Michelle Garrison, a state water resources specialist, saw something missing on her January drive from Oregon to Denver. No ice on the roads. No snow in the foothills.
Her mind turned to drought and reservoirs and the recently expired drought management agreement between Colorado and three other states.
“It makes me think that this year is going to be a real challenge,” she said. “It looked like November everywhere I drove.”
Garrison presented this year’s outlook Monday during a meeting in Aurora of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, the state’s top water policy agency. As warm and dry conditions continue in the West, the forecasts for the amount of water flowing through the Upper Colorado River Basin keep dropping. For officials like Garrison, it’s hard not to be pessimistic: More dry and warm weather means greater concerns about hydropower generation, recreation and algal blooms on the Western Slope.
And to top it off, the agreement that outlines how Upper Basin states, including Colorado, can help out in drought years expired Dec. 31, and it’s not yet clear from a legal standpoint what that means for this year.
“Things are looking exceedingly grim,” Garrison said as she described this year’s forecasts to the 15-person board.
The meeting kicked off after days of cold temperatures and snow across the Front Range. But the most recent snowstorm was not enough to recover from the worst snowpack on record for Colorado, and the quick return to 40-degree days didn’t help.
Colorado’s mountains harbor a vital water supply that melts and runs through four major rivers and 19 downstream states each year. Garrison’s concerns focused on the water that runs west into the Colorado River Basin, where it collects in an immense reservoir called Lake Powell before it’s released downstream to Arizona, California, Nevada and Mexico.
From November to Jan. 15, the forecasts for that flow of water into Powell, on the Utah-Arizona border, fell by almost 2 million acre-feet.
One acre-foot roughly equals the annual water use of two to four households. Colorado used about 1.9 million acre-feet of Colorado River water each year, on average, between 1971 and 2024, according to federal data.
And if the warm and dry conditions continue, the water level at Powell is forecast to fall to levels where turbines at Glen Canyon Dam can’t generate as much (or any) electricity and where low water levels could damage the dam’s infrastructure, according to the January 24-month study, a monthly report from the Bureau of Reclamation.
In 2019, four Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — formed a plan, called the Drought Response Operations Agreement, that outlined what the states could do in dry years to avoid dropping to those problematic elevations.
The agreement, called the DROA by the water wonks, aimed to keep Powell’s elevation above 3,525 feet above sea level by either changing when Glen Canyon released water or by sending emergency releases of water down from upstream reservoirs, including Blue Mesa, a federal reservoir and the largest reservoir in Colorado.
The first emergency releases from Blue Mesa and a Wyoming reservoir, Flaming Gorge, were in 2021 and 2022, dry years when water managers worried about the massive dam’s infrastructure.
Locally, the releases dropped reservoir levels, led to algal blooms and left some Western Slope recreation and marina businesses hanging out to dry.
The agreement expired Dec. 31, and water lawyers are working to clarify what that means for water management in 2026 before May when more emergency releases might be needed.
It’s one of several agreements that expire this year and must be replaced, including Mexico’s Colorado River agreement and reservoir operation rules from 2007. Negotiations among states to replace the 2007 rules have been at an impasse for two years.
Technical experts like Garrison, however, are still planning for potential emergency measures.
“The Upper Basin is so strongly hydrology-driven, that I think (drought) is always on our minds,” Garrison said. “We always feel like we have to be planning for drought.”
Powell’s water level can vary by as much as 20 to 30 feet in a year, Garrison said.
Keeping Powell’s elevation above 3,525 feet preserves an important cushion above 3,490 feet, when the dam hits a crisis point.
At that elevation, Glen Canyon Dam’s turbines can’t generate any electricity — and that would prompt electric utilities to turn to more costly, less renewable energy sources. The dam’s electricity is normally pooled with other power sources to serve customers in Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Texas and Utah.
Lake Powell’s elevation was 3,536 feet as of Monday. It stored 6.2 million acre-feet of water, or about 25% of its capacity.
Under the drought agreement, the reservoirs can release about 500,000 acre-feet for Powell. But if warm and dry conditions continue, the DROA emergency releases might not be enough to fill the gap and avoid problems at Powell, Garrison said.
At that point, Reclamation might have to cut releases from Powell for Arizona, California and Nevada, Garrison said. The releases are currently set to be 7.48 million acre-feet but can be cut as low as 6 million acre-feet under a 2024 interstate agreement.
The Bureau of Reclamation, which manages Glen Canyon, is already reining in winter reservoir releases, Garrison said. Technical experts are meeting monthly, or even more frequently. Federal officials called top negotiators and governors from the seven basin states to meet in Washington, D.C., this week to try to resolve differences over how to manage the river.
The whole situation has left water officials, like Garrison, worried. The Colorado River’s water provides water for 40 million people in the West. It’s the foundation of western economies and national food supplies.
Looking at the forecast, Garrison said she was feeling pessimistic.
“It’s just a real struggle for everybody to be dealing with hydrology this dry when you’re trying to set up what you’re going to do in the future,” she said. “It’s going to be hard.”