Drought has pushed 100

The Colorado River was divided up seven ways more 100 years ago. Now, the river faces new strains that threaten to break the compact. Mark Henle/The Republic

The Colorado River was divided up seven ways more 100 years ago. Now, the river faces new strains that threaten to break the compact. Mark Henle/The Republic

PINEDALE, Wyo. — Cowboy Michael Klaren heaved hay bales onto his wagon, climbed aboard and urged his two workhorses to drag it across a meadow, the ground spongy with the meltwater from a snowstorm.

Wet boots had raised his spirits on this March morning, as had two wet cow dogs he called Woodrow and Gus. The meadow was off to a more promising head start on spring than he had come to expect after years of drought.

If left to run off in rivulets or percolate through the pasture, the moisture from the Colorado River's prodigious Wyoming headwaters would collect in the nearby New Fork, join the Green River, and ultimately surge across three state lines before swelling the Colorado in southeastern Utah and buoying the Southwest's depleted reservoirs.

But first, Klaren would wring some of it out for his next hay crop.

"Personally, I think the water that falls in Wyoming is Wyoming's until it gets to Utah," he said. "When it falls here, it's our water."

If it were that simple, Klaren and his mountain town would have little to fear. But 100 years ago, Wyoming signed onto a deal to divide the water that flows through the Colorado River basin among seven states. It's based on a formula — one likely based on mistaken beliefs about the river itself — that did not award extra credit for living in the mountains where the snow piles up.

Instead, the states signed a compact allocating the water where it would readily be put to work. It meant the more populated states of California, Colorado and Arizona would get the biggest shares. And it meant in lean years, water users in places like Pinedale might go without, watching as runoff from the jagged Wind River Range flowed past the mountain ranches to farmers and cities far downstream.

Over time the government built massive dams near Las Vegas and Page to store the water for those big downstream users: a Yuma lettuce field, an Imperial Valley melon patch, the Phoenix suburbs, all stretching toward a desert horizon far from the river's channel.

But more than two decades into a punishing drought that climate scientists say will likely intensify with more warming, the system can no longer supply everything that some 40 million people in a warming and drying region desire from it, or that grocers nationwide sell from its verdant fields. Since 2000, water demand and evaporation have exceeded the river's flow, on average, by roughly 15%.

The federal and state governments that share the water are now urgently seeking conservation to save the river. Their negotiations could produce either a new system of sharing the pain of cutbacks or an impasse that ends in lawsuits as states and water users try to hang onto water promised them in a different time.

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Drought strains Colorado River and the rules that divided it up 100 years ago

The Colorado River Compact was signed in 1922. In the 100 years since, drought and growth have changed the way water users must share the water.

Farmers like Klaren are among the most at risk, in part because they use the most water. Agriculture, not big cities, consumes as much as 80% of the river's flow in any given year. Shutting down the canal that feeds Phoenix and Tucson wouldn't stabilize the reservoirs, Arizona's water resources director said early in November. The government could cut off municipal deliveries across the basin and still face shortages if farms don't adapt to the shrinking flows of a warming climate

Interstate negotiations have proceeded haltingly this year in an emergency effort to conserve billions of gallons needed to keep America's biggest dammed reservoirs — lakes Mead and Powell — from emptying. The U.S. Interior Department has also begun a process for determining how to operate the dams and preserve the river beginning in four years, when current rules expire.

Despite his wish to use local water as he and his neighbors see fit, Klaren knows that a worsening shortage endangers the life he chose in 1989. That's when, just three years removed from high school, he leased this place and started grazing cattle on it.

But Klaren would save fretting for another day. His son and future daughter-in-law worked in the next field, feeding and assisting cows and calves.

"You guys cannot imagine how cool it is for me to see my son doing this," he said.

His graying horseshoe mustache curled into a smile, deepening the sun-creased crow's feet around his eyes. He snapped the reins.

He had no complaints, so long as the water holds out.

The devastating combination of a warming climate and sustained overuse has long bent the Colorado River, but now stands ready to break it. If neither the demand nor the weather relents, it's possible the river could finally stop flowing past Hoover Dam by the end of President Joe Biden's term.

Farms with senior water rights on paper would not be able to claim their due from a dry riverbed. Phoenix, while backstopped with other in-state sources such as the Salt River, would have to stop pouring Colorado River water into its aquifer for future demands, and start pumping what is already there. Small ranch towns like Pinedale and even major farm service centers like Yuma would lose jobs and population as they are forced to reduce production.

A hundred years since seven states agreed to split up the Colorado River Basin's bounty with a federally chartered compact, persistent drought and overuse have laid bare the flaws in the "Law of the River," a set of laws, settlements and treaties that parcel out the water. The rules assumed a river flow that has only rarely existed since, and only in increasingly rare wet years. The states and Mexico now use more than the river supplies, and are drawing down their storage from years past.

Plunging reservoirs behind Hoover and Glen Canyon dams imposed austerity on central Arizona farmers this year and will spread still more pain in 2023. Without action to save massive amounts of water, a worst-case weather scenario could drop Lake Mead so low that it no longer releases any water toward the sprawling farm empires and cities of Arizona, Southern California and Mexico.

"We really are in a crisis," Central Arizona Project General Manager Ted Cooke said. If everyone takes what they’re currently taking from the river over the next two years, he said, Lake Mead's surface will sit just above the point where it can still flow through Hoover Dam. California and Arizona would be on the precipice of losing their massive supplies from the river.

The U.S. Department of the Interior and its water managers, the Bureau of Reclamation, established dam-operating guidelines in 2007 that were meant to prevent such a calamity. They hitched certain cutbacks to various water levels in Lake Mead, and led to Arizona's first mandated cutbacks this year. Their updated guidelines for 2026 and beyond will likely prescribe deeper cuts.

The Interior Department declined to make officials available for interviews about if and how the new guidelines might address or alter allocations among the states. In public settings over the last year, Interior and Reclamation officials have said only that they intend to build on the existing compact, as they have done with various water-saving agreements over the years.

Many experts say the time has come for the federal government to shake up the system it created when it built the dams to grow the West. That scheme awarded half to an Upper Colorado Basin in the mountains and sagebrush plains, and half to the Lower Basin in the desert Southwest and coastal Southern California. Some, heeding climate scientists’ projections of still lower levels, say the government will have to limit the states to percentages of the Colorado's year-to-year flow rather than the firm allocations they’ve always had on paper.

Having never used all the water that they were promised in the 1922 Colorado River Compact, the Upper Basin states now find there's no more to go around. The only way Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico could grow into their full allocation in the current climate would be to force Arizona, Nevada, California and Mexico to give back more of the water they’re already using.

Bruce Babbitt is among those who expect the U.S. will have to change the rules if drought continues to suppress river flows and reservoir levels over the next couple of years. The former Arizona governor and U.S. Interior secretary said the river will soon decline to the point where it's impossible for the Upper Basin to meet its fixed yearly commitments to the Lower Basin without "progressively shutting down current Upper Basin uses. That is an ethical and political impossibility.

"At that point," Babbit said, "the equitable solution will be to share reductions proportionately among all users in both Upper and Lower basins."

Klaren is a Cowboy State throwback, one of the few remaining ranchers who still works his leased spread with workhorses instead of tractors and flatbed trucks. On a late-winter morning, some of his 230 cows awaiting their meals and others tending or even dropping newborn calves, he rolled his wagon through a marshy meadow, peeling and kicking off slabs of hay imported from other farms.

"We just borrowed more money," he said. "My theory is one of these days cow prices are going to go up and we’ll get out of debt."

In years past he might have had enough homegrown alfalfa to get by. This March, a year after a paltry mountain snowpack had cut short his irrigation supply from the river, he had already burned through the half-crop of hay he had managed to sock away for winter, fenced off from the high country's moose and antelope.

Unlike water users in Arizona, Nevada and California, he can't draw water from giant government-financed reservoirs. When too little water melts into Wyoming streams, the state cuts off farmers and ranchers who don't own the earliest-staked water claims. Last year in the upper Green River Valley, Wyoming cut off ranchers whose rights preceded statehood in 1890.

The 20th century river was expected to provide at least 17 million acre-feet of water in an average year. Some years produced much more water — 20 million acre-feet or more — and the government set about building dams to store the excess for use in drier years.

An acre-foot is the arcane water measurement unit the government uses. It covers an acre (about a football field) to a 1-foot depth. It equals roughly 326,000 gallons and supplies two or three households a year in the Southwest. Its use simplifies calculations that on the Colorado would otherwise reach into incomprehensible trillions of gallons.

By the end of the last century, the average flow since 1906 would prove to have been just 15 million acre-feet, still enough to put away some water behind dams when mountain states like Wyoming weren't using their full entitlements.

Since 2000 the flow has plunged still lower.

The compact and a subsequent suite of laws, settlements and treaties had been based on wishful thinking. They assigned 15 million acre-feet to the seven U.S. states that touch the river or the tributaries that refresh it, splitting that amount evenly between those above and below Lees Ferry in northern Arizona. That didn't count 1.5 million owed to Mexico every year, or evaporation and seepage that would take about 1.5 million acre-feet a year.

The upstream states — Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico — would join the sliver of Arizona that's above Grand Canyon to form the Upper Basin. California, Nevada and most of Arizona would become the Lower Basin. Each basin could claim 7.5 million acre-feet, though to this day the Upper Basin has typically used only about 4 million.

Until last year the Lower Basin, with more irrigated acres than the Upper Basin and more than twice the population, used every drop of its allocation, and sometimes more. When the shortage in Lake Mead hit levels that 2007 river operating guidelines said would force cutbacks, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation cut deliveries to junior rights holders, mostly in central Arizona and, to a lesser degree, in southern Nevada. Further declines forced deeper cuts for next year, bringing Arizona's losses to more than a fifth of its former take from the river.

Arizona has borne the brunt of the shortage because, to win congressional approval for the Central Arizona Project's canal, the state accepted a lower priority than California's larger claims. California will likely have to cut its share to keep the river flowing out of Lake Mead in coming years, but has yet to do so.

The mechanism for ensuring equality of opportunity between the basins would prove simple in wet periods but disastrous in the current decades of megadrought, which scientists have determined to be the driest in 1,200 years. Instead of assigning each state a percentage of what flowed downriver each year, the Law of the River requires the less-developed Upper Basin to deliver, on average, at least the Lower Basin's 7.5 million acre-feet plus Mexico's share.

Whatever was left, in good times, was up for grabs. The federal government built Glen Canyon Dam to store years’ worth of flow just above Lees Ferry, simplifying the task of releasing at least the mandated flows to the Southwest even in occasional dry years.

Then the dry years started coming one after another.

Kevin and Wade Payne revved their snowmobiles and clattered across frosty mud and lichen-crusted rocks, seeking a way uphill toward the Pocket Creek snow-gauging site. Exhaust fumes wafted through the premature springtime scent of mountain sagebrush in the Wind River Range foothills southeast of Pinedale.

The brothers grew up on a southeastern Idaho ranch, one valley removed from the Colorado River Basin, and now travel the Upper Green each winter to ground-truth automated sensors that help predict how much water the mountain snowpack is likely to send toward Wyoming ranchers and then to the Colorado. One works for the state engineer's office; the other for the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service. In a cooler era, readings like theirs would paint a clear picture of the summer water supply to come. Rising temperatures now effectively wick moisture from the hills each spring and summer, complicating their forecasts.

Finding little snow to ride, Wade sped off alone, scouting for a route that could take them from 8,000 feet in elevation to their goal at 9,360, where they intended to sink an aluminum tube into the snow to measure its depth and to weigh it to calculate its water content. Minutes later he rode back, unsuccessful. There would likely be insufficient snow on which to reach Pocket Creek from then on, marking a March 25 close to a season that usually lasts until the thaw cranks up late in April.

Kevin, who supervises Green River water for the state, would have the unenviable job of shutting down diversions to some ranchers with old rights. There wouldn't be enough to go around this year, not and still meet obligations to keep the river moving adequate water out of state.

"There's years we’ve seen it just like this," Kevin said. "We’re used to shortage around here."

By late July he would cut off supplies to 117,000 acres irrigated by Wyoming's Green River Basin ranchers, the vast majority of them with water rights that precede the 100-year-old Colorado River Compact. Without major storage reservoirs to draw from in these headwaters, continued diversions would drain the streams.

The Payne brothers rode their sleds back onto their truck trailers and hauled them west for an hour, to a well-packed public snowmobile trail that would take them through aspens and evergreens to the Rowdy Creek gauge site in the Wyoming Range. There, they stabbed the tube into the snow at several predetermined points, finding a maximum depth of 40.5 inches and an average water content equaling 12.4 inches.

Around the Upper Green, the snowpack at that time was about three-quarters of average for late March. With weeks of possible accumulation yet to come, the outlook would fluctuate before, as it has in so many years this century, the winter fell short of the old norms.

Months later, on June 14, a U.S. Geological Survey crew dangled a kickboard-shaped sonar gauge into the Green River from Warren Bridge northwest of Pinedale, where each summer U.S. 191 leads tourists toward the Tetons and Yellowstone National Park. The instrument measured both depth and velocity, and found the river running at 3,610 cubic feet per second. Peak flows can reach 5,900 cfs here, USGS hydrologist Cheryl Miller said, but peaks don't always predict a season's water supply. A slow and steady melt can deliver as much or more as a short-lived flood.

Northwestern Wyoming had just experienced a burst of rain on melting snow that had flooded Yellowstone's northern gateway on the previous day, crashing a home into a different river descending the Continental Divide's other side. Here, the Green was surging at a rate that would put it in the top quarter of yearly peak flows.

"It's certainly high-ish," Miller said, not ready to pass judgment on the water year. High peaks, such as those brought on by some unseasonable 80-degree days that preceded that one, can quickly give way to low flows. Her hesitation was warranted. Ultimately the water flowing under Warren Bridge throughout the thaw would reach 71% of average.

In all, the Bureau of Reclamation would go on to count this as a poor runoff year for southwestern Wyoming, despite the Green's relatively high peak. At Flaming Gorge Reservoir, in the mountains where Wyoming meets Utah, the agency would calculate natural inflows gathered from upstream in Wyoming at 57% of normal for the spring-summer runoff season.

Low flows in one year can contribute to low flows in the next by drying out soils that then absorb part of a new season's snowmelt. The Upper Basin's snow piled up to 89% of normal in the winter of 2020-2021, but the water that Lake Powell gathered from all of it equaled just 36% of normal, trailing only 2002 for the low-flow record. One difference was the dry soil left behind by the previous year, according to river forecasters, sponging up the new moisture.

Another factor was and is rising heat.

From 1916 through 2014, Colorado River flows declined by 16.5%, climate scientists Mu Xiao, Brad Udall and and Dennis Lettenmaier determined in a 2018 study published in the journal Water Resources Research.

More than half of the losses came as a result of warming temperatures, according to their calculations. A warmer environment squeezes more from the snow and rain that falls in it, by extending growing seasons for trees and plants, and by sending more back into the atmosphere as those plants transpire it.

It's why Udall, a Colorado State University researcher who has long sounded the alarm on the river's dwindling supply, shuns the term "drought" on the river. He calls it aridification, a word suggesting a long-term shift instead of a mere dry spell.

Since 1970, the region has warmed by 3 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.7 degrees Celsius, a rate faster than the planet's average. Numerous studies of the Colorado River's climate have pegged a loss in flows of between 5% and 10% to every 1 degree Celsius of local warming, and temperatures are expected to keep rising with the concentration of greenhouse gases.

"Climate change is water change," Udall said.

Udall collaborated with then-University of Arizona climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck on a 2017 study that projected the losses would grow to at least 35% later this century, and possibly by more than half, if greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current trajectory.

Already the river has averaged less than 12.5 million acre-feet of new flows each year since 2000, while the basin takes some 14 million acre-feet from it. It's why Lake Powell and Lake Mead sit at barely one-quarter full.

The evidence of the West's overuse of the Colorado was apparent beyond river scientist Jack Schmidt's shoulder at Bullfrog Marina on a late-winter evening in southern Utah. He sat on a bench at the edge of a massive concrete boat ramp that for years provided house boaters and other recreationists access to Lake Powell. Now, the water was drained far out into the channel, and the ramp was closed to boats. The National Park Service had extended another ramp for temporary access and was considering moving the whole marina out of the increasingly shallow bay.

The seven states responsible for this drawdown would continue to overextend the river and its reservoirs until the federal government forced them to stop, said Schmidt, who previously headed the Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center and now directs Utah State University's Center for Colorado River Studies. The states, he said, operate in silos that keep them focused on their own needs instead of the river's.

"Nobody in Wyoming is going to say it's better to grow broccoli in Yuma" than to use the water on headwaters ranches, he said. "And nobody in (California) is going to say, ‘Let's fallow the alfalfa and grow it in Wyoming.’"

The result, he said, is that the Upper Basin is moving "ponderously slowly" toward meaningful water conservation, while the Lower Basin is cutting back quickly, especially in Arizona, but still uses more than the reservoirs can give for much longer. Changing the river's trajectory will require someone to act according to the entire basin's and nation's interest, he said.

"Reclamation is going to have to assert its authority," he said.

Schmidt co-authored a report this year that found a narrow pathway toward stabilizing Lake Mead and Lake Powell at their current, perilously low levels. He and colleagues, led by Oxford scientist Kevin Wheeler, found that if the Upper Basin holds the line at its current water use (just over half what it was promised a century ago), the Lower Basin could stop the bleeding with another 500,000 acre-feet of savings on top of commitments it has already made to slash about 1.5 million before Lake Mead hits dead pool.

To date, the Lower Basin and Mexico have cut deliveries by 613,000 acre-feet, mostly in Arizona, with deeper cuts for Arizona and Nevada scheduled to start next year.

Any federal action to require further cuts or to hold back more water behind the dams necessarily will take water from farm communities, north and south, Schmidt said. There's not enough wasted water in the cities to solve the problem.

"I don't want to adversely affect agriculture because I hate the concept that it's going to adversely affect rural communities," he said. "But how could it not?"

Leslie Hagenstein knows her hometown has to change. That starts on the Pinedale homestead she and her sister inherited, just across the New Fork from Klaren and his cows.

"We use, excuse me for saying it, a shitload of water," she said.

Hers is a small family farm leased to a friend, and in the grand scheme it only sips from the Colorado's supply when compared to the Southwest's hot, sprawling vegetable fields. But her farm's method, like most farmers in the area, is to soak the fields. With short growing seasons and few crop options at an elevation above 7,000 feet, profits are too low to finance high-efficiency drip lines and sprinklers.

Hagenstein has good water rights. She just no longer has a sure supply.

"All you have to do is look at the mountains," she said in March.

Visible from her yard, a dwindling snowpack hung in the Wind River Range. And in her yard, the snow was gone, something she couldn't recall seeing so early before in her 68 years.

The warming and drying weather feed her concerns about her community. The farm had always managed to take its share until 2020, when the ditch got cut off in the middle of summer. Farms that share the ditch hayed early, and then lost out.

Then it happened again.

"Last year I really was sensitive to the fact that, ‘Oh my God, there really is an end point,’" she said.

The problem for Hagenstein — and even for the town of Pinedale's municipal water supply — is that the big, 600-foot-deep alpine lake above town is not primarily a local asset.

Pinedale helped build a little dam to raise the lake by 6 feet back in the 1930s. It added about 30,000 acre-feet, with half of the new capacity going to the town and half to area irrigators. In wetter eras, it was all anyone could ask.

As drought sapped the whole Colorado River Basin, a problem emerged. The dam is younger than the compact, and comes with younger and, in times of shortage, inferior rights. If the state has to curtail deliveries to meet downstream obligations, as it has warned the town to expect by 2025, that water won't be available. The town would still have rights to water from the lake, but only in amounts that a mountain stream naturally dumps into it, and not from the storage pool it built.

Pinedale's dilemma is a miniature version of all Wyoming's. The state has not fully developed its would-be share of the Colorado River, but any new projects it builds would be last in line for scarce water.

To at least secure its continued access to its streamflow rights out of Fremont Lake, Pinedale is working on plans to pump water from the lake to its drinking water treatment system. That would keep faucets flowing if the lake is drawn down past its intake. The town is also working with ditch companies like Hagenstein's to install more accurate meters so farmers don't accidentally take more than they need.

"We don't want to call doomsday by any means," said Abram Pearce, Pinedale's public works director, "but we’re just trying to be prepared."

Hagenstein, a retired nurse practitioner, follows her father's example on water conservation. He dedicated some of his water rights to maintaining a minimum flow for the blue-ribbon trout stream that flows past her living room window. She's busy applying for grants to upgrade efficiency on the ditches.

Her respect for the river extends beyond its ability to produce farm rents for retirement income. On her coffee table lay several books about the Colorado and its tributaries, including a Grand Canyon river guide with maps.

She would put those maps to use two months later, driving to Lees Ferry, the river's Arizona dividing line between Upper and Lower Basins, to join a group of friends with Pinedale ties on the river trip of a lifetime.

She rose on May 25 and walked across the highway from the Marble Canyon Lodge to a little airstrip to welcome incoming women who would swell their party to 18. The all-women Grand Canyon float trip was about to begin from the same Colorado River beach where Hagenstein's late mother had long ago thrilled with her own friends from Pinedale.

For Hagenstein, seeing desert waters that very well could have originated in the mountain stream by her home was its own thrill.

"We’ve witnessed the glaciers shrink and watched the water disappear," she said. "I just want to kiss it because it's made it this far. The water I walked in today could have been on the glaciers I walked on as a college kid."

(After the rafting trip, she would give the river that carved the canyon "five stars. I had no concept how massive and majestic Grand Canyon was.")

"The cities need to use the water more wisely," said Barbara Burrough, one of the Pinedale women joining Hagenstein's float trip. "Just because we’re a small state that's lightly populated doesn't mean that the people and our way of life aren't important."

"It gives me goosebumps," said another in the party, Jar Mortenson. She winters in Tucson, and so relies on the Colorado in two states. But her ultimate allegiance to her Wyoming home was clear even as she joked about it and lifted a tequila toast and prepared to hit the rapids.

"This water is ours and we’re going on it," she said. "We don't want to share."

Tom Johnston grew up in the Pinedale area and then moved one county to the northwest to be a ski patroller at Jackson Hole. From there he became involved with the U.S. ski team, which hired him to contour snow for races. He shaped the slopes for the women's runs at several Winter Olympics, starting at Utah's Snowbasin in 2002, and continues to work on domestic World Cup events.

When he's not on the slopes, he's a farmer and, like a lot of others like him in Wyoming, he needs outside income.

"I have to support my cow habit," he said.

In June, Johnston patrolled fields he rents from Hagenstein, clearing weeds from the ditches to keep water from pooling and seeping through the dirt. "Every time I clean the ditch on this place, I save 20%."

Unlike a lot of local farmers, he said, he has precision-leveled the fields to ensure he gets the most out of flood irrigation without waste. The fields tilt slightly to move water faster and percolate less of it below the roots.

Declining runoff from the mountains has created enough uncertainty without even considering the pressures from downstream users, he said. Soon, he expects, other states will make a "call" on the river, the term for when the government enforces senior rights by cutting off junior rights. Efficiency will be paramount.

"That's one of the reasons I bust my ass," Johnston said as he toted a shovel along a ditch. "That call is coming."

Across the river, rancher Klaren fears that if people keep moving to the Southwest, they will wrestle away more of the water he needs to raise cows that, by his estimate, feed 1,500 people a year. His own family, including a new daughter-in-law, eat about a cow and a half each year, he said, and he was preparing to drive a few to slaughter on that day in March.

"I understand people need to drink water," Klaren said. "I do. But I also understand people's need for food, and that's what we do."

First and foremost, the Colorado River of the 21st century grows food. While rural Rocky Mountain residents grumble about swimming pools and golf courses as the wasteful receptacles for the water they watch flowing downstream, most of this river that rarely reaches the sea leaves its channel through canals and ditches to irrigate a mind-boggling farm empire that produces 15% of America's crops. That bounty includes most of the nation's winter greens, grown in and around Yuma and southern California, keeping salads on tables nationwide in any season.

Roughly half of the Colorado's flow grows feed for livestock.

Farms use at least three-quarters of the water that Americans and Mexicans take from the river before draining it entirely south of the border. Eliminate Phoenix and all of its golf courses and pools, exile the desert city's 1.7 million inhabitants and return their full annual share of 186,557 acre-feet to the river, and, at best, you will have saved about a tenth of the water that federal officials say they need to keep power and water flowing from Hoover Dam beyond the next few years.

The region's cities have grown dramatically, but water use has not tracked population growth. Instead, residents have reduced what they pour into lawns and pools, and have updated indoor fixtures, to the point that growth in the big cities has not increased consumption. Phoenix uses roughly the same amount as it did 30 years ago, when it had 600,000 fewer residents.

Rural farmers like Klaren, his neighbors and their state representative now feel all eyes on them.

"My fear, as a rancher and a legislator that represents ranchers, is what's going to be the gold rush in the state of Wyoming to supply industries and municipalities" within the state, Pinedale Rep. Albert Sommers told The Arizona Republic. "Thank God we cannot sell water to you guys (in the Southwest), because that's a gold rush that we cannot afford."

Bought out or not, Wyoming and the other high-elevation states are required to supply downstream states their shares. It's a reality that will squeeze farms and ranches around the headwaters unless and until nature again blesses the Rockies with ample snows for multiple years on end, restocking the reservoirs. Until then, everyone in the watershed faces hardship if the river's 40 million dependents don't conserve enough together.

Dozens of Native American tribes inhabit the Colorado River watershed, and their rights to water both complicate the crisis and offer possible solutions to it.

Through various settlements approved by Congress or the courts, tribes have secured rights to more than 3 million acre-feet from the river, or more than Arizona's full share. Their water comes out of their respective states’ allocations and generally enjoys a high legal priority during shortages, a recognition that they used the water long before the compact was written.

The tribes collectively use far less than their legal share. In some cases that's because they haven't needed it yet; in others because they lack canals, pipes and pumps to move it to their farmers and residents. Within Arizona, the Colorado River Indian Tribes on the state's western edge and the Gila River Indian Community south of Phoenix are among the state's largest holders of rights to the river, with more than 1 million acre-feet between them.

As it began to consider options for writing new dam operation guidelines, the Bureau of Reclamation this fall invited tribal leaders to share ideas during an online listening session in October. Colorado River Indian Tribes Chairwoman Amelia Flores told federal officials her community stood ready to conserve water on its farms if the agency supplies funding.

"It's not a secret that we have water," she said. "So your decisions will determine if we can make it available."

Gila River Indian Community Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis recently offered to leave up to 125,000 acre-feet of tribal water in Lake Mead in each of the next three years. The Bureau of Reclamation would pay $400 an acre-foot out of funds Congress approved for drought mitigation in the Inflation Reduction Act.

Tribes had no say in how states divided the river 100 years ago. By then, settlers had diverted the Gila River onto farms, depleting the resources that had sustained the Akimel O’odham and Pee Posh tribes that live and farm on Gila River Indian Community.

"This was a theft of our water, literally," Lewis told The Republic. It dealt trauma and dietary changes, such as reliance on government commodities, that still afflict members’ health. "It was a total upheaval of our society."

The community regained water, including from the Colorado, in a 2004 settlement that has since allowed it to store water for future use or sales, and to restore a stretch of the Gila for natural and cultural values. Elders collect plants there to weave into traditional baskets.

Now, Lewis said, state and federal officials must consult and collaborate with tribes as they seek to reverse the crisis on the Colorado.

But not all tribes have settled their rights to river water. The Navajo and Hopi tribes have not reached agreements on how much of Arizona's water they will control, for instance. When they do, other users may be cut off.

This would be a reversal of what University of Arizona sociologist Andrew Curley, a Navajo, calls Indigenous resource dispossession. Dams and canals reaching hundreds of miles off-river depleted the Colorado. "We’re seeing the actual limitations of that kind of worldview," he said.

Now, those who control the river have a chance to adopt a different system, one that collaborates to sustain life for all, rather than exploiting the less powerful and pumping the river away. Otherwise, Curley said, it is the tribes who have already proven they can and will survive in the region.

"We’ve been at zero for a long time, and we are still living in these areas," he said. "It's your communities that are living under crisis (and) that are more vulnerable."

In the fields of far southwestern Arizona, water has rarely been at risk. Until now.

Yuma hums with trucks and harvest machinery virtually year-round as crews rotate through some of America's sunniest and most productive vegetable patches.

John Boelts has thrived here since he uprooted from Nebraska during his childhood, leaving behind the Great Plains farm crisis of the 1980s. Typically, one of his biggest worries has been finding enough workers to pick his produce. Water wasn't a problem so long as Lake Mead was flush with nearly two years worth of river flows. Yuma irrigation districts enjoy some of the river's oldest rights and, unlike their counterparts in Wyoming, always had ample storage to draw down.

Now, with Lake Mead holding less than a third of its capacity, he worries about a river that could stop flowing past Yuma.

Boelts irrigates 2,000 acres with Colorado River water that grows one or two crops of lettuce and other vegetables in winter, wheat in spring, melons in fall and spring, and durum wheat and cotton in spring and summer. He grows some alfalfa year-round, to produce livestock feed and to renew his soils.

He accepts that Arizona's farms must be more efficient in order to save the river that supplies them. His farm includes a mix of leveled flood irrigation and, on the melons, drip lines that he says have contributed to a double-digit percentage reduction from him and his neighbors.

But the state's suburban growth threatens the life he and his neighbors have built, as a disputed purchase of farm water one county north of him shows. There, in La Paz County, a private company has agreed to fallow ground and send the water savings to Queen Creek. The state and the Bureau of Reclamation have signed off, though local officials continue to fight the transfer in court.

If metro Phoenix wants to push Yuma farmers to save water to support everyone else, Boelts said, then first it should work harder at its own conservation. To this point, Arizona cities have encouraged conservation but have not restricted residential use. All Arizonans require affordable food, he said, and he produces it.

"We need to stop looking at each other as haves and have-nots or (as being) in competition," Boelts said. "We’re all working together."

One of his Yuma County neighbors, third-generation farmer Robbie Woodhouse, said the area's farmers have long worked to improve their efficiency, and will now work harder to keep water in Lake Mead.

"It's the lifeblood of the southwestern United States," he said. "And we need to all do our part to preserve as much of it as we can."

That includes some compensated, seasonal fallowing to help keep water behind the dam, he said. But moving water permanently from farm to city would clear out rural schools, kill rural jobs and force the remaining farmers to pay more per-person to keep up the canals that supply them.

Woodhouse's grandfather was among those who lobbied Congress in the last century to get water to the Wellton-Mohawk Irrigiation District, where he now serves on the board. Now it's his turn to convince federal officials to let them keep it, potentially setting his irrigation district against others who want to use the water before it gets to Lake Mead.

"We'll lobby our voice as hard as we can, obviously," Woodhouse said.

Boelts employs several dozen people on the farm, 30 of them year-round. But in late January there were dozens more working there as packing companies dispatched harvest crews to gather his romaine lettuce.

One crew loaded a conveyor that moved the heads to a truck after they had knifed them from the soil and inspected them. They skirted a patch that a pest patroller had flagged after finding coyote tracks in the rows. The predator had likely trotted over from the dry Gila River bed above its confluence with the Colorado. Although it left no visible droppings, produce companies would reject it to prevent foodborne illness.

The approved heads would go to a cooler in town, then to a distribution center to be packaged or blended into salad mixes. Those bound for Phoenix would be on shelves within three days; those for the East Coast in perhaps five.

"The benefit to people is food that's immensely affordable," Boelts said.

Relying on foreign farmers is risky, Boelts said. It's a point that Arizona Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke would later reiterate to The Republic, at a time when U.S. ports were keeping international freighters waiting for months at a time to unload. The state risks far more than its continued urban growth if the river dries up.

"If that container (ship) contains lettuce," Buschatzke said, "there's not going to be lettuce three months later."

Boelts and other Yuma farmers have generally enjoyed more secure, predictable water supplies than headwaters irrigators such as Klaren in Wyoming. That's because they’re downstream of Lake Mead. They’re arguably in competition with those upstream irrigators as the government considers new restrictions.

But that's not how Boelts prefers to see it. To him, the biggest threat is continued diversions to cities, and especially to coastal California, the West's biggest population center.

Boelts wants the states and feds to invest in ocean desalination and water recycling projects that could allow the Los Angeles area to leave behind its share of the river. The states are studying and advocating such projects, but none is considered a full answer to the crisis on the river.

Saving the river will require major on-farm changes. As an immediate step, federal officials in October proposed paying farmers at least $330 for every acre-foot they temporarily forego, or up to $400 for extended deals. Yuma farmers have so far rejected that figure and sought to quadruple it in hopes of installing more drip lines and other expensive efficiency upgrades.

Rural communities in states with smaller congressional delegations have long feared they’d lose out when the reservoirs dry up. As conditions worsen, the urgency is also shaking big-state farmers with seemingly ironclad rights to a river that can no longer provide any guarantees.

The anxiety is perhaps nowhere more bewildering than in Southern California's rural desert interior, about an hour's drive west of Yuma and two hours east of San Diego. There, between the U.S.-Mexico border at Calexico and the Salton Sea's desiccated playa, the Imperial Irrigation District has long held both the river's biggest water share and one of its most legally protected.

Men in plaid shirts took turns rising to address the men and women in suits at the Imperial Irrigation District's May board meeting in El Centro, California. They urged the district to reject a rare plan to curb farmers’ water during the rest of this year.

"It's not fair," Imperial County farmer Tyler Sutter complained to the board. He wanted the district to dip into its dollar reserves to pay other farmers to conserve more, rather than rationing his water.

"You guys are just hog-tying us," said farmer Jim Abatti, whose family had previously sued and delayed the district from restricting farmers and has since filed another lawsuit.

Before this century, with swollen Colorado River reservoirs that looked more likely to spill over their dams than to slump below the intakes, Imperial irrigated without firm limits.

Since accepting a yearly grant of 3.1 million acre-feet in the dry decades since, the district has sometimes used slightly more than its share, with a pledge to cut back later and stay within its water budget on a rolling three-year average. That gave farmers flexibility to capitalize when a given crop's prices were high, but it wasn't going to fly with federal water managers in this year of shortage along the river.

At the time of the meeting, the district projected using 3% more than its allocation if it didn't act. To prevent that, board members were about to advance a plan that effectively tied farmers’ water volumes to the amount they typically used on their fields over the past decade.

Sticking to a field's 10-year average is what Sutter feared would cost him, he later told The Republic. He had purchased some of his land in the past few years, and now farmed year-round on ground that the previous owners had farmed seasonally, which required less water. Staying within his land's 10-year average would reduce his alfalfa cuttings. It's a loss for him, but also for supermarket dairy and meat customers.

"Food matters," he said.

The district water manager, Tina Shields, told The Republic that the restrictions would put the department on "a little bit of a diet." The move was important, she said, because politicians and everyone else in the region will naturally look to Imperial as they clamor for water conservation crescendos.

"If you use a lot of water, you can save a lot of water," Shields said. And Imperial uses the most.

The valley is a yawning, 813-square-mile cornucopia stuffed with artichokes, lettuce, spinach, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, melons, alfalfa hay and a town that calls itself the Carrot Capital of the World.

It is a smorgasbord churning out $2 billion a year on 300-plus days of sunshine and just 3 inches of rain, less than half of Phoenix's typical moisture. It would not grow much of anything edible without redirecting Colorado River flows into furrows and sprinklers.

When Lake Mead is full, Imperial's reign on the Colorado is unassailable. It enjoys rights predating the compact and most others on the river, and whenever it asks Reclamation for a pulse of water through Hoover Dam it can expect to see the river rise to meet its headgates within three days.

Yet Mead is nowhere near full, and a legal right, no matter how senior, isn't wet water.

"I can frame that damn puppy," former Southern Nevada Water Authority chief Pat Mulroy said during a Vail Symposium discussion on preserving the river last month. "I can hang it on a wall. But if nothing comes south out of Hoover Dam, I’ve got nothing."

Imperial Valley, like every smaller water consumer on the river, must help save water, said Mulroy, now a senior fellow in climate adaptation for the Brookings Institution. The river needs collaborations, not winners and losers.

"Finding your favorite villain, whether it's the farmer or it's the city, it matters not," she said. "It's not going to get us there."

The shift to more efficient irrigation on the Elmore Co.'s cantaloupes, sweet corn and carrots is one expensive sign of this new reality. A decade ago the Imperial Valley farm flooded its fields of melons, corn and forage. Farm manager Kevin Kenagy said he has since shifted 85% to sprinklers and 15% to even more efficient drip lines. This year's corn crop saved more than 600,000 gallons per acre with the new methods, he said.

"We’ve got to be realistic," he said. "There's obviously less water going down the river than we thought. Rights or not, everybody's got to get by with less."

Others around the valley have invested heavily in other on-farm conservation methods. Some have installed pump systems to return unused water that runs off of flood-irrigated to the tops of the furrows.

One, Andrew Leimgruber, showed The Republic a precision sprinkler system that cost $400,000 and saves more than 150,000 gallons on each of 160 acres of alfalfa. His system is automated from his phone, rolling across the field at his command, and draws from a new, concrete-lined ditch. Using moisture sensors, he can program the sprinklers to give only what the crop needs.

These water savers are made affordable by an agreement that Imperial grudgingly made with San Diego County when it agreed to live within a 3.1 million-acre-foot water budget in 2003. San Diegans would pay the farmers for conserved water, and gain access to about 200,000 acre-feet of it for urban needs each year. Farmers get between $150 and $300 for every conserved acre-foot.

While he's doing his part to protect the river, he would not support changing the river compact in a way that reduces Imperial's favored position in the pecking order.

"In times of shortage," he said, "it's not fair to rewrite the rules. Otherwise, what's the point of having a Law of the River?"

Imperial Irrigation District officials refer to fallowing — the temporary act of drying up lands and turning back their irrigation water to the river — as "the F word."

But sensing that the impending emergency could disrupt life as its farmers know it, the district this fall joined the Metropolitan Water District of Los Angeles in offering to take federal payments to reduce California's yearly deliveries of river water by 400,000 acre-feet.

That proposal has met with mixed reviews in other states, from acknowledgments that California is offering a first step toward equity to criticism that it's only doing what Upper Basin farmers often must without any compensation.

California's offer represents about 9% of the state's normal share of the Colorado, compared with the 21% that Arizona will give up next year because of the Central Arizona Project's junior water right. But if federal officials do cement such deals, California's offer would jump-start the region's stalled efforts to save the 2 million to 4 million acre-feet the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation says it needs to halt the reservoirs’ slide. The agency had asked the states to propose that much in new conservation efforts by August, but they failed to produce a plan at that point.

It was an offering that reflected a growing recognition around the watershed that those who refuse to yield any of their water risk inviting the Interior secretary to make cuts unilaterally. That kind of federal muscle could set off a chain reaction of lawsuits delaying any action until it's too late.

"The system will crash before we even get to court," Shields predicted.

Heading into the negotiations that will define how the government divvies the river for years to come, states and their major water users are struggling to set boundaries to protect both their rights and the river.

Imperial is willing to conserve and to discuss forgoing water for as long as shortage continues on the river, said Shields, the district's water manager. But the negotiations for new guidelines to begin in 2026 must prescribe only terms for spreading shortage around, not for rewriting the compact that gave California its share, or Imperial's place within that share.

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"There's an established priority system," Shields said, and that system favors Imperial irrigators.

For them and their workers and families, she said, this is not about power or greed. Without sufficient water, the Imperial Valley itself would dry up. Her daughter was among high school seniors awarded a scholarship at the board's May meeting, and Shields said she wants her to have a future in the valley.

Without water, she said, "Our entire community would have to move away," or some might rely on water trucks. "That's a third-world country."

The state and federal governments need to find new ways of working across borders to save water, Shields said. They can broaden the compact's options for shortage-sharing without scrapping the compact's core allocation system.

"There's an old saying that the Law of the River is whatever we agree it can be," Shields said.

Her willingness to consider temporary water concessions but not permanent reductions is shared by negotiators from other states.

Wyoming will participate in plans to temporarily reduce demand when it's needed to fulfill the Upper Basin's obligation to supply at least 7.5 million acre-feet to the Lower Basin on average, said Randy Bolgiano, a retired rancher who lives east of Pinedale and serves as the state's alternate representative to the Upper Colorado River Commission.

What Wyoming won't do is permanently reduce its share of the river, he said.

Bolgiano said he believes there's little for his neighbors to do now but pray for snow and keep dealing with the restrictions that shriveling streams deliver them each year.

"We’re at the mercy of the gods," he said, "and the gods are presently angry."

Among major cities, Las Vegas is uniquely at risk from the Colorado River's decline, because it is uniquely reliant upon the river. The region has no other sources besides a bit of groundwater, and takes 90% of its water from the river at Lake Mead. The compact also awarded Nevada by far the smallest share of the river — 300,000 acre-feet, or about a ninth of what Arizona gets — because few lived near or used the river there 100 years ago.

For that reason, the Southern Nevada Water Authority has been among the most conservative with its water during the drought, incentivizing grass removals and even backing a new state law that bans purely ornamental grass. This year the water provider wrote projections for an even smaller river than the drought years have so far averaged: 11 million acre-feet.

Such a low flow, if sustained over years, would upend life as millions of westerners know it. It would complicate the region's efforts to reach consensus on shared cutback, when even stopping reservoir losses at the river's average flow of 12.3 million since drought began has proven too much.

Las Vegas cannot afford to overestimate the river.

"What we are experiencing now is probably on the rosy side of what the next 100 years looks like," said Colby Pellegrino, Southern Nevada's deputy general manager of resources.

Recognizing that, the Las Vegas water provider sank $1.3 billion in a new, deeper Lake Mead water pipe and pump station over the last five years. It paid off this year when the reservoir dipped low enough to leave an old pipe dry.

The Lower Basin will keep reducing its water use, Pellegrino said. But the river won't stabilize if the Upper Basin doesn't forget about fully developing the hypothetical "half" that the compact negotiators awarded it in 1922, and even reduce some of its current use.

"There's no way anyone in the basin should be dreaming about the (full) allocations that we have," Pellegrino said.

Arizona's state water chief said all of the states will struggle to curb their demands, but none will have a choice in the matter. One reality or another, the drying climate or some new federal mandate, will force them.

"We all need to recognize our future is as much conservation as we can possibly do," said Buschatzke, Arizona's Water Resources director.

That doesn't mean the negotiations will throw out the 1922 allocations, he said. "I would be surprised if the next set of guidelines is constructed in a way that anyone gives up anything permanently."

Udall, the climate scientist, said he believes federal officials will nonetheless alter the rules that currently tend to favor farmers over cities, likely by the end of this year. The goal would be to assure that cities will always have the water they need for health and safety.

"It has to happen," said Udall, whose dad was an Arizona congressman and whose uncle was Interior secretary in the 1960s.

Pellegrino said she also expects the government to award a certain amount of guaranteed water to cities for health and safety.

The Metropolitan Water District of Los Angeles accepts the scientific projections of a permanently smaller river, water resource manager Brad Coffey said. To prepare, the water supplier is investing in new water reuse projects, and is paying for seasonal fallowing on farms of the Bard Water District and the Quechan Tribe, both providers of irrigation water across the river and state line from Yuma.

"They win by irrigating for their most high-value (vegetables) in winter and spring, then they don't plant a crop in the hot summer months," Coffey said. Metropolitan banks the saved water in Lake Mead.

Johnston walked his rented Wyoming hayfields in June, tromping his rubber boots through mud and tracking old boards that had washed out of place on the ditch. Although he levels his fields to maximize water savings, the infrastructure that gets that water there is ancient.

"I don't know how old these boards are," he said. "I’ve been here 20 years and they were here when I got here."

When he wants to remove them to let water gush through, he snags them with the barbed end of a pickaroon, a pole that loggers used to wrangle logs down river for making railroad ties in the old days.

Instead of using remote sensors to judge when it's time to close off the flow to a field, he watches for blackbirds. When they gather at the opposite end, it means the water has reached them and pushed up bugs and seeds for them to eat. Time to reinsert the boards.

It's low-tech farming when compared with the drip lines and electric pumps in Yuma or the Imperial Valley. But Johnston said his neighbors are more wasteful. They don't tend their ditches as often, which can lead to water spilling into his and adding to his official allocation. Locals say increasing efficiency would dry up the town and its surrounding, because the saved water would flow downriver instead of seeping from farms to create wetlands.

"There's some reasoning behind it," he said, "but at the same time there's blatant overuse and inefficiencies."

Johnston's cellphone rang while he walked a ditch. A horse stable in Florida had heard he grows high-quality hay, and wanted to place an order for delivery later in the year.

"I’m guessing because we’re pretty drought-stricken we won't have any to send out of state," he told the caller.

Woodhouse, the third-generation Yuma farmer now lobbying to keep his district's share, can empathize. He has enjoyed visiting rural communities in Wyoming and elsewhere in the river basin, and has the pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep and other hunting trophies on his shop wall to show it. Farmers in the mountains of Wyoming and Colorado must feel conflicted about letting the water flow past them to supply others, he said.

"I can see where those folks might think, you know, the water came running off the mountains from the snowpack where they're at, (and) that they've got their entitlements."

With the river depleted, they'll have to send enough to supply Arizona, Nevada and California first. At least, that's how the system has always worked. At its core, the Law of the River compels those at the top of the river to supply those at the bottom with their share.

But Woodhouse and his Arizona and California farm neighbors know their grip on the river is also slipping with each foot that Lake Mead slides toward dead pool, when the river would stop flowing to their canals.

The Law of the River is due for a reality check, and everyone is waiting to see how the federal government bends it before it breaks.

Brandon Loomis covers environmental and climate issues for The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Reach him at [email protected] or follow on Twitter @brandonloomis.

Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust. Follow The Republic environmental reporting team at environment.azcentral.com and @azcenvironment on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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