A jarring pothole — Allen Best (BigPivots.com)

Josh Shipley. Credi: Allen Best/Big Pivots

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

July 3, 2025

Josh Shipley rides a Harley and drives a Jeep. He says ending federal tax credits for solar may upend his business.

Josh Shipley rides a Harley in his spare time and likes to take his family on off-road Jeep trips and has hunted across North America.

On Wednesday morning, Shipley had to fight tears as he talked about the impact on his business, Alternative Power Enterprises, and the families of the employees of the earthquake-inducing bill now being debated in Congress.

“Removing these tax credits at the end of the year is going to be extremely detrimental,” he said on a press call orchestrated by the staff of U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper. “We actually don’t believe we’re going to be able to stay in business.”

The business is based in Ridgway, one of two smaller solar installation companies there. It has eight employees, and they have five spouses and seven children. They do work from Paonia to Silverton.

“It’s not just eight people that are going to be affected by this,” he said. The business, he explained, has been around for 30 years, and in recent years it has been able to start helping low-income families to get solar.

“I think in the last three years, 120 families in our area have benefited,” he said. “If I can’t survive, the other parts of this business are going away. I can’t be there to help those individuals.”

Shipley said he bought the business in 2020 with the assumption that federal tax credits would be phased out, but not until 2032.

The bill, he said, is a tragedy for U.S. energy policy.

“Republicans are always talking about independence and being — sorry, I’m getting a little emotional — getting and being dominant in our industries. This is how we become energy dominant. It’s not just wind. It’s not just solar. It’s not just natural gas plants. It’s not just nuclear power plants.

“It takes every single one of these technologies for us to create that — excuse me — and to keep these families — I’m sorry, excuse me — but it will take all of these forms of energy to create that dominance,” he said. This bill’s going to kill that. There are no if’s, and’s, or but’s about it. Small businesses will go out of business because of it. There will not be the workforce that is going to be required to create that energy dominance later, when they’ve realized what they’ve done.”

Hickenlooper, who had arrived late the night before from Washington D.C., touched on several provisions of what he called the “cruel, reckless bill” that the Senate had passed on Sunday morning.

“This was a vote that would strip 17 million Americans, including many, many children, of their health care, push more than 300 rural hospitals to close, gut investments in affordable clean energy,” he said “It would expand our national debt at a level that we have never imagined before, and all this just to accommodate these lavish tax cuts for wealthy Americans, most of whom aren’t asking for the tax cuts. It is a form of madness, fiscal madness, and I think it’s cruel.”

U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper called the bill passed by his fellow senators “cruel.” Credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

Later, he explained that the bill would gut the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. “It was a major step towards addressing climate change, and now it’s been it’s like running into a brick wall,” he said.

“We’re going to lose over a million jobs in this country. I mean, these are careers, hundreds of billions of dollars of lost GDP, lost wages. We’re going to see the cost of electricity go up. We’re going to kill new renewable energy that prevents blackouts just when we’re in the process of trying to accommodate AI. We need more energy. We’ve got over 8,000 solar jobs just in Colorado.”

Speaking later, KC Becker described the bill as triggering an all-hands-on-deck moment for the solar industry in Colorado. In April, she became the executive director of the Colorado Solar and Storage Association.

“People are nervous from the smallest companies to the largest companies. It’s been a whirlwind,” she said. “The bill was expected to get better in the Senate. It actually got worse in the Senate because of the excise tax (on solar and wind production, now discarded).”

Right now, many solar providers are working hard, because they have inventories of panels. But the demand, if this bill gets passed as new constructed, will cause demand to drop off a cliff after Dec. 31.

The big question in Colorado — and part of the national dialogue — is whether any of Colorado’s representatives in Congress who are Republicans will buck the marching orders of President Donald Trump. Rep. Gabe Evans and Jeff Hurd, both freshman and both Republican, voted for the bill after saying nice things about renewable energy.

Fort Lupton-based Evans was barely elected last November from the Eighth District north of Denver, his first run at Congress. Grand Junction-based Hurd has a more comfortable position in the Third District, which covers much of the Western Slope plus much of southern Colorado.

Also speaking on the webcast press conference were the four Democrats who are members of Colorado’s delegation in the House of Representatives, Gov. Jared Polis, and various individuals from health care providers, most from more rural parts of Colorado.

The take-away message was that this bill will dramatically hurt poorer people who are unable to afford health care without governmental assistance. That, however, can also be true in urban areas.

U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen was momentarily reduced to fighting tears when she talked about the giant erosion of programs to help low-income people. “When I think about my mom who works a low-wage job, without access to medical care,” said Pettersen, who then choked up. For her, this was politics, but the bill was also deeply personal.

Getches-Wilkinson Center Well Represented at #CrestedButte Public Policy Forum — Douglas Kenney #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Click the link to read the release on the Getches-Wilkinson Center website (Douglas Kenney):

July 2, 2025

On the evening of June 24, the GWC’s Doug Kenney joined Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s lead negotiator on Colorado River matters, at the Crested Butte Public Policy Forum for a conversation about current and future Colorado River issues. Well over 100 people packed the Center for the Arts for the public event that in previous years has featured speakers as varied as Ted Turner, Sandra Day O’Connor, and the GWC’s Senior Fellow Anne Castle.

The primary focus of discussion was how “big river” issues—that is, the changing rules determining how Colorado River supplies are shared amongst the seven states—impact the availability of water on Colorado’s West Slope. This required a review of the three numbers in the basin that increasingly are out of step: the amount of water entering the system each year through snowmelt and rain; the amount of water consumed by water users throughout the basin; and the amount of consumptive use that has been promised to water users in the Colorado River Compact and other laws. This mismatch of supplies, demands and allocations is not a new problem, but is of particular urgency now as Lakes Powell and Mead are two-thirds empty, the EIS process for new determining new reservoir operations is well underway, and the current year runoff is shaping up as one of the worst in decades.

The conversation was led by Julie Nania, an icon in Crested Butte for her work with High Country Conservation Advocates in protecting Mt. Emmons—the so-called “Red Lady”—from development into a molybdenum mine, as well as her service on the Board of Directors of the Upper Gunnison Water Conservancy District and as Executive Director and Faculty Chair of the Coldharbour Institute based at Western Colorado University. Julie began her career at Colorado Law (class of 2011), which included a post-graduate fellowship with the GWC from 2013-2014 working on tribal water rights. Julie stands as a great example of the GWC’s ongoing influence in protecting the resources and places that we all value.

Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall

Data Dump: Abandoned oil and gas wells in #NewMexico: Also: Public lands continue to take a beating, despite one small victory — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

A serious mess, also known as the NE Hogback #53 well and associated infrastructure. Chuza, the most recent owner of the site in the Horseshoe Gallup oil field in northwestern New Mexico, went bankrupt. That left New Mexico and federal taxpayers holding the cleanup bill. The site has been partially reclaimed, but only partially. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

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

July 2, 2025

🛢️ Hydrocarbon Hoedown 📈 Data Dump 📊

A new report on New Mexico’s abandoned and orphaned oil and gas wells presents an alarming and expensive scenario for the state. It reveals that while the industry generates a lot of revenue for the state, cleaning up its mess is also poised to cost state and federal taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. No, this report was not put out by an environmental or progressive advocates, but by the state’s legislative finance committee.

New Mexico has been an oil and gas hotspot for more than a century, during which drillers have sunk at least 121,000 wells, mostly in the San Juan and Permian basins in the northwest and southeast portions of the state. Newly drilled wells typically kick out a large volume of oil and/or gas during the first months after drilling, generating a lot of cash for their operators and for state coffers, and helping to push production numbers for the state through the roof.

Decline curve generated by decline curve analysis software, utilized in petroleum economics to indicate the depletion of oil & gas in a petroleum reservoir. By Richard Banks – Sent to me personally, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33914059

But the wells are soon afflicted with what’s known as the decline curve, meaning that the longer they pump, the less they pump. You know, it’s kind of like aging in people. Eventually, aging will render all oil and gas wells into low-producing stripper wells (I’m not sure how this analogy extends to the human realm, but hey …) that kick out less than 10 barrels of oil per day. Thousands of New Mexico wells are extreme strippers, producing one barrel or less daily. Yet they continue to spew methane, hydrogen sulfide, and volatile organic compounds at the same as or an even higher rate than their younger, more vital counterparts.

A trip through a sacrifice zone: The Horseshoe Gallup oilfield — Jonathan P. Thompson

This is problematic for a number of reasons. For one, the operators of stripper wells are likely to be smaller, less financially secure companies, and it’s easier and cheaper for them to keep the wells in a nearly inactive state — during which the wells continue to ooze pollutants into the air and groundwater — than to decommission, plug, and reclaim them. It may make economic sense to abandon these wells, or for the companies to cease to exist and “orphan” the wells, leaving them to the state or federal taxpayers to clean up, since reclamation bonds are woefully inadequate. And, finally, these wells generate almost nothing in production taxes, meaning that they aren’t contributing much to the state’s conservation fund, a portion of which is used to clean up abandoned and orphaned wells.

Saga of an Oil Well (The Horseshoe Gallup Field Sacrifice Zone Part II) — Jonathan P. Thompson

The near constant drone of drilling for over a century has resulted in a near-constant addition of low- to non-producing wells to New Mexico’s rosters. While responsible and financially solvent companies plug and reclaim their own wells, many smaller operators simply walk away.

New Mexico’s Oil Conservation Division is currently responsible for plugging close to 1,000 abandoned and orphaned wells, including 700 on state or private land, and for remediation and reclamation of an additional 500 well sites and 18 infrastructure sites (such as leaky tank batteries).

Detail of interactive map showing orphaned, inactive, and low-producing wells on state and private land in the San Juan Basin (this leaves out hundreds of additional such wells on federal lands).

At recent rates, plugging them will take close to a decade, not including remediation/reclamation. OCD is also responsible for remediation and reclamation of an additional 500 well sites and 18 infrastructure sties. In total, plugging, remediation, and reclamation of all currently orphaned wells and infrastructure on state and private land is estimated to cost a minimum of $208 million, and likely more. And that’s just for now.

The report goes on to say: “… in addition to wells the state already has legal authority to plug, thousands of inactive and low-producing wells are at risk of being orphaned, potentially increasing the state’s liability by many orders of magnitude.” There are about 1,400 inactive at high risk of being orphaned on state and private land, according to the OCD. And there are thousands more that are extremely low-producing wells — putting out less than one barrel of oil equivalent per day — for which the “expected cost of cleanup far exceeds predicted future revenues, increasing their risk of being orphaned.”

And the kicker: “Altogether, the state’s current and near-future liability for well plugging and site remediation is estimated to be between $700 million and $1.6 billion.”

More data from the report:

38,817 Number of stripper wells, meaning they produce less than 10 barrels of oil-equivalent daily, in New Mexico, making up about 64% of the state’s active wells. This number will continue to increase.

$100,000 Average cost to plug single oil and gas well.

450% Percent the average state-contracted cost to plug an oil and gas well in New Mexico has increased since 2019.

$250,000 Maximum amount of financial assurance an operator in New Mexico must post to cover the costs of plugging and reclaiming its wells. This cap applies whether the operator has five wells or 500 wells, meaning it actually provides almost no financial assurance whatsoever.

$46.4 million Amount spent by the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division to plug and reclaim 360 wells and associated infrastructure between 2019 and 2024.

9% Percent by which the cost of plugging a gas well exceeds that of an oil well. Most of the wells in the San Juan Basin are gas wells.

$208 million Estimated cost to New Mexico to plug, remediate, and reclaim all existing orphaned and abandoned wells and infrastructure on state and private land.

$5.6 million Amount in financial assurance associated with orphaned wells or their operators, meaning most of the costs will be shouldered by the taxpayers — either via the state reclamation fund or federal grants.

$66.7 million April 2025 balance of New Mexico’s oil and gas reclamation fund (which is funded by a portion of conservation tax revenues).

$6 million Tax revenue New Mexico’s 3,024 wells producing less than 1BOE/day would generate with the West Texas Intermediate oil price at $70/barrel (it’s currently lower than that). Plugging and reclaiming those same wells would cost an estimated $531 million to $885 million. “The vast majority of the wells—87%—are owned by private companies whose financial health is difficult for regulators to assess.”

$1.6 million Amount New Mexico paid in 2024 to plug six of Ridgeway Arizona’s wells under a 2023 settlement agreement with the company. Under the agreement, the state pays to plug 299 of the company’s wells, and the company reimburses the state $2 for each barrel of oil it sells, with a minimum payment of $30k per month. But at current rates, the total cost to plug the remaining wells could be $60 million or more, meaning it would take the company as long as 170 years to pay it off.

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

By now you’ve probably heard that Sen. Mike Lee pulled his public land sell-off provision from the budget reconciliation bill that the Senate just passed following intense backlash. And perhaps you’re planning on celebrating the salvation of America’s public lands on July 4.

There’s so much BS in Lee’s statement. How, for example, does selling public land to developers keep it from being ruined for the next generation? It doesn’t, it just locks up that land for every generation except those that can afford to buy a house in the new subdivision that would go there. Public land is not “locked away from the people who live there.” But it would be locked away if it was privatized. And while there is no property tax on public lands, there are federal payments in lieu of taxes, or PILT, which a county can use to fund schools and search and rescue operations. Plus, public lands generate billions in revenue for gateway communities through public land users’ sales and lodgers taxes and local spending.

Well, I hate to be Mr. Buzzkill, but while this victory may be sweet, it does little to offset the bitterness brought by continuing attacks on public lands, along with democracy, morality, decency, and, well, America, itself, this Independence Day week.

The “Big, Beautiful Bill” perpetuates and amplifies the massive transfer of wealth from low- and middle-income and working-class Americans to the richest 10%. It will slash Medicaid and other vital programs Americans have paid into and rely upon, while also dismantling tribal sovereignty. And yet, it will also drive up the deficit by trillions of dollars due to additional spending on the military industrial complex, which is reaching its tentacles further into immigration enforcement, wildlife blocking border walls, deportations, and $450-million-per-year concentration camps. With Trump threatening to revoke citizenship from U.S.-born citizens whom he considers threats (e.g. Zohran Mamdani and Elon Musk), those camps may end up housing his political opponents. I really hate to make this comparison, but that is some severe Nazi-esque nastiness.

The Senate’s bill gives more handouts to the oil and gas and coal industries, while revoking tax credits for wind and solar power, which could kill those industries when they are needed most.

And yes, some of you may cheer a weaker renewable-energy industry, since it will mean fewer utility-scale installations blanketing the desert. I get that. But it will also hurt rooftop solar and larger installations on big box stores, over parking lots, or in fallow agricultural land, brownfields or other appropriate sites. A western Colorado farmer’s plan to install solar panels to generate electricity and shade his crops, for example, is imperiled by the GOP’s plans.

This at a time when strain on the power grid is exponentially increasing due to the outsized demand of more and more AI-powering, hyperscale data centers. That power will come from somewhere, and if it’s not solar or wind or batteries, then it’s likely to be from pollution-intensive coal and natural gas (mined and drilled from public lands), fish-killing hydropower, or new nuclear reactors (that will require uranium mined from public lands).

And keep in mind, oil and gas leasing and mining claims represent a sort of quasi-privatization of public lands. Sure, the government retains title to the land, but the corporations get access to the minerals within, can rip the land apart to get to them, and can cut off public access with the necessary permits. With its accelerated 14-day “energy emergency” permitting process, the Trump administration is making it a heck of a lot easier for corporations to mine, drill, and otherwise develop public lands, sans public input. The latest beneficiaries include:

NorthWestern Energy, which was given the Bureau of Land Management green light to build a 74-mile natural gas pipeline between Helena and Three Forks, Montana.

Ormat got the BLM go-ahead to move forward on three separate geothermal projects in Nevada:
• Exploration work at the Diamond Flat project near Fallon;
• Upgrades at the McGinness Hills project in Lander County;
• Exploration drilling at the Pinto Geothermal Project near Denio.

I’m not suggesting that these are horrible projects that shouldn’t have been approved. Geothermal holds a lot of potential as a relatively clean, round-the-clock baseline power source, and these are merely upgrades and exploration, not full on developments. Still, geothermal development and even exploration have impacts and can affect groundwater aquifers, springs, and wetlands. Land agencies should have as much time as it takes to adequately analyze potential effects, and tribal nations should be consulted and have time to do their own analysis. And if it’s happening on public lands, then the public deserves to know about it and have an opportunity to weigh in. None of that is possible under this 14-day permitting process.

So, yeah, happy Fourth of July, y’all and welcome to the Divided States of Project 2025. And on that note, the Land Desk will be taking the rest of the week off.

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

Just getting into the ol’ July Fourth spirit with this picture of Raymond “Squeek” Hunt’s signs near his mutton meat slaughterhouse and shop in Waterflow, New Mexico. I mean, it does have an American flag in it, after all.

The Colorado Water Conservation Board grants hearing over Shoshone Power Plant water rights deal — Shannon Mullane (Fresh Water News) #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Water runs down a spillway at the Shoshone hydro plant in Glenwood Canyon. Rockfalls, fires and mudslides in recent years have caused frequent shutdowns of plant operations. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism

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

July 3, 2025

{The Colorado Water Conservation Board] unanimously agreed Tuesday to hear out Front Range water operators’ concerns about a Western Slope plan to purchase historic Colorado River water rights.

The Colorado River Water Conservation District, which represents 15 Western Slope counties, negotiated a $99 million deal to purchase water rights tied to the century-old Shoshone Power Plant, owned by a subsidiary of Xcel Energy.

The River District and the Front Range groups — Aurora Water, Denver Water, Colorado Springs Utilities and Northern Water — all want to maintain the historical flows past Shoshone to provide predictable water supplies long into the future. They mainly disagree about the amount of water involved. Front Range providers say, if the number is too high, it could hamper their ability to provide water to millions of people.

In June, the Front Range water managers asked the Colorado Water Conservation Board to hold a hearing to air concerns. That hearing will be held during the board’s meeting, Sept. 16-18.

“We look forward to the hearing, and we appreciate the effort and the time that you and the staff have put into this effort,” Andy Mueller, the River District’s general manager, said during the board meeting Tuesday. “[We] look forward to finishing this in September.”

The decision Tuesday also opened up a seven-day period, ending July 9, for others to ask to join the September hearing. The board will share updates with the public on its website.

The hearing is part of a larger [CWCB Instream and water court] process to decide whether Shoshone Power Plant’s water rights can become an environmental water right, called an instream flow right. These rights aim to keep water in rivers to help aquatic ecosystems.

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

In this case, the environmental water right would focus on a 2.4-mile stretch between Shoshone’s intake dam, which takes water out of the Colorado River, and the end of its penstocks, which return all of Shoshone’s water to the river. The power plant is tucked into Glenwood Canyon along Interstate 70 a few miles east of Glenwood Springs.

At times, the power plant sucks nearly all of the Colorado River’s flow — depending on the amount of water in the river above the dam — through its turbines before returning it to the river channel. When this happens, the 2.4-mile stretch immediately below the dam is reduced to a narrow channel of water.

The environmental flow right would allow water managers to keep more water in that stretch of the river to help fish and other aquatic species. If approved, it would be the largest, most influential instream flow right in the state’s portfolio. The Colorado water board has until Sept. 18 to make its decision.

The Colorado River District wants to purchase the water rights as part of a larger plan to permanently shore up water supplies for Western Slope communities, which have long worried that Shoshone’s flows could change if Xcel decided to shut down the power plant or sell the water rights.

The district has a purchase agreement with Xcel Energy to buy the rights and lease the water back to Xcel to generate electricity. One of the terms of the deal is getting the instream flow use approved by the state.

The Front Range water providers and water managers want to prevent any changes to Shoshone’s water rights from harming their water supplies.

Shoshone’s water rights are like the bottom blocks in a game of Jenga: change to the rights could cause ripple effects statewide, in part, because of their age, location and amount of water.

Shoshone’s oldest water right can impact up to 10,600 other upstream water rights because of the plant’s geographic location, according to the Colorado Division of Water Resources. Those junior water users include Front Range water managers, like Denver Water and Northern Water, that send water to millions of people.

Colorado transmountain diversions via the State Engineer’s office

They are also tied to numerous, carefully negotiated agreements that dictate how water flows across both western and eastern Colorado.

The Front Range water operators want to resolve their concerns about the historical flows through Shoshone during the instream flow approval process this summer.

The Colorado River District says their questions can be resolved during the subsequent water court proceedings, where opposing parties will have another opportunity to voice their concerns and make sure their water supplies aren’t negatively impacted.

“We are deeply concerned that the Front Range entities requesting this contested hearing are asking the CWCB to encroach on the jurisdiction of water court,” the district said in a prepared statement Tuesday.

More by Shannon Mullane

More Coyote Gulch Shoshone water right coverage here.

#Drought news July 3, 2025: Primarily dry weather occurred west of the Continental Divide of the Americas in #Colorado and #Wyoming where degradations occurred due to soil moisture and streamflow deficits amid growing precipitation deficits

Click on a thumbnail graphic to view a gallery of drought data from the US Drought Monitor website.

Click the link to go to the US Drought Monitor website. Here’s an excerpt:

This Week’s Drought Summary

Over the past week, scattered heavy rains fell over parts of the central Great Plains and Upper Midwest. Rain amounts were especially heavy in parts of Nebraska and Minnesota, where locally 8 or more inches of rain fell. These rains helped to alleviate drought and abnormal dryness in some areas. A few areas of the Dakotas, Minnesota, Indiana and Illinois that missed heavier rains saw localized degradations. Heavy monsoonal rain and thunderstorms also occurred in parts of west Texas and New Mexico, leading to some improvements to ongoing drought and abnormal dryness there. Meanwhile, most areas west of the Continental Divide remained dry or mostly dry. This continued dry weather led to further degradation in drought and abnormal dryness, especially in the Northwest, where severe and extreme drought developed or expanded in coverage. Conditions in the Southeast and central Gulf Coast were mostly quiet this week, though a few areas in east Tennessee and southern Louisiana saw localized abnormal dryness develop given short-term precipitation deficits and declining soil moisture. Heavier rains fell across parts of Florida, leading to some reduction in drought and abnormal dryness coverage in the Florida Peninsula. Well-above-normal temperatures occurred in the Ohio Valley, Mid-Atlantic and Lower Great Lakes regions, where temperatures ranging from 4-8 degrees above normal, and locally 10 degrees hotter than normal, were common. The Northwest was also warmer than normal this week, with most areas checking in with warm anomalies of 2-6 degrees. Southeast New Mexico and west Texas finished the week 2-8 degrees cooler than normal owing to rain and clouds from the North American Monsoon, which became much more active this week.

A mix of improvements and degradations occurred across Hawaii, where vegetation and streamflows responded to recent rainfall or lack thereof.

Scattered heavier showers fell across parts of Alaska, while some locations that missed out saw fire danger increase, leading to a mix of improvements and degradations.

Short-term rainfall deficits continued to build in north-central and south-central Puerto Rico, leading to localized increases in abnormal dryness coverage…

High Plains

Very heavy rain fell across parts of southwest and central Nebraska, which extended into portions of northern Kansas (north of Interstate 70) and portions of west-central and eastern South Dakota. Significant flash flooding occurred from rain amounts locally exceeding 8 inches in Grand Island, Nebraska, while very heavy rain, locally in excess of 5 inches, fell in parts of eastern South Dakota, where significant tornadoes also occurred on June 28. Heavier rain amounts fell in parts of south-central and northeast Colorado as well, though most of the heavier totals were in the 1-3 inch range. Primarily dry weather occurred west of the Continental Divide in Colorado and Wyoming. Temperatures across the region were mostly near normal to 2-4 degrees above normal, though parts of the eastern Dakotas were a few degrees cooler than normal. In areas that received heavy rain, soil moisture and precipitation deficits were alleviated and widespread improvements to ongoing drought or abnormal dryness occurred, including a two-category improvement in central Nebraska where some of the week’s heaviest rains fell. Meanwhile, degradations occurred in northwest Colorado and western Wyoming, where soil moisture and streamflow deficits mounted amid growing precipitation deficits…

Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending July 1, 2025.

West

Heavy monsoonal rains fell this week in parts of New Mexico, excluding the far northwest. Elsewhere, this week’s weather was almost entirely dry. Combined with warmer-than-normal temperatures (mostly by 2-6 degrees) in the Northwest states, this led to widespread degradation in drought and abnormal dryness for central and northern Utah, Idaho, parts of northern and much of western Montana, and Washington. Very low streamflows and large short-term precipitation deficits contributed to widespread expansion of severe and extreme drought in western Montana and adjacent Idaho. Short-term severe drought also occurred in parts of central and north-central Washington, where deficits in precipitation and streamflow continued to grow. In much of New Mexico, excluding the far west and northwest portions, near- or below-normal temperatures were common this week along with some heavier rainfall amounts exceeding 2 inches (locally exceeding 5 inches). The improved soil moisture and lessened precipitation deficits led to widespread improvements to ongoing drought and abnormal dryness in southeast, southwest and north-central New Mexico. Exceptional drought expanded slightly along part of the Arizona-New Mexico state line where deficits in groundwater and precipitation continued to mount…

South

Heavy monsoonal rains fell this week across portions of west Texas, with local amounts of 2-3 inches or more. Heavy rains of 2-3 inches or more also fell across parts of northeast Oklahoma, and southwest Tennessee. Elsewhere, rainfall amounts of at least 2 inches were less common, while southern Arkansas and northern Louisiana, northwest Oklahoma and portions of central Texas saw mostly dry weather this week. In west Texas, under the monsoonal rainfall, temperatures were 4-8 degrees cooler than normal in some areas. Elsewhere across the region, temperatures were mostly 2-4 degrees warmer than normal in Arkansas and northern Mississippi, while temperatures were mostly 2-6 degrees warmer than normal in Tennessee. Outside of Texas, the South region remained almost entirely free of drought or abnormal dryness. However, around a few localized areas of short-term precipitation and soil moisture deficits, a few small areas of abnormal dryness developed in southern Louisiana and eastern Tennessee. In west Texas, heavy rains from the North American Monsoon helped to partially alleviate short- and long-term precipitation deficits and improve soil moisture quantity…

Looking Ahead

The National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center is forecasting a few areas of rainfall exceeding 1 inch for the period through the evening of Monday, July 7. Localized 1-inch or greater totals are possible in locations in New Mexico, northwest Texas, central and eastern Oklahoma, northern Kansas and Nebraska into the Upper Midwest and northern Great Plains, western Montana, and the Florida Peninsula, perhaps extending to the Southeast’s Atlantic coastline as a weather disturbance moves through. Heavy rain amounts exceeding 3 inches are forecast in portions of the Florida Peninsula, especially along much of its Gulf coast. Mostly dry weather is expected from the Intermountain West to the Pacific Ocean and across much of south Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and the southern Mid-Atlantic.

For July 8-12, the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center forecast strongly favors warmer-than-normal temperatures in the western Contiguous U.S., especially west of the Continental Divide. Warmer-than-normal temperatures are also favored in the eastern U.S., especially from Virginia southward to Florida. Near- or below-normal temperatures are favored for parts of the southern and central Great Plains and western portions of the Midwest. Below-normal precipitation is favored from northern Arizona across Utah, Nevada, southern Idaho, much of Oregon and southwest Washington. Above-normal precipitation is slightly favored in southern Arizona and southern and eastern New Mexico eastward across much of the Contiguous U.S.

In Alaska, above-normal precipitation is favored across much of the state, especially in the eastern half and excluding the far west reaches. Cooler-than-normal temperatures are favored across most of Alaska, especially central and eastern portions of Alaska.

In Hawaii, warmer-than-normal temperatures are favored from Molokai westward. Above-normal precipitation is favored throughout Hawaii.

US Drought Monitor one week change map ending July 1, 2025.

Riparian restoration on Rifle ranch marks 10 years: John Powers hopes #RifleCreek project can be living lab for improving habitat — Heather Sackett (AspenJournalism.org)

Rifle ranch owners John Powers, left, and plant ecologist Lisa Tasker talk about the Rifle Creek restoration project at a tour of the property on June 3. The project has replaced invasive species with native plants. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

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

June 18, 2025

The banks of a previously degraded 1-mile stretch of Rifle Creek are now thick with willows and cottonwoods, and have signs that deer, elk and beavers are once again frequent visitors.

This summer marks 10 years since an ambitious, multiphase riparian restoration project began on John Powers’ ranch, located north of Rifle and off Colorado 325. Since 2016, the property has been a worksite of the Colorado Natural Heritage Program, which has cataloged species; replaced invasive Russian olive, thistles and weeds with native trees, flowers, shrubs and grasses; and trained the next generation of scientists and conservationists on how to restore the health of a stream.

On June 3, Powers, who is a self-described lover of the outdoors, along with friend and associate Janna Six, as well as interns from CNHP, hosted a public-outreach day with conservation professionals who worked on the project, including representatives from local governments, agencies and nonprofit organizations, for a tour of the project. Powers called it a living lab for education and hopes it can serve as a demonstration project for other ranches in the area that want to control erosion.

A decade ago, the banks of the creek were severely eroded — bare of vegetation in places and steep. Part of the reason for these conditions is the upstream Rifle Gap Reservoir, which was completed in 1967. Sediment collects behind the dam, meaning the water released downstream is clean and erosive, cutting into the streambanks. The three-phase project sought to remedy that.

“Rifle Creek used to be shallow, allowing horse-drawn hay wagons to cross it,” Powers said in a written response to questions from Aspen Journalism. “After the Rifle Gap Reservoir was built, severe erosion occurred downstream, making creek banks vertical and 12-15 feet deep.”

Powers said the goals of the project are to improve the habitat for songbirds, pollinators and wildlife; increase carbon sequestration, including cultivating healthy soil and minimizing erosion; and maintain the economic benefits of a working ranch while enhancing the ecological condition of the riparian area.

Small cottonwoods and other native trees have fencing to protect them from wildlife and livestock until they get established. The riparian restoration project on the Powers Ranch near Rifle planted thousands of native trees, shrubs and grasses. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

The thousands of native plants were put in over a three-year intensive effort by volunteers and interns, led by plant ecologist Lisa Tasker. Some are protected by fencing from wildlife and livestock until they become established, and are watered with a drip irrigation system.

“My hope is that I live long enough that I won’t be able to see one side of the creek from the other side of the creek,” Powers told tour participants.

David Anderson, director and chief scientist at CNHP, said conditions on the ranch have changed dramatically for the better over the past decade due to the restoration work.

“We’re seeing a lot more birds now that there’s some woody structure,” he said. “There’s just a whole different suite of wildlife that can utilize the riparian area there now.”

Anderson added that with the new vegetation providing shade to cool the stream, conditions for native fish will improve.

Sprinklers have replaced flood irrigation on part of the Powers Ranch property near Rifle. This summer marks the 10th year since the beginning of a creek restoration project on the ranch. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

Restoration tactics take time

Rivers and wetland habitats comprise a small amount of Colorado’s land area, but they are of outsize importance to wildlife. Improving the health of Rifle Creek is a focus of the Middle Colorado Watershed Council, a nonprofit organization that works to protect and improve watershed health. Between 2015 and 2019, the creek was the subject of a watershed assessment, which looked primarily at water quality.

The council has also been implementing the goals of its Riparian Restoration Implementation Plan, which spans the entire Colorado River watershed from Glenwood Springs to DeBeque. But the stretch of Rifle Creek from below Rifle Gap Reservoir to its confluence with the Colorado River is a main concern.

“We won’t be able to restore the whole thing right away,” said Kate Collins, executive director of the council, referring to plans to conduct additional restoration work along Rifle Creek beyond the Powers ranch. “But what we want to do is identify certain projects that are either the most urgent or perhaps they are the most low-hanging fruit — in other words, there’s the best opportunity for restoration.”

The health of many streams across the Western Slope is impacted by erosion, invasive species and agriculture. Collins said the tactics for fixing them are often low-tech, such as replacing invasives with native plants.

“Some of these techniques are being widely used, and this Rifle Creek project could be a model for others,” she said, referring to the Powers ranch restoration project.

Rifle Creek in 2015 before the riparian restoration project. The banks of the creek were severely eroded. CREDIT: JOHN POWERS

Future plans for the ranch include another bio blitz in 2026 in which CNHP interns will document as many species of plants and animals on the ranch as possible over a 24-hour period and compare the results to their bio blitzes in 2016 and 2017.

Powers and Anderson are also interested in potentially building what are called beaver dam analogs (BDAs), which are human-made structures that mimic beaver dams, helping to slow streamflow and keep water on the landscape. These temporary wood structures usually consist of posts driven into the streambed with willows and other soft materials weaved across the channel between the posts. Environmental groups and local governments are using BDAs to improve stream health and wildlife habitat.

“We’re really interested in doing some of those,” Anderson said. “I hope that maybe next year or in another subsequent year that we’ll work with the interns to build some of those structures right in Rifle Creek.”

For Powers, the Rifle Creek restoration on his ranch has been a passion project that keeps a riparian area thriving, as well as adapting to climate change and a future with less water. Collins sees the project as a step toward reconnecting the community to its local waterway.

“(Rifle Creek) is a vital part of what runs through that town and that community, and it’ll be exciting to see what positive ecological changes those bring about to virtually everything else,” Collins said…

This story ran in the June 23 edition of the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel.

Rifle Gap Reservoir via the Applegate Group

Front Range concerns over purchase of Colorado River rights on Western Slope to get hearing: #ColoradoRiver District wants to buy Shoshone Power Plant rights to protect water flows — The #Denver Post #COriver #aridification

Shoshone Falls hydroelectric generation station via USGenWeb

Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website. (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:

July 2, 2025

Four major Front Range water providers — Denver Water, Aurora Water, Colorado Springs Utilities and Northern Water — will present their concerns about the purchase of the Shoshone Power Plant water rights by the Colorado River District during a hearing in September before the Colorado Water Conservation Board. The board during a special meeting Tuesday decided to hold the hearing to hash out the urban utilities’ concerns about how much water should be allocated to the right. The board must decide by September whether to approve the new use of the water right proposed by the district…The Colorado River District, a taxpayer-funded agency that works to protect Western Slope water, in 2023 announced a $99 million deal to buy the water rights from Xcel Energy, which owns the power plant. The purchase — a decades-long effort by the district — will ensure that water will continue to flow west past the plant tucked into Glenwood Canyon and downstream to the towns, farms and others who rely on the Colorado River even if the century-old power plant were decommissioned.

Each of the Front Range utilities have said they do not oppose the purchase itself. They do, however, question the river district’s calculations of how much water has been used historically under the rights. Under Colorado water law, that number will determine how much water must flow through the plant in the future. The district’s calculations are too high, the four utilities argue, and would leave them with less water from the Colorado River for their own uses. The river district has repeatedly said it plans to maintain the status quo and will not use more water than has been used in the past. Disputes about the amount of water historically used under a water right should be settled in water court, the district’s general manager Andy Mueller said Tuesday in a statement.

“We are deeply concerned that the Front Range entities requesting this contested hearing are asking the CWCB to encroach on the jurisdiction of water court,” Mueller said. “… We believe maintaining public trust relies on following the right path and avoiding political intrusion.”

More Coyote Gulch coverage of the Shoshone plant.

Western public land sale axed from Senate budget bill: #Utah U.S. Senator Mike Lee withdraws a plan that could have auctioned more than a million acres — Angus M. Thuermer Jr. (WyoFile.com)

This map shows land owned by different federal government agencies. By National Atlas of the United States – http://nationalatlas.gov/printable/fedlands.html, “All Federal and Indian Lands”, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32180954

Click the link to read the article on the WyoFile website (Angus M. Thuermer Jr.):

June 28, 2025

Utah Sen. Mike Lee withdrew his land-sale provision from the Senate reconciliation budget bill Saturday evening.

“I was unable to secure clear, enforceable safeguards to guarantee that these lands would be sold only to American families – not to China, not to Blackrock, and not to any foreign interest,” Lee posted on X. “For that reason, I’ve made the decision to withdraw the federal land sales provision from the bill.”

The Republican had sought to require the sale of Bureau of Land Management property — owned by all Americans — to help Western communities resolve affordable housing worries. Critics said existing laws allow such sales and that the measure violated a core western value — public access to public land.

More than one million acres of public land were at stake. The provision required the government to auction the property rapidly and with curtailed public involvement.

Conservationists, hunters and anglers and outdoor recreation businesses erupted in virtual applause after Lee conceded. Opposition across the West stirred thousands to rally in support of continued ownership of and access to their publicly owned property.

“Public lands are the cornerstone of our conservation legacy,” Chris Wood, president and CEO of Trout Unlimited said in a statement heralding the provision’s demise.

Others were less reserved.

“Total faceplant,” wrote Land Tawney, co-chair of American Hunters & Anglers.

“He rewrote his scheme multiple times,” Tawney said of Lee. “And tonight? He yanked his own language from the bill,” Tawney wrote in a statement.

President Trump’s First EPA Promised to Crack Down on Forever Chemicals. His Second EPA Is Pulling Back — Anna Clark (Propublica.org)

Lock and Dam No. 1 on the Cape Fear River in Bladen County, North Carolina. By Bud Davis, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Digital Visual LibraryImage pageImage description pageDigital Visual Library home page, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2000782

Click the link to read the article on the Propublica website (Anna Clark):

July 2, 2025

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin claims to prioritize combatting long-lasting chemicals called PFAS. Despite this, the agency has delayed enforcement of standards and terminated over $15 million in funding for “forever chemicals” research.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

One summer day in 2017, a front-page story in the StarNews of Wilmington, North Carolina, shook up the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The drinking water system, it said, was polluted with a contaminant commonly known as GenX, part of the family of “forever” PFAS chemicals.

It came from a Chemours plant in Fayetteville, near the winding Cape Fear River. Few knew about the contaminated water until the article described the discoveries of scientists from the Environmental Protection Agency and a state university. Given that certain types of PFAS have been linked to cancer, there was widespread anxiety over its potential danger.

In the onslaught of legal action and activism that followed, the EPA during President Donald Trump’s first term took an assertive stance, vowing to combat the spread of PFAS nationwide.

In its big-picture PFAS action plan from 2019, the agency said it would attack this complex problem on multiple fronts. It would, for example, consider limiting the presence of two of the best-known compounds — PFOA and PFOS — in drinking water. And, it said, it would find out more about the potential harm of GenX, which was virtually unregulated.

By the time Trump was sworn in for his second term, many of the plan’s suggestions had been put in place. After his first administration said PFOA and PFOS in drinking water should be regulated, standards were finalized under President Joe Biden. Four other types of PFAS, including GenX, were also tagged with limits.

But now, the second Trump administration is pulling back. The EPA said in May that it will delay enforcement on the drinking water limits for PFOA and PFOS until 2031, and it will rescind and reconsider the limits on the other four. Among those who challenged the standards in court is Chemours, which has argued that the EPA, under Biden, “used flawed science and didn’t follow proper rulemaking procedures” for GenX.

These EPA decisions under Trump are part of a slew of delays and course changes to PFAS policies that had been supported in his first term. Even though his earlier EPA pursued a measure that would help hold polluters accountable for cleaning up PFAS, the EPA of his second term has not yet committed to it. The agency also slowed down a process for finding out how industries have used the chemicals, a step prompted by a law signed by Trump in 2019.

At the same time, the EPA is hampering its ability to research pollutants — the kind of research that made it possible for its own scientists to investigate GenX. As the Trump administration seeks severe reductions in the EPA’s budget, the agency has terminated grants for PFAS studies and paralyzed its scientists with spending restrictions.

Pointing to earlier announcements on its approach to the chemicals, the EPA told ProPublica that it’s “committed to addressing PFAS in drinking water and ensuring that regulations issued under the Safe Drinking Water Act follow the law, follow the science, and can be implemented by water systems to strengthen public health protections.”

“If anything,” the agency added, “the Trump administration’s historic PFAS plan in 2019 laid the groundwork for the first steps to comprehensively address this contamination across media and we will continue to do so this term.”

In public appearances, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has pushed back on the suggestion that his agency weakened the drinking water limits on GenX and similar compounds. Future regulations imposed by his agency, he said, could be more or less stringent.

“What we want to do is follow the science, period,” he has said.

That sentiment perplexes scientists and environmental advocates, who say there is already persuasive evidence on the dangers of these chemicals that linger in the environment. The EPA reviewed GenX, for example, during both the first Trump and Biden administrations. In both 2018 and 2021, the agency pointed to animal studies linking it to cancer, as well as problems with kidneys, immune systems and, especially, livers. (Chemours has argued that certain animal studies have limited relevance to humans.)

Scientists and advocates also said it’s unclear what it means for the EPA to follow the science while diminishing its own ability to conduct research.

“I don’t understand why we would want to hamstring the agency that is designed to make sure we have clean air and clean water,” said Jamie DeWitt, a toxicologist in Oregon who worked with other scientists on Cape Fear River research. “I don’t understand it.”

Delays, Confusion Over PFAS

Favored for their nonstick and liquid-resistant qualities, synthetic PFAS chemicals are widely used in products like raincoats, cookware and fast food wrappers. Manufacturers made the chemicals for decades without disclosing how certain types are toxic at extremely low levels, can accumulate in the body and will scarcely break down over time — hence the nickname “forever chemicals.”

The chemicals persist in soil and water too, making them complicated and costly to clean up, leading to a yearslong push to get such sites covered by the EPA’s Superfund program, which is designed to handle toxic swaths of land. During the first Trump administration, the EPA said it was taking steps toward designating the two legacy compounds, PFOA and PFOS, as “hazardous substances” under the Superfund program. Its liability provisions would help hold polluters responsible for the cost of cleaning up.

Moving forward with this designation process was a priority, according to the PFAS plan from Trump’s first term. Zeldin’s EPA describes that plan as “historic.” And, when he represented a Long Island district with PFAS problems in Congress, Zeldin voted for a bill that would have directed the EPA to take this step.

The designation became official under Biden. But business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and organizations representing the construction, recycling and chemical industries, sued. Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation’s playbook for the new administration, also questioned it.

Zeldin has said repeatedly that he wants to hold polluters accountable for PFAS, but his EPA requested three delays in the court case challenging the Superfund designation that helps make it possible.

The agency said in a recent motion it needed the latest pause because new leadership is still reviewing the issues and evaluating the designation in context of its “comprehensive strategy to address PFOA and PFOS.”

The EPA also delayed a rule requiring manufacturers and importers to report details about their PFAS use between 2011 and 2022. An annual bill that sets defense policy and spending, signed by Trump in his first term, had charged the EPA with developing such a process.

When Biden’s EPA finalized it, the agency said the rule would provide the largest-ever dataset of PFAS manufactured and used in the United States. It would help authorities understand their spread and determine what protections might be warranted.

Businesses were supposed to start reporting this month. But in a May 2 letter, a coalition of chemical companies petitioned the EPA to withdraw the deadline, reconsider the rule and issue a revised one with narrowed scope.

When the EPA delayed the rule less than two weeks later, it said it needed time to prepare for data collection and to consider changes to aspects of the rule.

In an email to ProPublica, the agency said it will address PFAS in many ways. Its approach, the agency said, is to give more time for compliance and to work with water systems to reduce PFAS exposure as quickly as feasible, “rather than issue violations and collect fees that don’t benefit public health.”

The court expects an update from the EPA in the Superfund designation case by Wednesday, and in the legal challenges to the drinking water standards by July 21. The EPA could continue defending the rules. It could ask the court for permission to reverse its position or to send the rules back to the agency for reconsideration. Or it could also ask for further pauses.

“It’s just a big unanswered question whether this administration and this EPA is going to be serious about enforcing anything,” said Robert Sussman, a former EPA official from the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. As a lawyer, he now represents environmental groups that filed an amicus brief in PFAS cases.

Back in North Carolina, problems caused by the chemicals continue to play out.

A consent order between the state and Chemours required the manufacturer to drastically reduce the release of GenX and other PFAS into the environment. (The chemicals commonly called GenX refer to HFPO-DA and its ammonium salt, which are involved in the GenX processing aid technology owned by Chemours.)

Chemours told ProPublica that it invested more than $400 million to remediate and reduce PFAS emissions. It also noted that there are hundreds of PFAS users in North Carolina, “as evidenced by PFAS seen upstream and hundreds of miles away” from its Fayetteville plant “that cannot be traced back to the site.”

PFAS-riddled sea foam continues to wash up on the coastal beaches. Chemours and water utilities, meanwhile, are battling in court about who should cover the cost of upgrades to remove the chemicals from drinking water.

Community forums about PFAS draw triple-digit crowds, even when they’re held on a weeknight, said Emily Donovan, co-founder of the volunteer group Clean Cape Fear, which has intervened in federal litigation. In the fast-growing region, new residents are just learning about the chemicals, she said, and they’re angry.

“I feel like we’re walking backwards,” Donovan said. Pulling back from the drinking water standards, in particular, is “disrespectful to this community.”

“It’s one thing to say you’re going to focus on PFAS,” she added. “It’s another thing to never let it cross the finish line and become any meaningful regulation.”

A letter dated April 29, 2025, notifying Michigan State University about the termination of a grant for research into PFAS, one day after the EPA said in a press release that it was committed to combating PFAS contamination by, in part, “strengthening the science.” Credit: Obtained by ProPublica

Research Under Fire

The EPA of Trump’s first term didn’t just call for more regulation of PFAS, it also stressed the importance of better understanding the forever chemicals through research and testing.

In a 2020 update to its PFAS action plan, the EPA highlighted its support for North Carolina’s investigation of GenX in the Cape Fear River. And it described its efforts to develop the science on PFAS issues affecting rural economies with “first-of-its-kind funding for the agriculture sector.”

Zeldin, too, has boasted about advancing PFAS research in an April news release. “This is just a start of the work we will do on PFAS to ensure Americans have the cleanest air, land, and water,” he said.

At about the same time, though, the agency terminated a host of congressionally appropriated grants for PFAS research, including over $15 million for projects focused on food and farmlands in places like Utah, Texas and Illinois.

Scientists at Michigan State University, for example, were investigating how PFAS interacts with water, soil, crops, livestock and biosolids, which are used for fertilizer. They timed their latest study to this year’s growing season, hired staff and partnered with a farm. Then the EPA canceled two grants.

In virtually identical letters, the agency said that each grant “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities. The objectives of the award are no longer consistent with EPA funding priorities.”

The contrast between the agency’s words and actions raises questions about the process behind its decisions, said Cheryl Murphy, head of Michigan State’s Center for PFAS Research and co-lead of one of the projects.

“If you halt it right now,” she said, “what we’re doing is we’re undermining our ability to translate the science that we’re developing into some policy and guidance to help people minimize their exposure to PFAS.”

At least some of the researchers are appealing the terminations.

About a month after PFAS grants to research teams in Maine and Virginia were terminated for not being aligned with agency priorities, the agency reinstated them. The EPA told ProPublica that “there will be more updates on research-related grants in the future.”

Even if the Michigan State grants are reinstated, there could be lasting consequences, said Hui Li, the soil scientist who led both projects. “We will miss the season for this year,” he said in an email, “and could lose the livestock on the farm for the research.”

Federal researchers are also in limbo. Uncertainty, lost capacity and spending restrictions have stunted the work at an EPA lab in Duluth, Minnesota, that investigates PFAS and other potential hazards, according to several sources connected to it. As one source who works at the lab put it, “We don’t know how much longer we will be operating as is.”

The EPA told ProPublica that it’s “continuing to invest in research and labs, including Duluth, to advance the mission of protecting human health and the environment.”

Meanwhile, the agency is asking Congress to eliminate more than half of its own budget. That includes massive staffing cuts, and it would slash nearly all the money for two major programs that help states fund water and wastewater infrastructure. One dates back to President Ronald Reagan’s administration. The other was spotlighted in a paper by Trump’s first-term EPA, which said communities could use these funds to protect public health from PFAS. It trumpeted examples from places like Michigan and New Jersey.

The EPA lost 727 employees in voluntary separations between Jan. 1 and late June, according to numbers the agency provided to ProPublica. It said it received more than 2,600 applications for the second round of deferred resignations and voluntary early retirements.

“These are really technical, difficult jobs,” said Melanie Benesh, vice president for government affairs at the nonprofit Environmental Working Group. “And the EPA, by encouraging so many employees to leave, is also losing a lot of institutional knowledge and a lot of technical expertise.”

The shake-up also worries DeWitt, who was one of the scientists who helped investigate the Cape Fear River contamination and who has served on an EPA science advisory board. Her voice shook as she reflected on the EPA’s workforce, “some of the finest scientists I know,” and what their loss means for public well-being.

“Taking away this talent from our federal sector,” she said, will have “profound effects on the agency’s ability to protect people in the United States from hazardous chemicals in air, in water, in soil and potentially in food.”

Map showing the Cape Fear River drainage basin. By Kmusser – Self-made, based on USGS data., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5506415

June 30, 2025 North American #Monsoon Drought Status Update: Wet Start for the Monsoon Over #Drought-Stricken Southwest — NOAA

Click the link to read the drought update on the NOAA website:

The North American Monsoon brings summer precipitation to parts of the Southwestern U.S. and Mexico. The monsoon season is June 15 to September 30, though the actual arrival of the monsoon can vary.

Key Points

Over the past year, drought developed and intensified in the Four Corners region and southern California and Nevada, with the most intense drought conditions in Arizona and New Mexico.

The 2025 North American Monsoon began last week in parts of New Mexico and West Texas, bringing helpful rains to drought-stricken areas but also dangerous flooding. Other states (Arizona, Colorado, California, Nevada, Utah) await their first monsoonal precipitation.

Monsoonal rainfall only provides a fraction of the West’s water supplies, with the majority coming from snowpack. However, it can meaningfully reduce local drought impacts by reducing demand for water stored in reservoirs, recharging soil moisture and groundwater, benefitting agricultural production by improving grassland health for livestock and filling stock ponds, and reducing wildfire risk.

Outlooks favor above-normal monsoonal precipitation for the Southwestern U.S. in July. This could improve drought conditions and provide short-term relief, but dry landscape conditions leading into the monsoon mean drought is likely to persist. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center predicts drought improvement (but not removal) for the area near the Arizona-New Mexico border in July.

However, precipitation in the first half of July is not a predictor of precipitation during the rest of the Monsoon season. Tracking conditions and outlooks as summer progresses will be especially important.

This update is based on data available as of Monday, June 30, 2025 at 8:00 a.m. MT. We acknowledge that conditions are evolving.

What Is the North American Monsoon? Why Does It Matter?

The North American Monsoon brings summer precipitation to parts of the Southwestern U.S. and Mexico, typically beginning in mid- to late June and lasting through September. This pattern results in active thunderstorms across Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and southern/eastern Utah. Monsoonal surges can also occur outside of these “core” areas, reaching Nevada, southeastern California, Far West Texas, and Wyoming.

The North American Monsoon is a seasonal wind shift that occurs between June 15–September 30, depending on geographic location. The monsoonal flow allows moisture to move into the Southwestern U.S., which provides a needed ingredient for thunderstorm activity.

The development of a ridge of persistent high pressure near the Four Corners region in the Southwest often initiates monsoon activity by providing a more moist, southerly flow from the subtropics around North America. Learn more about monsoon dynamics.

The monsoon can vary in intensity and location from year to year. A more active monsoon season can moderate hot conditions with more thunderstorm activity, increase soil moisture, and reduce land surface temperatures, and improve drought conditions.

How Does the Monsoon Impact Drought in the Southwest?

Rainfall associated with the monsoon is very important for the Southwest U.S. Parts of Arizona and New Mexico receive as much as 10-60% of their annual precipitation during the monsoon season (data for June-August).

The position of the high pressure system can shift throughout the season, which determines if Arizona or New Mexico will get more or less rain. This can sometimes result in rapid drought improvement or onset.

A weak or inactive monsoon season can worsen short- and long-term drought conditions. For example, the inactive 2023 Monsoon Seasonresulted in significant drought expansion for New Mexico and Arizona. Meanwhile, an average to above-average monsoon can potentially improve or remove drought conditions, such as the 2022 North American Monsoon, which was the 9th wettest on record and significantly improved drought conditions in Arizona and New Mexico.

The monsoon has a lesser influence in Nevada and California, though areas of southern Nevada and southeastern California occasionally receive significant monsoonal precipitation. On average, 20-25% of southern Nevada’s precipitation falls during the summer.

Even in states where an outsized portion of annual water supply is derived from snowpack, monsoonal rainfall can still meaningfully reduce local impacts. For example, monsoonal precipitation can reduce demand for water stored in reservoirs, recharge groundwater, benefit agricultural production by improving grassland health for livestock and filling stock ponds, and reduce wildfire risk.

North American Monsoon Precipitation Is a Major Contributor to Southwestern Annual Rainfall

Percent of total annual precipitation occurring during June-August, based on 1981-2010 PRISM data. Figure from Western Regional Climate Center

What Is the Drought Status Going into the North American Monsoon?

As of June 24, every state in the Southwest (and California) is experiencing some level of drought (D1-D4), according to the U.S. Drought Monitor :

97.33% of Arizona

39.29% of California (primarily in southern California)

45.47% of Colorado

50.60% of Nevada

80.20% of New Mexico

91.10% of Utah

National Weather Service offices throughout the Southwest have issued drought information statements describing local drought conditions and impacts, including for:

South-central and southwest Arizona and southeast California (NWS Phoenix)

Western Colorado and eastern Utah (NWS Grand Junction)

Mojave Desert and eastern Sierra (NWS Las Vegas)

Utah and Uinta County, Wyoming (NWS Salt Lake City)

In Arizona and New Mexico, drought conditions have expanded since summer 2024. Drought intensified and expanded northward and westward into southern Nevada and California due to a dry summer in 2024 followed by a dry fall and winter. Some areas (e.g., Arizona, southern California, and Nevada) saw slight improvement this spring, but drought persists.

Looking back 12 months to the start of the last monsoon (June 2024) until now (May 2025), Arizona experienced its 3rd driest and Nevada its 13th driest June–May, going back 130 years. Some areas were worse at the county scale. Yuma and Maricopa counties in Arizona; Imperial County, California; and Clark County, Nevada experienced June-May periods in the top three driest on record.

Utah, New Mexico, and the Navajo Nation have already declared drought emergencies.

Widespread Southwestern Drought at the Start of Monsoon Season (June 24, 2025)

U.S. Drought Monitor map of the Southwest U.S.. Valid June 24, 2025. The U.S. Drought Monitor depicts the location and intensity of drought across the country. The map uses 5 classifications: Abnormally Dry (D0), showing areas that may be going into or are coming out of drought, and four levels of drought (D1–D4). Source: NOAA, USDA, NDMC. Map from Drought.gov.

Low Statewide Precipitation Over the Past Year

June 2024–May 2025 precipitation for counties across the Western U.S. shown as a ranking compared to historical conditions from 1895 to the present. Brown hues indicate precipitation in the lowest third of historical conditions, gray indicates near-normal precipitation, and blue hues indicate precipitation in the top third of historical conditions. Source: NOAA National Centers for Environmental information, Climate at a Glance.

Will the North American Monsoon Be Active through September? What Does This Mean for Drought?

Seasonal forecasts of monsoon precipitation are largely based on continental or global-scale influences (e.g., sea surface temperature patterns), while actual rainfall totals for a given location are influenced by local-scale factors (e.g., local landscape, humidity, and temperatures), some of which can change quickly and over short distances. As a result, there is greater uncertainty in monsoonal precipitation forecasts for specific locations than when considering the Southwest region as a whole.

The Southwestern U.S. is forecast to be wetter than normal through at least mid- to late July. However, precipitation in the first half of July is not a predictor of precipitation during the rest of the monsoon season.

For the 2025 Monsoon Season, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center’s seasonal outlooks favor above-normal temperatures and equal chances of below-normal, normal, and above-normal precipitation across most of the Southwestern U.S. An “equal chances” outlook does not necessarily mean normal, or average, rainfall can be expected. Rather, it implies that there is nothing in the climate system (including the El Nino-Southern Oscillation, which is currently neutral) that is pushing weather patterns toward one extreme or the other and any scenario is possible.

Drought is predicted to persist in much of the region over the next month and the summer months, with potential drought improvements (but not removal) in the “core” monsoon region at the Arizona-New Mexico border.

Given these outlooks, wildfire risk is forecasted to be near normal for parts of the Southwest that normally have good summer precipitation from the monsoon.

For short-term forecasts, see the Quantitative Precipitation Forecast (QPF) or your local National Weather Service Weather Forecast Office.

Odds Favor Wet Start for the Monsoon through Mid- to Late July

Precipitation outlook for July 12–15, 2025, showing the probability (percent chance) of above-normal (green hues) or below-normal (brown hues) precipitation across the U.S. White indicates equal chances of above- or below-normal precipitation. Source: NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.

**Monthly drought outlook showing where drought is predicted to develop (yellow), persist (brown), remain but improve (gray/beige), or be removed (green) in July 2025. Issued June 30, 2025. Source:** NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.

Potential Impacts of North American Monsoon Precipitation for Drought

MonsoonImpacts Below-Average Precipitation Near-Average Precipitation Above-Average Precipitation
Impact on Drought Long- and short-term drought in the region would worsen, potentially similar to what happened in summer 2023. Short-term drought improvement is possible. This could help improve long- and short-term drought in the Southwest, but the potential for hazardous flash flooding would increase.
Water Storage Increased reservoir storage and groundwater depletion as municipal and agricultural demand increase during hot season. An average-to-above average monsoon can increase water storage and replenish stock ponds in parts of the region, but not by significant amounts. Research has shown that summer precipitation is less efficient than winter precipitation at alleviating hydrologic drought. However, a more active monsoon reduces outdoor water demand, which has a positive impact on water supply.
Wildland Fire Elevated wildland fire potential to continue through summer. Fire potential to return to near normal for this time of year. Lightning can be a source for fire ignition. Fire potential to return to near normal for this time of year.

Potential drought impacts if the Southwest receives below-average, near-average, or above-average precipitation during the 2025 North American Monsoon Season.

MonsoonImpacts	Below-Average Precipitation	Near-Average Precipitation	Above-Average Precipitation
Impact on Drought	Long- and short-term drought in the region would worsen, potentially similar to what happened in summer 2023.	Short-term drought improvement is possible.	This could help improve long- and short-term drought in the Southwest, but the potential for hazardous flash flooding would increase.
Water Storage	Increased reservoir storage and groundwater depletion as municipal and agricultural demand increase during hot season.	An average-to-above average monsoon can increase water storage and replenish stock ponds in parts of the region, but not by significant amounts. Research has shown that summer precipitation is less efficient than winter precipitation at alleviating hydrologic drought. However, a more active monsoon reduces outdoor water demand, which has a positive impact on water supply.
Wildland Fire	Elevated wildland fire potential to continue through summer.	Fire potential to return to near normal for this time of year. Lightning can be a source for fire ignition.	Fire potential to return to near normal for this time of year.

Southern Utes to tap #LakeNighthorse water: Tribe holds rights to 38,108 acre-feet annually — The #Durango Herald #AnimasRiver

Lake Nighthorse and Durango March 2016 photo via Greg Hobbs.

Click the link to read the article on The Durango Herald website (Christian Burney). Here’s an excerpt:

June 10, 2025

The Southern Ute Indian Tribe plans to begin drawing water from Lake Nighthorse this summer, becoming the first entity to use the reservoir for non-testing purposes since the reservoir’s completion in 2009. The Southern Ute Tribal Council approved the annual use of a portion of its Animas-La Plata Project water in Lake Nighthorse for “future industrial uses,” including energy development, in February 2024, according to the tribal newspaper, The Southern Ute Drum.

“This is a historic and exciting moment for the Southern Ute Indian Tribe – the Tribe is finally utilizing some of its ALP water rights that it has fought for over a long period,” the Drum reported. “The Tribe plans to continue developing its water resources for the benefit of the Tribe and its members in the future.”

[…]

Lake Nighthorse stores 123,541 acre-feet of water. The tribe holds a 44,662 acre-foot annual allocation from the A-LP, with 38,108 acre-feet stored in Lake Nighthorse, according to a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation spokesperson. The tribe’s claim represents about 35% of the water stored in the reservoir, according to the Drum…The tribe currently uses 6,553 acre-feet annually from its Animas River allocation under the A-LP, according to the Bureau of Reclamation.

Can fracking #wastewater be reused?: #NewMexico’s legislators are eager to repurpose “produced water,” but environmental organizations say that there is no safe way to do that — Shi En Kim (High Country News)

A DEQ worker collects samples from Alkali Creek below where produced water from the Moneta Divide Field is discharged. (Wyoming DEQ)

Click the link to read the article on the High County News website (Shi En Kim):

June 9, 2025

On Oct. 2, 2024, a geyser erupted in Toyah, a town in west Texas 50 miles from the New Mexico border. This was not a case of water miraculously appearing in the desert, a deliverance from the area’s long-standing drought. Rather, it was an environmental disaster: a blowout from an orphaned oil and gas well.

What gushed from the ground wasn’t actually water, but rather a vile brine of heavy metals, radioactive substances, chemical additives and noxious organics — the by-product of fracking.

The Toyah incident is the latest of at least eight leaks over the preceding 12 months in the Permian Basin, a fracking hub across west Texas and southeastern New Mexico. It highlights the increasingly urgent challenge of what to do with fracking’s wastewater — what fossil fuel companies euphemistically call “produced water.” But some New Mexico legislators have a solution in mind: For the last few years, they’ve proposed reusing the wastewater off the oil field for industrial purposes, such as data center cooling and hydrogen production.

Part of their argument is that New Mexico desperately needs water. More than 90% of its residents live in areas facing drought. In the next 50 years, the already-arid state will see its ground- and fresh water sources shrink by 25%.

Political pressure is mounting on New Mexico’s lawmakers to tap into fracking wastewater as a new resource. Environmental groups, however, strongly oppose the idea, arguing that there is still no way to make the wastewater safe for off-field use. Year after year, the New Mexico Legislature finds itself at a crossroads.

“We are, as a state, very beholden to oil and gas,” said Carlos Matutes, the New Mexico director at the advocacy group GreenLatinos that’s part of the coalition opposing produced water reuse. Any bill that sanctions produced water, he said, “is almost guaranteed to come back.”

PRODUCED WATER is an existential dilemma for the oil and gas industry. Fracking involves blasting underground rock with water to free up trapped oil and gas, but when that water returns to the surface, it is laden with contaminants it picks up from the earth. Every barrel of hydrocarbons reaped also generates up to 10 barrels of contaminated water. In 2021 alone, New Mexico was spewing 147 million gallons of toxic wastewater daily.

Drilling companies usually dispose of wastewater in dedicated injection wells. Water, however, does what water always does: It flows where it wishes, heedless of human-drawn boundaries. And it can travel for miles underground, then burst forth from improperly sealed oil wells, as it did with Toyah. (So far, no company has claimed ownership of the well, though its use dates back to 1961.) Even wastewater that stays underground finds ways to revolt — by triggering earthquakes. As fracking operations have ramped up over the last decade, so too has the tally of tremors. In the past year alone, New Mexico experienced over 2,500 quakes, most of them concentrated in the southeastern corner of the state, where fracking is most flagrant. In comparison, only 45 tremors rumbled the state in 2017.

Currently, most of New Mexico’s produced water is either injected underground or transported across state lines for disposal elsewhere. By contrast, neighboring Texas permits repurposing treated wastewater for other uses or discharging it into the environment.

Produced water. Graphic credit: U.S. Department of Energy

In late 2023, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham floated a strategic water supply proposal to follow in the footsteps of its neighbor. Initially, she proposed investing $500 million of state funds in treating produced water. But that measure dried up in legislative budget negotiations. In subsequent revisions, Lujan Grisham has watered down the funding allocation, from $250 million in 2024 to $75 millionin 2025. Each time, pushback from environmental groups helped flush produced water treatment from the proposals altogether.

Even if the plan had sailed through, though, it would not have recouped a significant amount of water, said Rachel Conn, the deputy director of the water conservation organization Amigos Bravos. Removing contaminants from fracking wastewater requires copious energy to boil off and squeeze fresh water from dissolved toxins. Her team estimates that it costs at least $2 to treat a barrel, twice as much as it costs to send it down an injection well. The total amount could easily top $1 billion a year. (In Texas, oil companies pay more, as much as $10 per barrel for treatment.) Given the high costs, Conn said that the amount of water the strategic water supply could afford to treat would meet no more than 1% of New Mexico’s water needs — a literal drop in the bucket.

Additionally, environmental organizations like Amigos Bravos have raised concerns about the safety of fracking wastewater, whether it’s treated or untreated. Radioactivity levels around several injection wells in Ohio and West Virginiaexceed the federal safety limit by several hundred-fold; and in one Pennsylvanian river, radium still persists among mussels even five years after the last discharge of produced water.

The complex cocktail of chemicals found in produced water makes it hard to characterize, said Bonnie McDevitt, a research physical scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey. Companies usually guard the chemical additives in their fracking fluid as a trade secret. Toxicity requirements cannot cover every contaminant present, essentially leaving some questionable compounds completely unregulated. That means that even if the treated wastewater technically meets drinking water standards, it may not necessarily be safe to drink. Environmental advocates are calling for testing limits on 600 compounds potentially found in fracking wastewater before it can be used off fracking fields.

But the fossil fuel industry insists that the treatment technology is ready; Ryan Hall, the director of technical operations at NGL Energy Partners, said, “We can treat to any spec.” As one of the nation’s largest handlers of the industry’s wastewater, his company manages 2.5 million barrels from the Permian Basin, mainly by disposing of it in injection wells. NGL Energy has also explored wastewater treatment in some states, and Hall said it is eager to start in New Mexico once authorities give the legislative greenlight.

The New Mexico Produced Water Research Consortium, which is partially funded by oil and gas companies, is currently leading the effort to develop purportedly safe and affordable treatment methods. T he institute’s recent projects include advancing various separation technologies and studying the health impacts of produced water on indicator species, like aquatic microbes and plants. “I’m with the environmental groups,” said Pei Xu, the institute’s research director and an environmental engineer at New Mexico State University. “We also want this water to be very safe. I think we have made a lot of very good progress.”

THE BATTLE BETWEEN industry and environmental groups is heating up. In April, New Mexico’s Water Quality Control Commission announced that it would allow pilot treatment projects to discharge up to 84,000 gallons of wastewater into groundwater daily. Environmental groups filed court briefs and staged a protest outside the Capitol, and 27 state legislators wrote a letter to the commission urging it to reconsider. In a follow-up hearing on May 13, the commission rescinded its April decision and reinstituted the ban.

What environmental groups want, ideally, is to end fracking altogether. But that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon: New Mexico is economically dependent on oil and gas, ranking second in the nation’s top fossil fuel-producing states. Industry has a solid grip on politics here — roughly 60% of Lujan Grisham’s 2017-2022 campaign contributions came from the state’s largest oil corporations.

At the very least, environmental groups say, taxpayer dollars shouldn’t be used to solve a problem of the industry’s own making. “It should be the industry’s responsibility to clean up that produced water,” Conn said. Her suggestion: Reuse the wastewater for future fracking. About 60% of wastewater is recycled on oil fields; Conn says bumping the rate to 90% could save 4 billion gallons of fresh water — more than all the produced water that the strategic water supply proposal would treat.

Active Permian Basin pumpjack east of Andrews, Texas. By Zorin09 – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14607474

Meanwhile, drilling shows no signs of slowing down. Across the Permian playa, pumpjacks rise like giant birds pecking at the ground. Strewn alongside these steel flocks are miles-deep injection wells, each designated by a comparatively squat wellhead that often comes in the shape of a cross — a headstone for an otherwise unmarked grave for the vast refuse that refuses to go quietly.

Environmental groups protest outside New Mexico’s Capitol after the state announced it would allow pilot treatment projects to discharge up to 84,000 gallons of wastewater into groundwater daily. Courtesy of New Energy Economy

Front Range water providers request state hearing to air concerns about Western Slope water rights deal — Shannon Mullane (Fresh Water News) #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

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

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

July 26, 2025

Four major Front Range water agencies have requested a state hearing to fully air their objections to a Western Slope plan to purchase historic, coveted Colorado River water rights.

The Colorado River Water Conservation District, which represents 15 Western Slope counties, is leading the effort to purchase the $99 million water rights tied to the century-old Shoshone Power Plant, owned by a subsidiary of Xcel Energy. The district wants to buy the rights to protect historical water resources for Western Slope communities long into the future.

Aurora Water, Denver Water, Colorado Springs Utilities and Northern Water also want to maintain the historical flows past Shoshone which provides stability for their water supplies. They just disagree over the numbers, namely how much water is included in the deal. If the number is too high, it could throw a wrench in their water systems.

The state’s water board, the Colorado Water Conservation Board, will decide during a special meeting Tuesday whether to grant the hearing requests.

“If, as the River District asserts, the status quo will be maintained, this acquisition can be a win-win for both the Front Range and the West Slope,” wrote Marshall Brown, general manager of Aurora Water in a letter on June 9. “However … we have significant concerns.”

The Colorado River District already has passed a few hurdles in its years long effort to purchase the powerful water rights for Shoshone, located just east of Glenwood Springs.

It has a purchase agreement with Xcel Energy. A diverse array of Western Slope cities, agricultural groups, the Colorado legislature and others have promised millions of dollars toward the asking price.

The federal government awarded $40 million, but that funding remains tied up in President Donald Trump’s policy to cut spending from big Biden-era funding packages.

Democratic and Republican Congressional representatives from Colorado have spoken in support of the purchase. U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd, a Republican from Grand Junction, asked Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum to release the funds in a committee meeting this month.

120 days to decide

The district is moving on with its next step: working with the state to use the water rights to help protect the environment. This is where the concerns over historical flows come in.

The River District wants Shoshone’s rights to be used to keep water in the Colorado River near the power plant in Glenwood Canyon to benefit aquatic ecosystems when the power plant isn’t generating electricity.

The additional environmental use would secure the flow of water past the power plant, even if the plant goes out of commission — maintaining the status quo flows permanently. That water could otherwise be used further upstream.

The Colorado Water Conservation Board, faces a September deadline to decide whether to approve this new environmental use, called an instream flow right.

If approved, the instream flow right would be one of the largest, most influential environmental water rights in state history in large part because of their seniority in the state’s water system.

The board launched its 120-day decision-making process May 21, triggering a 20-day window for people to submit notices that they planned to contest the proceedings and request a hearing.

Front Range outlines concerns

The four Front Range water managers were the only entities to submit notices within that 20-day window.

They want to recalculate how much water has been used at Shoshone in past decades before the matter goes to water court, where opposing parties will have another opportunity to voice their concerns and make sure their water supplies aren’t negatively impacted.

Collectively, the four agencies help deliver water to over 3 million people along the Front Range cities and northeastern plains.

In its letter, Aurora Water said the river district’s estimate could overstate historic use by up to 300,000 acre-feet. One acre-foot roughly equals the annual water use of two to three households. The utility did not respond in time for publication.

Northern Water is concerned about its ability to fill Green Mountain Reservoir in Summit County, which depends in part on downstream water rights, like Shoshone’s. The reservoir delivers water to the Western Slope, including to a 15-mile stretch of the Colorado River that provides vital habitat for endangered and threatened fish.

Colorado Springs Utilities’ letter said a too-high estimate could cut into the amount of water the provider can divert from the Blue River and the Homestake Water Project, which directs water from the Western Slope to the Eastern Slope.

Denver Water cited similar concerns, saying the proposal, as is, will change the “status quo” in ways that would harm the utility’s ability to provide water to over 1.5 million people during severe or prolonged drought.

Colorado Springs and Denver Water declined to comment further, referring to their written letters.

If the Colorado Water Conservation Board approves the hearing request, people will have until July 9 to ask to join the hearing process, said Rob Viehl, chief of the Stream and Lake Protection Section at the Colorado Water Conservation Board. The board will share updates with the public on its website and decide the date of the hearing during its meeting Tuesday.

More by Shannon Mullane

Shoshone hydroelectric generation plant Glenwood Canyon via the Colorado River District

#Utah U.S. Senator Mike Lee pulls his public land sell-off bill after serious backlash — Jonathan P. Thompson (BlueSky)

‘Like taking Smokey Bear away from the Forest Service’: President Trump’s Administration proposes consolidating wildland firefighting into single agency — Summit Daily News

The Grizzly Creek Fire burning along the Colorado River on August 14, 2020. By White River National ForestU.S. Forest Service – https://www.facebook.com/GrizzlyCreekFireCO/posts/128313015469678, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93777078

Click the link to read the article on the Summit Daily News website (Ryan Spencer). Here’s an excerpt:

June 26, 2025

[Colorado U.S.] Senator John Hickenlooper is looking into the proposal to create a U.S. Wildland Fire Service and what it could mean for wildfire response and resources

President Donald Trump’s 2026 budget proposal outlines plans to create a new U.S. Wildland Fire Service by combining the wildfire assets currently distributed between the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service. The budget request states that the “dispersed nature” of the federal wildfire program “creates significant coordination and cost inefficiencies that result in sub-optimal performance.” It would house the U.S. Wildland Fire Service in the Department of Interior. But in a letter to the Senate earlier this month, a nonprofit group representing thousands of U.S. Forest Service retirees, including seven previous chiefs of the agency, raised concern that consolidating federal firefighting operations would be “a costly mistake.”

“Wildfire management is more than extinguishing fires,” National Association of Forest Service Retirees Chair Steve Ellis wrote in the letter. “The critical linkage between fire suppression and forest management, including fuels reduction and prescribed fire, must be maintained. Severing forest management and forest managers from fire suppression will make firefighting less safe and put communities at greater risk.”

In addition to relocating firefighting operations, Trump’s budget request for the Forest Service asks Congress to zero out millions of dollars of funding, including for forestry research and grants that support state, tribal and private forestry efforts. It also proposes cuts of $392 million to the Forest Service management budget and $391 million to forest operations…Ellis, who worked for the federal government for 38 years in both the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, said “the fire program is integrated into almost everything the Forest Service does.” From forest thinning to prescribed burns, prevention and suppression, Ellis said strategies have to be integrated into the broader forest management goals. By removing firefighting operations from the Forest Service, the proposal could divorce firefighting from land management, he added…

When asked about the U.S. Wildland Fire Service proposal, White House Assistant Press Secretary Taylor Rogers pointed to the Los Angeles wildfires that killed 30 people, forced 200,000 to evacuate and burned 57,000 acres earlier this year…But Ellis questioned whether a consolidated federal firefighting agency like the U.S. Wildland Fire Service would have done anything to prevent or lessen the impacts of the Los Angeles fires. In his experience, Ellis said the fire program in the United States is “pretty seamless” with different agencies not only working with each other but also collaborating with state and local partners to combat wildfires.

Romancing the River: The Empire Strikes the Public Lands, Part 3 — George Sibley (SibleysRivers.com)

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

June 24, 2025

There it is again – the invocation for most of the 20^th century. But – wait: aren’t we in the 21^st century? Well, really – not yet in any way that matters. President Biden tried, through his big beautiful legislative acts (two of them), to nudge and cajole us into the early 21^st century: beginning to commence to proceed to address the scientific reality of a climate that our created realities have been inadvertently changing for the worse, and the socioeconomic realities of an increasingly inequitable society that unbridled private capitalism has been advertently imposing on us all. But Biden’s acts no longer address our official realities.

The new official reality, which wants to take us back to the good old days of the mid-20^th century, includes a full restitution of the fossil energies (including beautiful clean coal) that, a mere seven months ago, we were told we needed to stop using as soon as we possibly could for the sake of our continued existence on the planet. Trump may have missed a couple ‘first day’ promises – low grocery prices and peace in the Ukraine – but one first-day promise he did fulfill was issuing an executive order on January 20, 2025 for ‘Unleashing American Energy,’ colloquially known as ‘Drill, baby, drill.’

Therein, Trump explained that ‘in recent years, burdensome and ideologically motivated regulations have impeded the development of these (fossil) resources,’ inflicting ‘high energy costs upon our citizens … driving up the cost of transportation, heating, utilities, farming, and manufacturing, while weakening our national security.’ Trump proclaimed that this constituted a ‘National Energy Emergency’ caused by President Biden and other liberals obsessed by a ‘climate crisis’ that is now, almost magically, no longer an official part of American reality.

Biden-era policies, according to this MAGA narrative, kept energy development off of the public lands by ‘locking the lands up’ for conservation, preservation and recreation, making Biden’s administration responsible for our high gasoline and home-heating prices. And the Trump administration was going to reverse that by reopening the public lands for the O&G industry to drill new wells, increasing the supply of gas and oil to both bring down O&G costs and re-establish America’s global energy dominance – a dominance in O&G production that we already in fact have.

Trump’s Interior Secretary Doug Burgum followed this up February 3, 2025 with a seven-page order revoking all of President Biden’s energy-related executive orders dating back to 2021, and replacing them with orders specific to ‘drill, baby, drill.’

But there is a problem they are not acknowledging, however: is the O&G industry really going to get out there and ‘drill, baby, drill’? The truth, as usual with Trump, lies elsewhere….

Let’s take a look at how the leasing process goes, on our Bureau of Land Management lands (with similar rules on the National Forests):

First, someone from the public – usually someone from the O&G industry – expresses interest in a piece of land for oil or gas production. The BLM then has to prepare a lease sale for that land. Biden rules put in force last year (now rescinded) restricted this to lands with some probability of actual O&G resources in the land.

Once requested lands are mapped into lease units (maximum lease 2,560 acres in the lower 48 states, 5,760 acres in Alaska), the BLM holds quarterly auctions to lease the mapped units. The 2024 rules (now rescinded) raised the minimum bid from $2/acre to $10/acre, and also declined to sell the leases when there was no competitive bidding.
The leases are for 10 years (renewable in some cases), with rental at $3/acre for the first two years, $5/acre for the next six years, and $15/acre for any year thereafter – obvious incentive to get a lease into production.

Before leaseholders can do anything on the land, they need to put up a bond to cover the cost of closing-off and site reclamation when they abandon the well (after 4 years with no action). The minimum bond was increased in 2024 from $10,000 to $150,000, making forfeiture painful (now rescinded).

When leaseholders are ready to ‘develop’ a lease, they apply for a drilling permit. If their drilling plan is approved by the BLM (more than 95 percent are), they pay a permitting fee (minimum $10,000) and can then ‘drill, baby, drill.’ Biden rules (now reduced again) charged a 16.67 percent royalty to the government on what they produce.

Oil wells can be operated as long as they are profitable, with lease extensions. When they are no longer producing enough to profitably cover lease rent plus operating expenses, the company owning the lease is responsible for closing down the well and restoring the land.

Did the ‘Biden-era’ government ‘shut down’ this leasing and permitting process, ‘locking out’ energy development, as the Trump administration and the O&G industry claim? Hardly; that’s just more Trumpty-Dumpty fake news. Anyone with a cultural memory that goes back further than 2025 will remember that environmental interests were constantly haranguing the Biden administration to stop the leasing on public lands, since it undermined the administration’s other efforts to address the climate crisis, which was then officially part of our reality, like it or not. It is also part of our reality, however, that our need for gasoline and natural gas has not diminished much, and Biden had to work for a balance no one liked. Anyone wanting to revisit the kind of pressure from both sides that Biden and his Interior Department encountered on such issues could look at this AP story about leases in Alaska’s far frozen north.

There’s a more important fact (remember ‘facts’?) to keep in mind about the leasing situation, however, and Trumpish complaints that the government is blocking our energy dominance on the planet: 25 million acres of public land are currently reserved in O&G leases, but at least a third of that, maybe more, is in leases that have not been developed. Let me say that again: the O&G industry already holds several thousand leases that it has not begun to bring into production.

Two questions rise: Why are they not developing these leases on which they are paying rent? And why are they agitating for even more leases?

The answer to the first question is the most obvious: they do not want to bring more wells into production because the price of a barrel of oil has been dropping below their industrial break-even price of around $65/barrel. Energy production is governed to some extent by a calculation called the ER:EI – ‘Energy Return on Energy Investment.’ In the good old days of 30-cents-a-gallon gasoline, oil was ‘gushing’ abundantly from wells. The ER:EI of oil then ranged from 20:1 upward, depending on how fast it flowed and how far it had to go to market – meaning 20 barrels were produced for every barrel-equivalent of energy invested.

The miracle of ‘fracking’ opened up vast new regions from which oil could be squeezed, but fracked oil does not gush; instead it has to be freed from rock formations with complex and expensive drilling and pumping procedures. The ER:EI of fracked petroleum and natural gas is 5:1 or often lower. The O&G frackers need barrel prices above $65 to even begin making a profit.

Recent rumors of war in the Mideast have pushed the price up to the $70-75/barrel range, but that is a fluctuating situation that will not be reflected at the gas pump. And that may be countered by the OPEC+ nations (all the Arabian nation-states plus Russia and a handful of other non-Arabian states), who just upped the ante. They still have oil they can access at an ER:EI significantly above that of the United States frackers – and they recently voted to increase their production June 1 by an additional 411,000 barrels a day, which pretty well insures that the global prices of a barrel will not go up to where United States frackers will want to start developing the thousands of leases they are paying rent on. Unless, perhaps, Trump decides to put a tariff on OPEC oil and gas, with all the political chaos that would create – including driving up the price of gasoline and heating gas here.

So therein lies the truth about who is responsible for persisting higher gas prices: it wasn’t the Biden administration shutting off opportunities; it was the O&G industries refusing to develop low-cost public-land opportunities they already owned – not wanting to produce oil and gas at a loss as a patriotic MAGA gesture. America has no more ‘cheap’ oil with the massive profitability of a high ER:EI.

But at any rate, if we do actually have a ‘national energy emergency,’ it is certainly not going to be resolved by putting a lot more public land up for leases to ‘unleash’ America’s fossil energy, with more than a third of the public land already leased but not developed due to low energy prices. A January lease offer – Biden’s last – in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge had no bidders.

So why the big push for more public lands leasing?

Well, in Trumpland it may not be about lower prices for consumers at all, but about industrial control in the public lands. An O&G lease, so long as the rent is paid – pocket change for the industry – amounts to a priority use on public lands managed for multiple uses. So long as a lease remains undeveloped, it can’t be fenced; it is open for grazing cattle, hikers, bikers and other ‘multiple-users’ to wander over. But the O&G company has the priority use on the land, and if it decides to develop the lease, the surface land needed for the drilling and pumping operations becomes single-use land, with a road leading into it – no longer really ‘public’ or ‘multiple use’ for so long as the well operates.

As noted in the leasing and permitting process outlined above, the drilling company has to put up a bond assuring that it will properly shut down and plug the well and reclaim the area when the well runs out. The historic $10,000 bond was so low that companies found it cheaper to just forfeit the bond and leave it leaking methane into the atmosphere, polluting the underground water table, and surrounded by the refuse from the fracking operation. The Biden administration raised the bond for a permit to drill to $150,000, about twice the current average reclamation cost, and enough to make some miners/drillers to think twice about just abandoning the well. Now, of course, that Biden-era move toward good sense is being rescinded.

Abandoned pumpjack.By Hillebrand Steve, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service – http://www.public-domain-image.com/public-domain-images-pictures-free-stock-photos/miscellaneous-public-domain-images-pictures/abandoned-gas-well-pump.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24924881

How many ‘orphaned wells’ are there (abandoned with little or no reclamation)? No one seems to know for sure. The EPA estimates there are as many as four million abandoned wells nationwide, most plugged to some degree with known owners and operators; but some 100-150 thousand of the abandoned wells are orphaned – no financially solvent owner-operator can be found, and many of those are not plugged, and are emitting methane into the atmosphere and oil and toxic fracking fluids into water tables. Those numbers are more guesstimates than estimates, and no one really knows how many of the orphaned wells are on public lands, but we taxpayers will end up paying to plug, clean up and maintain the orphans, as (chronically inadequate) budgets allow (2024 information).

There may be another rationale behind the O&G industries’ desire for more leasing and permitting, when they aren’t developing a third of what they already have. There is a huge overlap between the 90 percent of BLM land that is open for O&G leasing at the request of the industry, and the BLM land that is suitable for the development of the massive solar, wind and geothermal renewable energy resources that will be needed when American reality again encompasses the climate crisis. Leasing processes have been worked out for renewable energy development – somewhat more rigorous than those for the O&G industry – and many of the suitable sites find an O&G lease right in the middle of them, with its undeveloped use priority. The developers of the renewables have to buy surface-use waivers from the O&G leaseholders – unless the O&G leaseholders don’t want to give up the chance to develop their non-renewables.

Well – enough said on this. I hope this disabuses you of the Trumpty-Burgumty nonsense about a ‘national energy emergency’ that can be resolved through a wide-open assault on our public lands. That’s the good news; the bad news is the fact that gasoline at the pump is probably never going to go down much, so long as a barrel of oil has to bring more than $70 to the fossil-fuel producer.

An intelligent and forward-looking society would be working to gently and fairly phase out the truculent O&G industries, and phase in the renewable energy resources with a lot of job creation – which the Biden administration, now seemingly maligned by everyone, was actually trying to do with the two big beautiful infrastructure acts that the Trumpty-Burgumties are trying to rescind as thoroughly as possible, for no discernible reasons other than their own ‘creative reality,’ and of course, with Trump, vengeance on his enemies.

The Trumpty-Burgumty teams have come up with some other plans for the public lands, including selling off some of them – a lemon from which it might actually be possible to squeeze some lemonade, depending on how it shakes out. More about that in the future, when we see if it stays in the Big Piggy Bill….

Next post – back to the Colorado River where, believe it or not, things are pretty much still where they were a year ago – which is to say ‘a standstill’ – at least in terms of a new management plan for the post-2026 era. Stay tuned.

Oil and gas infrastructure is seen on the Roan Plateau in far western Colorado. (Courtesy of EcoFlight)

#Drought news June 26, 2025: Short- and long-term precipitation deficits continued to grow in parts of N. #Colorado, which along with drops in soil moisture and streamflow led to localized worsening of drought or abnormal dryness

Click on a thumbnail graphic to view a gallery of drought data from the US Drought Monitor website.

Click the link to go to the US Drought Monitor website. Here’s an excerpt:

This Week’s Drought Summary

This week, widespread degradations occurred in the Northwest United States, where despite slightly cooler and wetter conditions this week, rapid drying continued to be a problem. In the central Great Plains and Midwest, scattered heavier rains led to improving drought or dryness conditions in some areas, especially in northern Missouri and Iowa, while some others who missed out on the heavier rains saw degrading conditions amid hotter-than-normal temperatures. In Florida, a mix of localized improvements and degradations occurred; scattered heavy rains improved the situation for some, while other areas that missed the heavy rain saw short- and long-term precipitation deficits grow amid worsening fire danger. After recent heavy rain, a small area west of Baltimore saw improvement to long-term moderate drought, while the most of the rest of the Northeast remained free of drought or abnormal dryness, with a small area of long-term moderate drought on Cape Cod continuing this week. A mix of improvements and degradations occurred in Texas following heavier rains last week in the south-central part of the state but drier weather in the Midland-Odessa area this week. Localized improvements occurred in areas of heavy rainfall on the eastern plains of New Mexico. Please note that any rain that fell from mid-Tuesday morning onward will be considered in next week’s map.

In Alaska, short-term abnormal dryness and moderate drought developed and expanded in parts of central Alaska, where short-term precipitation deficits built and fire danger increased.

In Hawaii, localized improvements and degradations occurred after an overall drier week with trade-wind showers on the windward sides of the islands.

In Puerto Rico, abnormal dryness developed along the northwest and south-central coasts where short-term precipitation deficits grew amid crop stress and decreasing groundwater levels…

High Plains

In Nebraska and Kansas, scattered heavy rains fell in parts of both states, especially in central and eastern areas, leading to localized improvements to ongoing drought and abnormal dryness. In some areas that missed heavier rains this week, temperatures ranging from 4-8 degrees hotter than normal led to degrading conditions, as streamflow and soil moisture levels dropped. Long-term drought over the last few years has continued to take a toll on trees in eastern Nebraska, as the bur oak, elm, hackberry, ash and red oak populations saw increased mortality or significant loss in canopy. Short- and long-term precipitation deficits continued to grow in parts of northern Colorado, which along with drops in soil moisture and streamflow led to localized worsening of drought or abnormal dryness. Meanwhile, heavier rains in the last couple of weeks in southeast Wyoming led to improving conditions there. The western half of Wyoming, in contrast, has continued to see rapid drying, leading to poor vegetation health and locally decreasing streamflow and soil moisture. Moderate and severe drought grew in coverage in parts of southwest Wyoming, while abnormal dryness grew in coverage northeast of Yellowstone National Park..

Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending June 24, 2025.

West

Predominantly cooler temperatures occurred in the West this week, with many areas west of Utah, Arizona and Wyoming seeing temperatures range from 2-8 degrees cooler than normal. Despite the cooler weather this week, the drying trend continued across much of the Northwest states, with abnormal dryness and moderate and severe drought significantly growing in coverage in northern portions of Utah and Nevada, northeast California, far western Montana, Idaho and southeast portions of Oregon and Washington. In these areas, short-term precipitation deficits are growing, streamflow is lower in spots, vegetation is struggling and soil moisture deficits are developing. Near the end of the week, scattered heavy rains fell in the eastern plains of New Mexico, leading to localized improvements in drought and abnormal dryness. The impact of these rains on the rest of the water cycle, as well as any further rain, will be further evaluated next week…

South

Temperatures across the South region this week ranged from near-normal to 2-6 degrees warmer than normal in most of the region. Heavy rains fell in parts of central and northern Oklahoma, Tennessee, northeast Arkansas, Mississippi, and the western Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles. Most of central and south-central Texas had drier weather this week. Despite the dry weather there, some improvements to the Drought Monitor occurred in south-central Texas as the impact of recent heavy rains continued to be evaluated. A small increase in abnormal dryness and moderate drought occurred in the Midland-Odessa area due to growing short-term precipitation deficits and decreasing soil moisture and streamflow. Outside of Texas, the rest of the South remained free of drought or abnormal dryness…

Looking Ahead

The National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center forecast through the evening of Monday, June 30, shows mostly dry weather in the West, especially for areas west of the Continental Divide. Drier weather is also expected in western North Dakota and Montana, most of Texas, Arkansas and western Louisiana, and in the eastern Carolinas. Rainfall in excess of 1 inch is forecast in parts of eastern Kansas and Nebraska, the eastern Dakotas, the Upper Midwest, the Northeast, the eastern half of the Gulf Coast and the Florida Peninsula.

For July 1-5, the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center outlook favors above-normal precipitation across Alaska, Hawaii and most of the Contiguous United States. The highest confidence for above-normal precipitation during this period is centered on Arizona, New Mexico, southwest Texas, Utah and Colorado as monsoonal moisture streams into the region. Cooler-than-normal temperatures are favored in southeast Arizona, New Mexico, western Texas and southern Colorado, while near-normal temperatures are favored from the central Great Plains into the Great Lakes. Within the Contiguous United States, warmer-than-normal temperatures are favored elsewhere, with the highest confidence for this residing in the Northwest, western Gulf Coast, and Mid-Atlantic. Warmer-than-normal temperatures are favored across most of Hawaii. Warmer-than-normal temperatures are also favored from southwest to north-central Alaska (excluding the Aleutian Islands), while cooler-than-normal weather is favored in the extreme northwest reaches of Alaska and in the southeast portion of the state.

US Drought Monitor one week change map ending June 24, 2025.

The secret double life of america’s public lands: And why you should know about it if you drink water… — John Zablocki (AmericanRiver.org)

Middle Fork Snoqualmie River, Washington | Monty Vanderbilt

Click the link to read the article on the American Rivers website (John Zablocki):

January 21, 2025

Public lands are the birthright of every American. One of the great privileges of living in this country is the ability to access hundreds of millions of acres to enjoy the great outdoors — all for free.

People care about and use public lands for many reasons. From hunters and anglers to miners and ranchers, hikers and mountain bikers—there is something for almost everyone on public lands. But what if you live in a city and never set foot on public lands? Why care about them then?

Log Meadow, California | Maiya Greenwood

Not everyone hunts, fishes, mines, ranches, hikes, or bikes; but everyone, truly everyone, depends on clean water. The big secret about public lands is that they are arguably the country’s single biggest clean water provider. According to the US Forest Service, National Forests are the largest source of municipal water supply in the nation, serving over 60 million people in 3,400 communities across 33 states. Many of the country’s largest urban areas, including Los Angeles, Portland, Denver, and Atlanta receive a significant portion of their water supply from national forests.

Healthy forests and grasslands perform many of the functions of traditional water infrastructure. They store water, filter pollutants, and transport clean water to downstream communities. And they do it naturally — essentially for free. When rivers are damaged from land uses on public lands, we all pay the price — literally; we all pay more in taxes and utility bills to clean up the water.

What happens on the public’s land also happens to the public’s water. The importance of managing public lands for the benefit of public water is so fundamental, it has been a pillar of public lands management agencies’ missions since their inception over a century ago. For example, The Organic Act of 1897[1] that created the US Forest Service stated:

As Wyoming protests, public land sell-off ‘just getting started’: #Utah U.S. Senator Mike Lee trims plans, calling targeted BLM land ‘unused,’ ‘mismanaged’ and ‘only appropriate for housing.’ — Angus M. Thuermer Jr. (WyoFile.com)

A two-track road cuts through Bureau of Land Management property west of Pinedale in April 2024. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)

Click the link to read the article on the WyoFile website (Angus M. Thuermer Jr.):

June 25, 2025

In the face of a backlash, Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee has revamped his public land sell-off measure to target only Bureau of Land Management holdings while also declaring, “we’re just getting started.”

A reconciliation budget proposal revised by Lee’s Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee targets BLM land within five miles of undefined “population centers.” It puts checkerboard BLM holdings back on a priority list for his “mandatory disposal” measure and takes lands under permit for grazing off the auction block.

The revision would shift 15% of revenue to local governments and conservation. The bill would appropriate $5 million to carry out the mandatory sales, which are designed to be offered within 60 days of passage and regularly thereafter.

Lee has not said or mapped how much land must be sold, ostensibly for affordable housing.

“We haven’t put out maps because there are a whole bunch of criteria established by the legislation, and those criteria are very difficult to reduce to a map,” Lee told conservative radio host Charlie Kirk in a video posted on X.

But opposition to Lee’s measure comes from “all walks of life,” said Land Tawney, former president and CEO of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. That includes “Democrats, Independents, Republicans, hunters, anglers, bird watchers, kayakers, ranchers [and] loggers,” he said Wednesday at a roundtable hosted by Democratic U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico.

Heinrich excoriated Lee’s measure.

“Eighty-five percent of the money from these sales would go to pay for tax cuts,” Heinrich said. “That means that folks like Elon Musk, who already own[s] 4,400 acres of land in Texas [worth] some $3.4 billion, will make money off the public lands that should belong to the American people.

“That’s horseshit,” Heinrich said.

A spectrum of opposition

Lee’s plan to include U.S. Forest Service land in the “mandatory disposal” provision flunked a parliamentarian’s rules test that limits reconciliation budget measures to relevant budget matters. The revised provision must undergo the same scrutiny, Democrats say.

Heinrich poo-pooed the notion that Lee’s measure would result in affordable housing. “An out-of-town billionaire can show up, buy a 100-acre parcel and throw a trophy home on it,” he said.

Powell resident Mike Tracy criticized Lee’s linking of public land and affordable housing.

“If you put those two concepts in the same sentence,” he said of Lee’s proposal, “it makes them seem somehow related, maybe even somehow causal.

“It makes people not feel comfortable speaking out against it because who wants to be against affordable housing?” he said at the roundtable. “I don’t think it’s proper to say that they’re related.”

U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat from Nevada, had a message for Lee. “Don’t come into our states and dictate what should be done.

“It is clear they’re trying to sell this public land to pay for this reconciliation package, which gives tax cuts to billionaires,” she said. “That’s what this is about.”

“Right now, we are pissed,” said hunting advocate Tawney, who represented American Hunters and Anglers. “They want to defund, dismantle and then divest,” he said of President Donald Trump’s administration.

Native American tribes are upset, too, said Hilary Tompkins, former solicitor for the Department of the Interior.

“The Southern Ute Indian tribe in southwestern Colorado is concerned because they have off-reservation hunting and fishing rights on an area that includes BLM lands,” she said. “They have not heard from anyone who is advocating for this proposal about the impact on those off-reservation treaty rights.”

Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon sees opportunities to resolve the state’s challenges with the checkerboard land ownership pattern along the Union Pacific Railroad line, said Jess Johnson, government affairs director with the Wyoming Wildlife Federation.

“I want to figure out how we do this in a Wyoming way,” she said of the checkerboard conundrum. “This budget reconciliation is not it.”

Not sensitive lands?

Wyoming’s U.S. Sens. John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis, Republicans who continue to support Trump’s agenda, did not respond Wednesday to requests for comment about the backlash. “It is clear that our congressional delegation isn’t in it for Wyoming,” the state’s Democratic Party chair, Lucas Fralick, said in a statement.

Lee, however, explained some of his thinking.

“I’m working closely with the Trump administration to ensure that any federal land sales serve the American people — not foreign governments, not the Chinese Communist Party, and not massive corporations looking to pad their portfolios,” he said in a post. “This land must go to American families. Period.”

In the radio interview, he said opposition was ginned up.

American Enterprise Institute’s proposed Freedom City sites on BLM land near Grand Junction, Colorado.

“The left is working overtime to dupe conservatives about my federal land sale bill,” he said. “This is just basically surplus land that’s suitable for housing because it’s right next to where people live.”

He characterized critics as having an agenda. “What I’ve heard is that people on the left generally want people moving from rural areas into urban areas, more suburban areas and from single-family housing into multi-family housing, higher density housing units,” he said. “They believe that that’s good for them, perhaps for Mother Earth, or whatever their reasons might be.

“These are not sensitive lands,” Lee said of the targeted BLM parcels. “They are not lands that are out there, that are part of an environment that’s appropriate for hunting, for hiking, for fishing, etc.”

Wyoming’s Johnson challenged that notion at the roundtable. She said she arrowed her first mule deer on public land near town.

“I was on this amazing parcel of public land — tiny,” she said. “It’s little. It’s one to three miles from Lander. It’s BLM. It’s really nothing special to look at, except it is everything to me.”

Tribal leaders rally support for Chaco Canyon, citing threats from President Trump’s energy policies — AZCentral.com

An image of the ruins of Chetro Ketl in Chaco Canyon (New Mexico, United States); shown is the complex’s great kiva. By National Park Service (United States) – Chaco Canyon National Historical Park: Photo Gallery, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1536637

Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral website (Arlyssa D. Becenti). Here’s an excerpt:

June 25, 2025

Key Points

The National Congress of American Indians passed a resolution seeking new protections for Chaco Canyon in New Mexico.

The group says the Trump administration wants to rescind an administrative order that created a 10-mile buffer around Chaco Canyon, barring oil and gas drilling for 20 years.

The resolution has renewed a rift between other tribes and the Navajo Nation, which says the 10-mile buffer could cost local residents royalties from gas and mineral extraction.

The oldest and largest organization representing tribal governments is urging action to protect Chaco Canyon from oil and gas leasing, amid what its leaders say are growing threats from the Trump administration’s energy policies. The National Congress of American Indians passed a resolution urging action to restart efforts to protect Chaco Canyon and the public lands surrounding it, and to pass the Chaco Cultural Heritage Area Protection Act, which would create a permanent 10-mile buffer zone around the site restricting oil, gas and mineral extraction. Trump has ordered federal agencies to prioritize energy and mineral extraction on public lands. Supporters of the buffer say that a shift in policy risks damage to Chaco Canyon, but residents with land allotments in the region argue that the buffer could deprive them of an income. With the resolution, the NCAI joins other tribes, elected officials and environmental organizations opposing a proposal to revoke Public Land Order 7923, which withdraws approximately 336,404 acres of federal land from new oil and gas leasing within a 10-mile area around Chaco Canyon for 20 years…

On June 6, New Mexico’s senators and congressional delegation sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum expressing support for the 10-mile buffer zone around Chaco Canyon. Sens. Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luján, along with Reps. Melanie Stansbury, Teresa Leger Fernández, and Gabe Vasquez, all Democrats, signed the letter, which voiced concern over the Interior Department’s move to begin revoking the public lands order…The letter said Interior has yet to adequately consult tribal nations on Chaco Canyon protections. A May 9 letter from the Bureau of Land Management, an Interior agency, announced a general tribal consultation for May 28, 2025, which gave less than 30 days’ notice and was short of the department’s own consultation standards. The letter also claimed that many affected Pueblos were not directly notified, and that BLM’s informal virtual presentation lacked the detail and structure needed for meaningful dialogue or informed tribal input According to the bureau’s own estimates, the 10-mile withdrawal area protects approximately 4,730 documented archaeological sites while oil and gas operators forgo development of only a few dozen wells, stated the letter.

The Navajo Nation is embroiled in a lawsuit against Haaland and the Interior Department, filed in a New Mexico federal court three days before President Donald Trump took office. The suit argues that Interior’s plan to withdraw land from new oil and gas leasing violated the law and could cost land allottees millions of dollars in royalties.

The official National Park Service map for Chaco Culture National Historic Park. By United States National Park Service – http://www.nps.gov/chcu/index.htm, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=111458973

BREAKING: #Utah Senator Mike MAGA Lee changes public land sell off bill — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org) #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Condors perched on steel girders some 450 feet above the Colorado River. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

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

June 24, 2025

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

Sen. Mike Lee, the Utah Republican and Trump sycophant, has slightly backed off on his proposal to sell-off public lands, but only slightly.

Lee posted the following on X/Twitter at 5:42 a.m. today:

Big sigh of relief? Nope. Sure, it’s great he’s removing Forest Service land from the pool of land eligible for “disposal.” This means the Hidden Valley/Falls Creek areanear Durango is out of danger, as are parcels near Flagstaff and Boise and Santa Fe that could have ended up on the auction block under the original provision. The 5-mile limit from population centers will also take some remote BLM parcels out of consideration — parcels that wouldn’t have been prioritized, anyway.

The change reduces the size of the pool of available land, and presumably also reduces the amount of land that would be sold to between 1.25 million and 1.9 million acres. That’s still a crap-ton of public lands that will be privatized, cluttered up with houses and roads and cul-de-sacs and power lines and so forth, and to which the public will lose access. If this goes forward, you can plan on houses popping up on some of your favorite hiking, trail-running, or biking areas.

And it still includes places like:

Animas Mountain and upper Horse Gulch near Durango;

swaths of BLM land near Naturita and Nucla, Colorado;

BLM land, including wilderness study areas, near Moab (wilderness study areas and areas of critical environmental concern are not exempted from the sell off);

parcels that abut Zion National Park’s boundaries (within five miles of Springdale and Rockville);

the lower slopes of Jumbo Mountain near Paonia;

parcels on Las Vegas’s fringe, along with tracts around Mesquite and Moapa that the Freedom Cities folks have their eyes on;

other Freedom City-proposed parcels near Fruita and Grand Junction;

the list goes on and on. (To get an idea just check out the Wilderness Society map, ignore the green areas, and look for “population centers” around the brass-colored areas to see what might be eligible).

Freedom Cities are back! — Jonathan P. Thompson

Lee says he will protect ranchers, which may or may not mean his provision would again leave out land that is in active grazing allotments. He doesn’t explain what the hell he means by “FREEDOM ZONES,” except to imply that he wouldn’t let any foreigners buy the land(?). Lee once again doesn’t mention a damned thing about affordable housing, meaning he’s just fine with public lands being used for luxury developments or even multi-million dollar mansions.

Oh, and then there’s that little aside about the Byrd Rule. Yeah, that might get in Lee’s way. See, the Senate parliamentarian ruled that the public land sell off provision, along with several other sections relating to energy development on public lands, were subject to a 60-vote threshold. This means they would likely be dropped from the reconciliation bill altogether, since leaving it in could sink the entire “Big Beautiful” whatever. Still, the GOP has a thing about ignoring the parliamentarian and the usual rules, and Lee indicated he would push on with this concept in one form or another. So now is not the time to back down.

The public lands sell-off provision has generated a huge amount of outrage and public push back, which is clearly working (after all, why else would Lee make those changes?). But it’s not the only or even the worst thing the MAGA folks are inflicting on the American public’s lands.

For example, yesterday Agriculture Secretary Brooke announced that the U.S. Forest Service plans to repeal the Clinton-era Roadless Rule, which blocks roadbuilding and other development on about 58 million acres of Forest Service land. If the rollback survives inevitable legal challenges, it will open up a lot of forest to logging.

Glen Canyon Dam, January 2022. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

To be a Colorado River watcher is to ride a slow-motion emotional roller coaster. We reached extreme highs during the late 1980s and into the 1990s, fell into a two-decade depression beginning in 2002 — with ebullient spikes in 2005, 2008, 2011, 2019 — and then the bountiful winter of 2023 came along and was followed up by a not-so-sad 2024.

It was enough to convince us we were recovering, and we could quit therapy, cut back on the meds, and stop worrying (all figuratively, of course). During this period of relative abundance, all of the studies about climate heating diminishing snowpacks and threatening the West’s lifeline seemed a bit abstract: Scary, sure, but we still had years and years before it manifested itself.

Yeah, no. It turns out that 2023 was just another manic and anomalous episode that falsely lulled us into complacency. And now that it has past, we’ve been sent spiraling back down into a deep aridification-sparked depression (somewhat figuratively speaking).

The snowpack-meagre 2025 winter delivered the first buzzkill to the Upper Colorado River Basin, followed by a warm and dry and dismal spring. Now, Lake Powell’s surface level is flatlining just as it should be shooting upward, an indicator that the river is back to its new normal. That is to say it is once again shrinking, and the gap between how much water has been allocated to the river’s users and what’s actually in there continues to grow. Which is to say, we’re still f&$#ed, and getting even more so with each passing year.

In fact, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s latest projection has Lake Powell possibly dropping below the minimum power pool, or the level at which hydropower production shuts down, as soon as the end of 2026. Mind you, that’s their worst case scenario, but these forecasts often lean towards optimism. Most notable is how dramatically the forecast has changed since April, a difference that is visible in the graph below.

Romancing the River: The Empire Strikes the Public Lands, Part 2 — George Sibley (SibleysRivers.com)

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

June 10, 2025

Get used to it: I’m probably going to be using that quote at the head of every post here for the near future at least; nothing so perfectly summarizes the history not just of the past several months, but of the past century, beginning – so I would argue – in the 1920s with the first crash of over-financialized hog-trough capitalism, resolved with the construction of Hoover Dam, and the birth of a growing government partnership with the private sector in financing and building what we came to accept as 20^thcentury reality.

Since the 1990s and the creation of the internet and virtual reality, we have seen the process of imperial reality creation speed up – now to a literally unbelievable speed with leadership standing firmly athwart the line between the merely incredible and the absolutely ridiculous.

Science has been puffing and panting along behind the juggernaut of industrial civilization for that whole century, trying to point out the’ real realities’ we have to ultimately confront and learn to live with, real realities whose consequences for what we have been doing are measurable, documentable – and increasingly alarming. So alarming that the Trumpty-Mumpty masters of the universe are telling us we can ignore, deny them. No, not can, but will deny and ignore them, because in their new reality such things as ‘climate crisis,’ ‘social inequity,’ ‘resource depletion’ (including potable water) either do not exist, or are deported, or are otherwise under control.

A Big Beautiful Joke: How many Republicans does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: None; Trump just says I’ve fixed it, and the Republicans sit in the dark and applaud….

Okay – moving on. I’ll begin with a couple of corrections to the last post, about the Trumpish assault on the public lands, specifically the lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). First, the correct name of the law mandating the BLM Resource Management Plans that the MAGAs don’t like, is the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA). And second, the Gunnison Sage Grouse is not a subspecies of Sage Grouse; it has been recognized as a distinct species. My apologies, and thanks to Arden Anderson, a retired BLM agent living in Gunnsion.

But now – well, I’m confused.

In my last post here, I got about halfway through some historical perspective on a bill proposed by my occasional congressional representative, Jeff Hurd, a lawyer from Grand Junction. (By ‘occasional representative,’ I mean I occasionally feel represented by Congressman Hurd, a definite improvement over the Repugnican Lauren Boebert whom he replaced.) But – now he’s got me almost as confused as Trump gets us all on tariffs.

Hurd’s bill to the House is for a ‘Productive Public Lands Act’ (‘PPL Act’). In Hurd’s own words: ‘This bill would force the Bureau of Land Management to reissue nine Biden-era Resource Management Plans (RMPs) which locked up access to viable lands throughout Colorado and the West. A reissue of these RMPs will put us on a path to energy dominance allowing for a more secure and prosperous United States.’ This is a direct legislative response supporting Trump’s trumped-up ‘national energy emergency,’ announced his first day in office with an executive order titled ‘Unleashing American Energy.’ One ‘First Day’ promise he did keep. We will look at more closely at the ‘national energy emergency’ in the next post (if it is still part of official reality).

Meanwhile, however, at about the time my post about Hurd’s PPL Act was appearing in your inbox, Hurd announced that he was introducing in the House, as a bipartisan legislation proposal, the bill that Colorado Democrat Senator [Michael Bennet] had just introduced in the Senate, for a ‘Gunnison Outdoor Resources Protection Act’ (‘GORP Act’).

The GORP Act, if passed, according to Senator [Bennet’s] website description, ‘will protect over 730,000 acres of public lands in Western Colorado, safeguarding the region’s local economy, world-class recreation, ranching heritage, wildlife habitat, and clean air and water.’ It’s a true mulitple-use bill, in the spirit of the FLPMA, that includes:

Enlargement of existing wilderness areas into undeveloped land around their edges;

‘Protection Areas’ designated to protect the natural and undeveloped character of public lands;

‘Recreation Management Areas’ to provide for sustainable management of both motorized and unmotorized recreation;

‘Special Management Areas’ set aside for ‘broadly conserving, protecting, and enhancing the natural, scenic, scientific, cultural, watershed, recreation and wildlife resources’;

A ‘Rocky Mountain Scientific Research and Education Area’ in the upper East River valley, above and below the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab in Gothic;

‘Wildlife Conservation Areas’ to conserve and restore wildlife and wildlife habitat (including the Gunnison Sage Grouse);

Existing mineral claims or oil and gas leases can be developed, but there will be no further withdrawals for minerals or oil and gas on the public lands covered by GORP, and the oil and gas rights under some of the land can only be developed with no surface disturbance (by horizontal drilling or tunneling).

If the GORP bill were to pass, it would require new Resource Management Plans that would, in Repugnican terminology, be ‘locking up’ a large quantity of public land for a diversity of uses valued in the local economy and culture – with no accommodation for the ‘national energy emergency.’ The GORP bill includes practically everything the ‘Productive Public Lands’ bill wants to undo in nine existing BLM Resource Management Plans.

It is not, in short, a bill anyone would expect from even a Republican, let alone a Repugnican – and certainly not from the congressman who put the ‘Productive Public Lands’ bill before the House. I’ve submitted a question to Congressman Hurd asking for his rationale, in submitting one bill that essentially contradicts another bill he had submitted. I’ve received no answer yet, but will pass it along when I do.

The simplest explanation – maybe just simplistic, fitting the Trumpty-Mumpty era – is that Rep, Hurd knows that the ‘Productive Public Lands’ bill will probably be passed by the Republican-majority House (the usual one or two vote ‘landslide’), while the GORP Act has practically no chance of passing. But proposing it will make him some friends among the conservationists and environmentalists that continue to be a growing part of his district, grasping at any straw in these times. Or maybe, I’ve heard it suggested locally, his work session with the Gunnison County Commissioners, between his presentation of the two bill, was a low voltage version of the biblical bolt that struck Saul/Paul on the road to Damascus. The commissioners did make a well-informed and passionate defense of the grassroots input on and support for the amended Gunnison Sage Grouse RMP that Rep. Hurd’s PPL Act would throw out.

And the amended Sage Grouse Resource Management Plan deserves a defense, in what’s left of our democratic system of governance. Rep. Hurd and other Repugnican supporters blame these RMPs on President Biden, but all President Biden did was what other presidents this century, excepting Trump, have done: they have stood back and let the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act, and the two 1976 Acts, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act and the National Forest Management Act, work as Congress intended, back in the way-too-short 1970s ‘enviro-populist’ era.

That legislation happened before the Supreme Court turned our elections over to the plutocrats who only want to get richer. From the mid-1960s through the 1970s, the people elected a series of Congresses that actually performed the will of the people, who saw the forests dying from acid rain, rivers too polluted to even swim in let alone drink from, air sometimes unbreathable, and who wanted to protect and restore what was still salvagable on the planet after a century of pedal-to-the-metal, balls-to-the-wall industrial capitalism. That, in at least my mind, is one of the times when America was great. And needs to be great again in that way, even greater as the challenges escalate – but that won’t happen during the Trumpty-Mumpty hog-trough administration.

The GORP bill is a synthesis of portions of the plans evolving since the turn of the century to keep the Gunnison Sage Grouse viable as a species, and also of a ‘Gunnison Public Lands Initiative’ that has been evolving since 2014. The ‘GPLI’ is a collaboration involving ranchers, motorized and non-motorized recreational users, whitewater and flatwater interests, and other stakeholders whose joint purpose is to strike a balance between conservation (in culture as well as nature), preservation, and tourism on the 2.5 million acres of public lands in Gunnison County – four-fifths of the County. Sage Grouse concerns spread the GORP bill into counties beyond Gunnison County where the bird is found in small populations.

The national public land agencies – mainly the BLM and Forest Service – accept the need for public participation in resource management planning, and respect the level of knowledge that most stakeholders bring to the table; but they also have top-down management priorities to work into the mix, and are a little reluctant about ‘citizen initiatives’ with a more local economic and ecological focus. Senator Bennett used the Gunnison Public Lands Initiative as a foundation document for his GORP bill, but the U.S. Forest Service mostly ignored it in the recent Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forest planning process for the next decade.

They prefer citizen response to alternatives established (with citizen participation) through the NEPA environmental analysis procedure; various alternative management action plans are outlined and analyzed according to the exhaustive (and often exhausting to read) environmental analysis that had been assembled. There is always a ‘no action, continue current management’ alternative; there is usually a ‘heavy industrial’ alternative that the environmental and recreational users don’t like, a ‘heavy recreation and preservation’ alternative that the loggers and miners don’t like, and gradations between leading to a ‘preferred alternative’ that tries to balance the various multiple uses in a way that everyone can live with.

So that is where we stand now: Senator [Bennet] and Representative Hurd are presenting the grassroots, multiple-use ‘Gunnison Outdoor Resource Planning Act’ bill (GORP Act) in the two houses of Congress, with thirty West Slope participating organizations signed on, including eleven County Boards of Commissioners. And Representative Hurd is presenting in the House of Representatives the ‘Productive Public Lands Act bill (PPL Act). The GORP bill, if passed, would require Resource Management Plans of exactly the type that the PPL bill, if passed, would seek to rescind, in favor of a top-down, single-use bill to ‘Unleash American Energy.’

Next time, we will take a deeper look at the unleashing of American energy on our public lands. (And after that, I promise, it’s back to the river – the beautiful, the beautiful and also useful river.

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

‘A glimmer of hope’ emerges from long-stuck #ColoradoRiver negotiations — Alex Hager (KUNC.org) #COriver #aridification

Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):

June 23, 2025

This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC and supported by the Walton Family Foundation.

There’s a break in the clouds that have hovered over Colorado River negotiations for more than a year. State water leaders appear to be coalescing behind a new proposal for sharing the river after talks were stuck in a deadlock for more than a year.

The river is used by nearly 40 million people across seven states and Mexico, but it’s shrinking due to climate change. As a result, state leaders need to rein in demand. For months, they were mired in a standoff about how to interpret a century-old legal agreement. The new proposal is completely different.

Instead of those states leaning on old rules that don’t account for climate change, they’re proposing a new system that divides the river based on how much water is in it today.

“We finally have an approach that at least allows a glimmer of hope that the laying down of arms is possible,” said John Fleck, a writer and water policy researcher at the University of New Mexico.

The long, tense negotiations have mostly been stuck on one issue: How much water should the Upper Basin states — Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico — send downstream from their largest reservoir, Lake Powell?

The new plan says the amount should be based on a three-year rolling average of the “natural flows” in the river — basically, how much water would flow through it if human dams and diversion weren’t in the way.

States would still have to negotiate the exact percentage of those “natural flows” that would go downstream to the Lower Basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada. Picking that number will likely be difficult, but the fact that states are willing to base it on current climate conditions represents a major philosophical shift in how the river is divided.

“This new approach gets beyond the obsessively arcane discussions about various interpretations of laws written 100 years ago, with people hoping that their lawyers’ arguments can mean they get more water,” Fleck said. “It says, ‘Look, we all have to share this river. We have to do some math about how much water it really has.’”

Nevada’s John Entsminger, Arizona’s Tom Buschatzke, and California’s JB Hamby sit on a panel of state water leaders at the Colorado River Water Users Association annual conference in Las Vegas on December 5, 2024. Arizona’s Tom Buschatzke (center) brought details of a Colorado River plan to the public, and said it “allows for a fair division of what Mother Nature provides to us. Alex Hager/KUNC

Details of the plan first emerged in a meeting of the Arizona Reconsultation Committee, where the state’s water leaders gather to discuss Arizona’s position in multistate talks. Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, described the plan as “innovative.”

“I was very pessimistic that we were on a path towards litigation,” he said. “I’m more optimistic now that we can avoid that path if we can make this work.”

Buschatzke emphasized that the proposal is in its early stages. The concept is now heading to the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal water agency which manages dams and reservoirs in the West. Employees there will run models to figure out exactly how much water would flow between the two basins.

State and federal leaders are in a crunch to finalize new water sharing rules before a 2026 deadline, when the current rules expire.

“It is still just a concept,” Buschatzke said. “We haven’t agreed to anything at this point, but we agreed to test it.”

Colorado, which often speaks on behalf of all four Upper Basin states, appears cautiously supportive of the plan.

“Colorado remains committed to developing supply-driven, sustainable operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead,” Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s top water negotiator, wrote to KUNC in a statement. “The natural flow approach is one way to achieve this, if it is done right.”

Colorado and its allies initially dug in their heels on a very specific interpretation of the 1922 Colorado River compact, arguing that they shouldn’t have to take new cutbacks to their water supplies since they feel the impacts of climate change-fueled shortages more than their downstream neighbors.

“There is no doubt that Arizona views things differently than the Upper Division States, and a successful framework will set aside our differing views and focus instead on the health and sustainability of the Colorado River System for all who depend upon it,” Mitchell wrote.

Inside #Utah’s PR campaign to seize public lands: Utah used actors, AI, stagecraft and NDAs as it sought to sway public opinion and take control of 18.5 million acres of federal public land — Jimmy Tobias (High Country News)

*Part of a promotional video the campaign ran last year.* ***Stand For Our Land Utah/YouTube screenshot***

Click the link to read the article on the High Country News website (Jimmy Tobias):

June 17, 2025

This story was published in partnership with Public Domain.

Last year, as Utah prepared to file a federal lawsuit aiming to take control of millions of acres of federal public land within its borders, state officials sought help swaying public opinion in their favor. So they turned to a group of public relations professionals at Penna Powers, a media and branding firm based in Salt Lake City.

Backed with a commitment of more than two million in tax-payer funds, the firm sprang into action. One of the early orders of business was studying the opposition. In June 2024, an assistant attorney general sent an email to numerous state government colleagues and Penna Powers staffers that contained a video from the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership (TRCP) in which the well-known hunter and media personality Randy Newberg described the dangers of transferring federal land to state control. “It doesn’t matter how many promises are made,” warned Newberg, “the financial realities would force states to sell off our public lands.”

Noting that organizations like TRCP are good at connecting with “traditionally conservative” audiences, the Utah official told his colleagues that “our PR efforts will largely depend on how well we can anticipate and effectively respond to these expected criticisms.”

“That definitely helps us know what we need to counter the opposition,” added Redge Johnson, director of Utah’s Public Lands Policy and Coordinating Office, or PLPCO, which has played a central role in organizing the state’s campaign to seize federal land.

Throughout 2024, Penna Powers put together an elaborate PR and media campaign to do just that — counter the opposition and build support for Utah’s efforts. They churned out videos, newspaper ads, social media spots and more. They hired actors, ran focus groups and helped prominent Utah politicians write talking points. In at least one instance, Penna Powers relied on AI to help create voice-overs in videos. In another instance, PLPCO staffers warned Penna Powers not to use too much scenic imagery in the campaign for fear it might undermine their efforts. They called the campaign “Stand for Our Land,” and those who worked on it were required to sign non-disclosure agreements. “The Office of the Attorney General is taking this NDA extremely seriously,” wrote one government official.

Hundreds of records reviewed by Public Domain shed light on the key players involved in this campaign and the strategies they used to persuade the public in their favor. Among other themes, their campaign relentlessly portrays the federal government as an absentee landlord that mismanages land and cuts off access to the public domain. Utah, on the other hand, is painted as a benevolent force working to ensure public land access. The campaign — like the lawsuit it was meant to support — seeks one principal outcome: federal land disposal. Utah has identified some 18.5 million acres of federal land within the state’s boundaries that are currently administered by the Bureau of Land Management on behalf of all Americans — and it wants those lands for itself.

Penna Powers, meanwhile, landed a big pay day. The contract between the PR firm and PLPCO runs until 2029 for a total cost of some $2.6 million.

In response to queries, PLPCO in a written statement said that,“Utah believes in protecting access to public lands for all users of all ages and abilities, and we are committed to actively managing these lands for generations to come. Utah is home to five national parks, several national monuments, and many other natural wonders. The state has always welcomed, and will continue to welcome visitors from around the world to visit and enjoy all that this great state has to offer.” Penna Powers did not respond to requests for comment.

Meanwhile, critics of the Utah PR effort called it a “propaganda” campaign meant to mislead Utahns and the general public.

“Penna Powers worked hand-in-hand with the state of Utah to craft a misleading message about the state’s land grab lawsuit,” said Kate Groetzinger, communications manager at the Center for Western Priorities, a conservation group. “They made it seem like forcibly taking ownership of public lands would help recreationists and ranchers, when the real goal of this lawsuit was to increase extraction and privatize national public lands in Utah. This campaign is the very definition of propaganda — misleading political messaging paid for by taxpayers.”

UTAH’S EFFORT TO take control of federal lands kicked off in earnest in 2012, when Utah’s then-Governor Gary Herbert signed into law the Utah Transfer of Public Lands Act, demanding state control of the majority of federal public land in Utah. “This is only the first step in a long process,” Herbert said at the time, “but it is a step we must take.” In 2018, Senator Mike Lee, a leading proponent of the land transfer movement, shared similar sentiments during a speech to the conservative Sutherland Institute in Salt Lake City. The campaign for land transfer, he said, “will take years, and the fight will be brutal.” Indeed, just last week, Lee put forward a proposal in the GOP’s massive reconciliation bill that would force the sell off of millions of acres of federal land in the Western U.S.

Utah’s actions to seize control of federal land have only grown more aggressive as the years have progressed. In August last year, it filed a lawsuit directly with the Supreme Court seeking to strip federal ownership over some 18.5 million acres of BLM land within Utah. It claims these lands are “unappropriated,” a novel argument meant to create a legal distinction between national parks, forests and monuments, and large swaths of BLM land across the West. If successful, Utah’s lawsuit would deprive the vast majority of Americans of their ownership stake in such BLM lands. Tribal nations, meanwhile, have been staunch opponents of Utah’s lawsuit, which the Ute Indian Tribe described as an “existential threat” to the tribe and its reservation lands.

In January this year, the Supreme Court declined to hear Utah’s case. It remains unclear whether Utah will refile its lawsuit in lower court, but its efforts to seize federal land are a generational project.

Regardless, Utah, faces a major public opinion hurdle. A large majority of Western voters are opposed to the idea of state control over federal public lands, according to Colorado College’s annual polling. Even in Utah, some 57% of voters oppose public land transfers. That is where Penna Powers comes in. The firm worked to reshape public opinion in the state’s favor, with a focus on building support among Utah residents as well as key decision makers at the national level.

“The Stand for Our Land public education campaign is informing Utahns about the management of public lands, and how federal agencies are restricting access to public lands and ignoring local concerns,” wrote PLPCO in a statement. “The Bureau of Land Management closed over 2,000 miles of Utah roads on public lands in the past two years.”

A centerpiece of Penna Powers’ effort has been glossy videos that portray federal land agencies as an exclusionary force bent on keeping people off the public domain. In one video, Penna Powers and PLPCO hired a voice actor to portray a “disabled camper” in a wheelchair on a camping trip with her family. “Because of my disability I need to reach campsites in a motorized vehicle,” the actor said. “If I lose road access, I lose the ability to do something I love with my family. That’s why I think Utah should be managing Utah land.” The actor who was selected to voice the video does not appear to use a wheelchair or mobility aid in social media posts and other records reviewed by Public Domain. PLPCO appears to have had many of those involved in its video shoots also sign NDAs. A talent agent for the actor in question did not provide comment at the time of publication.

Redge Johnson, the executive director of PLPCO, was particularly keen on the “disabled camper” storyline, among others. He asked about a video that combined the “disabled camper” story with one about an off-highway vehicles business. “I really want that video in the folder, it tells a great story,” he wrote to Penna Powers staffer Allyse Christensen, who worked on the Stand for Our Land campaign.

Others, like disability community advocate Syren Nagakyrie, said Utah’s use of a “disabled camper” storyline to promote its political agenda is “disingenuous.”

WESTERN PUBLIC LANDS ARE HABITAT FOR ARIDLAND BIRDS This map shows the cumulative range for 30 aridland bird species in North America, with the vast majority of that range falling within the boundaries of federal and state public lands. Source: Aridland bird data from Bird Conservation Regions, Bird Studies Canada and NABCI. Public lands map from GISGeography.com.

Trump appointee, a Jackson Hole consultant, ID’d pitfalls of #Wyoming managing its federal land: Tapped for Bureau of Land Management post, Brenda Younkin will report directly to agency’s acting director, Jon Raby — Mike Koshmrl (WyoFile.com)

Brenda Younkin was tapped for a Bureau of Land Management post in the Trump administration. (photo illustration by Tennessee Watson/WyoFile)

Click the link to read the article on the WyoFile website (Mike Koshmrl):

June 20, 2025

Not unlike the current moment, roughly a decade ago a political push to do away with large swaths of federal lands in the West was gaining steam.

Utah Republican U.S. Rep. Jason Chaffetz ran a bill at the time that would have transferred 3.3 million acres of the federal estate to state ownership. The bill was later pulled, and the representative resigned his congressional seat after the proposal whipped hunters and anglers into a fury.

The movement crossed state lines into Wyoming. During state lawmakers’ 2015 general session in Cheyenne, a legislative committee drafted a bill that demanded the transfer of vast tracts of federal lands to Wyoming. Later, the measure was amended to require a study of Wyoming managing federal lands, not owning them.

The Wyoming Office of State Lands and Investments was ultimately given $75,000 for the study, and it picked Jackson-based Y2 Consultants to complete the analysis. When the 357-page study was completed the following fall, state land managers and lawmakers were warned that they lacked staff and resources to take over control of 25 million acres of Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Reclamation property that fell within state boundaries.

A two-track road cuts through Bureau of Land Management property west of Pinedale in April 2024. Such tracts of public land could be on the chopping block because of federal budget reconciliation text that seeks to sell between 2-3 million acres of the federal estate. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)

“Ultimately, without significant changes to federal law, the greatest challenge would be that the state would be inheriting the same bureaucratic maze of overlapping, entwined, often conflicting federal mandates established in the labyrinth of laws and directives laid out by Congress,” the 2016 Y2 Consultants report stated. “The land management trials, conundrums, and conflicts encountered would largely be the same for the state that exist under present [federal] management.”

The first author listed on the report, a slot that typically denotes the lead, was Brenda Younkin, a natural resource specialist who co-founded Y2 Consultants with her husband, Zia Yasrobi.

On Wednesday, Politico’s E&E News publicized that Younkin had been appointed by the Trump administration and had started working in a senior advisor post at the Bureau of Land Management, where she’d report to its acting director, Jon Raby. Trump’s first pick to lead the BLM, Colorado oil and gas advocate Kathleen Sgamma, withdrew her bid after it was revealed that she’d written a memo expressing “disgust” for “President Trump’s role in spreading misinformation that incited” the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

WyoFile was unable to reach Younkin for an interview Friday, but an auto-response from her Y2 Consultants email address confirmed a “leave of absence” because of a new gig with the U.S. Department of the Interior, the BLM’s government parent.

The Bureau of Land Management’s 245 million surface acres, depicted in yellow in this map, account for about 10% of the United States’ landmass. (Library of Congress)

According to her biography and past interviews, Younkin has worked in the public lands and ranching sphere her entire career.

In statements made to the Cowboy State Daily, U.S. Sens. Cynthia Lummis and John Barrasso both lauded Younkin’s appointment.

“The more Wyoming voices we can have in the room, the better off we will all be,” Barrasso told the outlet.

Younkin joins a handful of other Wyoming residents who’ve gone to work for the Trump administration’s Interior Department via political appointments, or who have been nominated for positions.

Wyoming Game and Fish Director Brian Nesvik speaks at a Game and Fish Commission meeting in Douglas in September 2024. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)

In early February, former Wyoming Game and Fish Department Director Brian Nesvik was nominated to directthe U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, though four months later his appointment has still not cleared the Senate’s confirmation process. Cyrus Western, a former Republican statehouse representative, was picked to helm the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 8 office, based in Denver. Cheyenne attorney Karen Budd-Falen was also selected as the acting deputy secretary under Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.

Last, southwestern Wyoming big game hunting advocate Josh Coursey was appointed to a Fish and Wildlife Service post, pulling him away from the Muley Fanatic Foundation, which he co-founded. That group has since gone on record opposing a provision expected to be yoked into the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” that would mandate the sale of an estimated 2-3 million acres of federal land in 11 western states.

“Public lands need to stay in public hands and the Muley Fanatic Foundation opposes anything or anyone that threatens our lands that we hold dear for personal use,” President and CEO Joey Faigle told WyoFile in a written statement. “The public land sales being included in the reconciliation needs to stop now.”

If the public land sale mandates don’t stop, the amount of land that Younkin, the Jackson Hole consultant, will be tasked with overseeing at the Bureau of Land Management will shrink.

The disposal language in the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources legislative text demands selling between 0.5% and 0.75% of the BLM and U.S. Forest Service’s 438 million surface acres within the next five years. Although just a fraction of the agencies’ overall holdings, it’d translate to doing away with public lands that collectively add up to an area no smaller than Yellowstone National Park.

War, Inflation and Now #Drought Are Hitting Global Food Supplies: Staples including wheat, beef and coffee are all being affected by the lack of rainfall. In some cases, prices are climbing to record highs — The New York Times

Egeria Creek [May 2017] flows into the Yampa River. Photo/Allen Best

Click the link to read the article on The New York Times website (Somini Sengupta). Here’s an excerpt:

June 21, 2025

War, tariffs and inflation are not the only things driving up the price of food. Widespread drought is also looming over what people around the world eat. In Brazil, parched coffee farms have affected latte prices everywhere. In the Midwestern United States, years of poor rainshave led ranchers to cull cattle herds and have raised beef prices to their highest levels ever. In China, one of the nation’s key wheat-producing regions, the Yellow River Basin, is withering under unusually hot, dry conditions. Germany had its driest spring since 1931, though rains in recent weeks have allayed concerns about its wheat and barley crops. Ukraine and Russia, rivals on the battlefield, are also facing the threat of drought for their wheat crops. Both countries are breadbaskets for millions of people far and wide. Morocco, for instance, now in its sixth year of drought, has relied increasingly on wheat imports from Russia. Droughts are part of the natural weather cycle but are exacerbated in many parts of the world by the burning of fossil fuels, which is warming the world and exacerbating extreme weather. Droughts can be particularly risky as the production of important foods becomes increasingly concentrated. For example, much of the world’s coffee comes from Brazil, cacao from Ivory Coast and Ghana in West Africa, and corn from Brazil, China and the American Midwest…Around the world, most people get their calories from three staple grains — rice, wheat and corn — which means that weather hazards to places where they are produced can have big repercussions for food security. Bad weather in one or two of those regions can destabilize the global supply…

Sandwiches, instant noodles, rotis. Wheat, in all its forms, has become one of the world’s most commonly eaten grains, second only to rice. That makes it one of the most closely watched crops in the era of extreme weather. Wheat is also often closely guarded. Take India, for instance. Prompted by an intense heat wave in 2022, the Indian government banned wheat exports in order to stockpile it at home…

Summer barbecue season is approaching just as the price of beef has topped records. Ground beef in the United States is close to $6 per pound, and steak is nearly twice that…A few factors are driving the price rise, including soaring insurance costs for farmers and the abiding demand for beef. But central to the rising cost of beef is a drought that has stretched across the Midwestern United States over the past several years. The conditions have dried up a lot of grazing land. Cattle herd numbers are at their lowest in 70 years.

Navajo Dam operations update June 24, 2025

The San Juan River near Navajo Dam, New Mexico, Aug. 23, 2015. Photo credit: Phil Slattery Wikimedia Commons

From email from Reclamation (Conor Felletter):

June 23, 2025

The Bureau of Reclamation has scheduled an increase in the release from Navajo Dam from 350 cubic feet per second (cfs) to 450 cfs for Tuesday, June 24th, at 4:00 AM.

Releases are made for the authorized purposes of the Navajo Unit, and to attempt to maintain a target base flow through the endangered fish critical habitat reach of the San Juan River (Farmington to Lake Powell). The San Juan River Basin Recovery Implementation Program recommends a target base flow of between 500 cfs and 1,000 cfs through the critical habitat area. The target base flow is calculated as the weekly average of gaged flows throughout the critical habitat area from Farmington to Lake Powell.

This scheduled release change is subject to changes in river flows and weather conditions. If you have any questions, please reply to this message, call 970-385-6500, or visit Reclamation’s Navajo Dam website at https://www.usbr.gov/uc/water/crsp/cs/nvd.html

#California’s quest to turn a winter menace into a water supply bonus is gaining favor across the west — Matt Jenkins (Water Education Foundation)

Lake Mendocino, in Northern California’s wine country, was the proving ground for Forecast-Informed Reservoir Operations. (Source: California Department of Water Resources)

Click the link to read the article on the Water Education Foundation website (Matt Jenkins):

June 19, 2025

Western Water in-depth: For years, atmospheric rivers were a mystery. now, an innovative dam management approach is putting them to work

In December 2012, dam operators at Northern California’s Lake Mendocino watched as a series of intense winter storms bore down on them. The dam there is run by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ San Francisco District, whose primary responsibility in the Russian River watershed is flood control. To make room in the reservoir for the expected deluge, the Army Corps released some 25,000 acre-feet of water downstream — enough to supply nearly 90,000 families for a year.

In doing so, the Army Corps averted the possibility of a catastrophic flood. But almost as soon as the water headed downstream, the pendulum swung in the other direction. The weather turned dry, and the months that followed proved to be the driest on record in California up to that point. A year later, the reservoir became a drought-cracked mudflat. The local water supplier, Sonoma County Water Agency, was forced to reduce releases by 60 percent during the dry summer, impacting urban and agricultural water users downstream.

State officials were frustrated. Members of a drought task force created by then-Gov. Jerry Brown traveled to Lake Mendocino, tucked into the coastal wine country near Ukiah, to hold a press conference. An exasperated John Laird, the state resources secretary at the time, asked some of the Army Corps’ top brass what they’d been thinking when they sent so much water downstream.

“I just blurted it out,” says Laird, now a state senator. “It was one of those emperor-has-no-clothes moments, because somehow nobody was speaking up about this.”

It made for an uncomfortable moment. But the incident catalyzed a wide-reaching effort to manage dams more nimbly in the face of wildly variable weather, and particularly to meet the challenge of atmospheric rivers — intense winter storms that pummel California and other parts of the West with huge amounts of rain.

In the wake of the controversy at Lake Mendocino, the quest to harness the power of atmospheric rivers birthed a new water-management approach: Forecast-Informed Reservoir Operations, or FIRO. The concept has been tested on three dams in California since 2019, with programs in development for several other dams across the West.

By pairing FIRO with accurate forecasts of where those storms will hit and how much rain they’ll bring, dam operators can work in real time to not only reduce the risk of dangerous floods, but also capitalize on atmospheric rivers’ potential as a source of additional water for protection from drought.

Now, the concept is poised to improve operations at 39 more dams across the arid Southwest and another 71 throughout the rest of the country. That will vastly increase FIRO’s potential and help dam operators stand ready for the wilder weather that the future will likely bring: storms intensified — and made more erratic — by climate change.

Some 50 atmospheric rivers hit the West Coast of the U.S. during the 2024-25 season. (Source: Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes)

Atmospheric Rivers Enter the Lexicon

For decades, the “Pineapple Express,” a type of storm that feeds off warm tropical moisture, figured prominently in local weather lore. By the early 1990s, researchers realized that it was just one kind of a broader category of unique storms that take shape far out in the Pacific. In a 1994 research paper, Yong Zhu, now at North Carolina State University, and MIT’s late Reginald Newell, christened them atmospheric rivers.

According to a 2019 study, atmospheric rivers caused $5.2 billion in damage in Sonoma County over the preceding two decades and were responsible for 99.8 percent of all insured flood losses there. A single 1995 storm — the most damaging event in 40 years of record keeping in the West — inundated the town of Guerneville on the Russian River and caused $50 million in insured losses countywide. The study determined that atmospheric rivers are the primary driver of flood damage in the West.

These powerful plumes of water vapor — which, on average, carry 25 times the flow of the Mississippi River — deliver 30 to 50 percent of total annual precipitation in California.

“Atmospheric rivers are the hurricanes for the West Coast,” says Cary Talbot, the FIRO National Lead with the Army Corps’ Engineer Research and Development Center.

But when they fail to arrive, that can also have a big impact, leaving the state parched and reeling. Their influence isn’t limited to just California, either: In 2021, researchers Mu Xiao, now at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, and Dennis Lettenmaier, now at University of California, Los Angeles found that almost one third of snowpack in the Upper Colorado River Basin comes from snowfall brought by atmospheric rivers.

The Army Corps’ primary responsibility is the high-stakes task of controlling floods, or as the agency puts it, “flood risk management.” As a result, the Army Corps tends to be extremely risk averse, and it literally runs its dams by the book: Each of its dams has an individually formulated water control manual with flood control curves, more commonly known as “rule curves,” that are practically chiseled in stone.

“When those things are written, they go through a really rigorous (vetting) process because it’s what we are going to be graded on in the courts,” says Talbot. “When somebody sues us for how we operated, they’re going to look at the water control manual and say: ‘Did the operators follow the rules?’ So, water managers don’t really want to stray too far from what it says.”

Rule curves typically force operators to keep reservoir levels low during wet seasons so they can catch and hold back the rainfall from anticipated storms and reduce the impacts of flooding downstream. But if those storms veer off their predicted course, or dissipate before they arrive, operators can’t get back the water they’ve already released — exactly what happened at Lake Mendocino in 2012.

The public outcry over that incident, which would be followed by the driest three-year period on record until then, helped nudge the Army Corps toward a more flexible approach.

Flood-control releases in December 2012, followed by months of drought, sent reservoir levels in Lake Mendocino — shown here in December 2013 — plummeting. (Source: Sonoma Water)

“The disaster of a really bad drought in California focused congressional attention,” says Talbot. In 2015, Congress added a line in the Army Corps’ budget for a research-led Water Operations Technical Support program. “It wasn’t much money — it was really just $2 million to get it started — but the direction from Congress was to see if we can’t find a better balance between flood risk management and water supply, especially with respect to atmospheric rivers.”

The following year, the Army Corps modified its regulations to allow for the use of forecasts in operations planning. Actually incorporating that change into each dam’s water control manual, many of which are decades old, still required an administrative process that typically takes several years. But the announcement was a significant first step in the shift away from the hidebound rule curves that governed dam operations.

To make it all work, though, dam operators had to have weather forecasts that they could trust.

Decoding Atmospheric Rivers

As it happened, weather researchers were already on a quest to crack the mystery of how atmospheric rivers work. A key figure in the effort was Marty Ralph, who spent more than two decades as an atmospheric scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) beginning in 1992.

Marty Ralph, head of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes (CW3E), worked with colleagues to vastly improve the accuracy of atmospheric river forecasts. (Source: CW3E)

Ralph had begun studying cyclones off the U.S. West Coast in the mid-1990s. To get an up-close view of the storms in their spawning grounds far out at sea, he wheedled and cajoled the use of weather research aircraft from NOAA, NASA and the Air Force that sat idle following the busy summer hurricane season on the Gulf Coast. (At one point, Ralph experimented with — but ultimately gave up on — using a long-range surveillance drone called the Global Hawk, an $80-million-plus “hand-me-down,” as he puts it, from the Air Force to NASA.)

Ralph’s research focus gradually zeroed in on what would turn out to be atmospheric rivers. He didn’t read Zhu and Newell’s groundbreaking work on the phenomenon until 2003, but when he did, “the light bulb just went off, like, ‘Oh — that’s what we’re studying!’”

Ralph organized a series of annual “field campaigns” to learn more about atmospheric rivers and racked up more and more flight time. In 2013, he left NOAA to start the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes, or CW3E, at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. There, working with other researchers, he continued to research atmospheric rivers’ origins and behavior. But along the way, he says, “it became clear to me that we should be trying this as an operational program to help with forecasting” so that dam operators could have a more accurate real-time picture of individual storms’ paths and intensity.

Lake Becomes Proving Ground

Meanwhile, Lake Mendocino was emerging as the first test case for FIRO. At the time, Jay Jasperse was the chief engineer and director of groundwater management for Sonoma Water, which gets much of its supply from the lake. Despite the Army Corps’ new openness to using forecasts for more flexible dam operations, he says, there initially was “a lot of skepticism from some parties, and there was a lot of concern that the Army Corps was going to be incurring a lot of liability, and that this is going to negatively impact their flood risk management operations.”

During the 2020 water year, FIRO allowed an extra 19 percent, or 11,175 acre-feet of water, to be captured in Lake Mendocino. (Source: Sonoma Water)

“There were some spirited debates, and I think it took us a few years just to learn about each other and about each other’s agencies and how we worked and what our needs were,” Jasperse says. “But we all stuck with it, because the overall idea just made too much sense.”

Before FIRO was tried at Lake Mendocino, it went through an exhaustive modeling process to determine how it would affect dam operations. Gradually, Jasperse says, “we started seeing this was pretty doable, and the Army Corps started to get more comfortable with it.”

After extensive modeling, FIRO was first tested at Lake Mendocino during the 2020 water year and immediately proved its worth: That year, FIRO allowed an additional 11,175 acre-feet of water to be captured and stored there. That helped show that dams originally built principally for flood control could also be used to increase water storage and reliability.

“There’s ways to do both under the right conditions, and Lake Mendocino is proof of that,” says Patrick Sing, the lead water manager for the Army Corps’ San Francisco District. “When all the weather forecasts say it’s going to be dry, we can hold onto a lot of water instead of releasing it. We’re not impairing our flood management mission, and we’re doing our part to be stewards of a resource that’s very valuable in the event that the next year is a drought.”

Still, Sing notes that FIRO isn’t a silver bullet.

“You do all this research and modeling, but at the end of the day, it comes down to the reservoir operator to make a decision, and their agency is going to be held responsible for that decision,” he says. “If they’re not comfortable enough with FIRO, it’s probably not going to move forward. And they shouldn’t be forced to do it. They should be comfortable and convinced that it is safe to do.”

At Lake Mendocino, Sing says, “there’s been enough research and development and testing that we’re comfortable doing this.”

Forecast-Informed Reservoir Operations are currently underway or being actively assessed at 21 dams on the West Coast. (Source: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers)

Expanding FIRO

In 2022, FIRO-based operations were extended to Lake Sonoma, the other reservoir that supplies Sonoma Water within the Russian River watershed. And this year, FIRO was put in place on a preliminary basis at another dam, Prado Dam on the Santa Ana River in Southern California. Since 2020, FIRO has contributed to an additional 95,000 acre-feet of storage in the three reservoirs — an amount equal to just over 75 percent of Lake Mendocino’s total volume.

“We’re getting better and better,” says Jasperse, who now works as a consultant for both Sonoma Water and CW3E. “Everybody’s getting more and more experience every year.”

FIRO won’t work at all dams, especially in areas where forecasts are less reliable. In the summertime in the Deep South, for example, “pop-up thunderstorms can happen any day, any time,” says the Army Corps’ Talbot, who is based in Mississippi. “We’ve got a lot of moisture coming up from the Gulf, so it’s much harder to predict that kind of impactful rain here than it is in the West.”

But experience has shown that where FIRO is viable, it can provide additional water at a cost far lower than traditional approaches for boosting water supply, like increasing the size of a dam.

“Those are lengthy, expensive and complicated processes. It’ll take, in some cases, a decade or more to realize those benefits,” says Talbot. “FIRO is something that we literally can do today. We didn’t have to change the dam at all. This is just taking existing infrastructure and making it work better.”

At Prado Dam in Southern California, the Orange County Water District is expanding the possibilities of FIRO by pairing it with a groundwater recharge program to ensure that water that’s released from the dam isn’t lost. There, releases can be diverted into recharge basins downstream, where the water then soaks into the local aquifer.

Adam Hutchinson, the district’s recharge planning manager, says the agency anticipates getting an average of an extra 6,000 acre-feet per year through its FIRO operations. That’s not a lot of water, but it makes a big difference. The water retailers in the district’s service area rely on groundwater for the majority of their water supply, but they still have to import about 15 percent from Northern California and the Colorado River, at a cost of more than $1,000 per acre foot.

“So for that 6,000 acre-feet that we hope to get,” he says, “that’s $6 million a year that we’re saving by putting this free water in the ground.”

“AR Recon” flights to improve the accuracy of atmospheric river forecasts, which have been carried out from California and Hawaii for years, are now also being launched from Guam and Japan. (Source: U.S. Air Force 403rd Wing)

More Dams on the Radar

While FIRO is currently in place at just three dams, it is on the brink of a dramatic expansion. Earlier this year, two more dams — both significantly larger than any at which FIRO is currently in place — were added to the roster of potential FIRO sites: The Yuba Water Agency’s New Bullards Bar on the Yuba River, and Lake Oroville, the 3.5-million-acre-foot flagship of the State Water Project on the Feather River. A group of federal and state agencies and CW3E completed a final viability assessment at the two dams. The California Department of Water Resources and Yuba Water are now contemplating what steps to take to put FIRO into practice at those facilities. (In 2019 a more limited program, often referred to as “FIRO Lite,” went into operation at the federal Bureau of Reclamation’s Folsom Dam, on the American River just upstream of Sacramento.)

FIRO-implementation efforts are also in progress for several other dams: Seven Oaks, upstream of Prado on the Santa Ana River; a system of 14 dams in Oregon’s Willamette Valley; and Howard Hanson Dam near Seattle.

And now, FIRO is about to get a much bigger boost. In May, the Army Corps completed an initial evaluation of the suitability of FIRO at each of the 593 flood-control dams under its authority nationwide. It found that implementing FIRO is promising at 110 of those, including 39 across the Southwest. Another 299 dams nationwide may have potential as candidates for FIRO, although they face some significant barriers to implementation.

The Army Corps is now moving forward on two more-detailed rounds of evaluation on the 110 top-tier dams. Then, beginning in 2027, it will move toward implementing FIRO at those with the most potential.

The biggest impediment to more widespread implementation of FIRO remains a lack of accurate forecasts in parts of the country that don’t experience atmospheric rivers.

“The most common reason it’s not going to work is forecast skill” — essentially, accuracy, says Talbot. “That’s the leading factor for eliminating dams in the screening process.”

In the West, the effort to improve forecasts only continues to advance. In December 2023, then-President Biden signed the Atmospheric River Reconnaissance, Observations and Warning Act, which had been introduced by California’s senior U.S. senator, Alex Padilla. The law called for what has become known as the AR Recon aerial surveillance program, led by Ralph and Vijay Tallapragada of the National Weather Service, to be expanded throughout the full winter season. The past two years, AR Recon carried out 107 reconnaissance flights across the Pacific, flying not only out of California and Hawaii, but Guam and Japan, as well.

“The farther West we go, the greater the lead time improvement we get” in forecasting, says Ralph. “We’ve been able to improve the forecast of extreme precipitation in California by about 12 percent just by adding the (AR Recon) data. That’s the equivalent of 10 years of the typical process of improving forecasts through research — so we’re buying a decade of advances just by adding these data.”

The Army Corps’ Talbot says those strides forward are welcome news for dam operators.

“If you take a water manager and you give them three extra days of lead time, they can do a lot with that. Water managers always tell me, ‘Look, you give me a weather crystal ball and I’ll manage water better,’” he says.

“As long as we keep the aircraft flying and people advancing on the science and the meteorological wizardry, these water managers are getting closer and closer to that crystal ball.”

Reach Writer Matt Jenkins at mjenkins@watereducation.org.

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Aspinall Unit operations update June 23, 2025: 700 cfs in the Black Canyon

From email from Reclamation (Conor Felletter):

June 23, 2025

Today, Monday, June 23^rd at noon MT, the releases from Crystal Dam will increase to 1,650 cfs. On Tuesday, June 24^th at 9am MT, the scheduled releases from Crystal Dam will increase to 1,750 cfs. Releases are currently at 1,550 cfs. This release change is intended to meet the baseflow target in light of rapidly declining tributary flows. Reclamation will evaluate the need for further release increases in the coming days based on updated forecasts.

Gunnison River flows in the Black Canyon/Gunnison Gorge are currently ~500 cfs and are anticipated to increase to approximately 700 cfs. Gunnison Tunnel diversions remain at 1025 cfs.

Releases are made for the authorized purposes of the Aspinall Unit, and to attempt to maintain a target base flow through the endangered fish critical habitat reach of the Gunnison. Future release changes will be determined based on changes in tributary flows and weather

New #ColoradoRiver plan spreads the pain, shares water based on reality of shrinking flows — AZCentral.com #COriver #aridification

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

June 18, 2025

Key Points

Arizona officials present details of a new proposal to share future shortages on the Colorado River.

The “supply-driven” solution would base allocations on the river’s actual flows, not on storage in the reservoirs.

Upper Basin states say the plan has problems, but Gov. Katie Hobbs insisted Arizona will defend its river allocation and demand other states take cuts.

Negotiators for the seven states arguing over diminished Colorado River water are discussing an option they hope will end their deadlock, one that Arizona officials say would focus less on who gets what and more on what the river can realistically provide. They’re calling it the “supply-driven” solution, Arizona Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke said, and it links the required water deliveries out of Glen Canyon Dam to what might naturally be flowing downstream at Lees Ferry if the dam weren’t there. The Rocky Mountain states upstream from there would have to let that amount pass, and the Southwestern states would have to live within its limits. It’s intended as a fair way of adapting — and shrinking — the region’s use of a river whose flow was once thought to exceed 15 million acre-feet of water a year but, in the last 25 years, has averaged 12.4 million…

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

A Colorado State University climate scientist recently projected that the region’s warming trajectory could drop the flow to 10 million by the end of this century — a plunge of about a third of the water that the first state negotiators agreed to divvy up with the 1922 Colorado River Compact…

So far, agreement about what’s fair has appeared distant. The Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada have the bulk of the region’s population and farm production, and have fully developed and then started to cut back on the half of the river’s flow that the compact awarded them. The Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming have not fully developed their share of the water — a share that no longer fully exists. They have balked at cutting their existing uses to meet the compact’s requirement that they send at least half of the river’s flow of a century ago now that a changing climate has exposed the folly of the compact’s numbers. The supply-driven model would generally mandate a flow past Lees Ferry to the Southwestern states equal to a rolling three-year average of the natural flow that the mountain snowmelt provides, Buschatzke said. There would be upper and lower bounds on that number, to account for needs such as protecting reservoir levels that are safe for Glen Canyon and Hoover dam operations. Those bounds are as yet unidentified.

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

Once a Showcase of American Optimism and Engineering, Hoover Dam Faces New Power Generation Declines: #LakeMead is shrinking, threatening a big drop in electricity from the #ColoradoRiver basin’s biggest dam — Brett Walton (circleofblue.org) #COriver #aridification

Water level of Lake Mead behind the Hoover Dam July 2023. Photo credit: Reclamation

Click the link to read the article on the Circle of Blue website (Brett Walton):

June 23, 2025

The long-term drying of the American Southwest poses a gathering and measurable threat to hydropower generation in the Colorado River basin.

Should Lake Mead, the reservoir formed by Hoover Dam, continue to shrink, a substantial drop in the dam’s hydropower output is on the horizon.

The diminished state of the lake and the potential severe drop in electricity supply illustrate the consequences of a warming climate for the region. Built in the throes of the Great Depression, Hoover was the signature project of a country displaying its grit and engineering prowess to tame the West’s mightiest rivers to irrigate farmland and build cities. Today the dam is an aging asset buffeted by hydrological change and generating half the power that it did just a generation ago.

According to the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that manages the basin’s large dams, if Lake Mead falls another 20 feet, Hoover Dam’s capacity to generate electricity would be slashed by 70 percent from its current level.

If there is a reason not to be especially alarmed it’s this: Hoover is just a small piece of the region’s electric power infrastructure. Federal dams along the Colorado River account for just over 4 percent of Arizona’s generating capacity, for instance.

Still, the cheap electricity is a lifeline for tribes and small rural electric providers. And the dam’s ability to be quickly turned on and off helps regulate the peaks and troughs of electricity demand. Curtailing this source of inexpensive electricity would raise the cost of power in the region while also challenging the integration of renewable energy into the electric grid.

A hydropower shortfall will be “bad news for us,” said Ed Gerak, executive director of the Irrigation and Electrical Districts Association of Arizona, which represents power providers that receive federal hydropower from Colorado River dams.

Lake Mead now sits at an elevation of 1,055 feet. The break point for hydropower is 1,035 feet. At that level, 12 older turbines at Hoover that are not designed for low reservoir levels would be shut down, Reclamation said. Five newer turbines installed a decade ago would continue to generate power.

The threat is real, especially as this year’s runoff forecast for the basin continues to worsen. Every month, Reclamation updates its projection of reservoir levels over the next two years. The June update shows a 10 percent chance that Lake Mead breaches 1,035 feet in spring 2027.

In a worst-case scenario, the breach would happen at the end of 2026, just when current operating rules for Lake Mead and Lake Powell expire. The modeling indicates a similar chance that Lake Powell drops low enough in 2027 that Glen Canyon Dam, another key hydropower asset in the basin, stops producing electricity.

The probability that Lake Mead drops that far is small and laden with uncertainties about weather and water use. But it is large enough that Hoover’s power customers are signaling their concern.

Reclamation, for its part, acknowledges the problem at Hoover and is evaluating its options. The agency estimates that replacing the 12 turbines would cost $156 million.

“Reclamation is assessing the cost-benefit analysis of replacing some of the older style turbines and the timeline for installation,” the agency wrote in a statement to Circle of Blue. “Ordering new turbines is a lengthy process as they have to be designed, model tested, built and ultimately installed.”

The dozen older turbines are not designed to operate at low reservoir levels. Dams like Hoover, which was completed in 1936, function based on the principle of hydraulic head, which is the difference in elevation between the top of the reservoir and the intake pipes for the dam’s powerhouse. When the hydraulic head drops, so does the water pressure. That can trigger the formation of air bubbles in the water, which can gouge and damage the turbines in a process called cavitation.

The five turbines that would not be shut down are low-head units that can accommodate lower reservoir levels. Installed a decade ago at a cost of $42 million in response to a previous rapid decline in Lake Mead, they can operate down to 950 feet. (One of those five turbines is currently offline, and Reclamation does not have an estimate for when it will resume operating.)

Hoover Dam, at the center of the photo, forms Lake Mead, which is currently just 31 percent full. Photo © J. Carl Ganter/Circle of Blue

Hoover is already hobbled by low water. Power generation in 2023 was roughly half the output of 2000, the last year that Lake Mead was effectively full.

When Lake Mead is full, Hoover has a generating capacity of 2,080 megawatts, equivalent to a large coal-fired or nuclear power plant. Today its capacity is 1,304 MW. If the dozen older turbines go offline, it will drop again, to 382 MW.

These declines in hydropower generation have been felt by the customers who buy Hoover Dam’s electricity, Gerak said. In a shortfall, they have to buy market-rate electricity. Depending on the season and power demand, market rates can be considerably more expensive.

Eric Witkoski is the executive director of the Colorado River Commission of Nevada, which manages the state’s allocation of Hoover’s power. Witkoski said that rural electric companies in his state have a higher share of their electricity coming from the dams and would be most affected by a shortfall.

The value of Hoover’s electricity is measured not just in raw megawatts and dollars. It is a flexible power source that can be ramped up and down to match the region’s daily and seasonal rhythms. Energy use rises in summer afternoons when air conditioning units are blasting and electricity-consuming household chores are at hand. It falls at night when cooler air prevails and washing machines are silent.

“The beauty of hydropower is that it’s great for helping to stabilize and regulate the grid,” Gerak said.

IEDA and other interest groups are pursuing a number of fixes. They are encouraging Reclamation and its parent agency the Interior Department to use federal infrastructure funds to install new low-head turbines or to request appropriations from Congress.

They are writing their congressional representatives in support of the Help Hoover Dam Act, a bill that would unlock some $50 million in ratepayer funds that had been set aside for pension benefits for federal employees. The trade groups claim that Congress funds the pension benefits through other means and that the funds could be spent on dam upgrades if Reclamation was given the authority to do so.

They also want to set up an organization modeled after the National Parks Foundation that can accept donations for dam operations and maintenance, including the visitor center, which is supported by power sales.

These fixes will take time. But as Lake Mead declines, the urgency to achieve them will intensify.

Eddie Vedder — “No More”

The Runoff | Dismal flows, funding thaws & big decisions ahead — Heather Sackett (The Runoff)

Roaring Fork River 2024. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism

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

June 20, 2025

Dismal spring runoff worse than forecast

Peak river flows have come and gone on the Western Slope, with most rivers seeing below normal peaks and currently running well below last year’s levels. According to Aspen Journalism’s real time local streamflow tracker, streams are flowing at 42-63% of normal in the Roaring Fork Watershed.
Streamflows peaked on June 3 or June 4 with the Roaring Fork River flowing as much as 3,050 cfs at Glenwood Springs, which was 87% of average peak flow, and the Colorado River running up to 11,400 cfs near the stateline the next day, which was 64% of normal.As of June 18, the Colorado River is running at about 4,370 cfs at Glenwood Springs, or 43% of average, down from 5,640 cfs last week and from last year’s 13,000 cfs, while the Colorado flowed at 5,360 cfs near the Colorado-Utah stateline, or 33% of average.For more river data, check out Aspen Journalism’s streamflow tracker.According to the National Resources Conservation Service’s June 1 Water Supply Outlook report, statewide snowmelt was tracking about 10 days earlier than average and the streamflow forecasts for all Western Slope basins were below average and down from the April forecasts.

The low streamflows are sure to affect reservoir levels. According to a June 11 update from Tim Miller, a hydrologist with the Bureau of Reclamation, Ruedi Reservoir on the Fryingpan River is no longer forecast to fill. The seasonal inflow forecast for June is 66% of average, a 34,000-acre-foot drop from the April forecast. Miller said the plan is to keep releases to a minimum until the third week in July when the Cameo call is expected to come on. The Aspen Yacht Club boat ramp should be useable through the end of August.

According to the June forecasts from Reclamation, spring runoff into Lake Powell is forecast to be 45% of average, down from April’s forecast of 67%. Lake Powell is currently about 33% full.

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

The 1965 Flood: How #Denver’s Greatest Disaster Changed the City: Sixty years ago, a flood swept through the Mile High City — Westword.com

Cars piled up on West Alameda Avenue Denver Public Library

Click the link to read the article on the Westword website (Alan Prendergast). Here’s an excerpt:

June 17, 2025

Those who lived through it will tell you that the spring of 1965 was not like other springs in eastern Colorado. From Fort Collins to La Junta, the land shuddered and groaned, afflicted with mini-earthquakes and baby twisters, freak hailstorms and gale-force winds. But to say people should have paid attention is to wrap yourself smugly in half a century of hindsight. At the time, the bad winds and unfriendly skies were seen as mere anomalies, a little Wild West weather, nothing more. Nobody could anticipate what was coming because there had been nothing like it around here for generations, and the past was not much studied in these parts. Yes, it was wet, but after three years of drought, the farmers welcomed the rain. June arrived gray and damp, more like a New York November than the parade of dry, sunny days and mild nights the citizens of Denver had come to expect. A cold front from the Northeast butted against the Front Range and camped out, entwined with a flow of warm, humid air oozing up from the Gulf of Mexico. The unholy coupling went on for days, blotting out the sun and generating bursts of what the meteorologists called “orographic precipitation.” A few parched burgs got hosed. For the most part, though, the bank of dark thunderclouds just sat there over the mountains, swollen and ominous. Then the signs, the portents, became too violent to ignore…

The main event came on Wednesday, June 16, starting at about half past one in the afternoon. It began on the southern edge of Douglas County, with a hard rain and a tornado that ripped through the tiny town of Palmer Lake, peeling the roofs off thirty houses like so many soup-can lids. The twister scooped up water from the lake and dumped it into the houses, mixed with frogs, fish and gravel…Then it went away. But the rain kept coming. The rain was torrential. It was record-busting. It was biblical…It was no longer simply a flood. It had leapt in rank to a hundred-year flood, or even a five-hundred-year or thousand-year model, a millennial event. State patrol officers reported a wall of water estimated to be twenty feet high headed for Littleton, carrying in its wake a tangle of trees, asphalt, cars and other debris, with a second crest not far behind…It would be the darkest night in Denver’s history, a night of destruction far exceeding anything the city had ever known. The ’65 flood claimed 21 lives and resulted in property losses statewide estimated at $543 million — adjusted for inflation, that’s more than $4 billion in 2015 money — with the worst damage in the Denver metro area. Other floods in the state’s history have resulted in a greater loss of life; the Big Thompson flash flood in 1976 killed 143 people, while the death toll from a 1921 flood in Pueblo has been set as high as 1,500 people. But no natural disaster has had a more profound or lasting impact on state policy — or in shaping the Denver we know today…

The flood ravaged hundreds of homes and all but obliterated dozens of businesses; many never recovered. But it also triggered a painful re-examination of a century of haphazard growth and myopic planning, during which the city had abused and poisoned its main waterway and ignored the communities on its banks. The disaster became a trigger for long-delayed flood-control projects, ambitious urban-renewal plans and a bitter diaspora for longtime residents of Auraria…It was also the start of a renaissance along the South Platte itself. What was once the city’s greatest eyesore is now its showcase. But the transformation of the river didn’t occur overnight, or even over a decade. It took the determination of many officials, businesses, philanthropists and volunteers, as well as a still-evolving discussion of what the city lost — and found — in the flood.

The Colfax Viaduct during the 1965 flood of the South Platte River. Denver Public LIbrary

A welding company at West 11th Avenue and Zuni Street. Denver Public Library

Trains at 14th St and South Platte River June 19, 1965. Photo via Westword.com

Could data center boom threaten #Colorado’s water supply and #climate goals?: ‘Arms race’ to build more data centers is boosting economic impact, along with power and cooling needs — The #Denver Post

Steam rises above the cooling towers in The Dalles data center in Oregon (Google, 2020).

Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:

June 5, 2025

On Aurora’s eastern edge, where the bustle of metro Denver fades to farms, the first building of what will become the state’s largest data center stands behind a wrought-iron fence. In another section of the 65-acre campus, front-end loaders are at work preparing for the foundation of another building. Seventeen miles west, in a dusty industrial nook of northern Denver, workers on a recent day scattered across a huge pit dug into the earth to lay the foundation for that city’s newest data center. The two construction sites offer a glimpse into what a predicted boom in Colorado’s data center industry may look like as the industry expands exponentially nationwide to meet the needs of Americans’ increasingly online lives — and to provide the computing power demanded by artificial intelligence. The potential growth — and repeated proposals for state incentives to expedite that development — are creating concerns that the centers’ required power and cooling needs could keep Colorado from meeting its climate goals and drain already-stretched water resources…

Already, an “absolute arms race” among data center developers has prompted the state’s largest electricity provider to stop offering lower rates for the facilities, according to Xcel Energy executives. If all of the data centers’ requests to the utility for power were to come to fruition, Xcel would need to double its current generating power. When completed, the Aurora data center will be a 160 megawatt hyperscale facility that, at max capacity, could consume as much power as 176,000 homes. The northern Denver data center, once completed in the Elyria-Swansea neighborhood, could use a maximum of 805,000 gallons of water a day for cooling — the same as 16,100 Denverites’ average daily indoor water use. Regulators, environmental advocates and data center representatives all say Colorado faces a critical moment: Can the state balance the desire from some government leaders for the economic development brought by data centers with Colorado’s climate goals and water realities? And can it do that while protecting electric customers from bearing the costs of the burgeoning industry?

Ted Cooke tapped to run Bureau of Reclamation amid pivotal #ColoradoRiver talks — Alex Hager (KUNC.org) #COriver #aridification

The Central Arizona Project canal carries water through Phoenix in 2019. The project’s former general manager, Ted Cooke, was recently nominated to run the top federal agency for the Colorado River. Those who have worked with Cooke described him as a qualified expert. Ted Wood/The Water Desk

Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):

June 17, 2025

This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC and supported by the Walton Family Foundation.

President Donald Trump has tapped longtime water manager Ted Cooke to be the next commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The nomination, submitted Mondayto the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, attempts to fill a pivotal role at the top federal agency for Western rivers, reservoirs and dams.

If confirmed, Cooke will become the main federal official overseeing Colorado River matters. His nomination comes at a tense time for the river. The seven states that use its water appear deadlocked in closed-door negotiations about sharing the shrinking water supply in the future.

Cooke will likely try to push those state negotiators toward agreement about who should feel the pain of water cutbacks and when. If they can’t reach a deal ahead of a 2026 deadline, the federal government can step in and make those decisions itself.

Cooke has spent most of his lengthy career with the Central Arizona Project, which brings Colorado River water to the Phoenix area. He first joined the agency in 2003, according to his LinkedIn page. He climbed the ranks and served as CAP’s general manager from 2015 to 2023.

Ted Cooke and Tom Buschatzke: Photo credit: Arizona Department of Water Resources

Water experts across the Colorado River basin, including some who have worked with him in the past, told KUNC they regard Cooke as a qualified technical expert. Sharon Megdal, whose tenure on CAP’s board of directors overlapped with Cooke’s time as general manager, said she had “great admiration” for Cooke.

“He’s thorough, he’s deliberative, he looks for solutions, and boy, we need to find solutions right now,” said Megdal, who now directs the Water Resources Research Center at the University of Arizona. “My observation of seeing him in action in tough situations shows that he’ll keep working until a resolution is reached or a solution is achieved, and I think that’s what we need now.”

John Entsminger, Nevada’s top water negotiator, called Cooke’s appointment a “great choice,” and cited his work in shaping the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan. If confirmed, Cooke will likely be in the same negotiating rooms as Entsminger.

“There are times when [the Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner] has to level pretty realistic threats at everybody,” Entsminger said. There’s also times when they have to be the mediator… I think Ted has both of those skills. I’ve seen him be pretty pointed, and I’ve seen him drive compromise.”

The seven states working on the next set of rules for managing the Colorado River are currently split into two caucuses – the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico and the Lower Basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada.

The appointment of Cooke, a longtime Arizonan, could upset some on the other side of that divide. The Central Arizona Project, his former employer, is generally among the first entities to lose water under any plan for cutbacks.

Eric Kuhn is the former general manager of the Colorado River District. The taxpayer-funded agency was founded to keep water flowing to the cities and farms of Western Colorado. He said Cooke is qualified, but added “the nomination of someone from Arizona is interesting at a time when the Lower Division and the Upper Division states are far off.”

“I assume that he would recuse himself from decisions that could affect the CAP – which is just about any decision in the basin,” Kuhn wrote to KUNC. “None the less, his nomination is a plus for Arizona and the Lower Division States.”

Negotiators from Colorado and New Mexico declined to comment, and negotiators from Wyoming and Utah did not get back to KUNC in time for publication. Chuck Cullom, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission and a former colleague of Cooke’s, also declined to comment.

The #ColoradoRiver “psst psst” scheme emerges into public view: the “Supply Driven” concept — John Fleck (InkStain.net) #COriver #aridification #GWCWTI2025

Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):

June 18, 2025

Arizona yesterday finally moved the super-secret idea at the heart of current Colorado River negotiations out of the shadows.

The idea is deceptively simple: base Lake Powell releases on a percentage of the three-year rolling average of the Colorado River’s estimated “natural flow” at Lee Ferry. Allocate water based not on a century-old hydrologic mistake, but rather based on what the river actually has to offer. It presents an attractive alternative to the increasingly baroque and unproductive shitshow that had taken over interstate negotiations.

It has the great virtue of each basin getting out of the other basin’s business – one clean, simple number. But establishing the right percentage remains the hard part. Make the percentage too high and the Upper Basin will have to cut users with pre-Compact water rights. Make the percentage too low and Lake Powell fills up while Central Arizona goes dry.

But some of the early modeling suggests that there may be a sweet spot where a combination of Lower Basin cuts along the lines of what the Lower Basin has already been willing to offer, combined with modest Upper Basin system conservation programs, might thread a needle that could allow the crafting of a compromise. This is very good news if the negotiators and the folks back home who have been egging them on can seize this opportunity to set aside parochial smallness and think at the basin scale.

The possibility of a new approach was hinted at a CU Boulder’s Colorado River conference two weeks ago (I spent most of the conference hidden away watching and listening on Zoom through a covid haze, so it might have just been a fever dream, but I thought I heard the hints), and I’m told was a topic of some of the hallway conversations. But Tom Buschatzke’s reveal at yesterday’s meeting of the Arizona Reconsultation Committee (the closest thing we have to the much-needed C-SPAN for the Colorado River Basin) was the first public discussion of the hush-hush stuff that shouldn’t be quite so hush-hush given, y’know, 40 million of us stakeholders.

The full slide deck from the ~~Colorado River C-SPAN~~ Arizona Reconsultation Committee is useful. Reclamation’s Dan Bunk, for example, shared a slide slowing the latest “min probable” forecast (hilarious typo – “min problem” now corrected) showing the system tanking – dropping below minimum power pool at Powell – in winter 2026. The min probable forecast has been a useful guide lately, frankly, and the latest version is horrifying. (On any other day this would be the lead, and probably deserves its own post, but I try not to work on Wednesdays.)

We don’t have a lot of time here.

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

The latest seasonal outlooks through September 30, 2025 are hot off the presses from the #Climate Prediction Center

#Drought news June 19, 2025: Rain-related drought improvement dominated the High Plains, although some significant drought-related agricultural problems persisted

Click on a thumbnail graphic to view a gallery of drought data from the US Drought Monitor website.

Click the link to go to the US Drought Monitor website. Here’s an excerpt:

This Week’s Drought Summary

Active weather east of the Rockies led to significant reductions in drought coverage, especially in Florida, Texas, the northern and central Plains, and the upper Midwest. Amid early-summer showers, drought-free conditions largely continued from the southern Plains to the Atlantic Coast, excluding parts of Florida. Meanwhile, a Western hot spell—accompanied by short-term dryness across roughly the northern half of the region—was manifested in rapidly developing soil moisture shortages, declining prospects for summer water supplies, an elevated wildfire threat, a boost in irrigation demands, and increased stress on rain-fed crops…

High Plains

Rain-related drought improvement dominated the High Plains, although some significant drought-related agricultural problems persisted. By June 15, statewide topsoil moisture ratings on the High Plains ranged from 19% very short to short in Kansas to 50% in Wyoming, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Wyoming led the region on that date with 36% of its rangeland and pastures rated in very poor to poor condition, followed by Nebraska at 30%. Elsewhere, significant rain bypassed a few areas, including northeastern North Dakota, where moderate drought (D1) expanded…

Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending June 17, 2025.

West

In contrast to areas east of the Rockies, mostly dry weather dominated the West during the drought-monitoring period. Rapid surface drying and prematurely melting (or melted) snowpack had led to a variety of agricultural and water-supply issues and concerns. The Northwest has been especially dry in recent weeks, with topsoil moisture—as reported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture on June 15—rated 65% very short to short in Montana, along with 56% in Oregon and 45% in Washington. Unlike Oregon and Washington, Montana received some much-needed precipitation in mid-June—but continued to experience agricultural drought impacts. For example, Montana’s rangeland and pastures were rated 46% in very poor to poor condition on June 15. Among major production states, Montana led the nation on that date in very poor to poor ratings for spring wheat (28% of the crop) and barley (25%). Meanwhile, among several early-season Northwestern wildfires was the 3,600-acre Rowena Fire near The Dalles, Oregon, which has destroyed more than 150 structures, including several dozen homes…

South

Downpours in parts of Texas, the only state in the region still experiencing drought, delivered significant relief but also sparked flooding. In fact, deadly flash flooding struck the San Antonio area on June 12, when the official airport observation site received 6.11 inches—the second-wettest June day on record in that location, behind only 6.18 inches on June 3, 1951. San Antonio also set a one-hour station rainfall record for any time of year, with 3.98 inches falling from 3 to 4 am CDT. In drought-affected areas where heavier rain fell, some of the water was lost due to runoff, rather than absorption into parched soils. Additionally, groundwater and aquifer depletion in south-central Texas and neighboring areas has developed over many years—and will require much more than a singular heavy-rainfall event for replenishment…

Looking Ahead

Active weather will shift eastward during the next couple of days, as a hotter, drier pattern envelops the nation’s mid-section and quickly expands. Additional rainfall could total 1 to 3 inches across the eastern one-third of the United States, with some of the highest amounts expected from the lower Great Lakes States into northern New England. However, by the end of the week, any significant precipitation should be limited to parts of the North, with hot, dry weather dominating the remainder of the country. During the weekend, high temperatures should top 100°F in the western Corn Belt as far north as South Dakota, while readings will reach 95°F in nearly all areas of the Midwest. By Sunday, however, cooler air should spread as far east as the northern High Plains. During the transition to cooler weather, showers will develop from the Pacific Northwest to Montana. In the East, the first major heat wave of the season will persist into the first half of next week, with high temperatures near 100°F expected at lower elevations of the Atlantic Coast States from Georgia to southern New England. There are some indications that, by early next week, remnant tropical moisture once associated with Eastern Pacific Hurricane Erick could be entrained by a cold front, leading to an increase in shower activity from the southern Rockies into the upper Midwest.

The NWS 6- to 10-day outlook for June 24-28 calls for the likelihood of above-normal temperatures across much of the eastern half of the country, as well as the northern Rockies and environs, while cooler-than-normal conditions will be mostly limited to the Southwest. Meanwhile, near- or above-normal rainfall can be expected nationwide, with an area stretching from the Southwest into the Great Lakes States having the greatest likelihood of experiencing wet weather.

US Drought Monitor one week change map ending June 17, 2025.

Why #ClimateChange must be part of the #ColoradoRiver conversation — Allen Best (BigPivots.com) #COriver #aridification #GWCWTI2025

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

June 12, 2025

Brad Udall also makes the case that stakeholders in the basin can work together to solve this “really sticky, difficult issue”

Brad Udall was on a panel on June 5 at the annual Colorado River conference hosted by the Getches-Wilkinson Center at the University of Colorado-Boulder’s School of Law.

In his brief slot on the panel, Udall was first a cheerleader for Colorado River problem solving but reminding listeners that climate change was the elephant in the room, as several speakers later in the conference acknowledged.

Following are his remarks, lightly edited:

Given the policy expertise on this panel, I’m going to constrain my remarks to what’s going on in the climate space. I want to make the following two points and end with a heartfelt plea.

Within this basin, we can and have worked together to deal with a really sticky, difficult issue like climate change, to inform decision-making given the right partners, including the federal government at the table. Point two is our current climate trajectory is beyond awful, and that makes our challenge even worse.

So let me get to point one. We can, in fact, work together on a really difficult issue. In late 2006 Terry Fulp (then regional director of the Lower Colorado Basin Region for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation), pulled together six different sciences to consider how a changing climate would impact runoff, to inform the 2007 Interim Guidelines EIS. That effort became Appendix U.

Interestingly, it was the first time climate science was incorporated into a major EIS. It was not particularly controversial, and it was done during a Republican administration. It set the stage for future (Bureau of) Reclamation climate change efforts, efforts that have continued to this day.

But put an asterisk next to that.

The next year (2008), the Water Utility Climate Alliance was formed by eight major national water providers, and four of those were actually in our basin: the San Diego County Water Authority, Denver Water, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, and Southern Nevada Water Authority.

Members have led the way in figuring out how to adapt to climate change, including hiring certain staff to deal with this. And a hat tip for this to both Jim (Lochhead, former CEO of Denver Water) and Bill Hasencamp (Colorado River resources manager for Metropolitan).

Let me mention Reclamation again, because in 2009 Mike Connor, as a congressional staffer, wrote the SECURE Water Act, which made Reclamation perform a series of continuing climate change studies that are important to this day.

The lesson here is that when faced with such a daunting and unknown challenge, we actually can come together to discover scientific truths, but we need both federal and basic leadership to make this happen. Unfortunately, right now, one leg of this is seriously threatened, hence my asterisk.

My second point is about our awful moment, our global climate change trajectory. Hold on to your seats, because I’m going to make you uncomfortable. The world is on track for 3 degrees Celsius warming by 2100. This far exceeds anything agreed to by the 2015 Paris Climate Accords. And frankly, terrifies scientists. Three Celsius is a projected average global warming, but over land, that’s 5 Celsius. Converted into Fahrenheit, it’s nine Fahrenheit. Imagine every day, 9 Fahrenheit warmer. Highs, 9 Fahrenheit warmer. Lows, 9 Fahrenheit warmer. That’s a world unlike anything we currently know, and it’s going to challenge us all on every front.

And what’s worse about this, and not particularly appreciated, is that to get to 3 Celsius, we need large global greenhouse emissions to continue through this century to 2100. So, it will continue to warm significantly beyond 2100. Nine Fahrenheit is not where we end up. It’s kind of where we start.

This 3 Celsius outcome has been has been obvious for at least five years, as climate policy progress has stalled and even gone backwards. You know, post-Paris in 2015 there were all kinds of great net-zero by 2050 pledges by government and industry, including the fossil fuel industry.

But since then, the fossil fuel industry is trying to have it both ways. They love to tout these goals while at the same time talking to the shareholders about how they’re going to expand production in ways that are completely incompatible with 2 Celsius. And there are about 25 large, mostly national oil companies that are living this lie. Each one thinks they’re going to be the last one standing, selling a product that’s fundamentally incompatible with a stable climate. [ed. emphasis mine]

If you think we’ve got plenty of time to solve this, like 75 years, normally, I’d agree with you. But think about what’s happened over the past 35 years. Emissions have gone up 60% and continue to rise. With these bad actors and with banks willing to finance this and governments willing to subsidize it, what we’re witnessing is a monumental failure of both capitalism and governance.

Now, if this weren’t all bad enough for you, we now have an anti-knowledge president and his vile enablers systematically attacking all forms of knowledge using illegal and unconstitutional tactics. Nowhere has this been more true than in this climate science space, where they’re going after anything and everything that has the word climate on it, every federal agency.

I’ll mention three here in our basin that are really critical: NOAA, the USGS and Reclamation. All of that climate work is in the sights of these vile enablers and the administration. Hence that nasty asterisk again. This administration aims to stop all work at preventing future greenhouse gas emissions as well as our ability to adapt to coming changes.

And 95% of what I can say on this panel about this is not suitable for this room, but let’s call it what it is: it’s insanity what they’re doing.

There are also recent, strong signs that climate warming is speeding up. So 2023 and 2024 were 1.5 Celsius above a pre-Industrial average. And there, those two years have a trend line that’s twice what we’re used to seeing, and it has climate scientists flummoxed about the reasons behind it.

So why talk about global climate issues in a conference about the Colorado River? Well, it should be obvious. There is no way this makes for a better world in which we live, a better world in which the Colorado River flows, and if you live in that world, tell me how to join in la-la land, because I’d love to be there.

I’m now convinced that we need to plan for the worst possible climate future, and that’s somewhere around 10 million acre-feet runoff. But what it also means is taking a hard look at every existing agreement in the river. It either breaks them or substantially modifies them.

Let me get to my plea. These facts should be a call to action to everybody. Not only are we in a really deep climate hole, we’re continuing to dig. Absolutely the last thing we need is the federal government undercutting our efforts to meet the water supply challenges in this basin. There’s a term called the pessimism aversion trap. I’m going to urge you not to fall on that. And it’s the tendency to look the other way when confronted with dark realities. We still control our destiny, even if the solutions seem daunting.

So I’m going to ask for two things. One, obviously, fight back against all these harmful cutbacks to all aspects of our national climate effort, including the abandonment of science and scientists. Our federal allies are critical partners in this fight, and lasting damage has been done.

Second, some of you think that your job description doesn’t include worrying about reducing greenhouse gas emissions or what might happen at 2100 or beyond. I disagree. I plead with you to get serious about figuring out how to reduce the emissions of your organization and even your own personal emissions. I agree that individual actions aren’t going to solve this, but they send a really strong signal to everyone around us.

Finally, I need to apologize to and beg forgiveness our next speaker who deserves to follow someone far nicer than I am.

Project Managers to Investigate Uranium Mitigation Strategies at Chimney Hollow reservoir site — Northern #Colorado Water Conservancy District

Chimney Hollow Dam construction site. Photo credit: Northern Water

Click the link to read the release on the Northern Water website:

June 11, 2025

Chimney Hollow Reservoir Project managers are investigating strategies to mitigate the presence of mineralized uranium that is anticipated to be present in the first fill of the reservoir.

Mineralized uranium was detected in water samples taken from behind the cofferdam at the site following a series of major precipitation events in summer 2023. Further testing through 2024 identified the source of the minerals as being the granitic rock being quarried on the west side of the reservoir for placement in the rockfill shell of the asphalt-core dam. The low-level uranium minerals detected were not anticipated to be the result of leached material at the site.

During dam testing and first fill of the reservoir starting later this summer and continuing through 2027, no releases of water from Chimney Hollow Reservoir are expected. Ongoing monitoring of water quality at the reservoir will help managers develop a mitigation strategy that could include treatment and dilution with the significant sources of other water present in the infrastructure nearby.

As more information becomes available, Northern Water will share it with project participants, partner agencies and the public.

#Utah U.S. Senator Mike Lee revives public land sell-off bid: A parcel near you may one day be covered in houses — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Hidden Valley on National Forest land near Durango, Colorado. This is the type of parcel that could be on the auction block if Sen. Mike Lee gets his way. Photo credit: The Land Desk

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

June 13, 2025

It is not hyperbole to say we are living in dark times.

The U.S. President is about to hold a multi-million-dollar, taxpayer-funded, dictator-style military parade — for his frigging birthday. He activated the national guard and the marines to violently quell non-violent protests in Los Angeles. A U.S. senator was tackled, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed for deigning to ask a question of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during a press conference in which she admitted that federal troops were in Los Angeles not to stop rioting, but to “liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country.” Oh …

American democracy, morality, empathy, civil liberties, and the rule of law are all under attack, and the assailants are none other than the President, his administration, and a vast majority of congressional Republicans.

So when Sen. Mike Lee, the Jello-slurping Utah MAGA-ite, proposed selling off a mere one half of one percent of the nation’s public land, it might not seem worth squandering whatever remains of one’s outrage on. But we — as in the American people — stand to lose a lot from this latest push to take public lands out of the public’s hands.

Lee installed his amendment into the Energy and Natural Resources section of the so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill,” which proposes to rescind environmental protections on millions of acres in Alaska, slash royalty rates for oil and gas, and revive noncompetitive leasing, among other mining- and drilling-friendly provisions.

Lee’s provision would require the Interior Secretary to “select for disposal not less than .50% and not more than .75% of Bureau of Management land, and shall dispose of all right, title, and interest of the United States in and to those tracts” and the Agriculture Secretary shall select for disposal .50% to .75% of National Forest System.” Lands in national parks, monuments, or conservation areas, wilderness, wildlife refuges, and other protected areas would not be eligible for disposal.

While that’s a tiny fraction of the nation’s public lands, it adds up to between 2 million and 3.2 million acres, which on the upper end is about equivalent to Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments combined. The amendment would apply to every Western state except Montana, which was probably exempted in the hopes of winning Rep. Ryan Zinke’s support.

While the amendment is purportedly to free up more land for affordable housing, there is nothing in the text restricting the end use of the land after it’s sold or transferred. It only requires someone nominating a parcel to specify what they plan to use land for and the extent to which development of the tract would address local housing needs (including housing supply and affordability).

It would prioritize tracts for disposal that are:

nominated by states or local governments

adjacent to existing developed areas

have access to existing infrastructure

suitable for residential housing

would reduce checkerboard land patterns

inefficient to manage.

At first glance, this appears relatively harmless: It would merely consolidate private holdings on the urban fringe, and ease the management nightmares of checkerboard land-ownership. But this is where I urge you to think about your favorite public land-adjacent community and consider what might parcels might be prioritized for disposal.

I went through this exercise somewhat inadvertently recently as I rode my bike on a trail through a place known as Hidden Valley on National Forest land north of town. The valley floor is nearly perfectly level, having been carved by a glacier many millennia ago, and bounded on two sides by bone-white sandstone cliffs. Up until the fifth century A.D., Pueblo people inhabited and farmed the valley, and the area continues to hold cultural and archaeological significance. Grass — green during this time of year — covers much of the valley. Cattails, nourished by the waters of Falls Creek, jut from the northern end.

Durango folks come up here to walk and seek solace from the din of humanity. They walk and bike and in the winter even ski and snowshoe here and coexist — sometimes uneasily — with bears and mountain lions and deer and elk and even rattlesnakes.

That this tract of public land would be sold off for development is almost unthinkable. And yet, it fits all of the criteria: It is just a few miles from town, is sandwiched between existing residential areas, is easily accessible and quite buildable, and infrastructure is already in place. Durango is grappling with a severe housing affordability crisis and Hidden Valley could theoretically support hundreds of housing units, alleviating some pressure on the real estate market. Unthinkable to you and I, yes. But keep in mind that it would be the Trump administration calling the shots on this one.

There are hundreds of other Hidden Valley-like tracts of land across the West, pieces of public land near communities that provide all kinds of benefits to wildlife and humans and the ecosystem and solitude. And if Mike Lee has his way, 3 million acres of these special places would go on the auction block, ultimately to be covered with homes, affordable or otherwise, and other development.

The #ColoradoRiver Conclave — John Fleck (InkStain.net) #COriver #aridification #GWCWTI2025

The Colorado River from the Navajo Bridge. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on the Inkstain.net website (John Fleck):

June 5, 2025

Fascinating observation from Jim Lochhead this morning at the Getches-Wilkinson Center Colorado River Conference about the nature of the current negotiations and the role of the federal government. It came during a panel moderated by Anne Castle focused on what we learned from the expiring 2007 river management guidelines, which are the subject of intense renegotiation among the seven basin states.

From the perspective of the panel’s charge – what have we learned since the 2007 agreements – the way I phrased that, the the way the current process is going, should seem weird to us: “intense negotiation among the seven basin states.”

According to Lochhead, a Coloradan who was in the room for the ’07 negotiations, the current cloistered seven-state process is very different from what happened leading up to the ’07 agreement. In 2007, Lochhead explained, the states weren’t the decision maker, the federal government was the decision maker, playing a much more active role as facilitator compared to the current process, which has deferred to the states to come up with a deal.

This is not going well. At least I think it’s not going well. Who knows? Lochhead likened it to the selection of a pope, as we all await the puff of smoke. “The current process seems to me to be like the conclave.”

In my gossip network, I’ve heard good things about the current role being played by Scott Cameron, the Trump Administration’s point person on this stuff. We will hear from him tomorrow. I look forward to that.

Other stuff from the morning sessions

Weirdly, after driving all the way to Colorado for the meeting, I spent the morning in my hotel room on Zoom – a bit under the weather, not feeling up to the social battery drain of all those people, saving energy for tomorrow when I’m moderating the closing panel. But what I lost in social capital construction and maintenance, I made up for in being able to focus on the talks. Among them.

Brad Udall, our modern-day E.C. LaRue, was pretty frank about the climate change trajectory, arguing that we need to prepare for a 10 million acre foot river. For those not steeped in the numbers, that’s not very much water. The current climate trajectory, Brad said, is “beyond awful.”

Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis from the Gila River Indian Community argued that enduring solutions to the Colorado River’s problems will require federal financial help.

A couple of useful nuggets from my Bill Hasencamp of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. One: Bill talked about a really interesting analysis his team has done of the Intentionally Created Surplus Program, which concludes that there is a lot more water in the reservoirs right now, including in Lake Powell, than would otherwise be the case. They’ve briefed me on their analysis and shared the report with me, I just haven’t had the time to write about it yet, it’s super interesting.

Bill also talked about the weird state of the current state negotiations. One on one, people say they’re interested in compromise, in finding an agreement. In the negotiating room, they stick to hard line positions. This circles back nicely to Lochhead’s point that last time around, this was a federal process, not a state-run process.

Anne Castle made an incredibly important point about the challenges face by the state’s negotiators. They are sent into the room to advocate for their state’s water supplies. They need permission from their constituents to compromise, to be able and willing to give up some water in order in the interests of the good of the basin.

That’s on all of us.

New Getches-Wilkinson Center Scholarship Explores Renewables on Public Lands — Chris Winter and Obie Johnson

Click the link to read the announcement on the Getches-Wilkinson Center website (Chris Winter and Obie Johnson):

June 16, 2025

The Getches-Wilkinson Center is pleased to announce the publication of a thought-provoking article, “Facilitating a Green Future? Permitting Reforms and Renewables on Public Lands,” co-authored by Chris Winter, Executive Director of the Getches-Wilkinson Center, and Obie Johnson, a Colorado Law student and Wyss Scholar.

The piece was featured as the lead article in the spring 2025 issue of the American Bar Association’s Natural Resources & Environment journal and explores recent federal permitting reforms aimed at expanding renewable energy development on federal public lands. In recent years, the United States has accelerated its transition to a clean energy future, increasing the demand for new wind, solar, and transmission infrastructure. The article discusses many of the legal and policy initiatives spearheaded by the Biden Administration to facilitate the development of clean energy infrastructure on public lands.

Winter and Johnson highlight the tension between the development of clean energy infrastructure and the need to protect wildlife habitat and other natural resource values. They evaluate recent permitting reforms implemented under the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act and highlight how these new policies attempt to balance these important objectives across federal public lands.

Since the article was written, a new Administration that is less supportive of clean energy and conservation has taken office, prompting rapid changes to the legal and policy landscape. Despite these political dynamics, the long-term market trends still favor clean energy, though the full impacts of the Administration’s new policy agenda remain uncertain.

This publication reflects the GWC’s ongoing commitment to supporting scholarship and policy work that addresses the most pressing challenges in natural resources, energy, and environmental law. We are especially proud to highlight the contributions of student co-author Obie Johnson, whose work as a Wyss Scholar exemplifies the next generation of leadership in land conservation. The Wyss Scholars Program at Colorado Law School is made possible by the generous support and partnership of the Wyss Foundation.

Read the full article:
Chris Winter and Obie Johnson, Facilitating a Green Future? Permitting Reforms and Renewables on Public Lands, ABA Natural Resources & Environment, Vol. 39, No. 1 (2025)

To learn more about the GWC’s research and student programs, visit www.colorado.edu/center/gwc or contact us directly.

Middle #Colorado Watershed Council presents ideas on how to restore #RifleCreek — The #GlenwoodSprings Post Independent

Rifle Falls back in the day via USGenWeb

Click the link to read the article on the Glenwood Springs Post Independent website (Katherine Tomanek). Here’s an excerpt:

June 11, 2025

The Middle Colorado Watershed Council presented to Rifle City Council during the June 4 meeting for their plans on the restoration of Rifle Creek. The watershed is facing multiple challenges, including overallocation, ecological stress, aging irrigation infrastructure, salinity and natural contaminants, and growing pressure from climate-related threats like prolonged drought and wildfire risk.

“We’ve got some invasive species issues…the creek is creating a deeper channel because there’s no meandering and there’s nothing stopping it from racing towards the Colorado River,” said Wes Collins, director of restoration services at EcoPoint. “With some love, with some care, it can be a centerpiece for a lot of folks to enjoy, as well as create educational opportunities for our kids here in town.”

Kate Collins, executive director of the Middle Colorado Watershed Council, described the group’s Rifle Creek Master Plan for Resilience, which covers a 6.5-mile stretch from Rifle Gap Reservoir to the Colorado River confluence…The Middle Colorado Watershed Council is focusing on infrastructure upgrades, habitat restoration and monitoring water quality and flows to get the Rifle Creek watershed back to being healthy. This Resilience Plan aligns with Colorado’s Water Plan, supporting robust agriculture, thriving watersheds and the environment and fish passage among many other alignments, while also supporting Rifle community values through recreation, environment, agriculture and more…nitial projects include the Middle Colorado Watershed Council will be at Centennial Park, Deerfield Park, the Re-2 School District property, Government Creek, Grand Tunnel Ditch, the golf course and the Wisdom Ditch Outtake. Proposed improvements range from step pools and invasive species removal to flume replacement. These projects will hopefully lead to better instream flow, water quality, healthy vegetation, vibrant agriculture and crop production, public access and wildlife and fish migration.

A ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide’ to the June 2025 #ENSO update — NOAA

Click the link to read the article on the NOAA website (Emily Becker):

June 12, 2025

The Pacific Ocean has hit pause and settled into ENSO-neutral conditions, which are expected to continue through the Northern Hemisphere summer. This makes seasonal forecasting for upcoming global rain, temperature, and other patterns a bit trickier.

The odds of La Niña increase through the fall but remain lower than the odds of neutral. By the November–January period, there’s a 48% chance of neutral and a 41% chance of La Niña, with El Niño a distant third. Grab your towel, today we’re touring the galaxy of ENSO-neutral and what it means for seasonal prediction.

The story so far: what ENSO is, and why it matters

El Niño and La Niña, known collectively as the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), are a system of changes in the tropical Pacific Ocean and atmosphere. El Niño and La Niña alter global atmospheric circulation and the jet streams, affecting weather patterns around the world. El Niño and La Niña can often be predicted many months in advance, giving us an early heads-up for their impacts. ENSO-neutral conditions are in place when neither El Niño nor La Niña are present, and the tropical Pacific Ocean and atmosphere are close to the long-term average temperature and circulation.

El Niño and La Niña have expected impacts on global seasonal weather and climate, but what about neutral? ENSO-neutral doesn’t mean we expect upcoming seasonal rain, snow, and temperature to be close to average. Rather, during neutral, we don’t have the same predictive information that El Niño and La Niña’s atmospheric changes provide, making upcoming patterns harder to predict very far in advance.

The restaurant at the end of the universe: what’s happening in the Pacific right now

Our primary ENSO measurement, the temperature of the Pacific Ocean surface in the central tropical Niño-3.4 region, has been near average for the past few months, following last winter’s dip below the La Niña horizon. According to our most reliable sea surface temperature dataset, the Niño-3.4 region was 0.2 °C (about 0.4°F) cooler than the long-term average in May.

The restaurant at the end of the universe: what’s happening in the Pacific right now Our primary ENSO measurement, the temperature of the Pacific Ocean surface in the central tropical Niño-3.4 region, has been near average for the past few months, following last winter’s dip below the La Niña horizon. According to our most reliable sea surface temperature dataset, the Niño-3.4 region was 0.2°C (about 0.4°F) cooler than the long-term average in May.

The atmospheric circulation over the tropical Pacific also has looked mostly neutral. This overturning pattern, called the Walker circulation, is characterized by rising air over the far western Pacific and Indonesia, west-to-east winds aloft, sinking air over the eastern Pacific, and the east-to-west trade winds near the surface. During La Niña, the Walker circulation strengthens, while El Niño weakens it. A few La Niña-ish characteristics are still hanging around, including more rising air and more rainfall than average over Indonesia with some regions of stronger easterly trade winds over the tropical Pacific. Despite those fading, localized signs of La Niña, the ocean-atmosphere system across the Pacific as a whole is neutral.

We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty! What the models say about months ahead

It’s very likely that ENSO-neutral conditions will remain through the summer. By the fall, chances of La Niña do increase, but they are still lower than the chance for neutral. El Niño is the least likely, with odds of less than 1-in-8.

Out of the three climate possibilities—La Niña, El Niño, and neutral—forecasts say that ENSO-neutral conditions (gray bars) are most likely for the Northern Hemisphere spring and summer. Looking out to the fall, neutral is still the most likely, but chances for either La Niña (blue bars) or El Niño (red bars) are increasing. NOAA Climate Prediction Center image.

This forecast is informed by computer climate models, including those from the North American Multi-Model Ensemble. We consider lots of climate models, which gives us a range of potential outcomes. Most of these model runs fall into the neutral category through the end of 2025, with some in La Niña, and a few in El Niño, informing our forecast probabilities.

Line graph showing observed and predicted temperatures (black line) in the key ENSO-monitoring region of the tropical Pacific from spring 2025 through the fall. The gray shading shows the range of temperatures predicted by individual models that are part of the North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME, for short). By late summer, the shading spans from El Niño to La Niña, showing the range of potential ENSO states. However, the majority of model forecasts are concentrated in the neutral range, meaning the highest chance is that the temperature in the Niño-3.4 region of the tropical Pacific will be near average. NOAA Climate.gov image, based on data from the IRI.

In addition to the climate models, we study current conditions in the ocean and atmosphere. One valuable source of information is the pattern of water temperature under the surface of the Pacific Ocean. Our colleague, Caihong Wen of NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, has been studying ENSO oceanic signals for years. She pointed out that there is a very narrow band of slightly warmer-than-average subsurface water near the thermocline along the equator, with large regions of cooler subsurface water to the north and south.

This map shows the temperature pattern under the surface of the tropical Pacific Ocean. The colors show how much deeper (red) or shallower (blue) than average the 20-degree temperature line lies. More warm subsurface water is present where the 20-degree isotherm is deeper than average (red), while cooler water is indicated when the 20-degree line is closer to the surface (blue). There is a narrow strip of warmer subsurface along the equator in the western and central Pacific, flanked by large areas of cooler subsurface to the north and south. In the past, this pattern has preceded second-year La Niña events. Figure by climate.gov based on original from Caihong Wen.

Caihong led some interesting research a few years ago showing that this off-equator subsurface water can provide a source for a developing El Niño or La Niña event. For example, a pattern of cooler subsurface water like we’re seeing now preceded second-year La Niña events in 2008, 2011, and 2017. It’s not a strong enough relationship for a confident prediction of La Niña, but it may help explain why some of the model forecasts are tilting in a La Niña-ish direction.

Infinite improbability drive

Let me leave you today with a reading selection from our past 11 years of ENSO blogs, since we didn’t get around to it on our birthday last month. Curious about how ENSO helps with predicting tornadoes? Check out these posts from 2017, 2021, and just last month. ENSO influences the hurricane season—find out more in these articles from 2014, 2017, and 2024. Weather and climate extremes—including drought, heatwaves, atmospheric rivers, coastal flooding, and the range of daily temperature—are affected by El Niño and La Niña. Our runaway most popular post was about how ENSO changes snow patterns (read the La Niña follow up post here). We chronicled the strong El Niño events of 2015–16 and 2023–24, the endless La Niña of 2020–23, and had some fun along the way. Our smart, inquisitive audience, and the relationships we’ve formed along the way, make this the best place to be on the internet. Thanks for reading!

Spring #runoff peaks, winners announced: Also: About that energy dominance thing — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

San Juan Mountain foothills and sunset from the window of a plane. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

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

June 10, 2025

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

I’m calling it! Spring runoff appears to have peaked on most Western streams — and almost definitely has done so on the streams in this year’s Land Desk Super Predict the Peak Contest.

The good news is, the runoff was later and bigger than a lot of folks — including myself — predicted it would be. The bad news is that the flows were still downright pathetic compared to other years, even though in most cases the peak snowmelt was supplemented by heavy rain, meaning the runoff numbers don’t necessarily reflect a healthy snow year. Which is to say: The megadrought persists across much of the Western United States, with extreme conditions in the Southwest.

Here are the results:

Animas River in Durango, aka USGS gage 09361500: 2,740 cubic feet per second on June 1.

North Fork of the Gunnison River near Lazear, aka USGS gage 09136100: 1,280 cfs on June 3.

Rio Grande at Otowi Bridge, aka USGS gage 08313000: 1,350 cfs on May 14.

San Miguel River at Uravan, (extra credit for uranium readings!) aka USGS gage 09177000: 1,040 cfs on June 4.

Colorado River at the Utah-Colorado state line, aka USGS gage 09163500: 11,900 cfs on June 4.

Unfortunately, we had very few entries this year, possibly because these things are really hard to predict. That said, it looks like Andrew High has a winning formula, at least on a few of these stream segments. Here are the winners and their predictions:

Animas: Andrew High, 2,710 cfs on May 21.

North Fork: Andrew High, 1,260 cfs on June 7.

Rio Grande: Jim O’Donnell, 1,150 cfs on May 15.

San Miguel: B Frank, 692 cfs on May 15.

Colorado: Andrew High, 13,160 cfs on June 13.

Congratulations, winners! Andrew, B, and Jim, please send me your mailing address and t-shirt size at landdesk@substack.com and I’ll get your prizes in the mail ASAP.

Now, on to the not so happy news. What a difference a year can make. Last year at this time, the West seemed to be on its way to being drought-free, with the exception of New Mexico. Now? Not so much. It’s looking downright grim for New Mexico, Arizona, and southern Nevada, even though the Las Vegas area received a healthy dose of rain in May.

And, after a couple years of respite, it’s time once again to start worrying about Lake Powell — the barometer of the Colorado River’s health. Thus far this year, the volume of water flowing into the reservoir has been far lower than last year, which already was below normal. Judging by the runoff patterns so far, it appears as if June’s inflows may be even lower than May’s. If the rest of June is hot and dry, prompting greater evaporation from the reservoir, it could actually draw reservoir levels down this month during a time when water levels normally would rise.

The black bars show inflow volumes for the 2025 water year compared to the red bars for 2024. Source: USBR.

Normally Lake Powell’s surface level would jump substantially over the next month or so before dropping later in the summer after all of the mountain snowpack has completely melted. While reservoir levels are currently rising, it likely won’t continue for long. Source: Lake Powell Water-Data

But one of those truths about the West, is that aridification provides no buffer against flooding — especially flash-flooding. Some hikers found that out the hard way last week when a flash flood ripped down Big Horn Canyon in Utah, stranding them on the opposite side of the arroyo from their vehicle. They called for help and Bureau of Land Management rangers and Garfield County deputies responded and rescued the folks, according to the BLM’s Utah office. The Escalante River nearby jumped from 0 cfs to 1,200 cfs in just minutes around the same time. You can see some video of the flash flooding here: http://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1036784068519285

📈 Data Dump 📊

As long as we’re doing the graphs and charts thing, we might as well check in on that ol’ Trumpian “energy dominance” thing. The rig count — which is a snapshot of the number of rigs actively drilling at any given time — is the most accurate indicator of the oil and gas industry’s enthusiasm to extract the fossil fuels. And that verve appears to be waning under Trump. The number of rigs operating in the West has dropped since Trump took office, and is down significantly from the most recent peak in 2023 when, yes, Joe Biden was president and was supposedly waging a “war” on fossil fuels.

The red and blue shades indicate Republican and Democratic administrations, respectively. Source: Baker Hughes.

“What a hot mess” — Zack Labe

Water Year 2025 Snow #Drought Current Conditions Summary and Impacts in the West — NOAA

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

June 12, 2025

Persistent Snow Drought and Rapid Spring Snowmelt Will Decrease Western Water Supplies and Increase Wildfire Risk

Key Points

Snow drought developed and persisted this winter in pockets of the western U.S., largely driven by lack of precipitation with a lesser role from above-normal temperatures. The most severe conditions have persisted across Arizona and New Mexico into southern Utah and Colorado.

Snowpack has nearly disappeared from monitoring stations across the West as dry and warm conditions accelerated snowmelt and early snowpack loss. Snow disappeared early even in areas without widespread snow drought conditions and with above-normal peak snow water equivalent (SWE).

Summer streamflow volume forecasts are lower than normal across the West. The impacts of early season snow drought in some regions and the widespread rapid melt out across the West will challenge water supplies, agriculture, outdoor recreation, and tourism, as well as increase wildfire potential (see recent Southwestand Great Plains Drought and Wildfire Outlook webinars for more information).

Drought conditions are expected to persist or expand across much of the western United States this summer. Drought emergencies have been declared in several areas, including Washington, New Mexico, and the Navajo Nation.

Lake Powell is at 34% of capacity, and Lake Mead is at 31% of capacity. The Colorado Basin River Forecast Center is forecasting 45% of average April-July unregulated inflows into Lake Powell.

Snow Drought Conditions Summary

This update is based on data available as of Monday, June 9, 2025 at 12:00 a.m. PT. We acknowledge that conditions are evolving.

Jump to conditions for your region:

Rocky Mountain Water Year Snow Drought Summary

New Mexico and Arizona Water Year Snow Drought Summary

Oregon and Washington Water Year Snow Drought Summary

California and Nevada Water Year Snow Drought Summary

Alaska Water Year Snow Drought Summary

Rocky Mountain Water Year Snow Drought Summary

Northern Rocky Mountains

Snow Drought

Widespread snow drought conditions were not apparent in peak snow water equivalent (SWE) values across much of the northern Rocky Mountains. The region had near- to above-median peak SWE, although some SNOTEL stations peaked at 70-89% of median SWE. Most of the areas with below-median peak SWE were along the border of western Montana and eastern Idaho. Despite these conditions, the snowmelt season (April-May) was dry and warm across most of the region, which led to accelerated melt rates and early loss of snowpack. In Montana, snow at 84% of SNOTEL stations (62 locations) melted earlier than the median date. In Idaho, snow at 84% of stations (64 locations) melted early, and in Wyoming, snow at 84% of stations (57 locations) melted early. Snow is still present at some high-elevation stations in the region (about 20% of all stations).

Water Supply Outlook

The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service’s June-July water supply forecasts indicate below-median runoff for the entire northern Rocky Mountain region, with most large river basins expected to receive less than 80% of median flows. Forecasts for the Marias, Salmon, and Upper Snake Basins are among the lowest in the region at 45%, 65%, and 67% of median, respectively. Moderate and Severe Drought (D1–D2) are present throughout the region, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Based on the late onset snow drought conditions, near- to below-median October-May observed runoff, and below-median June-July forecasted runoff, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center forecasts that drought will persist and develop this summer.

Central and Southern Rocky Mountains

Snow Drought

The central Rocky Mountains (northern Utah and northern Colorado) had near-normal snow accumulation with peak snow water equivalent (SWE) of 85-105% of median at many SNOTEL stations. Snowpack in southern Utah and southern Colorado was much lower. Many locations reported peak SWE of less than 50% of median, and two stations in Utah reported record low peak SWE.

The primary driver of the low snowpack in the southern Rocky Mountains was an extremely dry winter (December-February) with record low precipitation in some areas. Across most of the central and southern Rocky Mountains, snowpack peaked early (1-2 weeks early in many locations) and then melted more quickly than normal (also 1-2 weeks early, or more) in April and May. In Utah, snow at 93% of SNOTEL stations melted earlier than the median date, and in Colorado, snow melted early at 82% of stations.

Water Supply Outlook

Water supply forecasts for central and northern Utah and Colorado indicate below-median June-July flows in three major sub-basins in the Upper Colorado: the Upper Green, Lower Green, and White-Yampa Basins are expected to receive 78%, 63%, and 59% of median runoff, respectively. In southern Utah and Colorado, the outlook is worse, with well-below-median runoff predicted for the Upper San Juan (63% of median), Lower San Juan (38% of median), and Upper Colorado-Dirty Devil (48% of median) Basins.

Low observed and forecast river flows are expected to lead to much-below-normal unregulated inflows into Lake Powell. May observed inflows were 41% of normal. The Colorado Basin River Forecast Center is forecasting 45% of normal (average) seasonal inflows. As of early June, Lake Powell was at 34% of capacity. Moderate to Extreme Drought (D1-D3) is currently widespread throughout western Colorado and most of Utah. Drought conditions are expected to persist and likely intensify throughout summer due to low snowpack and seasonal runoff.

New Mexico and Arizona Water Year Snow Drought Summary

Snow Drought

Arizona and New Mexico, along with southern Utah and Colorado, faced severe snow drought conditions this year with peak snow water equivalent (SWE) of less than 50% of median at most SNOTEL stations. Four stations in Arizona and four stations in New Mexico reported record low peak SWE. Peak SWE at some locations in central Arizona and northern New Mexico was 50-89% of median, but no station reported above 89% of median peak SWE.

Winter was extremely dry. Record low precipitation in many locations, likely influenced by a weak La Niña event, led to little snow accumulation and persistent snow drought conditions throughout the season. March storms brought the greatest snow accumulation of the season and some relief to part of Arizona. The March storms led to snow melting later than normal; however, these same locations had little to no snow on the ground for most of winter. In New Mexico, all but one SNOTEL station with at least 20 years of recorded observations were snow free at least two weeks earlier than the median date. This is due to the combined impacts of a dry winter, early peak SWE, and rapid spring snowmelt.

Water Supply Outlook

Observed October-May flows in eastern New Mexico in the Upper Pecos and Upper Canadian Basins were 144% and 95% of median, respectively. Water year flows in the Upper Rio Grande and Rio Grande-Elephant Butte Basins in western New Mexico were much lower, at 59% and 42% of median, respectively. Seasonal water supply forecasts indicate much-below-normal seasonal volumes for all of New Mexico, with many locations forecast to receive less than 25% of median flows. In Arizona, observed October-May flows were extremely low in the Little Colorado (12% of median), Salt (15% of median), and Verde (40% of median) Basins.

The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) June-July runoff forecast for the Lower Colorado-Lake Mead Basin is just 48% of median. Lake Mead is currently at 31% of capacity. The lake level is lower than this time last year, but not at the record low levels set in 2022. On May 22, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, signed an executive order declaring a state of emergency due to persistent and severe drought and escalating fire risk across the state. In late May, the Navajo Nation issued a Declaration of a Drought Emergency across tribal lands in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. The U.S. Drought Monitor indicates that drought is currently widespread in both Arizona and New Mexico, with several areas of Extreme and Exceptional Drought (D3-D4). Drought conditions are expected to persist and intensify throughout summer.

Oregon and Washington Water Year Snow Drought Summary

Snow Drought

Snow drought developed early in the season and persisted throughout the year, especially along the west slope of the Washington Cascade Range, where many SNOTEL stations reported peak snow water equivalent (SWE) of 50-69% of median. A handful of sites there reported less than 50% of median peak SWE.

Low precipitation was the main driver of the low snowpack in Washington, with some stations in the Washington Cascades reporting water year precipitation below the 15th percentile of historical conditions. Some isolated, lower-elevation locations on the west slope of the northern Oregon Cascade Range also experienced snow drought conditions this year, mainly due to warmer-than-normal spring temperatures. The southern Oregon Cascade Range and the Blue and Steens Mountains in Oregon were in a narrow wet corridor that received much-above-median water year precipitation and peak SWE greater than 150% of median. Snow melted more than two weeks earlier than the median date at 19 stations in Washington and 10 stations in Oregon.

Water Supply Outlook

Below normal June-July runoff is forecast for all basins in Washington, from 63% of median in the Lower Snake to 87% of median in the Lower Columbia. Washington issued a drought emergency in April for the Yakima Basin watersheds due to low snowpack, low runoff, and persistent drought over the past several years. This drought emergency was expanded in early June to 19 other watersheds in the Puget Sound and Central Washington regions.

Water supply forecasts are more optimistic in Oregon, with several central and southern Oregon basins expected to receive above-median runoff. Some basins in northern Oregon are forecast to receive below-median runoff during June and July, including the Middle Columbia (75% of median), Willamette (78% of median), and John Day (85%) Basins. The Washington and northern Oregon Cascade Range is currently in Moderate Drought (D1), and the Climate Prediction Center’s seasonal drought outlook indicates further drought development throughout summer is likely in other parts of northern and western Oregon.

California and Nevada Water Year Snow Drought Summary

Snow Drought

In California and far western Nevada (Lake Tahoe Basin), snowpack generally peaked above median in the north (Trinity Alps, Cascade Range, and Sierra Nevada), near median in the central Sierra Nevada, and near- to below-median in the southern Sierra Nevada. A few lower-elevation stations in the central Sierra Nevada and along the west slope of the southern Sierra Nevada reported peak snow water equivalent (SWE) of less than 70% of median, but snow drought concerns were fairly limited in California this winter. Similar to other regions across the West, April-May in California and Nevada was generally dry and warm, which led to rapid snowmelt and snow disappearing early even in locations that received above-normal peak SWE.

In northeast Nevada, peak SWE was generally above normal, with most stations reporting 110% to greater than 150% of median SWE. Peak SWE was closer to normal in central Nevada and below-normal in east-central Nevada near the Utah border. The Spring Mountains in southern Nevada received very little snow during most of the winter. Though some snow fell in the Spring Mountains in late February into March, overall snowpack was much-below-normal in that mountain range.

Water Supply Outlook

USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) June-July forecasts indicate runoff in the eastern Sierra Nevada is expected to be 119%, 82%, and 79% of median in the Truckee, Walker, and Carson River Basins, respectively. The California-Nevada River Forecast Center seasonal water supply forecasts indicate above-normal runoff elsewhere in California, except in parts of the central Sierra Nevada, where 80-90% of median runoff is forecast.

Nearly all of the major reservoirs in California are currently above the historical average water levels, which should help limit major surface water supply concerns this summer despite below-normal runoff forecast for parts of the Sierra Nevada. NRCS runoff forecasts for the three large basins in Nevada—Central Nevada Desert, Humboldt, and Black Rock Desert—are 90%, 75%, and 75% of median, respectively.

Currently, drought persists in southern California and central and southern Nevada. Extreme and Exceptional Drought (D3-D4) conditions are present only in large desert areas of southern California and Nevada that are largely disconnected from the seasonal snowpacks in the Sierra Nevada and northeast Nevada. The Climate Prediction Center’s seasonal drought outlook indicates that further drought development is likely throughout summer in parts of central California and far northwest Nevada.

Alaska Water Year Snow Drought Summary

Snow Drought

In South Central Alaska, peak snow water equivalent (SWE) was variable and highly dependent on elevation, especially in the coastal mountain ranges. Winter precipitation was above normal for the region, but winter mean temperatures were very warm (5-7 °F above normal), which led to more rainfall and less snow at lower elevations. Higher-elevation SNOTEL stations in South Central Alaska had peak SWE around 90-120% of median. Most of the lower-elevation stations had peak SWE around 60% of median.

Port Graham, on the southwest tip of the Kenai Peninsula, sits at 270 feet in elevation and reported peak SWE of just 19% of median despite above-normal winter precipitation. Snow melted about one to two weeks early at lower elevations in South Central Alaska. SNOTEL stations in the Fairbanks region reported peak SWE of 99-167% of median. Winter temperatures were well above normal, but the interior climate in the Fairbanks region is much colder than in coastal regions, which supported abundant snowfall at all elevations. The U.S. Drought Monitor currently shows a small area of Abnormally Dry (D0) conditions in South Central Alaska.

Low Water Year Precipitation Totals Drove Western Snow Drought

Water year to date (June 8, 2025) precipitation percentiles based on the period of record for each station. Only stations with at least 20 years of data are included in the station percentiles. Red indicates precipitation below the 15th percentile, orange/yellow between the 15th to 42nd percentiles, green/light blue the 43rd to 84th percentiles, and dark blue at or above the 85th percentile. For an interactive version of this map, please visit the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). Source: USDA NRCS.

Earlier than Normal Snowmelt Across the West

Snow Telemetry (SNOTEL) snow water equivalent (SWE) date of water year melt out for Water Year 2025, compared to the median melt out date. Only stations with at least 20 years of data are included. Blue indicates later than normal melt out, whereas yellow, orange, and red indicate earlier than normal melt out. For an interactive version of this map, please visit the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). Source: USDA NRCS.

Low June–July Streamflow Volume Forecasts Across the West

June–July streamflow forecast volume (50% exceedance probability; equivalent to the median value) for watersheds in the western U.S. Streamflow forecast volume is shown as a percentage of the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) 1991–2020 median. This map is valid as of June 1, 2025. For an interactive version of this map, please visit NRCS.

For More Information, Please Contact:

Daniel McEvoy
Western Regional Climate Center
Daniel.McEvoy@dri.edu

Amanda Sheffield
CIRES/NOAA/NIDIS California-Nevada Regional Drought Information Coordinator
Amanda.Sheffield@noaa.gov

Jason Gerlich
CIRES/NOAA/NIDIS Pacific Northwest and Missouri River Basin Regional Drought Information Coordinator
Jason.Gerlich@noaa.gov

Environmental Release Program provides vital water for #YampaRiver and its recreational users — Steamboat Pilot & Today

Stagecoarch Reservoir outflow June 23, 2019. Photo credit: Scott Hummer

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

June 13, 2025

The Yampa River Environmental Release Program is a collaboration between several local and state entities to ensure the Yampa River remains at a healthy flow and water temperature. Three of the main partners are the Colorado Water Trust, the city of Steamboat Springs and Friends of the Yampa. Friends of the Yampa is essentially the managing body for the finances of the Yampa River Fund, which provides necessary money for ideal water flow into the Yampa. Mike Robertson, the Yampa River Fund manager, explained the fund is a committee made up of groups throughout the Yampa Valley that help allocate and provide a sustainable funding source for flow releases. The money is held with Yampa Valley Community Foundation, which doles out the grants, while Friends of the Yampa acts as the managing entity. Each year, the Yampa River Fund provides about half of the money Colorado Water Trust needs to lease water from Stagecoach and Elkhead reservoirs. According to Blake Mamich, programs director at the Colorado Water Trust, the other half of the funding comes from the Colorado Water Conservation Board. The financial support of these two groups is crucial to the success of the release program in keeping the Yampa River at a safe temperature and flow rate for its ecosystem…

The Colorado Water Trust is set to release 5,100 acre feet from Stagecoach Reservoir in addition to 2,000 acre feet from Elkhead Reservoir over the course of this summer. This water will be released during times when the river is considered to be at a low flow…This water is not released all at once but must be stretched out and conserved to ensure that there is enough to sustain the Yampa during its critical period in late summer and early fall. Mamich noted that during this time, about half the water that runs through downtown Steamboat originates from Stagecoach. Factors that determine low-flow status are measured by the city. These criteria are primarily water temperature and water flow. According to city municipal code, recreational activity is closed if any or all of these conditions are met: the Yampa River flow drops below 85 cubic feet per second, the dissolved oxygen level average is less than 6 milligrams per liter and/or the water exceeds 75 degrees Fahrenheit for two or more consecutive days.

Josh Shipley rides a Harley and drives a Jeep. He says ending federal tax credits for solar may upend his business.

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🌵 Public Lands 🌲

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

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This Week’s Drought Summary

Looking Ahead

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Restoration tactics take time

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Delays, Confusion Over PFAS

Research Under Fire

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Key Points

What Is the North American Monsoon? Why Does It Matter?

How Does the Monsoon Impact Drought in the Southwest?

North American Monsoon Precipitation Is a Major Contributor to Southwestern Annual Rainfall

What Is the Drought Status Going into the North American Monsoon?

Widespread Southwestern Drought at the Start of Monsoon Season (June 24, 2025)

Will the North American Monsoon Be Active through September? What Does This Mean for Drought?

Odds Favor Wet Start for the Monsoon through Mid- to Late July

Potential Impacts of North American Monsoon Precipitation for Drought

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120 days to decide

Front Range outlines concerns

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This Week’s Drought Summary

Looking Ahead

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A spectrum of opposition

Not sensitive lands?

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🌵 Public Lands 🌲

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

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Atmospheric Rivers Enter the Lexicon