Water Desk grantees Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley of the Gastropod podcast recently explored the importance of alfalfa to Western water issues and dairy products.
Graber and Twilley “talked to farmers, economists, plant experts, journalists, and exporters about where this surprisingly important plant fits in to a warming world—and how we can prevent a future lacking in lactose without also drying up the West.” Below you can listen to the episode, which was originally published on September 27, 2022.
This episode was supported by a grant from The Water Desk, an independent journalism initiative based at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
With 25 years of experience working on the Colorado River, Chuck Cullom is used to responding to myriad challenges that arise on the vital lifeline that seven states, more than two dozen tribes and the country of Mexico depend on for water. But this summer problems on the drought-stressed river are piling up at a dizzying pace: Reservoirs plummeting to record low levels, whether Hoover Dam and Glen Canyon Dam can continue to release water and produce hydropower, unprecedented water cuts and predatory smallmouth bass threatening native fish species in the Grand Canyon.
“Holy buckets, Batman!,” said Cullom, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission. “I mean, it’s just on and on and on.”
Cullom is keeping tabs on the river’s rapidly growing list of issues while guiding the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico in talks with other water users on how to save a river system that is crashing under the weight of drought and climate change. Demand continues to greatly outstrip supply and now state officials, water users and tribes are hurrying to craft a new drought plan and avoid intervention from the federal government.
The Upper Basin has proposed a plan built around paying users to reduce water consumption. Though it doesn’t include mandatory cuts for water users, Cullom and the commission have made it a focal point of their negotiations with the Lower Basin.
Cullom spent the last two decades viewing issues on the river through a Lower Basin lens, managing drought strategies and mitigation plans for the Central Arizona Project. Now, in his first year at the commission, Cullom has the chance to use his dual-basin perspective to help the seven states and 30 federally recognized tribes hash out ways to divide the river, which continues to shrink swiftly.
In an interview with Western Water, Cullom explains the importance of communicating effectively on the river, why the Upper Basin’s five-point plan doesn’t require mandatory water cuts or offer potential savings amounts and the push to make the Lower Basin responsible for evaporation losses at Lake Mead.
WESTERN WATER: How has your previous experience in the Lower Basin prepared you for your current position as you switch your focus to the significant challenges facing the Upper Basin?
CHUCK CULLOM: One of the things that I learned over the course of my experience in the Lower Basin was that while we may want to isolate issues or challenges in one basin or another, we are tied together. So that was very important as I transitioned from Lower Basin to Upper Basin, recognizing that while we may want to isolate the issues between Upper and Lower, they cascade in both directions.
I understood early on that the Lower Basin perspective on how the system operates is different and unique from the Upper Basin. Water uses and management in the Upper Basin reflect and are driven by annual hydrologic circumstances, meaning that the hydrology and inflows that occur influence water management decisions year over year. Whereas the Lower Basin relies principally on storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead. When your perspective is so distinct and different, you have to be very careful about what you say and how you say it.
WW: Can you expound on the difficulty of communicating on such a large river system?
CULLOM: I had an experience in the early days of the system conservation pilot program in Arizona. The words we were using to describe how we were managing our uses, while useful and appropriate for what we were doing internally to Arizona, was offensive and inappropriate for the Upper Basin because it implied things that weren’t true. And the Upper Basin folks thoughtfully reached out and communicated directly … and then we figured out how we were going to work together. When you experience the world differently because you’re upstream or downstream of Glen Canyon Dam, communication becomes very important.
And it’s the same with tribal engagement. … The Upper Division [Basin] commissioners met with the tribal leaders for the six Upper Basin tribes and had a very thoughtful, frank and open discussion about the importance of working collaboratively on interstate Colorado River issues and what is helpful and unhelpful in that context. And it was a very useful conversation.
WW: In moving from the Lower Basin to the Upper Basin, has anything involving the Colorado River surprised you? How has your perspective changed?
CULLOM: One thing that surprised me is that the technical capacity in the Upper Basin is on par and in some instances higher than what I anticipated; it exceeds some of the capacity in the Lower Basin. Folks up here are super smart, super talented and lots of modeling expertise is engaged every day.
WW: In June, Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton called on the seven Basin states to devise a plan to reduce use of the river to protect Lake Powell and Lake Mead. She also indicated that all users will have to take cuts. Are Upper Basin states preparing to take cuts? And how might these cuts play out?
CULLOM: I don’t think the question is about are we prepared, it’s how effective our actions will be. The magnitude of contributions in the Upper Basin is limited by the tools we have, the hydrologic and geographic circumstances and what happens in the Lower Basin. So, for the five-point plan to be effective, it needs significant actions in the Lower Basin. But we are moving forward with our plan with the expectation that everyone will contribute in a meaningful way.
WW: What is the goal of the Upper Basin’s five-point plan and what has been the response from Reclamation or the Lower Basin?
CULLOM: The plan includes tools that lead to additional conservation in the Upper Basin on top of what is inflicted by hydrology in dry years, plus contributions that have been made through the 2019 Drought Response Operating Agreement.
The one criticism that we’ve received is “why didn’t you quantify your system conservation program?” We didn’t know if we would have funding and support from Reclamation and we didn’t know what the appetite of water users would be to take on even more reductions. So we didn’t think it would be appropriate to speculate on what we might achieve as an aspiration; we’re focused on delivering results rather than projecting what might be.
Two of the Lower Basin states (California & Arizona) have questions, Nevada is supportive and Reclamation has expressed support and provided resources to help us implement the plan.
WW:The five-point plan talked about reviving work on a demand management plan that was supposed to be part of the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan (DCP). Earlier this year, the Colorado Water Conservation Board halted work on such a plan because, it said, Colorado was much further ahead on investigating the concept than the other Upper Basin states (New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming). Is demand management a viable concept for the Upper Basin and what’s been done?
CULLOM: Colorado’s so-called pause on demand management is not that. The interstate work through the commission is continuing and will be completed in the fall and it will provide a report by the end of the year. I think Colorado was indicating that they had enough information and didn’t need any additional consultants or studies as they complete their own homework.
WW: How can Congress and the federal government help in facilitating a plan to keep the river system from crashing?
CULLOM: Congress has been very helpful. They passed the DCP and they passed the Inflation Reduction Act funding. We’re appreciative and trying to put that funding to very good use.
For the long-term perspective, Commissioner Touton identified tools that she is going to explore and develop and potentially implement in the Lower Basin, including appropriate accounting for evaporation and [transmission] losses. There’s about 1.2 million acre-feet of water that is unaccounted for in the Lower Basin that contributes to the imbalance between supply and demand. And the impact of that imbalance is higher releases from Glen Canyon Dam at a time when Glen Canyon Dam is in jeopardy. We support her efforts to try and bring the Lower Basin system into balance just like the way the Upper Basin accounts for evaporation and transmission losses. We think the secretary has significant authority to do that.
WW:With aridification shrinking the river supply and the disparity in use between the two basins, do you think re-apportioning the river is a serious possibility in the future?
CULLOM: I don’t think it’s warranted or helpful.
WW: In the short term or it’s just a concept that’s just absolutely not in play?
CULLOM: Well, folks can want to talk about it but trying to reconfigure [river apportionments] right now seems like you would create more uncertainty than you’re trying to resolve. In addition, there are the folks who would be most at risk from that conversation in underserved communities and tribes. There are significant tribal water rights that are confirmed but undeveloped.
I think there is significant room for flexibility to adapt to the ongoing drought and for aridification, climate change or whatever you want to call a hotter, drier future. And we need to work within the within the regulatory framework we have because otherwise it becomes a discussion about brute political force rather than what the system needs collectively.
WW: Looking ahead to the renegotiation of the 2007 Interim Guidelines, what are some of the main priorities for the Upper Basin?
CULLOM: We absolutely need a new set of rules. Extending rules that are under stress is not, I don’t believe, a viable option. A significant goal for the next set of rules is to bring the Colorado River uses into balance. By uses I mean including evaporation and losses. We need to bring the system depletions into balance with the available supply every year and rebuild the resiliency in the system by replacing the depleted storage. I think that’s the framework that the Upper Basin is seeking to explore.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
The Jim Bridger coal plant in Point of Rocks, Wyo., powers more than a million homes across six Western states. It consumes more water than any other coal plant in the West, according to the federal government. Julia Simon for NPR
Driving through the Wyoming sagebrush west of Cheyenne, the clouds of dust rising from the road give way to giant plumes of steam shooting into the warming sky.
This is the Jim Bridger power plant, one of the largest coal-fired power sources in the nation and an enormous emitter of carbon dioxide pollution. At the plant’s edge there’s a reservoir, lined with rocks and clumps of drying grass. The plant sucks up about 16 million gallons of water each day, using it to power more than million homes across six western states, all the way to Oregon.
But there’s a problem that looms for the coal plant operator and the customers that rely on it for electricity. This water is piped here from the Green River, a tributary of the rapidly shrinking Colorado River. Now, amidst a decades-long drought and a shortage of water downstream across the Southwest, future conservation in the basin could mean industrial users like Jim Bridger see their water shut off, says Wyoming State Engineer Brandon Gebhart.
“They would be likely the first one shut off. Unless they were able to find a different source of water, we would have to just shut off their water and not allow them to divert,” Gebhart says.
The western U.S. hasn’t been this dry for more than 1,200 years, but 30 western coal plants continue to suck up 156 million gallons a day of the region’s scarce water, according to the Energy Information Administration. Now the very plants whose emissions help drive climate change are at risk of shutdowns, because the water they need to operate has fallen to unprecedented levels.
Some utilities are already sending warnings, telling federal regulators that the drought could threaten coal plant operations. But there’s uncertainty at the state level over which officials are responsible for managing drought risk to power plants and the threat of brownouts and blackouts.
Old coal plants like Jim Bridger have for decades been critical to the grid, says David Eskelsen, spokesman for Rocky Mountain Power, a division of PacifiCorp, which operates the Wyoming plant. “With all the concerns about the use of fossil fuels, climate change, and the use of water in this way,” Eskelsen says, “that has to be balanced against the role that these particular power plants play in the stability of the regional transmission system.”
But rising water scarcity in the West means the stability of coal plants like Jim Bridger is no longer a sure thing, says Joe Smyth, research manager at the Energy and Policy Institute, a utility watchdog group.
“If you don’t have water to cool it, you can’t run it, right? Like it’s not a minor risk. It is a very disruptive event,” he says, “If you’re not aware of those risks, then you are not really operating your power plants responsibly.”
The coal plant sources its water by pipeline from the Green River, a tributary of the shrinking Colorado River. Julia Simon for NPR
Who ensures that coal plants have enough water?
Drought threatens coal plant operations and customers across the US. Earlier this year in its reliability assessment, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation issued a warning that drought in the Missouri River Basin could affect power plants, including coal plants, that use river water for cooling. In the west, the risk of low water is leading to new alerts for Wall Street investors.
In its latest filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, New Mexico utility PNM outlines the risks of drought to its coal plants on the San Juan river, a tributary of the Colorado. “If inadequate precipitation occurs in the watershed that supplies that region, PNM may have to decrease generation at these plants,” the utility writes, “Drought conditions or actions taken by the court system, regulators, or legislators could limit PNM’s supply of water, which would adversely impact PNM’s business.”
But for a coal plant like Jim Bridger, it can be unclear who is regulating this risk at ground-level, where power shortages could affect millions of Americans.
The Wyoming Public Service Commission (PSC) officially regulates plant operator Rocky Mountain Power, but the PSC’s chief counsel John Burbridge tells NPR his office has not taken steps to ensure there’s enough water to keep the power on. He says the PSC defers to the state engineer. “We trust that once [the utilities] have the state engineer’s permit they do have enough water,” Burbridge says, “You know it’s the old Ronald Reagan thing, ‘Trust, but verify.'”
But the state engineer Gebhart says a water right isn’t a promise of water forever for coal plants. “The granting of a water right does not guarantee an amount of water,” he says. “It allows them to use water when it’s available.”
Rocky Mountain Power spokesperson David Eskelsen says the Jim Bridger coal plant uses water mostly for the cooling cycle. The plant uses about 16 million gallons of water each day. Julia Simon for NPR
Gebhart’s office gave Jim Bridger its water rights from the Green River in 1968 – the coal plant started operating in 1974. In the scheme of Wyoming’s Green River Basin, that isn’t very old. Some local farms have water rights dating back to the 1880s, and they would have the seniority to keep their water over relatively newer users like Jim Bridger, Gebhart says.
Last week Wyoming and other upper basin states of the Colorado River missed the federal government’s deadline to propose cuts to help with the low water levels downstream at Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
It’s still unclear when this possible diversion of Colorado River water from the upper basin could happen. Eskelsen notes that Jim Bridger has a “contingency” at another nearby reservoir – although it, too, is on the Green River and also could be at risk. Ultimately while coal plants like Jim Bridger can ask the state engineer for guidance, they’re on their own to make sure they have water supplies to keep operating into the future, says water expert Patrick Tyrrell, the former Wyoming state engineer. “That’s not the state engineer’s job,” he says, “The primary responsibility is on them themselves.”
Jim Bridger doesn’t plan to close until 2037. It’s considering new technology to capture carbon emissions. The utility tells regulators that carbon capture would use about 35-40% more water. Julia Simon for NPR
Future plans for Western coal plants
The Jim Bridger coal plant isn’t scheduled to close for good until 2037. The Biden administration is aiming for a fossil-free electric grid by 2035. While some Western states like Colorado have committed to shutting down all their coal plants in the next decade, others are considering a different direction.
States like Wyoming, which produces about 40% of the country’s coal, hope to keep their coal plants running using new technology that would compress and trap their carbon emissions underground before they escape and cause global warming. In recent years, Wyoming’s legislature has mandated that utilities with coal plants explore installing “carbon capture and sequestration” technology. And landmark federal climate legislation features new incentives for carbon capture and storage, including upping the tax credit for storing carbon emissions underground from $50 to as much as $85 per ton.
But installing this technology in a mega-drought that shows no signs of relenting poses serious risks, says Avner Vengosh, professor of environmental quality at Duke University. Carbon capture requires even more water than these Western coal plants already use. In a recent filing with the Wyoming Public Service Commission, PacifiCorp estimates that carbon capture increases a coal plant’s water usage by about 35-40%.
Regardless of what happens with carbon capture and storage, Rocky Mountain Power plans to convert two of Jim Bridger’s four units from coal to natural gas in 2023. But even with gas as a fuel instead of coal, the plant would still use the same amount of water, says Eskelsen. “The boiler is still the same and the cooling cycle is still the same,” he says.
The Buckboard Marina on the Green River in Wyoming is about 50 miles southwest of the Jim Bridger coal plant. The sagebrush turns to sand marking where the Green River water has fallen. The falling water also means the marina owners must continuously adjust the ramp to the boats. Julia Simon for NPR
Locals push for less water-intensive energy
About 50 miles southwest of the Jim Bridger coal plant on the Green River is the Buckboard Marina. Families drive their boats down a long steep road to get to the shore.
Because of the drought, the water has dropped about six feet from a year ago, says Tony Valdez, co-owner of the marina, pointing to the old waterline where the sagebrush abruptly turns to sand. Now Valdez and his wife and co-owner, Jen Valdez, must continuously gauge the water to adjust the ramp to the boats. “It’s just straight down,” she says. “It’s like a slip and slide.”
Last month, the Valdez family attended a meeting at a local middle school with farmers, ranchers, and another marina owner about the shortage of water in the Colorado River Basin. “With our water dropping, you know our concern is, where’s our marina go?” Tony Valdez asks, “Where’s the water come from, if it ain’t falling from the sky?”
This drought has forced new questions about the water intensity of energy sources throughout the Colorado basin, says Wahleah Johns, the director of the office of Indian energy policy at the Department of Energy. She says that’s particularly true in the Navajo or Diné Nation, which is shifting away from coal. The Four Corners power plant, not scheduled to close until 2031, draws from the San Juan River, part of the dwindling Colorado River basin. Johns says as the Diné consider alternative energies, they’re thinking about the legacy of coal, water, and pollution.
“The biggest question that communities had is, ‘How much water is this gonna use?’ And particularly around solar power in comparison to coal.” While solar needs some water in the production of the panels, it doesn’t have a water footprint once it is installed. “We had to show, you know, very little water is gonna be used.”
Johns is a member of Diné nation, “My family, we haul water, we don’t have access to water. I mean [close to] 40% of my nation has to haul water every other day,” she says, “Those folks have an understanding of how precious water is.”
Earlier this year in a filing to federal regulators New Mexico utility PNM wrote that their coal plants, including the Four Corners Coal Plant, “may have to decrease generation” because of the drought. Susan Montoya Bryan/AP
Back at the marina in Wyoming, Tony Valdez remembers his life working in coal plants, including Jim Bridger. “My dad worked in ’em, my brother worked in ’em, I worked in ’em.” Valdez knows how much water coal plants use and says that’s why he’s interested in renewable energy.
“So why are we still pushing that sh*t up in the air when we have wind, we have solar, we have all this stuff that does not impact water?” he asks, “We’re pumping water through pipes to power plants to produce power, when there’s so many other things that you could possibly do.”
This reporting was supported with a grant from The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
Brad Lancaster, author and expert on water harvesting, talks to Mitch Tobin about how individuals and communities can make the most of rainfall and greywater to stretch local supplies.
The supplementary images in this podcast were reproduced with permission from “Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond” by Brad Lancaster and www.HarvestingRainwater.com, where you can purchase Brad’s books.
Episode highlights
Brad Lancaster, water harvester Brad is a teacher, consultant, designer of regenerative systems, and the author of the book series “Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond.”
If you’re interested in appearing on the show, please contact Water Desk Director Mitch Tobin at mitchtobin@colorado.edu. If you’d like to share your comments and questions, you can reach us at waterdesk@colorado.edu, or on Twitter and Facebook.
San Diego has shored up its water supplies by upgrading the All-American Canal, which takes Colorado River water to California’s Imperial Valley. TED WOOD
In the rolling hills around San Diego and its suburbs, the rumble of bulldozers and the whine of power saws fill the air as a slew of new homes and apartments rise up. The region is booming, its population growing at a rate of about 1 percent a year.
This, in spite of the fact that Southern California, along with much of the West, is in the midst of what experts call a megadrought that some believe may not be a temporary, one-off occurrence, but a recurring event or even a climate change-driven permanent “aridification” of the West. The drought is so bad that last year federal officials ordered cuts to water provided to the region by the Colorado River for the first time in history.
Water officials in San Diego, though, say they are not worried. “We have sufficient supplies now and in the future,” said Sandra Kerl, general manager of the San Diego Water Authority. “We recently did a stress test, and we are good until 2045” and even beyond.
San Diego is not alone. While the public image may be that booming southwestern cities such as San Diego, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Albuquerque are on the verge of a climate apocalypse, many experts agree that these metropolitan areas have enough of a water cushion to not only survive, but continue to grow into the surrounding desert for the foreseeable future, even during the worst drought in 1,200 years. Regardless of what the future holds, the search for water savings and more supply has so far been largely successful.
Major cities in the U.S. Southwest have so far been able to decouple the need for more water from growth.
It’s a remarkable case of adaptation to climate change that flies under the radar — the result of a quiet revolution in recent years in how these cities source and conserve their water supplies. From replacing water-guzzling lawns with native vegetation, to low-flow plumbing fixtures, to water recycling and desalination, to the shift of agricultural water to cities, governments in arid western regions are pursuing an all-of-the-above strategy.
“When we had severe drought in the 1980s and early 90s we lost 32 percent of our supplies for 13 months,” said Kerl. “It had a devastating impact on our economy. And San Diego said, ‘Never again.’”
These major cities have reduced their use of water so much through conservation measures, as well as creating new high-tech supplies, that they have so far been able to “decouple”the need for more water from growth. To be sure, the drought is taking a widespread toll on agriculture throughout the region, as well as on cities and towns that lack aggressive conservation measures and have only a single source of water, whether the Colorado River or groundwater. Page, Arizona, a town of roughly 7,500 people, could lose its municipal water supply if water levels in Lake Powell — already at historic lows — drop too far.
Compliance office Michelle Peters tests filtered water at the Carlsbad Desalination Plant, which provides water to San Diego County.
There are also profound ecological effects of taking so much water out of a stressed system. “The [Colorado] river itself is bearing a huge burden for this, in terms of the environmental flows of the river,” said John Fleck, writer-in-residence at the Utton Center at the University of New Mexico School of Law. “Perhaps that’s the biggest cost, because we tend to give that part of the system short shrift. The environmental cost is substantial and probably not going away.” Among other things, low flows and warmer water often lead to the drying of riparian wetlands, endangering fish and wildlife.
San Diego provides perhaps the best example of what cities are doing to make themselves drought-proof to continue business as usual in the face of deep water uncertainty. While such growth comes with serious problems — from traffic gridlock, to air and water pollution, to the destruction of nature — running out of water is not now on that list for most of the larger cities of the West.
Beginning in the 1990s, the San Diego region embarked on one of the most aggressive water conservation plans in the country. An analysis last year showed that the city’s water use dropped from 81.5 billion gallons in 2007 to 57 billion gallons in 2020 — a 30 percent decline. Nine cities surveyed in the Colorado River Basin lowered their water demand in the range of 19 to 48 percent between 2000 and 2015.
San Diego County has seen a 43 percent decline in per capita water use.
San Diego has pursued a multi-pronged approach. The city now requires an array of water-saving technology in new homes, such as low-flow toilets and showerheads. Perhaps the single biggest piece of the conservation solution is paying homeowners to tear out yards full of Kentucky bluegrass and replace them with far more water-efficient landscaping. The city-run program pays up to $4 a square foot for as much as 5,000 square feet, and so far has replaced 42 million square feet of water-thirsty lawns.
Melanie Buck of Encinitas, a suburb of San Diego, tore out a grassy lawn and replaced it with a collection of desert plants, including asparagus ferns and several types of cactuses. “It’s quite a lot of maintenance,” moving plants around as they grow, she said. “But our water bill is 50 percent less.”
Phoenix credits a similar program for its precipitous drop in water use. “In the 1970s, 80 percent of single-family homes had lush landscaping,” said Kathryn Sorensen, the former water services director for Phoenix and now research director at the Morrison Institute for Public Policy, a think tank on water issues. “Today that number is 10 percent. It’s been a wholesale change in how people use water.”
The key marker for residential use is gallons per capita per day. Right now, the average number of gallons used by homes that source their water from the San Diego County Water Authority is 135 gallons per capita per day, indoor and out, down from 235 daily gallons per capita in 1990 — a 43 percent decline.
Melanie Buck tends to desert plants in her yard in Encinitas, California.
The new water future is not just about residential conservation — the overall strategy is diversification. “Just like you don’t want to put all of your eggs in one basket in your investment portfolio,” said Kelley Gage, director of water resources for the San Diego County Water Authority, “you shouldn’t do the same with your water portfolio.”
At the time of the 1980s drought, San Diego had just one main source of water: the Metropolitan Water District, which brought Colorado River water to the city — across 242 miles of the Colorado River Aqueduct — to supply 95 percent of the San Diego region’s total. The rest came from local surface water.
Officials embarked on a search for other sources. The agricultural sector uses about 80 percent of the water in the Colorado River, and so it is the place many cities and suburbs have turned to find more.
San Diego’s single biggest source of water, secured two decades ago, is what is known as an ag-to-urban transfer. California was taking more of the Colorado River than its entitlement, and in 2003, as part of an agreement that reduced California’s reliance on the Colorado River, San Diego agreed to fund water-saving irrigation improvements for the Imperial Irrigation District — the single largest user of Colorado River water — and to lease the water that was saved.
San Diego County has made large investments in preventing leaks in the pipes that keep water flowing.
San Diego paid to line with concrete the 82-mile All American Canal — the largest irrigation canal in the U.S. — and the Coachella Canal. Unlined canals lose up to 50 percent or more of their water to seepage, and lining can reduce that loss by 95 percent.
San Diego also paid farmers to switch from flood to drip irrigation. All told, these measures freed up about 280,000 acre-feet of water. (An acre-foot provides two families with a year’s worth of water.) That transfer of savings from agricultural conservation is now the San Diego region’s largest single water source, about 55 percent of its supply. Colorado River water is only 11 percent of the total these days.
The San Diego County Water Authority has made large investments in “asset management” — the pipes that keep the water flowing. The county has 310 miles of large-diameter pipes — some of them up to 10 feet across — which deliver 900 million gallons of water a day. A major leak could spill large volumes of water in a short time, so monitoring the pipes and keeping them in good repair is an important part of conservation. Acoustic listening devices are a growing technology for saving water.
“We can go to a fire hydrant and listen for leaks,” said Martin Coghill, an operations and maintenance manager at the San Diego County Water Authority. If a leak is detected, technicians insert cameras, and in the case of the big pipes, they can lower someone in to inspect and do repairs.
This facility in Oceanside, California turns recycled water into potable water by running it through filtration tubes.
The concrete pipes the county uses have a fiber optic cable that runs inside the pipe. If any of the strengthening wires embedded in the concrete snap or otherwise break, the cable is designed to detect that sound and notify headquarters.
Water recycling is also playing an increasing role in water supply, in San Diego and elsewhere. Los Angeles has pledged to recycle all of its wastewater by 2035. Although San Diego’s climate is arid, with just 10 or fewer annual inches of precipitation, when it does rain the region captures 90 percent of the runoff in 24 reservoirs and treats that precipitation to drinking water standards.
A growing amount of wastewater is also being recycled to drinking water standards. The city of Oceanside, near San Diego, just opened the first advanced water purification facility in the region that allows so-called “toilet to tap” recycling, using ultrafiltration, reverse osmosis, and advanced oxidation to create 3 million gallons a day, about 20 percent of the city’s needs. The city of San Diego plans to have 40 percent of its potable water from similar advanced recycling by 2035.
San Diego County’s ace in the hole is North America’s largest desalination plant, capable of turning seawater into fresh water in about two hours to create 50 million gallons of potable water a day. The water is so pure that minerals have to be added to improve the taste. The downside is that it’s extremely energy intensive to operate, a big part of why it is almost twice as expensive as imported water — $2,725 for an acre-foot, versus $1,090 for imported water. Desalination also comes with serious environmental problems, including killing large numbers of fish, fish eggs, larvae, and plankton when the facilities suck in seawater.
A growing amount of sewage wastewater is being recycled to drinking water standards.
Las Vegas, where only 4 inches of rain falls each year, has dramatically upped its conservation game, and Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, has a robust cash-for-grass program that pays more than $32 a square meter. It also uses a series of hydrophones in its pipes to listen for leaks and repair them quickly. The technique was created by WaterStart, a Nevada-based think tank established by the Desert Research Institute designed to accelerate the development of innovative water technology and help startup companies that work on water conservation technology become viable.
Agriculture is also changing the way it does business. John Burr is a longtime avocado grower in Escondido, the heart of avocado growing in California. As he stood on a bluff above his avocado orchard, with a commanding view of the valley below, he explained how he and his daughter, Kyrsten, have brought precision agriculture to avocado growing.
First, they planted a high-density avocado orchard — 400 trees per acre instead of 100 — which cuts water needs in half. Dendrometers on the trees measure how much water the tree is taking up and how much it is losing to transpiration.
On Sunday mornings, John Burr looks at a spreadsheet on his computer. The California Irrigation Management Information System has 145 weather stations and two satellite systems that tell growers of all types how much water their crops have lost. “It pops out with how many inches of water we need to replace what was lost,” says Kyrsten Burr. “Then we can add precisely that much,” with micro jets that only spray water around the tree. “It’s not only more accurate, it also makes sure we are getting what the plant needs.”
Farmer John Burr next to his avocado orchard, which uses micro jets to spray water around the trees and funnels water directly to the roots.
Use has come down so much in California that Newsha Ajami, director of urban water policy at Stanford’s Water in the West program, says continued declines could upset water economics. “Everybody is still talking about investing in infrastructure,” she said. But officials need to better understand the demand for water, she says, which will continue to decrease as technology evolves.
For example, she said, California is “moving closer to small-scale recycling.” In San Francisco every commercial building over 100,000 square feet has to have an on-site recycling system that turns graywater from sinks and showers, not including sewage, into non-potable water for toilets and irrigation. One building, the Salesforce Tower, treats both graywater and sewage, saving 30,000 gallons a day. And home water recycling units are now in the picture. Water use may drop so far “that utilities could end up with stranded assets or extra capacity that isn’t utilized,” Ajami said.
How low can it go? “The decoupling can go on for a very long time,” says Fleck, especially in the U.S. where governments can afford the capital costs to assure alternative supplies. Las Vegas, for example, spent $1.5 billion to add a new outlet and massive pumps to assure a water supply from Lake Mead as levels drop. “I don’t think we know how long it goes on.” The question, he said “is at what point do cities become less livable because we have less green space around us.”
With all of these water conservation efforts, experts say that the future of cities like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and San Diego is a sufficiently wet.
“We know it’s a desert and we plan accordingly,” said Arizona’s Kathryn Sorenson. “Phoenix can survive dead pool” — the term for a nearly empty Lake Mead — “for generations. We have groundwater, we have done a good job of conservation and diversifying our portfolios. Desert cities are the oldest cities, and we will withstand the test of time.”
Correction, April 29, 2022: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the Desert Research Institute as part of the University of Nevada. The Desert Research Institute is part of the Nevada System of Higher Education but not associated with the University of Nevada.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
The confluence of the tiny San Pedro River and the much larger Gila was once one of the richest locales in one of the most productive river ecosystems in the American Southwest, an incomparable oasis of biodiversity.
The rivers frequently flooded their banks, a life-giving pulse that created sprawling riverside cienegas, or fertile wetlands; braided and beaver-dammed channels; meandering oxbows; and bosques — riparian habitats with towering cottonwoods, mesquite and willows. This lush, wet Arizona landscape, combined with the searing heat of the Sonoran Desert, gave rise to a vast array of insects, fish and wildlife, including apex predators such as Mexican wolves, grizzly bears, jaguars and cougars, which prowled the river corridors.
The confluence now is a very different place, its richness long diminished. A massive mountain of orange- and dun-colored smelter tailings, left from the days of copper and lead processing and riddled with arsenic, towers where the two rivers meet. Water rarely flows there, with an occasional summer downpour delivering an ephemeral trickle.
On a recent visit, only a few brown, stagnant pools remained. In one, hundreds of small fish gasped for oxygen. An egret that had been feeding on the fish flew off. The plop of a bull frog, an invasive species, echoed in the hot, still air.
The Gila River runs from the mountains of southern New Mexico across Arizona to the Colorado River. ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE FUND
The Gila River, which was listed by the advocacy group American Rivers in 2019 as the nation’s most endangered river, drains an enormous watershed of 60,000 square miles. Stretches have long been depleted, largely because of crop irrigation and the water demands of large cities. Now, a warmer and drier climate is bearing down on ecosystems that have been deprived of water, fragmented, and otherwise altered, their natural resilience undone by human activities.
Other desert rivers around the globe — from the Nile to the Tigris and Euphrates to the Amu Darya in Central Asia — face similar threats. Efforts are underway to restore some integrity to these natural systems, but it is an uphill battle, in part because desert rivers are more fragile than rivers in cooler, wetter places.
Last year was the second-hottest and second-driest on record in Arizona, where heat records are frequently broken. The last two years have seen fewer desert downpours, known locally as monsoons, an important source of summer river flow.
“We’re dealing with a rapidly changing climate that is becoming, overall, more dry and varied and warmer,” said Scott Wilbor, an ecologist in Tucson who studies desert river ecosystems, including the San Pedro. “We are in uncharted territory.”
Born of snowmelt and springs in the mountains of southern New Mexico, the Gila is the southernmost snow-fed river in the United States. It was once perennial, running 649 miles until it emptied into the Colorado River. As the climate warms, scientists predict that by 2050 snow will no longer fall in the Black and Mogollon ranges that form the Gila’s headwaters, depriving the river of its major source of water.
“We’re seeing a combination of long-term climate change and really bad drought,” said David Gutzler, a professor emeritus of climatology at the University of New Mexico. If the drought is prolonged, he said, “that’s when we’ll see the river dry up.”
The Gila River as it nears the Florence Diversion Dam in Arizona was almost dry by May this year.
The same scenario is playing out on the once-mighty Colorado, the Rio Grande, and many smaller Southwest rivers, all facing what is often called a megadrought. Some research indicates that a southwestern U.S. megadrought may last decades, while other scientists fear the region is threatened by a permanent aridification because of rising temperatures.
Worldwide, said Ian Harrison, a freshwater expert with Conservation International, “pretty much where there are rivers in arid areas, they are suffering through a combination of climate change and development.”
Like the Gila, many of these rivers have high degrees of endemism. “Life is often highly specialized to those particular conditions and only lives on that one river, so the impacts of loss are catastrophic,” he said.
Rivers everywhere are important for biodiversity, but especially so in the desert, where 90 percent of life is found within a mile of the river. Nearly half of North America’s 900 or so bird species use the Gila and its tributaries, including some that live nowhere else in the U.S., such as the common blackhawk and northern beardless tyrannulet. Two endangered birds, the southwestern willow flycatcher and yellow-billed cuckoo, live along the Gila and its tributaries, including the San Pedro and the Salt.
Desert rivers, of course, make life in the desert possible for people, too. Growing crops in the perpetual heat of the desert can be highly lucrative, especially if the water is free or nearly so thanks to subsidies from the federal government. Agriculture is where most of the water in the Gila goes.
A vermillion flycatcher perched near the Gila River in Safford, Arizona.
This spring, photographer Ted Wood and I made a journey along the length of the Gila, from the headwaters in New Mexico to west of Phoenix. In most of Arizona, the Gila is dry. Where it still flows, I was impressed by how such a relatively small river, under the right conditions, can be so life-giving. The trip brought home what desert rivers are up against as the climate changes, and also how much restoration, and what types, can be expected to protect the biodiversity that remains.
Our journey began at the river’s source, where Cliff Dweller Creek spills out of a shady canyon lined with Gambel oak in Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument. The creek is barely a trickle here. Above the creek, ancestral Puebloans, known as Mogollon, once lived in dwellings wedged into caves, making pottery and tending vegetable gardens. The Mogollon abandoned these canyons in the 15th century, perhaps done in by an extended drought.
From inside a Mogollon cave, I looked out at rolling hills, covered with ponderosa pine, pinyon and juniper trees. The green-hued water gains volume where three forks come together near here. Historically, the mountain snow melts slowly each spring, providing high steady flows through April and May. Flows slow to a trickle in June. In July and August, monsoons pass through and, along with frontal systems, cause flash flooding and a rise in water levels.
Flooding is a “disturbance regime,” not unlike a forest fire, that rejuvenates aging, static ecosystems. A healthy river in the mountains of the West is one that behaves like a fire hose, whipping back and forth in a broad channel over time, flash flooding and then receding, moving gravel, rocks, logs and other debris throughout the system. A flooding river constantly demolishes some sections of a river and builds others, creating new habitat — cleaning silt from gravel so fish can spawn, for instance, or flushing sediment from wetlands. A river that flows over its banks, recharges aquifers and moistens the soil so that the seedlings of cottonwoods, mesquite trees and other vegetation can reproduce. Along healthy stretches of the Gila, birds are everywhere; I spotted numerous bluebirds in the branches of emerald green cottonwoods.
Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument New Mexico, an ancestral Puebloan ruin at the headwaters of the Gila River.
The riparian ecosystem that lines the 80 or so miles of the New Mexico portion is largely intact because of the protections afforded by federal wilderness areas, the lack of a dam, and the river’s flow not being completely siphoned off for farming. This is an anomaly in a state that has lost many of its riparian ecosystems. “This is the last free-flowing river in New Mexico,” said Allyson Siwik, executive director of the Gila Conservation Coalition.
The future of the New Mexico stretch of the river is uncertain because of the possibility of more water withdrawals and the loss of snowpack. “We’ve seen flows in the last 10 years lower than we’ve ever seen,” Siwik said. This year, she said, set an all-time low on the river, with flow less than 20 percent of normal.
Undammed, the Gila River through New Mexico still floods, refreshing the Cliff-Gila valley, which contains the largest intact bosque habitat in the Lower Colorado River Basin. The valley is home to the largest concentration of non-colonial breeding birds in North America. The river is also a stronghold for threatened and endangered species, such as nesting yellow-billed cuckoos, the Gila chub, Chiricahua leopard frogs and Mexican garter snakes all live there.
At odds with efforts to keep the Gila wild are plans by a group of roughly 200 long-time irrigators in southwestern New Mexico. Each summer they divert water from the Gila to flood-irrigate pastures, which de-waters stretches of the river. The irrigators have been trying to raise money to build impoundments to take even more of their share of water, but so far have been unsuccessful, in part because of opposition from conservation groups.
Severe drought this spring combined with water overuse resulted in the drying of the Gila River in eastern Arizona and the death of the fish population.
Cattle are another threat to the river’s biological integrity here — both unfenced domestic cattle and feral cows. Cattle break down riverbanks, widen the stream and raise water temperatures. They eat and trample riparian vegetation, causing mud and silt to choke the flow, and destroy habitat for endangered species. The Center for Biological Diversity recently sued the U.S. Forest Service to force the agency to take action.
“We’re in a cow apocalypse,” said Todd Schulke, a founder of the Center for Biological Diversity. “They are even in the recovered Gila River habitat. It’s just heartbreaking.”
As the river enters Arizona, the riparian ecology remains largely intact, especially in the 23 miles of the Gila Box National Riparian Area. Here, 23,000 acres of bosque habitat is in full expression, with thick stands of cottonwoods, velvet mesquite trees and sandy beaches. It is one of only two national riparian areas in the country set aside for its outstanding biodiversity; the other is on the San Pedro River.
As the river leaves the riparian area, it undergoes a striking change: massive cotton farms near the towns of Safford, Pima, and Thatcher, first planted in the 1930s, cover the landscape. The dried, brown stalks of harvested cotton plants stand in a field, bits of fluff on top. Growing cotton in the desert — which uses six times as much water as lettuce — has long been seen as folly by critics, made possible only by hefty federal subsidies.
Farmers in Safford, Arizona pump groundwater near the Gila River to irrigate their fields.
Much of the flood pulse ecology is lost here, as the river is diverted or subject to groundwater pumping. Instead of flooding, the river cuts deeper into its channel, lowering the water table, which many plants can no longer reach. The cottonwood stands and other riparian habitats have disappeared. “You want the groundwater within five feet of the ground, but it’s mostly 8 to 12 feet,” said Melanie Tluczek, executive director of the Gila Watershed Partnership, which has been doing restoration here since 2014.
It is a harsh place for new planting. The river is dry in long stretches. Tamarisk, a pernicious invasive tree also known as salt cedar, needs to be cut down and its stumps poisoned to prevent regrowth. Small willows and Fremont cottonwoods have been planted on barren desert ground. Wire cages over infant trees keep elk, beaver and rabbits from gobbling them up.
Meanwhile, tamarisk grows prolifically, slurping up water, changing soil chemistry and the nature of flooding, robustly outcompeting natives, and increasing the risk of wildfire.
“If you can do restoration here, you can do it anywhere,” Tluczek said. She said the Gila Watershed Partnership has removed 216 acres of tamarisk along the river and planted 90 acres with new native trees. But the Gila here will never look like it did. “We can’t restore the past,” Tluczek said. “We’re going to see a floodplain that has more dryland species and fewer floodplain species.”
The Coolidge Dam in Arizona forms the San Carlos Reservoir, which is now at historic lows.
Downstream, the Coolidge Dam forms a giant concrete plug on the Gila. Built in the 1920s by the federal government, it was the result of irrational exuberance about the amount of water on the Gila and meant to supply farmers with water. Today, however, the reservoir is usually dry. Built to hold 19,500 acres of water, this year the water in the lake covered just 50 acres.
From here to Phoenix and on to the Colorado, water only occasionally flows in the Gila. Yet even the small amount of water that remains is vital to wildlife. “Where there has been water near the surface, animals smell it and will dig down in the sand in the riverbed to free it up,” Wilbor said. “You set up a camera and it’s like an African watering hole, with species after species taking turns to come use the water.”
Will the Gila River through most of Arizona to the Colorado ever be restored to a semblance of the biological jewel it once was? The chances are slim. But two pioneering efforts have brought back elements of the desiccated river.
In 2010, Phoenix completed a $100 million, eight-mile restoration of the long-dewatered Salt River where it joins the Gila and Agua Fria rivers at Tres Rios. Fed by water from the city’s sewage treatment plant across the road, this constructed complex includes 128 acres of wetlands, 38 acres of riparian corridor, and 134 acres of open water. It is thick with cattails and other vegetation, an island of green around a lake amid the sere surrounding desert.
Ramona and Terry Button run Ramona Farms on the Gila River Indian Community, where some water allocated to the tribe is being released into the Gila.
On the nearby Gila River Indian Community, meanwhile, home to the Pima — or the name they prefer, Akimel O’othham, the river people — is something called a managed area recharge. The Akimel O’othham, who share their community with the Maricopa, are believed to be the descendants of the Hohokam, an ancient agricultural civilization with a vast network of irrigation canals that was largely abandoned centuries ago. The Akimel O’othham continued to farm along the Gila in historic times until their water was stolen from them in the late 19th century by settlers who dug a canal in front of the reservation and drained it away.
After a century of the Akimel O’othham fighting for their water rights, in 2004 the Arizona Water Settlement Act provided the tribe with the largest share of Colorado River water from the Central Arizona Project, a share larger than the city of Phoenix’s allotment. The tribe is now water-rich, using much of that water to restore its tribal agricultural past, though with modern crops and methods.
Last year, some of the Colorado River water was released into the Gila to be stored in an underground aquifer and used to create a wetland.
Both of these projects, at Tres Rios and at the reservation, have created oases in a harsh desert landscape, bringing back an array of birds and wildlife, and — in the case of the Akimel O’othham — helping revitalize the cultural traditions of these river people.
“We’re not going to have rivers with native species in the Southwest unless we can protect and restore these systems,” especially with a changing climate, Siwik said. “Protecting the best, restoring the rest — or else we lose these systems that we need for our survival.”
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
Much of the South and Southern Plains faced a dangerous heat wave in July 2022, with highs well over 100 degrees for several days. Brandon Bell/Getty Images
The summer of 2022 started with a historic flood in Montana, brought on by heavy rain and melting snow, that tore up roads and caused large areas of Yellowstone National Park to be evacuated.
In between, wildfires raged through California, Arizona and New Mexico on the background of a megadrought in Southwestern U.S. that has been more severe than anything the region has experienced in at least 1,200 years. Near Albuquerque, New Mexico, a five-mile stretch of the Rio Grande ran dry for the first time in 40 years. Persistent heat waves lingered over many parts of the country, setting temperature records.
The United States is hardly alone in its share of climate disasters.
In Pakistan, record monsoon rains inundated more than one-third of the country, killing over 1,500 people. In India and China, prolonged heat waves and droughts dried up rivers, disrupted power grids and threatened food security for billions of people.
In Europe, heat waves set record temperatures in Britain and other places, leading to severe droughts and wildfires in many parts of the continent. In South Africa, torrential rains brought flooding and mudslides that killed more than 400 people. The summer may have come to an end on the calendar, but climate disasters will surely continue.
This isn’t just a freak summer: Over the years, such extreme events are occurring in increasing frequency and intensity.
Climate change is intensifying these disasters
The most recent international climate assessment from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found significant increases in both the frequency and intensity of extreme temperature and precipitation events, leading to more droughts and floods.
A recent study published in the scientific journal Nature found that extreme flooding and droughts are also getting deadlier and more expensive, despite an improving capacity to manage climate risks. This is because these extreme events, enhanced by climate change, often exceed the designed levels of such management strategies.
Flash flooding swept through mountain valleys in eastern Kentucky in July 2022, killing more than three dozen people. It was one of several destructive flash floods. Seth Herald/AFP via Getty Images
Extreme events, by definition, occur rarely. A 100-year flood has a 1% chance of happening in any given year. So, when such events occur with increasing frequency and intensity, they are a clear indication of a changing climate state.
The term “global warming” can sometimes be misleading, as it seems to suggest that as humans put more heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the world is going to get a bit warmer everywhere. What it fails to convey is that warming temperatures also lead to a more violent world with more extreme climate disasters, as we saw this past summer.
Climate models showed these risks were coming
Much of this is well-understood and consistently reproduced by climate models.
As the climate warms, a shift in temperature distribution leads to more extremes. The magnitudes of changes in extreme temperature are often larger than changes in the mean. For example, globally, a 1 degree Celsius increase in annual average temperature is associated with 1.2 C to 1.9 C (2.1 Fahrenheit to 3.4 F) of increase in the annual maximum temperature.
Heat waves, like the heat dome over the South in July 2022, can hit outdoor workers especially hard. Brandon Bell/Getty Images
In addition, global warming causes changes in the vertical profile of the atmosphere and equator-to-pole temperature gradients, leading to changes in how the atmosphere and ocean move. The temperature difference between equator and the poles is the driving force for global wind. As the polar regions warm at much higher rates then the equator, the reduced temperature difference causes a weakening of global winds and leads to a more meandering jet stream.
Some of these changes can create conditions such as persistent high-pressure systems and atmosphere blocking that favor more frequent and more intense heat waves. The heat domes over the Southern Plains and South in June and the West in September are examples.
The initial warming can be further amplified by positive feedbacks. For example, warming increases snow melt, exposing dark soil underneath, which absorbs more heat than snow, further enhancing the warming.
Warming of the atmosphere also increases its capacity to hold water vapor, which is a strong greenhouse gas. Therefore, more water vapor in the air leads to more warming. Higher temperatures tend to dry out the soil, and less soil moisture reduces the land’s heat capacity, making it easier to heat up.
These positive feedbacks further intensify the initial warming, leading to more heat extremes. More frequent and persistent heat waves lead to excessive evaporation, combined with decreased precipitation in some regions, causing more severe droughts and more frequent wildfires.
This increased humidity leads to heavier rainfall events. In addition, storm systems are fueled by latent heat, or the large amount of energy released when water vapor condenses to liquid water. Increased moisture content in the atmosphere also enhances latent heat in storm systems, increasing their intensity. Extreme heavy or persistent rainfall leads to increased flooding and landslides, with devastating social and economic consequences.
Even though it’s difficult to link specific extreme events directly to climate change, when these supposedly rare events occur with increasing frequency in a warming world, it is hard to ignore the changing state of our climate.
A family had to be airlifted from their home in eastern Kentucky after it was surrounded by floodwater in July 2022. Michael Swensen/Getty Images
The new abnormal
So this past summer might just provide a glimpse of our near future, as these extreme climate events become more frequent.
To say this is the new “normal,” though, is misleading. It suggests that we have reached a new stable state, and that is far from the truth.
Without serious effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions, this trend toward more extreme events will continue. Things will keep getting worse, and this past summer will become the norm a few years or decades down the road – and eventually, it will seem mild, like one of those “nice summers” we look back on fondly with nostalgia.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
Eric Whyte, Hay Manager for the Ute Mountain Ute Farm & Ranch Enterprise near Towaoc, Colo., holds a pot that was used to hold water by the Anasazi People in the Four Corners area of Colorado thousands of years ago. The pot was found in a field when work began clearing land for the farm and ranch enterprise. Credit: Dean Krakel, special to Fresh Water News
Colorado and three other Upper Colorado River Basin states have, for the first time in history, embarked on a series of formal meetings to find a way to negotiate jointly with some of the largest owners of Colorado River water rights: tribal communities.
The states, which include New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and Colorado, began meeting with six tribes several weeks ago, according to Rebecca Mitchell, director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board who also represents Colorado on the Upper Colorado River Basin Commission.
The tribes are the Jicarilla Apache Nation in New Mexico, the Navajo Nation in New Mexico and Utah, the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and the Paiute Tribe in Utah, as well as Colorado’s Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, based in Towaoc, and Southern Ute Indian Tribe, whose lands lie in and around Ignacio.
“We have four Upper Basin states and the six Upper Basin tribes, 10 sovereigns, in the room together saying that the table that is set is not the table that works for all, and we are going to create our own table. They are really focused on solutions and being part of the burden and part of the success,” Mitchell said.
The six tribes are among 30 tribal communities in the seven-state Colorado River Basin, which, combined, have paper water rights to roughly 25% to 30% of the river’s flows, more than 3.2 million acre-feet of water.
Source: The Status of Tribal Water Rights in the Colorado River Basin Policy Brief, Water and Tribes Initiative, 2021. Graphic by Chas Chamberlin
The news came Sept. 16 at the Colorado River District’s Annual Seminar in Grand Junction. The river district represents 15 counties on Colorado’s West Slope and is responsible for policy and managing the river within those boundaries.
For more than 100 years, modern water management in the American West has been conducted by the federal and state governments, without formal tribal leaders.
Under Western water law, water has to be measured, its historical use rates certified, and it has to be diverted so that it can be put to beneficial use. Tribal water rights are treated differently. Tribes’ water rights date back to the time when the reservations were created, based on a law that was applied retroactively – many reservations were established before the law existed and so the amount of water they received was never quantified or adjudicated. For this reason, many tribes have had to settle their water rights within the state or states where their reservation lies— some of those negotiations remain unsettled. Many tribes have never measured their water use and, even among those tribes with quantified water rights, many have never had the money to build the dams, pipelines and reservoirs that allow them to put the resource to use.
Roughly 60% of the water the tribes legally possess has never been developed or integrated into the region’s hierarchy of water rights, though they are often some of the oldest, according to tribal estimates.
Daryl Vigil, Jicarilla Apache Nation Water Administrator, said tribal leaders want the federal government to create a new framework to right past wrongs and establish a process for tribes to participate in critical river negotiations.
For too long, he said, “The policy-making process has been left up to the seven basin states and the federal government. We want to speak on behalf of our own water. We’ve heard a whole lot about scarcity and pain,” he told the Grand Junction audience of roughly 400 people. “And we know a whole lot about that. We’re asking, we’re demanding participation because it is a basic human right.”
During the past five years, as the Colorado River has sunk deeper into crisis, the tribes have begun working together and asserting their right to negotiate with federal, state and local water agencies to determine how their water will be used, how badly needed tribal water systems can be built, and how tribes can be fairly compensated for the water that has long been used by others.
Despite increased public pressure to recognize the tribes’ water rights and to include them in critical negotiations and decision-making processes, they continue to be shut out, including in the most recent talks over how to achieve the 2 million to 4 million acre-feet of cuts that U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton ordered back in June in order to keep lakes Mead and Powell operating.
Another set of critical talks set to begin in the near future still has no mechanism for including the tribes. These are talks that will determine how to operate the river well into the future, after the current framework for river operations, known as the 2007 Interim Guidelines, expires at the end of 2026. Tribes were not included in the talks leading up to the 2007 agreement either.
Lorelei Cloud, a member of the Southern Ute Tribal Council, said traditional water users in the Colorado River Basin won’t survive unless tribal waters are legally recognized, developed and put to use by tribes and other users in the basin.
“We are a sovereign government. We should be considered just as a state would be. If you think that we shouldn’t be involved, then don’t include our 30% allocation for anyone else’s use … We need to be included in every one of these conversations. My reservation was established in 1868. We are first in time first in line. You cannot discount us,” she said.
Jerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.
Fresh Water News is an independent, nonpartisan news initiative of Water Education Colorado. WEco is funded by multiple donors. Our editorial policy and donor list can be viewed at wateredco.org
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
In July, Cold Mountain Ranch and the Colorado Water Trust penned an agreement they hope will improve the Crystal River’s streamflow in dry years. The contract compensates the Ranch owners, Bill Fales and Marj Perry, for adjusting the timing of their water diversions when late summer flows dip.
The Crystal River has its headwaters in the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness, but as the river descends through the wide pastures above the Town of Carbondale, more than 30 agricultural diversions, representing around 300 cubic feet per second (cfs) of water rights, pull water from the Crystal and its tributaries to irrigate around 4,800 acres of land. In drought years, which are becoming more frequent, sections of the Crystal River run dry.
“A river is like a circulatory system,” says Alyson Meyer Gould, staff attorney & policy director for the water trust, “if you have a point where the circulatory system doesn’t work, it can have negative effects both upstream and downstream.”
A 2016 report on the Crystal River found there are specific stretches of the lower Crystal River that are most impaired, primarily after major ditches divert water from the river and before their return flows rejoin the Crystal downstream. This change to the river’s hydrology can impact water temperature, habitat quality and habitat availability, diminishing the ecosystem.
Cold Mountain Ranch is right next to one such beleaguered section of the Crystal River. The property has been in Marj Perry’s family since 1924. A cow-calf operation, the ranch irrigates several hundred acres for pasture and hay, utilizes grazing permits on nearby public lands and leases pasture nearby. In a typical year, Fales flood irrigates from early May through early October, moving water via ditches around his property in a three-week cycle. Fales gets two cuttings of hay, and spring and fall pasture with their water rights.
Under the new six-year agreement with the Colorado Water Trust, when river flows dip to 40 cfs or below, Cold Mountain Ranch will decide whether to enact the diversion coordination agreement. The ranch will be paid a $5,000 signing bonus for entering the updated agreement, an acknowledgment of the time and effort required to negotiate such a contract.
In addition to the bonus, for each cfs per day — up to 20 days total per year in up to five years — that they don’t divert during the contract period, they will be paid $250. The agreement will lift when flows hit 55 cfs. If the ranch is able to enact the agreement for their maximum decreed flow rate for the 100 potential days in the agreement, they could be paid $150,000 over five years.
Says Fales, “It’s the right thing to do. I’m not sure it’s a perfect thing to do, but I try not to let perfect be the enemy of the good. We’ll try it, we’ll see if it works and see what we learn from it.”
This is the second time that Cold Mountain Ranch and the Colorado Water Trust have entered such an agreement. The first ran from 2018 to 2020 but was never implemented. In 2018, flows in the Crystal were so low that “there was not enough water available to result in significant benefits instream,” according to the water trust. In 2019, flows were high enough that the threshold was never met. In 2020, heat and drought meant the ranch couldn’t afford to give up any water and still grow the hay and pasture they needed to feed their cows.
The water for this agreement will come from the Helms Ditch, which can divert up to around 6 cfs. In late summer this can be about 30% of the ranch’s available water. About half those rights were adjudicated in 1903 and the other half in 1936, making the diversion significantly more senior than the environmental in-stream flows on the river, which date to the 1970s. Cold Mountain Ranch uses water from three ditches, but the Helms Ditch is not shared with any neighbors, which makes it an easier candidate for an agreement with the water trust.
Bill Fales pulls debris from the Helms Ditch, which diverts water from the Crystal River. Photo by Olivia Emmer
One barrier to in-stream water conservation is the fact that water voluntarily left in the river can simply be diverted by another user downstream. In this case, the agreement is designed to alleviate drought stress on a concise stretch of stream, an area that in the dry year of 2012 was completely dewatered. If the water stays in the river for as little as a mile or two, it can make a big difference. As Heather Tattersall Lewin, director of science and policy at the Roaring Fork Conservancy explains, “As little as 6 cfs can make a difference in temperature resiliency, the existence of a cool pool versus a shallow riffle, or the ability for a fish to move from pool to pool or not.”
This agreement with Cold Mountain Ranch is not the only one of its kind for the Colorado Water Trust. In 2012, when much of the state was in a severe drought, there were insufficient laws in place to protect water users who wanted to conserve. In 2013, the Colorado Legislature passed Senate Bill 13-19, allowing some water users to temporarily reduce their water use without jeopardizing their legal rights. Without that protection, a water user who conserved could legally be considered to be abandoning their valuable rights to water, a rule often referred to as “use it or lose it.”
Senate Bill 13-19 was first used by the Colorado Water Trust and a rancher on Willow Creek in 2016. Willow Creek is a tributary of the Colorado River southwest of Rocky Mountain National Park. The rancher had noticed Willow Creek sometimes ran dry during the late summer months and reached out to the water trust. That agreement has been used to restore flows in 2016, 2021 and 2022. According to the water trust, “The project restores a fairly small amount of water to the stream, but because there are no other diverters immediately downstream, that additional water helps to keep Willow Creek connected to the Colorado River.” This style of agreement has since been drawn up by the water trust for four other projects, including Cold Mountain Ranch.
Climate change is impacting both the supply and timing of flows in streams like the Crystal River. Average peak runoff is moving to earlier in the season, extending the amount of time in late summer when streams run low. Warmer temperatures make the soil thirstier, so more snowmelt gets absorbed by the land instead of turning into runoff, even when snowpacks are typical, increasing the frequency of low-flow years.
“The Colorado Water Trust sees diversion agreements as one of many tools in the toolbox to improve flows in Colorado Rivers in the face of climate change,” says Blake Mamich, water transactions coordinator for the water trust.
For some water users, dry years will make changing their diversions more challenging — many agricultural water users on the Crystal River and its tributaries already experience water shortages in dry years. But, continues Mamich, “these agreements may be advantageous to agricultural producers in sub-optimal production years, as a way to diversify income while supporting the health of the river.”
Agriculture represents the majority of water use in Colorado, so ranchers and farmers will need to be part of any major water conservation strategy. But it’s not as simple as just buying agricultural water rights. Farms and ranches around the state are a significant part of the state’s economy and lifestyle — permanently drying them up can have profound negative effects on local communities.
That’s why the water trust is trying these voluntary and temporary agreements, hoping to find a solution that benefits both the environment and agriculture. But, in the quest to improve flows around the state, the water trust uses many statutory tools to get more water in rivers, including purchasing and leasing water rights, creating agreements around the timing of reservoir releases, and more.
For the Crystal River, water from Cold Mountain Ranch is just a start. The Crystal River Management Plan cites a need for 25 cfs during severe drought to meet goals for maintaining the ecosystem. The agreement between the water trust and the ranch will, at most, contribute 6 cfs for just 20 days of the year. To continue to build the river’s resilience in the face of climate change, Mamich says it will likely take a combination of various tools, from new infrastructure to additional diversion agreements with more water rights holders in the watershed.
Olivia Emmer is a freelance journalist based in Carbondale, Colorado. She can be reached at olivia@soprissun.com.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
Fresh Water News is an independent, nonpartisan news initiative of Water Education Colorado. WEco is funded by multiple donors. Our editorial policy and donor list can be viewed at wateredco.org
“You’re looking at the most endangered fish in North America,” Zane Olsen, the manager of the Ouray National Fish Hatchery tells me as he points to a deep open-topped water tank. Inside are dozens of juvenile bonytail, the rarest of four endangered native Colorado River fish species and one Olsen and his colleagues are trying to bring back from the brink of extinction.
When I arrived at the hatchery one clear morning in May, Olsen was already soggy. Fish eggs mottled his pink polo shirt, and the tall, rangy fellow didn’t seem to have a moment to stand still. The hatchery essentially functions like a fertility clinic for fish, and this was the one day a year that it spawns the razorback sucker, another endangered fish that makes up the bulk of the hatchery work. (The Colorado pikeminnow and the humpback chub, the other two endangered Colorado River basin fish, are raised elsewhere. ) Three days earlier, hatchery workers had injected the razorback with hormones to ripen their eggs, and now they had a short window for capturing them. I’d come to help with the spawning and to learn more about how the endangered fish are faring after more than two decades of drought in the West.
Found nowhere else in the world, the native razorback has occupied the waterways of the Colorado River basin for at least 3 million years, one reason why Olsen says they’re known as the “dinosaurs” of the Colorado. Known as “detritivores,” the bottom-feeding fish were once an important part of the river’s food chain because they nosh on dead plant and animal matter that might otherwise build up and cause disease while returning essential nutrients to the ecosystem. The fish have adapted to the harsh monsoon-to-drought cycles of the desert rivers that flood with melted mountain snowpack in the spring and are parched in the late summer. Razorback suckers can grow up to three feet long, 80 pounds, and live for 50 or 60 years. But such geriatric monster fish are rare in the wild today.
The native fish have not fared so well over the past century since humans began trying to make the western desert bloom by damming the Colorado and its tributaries, a watershed that was once one of the most biologically diverse in North America. “They’re a bellwether for the health of the entire river ecosystem, from Wyoming to the Gulf of California,” says Taylor McKinnon, senior public lands advocate at the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity.
Spring storm clouds over the Green River in the Ouray National Wildlife Refuge March near Ouray, Utah on the Uintah & Ouray Reservation. Russel Albert Daniels
The past two years have been especially brutal, as the winter runoff has dwindled and the worst drought in the West in at least 1200 years have pushed the Colorado river towards catastrophic ecological collapse. The plight of the razorback and the other endangered native Colorado River basin fish, says McKinnon, are “a concrete, real-world example of how climate change magnifies a whole slate of existing threats to endangered fish.”
The US Fish and Wildlife Service first listed the razorback as endangered in 1991, and the species would be extinct in the Upper Basin but for the hatchery program, which was established in 1996 as part of the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program and is funded by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The program has been successful enough that last year, FWS proposed downlisting the razorback from “endangered” to merely “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. But the extreme mega-drought of the past two years makes that proposal seem wildly optimistic.
“We’ve had a series of dry years,” says Bart Miller, the healthy rivers director for Western Resource Advocates that is a partner in the recovery program. “There’s less water in the rivers, and that’s having an impact on fish,” he says. “Lower flows mean higher temperatures” that benefit invasive species, while the lower water levels can leave the fish stranded when their habitat gets fragmented into pools.
The level of water stored in Colorado basin reservoirs has plunged precipitously during the past 20 years, and even more dramatically in the past two. At 27 percent capacity, Lake Mead, behind Hoover Dam, is so low that human remains are resurfacing from the bottom. Lake Powell, created by the Glen Canyon Dam in 1963, has dropped 165 feet since its creation and is at 25 percent capacity. If it falls another 43 feet, the turbines in the dam will cease to function, and about 5 million people, including members of the Navajo Nation, will have to find another source of electricity.
To protect these reservoirs, the seven states that rely on the river to supply 40 million people with water are scrambling to find a way to voluntarily cut consumption by as much as 30 percent to head off the crisis. But this summer, water managers and state officials failed to come to any sort of agreement on how to make those cuts, and the US Bureau of Reclamation, which controls the dams, is now poised to impose what promise to be painful federal water mandates on the states. There are so many competing interests—agriculture, real estate development and golf courses, hydropower companies, Native American tribes who’ve been screwed out of water rights for a century—all claiming a share of the ever-shrinking river. Even the motorboat lobby, houseboat aficionados, and Jet Ski enthusiasts (collectively known as “Powellheadz”) have organized to demand that the Bureau refill Lake Powell to bring back marinas recently shuttered because of low water levels. Meanwhile, environmentalists are pushing to kill off “Lake Foul” for good by (metaphorically) blowing up the hated Glen Canyon Dam, as the writer Edward Abbey proposed in his memorable 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang.
Which brings me back to those ancient fish lazing about in the tanks and ponds of the Ouray hatchery. Because of their protected status, the chunky tuba-lipped fish are supposed to have some rights to the Colorado River water, too. “These fish exist nowhere else in the world,” says Matthew Breen, the native aquatics project leader for the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources’ Northeastern Regional Office. “That’s something worth preserving, right?”
But as with Lake Powell, their future does not look especially bright, despite the best efforts of the hatchery workers who were trying to coax some eggs out of a couple of tanks full of ripened razorback suckers.
The Ouray National Fish Hatchery is a small facility at the northern end of the Ouray National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Utah, a 16-mile stretch along the Green River designated as a sanctuary for migrating birds in 1960. The Green River is the Colorado’s largest tributary, and in the refuge, its muddy waters ripple through a lovely riparian space full of cottonwood galleries, mule deer, elk, migrating birds, endangered fish, and a species of endangered hookless cactus. It’s a critical habitat for the razorback, and in some ways, the fate of refuge seems nearly as precarious as that of the imperiled fish sheltered there. This modest Eden nested between the Uinta and Wasatch mountains is completely surrounded by the major oil and gas fields of Utah’s Uinta Basin, which local environmentalists have dubbed “Mordor” in reference to the industrial hellscape of J.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
Holding pools for endangered fish at the Ouray National Fish Hatchery. Russel Albert Daniels
Oil companies have been trying for years to tap the oil and gas reserves underneath the refuge, where surface rights are owned by the Fish and Wildlife Service but the mineral rights underground are still controlled by a collection of private interests and the state of Utah. In 2013, Thurston Energy applied to drill two test wells mere feet from the fish hatchery. Fish and Wildlife Service employees responded with alarm about the potential impact on the endangered fish through groundwater contamination and potential oil spills in the Green River, not to mention the health of the hatchery workers who’d be exposed to the emissions.
“As you can understand, a fish hatchery is only as good as its water source,” reads one 2013 report obtained by the Center for Biological Diversity through a public records request.
“Contamination of the water supply to Ouray NFH could cause a complete loss of the facility and require a complete relocation of the entire operation. The Recovery Program estimates that the replacement cost of the facility alone is $10 million… estimates do not include the high recovery value of the fish housed at the facility, the loss of genetic material, or the protracted length to achieve recovery if these recovery resources were lost. Because the Ouray NFH contains resources that are priceless, rare, require long-term work, and are critical to recovery, special risk management must be considered…Overall, it may be impossible to adequately protect the Ouray NFH under the current proposed action and location of the proposed oil wells.”
A year later, oil prices plunged and the proposal languished. But in 2019, the Trump administration approved Thurston’s proposal to drill two wells inside the refuge, though farther away from the hatchery. Last fall, the state of Utah issued final permits. “Most of the oil and gas wells are located away from the river floodplain,” a US Fish and Wildlife Service spokesperson explains via email. “While the potential for spills can pose a risk, they have been rare.”
The entrance to the refuge is on State Route 88, directly across from a couple of oil pumpjacks, which cloaked what should have been a pristine area with a faintly industrial stink. Happily, when I entered the fish hatchery, a nondescript, low-slung concrete building, it smelled more like fish than petroleum products. Olsen provided a quick tour—quick because most of the work took place in one large room full of fish tanks. Curling pictures of fish and yellowing newspaper clippings adorned bulletin boards in the lobby, which was the extent of the visitor center. The main room had a high warehouse ceiling criss-crossed with PVC and other water pipes and a network of metal grates along the floor for drainage. A sign over a walk-in fridge declared “fish food storage.”
(Lt to rt) Zane Olsen, Trent Thompson, and Bruce Haines at the Ouray National Fish Hatchery near Ouray, Utah. Russel Albert Daniels
With a modest budget of about $640,000 in 2022, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the hatchery is surprisingly low-tech; only three full-time employees work there, so it relies on volunteers to help with the spawning. Today, with promises of burgers on the grill and fresh watermelon for lunch, Olsen has roped in the facility maintenance man Trenton Thompson; Bruce Haines, a retired former Fish and Wildlife Service staffer; and a couple of guys who’ve come down from the trout hatchery at Jones Hole to assist the permanent staff.
A handful of workers in wellies joked with each other over the low roar of water pumps churning a dozen or so fish tanks that looked like smaller versions of above-ground swimming pools. But they took the work seriously. When photographer Russel Daniels, who’d come with me, inquired whether Olsen had ever eaten one of the fish, he and his colleagues recoiled with genuine horror. “That’s a $10,000 plate,” an unsmiling Olsen informed him, citing the steep fines and possible jail time for harming the rare fish.
After my tour, I don a big yellow rubber apron and join the huddle around one of the big fish tanks for a tutorial on fish spawning. Thompson’s facility maintenance title vastly understates the scope of his duties. I watch as he expertly extracts a female fish, which is about two feet long, from a water tank and holds it for Olsen, who explains that the fish are equipped with PIT tags—short for Passive Integrated Transponder—that track them after they are released into the wild and help ensure that the spawning involves the right genetic mix. (No ichthyological intermarriage here!) He waves a wand over the fish to log the data from PIT tag before drying the fish off with a towel he throws over his shoulder like a chef. It’s important to keep the ladies dry, he explains, because razorback sperm, which they’ll mix with the harvested eggs, is activated by water, and will live for only 60 seconds once it gets wet.
(Lt to rt) Zane Olsen, Trent Thompson, and Bruce Haines express eggs and milt from a razorback sucker for incubation. Russel Albert DanielsBruce Haines with express eggs and milt from a razorback sucker. Russel Albert Daniels
Thompson cradles the big fish as Olsen gently massages its soft white belly and sends a stream of eggs squirting out into a plastic Ziploc bag Haines holds awkwardly under its tail. The process is not unlike milking a cow. Thompson plops the fish back into another tank and pulls out another victim and I get to take over the belly rubs.
Olsen asks if I want to hold one of the aquatic dinosaurs myself. Of course, I do! Spawning endangered razorbacks might be one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. But the stakes seem high. I imagine the headline: “Reporter drops, kills rare fish.” Luckily, when I reach into the tank and pull her out by the tail, the razorback flops only a little. I carefully cover her eyes to calm her while Thompson rubs his hand along her underside. I try to explain to her that the misery will be short and that it’s for a good cause. She has some heft to her and seems like a hearty soul for a rare fish. She doesn’t protest, soon gives up her eggs, and I return my charge to her little pool.
After adding sperm to the bag and giving the mix a tannic acid wash to prevent clumping and fungus growth, workers take the fertilized eggs to a special isolation room designed to keep out parasites and bacteria and transfer them to special jars for incubation. With luck, nine days later, at least 10,000 fry will appear. In the wild, they would feed on zooplankton but here will subsist on brine shrimp from the Great Salt Lake for about two years, graduating from the tanks to half-acre long rubber-lined ponds.
Holding a million gallons of filtered water, the ponds are covered with ropes and netting to help keep out the cormorants, osprey, and other shorebirds that view the fish-rich ponds as an “all-you-can-eat chuck-a-rama,” says Thompson, who occasionally has to deploy a rifle loaded with M-80 fireworks to scare off the predators. After about two years, once the fish reach 24 inches long, they’re released into the wild. About 80 percent will make it to the river, Olsen says.
What he doesn’t say is that the fish struggle once they’ve been released, and few of them will reach their natural lifespan of 40 or 50 years. Breen says the last native population of elder fish started to disappear in the early 2000s. In the past few years, however, wildlife experts have started to see some adult razorbacks in the river that had been released from captivity in 2014 and 2015, a hopeful sign. And recently, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, they’ve seen the “first confirmed wild-recruited razorback sucker in the Upper Basin since the 1990s.”
“Without the hatchery,” Breen says, “none of it would have been possible.
The Ouray hatchery is just one part of the Upper Colorado Endangered Fish Recovery Program, a collaborative effort created in 1988 by water users, electric companies, state and federal agencies, Native American tribes, and conservation groups to try to recover the four endangered fish species that once were plentiful in the Colorado River. Essentially the very same entities that had endangered the fish in the first place came together to try to save them. This wasn’t solely an exercise in benevolent conservation. The program was specifically created to head off lawsuits under the Endangered Species Act, which required states to consider things like fish habitat when green-lighting projects that would drain more water from the river basin. Nonetheless, the cooperative program is a sea change from decades past when many of these same agencies were actively trying to kill off some of the native fish in the interest of economic development.
Some of the same agencies now involved in the endangered fish recovery program are partly responsible for hastening their demise. In 1962, the US Bureau of Reclamation completed the construction of the Flaming Gorge dam on the Green River, about 75 miles north of the Ouray refuge. Promoters had promised the dam would provide immense economic benefits to the region, not just by providing water for irrigation and development, but by creating a massive reservoir stocked with non-native trout to attract visitors who liked sport fishing.
Even then, western water managers knew that such artificial lakes would fill up quickly with trash fish like carp that not only devoured all the native fish but also the prized rainbow trout. So state agencies in Utah and Wyoming decided to give the farm-raised trout a head start by spreading the poison rotenone over nearly 445 miles of the Green River before the dam was closed. In just three days, 450 tons of fish were killed. Dead fish were found as far away as Dinosaur National Monument, where state officials had promised the fish would not be affected. The episode was such a scandal that then-Interior Secretary Stewart Udall sent a letter to the chairman of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists apologizing for the disaster; he promised nothing like that would happen again.
A razorback sucker is an endangered, native fish of the Colorado River watershed, which it has inhabited for over 3 million years. They are found nowhere else on earth. Russel Albert Daniels
And yet, what fish the poison didn’t kill, the dam did. The water released from Flaming Gorge was too cold for the razorback to thrive, and the change in water flow destroyed the natural side channels and wetlands of the Green River, where the native fish historically spawn and hide out from predators until they’re old enough to survive in the deep river water. Thanks to the recovery program, the Bureau of Reclamation has tried to time water releases from Flaming Gorge to mimic the natural flows of the river to give the razorback larvae a fighting chance. And more recently, scientists have been working with the bureau to create new wetlands on the Green specifically for fish habitat, which has proven moderately successful.
Still, new threats to the fish from the climate-change-driven drought are significant—though not always obvious. Historically, most of the funding for the fish recovery program has come from the sale of hydropower at the very dams that endanger the fish in the first place. But thanks to the drought and low water levels, the hydropower system on the river has been producing about 40 percent less electricity this year. As a result, the US Bureau of Reclamation has had to cover the fish recovery program’s deficit.
Meanwhile, demand for water continues to grow in the West, along with the population in states like Utah that are dependent on the Colorado River. Utah—which uses more water per capita than any southwestern state and has the lowest water rates—has refused to impose measures adopted in other basin states to cut down on wasteful water use, such as mandating the use of water-efficient plumbing fixtures in new construction or raising water rates to encourage conservation. Much of the water used in Utah isn’t even metered, a basic requirement for figuring out how much is getting used by whom and how much can be cut.
To keep those Glen Canyon turbines spinning, Lake Powell needs more water. But without big cuts in consumption, the obvious solution for filling the reservoir is stealing the water from somewhere else in the system. Flaming Gorge reservoir on the Green River, which also happens to be the habitat for the razorback suckers raised at the hatchery, is one of the few reservoirs in the basin that is anywhere near capacity, and thus a ripe target for state agencies looking to avoid other, painful cuts to water consumption.
The Bureau of Reclamation announced earlier this year that it would release 500,000 acre-feet of water from Flaming Gorge to try to stabilize the reservoirs downstream. In the short term, Breen says, those releases should be good for the endangered fish, as they’re timed to benefit the razorback sucker’s reproductive cycle. But it is ultimately robbing Peter to pay Paul. The Green River water flows have already fallen 20 percent since 2000, and the Colorado River Basin has been oversubscribed for decades, with states claiming rights to more water than remains in the river. Its major reservoirs have been drained as the winter snowpack has diminished. It was a record 107 degrees in Salt Lake City this week.
“The system is approaching a tipping point, and without action we cannot protect the system and the millions of Americans who rely on this critical resource,” M. Camille Calimlim Touton, commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, said during a news conference in August. “Protecting the system means protecting the people of the American West.”
Meanwhile, the biggest ongoing threat to the Colorado’s endangered fish is other, nonnative fish. Only 12 fish are native to the Upper Colorado River Basin, Breen says. But now more than 50 species compete in the rivers. Many that were intentionally introduced to promote sport fishing are highly predatory in a way the razorback and others have not evolved to survive.
“Warmer, low flows also benefit invasive fish species like smallmouth bass, exacerbating the problems posed by that species,” a Fish and Wildlife Service spokesperson told me in an email. “These nonnative smallmouth bass spawn and hatch in summer, as do the Colorado pikeminnow, and grow at a much faster rate than native fishes.”
The recovery program spends more than $2 million a year trying to eliminate the non-native fish from the Green River and elsewhere in the system—a move that is not always popular with local anglers who like to fish for the bass. “For the record: I love smallmouth bass,” says Breen. “I grew up fishing for smallmouth bass in the Midwest. But that’s where they’re supposed to be. Bass are very predacious, and they’re not supposed to be in that river.”
The smallmouth bass invasion had been somewhat contained to the upper Colorado watershed, but this summer, as the river has dried up, the reservoir in Lake Powell is allowing warm water to flow through the Glen Canyon dam, and with it, the smallmouth bass. Much to the dismay of conservationists and wildlife managers, the bass are now starting to make a foothold in Grand Canyon, the last pristine habitat for the humpback chub, another native Colorado River fish whose status had been downgraded by the Fish and Wildlife Service from endangered to threatened. The arrival of the bass threatens to undo all that progress.
That’s one reason why McKinnon is skeptical that the fish like the razorback raised in a hatchery are sufficiently recovered enough to come off the endangered species list. “The program has proven to be an excellent exercise in feeding non-native bass,” he says, “but not creating the self-sustaining populations that recovery requires.” He says a massive public investment has been made in the hatchery program, but “those fish still aren’t able to successfully reproduce in the wild. They’re able to spawn, but the juvenile fish are consumed by nonnative fish.”
In March, Breen co-authored a paper in Fisheries, a journal of the American Fisheries Society, arguing that what the Colorado’s endangered fish really need to thrive is simply more water in the river, with natural flows unimpeded by dams and other artificial obstructions. “Unless we prioritize conservation of riverine ecosystems, native species populations will likely continue to decline as flows are further reduced by climate change and human water use,” the authors conclude.
The White River near the confluence with the Green River. Russel Albert Daniels
More water is the obvious solution but also improbable. Real estate developers committed to lawns and golf courses, alfalfa farmers, and big California cities are unlikely to be willing to sacrifice water to save some big, ugly fish no one wants to eat. Onlyone major tributary still has the natural water flow required to sustain the endangered native fish, and that’s the White River, which meets the Green not far from the Ouray hatchery. But water companies long have had their eyes on the White for a dam to fuel more development in Colorado.
Until and unless there’s more water in the Colorado River basin, the future of the razorback sucker will depend a lot on the Ouray hatchery. At the end of my visit, I snapped a photo of Olsen holding up a life-sized model of the Colorado pikeminnow, which grows up to six feet. He gives me some endangered fish trading cards, courtesy of the recovery program. We talk about how this messy, wet job he does is almost all that stands between an ancient fish and extinction. I suggest he’s doing the lord’s work among the water dinosaurs. Olsen gives me a crooked smile, “It is pretty cool, isn’t it?”
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
