Drought has raked its fingers across Colorado. By mid-summer, its mark is difficult to ignore.
Some reservoirs have fallen so low that they instead look more like the rivers they once were. Boat ramps across the state no longer reach water. Where there should be rows of corn, the landscape is dotted by brown, fallowed fields.
Creekbeds have dried up weeks earlier than normal, while even larger rivers have dwindled to trickles. Rising water temperatures in those shrunken rivers are causing fish to suffocate. And for at least two dams, declining reservoir levels now threaten power production.
“Everybody’s got a story of woe,” said Steve Pope, the manager of the Montrose-based Uncompahgre Valley Water Users Association. “Itap regionwide; nobody is escaping it.”
At a meeting of water managers last month, the head of Colorado’s Division of Water Resources compared the state to Mordor — the barren, ash-covered domain of the villain in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. He then flipped through a series of graphs showing streamflow gauges across the state. Each one was at or near record lows.
“The monsoons will help — they will help reduce demand — but they won’t bring storage back up,” state engineer Jason Ullmann told his fellow water officials. “I think we’re all holding our breath to get through this year.”
It’s too early to say that this summer’s drought is the worst on record, Ullmann said in a later interview. Heavy rains from the monsoon that arrived in July could alleviate the worst of the suffering — if those come.
So far, rain has done little to lift the weight of drought.
As it has for months, nearly the entire state is enduring some level of dryness, according to by the U.S. Drought Monitor. It considers half of the state to be in extreme or exceptional drought — the two most severe categories used by the agency. The latest Colorado map barely changed from the one released the week prior.
Beyond the Front Range urban corridor, where many cities and utilities have imposed watering restrictions, the drought has caused millions of dollars in losses to Colorado’s farmers. It’s sapped reservoir storage and hamstrung river recreation — including rafting on many popular stretches of river. It has also spurred new collaborations between water users trying to survive.
“The whole state is feeling the pain and the strain of this year’s drought,” said Emily Adrid, a water planning and climate impacts specialist at the .
This winter’s record-low snowpack and continued record-high temperatures are signs of conditions that could become more probable as climate change advances, scientists have said. The 2026 water year — which began in October with snowfall and will end in September as summer irrigation ends — is thus far the warmest on record and the fourth-driest, .
The winter’s anemic snowfall yielded a snowpack that was 58% of normal, to the dismay of skiers, snowmobilers and water managers across the state. A record-warm spring season began melting the mountain snow weeks earlier than expected.
Spring runoff — the surge of water that refills reservoirs and irrigates farmers’ fields — yielded half the average amount this year. Statewide reservoir storage sits at 75% of average, though several reservoirs are less than half full.
“One of the lessons we all need to learn is that climate change is real,” said Andy Mueller, the general manager of the Colorado River District. “While this is a one-off year — we hope — we should anticipate more of these types of years in the future,” he said. “We need to adjust our expectations as a society to the availability of water.”
Thousands of acres of fallowed fields
In the Uncompahgre River Valley in southwestern Colorado, weeds are growing across thousands of acres of land that normally produce corn, beans and grains.
Farmers this spring were forced to fallow thousands of acres because they knew there wouldn’t be enough water, said Pope, from the valley’s water users association. For nearly a century, the association has delivered water from the Gunnison and Uncompahgre rivers to more than 83,000 acres of land in Montrose and Delta counties.
This year, the Uncompahgre River has provided almost no water.
At one point, one of the gauges on the river read 4 cubic feet per second, at a time when the riverbed should have had 400 cfs rushing over.
The association could provide only half of its normal amount of water this year, forcing hard choices in the valley as the organization relied primarily on the Gunnison River. Large farm operations cut their acreage by up to 60%, Pope said.
“The majority of our row crop farmers are pretty hard hit,” he said.
Water in Colorado is allocated based on when the water right was established. Older rights have seniority over those that came later.
In several basins, holders of water rights older than the state of Colorado — which just marked 150 years of statehood — are the only ones receiving it now, said Ullmann, whose office implements water curtailments. Those restrictions have also come earlier in the year. Some water users with senior rights are seeing their water allocations cut for the first time in history, he said.
While most municipal water users have reservoir storage to get them through lean times, agricultural users often do not, Ullmann said. So when they lose their water, they’re forced to cut back. That could mean growing less feed for their cattle, which then leads to selling off chunks of the herd.
Water users in the southwestern region, too, are struggling, said Andrew Straub-Heidke, the general manager of .
Monsoon rains this year and last year have helped the region. Heavy rainfall last year propped up reservoir levels before the dry winter began. In the past week, rains have eased water cuts.
“We’re hurting, like the rest of the state,” Straub-Heidke said. “I know people have been excited for the rains, and I hope they keep coming.”
For Pope, one silver lining of the season is that he was able to warn farmers that it would be a difficult water year before they bought supplies in the spring. But it could still take years for producers to recover, especially if more drought years follow.
“The reality is we’re at the mercy of Mother Nature up here,” he said. “We don’t have enough storage to have multiple years of carryover.”
Concerning reservoir levels
For the first time in 40 years, the turbines of Aspen’s hydropower plant on will soon stop spinning because the reservoir’s levels will fall too low.
The exact date isn’t clear, but the water level of the reservoir, which is on the Fryingpan River north of Aspen, will certainly drop below the minimum level to safely operate the Ruedi Hydroelectric Facility in the coming weeks, said Joshua Mattson, the city’s utilities resource and portfolio manager. The facility will then be powered down until at least the springtime, when runoff should boost the reservoir’s levels again.
When it shuts down, the city will lose 18% of its energy portfolio, forcing officials to pivot to purchasing power from another source. Utility managers estimate they will spend about $710,000 to buy power from the Municipal Energy Agency of Nebraska, according to a memo Mattson submitted to the City Council.
That power will come from renewable sources, Mattson said.
Low reservoir levels are causing concern across the state. Green Mountain Reservoir — on the Blue River north of Silverthorne — each day falls to a new low. On Wednesday, .
Falling water levels have stranded boat ramps, revealed islands and left buoys sitting on rocky shores, instead of floating.
Earlier this year, the low reservoir prompted emergency collaboration among the dozens of entities that rely on the reservoir’s water, which is part of that diverts water from the Colorado River system to northeastern Colorado communities.
For the first time, spring runoff delivered so little water to the Colorado River and its tributaries that, for the first time, there was not enough to fill the demands of a pool of water in Green Mountain Reservoir set aside for hundreds of users along the river that have less senior water rights.
Without action, those entities — including Summit County towns, Eagle County government agencies and many homeowners associations — would have seen their water supplies cut by early June.
Water managers at the took heed of the warnings in the runoff data and in late March began to cobble together a solution, said Mueller, the district’s general manager. The district, a taxpayer-funded agency that works to protect Western Slope water, took 15,000 acre-feet of water that it normally leases to the highest bidders and instead redistributed it to water users who needed it most. An acre-foot of water is approximately enough for two families’ annual needs.
Without the pivot, the 15,000 acre-feet likely would’ve been leased to a handful of wealthy ranchers, Mueller said.
“We just didn’t think that was the right thing to do,” he said, noting that the district lost revenue by changing the practice.
The district also helped negotiate a deal with farmers in the Grand Valley who have senior rights. They agreed to use less than their legal allotment early in the season so that users upstream with less-powerful water rights could continue to access their supplies. The agreement means that those farmers will have water longer into the summer season, but farmers still have needed to cut production.
“But they were willing to do that in order to make the whole system work, which I think is a lesson for us all in this time where it’s hard to get people to cooperate,” Mueller said.
Water users are also keeping a close eye on Blue Mesa Reservoir, the largest reservoir in the state. On Wednesday, Blue Mesa — the lowest level on record for that date in the last 30 years.
Projections from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation show that the reservoir west of Gunnison should remain above the level needed for hydropower production through the next two years under relatively normal weather conditions.
But under , the reservoir could fall too low by October, the projections show.
The federal agency has been working to reduce demands downstream of the reservoir to keep it fuller longer, Bureau of Reclamation spokeswoman Jennifer Erickson said in an email.
Pope, with the Uncompahgre Valley Water Users Association, is also keeping a close eye on Blue Mesa’s storage. Its irrigation project diverts water downstream of the reservoir, redirecting it from the middle of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison.
The association generally starts drawing water from that diversion in April, before spring runoff begins. If there is not enough water in the river below the dam to meet the project’s demands, its leaders could place a call on the river that would siphon most of the water out of the canyon, which is a national park.
“Politically, itap a difficult decision,” Pope said.
Hundreds of miles of streams closed to fishing
Too little water flowing in rivers has also caused problems for wildlife. On the Elk River north of Steamboat Springs last month, the bodies of hundreds of silvery fish bobbed on the surface and along the banks. The river had become too hot for the mountain whitefish, one of only two sport fish native to Colorado.
More than 300 mountain whitefish died on July 19 — the largest, but not the only, fish kill as drought sapped water levels and raised temperatures in mountain streams, said Ben Felt, a senior aquatic biologist with Colorado Parks and Wildlife.
State wildlife officials have implemented fishing restrictions on more than 630 miles of rivers and streams to protect fish populations — a record number that continues to increase weekly.
“What we’re seeing this year with fishing closures is really unprecedented,” Felt said.
Last week, CPW implemented voluntary afternoon fishing closures on stretches of the Colorado River, the Fraser River, Clear Creek and several branches of the South Platte River. The closures include the famed “Dream Stream” in Park County between Spinney Mountain and .
Streamflows in all of those reaches are far below normal. Flows in Clear Creek near Golden have hovered around 80 cubic feet per second, a third of the norm for this time of year. The Middle Fork of the South Platte River near Hartsel generally flows at about 110 cfs in late July, but current flows hover around 10 cfs.
CPW officials consider several factors when deciding when to impose a fishing restriction: how much water is in the waterway, the maximum water temperatures, water quality and how much fishing pressure the area receives. Warning away anglers keeps more fish from experiencing the stress of being hooked, netted and handled.
The vast majority of fishing closures are voluntary and anglers, so far, have abided by them, Felt said. CPW biologists recommend anglers focus on high alpine lakes and streams, or on stretches of tailwaters immediately downstream of dams that remain cool.
Colorado’s drought has also caused water managers to completely drain reservoirs across the state, leading to emergency fish salvages where anglers can harvest as many as they can catch.
Denver Water this spring drained Antero Reservoir, a popular fishing destination. The Windsor Reservoir and Canal Company is drawing down Douglas Reservoir in Larimer County, the Trinchera Irrigation Company is draining Mountain Home Reservoir near Fort Garland and the New Cache La Poudre Reservoir Company is draining Timnath Reservoir near Fort Collins.
CPW has also closed boat ramps at at least five state parks, where waters are too low for large boats.
When those reservoirs refill, they will need stocked fish to jump-start the fishing and aquatic environment. But CPW’s fish hatcheries, too, are struggling.
The agency operates 19 fish hatcheries across the state where biologists raise 90 million fish from 30 species every year. Some of the facilities have not had access to the amount of water they need for normal operations, said Jeff Spohn, CPW deputy assistant director for the aquatic branch.
In response, hatchery staff are reducing the number of fish in impacted hatcheries by releasing them early. But that is complicated, too — some waters they planned to stock are too low to receive new fish.
Looking past this summer, state water managers worry about what might happen should this coming winter’s snowpack fall below the average. The state needs three or four years of average or above-average snowfall to recover, Ullmann said.
“I don’t know if anyone has another silver bullet solution as to how they’re going to get through next year if we have a bad snowpack,” he said.
