Without an April-May miracle, human-caused climate change likely will finally catch up with the Colorado River—and the 40 million people who rely on it—in the form of a full-blown crisis later this year.

“Drought” may be too hopeful a word, since it implies an eventual end. Most climate scientists refer to the phenomenon as “long-term aridification,” caused by a lack of rain and snow and warming temperatures.

The West has just experienced its warmest winter since record-keeping began in 1895. The average October-through-December temperature in some parts of the region has been more than 8° F warmer than the 20th-century mean. This is a huge anomaly.

In Gunnison County, Colorado, one of the colder places in the nation, the average minimum temperature for that four-month stretch was about 19° F. That doesn’t seem so bad until you realize that back in 1990, another dry, warm winter, the corresponding measure was 13.6° F. For the Upper Colorado River Basin, the average minimum temperature for that four-month stretch was about 26° F, the warmest on record.

The warmer temperatures tinker with the health of the watershed.

This water year, which began Oct. 1, started out with record-high precipitation in some areas, most of which fell as rain. That helped fend off severe drought conditions. But what really counts is the mountain snowpack, which serves as a giant natural reservoir that supplies at least 70% of the Colorado River’s water each year. Warm temperatures have left some areas snow-free even in parts of Wyoming, where the white stuff normally would be piled high in March.

The diminishing snow has, in turn, shrunk the Colorado River. The “natural” flow—or an estimate of how much water the river would carry without upstream diversions or human consumption—has been below 15 million acre-feet (MAF) at Lees Ferry during 20 of the last 26 years, with an average flow of 12.25 MAF during that time.

This matters, because when the Colorado River Compact of 1922 parceled out the river’s waters, the river was assumed to carry an average annual flow of at least 16.5 MAF. Demand has significantly exceeded supply for the last 26 years, forcing the drawdown of the watershed’s big savings accounts, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, to about one-third of their capacity.

Meanwhile, to comply with the Colorado River Compact of 1922—the document that serves as the Ten Commandments for the management of the river’s waters—the Upper Basin States must release, on average, at least 7.5 MAF from Glen Canyon Dam each year.

Given that the Upper Basin states need a bunch of water to keep their cities and farms from drying up, and that an additional 800,000 acre-feet evaporates or seeps into the underlying rocks at Lake Powell each year, you can see how the warming climate wreaks havoc on the math of the Colorado River.

The entire river system now teeters on the brink, and this year’s snow drought may be what pushes it over the edge.

The Bureau of Reclamation’s latest forecast says Lake Powell’s surface level is likely to drop below the minimum level needed for power production later this year. This so-called “deadpool” would not only mean the end of hydropower production, it would also force all of the dam’s releases to go through the river’s 8-foot-wide, steel outlet tubes, which were not made for sustained use. This could compromise the tubes and the dam itself.

It’s possible that the dam would even be shifted to a run-of-the-river operation, in which releases equal the amount of water flowing into the reservoir, minus evaporation and seepage. That would almost certainly result in water shortages downstream, at the very least for the Central Arizona Project, which serves the Phoenix metro area.

This quandary didn’t sneak up on us.

The seven Colorado River states and the federal water managers can’t agree on who should make what cuts in consumption. The feds, meanwhile, haven’t gotten around to re-engineering Glen Canyon Dam or creating a bypass around it that would enable the water to keep flowing. It’s almost as if they’ve been paralyzed by the belief that dry winters were just a minor glitch.

Now, as the spring runoff gets underway, it has become clear that nature won’t save us: We have no choice but to live within increasingly meager limits.

Jonathan Thompson is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a longtime journalist and author about the West.

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But there’s a problem: The river carries a hefty 55% of the sediment entering the reservoir, and that mud is piling up.

The sediment-heavy river flows south into New Mexico before jogging into Utah, then it joins the Colorado River close to the Arizona border. The confluence is submerged under Lake Powell.

After decades of drought, the reservoir created by Glen Canyon Dam has dwindled to just a third full. Now, as the San Juan River flows toward Lake Powell, it rambles over a huge pancake of mud that’s 49 miles long, a mile wide in some places, and as much as 120 feet deep in the final reaches of the San Juan River.

Unique hydrology has contributed to this plug, A relatively wide canyon and multiple waterfalls slow down the river, allowing sediment to drop out. Though the San Juan is the muddiest tributary, all the Colorado’s tributaries drop a good deal of mud 100 miles or more upstream of Glen Canyon Dam.

It’s a Western phenomenon caused by damming swift rivers, said Jeff Geslin, a geologist at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. The result is that reservoirs in the West have become “temporary sediment storage facilities.”

If that mud could move through the Grand Canyon, like it did before the dam, biologists say that would help restore the canyon’s ecosystem, which depends on sediment-laden flushes in spring to scour riverbanks. Then, as the river slows, beaches form and vegetation returns.

Gary Gianniny, professor of Geosciences at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado has been studying the San Juan River, along with river researchers who call their team, “The Returning Rapids Project.”

The group’s big worry is that without drastic action—draining Lake Powell to let the Colorado River run free—time may be running out for the languorous San Juan River.

Mike DeHoff, principal investigator of the Returning Rapids Project said the sediment layer on the San Juan has created new channels and new waterfalls. DeHoff added that no one knows whether the river’s sediment plug would dissipate even if Glen Canyon Dam were breached.

Researchers boating the San Juan River where it approaches Lake Powell say they’re forced to navigate an ever-moving pile of sediment that also involves portaging around rock waterfalls. When they finally arrive at Lake Powell, there’s dangerous liquefied clay and sand to navigate.

“I’ve seen people sink to their chests in the mud, saved only by their flotation devices and nearby boaters,” said DeHoff of Moab, Utah.

“We’ll need a drone to study that area,” added Gianniny.

Researchers with the Returning Rapids Project talk a lot about what to call these giant slabs of calving sediment. DeHoff suggests “mud bergs.”  

Semi-solid mud walls along the river have already been dubbed “the Dominy Formation,” named after the avid federal dam-builder Floyd Dominy.

“Technically, Gianniny said, the giant mud plug is a “mass of uncompacted mud and sand that causes alluvial fanning.” And falling slabs of sediment, those “mud bergs,” act as semi-permanent river features.

BLM River Ranger Chad Niehaus uses a packraft to regularly visit what researchers are calling the Lowest San Juan. He floats over 30-plus miles of the muddy river, finishing with a four-mile backpack out to a four-wheel drive vehicle 48 miles from Page, Arizona as the crow flies.

Niehaus marvels at the deserted region. “Sediment is moving around, and you must be vigilant in a different way than you do on a ‘normal’ river.”

Drought, climate change, “whatever you call it, the Lowest San Juan has re-emerged,” Niehaus said about wildlife in the once-submerged canyon. “I’ve seen river otters, mountain lions, coyotes—even pelicans—but the most astounding aspect is how quickly nature is coming back.” In places, cottonwood trees are 20 feet high, he said.

“When I was a teenager there were places on maps that were considered forever gone,” he said, pointing to sections on the map entitled, “Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.”

Now, he said, “some forever-gone places are revealed.” He mentions Cathedral in the Desert, a wondrous site on the nearby Escalante River. Enough water has receded to make it visible, though some of this sacred place for Indigenous people is buried under 30-plus feet of sediment.

Meanwhile, the muddy end of the San Juan River is wild again: “I rarely see a footprint.”

Dave Marston is the publisher of the independent nonprofit, Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He lives in Durango, Colorado.

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Because within 24 hours, a more jaundiced — and realistic — picture emerged.

For starters, the Colorado River has not been saved. Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton told a U.S. Senate subcommittee last year that two to four million acre-feet of water per year had to be permanently conserved in the river to protect the Colorado River system.

But this new deal amounts to conserving just one million acre-feet of water per year for the next three years. That makes only a tiny blip in the perilously low water levels at Lake Mead and Lake Powell reservoirs. And Glen Canyon Dam — the doomed dam that should’ve never been built, and which is partly the cause of the crisis — gets “saved” for at least 3 more years.

Moreover, the Lower Basin farmers and cities reaching the agreement had to get paid to reach it. The administration said that 2.3 million of those lost three million acre-feet of water will be “compensated” by the federal taxpayer through the Inflation Reduction Act. News reports suggest this particular inflation reduction could cost U.S. taxpayers $1.2 billion.

What helped push the river to the brink of collapse was those exact same farmers and cities, who have taken more water out of the river than the river could provide, given the region’s extended drought. Now, the Biden administration is paying them to stop doing what they should have corrected on their own.

The agreement also does nothing to address over 20 proposed new dams, diversions and pipelines in the states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico. Those withdrawals from the Colorado would drain even more water out of the dwindling river, totaling about 500,000 acre-feet per year.

So at the same time that the federal government is paying farmers in southern California not to farm, it’s not acting to block permits in the Upper Basin that would further drain the river, thus probably requiring more payments to farmers to not farm.

The flow of water through the depleted Grand Canyon also does not improve as compared to the last two decades.The ecological health of the river in Grand Canyon has been eviscerated and this deal keeps eviscerating it.

Endangered fish will continue to struggle on life support, maintained only by a “forever” breeding and stocking program. The flow of water into Mexico and down to the Sea of Cortez will continue to be so minimal that the river never meets the Sea.

As for Lake Powell, its vaunted salvation over the next three years is merely a stopgap.

What this deal does do is set the precedent that the American taxpayer will backfill any and every financial loss caused by a changing climate. It has been estimated that the Colorado River’s water generates $1.4 trillion in economic activity per year. As climate change further depletes the river, will the U.S. taxpayer always be on the hook?

This so-called historic agreement offers little that is sustainable, equitable or environmentally sound. It’s more a historic boondoggle — one that merely kicks the can down the road.

Gary Wockner is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He leads the Save the Colorado nonprofit.

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Weisheit, 68, co-director of Living Rivers and a former Colorado River guide, has long warned the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation that its two biggest dams on the Colorado River could become useless because of prolonged drought.

Although recently, at a BuRec conference, he also warned that “atmospheric rivers” could overtop both dams, demolishing them and causing widespread flooding.

Weisheit points to BuRec research by Robert Swain in 2004, showing an 1884 spring runoff that delivered two years’ worth of Colorado River flows in just four months.

California well knows the damage that long, narrow corridors of water vapor — atmospheric rivers — can do. Starting in December, one atmospheric storm followed another over the state, dumping water and snow on already saturated ground.

The multiple storms moved fast, sometimes over 60 miles per hour, and they quickly dropped their load. Atmospheric rivers can carry water vapor equal to 27 Mississippi Rivers.

These storms happen every year, but what makes them feel new is their ferocity, which some scientists blame on climate change warming the oceans and heating the air to make more powerful storms.

In California, overwhelmed storm drains sent polluted water to the sea. Roads became waterways, sinkholes opened up to capture cars and their drivers, and houses flooded. At least 22 people died.

Where do these fast-moving storms come from? Mostly north and south of Hawaii, then they barrel directly towards California and into the central West, says F. Martin Ralph, who directs the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego.

“Forty percent of the snowpack in the upper Colorado in the winter is from atmospheric river storms penetrating that far inland,” he adds.

The real risk is when storms stack up as they did in California. That happened in spades during the winter of 1861-1862, in the middle of a decade-long drought, when the West endured 44 days of rain and wet snow. California Governor-elect Leland Stanford rowed to a soggy oath-of-office ceremony in flooded Sacramento, just before fleeing with state leaders to San Francisco.

Water covered California’s inland valley for three months, and paddle wheel steamers navigated over submerged farmlands and inland towns. The state went bankrupt, and its economy collapsed as mining and farming operations were bogged down, one quarter of livestock drowned or starved, and 4000 people died.

In Utah that winter, John Doyle Lee chronicled the washing away of the town of Santa Clara along the tiny Santa Clara River near St. George. Buildings and farms floated away leaving only a single wall of a rock fort that townspeople had built on high ground.

Weisheit knows this history well because he’s been part of a team of “paleoflood” investigators, a group of scientists and river experts. To document just how high floodwaters rose in the past, researchers climb valley walls. The Journal of Hydrology says they seek “fine grained sediments, mainly sand.”

It’s a peculiar science, searching for sand bars and driftwood perched 60 feet above the river.

The Green River contributes roughly half the water that’s in the Lower Colorado River, and in 2005, Weisheit and other investigators found six flood sites along the Green River near Moab, Utah. Weisheit says several sites showed the river running at 275,000 cubic feet per second (cfs).

If the Green River merged with the Colorado River, also at flood, the Colorado River would carry almost five times more water than the 120,000 cfs that barreled into Glen Canyon Dam, some 160 miles below Moab, in 1984. That epic runoff nearly wiped out Glen Canyon Dam.

Now that we’ve remembered the damage that atmospheric river storms can do, Weisheit believes that Bureau of Reclamation must tear down Glen Canyon — now.

He likes to quote Western historian Patty Limerick, who told the Bureau of Reclamation, at a University of Utah conference in 2007, what she really thought: “The Bureau can only handle little droughts and little floods. When the big ones arrive, the system will fail.”

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West.

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The usual suspects make up the rewilding sponsors: former Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Dan Beard and Richard Ingebretsen’s Glen Canyon Institute. There’s also Clark County, Nevada Commissioner Tick Segerblom; Save the Colorado’s Gary Wockner; and nature photographer John Fielder. Great Basin Water Network and Living Rivers are co-sponsors.

“Rewilding” is hardly a new concept. In 1996, draining Lake Powell was ballyhooed by David Brower and the Sierra Club, so much so that Congressional hearings were held, though mostly to denounce the very notion.

“Circus atmosphere” is how one observer described the packed hearings. Colorado Republican Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell went all the way over to the House to say, “This is a certifiably nutty idea,” reported Ed Marston in High Country News.

It was the Glen Canyon Dam’s heyday as cheap and plentiful electrical energy poured out of its eight hydro turbines. The 5-billion-kilowatt hours of power it produced each year was enough to power 650,000 homes. You could say that the Southwest’s building boom was enabled by cheap electricity that made air conditioning routine.

The biggest opponents of plug-pulling 26 years ago were water managers from the Upper Basin states of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming. They considered Lake Powell their “savings account” to ensure compliance with the 1922 Colorado River Compact. Other opponents were the 3 million annual visitors to the reservoir, appalled at the mere suggestion of losing southern Utah’s flatwater paradise. Houseboat shares, for example, are passed down generationally like heirlooms.

Now, rewilding is back for consideration, and while the contest is fuzzy on details — see www.rewildingcoloradoriver.org — its goal is crystal clear: How do we pop the cork on the 710-foot-tall concrete and steel structure holding back Lake Powell, the artificial 186-mile-long lake rimmed by sandstone cliffs?

As the West faces increasing aridity, rewilding advocates see the Bureau of Reclamation, the agency that built and operates the dam, on its heels. Last year, it shifted water in a game of musical chairs, draining upstream reservoirs in Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico, to shore up Lake Powell. The water shuffle was barely enough as water levels in the reservoir plunged 50 feet.

Meanwhile, big challenges face the empty-Lake Powell crowd. More than 1,000 dams have been removed throughout the country, and nature seems to start healing the land quickly. But draining Lake Powell with existing water outlets is impossible: The lowest diversions are the so-called “river outlet works” at 3,370 feet of elevation, which is still 237 feet above the canyon floor.

To make a river wild, it has to flow fast, at grade. Yet at grade is where the rebar-reinforced, 300-feet base of the dam shoulders hundreds of millions of tons of fine sediments behind it.

Drilling this beast would require advanced engineering and construction techniques. Then, releasing water through the hole is akin to popping a giant water balloon without getting a face full of sandy water.

Forty years ago, it was a wetter world, says commissioner Tick Segerblom, an ex-river guide and 4^th generation Nevadan. “The dam was nearly overtopped, lost in spring floods, and now it’s nearly drained.” He points to the damage the dam causes as sandbars disappear in Grand Canyon downstream and silt builds up behind the dam.

If there was ever a time to consider this radical rewilding notion, it’s now. A free-flowing Colorado River, says the Glen Canyon Institute, would still be a major tourist attraction, and Segerblom sees Page, Arizona, becoming the gateway to a new place called Glen Canyon National Park.

Restoring a wonder of nature — why not imagine it? A solution would have pleased David Brower, who regretted not fighting the dam. “Glen Canyon died,” he lamented in a Sierra Club book, “and I was partly responsible for its needless death.”

Perhaps this contest cracks the door to rebirth.

Dave Marston is publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West.

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