Despite recent rain, much of the Roaring Fork Watershed remains in “exceptional” drought as of the autumn equinox. Pitkin and Eagle counties are among the 15.2% in the state categorized in the highest ranking for drought, according to the United States Drought Monitor, alongside Lake and Alamosa counties. The majority of Garfield County is in either exceptional or “extreme” drought, the next highest ranking. The dryness paired with above-average temperatures in 2026 made the January through August period the sixth-driest recorded in Colorado since 1895, with 3.78 fewer inches of rain than average. That decreased precipitation has shown in local watersheds and trickled into recreation management. By June, local angling guides were sharing anecdotes about adjusting trips to early hours of the morning to reduce stress on fish.
Colorado River District’s annual water seminar included stories of how collaboration and creativity pulled users through this year’s drought crisis, while questions remain about whether that’s enough to secure water in a hotter, drier future
On Colorado’s Western Slope, water managers, ranchers, producers and community leaders knew early in the year that this summer was going to be unlike any others they’ve experienced.
“Things were not looking great — and then March happened,” said Rebecca Briesmoore, senior water resources engineer for the Colorado River Water Conservation District, at its annual water seminar on Friday, Sept. 18, in Grand Junction. “Every single county in the state of Colorado broke the record for the hottest March on record by a large margin. What does that do to our snowpack? It started melting very, very quickly. We saw that [snow water equivalent] just plummet down the graph.”
[…]
“Drought is really a different kind of emergency,” [Jen] MacPherson said, adding that there aren’t a lot of tools set up for towns to address running out of water.
In Kremmling, partnership and collaboration ultimately helped the new town manager find solutions. The town’s water rights in one of its reservoirs were shared with the Colorado River Cattle Ranch.
“That ranch decided to cut irrigation to a hay meadow; they sacrificed hundreds of thousands of dollars to help us [provide] drinking water,” MacPherson said. “And we’ve seen stories like that up and down the entire river.”
Plus, the town and residents stepped up with conservation efforts, reducing its use by 45%, she added.
Colorado National Monument from the Colorado Riverfront Trail near Fruita September 18, 2026.
Click the link to read the article on The Aspen Times website (Ali Longwell). Here’s an excerpt:
September 24, 2026
The Colorado River Conservation Water District’s multi-year bid to acquire the historic Shoshone water rights on the Colorado River has required collaboration, strange bedfellows, bipartisan support and intense fellowship. While the River District wants this spirit of partnership to continue as the deal moves through Colorado Water Court, it won’t compromise values — nor those of the 17 Western Slope counties the district represents — to do so, according to General Manager Andy Mueller.
“We have a trial date set, we’re doing our best to get mediation going and try to solve that problem collaboratively among parties, but frankly, I want everybody here to understand that the west slope will not compromise our important values,” Mueller said during his keynote address at the Colorado River District’s annual water seminar in Grand Junction on Friday, Sept. 22. “…We’re gonna defend the west slope’s interest on this.”
[…]
After a decree from the water court, the River District will only need to get approval from the Colorado Public Utilities Commission and secure funding to seal the deal. Mueller said the district is currently $1.6 million shy of the $98.5 million needed, with contributions coming from the River District’s board, the Colorado Water Conservation board and over 40 Western Slope utilities, organizations and municipalities. The federal government is supplying around $40 million through a bucket of drought mitigation funding created by the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act. Securing the funding was a bit of a rollercoaster and took a combination of strange bedfellows, intense fellowship and bipartisan coordination, according to those involved…
“When you look at Shoshone and the coalition that came together behind that, you see strange bedfellows,” said Zane Kessler, Colorado River District director of government relations. “It’s not every day that you have Pitkin County and Mesa County agreeing. It’s not every day that you have the rec community and ag. vocally supportive of a project.”
During Friday’s seminar, Rep. Jeff Hurd, a Republican representing Colorado’s 3rd District, and U.S. Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet joined Kessler to discuss just what it took to get this funding from the federal government. With Bennet’s help, the funding was initially awarded in the final days of Joe Biden’s presidency and subsequently frozen on President Donald Trump’s first day in office.
“We were able to come up with the $40 million, Jeff and I, working two different administrations,” Bennet said. “One, the Democratic Biden administration and the other, the Trump administration. I give Jeff full credit for that. He landed on this plane, because it wasn’t like I was getting my calls returned from the Trump administration.”
The twin turbines of Xcel Energy’s Shoshone hydroelectric power plant in Glenwood Canyon can generate 15 megawatts. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
The effects of this year’s historic drought are easy to see when standing on the barren, sandy shoreline exposed by low water levels at Denver Water’s Cheesman Reservoir.
The reservoir was completed in 1905 and is Denver Water’s oldest mountain reservoir. It straddles Douglas and Jefferson counties along the South Platte River in the foothills southwest of Denver.
Cheesman’s history dates back to Denver’s early days, when city leaders knew that a stable, reliable water supply was critical to the future of the growing city.
Cheesman Reservoir was down 35 feet as of Sept. 15, 2026. The reservoir is expected to continue falling until the 2027 spring runoff due to customer demand. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Today, Cheesman Reservoir is a critical part of Denver Water’s system that collects, stores, cleans and delivers water to 1.5 million people across the Denver metro area.
As of mid-September, the reservoir was at 65% of capacity, when normal for this time of year is 88% full. The water is down due to last winter’s record-low snowpack and the need to meet customer demands for water during the ongoing hot and dry conditions this summer.
Watch a video showing reservoir conditions in September 2026:
Water levels in Cheesman will continue dropping this fall and through the winter. The reservoir is forecast to be at about 60% of capacity or lower by April 1, 2027, before the start of next year’s spring runoff.
During the drought of 2002-2003, Cheesman dwindled to merely 29% full, less than one-third of its capacity.
Cheesman Reservoir dropped to 29% of capacity during the drought of 2002-2003. Photo credit: Denver Water.
While the water is low at Cheesman, it shows the vision of Denver’s pioneers in the late 1800s who had the foresight to prepare the infrastructure needed to get through times of drought that continue more than a century later.
Cheesman Dam carries the name of Walter S. Cheesman, an early Denver businessman, railroad developer and real estate magnate. He was president of the Denver Union Water Company, which built the dam and was a precursor to Denver Water.
Early Denver businessmen (from left) David Moffat (his name is on the Moffat Tunnel that carries water under the Continental Divide), William Robinson and Walter Cheesman pose for a photo in 1905. The three were instrumental in building critical water infrastructure in the late 1800s and early 1900s to serve the growing city. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Cheesman and other water and city leaders knew that Denver lacked the annual precipitation needed to support the young, bustling community. In order to grow, the city would need a reliable source of water. That’s because the South Platte, Denver’s primary water supply at the time, would nearly dry up in the months after the spring runoff.
In the 1890s, scouting parties began looking for locations to build a dam and reservoir on the South Platte River west of the city.
On what’s described as a surveying and fishing trip in 1893, a group that included C.P. Allen, chief engineer of two early water companies, identified a deep, narrow canyon on the South Platte River, about 48 miles southwest of Denver, the perfect location for what would become the site of Cheesman Dam.
Engineers walk on the frozen South Platte River in the winter of 1896 at the site of the future Cheesman Dam. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Construction of Cheesman Dam in the early 1900s. The dam was built using nearby granite stones carved by Italian craftsmen. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Cheesman Reservoir, then and now, captures melting snow from the spring runoff. The water it stores is used to stretch the annual spring rush of water down mountain streams and rivers and make it last year-round.
Learn about the history of Cheesman Reservoir in this video:
The reservoir’s water levels fluctuate every year depending on snowpack, weather conditions and customer demand. When full, Cheesman can hold 79,064 acre-feet of water. In wet years, excess water flows over the dam’s spillway in spectacular fashion.
Water flows over Cheesman Dam’s spillway during the spring of 2014. Water flows over the spillway when the reservoir reaches capacity in years with high snowpack. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Part of Cheesman’s value stems from the age of its water rights.
Water rights associated with Cheesman Reservoir date to June 27, 1889, which means Denver Water has relatively senior rights to capture and store water from the river — even in times of drought when river flows are low.
The reservoir is also in a favorable location for water storage.
“Cheesman Reservoir was built in a deep, narrow canyon, which means it has a relatively small surface area, which limits evaporation,” said Nathan Elder, water supply manager at Denver Water. “Reducing water loss is important all the time, but critical during droughts.”
The reservoir’s attributes came into play this summer when Denver Water moved water from the shallow Antero Reservoir upstream on the South Platte into Cheesman to reduce evaporation.
“Denver Water is fortunate to have had the visionaries of the past who prepared us for the water challenges we face today,” Elder said. “The reservoir they built serves as the workhorse of Denver Water’s South Platte collection system.”
Cheesman Dam and Reservoir on Sept. 3, 2026. The reservoir has water rights dating back to 1889, which are critical because they make it easier to fill the reservoir each year. Photo credit: Denver Water.
As for when Cheesman will fill again, Elder says that’s hard to predict, although the reservoir will likely need more than one winter with above-normal snowpack to fully recover.
“We’re not sure what the coming winter will deliver in terms of snowpack. That’s why it’s important for our customers to do their part and look at ways to conserve water at home.”
Elder reminds customers that Denver Water has banned lawn watering and spray irrigation as of Oct. 1. The move is expected to save an estimated 5,000 acre-feet of water this fall, which will help stretch our water supplies in Cheesman and other Denver Water reservoirs.
In the last post here, I argued that, water-wise, the Colorado River region is no longer in a ‘water crisis’ – a term implying a situation where some changes and adjustments need to be made ‘to get back to normal.’ No. We will never get back to the 20th century Colorado River ‘normal’ – the seemingly successful operation of our vast water storage-and-distribution system we experienced from the 1970s through the 1990s, providing some or all of the water and food and power for 30, 35, 40 million people.
Instead, I suggested we should take seriously a United Nations University study declaring that the whole planet is in state of Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era. The scientist-authors used the current Colorado River situation as one of their examples of ‘global water bankruptcy.’ This water bankruptcy, here as everywhere else on the planet, is due to two ‘universal’ factors:
– One factor is the extent to which we humans have become a swarming species on the planet, overwhelming the planet’s capacity to supply our expanding needs along with the rest of the planet’s ‘life project.’ Our more sophisticated water ‘needs’ exacerbate our physical numbers in creating the bankruptcy. (See cartoon above)
– The other factor is a planet growing steadily warmer for the foreseeable future, resulting in a general ‘drying out’ and diminished water supply in the tropical and so-called temperate zones where most of the planet’s life and food production happen.
The current systems for water management and operation around the world cannot – repeat: cannot – continue to pretend to meet the relentlessly increasing demand with the relentlessly shrinking water supply.
Those are therefore bankrupt systems, in their current state. That does not mean the systems must be terminated, but it does mean there will have to be major changes in the systems if they are ever again going to sustainably meet the needs of the people.
The first stage of bankruptcy management is the formalization of old cowboy wisdom; if you’ve dug yourself into a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging. On the global level, this would mean stop having so many babies that survive infancy to become eating, drinking, coupling adults – or more the case today, perhaps, lifelong vaguely angry adolescents (eating, drinking and coupling). The most developed nations have in fact made inroads on this challenge, achieving (with no formal program) zero or even negative birth-to-death ratios; their population increases are mostly through immigration.
But that’s global, the first and oldest species-level problem, the trauma of success we’ve been grappling with for 6,000 years plus or minus: how to organize the swarming population for something other than the ultimate decline and fall into following some Ozymandias or Trump off a cliff.
For now, let’s just bring it home to the Colorado River region. (‘Region’ here, remember, means the natural river basin plus all of the out-of-basin extensions who depend on Colorado River diversions – the South Platte and Arkansas River Basins, the Salt Lake basin, Southern California out to the Pacific coast.)
The Bureau of Reclamation has, as discussed in the last post, taken the lead in ‘stopping digging’ by essentially ignoring the antiquated Colorado River Compact and mapping out an ‘adaptive management’ agenda of a ten-year plan broken into five reviewable and alterable two-year periods. [ed. emphasis mine]
The Bureau’s chief goal in this ten-year plan is not delivering an easy and comfortable desert lifestyle for the 40 million or so people who depend on the river for some or all of their water, food, energy and water-based entertainments. Their chief goal for the next decade is to save the system of water storage and distribution that has been stretched to the breaking point through enabling that lifestyle for a possibly unsustainable number of people, and the people will have to pay for that effort to save the system over the coming decade – and quite probably live with reasonably diminished expectations on into the future, for so long as we continue shrinking the river through pumping ever more heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.
How will we pay? Tiered water bills will probably make it unaffordable for most of us to maintain a desert-defying green lawn. Unavoidable major cuts to agricultural water will introduce change and some chaos in the food supply systems, guaranteeing continued high or higher prices at the supermarket. It may make 50-plus percent of ag water going to animal food production (hay and corn) economically unsustainable; meat may eventually go back to being a special Sunday treat. The need to increase storage in reasonably good water years will mean cheap hydropower production will continue to be replaced by more expensive alternatives – wind and solar as they develop, but when necessary a fallback on fossil fuels (meaning more planet-warming gases into the atmosphere). The need to increase storage in good years will also mean marginal flows in all the ‘recreational canyons’ below the major dams, now a significant element in the basin economy. (This year the recreational economy took a big hit as many streams dropped below the level for safe boating or fishing.)
The Bureau wants consumptive use of Colorado River water to have been permanently cut by 3 million acre-feet (maf) not later than the end of the 10-year planning period (2036), on the valid assumption that ever lower snowpacks and runoffs are the shape of the future; that reduction in use will, they believe, allow them to build up some storage in the good years for sustainability through the bad years – the basic idea of storage.
The cuts to go in effect October 1 (beginning of the 2027-28 first two-year Bureau plan) will achieve between a third and half of the 3 maf through mandatory cuts totaling 1.25 maf for the three Lower Basin states below the big federal reservoirs (California, Arizona and Nevada), and a program of voluntary paid reductions in Upper Basin use, paid from a $100 million fedeal fund. Users can expect that the other half of the consumptive use reduction will be worked in to the two-year reviews and subsequent modified plans for the next two years.
The reaction to this plan has – as one might expect – not been positive. The state of Nevada has sued the Bureau/Interior for the depth of the current cuts and the promise of deeper. The Central Arizona Project governing board has also decided to sue, because the CAP will take the deepest cuts, due to the junior status of its water rights.
The state of Arizona also threatened to sue in a letter to the Bureau; they castigated the Bureau’s plan for seeming to pay no obeisance to the Colorado River Compact, and are essentially demanding that the Bureau continue to release 8.23 maf on average from Powell to meet the Upper Basin Compact obligation, even if it means Upper Basin users having to cut their uses to accumulate that hydrologically antiquated quantity. They have created a multi-million dollar war chest and have hired a law firm to defend their state of denial.
California has been mostly quiet; they will only stir from their den if someone suggests that the cuts should be divided among the three states equitably according to each state’s usage of the waters, rather than distributed through appropriations priorities.
The lack of mandatory Upper Basin cuts in the plan is a very sore point with the Lower Basin users. The Upper Basin states answer by saying that nature already imposed major reductions on their use – reductions that are not really quantified, however. It is important to acknowledge a major distinction between the two Basins: nearly all the lower Basin water users are below the big federal storage reservoirs, while many, maybe most of the Upper Basin water users are above the larger federal storage reservoirs. Living and working above a dam versus below a dam develops different perspectives on things like predictability, sustainability and freedom to act.
There is actually not a great quantity of private consumptive use in the Upper Basin that is ‘controlled’ by federal reservoirs, which can impose cuts by simply not releasing water from the reservoirs – how the Bureau will be enforcing its mandatory cuts in the Lower Basin. Also the upstream Upper Basin federal reservoirs like Green Mountain and Taylor are all on the small side (less than 150,000 acre-feet). Many of the Upper Basin agricultural diversions are also small, with numerous single-ranch headgates – too much to cover for overworked water commissioners with too-large sectors; they have to accept that a lot of the recording of use will be done by the farmers and ranchers themselves, an honor system that does not always insure accuracy.
Even the paid voluntary cuts face a challenge; to get the water saved by upstream users down to Powell Reservoir, it must be ‘shepherded’ past downstream users who are free to take the water to meet their own allotments, and no one knows how this shepherding can be done. A legal system based on ‘first come, first served’ does not automatically encourage a sharing attitude.
So that is where it stands today. I think it has to be acknowledged that the Bureau of Reclamation is trying to instill a ‘bankruptcy awareness’ over a region of heavily invested consumptive water users that are steeped in denial over a water situation they seem to feel they cannot afford to acknowledge.
That the Bureau of Reclamation was a moving force pushing the over-development of the river system through the first three quarters of the 20thcentury cannot be denied; if ‘arrogance’ can be defined as large actions taken in a state of ignorance about outcomes (suggesting that smaller trial runs would have been wiser), then the Bureau has been arrogant, culminating probably in Glen Canyon Dam. Basically 20th-century America became arrogant after World War II; the Bureau was just another running dog.
America right now is insufferably arrogant in its behavior globally, trying to make ongoing ignorance mandatory in the face of sadder-but-wiser awareness (‘wokeness’), in order to try to perpetrate large actions done stupidly; make America grate again. But the Bureau, viewing the imminent reduction of its massive Colorado River achievement to a dead-pool joke, has more humbly come around to a ten-year flexible and resilient plan to reduce water use in the Basin (plus extensions) to fit the Colorado River we now have, not the river we thought we had when we drafted a compact dividing the river among the seven states supposedly united by the river.
This is the Bureau’s attempt to move to bankruptcy management, and it has resulted to date in a flurry of lawsuits and threats, which must presumably be dealt with before what needs to be done can be done. History suggests that this could take up to a decade once it is submerged in the courts, and the Bureau managers are convinced that a prolonged period of ‘no action’ (the first alternative in all EIS-driven decisions) will inevitably result in dead-pool episodes in Powell and Mead Reservoirs. Recent history, on the other hand, suggests that the Supremes (to whom interstates disagreements go) are no longer interested in careful constitutionally-based jurisprudence if it doesn’t suit their politics, so they might let the Bureau go ahead with its escalating cuts to the Lower Basin while a water master thrashes through the legal thicket.
We’ll see. Meanwhile, next time I want to start looking at some ideas that might help lead out of our current bankruptcy….
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Blue Mesa reservoir seen in August 2026 at about 21% full. Under a new state-run conservation program, saved water could be stored in Blue Mesa. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
The state water board has given the green light to a one-year, state-run water conservation program.
On Wednesday [September 16, 2026], the Colorado Water Conservation Board unanimously approved the application review process and criteria for what state officials are calling Colorado’s near-term contribution program for 2027. The move came at the board’s regular September meeting at Copper Mountain.
Board member and Colorado River mainstem representative Taylor Hawes reminded the board that their unenviable position was due to a historic drought.
“None of us want to be in this situation where we are dealing with these kinds of impacts from climate-change-driven drought,” Hawes said. “We’re doing this in response to what’s being thrown at us in terms of decreased supply.”
The contribution program aims to use $100 million in funding from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to pay water users in the Upper Basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) to voluntarily cut back. According to the criteria approved Wednesday, projects in Colorado are required to avoid negative impacts; avoid speculators; comply with the rules of local ditch companies; and consult with tribes and local water conservation districts about proposed projects within their boundaries. The program will also give weight to projects that see participation statewide, across water sectors and by tribal nations; build drought resiliency; and have environmental benefits.
The approval comes at a pivotal moment, as the federal government has taken over operations for the Colorado River and the nation’s biggest reservoirs after the seven states that share the river failed to find agreement after years of negotiations. The federal plan calls for cuts only for the Lower Basin states (California, Arizona and Nevada). But with the region wracked by historic drought, the Upper Basin states can no longer escape scrutiny over their water use and are expected to contribute in some way.
“We’re not doing this for fun,” Hawes said. “We’re doing this because our situation requires it. … It’s a step toward just being able to live within the river’s means.”
THay bales seen on a ranch outside Carbondale in July 2024. The state water board approved a contribution program on Wednesday that could pay agricultural water users to cut back. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
Full fallowing not favored
The Upper Basin has experimented with these types of paid conservation programs before, including in the System Conservation Pilot Program (SCPP), which ran in 2023 and 2024. And Colorado conducted its own exploration of a demand-management program from 2019 to 2021.
But these programs remain controversial and go against the main philosophy of Western water law: to maximize the use of water. Farmers and ranchers often feel unfairly targeted for water savings because they use the majority of Colorado River water. And some worry about the potential for impacts to rural agricultural communities if water is taken off the land.
Although, in theory, all water-use sectors were allowed to participate in SCPP, in Colorado only agricultural water users in participated in the pilot program. Removing water from the Western Slope’s hay and alfalfa fields for an entire growing season — known as full-season fallowing — has been the most common way to find water savings in the past and is one of the easiest ways to calculate water savings. But early studies have shown that removing water from forage crops for the whole season can have negative impacts on fields that last for several years.
Troy Waters, a fifth-generation Mesa County farmer who sits on the board of Grand Valley Water Users Association and Grand Valley municipal water provider Ute Water, said during the public comment portion of Wednesday’s meeting that fallowing fields will just lead to “buy and dry,” where water is removed permanently, resulting in negative economic impacts to communities. Instead, Waters said he would like to see the funding from Reclamation go toward upgrades to aging infrastructure, such as lining ditches, which could have long-term water savings.
“This fallowing ground is causing nothing but a can of worms with farmers,” Waters said. “I’ve seen the fights; I’ve sat in on the board meetings. It’s not a solution. Let’s take this money and find a better solution.”
Some board members agreed. After some discussion, the board amended the criteria to add that multiyear fallowing projects should be disincentivized.
“The intent of making that suggestion is I don’t want to push people toward fallowing,” said CWCB Arkansas Basin representative Alan Ward. “I want that to be the exception.”
State officials have said they want to broaden the types of projects funded for next year, which is part of the reason why they are calling this a “contribution” program and not strictly a conservation program. A goal is to encourage participation from cities and industrial water users by offering more money to these sectors, where water is more valuable.
Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s representative to the Upper Colorado River Commission (UCRC) and a negotiator on Colorado River issues, said she heard loud and clear that there is not an appetite for multiyear fallowing projects.
“I think it is my responsibility to take that back to the Bureau of Reclamation and Department of the Interior and say these are the kinds of things we can do in Colorado and fallowing is not the only answer; the impacts of that might be too great,” Mitchell said.
State officials announced in July they would be creating a contribution program using federal money and have been taking feedback from water users and stakeholders since then. At Wednesday’s meeting, Emily Zmak, deputy interstate section chief at the CWCB, presented the findings from public comments, surveys and input, which helped officials craft the project criteria.
“Almost universally, we’ve heard support for a program,” Zmak said. “I would say 99% of the input either supported a program outright or supported a program with certain sideboards. Water users have been very invested in shaping the direction of a contribution program.”
The top criteria that respondents said they wanted to see in a program were protection of water rights; drought resilience; community impacts; and credit from Reclamation for the saved water. Respondents did not support having a minimum acreage for participation.
Sprinklers irrigate a ranch outside of Carbondale on Highway 133. Some water users and state water board members are hoping fallowing projects won’t become the backbone of a new state conservation program. CREDIT: CLAIRE DE L’ARBRE/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Approval process
Water-saving projects would have to go through several rigorous steps for approval, said Amy Ostdiek, interstate section chief with CWCB. First, there would be a review by the Colorado Division of Water Resources. CWCB staff would also consult with tribal nations for projects on their land and with local conservation and conservancy districts for projects within their boundaries. Then in January, the CWCB would decide which projects to advance to the UCRC for approval, before going to Reclamation for its approval.
“We would be seeking robust public input and review of these applications,” Ostdiek said.
CWCB’s approval Wednesday is conditioned on an agreement between federal officials and the Upper Basin states that says the states can get credit for and have control over the saved water.
Under the Upper Basin’s contribution program, saved water would have to be moved and stored in either Lake Powell or Blue Mesa, Flaming Gorge and Navajo reservoirs (known as the Upstream Initial Units) in order to get credit from Reclamation for the stored water. One of the criticisms of past pilot conservation programs was that the water was neither tracked to Lake Powell nor measured to see how much ended up there.
On Sept. 11, the UCRC sent a letter to federal officials saying that water saved through the program should be stored in one of the Upstream Initial Units and should be operationally neutral, meaning the pools of saved water would not be factored into federal reservoir operations or releases.
“Without these elements, participation in an Upper Basin Program may be significantly limited,” the letter reads. “Accordingly, we intend to work with you so that contributions generated by the Program and stored at Lake Powell or the Upstream Initial Units will be credited and regarded as operationally neutral.”
A portion of the city of Aspen’s water allocation in Ruedi Reservoir will be utilized to support regional drought response efforts, according to an informational memo sent to the Aspen City Council last week. The city will make up to 350 acre-feet of its annual water allocation from Ruedi available to support drought response efforts. It has access to 400 acre-feet annually. The water will be used to assist the Colorado River Water Conservation District’s emergency substitute water supply plan, which provides supplemental water supplies for municipal and domestic historic user pool beneficiaries and other eligible water users whose supplies may not otherwise be fully available during current drought conditions.
“By making a portion of the city’s available contract water supply available for release, Aspen is helping maintain water supplies used to support municipal and domestic water users affected by the current drought conditions and administration associated with the Cameo call,” the memo states.
The Cameo call consists of a series of water rights on the Colorado River. It keeps water instream until it reaches the Grand Junction area, and can mean upstream diversions may need to shut down or release additional water into the river to meet the needs of the Cameo call. The release of the water also provides benefits to streamflows, aquatic habitats, fisheries and riparian resources within the Roaring Fork and Colorado rivers, according to the memo.
The proposed purchase of the Shoshone Power Plant’s water rights took center stage at the Colorado River District’s Annual Water Seminar held at Colorado Mesa University on Friday, Sept. 18. While much of the annual meeting covered the historic drought that threatened the Western Slope and the rest of the Colorado River Basin, the Shoshone effort was held up as an example of how to manage water rights. Colorado River District General Manager Andy Mueller devoted a section of his keynote speech to the effort to purchase the power plant and its senior water rights for $99 million.
“It’s been going on since this district was formed in the 1930s,” Mueller said. “We have been trying to gain control and ensure permanency of the water rights that command the river related to this little power plant in Glenwood Canyon.”
There has been positive progress on the purchase, Mueller said, including raising more than $97 million from local, state and federal partners. The district also got a positive decision from the Colorado Water Conservation Board [8-0 vote on instream flow application]. However, there is still more negotiations underway, he said…On the funding side, Mueller credited Sen. Michael Bennet and Rep. Jeff Hurd for helping to secure and get released $40 million in federal funding for the purchase. Bennet and Hurd sat down for an “armchair conversation” about Shoshone at the seminar Friday afternoon…After lunch, Hurd and Bennet sat down and gave each other credit for the bipartisan effort to get the $40 million in federal funding for the Shoshone purchase. Bennet insisted on its inclusion in the Inflation Reduction Act during the Biden administration…When the Trump administration came in, it funded tens of millions of dollars in funding approved through that legislation. Hurd said he worked behind the scenes to convince the administration to release the funding.
“Give Jeff full credit for that,” Bennet said. “He landed this plane because I wasn’t getting my calls returned from the Trump administration and he was. He told them it was his number one priority.”
A map showing the boundaries of the Colorado River District, and its 15 member counties
The Colorado River District’s Annual Water Seminar held at Colorado Mesa University on Friday, Sept. 18, naturally focused on this year’s historic heat and drought that left many on the Western Slope facing water shortages, but it also looked toward the future and the positive steps taken to address this year’s challenges…
“Unprecedented. Worst ever. Miserable. Warmest ever. Hottest ever,” [Andy] Mueller said. “You can keep going, but I want to also say that this was a year of extremely collaborative creativity in western Colorado. It is really important to recognize that, applaud that and make sure we grow that, because it is how we get through tough times. It’s how we’re going to survive and thrive in the future.”
[…]
Mueller highlighted the collaboration between communities, irrigation companies and water users throughout the district. He said there were many efforts that helped extend the irrigation season…
Blue Mesa Reservoir on the Gunnison River, seen Aug. 30, 2026 at about 21% full. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
There were also areas, especially in the North Fork Valley and the Gunnison River, that have seen severe impacts from the drought. Colorado’s largest reservoir, Blue Mesa, is also in a dire condition, he said.
“On the Gunnison, there’s a train wreck that is accelerating at Blue Mesa,” Mueller said. “We are working with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Uncompahgre Valley Water Users and the Upper Gunnison Water Conservancy District to try to figure out solutions. But that reservoir, if anybody hasn’t seen it recently, is not just one reservoir anymore. It’s a bunch of little pools. It has dried up.”
[…]
Facing the challenges the future presents won’t be easy, Mueller said, but the next generations will depend on work done now.
“When I talk to my daughters who are in their 20s, they and their friends are absolutely scared for their future,” Mueller said. “They are extremely intelligent, they’re paying attention, but they look at this tremendous uncertainty that we have created in our society and in our globe. They need our help, helping them see the future. That is our job to do that.”
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Daily News website (Drew Shaw). Here’s an excerpt:
September 19, 2026
Colorado water experts and elected officials urged collaboration across industries, borders and political parties as the Western Slope seeks sustainable water systems that will serve future generations. The year’s unprecedented statewide drought won’t be the last, speakers said throughout Friday during the Colorado River District’s annual water seminar on Friday (September 18, 2026) in Grand Junction.
“We can’t run from it — we have to learn from it,” said Andy Mueller, the district’s general manager, during the event, which was held at Colorado Mesa University.
Ruedi Reservoir, above Basalt, on the Fryingpan River, April 22, 2026. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith
Communities and entities made sacrifices to ensure the region’s water needs were met. Reservoirs, such as Ruedi Reservoir east of Basalt, have been drawn down at faster rates than normal, municipalities have led water conservation campaigns and farmers across the valley have needed to settle for significantly smaller crop yields…The river district has for years sought the means to buy from Xcel Energy the Shoshone water rights, the oldest and largest non-consumptive water rights on the Colorado River. In acquiring the rights, the river district would prevent any other potential buyers from diverting the water from Western Slope communities…The agency has raised about $97 million of $99 million for the acquisition, $40 million of which comes from federal funds. Those federal dollars, which were secured by the state’s Democratic senators under the Biden Administration, were frozen in 2025 under the Trump Administration. Earlier this year, U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd, R-Grand Junction, worked successfully to release the funds.
“That’s the kind of collaboration we need in Congress and in our communities,” Mueller said…
Mueller said the state’s future water security depends on finding sustainable systems to manage the water it has now.
“How can we adapt to uncertainty and rising temperatures and reduced streams?” he asked. “We don’t need to argue about whether or not that’s happening. We need to focus on the future and figure out solutions.”
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Seminar day did not include an EV element. I ride my bicycle from Fruita to Grand Junction along the Colorado Riverfront Trail. The 14 mile ride has great views of the Colorado National Monument, Grand Mesa, and Mt. Sentinel.
Colorado National Monument from the Colorado Riverfront Trail near Fruita September 18, 2026.
Of course the Colorado River is front and center and it was so gratifying to see the river running with sediment.
Colorado River running muddy September 18, 2026.
It had been rainy all week in western Colorado and you could tell, it was enough to get near average streamflow at the Utah line.
My main takeaway from the seminar was that West Slope water users shared supplies to get through these rough times. Collaboration was mentioned several times as was, “We didn’t call anyone out.”
Check out my live-posts from seminar on my BlueSky feed or the seminar hash tag (click on the “Latest” tab).
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Denver Water can finish its Gross Dam expansion and fill the controversial reservoir in western Boulder County, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday, lifting an injunction by a lower court judge and confirming the dam’s permits as sound.
The appeals court said the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had acted responsibly in issuing construction permits for the $600 million expansion, which is largely complete and will be filled using water rights Denver holds in the Colorado River basin on the western side of the Continental Divide.
“We do not think the Corps’s choice of cost methodology was arbitrary or capricious,” the appeals court ruling said. The plaintiffs, including nonprofit Save the Colorado, argued the Corps rejected clear evidence of climate change, but the appeals court ruled the Corps gave the research fair consideration.
“The Corps considered — and rejected — the reliability of that and similar studies, one of which showed that in the Colorado River Basin, ‘no consistent trends in annual precipitation have been detected over the last 100 years,’” the appeals court said.
“In the end, the environmental groups ask us to substitute our judgment for the Corps’s. They point out scientific studies that, in their view, rebut the Corps’s reading of the scientific literature and ask us to opine on what the scientific research establishes,” the appellate ruling said. “But our job is not to second-guess the Corps’s assessment as long as it rests on a reasoned basis.”
“We’re pleased to see the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals confirm that the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project was lawfully permitted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and that Denver Water can proceed with the final stages of this critical project to ensure a safe, secure water supply for the 1.5 million people we serve,” according to a statement from spokesperson Todd Hartman. “With this decision, Denver Water can move forward with completion of construction, site preparation and eventual filling of the expanded reservoir. An expanded Gross Reservoir is vital to the future of the Denver region.”
It’s nonsensical to be putting more straws in, and further draining, the Colorado River at this point in history,” Wockner said. “That the law allows it to happen doesn’t make it right, it just makes it legal. I saw something wrong, I stood up, spoke out and took action. It was the right thing to do and I would do it all over again.”
Wockner said Tuesday the plaintiffs would not be appealing the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Gross Reservoir Dam backs up South Boulder Creek, while also taking in water through the Moffat Tunnel under the divide, from the Fraser and Williams Fork rivers in the Colorado River basin. Denver Water has said the expansion is needed to balance its water storage system currently heavily concentrated on the southern end of the metro area.
The Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to further constrain the reach and potency of the Clean Water Act by re-defining what qualifies as “waters of the United States,” or WOTUS, which are streams, wetlands, and other water bodies under federal jurisdiction. The proposed definition would disproportionately affect the arid West by lifting protections from thousands of miles of streams, arroyos, and wetlands.
Under the CWA, a firm or individual looking to discharge pollutants or other material into, or dredge or reroute or otherwise alter, a WOTUS waterway must obtain a federal permit from the EPA or Army Corps of Engineers. A battle has raged for more than five decades over what constitutes a WOTUS. The Supreme Court’s 2023 Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency ruling called for a narrower definition, handing industry and right-wing ideologues a major victory.
Ephemeral streams are streams that do not always flow. They are above the groundwater reservoir and appear after precipitation in the area. Via Socratic.org
The changes in the latest proposed supplemental rule are even more exclusionary than the administration’s November 2025 proposal, which removed “ephemeral” and “intermittent” waterways — i.e. arroyos or washes that run only after rains or snowmelt — from federal jurisdiction. Included as a WOTUS under that proposal were “relatively permanent … bodies of surface water that are standing or continuously flowing year-round or at least during the wet season.”
The new proposal omits the “wet season” verbiage. It then defines “relatively permanent” to be synonymous with “perennial,” which in turn is defined as ‘‘having standing or continuously flowing water every day of the year during ordinary conditions.’’ However, “a body of water does not lose its relatively permanent status if it dries up as a result of anomalous events such as drought or dry spell.1 A body of water also does not lose its relatively permanent status if it dries up for no more than a single period of up to 30 consecutive days in any given year as a result of non-anomalous events resulting in a temporary interruption such as low tide or a regularly occurring dry spell.” Yet, “if flow is interrupted for two periods in any given year, and each period consists of 10 consecutive days of no flow, the water body would not be jurisdictional.”
A Natural Resources Defense Council analysis found that the new proposal would remove protections from more than 94% of the nation’s wetlands and about 79% of its streams. The changes would hit the West hardest, leaving a state like Arizona with almost no federally protected streams or wetlands.
So here’s my interpretation of where the updated proposal leaves us:
WOTUS waterways (keeps CWA protections): A year-round river, stream, or lake that never dries up, such as the Animas River, the San Juan River, the Colorado River, the Gunnison River, Cement Creek, Mineral Creek, the Fremont River, and so on, would retain federal protections under the CWA. However, since most of these rivers are fed by intermittent or ephemeral streams, they would also be potentially affected (since is someone altered or polluted a tributary, the effects would eventually reach the mainstem).
Non-WOTUS waterways (would lose CWA protections): All intermittent and ephemeral streams, i.e. arroyos or washes that run only when it rains, such as are ubiquitous in the arid West, would be removed from federal jurisdiction. Other streams and rivers that run seasonally, but regularly dry up for more than 30 consecutive days per year, such as the Paria River, the Dirty Devil, Rio Puerco, Santa Cruz River, or the Mancos River, would also lose federal protections, as would wetlands that are only “wet” for part of the year.
Vague WOTUS status: Rivers or streams that are perennial as a whole, but on which certain segments dry up for more than 30 days per year (usually because of upstream diversions), e.g.: the Rio Grande through Albuquerque, long sections of the Lower Dolores River between McPhee Dam and its confluence with the San Miguel, the North Fork of the Gunnison around Paonia, lower reaches of the La Plata River, or Junction Creek through Durango, and numerous desert rivers in Arizona and New Mexico.
While the proposed rule would remove federal CWA protections from many waterways, it would not automatically give developers or industry free rein to bulldoze or dump toxic waste into them. State and local laws would still apply, and arroyos and streams on public land would still be protected to some degree by federal environmental laws. Colorado lawmakers passed a bill in 2024 that effectively backfilled the regulatory gap left by the Sackett decision. New Mexico also has moved to implement its own layer of water protections. In more industry-friendly states such as Idaho and Utah, the proposed rule would leave thousands of miles of streams and waterways vulnerable to development and pollution.
The proposed rule is open to public comments until Oct. 9. You may send comments, identified by Docket ID No. EPA–HQ– OW–2025–0322, by any of the following methods:
Federal eRulemaking Portal: https://www.regulations.gov/. Follow the online instructions for submitting comments.
Email: OW-Docket@epa.gov. Include Docket ID No. EPA–HQ–OW– 2025–0322 in the subject line of the message. •
Mail: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, EPA Docket Center, Water Docket, Mail Code 28221T, 1200 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20460.
Hand Delivery or Courier: EPA Docket Center, WJC West Building, Room 3334, 1301 Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20004.
For more background on the long and winding struggle to define WOTUS, check out the following:
My February 2022 High Country News piece on the Supreme Court taking up the Sackett Case, including a detailed timeline of the WOTUS definition battle.
And, from the Land Desk archives (you’ll need a paid subscription for access):
A new paper is out from the group of Colorado River experts known by some as the “Traveling Wilburys of the Colorado River Basin,”2 and lo and behold, it actually contains some good news. Namely this: The Lower Basin users have managed to make significant reductions in water use over the last decade and a half without turning the Southwest into a dust-choked wasteland and getting ahead of the latest round of mandated cuts. This indicates that the users can continue to slash water use in the future — to a degree — if necessary.
The Lower Basin accounts for about 60% of all consumptive water uses and losses on the Colorado River. Irrigated agriculture, in turn, makes up about 60% of the Lower Basin’s consumptive use. The Imperial Irrigation District, which is primarily agricultural, is the largest single water user on the entire river. This means that the agricultural sector — and the IID in particular — “will play a significant role in future reductions in water use,” as the authors put it.
So far, the Lower Basin’s farmers and the IID have stepped up. In 2025, the Lower Basin states’ consumptive use was 5.76 million acre-feet, the lowest since at least 2010. Since 2023, California has used about 13% less water, a reduction attributable mostly to cuts at IID.
Source: The Colorado River Water Supply Crisis in a Few Graphs: Part 2 Agricultural Water Use in the Lower Basin.
Figure 3. Consumptive use in Arizona since 2010. Estimated use in 2026 based on forecast of September 1, 2026.
Notably, IID’s reductions came mostly during the summer months, the peak season for field crops such as alfalfa, Bermuda grass, and kleingrass, when it’s too hot to grow most garden crops, such as lettuce, onions, and broccoli. During the vegetables’ growing season, from November through March, water use stayed roughly the same as before. A similar, but less dramatic, dynamic shows up in Arizona.
Figure 6. Box-and-whisker plots of total monthly consumptive use by the IID between 2010 and 2026. Each box is the Inter Quartile Range, defined by the 25th and 75th percentile of the years of data for that month. These boxes represent the typical monthly use pattern since 2010. Red dots are the average use in each month between 2024 and 2026. See text for additional explanation of a box-and-whisker plot.
This suggests a couple of things: 1. The Imperial Irrigation District and other large agricultural users may be able to significantly lower overall water use without harming important garden crops such as broccoli and carrots (easing fears that the Colorado River crisis will deprive us of vegetables); and, 2. The IID is successfully using its vast alfalfa crop as a giant water demand-response tool3. That is, through both fallowing some fields and putting others on a summer water diet, the district’s farmers have managed to slash water use, while still growing gobs of hay and alfalfa.
And because the IID still has about 150,000 acres of alfalfa, it has huge potential for future water cuts through these same methods, which is the good news. The bad news is that the federal plan for operating the river contemplates Lower Basin cuts of up to 3 million acre-feet per year (resulting in a total annual consumption of 4.5 MAF), which is about twice what the Basin has already achieved.
To consider the viability of such cuts, the authors summed up the smallest monthly use in each Lower Basin state since 2010, even though they didn’t occur simultaneously, and even though in some cases the reductions were due to heavy precipitation, not conservation efforts. The result was 5.03 MAF, still 530,000 acre-feet over the potential target. In other words, getting to 4.5 MAF/year is likely to be much more painful than accomplishing the reductions so far.
Yet some pain is likely to be necessary unless the West’s warming climate does a rapid about-face, and soon.
📸 PARTING SHOT 🎞️
Horse, Torrey, Utah. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
1 * The proposed rule says “only extreme (D3) and exceptional (D4) droughts would qualify as anomalous drought conditions that can temporarily interrupt perennial flow, and can extend continuously across no more than a five-year timeframe.”
2 This is an appropriate monicker, coined by longtime Colorado journalist Allen Best, and is great for those of us in Generation X or older. But I worry that it might not mean much to anyone under the age of, say, 40? So if you have any more contemporary suggestions for a group of superstar water wonks, aka, Jack Schmidt, Anne Castle, Eric Kuhn, Kathryn Sorensen, and Katherine Tara, I’d love to hear them!
3 Demand response is a term typically used in relation to electricity use. It’s when large power users, or a collection of smaller users, are paid to reduce electricity consumption during times of high demand to ease grid strain. So, for example, during a heat wave, when everyone’s air conditioners are running full blast, the utility or grid operator would signal a factory, say, or a data center, or even a host of smart thermostats, to scale back their operations or dial down the AC during the hottest time of the day when solar generation might be dropping off. The targeted drop in consumption has the same effect as increasing power generation would, keeping supply and demand in balance.
Since Jonathan wonders if anyone under 40 will get the reference to the Traveling Wilburys, here you go:
Welcome to the first edition of the Land Desk’s Newswire, a human-curated summary (we are a non-AI shop, FYI) of some of the week’s biggest headlines that concern land, water, and other Western issues. I’m still working out the timing of this, and how it will meld with the week’s other dispatches, so expect some adjustments in coming weeks. Please give it a gander and, as always, I appreciate your feedback.
🚣🏽 WATER WATCH 🌊
New Mexico officials release about 2,000 acre-feet of water from Abiquiu Dam to provide a temporary un-drying of the Rio Grande’s desiccated riverbed through Albuquerque in an attempt to nourish stressed vegetation, recharge the aquifer, and to study the effects of such pulses. Audubon Southwest leased about 300 acre-feet of the water from various users, the Middle Rio Grande Conservation District contributed 300 acre-feet more, and the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority provided the remaining 1,400 acre-feet from its share of river imported from the Colorado River Basin via the San Juan-Chama Project. (Inkstain, Laura Paskus, KUNM)
Aurora Water — a municipal utility on Colorado’s Front Range — looks to buy Lower Arkansas Valley farmers’ water rights to feed the city’s future growth, sparking concerns about negative impacts of “buy and dry” deals. But officials say it would be a “buy and (only partially) dry” deal that keeps some of the water in agriculture. (Colorado Sun)
🌵 PUBLIC LANDS 🌲
A new study finds federal land management agencies spent $1 billion less on vendors in Western states in 2025 compared to 2024, acutely affecting the small business sector. Some of the largest cuts were to wildland fire management investments, particularly on-the-ground suppression work as spending was shifted to aerial firefighting. (news release)
Conservation groups file a lawsuit challenging oil and gas leasing on hundreds of thousands of acres of public land in big-game migration corridors and wilderness quality lands in Wyoming and Colorado, saying the BLM violated federal law by skirting environmental protections. (news release)
The Bureau of Land Management seeks public input on 38 proposed oil and gas leases on 66,221 acres in northwestern Colorado that would be auctioned off in March 2027. The bulk of the parcels are under the jurisdiction of the BLM’s Kremmling and Little Snake River field offices, with one in the Royal Gorge office. (news release)
🦫 WILDLIFE WATCH 🦅
Colorado Parks and Wildlife officers euthanize a lethargic and unresponsive 300-pound male bear in Durango, finding that its stomach and intestines were completely blocked with trash. “We’ve all heard the oft-repeated phrase ‘garbage kills bears’ for years,” said Bryan Peterson of Bear Smart Durango. “And many have asked how in the world does trash get bears killed? Well, in many ways, but sometimes literally. Our community’s tepid approach to trash management got a bear killed. Thankfully, its pain and suffering was ended.” (news release)
Colorado Parks and Wildlife officers “lethally remove,” i.e. kill, two male yearling wolves from two separate packs after the animals were linked to attacks on sheep and cattle in Rio Blanco and Pitkin counties. (news release, Summit Daily)
🐮 GRAZING GAZETTE 🥩
A Wyoming advocate shows how the state’s agriculture industry’s resource footprint — in terms of water use for irrigation and land-use for livestock grazing — significantly dwarfs its statewide economic footprint, and that should be considered before giving ranchers outsized political influence. (WyoFile)
🛢️HYDROCARBON HOEDOWN📈
A pair of peer-reviewed studies link Permian Basin oil and gas operations to radioactive plumes and high ozone pollution in Loving, New Mexico, and other nearby communities, potentially increasing lung cancer and other health risks. (Capital & Main)
The Bureau of Land Management and Southern Ute Indian Tribe launch a planning process to guide and analyze oil and gas development on 110,000 acres of tribal trust land within the tribe’s land in southwestern Colorado. (news release)
⛈️ WACKY WEATHER WATCH⚡️
A massive sinkhole emerges in actor Nicolas Cage’s oceanfront house’s drivewayin Malibu, prompting city officials to declare and emergency, evacuate nearby homes, and shut off gas service in the gated community. Officials worry the situation could be worsened by forecasted high tides and rain and long-term weather disturbances resulting from the coming super El Niño. (Los Angeles Times)
🐓 REGULATORY CAPTURE CHRONICLES 🦊
Radical right-wing U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and fellow House Republicans launch an investigation of nineteen conservation groups, accusing the entities of profiting at the expense of taxpayers via statutory fee-shifting provisions, which can reimburse the organizations for legal costs when they win in court. (AFP,news release)
🤖 DATA CENTERS 👾
Pinal County, Arizona’s board of supervisors vote to reject Vermaland’s proposed data center complex following widespread local opposition, even though the developer scaled back the original proposal. The scaled-back proposed facility, spread across 3,300 acres, would have included 11 buildings and a gas-fired power plant. (AZ Family)
Tribal nations and Indigenous advocates push back on data center developmentin Arizona, Oklahoma, Nevada, and beyond. (Washington State Standard)
Oracle seeks proposals for the development of 2 gigawatts of new solar, wind, geothermal, or other renewable energy technologies to provide “carbon-free energy matching” for its Project Jupiter data center complex under development in southern New Mexico, which is expected to be powered by gas-fired fuel cells. The firm is also offering $1 million to support carbon capture and sequestration at the facility. (news release, KRQE)
Creekstone Energy, the developer of the massive Delta Gigasite data center in central Utah, looks to use untested technology to “create” more water than it uses by capturing condensation from natural gas combustion at the plant dedicated to powering the facility. (Salt Lake Tribune)
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) opposes Attorney General Kris Mayes’ call for a pause on new data centers to get a better handle on their water and energy use, acknowledging the concerns are valid but saying a statewide moratorium is the wrong approach. (AZ Family)
A peer-reviewed study finds that data centers, which typically combine large capital investments with little local labor demand, can strain a community’s public infrastructure without generating widespread economic gains. (SSRN)
🔋ENERGY TRANSITION 🔌
Officials and residents of the Coalmine Canyon Chapter of the Navajo Nation push back against 750-megawatt solar-plus-storage installation in northern Arizona, saying the developers have been less than transparent and the power will not go to local homes, many of which are off the grid. (High Country News)
Accelergen Energy proposes a 125-megawatt solar-plus-storage installation on about 900 acres east of Cortez, Colorado. (Durango Herald)
A new study finds small-scale, front-of-the-meter solar-plus-battery installationscould serve about 32% of California’s largest utilities’ peak summer electricity demand; analysts say developing this asset would improve reliability and preserve affordability without significant transmission upgrades. (Utility Dive)
📈 DATAVIZ OF THE DAY 📊
The stats for August are in and, well, it was a warm one. This August was the hottest August on record for the contiguous United States, as well as for many counties in the Southwest. It was also the hottest month on record globally, barely edging out July 2023 for the dubious honors.
In the struggling Colorado River basin, where water is scarce, the White House has signaled its priorities for how to use the remaining gallons.
Even as scientifically-determined thresholds have been met for releasing water from Glen Canyon Dam for ecological and recreational benefits in Grand Canyon, the Trump administration has decided against those actions in this record-hot year – deciding not to release cold water from deep in Lake Powell to aid the humpback chub, a threatened fish species, and not to authorize a high-volume release of water to rebuild Grand Canyon’s eroded beaches, which are in terrible condition, according to federal monitoring.
These environmental releases would not change the total volume of water flowing out of Lake Powell over the year, just the timing.
Because the releases bypass the dam’s turbines and reduce hydropower generation, which is part of the administration’s “energy dominance” agenda, the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that manages Glen Canyon Dam, will not be doing them.
“After evaluating management alternatives and considering all authorized purposes, the decision was made based on significant hydropower generation concerns under already strained system conditions,” Reclamation said in a statement in August.
The administration’s decisions foreshadow more difficult choices ahead. Due to climate change and overuse, the Colorado River is shrinking and warming. Its dams were built and river management goals were laid out during an era that anticipated healthy reservoirs. That is no longer the case. Because Lake Powell and Lake Mead are about a quarter of their capacity or less, the hydrological assumptions that inform current management strategies are outdated, said Jack Schmidt, a scientist who has spent his four-decade career studying the Colorado River.
“Everything needs to be revisited because the driving factors of the Colorado River ecosystem in Grand Canyon are now completely changed and probably forever changed,” said Schmidt of Utah State University’s Center for Colorado River Studies. “Everything was developed in a world of full reservoirs. And now the reservoirs are empty.”
Tradeoffs Plague Water Managers
Even in the best of times, managing a large dam on a major river is not easy. Dams alter the river’s natural patterns of flow and temperature. Operators must weigh one set of benefits against another group of costs.
Glen Canyon Dam is one of the thorniest management conundrums. Located near the Arizona-Utah border, the 63-year-old structure has emerged as the most significant water-supply choke point in the Colorado River basin and it is the focus of clamorous debate about water and power infrastructure in a drier climate.
As managers grapple with how much water to release, Glen Canyon Dam is also choking the river of its natural supply of sediment. Without new inputs, sand bars and beaches in Grand Canyon are at risk of disappearing. These features provide habitat, give boaters a place to camp during river trips, and protect archaeological sites.
Most of the river’s sediment now comes from the Paria River and Little Colorado River, downstream of Glen Canyon. Periodic high-flow water releases from the dam mimic the thunderous floods of the past that carried sediment through Grand Canyon to fortify eroding beaches.
There is enough sediment in the Colorado River below Glen Canyon today to warrant a high-flow release. Yet Reclamation has not done one since 2023. Experts agree that Reclamation is highly unlikely to conduct one this fall either. A final decision will be made in the next few weeks.
The need for a high-flow release is mounting. In August, David Topping, a research hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center, presented data showing the ill health of Grand Canyon beaches. A typical sand bar is smaller now than in 2016, when the current management plan that established the high-flow triggers was finalized.
The lack of high-flow releases has deprived researchers of crucial data on how the size and duration of these mini-floods, usually one to four days in length, aid beach-building.
Before and after photos of results of the high flow experiment in 2008 via USGS
“What can we do if the administration isn’t willing to allow us to use the bypass tubes for high-flow experiments, if that’s going to be off the table, at least for a while?” said Wayne Pullan, Reclamation’s Upper Colorado Region director, at a Glen Canyon management meeting in August, asking attendees to consider management options under political constraints.
“We’re in a pinch point,” Pullan added. “A real pinch point.”
Degraded beaches result in a degraded river experience, said David Brown of the Grand Canyon River Guides, a recreation advocacy group. Rafting groups have to compete for limited real estate in what is generally regarded as one of the world’s premier river corridors.
“When there’s less campable area, that means everyone’s kind of getting squished together or your toilet is next to where people are sleeping,” Brown said.
Non-Native Species Thrive in Warm Water
In addition to sediment, water temperature is the other blinking red environmental indicator.
Air temperature records in the basin are being obliterated this year. Colorado, home to the river’s headwaters, had its hottest summer ever. Scorching air temperatures are reflected in water. The Colorado River below Lake Powell is the warmest since Glen Canyon Dam was completed.
Smallmouth bass were introduced as a sport fish in the upper Colorado River basin in the late 1960s. Voracious feeders, smallmouth bass view other fish as the sport, happily preying on threatened native species like the humpback chub, an eighteen-inch fish in Grand Canyon with a distinctive smooshed silhouette.
Listed as endangered in 1967, the humpback chub has now bounced back thanks to tens of millions of dollars of conservation investment. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service upgraded the humpback chub to “threatened” status in 2018.
Diagram showing critical reservoir levels at Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell. Land Desk diagram with data from the Bureau of Reclamation.
Smallmouth bass live in Lake Powell, preferring the layer of warm water closest to the surface. As the lake shrinks, that warm layer has now reached the level of the penstocks, which pull water into Glen Canyon Dam’s turbines for hydropower generation before being released downstream.
In these low-water conditions, the fear is that more smallmouth bass will be delivered into the Colorado River below Glen Canyon.
Once there, they will find a habitable environment. Smallmouth bass spawn when water temperatures exceed 60 degrees Fahrenheit. This year, that mark was breached in June. Today, the river at Lees Ferry, about 16 miles downstream of Glen Canyon Dam, is about 70 F.
These conditions – when the river temperature is above 60 F for three consecutive days – are supposed to trigger a release of cold water from deep in Lake Powell. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says that this “cool mix” is the “only conservation measure proven to limit smallmouth bass reproduction.” Evidence from cool mix releases in 2024 and 2025, which knocked down smallmouth bass numbers, supports that conclusion.
Cool mix, however, will not happen in 2026 due to the Trump administration’s desire to generate hydropower.
The last cool mix flow, in 2025, cost the Western Area Power Administration, which markets federal hydropower, $6.1 million to replace that electricity for its contractors.
Instead of cool mix, Reclamation says it is focusing on other options to keep smallmouth bass from establishing downstream of Glen Canyon and to preserve the humpback chub’s hard-won conservation gains. In the short term that means stunning the bass with electric-shock tools and physically removing them from the water.
In the longer term, Reclamation is considering installing infrastructure to regulate the temperature of the water that passes through Glen Canyon. The agency calls this one of its “durable structural solutions.”
An Uncertain Future
Cool mix and high-flow releases are an attempt to rebalance an ecosystem that the dams destabilized. Congress passed the Grand Canyon Protection Act of 1992, which orders Reclamation to operate Glen Canyon Dam in a manner that protects and reduces harm to the “natural and cultural resources and visitor use.” That is, fish, tribal archaeological sites, and rafting.
The act required an environmental impact statement for Glen Canyon Dam that would analyze the actions required to achieve the broad environmental-protection goals set by Congress.
It was a “compromise to really put all the resources on the same playing field,” said Jen Pelz of the Grand Canyon Trust. In her view, decisions this year tilt in one direction – hydropower. “I don’t feel like they’re being balanced right now.”
Because the river guides were instrumental in lobbying for Grand Canyon protections, the present-day failures to uphold the act’s goals are all the more galling, Brown said. “It’s very hard to watch it get ignored.”
The administration is prioritizing hydropower when hydropower is at a pivot point.
Generation at Glen Canyon is down more than 40% from when Lake Powell was full. Utilities are turning to solar and wind to cover some of the generation losses, while utility-scale batteries are helping to replace the capacity and grid-regulating functions that a large dam provides.
The decision to favor hydropower over ecology reflects bigger problems with the Colorado River’s infrastructure. Glen Canyon Dam is not designed for the river as it exists today. Reclamation wants to keep Lake Powell high enough to generate hydropower because the dam’s other outlets to deliver water downstream are untested over long periods and were damaged in a previous high-flow release.
Lower basin states and tribes, including Arizona, California, Nevada, and the Gila River Indian Community, have asked the federal government to update Glen Canyon’s infrastructure for water delivery and power generation. Reclamation is assessing three options and expects that study to be released in early 2027. Any additional action will require congressional approval and funding.
Along with the infrastructure problems, man-made climate change is sapping the river and heating up its water. Ecologists consider the Grand Canyon a “novel ecosystem,” meaning its native species and natural processes have been disrupted and rearranged by human meddling.
To Schmidt, the former chief of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center, this suggests a wholesale rethinking not just of the river’s infrastructure but also of our ecological goals for the Colorado River.
“We as a society get to play God in deciding what attributes of that ecosystem we value, which ones we want to work hard to preserve and which ones we don’t,” he said. “The answer is not an obvious one.”
This story was produced by Circle of Blue, in partnership withThe Water Deskat the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
Just days after President Donald Trump angered U.S. ranchers by waiving tariffs on 300,000 metric tons of foreign beef (and whatever other meat-adjacent-material may pass as beef), he threw the livestock industry a bone by ordering a “review” of federal Endangered Species Act protections for gray and Mexican wolves. The order also instructs the Interior Department to push states into removing any state-specific protections and to “revise their standards for lethal takings of gray wolves and Mexican wolves to assist ranchers in combating predation.”
In other words, Trump wants to revive the late 19th and early 20th century campaign to exterminate wild predators to benefit ranchers. Will this please a handful of public lands livestock operators who are ideologically inclined to hate wolves, whether they affect their operations or not? Sure. Will it save the American rancher, or even offset the influx of foreign beef? Nope.
Wolves do kill cattle if they are not adequately protected (and the rancher is compensated for the lost livestock), and they can have other impacts on ranching operations in wild areas. But study after study has shown that other factors — from weather and climate, to sickness and disease — account for a far greater share of cattle and calf mortalities.
This is the administration’s latest ploy in its quest to boost the number of cattle on public lands. It is also peddling vacated grazing allotments and easing the already decidedly lax regulations on grazing.
Federal staffing rosters show the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has lost 36% of its staff under the Trump administration, dripping from 9,957 staffers to 6,333 between 2024 and 2026, likely exacerbating a backlog of Endangered Species Act listing decisions. (news release)
Milkweed and sweet peas along the Farmers Ditch in the North Fork Valley (and a reminder that irrigation ditches support more than just crops). Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
🐟 COLORADO RIVER CHRONICLES 💧
The irrigation canals, laterals, and ditches are going dry in the Colorado River’s Upper Basin weeks before the growing season comes to an end, forcing farmers to rely on September rains or their own storage to get their crops to harvest time. It goes to show that even without mandatory cuts, many Upper Basin water users experience water shortages during dry years.
The biggest and latest user to get cut off by low river flows was the Grand Valley Water Users Association, which began drawing down its Government Highline Canal as “the river flows drop to undeliverable levels.” Flows in that canal fell from almost 1,500 cfs at the end of August to about 725 cfs early this week. The more senior Orchard Mesa Irrigation District and Grand Valley Irrigation Company continued to pull water from the river and deliver it to irrigators.
In the North Fork Valley, all but the most senior ditches were shut off weeks ago, after Paonia Reservoir hit dead pool. And on the Dolores River, even the most senior water rights holders — the Montezuma Valley Irrigation District — lost their water at the beginning of this month. Usually it holds out for at least another couple of weeks. (Other water users received dramatically curtailed amounts throughout the irrigating season).
In the Grand Valley, the canal’s loss was the river’s gain: The Colorado River near Palisade, after running as low as 42 cfs this summer, bounced back to around 300 cfs at the end of August. A corresponding increase in flow can be seen at the USGS gage1 near Cisco. This little boost, combined with a few intense, but patchy storms, and a slight increase in releases from Flaming Gorge Reservoir, have brought up inflows into Lake Powell, somewhat slowing the drop in surface levels.
Dolores River watershed
The Dolores River, on the other hand, remains virtually dry downstream of McPhee Dam, and McPhee Reservoir’s surface level is currently about 12 feet lower than it was a year ago.
A tale of water inequality in the West — Jonathan P. Thompson, “I wrote the essay [click the link]—about my parents’ farm’s ditch in the North Fork Valley of Western Colorado—in 2018, which was one of the region’s driest years on record. The essay is every bit as pertinent today, an equally dry time for most of the Western Slope, even if some details have changed: My sister owns the farm now—along with the robust water rights—…”
The Central Arizona Project’s board of directors authorizes its attorneys to take legal action “if necessary” to protect its allotment of Colorado River against the Bureau of Reclamation’s plans for operating the river’s infrastructure in the coming decade. The CAP stands to lose the most water under a shortage, as Arizona agreed to junior water rights in exchange for federal funding for the vast plumbing project that delivers river water to the central and southern parts of the state. Nevada already sued the federal government over potential cuts to its share of water. (Arizona Republic)
Western Colorado anglers and boaters call on the Bureau of Reclamation to increase water releases from Blue Mesa, Morrow Point, and Crystal Reservoirs to preserve streamflows in the Gunnison River in the Black Canyon, the Gunnison Gorge, and further downstream, saying the decision to reduce releases to protect reservoir levels has “exerted a toll on a vital and cherished natural resource.” (Aspen Journalism)
🤖 DATA CENTER WATCH 👾
The Big Data Center Buildup drives up electricity demand in Wyoming and spurs a wave of proposed gas plants, some of which would serve the grid and others dedicated to powering server farm facilities. (WyoFile)
⛏️ MINING MONITOR ⛏️
The Southern Ute Indian Tribe says it will pull out all of the stops to block potential mining projects in the La Plata Mountains in southwestern Colorado, adding to the list of entities opposing Metallic Minerals’ exploratory drilling project on the western side of the range. (Durango Herald)
New Mexico Land Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard puts state trust lands off-limits to new uranium mining leases, and orders her office to instead focus on cleaning up the more than 1,000 former uranium mining-related sites in the state. The order does not affect private or federal lands. (news release)
Anfield Energy looks to raise at least $50 million to finance its plan to refurbish and reopen the Shootaring uranium mill — which has been idle since 1982 — near Ticaboo, Utah. Anfield is the firm behind the Velvet-Wood uranium mine in the Lisbon Valley and has designs on mining near Slick Rock, Colorado. (Northern Miner)
🌵 PUBLIC LANDS 🌲
A federal judge temporarily blocks the Trump administration’s effort to evict bison from public lands in Montana, finding that the Bureau of Land Management’s decision to kick the animals off American Prairie-held grazing leases was likely “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and otherwise not in accordance with the law.” (Public Domain)
The U.S. Department of Agriculture releases its final Forest Service reorganization plan, which includes moving the headquarters to Salt Lake City and shuttering 23 facilities nationwide, including four in California, one in New Mexico, and one in Oregon, with the remainder being in non-Western states. The USDA says “less than 200” of the agency’s 30,000 employees are expected to need to relocate, mostly from Washington, D.C. to Fort Collins, Salt Lake City, or a newly established center. (news release, OPB)
The Center for Western Priorities fact-checks Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s numerous erroneous statements about the administration’s dramatic reduction of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments, finding that on this topic (and others) the cabinet member is a serial liar. (Westwise)
🏠 RANDOM REAL ESTATE ROOM 🤑
Anita Verma-Lallian, a real estate investor who made her name buying and selling multi-million-dollar Phoenix-area properties for data centers, unveils a plan for a massive development in Tonopah, Arizona. Tentative plans for the $6 billion to $10 billion development include a movie studio, amusement park, hotels, retail, and a data center complex. The property is adjacent to one where Bill Gates’ investment firm is planning a “futuristic smart city.” (Phoenix Business Journal via KTAR)
🛻TRANSPORTATION 🚂
The Utah Department of Transportation completes the $152 million Energy Corridor highway improvement project on State Routes 162 and 262 in San Juan County. The routes pass through the Aneth Oil Field and could potentially be used for uranium ore haul trucks traveling from New Mexico mines to the White Mesa Mill near Blanding. (ABC4)
🤯ANNALS OF INANITY🤡
When will it stop!?! Amid a flurry of inane, bizarre, and cognitively-impaired social media posts, President Donald Trump on Sunday suggested New Mexico’s name should be changed to “New America.” (CNN)
📈 TODAY’s DATAVIZ 📊
Are coal and electricity consumption getting back together? For the latter half of the 20th century, U.S. coal consumption climbed in tandem with electricity demand: As Americans used more power, more coal was burned to generate that power, and vice versa. In 2008, electricity demand plummeted due to the financial crisis, dragging coal consumption down with it.
While electricity demand rebounded along with the economy, and then plateaued, coal-burning continued dropping precipitously; the two phenomena had been decoupled from one another. But over the last three years electricity demand has shot back up, in large part due to data centers’ guzzling up a lot of power, but also because of electrification of transportation and buildings, and an increasing need for air-conditioning to fend off rising temperatures. And last year the electric power sector’s coal consumption shot back up as well. Is the decoupling being undone? Or is this just a minor blip? Only time will tell.
Dataviz by the Land Desk using stats from the Energy Information Administration.
📸 PARTING SHOT 🎞️
Continuing with the opening theme … Sign near Bowie, Colorado. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
1 Yes, I use the archaic “gage” instead of “gauge” when referring to USGS streamflow monitors, not just because I’m archaic, but because that’s what the USGS does.
Colorado ranchers who own some of the state’s most scenic landscapes are joining new research efforts to better understand emerging water quality issues in the Yampa and Gunnison basins, among others.
Pressured by rising stream temperatures and shrinking flows due to climate change, rivers and lakes across the state are showing signs of distress, including algae blooms, some of which are toxic.
At the same time, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and Colorado State University are analyzing water quality and testing how voluntary best management practices, rather than strict regulations, can protect these hallmark water bodies.
Philip Rossi grows hay and runs a cattle operation in the Upper Yampa River Basin above Stagecoach Reservoir. He is among the first ranchers to agree to allow scientists to monitor the water quality, and soon the temperature, of the irrigation water that runs off from his hay meadows.
So far the news has been good, Rossi said. Little if any of the fertilizer he applies to his hay reaches the stream and in the years he’s been working with the CSU researchers, the use of nonfertilized grass strips along the creek that runs through his property has reduced that number even further.
“What I learned is that I wasn’t wasting money. The fertilizer I was putting on was being used, and just as important I wasn’t affecting the stream.”
With results from the first three-year study officially out, another even broader effort involving more ranches is underway. It will add the monitoring of stream temperatures to the analysis.
Erik Wardle, director of Colorado State University’s Agricultural Water Quality Program, said there was little water quality data available in remote regions such as the Yampa Basin. “We wanted some real world data on what’s happening on our ranches and our cow-calf operations.”
As word of the research has spread, more ranchers have come forward to participate, despite skepticism and worry about government efforts to monitor what they’re doing. “Early on I was doing a lot of cold calling, asking ranchers to participate. And a lot of them said, ‘Are you crazy?’ But now I would say 85% of what we’re doing is being driven by these producers. These ranchers have put themselves out there,” Wardle said.
Even in these pristine areas of Colorado, no one expects water quality worries to subside in the warmer future. In response, water agencies in the area are looking for ways to change the way they operate to help streams.
“Water quality on the West Slope has always been assumed to be great,” said Andy Rossi, general manager of the Upper Yampa Water Conservancy District, which owns Stagecoach Reservoir. He is not related to Philip Rossi, the rancher.
“Here we are in snowpack-dominated basins with pristine wilderness areas driving our water supply. But 10 years ago we started seeing changes, like toxic algae blooms in Stagecoach Reservoir and Steamboat Lake.”
Since then, the water district has shifted into high gear to understand what’s happening and why, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a water quality modeling and monitoring program.
Nothing that has been uncovered yet has exceeded a state standard, Rossi said, “yet we still have potentially toxic algae blooms. The assumption has always been that ag is the source of our troubles. But we felt it was unfair to jump to that conclusion without doing the strict science to figure it out.”
Can best practices be shared between ranches?
With early research results in hand, Tyson Ingels, a veteran water quality regulator at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, said the state hopes to avoid a strict regulatory approach for these remote high country lakes and streams, relying on voluntary efforts instead.
“This is a very positive study,” he said. “For mountain hay we didn’t have the best data on how best management practices could impact nutrient levels. This was an area that needed to be better understood.”
Looking ahead, Ingels said the state wants to take a measured approach to these regional water quality issues. That the best management practices that are being used on the Rossi Ranch and elsewhere are working well indicates that water quality goals can likely be achieved without a heavy-handed regulatory effort.
Philip Rossi said he’s feeling optimistic, in part because of all the scientific groundwork that is being laid, as well as the early encouraging results of the studies.
He believes that the temperature studies of the water that is returning to the streams, will also show minimal impact.
The rationale, he said, is that water used to flood irrigate fields seeps into the groundwater, flowing to the stream later, when it has cooled down. This was the belief held by his father and grandfather, and Rossi believes the new studies will uphold those beliefs. “The researchers are going to find out the things that my dad told me and that my grandpa used to say” are true, he said.
Black Canyon of the Gunnison. Photo credit: NPS/Kris Toy
From email from Reclamation (Andrew Limbach):
On Monday, September 14th at 8:00 AM (MDT), the UVWUA will begin ramping down tunnel diversions to 675-700 cfs. In coordination with that effort, Crystal releases will decrease to 875-900 cfs from 1240 cfs, and flows through the Black Canyon will be between 200-225 cfs. Tunnel diversions are anticipated to be at 700 cfs through October 31.
The Crystal outlet works typically experiences increased levels of cavitation between 900 and 1200 cfs. Therefore, Crystal releases may need to be adjusted as needed to find an optimal operating zone. Recreators and boaters in the Black Canyon should expect fluctuations of river flows until the final releases and diversions are set. Another notification will be sent out once the releases are finalized.
Green Mountain Reservoir August 17, 2026. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
September 7, 2026
No place in Colorado that I have visited offers such blunt testimony to the warming, drying climate than Green Mountain Reservoir. It also poses a question to those politicians whose answer to non-winters and ever-hotter summers is more dams and reservoirs.
The reservoir between Silverthorne and Kremmling was 14% full during Labor Day weekend, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the operator. Put another way, it was 86% empty.
That’s worse even than the roughly 78% empty at Lake Powell, the reservoir located roughly 700 river miles downstream from Green Mountain.
Green Mountain was part of Colorado’s mission begun in the 19th century to put water to “beneficial use,” a central axiom of state water law. Pioneer settlers did an admirable job of this, in the beginning using nothing more than horses, oxen and human labor.
In 1902, the federal government became a partner, creating the Bureau of Reclamation. Over the next roughly 90 years, the federal treasury was visited repeatedly to prevent “waste” of any portion of the Colorado River flowing into the Pacific Ocean.
Green Mountain Reservoir, back in the day. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Construction of Green Mountain Dam was part of that work. During the hot, dry 1930s, farmers in the Fort Collins-Longmont-Greeley area wanted to import water from the Colorado River headwaters near Grand Lake. Western Slope irrigators objected. Farms in the Grand Junction area would lose late-season water needed to get their crops and orchards across the finish line.
Green Mountain was the compromise. And it has worked out well. A pool of 66,000 acre-feet of water was reserved for down-stream irrigators in the Grand Junction area. Deliveries in this canal usually continue through October, sometimes later.
This year was different. For the first time in 110-plus years, deliveries ended in late August.
DeBeque Canyon has changed somewhat since this photo of the Roller Dam was taken in 1916. Most notably, now the canyon has an interstate highway. Photo/U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. For a more complete history, see the Palisade Historical Society page.
In April, the Glenwood Springs-based Colorado River Water Conservation District issued a warning. Green Mountain was the lowest it had been since filling during World War II. This jeopardized the late-summer flows to irrigators who took delivery of water from the Government Highline Canal. The canal diverts water from the Colorado River at the Roller Dam, a short distance upstream from Palisade. It then distributes water to farms and orchards for 55 miles, nearly to the Utah border.
Wolford Mountain Reservoir back in the day. An aerial view of Wolford Reservoir, formed by Ritschard Dam.
This year, in a testament to cooperation, the Colorado River District and Colorado Water Conservation Board ponied up more than $1 million to buy use of water. Water was tapped from headwaters reservoirs, most notably Wolford and Williams Fork, near Kremmling, and Ruedi, near Basalt. Others, including Front Range diverters, helped.
Williams Fork Reservoir back in the day. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Irrigators got only 50% of their normal water. In response, many switched crops to varieties of plants that could survive with less water.
Even so, by late August, the water was running out. The Grand Valley Water Users Association, operator of the canal, stopped deliveries on September 3. Maybe monsoon rains will deliver water to resume operations, but that’s the story for now.
Once again, the idea that we just need to store more is entirely too simplistic. Yes, saving for a rainy day is always good, but this idea that we can build our way to more water defies ample evidence about the warming, drying climate.
We can have droughts, yes. They come and go. But the science clearly shows that these hot, dry years of the 21st century will not be ephemeral. They have been driven by a warming climate caused by accumulating greenhouse gas emissions.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
In the 20th century, the Colorado River delivered about 15.2 million acre-feet. In this century, the annual flows have declined to 12.2 million acre-feet. Since 2020, average flows have declined even more, to 10 million acre-feet. And this recent span included a very, very big snow year, in 2022-23, a three-wire winter like those of old. But the spring was like those of the 21st century, early and uncommonly warm.
The pitiful storage in Green Mountain, whose shoreline is seen in the above photograph I took on Aug. 17, testifies to this warming, drying climate. So does the canal near Grand Junction where deliveries were cut off last week for the first time in 110 years. And then we have near doubling of 95 degree-plus days in Denver during last 30 years as compared to the three decades before as reported by KUSA.
Might we figure out better infrastructure? Maybe. The idea of storing water underground, as Greeley began doing several years ago, intrigues. It requires more energy but greatly reduces evaporative loss.
The federal government in its documents has excised climate change. So have many politicians in Colorado speaking on the stump, hewing to the recent version of political correctness.
If there are ideas for storing water that don’t assume a return to the climate of the 20th century, I’m all for hearing them. But to think this is just another drought defies tons of evidence.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision on Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency dramatically weakened protections for millions of acres of the West’s essential wetlands and streams. Under the ruling, only bodies of water with a “continuous surface connection” to a “relatively permanent” traditional, navigable water body can be legally considered part of the waters of the United States (WOTUS) and therefore covered by the Clean Water Act.
The court’s definition excludes wetlands with belowground connections to bodies of water as well as those fed by ephemeral or intermittent streams. In effect, an estimated 60% of wetlands have lost federal protection, according to a National Resources Defense Council report. The language in the decision was ambiguous — exactly how wet a wetland has to be to fall under WOTUS and qualify protections was left up to federal agencies.
Wetlands are critical to both human and ecosystem health as well as for climate change mitigation. But they are also prime targets for dredging, filling and other disruptions because of their proximity to water and rich, fertile soil.
Under President Biden, the EPA broadly interpreted Sackett, focusing on protecting wetlands adjacent to bodies of water, with no explicit threshold for how often they had to be flooded. In March, however, Donald Trump’s EPA released a memo indicating that it plans to restrict all WOTUS, although it’s not yet clear by how much.
“The current EPA seems to be using Sackett as a springboard to find any perceived ambiguities and narrow the definition of WOTUS further,” said Julian Gonzalez, senior legislative counsel at Earthjustice.
“The current EPA seems to be using Sackett as a springboard to find any perceived ambiguities and narrow the definition of WOTUS further.”
In the absence of federal regulations, state dredge-and-fill permitting programs can protect wetlands, and California, Oregon and Washington all have broad protections for non-WOTUS wetlands and streams. And since the Sackett decision, Colorado and New Mexico have passed laws restoring clean water protections for waters excluded from WOTUS. “It’s a dereliction of duty on the federal government’s part by not appropriately protecting the waters of the U.S. and that leaves it up to the states to fill in those protections,” said Rachel Conn, deputy director of Amigos Bravos, a New Mexico conservation organization.
The result is a patchwork of laws protecting the nation’s wetlands. But if more Western states were to emulate their neighbors’ efforts and take action, millions of acres of wetlands could be saved, even in the absence of strong federal protections.
National Resources Defense Council estimates are based on scenarios in which the federal government adopts two interpretations of Sackett that are supported by industry and some states: one, excluding wetlands adjacent to intermittent or ephemeral streams (bottom of range), and another, excluding wetlands that are not wet or flooded most of the year (top of range). According to legal experts, the EPA’s current guidance suggests that the administration will limit WOTUS significantly, excluding most wetlands. Alaska is excluded from this graph due to lack of data.
Credit: High Country News
Arizona
Wetland oversight is primarily conducted through the Surface Water Protection Program (SWPP), administered by the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. House Bill 2691, passed in 2021 before Sackett, established the SWPP, which allows the state to protect some waters not covered under the Clean Water Act.
Wyoming
While Wyoming lacks a permitting program, it does bar the discharge of any pollution or wastes into its waters without a clean water permit. In addition, Wyoming established a Wetland Banking Fund before Sackett to encourage individuals and companies to preserve wetlands. It enables entities to bank wetland credits earned from wetland conservation projects and use them later to offset a development’s impacts on wetlands, with the goal of achieving “no net loss of wetland function and value in the state.”
Colorado
Wetland protections are primarily governed by House Bill 24-1379, a law passed in 2024 that aims to restore Clean Water Act protections to state wetlands that lost them owing to Sackett. It establishes a state permitting program.
New Mexico
The Pollutant Discharge Elimination System Act (SB 21), which was signed into law on April 8, gives the state authority to regulate surface waters. It creates a statewide permitting program and addresses polluted groundwater that falls outside federal programs.
Credit: Hannah Agosta/High Country News
How wetlands work
Approximately 40% of species, including half of all federally listed species, rely on wetlands, which act like sponges for excess water, offering billions of gallons of flood protection and storing this water for later use. Their plants, roots and microbes filter pollution from drinking water and also store 20%-30% of the world’s total soil carbon. But Western states have lost 50% of their wetlands since colonization, and roughly half of the region’s remaining ones are degraded.
Illustrations by Hannah Agosta/High Country News
SOURCES: From Gold, 2024 in Science/Environmental Defense Fund, National Resources Defense Council, U.S. Fish and Wildlife National Wetlands Inventory, Wetlands International.
Iron Fen. Photo credit from report “A Preliminary Evaluation of Seasonal Water Levels Necessary to Sustain Mount Emmons Fen: Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forests,” David J. Cooper, Ph.D, December 2003.
Communities across the West have been anxiously waiting for a plan to manage the Colorado River. The states that share the river have been unable to reach an agreement over how to manage it, forcing the federal government to move forward without one.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation recently published a management framework for the next 10 years.
This is not the long-term agreement many had hoped for, but it does leave room for collaborative solutions.
Communities across the West have been anxiously waiting for a plan to manage their water supply from the Colorado River. They watched as the states that share the river talked in circles behind closed doors. They attended conferences where state negotiators repeated the same tired arguments, did not present together, or were entirely absent.
Outside the conference rooms, conditions on the ground were deteriorating. The Colorado River Basin experienced its warmest winter on record. The meager snowpack in the mountains was sucked into parched soils, rivers dwindled, and the Basin’s two major reservoirs hit record lows.
And the situation continues to worsen.
While negotiators were struggling to find consensus, farmers were fallowing fields, raft guides were staring down an uncertain season, neighbors were reporting each other for overwatering, families were discovering that their favorite fishing spots had closed, and municipalities were on the hunt for alternative water supplies.
Three years ago, the U.S Bureau of Reclamation set out to work with the Basin states, Tribes, and stakeholders on a 20-year management plan for the Colorado River. But the states never reached a long-term agreement, forcing the federal government to move forward without one.
On Aug. 21, Reclamation published a framework for managing the river over the next 10 years. While it is not the long-term agreement many had hoped for, it does leave room for collaborative solutions.
What happens next will shape the river for generations.
What Is the Record of Decision?
A Decision-Making Framework
The record of decision lays out a 10-year framework for managing the river.
Under this framework, the Bureau of Reclamation will issue preliminary guidelines every two years for operating the river’s reservoirs and distributing shortages. Those guidelines will inform Reclamation’s annual plan for the river, which will be released every summer. Reclamation can adjust that plan each April depending on the winter’s snowpack and current reservoir levels. It is a tedious process, but one that allows the agency to modify operations as river conditions change.
State officials have raised concerns that the two-year framework will result in never-ending negotiations while making it difficult to plan ahead and finance solutions. These are valid concerns, but there is an off-ramp. If the states collaborate, they could replace the framework with a long-term deal that provides more certainty to their constituents and removes the need for prolonged negotiations.
Rafting the Colorado River. Photo credit: Western Resource Advocates
A Plan for Managing Water Shortages
In addition to the record of decision, Reclamation issued operating guidelines for 2027 and 2028. These guidelines outline Lake Powell and Lake Mead operations and include shortages the Lower Basin offered earlier this year. Under the guidelines, the Lower Basin will reduce its use of the Colorado River by 1.25 million acre-feet in both 2027 and 2028. It will also pursue 700,000 acre-feet in additional conservation by 2028.
The record of decision allows Reclamation to impose even deeper cuts on the Lower Basin — up to 3 million acre-feet per year — if Lake Mead starts to approach the minimum levels needed to produce hydropower and to avoid hitting deadpool.
Reclamation is not mandating cuts in the Upper Basin because its authority to do so is less clear. But that doesn’t mean conservation isn’t urgently needed in the Upper Basin. In the record of decision, Reclamation includes up to 200,000 acre-feet of voluntary conservation each year collectively by Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming.
While this conservation is considered voluntary, it is in the Upper Basin’s best interest to be part of the solution. Flows on the Colorado River have declined by over 30% since 2020. The river will continue to be on a knife’s edge unless everyone contributes.
By saving water now, the Upper Basin can help keep things from getting worse and reduce the need for emergency releases from upstream reservoirs to prop up Lake Powell. This can help rebuild storage and support the outdoor recreation economy in places like Flaming Gorge in Utah and Blue Mesa in Colorado.
Conservation in the Upper Basin can also help avoid expensive and risky legal battles over the river. The 1922 Colorado River Compact says that the Upper Basin will not cause the flow of the river to be depleted below a certain amount over a 10-year period. The Upper Basin argues that this volume is 75 million acre-feet. The Lower Basin says the amount includes water deliveries for Mexico and is set at 82.5 million acre-feet. We could hit the 82.5 trip wire as soon as this fall, potentially triggering litigation from the Lower Basin. Such a dispute would likely cost taxpayers millions of dollars, take years to resolve, and leave the river’s future in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court. If the Lower Basin prevails, water users in the Upper Basin could see drastic cuts to their supply and little time to implement solutions or secure funding to ease the pain.
The four Upper Basin states are at various stages of developing programs to pay water users to decrease their consumption. WRA is advocating for long-term programs that prioritize projects that keep rivers healthy.
Credit: Western Resource Advocates
Is the Latest Plan Enough?
Reclamation’s models show that the reductions planned for the next two years will just barely allow the Basin to scrape by. In the worst-case scenario, the Basin could drain its accessible water savings in Lake Powell. The only water left would be what flows in the river, and that is nowhere near enough to meet current demands.
What’s Next?
Implementing Solutions or Handing the Reins to the Supreme Court
The Basin states have an important decision before them — implement the new guidelines and work toward a long-term deal or take their chances in court.
Nevada was the first to take the plunge. Three days after Reclamation released the record of decision, Nevada filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of the Interior and Bureau of Reclamation. The state claims that the plan and the potential cuts to Nevada’s water supply violate federal law and seeks to halt its implementation.
Nevada’s lawsuit underscores the need for a deal that all seven states can agree to, rather than a plan imposed by the federal government. There is still an opportunity to reach such an agreement — the Nevada case does not preclude the seven states from continuing to negotiate or from entering into agreements to stabilize the river.
The states must not let this one case spiral out of control. Litigation between all seven Basin states over the Colorado River Compact would make things much worse.
History shows that multistate water disputes can take at least a decade to be resolved and often have unintended consequences.Arizona v. California, a dispute over Colorado River allocations in the Lower Basin, began in 1952 and was not resolved until 1963. The court settled the disagreement over water allocations and ruled that the Secretary of the Interior has broad authority to act as watermaster in the Lower Basin — giving the federal government greater control over Lower Basin water deliveries. Texas v. New Mexico, a dispute over the Rio Grande, went on for 13 years before reaching a resolution last spring. And a dispute between Kansas and Colorado over the Arkansas River was on-again, off-again for more than a century. The court ruled that Colorado was overusing water and awarded both water and monetary damages to Kansas. And these cases all involved two states — not seven.
The Colorado River does not have decades. Researchers predict that it will only take one more dry winter to drain the Basin’s accessible water savings.
On top of lost time, state litigation over the 1922 Compact would cost millions of dollars — money that is better spent implementing conservation programs, restoring watersheds, and increasing water efficiency. And litigation would leave decisions with the Supreme Court, not the communities that depend on the river and know it best.
Nevada’s lawsuit against the federal government does not change the fact that we have a river to manage. New guidelines are still needed by Oct. 1. The decision-making process must continue and the Basin states must act now to prevent a seven-state legal brawl.
In the coming months WRA will be advocating for:
Protections for the river: Protecting river health and our communities are two sides of the same coin. The day-to-day operations of the river’s reservoirs affect everything from fish habitat to hydropower production to local water supplies and outdoor recreation. Operating guidelines must consider the full range of impacts and incorporate policies that maximize benefits for both our communities and the environment.
Transparent decision making: The record of decision includes a plan for issuing new operating guidelines every two years. Those guidelines will affect 35 million people and must not be developed behind closed doors. A clear public process is needed to incorporate input from the Basin states, Tribes, Mexico, water users, communities, scientists, and conservation organizations.
Sustained federal funding: Federal funding will be critical to implementing the changes that are needed to secure the West’s future, including restoring watershed health and incentivizing water use reductions. The river that supplies water to 1 in 10 Americans is worthy of federal investment.
Equitable water access and Tribal inclusion: The 30 federally recognized Tribes in the Colorado River Basin have long been excluded from key decisions and denied their fair share of the river’s water. The new guidelines and programs must uphold Tribal water rights and provide clear pathways for Tribal collaboration.
State collaboration: The states have been talking past each other for the last three years and it’s resulted in a federal management plan that few decision makers are happy with, and one state has already filed a lawsuit on. It is time to try a new approach before things get worse. The states must enlist the help of a professional mediator who can facilitate more productive negotiations. And the states must finalize and sign implementation plans — like the Lower Basin’s proposal to reduce its water use by 1.25 million-acre feet in 2027 and 2028 — as soon as possible.
Basinwide collaboration: Many of the river’s most successful programs — including those that restored hundreds of miles of fish habitat and put tens of millions of dollars toward water conservation — were the result of collaborations between states, federal agencies, Tribal nations, water users, conservation organizations, and others. The challenges the river faces are growing. We must accelerate our efforts, build new partnerships, launch new programs, increase investment, and expand on successful initiatives.
The record of decision has set the stage, now it is time for the river’s next act.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Tens of millions of people across the West depend on the Colorado River for drinking water, food, power and their livelihoods. But years of drought, rising temperatures and declining reservoirs have put that lifeline under extraordinary strain. The newly released Record of Decision and federal Operating Guidelines for the river provide a framework for operations, but they cannot resolve the region’s underlying challenges on their own. The work that happens next will determine the future of the river and the communities that rely on it.
2026 marks one of the worst water years on record for the Colorado River Basin and throughout the American West, as river flows dwindle and megafires consume landscape after landscape. Water in Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the U.S., has dropped to its lowest level since it was filled more than 90 years ago. Long-term planning and investment is critical to stabilize the river while protecting communities from increasingly severe fire, floods and drought.
Reclamation announces 2026 operating conditions for Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Hoover Dam. Photo credit: USBR
The release of the guidelines is a milestone, not the finish line. A document can’t ensure safe water supplies or combat the impacts of severe drought and wildfires. Significant federal, state and local funding needs to be directed towards strategies that make the health of rivers, forests and wetlands a priority. Without it, the Basin will remain at risk of chronic shortages, food supply disruption, energy grid vulnerability and rising economic instability that breed disruption and conflict for the entire region.
It is critical that we take this opportunity to invest in work that focuses on ensuring healthy watersheds, sustainable water use and collaboration between Colorado River Basin states and Tribal Nations.
Nature-based solutions—including river and forest management and wetland restoration—are a crucial part of the Basin’s infrastructure. They enable dependable water supplies, reduce threats from wildfires and flooding, sustain fish and wildlife and support local communities and economies. With so much attention focused on water allocations, reservoir levels and operational decisions, the role of these natural systems cannot get lost in the mix.
Fortunately there are projects throughout the Colorado River Basin that offer a blueprint for how to work with the power of nature to create a more sustainable path forward.
Projects designed to better manage forests and restore wetlands can improve water quality and create natural firebreaks. Regenerative agriculture practices like growing crops that use less water, and limiting the disruption of soil, can help create healthier farmland that better absorbs and retains water so farmers can use less. These approaches are an important part of a broader portfolio of tools that help communities conserve water, reduce risk and strengthen watersheds.
As the Colorado River endures one of its worst water years on record, long-term planning and investment is critical to stabilize water supplies while protecting communities from increasingly severe fire, floods and drought. Grand Canyon and Colorado River by Brian Richter
Transparency and collaboration between the federal government, Basin state leaders, Tribal Nations and Mexico is essential. We know that those closest to the problem are closest to the solution and that we will be more effective when we draw on the collective expertise of everyone who relies on the river. Basin states have not yet been able to negotiate a long-term management plan but that cannot stand in the way of continued work to create a more reliable and resilient Colorado River system.
Philanthropy also has a vital role to play in the future of the Colorado River. We are continuing to collaborate with our grantees to advance innovative, nature-based solutions for the region. Philanthropic investment can help test and scale approaches, fill gaps, build partnerships and demonstrate what is possible in complement to the much-needed federal, state, Tribal and local investments. Together we can help make sure the river can continue to provide for the next generation.
The U.S. Forest Service-owned parcel known as Janeway is adjacent to the Crystal River. A potential nature-based aquifer recharge project could reconnect the historic floodplain to the river and retime spring flows as part of a water supply replacement plan. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
The Trump administration continues its crusade to make America’s public lands motorized again. This time it’s the Forest Service launching a revamp of its travel management rule by “simplifying regulatory requirements” to “increase access, including for motorized vehicles, e-bikes, and other mobility devices.” The move follows, and is an attempt to implement, President Donald Trump’s rollback this summer of Nixon-era restrictions on off-highway vehicles on public lands. Comments are being accepted on the proposal until Sept. 23.
This rule would bolster the administration’s rollback this summer of the 2001 Roadless Rule, which prohibits roadbuilding and commercial timber operations — with exceptions — on 45 million acres of National Forest lands.
The current action starts the process of developing an environmental impact statement, which will give more specific details. But the notice of intent gives an overall look at what the administration proposes. Most basically, it aims to open the door for individual forests to relax motorized travel restrictions and open currently closed areas to the vehicles. The “public access rule,” as they’re calling it, would:
“… establish a presumption that existing roads, trails, airfields, trailheads, and other access routes and points on NFS lands are open to appropriate public use,” unless the closure is required by law (or other specific reasons). This is a switch from the current “closed unless designated open” policy to an “open unless closed” framework, with possibly dramatic effects.
“ … establish a requirement to consider new roads, trails, airfields, trailheads, and other access routes and points where appropriate to increase access.” This appears to be aimed at optimizing, if you will, the Roadless Rule rollback by encouraging new roadbuilding.
“… establish processes and conditions for authorizing limited off-route motor vehicle and other motorized equipment use for, among other things, downed big-game retrieval, firewood collection, dispersed camping, and for designating areas for over-snow and other motorized recreation.” This one’s pretty scary, because it would open the door to allowing OHVs or snowmobiles to drive just about anywhere in a forest (except in designated wilderness areas).
You have until Sept. 23 to weigh in on the proposal. To do so electronically (preferred)through the Federal eRulemaking Portal, go to https://www.regulations.gov, docket number FS-2026-0100, and look for the COMMENT button. Or send snail mail to: Director, Public Benefits, 201 14th Street SW, Public Benefits Office, Washington, DC 20250.
Upper White Canyon and tributaries and Bears Ears in the clouds. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Several tribal nations, advocacy groups, and Patagonia have filed lawsuits — and/or revived dormant ones — seeking to block President Donald Trump’s proclamations this summer shrinking Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments. The legal argument behind the lawsuits is clear and potent: The 1906 Antiquities Act authorizes presidents to establish national monuments, but not to shrink or revoke them. Therefore Trump’s 2017 and 2026 shrinkages are illegal and should not stand.
History backs the plaintiffs. In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sought to revoke the Castle Pinckney National Monument, a former military installation in South Carolina. His attorney general’s analysis, however, determined that the Antiquities Act “does not authorize [the President] to abolish [national monuments] after they have been established.” FDR, respecting the rule of law, let the monument stand. Eventually, Congress, which does have the power to alter national monuments, voted to revoke national monument status for the site.
In 2017, a quartet of legal scholars, including Mark Squillace, of the University of Colorado Law School, published their own analysis in the Virginia Law Review. They, too, found that in 1906 Congress did not delegate to the president the authority to downsize or abolish a national monument or weaken the protections granted by the original national monument proclamation. Furthermore, the Federal Land Policy Management Act of 1976 clarified that only Congress has the power to modify or revoke a national monument.
The cases likely will take years to wend their way through the courts, and may ultimately lead to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the power of the Antiquities Act.
Boaters on the Colorado River a few miles downstream from Glen Canyon Dam. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
🌨️🦦🚣🏽 Water Watch 🌊
While climate change-exacerbated drought most notably diminishes the amount of water in rivers, it also raises the temperature of streams, which is especially problematic for fish and other aquatic life. The Colorado River downstream from Glen Canyon Dam, which includes the long stretch through the Grand Canyon, is warming up fast.
When the river stalls out and becomes Lake Powell, the reservoir’s surface just sits in the sun and bakes, while the deeper waters remain chilly. Some fish, like non-native smallmouth bass prefer the warm water, and stay near the surface. When the reservoir is full, the depth of the water at the penstock intakes — where released water exits the dam — is too cold for the bass, so they aren’t likely to escape the reservoir into the river below. But as the surface level drops, the depth of the water at the penstock intakes on the dam decreases, meaning that the water released through the dam’s turbines and into the river below gets increasingly warmer — and is more likely to include warm-water fish.
Currently, Lake Powell’s surface is a mere 28 feet above the penstock intakes, meaning the released water is warm and includes a lot of bass. This, in turn, warms up the river below, making it more favorable to the invading bass, which prey on and compete with endangered native fish. Meanwhile, the warmer water stresses the trout, potentially harming the recreational fishery between Lees Ferry and the dam.
So in 2024 as it became clear low reservoir levels were chronic, the Bureau of Reclamation began doing “cool-flow mixes.” When the river water temperature downstream of the dam hit 59.9° F, dam operators would begin releasing cooler water from the lower river outlet tubes. This dropped the river temperature enough to help downstream fish, and hurt the bass.
This year, however, the feds halted the cool flow mixes to ensure that all releases go through the turbines and generate hydropower. The Grand Canyon Trust built a nifty online gadget that shows the consequences, which aren’t good: The water temperature at the monitor just below Soap Creek Rapid in the Grand Canyon soared above 70° F during the waning days of August, and has been above the cool-mix threshold for 78 days this year so far. Click on the interactive graph to see how water temperatures have changed over the years — and how well the cool-mix flows worked in 2024 and 2025.
🤖 Data Center Watch 👾
The first data center project on public lands has been halted — for now.
On Tuesday, the Interior Board of Land Appeals granted a stay on the Townsite Solar 2’s planned data center on federal land near Boulder City, Nevada, blocking further development while legal challenges are considered. The order also expedites consideration of the appeals filed by environmental groups and the city.
In 2023, the Bureau of Land Management authorized Townsite Solar 2 to develop a solar-plus-storage installation on public land in southern Nevada. Then, in November 2025, before beginning construction on the solar facility, the firm requested an amendment to its right of way that instead would allow it to develop a hyperscale data center, a 70-megawatt battery energy storage system, a substation, and biodiesel generators on the same site. The BLM approved the amendment without conducting a new environmental review or public scoping after determining that the new project “is substantially the same” as the former one.
Both the Biden and Trump II administrations proposed opening national laboratories and other federal properties to data center development. However, this was the first such project to be approved for BLM land.
Boulder City, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Sierra Club appealed the approval and requested the stay, arguing that the agency failed to adequately consider the data center’s potential impacts. The board’s ruling notes, “Appellants are likely to prevail on that question because the two projects are not ‘substantially the same.’” The board also determined the appellants “demonstrated that permanent and irreparable harm is likely to occur to its members’ aesthetic and recreational interests in the project site.”
⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️
Federal regulators on Tuesday approved the Navajo Transitional Energy Company’s proposed Navajo Mine expansion, authorizing the tribal-owned company to extract some 503 million tons of coal over the next 110 years. Yes, you read that right: The coal industry may be in decline, but these folks just got permitted to keep digging up the dirty fuel for over a century more, despite strong opposition from residents and advocacy groups.
The surface mine sits on the Navajo Nation north of Burnham and about 22 miles southwest of Farmington, New Mexico. It was built in the 1960s to serve the nearby Four Corners Power Plant, and remains the facility’s sole fuel provider.
NTEC says it needs the expansion to continue serving the plant until its closure; its primary owner, Arizona Public Service, plans to shutter the facility by 2041. After that the firm, which also owns coal mines in the Powder River Basin, would apparently try to peddle Navajo Mine coal elsewhere.
This has set off alarm bells for anyone concerned about the landscapes and air quality of the Four Corners region. Not only would the mine tear apart another 9,000 acres of land, displace residents and dwellings, and destroy dozens of historic cultural properties, but that coal would also be burned somewhere, releasing climate-warming and health-harming pollutants in the process. Also concerning is the prospect that the Four Corners plant, which has sullied the region’s air for more than 60 years, would continue operating indefinitely.
***
The San Carlos Apache Tribe, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Lower San Pedro Watershed Alliance have filed a lawsuit seeking to stop further exploratory drilling or other development at Faraday’s proposed Copper Creek mining project. The groups accuse the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service of failing to consider drilling’s impacts on endangered Mexican spotted owls that are known to inhabit the area.
The mine is proposed for about 78 square kilometers in the Galiuro Mountains east of Mammoth, Arizona, on private, state, and Bureau of Land Management parcels. Last June, the Bureau of Land Management approved Faraday’s plan to construct 67 drill pads, along with associated roads and infrastructure, and the company recently completed the first round of water-intensive drilling.
The complaint also says the BLM failed to consult with the San Carlos Apache Tribe, as required under the National Historic Preservation Act.
“Game on!” as a friend texted yesterday afternoon. Credit: John Fleck/InkStain
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):
September 2, 2026
At 2 p.m. Monday (Aug 31, 2026) the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority, along with the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District and Audubon Southwest, began releasing a pulse of water from Abiquiu Reservoir on the Rio Chama in Northern New Mexico as an experiment – what might a several day pulse of water do to help the aridification-starved riverside forests along New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande?
Here’s Bernalillo County Commissioner Barbara Baca, chair of the ABCWUA board:
As I and others have written previously, we’re seeing extraordinary stress on the riverside trees, the ribbons of green that flank the Rio Grande through New Mexico’s largest city.
The tradeoffs that we talk about every fall semester in the water resources class I teach, tradeoffs among competing and conflicting values, are becoming real. The motivating question I’ve used in my writing on water since my old newspaper days was to ask, as pointedly as I could, “When supplies run sort, who actually doesn’t get water?”
Two answers have become increasingly obvious in recent years along the Middle Rio Grande. What we’ve come to call the “accordion” of irrigated agriculture is squeezing, as pastures and fields without the super-senior water rights that apply to some of the irrigated lands of New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande (or a supplemental well) go dry.
“The environment” is the other.
The question has never been “What do we say we value?”, but rather “What do we value enough to give up water in some other place?” This is about tradeoffs. More water in one place – an irrigated field or the river channel itself – necessarily means less water in some other place. My “what do we value enough to give up water” formulation shifts this from a question of what we say we value to what we actually value enough to give up water to preserve?
Behind the scenes for the last couple of weeks there has been an extraordinary effort underway to scrounge up some water currently in storage upstream for other purposes, and to rapidly put in place the tools to monitor the results. Nobody’s quite sure how much water will get how far into the bone dry Albuquerque reach of the river, how far downstream the pulse will make it, what the results might be for the riverside forest.
For my whole professional life, long before I shifted from newspapers to writing books, I had a joke when something remarkable happened: “That’ll be great material for my book!” This is that.
Sun’s almost up, I’m off to chase the water.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
A windrower cuts alfalfa for drying prior to baling in the Imperial Valley of California in June 2007. Photo by Timothy Hearsum/AgStock
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Daniel M. Frey):
August 30, 2026
Forty million people depend on the Colorado River. Some of its largest cities are facing real shortages. Yet nearly half of the water put to human use in the basin goes to growing feed crops such as alfalfa, hay and silage for cattle, with a meaningful share exported overseas.
This is not a hydrology problem. It is a political one.
The misuse of water
Growing alfalfa and hay to feed livestock consumes roughly 46% of all the water put to human use in the basin—more than every city and industry combined, and more than any other single use of the river. In the Imperial Valley, a material portion of alfalfa is exported. Foreign agribusinesses, including Saudi Arabia’s Fondomonte and the UAE’s Al Dahra, have leased Southwestern land to grow water-intensive feed and ship it home to countries that have banned the same crop domestically to protect their own water. Arizona’s governor already canceled state land leases with one of these companies over exactly this issue. We are draining a river that 40 million Americans depend on to grow low-value cattle feed.
This is not even a true market outcome. Between 2017 and 2023, the federal Crop Insurance Program paid $5.6 billion to farmers in the seven Colorado River states for drought-related losses, including more than $2 billion to alfalfa and hay growers alone. Separately, the federal government has committed $1.2 billion over three years under the 2023 Lower Basin conservation agreement to pay some of those same farmers to leave water in the river instead — and under “use it or lose it” water law, that money does not necessarily translate into lasting reduced consumption once the payments end. We are subsidizing the least essential, most water-intensive use of the river while barely funding a lasting transition away from it. These policies ignore urgent human needs and support the continued subsidized irrigation of low-value crops.
Because so much of this crop is exported, converting these acres would not meaningfully affect the U.S. or global food supply. Foreign and domestic buyers would simply source feed from places where water is not scarce. What we would lose is a low-value export that is consuming precious water.
Nobody needs Southwestern agriculture to disappear. Israel farms one of the driest landscapes on Earth and still exports produce because it rebuilt its water use around efficiency instead of volume.
Drip irrigation, which Israel pioneered in the 1960s, delivers water at 70% to 90% efficiency, compared with roughly 40% to 60% for the flood irrigation still common in the Colorado River Basin.
Israel recycles 85% to 90% of its municipal wastewater, supplying more than half its total agricultural demand. Israeli farming also shifted deliberately from low-value, high-water fodder crops to higher-value, lower-water produce such as tomatoes, peppers, dates and avocados. None of this is exotic or new.
Why the status quo persists
So why has nothing changed here? Under prior appropriation law, the oldest agricultural water rights, some dating to the 1800s, are legally senior to every city built afterward, including Phoenix, Las Vegas and Los Angeles. That seniority is the leverage in every negotiation.
The Imperial Irrigation District alone holds senior rights to roughly 3.1 million acre-feet a year — nearly a fifth of the river’s average flow, and on its own equal to Arizona’s and Nevada’s entire combined state allocations. That gives a handful of districts a permanent seat at every basin-wide deal because the law guarantees it. When $4 billion in federal conservation funding was distributed through the Inflation Reduction Act, much of it paid agricultural districts to conserve water they were under no legal obligation to relinquish, thanks to their senior water rights.
This is organized and specific, not a vague farm lobby. The Family Farm Alliance, representing irrigated agriculture across 16 Western states, has testified before Congress repeatedly over the past two decades and led a 2025 push for at least $2 billion in near-term drought funding to sustain current agricultural use, not reduce it.
What should change
None of this is an argument against private property or against farmers and ranchers as people. Water rights in the West are real property, built into land value, farm equity and family inheritance. Any transition worth pursuing must compensate people fairly for what the law actually gave them. Conservation is not agriculture’s job alone. Cities owe real cuts too, through tiered pricing, continued investment in water reuse, limits on ornamental turf and honest accounting of growth in already stressed areas.
But fairness among water users does not mean treating every use as equally necessary. Water for people—for drinking, sanitation and food—comes before subsidized hay exports. That ranking is not radical. It is what “beneficial use” was always supposed to mean before the term became a shield for the status quo.
The technical plan is not the missing piece; versions of it have circulated for years. What is missing is the political will to say, plainly and before the next crisis, that human need outranks irrigated hay, even when the institutions built to avoid that choice are loud, organized and well funded. The reservoirs will not wait for a more comfortable moment. Neither should we.
The 40 million people who depend on the Colorado River should demand that political and business leaders protect their most precious, life-sustaining resource.
Daniel Frey is a Boulder resident, non-practicing CPA and Certified Energy Manager (CEM). He researches and writes on energy and sustainability issues.
Top ten Western counties for acreage planted in alfalfa. Data Source: USDA NASS.
Map of the San Juan River, a tributary of the Colorado River, in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, USA. Made using USGS National Map data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47456307
At recent meetings, the San Juan Water Conservancy District (SJWCD) and the Pagosa Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD) boards of directors approved applications for findings of reasonable diligence for several water rights held by the districts…At an Aug. 13 meeting, the PAWSD Board of Directors unanimously approved applications for findings of reasonable diligence for three sets of water rights, including rights for the San Juan River intake, a group of rights associated with the Dry Gulch Reservoir project that the SJWCD leads development on, and a second enlargement on a water right in Dutton Ditch. The Dry Gulch and Dutton Ditch water rights are held by both PAWSD and the SJWCD, while the San Juan right is exclusive to PAWSD. PAWSD board member Bill Hudson pointed out that these water rights are not rights PAWSD is currently using, but are rights that could be developed in the future if the district needs them…At an Aug. 17 meeting, the SJWCD Board of Directors also unanimously approved diligence filings for the Dry Gulch and Dutton Ditch water rights. SJWCD legal counsel Jeffrey Kane explained to the board that he would file the joint application for the Dry Gulch water rights, while PAWSD’s legal counsel would file the application for the Dutton Ditch water rights.
Reductions in Lower Basin water use during the last four years, including forecast use in 2026, are similar to the initial targets for Lower Basin shortages described in the Final Environmental Impact Statement for Post-2026 Operational Guidelines and Strategies for Lake Powell and Lake Mead (FEIS) and the accompanying Record of Decision (ROD). 6 Lower Basin consumptive use in 2023, 2024, and 2025, and forecast for 2026 has been the smallest for the entire 2010-2026 period. These four years of smallest use are between 1.4 and 1.7 million acre feet/year (maf/yr) less than the 7.50 maf/yr amount generally recognized as the Lower Basin’s mainstem allocation.
Reductions in Lower Basin use have been achieved by large reductions implemented by Central Arizona Project (CAP) contractors and subcontractors, the Imperial Irrigation District (IID), and non-CAP water users in Arizona. The reductions in use in the IID have been in summer water use and have not affected consumptive use in winter when garden crops, such ass lettuce, onions, carrots, and broccoli, are grown.
There is no historical analogy for implementing Lower Basin shortages of 3 maf/yr that would reduce annual consumptive water use to 4.5 maf/yr. We identified the lowest use in each month between 2010 and 2026 in each Lower Basin state and summed those monthly values, even when those months did not occur in the same year. The annual total of the summed lowest monthly uses yielded a minimum total Lower Basin use of 5.03 maf/yr. Thus, implementation of 3 maf/yr shortages would require reductions in monthly use greater than the sum of the smallest monthly uses during the past 17 years.
INTRODUCTION
This paper is part of a series, The Colorado River Water Supply Crisis in a Few Graphs, whose goal is to provide readers with summary information about the natural water supply, reservoir storage, and consumptive uses and losses in the Basin so that readers can better understand and consider the current water crisis. The long-term fate of the water supply provided by the Colorado River depends on many complex and interconnected factors: the natural flow of the river, the amount of water stored in the Basin’s reservoirs, the consumptive uses of that water, the losses caused by reservoir evaporation, and the losses associated with water flowing through natural channels (i.e., transmission losses).
In 2024, approximately 60% of all uses and losses of Colorado River water in the United States occurred in the Lower Basin (Table 1).⁷ In this paper, we summarize water use in the Lower Basin since 2010, primarily focusing on consumption by the Imperial Irrigation District (IID), the largest user in the entire Colorado River Basin, and on the aggregate consumption by Arizona users not served by the Central Arizona Project (CAP). We focus on these agricultural users, because agriculture makes up approximately 60% of consumptive uses in the Lower Basin,⁸ and the agricultural sector will play a significant role in future reductions in water use in the Lower Basin.
Table 1. Consumptive uses and losses in the United States part of the Colorado River Basin in 2024.9
This paper provides historical context in which to consider the magnitude of recent reductions in Lower Basin water use by comparing current water use with typical rates of use since 2010. We also provide historical context for the shortage goals described in the recently released ROD and Operating Guidelines for 2027 and 2028. 10 The ROD lists a potential maximum Lower Basin reduction of 3.0 maf/yr but also includes language that seems to allow for even greater reductions, after consultation, in extraordinary circumstances.
We analyze the Lower Basin water use data summarized by the Bureau of Reclamation in annual decree accounting reports formally titled Colorado River Accounting and Water Use Report: Arizona, California, and Nevada.¹¹ These reports are issued each May and summarize monthly water use by every Lower Basin user. Reclamation also provides monthly provisional data on the current year’s water use, and the agency provides forecasts of annual use for the current year.¹² Similarly extensive and precise data describing Upper Basin use are not readily available.
Lake Mead and Lake Powell are the largest reservoirs in the United States and essentially are one gigantic reservoir separated into two parts by the Grand Canyon.¹³ Inflow to this gigantic reservoir primarily is snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains, and a significant amount of that runoff is put to beneficial use by Upper Basin users before it reaches Lake Powell. A small amount of additional inflow occurs within the Grand Canyon, and there are occasional inflows to Lake Mead from the Virgin River. Southern Nevada Water Authority directly withdraws water from Lake Mead, and other Lower Basin users divert stream flow after it is released from Lake Mead.
RECENT LOWER BASIN WATER USE
In 2025, total consumptive use in the three Lower Basin states was 5.755 maf, the smallest annual total use since at least 2010 (Fig. 1) and 17% less than the average for 2010-2025.14 This small amount resulted from the lowest annual use in California (3.647 maf) since at least 2010 and the second lowest annual use since 2010 in Arizona (1.911 maf). Lower Basin use in 2026, 5.961 maf, is forecast to be slightly more than in 2025.15
Figure 1. Consumptive use in the Lower Basin since 2010. Estimated use in 2026 based on forecast of September 1, 2026.
Water use in California since 2023, including forecast use in 2026, has been 13% less than between 2010 and 2022.16 Decreased use in California in those years has been primarily due to reductions in use by IID (Fig. 2). IID’s consumptive use of 2.187 maf in 2025 was the lowest since 2010 and forecast use in 2026 of 2.242 maf is also very low. Average use by IID between 2023 and 2026 will be 12% less than average use between 2010 and 2022.17 Annual consumptive use by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) between 2023 and 2026 will be 13% less than between 2010 and 2022, although the savings are not as great because MWD uses less water than does IID.18
Figure 2. Consumptive use in California since 2010. Estimated use in 2026 based on forecast of September 1, 2026.
The proportionate reductions in water use in Arizona have been much larger than in California. Average statewide water use between 2023 and 2026 will be 25% less than between 2010 and 2022.19 CAP has reduced its uses by 40% between those two time periods, while non-CAP users have reduced consumption by 6%. The smallest use by Arizona was 1.890 maf in 2023 (Fig. 3). Use in 2025 by non-CAP customers, 1.004 maf, was the lowest since at least 2010. Non-CAP use has exceeded CAP use since 2022.
Figure 3. Consumptive use in Arizona since 2010. Estimated use in 2026 based on forecast of September 1, 2026.
LOWER BASIN AGRICULTURAL WATER USE
Imperial Irrigation District
IID is the largest individual user of mainstem Colorado River water in the Colorado River Basin, exceeding use by any state in the Basin except California itself. Much of California’s ongoing reductions in use are due to decreased use by IID resulting from various compensated agreements. Future reductions by IID have the potential to significantly affect the Basin’s effort to balance consumptive use with declining supply.
In comparison to typical annual use since 2010, IID’s use in 2024 and 2025, as well as forecast use in 2026, has been notably reduced, as represented in a box-and-whisker plot (Fig. 4).20 The box in Figure 4 encloses 50% of the years since 2010, and the length of this box is called the Inter Quartile Range (IQR), bounded by the 25th and 75th percentile of the 17 years of data, including forecast use in 2026. The line through the middle of the box is the median value for this period. Lines extending up and down from the box (i.e., whiskers) extend from the box to values within an acceptable range. Values that are greater than 1.5 times the IQR above the 75th percentile or below the 25th percentile are beyond the acceptable range and are outliers and individually plotted. Thus, 2024, 2025, and forecast use in 2026 are outliers, indicating that use in those years has been significantly less that typical use during the entire period since 2010.
Figure 4. Box-and-whisker plot showing distribution of annual use by IID since 2010. The box is the Inter Quartile Range, defined by the 25th and 75th percentile of the years of annual use data. The line inside the box is the median. Whiskers extend from the box to an acceptable range, and outliers are circles that are labeled. The three most recent years are outliers of low water use. Estimated use in 2026 based on forecast of September 1, 2026. See text for explanation of a box-and-whisker plot.
The largest proportion of irrigated land in IID is devoted to field crop production, the largest proportion of which is devoted to alfalfa (Fig. 5).²¹ The area devoted to alfalfa production changes little from year to year and during the year and was approximately 150,000 acres in 2025.²² In 2025, other significant field crops were Bermuda grass and kleingrass, whose average irrigated area was 80,000 and 20,000 acres, respectively. The area devoted to garden crop production changes greatly throughout the year and is largest between November and March. Little land area is devoted to garden crop production in the heat of summer. The most significant garden crops are lettuce, onions, carrots, and broccoli.
Figure 5. Area of IID irrigated for different categories of crops in 2025. Field crops include alfalfa that is also plotted separately.
Water use by IID is typically lowest between November and February when garden crops are grown (Fig. 6). Water use increases greatly in March and remains high through October when field crops are the primary focus of production (see Appendix).
Figure 6. Box-and-whisker plots of total monthly consumptive use by the IID between 2010 and 2026. Each box is the Inter Quartile Range, defined by the 25th and 75th percentile of the years of data for that month. These boxes represent the typical monthly use pattern since 2010. Red dots are the average use in each month between 2024 and 2026. See text for additional explanation of a box-and-whisker plot.
Reductions in consumption during the past few years have been accomplished primarily by reduced water use between June and September when alfalfa and grass hay are the primary crops. These reductions are reflected in Figure 5 where red dots are the average monthly water use since 2024. Red dots plot below the grey boxes of the IQR in June, July, August, and September, demonstrating that recent water use in these months has been significantly less than typical since 2010. In contrast, recent water use between December and May has been within or slightly less than the IQR.
Agricultural use of mainstem Colorado River water in Arizona
We estimated agricultural use of mainstem Colorado River water in Arizona by subtracting the total diverted by the CAP from the total use in Arizona. This remainder includes all the agricultural uses along the Colorado River as well as a small amount used by the City of Yuma, other towns along the river, and military bases.²³
The monthly pattern of water use is similar to the monthly pattern by the IID. The smallest uses are between November and February (Fig. 7). Consumptive use increases in March and is highest between April and August.
Reductions in water use by these Arizona growers have been more modest than by IID. Recent average use has been somewhat less than the typical range between April and July and has been within the typical range in other months, except for November when there was significant precipitation near Yuma in 2025.
Figure 7. Box-and-whisker plots of total monthly consumptive use in Arizona by users of mainstem Colorado River not served by the CAP between 2010 and 2026. Each box is the Inter Quartile Range, defined by the 25th and 75th percentile of the years of data for that month. These boxes represent the typical monthly use pattern since 2010. Red dots are the average use in each month between 2024 and 2026. See text for additional explanation of a box-and-whisker plot.
Management and Policy Implications
Consumptive water use of mainstem water in the Lower Basin has been less than 7.5 maf/yr in every year but one since 2010. Since 2023 including forecast use in 2026, this reduction ranged between 1.4 and 1.7 maf/yr. The Lower Basin states have reduced water use comparable to the initial targets for Lower Basin shortages described in the recently released ROD24 and Operating Guidelines for 2027 and 2028.25 Thus, the good news is that the initial shortage goals of the FEIS have been achieved in recent years.
These savings have been achieved by large reductions in use by the CAP (Fig. 3) and by reduced agricultural water use in summer by IID (Fig. 6) and non-CAP water users in Arizona (Fig. 7). These reductions in agricultural water use have not resulted in changes of the amount of water consumed in winter when garden crops are grown.
The ROD allows for potentially large Lower Basin shortages of up to 3 maf/yr and potentially more in the event that Basin runoff continues to be low and reservoir live storage drops to critical levels. We placed these potential shortages in perspective by summing the smallest monthly use in each Lower Basin state since 2010 even though these months of smallest use did not occur in the same year. In some cases, the smallest water use was not due to significant water conservation but to unusually rainy conditions when demand for supplemental irrigation water was low, such as in November 2025. In other words, there is no historical experience with implementing the annual sum of these smallest monthly uses, because the smallest monthly uses did not occur in the same year.
Nevertheless, summing the lowest monthly use in each state provides perspective to the magnitude of the proposed 3 maf/yr shortages. The summed value of smallest monthly uses yields a potential minimum annual Lower Basin use of 5.03 maf/yr for the three Lower Basin states (Table 2). Although many of the months of smallest use occurred between 2022 and 2026, some were unique months of very low use in the 2010s. There is no historical analogy for imposition of the largest Lower Basin shortages envisioned by the recently released ROD and 2027-28 Operating Guidelines. [ed. emphasis mine]
Table 2. Smallest monthly consumptive use in each Lower Basin state since 2010.
CONCLUSION
The analyses summarized in this paper demonstrate that agricultural water use that supports winter garden crop production has not changed despite recent reductions in annual water use by IID or by non-CAP water users in Arizona. To date, water use by IID and by non-CAP water users in Arizona has been reduced in summer when garden crops are not grown. In times of acute water shortage, it is likely that continued and additional water savings can be achieved by reductions in irrigation of field crops in summer, without causing shortages to garden crop irrigation in the winter.
It is notable, however, that summing the lowest monthly water use in each state since 2010 results in a theoretical reduction from the Lower Basin allocation of 7.5 maf/yr of approximately 2.5 maf/yr, less than the maximum potential Lower Basin shortage envisioned in the recently released ROD. Our calculation of a theoretical shortage is based on summing the smallest use in each month between 2010 and 2026, and these months are not all in the same year. In some cases, the lowest use resulted from unusually large precipitation that reduced irrigation demand, rather than explicit conservation efforts.
The Priority Shortage Allocation Model utilized in the FEIS distributes shortages among the Lower Basin states in a much different manner than the way shortages have been achieved in the past.26 Tabulating the historical minimum monthly uses demonstrates that achieving the 3 maf/yr reductions described in the FEIS and ROD would be very difficult and is without historical precedent. Implementation of such large shortages would likely require new management policies, including compensated fallowing, permanent retirement of irrigated acreage and corresponding water rights, and unprecedented investment in increased irrigation efficiency.
We recognize that our theoretical comparison of minimum monthly uses since 2010 in no way captures the economic dislocation and secondary impacts that might result from implementing such shortages now. A full economic analysis of the impacts of the largest potential Lower Basin reductions described in the FEIS and the ROD is critical for understanding the consequences of significant reductions in water use in the Lower Basin. That type of analysis is beyond our expertise. Nevertheless, we recognize the importance of such an analysis, and we recognize the real-world distress that such large reductions of use might cause.
1 Center for Colorado River Studies, Utah State University, former Chief, Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center.
2 Getches-Wilkinson Center, Univ. of Colorado Law School, former US Commissioner, Upper Colorado River Commission, former Assistant Secretary for Water and Science, US Dept. of the Interior.
3 Retired General Manager, Colorado River Water Conservation District.
4 Kyl Center for Water Policy, Arizona State University, former Director, Phoenix Water Services.
5 Staff Attorney, Utton Transboundary Resources Center, University of New Mexico.
7 All annual data in this paper are calendar year. 2024 is the most recent year that consumptive uses and losses data are available for the entire Basin.
8 Richter et al., 2024, New water accounting reveals why the Colorado River no longer reaches the sea. Communications Earth & Environment 5:134. available at https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01291
⁹ Upper Basin state uses in Table 1 do not include state reservoir evaporation. Total major and minor state reservoir evaporation is listed separately in Table 1. Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP) reservoir evaporation is evaporation from Blue Mesa, Morrow Point, Flaming Gorge, and Lake Powell reservoirs. Source of Upper Basin data: J. Prairie, Upper Colorado Basin Research and Modeling Group Chief, Bureau of Reclamation. Source of Lower Basin state uses: Reclamation. 2025. Water use report: Arizona, California, Nevada, calendar year 2024. Source of mainstem reservoir evaporation (Mead, Mohave, Havasu) data: S. Tighi, Hydrologist, Reclamation, Lower Colorado Region. Evaporation at Senator Wash and diversion dams estimated at 28,000 af.
10 Department of the Interior, August 2026, Operating Guidelines: Colorado River Guidelines for Coordinated Operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead, Operating Years 2027 and 2028 (2027-28 Operating Guidelines), available at https://www.usbr.gov/ColoradoRiverBasin/post2026/decision-doc/2027-2028OperatingGuidelines_Final.pdf. We note that these Operating Guidelines provide for 1.25 maf/yr of shortage, allocated among the Lower Basin states as previously proposed: 760,000 af/yr in Arizona, 440,000 af/yr in California, and 50,000 af/yr in Nevada, The distribution of shortages greater than 1.25 maf/yr is not specified but would presumably be subject to consultation. See 2027-28 Operating Guidelines at 5.3.A. The ROD allows for the development of different methods of shortage allocation. See ROD at 5.
¹² Lower Colorado River Water Accounting – Actual Water Use and Official Water Use Forecast, both available at https://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/g4000/wtracct.html. Throughout this paper, we refer to the forecast for 2026 that was made on September 1, 2026. The forecast is frequently revised.
¹³ There is no significant water use in the Grand Canyon.
14 Average Lower Basin consumptive use between 2010 and 2025 was 6.880 maf/yr.
16 Average use between 2010 and 2022 was 4.326 maf/yr. Average use between 2023 and (forecasted) 2026 will be 3.764 maf/yr.
17 Average use between 2010 and 2022 was 2.600 maf/yr. Average use between 2023 and (forecasted) 2026 will be 2.290 maf/yr.
18 Average use between 2010 and 2022 was 925,000 af/yr. Average use between 2023 and (forecasted) 2026 will be 804,000 af/yr.
19 Average use between 2010 and 2022 was 2.590 maf/yr. Average use between 2023 and (forecasted) 2026 will be 1.930 maf/yr.
20 IID used 2.187 maf in 2025, 2.312 maf in 2024, and is forecast to use 2.242 maf in 2026. Median use between 2010 and 2026 was 2.546 and use in 50% of the years of that period was between 2.481 and 2.558 maf/yr.
22 Total net area of crops in 2025 was approximately 350,000 acres.
23 Forecast use in 2026 for Bullhead City, Lake Havasu City, Parker, Yuma, U.S. Army Yuma Proving Grounds, and the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Yuma is 35,000 af.
25 Department of the Interior, August 2026, Operating Guidelines: Colorado River Guidelines for Coordinated Operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead, Operating Years 2027 and 2028 (2027-28 Operating Guidelines), available at https://www.usbr.gov/ColoradoRiverBasin/post2026/decision-doc/2027-2028OperatingGuidelines_Final.pdf. We note that these Operating Guidelines provide for 1.25 maf of shortage in each year, allocated among the Lower Basin states as previously proposed: 760,000 af in Arizona, 440,000 af in California, and 50,000 af in Nevada. The distribution of shortage greater than 1.25 maf/yr is not specified but would presumably be the subject of consultation. See 2027-28 Operating Guidelines at 5.3.A. The ROD allows for the development of different methods of shortage allocation. See ROD at 5.
26 See FEIS Appendix C, Shortage Allocation Model and Alternative Distribution Model Documentation, at C.4.2. However, the ROD specifies that other methods of shortage allocation may be developed. ROD at 5.
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Click the link to read the article on the Grist website (Austin Corona):
August 28, 2026
Nevada officials have long presented themselves as a voice for compromise and conservation in debates over the Colorado River. The Las Vegas area, home to two-thirds of the state’s population and most of its economy, has become a model of urban water conservation. As the river has declined from overuse and a decades-long drought exacerbated by climate change, southern Nevada water planners built extensive water reuse facilities and implemented tight restrictions on new turf and fountains, dropping the region’s per capita water use by 58 percent in roughly 20 years. Meanwhile, in interstate negotiations over the management of the Colorado River, state representatives have positioned themselves as bridge-builders, sometimes referring to themselves as the “middle basin” between the river’s divided upper and lower basin states.
When the federal government’s new management plan for the river was announced earlier this month, most observers thought Arizona, which stands to take the largest immediate cuts, would launch the first lawsuit over the plan’s implications for its water supplies. So it came as a surprise to many Colorado River experts when Nevada became the first to sue the federal government over the plan this week.
“I expected that there would be litigation, but it was surprising to me that Nevada fired the first shot,” said Anne Castle, former chair of the Upper Colorado River Commission.
The natural flow flow at Lees Ferry, which is a calculation of what the Colorado River’s flow would be without any upstream dams, diversions, or human consumption. Land Desk graph using Bureau of Reclamation data.
Nevada’s lawsuit comes after more than two years of negotiations among the seven Colorado River states and the federal government over how to reduce water use on the declining river. The states failed to reach a long-term agreement before the river’s current management procedures expire in October, leaving the Interior Department to impose its own plan. The federal government’s plan largely relies on cuts to water use among the Lower Basin states — Arizona, Nevada, and California — to prop up water levels in the river’s largest reservoirs. Those reservoirs have been draining so quickly that the dwindling water depth could threaten hydropower and dam operations within months without intervention.
Nevada argues that the federal government’s plan illegally forces it to take too much of those cuts. In a worst-case scenario, the plan could allow for a 71 percent cut to the Las Vegas area’s water supply, the state argued, calling it an unacceptable risk to the state’s largest population center and economic hub. Nevada believes this outcome results from a misreading of the law and also claims the government didn’t consider important alternatives to such drastic cuts.
This worst-case scenario, which experts say is an interpretation of the plan’s implications by Nevada, would become possible if reservoir levels continue to drop and if Nevada couldn’t reach an agreement with Arizona and California to help it absorb more of those cuts. Those three states already have such an agreement, which is incorporated into the federal plan and meant to last through 2028, at which point the plan allows the states to update the operations with a new agreement. Without an agreement, the federal government will implement cuts based on preexisting water rights and agreements, cutting the most from Arizona and leaning increasingly on Nevada and California as potential shortages increase. The plan was created through a decision-making process required under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, which mandates that federal agencies gather public input and consider environmental and socioeconomic impacts of major decisions.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
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Blue Mesa Reservoir on the Gunnison River, seen Aug. 30, 2026 at about 21% full. Anglers and boaters say federal water management decisions are negatively impacting fish and recreation below the reservoir. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
As this year’s historic drought drags on, conflicts over how to share and manage water are bubbling over. Gunnison River anglers and boaters say federal water-management decisions are causing increased water temperatures, prompting fishing closures, and creating serious economic impacts to outfitters and businesses.
An Aug. 26 letter from Drew Peternell, Colorado state director of Trout Unlimited, to U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Area Manager Bart Deming, asks the federal agency to change its approach to drought management. The river conservation nonprofit organization asked Reclamation to increase streamflows in the Black Canyon and Gunnison Gorge to alleviate damage to the fishery; to evaluate water use by downstream irrigators; and to better understand the drivers of storage depletion.
“We acknowledge that the extraordinary drought conditions of the current water year present significant operational challenges,” the letter reads. “Nevertheless, the decision to reduce flows in the Gunnison River has exerted a toll on a vital and cherished natural resource.”
At a public Aug. 27 operations meeting in Grand Junction, Reclamation officials said they plan to reduce flows out of Blue Mesa Reservoir to as low as 200 cubic feet per second through February, in an effort to recover some storage in the reservoir, which is depleted after this year’s record-breaking drought and hot temperatures. Flows so far this month have hovered around 245 cfs.
Peternell said Trout Unlimited would like to see flows of at least 300 cfs in the Gunnison River, the minimum threshold for a healthy environment set by a federal reserve water right. The Black Canyon and Gunnison Gorge are home to a 27-mile-long Gold Medal trout fishery and are downstream of the federally operated Aspinall Unit, which is made up of Blue Mesa, Morrow Point and Crystal reservoirs.
“It’s been a tough year for everyone and there’s not enough water to go around, unfortunately, so we appreciate that Reclamation is in a tough spot,” Peternell said in an interview with Aspen Journalism. “But 300 cfs is a minimum flow target for the Black Canyon and it’s the minimum amount of water the fishery really needs to survive down there, and we’re below that. We’re down to 250 or 240, and that’s hard on the fish, it’s hard on the people who make a living off that fishery.”
Federal water managers control how much water flows out of the Aspinall Unit in the highly engineered Gunnison River system, which is the largest tributary of the Colorado River in the state. Reclamation officials project storage in Colorado’s largest reservoir could fall to just 128,000 acre-feet, or 15% full, by the end of the year under the most probable scenario.
At the Aug. 27 meeting, officials presented modeling that showed releasing water at a rate of 300 cfs could cause Blue Mesa to fall below the level needed to make hydropower, but 200 cfs will allow storage to build back up slightly over the winter. Reclamation officials presented modeling projections that showed if they don’t reduce releases now, the amount of water coming out of Blue Mesa may need to be dialed back to just 150 cfs this winter to preserve the ability to make hydropower.
“If we didn’t act, this slide right here is a plane going down and we pull up at the last second,” said Reece Carpenter, a Reclamation staffer with the Resources Management Division at the Western Area Office in Grand Junction. “So it’s very important for Reclamation and all of our partners to have that coordination to make some decisions.”
This management decision rests on a sentence in the Record of Decision for the Aspinall Unit’s environmental impact statement, designed to protect endangered fish, that says “the minimum downstream flow through the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park and Gunnison Gorge National Conservation Area is 300 cfs, except in severe drought when the flow may decrease.” And the Colorado River Basin is experiencing the most severe drought in recorded history.
Tim Patterson, owner of RIGS Fly Shop & Guide Service in Ridgway and who has been guiding for more than 30 years, said Gunnison Gorge trips represent more than half of his company’s guiding and outfitting business, and that flows of 200 cfs are a deal breaker. Low flows contribute to higher water temperatures, which can lead to fishing closures, and make navigating some rapids difficult, if not impossible.
Patterson would like more advance notice from federal water managers when flows will be dropping, and real-time temperature and flow monitoring. Patterson said he has already canceled a handful of trips this year and may have to cancel more if flows stay below about 250 cfs.
“The Gunnison Gorge National Conservation Area, as far as a guided fly-fishing trip, is a bucket-list trip known around the world and a must-do,” Patterson said. “So people have planned for over a year in advance for this experience, and it just puts us in a real tough spot.”
Boaters in the Gunnison Gorge National Conservation Area. A Ridgway outfitter said he has had to cancel trips this year because of low flows in the river. CREDIT: RIGS FLY SHOP & GUIDE SERVICE
Farmers facing ‘immeasurable hardship’
While flows in the river decline, downstream irrigators are still taking nearly their entire allocation of water. The Uncompahgre Valley Water Users Association is still diverting just more than 1,000 cfs through the Gunnison Tunnel. The association is a vast expanse of farmland that extends from just south of Montrose to Delta, and is the largest water user in the Upper Colorado River Basin. Water from the Gunnison River transforms the arid high desert into lush green fields of corn, pinto beans, onions and alfalfa.
The association normally gets half of its water supply from the Uncompahgre River. But this basin saw some of the worst snowpack in the state at just 14% of median. That means farmers in this area are experiencing deep water cuts this year. And some growers made the tough decision to leave fields dry and unplanted this year.
“I’ve got a senior water right, and I got 50% of my system that’s fallowed right now,” Uncompahgre Valley Water Users Association General Manager Steve Pope said at the Aug. 27 meeting.
This field in the Uncompahgre Valley Water Users Association district has been fallowed this season due to a lack of water. The state of Colorado announced Wednesday that it will set up a conservation program using federal dollars, which means more fields on the Western Slope could soon look like this. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
This year’s conditions on the Gunnison River highlight how tensions are exacerbated among water-user groups — especially in times of extreme drought. Colorado’s prior appropriation system of water law says the oldest water rights have first use of the river, which almost always means agricultural water users get their water first.
The state didn’t begin to grant water rights for the environment until the 1970s and for recreation until around the early 2000s. Although a large part of the Western Slope’s economy, culture and identity is now centered around outdoor recreation, keeping enough water in rivers for boating and fish is often the last priority.
The letter from Trout Unlimited asks Reclamation to evaluate power contracts with the Uncompahgre Water Users Association, which has several hydropower generating stations on its system of canals, and implement clear efficiency standards for water use. The letter lists reasons that suggest more water is being diverted from the Gunnison River than is necessary for irrigation.
Pope called their concerns “absolutely ridiculous.”
“These farmers have suffered immeasurable hardships this year, and for someone to say, ‘We think you should further reduce to maintain water temperatures and fish flows in the Black Canyon,’” Pope said. “They don’t bring a water right to the table; they don’t bring anything but a demand, and I don’t agree with it. Irrigation and agriculture is the senior priority, and it’s going to be used.”
Pope said he plans to dial back Gunnison River diversions to about 700 cfs by mid-September, but the river won’t see a bump in flows because of Reclamation’s plan to keep dam releases low to build back storage.
This rock formation known as the Dillon Pinnacles on the shores of Blue Mesa Reservoir on Aug. 30, 2026. Federal water managers say they will hold reservoir releases to between 200 and 300 cfs until February in an effort to recover storage in the reservoir. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Patterson is hoping his business can get through September — which is the busiest month for multiday trips through the gorge — relatively unscathed. He would like to see more collaboration and communication between water managers and water users, and he wants anglers to have a seat at the table.
Patterson framed the issue not as a fight among water users, but as an unevenly built safety net in times of shortage. For now, river recreation remains largely at the mercy of upstream decision-makers.
“We’re seeing it all over the Colorado drainage,” Patterson said. “You can’t demand water that isn’t there. But passing it through a special place like this and working with us on times of years to minimize water temperature issues and things like that is a great step. I think it starts with acknowledging that this place is special and important and deserves to be protected.”
The Government Highline Canal, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
September 3, 2026
Farmers served by the Government Highline Canal as of today will get no water, a result of last winter’s dismal snowpack and low levels in Green Mountain Reservoir
The Government Highline Canal has delivered water to farms in Colorado’s Grand Valley during irrigation season for more than 110 years.
Thursday will be a first in that long history. No water will be available in that canal to farmers, even though the growing season has not ended.
“This will be the first time since around 1914 the Government Highline Canal has been at undeliverable levels during the irrigation season, which usually runs until Nov. 1 (and sometimes later),” said Tina Bergonzini, general manager of the Grand Valley Water Users Association.
Water supplied by reservoirs upstream in the Colorado River headwaters has essentially run out.
The predicament on the Colorado River had become apparent by April. Record-breaking heat of March made it extremely likely that runoff would be anemic. It got a bit better in May, but not much.
This was clearly evident at Green Mountain Reservoir, between Silverthorne and Kremmling. The dam had been built between 1938 and 1943, as part of a quid pro quo. Farmers in northeastern Colorado, particularly in the Fort Collins-Longmont-Greeley triangle, wanted to divert water from the Colorado River headwaters.
Western Slope representatives objected. They worried that they would lose irrigation water they needed after spring runoff subsided in June and July. The federally financed dam was the answer. It can hold nearly 154,745 acre-feet of water. Of that, 66,000 is marked for delivery to downstream irrigators, most in the Grand Junction area.
Green Mountain was the quid for the quo of the Colorado Big-Thompson Project annual diversion of between 200,000 and 230,000 acre-feet through the Continental Divide.
It worked — until this year.
In April, the low levels in the reservoir made it clear that the farmers would not get the full amount of water they had come to expect. The Glenwood Springs-based Colorado River District created a plan to ease the shortage.
The district — which had been created to look out after Western Slope interests in the 1930s — looked into how it could tap various pools of water, getting a thimbleful here, a cupful there. Irrigators wouldn’t become whole, but they would get help, said Andy Mueller, the general manager of the River District at the board’s April meeting.
DeBeque Canyon has changed somewhat since this photo of the Roller Dam was taken in 1916. Most notably, now the canyon has an interstate highway. Photo/U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. For a more complete history, see the Palisade Historical Society page.
Water for the Grand Valley Canal is diverted from the Colorado River at what is called the Roller Dam on the Colorado River just east of Palisade. It continues 55 miles down the valley, mostly north of I-70, ending near Mack, 10 miles from the Utah border.
The canal is called the “government” for a good reason. It was built with federal money via the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, an agency created in 1902 to help turn arid places like the Grand Valley into gardens and orchards. Accounts vary about when the water began flowing in the canal. Some say 1913, others 1914 or 1915. Regardless, the water has always flowed since before the United States entered World War I.
Until this year.
Early in the irrigation season, irrigators benefitting from the canal agreed to curtail their water use in exchange for getting water from reservoirs near the Colorado River headwaters later in the season.
That sounds simple enough. The mechanics are complicated. Crucial to understand is the seniority of the “Cameo call” at the Roller Dam, where water is diverted. Upstream users have to honor that very senior call.
The call is for 1,950 cubic feet per second. Grand Valley’s Bergonzini said her district lowered the target by 300 cfs and then another 200 cfs, or 1,450 cfs. That left a little more water in Green Mountain. Altogether, the reduced water diverted from the Colorado — combined with the two storms during May — brought the amount of water available in Green Mountain up to 50% of the allotment for the Grand Valley farmers.
This story has endless details. The essential story is that those with rights to water on the Colorado River within Colorado — including a transmountain diverter, Northern Water — have worked with the irrigation district to ensure the farmers in the Grand Valley had some water during the growing days of summer. Water officials stress what Bergonzini calls “teamwork and collaboration between entities.”
Upstream reservoirs tapped included Wolford and Wiliams Fork, both near Kremmling, and Ruedi, near Basalt. An additional 5,000 came from Granby Reservoir late in the season.
Helping out were appropriations of $450,000 from the River District in April and then, in May, $585,000 from the Colorado Water Conservation Board.
Still, farmers dependent upon the ditch only got 50% of the water they normally would from Green Mountain.
Some of the teamwork involves Orchard Mesa Irrigation District. The Grand Valley and Orchard Mesa districts have an agreement to share shortages.
A short distance east of Palisade, water from the Colorado River is pumped up to Orchard Mesa. Photo/Allen Best
Orchard Mesa pumps water uphill from near Palisade to the mesa, site of many of the peaches for which Palisade is famous. Farther down on the Government Highline Canal, other farms grow alfalfa, wheat, and usually corn. This year, however, little corn was grown, yielding to Sudan grass, triticale, and barley, as they are shorter season and can be grown with less water, said Grand Valley’s Bergonzini.
Both peach and grape orchards on Orchard Mesa have done quite well, said Rob Talbott, president of the irrigation district’s board of directors.
The fundamental story, he said, is that “everybody is doing whatever they can to share their water.”
The sharing continues. The peach orchards need water now if they will be productive next year.
“The peach trees (primarily on Orchard Mesa) need water right now to get ready for hibernation whereas my growers (served by Government Highline Canal) can wait for a bit to water in winter wheat and hay. They crop switched earlier this year to shorter season crops, so we have different needs,” explained Bergonzini.
The canal is designed for flows of 730 cfs, not for the 100 cfs now available. As such, she said, it’s better to let the peach trees have the water now.
“Then, IF THE RIVER HAS RISEN SOME,” said Bergonzini, using all-caps for emphasis in her e-mail, Grand Valley will take Orchard Mesa’s irrigation water and augment it with what is available in the river to get some crops watered along the 55-mile canal.
That could happen at the end of September.
“We are planning on running late — perhaps the middle of November if the weather allows without freezing, to assure our growers get good moisture on their fall crops,” she said.
Lauren Boebert at the Colorado Water Congress Annual Summer Conference. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
August 31, 2026
Many political office-seekers spoke at the annual summer conference in Steamboat. Some ‘y’alled to the attendees. Others not so much. Most called for more water storage and “forest resilience.”
“God bless, y’all,” said Victor Marx, the Republican candidate for governor in Colorado in wrapping up his allotted 15 minutes at the podium at the Colorado Water Congress summer conference in Steamboat Springs.
Lauren Boebert, who represents the Fourth Congressional District in Colorado, followed him on the agenda. “It is wonderful to be back with y’all at Water Congress,” said Boebert, a Republican seeking her fourth term in Congress.
Y’alls were common during her quarter-hour on stage. It being a water conference, one of them had to do with water. “So y’all better get real good at that xero-scaping for your lawns and everything you’re building out there because your cactus, your cacti might do just fine, but we’re taking it back,” she said of Arizona.
Dwayne Romero, the Democratic candidate in Boebert’s former Third Congressional District, who preceded them, used none.
What this says exactly, I’m not sure. Y’all is a Southern locution that has become somewhat more common across the United States. I do note that Romero grew up in southeast Texas while Marx was reared in Louisiana, both of those places thick with y’alls and drawls. As for Boebert, she came to Colorado from Florida at the age of four.
Water Congress’s twice-annual conferences always have elected officials as well as water leaders from across Colorado. This being election season in 2026, the time devoted to the pols was greater than normal.
Victor Marx, the Republican nominee for Colorado governor, says Colorado must be prepared adequately for when the rain and snow returns. Photo/Allen Best
Like Marx, some are seeking statewide offices, while others, including Boebert and Romero, are running for Congress in districts with more rural areas.
That makes sense, as the Water Congress has a strong rural constituency. Denver Water is well represented, but so is Logan County. I also noted that Rod Lenz, the chair of the Republican River Water Conservation District’s board of directors, managed to get to the conference by Wednesday morning after a meeting in Holyoke that lasted long into the previous afternoon. That’s a good five-hour trip by car.
As for the y’alls, I have no idea whether Jeff Hurd, the Third Congressional District incumbent, Phil Weiser, the Democratic nominee for governor, drawled y’alls. I suspect not. I have heard both speak several times. Neither is a y’all guy. Both are also attorneys.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Romero and Boebert started out on much the same note in their remarks about the Colorado River. Romero mentioned “decades of lower-basin use” and urged solidarity with Colorado’s negotiating team on “protecting Colorado’s compact entitlements.” Boebert struck the same tone but with more pugilistic language. “We’re fighting for what belongs to us and for our future generations.”
Beyond those obligatory remarks, the two candidates differed greatly. Boebert talked about what she has done for her constituents regarding water and mentioned her work on the Arkansas Valley Conduit Project. “Even though my dear great president may have vetoed that, we are still working to get that over the line for Southeast Colorado.”
Boebert was typical Boebert, saucy and sort of interesting in how she played to her base. She wore blue jeans, as that seems to be her style when making the rounds in Colorado. In what may be more revealing, she also tried to talk about her bi-partisan work. I also noticed she did so when running in a tight race in her former congressional district, the third, in 2022. She won that race by a mere 546 votes, precipitating her move across the Continental Divide.
Maybe it’s because she is in what appears to be a tougher contest with the Democratic candidate, Eileen Laubacher, a retired Navy rear admiral, in a district that in the past has been unflinchingly Republican. Laubacher’s resume, money and growing institutional support could, noted Axios in a story last week, “make Boebert sweat.” Laubacher also spoke at the conference. But again, I was elsewhere.
Themes
Two themes were evident in remarks made by the office-seekers and others at the conference. One was the need for more storage, the other for more “watershed restoration” via Proposition 137, the proposal on the November ballot to divert sales tax revenues from sporting goods to do work in the forests and expand funding for parks.
The discussions in a general way crossed party lines but the storage case was cited more prominently by Republican speakers. Absent, though, was the sort of specifics I thirsted for.
Politicians rarely get into the details when on the stump, of course. And 15 minutes isn’t much time. Boebert’s comments will likely be echoed in the next two months.
“Forest management is not optional anymore. It never was, and for anyone to come up and present policy that is more reactive then proactive is failing you and each and every one of us — is failing future generations,” said Boebert. “Healthy forests hold snow longer, release water cleaner, and protect our watersheds from catastrophic fires that turn drinking water into ash.”
Boebert then took aim at clean energy.
“We hear all the environmental claims about carbon emissions, but these wildfires that are too quickly growing out of control, burning down our beautiful state, neighboring states in the West, with more than 6 billion standing dead trees that no one will allow us to harvest or not harvest enough of, unfortunately even taking lives of first responders…”
Boebert attributed to NASA a statistic: A wildfire produces more greenhouse gas emissions than all of the cars fueled by fossil fuels in a year.
“So EVs aren’t the answer. Sending your money to DC for wind and solar isn’t the answer. It’s being good stewards of our land, managing our forests.”
The storage theme also got lots of attention. It was bipartisan. Little of the conversation went very deep. Some of it was almost insultingly oversimplified.
Consider what Marx had to say: “We can’t make it snow. We can’t make it rain. But we can decide whether we’re prepared for when the water comes. So I believe we should store water in good years. Lord, please send it.”
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
It sounds good, being “prepared adequately.” But that statement assumes good years will come. Examining the science, Colorado State University’s Brad Udall has suggested there may not be any good years, let alone enough to fill all the [reservoirs] already built.
Consider that we have two giant reservoirs on the Colorado River sitting 75% empty. And in the headwaters, Green Mountain Reservoir is 15.1% full, as of Sunday, according to the Bureau of Reclamation. Blue Mesa Reservoir was only marginally better. Navajo, on the Colorado-New Mexico border, is doing better at 40% to 45%.
Romero’s call for partnership
Of the three office-seekers I heard, Romero was most interesting. It was obvious to me he had taken the time to study the Colorado River issues. As for Marx, he rambled.
Romero’s comments were calculated, of course. He was making a case for stability after the chaos of the Trump presidency.
“We have to restore Congress and our federal agencies as institutions that work. Congress has to legislate. It has to authorize projects. It has to appropriate money. It has to conduct oversight. Those are all the rules that were stipulated in the Constitution for our Congress,” he said.
I suspect Jeff Hurd would agree with at least parts of that statement.
Green Mountain Reservoir, seen here on Aug.17, sits about 85% empty. Most other reservoirs have more water stored, but not that much. Photo/Allen Best
He later talked about what this meant on the ground. “A rancher can’t make long-term conservation investments around a pilot program that could disappear with the next administration,” he said.
What must be restored, he continued, is a federal partnership with the state, “where federal dollars turn local grit into lasting resilience. So here’s the heart of it: We have the right people, we have the expertise, we have the will. Now we need to bring real, sustained funding and solutions and resources to bear, enough to help us build resilience for the next 50 years of demand. And we need genuine, reliable partners.”
As for resilience, said Romero, it comes from many projects. “It’s a modernized diversion that lets a farmer grow more with less. It’s a storage that gives a community room to breathe in a drought. It’s a treated watershed that doesn’t burn catastrophically. And it’s securing an historic right like Shoshone, so it benefits Colorado permanently.”
Shoshone, of course, is the hydroelectric plant in Glenwood Canyon, and the Colorado River District is nearing success in its multi-year effort to make sure that the very senior water rights continue to ensure water flows downstream. It’s complicated, of course.
“These things take money. The federal government has helped build the water structure that made this modern American West possible. It is their responsibility to be a reliable partner with us, adapting that infrastructure and those institutions to the 21st century. They need to stay with us for capital and capital improvements.”
Romero wrapped up his speech with this observation: “Our hardest moments are often when we find our common ground.” That means, he said, “creating solutions that last beyond the next drought, the next negotiations, or the next administration, but for generations to come.”
Sounds good – but where does additional storage make sense that allows communities to breathe?
As for forest resilience, it sounds good — but what exactly is being proposed? Most environmental organizations seem to support Proposition 137, as do Denver Water and Northern Water. Western Resource Advocates and other environmental organizations are pushing it.
I still have major questions about the mechanics even after sitting through an hour-long press conference on Monday morning. Sometimes I can be fuzzy in my thinking, but in this case I think there’s some fuzziness about what is being proposed.
From its start as a pure snowflake in the Rocky Mountains of Montana to its clouded, churning confluence with the Mississippi River in St. Louis, the “Big Muddy” has for centuries been incrediby impactful to the communities that call it home. Native Americans were first to recognize the importance of the Missouri River, with twenty-nine Tribal Nations recognized to hold cultural, economic, or water rights to this current day. Followed by Lewis and Clark on their historic “Corps of Discovery Expedition”, the river opened up a new horizon for the newly established United States of America to expand.
As time moved on, the Missouri and its floodplain became more developed, heavily farmed, tightly constricted, and eventually dammed. The Pick-Sloan Flood Control Act of 1944 changed the wild and free Big Muddy like never before; building massive dams and reservoirs, and thousands of miles of levees to facilitate flood control, farm irrigation, commercial navigation, and hydropower generation. While it can be debated as to the successes of Pick-Sloan, one thing is certain, a new wave of threats to the health and function of the river itself was set in motion and continues to grow today.
Confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, Missouri | Mitch Paine Photography
One of the first major rivers that was a focus of conservation efforts by American Rivers, we pushed for the endangered species listing of the pallid sturgeon, piping plover, and interior least tern. Changes in the river connectivity, historic hydrology, and natural sandbar creation severely impacted these species’ ability to survive. We were also a primary advocate in the subsequent actions for the Congressional creation of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ (USACE) Missouri River Recovery Program (MRRP).
Pallid sturgeon
The MRRP is focused on:
(1) avoiding actions that jeopardize federally listed species, and
While advances have been made, including the de-listing of the interior least tern and the slow completion of levee-setbacks to establish floodplain re-connection, there is still over halfway to go to complete the total 166,750 acres of Missouri River floodplains that were approved to be acquired and restored as part of the BSNP.
Coyote Gulch and daughter at the confluence of the Missouri River and Mississippi November 25, 2022. The Mississippi is to the left and the Missouri is to the right. Note the huge gaging station on the far bank.
The San Luis Valley is searching for ways to use less water without shrinking agriculture. [The Rye Resurgence Project] effort believes rye could help. But turning the grain into part of the valley’s future will require more than convincing farmers to plant it.
“The situation is urgent, and we have to take action to reduce water use,” said Heather Dutton, manager of the San Luis Valley Water Conservancy District…
For years, groundwater has been pumped from the valley’s aquifer faster than nature can replenish it. If that continues, Dutton said, state regulators could eventually require irrigation wells to shut down. One option would be farming fewer acres. But Dutton said that would come at a steep cost.
“It wrecks our economy. It wrecks the fabric of our society of having people employed in agriculture and the heritage of this place,” she said. “That’s why it’s so important that we figure out other alternatives and ways that we can remain in farming, but use less water.”
[…]
The effort, launched by Dutton and Hooper farmer Sarah Jones, is exploring whether rye can help farmers reduce water use without taking more land out of production.
“This is a rye field that’s being used strictly for grazing and green manure,” project manager Morgan Neely said while walking along the perimeter of a lush green field in the San Luis Valley. Cows were cornered off to a section of the field.
Rye requires less than 12 inches of water each year — roughly one-third to one-half as much as many traditional valley crops, Neely said. Its living roots help hold down topsoil during the valley’s powerful spring winds, and it can be grazed by cattle, incorporated into the soil or harvested for grain.
It was among the first to see its lower-priority water eliminated in the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan.
The Eloy irrigation district secured state and federal aid to resume pumping groundwater, but those wells only produce a fraction of the water that the Central Arizona Project once delivered.
In a gravity-fed system like CAIDD’s, less water in canals means less momentum to push water to every customer.
“Some laterals are better than others,” said district president Dan Shedd, who irrigated 2,200 acres when Colorado River water was still flowing.
That’s down to about 600 acres now.
“My neighbor can’t farm as much as I can because of where the wells are situated. Most of us are less than 50%.”
Farms need extra in summer
Farmers across the district have adapted to this new reality.
Most have fallowed land. Some have sold or leased parcels to solar projects to help make ends meet.
Many remaining fields have been reconfigured into smaller plots, so lower-pressure water can move uniformly across them.
And farmers are diversifying what they grow.
“Normally, I’d have 1,600 acres in cotton,” Shedd, an Arizona Farm Bureau member, said.
“But now I’m growing wheat and garbanzo beans in the winter when there’s more water. It’s just a break-even deal.”
Summer is a different story.
Though more profitable alfalfa, cotton, corn and Bermuda grass can be grown then, it can be a struggle to pump enough water when the heat’s on and everyone needs irrigation at once.
In past years, the irrigation district has secured extra supplies from nearby providers to supplement when needs are highest.
But that water is growing scarce as others across Arizona now face cuts.
CAIDD knows it needs to do more.
Cadiz has groundwater to sell
Meanwhile, a California company called Cadiz is looking for interested parties to sell its groundwater, which it says would otherwise be lost to evaporation in a dry lakebed.
The water and land management company has secured rights to pump up to 75,000 acre-feet of water a year from an aquifer roughly the size of Lake Mead.
Its Mojave Groundwater Bank, located about two hours west of Lake Havasu City in Arizona, is neither new nor universally welcomed in California.
Opponents have tried to stop the project multiple times over 30 years.
But Cadiz recently secured the last federal permit it needs to begin converting a natural gas line to transport its water north and west.
The idea, at least initially, is to exchange that water with users who receive supplies from the State Water Project.
That water would flow to Los Angeles, in an agreement that has yet to be cemented, where users there would agree to conserve a commensurate amount of Colorado River water.
Central Arizona Project map via Mountain Town News
And then, in other agreements that still must be negotiated, 10,000 acre-feet of that water would flow to CAIDD through the Central Arizona Project canal.
Effort now is to lower the price
If this sounds complicated, it is.
Finalizing complex agreements to move water every year for at least five decades is one thing.
Lowering the price for CAIDD to officially bite on this deal is another.
“We can’t pass the cost onto food,” Cadiz CEO Susan Kennedy said, particularly when farmers already operate on slim margins.
Kennedy — a long-time California political operative — is rustling the bushes for private investment and an 80% federal funding match.
She is also working with the Bureau of Reclamation to develop a model exchange agreement that could be used to expedite other interstate water transfers.
This could change the narrative
Ten thousand acre-feet is a drop in the bucket for CAIDD, which even at diminished capacity delivered about 160,000 acre-feet last year.
It’s not enough water to restore fields that have been taken out of production.
But it is enough to provide more long-term certainty for those that remain.
If the deal comes together, it could prove to other irrigation districts that new supplies aren’t necessarily out of reach, and that agriculture has a more secure future in Arizona, despite its current water challenges.
And even if it doesn’t, district leaders contend, the conversation could open doors to other ideas and opportunities.
“This could bring water to Arizona, whether or not we can utilize it,” said Ron McEachern, CAIDD’s former general manager.
The Berthoud Pass Ditch is now owned by the City of Northglenn. Photo credit: Clear Creek County
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
August 28, 2026
The Colorado Attorney General’s Office and the 14th District Attorney’s Office this week charged Fabrizio Lorenzin, 65, with four felonies in connection with repeated sabotage of the Berthoud Pass Watershed Ditch and its security cameras over several years. The remote ditch system begins at 11,200 feet high on its namesake pass in the mountains and helps funnel water to Northglenn and Golden. The ditch’s water is stored…in Standley Lake in Adams County. Lorenzin allegedly forced open headgates on the system’s ditches, damaging the infrastructure and diverting millions of dollars’ worth of drinking water from its intended destination downstream. Prosecutors allege that he also stole cameras meant to watch the district’s property…
Law enforcement first began investigating the possible tampering with the headgates in August 2019, according to an arrest affidavit documenting the investigation. That’s when four of the gates that control the direction of the flow of water were vandalized, diverting water worth approximately $1.3 million, the affidavit says…Headgates were damaged again in 2022, diverting $4.3 million in water, the affidavit says. Trail cameras again photographed the same man with the same backpack. Another headgate was damaged in 2023 when it was forced open and propped up with rocks. This time, the trail cameras were also stolen. In 2024, the affidavit says, federal investigators with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency installed three cameras with Apple AirTags attached. More images from the area showed the same man with the same backpack. In August 2024, the AirTags on the stolen cameras pinged from inside Lorenzin’s home, the affidavit says, and investigators searched it on two occasions, finding the disassembled EPA cameras and a laptop that contained images from other stolen cameras. A review of the search history on the laptop found multiple searches for information related to sabotage on the Berthoud Pass system as well as information about trail cameras and headgates, the documents says.
Eagle County is currently within the region of Colorado facing D4 conditions, which is the most extreme level of drought. Colorado Drought Monitor map August 25, 2026
Click the link to read the article on the Vail Daily website (John LaConte). Here’s an excerpt:
August 28, 2026
Upper Eagle Regional Water Authority now required to replace diversions with more water
On Aug. 14, the Colorado Division of Water Resources placed what’s known as a “call” on the Eagle River, meaning that any water user with junior water rights is now required to stop diverting, or replace their diversions with augmentation water. The call came as no surprise to water managers, and is not uncommon in drought years when the Eagle River between Gore Creek and Lake Creek reaches an average flow that is less than 85 cubic feet per second between May 1 and Sept. 30. That minimum average threshold was set in a court decree issued Oct. 7, 1981, which said that minimum streamflow is “required to preserve the natural environment to a reasonable degree on the Eagle River.” What is uncommon, said Tim Friday, director of water & utility resources for the Eagle River Water & Sanitation District, is the fact that the Colorado Division of Water Resources consulted with the district before placing the call on the Eagle River. The call could have been placed a month earlier, as the average minimum flow had dropped below 85 cfs back in July, but the Division of Water Resources stalled it a month in case flows came back up…The Eagle River Water & Sanitation District isn’t as affected by the call, as many of the water rights in the district are senior to the 1981 court decree, but the Upper Eagle Regional Water Authority, which also supplies water to many properties in Eagle County, has water rights that are junior to the 1981 decree…For more information about the instream flow rights on the Eagle River, visit Colorado’s Decision Support Systems website.
This ditch in the Uncompahgre Valley Water Users Association flows past an unplanted field. The River District is concerned that legal tools the state plans to use for its new conservation program could favor certain regions, like the Uncompahgre Valley. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Colorado could most easily wring water from Grand, Uncompahgre, Upper Gunnison valleys
Western Slope water managers are raising concerns that the legal tools used under Colorado’s new conservation program could cause negative impacts to local communities and the state’s agricultural industry.
In a letter to the state water board, the Glenwood Springs-based Colorado River Water Conservation District said it is concerned that the legal mechanisms state officials plan to use to move conserved water into downstream reservoirs may mean certain geographic areas are more likely to give up water. The River District also says the program’s framework should be set by lawmakers – with a significant stakeholder process – during the 2027 session, instead of by the Colorado Water Conservation Board and state Division of Water Resources officials.
At its July meeting, River District staff presented a map of the river basins in its 15-county region, showing which areas were most likely to participate in a conservation program. The Uncompahgre River basin; Dolores River basin; Colorado River in the Grand Valley; White River near Rangely; and Green River, Little Snake; and the Yampa in the Maybell/ Lily Park area were the most likely regions to see participation in a new state conservation program.
“What it shows is the potential for the disparate impacts,” River District General Manager Andy Mueller said at the July board meeting. “And because it’s so easy to pay someone in the Grand Valley for a full [growing] season, that’s going to be the inclination. That’s the easy thing.”
In July, officials from the CWCB and Division of Water Resources unveiled what they are calling a “near-term contribution program,” designed to pay water users in the Upper Colorado River Basin (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) to voluntarily cut back for the next two years. The state of Colorado will run its own program, alongside similar programs in Utah and Wyoming, using $100 million in promised funding from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
“We have this federal funding available to us and to bring those funds into Colorado, we need to hit the ground running and start the application window,” Amy Ostdiek, interstate section chief at the CWCB, said in an interview with Aspen Journalism. “So we are looking at doing this with the tools we have available under the law as it exists today. And that’s just kind of the reality of the timing of it.”
Shepherding vs. existing authorities
One of the complications of setting up a contribution program are the legal tools used to move water saved upstream to either Lake Powell or Blue Mesa Reservoir, where the state can then get credit from Reclamation for the stored water. One of the criticisms of past pilot conservation programs was that the water was not tracked to Lake Powell nor measured to see how much ended up there.
State lawmakers would need to pass a law to ensure that conserved water is protected as it moves through the river system so that it reaches a specified downstream reservoir without being taken by other water users along the way, a process known as “shepherding.” State officials believe they have the legal authority to shepherd water across the state line only in the case of a call from the Lower Basin states (California, Arizona and Nevada). And so far, the Lower Basin has never placed a compact call.
That means the most straightforward places to wring water from the state are the Grand Valley, the Uncompahgre Valley and the Upper Gunnison Valley. The irrigation districts of the Grand and Uncompahgre valleys are close to the state line and the Upper Gunnison Valley is just above Blue Mesa, so the majority of water conserved in these locations will get to where it needs to go without the state Division of Water Resources having to actively shepherd it.
The River District has long warned that these types of programs, if not done carefully, could cause negative economic impacts by removing water from the Western Slope’s rural agricultural communities.
“Without shepherding, you end up with the potential that there are certain areas that are targeted and can produce water in this program and other areas that cannot,” Mueller said. “Therefore, you end up with these disproportionate impacts that we’ve been concerned about.”
Sonia Chavez is the general manager of the Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy District, one of the areas that could be singled out. The 59,000 irrigated acres of agricultural land in the district produces mostly hay and is above the state’s largest reservoir, Blue Mesa, where state officials plan to store water conserved under the program.
“That has not been lost on us that we are the only community sitting above a federal reservoir in the state of Colorado,” Chavez said.
State officials say they intend to use their “existing authorities” for this new program, without the change in state law needed to allow shepherding. But the precise definition of existing authorities is still unclear. Officials said it could include loans of conserved water to the state’s instream flow program or releasing water from Blue Mesa Reservoir at times of year when downstream users won’t pick it up, so the water is nearly guaranteed to get to the state line.
The River District’s letter asks the CWCB for more clarity on the definition of existing authorities and how they would be used as part of a contribution program.
From left, Interstate Section Chief at the CWCB Amy Ostdiek, Colorado representative to the Upper Colorado River Commission Becky Mitchell and State Engineer Jason Ullmann, speak on a panel at Colorado Water Congress on August 20, 2026 in Steamboat Springs. State officials are rolling out a water conservation program that would pay water users to temporarily cut back. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Lawmaker involvement
The creation of a conservation program for Colorado comes at a critical time for the basin, which remains locked in the grip of a historic drought, combined with a management crisis. With the seven states that share the river still unable to find agreement on a new framework after more than two years of failed negotiations, the federal government has stepped in with its own two-year operating plan. That plan, which was released last week and includes cuts to water use in the Lower Basin, immediately triggered a lawsuit from the state of Nevada.
While the Lower Basin states are subject to mandatory cuts under the federal plan, the Upper Basin is not. But the four Upper Basin states have offered to voluntarily contribute 100,000 acre-feet of water over the next two years, when conditions allow, which would be set forth in a parallel agreement with Reclamation separate from the federal management plan. Colorado’s conservation program is an effort to make good on that promise.
“We’re in the post-2026 world, and I think that acting now and doing what we can with the authorities that we have shows Colorado’s commitment and demonstrates that we are at the table in a meaningful way,” Ostdiek said. “We think it’s important, for various reasons, to move forward with this now.”
In its letter, the River District also asks for the state to limit the criteria it uses to approve participation to a one-year, temporary program so lawmakers can use the 2027 session to use a stakeholder process to come up with a framework for a future program beginning in 2028.
“The Colorado River District has long advocated that any government action that facilitates a Colorado River conserved consumptive use program inside the State of Colorado – or directs the Colorado State Engineer to shepherd conserved water to the state line, whether done under existing authorities or otherwise – must only be done through legislation enacted by the Colorado General Assembly,” the River District’s letter reads.
At a June hearing of the state’s Water Resources and Agriculture Review Committee, lawmakers told state officials that the legislature should be involved in the creation of a conservation program.
But putting the conservation issue – which remains controversial – before stakeholders and lawmakers hasn’t yielded results in the past. In 2023, a 17-member, state-wide drought task force, was supposed to make recommendations to lawmakers about what a conservation program should look like. The group could not agree and did not advance any recommendations on that topic, with some members saying a state conservation program was premature.
And at an August 2025 meeting of the Water Resources and Agricultural Review Committee, some Delta County ranchers asked lawmakers to consider a bill to allow shepherding during the 2026 session. They did not.
State officials held a workshop to get feedback about a water conservation program at Colorado Water Congress Aug. 19 in Steamboat Springs. Water users have for years expressed concerns about equity and protecting water rights in programs like this. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
CWCB taking feedback
CWCB officials are currently taking comments and feedback on the contribution program. They held a well-attended workshop for water users on August 19, 2026 at Colorado Water Congress in Steamboat Springs. Attendees had many of the same lingering concerns that have been voiced for years, including how to protect water rights and how to encourage participation across the state.
State officials plan to offer different amounts of compensation to participating water users to account for the difference in the value of relatively cheap water on the Western Slope versus more expensive water on the Front Range. So far, in previous pilot conservation programs, every participant has been a Western Slope water user.
Western Slope agricultural water users have long said that if they don’t see comparable cuts being taken by Front Range municipalities, which collectively draw about 500,000 acre-feet from the headwaters of the Colorado River each year, that they won’t want to participate. They don’t want Front Range urban growth to be fueled by water cuts west of the Continental Divide.
At the workshop, Northern Water’s Director of Engineering Kyle Whitaker tried to put that fear to rest, saying the water provider, which supplies water to farms and communities on the Front Range like Fort Collins, Boulder and Longmont through its Colorado-Big Thompson project, would participate in future conservation programs.
“As transmountain diverters to the east, I only speak for Northern Water, and we will participate from here going forward,” Whitaker said. “We’ve been working on things to be a part of this for a number of years now, and those are finally in place.”
The CWCB is set to consider the criteria for program participation at its September meeting.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
We have met briefly at at least one Colorado water conference (but it’s been a while). I was the Water Resources Analyst at Northglenn for a while, and now am the Water Resources Manager at Consolidated Mutual. But, on my own time, I’ve built something for Colorado water records that may be useful to you or your readers, and I’d rather you see it early. I would appreciate feedback and hopefully some exposure from your organization.
It’s the whole state in one place: all 177,301 decreed structures, 2,271 stream gages, diversion records, water court history, and the calls that administer them, across all seven divisions. Type an address and it shows you the ditches and rights around it. Open any ditch and you get its decrees, what it actually diverted year by year, and where it sits in line. Open a district and you get a straight-line diagram of who takes what, and where.
The piece I’m proudest of went live this week: for any structure, on any day, how much of its decree was actually in priority. Not whether a call was on — how many cfs of that particular ditch’s decree was in priority, counted by the hour, running back through the call record to 1950. I don’t know of anywhere else you can get that without building it yourself.
And it shows its work. Where DWR publishes its own day-by-day out-of-priority analysis, the page scores itself against DWR live, on the page: 98.7% agreement across about 86,000 structure-days, and it lands on DWR’s exact percent-of-day 90.9% of the time. Every page also states plainly what it can’t tell you. I’d rather your readers see the error bars than trust me.
A few things a reader could do with it in five minutes: find out whose ditch runs behind their house; see how many days their ditch was out of priority in the 2002 and 2012 droughts; or watch a senior downstream call reach up a tributary and shut off juniors sixty miles away.
I’d genuinely value your eye on it, and if you think it’s worth a mention to your readers, that would mean a lot. Happy to give you a walkthrough, or to run a specific question against the data if it would make a better post.
— John Crawford
(Water Resources Manager, Consolidated Mutual Water Company), but working independently on this project hydrohistorian.com.
Milkweed, sweet peas, and a plethora of other flora billow from Farmer’s Ditch in the North Fork Valley of western Colorado. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
It seems like every time the Colorado River and other Western water woes make national headlines, some pundit — usually from the East Coast — weighs in with their “simple” or “obvious” solution. And I get mad and start throwing things around the room, then type out some blistering rant riddled with epithets and insults.
Well, the Colorado River is in the news again, and with it have come the usual swarm of oversimplified hot-takes. The one that really got my goat this time is from Matthew Yglesias, who wrote a piece headlined: The Western water crisis has a simple solution: Stop giving the majority of the water away to farmers for almost nothing!
These things piss me off so much not because they’re wrong, but because there is no “simple” solution to the Western water crisis. That’s because the crisis itself isn’t simple, and saying that it has simple fixes implies that the folks who have spent a lot of time trying to solve the problem are a bunch of idiots, since they hadn’t come up with this solution already. It seems as if Yglesias and his ilk assume that the West is not only monolithic, but that we Westerners are a bunch of backwoods bumpkins who don’t understand the region’s own problems.
Who cares what these bozos believe, right? Right. But judging by the comments on Yglesias’ social media posts, a lot of other people are similarly deluded. So I figured his piece provides a nice opportunity to clear some things up.
West Drought Monitor map August 25, 2026
In fact, there is no single “Western water crisis.” The West is huge and is geographically, hydrographically, and ecologically diverse. While most, but not all, of the Western U.S. is in some stage of drought currently, not all of those places are experiencing a water crisis, per se. There is a Colorado River water crisis and a Rio Grande water crisis and a San Joaquin Valley water crisis, but those crises are not all the same.
The Colorado River crisis is multifaceted and manifests in different ways in different places and on different levels. The river itself is in crisis, in that stretches of the mainstem and its tributaries virtually dry up during summers like this one. Its users are facing a potential crisis, i.e. looming shortages, as in some of them are getting less water from the river than they did in the past. And the vast and complex plumbing system and legal framework that has been built up to harness and govern the river is perhaps facing the most immediate crisis: It is collapsing under its own weight and in many ways has become obsolete. Each of these is a distinct calamity, with its own twists, turns, causes, and bevy of potential solutions.
From his perch in the Northeast, however, Yglesias sees just one dimension, writing in the “nut graf” of his piece:
Uh, not quite.
Yes, irrigated agriculture is by far the dominant consumer of Colorado River water, accounting for 52% of overall consumption and 74% of direct human consumption. And yes, agricultural users typically and notoriously pay less for the water than municipal users. No, this is not dictated by federal law.
Agricultural users were among the first entities in the colonial-settler era to put large quantities of water to beneficial use, giving them the most senior rights to the largest quantities of water. The Imperial Irrigation District, for example, has senior rights to about 3 million acre-feet of Colorado River water, most of which is used for agriculture.
These water rights holders have a legal right to use a set amount of water each year. They are not leasing or purchasing the water from the federal government or anyone else. It’s essentially theirs, for free, as long as they are able to divert it from the river and put it to beneficial use.
San Luis People’s Ditch March 17, 2018. Photo credit: Greg Hobbs
Usually the water rights are held by irrigation districts, ditch companies, municipalities, corporations, or, in some cases, very large individual landholders. In the late 1800s, these entities built their own diversions, canals, and delivery systems. Construction was often financed by private investors and the individual irrigators, who held stocks, or shares, in the ditch company. Each share would entitle its holder to a set amount of water from the canal. The shareholder would pay an annual fee for each share to cover construction, maintenance, and operating costs.
The Bureau of Reclamation was established in 1902 to build larger scale dams, diversions, and canals to deliver water to users and to spur agricultural development in the arid West. Call it the nationalized version of an irrigation district, but on steroids. The federal government paid for the projects, but the irrigation districts and municipal water utilities they served were expected to pay back the costs over time. The taxpayers supposedly wouldn’t have to pay a dime. Yet as the years went by, and as the budgets of the projects skyrocketed, the terms of the paybacks were relaxed, especially for agricultural users. This effectively subsidized water delivery, which in turn lowered farmers’ costs.
The All American Canal, the largest diversion on the Colorado River, passes through Winterhaven, CA on its way to the Imperial Valley. The Colorado River is seen flowing next to it.
One of the Bureau’s big projects was the 80-mile-long All-American Canal, built in the 1930s to ferry Colorado River water to the Imperial Irrigation District and other users. The IID entered into a 50-year payback contract, which ended in 1994. The Bureau still owns the canal, but the IID operates and maintains it and other infrastructure that delivers Colorado River water to nine cities and some 500,000 acres of farmland.
The IID pays nothing for the Colorado River water itself. It does pay to operate and maintain its vast water delivery system, and offsets those costs by charging agricultural and municipal users just $20 per acre-foot for water it delivers, a bargain basement rate. In other words, Imperial Valley farmers do get cheap water, but so do Imperial Valley cities and even industry (which pays $85/af, also relatively affordable). IID also brings in about $160 million annually by selling water to the San Diego County Water Authority. The operating costs for the All-American Canal system are lower than, say, the Central Arizona Project’s, because the All-American Canal is gravity fed, whereas the CAP uses huge amounts of electricity to pump water uphill.
Similar setups exist across the Colorado River Basin. But each system is distinct, and each has its own mix of federal and private funding and operational scenarios and rates.
And here’s one of the main flaws of Yglesias’s argument: He assumes that there’s some all powerful actor out there that sets rates and standards for water from the Colorado River, although he himself clearly doesn’t know who or what that actor is (he always uses the passive voice, or the all-encompassing “you” in these cases). That’s because that entity doesn’t exist. While the feds could stop subsidizing agriculture, and should not build any more water projects, they don’t have the authority to step in and adjust water rates. States probably could set rates for groundwater, but they can’t charge the IID for exercising their water rights on the Colorado River.
Next, Yglesias pivots to pillorying alfalfa, because that’s in vogue these days. I’m not going to get into that too much, because I’ve written about it so many times here before, but this little bit is pretty funny:
Now, I’m no alfalfa apologist (nor am I an alfalfaphobe), but I feel like I should point out that most of the alfalfa grown with Colorado River water is used to feed dairy cows, which in turn produce milk and cheese and ice cream. Unless Yglesias is a vegan, he might want to consider that. He then argues that since alfalfa is relatively low-value (money wise) compared to Las Vegas casinos, Phoenix microchip factories, or housing, the water should be going to casinos, factories, and housing, not farms, which would presumably happen if farmers had to pay more for water (i.e. they’d go broke and be forced to sell).
First off, there is nothing novel or groundbreaking about this idea. Sprawl has been gobbling up farmland, and water rights, for decades in the West. Phoenix didn’t just grow into the desert, it also grew into citrus orchards and alfalfa fields, and will probably continue to build housing and data centers on what ag land remains. A different version of this concept, where a city or developer purchases a farmer’s water rights, but uses them somewhere else — a practice known as buy and dry — is also not uncommon.
This does not solve the water crisis. Instead of cutting consumption, which is what’s needed, it merely shifts the consumption from one use — agriculture — to other ones, such as housing and golf courses and chip manufacturing and data centers. This may wring more cash out of each acre-foot of water, but it doesn’t lower consumption. An acre-foot is an acre-foot, whether it’s going to alfalfa, a golf course, a neighborhood’s lawns, a data center or a swimming pool.
Besides, transitioning land out of agriculture comes with its own problems. We can argue forever about whether farming alfalfa or any other crop in the desert is appropriate, or of adequately high value, or whatever. We can argue that the Bureau of Reclamation should never have existed, and that irrigating the arid West should have been left to private entities operating in a free market. But the fact is, there is farming in the desert, those projects did end up subsidizing the agriculture industry, and communities, economies, cultures, and even new landscapes have emerged from and formed around those farms.
Photo of Crowley County by Jennifer Goodland
Taking vast swaths of land out of farming, whether to build houses or solar panels or to buy the water rights and use them somewhere else, has myriad consequences, many of them negative. Fields can become noxious-weed-clogged dust pits, the wildlife and ecosystems that have come to rely on irrigation runoff dry up, farm workers and families and the businesses that rely on them are displaced, communities’ economies are upended. As Madeline Wilson, an agricultural systems specialist for Colorado State University’s extension office pointed out at a 2024 panel on dust-on-snow, every field fallowed in the San Luis Valley for conservation purposes also represents a family. “We’re not just talking about drying up lands,” she said, “but the drying up of our economy.”
In no way does this mean that farms should be immune from curtailment. Indeed, because agriculture is the biggest user of Colorado River water, it will have to take the largest cuts in consumption. There is simply nowhere else from which the 4 million acre-feet or more of reductions per year needed to bring demand into line with dwindling supplies can come. But forcing farmers into bankruptcy by jacking up water rates (if there was a mechanism to do so), or prescribing “incredibly simple” policy solutions that don’t consider the complexities of the situation and its myriad moving parts or the on-the-ground impacts, isn’t the way to do it.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
The “root cause” of the Colorado River crises is not alfalfa or pecans or cotton or cattle, it’s not the prior appropriation doctrine or the low price of water, it’s not overpopulation, it’s not data centers or golf courses or lawns or bad forest management or lack of or too many reservoirs. The root cause is twofold. First, there’s scarcity. The Southwest is an arid place, and climate change-exacerbated warming is drying it out more: there is less precipitation; the precipitation we do get is falling as rain, not snow; the snow we get is melting faster; and evapotranspiration is happening at a higher rate. This all leads to less water in the streams, reservoirs, rivers, and even aquifers. Secondly, there’s the chronic and long-term failure to acknowledge the scarcity, and the stubborn refusal to adapt to it and adjust consumption accordingly.
Consumptive use of Colorado River water for the Lower Basin’s largest users over time. Source: Bureau of Reclamation.
There has been progress. Over the last two decades some of the biggest water users on the river have slashed their water use considerably, sometimes because they had no choice, in some cases because they were incentivized to do so, and in other cases they did it to get ahead of future cuts. Last year, for example, the Imperial Irrigation District used 900,000 acre-feet less than it did in 1999. By its count, it has conserved over 9 million acre-feet since 2003 by fallowing fields and deploying various efficiency measures. And yet they’ve done so while continuing to grow nearly $240 million worth of alfalfa annually. It will need to do more; everyone will. But it’s a pretty big start.
There is one simple solution to the Colorado River crises: Everyone on the river has to use less water. Period. This won’t come from pithy policy prescriptions or one-dimensional solutions. It will require the tribal nations, the states, and all of the water users in the basin to come together and find a new way to approach and think about and revere the lifeline of the Southwest.
Coming in September: The Land Desk News Feed! This will be a once-a-week roundup of the West’s most important headlines, journalism, and commentary, curated and summarized by yours truly. I’m thinking it will probably drop on Wednesdays, but haven’t settled on anything, yet. Most weeks it will come in addition to the regular two Land Desk dispatches, but some weeks it may take one of the others’ place (meaning you’d only get two newsletters that week so as to not clog up your inbox all the time!).
All paid and free subscribers should expect the first edition on Sept. 9.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
Church and Cerro Pedernal, Youngsville, NM. Jonathan P. Thompson photo
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (Karl Flessa):
August 20, 2026
In the classic Monty Python sketch, a customer returns to the pet shop where, just 30 minutes ago, he purchased a parrot. He complains that the parrot is dead. The shopkeeper tries to convince the customer the parrot is only resting or is stunned.
In the ensuing argument, the customer uses no fewer than eighteen euphemisms: “This parrot is definitely deceased…demised…passed on…no more…ceased to be…expired…gone to meet his maker…a stiff…bereft of life…rests in peace…pushing up the daisies…metabolic processes are now history…off the twig…kicked the bucket…shuffled off his mortal coil…run down the curtain…joined the bleedin’ choir invisible.”
Indeed, the parrot was nailed to its perch, already dead when the customer bought it.
The Compact and its subsequent agreements are as dead as that parrot.
The Compact is dead because it is founded on a false premise: a river that can produce the prescribed amount of water.
The Compact is dead because it is unjust: neither the Tribes nor nature participate in negotiations.
The Compact is dead because it doesn’t work. The Basin States are locked in battle; the Federal government tinkers and dithers.
In the longer version of the sketch, the shopkeeper goes to the back in search of a live replacement, returning to report “…we’re right out of parrots.”
So are we.
We need a new Compact.
Proposals are not lacking: proportional allocations, Tribal standing, a whole-basin approach, adjustments based on actual flows, a basin authority, nature’s fair share, interstate trading… .
What’s lacking is the courage to change. [ed. emphasis mine]
The Compact is a dead parrot.
Delph Carpenter’s original map showing a reservoir at Glen Canyon and one at Black Canyon via Greg Hobbs
At its Aug. 17 meeting, the San Juan Water Conservancy District (SJWCD) Board of Directors moved forward with contracting engineering firm RJH Consultants to perform a water demand study for the district’s reservoir project. SJWCD board president Randy Cooper opened discussion of the study by summarizing the history of the study, which the board delayed approving at its last meeting since board treasurer Joe Tedder was not at the meeting and had not had an opportunity to review the contract. He explained that the $147,400 cost of the study would be split between 2026 and 2027, which RJH had agreed to. In response to a question from Tedder, Cooper stated that RJH would be ready to start work on the study immediately upon board approval…The board agreed that RJH should provide monthly updates on the project to ensure that the project adapts to any changing circumstances or barriers the district encounters, which Jones raised concerns about.
Map of the San Juan River, a tributary of the Colorado River, in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, USA. Made using USGS National Map data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47456307
The Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD) Board of Directors heard an update on drought conditions and continued discussions of violation enforcement at its Aug. 13 meeting…PAWSD is currently in drought stage two of its four-stage drought management plan. PAWSD District Manager Andrew Connor stated that PAWSD currently has “really good compliance” and saw a drop in water sales in July, meaning that public education is working, even if revenues for the district also decreased…PAWSD board member Glenn Walsh asked if the revenue decrease from lowered water use in July was compensated for by surcharges for high water use, which staff confirmed. PAWSD board member Alex Boehmer commented that, since the district is getting compliance with its regulations, he did not think implementing violation letters and fines is necessary. He added that he would also like to authorize Connor to move the district in and out of drought stages when necessary. Tautges commented that he would only want this authorization for reducing the drought stage and not for increasing it, which should require a board vote.
I drove to the bluff overlooking the “Gunny” to process the sad news — news that hasn’t yet been made official — that by October a big portion of the lower Gunnison River in western Colorado will be dry. The official term is “fully dewatered.”
Monsoons were supposed to be heavy this year. As I looked down at the river in late August, clouds in the distance appeared almost monsoonal. Wisps of rain streamed out, but they evaporated before reaching the parched ground. It just about made me cry.
Below me, the North Fork of the Gunnison unceremoniously trickled into the Gunnison River at a place known as Pleasure Park, a weather-beaten outpost of civilization that’s one of the last best-kept secrets in Colorado.
The Gunnison River starts high in the Elk Mountains and flows into Colorado’s largest body of water, Blue Mesa reservoir, though currently it is only the second largest because of drought. Then it flows free through Black Canyon National Park, but only after most of its water gets diverted to irrigate farmland surrounding the towns of Delta and Montrose. The park is a gem, albeit one of the least visited in the nation. From above there’s not much to do except walk to outlooks to stare at sheer, colorful rock walls on the other side and the thin ribbon of river 2,000 feet below.
The “Gunny” then flows through the remote yet accessible Gunnison Gorge Wilderness. In this thin crack of the earth, I’ve spent the past 12 summers working as a wilderness fly-fishing river guide.
Accessible is a relative term. The hearty few that run this remote wild river get to the water by hiking a rough 1.2-mile-long mule trail that drops steeply for almost 600 vertical feet. Even getting to the trailhead takes an hour and a half from the nearest town, and it’s on a four-wheel-drive road that’s been the death knell of many a low-clearance vehicle. Rocky on a good day, it can become impassable when wet.
For those with the dough, a mule packer can be hired to transport boat and gear to the river. Those with the youth, knees, and determination can backpack down rafts, frames, oars, fishing and camping gear. Even elite guests, including former presidents who book fly-fishing trips with commercial guide services, carry their personal gear down to the river.
World-class fishing is why anybody makes the effort, 14 miles of wilderness Gold Medal water, the action peaking in June when large hungry trout key in on an epic salmon-fly hatch.
This stretch of river may be navigable, but it features 18 named technical rapids, and any one of them can humble experienced river runners. Rapids called “Improvise,” “Boulder Garden,” and “Squeeze” can feel more like rock than water, and almost every rapid has ruined a trip at some point. The river is littered with rocks that also earned names because they have strong personalities: “Queen of Hearts,” “The Table and Tombstone,” and “Dicky Do.” Others carry the monikers of unlucky guides.
All these barriers have kept crowds at bay though now there’s a new constraint — 90-to-100-degree temperatures for days on end. The Gorge can remain runnable in 14-foot rafts down to about 300 cubic feet per second, but even then it’s tight. Today it’s running well below that, and the water is too warm for the fish. Most commercial trips have been canceled.
Jacob Richards. Photo credit: Writers on the Range
Looking upriver into the Gorge, I don’t see any boats fishing their way out of the wilderness, and it doesn’t take much to imagine the riverbed — a sad meander of dry cobbles bleached white, punctuated by stagnant pools full of belly-up trout.
This place, with its rugged remoteness, wild rapids and world-class trout fishing, has carved its way into my soul. I mourn for future generations who will probably know a much different river.
I feel bad for the salty guides out both trips and tips. I mourn too for the bugs that fattened the fish that paid my bills, for the mergansers, ring-tail cats and desert bighorn sheep. All need a river that’s wet.
Jacob Richards is a contributor to Writers on the Range, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a writer about Western environmental issues and sometime outdoor guide. He lives in Fruita in western Colorado.
Nixon Rock, in the Gunnison Gorge. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Denver Water’s collection and service areas continue to face severe drought conditions, with historically high temperatures, low streamflows and reservoir storage far below normal. As a result, at its meeting today, the Denver Board of Water Commissioners amended its Stage 1 drought resolution to prohibit lawn watering as of Oct. 1.
Until that time, Denver Water customers are still required to follow mandatory watering restrictions of two assigned days per week through Sept. 30, per the current Stage 1 drought restrictions that remain in place.
A group of visitors walks down the boat ramp at Williams Fork Reservoir on July 20. The ramp was closed this summer due to low water levels caused by drought. Photo credit: Denver Water.
“The drought afflicting the Denver region and its water supply system has only worsened over the course of the summer, making it clear that we need to take additional steps in response,” said Tyrone Gant, president of the Denver Board of Water Commissioners. “Formally ending lawn watering Oct. 1 will help stretch our supplies, as we will be entering next spring with storage levels far below normal.”
While the board’s Stage 1 drought declaration set a target for system-wide reduction of 20% below the five-year average in water consumption, prolonged hot and dry conditions have led to many customers using more water during their permitted irrigation days to keep trees, shrubs and landscapes alive, making the conservation target difficult to achieve. With drought conditions ongoing, Denver Water staff project storage supplies could drop to 60% before the 2027 runoff season.
“Despite the blistering conditions, customers overall have reduced their water use this summer. But with a lack of precipitation and the hottest first seven months in the Denver region we’ve recorded, we must take this additional step,” said Denver Water CEO/Manager Alan Salazar. “It’s critical that our customers turn sprinklers off Oct. 1, so that we can extend our water supply.”
Lawn watering and all spray irrigation must stop after Sept. 30, 2026, as part of an amendment to the Stage 1 drought declaration originally approved March 25. Trees, plants and gardens may be watered any day by hand if needed. Photo credit: Denver Water.
The resolution includes additional details outlining the kind of watering still permitted after the shutdown date.
High-traffic, active-use grass areas, such as parks and school fields, may only be watered after Sept. 30, under a Denver Water-approved water budget or variance. Additionally, recycled water users can continue to irrigate any day of the week, following the standard watering rules, as they are relying on reused water supply.
Trees, shrubs and perennials may be watered any day with a hand-held hose with a shutoff nozzle or low-volume, non-spray irrigation (such as a drip system). They may not be watered by spray irrigation.
Annuals and vegetables may be watered any day with a hand-held hose with a shutoff nozzle or low-volume, non-spray irrigation, until the first frost. They may not be watered by spray irrigation.
Grass establishment is not allowed after Sept. 30, except under special circumstances outlined under an approved variance.
An irrigation system may be operated for installation, repair or reasonable maintenance, so long as the system is attended throughout the period of operation and water waste does not occur.
Placing a soaker hose around the tree along the drip line is an effective way to water trees without wasting water. Reminder: Don’t water established trees too close to the trunk. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Conditions in Denver Water’s service and collection areas continue to worsen. The amended resolution outlines specific factors driving the additional board action.
Denver Water’s water collection system watersheds remain in various levels of drought as defined by the U.S. Drought Monitor.
Natural streamflow in the areas that flow into Denver Water’s storage reservoirs for the period of April to July was 95,000 acre-feet, which is 22% of normal and marks the lowest level observed since recordkeeping began 110 years ago.
The Denver metro area is experiencing the hottest year on record (through July) with average daily high temperatures five degrees above normal and four inches below normal precipitation.
As of Aug. 24, 2026, storage in Denver Water’s supply reservoirs is at 72% full, which is significantly lower than the historic median of 94% full for this time of year.
“If you are the only one on your block with a lush green lawn, you might want to revisit your watering practices, as your overuse is compounding the impacts of this historic drought on our water storage supplies,” said Greg Fisher, Denver Water’s manager of demand planning.
“We’re asking everyone to care more and water less, so we don’t have to take more drastic steps in the future, which could create more damaging impacts to our landscapes.”
With reservoir levels continuing to drop, Denver Water is asking customers to Use Only What You Need. Every drop saved, both indoors and outdoors, makes a difference. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Watering season typically runs from May 1 to Oct.1, during which Denver Water’s annual watering rules are in place. In a non-drought year, the start and end dates are general guidance for customers to turn on and off their irrigation systems. With this amendment to its March 25 drought resolution, the board has made the Oct. 1 date mandatory this year, prohibiting lawn watering as of that date.
In addition, the lawn watering ban remains in effect until the board determines how and when lawn watering can resume. That means sprinklers need to remain off in spring of 2027, pending an official resolution from the Board of Water Commissioners. [ed. emphasis mine]
The Yampa River at Deerlodge Park July 24, 2021 downstream from the confluence with the Little Snake River. There was a ditch running in Maybell above this location. Irrigated hay looked good. Dryland hay not so much.
A rare call has been placed on the main stem of the Yampa River as historic drought conditions continue to strain water supplies across Northwest Colorado, potentially curtailing more than 300 upstream diversions and prompting water managers to urge residents to conserve wherever possible. The call was placed Aug. 19 at the Lily Park Ditch No. 1, Pump Station No. 1, near the confluence of the Little Snake and Yampa rivers. The agricultural water right carries a priority date of May 28, 1923…Holly Kirkpatrick, public affairs manager for the Upper Yampa Water Conservancy District, said the call is only the fifth to occur on the main stem of the Yampa River below Stagecoach Reservoir…Kirkpatrick said well over 300 diversions upstream of the calling point could be subject to curtailment if they have priority dates junior to May 28, 1923. The call also applies to tributaries upstream of the Little Snake and Yampa river confluence. Some of those tributaries, however, may already have little or no natural streamflow available because of the severity of this year’s drought, she said. The Upper Yampa Water Conservancy District reported Aug. 20 that baseflows in tributaries across the basin remained below the 10th percentile, an indication of unusually low water levels. The district’s report showed the Yampa River below Craig flowing at 94 cubic feet per second, compared with a historical mean of 156 cfs for the date. In Steamboat Springs, the river was flowing at 58 cfs compared with a historical mean of 96 cfs. Reservoir releases are now supplying much of the water moving through the Yampa River, Kirkpatrick said.
Central Arizona Project map via Mountain Town News
Click the link to read the article on the KTAR website (Heidi Hommel). Here’s an excerpt:
August 26, 2026
The Upper Basin is on the verge of violating the Colorado River Compact for the first time in the agreement’s 104-year history, failing to send enough water downstream to the Lower Basin, Central Arizona Project President Terry Goddard told KTAR News 92.3 FM on Monday…Goddard said the new framework from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation that will guide operations through 2036 could make it worse…
“We have a violation of the compact either today or within the next month,” Goddard said.
The compact requires the Upper Basin to deliver 75 million acre-feet to the Lower Basin over any rolling 10-year period, averaging 7.5 million acre-feet a year. Goddard said the Upper Basin is falling short of that obligation for the first time in the compact’s history, releasing only 6 million acre-feet this year and running right at the 10-year threshold. [ed. As Ed Millard says, the action is not from the Upper Basin but from Reclamation]
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
A moisture index satellite image of Las Vegas, Nevada. Southern Nevada stands to lose as much as 71% of its Colorado River allotment under the Department of Interior’s operating guidelines for the river and its two largest reservoirs. Source: Copernicus Browser.
THE NEWS:The U.S. Interior Department on Friday handed down the operating guidelines for the Colorado River for the next two years, while also finalizing the 10-year decision framework that will guide these plans. And on Monday, Nevada filed a lawsuit challenging both the framework and operating plan, saying that potential shortages required by the plan could cause “cause devastating environmental, socioeconomic, and health and human safety impacts to southern Nevada and its citizens.”
THE CONTEXT: Interior, i.e. the Bureau of Reclamation, did two things. The first was to hand down a record of decision on the framework that will guide operating plans for the next decade, which I wrote about here, so I’ll skip the details this time.
They also released a more specific plan for the 2027 and 2028 operating years. In the new plan, the feds affirm their commitment to “defending” minimum power pool in Lake Powell, or a reservoir surface elevation of 3,490 feet. When the water falls below this level, water can no longer be released via the penstocks and hydropower turbines, so it must all go through the lower river outlet works, which weren’t designed for sustained use.
Notably, Reclamation plans to do this by “initially seeking to maintain a minimum elevation of 3,510 feet. This provides an operational buffer and provides additional flexibility in recognition of the operational risks associated with sustained operations below elevation 3,490 feet … .”
The current elevation is 3,518 feet, meaning it could reach that upper buffer zone of 3,510 feet in October if current levels of decline continue.
To prevent it from falling any further, Reclamation would cut back releases from Glen Canyon Dam, which in turn would cut flows through the Grand Canyon and into Lake Mead, which would pull down Mead’s levels and trigger mandatory cuts for the Lower Basin users. Under the new operating plan so far, these cuts aren’t as onerous as many feared, and actually match up with what the Lower Basin had proposed to do voluntarily. The deets:
The Lower Basin would receive 6.25 million acre-feet from the Colorado River, or 1.25 MAF below the Colorado River Compact’s allotment of 7.5 MAF.
Arizona would receive 2.04 MAF; California 3.96 MAF; and Nevada 250,000 AF.
This means Arizona would take a 760,000 AF cut; Nevada a 50,000 AF cut; and California a 440,000 AF cut.
Arizona takes the largest cut by percentage and volume because the Central Arizona Project, which delivers most of the state’s Colorado River water, has junior water rights to other big users on the river.
But if reservoir levels continue to drop, then Reclamation could impose further cuts on the Lower Basin, potentially slashing Nevada’s water deliveries by as much as 213,556 acre-feet, or about 71% of its total entitlement of 300,000 acre-feet. This would be truly disastrous for the Las Vegas metro area, which relies on the Colorado River for about 90% of its water. And it’s not like there are a bunch of alfalfa fields the city could “buy and dry” for the water rights.
The Southern Nevada Water Authority has managed to cut overall water consumptionover the last three decades, even as the population has soared, through system-wide efficiencies, incentives, tearing up ornamental grass, water recycling, and extra fees for water gluttons. Las Vegas still has room to conserve, but as Western water scholar John Fleck put it, there “is an absurdity to a plan that would require Las Vegas to cut 71%. That’s existential.”
Even more astonishing than the fact that the federal government is considering virtually drying up one of the Southwest’s major metropolises is their justification for doing so: To protect Glen Canyon Dam and keep it producing hydropower, even at greatly diminished levels, and — though it’s not stated — to keep lake-based recreation somewhat viable.
You have to remember that when the feds vow to defend the 3,500-foot level at Lake Powell, and when they refuse to even consider re-engineering Glen Canyon Dam to allow for releases at lower levels, either by rebuilding the outlet tubes or tunneling a bypass around the dam, they are also saying they are going to trap more than 4 million acre-feet of water behind the dam that could otherwise flow downstream into the Grand Canyon and Lake Mead. That’s enough water to fill Nevada’s entire allotment for more than 13 years that, instead, will be sitting in the reservoir and slowly evaporating.
Nevada’s lawsuit — which is against the federal government, not the Upper Basin states — alleges that the feds’ plan violates the Law of the River. It slams the plan for not explicitly calling for releasing more water from Upper Basin reservoirs to prop up Powell, does not require Upper Basin states to make any cuts, and fails to consider a long-term alternative or engineered solution alternative to address Glen Canyon’s infrastructure limitations. The plan also does not account for its potential impacts on hydropower production at Hoover Dam, which drops off steeply as reservoir levels decline (meaning that preserving power output at Glen Canyon could lead to a net reduction in combined output from the two dams).
Save the Colorado, a river advocacy group, came out in support of Nevada’s lawsuit in a written statement. “Las Vegas has one of the best water conservation programs in the entire U.S.,” said Gary Wockner, the group’s executive director. “Penalizing Las Vegas for water use is like penalizing an obese person who lost a lot of weight taking GLP1s.”
Rough Times at the national parks these days. In Bryce Canyon, a sudden thunderstorm left visitors stranded on trails and requiring rescue, with two of them transported to a hospital for hypothermia. It also unleashed some serious flash flooding. In Zion National Park, a rockslide narrowly missed a shuttle bus and forced the closure of a portion of the Zion Canyon Scenic Drive. And in Canyonlands, officials were searching for a missing individual in Horseshoe Canyon, a remote area north of the park’s Maze district. Temperatures in the area were in the 90s. In Death Valley, a French tourist died after his car got stuck in the mud on a remote road in 116° F heat.
The video below shows flooding near Tropic, Utah, downstream from Bryce Canyon National Park. Source: Garfield County Sheriff.
In May, I wrote about how climate change and aridification and a shrinking Lake Powell were coming for the Bullfrog Marina, on the northwest side of the reservoir. The water was simply getting too low for the marina to remain viable, so they were planning on moving it across the reservoir to Halls Crossing Marina.
At the time, it was not yet clear how lower water levels and the marina’s removal might affect visitation to the remote area. Now preliminary numbers are in:
67,277: Total recreation visitors to the Bullfrog District of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, January through July 2025
44,206: Total recreation visitors to the Bullfrog District, January through July 2026.
That’s a decrease of over 23,000 visits, or a 34% drop. Even more dramatic is the drop in overnight stays in July, from over 47,000 in 2025 to just 17,000 in 2026. Then did folks make the long drive over to Halls Crossing, instead? It appears that some of them may have once the marina was moved, but overall this year visitation is also down on the northeast side of the reservoir.
18,023: Total recreation visitors to the Halls Crossing District of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, January through July 2025.
15,099: Total recreation visitors to the Halls Crossing District, January through July 2026.
That’s a decrease of 2,944 visits, or a 19% drop. This may not all be related directly to the dropping lake levels. Horseshoe Bend, which is in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area but downstream from the reservoir, has also seen a significant drop off in visitors this spring and summer. In a future dispatch I’ll take a closer look at tourism numbers in general to get a better sense of how widespread the declines are.
And now for the images showing Bullfrog with the marina, and without. The first image is from August 2024, when the reservoir’s surface elevation was at about 3,580 feet. The marina was still there, and the boat ramps still made it all the way to the water. The second image is from August 2026, with a surface level of just over 3,518 feet. Look closely and you’ll see the marina is gone, and the ramps are high and dry.
Bullfrog Bay and Marina, August 2024. Source: Copernicus.
Bullfrog Bay and no marina, August 2026. Source: Copernicus.
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Stephanie Daniel):
August 24, 2026
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Boise State Public Radio, Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Northern Colorado, KANW in New Mexico, Colorado Public Radio and KJZZ in Arizona as well as NPR, with support from affiliate newsrooms across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
Three states are being required to cut their water use under a final plan for managing the Colorado River over the next two years, while the four upstream states are being asked to voluntarily conserve water.
The U.S. Department of the Interior released the Record of Decision for managing the river over the next decade and laying out more specific rules for the next two years. The plan is intended to protect Lake Powell and Lake Mead, which have fallen to historically low levels after years of drought.
Arizona, California and Nevada will have to collectively reduce their water use by 1.25 million acre-feet per year over the next two years, with additional restrictions possible if conditions worsen, according to the plan.
Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming are not subject to mandatory reductions; instead, those states are setting up programs to voluntarily conserve water.
“Under the proposed plan issued by the Department of the Interior, southern Nevada could lose more than 70 percent of its already meager Colorado River allocation while the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming are not required to contribute a drop,” Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo said in a news release on Monday.
Upper Basin officials say their water users already face reductions when drought leaves less water available and that the federal government doesn’t have authority to impose mandatory cuts in their states. But they say the Upper Basin is willing to contribute voluntarily.
“Not because we have to, or that we feel like we legally have to,” Colorado’s river negotiator Becky Mitchell said at a conference last week in Steamboat Springs, “but because the importance of this system and the survival of this system is a responsibility for everyone.”
The federal framework envisions up to 200,000 acre-feet of water per year in Upper Basin contributions when conditions allow. The federal government is dedicating $100 million to the Upper Basin to compensate farmers, cities or other water users to use less. Colorado, Wyoming and Utah are also setting up their own state programs to facilitate participation.
Colorado officials expect applications could open this fall and projects could start next year.
“Our position has been and continues to be that we’re going to be part of the solution,” said Amy Ostdiek, section chief for the Colorado Water Conservation Board at the Steamboat conference. “We’re going to do it in the ways that we can, at the times that we can, but we can’t provide water certainty for our neighbors downstream that we don’t have ourselves.”
Criteria for selecting projects, how water users will be compensated and how the Upper Basin gains credit for conserved water are still being worked out.
The Green River flows beneath the Flaming Gorge Dam in Utah. The federal government is sending water from the reservoir to prop up Lake Powell, something it could do in future dry years under a plan to manage the Colorado River. Ted Wood/The Water Desk
The federal plan also creates a potential “conservation pool” in Lake Powell, allowing the Upper Basin states to store a certain amount of conserved water.
John Berggren, a water policy analyst with the nonprofit Western Resource Advocates, has advocated for a conservation pool and said its inclusion in the federal framework is promising. However, exactly how it would work is not clear.
“How that pool operates, how the water is used, when it’s moved, if it’s moved, who decides that – all that is going to depend on future agreements,” he said.
Some key questions, he said, have to do with what the conserved water is credited towards, such as whether it’s used to offset shortages in the Lower Basin or help the Upper Basin fulfill their legal obligations to deliver water downstream.
The new framework also allows the Upper Basin to come to an agreement with the Interior Department to draw down a few reservoirs when Lake Powell nears getting too low for hydropower. That started happening this year, with water released from Flaming Gorge Reservoir in Wyoming.
