Spring Sprang Sprung

To All,

It's Mother's Day 2026, in the middle of what has certainly been an interesting springtime in Colorado ("interesting" in a Chinese curse sort of way). After a winter in which we got only half our normal amount of snow, we're now seeing less than half the normal amount of water in our rivers. The Lower Upper Colorado River, flowing about twenty feet away from me as I write this, is currently at 468 cfs and dropping. That doesn't sound too bad, but for  context the mean average for May 10th is 2,200 cfs.  

Yesterday I drove along the Arkansas River to Salida, and things are the same down there. Flows are around 300 cfs, but it should be in runoff mode right now and much higher. The primary reservoir source for the Ark is Twin Lakes, but that's pretty low right now too. It doesn't appear as though it will fill either this year, which isn't good news for the normally bustling rafting businesses on the Arkansas.  There is a management agreement in place which is supposed to "guarantee" 700 cfs during the summer to keep those many rafts afloat, but if there's no water to supply it then that agreement might have well been written on water.  

  Driving through the heart of the state yesterday, I saw a lot of irrigation systems that didn't seem to be doing much. If there isn't water for the fields in May, what will July and August look like? The folks in Fruita that my wife has been buying hay from twice a year don't have any to sell this year.  She thought that she had lined some up to come from someone in Laramie she found on Craigslist, and paid them a $700 deposit using Venmo to pay for their diesel. But when they didn't show up yesterday, and she did a little more research, she realized that was a scam.  They've taken money from others using the same tactic. Now we're scrambling to find some food for our livestock, and we're not the only ones.  It wasn't very nice getting ripped off on top of everything else. I can't understand how some people sleep at night, I assume it must take a lot of alcohol or pharmaceuticals.

At this point the low flows aren't posing an issue for the fish, yet.  The cold water coming out of the bottom of dams is keeping the water temps from getting too high, but that probably won't last.  Its already risen to 65F about a month early. In every low water year we've had, water temps have spiked and in some years there have been voluntary fishing closures to protect the fish.  Unless we get a drastic shift in our weather, that will happen again this year.  

Then there are the fluctuations the river has been going through.  Typically, once the ice melts off the river in late March, the water stays low and clear until the snowpack begins to melt.  It usually peaks in June, and then drops back down to some stable flow.  With several reservoirs upriver on the Colorado or its tributaries, that peak flow gets smoothed out, but that water which is held back in May and June gets released in July and August.  Its the management regime which is what created the fine trout fishery we enjoy today. But this year that steady rise hasn't happened, or rather its already happened a few times, followed by a big drop.  The normal hydrograph profile that should look like Volkswagen Beetle looks more like the roller coaster at Elitches.  

In the twenty plus years I've lived beside river, I've never seen the flows bounce around like this before.  I'm hoping that the low water not being released now will be coming down the river later this summer when it will be more critical.  

The one bright spot this spring was the skiing, oddly enough.  It may have been one of the worse snowpacks ever recorded, but there were some good days to be on the hill if you were able to time your visit right.  And though the season ended earlier than usual, conditions were pretty good at most ski resorts when they did pull the plug.  Steamboat got thirteen inches towards the end of its last week.  The upper mountain skied well, but there wasn't a snowflake to be found down below. Getting off the mountain at the end of the day involved taking a gondola downhill, an odd sensation. On Beaver Creek's final day, most of the mountain was pretty well covered though it was getting thin at the bottom. It could have stayed open longer, but it would have involved a downhill lift ride a la Steamboat. Closing Day came two weeks earlier than planned, which doesn't seem like a big difference. But the Beav usually closes not because of the conditions on the ground, but due to Forest Service permits and elk migration. It often has excellent snow on Closing Day. 

 Then there is Copper Mountain.  Copper did a better job of extending its season than any other ski area I'm familiar with. First, they managed to stay open almost as long as originally intended when the season started.  There initially was an early closing planned, but they did a great job of moving snow around at the bottom of the mountain to keep access to the lifts open. The snow from the tubing hill ended up near the bottom of the Superbee lift. They scraped snow off the side of their huge half pipe to keep things white at the Center Village.  On the Friday of their last weekend, they kept the lifts running until seven pm. This is something I've never seen a ski area ever do.  They also waived paid parking for the last weekend, so you could walk to a lift without having to take a bus.  The other unusual thing Copper did was to groom the run Copperopolis at four pm, and so when the lift that served that run reopened at five it yielded access to huge swath of fresh corduroy.  A Basin got into things by extending its season an extra week as well.  Twenty inches of snow fell during its last week, so when the lifts reopened on Friday morning for its last weekend, I was one of the first people in line.  It was a wonderful last day to ski, with lots of fresh snow and sunshine. The end of the season may have come too early, but at least it was a positive way to go out.  

So now at roughly the midpoint of springtime, the coming summer looks like it will be a challenging one on many levels.  What gives me some hope for the Colorado River is that although the reservoirs upstream are only half full, there are several of them.  The "Lower Upper" sits in the sweet spot below the supply, but above the demand.  There is enough water to keep us going this summer, so long as its released when its most needed and not too much of it flows east instead.  

There is supposed to be something called a "Super El Nino" forming in the Pacific Ocean, which may or may not result in a wetter weather pattern this summer, fall and winter.  The snowpack numbers for the last twenty five years have shown a steady decline, but every few years there's an outlier year where the snowpack looks great. We are due for a year like that, so I'll be doing a snow dance in October!

Jack Bombardier