I'm having a hard time believing my eyes with water data this year.

The Colorado River mainstem through Grand Junction was flowing at 54 cfs last night. Not a typo. 54 cfs.

Last year on this date it was flowing at 1,420cfs. Even in 2002, the driest year on record, it was at 690cfs on April 22.

Went down to the Colorado River in Grand Junction to see what this very low flow looks like. Plenty of exposed cobble bars. Looking low and slow and what you might expect to see in late summer with heavy diversion upstream. Not the start of spring runoff.

Honestly still in shock by its placement, but my article (and job talk paper), “Indigenous Constitutionalism,” is officially out in the Harvard Law Review. A brief thread on this project🧵

harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-13...

Colorado mountain snow: average year vs. this year.

Record low snowpack by a HUGE margin.

Colorado River snowpack evolution since Oct 2025. Melt started about March 7. Down to 6 Inches now from 9 inches then. There is no historical analog.

This is a graph of snowpack above Lake Powell using 104 snow measuring stations. It was 9 inches of water
on March 7, now 6 inches. Other dry years shown.There is no historical analog to this.

Will be interesting to see what a major heat wave does to next month’s projections.

Things in the CO basin just keep heating up. Literally. The year without summer? Try the year without runoff.

Western US snowpack is still looking BAD. Hope for snow, but plan for low river flows and severe wildfire risk.

the Colorado River - again refusing to honor the Compact that it's bound to

Demand management and in-stream flow programs are great for addressing local environmental, ecological, and production concerns, but they aren’t up to saving 4 maf.

When thinking of solutions for the CO river basin, the scale of the problem far exceeds what is possible with demand management or in stream flow programs. Instead it seems reasonable to think of/address what the downstream (pun intended) impacts of removing water from the land are and address those

Oh, and give the rivers some damn water. In a first in time, first in right system, they were here first and their rights to exist (and thus support human civilization) are primary.

Everyone has to reduce their water use, and that reduction has to be collective-a full cultural shift. The primary burden will fall on ag because they are the primary users of water, but they are not alone, and they do not act in a vacuum.

our entire relationship with water, and ag has to change. HOW we perform ag is the key, not whether ag exists at all.
Not the same for municipal lawns. Those are bad and need to go. More trees less lawns, Denver.

It is also unarguable that farm and ranch lands, especially in regions where we have removed wetlands, provide significant ecosystem services to the public. To be clear, I actually don’t think ag is the bad guy here, nor do I think it needs to go away. What I do think is that

It also means critically examining the Western identity of farmers and ranchers. In the scheme of things, 100 years of ag settlement is nothing, but it is a big piece of people’s cultural identity, and cultural identity is important for belonging and engaged citizens.

The agricultural economy is not insignificant but it is also not an insurmountable barrier if the alternative is complete environmental degradation and collapse of the whole system. We make these changes in certain areas to protect row cropping in others (I love salads in winter).

It looks like transitioning from production of forage crops potentially to low impact grazing and low/no water intensive production. It looks like a massive increase in farm bill conservation title programs, like we saw after the dust bowl to assist agricultural producers to make this shift.

While the evaporation savings from draining Powell will help, it’s still a fraction of the total savings that are needed to stabilize the basin. So what does that look like? It looks like restoring grasslands and wetlands while we still have water to establish grasses and restore soil health.

The makings of a continuous dust-on-snow event. But if we don’t change our relationship with water, water use, and ag in the basin, Lake Mead will go the way of Powell, and there’s a lot more people reliant on Mead.

This also means there’s big money interests who are willing to bring takings claims. Real big caveat here though-we disrupted the native grasslands and desert habitats, so if we just remove water from the lands, the results could be essential another dust bowl.

Step two is learning to treat water like the public good it is. Western water law provides that water is held in the public trust, but the right to use water is a private property right that has lead to the over exploitation of water in the basin.

Decommissioning/by-passing Glen Canyon Dam, which directly serves Page, AZ for municipal water (they’ll need a new pipe and we should pay) and is a relic to help upper basin states comply with a compact we made up, is step one. It’s basic triage, and it’s the easy step.

One final note - this project should also include putting the river back in its historical channel at North Wash so the sediment continues to be moved downstream and doesn’t become a toxic dust source.

As the lake gets lower, these elevations take less water to change. All of this just results in cascading problems. Altering the ability to release from Powell is the only option and it has to be done BEFORE there’s a crisis.

3,490’ absolute bottom of power pool and reliant on cavitating outlet works, 3,470’ penstock intake- couldn’t put water through them even if we wanted to sacrifice the power plant, 3,440’ too little pressure to release enough to meet compact, 3,374 dead pool and then down at 3,133 is river level.

As I keep screaming from the rooftop, construction takes time, and we’re out of time! Things only get worse and worse starting around here 3,510’:

They’ve been missing deadlines since 2022. It’s time to end the charade and begin drilling tunnels around the Glen Canyon Dam

I’d bet my law school loans that the law is more flexible than the water that falls from the sky.

Without an incredible change in the trajectory of winter precipitation in the CO Basin this may be the year we see catastrophic collapse of the system and it really feels like we’re just standing on the tracks watching the train saying “we don’t have the legal authority to step off the track”