human activities such as dumping mine waste into streams, irrigation diversions, dams, and stocking of non-native fish that prey on the sucker’s eggs and young diminished the population of razorback sucker and other native fish.
So in 1991, the USFWS listed the fish as endangered under the ESA, bringing it extra protections and resources toward its recovery. A propagation and stocking effort helped bring the population back, and fish stocked in the Colorado and Green Rivers have been found to be reproducing, according to Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program. As a result, the USFWS determined that the species is “not currently in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range,” and in 2021 proposed “downlisting” it to “threatened” status. That action was finalized last week.
Advocates understandably question the timing of the move. One of the main threats to the sucker is low streamflows, and we’re seeing some of the lowest streamflows on record throughout the Colorado River Basin right now, and climate change is likely to make them worse. The non-native fish that prey on the sucker tend to thrive in warmer water, also a result of climate change (Colorado wildlife officials have enacted voluntary fishing closures on several rivers in the state due to high water temperatures).
“The razorback sucker’s outlook is no better today than when the fish was originally protected under the Endangered Species Act in 1991, so this move makes no sense,” said Taylor McKinnon, Southwest director at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a written statement. “It’s still in danger of extinction throughout its range, which should preclude this downlisting.”
If you happen to be anywhere near Mancos, Colorado, from mid-August to the end of September, I urge you to visit the Sundog Gallery to see the “Portal” exhibit, featuring oil paintings by the late Stanton Englehart. I consider Englehart to be thepainter of the Four Corners Country — no one captures the light, and darkness, of the Great Sage Plain, the mesas, the canyons, and even the waters of Lake Powell quite like Englehart did.
The show opens Aug. 14 with a reception from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the Sundog Gallery on Grand Avenue in downtown Mancos and runs until Sept. 30.
The different sides each presented closing arguments, but it was the reflections of Division 3 Water Court Judge Michael Gonzales that had the courtroom thinking as he brought to a close the water trial dealing with the Subdistrict 1 Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management.
At times it was a bruising trial Gonzales noted Thursday in his closing remarks, as he encouraged all the parties to move on and to not let the four-week trial wear on them and their own personal relationships.
“We all know that there’s no way this court can fashion an order or an opinion that’s going to satisfy everybody. It’s just not going to happen,” the judge said. “I mean, it can’t because we know that we have mutually exclusive and competing interests. We know that this petition when it was created recognized that, but we still said ‘cooperation’ and all those nice things. And in reality, I think we all knew at some point that was going to come to a head. And I think we’re there, but that doesn’t mean we still don’t move forward.”
San Luis Valley Groundwater
This was the big water trial because it dealt with a plan to recover the unconfined aquifer of the Upper Rio Grande Basin, Gonzales noted. He pointed to testimony of Mosca-area farmer Lyle Nissen as one he enjoyed the most.
“I just loved his testimony. Someone who’s made some recognition, someone who’s made some changes, someone who didn’t come in here and complain and just said, ‘This is how it is. I recognize it and I move forward.’ And that was great to hear,” Gonzales said.
He also referenced a term he learned during the course of the trial, “deep percolation,” and used it to provide further insight into his thinking.
“I sat in my back yard and I watched the rain come down,” he said of the week’s weather. “I watched puddles form and I thought about my second favorite term from this trial, ‘deep percolation’ and I said, ‘Aha.’ And then I came back 10 minutes later and that puddle was completely gone. I said, ‘Wow.’
“I also sat there and I thought about the testimony I think was from this current state engineer when he said that we need rainstorms of biblical proportion to get us where we need to be, and that hit home. And no matter how wonderful that rain was, there needs to be things that happen.”
The state Division of Water Resources and the Rio Grande Water Conservation District are asking Gonzales to reject the protestors’ arguments and approve the plan. Without it, they argued, the unconfined aquifer won’t recover and broad groundwater well curtailment in the subdistrict becomes inevitable.
The cornerstone of the new plan is the “one-for-one” feature, which limits groundwater pumping to the amount of natural surface water that flows into the subdistrict over a five-year running average. The intent is to put more water into the unconfined aquifer system than is taken out and one-for-one pumping guarantees that, according to the state and subdistrict.
Gonzales noted “the monstrosity of an equation” within the Fourth Amended Plan when he was quizzing Rio Grande Water Conservation District attorney Pete Ampe during his closing remarks.
The one-for-one pumping feature, the equation to determine success, and a new “depletion fee” that sets the value of water in the subdistrict at $500 per acre-foot were all argued over, discussed and debated throughout the month-long trial.
Attorney Mirko Kruse, representing his family’s farming interest, and attorney Andy Jones, representing L Cross Ranch, want Gonzales to refer the plan back to the subdistrict for adjustments they’re requesting but are otherwise good with the plan.
Two other protesting groups, Northeast Water Users Association and Sustainable Water Augmentation Group, want the plan tossed entirely on grounds it isn’t legal; they asked Gonzales to order the subdistrict to only make changes to the existing third plan of water management.
Gonzales told all the attorneys to address Rule 8.7 of the state groundwater rules governing the Upper Rio Grande Basin. That rule determines how “proportional responsibility for maintaining a sustainable water supply is divided among all the well users within the Response Area.”
It gets to one of the key arguments made by SWAG and its belief that groundwater irrigators like their clients are being illegally targeted and asked to share a disproportionate share of the burden in the unconfined aquifer recovery efforts.
Gonzales provided a timeline that leads to this Thanksgiving for when all the case documents and filings will be completed and he can begin his deliberations.
“I guess if there’s one message that we all need to take to heart is that we need to change the things we’ve been doing,” Gonzales said in completing his comments. “We can’t continue down the path we’ve been because if we think that’s the only way we can go, we’re dooming our children, our children’s children. And I don’t want to be a part of that time.”
