Re: “In defense of the Democratic caucuses and grassroots organizing,” and “Republican Party hung the heavy price on health care,” April 12 letters to the editor

Pop quiz:

Letters to the editor published in the Post are

a) an accurate reflection of the political leanings of its readership

b) a reflection of the Post¶¶Òőap editorial bias and accompanying discretion

c) all of the above

Hint: there is no right answer.

But whatever the reason, it¶¶Òőap obvious the published letters skew left and even hard left, Sunday after Sunday. One fellow in defense of the caucusing process in our state asserts, regarding Sens. John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet, that “their centrist pandering to Republican colleagues in the Senate is deeply unpopular.” Wait, what? Plenty of adjectives apply to Colorado’s Democratic senators, but centrist isn’t any of them. Unless, of course, you skew hard left — really hard left.

And then there’s the writer who, as the headline summarizes, hangs the heavy price of health care on Republicans. “The reasons for our health care situation fall in the lap of the Republican Party ” before backtracking with “This is not a Republican or Democratic issue…” That¶¶Òőap not atypical for those who are somewhere left of center who want it both ways and deny the fact that health care policy is a political issue and nothing more. Rather than recognize that reality, they choose to occupy an imaginary moral high ground with empty phrases like “people will die…” .

The good news for those of us who are somewhere right of center is that the Op-Ed page doubles as the entertainment section for us.

Jon Pitt, Golden

‘Leftward’ movements that have benefited Colorado’s residents

Re: “Can Colorado’s GOP recover?” April 12 commentary

Columnist Kafer, mourning the loss of Republican power during the Trump decade, attributes the rise of Democrats in part to “some very smart, strategic decisions to move the state leftward.” The tone implies that leftward is undesirable and in need of correction by a revived Republican Party.

What if, though, leftward succeeded over the past 10 years because leftward policies create results that Coloradans want and value? What if leftward means good for the people? What if leftward eases people’s burdens and makes Coloradans’ lives better, fairer and healthier?

Leftward created:

1. , a state-wide, universal paid family leave program that allows workers to have babies, care for loved ones, and recover from illness in dignity.

2. Universal free full day kindergarten and pre-school, relieving some of families’ still enormous childcare burdens while improving early childhood education for all.

3. A mandate that employers post in job announcements, thus increasing applicants’ control in their job searches.

4. Prohibitions against landlords’ most abusive and practices, making tenants’ lives easier without endangering the landlord class.

5. A 2026 minimum wage of and hour, where the federal minimum wage remains at an aughts-era .

6. An attorney general who courageously fights the abuses of a federal executive branch and the monopolization efforts of grocery conglomerates, compared to a Republican attorney general who sought to destroy the Affordable Care Act (he failed).

Floy Jeffares, Lakewood

I suppose it is ironic that Krista Kafer’s column lamenting the changes in the Colorado GOP is published the day after the Colorado GOP has their state nominating meeting in Pueblo where they nominated two candidates, one of whom wants to “DOGE the mess out of everything” at the state Capitol (since that worked so well in Washington) and claims there is a pedophile ring at the state Capitol that he will reveal after he is elected. Both have stated they will free Tina Peters

The sad fact is that the Republican Party, both in Colorado and nationwide, has lost its mind and moral compass and is incapable of governing. When all you want to do is tear things down, rather than build things up, then you are incapable of making rational decisions and making things better. Unfortunately, this is where the Republican party is today, and they are no alternative to the Democrats in running the state (or nation), given the binary choice between the two visions of democracy.

I keep hoping for the day that the fever will break in the Republican Party and they return to the country-club Republican party I grew up around, where making things work was the call of the day, but it is increasingly looking like that will not happen in the remainder of my days on this mortal coil.

Martin Ward,ÌęAurora

Falsely claiming genocide

Re: “Bennet’s shortsighted move to back out of a forum,” April 12 editorial

In Sunday’s editorial criticizing Sen. Michael Bennet, the writer casually tossed out the accusation that “Israel waged a genocidal war” against the Gazans. Quite the opposite is true.

If Israel intended to eradicate Gazans, why hasn’t it over the past 2 1/2 years?ÌęIsrael has killed perhaps under 2% of Gaza’s civilians, while nearly all of Hamas’ deeply embedded military capability is gone. Why did Israel facilitate the delivery of over a million tons of aid, send millions of messages to civilians instructing them how to flee, execute elaborate evacuation plans, and abort a large portion of its military strikes due to civilian presence?

Clearly, Israel’s intent was to minimize civilian casualties while pursuing fighters in the complex, civilian-threatening, 3D battlespace that Hamas created.

“Israel has doneÌęmore to prevent civilian casualtiesÌęin war than any military in history,” according to , a U.S. war scholar.

Agreed, genocide is very bad. Falsely accusing genocide is also bad. Many agencies, media, and so-called experts are lining up to hurl the pithy genocide accusation at Israel. The editorial board should take a few moments to learn about the false accusation (see the 100-second by Dr. Sara Brown or the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies debunking genocide) before queuing up in that line.

Mark Brown, Littleton

Acknowledge the real potential harms to girls in transgender sports

Re: “Proposed initiative on transgender athletes puts our daughters at risk,” April 12 commentary

Mike Smith’s commentary against falsely claimed that it “puts our daughters at risk”. Initiative 109 focuses on designating a school athletic team or intramural sport, based on biological sex, whereby a team or sport designated for girls does not allow on the team persons who are biologically boys. That reduces the risk of injury to girls on the team or on an opposing girls’ team. That far outweighs Smith’s stated concerns about his tall daughter being falsely accused of being a biological boy. Most tall teenage daughters would not be mistaken for being a biological boy. Colorado schools have records of their students’ biological sex.

Read the full initiative on the secretary of state’s website to appreciate Smith’s many nonsensical remarks, such as his “When you write laws that treat every child as a potential suspect, you are not protecting kids,” and his “Initiative 109 is vague and poorly written, leaving critical questions unanswered about how it would actually be enforced.”

Smith mentions that a Utah State Board of Education member incorrectly implied on social media that a teenage girl was a biological boy. Smith falsely called it “one among many examples of the harm these policies cause to female athletes,” whereby he claims “you are not protecting kids – you’re endangering them.” He did not mention that the offending board member was by the Utah legislature and governor and was recently forced off the board.

Joseph B. Feiten,ÌęWestminster

Managing water rights is an unenviable — yet necessary — task

Re: “,” April 12 commentary

Kudos for the article on depleted water supplies in the Colorado River Basin, as that has critical, far-ranging impacts beyond just that watershed. It has long been recognized that management of the Colorado’s water supplies had a “structural deficit” (more water was allocated than is actually available), in part because the 1922 Colorado River Compact was based on a series of exceptionally wet years.

Additionally, the compact ignored the rights of Native Americans (who hold the senior water rights), did not consider Mexico’s water claims, and did not address any water needs for the basin’s environment.

Furthermore, the situation has been made much more dire because of “aridification,” which has increased temperatures, modified precipitation, and reduced river flows throughout the basin.

Now state and federal officials are faced with the daunting task of determining how the river should be managed in the future. I do not envy those individuals, for politically, it is a no-win situation. They must deal with the realities of nature and can no longer “kick the can down the road,” for the can has fallen off the cliff!

Given the ongoing rhetoric, I can’t say I’m optimistic, but hopefully, collective wisdom may prevail, and a solution will be found that provides equitable water supplies for all involved (states, tribes, and our environment). However, if agreement cannot be found and the situation results in litigation, there will be a lengthy and costly process, and no one wins.

Water touches every aspect of our lives as it is essential for our very existence, a key aspect of our quality of life, necessary for the environment, and critical to our economy. Therefore, I hope The Denver Post will continue to cover water issues beyond just the Colorado River.

ÌęGene Reetz, Denver

Editor’s note: Reets is a retired EPA senior water resources scientist.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

As a yearslong stalemate in negotiations persists between the seven states that share the river, it’s become increasingly likely that the federal government will impose its own long-term plan, choosing from a range of proposals officials have outlined in recent months.

But experts and water managers across the 250,000-square-mile Colorado River basin are raising the alarm about the five plans, questioning if any of them hold up under the new climate reality. They say the federal plans won’t keep the system from crashing in critically dry years — which are becoming more frequent — and could wreak chaos on the pivotal lifeline for 40 million people in the American Southwest.

“In every one of those alternatives, under what they call critically dry hydrology, the system is failing,” said Andy Mueller, the general manager of , a taxpayer-funded agency based in Glenwood Springs that works to protect Western Slope water. “And critically dry hydrology is what we have continued to see consistently in the basin in the last 25 years and what we should expect going forward.”

Climate change and persistent drought have already sapped hundreds of billions of gallons of water from the river’s annual flow. Officials from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Friday to add more water to Lake Powell — one of the system’s two major reservoirs downstream of the river’s headwaters in the Colorado mountains — after updated projections showed that spring flows into the already-low reservoir could be less than a third of average.

Federal water managers over the next year will release hundreds of millions of gallons of water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir in Wyoming and Utah to keep Lake Powell above “minimum power pool” — the reservoir elevation needed to send water through hydropower turbines. Without access to the turbines, water released from the dam must flow through much smaller bypass tubes that are , choking flow from one of the West’s largest water banks.

Emergency decisions like those taken Friday illustrate some of the risks of failing to prepare for intense drought, experts say.

In extremely dry years, the longer-term plans under consideration by Reclamation would allow the water levels of the system’s two main reservoirs to repeatedly fall below minimum power pool. Federal officials then would be forced to make recurring emergency cuts to the water supplies of the three states downstream of the reservoirs, creating uncertainty for millions of people and a massive agricultural industry.

For more than two years, negotiators from the seven states that rely on the river have tried and failed to agree on that runs from Colorado’s high country to Mexico. The technical nitty-gritty of the disputes is wonky, but the key issue underlying the schism between the states is simple: Who should be forced to use less water — and how much less — as the Colorado River’s flows shrink?

Reclamation officials on Friday said they are preparing to implement their own plan this summer if the states can’t agree on answers to those questions. In January, federal officials released five potential operational guidelines — called “alternatives” in federal jargon — and asked for input.

They , including critiques from across the basin asserting that none of their plans would function well in dry years. That criticism also applied to the only plan the Bureau of Reclamation can implement without consensus from the basin states or without gaining new legal powers.

Letters from a number of Colorado entities — including the , , the Western Slope’s and county commissions from a vast swath of the state — urged federal officials to present at least one plan that would hold up in extremely dry years.

“Sound science dictates that Colorado River management must evolve to handle a permanently drier future,” Tina Bergonzini, the general manager of the Grand Valley Water Users Association, . “The current federal preference for predictability is an atmospheric impossibility given that studies indicate rising temperatures have already slashed river flows by a fifth.”

Bureau of Reclamation officials declined an interview request for this story. But they have publicly acknowledged the risk.

“In critically dry periods, all of the alternatives have unacceptable performance,” bureau engineer Rebecca Smith said during . Even imposing large cuts to water usage in those years would not keep the major reservoirs at functional levels, she said.

The conflict on the Colorado is likely one of the world’s first major water policy overhauls to grapple with the reality of climate change, said , a senior water and climate research scholar at Colorado State University’s .

In the past, Colorado River managers made operational tweaks and short-term deals to address drought. This time, it’s different.

“We’re not looking at an incremental step here,” Udall said. “We’re looking at a complete redo of how we operate this resource that affects 40 million people.”

‘Downright scary what¶¶Òőap going on’

The West first wrestled with divvying up the powerful Colorado River in 1922, when delegates from each of the seven states met in Santa Fe and signed .

At its most basic, the compact divides up the 18 million acre-feet of water then estimated to be in the river — including 7.5 million acre-feet reserved for the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico, and 7.5 million acre-feet for the Lower Basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada. An acre-foot of water is the volume of water it takes to cover an acre of land in a foot of water — about 326,000 gallons — and is generally considered the annual water consumption of two families.

The 18 million acre-feet was likely an overestimation of how much water there was even a century ago, but today’s river provides even less than the total amounts promised to states in 1922.

“Since 2000, the flows have been radically different,” Udall said.

The 20-year average annual flow measured in 1925 was 17.6 million acre-feet, Bureau of Reclamation data show. In 2025, it was 12.7 million acre-feet.

But even that number hides the reality of recent dry years. The five-year average amounts to only 10.9 million acre-feet. Last year’s flow measured at 8.5 million acre-feet.

This year will be even lower due to record-low snowpack across much of the basin.

The conditions this year are not a one-off, Udall said, but symptoms of a larger warming trend fueled by human-caused global climate change. Hotter temperatures not only increase water loss through evaporation but also make plants and soils thirstier, reducing the amount of water that flows downstream. Evidence is also piling up indicating that climate change is reducing precipitation across the Colorado River’s headwaters, Udall said.

“I think this is quite nerve-racking — and perhaps just downright scary — what¶¶Òőap going on,” he said.

The Bureau of Reclamation acknowledges the likelihood of a hotter, drier future in its draft environmental impact statement, though it shies away from using the term climate change.

“The basin is experiencing increased aridity due to climate variability, and long-term drought and low-runoff conditions are expected in the future,” the document’s executive summary states.

Expect more critically dry years

Future hydrology is the biggest and most impactful uncertainty federal officials must reckon with while crafting plans for the river, Smith said in the January webinar.

The bureau modeled hundreds of potential future conditions and then compared how each of its five proposed plans would perform under different levels of river flow over the next 20 years, broken into three categories:

• Average (12-14 million acre-feet average over 20 years)
• Dry (10-12 million acre-feet average over 20 years)
• Critically dry (less than 10 million acre-feet average over 20 years)

If average flows over the next two decades fall in the “average” category, the plans generally would be able to keep Lakes Powell and Mead — the two big downstream reservoirs — above critical levels and eliminate the need for emergency reductions in water supplies to keep them functional.

But that’s not how recent years have gone.

Since 2020, Colorado River flows have fallen into Reclamation’s “critically dry” category in four of six water years. The repeated dry years, coupled with downstream consumption that has not changed to match the reduction in inflow, have and Mead, which are now less than a third full.

“Critically dry hydrology is what we have continued to see consistently in the basin and what we should expect going forward,” said Mueller, from the Colorado River District.

Between 2021 and 2025, the river’s flows averaged 11.2 million acre-feet — low enough to fall into Reclamation’s dry hydrology category. That average was boosted by the unusually wet 2023 year when the river delivered 17.4 million acre-feet of water, while most of the other years fell into the critically dry category.

As modeled by the bureau, if critically dry years continue, Powell and Mead will more often fall so low that their will become unusable, impacting power availability for more than 1 million people. Bureau officials would more often be forced to implement emergency water cuts to try to keep the reservoirs functional.

In , the Colorado River District urged officials to add an alternative plan that would function well in critically dry periods.

“The population of the state of Colorado and the entire Colorado River basin is best served by the Department of the Interior studying alternatives that actually bring the system into balance,” Mueller said, referring to the cabinet department above the bureau. “And recognizing that those management alternatives will have some extremely harsh realities — hydrologically and politically — up and down the basin. But that¶¶Òőap what we’re best served by.”

Bureau of Reclamation’s most likely plan

Without a deal between the seven states or obtaining more legal authority from Congress or the states, federal officials will be forced to implement a plan dubbed “Basic Coordination.”

The plan mandates the least cuts for the Lower Basin states and is generally less flexible than the other proposals.

In dry periods under that plan, Lakes Powell and Mead could fall below minimum power pool 30% to 40% of the time, according to Bureau of Reclamation projections. In critically dry periods, that figure rises to more than 70%.

The federal agency estimates that Lake Powell will be vulnerable to falling below that level in the first five years under the Basic Coordination plan if the average annual flows in that period amount to less than 11.3 million acre-feet. The five-year average has fallen below that level in three of the last five years.

If the federal government enacts the Basic Coordination plan, the bureau will keep scrambling to make emergency decisions to ensure Powell and Mead are operable. Such decisions could involve cuts to Lower Basin water supplies or the sending of water from federally-managed reservoirs upstream — like Flaming Gorge or Colorado’s Blue Mesa — to keep enough water in Powell.

Federal officials could also seek water from other water sources the government owns or operates in Colorado, Mueller said, such as from irrigation projects on the Western Slope or , which delivers Colorado River water across the Continental Divide to northeastern Colorado.

“Legal uncertainty and hydrologic uncertainty would erupt,” he said. “We, as good water managers throughout our state and the basin, should try to avoid that.”

Under the Basic Coordination plan, reactive chaos will erode what certainty remains on the changing river, said , the regional policy manager for , a climate advocacy organization.

“We will be right back where we are with emergency operations,” he said, like pulling water from upstream reservoirs to prop up Powell. “But you can’t do that every single year because there isn’t enough water in the Upper Basin reservoirs.”

Bureau of Reclamation officials plan to finalize new long-term guidelines by Aug. 15, in time for the Oct. 1 start to the new water year, which generally tracks with the start of snowfall.

“You don’t want to limp through with Basic Coordination, you’d want to put everything on the table you can,” Berggren said.

“We’re facing a crisis,” he continued. “We have tools available, we know what they are — we just need to implement them.”

Water scarcity, due to exceptionally low mountain snow and soil-drying heat, looms foremost.

“If we don’t get moisture, I’m not going to plant,” said chile grower Praxie Vigil, who runs along the Bessemer Ditch, a 43-mile irrigation canal that once nourished crops across 20,000 acres east of Pueblo. He was planning to decide this weekend.

“It¶¶Òőap not looking good for any of us. Usually, I just plant and hope for the best. But this year, I’m not going to. This is bad. I can barely water 20 acres,” said Vigil, who works a side job as a pipe-welder to make ends meet.

The dry conditions, compounded by federal policies and turbulence far beyond the Rocky Mountain West, are forcing Colorado farmers to scale back production this year, change the crops they prioritize and question their long-term survival. Grocery shoppers likely will see less locally grown food in produce sections.

First, the Trump administration’s tariffs and war on Iran drove up prices for fertilizer, packaging and other materials. The Mideast conflict also broke supply chains — sprinkler heads and filters needed for those peaches, made in Israel, aren’t available.

Then, Trump’s bombing that began Feb. 28 led to fuel costs spiking to $5 per gallon of diesel.

Meanwhile, the federal government’s crackdown on immigration and state limits on how many hours seasonal foreign workers with H2A visas can work have intensified agricultural labor uncertainty.

“I haven’t had anybody physically taken away. But there’s definitely fear among the workers,” Brian Crites said at , working his family’s 1890s homestead at Avondale, where he’ll leave 750 of his 1,000 acres unplanted due to high costs and lack of water. Even though workers from Mexico on his farm hold green cards, they see information online, Crites said. “I try to keep the morale up. I tell them they’re pretty safe here.”

Other challenges include retailers mislabeling produce as Colorado-grown when it’s not, which degrades the state brand. Lawmakers and Gov. Jared Polis just prohibiting the deceptive trade practice of fake local labeling.

“Agriculture is a big powerhouse of our economy. It is our No. 1 export sector. We do everything we can to support ranchers and farmers in our state,” Polis said in an interview last week. “What the government cannot do is make it rain or snow.”

‘Hit from every direction’

As summer approaches, “everybody’s looking at what their options are,” said peach grower Bruce Talbott, operator of on Colorado’s Western Slope.

His orchards depend largely on the federally run Green Mountain Reservoir, which measured 36% full last week, with streams feeding the reservoir also running low because paltry mountain snowpack had already melted away.

“We want to haul down as little water as possible and stretch what we do have as far as we can. How that¶¶Òőap going to play out is unknown. …We’ve never actually shut off the canals. Right now, we’re running them low,” Talbott said.

“If there’s no more capturable water, then we’ve got enough until Aug. 1.” he said. “That¶¶Òőap enough that about half the peaches would get harvested. The last half would not. The peaches would be small. And it would be awfully hard on trees. Our chances of having healthy trees headed into next year would be very compromised. We’d probably lose a lot of orchards.”

Hail this month damaged cherries, pears and apricots in the area, and crops that bloomed early in February due to warm winter temperatures need water longer and still are vulnerable to frost through May, director Jessica Burford said.

“We’re getting hit from every direction,” she said. “It’s going to be a very expensive year. Farmers are worried about our peaches being large enough to meet grocery store standards.”

Yet few were quitting.

“We are farmers. We are here to produce food. If we don’t do it, we won’t get paychecks. We would starve, our fields would go to crap, and weeds would take over. So we might as well give it a shot,” said Dalton Milberger, owner of , east of Pueblo. “Chile is our lifeline.”

As Milberger was preparing to plant chile seeds last week, his machine broke down.

A statewide crisis

Farmers statewide are wrestling with similar difficult decisions on whether to plant crops, Commissioner Kate Greenberg said.

The unprecedented warm weather has led to “an incredible lack of soil moisture,” and that, combined with the other “conflating factors,” means that — unless summer brings regular monsoon rain — some farms may die, Greenberg said.

“It’s hard to pinpoint if and when we lose farmers and what exactly the tipping point is,” she said. “Folks are now pivoting from their plans. Maybe it means cutting back on acres, maybe not growing so much. Maybe the conversation is that this is the year when we turn in our gloves and call it good. We’ve got a lot of those conversations going on right now. The combined pressures on farming and ranching families are not alleviating. It’s possible they could force out family agriculture.”

Taking a year off generally isn’t an option, “because there are payments to be made,” said Mike Bartolo, who helped develop resilient green chile seeds over 32 years of work as a research scientist for the and serves on the board of the .

Bartolo was born and raised in the Arkansas River Valley, where water rights sell-offs to Front Range cities in the 1970s decimated farm fields and towns. Aurora and Colorado Springs officials, seeing the Colorado River Basin’s water shrinking, again are pressing for control over stressed farmers’ water rights, Bartolo said.

Planting crops now — “one of the most troubling times in agriculture I’ve witnessed in my lifetime” — means taking “a tremendous amount of risk, on top of existing risks,” he said.

“Unless there’s some miraculous turnaround, we face an era of uncertainty. We don’t know what to do. You’re kind of backed into a corner. What do you do? This is your livelihood. How do you sustain yourself? In Colorado’s rural communities, we are looking at survival.”

‘Hoping to get through this year’

State leaders say they’re committed to supporting farming and rural communities. But climate change impacts “will get worse,” Polis said, anticipating “a world of scarcity of water” where “in addition to the reduced supply, there’s also increased demand” due to population growth.

Federal immigration and foreign policies aren’t helping, he said. “If you start a war with Iran, you know that prices are going to go up a lot.”

Climate warming sets off cascading changes, such as increased pests, for which a state in Palisade breeds insect natural enemies that can be deployed to manage those pests.

But worms, mites and beetles still gnaw at the crops in Olathe, where farming has become “crisis management,” said owner David Harold, who decided last week he’ll be “cutting way back” on sweet corn.

Instead of planting corn on 1,600 acres, he’ll plant on just 100 to 300 acres. That will make it harder to find the Olathe sweet corn in supermarkets, and Harold said he’ll shift to direct sales to people who pre-order online.

Tuxedo is also “losing some workers to other areas” where migrants can work more hours, despite giving them “all the extra hours and overtime I can afford,” he said.

“We are very off balance. Fertilizer prices. Diesel prices. Transportation. I cannot get equipment in and out of here like I need to. The whole thing has been coming apart. We don’t have a clear path right now,” Harold said.

“I’m not going to put the money into these crops and then hope the bugs don’t get me, hope there’s enough water, hope there’s enough truck drivers, hope the consumer can afford it. It’s been a rollercoaster. What are we going to do? Can we take the risk? We’re struggling. Big changes are here right now. I am hoping to get through this year.”

Crop-switching and reduced planting

Along the Arkansas River east of Pueblo, farmers last week were meeting with irrigators and leaning toward a strategy of prioritizing high-value crops, such as the green chiles, while reducing corn and alfalfa.

But “it’s touch and go,” said fifth-generation farmer Rocky Musso, operator of , eight miles east of Pueblo. Musso had his fields plowed and was headed to meet with a neighbor “before we make a decision” to find out who might be able to spare unused shares of water.

“We don’t want to plant too conservatively. We will cut down to about 60% to 75% of our chile planting,” he said. “We were always taught to farm every season. You get discouraged. But it does us no good to get discouraged.”

At , established in 1890, water levels in the Bessemer Ditch were roughly 70 cubic feet per second. That’s less than half the typical spring flows during planting season, due to the low snowpack in the mountains west of Leadville above the headwaters of the Arkansas River.

The family operators produce a variety of foods, including pinto beans, onions, squash, tomatoes and pumpkins — in addition to Pueblo green chiles.

While they’re facing “the worst year in recorded history,” they made some smart moves, such as anticipating the impact of tariffs and stocking up early on fertilizers before prices went up, Jayme DiSanti said.

“We’re still going to plant. We’re going to cut back on other things and focus on vegetables,” DiSanti said. “We are not going to cut back on green chiles. That’s our thing. We’re going to be short on water. But chiles like it hot and dry. So people can probably expect hotter chile.”

That, too, was a severe drought year. Those who worked Colorado’s rivers in those days remember low river flows and steep declines in business. Now stories about their experiences are echoing through the industry, which has an annual economic impact on the state of more than $200 million, according to the Colorado River Outfitters Association.

“I was not here in 2002, but I’ve definitely heard the horror stories,” said Kyle Johnson, business manager and co-owner of Rocky Mountain Adventures, which operates on the Poudre River west of Fort Collins.

User days in 2002 tumbled 40% from the previous year, according to figures compiled by the outfitters association, from more than 502,000 in 2001 to 298,000 in 2002. The following year, they rebounded with 448,000.

Duke Bradford was a river manager that summer on the Arkansas River, the heart of Colorado’s rafting industry. User days there numbered 139,000, down from 252,000 in 2001. Bradford recalls how the river “channelized” with a narrower stream than normal years, like a two-lane road restricted to one lane.

“The river was very runnable, but it was also very channelized,” said Bradford, the owner of AVA Rafting, which runs trips on the Arkansas, the Upper Colorado and Clear Creek. “There was only one channel to go down. That made it challenging if you had several boats. If one gets stuck, it could be a little bit of bumper boats.”

Outfitters insist there will be a rafting season this year, but the same lack of snowfall that negatively affected ski resorts over the winter — forcing many to open late and close early — will also hurt rafting since there has been less snow to melt. That, along with ongoing drought, means the low-water conditions typically found in late summer may come much earlier than usual. To make it work, river guides plan to adjust in ways they hope will help them make the best of what they have.

“The water’s not going to get to be high, boat-flipping water,” said David Costlow, executive director of the Colorado River Outfitters Association. “Usually, we try to get to the middle of July before we start entering low water. It will probably be early this year. It could be the end of June, first of July, but it depends on the next few weeks.

“We’re hoping that low-water season doesn’t start until after July 4,” Costlow added. “It depends on temperatures and how much moisture we get between now and then.”

March ‘failed to deliver’

The winter snowpack is currently well below average across the state; in fact, it is about a quarter of what Colorado usually has at this time of year, according to the USDA National Water and Climate Center. That’s the lowest since record-keeping began in 1941. Meanwhile, warm spring temperatures triggered a much earlier runoff than normal.

Outfitters are hoping spring rains will improve the situation, but three-month weather projections from the Climate Prediction Center of the National Weather Service are calling for above-normal temperatures and below-normal moisture through June.

March is normally Colorado’s snowiest month, so outfitters were hoping for a boost last month. It didn’t come.

“Up until about spring break, we were seeing really similar patterns to this time last year,” Johnson said of the picture in the Poudre. “Coming into (spring) last year, things didn’t look fantastic, but then March and April really saved the day. We get our most snow at altitude in the month of March historically. March (this year) grandly failed to deliver.”

Outfitters are used to adapting when confronted with low-water years. Many of the strategies they will employ early this season track with what they normally do in the late season. They’re also trying to think of creative ways to bridge the gap.

“We just ordered 20 inflatable kayaks, which are great for lower water conditions — more agile and fun — and it expands the options for our guests,” said Travis Hochard, chief operating officer of River Runners rafting and president of the Arkansas River Outfitters Association. “Inflatable kayaks are perfect for low water. They’re nimble, interactive, and give guests a more hands-on experience.”

Bradford said his company will run smaller boats to deal with channelized flows. That will mean 14-foot boats on the Upper Colorado instead of 16-footers, and 12-footers on the Arkansas instead of 14-footers.

“Normally, you could put six people in a boat, but when it¶¶Òőap channelized, that¶¶Òőap not realistic,” Bradford said. “We’ll cut those numbers down quite a bit to navigate that single lane. We’ll run small loads and we’ll make it happen. We’re going to make it a good year, no matter what happens.”

Rafting on Clear Creek is almost entirely dependent on rainfall during the season, even in good snow years, because it’s situated in a relatively small drainage. Outfitters there are hoping Colorado’s monsoon season, typically mid-July through August, delivers this year.

“If it rains, that river goes up substantially,” Bradford said. “If we get the monsoons, it can double (its flow) overnight.”

The Upper Colorado draws on runoff from a much larger basin that includes the west side of Rocky Mountain National Park and the Never Summer Range. Reservoirs in that drainage include Grand Lake, and flows are controlled by water managers. Rafting on the Upper Colorado is concentrated west of Kremmling.

“The Colorado River, when that water needs to flow to Utah and Nevada, it¶¶Òőap going to flow, and we’re going to be there to ride it,” Costlow said. “It will not be a high-water season, it’ll be a mid-water season for a while, and then we’ll probably enter low-water season earlier than normal.”

On the Poudre, Johnson said his company is focused on providing quality experiences for as long as there is enough water to do so.

“Looking at the snowpack per drainage, we still sit better than most, but unfortunately, we’re all looking at pretty low snow totals,” Johnson said. “The Poudre is a very long canyon with a lot of navigable whitewater. There will be a season.”

‘Fish are pretty resilient’

Below-normal stream flows and above-average temperatures are also likely to impact fish populations. The Arkansas Headwaters Recreation Area, managed by Colorado Parks and Wildlife on federal land, includes a 152-mile stretch of the Arkansas. Not only is it Colorado’s busiest area for rafting, but it includes more than 100 miles of Gold Medal trout fishing.

Josh Nehring, a CPW deputy assistant director who focuses on aquatics and fish management, believes the impact of low water will be felt more by rafting businesses than fishing interests.

“Fish are pretty resilient, especially in the Arkansas,” Nehring said. “In the majority of the Upper Arkansas Basin, fish can freely move upstream and downstream to find better habitat.”

With lower stream flows and higher temperatures, though, the level of dissolved oxygen in the river could be reduced, affecting fish activity.

“There have been some studies done with increased water temperature and related stress where fish will end up feeding less, because they’re more in survival mode as opposed to actively feeding,” Nehring said. “One thing anglers might see is lower catch rates. As temperatures get up toward 70 degrees, one option would be to go to higher elevations where the stream is cooler.ÌęTrout need cooler water, so head to higher elevations where there’s maybe more flow, cooler water temperatures, better conditions.”

Nehring also suggests anglers consider visiting reservoirs in eastern Colorado that contain fish that are more tolerant of warm water.

Those in the rafting industry insist there still will be enjoyable rafting in the state this year despite the drought.

“The message we’re putting out is, recognize that it¶¶Òőap going to be a lower-water year, but you can still have fun with your family and friends on the river,” said Bob Hamel, executive director of the Arkansas River Outfitters Association. “It¶¶Òőap hot, and you’re going to want to be near water. Outfitters are buying smaller boats; they’re doing inflatable kayaks, SUPs (stand-up paddleboards). It¶¶Òőap a good year to learn to kayak. People are looking to operate under those guidelines and adapt.”

Winter is more than just a season in the western U.S. – it is a savings account to get farms and homes through the long, dry summer ahead. As the snowpack that accumulates in the mountains through winter slowly melts in late spring and summer, it feeds into rivers and reservoirs that keep communities and ecosystems functioning.

The April 1 snowpack measurement has long been the single most important number in western water management, considered a strong proxy for how much water the mountains are holding in reserve.

But in 2026, that .

Across the western United States, temperatures from November through February were among the , with many areas (2.8 to 5.5 degrees Celsius) above the 20th-century average. March continued to break heat records, leaving on April 1. At lower elevations, the higher temperatures meant a significant part of the winter’s precipitation fell as rain rather than snow. In some places, snowfall accumulated but melted quickly during warm periods.

As a result, even regions that received near- or above-normal precipitation for the season failed to build substantial snowpack. In the northern Rockies and the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, any above-average snow accumulation was largely confined to the highest elevations, while middle and lower elevations had relatively little snowpack.

This situation is a hallmark of warming winters. As global temperatures rise, the freezing line where precipitation changes from rain to snow moves up the mountains, shrinking the area capable of sustaining a seasonal snowpack.

The exceptionally warm winter of 2025-26 across much of the western U.S. delivered a powerful preview of what in a warmer climate may increasingly look like: less snow and a fundamental – the chart of how much water flows through streams across the year.

A flattening hydrologic pulse

The consequences of this shift for water supplies are already visible in streamflows.

In multiple river basins in the West, streamflows were above average in winter and early spring, and some locations were . Historically, that water would have remained frozen in the snowpack until late spring. Instead, precipitation arriving as rain – along with intermittent midwinter melting events – increased the runoff.

Scientists who study natural water flows, , pay attention to the hydrographs of streamflows in river basins to see when the water flow in mountain streams is strongest and how long that flow is likely to continue into summer.

In recent years, rising temperatures have led to a redistribution of streamflows throughout the winter and early spring in ways that are of snowmelt-dominated rivers. Rather than a single dominant peak during late spring or early summer, emerge in winter and early spring. At the same time, the traditional snowmelt pulse, relied on to fill reservoirs in late spring, weakens.

In effect, the hydrograph is flattening. The winter of 2025-26 illustrates this phenomenon: Higher early-season streamflows suggest the West will see less runoff later in the year when communities, farms and wildlife need it.

The Colorado River: A system on the edge

Nowhere does the convergence of record warmth, depleted snowpack and altered hydrology carry higher stakes than in the Colorado River Basin. More than plus Mexico and 5.5 million acres of farmland depend on the river’s water, but the river’s flow is no longer meeting demand.

The April-through-July 2026 runoff into Lake Powell – the reservoir behind Glen Canyon Dam and the of the Upper Colorado River Basin’s annual water budget – is in recent decades. It has been tracking close to the , considered benchmarks of western drought.

Unless spring brings substantial late-season snowfall to the high mountains, 2026 could join those years as a marker of how thin the margin between water supply and demand has become in a river system already under sustained stress from two decades of drought and water overuse.

The low reservoir levels in the basin in 2026 and the low snowpack are adding fears of water shortages just as the seven states that rely on the Colorado River are struggling to reach a .

The changing rhythm of water in the West

The winter of 2025-26 highlights two emerging realities.

First, in determining western water supplies. Even above-normal precipitation cannot compensate for persistent warmth when it falls as rain rather than snow and accelerates snowmelt in the mountains.

Second, the nature of the West’s streamflows is shifting in ways that complicate water management.

Rain-on-snow events can produce flooding in winter, as the . A low snowpack also means less runoff in summer, which can exacerbate water shortages and raise the wildfire risk as landscapes dry out. Even if a year has normal precipitation, if it falls as rain or there is earlier snowmelt, then evaporation through summer, in a warmer climate, will leave less water in the system.

Snowpack declines, earlier runoff, elevated winter flows and flattened hydrographs are all for the western United States as global temperatures rise.

What makes the winter of 2025-26 notable is how clearly these signals appeared, even in a year without widespread precipitation deficits.

This shift highlights the need for adaptive reservoir operations – the ability to adjust water storage and release decisions in real time to capture earlier runoff and preserve water for longer dry seasons, while still maintaining space in reservoirs for flood control during wetter winters. For communities across the West, it also reinforces the growing reality that the familiar seasonal rhythm of mountain water is changing.

Imtiaz Rangwala is a senior research scientist in climate at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

Even more troubling, mountain snow accumulations peaked a month early and contained just half the average moisture.

As a warm winter with gave way to early springtime , snow is vanishing from all but the highest elevations in the West. It¶¶Òőap a clear sign that water shortages could worsen the ongoing , barring an unexpected deluge.

Gutsch struggled to match the mood of the sunny, 56-degree weather as she stood in a section of the Rocky Mountains that¶¶Òőap considered the headwaters of the Colorado River.

“We love being out here. We love being in the snow, taking these measurements. This year, it¶¶Òőap kind of hard to enjoy it because it¶¶Òőap slightly depressing with the conditions that we’ve seen,” said Gutsch, who is with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service.

Department hydrologists told The Associated Press of the dismal, record-low snowpack after concluding their field assessments late Tuesday.

Cities in the region are imposing water-use restrictions, and ranchers are wondering how they will feed and water their cattle. Meanwhile, the threat of devastating wildfires looms.

High (country) and dry

Ranchers in Colorado’s scenic mountain valleys near the Continental Divide are, in a sense, among the first in the region affected by drought, being nearest to the melting mountain snowpack.

They hardly need Gutsch to tell them how parched this winter and spring have been. They remember past droughts — bad ones in 2002, 1981, 1977 — and wonder just what this dry winter will mean for their operations.

“I’ve never seen it so warm so early and no snow all winter long,” said Philip Anderson, a retired teacher who also has ranched most of his life in Colorado’s North Park valley.

The heaviest snows in the Rockies fall in late winter and early spring, including now. Snowfall isn’t unusual in the highest regions even into June.

Anderson’s place is at about 8,100 feet (2,500 meters) in elevation. There, in a typical year, a foot (30 centimeters) or more of snow will linger on his pastures until springtime, helping the grass to green up and stock water ponds to refill.

But without snow on the land, his cows are grazing his grass before it can grow high, and several of his ponds are dry. The ditch that would usually move water from the nearby Illinois River to his property is also dry — tapped already by neighbors with more senior water rights than his.

“A lot of the people which are closer to the mountains have to let the water go by and let those folks with the senior water rights have it,” Anderson said.

The last time Anderson had to haul water in his truck from a nearby wildlife refuge was in 2002. That same year, he had to sell off his herd.

North Park — about 100 miles (161 kilometers) from the South Park valley that inspired the cartoon TV show — is a headwaters of the eastward-flowing Platte River system. Thirty-five miles (56 kilometers) to the west of Anderson’s place, across the Continental Divide, is the Stanko Ranch on the Yampa River.

Jo Stanko dreads low flows because they allow her cattle to wade across the Colorado River tributary. Then they need to be rounded up and brought back home.

This year, Stanko has been watering her parched meadow earlier than ever in her 50 years of ranching. She plans to cut hay before June and is considering buying hay soon to feed her 70 cows afterward.

“Hay’s always a good investment, you know, because it might be really expensive,” she said.

Go with the flow? Not when low

An old saying in the West is that whiskey’s for drinking and water’s for fighting over. It applies all the more when water becomes scarce amid a decades-long drought driven in part by human-caused climate change.

Meanwhile, the river’s Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming remain at an impasse in negotiations with the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada to create new rules for managing the water during shortages.

Like the water itself, time is running short — the current rules expire in September.

A recent federal plan would conserve river water “completely on Arizona’s back,” Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs told a U.S. Chamber of Commerce meeting in March.

Upper Basin states say their cities, farmers and ranchers already use far less water than they are entitled to under the existing agreements. That¶¶Òőap because they honor senior water rights — some of which date to the 1880s — before those who own newer rights during droughts, Becky Mitchell, the Colorado River negotiator for Colorado, recently told other Upper Basin representatives.

“When there is less, we use less. This is not voluntary and no one gets paid as a result,” Mitchell said.

After missing multiple deadlines set by federal officials in recent months to, at least, create outlines of an agreement, the two sides are hiring more lawyers in case the dispute goes to court.

Cities cut back

After the driest and warmest winter on record, Salt Lake City announced a 10% daily cut in water use.

Reductions will be voluntary for residents, but the biggest nonresidential water users will have to consume no more than 200,000 gallons per day.

On the other side of the Rockies, Denver Water approved limits to watering lawns and other restrictions, with hopes of achieving a 20% cut.

Water officials urged even less watering. Lawns in the Front Range region are just beginning to green up and don’t need watering twice a week until at least mid-May, they pointed out.

The city gets much of its water from mountain snow that accumulates east of the Continental Divide and on the western side. Tunnels under the mountains divert half the city’s water from snow-fed streams on the western side.

“We’re 7 to 8 feet of snow short of where we need to be,” Nathan Elder, water supply manager for Denver Water, said in a statement. “It would take a tremendous amount of snow to recover at this point, so it¶¶Òőap time to turn our attention to preserving what we have.”

Wildfire risk looms large

On the same day Denver approved the water restrictions, the city set a new high temperature record for March: 87 degrees (30 Celsius).

The previous record of 85 degrees (29 Celsius) was set just a week earlier.

Drought was bearing down west of the Rockies, too. In California, snowpack in the Sierra Nevada measured only 18% of the average for this time of year,

Hot, dry weather is a recipe for wildfires. While other parts of the U.S., including the South and Southwest, face higher fire risk this spring, forecasters expect the threat in the Rockies to rise as above-average temperatures and below-normal precipitation persist into summer.

This week, the region is getting a reprieve of cooler, damper weather, with snow back in the forecast by the end of the week in North Park. But Anderson said he needs a lot more — half an inch (1 centimeter) of rain every other day for several days — to get out of the drought.

Until then, he suggested that North Park senior and junior water-rights holders work together to ensure everybody has enough.

“It¶¶Òőap pretty serious,” Anderson said. “If we just talk and communicate together and cooperate, we might be able to make it through this. But we’ll see.”

___

Amy Taxin in Santa Ana, California, contributed.

___

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at .

The restrictions, which were put in place immediately, limit residents to using water outside their homes, such as for their lawns, to twice per week. Restaurants will also only serve water when customers request it. The last time implemented these restrictions was in 2013.

Residents will need to follow schedules based on their addresses. Those with addresses ending with an even number will be permitted to water on Sundays and Thursdays, and those whose addresses ending with odd numbers will be assigned Wednesdays and Saturdays.

Denver Water’s typical rules for the summer months will also still be in place, including limiting outdoor watering to the cooler hours between 6 p.m. and 10 a.m.

“We are asking customers to not turn on their irrigation systems until mid-May,” said spokesperson Travis Thompson. “They may need to hand water trees and shrubs until then. Once they begin irrigating their lawns, they must follow their assigned watering days and water no more than two days per week.”

The Colorado River basin’s snowpack is at 53% of normal, making it the lowest coverage on record for this date, said Nathan Elder, Denver Water’s manager of water supply. There’s a low probability that reservoirs will fill up this year, he said.

“Current conditions indicate that this is going to be an exceptionally challenging year for our water supply,” Elder said. “The recent heat wave has exacerbated an already poor situation from a water manager standpoint.”

Denver Water staff plans to return to the board on April 8 to recommend the implementation of higher drought pricing as well. After the utility takes those measures, officials will watch how conditions change and how customers respond before deciding whether to take further action later this summer.

“We’re dealing with conditions we’ve never seen before,” board President Tyrone Gant said during the meeting.

The goal of Stage 1 drought restrictions will be to reduce average customer usage by 20%. Beyond limiting outdoor watering to two days per week, Denver Water will establish water budgets for its large customers.

Denver Water serves 1.5 million people — or about a quarter of the state’s population — with covering Denver and some of its surrounding suburbs, including Lakewood, Littleton, Centennial and Lone Tree.

Denver isn’t the only city implementing water restrictions. Officials in Erie told residents and businesses on March 20 that they must shut off all their sprinkler systems through the end of the month. They said they will turn off water service at any properties that don’t comply with the request. The town switches to its summer water distribution system, which provides more water, on April 1.

Thornton was the first city in the metro Denver area to enact Stage 1 drought declaration earlier this month. That includes a mandatory twice-weekly limit on outdoor watering.

Earlier this month, Gov. Jared Polis activated the state Drought Task Force for the first time since 2020 to monitor the conditions and recommend mitigation efforts.

Nearly three-quarters of the state is experiencing some level of drought, according to a . The worst drought conditions are on the Western Slope, in areas including Summit, Eagle and Pitkin counties. Much of that area is considered to be in “extreme drought,” with some sections in the worst possible “exceptional drought.”

About 3.6 million people live in the areas experiencing some level of drought, which also includes most of the Front Range.

A heat dome that’s expected to hover over the state and the Mountain West through Saturday is forecast to bring temperatures into the 80s at lower elevations and into the 50s and 60s at higher elevations. The heat this week follows the warmest winter recorded in Colorado since records began in 1895.

“It’s possible that many areas of the state at high elevations have already seen peak snowpack,” Peter Goble, the assistant state climatologist, the Colorado Water Conservation Board’s Water Conditions Monitoring Committee on Tuesday.

The temperatures expected from the heat dome will be high enough to spur melting, said Brian Domonkos, a hydrologist with the Colorado office of the federal . Statewide, snowpack depth typically peaks around April 8.

The National Weather Service — at an elevation of 11,020 feet — shows overnight lows are not expected to drop below freezing until Sunday night. Daytime highs could hit 60 degrees.

, located at nearly 11,000 feet in southern Colorado, is also not forecast to reach freezing temperatures overnight this week.

The record heat is expected to shrink an already anemic snowpack. Statewide snowpack , the lowest recorded since records began in 1986. Some river basins in southern Colorado — including the Rio Grande, the San Juan, the Animas and the Arkansas — had less than half of normal snowpack on Wednesday.

“We have very little winter left,” Domonkos said. “There’s essentially no chance for us to get back to normal snowpack.”

Colorado’s mountains and streams will begin to see increased water flows from the melting this week, according to the .

in Steamboat Springs will likely more than double in the next seven days, from 124 cubic feet per second on Wednesday to more than 400 cfs late next week. The Animas River in Durango could hop from winter flows hovering around 300 cfs to .

Those flows are still far lower than peak runoff flows that will come later this spring and summer. But expected extended warm temperatures, paired with the “extremely grim” snowpack, mean those peak flows will also be lower than normal, said Cody Moser, a hydrologist with the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center, at a briefing Wednesday.

Across the Colorado River Basin — which includes a large swath of western Colorado — those flows are expected to be at or below 70% of the average recorded between 1991 and 2020, he said.

Across the Colorado River Basin, “I think it’s highly likely that we’ve already seen peak snowpack,” Moser said.

The vast majority of Colorado’s water supply comes from its winter snowpack. The lack of snow has water providers across the state enacting drought restrictions or preparing to do so.

Denver Water — which serves 1.5 million people across the Front Range — will likely skip declaring a drought watch and instead skip to the next step by imposing Stage 1 water restrictions, Nathan Elder, the utility’s water supply manager, said Tuesday.

Those restrictions — last implemented in 2013 — in outdoor water use.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis on Tuesday activated the state Drought Task Force to address the dire conditions. The task force will monitor conditions across the state and recommend mitigation efforts to Polis. The governor last activated the task force in 2020.

If conditions continue to deteriorate, Polis could declare a drought emergency and seek federal disaster assistance.

“Colorado is experiencing the warmest year so far in our 131-year record, and one of the driest,” Polis said in a news release. “Activating the Drought Task Force will help ensure we are protecting one of our most precious resources by closely tracking impacts, supporting communities, and coordinating better as we prepare for the year ahead.”

Without an April-May miracle, human-caused climate change likely will finally catch up with the Colorado River–and the 40 million people who rely on it—in the form of a full-blown crisis later this year.

“Drought” may be too hopeful a word, since it implies an eventual end. Most climate scientists refer to the phenomenon as “long-term aridification,” caused by a lack of rain and snow and warming temperatures.

The West has just experienced its warmest winter since record-keeping began in 1895. The average October-through-December temperature in some parts of the region has been more than 8° F warmer than the 20th century mean. This is a huge anomaly.

In Gunnison County, Colorado, one of the colder places in the nation, the average minimum temperature for that four-month stretch was about 19° F. That doesn’t seem so bad until you realize that back in 1990, another dry, warm winter, the corresponding measure was 13.6° F. For the Upper Colorado River Basin, the average minimum temperature for that four-month stretch was about 26° F, the warmest on record.

The warmer temperatures tinker with the health of the watershed.

This water year, which began Oct. 1, started out with record-high precipitation in some areas, most of which fell as rain. That helped fend off severe drought conditions. But what really counts is the mountain snowpack, which serves as a giant natural reservoir that supplies at least 70% of the Colorado River’s water each year. Warm temperatures have left some areas snow-free even in parts of Wyoming, where the white stuff normally would be piled high in March.

The diminishing snow has, in turn, shrunk the Colorado River. The “natural” flow–or an estimate of how much water the river would carry without upstream diversions or human consumption—has been below 15 million acre-feet (MAF) at Lees Ferry during 20 of the last 26 years, with an average flow of 12.25 MAF during that time.

This matters, because when the Colorado River Compact of 1922 parceled out the river’s waters, the river was assumed to carry an average annual flow of at least 16.5 MAF. Demand has significantly exceeded supply for the last 26 years, forcing the drawdown of the watershed’s big savings accounts, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, to about one-third of their capacity.

Meanwhile, to comply with the Colorado River Compact of 1922–the document that serves as the Ten Commandments for the management of the river’s waters—the Upper Basin States must release, on average, at least 7.5 MAF from Glen Canyon Dam each year.

Given that the Upper Basin states need a bunch of water to keep their cities and farms from drying up, and that an additional 800,000 acre-feet evaporates or seeps into the underlying rocks at Lake Powell each year, you can see how the warming climate wreaks havoc on the math of the Colorado River.

The entire river system now teeters on the brink, and this year’s snow drought may be what pushes it over the edge.

The Bureau of Reclamation’s latest forecast says Lake Powell’s surface level is likely to drop below the minimum level needed for power production later this year. This so-called “deadpool” would not only mean the end of hydropower production, it would also force all of the dam’s releases to go through the river’s 8-foot-wide, steel outlet tubes, which were not made for sustained use. This could compromise the tubes and the dam itself.

It¶¶Òőap possible that the dam would even be shifted to a run-of-the-river operation, in which releases equal the amount of water flowing into the reservoir, minus evaporation and seepage. That would almost certainly result in water shortages downstream, at the very least for the Central Arizona Project, which serves the Phoenix metro area.

This quandary didn’t sneak up on us.

The seven Colorado River states and the federal water managers can’t agree on who should make what cuts in consumption. The feds, meanwhile, haven’t gotten around to re-engineering Glen Canyon Dam or creating a bypass around it that would enable the water to keep flowing. It¶¶Òőap almost as if they’ve been paralyzed by the belief that dry winters were just a minor glitch.

Now, as the spring runoff gets underway, it has become clear that nature won’t save us: We have no choice but to live within increasingly meager limits.

Jonathan Thompson is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a longtime journalist and author about the West.

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Modeling released late last week showed the river system on track to deliver a scant 2.3 million acre-feet to Lake Powell, one of the river system’s largest reservoirs. That’s 36% of the median of 6.4 million acre-feet recorded between 1991 and 2020. If the forecast comes true, it would be the fifth-lowest inflow to Lake Powell since the reservoir’s establishment in 1963, according to the National Weather Service’s .

“It’s not a pretty picture here,” Cody Moser, a hydrologist with the center, said of the basin’s snowpack during .

Lake Powell and its counterpart, Lake Mead, make up the vast majority of water storage on the Colorado River, which provides drinking water to 40 million people, sustains millions of acres of agriculture and provides critical wildlife habitat.

Lower-than-expected water supplies can lead to fallowed farm fields, drought restrictions in cities and difficult decisions for water managers tasked with divvying up the meager supplies. relies on water from the river and its tributaries. Front Range communities, too, need the river. Half the supplies used by comes from the Colorado River.

Lake Powell, located primarily in southern Utah, collects water from the states upstream of it — Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico — and releases water to three states below — Arizona, Nevada and California.

Negotiators from the seven Colorado River basin states for more than two years have tried to agree on a plan to split up the river’s water, but so far they have failed. The river’s current operation guidelines expire at the end of the calendar year.

Already, water levels could fall so low at Lake Powell by August that water will no longer flow through the intake tubes for Glen Canyon Dam’s hydroelectric turbines. Lake Powell at the beginning of March was 24% full, while Mead — which is in Nevada and Arizona — was 34% full.

Much of the Colorado River’s water begins as snow in Colorado’s mountains, which have been plagued by record-low snowfall this winter.

The Colorado River headwaters’ snowpack — the lowest recorded level since measurements began in 1986.

“The Colorado headwaters are the worst this water year; they’re well below normal,” Moser said, noting that many winter storms missed the area.

Other regions in the basin have fared better. Basinwide, precipitation amounts are similar to those recorded last season.

Some areas, like the Green River basin above Flaming Gorge Reservoir — which straddles the Wyoming-Utah border — have received above-average precipitation.

But record heat erased any good news about precipitation, Moser said. Much of the Colorado River basin experienced the warmest winter on record, he said.

Higher temperatures convert would-be snowstorms into rainstorms. When it rains instead of snowing, more of the water is absorbed by the soil, evaporates or is sucked up by plants — reducing the amount of water available for human use.

The heat also has dried out soils across the basin, which means that the ground will absorb more water than normal, decreasing the amount expected to flow downstream.

Some snow has already begun to melt — even at elevations as high as 10,000 feet, Moser said.

River gauges are already recording daytime melting, Moser said, including on tributaries to the Yampa River in Colorado and on the rivers and streams above Blue Mesa Reservoir outside Gunnison. Typically, the snow in those mountains does not begin to melt until early April.

Even in the best-case scenario, it is too late for Colorado River supplies to reach normal. At best, if spring weather is significantly wetter and cooler than expected, inflow to Lake Powell could reach two-thirds of normal.

If the river delivers the projected 2.3 million acre-feet of water, it would be slightly more than the panic-inducing inflows of 2012. The lowest inflow on record occurred in 2002, when less than 1 million acre-feet made its way to the reservoir.

There’s not much hope in the near future for drought-reversing weather. Temperatures are expected to remain warmer than normal and precipitation lower than normal across the entire basin through at least March 19, Moser said.

“Starting tomorrow, it’s going to be mostly dry,” he said on Friday.