The Colorado River is one of the West’s most vital resources serving as the primary water source for some 40 million people. It’s also one of the most endangered. For two decades, the river has faced historic draught, which is pushing the resource to the precipice of crisis. Year after year, the outdated Colorado River Compact, created during some of the basin’s wettest years, requires the river basin to provide more water than it’s able to replenish. Now, the 100-year-old water truce among seven states of the Southwest, Mexico and 29 federally recognized tribes may be moving toward open hostilities as the life-giving but drought-decimated Colorado River is at a tipping point, federal officials say.
The Wahweap Marina and miles of exposed shoreline along Lake Powell are seen from a flight on Friday, July 8, 2022, in Page, Ariz. Water levels were at historic lows since the flooding of the canyon with the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam in the 1960s.
The Glen Canyon Dam near Page, Ariz., serves as the command-and-control center for the seven dams throughout the Colorado River Basin above it. As drought has drawn water levels down to record lows, the federal Bureau of Land Reclamation has authorized emergency releases from upstream tributaries to ensure the operation of Glen Canyon Dam.
Glen Canyon Dam Operations Supervisor Kent “Kato” Miyagishima walks underneath a pipe 15 feet in diameter that ushers water inside the Glen Canyon plant on Wednesday, June 22, 2022. As water levels have reached historic lows, operators worry if the dam will be able to continue producing electricity.
In the summer of 2022, only four of eight massive generators and turbines were online churning out electricity at Glen Canyon Dam at a much lower rate of 90 megawatts, compared with 165 megawatts at full operation. Inflow is at 60% of average, according to the Bureau of Land Reclamation.
Power lines line the edge of the canyon just south of the Glen Canyon Dam.
Control guages show water pressure, temperature and other measurements inside the Glen Canyon Dam.
A houseboat is beached on the shores of Lake Powell, where a white line, part of the bathtub ring that now lines the edge of the lake can be seen from a flight on Friday, July 8, 2022, near Page, Ariz. Even as water levels remained low, recreationists say there’s still plenty left to recreate on and that new campsite and places to explore—remnants of the canyon that was flooded sixty years ago—are exposed.
Boats on Lake Powell on Thursday, June 23, 2022, give a scale to the bathtub ring, more than 100 feet high, created by overuse and draught in the Colorado River Basin. The last time the lake was full was 1999.
People lounge in a pool at The STRAT Hotel on Saturday, April 15, 2023, in Las Vegas. Nevada saw record-breaking heat this summer.
The famous Bellagio fountains in Las Vegas use recycled water taken from underground wells rather than water from Lake Mead.
Lines marking different water levels on the Hoover Dam and it’s intake towers show how Lake Mead has receded over the years on Jan. 22, 2023.
The Colorado River flows through Palisade, Colo. Although growers in Palisade have some of the most senior water rights in the basin, so their risk for water cuts is low, many are making water conservation changes.
Trent Cunningham poses for a portrait between his pear trees and as they are irrigated on June 20, 2022, in Palisade, Colo. Over the years, he has switched from flood irrigation to more conservative irrigation techniques that use only 20% of the water. The water saved stays in the river for potential use downstream.
The thin black hoses and sprinklers that deliver water over the roots of Trent Cunningham’s pear trees distributes the water more evenly and directly than flood irrigation. Across the orchard industry in Palisade, about 70% of the area has made the switch to more efficient irrigation.
Water flows from a pipe on a site that still uses flood irrigation on Palisade. Flood irrigation is the least efficient way to irrigate, losing as much as 50% of the water applied to evaporation.
Colorado Springs relies on the Colorado River for 70% of the cities water supply.
In an effort to help people learn how to reduce their water use and shrink the areas where turf grass exists, Colorado Springs Utilities built the Xeriscape Demonstration Garden.
The rising sun illuminates sprinklers in Memorial Park on Monday, August 1, 2022. Of the 1.9 trillion gallons of Colorado River water used in a typical year, approximately 80% of that is used for agriculture, 12% is used residentially and 4% is used commercially.
Kayto Sullivan Sr. sits on the tailgate of his truck while filling hundreds of gallons’ worth of containers with water from a spigot this month in Goulding, Utah. About 20% of Navajo Nation households live without running water and have to haul it from watering stations, sometimes hours away from their homes. Although tribes have some of the most senior rights to Colorado River water, many areas don’t have necessary water infrustrucutre.
Pipes that will eventually be laid underground as part of the Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project sit on a construction site on Aug. 4, 2023, in the New Mexico desert near Shiprock. The pipeline, being built by the Bureau of Reclamation, will ultimately stretch for about 200 miles from the San Juan River—a significant tributary of the Colorado River—near Farmington, gaining 2,000 feet of elevation on its uphill journey to Gallup, N.M.
Construction workers on the site of a pump station that will transport water in a pipleline as part of the Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project. The project is the Bureau of Reclamation’s largest currently under construction and settles a portion of the tribe’s water rights that date back to the treaty signed with the U.S. government in 1868. The Navajo Nation first requested inclusion in a project planned to serve Gallup in 1975, going on 50 years ago, according the bureau's history of the project.
A helicopter drops mulch in the East Troublesome Fire burn scar on Sunday, August 1, 2021, near Grand Lake, Colo. The mulch is mean to prevent heavy rains or runoff over hydrophobic soils from washing away collected soot and ash deposited by a fire, and sluicing it directly into the water system. In Grand Lake, it took nearly a year for Northern Water, which provides water to northeastern Colorado, to understand the scope of the damage to the water system, which includes the headwaters of the Colorado River and it’s tributaries.
Booms with collection barriers that extend under the water, such as this one in Willow Creek Reservoir, near Grand Lake, Colo., have been set up to collect larger debris that washes down, over hydrophobic soils, into the reservoirs, to keep them from traveling into the system that provides water to more than a million residents, and about 615,000 acres of irrigated land, on the east side of the Continental Divide
Jim Loken stands on the deck at Lake Fork Marina on Friday, June 10, 2022, near Gunnison, Colo. The Loken family has run the two marina’s on Blue Mesa Reservoir for three generations. Emergency releases to shore up Lake Powell and keep power-generating turbines turning downstream have caused the closure of the marinas that Loken's family have made a living from since the 1980s. In the summer of 2022, they were only able to open the Lake Fork Marina, while the Elk Creek Marina remained inoperable.
The shores of the Blue Mesa reservoir and the high water line are reflected in the windows of Pappy’s Restaurant which remained closed for the 2022 season.
Elk Creek Marina on Blue Mesa Reservoir sits empty early in June. Two seasons in a row, the government ordered the marina to be closed due potential pulls from the reservoir to that would help maintain water levels at Lake Powell.
Jose Tejada rows a raft through a section of the Colorado River east of Moab, Utah, on June 21, 2022. Tejada started as a rafting guide with Sheri Griffith Expeditions in the 1980s and bought the company with his oldest son in 2005. He says one of the biggest differences between rafting guides and many of the other groups fighting over the river is that they don’t take anything from it.
After rain, a rainbow appears over bright red Colorado River during sunrise near Moab, Utah. Some people who live, work and recreate on riverwater that accumulates from snow runoff and rainfall say drought conditions ebb and flow. They are optimistic water levels will rebound. But in many locales, levels have reached historic lows.