USA TODAY International Edition
CLIMATE’S TOLL ON COLORADO RIVER
Consequences of dry, warm weather trickle downstream
ROCKY MOUNTAIN NATIONAL PARK, Colo. – Beside a river that winds through a mountain valley, the charred trunks of pine trees lie toppled on the blackened ground, covered in a thin layer of snow. Weeks after flames ripped through this alpine forest, a smoky odor still lingers in the air.
The fire, called the East Troublesome, burned later into the fall than what once was normal. It cut across Rocky Mountain National Park, racing up and over the Continental Divide. It raged in the headwaters of the Colorado River, reducing forests to ashes and scorching the ground along the banks.
The fires in Colorado spread ferociously through the summer and fall of 2020 after months of extreme heat that worsened the severe drought.
As smoke billowed over the headwaters, the fires raised warning signs of
how profoundly climate change is altering the watershed, and how the symptoms of heat- driven drying are cascading down the heavily used river – with stark implications for the entire region.
Over the past two decades, rising temperatures have intensified the dry years across the Colorado River Basin, composed of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. Warmer conditions are eroding flows of tributary streams as vegetation draws more water and as more moisture evaporates off the landscape.
Over the past year, the relentless hot, dry months from the spring to the first snows left the soil parched. The amount of runoff into streams and the river dropped far below average. With reservoirs sinking toward new lows, the risks of water shortages are growing.
Much of the river’s flow begins as snow and rainfall in the territory of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, which includes 15 counties on Colorado’s West Slope. Andy Mueller, the district’s general manager, said the extreme conditions over the past year offer a preview of what the region should prepare for in the future.
“Climate change is drying out the headwaters,” Mueller said. “And everybody in the Colorado River Basin needs to be concerned.”
Mueller saw the effects while backpacking in Colorado’s Holy Cross Wilderness in the summer with his daughter. Above the tree line, at an elevation of 12,000 feet, they expected to see mushy green tundra. Instead, they found the ground was bone dry.
When the fires erupted, they burned intensely, ravaging high- elevation forests that once were dubbed “asbestos forest” because they stayed moist and historically didn’t burn.
“We’re really seeing the effects of climate change hit locally in the Upper Basin incredibly fast and incredibly hard,” he said.
The effects are traveling downstream to the reservoirs that supply water for farmlands and millions of people.
The water behind Glen Canyon Dam has fallen to 40% of Lake Powell’s capacity. Behind Hoover Dam near Las Vegas, Lake Mead also sits 40% full and is approaching shortage levels.
Farmers, city officials, environmentalists and managers of water districts have been talking about ways to adapt. There are procedures in place to deal with shortages, but there are also scenarios in which water deliveries could be abruptly cut in some areas, potentially triggering a crisis.
People who focus on the river widely acknowledge the need to adjust to a shrinking system with less to go around.
Many suggest solutions can be achieved through collaborative efforts – often with money changing hands in exchange for water – while working within the existing rules. Others say solutions shouldn’t fall on the backs of farming communities by taking away water that fuels their economies. Some people argue the river seems headed for a crash and its rules need to be fundamentally reimagined.
In Colorado and the other three states in the river’s Upper Basin – Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico – officials have been studying the possibility of adopting “demand management” plans, which would pay some water users who would temporarily turn over some of their water to help boost Lake Powell.
Representatives of the four states committed to look into starting such a program in 2019 when they signed the Drought Contingency Plan.
The idea, if the states eventually agree to participate, would be to reduce the risks of a scenario called a “compact call,” in which the three states in the Lower Basin – Arizona, California and Nevada – could demand the Upper Basin send their allotted water downstream under the obligations of the 1922 Colorado River Compact. If that were to happen, it could trigger mandatory cutbacks for some Upper Basin water users, starting with entities that have lower- priority junior water rights.
The deals between the seven states are designed to temporarily lower the odds of Lake Mead and Lake Powell dropping to critical lows over the next five years. The states’ representatives have yet to wade into the details of negotiations on what shortage- sharing rules will look like after 2026, when the current agreements expire.
What’s increasingly clear is that the status- quo methods of managing the river are on a collision course with worsening scarcity.
“We’re bound by that river,” Mueller said. “All of us, regardless of our legal rights, regardless of what’s on paper, we need to consider how we can use less water. And we need to take action immediately.”
Last winter, the Rocky Mountains were blanketed with a snowpack that was slightly above average. Then came extremely hot conditions, which shrank the amount of runoff and flows into tributaries and again baked the soils dry.
The Colorado River has always cycled through wet and dry periods. As the planet heats up with rising carbon dioxide levels, the dry spells are becoming more intense.
In a 2018 study, scientists found that about half the trend of decreasing runoff in the Upper Colorado River Basin since 2000 was the result of unprecedented warming. In other research, scientists estimated the river is so sensitive to warming that it could lose roughly one- fourth of its flow by 2050 as temperatures continue to rise.
The soils were so dry over the past year that they soaked up moisture, contributing to below- average stream flows, said Megan Holcomb, a senior climate change specialist with the Colorado Water Conservation Board.
“You can think of it as like the dry sponge that you haven’t wetted in forever,” Holcomb said. “That kind of soil moisture deficit is not something that you rebound from immediately.”
The state usually gets its largest wildfires in June and July. But with the severe drought, the fires burned through August, and then exploded in October with unprecedented speed and intensity. The ultradry conditions, together with high winds, contributed to the three largest wildfires in Colorado history, which together devoured more than half a million acres.
Rising temperatures will lead to more of these scorching summers.
A rancher looks to adapt
Paul Bruchez raises cattle on his family’s ranch in the headwaters near the town of Kremmling, Colorado.
His shop sits about 200 yards from the Colorado River. The river runs through a wide, grassy valley.
The Colorado once spread across the meadow in seasonal floods. But dams and drier years have made it smaller, leaving it shallow enough in the fall to drive across some sections in an offroad vehicle.
Bruchez has been involved in discussions about the river as a member of the Colorado Basin Roundtable. And while he’s heard many people voice alarm about the watershed lately, Bruchez said he and neighboring ranchers have been talking about the need to adapt to a river with less water since 2002, when severe drought came.
The flows dropped so low then that even ranchers with the longest- standing water rights, known as senior rights, couldn’t get it to their fields.
“This isn’t a conversation about what’s going to happen in 50 years. We’ve been living it,” he said.
Many discussions lately have focused on ideas for more flexible rules that would spread the burden of water reductions, and for creating programs that would pay some to use less and contribute the water to reservoirs.
With agriculture using a large share of the water, the idea is that some ranchers and farmers could irrigate less or leave some fields temporarily dry in exchange for payments.
Questions remain about how such a program would work, and the proposal has been controversial.
Because Bruchez and other ranchers have senior water rights, their concern isn’t so much that mandatory cutbacks would affect them directly, but rather that in a pinch, if others were forced to cut back, pressures would build for investors to step in and do “buy- and- dry” land deals in which farms and ranchlands would be retired.
“Water eventually flows towards money,” Bruchez said. And as risks of shortages grow, “it puts the financial pressure on water.”
For people in agriculture, he said, “we need to be at the table or we’re going to be on the menu.”
‘ It affects everybody’
One of the main tributaries that feeds the Colorado is the Gunnison River, which like the main stem has shrunk during the heat- amplified drought. Along the Gunnison, cattle ranchers got less water last year and their pastures produced less hay.
The river has dropped to some of its lowest levels in years, said Sonja Chavez, general manager of the Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy District.
The effects are visible at Blue Mesa Reservoir, one of the state of Colorado’s largest, which has declined to less than half its full capacity.
Chavez walked on sandy ground that used to sit underwater.
“When we are dry in the Upper Gunnison Basin, it affects everybody downstream of us,” Chavez said. And the swings between high and low flows, she said, have made it difficult to plan how to operate the reservoirs.
“Climate change within the basin is having dramatic effects on everyone,” Chavez said.
Elsewhere, some representatives of agricultural water agencies worry about the potential consequences of paying farmers to leave land dry.
One such voice is J. B. Hamby, a newly elected board member of California’s Imperial Irrigation District, who said he’s concerned that while cities and sprawling suburbs continue to grow rapidly, agricultural communities are increasingly at risk. He said people in cities need to realize there is a priority system that shouldn’t be changed.
“The fact is that we were here first. We established a right to this. We continue to be more efficient,” Hamby said. “And it was their choice to build a Phoenix or a Las Vegas in the middle of these bowls of sun, in the middle of the most arid places in the country.”
The latest projections show Lake Mead could fall below a key threshold by summer, which would trigger a shortage declaration and larger cutbacks in 2022.
In the years to come, Hamby said, farming communities shouldn’t be told to use less and face the consequences.
Hamby pointed to the recent history of the Imperial Irrigation District, which in 2003 approved a deal that transferred increasing amounts of water from Imperial Valley farm to cities in Southern California.
Now, with less water flowing to farms, the amount of runoff into the Salton Sea has shrunk, leaving growing stretches of exposed lakebed that spew dust into the air. The dust is contributing to some of the worst air pollution in the country.
Hamby said the Imperial Valley would have been better off without the water transfer deal. Looking at the proposed approach in Colorado, Hamby said, it seems to replicate what occurred in Imperial.
“When you tie money to water, you get users who become addicted to the money and don’t actually in the end start to want to farm anymore,” Hamby said. “That is really corrosive to the long- term survival, much less thriving, of rural communities.”
Other critics of demand management argue the concept is misguided.
Gary Wockner, who leads the environmental group Save the Colorado, focuses mainly on fighting proposals for new diversions, dams and pipelines, but lately he has also spoken against the proposal for “temporary, voluntary and compensated reductions” in water use.
Wockner says the effects of climate change are so dire that it no longer makes sense trying to keep enough water in Lake Powell to avert a potential compact call.
“We think the farmers are purposely being sold a bill of goods,” Wockner said. “Saving us from a compact call is sort of a Trojan Horse to get the water away from the farmers.”
Wockner’s group, together with the Center for Biological Diversity and Living Rivers, went to court in 2019 to challenge the federal government’s approach to managing Lake Powell.
In their federal lawsuit, they argued officials didn’t sufficiently consider the effects of climate change in a 2016 operations plan for the dam. They demanded the government redo its analysis and include the alternative of draining Lake Powell and decommissioning Glen Canyon Dam.
“If we’re going to actually try to take climate change seriously, we should focus on saving Lake Mead,” he said. “We think Lake Powell is doomed.”
‘ Are we doing enough?’
At his ranch by the river, Bruchez said he wants to be on “the preventative side,” getting ahead of the looming problems instead of reacting. And that includes studying and promoting conservation, he said, because the bottom line is “we just all have to figure out how to use less water.”
In early 2019, Bruchez began talking with a researcher from Colorado State University about a project that would help provide data on crop water use, impacts of reduced irrigation and strategies for conserving water.
The project began in 2020 with about $ 900,000.
Nine ranchers participated and were paid for leaving some fields dry or partially dry, Bruchez said. More than 900 acres weren’t irrigated for the entire year, and about 200 acres were “deficit irrigated,” meaning they got less water.
Bruchez’s ranch totals about 6,000 acres. He participated on about 41 acres, where he stopped irrigating on June 15 and didn’t water the rest of the year.
“My end goal is to understand the impacts of water conservation for agriculture so that if and when there are programs to participate, agriculture is doing it based on science,” Bruchez said. “To me, the question just comes down to, are we doing enough, quick enough?”