Shared pain
Dismal trend highlights need to cut usage in Upper Basin, too

Retired civil and water engineer Louis Meyer awoke Monday morning at his farm about 10 miles north of Durango to see the mountains wearing a fresh blanket of snow. They had been scantily clad for much of the winter.

The spring snow was welcome, he said, but unlikely to change the story of Southwest Colorado: Runoff will be abysmal.

A resident of Southwest Colorado for about eight years, Meyer has been active in statewide water issues for the past 45 years and was lead author for Colorado’s Water Plan for the Colorado Basin. He has conferred with others with deeper local knowledge, and right now, it appears area farmers and ranchers in the region who might normally get three or four cuttings of hay will get no more than two. In La Plata County, they will be lucky to get one.

Snowpack in the San Miguel, Animas, San Juan and Dolores river basin was at at 32% of median as of Wednesday, according to Snotel data, which is managed by the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

East of Wolf Creek Pass, in the upper Rio Grande drainage, numbers were a little better – 40% of median courtesy this week’s storm. Last week, before the fresh snow, levels in both basins had been languishing below 30%.

Water managers in the San Luis Valley warned in a May 1 Facebook post that they expect early runoff, low flows and a short boating season. Heather Dutton, manager of the San Luis Valley Water Conservancy District, said there had been high hopes of big dumps several times throughout the winter but, “it just never materialized.”

Snowpack in Colorado’s southern mountains has always been uneven. Some years are better than others. But a trend has emerged of earlier springs and less moisture in the San Juan and Sangre de Cristo ranges.

Colorado State Climatologist Russ Schumacher and associates at the Colorado Climate Center have analyzed data from Snotel stations across Colorado going back to at least 1979. (Snotel stands for SNOwpack TELemetry, an automated system.) Although in Colorado’s northern mountains, trends over the last 45 years are fairly modest, many stations in southern mountains show levels below the 10th percentile, he said.

A Snotel station near Wolf Creek Pass had the second lowest peak snow-water equivalent since the station was established in 1979. The lowest reading was in 2002. 

“In the southern mountains, the data make a very clear statement: snowpack is declining, and the peak is happening earlier. At many of the stations in the San Juan and Sangre de Cristo mountains, the peak snow-water-equivalent has declined by 3% to 5% per decade, and the peak has shifted two to four weeks earlier,” Schumacher said.

The 1980s were unusually wet, which makes recent declines look even worse. Contributing to the declines have been dust-on-snow events and rising temperatures.

During the 21st century, Colorado has had just one year of below-average annual temperatures. Seven of the top 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 2010.

At his farm along the Animas River, Meyer first noticed a problem in February. The well that taps water for domestic use went dry. The water table had dropped 35 feet. He persuaded others on the ditch to begin diverting water from the Animas to cause groundwater levels to rise. It eventually worked, although he was out of water for a week to 10 days.

Meyer operated a water consulting firm in Glenwood Springs for 35 years before he retired. He then bought ranch property near Mancos. After a drought in 2021, he resolved to get a property with better access to water and moved to his current home in the Animas Valley. 

In Cortez, Ken Curtis, director of the Dolores Water Conservancy District, has been monitoring snowpack. In late April, data suggested a runoff of 30% of average. Because his district owns more senior water rights, the farmers in his district will probably do better than that.

“It’s been a weird year,” he said. “We are definitely going to have a shortage.”

This was the eighth or ninth year out of the last 15 that runoff from the winter snowpack has been on the low side. The good news, he reported, was the relative absence of dust-on-snow events.

At least part of this drought is the result of rising temperatures created by accumulating greenhouse gases, a process called aridification. Since about 2017, scientists have convincingly shown that it is responsible for roughly half of declined flows. Drought may go away, but human-caused aridification will not any time soon.

In the last 25 years, the Colorado River has yielded significantly less water than the 20th century average – and far less than delegates from the seven basin states assumed when they drew up the Colorado River Compact in 1922. The compact assumed far more water than occurred in the 20th century. That faulty assumption was tolerable until the 1990s, when the Central Arizona Project withdrawals began, followed by drought and aridification of the 21st century. The river now delivered 14.5 million acre-feet – unlike the 20 million acre-feet that was assumed.

Flows into Lake Powell on March 2 were 61% of average. The reservoir is 31.4% full, far better than in 2022, when it dipped below 23%. Although runoff in the last couple years has been OK, this year will be a stern reminder that new agreements must be hammered out.

The states, divided into the Upper and Lower basins, have been trying to come to grips with the new reality. Colorado to a small extent, but Wyoming and Utah especially, have not been using the amount of water that was assumed by the compacts. California and Arizona had been – and then some.

In recent years, California and Arizona cut back their use dramatically. However, a recent paper by water journalist and author John Fleck, along with other experts, argues there must be shared pain in reduced water use. That runs counter to the stance of Colorado and other basin states that it’s a lower-basin problem.

In the paper, issued April 25, the authors outline seven essential pillars for post-2026 management of the river. The first calls for enforceable reductions in water use in both the Upper and Lower Basin. 

“Shared pain is also critical to inducing the various states not to litigate over the interpretation of the 1922 Compact,” they wrote. “Shared does not mean equal, either in amount, triggers or duration.”

Meanwhile, at his farm near Durango, Meyer agrees. Colorado must recognize it needs to cut back somewhat in line with what Arizona and California have done.

The following was edited for length. To read it in its entirety, go to www.bigpivots.com, where Allen Best writes about the climate and clean energy transition in Colorado and beyond.