The crisis on the Colorado River is simple: The seven Western states that border the essential waterway use more water than it contains. Chronic overuse has drained its two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, and a two-decade drought cycle has pushed them to the point of collapse. 

The dream solution to this crisis is an agreement among all involved to use less water. Such a deal would decide who must reduce consumption, which means asking which cities would ban irrigating lawns and washing cars and which farmers would rip up their fields.

This has proven impossible. The states have been trying to work this out since the last dry spell, in 2022, but talks have ended in frustration and name-calling. The main sticking point is between the “Upper Basin” states led by Colorado and Utah (along with Wyoming and New Mexico) and the “Lower Basin” states of Arizona, California, and Nevada. Each side believes the other has a legal and a moral responsibility to cut usage during dry years. The stalemate means the Trump administration must design a schedule of restrictions ahead of a crucial deadline in September. So far, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has balked at resolving the quarrel.

Instead, the administration is turning to a far less controversial plan: Throw money at the problem. The Interior Department and Congress are pondering a slew on projects that could increase supply, a reversal of Trump’s zeal for cutting federal grants. The seven state governors have sent Washington a “wish list” of over $50 billion, and several startups have their hands out as well.

Federal investment makes sense given the scale of the problem and the intractable impasse, said Jennifer Pitt, the Colorado River program director at the National Audubon Society and an expert on the governance of the river

“It is something easier for people to agree on,” she said. “This is a slow moving crisis, but it is a crisis, and we do see the federal funding come in to address crises in other parts of the country. Just because this is a slow moving one doesn’t make it any less worthy.”

During a Senate committee hearing last week, the Interior Department’s top water official, Andrea Travnicek, said the agency has yet to vet the wish list. She didn’t offer a specific funding request, and urged lawmakers to be “thoughtful” about how they spend taxpayer money. But senators of both parties seemed to encourage new investments. “The basin should not be forced to choose between stabilizing the present and negotiating the future,” said Senator Martin Heinrich, a Democrat from New Mexico.

The possibility of new funding marks a return to the policy of the Biden administration. During the last extreme drought in 2022, the Interior Department paid farmers billions to leave their fields fallow, but that money, from the Inflation Reduction Act, has almost run dry. 

The difference now is that the roster of proposals is far more ambitious, and some far less certain to bolster the basin’s water supply. They range from desalination plants to desert groundwater pipelines to forest ecosystem restoration.

Here are a few of the major solutions state officials and companies are proposing.

Desalination

As the Colorado River crisis has deepened, some cities in the Southwest have eyed desalination, which extracts salt from sea water. A company called Poseidon Water opened such a plant in San Diego in 2015, and tried for decades to open another in Los Angeles. The wish list to Interior requests as much as $6 billion to build one in Baja California to supplement Arizona’s vanishing Colorado River supplies.

The Interior Department also signed an agreement in early June with San Diego’s water agency that explains how that plant would help. Rather than sending treated seawater inland, states would pay the city to take less from the Colorado River. Arizona stands to lose the most water during drought years, and it would be the most likely to participate in that exchange.

But desalination is expensive, requires enormous amounts of electricity, and state-of-the-art industrial technology. The Poseidon facility cost $1 billion, but San Diego has diversified its water portfolio so much that it no longer needs all the water it must purchase from the plant. Trading water could help it offset some of that cost. 

Taming tech and power

Nevada uses less water than any state on the river, and has cut usage in Las Vegas by replacing grass with artificial turf. It is now seeking money to slake some of its last thirsty industries — power plants and data centers. These facilities need a fraction of what agriculture requires, but dominate usage in The Silver State.  

The state’s wish list includes $300 million to retrofit its largest natural gas plant and reduce water consumption by an amount equivalent to more than 3,000 average homes. It also seeks $650 million to install zero-water cooling systems in its airports, schools, and industrial facilities. These closed-loop systems, which recirculate the same cooled water or, in the case of data centers, blast hot servers with cold air, have become more popular in Western states amid concerns about the tech boom’s growing thirst.

Squeezing rain from the clouds

Whereas Lower Basin states like Arizona and California can draw from the Colorado River’s big reservoirs on demand, northern states at its headwaters only receive the rain and snow that feed it. 

These Upper Basin states have been trying for decades to engineer more precipitation, with support from Washington. It sounds futuristic, but cloud seeding — spraying salt or silver iodide into clouds, forcing them to release water they might otherwise retain — has proven fairly effective on a small scale. Utah spends a few million dollars each year doing this, and officials say it could boost annual snowpack by as much as 10 percent. 

In addition, a few startups are pitching cheaper and more scalable versions of this technology. Rain Enhancement, a Florida-based outfit, says it has brought about 15,000 homes’ worth of rain to a river tributary in Utah this year; another, Rainmaker, says it can produce 1,000 times that much by 2031. That’s enough to close the supply gap on the river. That promise is fanciful, but these companies could secure federal funding from an administration that loves the tech industry.

Mining a hoard of desert groundwater

The West teems with companies that have promised miracles, from building a 300-mile pipeline to tapping a hoard of groundwater in Nevada. But perhaps no project has had a longer and more turbulent history than Cadiz, a proposal, almost 30 years old, to export groundwater from an aquifer in the Mojave Desert.

This has drawn vicious opposition from environmentalists and the late California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who called it a “grave threat” to the desert. Cadiz experienced several setbacks during the Biden administration: It lost a federal permit, California ended its pipeline lease, Arizona declined to support it, and its stock price fell to almost zero. But Susan Kennedy, its CEO, says Cadiz is flowing again with a funding agreement from the Interior Department to study exchanges between Cadiz and the Colorado River.

The company still needs to finish two pipelines, one to the Central Valley and another to the aqueduct that carries Colorado River water to California. It also must build a plant to remove contaminants in the water, but Kennedy believes she can have the tap running by 2028.

“This isn’t a competition, it’s an all-of-the-above situation,” she said of the situation on the river. That may be so, but the seven states did not include Cadiz on the “wish list” sent the Interior Department.

Impacts from Colorado’s extreme drought conditions are hitting several state parks in the state’s northwest corner. 

Colorado Parks and Wildlife announced emergency water conservation measures and boating restrictions at both Sylvan Lake State Park in Eagle County and Rifle Gap State Park in Garfield County, according to a Monday, June 22 news release. 

Both parks are located within some of the more extreme drought conditions in Colorado. According to the June 18 U.S. Drought Monitor, Eagle County and western Garfield County are experiencing exceptional drought conditions — the worst measured by the monitor.  

Sylvan Lake State Park

At Sylvan Lake State Park outside of Eagle, the park’s main source and well, Zurcher Spring, has run completely dry and shows no signs of recovery due to the extreme drought conditions in the region. 

To maintain basic operations at the park, Parks and Wildlife has transitioned to using a secondary water source, Cowboy Spring. This spring is producing 2,000 gallons of water per day, and with park usage ranging between 2,500 and 3,000 gallons daily, park staff shut off all 17 public water spigots in the state park. 

“We are using more water than we can currently produce, and are on track to run out,” said Sylvan Lake State Park Manager Matt Westerberg in the news release. “We know turning off the water spigots isn’t ideal, but our hope is this will save enough water to keep the main campground shower building operational for visitors.”

Despite having a workaround, Parks and Wildlife is asking visitors to help out by bringing their own water. Visitors can fill their tanks at the visitor center, which operates on a separate, functioning well system. 

Rifle Gap State Park

A little further west in Garfield County, Rifle Gap State Park is experiencing impacts brought on by the winter’s historically low snowpack and early snowmelt. While the park typically experiences water declines in the late summer, they are hitting the state park months ahead of schedule, Parks and Wildlife reported. 

To combat this, Parks and Wildlife is reducing motorized boat launching to a single lane and has pulled all courtesy docks from the water. Access for hand-launched vessels like kayaks, canoes and stand-up paddleboards will remain unaffected by the closure.

“With our boat ramp down to a single lane, launching and loading will take significantly longer than usual,” said Rifle Gap State Park Manager Brian Palcer in the release. “We are asking all boaters to practice patience, pack an extra dose of courtesy for their fellow recreators at the ramp, and expect delays. We want everyone to have a safe, enjoyable day on the water despite these challenging conditions.”

Parks and Wildlife encourages boaters to exercise caution as low water levels have also exposed shallow, unmarked hazards across the reservoir, including uneven bottom topography, fish habitat structures, rocks and tree stumps. With these conditions, the agency also issued a reminder that life jackets are required on all vessels.  

If the reservoir continues to recede at its current rate, Parks and Wildlife said the water levels will drop entirely below the concrete boat ramp, forcing a complete closure of the ramp to motorized watercraft for the remainder of the season in early July.

At both parks, the most current information can be found on their individual Facebook pages and websites on CPW.State.CO.US/state-parks. 

From the Times-Call photo archive via Longmont Museum: “The modern front of Colorado Creamery at 526 Main St. makes a background, above with two of the firm’s trucks parked at the right of the picture and two of the sales representatives standing at center of photo.” Originally published June 22, 1960.

For more historic photos, visit timescall.com/tag/historic-photos. We are adding new photos every week.

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