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.
Utah’s Flaming Gorge Reservoir, which Colorado River officials have used twice during the past two years to add water to the rapidly deteriorating river system, likely only has enough water left for two more emergency releases, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
Last summer, Reclamation ordered the release of 125,000 acre-feet of water from Flaming Gorge to help keep Lake Powell from falling too low to produce power. Then, earlier this summer, Reclamation announced that it would release another 500,000 acre-feet of water from Flaming Gorge and hold back 480,000 acre-feet in Powell instead of releasing it to Lake Mead, as it would normally do.
Another 30,000 acre-feet was released from Colorado’s Blue Mesa Reservoir last summer, which along with Flaming Gorge, New Mexico’s Navajo, and Powell itself, was supposed to act as a critical savings account for the river system.
The Colorado River Basin, which is divided into two regions, includes seven states: Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming make up the Upper Basin, while Arizona, California and Nevada comprise the Lower Basin. Lake Powell serves as the largest water bank for the Upper Basin, while Lake Mead holds water for the Lower Basin states.
Colorado River Basin. Credit: Chas Chamberlin
But as drought and climate change continue to sap the Colorado River, even the water in the Upper Basin’s high elevation storage ponds, namely Flaming Gorge, Blue Mesa and Navajo, isn’t enough to protect the larger system, and those kinds of releases can’t go on indefinitely, said Jim Prairie, a hydrologic engineer with Reclamation.
“We could release from Flaming Gorge maybe two more times,” Prairie said at a conference convened by the Colorado Water Congress last week.
And Blue Mesa and Navajo, now at less than 50% of capacity themselves, are considered too low to provide much, if any, additional relief.
It is analyses like these that prompted Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton in June to order the seven basin states to find ways to come up with 2 million to 4 million acre-feet of water next year, to inject into the reservoirs to keep them full enough to generate hydropower and supply water.
That means determining which water users and states are going to cut back use.
Tensions are rising as the federal government and the states continue to fail in their efforts to develop a concrete plan that will cut water use enough to come up with that 2 million to 4 million acre-feet.
“If we failed at anything in the [drought contingency planning done in 2019] it is that our vision was insufficiently dark,” said Wayne Pullan, director of Reclamation’s Upper Colorado Region.
As the freefall on the river continues, veteran federal hydrologists and engineers at Reclamation are scrambling to come up with new ways to forecast what is going to happen, using, among other tools, a stress test that is based on recent observed inflows, rather than models.
Hydrologists are also using data that excludes measurements from extremely wet years back in the 1980s, and focuses instead on the most recent dry periods.
Reclamation estimates that Powell will receive just 6.2 million acre-feet of water from the mountain snows in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico in 2022, using its new forecasting models. That is far below the 9.6 million acre-foot average, a figure based on a 30-year average that includes extremely wet periods.
Credit: U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
Right now, Powell stands at 3,533 feet, just 8 feet above the top of a buffer pool that must be maintained to keep the reservoir’s power turbines operating. Lake Mead is similarly low, with an elevation of 1,043.42.
Reclamation expects the reservoirs’ levels to continue dropping next year as well. “This could be where our hydrologies are going to stay,” Prairie said.
But it isn’t only the one-year outlook that is so troubling, Prairie said. It is the wildly varying temperature scenarios, low soil moisture levels, and shrinking snowpacks that are making it difficult to determine the best methods for keeping the giant river system, and Powell and Mead, from crashing.
Ironically, 2022 is shaping up to be slightly wetter than 2021, when inflow was just 3.5 million acre-feet, well below the 6.2 million acre-feet expected for this year.
Urging water users to move quickly to find ways to deliver and keep more water in the system, Prairie said, “Even if we have a good year next year, it is not going to save us.”
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.
The Aspen Consolidated Sanitation District started collecting wastewater samples in December 2021. The district was the first one to send out samples in the valley. CREDIT: CURTIS WACKERLE/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Consistent, widespread testing of the community’s wastewater for COVID-19 has been long-awaited as traditional public health metrics have struggled to fully capture the spread of the virus in the community’s transient population. Now, sanitation districts throughout the valley are participating in a state-sponsored tracking program, but local public health officials are grappling with interpreting the relative highs and lows, and how they compare to the picture captured by other metrics.
“Since April, we’ve seen a disconnect between our incidence rates, our positivity and our wastewater measurements,” Pitkin County epidemiologist Carly Senst told county commissioners July 26. “The wastewater is showing much higher prevalence than what we’re seeing come through.”
Wastewater testing can detect the presence of the SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, as people infected with COVID can shed RNA — the genetic material from the virus — in their feces long before they show symptoms or get tested. This metric can help local public health departments better understand the spread of the virus in their communities, which has become more challenging with people increasingly using at-home tests, and especially in a tourism-oriented community such as Aspen where traditional metrics have often fallen short. Incidence rate, for example, counts cases among only county residents, who may comprise just a slice of the total daily population including workers and visitors.
But wastewater data can be challenging for local public health departments to evaluate because it is a new and imperfect tool and has its share of shortcomings.
“We are still in the process of collecting data to determine if we can be more specific with the relationship between wastewater levels and our incidence rate,” Senst said.
CREDIT: INFOGRAPHIC COURTESY OF THE CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION This infographic from the C.D.C explains how the wastewater monitoring program works.
A statewide window into wastewater
Pitkin County has been sending wastewater samples to a Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) lab in Denver since December, when the Aspen Consolidated Sanitation District (ACSD) became the first wastewater treatment facility in the valley to participate in the state’s COVID-19 Wastewater Monitoring Project. The project, launched in August 2020, is a collaboration between Colorado State University and CDPHE. It now incorporates data from 55 wastewater utilities across the state, including Aspen, Snowmass Village, Basalt and Glenwood Springs. (Carbondale doesn’t participate in the state’s program but sends samples to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)
Besides knowing whether the virus is present, wastewater data has proven useful in informing public health departments quickly of when new variants are circulating in the community, according to Senst. The omicron subvariant BA.5 was first detected in the Snowmass’ sewage May 16, and it has since been found in Aspen’s wastewater since May 30, Glenwood Springs since June 6 and Basalt since July 11.
A CDPHE courier comes twice a week to each of the four participating utilities in the valley to collect the samples and bring them to a lab in Denver. That lab then analyzes the samples and reports the data on the CDPHE wastewater dashboard typically within four business days from when the state lab receives the samples, according to state officials. Courier times can vary across the state and analysis can take longer, which may result in reporting delays.
A CDPHE courier comes twice a week to each of the four participating utilities in the valley to collect the samples and bring them to a lab in Denver where samples are analyzed.CREDIT: PHOTO COURTESY OF NATHAN NELSON/ACSD
Relative heights of peaks leave officials scratching their heads
This data shows that about 2.8 million copies of the virus were detected per liter at the Aspen treatment plant Jan. 6 — the highest detection level recorded at the Aspen facility since the monitoring program started.
This coincides with the highest case counts recorded locally as COVID spiked in Aspen with the omicron wave during late December and early January. According to CDPHE’s data, an average of 121 new cases per day (based on the three previous days) were reported in Aspen on Jan. 5 within the sanitation district’s boundaries, which extend roughly from the airport to Smuggler Mountain. This dropped slightly to 117 new cases on Jan. 6. Pitkin County’s seven-day incidence rate at the time was about 3,000 per 100,000 — the highest rate the county has ever recorded.
Senst noted that Aspen has a relatively small community with a large transient population of tourists and the commuting workforce. “So spikes don’t always mean that there is a higher incidence rate among the community (although it could),” she wrote. “It could also mean that there was a large event that brought a lot of people into the Aspen area.”
Glenwood Springs also saw its highest case counts of the pandemic during the winter omicron surge, according to incidence-rate data based on new infections among the resident population. The number of daily cases spiked to its highest level in the sewershed — the community area served by a wastewater-collection system — with about 70-72 cases Jan. 5 and 6, based on the average of the three previous days. The number of virus copies in the Glenwood Springs wastewater system also climbed, to a high of 300,000 copies per liter — well short of the concentration experienced by Aspen during its concurrent peak.
More recently, the sanitation district in Glenwood reached its record level, with 481,000 copies per liter July 28, while the number of reported new cases was low, hovering around a three-day average of 10 cases in mid-July.
Although the late July number was the highest level of copies the county has seen since January, when Glenwood Springs started sending samples, Garfield County public health specialist Carrie Godes said she didn’t think they could accurately say what caused that spike.
Garfield County epidemiologist Mason Hohstadt agreed with Senst that it’s still early in the process to draw any conclusions, but he also noticed a disconnect between the dropping number of reported positive tests and the recent spike in copies of virus in Glenwood Springs’ wastewater samples.
Wastewater measurements are only a guiding tool to know where we’re standing with the virus. “We are using it as a way of being able to give people information at this point, especially going into the third year (of the pandemic),” Hohstadt said.
The four participating valley treatment plants all recorded high levels of virus copies about mid-July. Aspen and Snowmass recorded more than 1 million copies, Glenwood Springs was just shy of 500,000 copies, while Basalt spiked to 2.8 million copies per liter, or as much as Aspen during January’s omicron tsunami.
“We can’t always pin down why these types of peaks in the wastewater surveillance data occur, but the theory is that there was a higher level of disease burden during that ‘peak,’” Senst wrote in an email. “Was it from tourism or another source? We are not able to tell.”
Although an increase in COVID presence in wastewater may not be surprising as more tourists are coming into town and variants such as BA.5, which allows reinfections, keep spreading, the data collection is still new and requires more time for local public health to make heads or tails.
Since early this month, Glenwood Springs’ number of copies has ranged from about 20,000 to about 60,000. Aspen’s recent number of copies has varied between 301,000 and 386,000 so far this month, while between 242,000 and 305,000 copies have been detected in Snowmass Village’s sewershed.
In Basalt, a week after the 2.8 million peak in mid-July, wastewater data dropped to 371,000 copies on July 21.
Senst added that the data being collected now will help them better understand the peaks and valleys in future trends. “The more data we have, the better picture we are able to see,” she said.
The Aspen Consolidated Sanitation District recorded over one million copies of the virus per liter in mid July, but local public health officials are grappling with questions on what causes these spikes as they learn to interpret the new data.CREDIT: LAURINE LASSALLE/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Limitations of sampling the valley’s transient population
Wastewater measurement is only a snapshot of the presence of the virus in wastewater. One data point doesn’t necessarily indicate a trend as does a seven-day incidence rate.
The valley’s transient population remains an obstacle to determine disease burden on the community. When the lab publishes data after analyzing samples, a new wave of tourists may have already arrived and those who were in the valley the week before may have already left.
CDPHE officials confirmed that tourism and other factors may impact single spikes in smaller communities. “For example, a special event or a tour bus depositing waste into the sewershed can impact a sample. We’ll get occasional spikes, and this is why we recommend looking at trends rather than single data points,” state officials said.
Wastewater data is best used in combination with other metrics, including case numbers and incidence rate.
It is also worth noting that any residences or buildings with their own sewer system will not be recorded into the data, because wastewater measurements include only flow being processed through a participating municipal treatment facility.
Wastewater samples are not collected daily, the Pitkin County’s COVID update said Aug. 2. CDPHE may sometimes face delays in sample collection or data reporting, which can affect the ability of local public health departments to interpret accurate information from the wastewater monitoring program. “It takes a few weeks for everything to be processed, and sometimes the ‘peak’ has already passed by the time we get the data,” Senst wrote.
Even though Aspen wastewater treatment was the first in the valley to be part of the state’s program, facility manager Nathan Nelson wishes it had happened before people were vaccinated and boosted. “By the time they actually started testing in Aspen, very few people seemed to care.”
A more burdensome process for smaller sanitation districts
Although the wastewater collection process hasn’t impacted the operations of larger sanitation districts such as Aspen or Glenwood Springs, the task has been more time consuming for smaller districts with limited personnel such as Basalt, which has been collecting samples since May.
If a facility has only one operator, that person may get busy and may not be present for the sample collection and has to cancel the pickup, resulting in no sample being sent to the lab. Smaller districts sometimes struggle to keep up with the sampling frequency and find entering information both on paper and online redundant and time consuming for staffers.
CDPHE officials said twice-a-week sampling is necessary to establish a trend and has always been a requirement of the program. The state is also working on modernizing their systems and transitioning to an online-only sample submission form. In the meantime, utilities still have to submit both a paper and an online form.
The testing process doesn’t cost anything to the districts, because it’s fully covered by CDPHE, which has received and budgeted approximately $9.4 million in federal funds to support COVID wastewater surveillance testing from January 2021 through at least July 2023, state officials said.
CDPHE also shares its data with the CDC’s National Wastewater Surveillance System. Colorado has been actively participating in the NWSS since January 2021, and the Carbondale Wastewater Department has been sending samples twice a week directly to the CDC since June 20.
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.
John McClow, left, moderates a panel on the Colorado River at the Colorado Water Congress summer conference in Steamboat Springs Thursday. From left: Becky Mitchell, director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board and commissioner of the Upper Colorado River Commission; Gene Shawcroft, Colorado River Commission of Utah; Tom Buschatzke, director, Arizona Department of Water Resources. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
STEAMBOAT SPRINGS — Water managers in recent weeks have put forth plans for conservation aimed at addressing the water-scarcity crisis on the Colorado River. But the proposals, which are vague and voluntary and lack goals with numbers, will probably do little to get additional water into the nation’s two largest reservoirs with the urgency officials say is needed.
In June, federal officials said the seven Colorado River basin states had to conserve an additional 2 million to 4 million acre-feet and threatened to take unilateral action if the states didn’t come up with a plan within 60 days.
But the deadline came and went without a basinwide deal or drastic action by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, except to implement the next round of cuts already agreed to by the states in the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan. As of Friday, there was still no plan from the lower basin states — California, Nevada and Arizona — on which upper basin water managers say the bulk of the responsibility to conserve rests.
Golfers take shots on the green lawns of the City Park Golf Course in central Denver on Sept. 28 2020. Denver Water has signed an MOU to the Bureau of Reclamation committing to reducing water use.CREDIT: LINDSAY FENDT / ASPEN JOURNALISM
Cities say they will reduce
On Wednesday, a group of seven municipal water providers — Aurora Water, Denver Water, Pueblo Water, Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District, Colorado Springs Utilities, Southern Nevada Water Authority and Metropolitan Water District of Southern California — sent a letter and memorandum of understanding to the Bureau of Reclamation pledging to be part of the solution by reducing their water consumption. They committed to expand water-efficiency programs and reduce nonfunctional turf grass by 30%.
The move was praised by environmental conservation group Western Resource Advocates as a good first step.
But the MOU does not include a specific amount of water savings from the municipalities. And although some urban water providers in the basin have been using less water in recent years even as their populations grow, it’s unclear if the new commitments will result in them diverting less from the Colorado River.
“They weren’t able to put numbers, they weren’t able to put dates, we don’t know how much they can actually save, but I’m glad they are saying we want to be part of the solution,” said John Berggren, a water policy analyst with WRA.
Berggren said any success of the measures will depend on the scale.
“If all these providers really scaled up their programs … with millions of dollars and dozens of staff, in a year or two, we could see fairly decent savings,” he said.
Even if the municipalities do conserve water, the amount of water they command is relatively small. Agriculture uses about 80% of the Colorado River’s allocation; in the state of Colorado, it’s roughly 86%.
This photo from December 2021 shows the famous “bathtub ring” at Lake Mead due to declining water levels. The lower basin states are planning to save water in the reservoir through the 500 + Plan.CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
5-point Plan
James Eklund, a water attorney and former head of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, who was one of the architects of the Drought Contingency Plan, said water managers, including himself, have failed at getting more water into the system. He addressed a panel of experts at the biannual gathering of the Colorado Water Congress in Steamboat Springs on Thursday.
“If you turned off all the municipalities, you wouldn’t have the water necessary to solve this problem, so we have to deal with agriculture,” Eklund said.
Eklund also took aim at the upper basin states’ 5 Point Plan. The plan was the Upper Colorado River Commission’s response to the feds’ 2 million- to 4 million-acre-foot challenge and includes a plan to restart a program that would pay irrigators to temporarily leave more water in the river. Known as the System Conservation Pilot Program, it ran from 2014 to 2018. It’s still unclear how much funding the program would receive this time around or how soon Lake Powell could see a boost from it.
“Our 5 Point Plan doesn’t get it done in my opinion,” Eklund said.
CWCB director and panelist Becky Mitchell addressed the criticism that plans for restarting the SCPP don’t come with a specific amount of water or other details.
“Since this is a voluntary program, we cannot commit to any specific amount,” she said. “It’s not appropriate for us to say what we can do in a program that is voluntary, especially when we don’t know exactly the money that’s going to be attached to it, where exactly it would come from, when we can get it, when we can get it out the door. But it’s also dependent on what’s happening with hydrology and our snowpack and what’s available.”
Water levels were low at this marina on Lake Mead in December 2021. Some entities are pulling out of a voluntary agreement to leave up to 500,000 acre-feet in the reservoir.CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
What has been done so far?
Last year, the Bureau of Reclamation made the unilateral decision to release water from upper basin reservoirs, including Blue Mesa in Gunnison County, in order to prop up Lake Powell and preserve the ability to make hydropower at Glen Canyon Dam. Reclamation also implemented a Tier 1 shortage under the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan, which lays out which lower basin entities will take cuts at which trigger elevations. Arizona bore the brunt of that with a 512,000-acre-foot reduction.
This year, as part of the Drought Response Operations Agreement, the Bureau of Reclamation is releasing more water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir and holding back water in Lake Powell, which together will boost the reservoir by nearly 1 million acre-feet.
But it’s still not enough.
On Thursday, Jim Prairie, an engineer and modeling expert with the Bureau of Reclamation, presented an analysis of water volumes needed for protecting the 3,525-foot elevation at Lake Powell and 1,020 at Lake Mead. Dropping below these levels could threaten hydropower production.
“As we start to drop below those, we are going to lose some of the buffering protection those major reservoirs provide,” Prairie said. “If 2023’s inflow is like 2022, the 11th driest year, we would still need an additional 2.5 million acre-feet on average to stay above those two buffers.”
On Aug. 16, the Bureau of Reclamation implemented the Tier 2A cuts under the DCP, which means more reductions for Arizona, Nevada and Mexico. California, which uses the biggest share of the Colorado River, will begin taking cuts in the next tier, when Lake Mead’s elevation drops below 1,045 feet, which could happen next year.
Tom Buschatzke, director of Arizona Department of Water Resources and a panelist at Thursday’s Water Congress session, said the Colorado River needs leadership from state water managers, but also the federal government.
“We have to stop playing this game of chicken it seems we are in right now,” he said.
So far, it seems the only way to guarantee more water in Lake Powell and Lake Mead is when the federal government forces it to happen. Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton seemed to issue an ultimatum to the states in June, but when the states failed to reach a deal, there was no swift or strong action from the feds, except to implement the already-agreed-upon next round of cuts. Federal officials have also said they will study the feasibility of passing water through Glen Canyon Dam if levels drop below the hydropower intakes.
There are signs another much-celebrated but voluntary program known as the 500+ Plan, announced in December and designed as a way for lower basin water users to keep water in Lake Mead, is faltering. In Arizona, the Gila River Indian Community and the city of Tucson have said they will not leave part of their allocations of Colorado River water in Lake Mead after all, even though they previously agreed to do so.
Natalie DeRoock, senior public information officer for the city of Tucson, said city council members there voted 6-1 this week to order the city’s full 141,191 acre-feet of water in 2023 after it became clear that other stakeholders were not going to step up to give a little when it comes to Colorado River water.
Berggren said we are starting to see voluntary collaboration start to break down and that it might be time for federal intervention.
“Historically, the threat of the federal heavy hand has been enough to get the voluntary things to happen in this basin, and we have seen that not work this time,” Berggren said. “I think this is a time for strong federal leadership, and I would love to see Reclamation exert its authority and demand what has to happen to keep the system from crashing.”
Editor’s note: After publication of this story, Denver Water spokesperson Todd Hartman sent the following statement in response to the question of whether the pledge would result in less diversion from the Colorado River: “We believe these commitments, when realized, will have the effect of stretching our own water supply further, reducing diversions from the Colorado River. How much, if any, of this water ultimately makes it to Lake Powell depends on decisions and actions outside of our control. For Lake Powell to benefit meaningfully, we need collective action of all water users.”
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.
Two Gunnison River water districts in the headwaters of the Colorado River system are embarking on a $700,000 drought planning effort, aided by hundreds of thousands of dollars in new funding from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
The Montrose-based Uncompahgre Valley Water Users Association, one of the largest suppliers of agricultural water in the Upper Colorado River Basin, will spend $400,000 to develop an action plan for dealing with the ongoing and future droughts, with $200,000 in federal funds, and matching funds from local sources.
The Gunnison-based Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy District will spend $300,000 for a similar program, with $140,000 in federal funds, and another $166,000 from local partners, according to its application. The Upper Gunnison district is responsible for delivering agriculture water, but also serves the city of Gunnison and the town of Crested Butte as well as the ski area.
Reclamation granted this funding through its WaterSMART program. On Aug. 2 the agency awarded more than $865,000 in drought planning funds to water districts and agencies in five states, including California, Arizona, New Mexico and Oregon, as well as Colorado.
The seven-state Colorado River Basin is facing severe water shortages and is operating under a basin-wide set of state-level drought contingency plans. Those plans include water cutbacks for users in Arizona and Nevada, and possibly California in the Lower Basin, as well as emergency releases of water from reservoirs in the Upper Basin, including Flaming Gorge and Blue Mesa. The Upper Basin includes Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.
Compared to the multi-million dollar state and federal efforts, the local WaterSmart grants are fairly small, but officials say they provide critical help in important areas and create opportunities to win matching funds from other agencies.
“This really helps because there is so much that has to be done,” said Sonia Chavez, general manager of the Upper Gunnison district. “And anything we can get will help us leverage funding to get more done. A couple of hundred thousand dollars really helps.”
Steve Pope, manager of the Uncompahgre association, said the money will go toward developing contingency plans and designing improvements to the association’s aging federal infrastructure on which it relies.
“Our infrastructure is extremely old,” Pope said. “Even though this grant is for planning purposes it will have a big impact on our system in the sense that it will allow us to best manage our water without having to make big infrastructure changes.”
Pope is responsible for delivering 500,000 to 700,000 acre-feet of water, through more than 700 miles of canals, laterals and drains, to farmers and some small towns in the Gunnison Valley.
Upper Basin water districts receive drought contingency funds
Both districts occupy key territory in the Upper Colorado River Basin, with the Gunnison district lying just above Blue Mesa Reservoir, and the Uncompahgre district lying below.
Blue Mesa Reservoir, Colorado’s largest water storage reservoir operated by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, has been hard hit by drought and by emergency releases of water to help stabilize Lake Powell.
Chavez said her small, largely rural district has never implemented a drought plan, in part because one has never been needed until now.
The new grant funds will allow it to better monitor and analyze its water supplies, develop ways to conserve water, and determine equitable ways for farmers and cities to use whatever water is available.
“If we get into a drought, how is my little community here going to get through that drought?” Chavez said, “and how could we better share the water we do have available?”
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.
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.
Colorado needs more reservoir storage and ways to manage urban growth in order protect its water supplies, prominent politicians said at a major gathering of water officials in Steamboat Springs.
“Water is central to our livelihoods and its increasing scarcity is a challenge of the first order for everyone who calls the American West home,” said Joe O’Dea, a Republican challenging incumbent Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet for one of Colorado’s U.S. Senate seats.
O’Dea spoke, along with Bennet, Gov. Jared Polis, and republican gubernatorial candidate Heidi Ganahl at the Colorado Water Congress’s summer convention. The Colorado Water Congress is a statewide association that represents water districts, utilities, environmental groups and tribal communities.
“You can’t solve our problem without talking about storage. We know this region is getting drier and large-scale weather events are coming at unpredictable times,” O’Dea said. “That makes it all that more important to store water resources whenever they do appear.
“But we need a more rational process to approving them. Chatfield took the better part of 23 years to permit a single common sense project. Environmental review and public comment are central to good decision making, but they shouldn’t take decades,” O’Dea said.
O’Dea was referring to the successful effort to convert some of the space in the federally owned Chatfield Reservoir southwest of Denver for storage rather than simply flood control, which was its mission when it was built in the 1960s.
Gov. Jared Polis, too, pointed at climate change as a key driver that will shape how Colorado and other states manage their water supplies in the coming decades.
“Over the past two decades we have faced forces that threaten our access to water. The chronic, extreme drought, the changing nature of precipitation across the West. These pressures threaten water security, not just of our farms, cities and rivers, but the entire region,” Polis said.
“As a headwaters state, our resources flow to 18 states and Mexico. The entire region relies on Colorado to be a good steward. We’re proud of that responsibility and we take that responsibility very seriously,” he said.
To fulfill that responsibility within and outside the state’s borders, Polis called for more major investments in water sustainability, citing as an example the $60 million that Colorado lawmakers approved this year to fallow land in the Rio Grande and Republican River basins to improve aquifer health and ensure the state can meet its obligations to deliver water to New Mexico and Texas, which also rely on the Rio Grande, and Kansas, which relies on the Republican River.
“As we look to the future of our state, we need to understand the connectedness of water to the many challenges we face,” Polis said. “We are facing consistent growth in Colorado. But we can’t afford the water profile of exurban sprawl. We need to grow in a sustainable way,” he said, citing the need to develop more housing that reduces Coloradans’ per capita water use.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Heidi Ganahl also called for more water storage and promised to limit federal intervention in Colorado’s water affairs, including negotiations over how to reduce water use among the seven states that rely on the Colorado River. These include the Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, and the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada.
“The Upper Basin states have done just fine working through water issues. But expanding water storage is a must … and we must go in a different direction [regarding federal permitting requirements],” Ganahl said, adding that she would push the federal government to streamline water project approval processes.
She also criticized the Colorado Water Plan, a multi-million dollar collaborative effort by the Colorado Water Conservation Board to ensure the states’ major river basins are able to plan for and secure the water they need. Ganahl said it was too expensive and bureaucratic and that the current work to update the plan, first approved in 2015, “misses the mark. As governor I would simply work to develop more water.”
Bennet urged the conference attendees to look ahead and continue the hard work that has already been done.
“The conditions are as dire as we’ve seen, and we have a very difficult negotiation in front of us,” he said. “The people in this room have stepped up and made sacrifices,” he said. “But we know temporary Band-Aids are not going to cut it. All parties have to live with what the Colorado River can provide. This is an opportunity to make decisions that will strengthen the West for the next 100 years and fulfill our responsibility to the next generation.”
Political pollster Floyd Ciruli said that so many candidates spoke at the water conference was an indicator of the national attention that Western water shortages are generating, and he gave the politicos credit for providing on-point suggestions for what could be done.
“All four of these candidates were ready for today,” Ciruli said. “All of them talked about water.”
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.
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.
Canby Mountain, 13,460 feet in elevation, near Stony Pass in the San Juan mountains of southwestern Colorado is the headwaters of the Rio Grande. The 1,885 mile-long river flows to the Gulf of Mexico. Credit: Dean Krakel
Albuquerque, New Mexico — In late June, the mornings start out at 80 degrees but temperatures quickly soar past 100. Everywhere fields are brown and the high desert bakes in glaring sunlight. But there is one long, narrow corridor of green here: the Rio Grande.
Jason Casuga, CEO of the Middle Rio Grande Water Conservancy District, and Anne Marken, water operations manager, have been watching the river’s water gauges around the clock for days, knowing that entire stream segments below Albuquerque may go dry at any time. If rains come over the weekend, everyone will relax, at least for a while.
If that moisture doesn’t come, Casuga and Marken must move quickly to release to these dry stream segments whatever meager water they can squeeze from their drought-strapped system, giving the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation time to save as many endangered silvery minnow as they can from almost certain death.
“We only have so much time to start the drying operation,” Casuga said, referring to a practice where his district shifts water in its system so that Reclamation can rescue the fish before the stream goes completely dry and leaves them stranded to suffocate.
The Rio Grande Basin spans Colorado, New Mexico and Texas. Credit: Chas Chamberlin
“If we don’t do it, you might see 30 miles of the entire river go dry. It’s stressful. We’ve been doing this controlled hopscotching for weeks now.”
The Middle Rio Grande district, created in 1925, is responsible for delivering waters to farmers as well as helping the state meet its obligations to deliver water to Texas under the 1938 Rio Grande Compact. It coordinates management activity with Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of engineers on a river system that includes five major reservoirs and hundreds of miles of canals.
A crippled river
The district’s liquid juggling act is becoming increasingly common, and it is painful for everyone to watch, from the 19 tribes and six pueblos whose homes have lined its banks for thousands of years, to the 6 million people and 200,000 acres of irrigated lands that rely on the river across the three-state river basin.
“The worry is heavy,” said Glenn Tenorio, a tribal member of the Santa Ana Pueblo north of Albuquerque, who also serves as the pueblo’s water resources manager.
The Pueblo of Santa Ana lies just north of Albuquerque on the Rio Grande. Credit: Creative Commons
Under the terms of the 1938 Rio Grande Compact, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas share the river’s flows before it reaches Mexico. They have watched drought cripple the river, with flows dropping by 35% over the last 20 years.
But unlike other Western states, in New Mexico water users share both supplies and shortages, and that’s a lesson other states might benefit from, experts say. In most Western states where the prior appropriation system, known as first-in-time, first-in-right exists, water users with younger, more junior water rights are routinely cut off in times of shortage, creating expensive, conflict-ridden water management scenarios.
Water scarcity grows
Still, in response to growing water scarcity, Texas sued New Mexico in 2013, alleging that groundwater pumping in the southern part of New Mexico was harming its own share of water in the river. After being heard briefly before a special master for the U.S. Supreme Court last year, the three states—Colorado is also named in the case—agreed to pause the lawsuit while they conduct mediation talks.
Whether the talks will succeed isn’t clear yet. In addition to the groundwater dispute, New Mexico owes Texas roughly 125,000 acre-feet of surface water from the river and, under the terms of the compact, cannot store any water in its reservoirs until Texas is repaid.
But there is some hope emerging, as Colorado embarks on a $30 million land fallowing program to reduce its Rio Grande water use and as New Mexico seeks new federal rules that will allow it to store more water and re-operate its federal reservoirs.
Abiquiu Reservoir, in northern New Mexico, is one of several that are being drained by the mega drought. Credit: Mitch Tobin, Water Desk, March 2022
Page Pegram helps oversee Rio Grande river issues for New Mexico’s Office of the State Engineer. Unlike Colorado, New Mexico has never had the resources to quantify its various water users’ share of the river. Until now, the state has survived on healthy snowpacks and summer rains.
Though the drought has lasted more than 20 years, in the last five years, Pegram has seen the system deteriorate significantly.
“We’re seeing a fundamental change in water availability,” she said. “Suddenly, everything is different. Temperatures are higher, evaporation is higher, and soil moisture is lower. It’s new enough that we can’t pinpoint exactly what’s happening and we don’t have time to study the issue. It’s already happened.”
In the beginning
The Rio Grande has its genesis in the lush high mountain tundra above Creede, Colo., flowing down through Monte Vista and Alamosa, making its way along Highway 287, crossing the Colorado state line as it flows toward Santa Fe and Albuquerque, then dropping down to the tiny town of Truth and Consequences before it hits the Texas state line. At that point it travels through El Paso and forms the border between Texas and Mexico until it hits the Gulf of Mexico.
It is in the headwaters region in Creede where the majority of its flows originate. And while the hay meadows outside Creede are lush, and the streams cold and full, water has become so scarce even here that if homeowners want to drill a water well, they have to buy water rights from elsewhere to ensure those farther downstream on the river have adequate supplies.
Visitors walk along the sidewalks and streets of Creede, Colo., during a summer rain on July 18, 2022. Creede came into existence during the silver mining boom of 1889. The nearby Rio Grande, which rises on Stony Pass in the San Juan mountains that surround the town, has played a key role in the area’s farming and ranching history. (Dean Krakel, Fresh Water News)
Zeke Ward has lived in Creede for some 40 years, and has served on citizen advisory boards that oversee the river, water quality, and mine residue cleanup efforts.
He said the headwaters area has largely been protected from the most severe aspects of the mega-drought gripping the Rio Grande Basin and much of the American West because there are few people here and 80% of the land is owned by the U.S. Forest Service.
Still, he says, the river is vital to the region’s small tourist economy. “We don’t have a ski area,” he said. “So we have to make a living in 100 days, and that’s not easy.”
Follow the river below Creede and soon you enter the San Luis Valley, where irrigated agriculture dates back at least to the 1500s and where the combination of drought and overpumping have sapped an expansive, delicate series of aquifers. So much water has been lost that the state has issued warnings that it will begin shutting wells down if the aquifer, which is fed from the Rio Grande and its tributaries, is not restored within 10 years.
Craig Cotten is the top Colorado regulator on the Rio Grande and has overseen state and community efforts to make sure Colorado can deliver enough water to fulfill its legal obligations to New Mexico and Texas.
Craig Cotten, Colorado’s top regulator on the Rio Grande, stands on a ditch that delivers water to New Mexico to help meet Colorado’s obligations under the Rio Grande Compact of 1938. Credit: Jerd Smith, Fresh Water News
To do so, Cotten routinely cuts water supplies to growers, based on where they fall in the valley’s system of water rights. Right now, Colorado is meeting its compact obligations, but the cost to the valley is high and the cost of failure higher still.
“The farmers are struggling with reaching sustainability,” Cotten said. “If they don’t get there, wells will be shut down.”
But Cotten said he is cautiously optimistic that the Rio Grande can be brought back to health as the climate continues to dry out, in part because there are new tools to manage its lower flows more precisely, including sophisticated airborne measuring systems that show with greater accuracy how much snow has fallen in remote areas and how much water that snow contains.
Knowing more precisely how much water is in the system means the state can capture more when flows are higher, and see more accurately when streamflows will drop. Previously, snow-water estimates have varied widely, miscalculating by as much as 70% or more how much water is in a given mountain region.
In addition, this year Colorado lawmakers approved $30 million to begin a program that will pay San Luis Valley farmers to permanently fallow their lands, something that will relieve stress on the aquifer and the Rio Grande and which could stave off a mass well shutdown.
Plenty to learn
Cleave Simpson manages the Rio Grande Water Conservation District in Alamosa and is also a Colorado state senator.
He believes that the work on the upper Rio Grande holds important lessons for the three states sharing its water and others in the American West.
The people of the Rio Grande Basin have been living with whatever the river can produce for years now, and effectively sharing in any shortages. In addition, though the San Luis Valley aquifers are deteriorating, the farmers in the region have taxed themselves and used some $70 million from those tax revenues to fallow land, something that more and more experts agree will need to be done everywhere, including in the crisis-ridden Colorado River Basin.
“You don’t have very far to look to see your future on the Colorado River,” Simpson said. “Just look at the Rio Grande.”
With storm clouds looming over the distant La Garita mountains windrows of freshly cut alfalfa hay wait to be baled up on a farm near Center, Colo., on July 19, 2022. (Dean Krakel, Special to Fresh Water News)
Farmers in the San Luis Valley, including Simpson, are also testing new crops, such as quinoa and industrial hemp, which use less water than potatoes, a longstanding local mainstay.
“I don’t think I can keep doing what our family has been doing for four generations,” Simpson said. “I raise alfalfa because my dad and my grandpa did. But now I am raising 50 acres of industrial hemp for fiber … it certainly uses less water than my alfalfa crop.”
Daily prayers
The work in the San Luis Valley, including the new $30 million paid fallowing program, is a major step toward bringing the Rio Grande Basin back into balance.
And while “fallowing” is a term somewhat new to the water world, it is a management practice some of the oldest users of the river, its tribes, have practiced for millennia.
Tenorio’s family has lived in Santa Ana Pueblo for thousands of years. He said tribal members have learned to balance their needs with whatever the river provides. These days that’s not easy, but he said they focus on the future, to ensure their communities can grow and that their irrigated lands continue to produce the corn, melons, grains, beans and alfalfa that they’ve raised as long as anyone can remember.
“We only can do with what we’re given from Mother Nature,” Tenorio said.
Like other tribes in New Mexico, the Santa Ana Pueblo’s water rights have never been quantified, but because they are so old, they get their water first based on how much is available.
Looking ahead, Tenorio is hopeful that better coordinated use of New Mexico’s few reservoirs, as well as more efficient irrigation systems, will allow everyone to adapt to the drier environment.
“We pray every day for our farmers and everyone who lives on the river,” he said.
Near Wagon Wheel Gap, Colo., the Rio Grande flows through an area known as the Pinnacles. Wooden, numbered trout signs guide visitors through the Wagon Wheel Gap interpretive site. The Gap is one of the few places early settlers could find passage for wagons into the upper Rio Grande Valley. (Dean Krakel, special to Fresh Water News)
Unlocking manmade infrastructure
Casuga, of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, describes himself as the CEO of bad news. But he said he has some hope that the river can be better managed.
If new rules to operate the federal reservoirs are eventually approved, he says New Mexico could easily meet its water obligations to Texas. An effort is now underway in Washington, D.C., to make that happen.
“This river is highly developed from a human standpoint,” Casuga said. “We as men impact the river so we have to unlock this manmade infrastructure to help it.”
Until then though, the day-to-day reality of operating the river remains complex. In June, when the temperatures were soaring, the rain did come, but it offered only a brief respite for the Rio Grande.
This week, as the searing heat returned, the river began drying out, forcing Casuga and Marken to launch their elaborate hopscotch game again.
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.
This reporting was made by possible by a grant from the CU Water Desk.
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.
From left, Mike DeHoff, Eric Balken and Pete Lefebvre walk near the mouth of White Canyon, a previously inundated area, now exposed as Lake Powell recedes. Alex Hager / KUNC.
On a scorching July afternoon, Mike DeHoff steered his small metal motorboat down what one could argue is the weirdest stretch of the Colorado River in all of its 1,450 miles: the delta of Lake Powell.
DeHoff’s boat floated on roiling water supercharged with sediment, the same color as an iced latte. Craggy, gnarled mud formations rose up from the river channel. Rapids made of mud, which change their contours by the hour, tossed the boat from side to side.
“I mean, look at this,” DeHoff said. “It’s like boating through what you think Mordor would look like.”
Winds whipped up dirt and fine sand from giant, dried-out mud flats, spilling more sediment back into the river. Whole slabs of mud cleaved themselves clean off, like a calving glacier. One attempt to climb up the sediment-caked canyon walls by this reporter and his photographer nearly triggered a dirt avalanche big enough to bury a person. In the delta, the river’s water appeared so thick with sediment that it threatened to turn back into mud at any moment.
A rafting outfitter motors through Lake Powell’s delta. Alex Hager / KUNC
The launch point for this trip, an access area called North Wash, near Hite, Utah, is so steep and unstable that rafting outfitters have to use complex winch and pulley systems just to get boats out of the river. It can’t really be called a boat ramp with a straight face, DeHoff said. The chaos created by a receding reservoir caused the Colorado River to jump its channel, and begin carving away at the ramp.
Lake Powell’s delta is the place where the flowing Colorado River meets the stillwater reservoir. And it moves, depending on the year. The river’s flow and the reservoir’s elevation dictate where they meet. It is a “no man’s land,” as DeHoff called it, between the whitewater rapids of Cataract Canyon and the motorboater’s paradise of Lake Powell.
This trip was an investigatory one for DeHoff, a longtime river runner who’s spent decades rafting down Cataract. Features long hidden underwater were on the surface, and he wanted to see them.
For the last five years, with a few partners, DeHoff has run a project called Returning Rapids, an attempt to document the change that comes as the nation’s second-largest reservoir plummets to a record low.
Mike DeHoff of Returning Rapids matches a historic photo taken near the mouth of White Canyon to see how far Lake Powell has dropped. Alex Hager / KUNC.
DeHoff piloted the boat around what he dubbed “mud-bergs,” like icebergs, but made of the claylike mud that collected at the bottom of Lake Powell for decades.
“The mud-bergs that we see defining and changing the river corridor, they change day to day, month to month,” DeHoff said. “And that’s a terra incognita for me.”
When the reservoir was full back in the 1980s and 1990s, this delta would have been deep underwater. With the reservoir at a historic low, more than ever before, that lake bottom is exposed. With the force of gravity behind it, the Colorado River is just doing what it does best: carving canyons.
Though, instead of the grandeur of the Grand Canyon, on this trip DeHoff took us through a mini-canyon of mud at the edge of Lake Powell.
“This is like a river on an acid trip right now,” he said.
Mudbergs rise up from the Colorado River’s channel as it flows into the still waters of Lake Powell.
A new historic low
For decades the Colorado River filled Glen Canyon to the brim. Lake Powell has been a fixture of the southwest since the 1960s, providing hydropower to southwestern utilities, water supply reliability to downstream users, and summer vacation memories to families on houseboats.
Over its lifespan, the reservoir’s level has fluctuated wildly, driven by the massive piles of snow that gather in the Rocky Mountains each winter and melt off in the spring.
Since Glen Canyon Dam was commissioned in 1964 and it first began filling, Lake Powell has never been like it is right now, at just 27% of its capacity. It’s threatening to dip below the minimum elevation needed to produce hydropower within the next year. A string of dry winters could push it to dead pool status.
An ore cart, encrusted in invasive mussel shells, rests on a ledge above a receding Lake Powell. Alex Hager / KUNC.
The megadrought plaguing the Colorado River basin has splashed across national and international headlines as the river’s two main reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, hit new historic lows. Combined, their dwindling levels leave the water supply for tens of millions in the Southwestern U.S. uncertain. The current crisis garnered attention from the UN’s Environment Program, which warned of water and energy shortages without action.
Prompted by low reservoir levels, the Bureau of Reclamation has called for an unprecedented amount of conservation, two to four million acre-feet over the next year, to preserve current levels at the reservoir. The agency’s leader, Camille Calimlim Touton, threatened the seven states that rely on the Colorado River with unilateral action in absence of a commitment to conserve.
This summer, Lake Powell hit a high point of 3,539 feet in elevation. It is now on a long, slow decline until it receives another rush of snowmelt in spring 2023. As it declines, the reservoir’s upper reaches and its famous side canyons long buried underwater, are reemerging. River runners, scientists, environmentalists and journalists are rushing in to document the rapid change.
Even as problems mount at Lake Powell, DeHoff and others see this moment with a certain kind of somber optimism. They say if the region’s leaders frame it in a certain way, the reservoir’s decline could be viewed as hopeful, not catastrophic.
Camping on the Colorado
On a beach nestled inside Glen Canyon, DeHoff took a seat in a wooden fold-up chair next to Pete Lefebvre, a longtime river guide. This was camp for the night after boating through mud-bergs, a narrow stretch of sand close to the mouth of Trachyte Canyon, also formerly inundated as part of Lake Powell.
“This is the first time we’ve camped along the Colorado River, where it’s flowing in what would be Glen Canyon proper,” DeHoff said.
Mike DeHoff and Pete Lefebvre of Returning Rapids document the changing levels of Lake Powell, and how it affects Cataract Canyon upstream. Alex Hager / KUNC.
The two men work together on Returning Rapids out of their home base in Moab, Utah. The project has started installing time-lapse cameras to watch erosion happen in real-time and get a sense of when mud-buried river rapids will be unearthed.
Early on, Lefebvre said they found that asking one admittedly selfish question — “where can we go rafting?” — led to asking dozens more about sediment movement, water supply, hydropower production and the future of recreation.
“We just didn’t even expect to be studying this area the way that we are right now,” he said of the reservoir delta. “Just because of how fast the river is moving downstream and the lake is dropping.”
The federal government has recently pulled emergency levers to prop up Lake Powell, sending more water from upstream reservoirs and restricting releases from Glen Canyon Dam. With warming temperatures sapping snow in the Rocky Mountains and downstream demands for water going unchecked, Lefebvre said it feels like the whole Colorado River basin is at a breaking point.
“I just think that we don’t, as a species, react until it’s like, ‘Oh man, we need to do something,’” he said. “We’re getting to the point where people are saying, ‘Man, we need to do something.’”
As the region grapples with how to use less Colorado River water, this is the place where those decisions show up on the ground, Lefebvre said.
“Until there’s a scarcity of water, I don’t think people treat it like it is the most important resource we have,” he said. “Being subsidized, being cheap, allows us to act frivolously with it and I think that’s possibly going to change in the future as we get squeezed.”
A side canyon sensory experience
The next day, the boats rolled into Lake Powell and veered up into one of its many side canyons. Years ago, when the reservoir was full, a boat could continue up for miles into this narrow canyon. Now the low level forces boaters off at a narrow sand bar and requires a hike up to see any natural wonders that await.
Dead cottonwoods, long buried under the still waters of Lake Powell, have reemerged as “ghost forests.” Alex Hager / KUNC.
This canyon featured a forest of formerly underwater cottonwoods, flooded during the reservoir’s initial rise in the late 1960s and preserved in place at its bottom. They now stand darkened and dead among vibrantly green regrowing vegetation. A shallow flowing creek full of tadpoles winds its way through the canyon. Willows line its banks and play host to an insect symphony.
“Oh, man, that smell,” said Eric Balken, as he led a group up the canyon, inhaling deeply. “The willows smell so alive.”
Balken runs the Glen Canyon Institute, which advocates draining Lake Powell and moving what’s left of its waters downstream. DeHoff and Lefebvre’s Returning Rapids is a project underneath the Institute’s umbrella. Balken pointed out a high water mark from the reservoir stained on the redrock one hundred feet or more above our heads.
“There are a lot of big changes coming to the Colorado River,” he said. “And this is one that’s a good change. To see this canyon come back is really special.”
Eric Balken, of the Glen Canyon Institute, walks past a sunken speedboat in a side canyon in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. Alex Hager / KUNC.
The hike yielded artifacts from when the reservoir still inundated this canyon — four pairs of sunglasses, empty beer cans, a life jacket, a sunken speedboat half-buried in the sand.
Groups like Balken’s want to see Lake Powell’s dam decommissioned and Glen Canyon behind it restored. Balken says this current moment of reckoning on the river, where users are collectively trying to figure out how to use less, should be seen as an opportunity. Lake Powell was built to hedge against lawsuits among the river’s Upper and Lower Basins and ensure a legally-required amount of water flowed downstream. Many of the legal concepts and engineered systems used to manage this river system are woefully out of date, Balken said. A crisis like this one can be a powerful motivator to change, he said.
“Now we’re being given a chance to rethink this place. The reason why it was a mistake was because it had so much value beyond a storage tank,” he said. “We should prioritize water storage elsewhere. We should stop thinking about Glen Canyon as a place to store water and start thinking about it as a place that has natural values, intrinsic values.”
Eric Balken of the Glen Canyon Institute hikes through a narrow slot canyon. Alex Hager / KUNC.
Balken said the federal government and the states who rely on Lake Powell for storage need to be planning for a future without it. Climate change and its ability to warm up and dry out the southwest will continue to put pressure on the reservoir. In the very near future, he said, it might not be feasible to keep Lake Powell in operation for hydropower and recreation. A failure to plan for a very low reservoir, and instead rely on optimistic models that show possible recovery, could put the water supply for downstream users in jeopardy.
“We need to think about what conditions would it actually make sense to fully phase this reservoir out,” he said. “It’s hard for people to imagine right now, but once you can’t come here for your houseboat vacation anymore, once it’s not generating any more hydropower,” it’s easier to begin reconsidering Lake Powell’s usefulness.
Balken noted that his organization’s views were until very recently seen as fringe among the West’s water elite. Now national news outlets have showcased Glen Canyon’s wonders reemerging. He’ll even run into boaters, those who will need to find a new place to dock their houseboat if Balken’s dream is realized, who tell him how fascinating it is to watch the canyon emerge from the water after being buried underneath it.
“It’s encouraging for me,” Balken said. “While also being mindful of the fact that the fabric of western water management is coming apart at the seams.”
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. This article was also supported by 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.
Grizzly Reservoir will be drained next summer for a rehabilitation project on the dam, tunnel gates and outlet works. The reservoir serves as the collection bucket for water from the surrounding drainages before it’s diverted through the Twin Lakes Tunnel to the Front Range. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Grizzly Reservoir, the high-mountain lake above Aspen formed by damming Lincoln and Grizzly creeks, will be drained next summer for repairs to the dam, tunnel and outlet works.
After spring runoff next year, Twin Lakes Reservoir and Canal Company will draw down the reservoir so workers can install a membrane over the steel face of the dam, which was constructed in 1932 and is corroded and thinning, according to a May report on the feasibility of the dam rehabilitation.
The report, by RJH Consultants, Inc. of Englewood, included an inspection and evaluation of the infrastructure, and presented different options for rehabilitation. Half the cost of the study — $50,000 — was funded by the Colorado Water Conservation Board.
The project will also replace the gates that control the flow of water into the Twin Lakes Tunnel and repair the outlet works that release water down Lincoln Creek. According to the report, the outlet works have issues with cracks, holes and seepage, and the more-than-80-year-old tunnel gates have problems with leakage, are difficult to operate and require significant maintenance every year.
“The purpose of the rehabilitation of the dam is to address dam safety concerns associated with the corroded and thinning upstream-slope steel facing, uncontrolled seepage, and operational problems with the outlet works,” the report reads.
Twin Lakes officials expect the project to be completed in October 2023. They will also draw down the reservoir this month to weld a small test portion of the dam membrane to see how it fairs through the harsh winter at 10,500 feet. That work is scheduled to begin Aug. 22 and the reservoir will be refilled in October.
“That infrastructure is aging and it’s time to do some rehab work on it,” said Twin Lakes Reservoir and Canal Company Board President Kalsoum Abbasi.
Grizzly Dam is considered a high hazard dam by the Division of Water Resources. That does not mean it’s likely to fail, but it means loss of life would be expected if the dam did fail. The last state inspection in 2021 found the dam satisfactory — the highest rating — and said full storage capacity was safe.
The report estimated a nearly $7 million price tag for the rehabilitation work. Twin Lakes plans to get a CWCB loan for some of the cost and will pay the remainder with money raised from assessments on its water users.
Kalsoum Abbasi, the president of the Twin Lakes Reservoir and Canal Company, explains how the water collection system works at a July tour of Grizzly Reservoir. The system is the biggest supplier of Western Slope water for the city of Colorado Springs.CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Twin Lakes system
Grizzly Reservoir is part of a complex system of storage buckets, tunnels and canals that takes water from the headwaters of the Roaring Fork River basin under the continental divide and delivers it to Front Range cities. The system collects runoff from 45 square miles of mountainous terrain, including the New York, Brooklyn, Tabor, Lincoln, Grizzly and Lost Man creek drainages and dumps it into Grizzly Reservoir, which can hold 570 acre-feet of water.
From there the water flows into the 4-mile-long and straight-as-a-pin Twin Lakes Tunnel under the Continental Divide and into Lake Creek, a tributary of the Arkansas River. Twelve miles later the water arrives at the Twin Lakes Reservoir where it is stored before being sent to Front Range cities via pipelines and pumps.
Four municipalities own 95% of the shares of Twin Lakes water: Colorado Springs Utilities owns 55%; the Board of Water Works of Pueblo has 23%; Pueblo West Metropolitan District owns 12% and the City of Aurora has 5%.
The Twin Lakes system is so integral to the cities’ water supply that they employ two caretakers to live year-round in a cabin at the remote reservoir site to make sure everything operates smoothly. It’s Colorado Springs’ largest source of Western Slope water and represents about 21% of its total water supply.
The project is able to divert up to 46,000 acre-feet annually, or nearly 40% of the flows in the Roaring Fork headwaters, according to numbers from the Roaring Fork Conservancy. In recent years, Twin Lakes has diverted between about 31,000 and 38,000 acre-feet annually, according to data from the Colorado Division of Water Resources.
During next year’s rehabilitation work most of the creeks — Lost Man, New York, Brooklyn and Tabor — will be allowed to flow downstream instead of being collected by a canal system that feeds Grizzly Reservoir. As long as the water rights are in priority, Twin Lakes will probably still take and send through the tunnel whatever flows they get from Lincoln and Grizzly creeks, according to Abbasi. This means a stretch of Lincoln Creek below the dam will be dry.
When irrigators in the Grand Valley place the Cameo call, which happens most summers and often commands the entire Colorado River and its tributaries upstream, those with junior water rights have to stop diverting so irrigators can get their share. That’s because under Colorado water law the oldest water rights have first use of the river and Cameo’s right is older than Twin Lakes’.
“As long as we are in priority, we can still bring some water through the tunnel,” Abbasi said. “Whatever is making it into the reservoir, we will have a way to route that through the tunnel for the majority of the project.”
Abbasi said overall, Twin Lakes will probably divert less water than normal in 2023.
This dam backs up water from Lost Man Creek so it can flow into a canal and into Grizzly Reservoir. The reservoir is part of the Twin Lakes Reservoir and Canal Company infrastructure that moves water from the headwaters of the Roaring Fork River to the Front Range.CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Pitkin County’s stored water
Once work begins on the dam next summer, there will probably be more water flowing in the upper Roaring Fork above Aspen when the creeks that usually flow into Grizzly are allowed to go downstream. But there will also be a 200-acre-foot hole where water stored by Pitkin County won’t be released.
As part of a 2018 water court settlement, Pitkin County received 800 to 1,000 acre-feet of water from the Twin Lakes system, which is sent downstream instead of to the Front Range. Two hundred acre-feet of that can be stored in Grizzly Reservoir to release during the late summer.
“The rationale for Pitkin pushing for that was that’s when we tend to need the water the most,” said Laura Makar, assistant Pitkin County Attorney. “That’s when flows matter and every cfs makes the biggest difference.”
This year, the county used the 200 acre-feet to help boost streamflows between the end of spring runoff and when the Cameo call came on this week.
“We timed it perfectly so there’s no hole in the river,” Makar said. “The fish and river got the full benefit. We could sort of nurse the river along until the Cameo call came on.”
But next year, releasing the 200 acre-feet of stored water won’t be possible since there won’t be any water in Grizzly Reservoir during the late summer.
“It sounds like next year we will be limited to whatever exists naturally in the system,” Makar said. “We are making sure that when we plan for next year, we are ensuring we get the full benefit… but knowing we won’t have 200 acre-feet in late season releases that could actually come from the reservoir.”
Aspen Journalism covers rivers and water in collaboration with The Aspen Times. This story ran in the Aug. 14 edition of The Aspen Times.
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.
