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The Other Border Dispute Is Over an 80-Year-Old Water Treaty

By
Martha Pskowski, Inside Climate News
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The U.S. 90 bridge crosses the Amistad Reservoir near Del Rio, Texas. Water deliveries from Mexico are stored at the reservoir, where water levels have dropped in recent months. (Omar Ornelas for Inside Climate News)

This story was reported with a grant from The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder.

EL PASO—Maria-Elena Giner faced a room full of farmers, irrigation managers and residents in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas on April 2. 

The local agricultural community was reeling. Reservoirs on the Rio Grande were near record lows and the state had already warned that water cutbacks would be necessary. The last sugar mill in the region closed in February, citing the lack of water.

But Mexico still wasn’t sending water to the U.S. from its Rio Grande tributaries, as a 1944 treaty requires the country to do in five-year intervals. 

“We haven’t gotten any rains or significant inflows,” said Giner, the commissioner of the International Boundary and Water Commission. “It’s not looking good.” 

The IBWC, based in El Paso, implements the boundary and water treaties between the two countries. Giner’s team had spent 2023 working to reach an agreement with Mexico to ensure more reliable water deliveries on the Rio Grande. In December, she was confident the U.S. and Mexico would sign a new agreement, known as a minute. But at the final hour Mexico declined to sign. 

The impasse left farmers and communities in the Rio Grande Valley facing down another hot summer with limited water supplies. The state of Texas and members of Congress joined the supplications to Mexico: Start sending the water you owe. But with the political opposition in Mexico calling for the water treaty to be renegotiated—and presidential elections approaching in June—Mexican officials waited.

Immigration, trade and drug trafficking dominate much of the U.S. diplomatic agenda with Mexico. But in recent months water has become a more urgent topic, rising to the “upper echelons of the Department of State,” in Giner’s words. The 1944 treaty between the U.S. and Mexico governs water distribution on both the Rio Grande and Colorado River. Drought, climate change and politics are increasing tensions over treaty compliance. 

As of May 20, United States ownership of water at the Falcon and Amistad Reservoirs was at 20.1 percent of normal conservation capacity. South Texas farmers and municipalities are figuring out how to make do with less this summer.

Texas Republican Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz and members of both parties in the House are pushing for the State Department to withhold funds for Mexico. 

Giner, who herself grew up between the two countries in Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, remains convinced the neighboring nations can work out their differences over an 80-year-old treaty to manage shared rivers. 

“[This minute is] the tool that we have at the IBWC,” Giner said during the April meeting. “Mexico is a sovereign country. And our tool is influence.”

Rio Grande Valley Farmers Fear More Losses

The Rio Grande starts its 1,900-mile journey to the Gulf of Mexico high in the mountains of southwestern Colorado. But the water that flows through the Texas Rio Grande Valley mostly originates in tributaries in Mexico. The most important is the Rio Conchos that flows from the Sierra Tarahumara through the agricultural heart of Chihuahua before joining the Rio Grande at Presidio, Texas.

The 1944 water treaty commits the U.S. to send Mexico 1.5 million acre-feet of water from the Colorado River each year. On the Rio Grande, Mexico is expected to send an average of 350,000 acre-feet of water from the Mexican tributaries each year over a five-year cycle for a total of 1.75 million acre-feet. This water flows to the Falcon and Amistad Reservoirs, which store water for the farms and communities of the Rio Grande Valley and the downstream Mexican states of Tamaulipas and Nuevo León. 

Irrigation water from the Rio Conchos feeds alfalfa and pecan production in Chihuahua, Mexico. Farmers and politicians in Chihuahua have opposed additional water deliveries to the United States. (Omar Ornelas for Inside Climate News)

The last five-year cycle ended in conflict in 2020, with farmers in Chihuahua protesting water deliveries to the U.S. In a last-minute deal, known as minute 325, Mexico agreed to transfer water stored at the international reservoirs to the U.S. to end the cycle without a deficit.

The current cycle ends on October 25, 2025. Well into the fourth year, Mexico has sent less than 400,000 acre feet of water. At this rate it is unlikely that Mexico can meet its obligations.The main reservoirs on the Rio Conchos are at low levels, with La Boquilla at 28 percent capacity and Francisco Madero at 25.8 percent, as of May 16. The entire state of Chihuahua is currently in a drought.

With irregular water deliveries hampering agricultural production, the last sugar mill in Texas, the Rio Grande Valley Sugar Growers, closed for good in February. 

“I just don’t see a means by which sufficient water could be delivered right now in time to save the agricultural production for this year,” said Carlos Rubinstein, a former Texas Commission on Environmental Quality Rio Grande watermaster and consultant. “So the water is going to have to come from Mother Nature this year, which is a bad spot to be in.”

Towns and cities in the Rio Grande Valley that rely on the river for their water could also face shortages this year. Municipalities may be forced to buy additional water or speed up plans to develop alternative water supplies, like desalination. 

The Delta Lake Irrigation District diverts water to municipalities including Raymondville and Lyford. Water for these communities is conveyed through irrigation canals; if there is no irrigation water the municipal water can’t move through the canals.

“We’re at a point where within the next 60 days if we don’t get substantial rainfall or Mexico releases some water… I don’t know what my municipalities that I deliver water to are going to have to do,” said general manager Troy Allen in early May.

“We’ve already lost the sugar industry in the Rio Grande Valley,” Allen said. He worries the citrus industry will be next. “That’s my big fear.”

Negotiations Advance Then Falter in 2023

State and federal officials tried to avoid this. 

Minute 325, signed by the U.S. and Mexico in October 2020, set the goal of signing a new minute by December 2023 to increase “reliability and predictability” in Rio Grande water deliveries.

The Rio Grande Minute Working Group formed in 2022 with representatives from IBWC, the TCEQ, the Department of State, Mexico’s IBWC, known as CILA, and Mexico’s National Water Commission, known as CONAGUA.

In Mexico, water is federal property. But once that same water is delivered to the U.S. in the international reservoirs, it falls under the purview of the state of Texas. TCEQ’s Rio Grande Watermaster then manages deliveries to irrigation districts and other users. While IBWC handles direct negotiations with Mexico, the agency must work closely with TCEQ. 

Giner wrote to TCEQ Commissioner Bobby Janecka, a member of the working group, in January 2023. She wrote in an email, provided by TCEQ in a records request, that she looked forward to “achieving a minute signing that will lead to predictability and reliability in the Rio Grande.”

TCEQ has urged IWBC to do more, and political tensions on the border have bled into the water dispute. “IBWC must hold Mexico accountable,” wrote the director of the agency’s Office of Water at the end of January 2023.

In late June 2023, IBWC took issue when Texas Governor Gregg Abbott ordered floating buoys designed to stop migrants to be installed in the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass. IBWC denounced the move, saying they were not consulted and the buoys could violate treaty agreements. Tensions with Mexico flared; Mexico’s top diplomat lodged a complaint with the U.S. government, warning the buoys violated the 1944 treaty and were possibly in Mexican territory. The U.S. Department of Justice later sued Texas. That case is now in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. 

On July 18, 2023 IBWC foreign affairs officer Sally Spener notified TCEQ that Mexican officials had postponed a meeting because of the incident, according to emails obtained by Inside Climate News. 

“We were able to continue our negotiations through all of that last year,” Spener said in a May 2024 interview, referring to the buoy controversy. “But it was a distraction.”

Spener said by the second half of 2023, the working group put “concepts on paper” and drafted a minute laying out what the two countries agreed on.

On December 5, the IBWC presented details of the draft minute to stakeholders in the Rio Grande Valley. Irrigation districts and farmers in the valley don’t always agree with the federal government’s approach to working with Mexico, so their buy-in was important. Commissioner Giner explained how key points in the minute would resolve long-standing disagreements about the treaty.

Some irrigation districts and politicians in Chihuahua argue that Mexico should only allocate “wild water,” or water that overflows the country’s domestic dams, to fulfill the treaty. The draft minute would reinforce the importance of Mexico releasing water from its domestic reservoirs, settling that debate. 

Mexico’s San Juan and Alamo Rivers have previously been used to supplement the five tributaries named in the treaty. The draft minute affirmed that, when the U.S. agrees, Mexico could allot water from these rivers to meet its obligations.

The draft also included a new “projects” working group that would focus on increasing water conservation in the drought-impacted watershed. A separate “environment” working group would focus on the Big Bend and increasing water flow in an area that runs dry much of the year. 

“There was some of it that we didn’t agree with, but it was a start,” said Troy Allen of the Delta Lake Irrigation District of the draft minute. “[Commissioner Giner] is very transparent and I think she is really trying her best to help us out.”

IBWC was poised to sign the minute in December. Suddenly Mexican federal officials backtracked, saying they needed to “undertake additional domestic consultations,” according to Spener. Until those consultations were complete, Mexico wouldn’t sign the minute.

Not everyone in Mexico wanted the new agreement. The heart of that opposition lies in Chihuahua.

Mexican Opposition Politicians Protest Water Deliveries

Mexican presidential candidate Xóchitl Gálvez took the stage in Camargo, Chihuahua, on April 14. She spoke just a few miles from La Boquilla, where Mexican farmers protested water deliveries to the United States in 2020.

Those same farmers were out in force for Gálvez, who is backed by Mexico’s three main opposition parties, the PAN, PRI and PRD. Her opponent from the MORENA party, Claudia Sheinbaum, is the hand-picked successor to incumbent president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. 

In 2020, López Obrador sent the National Guard to the La Boquilla reservoir in anticipation of opening the floodgates to send water north. Protesters pushed out the National Guard and a protester was killed in the confrontations. 

A view of the La Boquilla Dam along the Rio Conchos in Chihuahua, Mexico. (Omar Ornelas for Inside Climate News)

Gálvez opened her speech this spring discussing water. “We are in the worst drought in many years,” she said, before launching into criticisms of MORENA’s agricultural policies.

“The treaty payment to the United States in 2025 has to be renegotiated,” she said to cheers. “I promise I will defend the water of Chihuahua.”

Chihuahua governor María Eugenia Campos Galván also opposes water deliveries. Representing the PAN, Campos Galván is one of the few opposition governors in Mexico. For her, defending the water of Chihuahua means challenging the federal officials who send water to the United States.

Chihuahua Congressman Salvador Alcántar, also of the PAN, was instrumental in the 2020 protests. He is steadfast that the water stored at the reservoirs along the Rio Conchos should not be sent to the United States.

“We are in an extreme drought in Mexico. Right now it will be difficult to comply with the commitments in the treaty,” he said in an interview in Spanish. “No one is obligated to give what they don’t have.”

Texas and IBWC officials acknowledge that Mexico’s upcoming presidential election on June 2 cast a shadow over the minute negotiations. Sheinbaum is heavily favored to win. But the federal government is not expected to take action on the treaty or water deliveries in the interim.

“We continue to push for the minute,” said IBWC’s Spener. “And even without the minute [Mexico] can make water deliveries.”

CONAGUA, which manages water allocations on the Rio Conchos, did not respond to questions from Inside Climate News. 

Bad Weather and Bad Politics

Mexico alone doesn’t shoulder the blame for water shortages this year. A prolonged drought and climate change are pummeling the Rio Grande watershed and Mexican tributaries alike. Extreme heat is already taking a toll on agriculture in the Rio Grande Valley. These trends are only expected to continue.

Temperatures throughout the Rio Grande basin are projected to increase by four to 10 degrees Fahrenheit this century, according to the Bureau of Reclamation. Higher temperatures decrease snow accumulation and snow melt. More water evaporates from reservoirs as temperatures warm. 

The Rio Grande flows through a balmy former wetland in Cameron County, Texas. (Dylan Baddour/Inside Climate News)

Drought and rising temperatures are also impacting the Conchos basin in Mexico. Annual runoff in the Conchos basin could decline by up to 25 percent by 2050 because of changes in precipitation and higher temperatures, according to the 2015 Mexico Water Vulnerability Atlas. A study in the Journal of Climate this year projected that Chihuahua is likely to “experience strong drying during the spring and summer months” this century. 

Texas politicians are pressuring the Biden administration to take more decisive action to help the state’s farmers. On May 10, Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, along with eight representatives, including Republicans Monica De La Cruz and Tony Gonzales and Democrats Vicente Gonzalez and Henry Cuellar, sent a letter urging the both the House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees on State and Foreign Operations to withhold designated funds from Mexico until the country “meets its obligations to resolve the ongoing water dispute.” 

López Obrador spoke to the treaty on May 15 during his daily press conference. He said Mexico does not have a date to make a decision. “We support this compact,” he said. “We agree it shouldn’t be modified and we have a very good relationship [with the United States]. But as the weather gets hot and there are elections coming up, all these issues come to light.”

The Department of State referred questions about the treaty negotiations to IBWC. 

Spener of the IBWC said they continue to encourage Mexico to deliver water. The minute working group held its most recent meeting in April in El Paso. 

TCEQ Commissioner Bobby Janecka wrote to Commissioner Giner on April 26, concerned that Mexico continued to allocate water to its irrigation districts without planning how to send water to Texas. He also opposed Mexico arguing that extraordinary drought prevented the country from complying with the treaty. “We are deeply concerned about these claims,” he wrote.

Irrigation districts in the Rio Grande Valley worry about trade-offs when the U.S. agrees to alternative measures—beyond the five tributaries named in the treaty—for Mexico to deliver the water it owes. Anthony Stambaugh, general manager of the Hidalgo County Irrigation District No. 2., said Mexico “needs to be caught up first,” before the U.S. offers more concessions.

When the treaty clock runs out on October 25, 2025, both the U.S. and Mexico will have entered new presidential administrations. The incoming U.S. president will also appoint the IBWC commissioner. The tone of binational negotiations could change dramatically.

Mexicans go to the polls on June 2. Water issues, from Chihuahua to Mexico City, have taken on greater importance during the campaign. Water shortages are spreading to more neighborhoods in Mexico City as supplies dip. Frontrunner Sheinbaum is largely expected to continue her predecessor’s policies if elected. She has committed to making water management a priority and would consider a revision of the National Water Law. Meanwhile, her opponent Gálvez has said, if elected, she would modernize agriculture to make more efficient use of water.

Six months later, the United States will hold its presidential election. Water and the 1944 treaty are hardly top campaign issues north of the border. But, if elected, Republican candidate Donald Trump would likely take a more confrontational approach in his dealings with Mexico. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has invested heavily in water conservation in Western states, including in the Colorado River Basin and the Rio Grande. These investments, through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, would likely continue if Biden is re-elected.

In the Rio Grande Valley, the immediate concern is how to get through a dry, hot summer with less water to go around. As water supplies dwindle—and the political divide widens—the immediate needs to secure water will take precedent.

Carlos Rubinstein, the former TCEQ watermaster, said resolving the root issues of water supplies on the Rio Grande requires continuous work, not just during the bad years.

“It’s bad weather and it’s bad politics,” he said. “So that’s a really tough place to be.”

This story was produced by Inside Climate News, in partnership with The Water Desk, an independent initiative of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.

Reporter’s Notebook: The making of “The Gen Z Water Dealmaker,” a podcast about the Colorado River negotiations

By
Luke Runyon
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The Colorado River is in the midst of one of the worst water crises in recorded history. Climate change and overuse are taking a significant toll. Leaders from seven U.S. states must compromise and reach a solution to prevent the river from collapsing.

LAist Correspondent Emily Guerin

To understand how negotiators from those states are thinking in this moment, Emily Guerin, a reporter for LA’s public radio station, LAist 89.3, took a deep dive into the river’s political landscape in her latest podcast series, “Imperfect Paradise: The Gen Z Water Dealmaker” from LAist Studios.

Emily brings a sharp eye to the river’s notoriously complex, multi-layered political landscape, and paints a compelling portrait of the most powerful people tasked with negotiating agreements to share the dwindling water supply.

In this recorded webinar, The Water Desk co-director Luke Runyon and Emily talk about narrative storytelling on the Colorado River, and what the story of the river basin’s most powerful decision-makers tells us about our ability to adapt to a changing climate.

In Colorado, new scrutiny and possible fixes coming for drinking water in mobile home parks

By
Eleanor Bennett, Aspen Public Radio
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Silvia Barragán stands outside her front door in Apple Tree Park in western Colorado on April 28, 2024. For years, Barragán and her neighbors in the mobile home park have been speaking out about the discolored water that comes out of their taps. (Eleanor Bennett / Aspen Public Radio)

In western communities, mobile home parks provide a more affordable place to live, but residents often face problems with their drinking water. 

In Colorado, a new law gives the state authority to test water quality in these communities and force owners to fix any issues.

The state plans to start testing the water at hundreds of parks across the state this summer. Officials have already gotten a head start at one community in Western Colorado that helped spur the legislation.

Apple Tree Park sits on the banks of the Colorado River just across from the town of New Castle. 

Silvia Barragán moved to the park in 2015. Her street is lined with trees and she has a big yard with a garden. 

“Some people might look at this as just a trashy mobile park, but it’s not,” Barragán said. “It’s a nice, nice neighborhood. There’s a lot of kids in the summer running around and there’s a lot of elderly people that have lived here most of their lives.”

Barragán is originally from Michoacán, Mexico, and she raised her family in western Colorado. Her experience at Apple Tree Park over the last decade has mostly been positive. 

“Since I moved here, I felt peaceful and at home,” Barragán said. “My neighbors are great neighbors and I haven’t had any issues in Apple Tree except the water.”

Cars line up in front of mobile homes on a quiet street at Apple Tree Park in western Colorado on April 28, 2024. Water quality issues at the park helped spur a new Colorado law that gives the state authority to test water quality in mobile home parks and force owners to fix any issues. (Eleanor Bennett / Aspen Public Radio)

For years, Barragán and her neighbors have been speaking out about the discolored water that comes out of their taps. 

“It’s kind of brownish, yellowish. It’s kind of nasty,” she said. “It’s like river water, like if I’m camping and I go get river water, that’s what it looks like.”

Barragán only wears black now because the water stains her clothes and laundry, and it ruins her appliances.

It has an unpleasant smell and taste, so she fills up water jugs at the local grocery store.

“I buy water,” Barragán said. “I buy water for cooking, I buy water for drinking, I buy water for the dogs.” 

When the state tested the water at Apple Tree Park, they found it meets federal EPA standards under the Safe Drinking Water Act, passed in 1974, but it has higher than normal levels of heavy metals such as iron and manganese. The park is supplied by groundwater wells, and is outside the limits of the nearby town of New Castle, which draws the majority of its drinking supply from a nearby creek.

Apple Tree Park resident Silvia Barragán points at a bucket she filled with discolored water on April 28, 2024. The water meets federal EPA health standards, but has higher than normal levels of heavy metals such as manganese and iron, so Barragán buys water at the local grocery store. (Eleanor Bennett / Aspen Public Radio) 

Joel Minor used to manage the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s environmental justice program, and said Apple Tree’s situation — of heavy metals showing up in underground well water — is pretty common. 

“Because of the taste and color and odor of the water, it can be unpleasant to drink and can cause other issues,” Minor said. “We recognize that that creates challenges for park residents and may require them to spend money on things like bottled water or repairing or replacing appliances.”

While Apple Tree’s overall water system meets federal health standards for drinking, a recent round of testing this winter found that a few samples out of the 200 taken had manganese levels that were above the EPA’s health advisory for infants. High levels of manganese can negatively impact babies’ brain development.

When the state got the test results back in February, they worked with the park owner—Utah-based company Investment Property Group (IPG)—to notify residents and local health officials about the issue. 

“What we want folks to know is to be cautious about using tap water from the park for making formula for infants under the age of six-months-old,” Minor said. “These particular locations where this occurred seem to be spots where maybe the water isn’t being flushed quite as well.”

A water-stained bathtub in Silvia Barragán’s home at Apple Tree Park is one example of how the discolored water has impacted her appliances. Other residents at the mobile home park have also had to replace appliances such as dishwashers and laundry machines more frequently than usual. (Eleanor Bennett / Aspen Public Radio)

With the passage of the Mobile Home Park Water Quality Act in 2023, the state’s been working with IPG to do more regular testing and to fix the water issues. The company didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. 

In 2020, IPG bought the mobile home park from the local Talbott family, which had owned the park since its inception. The company has properties across 13 states, including more than 110 mobile home parks, according to the Mobile Home Park Home Owners Allegiance’s online database.

The state has been having regular meetings with IPG, Garfield County health officials, local advocacy groups and park residents to come up with a variety of ways to improve the water. 

“One key short-term solution that we’ve been working with the park on is flushing the water system more frequently, which can help remove iron and other metals that have accumulated in the system,” Minor said. “We’ve also worked with that same coalition to put on an informational webinar about how to do in-home flushing for appliances like water heaters and pipes so that residents are also able to flush their own water systems.”

Another short-term fix already underway is putting in water stations where residents can fill up jugs for cooking and drinking. 

The state is providing direct funding to the park in the form of an assistance grant to help install these stations. One has already been installed at a local school across from the mobile home park that’s also owned by IPG, and the company plans to install a second by early June in a communal area near the entrance to the park. 

“That was something we came up with based on feedback from park residents that folks are having to drive across the river and across the highway into New Castle to fill water jugs for drinking and other purposes,” Minor said. “So these are key short-term solutions, but we recognize they don’t address the root cause of the problem.”

A Pride flag hangs outside a home at Apple Tree Park near New Castle, Colorado on April 28, 2024. State officials are working with the company that owns the park to fix its water quality issues under a new state law that went into effect this year. (Eleanor Bennett / Aspen Public Radio)

To address the root cause, the state is proposing bigger engineering solutions like installing a filtration system, or even connecting Apple Tree to a municipal water supply. 

But Apple Tree is just one of about 750 mobile home parks in Colorado. The new legislation gives the state authority to test, but the full scope of just how bad water quality could be at those parks, and the costs to fix the various causes could easily begin to rise as testing ramps up.

There is additional funding available for park owners to make these system-wide changes, and if they don’t, the state could impose fines until the problem is fixed. 

“We are really trying to prioritize solutions that won’t increase rent for park residents by either looking at lower cost options or ways of getting outside funding that can ensure that some of those costs don’t get passed on to residents,” Minor said. “We know that passing along the cost could potentially make the equity challenges that are already at play worse if residents have to pay more for their water bills or their space rents.”

Alex Sanchez leads the Glenwood Springs-based Latine advocacy nonprofit Voces Unidas, which worked with Apple Tree residents and Democratic Colorado House Representative Elizabeth Velasco of Glenwood Springs to pass the water quality legislation. 

“We’re not opposed to getting state dollars and federal dollars to be able to support or incentivize some of these solutions,” Sanchez said. “But ultimately, we believe it’s the responsibility of those corporate owners who have been making a lot of profit off the backs of hardworking folks without having access to, you know, quality water, potentially sidewalks, infrastructure and other benefits that many of us take for granted.” 

Apple Tree Park resident Silvia Barragán fills up a bucket with the discolored water that comes out of her kitchen faucet on April 28, 2024. Barragán only wears black now because the water stains her clothes and laundry. (Eleanor Bennett / Aspen Public Radio)

For Sanchez and Voces Unidas, the new law is just the first step in addressing a widespread environmental justice issue — many people living in these communities have lower incomes, don’t speak English as a first language, don’t have access to resources to file complaints, and are Latines or other people of color. 

“The issue is not just contained to one or two parks. Something is happening in these mobile home park communities and because they’re not regulated, there’s not a lot of accountability,” Sanchez said. “Many of these communities across Colorado are owned by corporations that are from out of state.” 

In a recent statewide poll in Colorado, Voces Unidas found 41% of mobile home park residents surveyed did not trust or drink their water. 

Since 2020, the state’s health and environment department has received 66 formal water quality complaints from 42 parks. State officials estimate that it will take them four years to test the water at all of Colorado’s roughly 750 parks. 

For her part, Apple Tree Park resident Silvia Barragán is glad that her community is at the top of the state’s list.  

“When I bought this place, I thought I was gonna retire here,” Barragán said. “So I would be sad to think that I need to buy another place just because, you know, I haven’t seen any change.”

Barragán hopes the new legislation will speed things up, but she doesn’t know how much longer she can wait for clean water. 

This story was produced by Aspen Public Radio, in partnership with The Water Desk, an independent initiative of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism. 

Join us for a webinar on new Colorado River podcast

By
Luke Runyon
-

The Colorado River is in the midst of one of the worst water crises in recorded history. Climate change and overuse are taking a significant toll. Leaders from seven U.S. states must compromise and reach a solution to prevent the river from collapsing.

To understand how negotiators from those states are thinking in this moment, Emily Guerin, a reporter for LA’s public radio station, LAist 89.3, took a deep dive into the river’s political landscape in her latest podcast series, “Imperfect Paradise: The Gen Z Water Dealmaker” from LAist Studios.

Emily brings a sharp eye to the river’s notoriously complex, multi-layered political landscape, and paints a compelling portrait of the most powerful people tasked with negotiating agreements to share the dwindling water supply. Full disclosure: I served as an editorial advisor on the project, and think it’s a great introduction into the current state of Colorado River policymaking.

If you’d like to learn more about how the series came together, join me and Emily on Friday, May 17 at 1 p.m. MT. We plan to talk about narrative storytelling on the Colorado River, and what the story of the river basin’s most powerful decision-makers tells us about our ability to adapt to a changing climate.

Register for webinar

Meet The 28-Year-Old Californian Trying To Save The Colorado River

By
Emily Guerin
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Once the water has passed the drop, it flows downhill by gravity towards the Imperial Valley. (Zaydee Sanchez/LAist)

The Colorado River is in crisis — one of the worst in recorded history. We take more water out of the river than flows in, and climate change is making things worse. So for the past several months, the seven states that use Colorado River water have been trying to come up with a plan to keep the river from collapsing. Thirty tribal nations and Mexico also tap the Colorado River, but they are not formally represented in these negotiations. California is the single largest user of Colorado River water, which means that any effort to save the river involves California making some serious cuts. 

The states have until the end of 2025 to make a deal. And recently, the states have been deadlocked over who should use less water, and how much. The states in the “Upper Basin” (Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico) vehemently disagree with the states in the “Lower Basin” (California, Arizona, and Nevada). 

If they can’t make a deal in time, and the river continues to dry up without an agreement about how to handle that, no one knows what will happen. 

At the very worst, big reservoirs could get so low, no water would pass through the dams. That means 30% of Southern California’s drinking water would be cut off, likely resulting in strict rationing and higher prices for water.

JB Hamby is California’s lead negotiator on Colorado River issues and the subject of a new season of Imperfect Paradise called The Gen Z Water Dealmaker. 

NAME: John Brooks Hamby, aka J.B.

AGE: 28

HOMETOWN: Brawley, California

DAY JOB: Board member of Imperial Irrigation District, a public utility that imports Colorado River water to California’s Imperial Valley and provides electricity. Elected in 2020.

SIDE HUSTLE: Lead negotiator for California on Colorado River issues. Elected in 2023.

NUMBER OF PHONES: Two

NUMBER OF CARS: One, a silver 2013 Toyota Prius with 210,000 miles.

NUMBER OF BOOKS HE’S READ ABOUT THE COLORADO RIVER: A lot. Not exactly sure. I’m on the market for some bookshelves.

FAVORITE ANIMAL: The desert pupfish. They’re an endangered fish native to the lower Colorado River and Arizona. They’re half the size of your pinky, tolerate heat and salinity, and the males turn bright blue when mating. I have a pupfish hat and sticker on my water bottle!

FAVORITE ARTICLE OF CLOTHING: My silver belt buckle. It’s made by a Navajo jeweler, and I bought it in Prescott, Arizona.

FAVORITE SMELLS: Lemon blossoms, fresh-cut alfalfa or the desert after it rains.

A TYPICAL DAY: At home, it is waking up and immediately checking emails, reading from a short stack of documents over breakfast, making calls throughout the morning, and then meetings in the afternoon for Colorado River or energy-related issues. In the evening, I go on a walk and read Robert Caro’s The Power Broker before bed. I travel a lot to Denver, Phoenix, and Las Vegas to meet with the other Colorado River basin states, or to Washington, D.C., to talk to our congressional delegates. 

WORRIES: The seven states that use the Colorado River could fail to come up with a solution we can all live with.

NIGHTMARE SCENARIO: Two things: the big reservoirs on the river dropping so low, no water can pass through the dams – which means no water for California. It’s called deadpool. Or going to the Supreme Court over these ongoing negotiations.

WHAT GIVES ME HOPE: The Lower Basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada have already come so far to overcome divisions and historical disagreements. We’ve done the same in California between cities, farms and tribes. There is little limit to what we can accomplish if we are working constructively toward a common goal, not vilifying others or absolving ourselves of any responsibility.

WANNA LEARN MORE? Listen to the new series of Imperfect Paradise: The Gen Z Water Dealmaker.

How this spring’s snowpack is stacking up

By
Mitch Tobin
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The snowpack in the San Juan Mountains as seen from Telluride ski area in southwest Colorado on March 28, 2024. Photo by Mitch Tobin/The Water Desk.

A version of this post originally appeared on Snow News on April 4, 2024.

April 1 is a big day for fools, and for the West’s water professionals.

For the region’s water wonks, April 1 is a critical date for tracking snow accumulation and projecting the subsequent runoff that will fill streams, rivers, reservoirs, aqueducts, irrigation ditches, and the taps in homes and businesses.

Snowmelt accounts for most of the water flowing in key rivers such as the Colorado and Rio Grande, and while the annual snowpack tends to max out at different times throughout the vast region, many areas peak around early April. The April 1 map below shows how river basins fared in terms of snow water equivalent (SWE), a measure of the snowpack’s water content.

Source: Natural Resources Conservation Service.

Overall, conditions were above normal in southern portions of the region, below normal in northern tier states, and about average in many of the remaining locations. The map makes full use of the colors in the legend, ranging from below 50% (red) to more than 150% (deep blue) of the median for 1991 to 2020. The north-south gradient is about what you’d expect from an El Niño, which tends to tilt the odds this way, as I discussed in an earlier post.

The maps below, from the ENSO blog at climate.gov, show how this winter’s precipitation differed from the long-term average (left) and the pattern that’s expected based on prior El Niños (right).

Source: climate.gov.

The post’s author, NOAA’s Nat Johnson, writes there was a “reasonably good match between what we saw and the expected El Niño precipitation pattern,” but he also notes some discrepancies: “the Pacific Northwest and Northeast were considerably wetter than the expected El Niño pattern, while portions of the southern tier from southern Texas to the Southeast were notably drier.”

How did the April 1 snowpack compare to previous years? I created the graphic below using data from 2022, 2023, and 2024.

Source: my compilation of maps from the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

At this time last year, the snowpack was huge in many parts of the West, and even record-breaking in some locations. This year’s map isn’t as blue, but conditions are better than they were in 2022, at least in most places.

I took a glance at the April 1 snowpack maps for Western states (available here) and have included a few of them below:

  • Utah (looking good; I wish I hadn’t skipped skiing there this season)
  • Montana (grim, with record lows in some basins)
  • Idaho (wide range of conditions from north to south)
  • Colorado (about average and the headwaters of important rivers)
Source: Natural Resources Conservation Service.

It’s worth remembering that in a state like Colorado, where the snowpack supplies water to 18 other states and Mexico, the weather in April and May can play a major role in determining streamflows and reservoir levels.

In the April 4 chart below, the black line shows actual snowpack levels in Colorado since October 1, 2023, and the solid green line indicates the median from 1991 to 2020. Looking into the future, the dashed lines show a variety of possible trajectories for the snowpack in the months ahead. The dark blue and dark red lines plot the maximum and minimum projections, respectively.

Source: Natural Resources Conservation Service.

Although it’s highly unlikely, the chart above shows that moving forward, the state’s snowpack could plummet and be significantly below average by May 1. Alternately, if we get hit by a bunch of storms and it stays cool, the snowpack could keep on growing into May. In other words, the story of this season’s snowpack is still in flux.

In recent years, snowpack levels in the Rockies that were around normal on April 1 have translated into below-average streamflows. Some scientists have pointed to deficits in soil moisture as the culprit for the disparity. Others are researching how warming temperatures are impacting sublimation, when snow converts directly into water vapor. A 2023 paper from Colorado State University scientists argued that spring and summer precipitation was important for explaining the discrepancy between snowpack levels and subsequent runoff. 

In California, the snowpack was a mere 28% of normal on January 1, but all of those atmospheric rivers and other storms wound up delivering a statewide estimate of 110% on April 1. Recent headlines have used phrases like “unusually normal” and “average is awesome” to describe the conditions in California, where the April 1 snowpack in 2023 was 232% of normal but just 35% in 2022. The April 3 graphic below shows the northern part of the Sierra Nevada has the deepest conditions.

Source: California Department of Water Resources.

In a sign of the snowpack’s significance, California Gov. Gavin Newsom used the April 1 milestone as a news hook for announcing a new water plan for the state. “Newsom wore snowshoes as he joined state water managers for their final snow survey of the season,” wrote Ian James of The Los Angeles Times. “The snow was more than 5 feet deep at Phillips Station near South Lake Tahoe on Tuesday. Officials noted that nine years ago, then-Gov. Jerry Brown had stood on snowless ground at the same spot and declared a drought emergency.”

If you’d like to see interesting and detailed maps of the Sierra snowpack, check out this page from researchers at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado Boulder. These experimental products provide “near-real-time estimates” of SWE at a resolution of 500 meters (1,650 feet, or about 0.3 miles). They’re based on recent cloud-free satellite imagery and on-the-ground data from snow pillows and other sources.

Three views of the Sierra Nevada snowpack on March 18. Source: Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research.

Elsewhere in the West, warm and dry conditions have persisted in places such as Washington, Montana, northern Idaho, and much of northern Wyoming, with some SNOTEL stations reporting record-low SWE readings, according to an April 3 snow drought update from drought.gov.

On the bright side, “an active March storm track favored the Sierra Nevada, central Great Basin, and Four Corners states, where little snow drought remained by the end of March,” the update said. For the second year in a row, the April 1 snowpack was above normal in the Upper Colorado River Basin, which is crucial for filling the beleaguered Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

Panoramic view of the San Juan Mountains from Telluride ski area on March 28, 2024. The snowpack in southwest Colorado was about average on April 1. Photo by Mitch Tobin/The Water Desk.

Snow News is a free multimedia newsletter that covers the science of snow and the state of the snowpack.

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.

10 visuals that show how climate change is transforming the West’s snow and water supply

By
Mitch Tobin
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The Arkansas River and Sawatch Range near Leadville, Colorado, in March 2021. Photo by Mitch Tobin/The Water Desk.

A recent federal synthesis of climate change research paints a grim portrait of snow’s future in the American West and warns that the fast-growing region’s water supply is vulnerable.

“Climate change will continue to cause profound changes in the water cycle, increasing the risk of flooding, drought, and degraded water supplies for both people and ecosystems,” according to the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5) released in November.

The congressionally mandated report concludes there is “widespread consensus” that warming will “decrease the proportion of US precipitation that falls as snow, decrease snow extents, advance the timing of snowmelt rates and pulses, increase the prevalence of rain-on-snow events,” and transform the runoff that is vital for farms, cities and ecosystems. 

Climate change has already diminished the West’s snowpack, with warming global temperatures leading to earlier peaks and shorter seasons, especially at lower elevations and in areas closer to the coast.

In areas where snow is the dominant source of runoff, the volume of water stored in the snowpack may decrease by more than 24% by 2050 under some emissions scenarios, with “persistent low-snow conditions emerging within the next 60 years,” the report said.

“When we have less snow in the West, it can strain our water supplies,” said report co-author Steph McAfee, regional administrator of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center. “We’ve tended to rely on the snowpack as a reservoir that didn’t need to be built and it doesn’t need to be maintained, so it’s been a key place for storing water. Having less snow directly means less water stored for use in the summer.”

NCA5 stresses that climate change’s reshaping of the water cycle and other impacts will exacerbate inequalities in U.S. society and pose a special threat to some marginalized communities.

“All communities will be affected,” the report said, “but in particular those on the frontline of climate change—including many Black, Hispanic, Tribal, Indigenous, and socioeconomically disadvantaged communities—face growing risks from changes to water quantity and quality due to the proximity of their homes and workplaces to hazards and limited access to resources and infrastructure.” 

NCA5 describes itself as the federal government’s “preeminent report on climate change impacts, risks, and responses,” though it is required to steer clear of policy prescriptions. 

The report is based on the latest science, but it is produced for decision-makers and the general public, so it is written in relatively accessible language, and data visualizations play a leading role in communicating the findings. 

Below I use 10 visuals from NCA5—mostly maps but also charts, an infographic and a photo—to help summarize the report’s conclusions about climate, snow and water in the West, focusing on the more arid parts of the region. 

Climate, snow and water

At one level, the story of snow and climate change is simple: in order for snow to fall and stick around, it has to be cold enough, so the warming of the planet is generally bad news for snow. 

“I think the changes to snow and snowpack are changes that we have more confidence in than just about any other water parameter because of the direct effect of warming on snowpack and snow precipitation,” said Elizabeth Payton, NCA5’s Water Chapter Lead and a water resources specialist at the Western Water Assessment at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Co-author Ben Harding, senior water resources engineer at Lynker, summed up the report’s findings on snow this way: 

“We’re going to see shorter periods of time with snow on the ground, the snow will start to accumulate later and it’ll start to melt earlier,” he said.

A smaller snowpack, a curtailed snow season and a new runoff regime will test the region’s complex water infrastructure of dams, aqueducts and canals, many of which were built in the early to mid-20th century, before climate change was recognized as a peril. The altered snowpack will also strain the West’s water laws and policies, many of which emerged in the 19th century, before some Western states were even admitted to the union. 

But while climate change has already shrunk the snowpack in most parts of the world and will continue to take a toll as temperatures climb, there are exceptions that buck the trend. Total global precipitation is expected to increase due to warming, including in places where the snowpack shrivels. NCA5 predicts there will be worse droughts and floods. 

For example, atmospheric rivers, which are pivotal for the West’s snowpack and water supply, are expected to strengthen in the years ahead. But beyond a certain point, warming makes it more likely that rain will fall instead of snow, even high in the mountains, raising the risk of flooding and a subpar snowpack. 

As temperatures keep rising, increasing rates of melting and evaporation will play a key role. Another critical factor is how much moisture gets sucked up by plants and then transpired into the atmosphere. Some snow never becomes snowmelt and is “lost” to the atmosphere through sublimation, moving directly from the solid to the gaseous phase. Soil moisture is yet another essential element of the water cycle, impacting drought, flooding, agriculture and ecosystems. 

But that’s not all. In Colorado, for example, dust-on-snow events are a big deal because the darker material reduces the snow’s reflectivity and causes it to absorb more heat, accelerating the meltout. Climate change threatens to worsen the dust problem as it continues to aridify parts of the West.

Warming is adjusting the dials on all of these factors, and the magnitude of these changes matter, but there’s yet another crucial dimension: timing. In spring, farmers, water managers and dam operators not only care deeply about the volume of the snowpack that will fill reservoirs, canals, ditches and pipes, but also are keenly interested in when that water will be entering the system. 

“Having a pulse of snowmelt at the beginning of the growing season has been helpful to farmers and ranchers, and the timing of the snowmelt has been something that ecosystems have evolved to adapt to,” Payton said. “The timing is going to be shifting dramatically.”

Warming has already taken a toll on the West’s snowpack

While much of NCA5 focuses on the future, the report also looks back at how climate change has already transformed the nation. The graphic below depicts how the West’s snowpack has shifted in recent decades, with red circles indicating declines, blue circles showing increases and the circle scaled to the size of the change. 

The figure’s title says it all: “Western snowpack is declining, peak snowpack is occurring earlier, and the snowpack season is shortening in length.”

Map “a” shows changes in the volume of the snowpack on April 1, a key date for water managers as they plan for the runoff season. About 93% of sites have experienced a decrease in April 1 snowpack since the 1950s, with the decline averaging about 23%. 

Map “b” concerns the timing of the snowpack’s peak, which has come nearly eight days earlier on average since 1982. 

Map “c” presents data on the length of the snow season, which has decreased by 18 days on average over the last four decades. 

(For more on these maps, including the underlying data, see this page from the Environmental Protection Agency.)

While the vast majority of circles in the figure are red, there are also some blue locations, such as in north-central Colorado. When I asked NCA5 co-authors about those sites, several noted that many of them lie at higher elevations—like those along the Continental Divide in Colorado—and the naturally colder conditions there can help preserve their snowpack in a warming world, up to a point. 

“There are some parts of Alaska or some very high elevations that might have more snow when the snowpack is at its largest,” McAfee said. “They’re starting out really cold, so if it warms up some, it’s still cold enough to snow. If it warms up enough, then there’s the possibility for snow melting earlier or more of those storms bringing rain than snow.”

While some high-elevation locations may see their snowpack increase in coming years, it’s “by and large definitely not enough to compensate or offset the widespread losses in snow that are occurring everywhere else,” said co-author Justin Pflug, a scientist at the University of Maryland and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

How much warmer it gets will be crucial for the snowpack (and much else)

One of the challenges in producing a report like NCA5 is the uncertainty surrounding future greenhouse gas emissions. Innovation, geopolitics, consumer preferences and more make it hard to predict how rapidly the economy will decarbonize. As a result, scientists must use varying emissions scenarios, and it remains to be seen just how much temperatures will rise at a global level.

While the rate of future warming is uncertain, one thing that’s clear is that some parts of the planet will warm more than others and have already experienced much steeper temperature increases. 

The graphic below, which maps the projected change in temperatures at various levels of global warming, shows that the effects are expected to be uneven across the United States. For example, at 2°C of global warming, parts of the Interior West would be more than 5°C warmer. Across the globe, researchers have found “growing evidence that the rate of warming is amplified with elevation,” according to a 2015 paper in Nature Climate Change.

Locations in Alaska would be even hotter than that, mirroring a global trend of much more rapid warming in the Arctic. A 2022 study in Communications Earth & Environment is titled “The Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the globe since 1979.”

“One of the key messages for us in the water chapter is that temperature really matters for water,” McAfee said. “Temperature influences whether or not we get rain or snow. It influences when the snowpack melts. It influences how big a sip the atmosphere takes from the water and all of that. So we can’t think about precipitation and we can’t think about our water systems separate from temperature.”

When people hear about droughts and water shortages, they naturally think of a lack of precipitation, which remains the primary driver of such dry times. But as NCA5 notes, “higher temperatures can cause drought to develop or become more intense than would be expected from precipitation deficits alone.”

In a “hot drought,” the atmosphere demands more moisture and desiccates the landscape. Warmer temperatures also contribute to “snow droughts” (discussed below), “flash droughts” that develop in a matter of weeks and “megadroughts” that can extend over decades. 

NCA5 also emphasizes two other messages related to temperature: the degree of change matters greatly, and how hot the planet gets depends on the choices society makes now. 

“The more the planet warms, the greater the impacts—and the greater the risk of unforeseen consequences,” according to the report. “While there are still uncertainties about how the planet will react to rapid warming and catastrophic future scenarios that cannot be ruled out, the future is largely in human hands.”

Climate change is projected to increase global precipitation, but not necessarily in the Southwest

Scientists and their models can paint a much clearer picture of how temperatures will change compared to the projections for precipitation. That said, global warming is expected to increase overall precipitation on the planet because there will be higher evaporation rates and warmer air can hold more moisture. 

The figure below shows projected changes in annual precipitation according to four different levels of warming, with greens indicating increases and browns depicting decreases. The hatching shows areas where 80% or more of the models agree on whether precipitation will increase or decrease. 

Most of the country is expected to see more precipitation overall, with higher levels of warming generally leading to wetter conditions and more certainty about those changes. But in all of the maps, precipitation is expected to decrease in Southern California, much of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, plus portions of Colorado.

“Precipitation changes also scale with global warming, but these projections vary by location and are less certain than temperature changes,” according to NCA5. 

Payton said “there’s not a very strong signal” for total precipitation changes for the Southwest. “The atmosphere can hold more moisture when it’s warmer,” she said, “but that moisture has to come from somewhere, so over the Southwest, where it’s already dry, is it going to be able to suck up that additional amount of moisture that it can hold?”

While precipitation projections are cloudier, Westerners should expect a shift from snowflakes toward raindrops in many parts of the region: “it is virtually certain that less precipitation will fall as snow, leading to large reductions in mountain snowpack and decreases in spring runoff in the mountain West,” according to NCA5.

Overall, NCA5 concludes that “changes in future precipitation and temperature are expected to exacerbate drought across large portions of the US,” with projections showing “the strongest drying signal occurring in the Southwest.”

While drought and water scarcity are dominant themes in more arid parts of the West, these areas also contend with floods that can turn dry washes into raging torrents in a flash and threaten both lives and property.

“Warmer air is thirstier air, and that really raises the risk of higher-severity precipitation events,” Pflug said. 

Flooding can also be caused by snowmelt, especially in years with a big snowpack, rapid thawing in spring or when it rains on top of snow. 

“Due to climate change, snowmelt-driven flooding is expected to occur earlier in the year due to earlier runoff,” the report said. “Moreover, atmospheric rivers, which have driven much of historical flooding in the region, are expected to intensify under a warming climate.” 

The graphic below shows the importance of atmospheric rivers to extreme precipitation in the Pacific Northwest, especially in winter (see my previous post for more on climate change and atmospheric rivers).

The West’s snowpack will store less water and runoff will change

The maps below depict how warming temperatures and changing precipitation patterns are expected to influence three crucial variables in the Southwest’s water cycle, with the top row of maps showing projections for 2036-2065 and the bottom row showing 2070 to 2099, both relative to the 1991-2020 period.

The leftmost maps show projected changes in soil moisture, a critical factor for agriculture and a host of ecological processes. While drier soils are expected in many parts of the Southwest, and especially in portions of the Four Corners states, other areas are expected to see increases in soil moisture.

The center maps depict projected changes in the maximum volume of snow water equivalent, a measure of the snowpack’s water content. Whereas the soil moisture picture is somewhat muddled, the story for snow is crystal clear: steep declines throughout the region, and especially in California’s mountains. 

The rightmost maps show expected changes to runoff—the water that reaches streams, rivers, lakes, reservoirs and taps. As with soil moisture, the projections vary by location but many of the highest-elevation areas, such as the Sierra Nevada, the Southern Rockies and Utah’s Wasatch Range, are expected to see decreases in runoff.

The report’s co-authors stressed that the interactions between soil moisture, snowpack and runoff are complicated, and there is still considerable uncertainty about future precipitation patterns. With soil moisture, for instance, earlier snowmelt may lead to wetter conditions in spring but drier conditions later in the summer.  

Because the changes will vary across the country, people should “look at results and data and projections for their own region and not necessarily take a message from elsewhere and assume that’s what’s happening where they live,” McAfee said. “Climate change will have different impacts in different places. So the fact that we might be concerned about reduced water supplies in the Colorado River doesn’t necessarily mean we have the same concerns in every river basin.”

In the Colorado River Basin, research has shown that “less snow means more evaporation, and this is because snow is really reflective,” McAfee said. “Anyone who’s ever been out skiing knows this: you can get that reflection up and the nose and chin sunburn, and if the snowpack melts early, the land gets more energy, which makes it possible to evaporate more water from the soils and streams and for the plants to get going earlier.”

One challenge for scientists and water managers is that it’s tough to calculate how much snow is out there. Snow accumulation can vary dramatically on a single run at a ski resort, not only from top to bottom due to thousands of feet of elevation difference, but even from one side of the run to the other due to trees, shading, rocks and wind.  

Another vexing problem is tracing what happens to all those H20 molecules after they’ve fallen to earth. 

“There’s still some uncertainties about where the snow is going hydrologically,” Pflug said. 

In recent years, peak snowpack levels in the Rockies that were around normal have translated into below-average streamflows. Some scientists have pointed to deficits in soil moisture as the culprit for the disparity. Others are researching how warming temperatures are impacting sublimation, when snow converts directly into water vapor. A 2023 paper from Colorado State University scientists argued that spring and summer precipitation was important for explaining the discrepancy between snowpack levels and subsequent runoff. 

Here’s how NCA5 sums up the situation for the Colorado River, which supplies some 40 million people in seven U.S. states and Mexico while also irrigating millions of acres of crops:

“Colorado River streamflow over the period 2000–2014 was 19% lower than the 20th-century average, largely due to a reduction in snowfall, less reflected sunlight, and increased evaporation. The period 2000–2021 in the Southwest had the driest soil moisture of any period of the same length in at least the past 1,200 years. While this drought is partially linked to natural climate variability, there is evidence that climate change exacerbated it, because warmer temperatures increase atmospheric ‘thirst’ and dry the soil. Droughts in the region are lasting longer and reflect not a temporary extreme event but a long-term aridification trend—a drier ‘new normal’ occasionally punctuated by periods of extreme wetness consistent with expected increases in precipitation volatility in a warming world.”

Some rural and Indigenous communities are especially vulnerable to the changing water cycle

The consequences of a thinner, less reliable snowpack and changing runoff patterns will be far-reaching, but they will be especially problematic for some rural communities dependent on farming and snow-related recreation. 

The infographic below illustrates some of the downstream effects on agriculture, with snow droughts contributing to the stresses facing the sector and its workers. Reduced snowmelt for irrigation may cause farmers to lose money, generate more dust that harms both farmworkers and the snowpack, and lead to increasing use of dwindling underground aquifers as agriculture shifts from surface water to groundwater.

While the graphic above focuses on agriculture, climate change will also affect the water supply for cities, suburbs and businesses, plus the innumerable species that have evolved to depend on the snowpack and snowmelt. 

Farmers who rely on direct flows from the river may have very senior water rights, but often they lack reservoirs to store the water, so as climate change shifts precipitation from snow to rain and starts the runoff season earlier, these water users—plus fish and other wildlife—face a growing risk of shortages later in the year. 

“For communities that have storage rights, they’re less sensitive to the loss of snowpack if you still are getting precipitation in some form or another,” Payton said. “There are a lot of people and communities in the West who are just living on the edge, and they don’t have the storage, they don’t have the infrastructure to take advantage of when it’s there and are very much dependent on the regime that they’ve been used to.”

NCA5 highlights that “community-based snow-fed irrigation systems in high-elevation watersheds of New Mexico and Colorado, known as acequias, are particularly exposed to the shortfalls in annual snowpack.”

While building more reservoir storage is a potential solution, that strategy has three problems, Harding said. “One is people don’t like reservoirs, except for the people that are going to benefit and use the water. Two is they’re really expensive. And three is we’ve used up most of the really good reservoir sites, so that seems unlikely,” he said. 

Even without the influence of climate change, many Indigenous communities in the West confront major hurdles in securing safe and adequate water supplies (see this 2021 paper for more on incomplete plumbing and poor water quality in U.S. homes). 

The map below shows that many American Indian and Alaska Native homes already face serious problems with their water and sewer systems. At deficiency level 2, a water and sanitation system is in place but it needs upgrades or maintenance, while at level 5, the worst category, “there’s absolutely no water supply, no sanitation system in at all,” said co-author Heather Tanana, a visiting professor of law at the University of California-Irvine, in a webinar.

“As we’re experiencing increased changes in the water cycle, the water quality and quantity impacts are further being exacerbated in part because of aging infrastructure,” Tanana said. “So who is being the most affected? Again, it’s our under-resourced frontline communities.” 

There are two types of snow drought to worry about: dry and warm

The report highlights two kinds of “snow drought” that can afflict the West (this page offers updates on the current status of snow droughts). In a “dry” snow drought, a lack of precipitation diminishes the snowpack. That’s what happened in California’s Sierra Nevada in the 2014/2015 winter, “resulting in the shallowest snow volume ever recorded there,” according to NCA5. 

That same winter, but farther north in Oregon and Washington, there was another snow drought, but this one was a “warm” one. Winter precipitation was 77% to 113% of normal, yet because of higher temperatures, the precipitation shifted from snow to rain, leading to a reduction in the snowpack and higher winter snowmelt, but below-normal flows from April to August. 

The graphic below illustrates the streamflow for two locations: Washington’s Ahtanum Creek and California’s Merced River. In each chart, the black line indicates flows during the 2015 water year (which began October 1, 2014), the gray lines show data from 1952 to 2021 and the dashed line plots the median for that period. The top chart shows that runoff spiked in February and again in March but was then mostly below average during the subsequent warmer months. By contrast, the Merced River’s flow was below normal for nearly the entire runoff season. 

“In Oregon and Washington, irrigated crops—including valuable orchard crops—that depend on direct streamflow diversion water rights failed, but municipal water supplies that relied on storage rights that allow reservoirs to capture winter runoff were sufficient,” according to NCA5. “In California, total water supply was limited, resulting in severe or complete cutbacks to junior water rights and contract holders.” 

The September 2015 photo below from NCA5 shows an apple orchard in the Roza Irrigation District, near Yakima, Washington, suffering the effects of the warm snow drought and reduced irrigation.

Warming will make the landscape “thirstier” in many locations

NCA5’s water chapter discusses a measure known as the “annual climatic water deficit.” In simple language, this metric describes the thirstiness of the landscape. 

“This is a measure that I advocated for because I think it integrates the effects of everything,” said Harding, who defined the deficit as “how much water we’d have to add to the system to fully satisfy the needs of the plants.”

As shown in the maps below, the climatic water deficit is expected to increase by midcentury across much of the nation—and especially in the Southwest. Map “a” shows the average of the projections, while maps “b” and “c” report the average of the wettest and driest 20% of projections. 

The region’s increasing dryness threatens to reinforce snow loss by increasing the amount of dust that lands on the snowpack, thereby accelerating its melting. As a result, NCA5 cautions that “under increasing aridity, agricultural practices such as fallowing and grazing on rangelands will need careful management to avoid increased wind erosion and dust production from exposed soils.”

Adding insult to injury, NCA5 warns that those soils will be more susceptible to blowing around because hotter summers will “degrade protective desert soil crusts formed by communities of algae, bacteria, lichens, fungi, or mosses.” 

Learn more

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an editorially independent initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder.

In dry years, Colorado’s Crystal River runs at a trickle — but why?

By
Heather Sackett, Aspen Journalism
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The Crystal River flows past a stream gauge at the fish hatchery just south of Carbondale. This location has nearly dried up in late summer in recent years due to drought, climate change and senior water users’ upstream diversions. Photo: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism

Editor’s note: This story is part of a larger project undertaken by Aspen Journalism — a nonprofit, investigative news organization — to examine water use on the Crystal River. Visit Aspen Journalism’s website to see the complete project, including narrative descriptions of how water is used on each of the river’s eight largest ditches, as well as an interactive map.

In 2012, one of the driest years in Colorado in recent memory, the Crystal River practically dried up. 

Ken Neubecker, a now-retired Colorado projects director at environmental group American Rivers and former member of the Pitkin County Healthy Rivers board, recalls the stream conditions.

“I took a photo on the Thompson Road bridge, and it was running about 1 cubic foot per second, if that,” he said. “It was mostly dry rocks with some puddles in between.” (One cfs, which is equivalent to the amount of water to fill one basketball, is a common way to measure the flow of water.)

These extremely low-water conditions returned in the drought years of 2018, 2020 and 2021, with river flows near the fish hatchery just south of Carbondale hovering around 8 to 10 cfs — not enough to support aquatic life and nowhere near the 100 cfs that the state of Colorado says is the minimum needed to maintain a healthy stream. 

Beginning high in the Elk Mountains, the Crystal River flows 40 miles through a canyon under the flanks of Mount Sopris and winds past the towns of Marble, Redstone and Carbondale before joining with the Roaring Fork River, a major tributary to the Colorado River. Along the way, its waters turn mesa hayfields, acres of alfalfa, and town parks and lawns a verdant green. 

A historic drought driven by climate change and temperatures that creep ever higher are partly to blame. But the factors that lead to a dry river bed are many and include unique geology, ill-defined legal concepts, misunderstandings about the value of water, inefficient irrigation systems and vague state guidelines regarding waste that seem to be enforced only under specific circumstances.  

These barriers to conservation are widespread across western Colorado. The Crystal River is one place where these complex issues converge, resulting in a chronic dry-up of stream sections in late summer most years. To Neubecker, the cause is water users taking more than they need and not leaving enough for downstream users — especially when the “user” is the river ecosystem itself.

“It just dries up a stretch of river and disconnects the upper part of the river from the lower part,” he said. “You have to be a good neighbor, and that concept has been totally thrown by the wayside.”

The Crystal is not unique. Rivers throughout the West face increasing pressure from chronic overuse, warming temperatures and prolonged dry spells. Persistent dry-ups that span weeks or months are a familiar feature of many so-called “working rivers” that supply water to the West’s sprawling farmlands and growing cities. 

As scarcity has gripped the states that make up the headwaters of the Colorado River, a new level of scrutiny has fallen on water uses once considered insignificant, even small hayfields or grassy front yards. Communities throughout the West are now under pressure to justify their use of any amount, and make a case for continuing to do things the way they’ve always been done.  

To better understand these issues plaguing the Crystal, Aspen Journalism examined the river’s biggest users to create the most complete picture possible of how water is used, why dry conditions persist and what can be done about it. We created a detailed analysis using publicly available information; state-of-the-art, satellite-based measurements; interviews with experts; and, where possible, site visits and ditch tours. 

Understanding exactly how the West’s water is used — and perhaps where opportunities for efficiency improvements exist — will only become more crucial in a hotter, drier future with increasing scarcity across the Colorado River basin.

Low ditch efficiencies

According to Aspen Journalism’s analysis, some of the Crystal’s biggest diverters have very low ditch efficiencies, meaning that the crops they grow are using just a small fraction of what they take from the river. 

The low efficiencies pose the question: Does the small amount of water that is actually used by the crops justify the large amounts diverted from the Crystal, to the detriment of its ecosystem?

Of the 42 active ditches on the Crystal according to the Colorado Division of Water Resources (DWR) database, Aspen Journalism examined the top eight: those with the biggest and oldest water rights, the majority of which date to the 1880s. The analysis compared how much they were taking out of the stream based on diversion records maintained by DWR and how much water was absorbed by crops. Known as evapotranspiration, this is tracked by satellites through a publicly available platform called OpenET. Evapotranspiration is a measure of the amount of water used by crops, also called consumptive use. 

Aspen Journalism’s analysis shows that Crystal River ditches that irrigate primarily agricultural land — the East Mesa, Lowline and Ella — have an average efficiency of between about 12% and 14%. That means the crops that are irrigated by these ditches use 12% to 14% of the water the ditch diverts. An outlier is the Sweet Jessup Canal, which irrigates Crystal River Ranch and whose crops use nearly 30% of the water it diverts, according to our analysis. Much of this ditch is lined or piped, making it more efficient.

For ditches that are used primarily for outdoor watering of residential lawns, gardens, ballfields and parks — ditches such as the Carbondale Ditch, the Weaver & Leonhardy, Bowles & Holland, and the Rockford, the latter of which also irrigates some agricultural land — our analysis showed lower efficiencies, ranging from less than 1% to about 9%. However, that analysis likely reflects an undercount of the amount of water consumed on smaller parcels.  

OpenET is becoming a widely used tool by water managers, including by the Upper Colorado River Commission, to calculate the water savings on individual fields that participate in its 2023 and 2024 System Conservation Program. Still, this technology has limitations. For example, the satellites work best on parcels that are at least .22 acres, so consumptive use tied to many residential lawns and gardens that are irrigated with water from these ditches is probably not included in these calculations. There is also no way to account for the amount of water a crop uses that comes from precipitation. Including that figure would result in lower ditch-efficiency percentages. For a complete explanation of how Aspen Journalism got these numbers, including all the caveats and limitations of the data, see our methodology breakdown. 

The two ditches owned and operated by the town of Carbondale — the Carbondale Ditch and the Weaver Ditch — appear to be using a particularly small percentage of the overall water they take from the river. These ditches weave through the front yards, parks and alleyways of Carbondale, contributing to the charming, small-town feel and adding a riparian ribbon of green to an arid landscape. In general, these ditches that are used by residents to water their lawns and gardens have less-consumptive use than ditches that are all or nearly all agricultural use. However, since the OpenET does not pick up small lawns and gardens, it’s hard to know exactly how much water is being consumed from these ditches.

Kevin Schorzman, public works director for the town of Carbondale, said the town does not track ditch efficiencies, consumptive use or the number of homes that use ditch water for their lawns. He said the town has undertaken several projects over the past few years that should lead to improved efficiency in the ditch system, including lining portions of the Carbondale and Weaver ditches with concrete as well as piping sections of both ditches. 

Officials have pointed to a river restoration project, which includes headgate modernization and automation on the Weaver Ditch as having benefits for the environment. But Schorzman said the project may or may not impact diversions from the river.

Inefficiencies widespread

James Heath, DWR engineer for Division 5, agreed that Aspen Journalism’s ditch-efficiency numbers, while low, looked pretty reasonable. Additionally, a 2015 consumptive-use analysis of the Colorado River basin by Wilson Water Group put the overall system efficiency for the area that includes the Crystal’s watershed at 10%, which is in line with Aspen Journalism’s findings.

Very low ditch efficiencies seem to be common throughout Division 5, which contains the headwaters of the Colorado River. The 2015 Wilson Water Group study showed efficiencies in sub-basins ranged from 10% to 31%. Two other mountainous headwaters — the Blue River and Eagle River basins — had efficiencies of 14% and 16%, respectively. 

Eric Kuhn, a Colorado River expert, author and former general manager of the Glenwood Springs-based Colorado River Water Conservation District, said the Crystal’s ditch efficiencies are in line with other places in western Colorado. He said irrigators in some basins are diverting 10 to 12 acre-feet for every acre-foot that their crops end up using. 

“Those are the numbers we kind of got used to when people looked into them in detail,” Kuhn said.

It is common knowledge that ditches must take more water than only what is needed by crops, as pointed out by Joe White, director of finance at Colorado Rocky Mountain School. The private boarding school is the largest shareholder on the Rockford Ditch, which diverts from the Crystal.

“I don’t think that should surprise anyone,” White said. “Diversions are never going to equal consumptive use. Everyone knows it takes more diversion than consumptive use to deliver water to where it needs to be applied.” 

White said Aspen Journalism’s numbers sound too low, but he did not provide his own consumptive-use numbers for the Rockford Ditch. White added that the Rockford needs to be kept full so that the lawn-watering irrigation pumps in the nearby neighborhood of Satank function properly.

“It’s challenging to regulate it as efficiently as we would like to,” he said.

Because the Crystal is not the only overtaxed stream in Colorado dealing with these issues, cities across the state are attempting to deal with water scarcity. That can be through strict conservation measures and, in particular, wringing water from nonfunctional, ornamental grass by banning its planting and incentivizing its removal. 

But so far, widespread mandatory conservation measures — cracking down on waste and implementing efficiency standards — have not been aimed at agriculture, which is by far the biggest water-use sector and potentially has some of the lowest-hanging fruit to find water savings through irrigation improvements. 

This parcel of land on Prince Creek Road is owned by Bailey Family Investment Company and is watered with Crystal River water via the Ella Ditch. The sprinkler gun system was installed in recent years. Photo: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism

Reasons for low efficiencies

There could be several reasons why ditch efficiencies on the Crystal are low. The most basic is that flood irrigation is less efficient than sprinklers. About 58% of agricultural lands on the top eight ditches are flood irrigated, according to data from the state DWR. Many ditches were also built in the late 19th century and are not lined or piped, meaning that some of the diverted water is lost to leakage. 

Some of the diverted water is lost to thin, rocky soils that water percolates through quickly. Irrigators often need to divert extra water, known as “push water,” to ensure that there’s enough pressure to get the water all the way to land at the end of the ditch, which is sometimes miles from the point of diversion. These transit losses are not considered part of consumptive use and are not measured by OpenET. 

There is some evidence that soils in the area are especially rocky — the Crystal River was originally named Rock Creek — which may be contributing to low efficiency, allowing water to seep through the bottom and sides of ditches before reaching a farm field.

Heath, the division engineer, also found evidence of this from drill logs for water wells in the area. 

“They are running into some pretty coarse materials at shallow depths that would cause a lot more ditch loss, a lot more deep percolation, which would increase the losses and cause the overall system efficiencies to go down,” Heath said. “So, I think it’s pretty reasonable, the numbers you’re coming up with.”

Much of the diverted water that the crops don’t use eventually seeps back to the river over days, weeks or months, a phenomenon known as “return flows.” If the Crystal River Valley’s geology really is as porous as evidence suggests, return flows probably make it back to the river quickly, without much being stored for late-season returns. 

The problem with return flows is that they do not go back into the river at the same spot they are taken out and have a delayed return, contributing to seasonal dry-ups. And after percolating through the soil, return flows can be warm and laden with salt and other contaminants, impacting the river’s overall quality and the fish that depend on cold, clean water.

The Weaver Ditch, maintained by the Town of Carbondale, runs through downtown, turning parks and lawns green. A headgate modernization project may not result in less water diverted from the river, according to town officials. Photo: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism

Is water being wasted?

Carbondale’s Schorzman said the town is adhering to state guidelines on waste and operating the ditch systems in a manner that is reasonably efficient. But pinpointing who might be wasting water in Colorado is difficult.

According to state guidelines on waste from 2017, which recently retired Colorado state engineer Kevin Rein said are still in effect, “a person shall not run through his or her ditch any greater quantity of water than is absolutely necessary for irrigation, domestic, and stock purposes to prevent the wasting and useless discharge and running away of water.”

The guidelines define waste as “diverting water when not needed for beneficial use, or running more water than is reasonably needed for application to beneficial use.” Beneficial use is defined as “the use of that amount of water that is reasonable and appropriate under reasonably efficient practices to accomplish without waste the purpose for which the appropriation is lawfully made.” 

But “reasonably efficient” is not clearly defined. And how much more water ditches should take than what’s needed by crops is also unclear. Determining whether an irrigation practice is reasonable or wasteful is subjective.

Much like the famous Supreme Court test for obscenity, Rein said water commissioners have a good idea of what waste is when they see it. DWR has not done an efficiency analysis on the Crystal ditches, and Rein said he cannot identify a threshold for “reasonable” because every system is different. 

“I don’t know whether it was intentional or not, but it’s important to our administration that it allows for judgment and for evaluation of myriad factors,” Rein said, referring to the subjective nature of the criteria.

The Rockford Ditch has the oldest water rights on the Crystal River. It irrigates some agricultural land as well as the lawns and gardens of the Colorado Rocky Mountain School and the Satank neighborhood of Carbondale. Photo: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism

Divert it or lose it?

Another potential explanation for the low use numbers could be that some irrigators are overdiverting based on a misunderstanding of Colorado water law. The true value of a water right is tied to its historical consumptive use, which is how much water the crops use. However, there is an entrenched, incorrect belief that by maximizing the amount of water taken from a stream, one can increase the future value of a water right or protect it from abandonment. Many interpret Colorado’s famous “use it or lose it” doctrine as “divert it or lose it.” 

“The reality of that is sometimes it can feel like you have something on paper and giving up something you have on paper feels like you’re losing something,” said Assistant Pitkin County Attorney Laura Makar. 

According to a 2016 special report by DWR officials and experts at the Colorado Water Center at Colorado State University, “use it or lose it” is commonly seen as a barrier to implementing water-conservation measures and efficiency improvements.

Users are told to divert their whole amount, “in order to preserve the water right; that is, protect it from abandonment and/or lead to the maximum value of the water right in a water right change proceeding,” the report reads. “This conclusion is based on a misapplication of the law.” 

In reality, there are two requirements for abandonment: A water right must sit dormant and unused for 10 years, and the owner must intend to abandon it. For the past 20 years, DWR has had a policy of not placing water rights that date to before the 1922 Colorado River Compact on the abandonment list, which is compiled every 10 years. This means pre-compact water rights (like many of those in the Crystal analysis) have an additional layer of protection from abandonment, even if they meet the two requirements.

Neubecker said taking more water than you can use violates one of the most sacred concepts at the heart of Colorado water law: the duty of water. The duty of water is the amount needed to grow a crop — not the maximum allowed by a decree — and varies depending on crop type and location.  

“Technically, it is against the law to take more water than you actually need regardless of what your decree says,” Neubecker said. “It’s just that neither the lawyers nor the state engineer’s office are going to enforce it.”

The Bowles & Holland Ditch, named after two of Carbondale’s earliest white European settlers, used to grow crops like potatoes. Now it mostly irrigates the lawns and golf course of River Valley Ranch. Photo: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism

Low efficiencies not a problem for state officials

DWR officials don’t have a problem with inefficient ditches as long as irrigators are not wasting water. Rein said that low efficiency doesn’t mean irrigation is being done improperly. 

“I’m not aware that we have evidence of waste occurring on those systems,” Rein said.

There was, however, at least one documented instance of alleged water waste that occurred on the Crystal in recent years. In 2018, former water Commissioner Jake DeWolfe restricted how much water was flowing into the Lowine Ditch for taking more than it could put to beneficial use. Attorneys for one ditch user, Tom Bailey, complained in a letter to DWR, saying that the commissioner’s determination of waste was “ambiguous and erroneous,” and that the guidelines for waste are unlawful, claims that reflect the subjective nature of defining waste. DeWolfe declined to speak with Aspen Journalism for this story.

One of the ways water commissioners determine if waste is occurring is by looking at what is known as the “tail water,” which is where, after irrigating land, the ditch returns the water to the river. In 2018, DeWolfe said the large amount of tail water from the Lowline was an indication of waste. 

The situation on the Crystal in 2018 is indicative of how state officials manage the river. The system is complaint-driven, meaning water commissioners will usually focus their efforts on streams where a water user has placed a call or where they have heard complaints of waste from water users. If a river is not on call, if no one is reporting their neighbors for taking too much or if there are no obvious indicators such as flooding, water commissioners probably won’t scrutinize ditches for waste. In most cases, tail water is not measured.

According to Heath, since 2018, no complaints about waste in the Crystal River basin have been received and waste has not been observed by water commissioners. Therefore, curtailment of structures within the Crystal River basin for waste issues has not occurred since 2018.

Heath said that as long as irrigators aren’t taking extra water to expand their historical irrigated acreage, his office doesn’t have an issue with low ditch efficiencies.

“As long as they continue to operate as they have historically operated, I don’t see that there is a problem with the diversions they are making,” he said. “They are operating their ditches and irrigating as they always have, and it just yields a low system efficiency.” 

This section of the lower Crystal River dried up during the late summer of 2012, a drought year. The dry stretches occurred again in 2018, 2020 and 2021, with the river hovering at around just 8 cubic feet per second. Photo: Ken Neubecker

When the river is harmed

In Colorado, inefficient or wasteful practices are only considered such if they deprive another senior user of water. 

But what if the other water user being harmed is the river ecosystem itself? There are few ways to ensure that enough water stays in the river for the fish, plants and animals that depend on it.

The stretch of the Crystal River just south of Carbondale near the Colorado Parks and Wildlife fish hatchery has a tendency to dry up during the late irrigation season. The problem is worse in dry years, and the tool meant to address it is limited in what it can accomplish. 

The Colorado Water Conservation Board holds instream flow water rights on the Crystal River, which are intended to preserve the natural environment to a reasonable degree. They date to 1975 and are some of the oldest instream flow rights in the state. Although the Crystal River was here long before any humans inhabited the valley, under the cornerstone of Colorado water law known as prior appropriation — where the oldest rights, which almost always belong to agriculture and cities, get first use of the river — the instream flow rights that protect the river itself might as well have been born yesterday. 

The instream flow right is 100 cfs on the stretch of river between Avalanche Creek and its confluence with the Roaring Fork, but it is rarely met from August to October. The reason?

“It’s the senior uses in the area,” said Rob Viehl, chief of the Colorado Water Conservation Board’s stream and lake protection section. “There are a lot of large senior irrigation ditches right above the fish hatchery gauge that divert a lot of water. They are in priority, and they are legally senior to the instream flow.”

The dry stretch is immediately downstream from the diversion for the Carbondale Ditch, which can pull 42 cfs from the river.

“Carbondale definitely needs to do some ditch-efficiency work,” Neubecker said. “The town of Carbondale is the single-biggest water rights holder on the Crystal.”

Cold Mountain Rancher Bill Fales turns the headgate of the Lowline Ditch. Fales is participating in a non-diversion agreement with the Colorado Water Trust to keep more water in the Crystal River. Photo: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism

Possible solutions

Much of western Colorado’s irrigation infrastructure is stuck in the 19th century. Upgrading ditches and headgates — and, in turn, making them more efficient — can be costly. 

Matt Rice, southwest regional director for environmental group American Rivers, said Aspen Journalism’s analysis points to the need to upgrade that infrastructure. And with billions of dollars in federal funding available, now is a good time for these types of projects, he said. Some of Rice’s work with American Rivers receives funding from the Walton Family Foundation, which also provides funding to The Water Desk for its Colorado River coverage. 

“If you need that much nonconsumptive push water to get your 11 or 7 or 9%, my sense is that there is a lot of opportunity to do things better,” Rice said. “It seems to me that infrastructure modernization on the Crystal could be a key thing to investigate.”

Colorado River environmental groups — including American Rivers, Trout Unlimited, The Nature Conservancy, Pitkin County Healthy Rivers — have funded and worked on agricultural infrastructure improvement projects that claim to have multiple benefits for agriculture, the environment and recreation. The idea is that if a project makes an irrigation system more efficient, less water will need to be diverted from a river. 

But although they may improve riparian habitat or create safer passage for boats, there’s no evidence these projects result in more water left in rivers. Of all the experts Aspen Journalism interviewed for this story, none could point to a ditch infrastructure improvement project that resulted in a measurable decrease in diversions, as reflected in diversion records maintained by DWR. Simply quantifying flow needs specifically for recreation and the environment through stream-management plans has been thwarted in recent years by agricultural interests. 

The town of Carbondale and other groups have recently completed a headgate modernization project on the Weaver Ditch, which supporters say will benefit the environment. But Schorzman, Carbondale’s public works director, said in an email that the project “may or may not impact diversion amounts.”

Environmental groups say they must work with — and not against — agriculture since they are the biggest water-user sector and that building relationships is important. In that spirit, Pitkin County Healthy Rivers has earmarked tens of thousands of dollars (the exact amount the project will cost is still unclear) to fund a piping project for the East Mesa Ditch, which had a blowout from sinkholes in September. Healthy Rivers has not secured a commitment from ditch owners that there will be any benefit to river flows from the piping project, even though part of its mission is to maintain and improve the quantity of water in local streams.

“The question is: How can we stay true to our charter of maintaining streamflow while helping somebody divert water from the river?,” Pitkin County Attorney John Ely said at a September Healthy Rivers meeting. “You simply can’t preserve water in the river at all without someone you can work with and someone who holds a relatively senior water right. … You can’t solve the riddle of how to protect streamflow without working with agriculture.”

An often-heard refrain from water users is that if they leave the water in the river, it will just get picked up by the next downstream user, so they may as well divert it. That is true to a degree. But if all the water users on a system were to become more efficient, they might be able to each take less. 

And a new state law allows water users to get paid to temporarily lease water to the state’s instream flow program for five out of 10 years. The loaned water is tracked by DWR officials so that it stays in the river through the stretch where it’s needed. So far, the program is little-used — just nine projects so far statewide — and no water users on the Crystal are currently doing this type of instream flow loan. 

Carbondale ranchers Bill Fales and Marj Perry are participating in a slightly different program, a non-diversion agreement with the Colorado Water Trust designed to leave more water in the river. When river flows dwindle to less than 40 cfs, Fales will get paid to reduce his diversions from the Helms Ditch, which could result in an additional 6 cfs in the Crystal.

“Obviously we are like everybody else — we hate to see the river dry,” Fales told Aspen Journalism in 2022..

Colorado’s entrenched water law system protects those European American settlers who first put the water to beneficial use, growing crops and building cities. One hundred and forty years later, that system still reflects the values of the time that the concept of prior appropriation was invented and largely excludes water for the environment, recreation or tribal communities. But as water supplies continue to be squeezed across the Colorado River basin, that may one day change.

“Change is hard,” Makar said. “If we have a system that has been in place and working one way for a long time, it requires new education, new materials. … I think it’s worth it, and I think that the system is eventually going to require it. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.”

This story was produced in partnership with The Water Desk, an independent initiative of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism. 

Aspen Journalism is a nonprofit, investigative news organization covering water, environment, social justice, history and more. Visit http://aspenjournalism.org. 

Reading list: great snow journalism

By
Mitch Tobin
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Parsenn Bowl at Winter Park ski area in Colorado in January 2017. Photo by Mitch Tobin.

Over the past few years, I’ve been collecting news stories and other journalism related to snow. Below are links to some of the best and most interesting work that I’ve come across, lumped into a few categories.

If you’re looking for a crash course on snow and the Western snowpack, you should check out some of this great reporting, writing, and visual storytelling.

In a 2019 piece, I took a stab at describing the subdiscipline of “water journalism,” so it should come as no surprise that I also think that “snow journalism” is a thing.

If Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain and my former employer, can hire reporters to cover Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, I think snow is also worthy of a “beat.”

The consequences of a changing snowpack—for reservoirs, farmers, cities, wildlife, wildfires, recreation, and more—have sparked tons of other stories in recent years, but in the list below, I’ve stuck to journalism directly related to the weather itself.

I’ve hyperlinked the journalists’ names so you can follow or learn more about them.

Atmospheric rivers

How climate change will make atmospheric rivers even worse. By Kasha Patel, The Washington Post, 1/12/2023, (video here).

This jet warns California of incoming atmospheric rivers. By Ian James, Los Angeles Times, 2/1/2023.

How California’s storms are projected to become more extreme with climate change. By Ian James, Los Angeles Times, 2/8/2024.

Atmospheric river storms are getting stronger, and deadlier. The race to understand them is on. By Gabrielle Canon, The Guardian, 2/11/2024.

Avalanches, flooding, and natural hazards

Mountains, Ice and Climate Change: A Recipe for Disasters. By Henry Fountain, The New York Times, 2/8/2021.

Satellites, airplanes and lasers are tracking Colorado avalanches. By Bay Stephens, The Colorado Sun, 3/1/2021.

How Breckenridge’s Peak 7 avalanche 35 years ago changed Colorado skiing. By Jason Blevins, The Colorado Sun, 2/18/2022.

The Trillion-Gallon Question: What if California’s Dams Fail? By Christopher Cox, Photographs and Video by Spencer Lowell, The New York Times, 6/22/2023.

Halo created by ice crystals in the atmosphere above Copper Mountain, Colorado, in January 2023. Photo by Mitch Tobin.

Climate change and drought

Snowpack in Colorado, across the West is melting earlier than it did in the 20th century. By Lucy Haggard, The Colorado Sun, 4/6/2021.

In the West, Signs in the Snow Warn That a 20-Year Drought Will Persist and Intensify. By Bob Berwyn, Judy Fahys, Inside Climate News, 4/9/2021.

The winnowing of winter. By Heather Hansman, High Country News, 11/1/2021.

Western U.S. could become nearly snowless due to climate change. By Diana Leonard, The Washington Post, 12/3/2021.

Life Was Built Around Snow. What Happens When It Vanishes? By Ruth Fremson and Kirk Johnson, The New York Times, 10/21/2022

Pink snow is a red flag for the West’s water. By Kylie Mohr, High Country News, 11/29/2022.

Warmer winters spell trouble for snow plow business. By Mara Hoplamazian. National Public Radio, 1/20/2023.

Snow eases California drought and restores water levels but more needed. By Joshua Partlow, The Washington Post, 3/4/2023, (video here).

Warming to push snowline higher in California, study finds. By Ian James, Los Angeles Times, 5/25/2023.

Study shows how warming climate is sapping the Colorado River. By Ian James, Los Angeles Times, 7/30/2023.

Climate change is a threat to Colorado’s snowpack. What does that mean for the water in your tap? By Shannon Mullane, The Colorado Sun, 1/9/2024

Washington state drinking water, hydropower at risk as Pacific Northwest snowpack shrinks. By Conrad Swanson, The Seattle Times, 2/12/2024.

Cloud seeding

Make it rain: US states embrace ‘cloud seeding’ to try to conquer drought. By Oliver Milman, The Guardian, 3/23/3021.

Utah is a leader in cloud seeding and could prove as a model for boosting a drought-stricken West’s water supplies. By Zak Podmore, The Salt Lake Tribune, 3/28/2021.

Can Cloud Seeding Help Quench the Thirst of the U.S. West? – Yale E360, By James Dinneen, Yale Environment 360, 3/3/2022.

Is cloud seeding a potential solution to Colorado’s drought? By Michael Booth, The Colorado Sun, 11/13/2022.

Data visualization

Of 21 Winter Olympic Cities, Many May Soon Be Too Warm to Host the Games – The New York Times. By Kendra Pierre-Louis and Nadja Popovich, The New York Times, 1/11/2018.

Climate change and California’s water. By Lauren Tierney and Monica Ulmanu, The Washington Post, 5/9/2018.

Compare This Snow Season to Every Winter for More Than 50 Years – The New York Times. By Francesca Paris, The New York Times, 1/26/2023.

How much snow still covers California’s mountains this July? By Abhinanda Bhattacharyya, Los Angeles Times, 7/27/2023.

Dust on snow

The Rocky Mountains Are Dusty, And It’s A Problem. By Luke Runyon, KUNC, 4/17/2018.

Dust blowing off the shrinking Great Salt Lake is eroding Wasatch snowpack and that could eventually threaten drinking water. By Brian Maffly, The Salt Lake Tribune, 12/22/2018.

Can the next generation of scientists help solve our dust on snow problem? By Aedan Hannon, The Durango Herald, 4/17/2022.

Colorado’s above-average snowpack has an enemy: Dust. By Tracy Ross, The Colorado Sun, 5/18/2023.

Dust on snow in the San Juan Mountains near Telluride, Colorado, in May 2023. Thanks to LightHawk for the aerial support. Photo by Mitch Tobin.

Skiing and winter sports

How climate change is transforming Colorado’s ski industry. By Jacy Marmaduke, The Coloradoan, 1/25/2018.

This Austrian ski resort is preparing for a snowless future – The Washington Post By Denise Hruby, The Washington Post, 2/18/2021.

How snow is made in the Beijing Olympics. By Bonnie Berkowitz and Artur Galocha, The Washington Post, 2/1/2022.

Climate change threatens $50 billion ski industry. By Kirk Siegler, National Public Radio, 3/31/2022.

Europe’s snowless ski resorts preview winter in a changing climate. By Rick Noack, The Washington Post, 1/12/2023.

Ski resorts can now make fake snow in 80 degrees. Here’s why that’s a problem. By Amudalat Ajasa, The Washington Post, 1/28/2023.

Ski Resorts Are Spending Big on Snow-Making to Keep Ahead of Climate Change. By Eric Niiler, The Wall Street Journal, 3/4/2023.

Studying the snowpack

Planes, pits & snowmobiles: how scientists get good data. By Emily Benson, High Country News, 3/6/2017.

A flurry of research illuminates snow’s foes (Winter’s winners and losers). By Emily Benson, High Country News, 3/27/2018.

When Water Is Scarce, Some Researchers Go Underground To Find Out Why. By Alex Hager, Aspen Public Radio, 3/13/2021.

Pink snow is a red flag for the West’s water. By Kylie Mohr, High Country News, 11/29/2022.

Why is it difficult to figure out how much snow will make it to the Colorado River By Alex Hager, KUNC, 3/11/2023.

See What California’s Record Snowpack Looks Like, Up Close. By Raymond Zhong, The New York Times, 4/3/2023.

Scientists use lasers to provide new Colorado snowpack data. By Shannon Mullane, The Colorado Sun, 5/9/2023.

From the air, scientists map California’s vast snowpack. By Ian James, Los Angeles Times, 5/15/2023.

Wildfires and forest health

Ski Resorts Threatened by Wildfires Prepare to Defend and Rebuild – WSJ By Jim Carlton, The Wall Street Journal, 3/19/2022.

Higher-elevation wildfires in the West are threatening water supplies – The Washington Post. By Joshua Partlow, The Washington Post, 9/22/2022.

Wildfire and drought are shrinking California snowpack – Los Angeles Times, By Haley Smith, Los Angeles Times, 2/14/2023.

La Sal Mountains near Moab, Utah, in March 2023. Photo by Mitch Tobin.

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.

In $100 million Colorado River deal, water and power collide

By
Alex Hager, KUNC
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The Shoshone Hydroelectric Facility sits beneath a busy stretch of Interstate 70 on Jan. 26, 2024. The Colorado River District is poised to spend $98.5 million on rights to its water in an effort to keep the Colorado River flowing for farms and cities in Western Colorado. Photo: Alex Hager/KUNC
KUNC’s Alex Hager reports from Western Colorado

Colorado’s Glenwood Canyon is as busy as it is majestic. At the base of its snowy, near-vertical walls, the narrow chasm hums with life. On one side, the Colorado River tumbles through whitewater rapids. On the other, cars and trucks whoosh by on a busy interstate.

Pinched in the middle of it all is the Shoshone Generating Station.

“It is a nondescript brown building off of I-70 that most people don’t notice when they’re driving,” said Amy Moyer, director of strategic partnerships at the Colorado River District. “But if you are in the water world, it holds the key for one of the most interesting and important water rights on the Colorado River.”

Beneath a noisy highway overpass, Moyer looked at the hydropower plant through a chain-link fence. Her group, a taxpayer-funded agency founded to keep water flowing to the cities and farms of Western Colorado, is poised to spend nearly $100 million on rights to the water that flows through the Shoshone facility.

The purchase represents the culmination of a decades-long effort to keep Shoshone’s water on the west side of Colorado’s mountains, settling the region’s long-held anxieties over competition with the water needs of the Front Range, where fast-growing cities and suburbs around Denver need more water to keep pace with development.

Even though the Shoshone water rights carry an eight-figure price tag, the new owners will leave the river virtually unchanged. The river district will buy access to Shoshone’s water from the plant operator, Xcel Energy, and lease it back as long as Xcel wants to keep producing hydropower.

Pedestrians walk across a bridge spanning the Colorado River in Grand Junction, Colo. on Jan. 25, 2024. The Colorado River District says buying the Shoshone water right will bring more predictable flows to the river’s ’15 mile reach.’ Photo: Alex Hager/KUNC

The water right is considered “non-consumptive,” meaning every drop that enters the power plant is returned to the river. The river district wants to keep it that way as long as they can and ensure the water that flows into the hydroelectric plant also flows downstream to farmers, fish and homes.

The river district is rallying the $98.5 million sum from local, state and federal agencies. The district has secured $40 million already, with deals in the works for the remainder. It’s rare for a big-money water deal to find this kind of broad approval from a diverse group of water users. But the acquisition is seen as pivotal for a wide swath of Colorado, and has been co-signed by farmers, environmental groups and local governments.

“It’s so much more than, ‘We’re going to spend $100 million to do nothing,’” Moyer said. “We’re keeping native flows in the river for so many benefits on the West Slope.”

Why Shoshone?

To understand why this unassuming power plant wields so much clout, you have to take a look at its history.

About 40 million people across seven Western states rely on the Colorado River. It supplies big cities like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Denver. It supports a multi-billion dollar agriculture industry. But it’s governed by a century-old legal document and a management system that has proven frustratingly difficult to adapt for today’s policymakers.

Core to that management system is the concept of “prior appropriation,” which means that those who were first to use water will be the last to have their water curtailed in times of shortage. It often ignores Indigenous people who were using the river’s water before white settlers ever arrived. But under the rules white settlers drew up and modern governments still use today, it means older water rights are more powerful.

Shoshone’s water right is one of the oldest and biggest in the state, giving it preemptive power over many other rights in Colorado.

Even in dry times, when cities and farms in other parts of the state feel the sting of water shortages, the Shoshone Hydroelectric Plant can send water through its turbines. And when that water exits the turbines and re-enters the Colorado River, it keeps flowing for myriad users downstream.

The Colorado River flows through the Shoshone diversion structure on Jan. 29, 2024. The diversion structure routes river water into the hydropower plant. Photo: Alex Hager/KUNC

The hydro plant itself produces relatively little energy. Its 15 megawatt capacity is only a small fraction of Xcel Energy’s total Colorado output of 13,100 megawatts. Shoshone’s capacity is enough to serve about 15,000 customers, which is less than a quarter of the population of Garfield County, where the plant is located.

But the power plant has held legal access to water from the Colorado River since 1902, and can claim seniority over the vast majority of other water owners in the state.

That kind of seniority means power and certainty for whoever owns it. And that has raised the hackles of Western Colorado water users, who worry that water users in other parts of Colorado might be interested in buying Shoshone’s water right.

Colorado’s Front Range – functionally the metro area from Fort Collins to Pueblo – only exists in its current capacity because of a complex network of canals, pipes, and tunnels cut through the mountains, carrying water against gravity to the places where it’s needed. About 80% of the state’s water falls on the west side of the mountains, but 80% of its people live on the east side.

Cities on the Front Range have been able to grow significantly over the past century, despite often having access to a finite supply of water. Their Western Colorado counterparts worry that future growth could lead those cities to spend big on more water from the West Slope and say securing Shoshone’s water blocks Eastern Colorado water users from the chance to snatch it up themselves.

Fish and farms

The Colorado River District’s plans to buy Shoshone’s water have rallied widespread support, largely because of the transfer’s widespread benefits.

Perhaps no constituency will benefit from the move as much as the one that lives in the river itself.

“Anything that results in more water in the river is good for fish,” said Dale Ryden, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Standing on the banks of the Colorado River in Grand Junction, Ryden looked out over a murky, meandering stretch of water. It’s part of the “15 mile reach,” a critical section of the river about 80 miles west of the Shoshone plant. The reach is filled partly by water exiting Shoshone’s turbines.

Ryden explained that this section of river is home to a variety of species, some of which are endangered, and some which are found nowhere else on earth besides the upper portions of the Colorado River.

Those species – with funky names like the flannelmouth sucker and the humpback chub – rely on this stretch of river for virtually every aspect of life.

“Back in the day, before there were people here and there was a lot of water and snowpack, the ’15 mile reach’ was kind of the place to be if you were an endangered Colorado pikeminnow or a razorback sucker,” Ryden said. “The adults live here, they spawn here, they feed here. It’s just a really highly-used and good section of river for the adult endangered fish.”

Fish biologist Dale Ryden holds a razorback sucker on Jan. 26, 2024. The endangered fish species lives in the Colorado River, and proponents of the Shoshone water right transfer say the fish will benefit from increased flows to a portion of its habitat. Photo: Alex Hager/KUNC

Because the fish are protected by the federal Endangered Species Act, people who use water from this section of the Colorado River are legally required to leave enough behind for fish. That means dry conditions and water shortages would force farmers and ranchers in the nearby Grand Valley to play a tricky balancing game between their own water needs and the legal protections afforded to endangered fish.

“We can’t have farming without taking care of those fish,” said Tina Bergonzini, manager of the Grand Valley Water Users Association, one of a handful of agricultural irrigation districts near Grand Junction. “They go hand in hand.”

Mesa County, which contains the Grand Valley, has an annual agricultural output of about $94 million. It’s the state’s top producer of fruits and berries, including the regionally-famous peaches from Palisade.

Bergonzini says the farmers and ranchers who contribute to that total will be able to depend on a steady water supply year after year once Shoshone’s water is guaranteed to keep flowing their way.

“I think peace of mind is the number one most important thing that it’s going to be able to bring to the Grand Valley,” she said.

The Grand Valley Water Users Association was among 21 groups that co-signed the river district’s plan to buy the Shoshone water right.

Other potential suitors

The river district describes the deal as ‘protecting’ the Shoshone water right, but hasn’t detailed who exactly they’re protecting it from. History provides more than a few examples of Front Range cities and agriculture looking West for new water supplies, but it’s unclear which diverters, exactly, would have wanted to buy Shoshone.

Denver Water, the state’s largest water utility, would have been a potential candidate to buy access to Shoshone’s water, but forfeited that opportunity in 2013 when the agency inked the “Colorado River Cooperative Agreement” along with the Colorado River District. In fact, Denver Water agreed to support the acquisition of the Shoshone water right by a West Slope entity.

Representatives from Denver Water, Aurora Water and Northern Water – which serves eight counties north and east of the Denver metro – declined to comment on the transfer of Shoshone’s water rights. A spokeswoman for Colorado Springs Utilities said the agency was “aware of the Colorado River District’s efforts to acquire the Shoshone water rights and would not oppose the transfer of those rights.”

This 1968 photo shows two large tubes, known as penstocks, which carry Colorado River water into the Shoshone hydropower facility from pipes within the canyon wall. Photo: Historic American Engineering Record/Library Of Congress

Mark Hermundstad, a retired water lawyer who helped craft the Colorado River Cooperative Agreement, said he was not aware of any particular water agency that was poised to buy the Shoshone right but that threats may have still existed. He even floated the idea that an East Coast hedge fund could theoretically attempt to buy Shoshone’s water.

“There’s always been a possibility that someone with a lot of money could come in and buy it and try to do something with it,” he said.

Following the funds, and what comes next

Almost all of the $98.5 million for the river district’s acquisition of Shoshone’s water will derive from public funds.

The vast majority of that money, about $49 million, is set to come from the federal government. The river district plans to request a chunk of money from a $4 billion pool given to the Department of the Interior in 2022 for Colorado River projects. The extraordinary infusion of federal money has so far been used to fund a number of incentive programs designed to pay water users — mostly farmers and ranchers — in exchange for reduced water use.

Twenty million dollars will come from the river district’s own coffers. The agency is funded by taxes from 15 counties in Western Colorado. In 2020, voters in those counties overwhelmingly approved a rate hike for payments to the river district, designed to bring in an extra $5 million each year.

Cattle graze in the Grand Valley on Jan. 25, 2024. Farm groups say the area’s growers will benefit from the Colorado River District’s acquisition of the Shoshone water right because it will help them have more predictability in the amount of water they can divert for farms and ranches each year. Photo: Alex Hager/KUNC

Another $20 million will come from the state of Colorado. The state’s water management arm, the Colorado Water Conservation Board, recently voted to approve that spending from its annual “water projects bill,” bringing the river district one step closer to its fundraising goals.

Besides wrangling the formidable sum, the main hurdles left for the river district concern permitting, regulation and a court hearing. Both the river district and state officials say they are optimistic that all the necessary paperwork will get stamped without issue.

“I don’t expect that there’s going to be entities or individuals that come out of the woodwork vocalizing any strong opposition to us moving forward in this way,” Lauren Ris, director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, said.

Only one aspect of the transfer appears to present a potential wrinkle: the river district’s ability to own an “instream flow.” That designation refers to water that is owned but not used, in the traditional sense. Instead, it’s left in rivers and streams to “preserve the natural environment.” The state is usually the only entity allowed to own that type of water right.

In a recent Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) meeting, Phil Weiser, the state’s attorney general, pointed out that it would be unusual for the river district—rather than the state board itself—to own Shoshone’s water and keep it as an instream flow.

In an interview with KUNC, Ris pointed to a short list of other times the board made exceptions to its usual policy about instream flow ownership. Ris said the Colorado River District’s takeover of Shoshone is big and important enough that it makes sense to “think creatively” and consider adding Shoshone’s water to that list.

“The easiest way to have an instream flow water, right, is for the CWCB to outright own it and operate it,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean that it’s the only way, and this is such an outlier unique situation.”

‘Long-term, permanent solutions’

The past few decades have seen the Colorado River governed by a patchwork of short-term agreements. The region’s top water policymakers have appeared reluctant to agree on more permanent measures to significantly correct a growing imbalance between supply and demand. Instead, they’ve put together temporary deals designed to stave off catastrophe at the nation’s largest reservoirs.

While the Shoshone water right transfer likely won’t change much for tense negotiations about water management between states that use the Colorado River, it’s a rare moment of durability and stability for at least one area that uses the river’s water.

“Now more than ever, there is a desire to look for long-term permanent solutions on the Colorado River,” said the Colorado River District’s Amy Moyer. “This is one that exists for Colorado.”

Across the Colorado River Basin, that imbalance and the growing harm of climate change have also compelled environmental groups to raise alarm about potential damage to ecosystems for plants and animals. Management decisions about the river’s water tend to prioritize cities and agriculture over the natural world.

Proponents of the Shoshone water right transfer say it will help push back on the harms of water shortages, at least on one stretch of the Colorado River.

“Being able to stabilize or make permanent existing rights is very helpful as we look at addressing and dealing with climate change and its impact on streams,” said Bart Miller, healthy rivers director at the conservation group Western Resource Advocates. Miller’s group receives funding from the Walton Family Foundation, which also supports KUNC’s Colorado River coverage.

Policymakers are struggling to make significant reductions to the amount of water used by cities and farms, and climate change means less water will enter the river system in the future. Environmental advocates say the Colorado River District’s ownership of the Shoshone water provides some insurance against those realities by adding predictability and protection to a stretch of the Colorado River.

This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. It was produced in partnership with The Water Desk, an independent initiative of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism. 

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