GRANBY, Colo. — High in the Rocky Mountains, spring-fed streams and ponds have vanished, leaving patches of cracked mud in what were once spongy meadows.
This year has been so extremely warm and arid that the mountains have remained largely snowless. The water-generating source of the Colorado River, its headwaters, is drying up.
“I grew up here and have never seen the creeks and the springs dried up like they have this year,” said Merrit Linke, a fourth-generation rancher and county commissioner. “There’s just not any water.”
Linke drove his pickup through pastures searching for the few remaining water holes where he could lead cattle to drink.
“No one has ever seen it like this,” he said, “not this dry, not this warm, not this low a snowpack.”
Rancher Merrit Linke’s border collie, Z, pads across a parched reservoir that is normally full of water near Granby, Colo.
The desiccation of the river’s headwaters is shrinking a critical water lifeline for about 35 million people and 5 million acres of farmland across the Southwest, from the Rockies to Southern California and northern Mexico.
With less snowmelt feeding the Colorado River, its giant reservoirs are dropping to dangerously low levels. Lake Mead, the country’s largest reservoir near Las Vegas, is now 28% full.
Lake Powell, the second-largest reservoir, is at just 24%, approaching a point where there won’t be enough water behind Glen Canyon Dam to continue generating electricity. To keep hydropower going as long as possible, the Trump administration is taking emergency measures, releasing extra water from another reservoir upstream to raise the lake level.
Experts and state water managers say it’s clear the seven states that rely on the river need to drastically cut water use to avert disaster before the supply in reservoirs is exhausted.
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A substantial portion of the cutbacks will likely fall to California, which uses more from the river than any other state — nearly one-fourth of the water that flows from taps in Southern California cities, and all of the water that irrigates farms in the Imperial Valley.
About three-fourths of the water that’s taken out of the Colorado River is used for agriculture, producing alfalfa, corn, lettuce, broccoli and other crops.
In Colorado, farmers and ranchers are struggling with the immediate consequences. They’re leaving many fields and pastures dry, selling off cows, and bracing for tough economic times.
1. A firefighter crosses a section of the Colorado River near the Shoshone hydropower plant to help quell a blaze. 2. Rancher Merrit Linke searches for a water hole for his cattle near charred trees that burned in the 2020 East Troublesome fire in Granby, Colo. 3. Farmers in Colorado’s Uncompahgre Valley have left many fields unplanted this year because of water shortages.
Some who raise cattle here say they doubt global warming is fueling the crisis, but scientific research shows rising temperatures have intensified the severe dryness over the last quarter-century. And this year, the river flow is collapsing to one of its lowest points on record.
“We definitely feel like we’re on the front lines of climate change,” said Becky Mitchell, the state of Colorado’s river commissioner. “This year is a perfect example.”
Scientists say the extreme heat and dryness of the last few years add to evidence that human-caused climate change is driving the aridification of the Southwest, a long-term shift to drier conditions.
Since 2000, as temperatures have climbed, the flow of the Colorado has averaged 21% less than during the last century. But recent years are even worse: Since 2020, the river has shrunk about 32%, according to federal data.
Recent research suggests the river flow will diminish further as the use of fossil fuels releases more planet-heating gases.
“It’s frightening,” said Brad Udall, a water and climate scientist at Colorado State University. “It should shake people to their core about what climate change can do and is doing.”
Winters don’t get as cold anymore. A record heat wave in March rapidly melted what little snow had fallen, some of it evaporating straight into the air.
In multiple studies, researchers have found climate change may be altering weather patterns in ways that push storms away from the Southwest, starving the region of snow and rain.
In an alpine valley near Carbondale, Colo., more than 6,000 feet above sea level, water is still flowing in ditches to green meadows where cows graze.
But Bill Fales, a lifelong rancher, said he expects the water from the Crystal River, a tributary of the Colorado, will run short this year.
“Because there’s no snowpack, the rivers are going to be extremely low, if not dry,” Fales said as he walked through knee-deep grass carrying a shovel. “There’s just not going to be much water to get.”
Rancher Bill Fales pauses while tending to one of his pastures.
He motioned to Mt. Sopris, a nearly 13,000-foot peak that towers above the pastures and should be snowcapped in June. Now, it’s bare, gray rock.
“That’s pretty scary,” Fales said. “It’s becoming more and more common, is what’s terrifying.”
He has noticed drastic changes over the last three decades.
Pastures that were usually blanketed in two feet of snow all winter now get very little. Less water runs off into streams, he said, because “it’s grabbed by the ground and by the atmosphere.”
“To me, it’s all because of climate change,” he said. “We just have to somehow adapt.”
1. Rancher Joel Currier releases bales of hay for cows to feed on at his family’s ranch near Molina, Colo. 2. Carlyle Currier, a rancher and president of the Colorado Farm Bureau, drives past the old home where his great-grandfather used to live in Molina, Colo. “The drying of the Colorado River this year is affecting everybody,” he said. 3. Doug Wilson walks across a field he left dry for lack of water in the Uncompahgre Valley near Delta, Colo. “I have half the water that I normally do,” he said, “so I have half the income.”
Fales said he and other ranchers in Colorado’s high country have no choice but to live with the snow nature provides. Downstream, he said, California and other states take way too much water from reservoirs year after year, “like giving a checkbook to a teenager.”
Negotiators for the seven states have repeatedly deadlocked on how much less each should take from the river. The four upstream states — Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico — are at odds with the downstream states — California, Arizona and Nevada.
The Trump administration is responding by preparing its own plan to impose water cuts.
“I think that we have to drastically alter how we live,” Fales said. “We all need to start living within our means, and as a society we’ve been living like there’s no tomorrow.”
Lately, Fales has been hearing Coloradans say they’re hoping the strong El Niño pattern in the Pacific might bring wetter weather. “I keep telling people that hoping for a rainy summer isn’t a really good business strategy. But it’s what everyone’s doing.”
When water is scarce in Colorado, state regulators order some landowners to stop taking from streams, starting with those who have the newest, lowest-priority water rights.
A state enforcer comes around and posts notices on irrigation gates, the big valves that let water into ditches, telling people they have to use less. Sometimes they shut off the water.
This year, the shortages are so severe that many landowners are being told they will get less. Even some who have rights dating to the 1880s that grant them high priority are seeing cuts.
A tractor sprays herbicide on a field near Loma, Colo. Grower Joe Bernal is leaving the field unplanted this year due to the lack of water.
Cities and towns have imposed limits on outdoor watering. Some residents are letting their lawns turn brown and die.
In the last three years, farmers in California and Arizona have agreed to leave fields dry part of the year in exchange for federal payments.
As reservoirs decline to record low levels, more growers in other states could face economic hardships similar to what Colorado farmers are grappling with.
“This will be a very difficult year for a lot of farmers,” said rancher Carlyle Currier, president of the Colorado Farm Bureau. “I’m sure there will be some that probably go out of business.”
On his ranch, Currier and his son, Joel, are still watering pastures but have shut off irrigation in some areas, turning the grass brown.
“I’ll have to buy a lot of hay,” he said. “That takes all the profit out of raising your cattle for the year.”
In western Colorado’s Uncompahgre Valley, water is flowing through canals to fields of corn, pinto beans and onions. But growers are only receiving half of their allotted water and have left many fields dry, creating a patchwork of green crops beside bare dirt that resembles a checkerboard.
Standing on a barren field, Doug Wilson dug the toe of his boot into the sunbaked soil crust, which crumbled.
“There’s no moisture there,” he said. “It’s very depressing.”
Wilson has planted only half his fields and is leaving the other half fallow.
“I don’t see how we have the water to survive as farmers the way we’ve done it in the past,” he said.
The ultradry conditions and low river flows also bring other worries. Fish could struggle as streams shrink and get warmer. Parched forests could become fuel for wildfires. And in many areas, the water shortages are predicted to worsen.
Near Grand Junction, some farmers expect they will run out of water from their canal this summer — the Government High Line Canal, built in 1917.
Rancher Doug Bruchez peers down at the Williams Fork River, a tributary of the Colorado River that has shrunk dramatically, in Kremmling, Colo. “In a normal year, the water is almost touching the bottom of this bridge,” he said. “This is terrifying.”
“We’ve never run short of water to complete a growing cycle,” said Joe Bernal, who runs a family farm founded in 1925 and is president of the Grand Valley Water Users Assn.
Seeing the canal without enough water to flow, he said, “it’ll be surreal.”
He decided not to plant corn, leaving some fields dry, while continuing to grow wheat.
“The outlook is grim, but resilient people make adjustments,” Bernal said. “Farmers are eternal optimists, and we feel that we’ll adapt and next year will be better.”
The lack of snowmelt also shows in the Williams Fork River, an upper tributary of the Colorado that flows into a reservoir. Usually in June, it’s a raging river that almost touches the bottom of a two-lane bridge. This year, it has been reduced to a gently flowing creek, the water about 10 feet below.
“This is terrifying,” rancher Doug Bruchez said as he stood on the bridge looking down. “We are in unprecedented times.”
His family’s canal has gone dry. He said they won’t be able to irrigate nearly 80% of their ranch.
“That’s the scary part for me, is I don’t know how I’m going to make an income this year,” he said.
The dire state of these streams, he said, shows why all seven states must quickly find ways to use less. “We all need to work together to figure out this problem, because it’s coming for all of us.”
That will mean switching to more efficient irrigation and crops that consume less water, he said, as well as larger efforts to conserve in cities, recycle more wastewater, and invest in desalination along the Pacific coast, something several ranchers and farmers emphasized.
State leaders have urged the federal government to provide billions of dollars to help the region adapt. A coalition of water agencies, agriculture organizations and environmental groups have asked Congress to approve at least $2 billion for a “drought mitigation program.”
Aridification is similarly afflicting other parts of the world. Using satellite data, scientists have found that large swaths of the Earth are drying out — including one stretching from the western U.S. through Mexico to Central America, and another from Morocco to France, across the entire Middle East to northern China. They found that these “mega-drying” regions are expanding.
Facing this long-term change, Udall said paying more farmers to temporarily stop irrigating would be a waste of money. He suggests a controversial idea: permanently buying out some farmland, primarily in California and Arizona.
Landowners could volunteer to sell and take lands out of farming, he said, and such a program could also compensate others affected by the loss.
“This is a permanent crisis that needs to be dealt with in ways that are unprecedented,” he said. “It’s going to mean less agriculture in the American Southwest.”
Reporting for this article was supported by a grant from the Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
