The drama engulfing the seven states in the Colorado River Basin could take another, more perilous, turn in a few weeks.  

Water experts are warning that by October, the river’s flow may cross a critical threshold at Lee’s Ferry, a bend in the river in Arizona that has been a bellwether of the river’s health for decades. The 1922 Colorado River Compact — the river’s foundational agreement — states that the river’s flow must stay above a certain level at Lee’s Ferry in order to provide enough water for downstream states. 

If the flow falls below that point, which some experts equate to a “tripwire,” it could trigger prolonged and expensive litigation at the Supreme Court, a turning point that could have terrible consequences for basin states. 

“I can’t imagine what the Front Range of Colorado would look like at that point,” said Darren Beck, a water program supervisor for Boulder County Parks and Open Space, of the prospect of huge cuts to their Colorado River water. 

“It would just be dry fields and weeds and decimated economies and families.”

Tensions along the Colorado River have already run high this year — a historic drought, following record-breaking winter temperatures, has threatened water supplies for communities across the West that rely on the river and its tributaries.

For more than three years, the seven states in the Colorado River Basin have been unable to reach a deal to share increasingly scarce water. In August, the federal government issued its own plan to save water, which foisted massive water cuts on Arizona, Nevada and California. 

Nevada officials called the cuts draconian, and the state has already sued the Bureau of Reclamation over the plan. 

A Supreme Court case and ruling could impose even more dire cuts and lead to bitter disputes for decades. A ruling could, for instance, force cities, farmers and ranchers in Colorado to slash their water use, leading to painful decisions. 

“We’re talking about a really significant portion of this state’s water supply being unavailable for five or 10 or 15 years to make up [for] a bad court decision,” said Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, during a June hearing to state lawmakers.

Both upper and lower basin states are lawyering up. Colorado Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate, Phil Weiser, said his office would defend the state’s rights, and has insisted his lawyers are now the “best … water law firm in the state.” 

But Michael L. Connor, who led the Bureau of Reclamation under President Obama, said a Supreme Court case would create more headaches and not solve the river’s fundamental problem: There is less water to go around. 

“If there is Supreme Court litigation over the compact, everybody loses,” he said. 

At stake is who decides how to divide up an ever-shrinking pool of water. Will it be state negotiators, who represent millions of people and could still one day reach an agreement? 

Or will it be nine justices in black robes? 

“Handing the ability to decide really important questions about the operation of the Colorado River to nine people — who don’t know much about it —  is very risky business,” said Anne Castle, a scholar at CU-Boulder Law School and former chair of the Upper Colorado River Commission, which represents the Upper Basin states. 

Lawsuits over the river’s management are already flying in federal court. 

In August, the Bureau of Reclamation finalized its two-year plan to release water from Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the country’s two largest reservoirs. The plan is a short-term attempt to deal with a long-term reality: since 2000, the river’s flow has declined by about 20%, and Mead and Powell are at their lowest levels since the 1950s. 

Besides states, tribes could also sue over Reclamation’s plan. 

The entire river basin is home to 30 federally recognized tribes, who are legally entitled to more than 25% of the river’s water. But many of those rights have never been fully recognized, and many tribes can’t access all of their water because they lack the expensive infrastructure to redirect it. 

Still, “the feds absolutely have a duty to tribes to protect their water interests,” said Heather Tanana, a tribal water law expert at the University of Denver. That stems back to a 1908 Supreme Court decision, which ruled that tribal reservations should have enough water to function. 

While that has hardly been achieved, some tribes downstream could argue that Reclamation’s latest plan violates the government’s responsibility by slashing their water supplies, Tanana said. 

Arizona is poised to take the lion’s share of water cuts, which would affect the Gila River Indian Community, near Phoenix.

Gila River Governor Stephen Roe Lewis said the tribe is poised to sue if water cuts become too extreme, even though litigation is not their first choice. 

“The community … will not hesitate to turn to the courts to protect our interests and our future,” he said at a CU-Boulder water conference in June.

A tripwire in an unsettled document 

The 1922 compact allocates an equal amount of water between the Upper Basin and Lower Basin — 7.5 million acre-feet per year. One acre-foot is roughly enough water for two households a year. 

The compact is an inherently incomplete document — it took more than a dozen new laws, agreements and settlements over the next 50 years to build out the River’s complicated system of dams, diversions and reservoirs, and even include tribes and Mexico in the process. 

The compact clearly states that the Upper Basin will not cause the river’s flow at Lee Ferry (now called Lee’s Ferry) to drop below 75 million acre-feet of water over any 10-year period. 

The Upper Basin also has to kick in roughly half of what’s owed to Mexico, based on the compact and a 1944 treaty. That brings the 10-year total to between 82.5 and 81.5 million acre-feet, depending on how much water is being sent to Mexico, according to Castle and Eric Kuhn, a river historian and former general manager of the Colorado River District. (The Upper Basin, for their part, strongly disputes they owe this much).  

Flows at Lee’s Ferry have dipped below that amount before, in the 1960s and ‘70s, but in much different circumstances. During that period, Reclamation was filling Lake Powell, and the river still had plenty of water to go around, according to Kuhn. 

For decades since then, flows have steered well clear of that range. But officials at the Upper Colorado River Commission and the Arizona Reconsultation Committee, which advises state officials, estimate that by October, the river’s 10-year flow will dip below 82.5 million acre feet. 

“We call that the first tripwire,” Kuhn said. “That’s when the flows are below the upper bookend of how much the upper division states might owe.” 

Crossing the tripwire could be a watershed moment — Arizona’s top river negotiator said it could be the basis of a Supreme Court lawsuit, one that argues that their upstream neighbors are violating the compact.

Potential decades in a black box

If history is any guide, Supreme Court water cases move at a glacial place — often taking decades to resolve — and can end with clear winners and losers. 

In 1952, Arizona sued California to secure more water and question aspects of the compact. It was the last time that the compact’s fundamental questions came anywhere close to being litigated between states. 

Arizona eventually triumphed, which paved the way for the construction of the Central Arizona Project, which now provides water to farms, tribes and desert metropolises, including Phoenix. The case, though, took 11 years to get to a ruling — additional decrees were issued more than 50 years later. 

It took more than five years just to decide which other parties should join Texas v. New Mexico and Colorado, a 2013 suit about the Rio Grande River, according to Castle. It took more than 12 years for the Supreme Court to approve a settlement. 

John Berggren, a river expert at the advocacy group Western Resource Advocates, said that litigation wastes time and cuts off cooperation that’s needed to create long-term solutions in the basin. 

“It will definitely stymie any creative thinking — or any new thinking — because all seven states are going to be very much towing their legal line,” he said. “It just locks up every conversation and you’re no longer having useful or productive negotiations.” 

Plus, no one actually knows how such a case would end. Colorado has ended up at the Supreme Court to fend off claims that it overused its share of water from both the Arkansas and Republican rivers. Both those cases have taken decades — and did not always break Colorado’s way. 

“Our experience in the litigation around the Arkansas River Compact and the Republican River Compact has not had happy endings for Colorado,” said Castle. 

“The point is that once litigation is started, you don’t know exactly where it’s going to end,” she said. 

The endgame

For years, the Upper Basin states have said that they can’t agree to mandatory water cuts, because they’re at the mercy of whatever rain or snow falls that year. Last winter, Colorado experienced record-low snowpack, which strained water supplies. 

Several towns near the river’s headwaters came extremely close to running out of drinking water. On the Front Range, water supplies that are normally flush were sporadic or non-existent. 

Take Hecla Lake, a small pond in Louisville, Colorado. By the early summer, the lake was “bone-dry,” because drought conditions had reduced its normal supply to a trickle, according to Beck, the Boulder County water supervisor. 

By August, though, Hecla had received a much needed infusion of water from the Colorado River headwaters. But that water was only temporary, destined to flow to a small, parched farm nearby. Without it, Beck said, the farm would have gone dry. 

Attorney General Phil Weiser and Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s top river negotiator, both seem confident in their approach to protect Colorado water users. Both have said the state would never agree to a “bad deal” to divide up water. 

“I am not willing to offer a compromise that would leave us worse off than our worst day in court,” Mitchell told state lawmakers during a June hearing. 

A worst case outcome, according to Castle and Kuhn, would be if the Supreme Court, or a court-appointed expert, made a quick decision and ordered the Upper Basin states to send more water downstream. That would lead to what’s called “mandatory curtailment,” or cutting off users with water rights that were formalized after the 1922 compact.

That is a lot of water — it includes water for Denver and other Front Range cities, water for snowmaking at ski resorts, and supplies for hundreds of communities and farms across the Western Slope.

Neither Mitchell nor Weiser have publicly detailed the particulars of the state’s litigation strategy. The AG’s office denied a CPR News public records request for recent documents about Colorado River litigation, and did not comment on questions about its strategy. 

But the state is preparing. The Colorado Water Conservation Board has millions in cash in case of compact litigation, according to Lawrence Pacheco, a spokesperson for the AG’s office. Attorneys and staff in the office have also billed the state for nearly 18,000 hours of work on Colorado River issues this year, according to Pacheco. 

Their approach, though, is running into some pushback from lawmakers. During a June hearing, state senator Dylan Roberts sharply questioned why the state was leaning on lawyers to defend its position, instead of working towards a compromise that avoids a courtroom.

“I don’t think Colorado fares well when we go to court … throwing our fate to the nine justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, only one of whom has any experience with Colorado at all,” Roberts told Mitchell, referring to Justice Neil M. Gorsuch. 

Kuhn said the state should have agreed to a specific target of water conservation during earlier negotiations, instead of holding firm. That could have staved off the possibility of much more painful, forced curtailment later.

“My concern is that Colorado backed the basin into a corner with that position,” Kuhn said. “What Colorado’s position is doing is forcing the other states to become a little bit more aggressive.” 

No one exactly knows how mandatory curtailment would even work. Last year, the state began “listening sessions” with groups of water users, to figure out what Colorado would do if the Upper Basin was ordered to comply with the compact, according to Jason Ullmann, the state’s top water engineer.  

Those discussions were private, Ullmann said, and are still in their early stages. The state is still figuring out if they would need new rules or not in the case of curtailment, he said. 

Supreme Court case or not, it’s clear that an exceptionally bad drought year will stress the river’s supplies. At the end of the day, there is only so much water to go around … and plenty of demand from people willing to use it. 

By early September, Hecla’s water was gone, pumped downstream to irrigate the farm. The lake was once again dry. 

CPR News is covering this unfolding story and its impacts on communities, the Colorado River, farmers and ranchers, outdoor recreation and the environment through a new series, Water Pressure.

Read more from the series here.

Copyright 2026 CPR News

Under the searing desert sun, Max Wilson watched water flow through a canal in north Phoenix. This unassuming strip of blue next to a busy road is the city's lifeline to the Colorado River. Soon, there will be less water in it.

Wilson, water resources management advisor for the city of Phoenix, has to make sure cuts to this canal's supply don't cause taps to go dry for more than 1.7 million people who depend on his system.

He is confident water will keep flowing out of kitchen sinks, showers and sprinklers across the nation's fifth-largest city.

"Arizonans have been solving water problems for our entire history, and we didn't forget how to do that overnight," Wilson said. "We're going to do it again now."

The cuts, which kick in on Jan. 1, are the result of a new federal plan for managing the Colorado River. After more than 26 years of drought and climate change sapped the river's supply, the nation's two largest reservoirs — Lake Powell and Lake Mead — are at record lows. The seven states that use the river's water spent years trying to agree on a plan to rein in demand. Those negotiations failed, and the federal government had to step in with its own.

The result is a strategy that includes mandatory cuts of 27% to Arizona's Colorado River supplies each year through 2028, with an option for steeper cuts after that.

Now, central Arizona cities are charting a course through a future with less Colorado River water. Water managers across the Phoenix metro say they have robust backup plans in place to keep taps flowing, thanks to years of preparation and huge construction projects. Those upgrades, though, come with a big price tag, and will carry the area into a future that is still rife with uncertainty.

The Central Arizona Project — a system of canals and pumps which carry Colorado River water 336 miles across the desert to the Phoenix and Tucson areas — will be hit the hardest by new cuts. Colorado River water makes up 40% of the supplies Phoenix feeds to its customers.

"The cuts that we're talking about today will not threaten water deliveries to homes," Wilson said. "There will never be a moment where you go into your house, you turn on your faucet and no water comes out the other side."

The very fact that Phoenix and its neighbors can receive water from the Colorado River is a feat of engineering. The canal system that carries it from western Arizona is a gravity-defying product of 1960s optimism and more than $4 billion in building costs.

Soon, with less water in that canal, it will take more feats of engineering to survive. The steep costs of those projects will likely be passed along to residents.

"All those solutions are here, and we know what they are, and we're working on implementing them," Wilson said, "They are going to be very expensive. And ultimately, our customers are going to be the ones who have to pay that bill."

Decades of planning 

Cities say the main reason they can survive Colorado River cuts is the simple fact that they have diverse water portfolios.

When one source is short, they can lean harder on a different one. In the Phoenix area, that is most often the Salt and Verde River system and groundwater.

You wouldn't know it driving around Phoenix, but the city is built on the banks of a major river.

In the city today, the Salt River is mostly reduced to a wide, dusty trough that passes unceremoniously under freeway bridges. That's thanks to more than a century of planning and construction stretching back to some of the area's earliest waves of white settlement.

The Salt River's first major dam, Roosevelt Dam, was completed in 1911 in an effort to tame erratic flows and wrangle its water for the nascent farming communities downstream. In the century-plus since, Roosevelt was joined by other dams, which now form a chain of reservoirs in the foothills east of Phoenix.

As farming ebbed, the water stored in those reservoirs helped the Valley's cities and suburbs become one of the nation's fastest growing urban areas. Now, it will help keep them afloat during epically dry times.

The cuts to Phoenix's Colorado River allocation are survivable partially because the city gets so much water from the Salt and Verde Rivers, which supply about 58% of the water sent to customers.

Early settlers of the Valley constructed the Salt River's first dams and laid the groundwork for the area's future. Throughout the 20th century, water managers built on top of it. In the 1990s, a $430 million project raised the height of Roosevelt Dam and increased its storage capacity by 20%.

Now, 21st century water managers have to invest hundreds of millions more to make sure they can get water from the Salt River system to the places it's needed. The city of Phoenix spent about $300 million building a "drought pipeline," which was completed in early 2023 and carries water from the south side of the city to the north.

Before the pipeline, north Phoenix was largely dependent on water from the Colorado River. Phoenix has legal access to Salt River water that it can use to help keep taps flowing for more than 400,000 people in that area, but that water flowed into the south side of the city. The 12-mile pipeline fixes that, but came with a large price tag.

Still, Wilson said it was necessary and, in the future, might look like a bargain.

"Three hundred million dollars seemed like a lot of money at the time," he said. "I think many of the projects that we're talking about moving forward are not in the hundreds of millions, but are rather in the billions of dollars."

Doug Dunham, associate director of water resources for EPCOR USA, agrees.

On a recent August morning in Anthem, a master-planned community on the far northern edge of the Phoenix metro, water bubbled up into a large storage pond at a water treatment plant owned by EPCOR, a private utility company.

Dunham explained the system would keep working normally, despite the cuts, for a number of reasons.

"This isn't new headlines to us," Dunham said. "Across the Valley, across the state, from Tucson on up, there have been people who've been thinking about this and planning for these kinds of things for a long time."

In EPCOR's case, that includes big, physical infrastructure — like a system of interconnected pipes that keeps disparate water treatment plants working if one source of water can't supply enough — along with on-paper access to a special share of Colorado River water.

The company's Anthem plant is plugged into the Central Arizona Project canal via a 9-mile pipeline. But the Colorado River water that flows there from the canal will not be cut like many nearby cities. Instead, access to that water is leased from the Ak-Chin Indian Community, which has deep legal protections on its water. It would only be cut off under much steeper reductions, the likes of which are not included in the next few years of Colorado River plans.

Lease deals can be a big part of some utilities' preparations for times of shortage. Essentially, if a utility's legal rights to water are on the chopping block, it can go out and buy access to somebody else's water that is more legally protected.

But the strategies that have worked so far, Dunham said, can only do so much.

"Eventually we're going to have to do harder, more difficult, and — read into that — more expensive things to make sure that water resources are brought in," he said. "The next buckets, so to speak, the next sources of water, those projects are going to be very expensive."

Who pays for it all?

The steep costs of big, new infrastructure will primarily fall on the shoulders of the people who use the water those projects provide. Homes and businesses across the Valley have already seen some of those costs baked into water bills over the years, and they will likely see more increases.

And without a long-term strategy for spreading out those costs, rate hikes can be dramatic.

That has been on display in Gilbert.

The town gets about 41% of its water from the Colorado River, and will lose 20% of that allocation under the upcoming cuts.

For decades, Gilbert has been building contingency plans that will keep water flowing to homes and businesses even during dry times.

In the late 1990s, it built a sprawling nature preserve structured around seven ponds that are designed to help treated wastewater seep underground, filling an aquifer that can provide a backup when there's not enough water from other sources. Now, it's nearly done building the wells to get some of that water back.

Gilbert had plans to rebuild its largest water treatment plant and install a network of eight wells to help draw groundwater as part of its strategy to weather a future with less Colorado River water.

Lauren Hixson, the town's water resources manager, said the wells needed to be fast-tracked to catch up with demand for water. That more aggressive timeline, combined with a Town Council that had skipped increases to water rates in the past, meant Gilbert needed to raise money for its new projects quickly.

As a result, water bills in Gilbert have doubled, roughly, since 2024.

Those steep rate hikes did not land well with customers, Hixson said. Even though they helped fund important infrastructure, she said it was difficult to get people to understand the reason for the increase.

"I think we did our best to get the message out ahead of time, but a lot of people aren't paying attention until it actually takes place," she said. "Then they see the bill, and they're like, 'Wait, why?'"

Hixson said residents have been getting gradually more receptive as her team explains the need for water system upgrades, but sudden, unexpected rate increases can make it hard for people to appreciate that preparation, despite a local government's best attempts to get the word out.

"It's really important for communities to be looking at that really regularly so that there isn't a big shock," she said.

However, some experts see higher water rates as a different part of the solution to shortages.

In the Phoenix area, local utilities rarely force their customers to use less water. Mandatory restrictions on things like lawn watering, for example, are rare.

Kathryn Sorensen, director of research at the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, said mandatory watering rules may not be necessary if a city can use high water rates to send the message instead.

"I'm not convinced that voluntary or even involuntary water conservation measures necessarily get you a lot of water," she said. "What does work is a good price signal on what you pay for the water."

Phoenix's water department, which Sorensen used to run, charges more for water during the summer. That, she said, makes people think twice about growing a thirsty lawn during the hottest months of the year.

"When people get that bill, they see it and they feel it in their pocketbook," Sorensen said "That can be really painful, and the change can be immediate. No one wants a $500 water bill in the middle of the summer, right? It works."

The proof is in the data. Phoenix has brought down peak summertime water use since the 1980s by about 40%, and Sorensen said higher rates are a big part of that.

"Many decades ago, something like 80% of single-family homes had majority grass landscaping," she said. "Today, within the boundaries of the city of Phoenix, that's less than 10%. There are these kind of hardcore advocates that just want a lawn. That's not against the law in Phoenix, but trust me, they pay through the nose for that lawn. Those price signals are really effective."

Uncertainty lies ahead

For all of their advance planning, water managers are still facing an unpredictable future.

Climate science shows that the massive reservoirs that store the Colorado River are unlikely to fill back up any time soon. Drier conditions are here to stay, and so is the reality that big reductions to demand are the main way for humans to adapt to that future. Climate scientists, policy researchers, environmentalists and most water policymakers generally agree.

But the exact way state and federal governments choose to bring down demand is much less certain.

In the latest set of rules for managing the Colorado River, the federal government gave itself the authority to cut water for Arizona, California and Nevada by up to 40% as soon as 2028. The promise of a roughly 20% cut for those states will only last for a relatively short time.

Those rules force decisionmakers back to the negotiating table to tweak cutbacks every two years through 2036. After that, they could throw a curveball to the city utility managers that have to live with the consequences of those cuts.

EPCOR's Dunham said that can be difficult for someone who might have to build new water treatment plants and storage facilities.

"Those kinds of things take many years to get off the ground and into operating conditions," Dunham said. "So these short two-year cycles are going to be very, very challenging."

Not only does the cutback plan leave room for uncertainty, but some parts of cities' backup plans also have a murky future.

Many Valley cities are part of a water storage program through the Arizona Water Banking Authority. Since the late 1990s, taxpayers have been funding a program to stash extra Colorado River water underground, with the idea that it could be used as a backup in times of shortage.

But the shortage is here, and the Water Bank has locked horns with city leaders over policies to retrieve that water.

Local utilities said the Water Bank should give them access to exactly as much stored water as they lose to mandatory Colorado River cutbacks — essentially providing a one-to-one replacement for the water they lost. The Water Bank argued it would be better to stretch out those supplies for the future, and wanted to give cities some water, but not 100% of the amount they lost to cutbacks.

After a public back-and-forth, the Water Bank agreed to give utilities access to 100% of the water they lost to cutbacks, but only for a year. Those underground backup supplies are a big part of some cities' plans to adapt to a drier future, but they aren't certain how much of that water will be available after the yearlong policy expires.

In some parts of the Valley, the uncertainty runs much deeper.

Larger, older cities toward the core of the Phoenix metro tend to have more taxpayers, deeper pockets, larger staffs and a long history of securing access to different sources of water. Smaller suburbs and exurbs are often on the other end of the spectrum.

The town of Cave Creek, for example, is in a pinch.

Cave Creek sits in a quiet, saguaro-dotted valley less than an hour northeast of Phoenix. It gets about 95% of its water from the Colorado River. With big cuts to that supply on the way, it has had to move quickly.

With few options and high costs that would be difficult for its small population to fund, the town is working on exchange deals with nearby cities. But those don't represent a permanent solution.

A consultant for Cave Creek's water department told KJZZ in April that the city will have "five to eight years" worth of alternatives, and will need longer-term fixes once that time runs out.

The next generation

On the banks of the Central Arizona Project canal in Phoenix, city water manager Max Wilson stood on a gravel road above the steady amble of blue-green water.

He said the work to keep water flowing for the next few years — and for future generations — is already visible. With the '60s-era concrete canal on one side, he gestured in the other direction, toward a towering construction crane down the street.

"As we stand here," Wilson said, "what we're looking at is the confluence of the city's past and the city's future."

Under the crane is the city's big bet on sustainable supplies for the future. At Phoenix's Cave Creek Water Reclamation Plant, it's partway through the construction of a huge facility that will take sewage and clean it up into pure, safe drinking water. It's part of a massive overhaul at the once-mothballed plant, putting Phoenix at the doorstep of delivering recycled water to homes and businesses for the first time in Arizona history.

The project is expected to start sending water into city pipes as soon as early 2029. City officials say it could cost more than $359 million to build, and $8.5 million to run and maintain each year.

"Yes, we will have to pay some of those costs," Wilson said. "But when you think about the benefits, and you think about the fact that our kids and our grandkids are not going to be exposed to the types of shortages that we're talking about here today, I think it's worth it."

By 2033, Phoenix hopes to bring another, even bigger reuse facility online as part of a joint venture with the cities of Mesa and Glendale, as well as EPCOR.

Wilson said the facilities will make the city "more and more drought-proof" going forward.

He also called on the federal government, which has had a big role in helping Western communities adapt to dry times, to help foot the bill for projects like the water recycling facility.

"The federal government made a choice to place this burden entirely on [Arizona, California and Nevada]," he said, "and in making that choice, I think they also made a second choice, which is that they're going to need to step up and step in to be able to help offset some of these costs moving forward."

Copyright 2026 KJZZ News

A drought-riddled summer can still make for a fun recreation season on the Upper Snake River. But for dam managers and wildlife stewards, it also means more headaches and question marks.

At least that’s how this summer’s record-breaking dry heat is panning out for much of the watershed and its dams, which are nearing record-low water levels into the fall.

Jackson Lake is 33% full as of late August. Closer to 88% is more normal for this time of year, according to Brian Stevens, the Upper Snake operations manager at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

Three-quarters full is the typical minimum going into winter, but with a dry, warm fall in the forecast, Stevens said the dam could near zero-percent territory, with an anticipated “1 to 10% full range by the end of the fall.”

If the warm temps and sparse rain continue, the Palisades Reservoir in Alpine could lose the ability to generate power from its dam.

“The chance is less than 50% that it happens,” said Stevens.

Several water uses — like irrigation, power generation and ecology — are caught in the fray when there are warmer temperatures and low water levels impacting the Upper Snake’s nine reservoir system.

“We’re trying to balance all of those [uses] given the drought conditions throughout the system,” said Stevens.

To keep up with irrigation needs downstream, dam releases have also been more than average for this time of year, at 5,000 cubic feet per second through mid-September.

The Upper Snake’s water woes are on par with the rest of the West.Water supply and hydroelectricity for millions downstream are at risk at two of the country’s largest reservoirs. Lake Mead and Lake Powell, which pull from the Colorado River, hit record lows this summer. The Flaming Gorge isalso below normal levels due to long-term drought and increased dam releases.

Fish take the heat 

Since the Jackson Lake Dam pulls water from a relatively shallower point, it releases warmer water than other dams might. This can result in reduced dissolved oxygen, which stresses aquatic life and can be deadly for fish.

“When you have more water that’s stored in Jackson [Lake] that makes up a larger portion of total stream flow, then water temperatures are warmer,” said Dr. Sarah Newcomb, a Snake River headwaters hydrologist with the Jackson Hole chapter of Trout Unlimited.

The warmer water is one of several drought factors that led the Wyoming Game and Fish Department to issue a voluntary fishing closure on the Snake in July.

“Our primary concern is largely associated with catch-and-release angling under warmer water conditions,” said Darren Rhea, the department’s Jackson-based fisheries supervisor. “It can induce mortality if they’re hooked and landed under stressful conditions.”

A first for the department, the daytime closure came after water temps held at or above 70F for several days in July. That’s also when air temperatures nearly broke records in Jackson.

Rhea will have a better idea of how fish took to this year’s unique summer once his department collects more data in October.

“We’ve been through some warm and dry periods, but temporarily,” Rhea said. “I don’t recall in my career seeing a snowpack disappear so rapidly, followed up by such extreme air temperatures during the summer.”

Longer approaches for lake-goers, but more water on the river 

Fish aren’t the only ones out of luck. The Colter Bay Marina was forced to close up shop on July 13, nearly two months ahead of schedule.

Grand Teton Lodge Company usually offers scenic boat rides at the marina through September but called those off for the summer by mid-July. A subsidiary of Vail Resorts, the company declined to comment on the closure.

But Rendezvous River Sports owner Aaron Pruzan said there’s still plenty of put-ins for lake kayakers and paddleboarders at lower shorelines. It just might mean more walking to get there.

“I would see no reason why we’d need to end our season early,” said Pruzan, who also founded the Jackson Hole Kayak School. “Jackson Lake at low water level still provides an amazing experience.”

With the extra releases, surfing Lunch Counter, a famed rapid in the Snake River Canyon, has also been in season longer than is usual.

Forecasts predict the extreme El Niño weather will continue to intensify into the fall. At least 95% of the Intermountain West is experiencing some level of drought already, with most counties breaking heat records.

Nevada filed a federal lawsuit Monday challenging the Trump Administration's new rules drastically cutting the state's access to the Colorado River.

Under new regulations finalized by the Department of the Interior last week, the Lower Basin states – Arizona, California and Nevada – have to cut their share of the Colorado River by 1.25 million acre-feet over the next two years. Northern Basin states do not.

According to the suit, the reduction unfairly slashes Nevada's share of the river by about 71 percent to about 86 thousand acre-feet of water a year. For context, the state used about 212 thousand acre-feet in 2024.

John Entsminger oversees the Southern Nevada Water Authority, one of the litigants. He says the state has a legal right to that water.

"The entire Southern Nevada economy is based upon a legal entitlement to 1.8% of the Colorado River," said Enstminger. we have the Federal government coming in and asserting that they have the authority to take 70% of that meager 1.8%." 

The complaint alleges that federal officials failed to analyze how the cuts would fully impact Nevada's economy, despite a legal requirement to do so.

The state is asking a judge to vacate the Department of Interior's entire 2027-2036 framework for the Colorado River.

Copyright 2026 KNPR News

Updated at 4:15 p.m. Aug. 21, 2026

The federal government finalized new rules Friday to operate the Colorado River’s biggest reservoirs in the next two years. 

The Bureau of Reclamation’s plan calls for California, Arizona and Nevada to take significant cuts to their water supply from the river, at least in the short term. Those states, collectively known as the Lower Basin, will lose out on 1.25 million acre-feet of water a year. 

One acre-foot supplies enough for about two average households. Water delivered to those states supports tribes, vast expanses of irrigated agriculture and cities like Phoenix and Los Angeles. 

Ad:Reclamation’s plan will be in place for 10 years, though actual specifics of conservation measures and water cuts will likely be re-issued every two years. 

The Colorado River is drying up — it now has far less water flowing than it did since 2000. That means there is less water to share between the Lower Basin and the Upper Basin states (Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico).  

The newly finalized plan replaces guidelines that have been in place since 2007 and will take effect on Oct. 1. 

Deeper water cuts may be coming

For years, the Upper and Lower basin states have been unable to reach a long-term agreement to share increasingly scarce water. That forced Reclamation to impose its own plan on the states. 

If the states do have a breakthrough, then their own long-term agreement could replace or modify the federal rules, according to the agency. 

The Lower Basin states have proposed water cuts for months, in an effort to stave off deeper cuts that the federal government could have imposed on them. 

Still, Arizona has sharply criticized aspects of Reclamation’s plan ever since the agency published a final environmental review last month. 

If greater water cuts take effect, they “would inflict catastrophic harm on Arizona’s citizens without any corresponding mandatory contribution from the Upper Division States,” according to an Aug. 10 letter sent by Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources. 

No mandatory cuts to Upper Basin states

Reclamation’s plan does not call for mandatory water cuts to the Upper Basin states. 

Those states are instead developing a much smaller, voluntary water conservation plan that will be paid for by the federal government.  The Lower Basin states have also committed to a voluntary water conservation program. 

Colorado is already dealing with its own state-level water cuts this year, because of a historically bad drought and its worst snowpack on record. That has left farms, ranches and cities scrambling to shore up supplies. 

In a statement, California’s lead Colorado River negotiator JB Hamby said Friday’s plan was a short-term fix, and that the Upper Basin states would have to contribute more water in the future. 

“This is a bridge, not a permanent solution,” he said. “But three states cannot carry the responsibility of all seven.” 

Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s top negotiator, said in a statement that Colorado is still committed to a basin-wide solution, and that statewide water shortages this year were similar to mandatory cuts faced by the Lower basin.  

“We also acknowledge that the Upper Division States face mandatory cuts already, including water rights that predate the 1922 Colorado River Compact by decades,” she said.

Protecting Powell 

The plan also limits how much water is released from Lake Powell. That’s because Powell, and its downstream neighbor, Lake Mead, are at their lowest water levels ever recorded. 

Lake Powell is inching closer towards “minimum power pool” — below that level, it cannot generate hydroelectric power used by millions. Reclamation expects to release between 6-7 million acre-feet of water over the next year from the gargantuan lake, which is well below its historical average. 

If water levels continue to drop, Powell could one day reach “deadpool,” where billions of gallons of water are effectively trapped, like a massive bathtub without a drain. 

Flexibility if drought persists

The 10-year plan offers wide latitude to the Interior Secretary if drought and terrible snowpack continue to parch the basin. Reclamation is allowed to reduce releases even more from Lake Powell, and impose even harsher water cuts to the Lower Basin states. 

The plan also calls for a new agreement to send water from upstream reservoirs, like Blue Mesa, in Colorado, to protect water levels and dam infrastructure in Lake Powell. 

A main sticking point in negotiations has been the Upper Basin’s unwillingness to agree to any mandatory water cuts. For years, Colorado has insisted that, unlike the Lower Basin, who can count on water stored up in reservoirs, the Upper Basin is at the whims of Mother Nature. 

“We cannot provide certainty to our lower basin neighbors that we as upper basin water users have never had ourselves,” Amy Ostdiek, a section chief at the Colorado Water Conservation Board, told a group of water experts on Thursday. 

Mitchell also said Thursday that Colorado would not accept a “bad deal” for the state’s water users. 

But the prospect of deep water cuts across the Lower Basin, or long, drawn-out litigation, could test that position. 

Tribes, states or other groups are now able to sue Reclamation over its final plan, and could argue that the agency erred in how it conducted its environmental review. 

Some tribes, like the Gila River Indian Community (GRIC) in Arizona, have indicated that drastic federal water cuts could force a lawsuit. Many tribes in the basin also have water rights on paper that have never been fully realized. 

GRIC Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis said that while litigation is certainly not the community’s first choice, it is an option. 

“The community … will not hesitate to turn to the courts to protect our interests and our future,” he said at a CU-Boulder water conference in June.  

Editor’s note: This story was updated to include comments from Colorado negotiator Becky Mitchell.

Copyright 2026 CPR News