The West’s Winter Has Been a Slow-Moving Catastrophe

If you are reading this on the East Coast, congratulations on the warmer weather you’re finally getting this week. It was cold and snowy for a while there. Here in the West, we wish we’d been in your shoes. Spare a thought for the tens of millions of us who live on the other side of the continent, where a catastrophe is unfolding.

In Colorado, where I live and grew up, this winter has been especially warm and dry. Last year closed with the warmest December in the history of recordkeeping. It was 8.9 degrees warmer than the average from 1991 to 2020, and the warmest of all in a record that goes back to the late 19th century. Over this past weekend, my neighbors and my family walked with our dogs and our kids in T-shirts and shorts, because it was in the mid-60s in Colorado Springs. About 60 miles north, my family in Denver saw a new record high of 68 degrees—on February 15.

But temperatures are not the only reason this winter is a catastrophe. This year, our snowpack is among the lowest ever measured, which means it won’t be enough to fill the rivers that are born in our mountains, which feed  reservoirs and water farms from here to Los Angeles. Snow is finally coming to the mountains this week, but we still cannot avoid one of the worst water years in modern history. The West is already experiencing the worst drought we have seen in 1,200 years, as our junior senator, John Hickenlooper, reminded me in an email over the weekend. Colorado politicians have to be attuned to these dynamics: “The snowpack is pretty much as large as all of our reservoirs combined. That’s why winters like this one are so terrifying,” he wrote. Drought can mean economic disaster.

Hickenlooper, who was also the state’s governor and the mayor of Denver, is not a man given to hyperbole. It really is that dire. Unless a lot of snow falls soon, Colorado’s environment and economy will take a huge hit. Ski resorts are losing money now. In the spring, rivers that usually offer waist-high whitewater rapids and fishing pools will instead be a trickle; in the summer, farmers will lose peach crops. Hydrologists, fire scientists, and climate researchers are bracing for summer too; their spectrum of worry ranges from concern to actual panic.

“It’s as bad as you think it is,” Russ Schumacher, the Colorado state climatologist, told me. On top of the ongoing, decades-long drought in the region, all of Colorado is in a snow drought too. The amount of water stored in the snowpack is the lowest it’s been at this point in winter since at least 1987, when comprehensive measurements began, he said. Going back to older records, some of which date from the Dust Bowl, the 2025–26 water year is the third-worst ever measured. In the two worse years, snowpack measured about 40 to 42 percent of average at this point in winter; this year, Colorado is sitting around 58 percent of median overall, and lower in some areas.

Climatologists say that a weak La Niña pattern in the Pacific is partly to blame, parking a high-pressure “heartbreak ridge” farther east than usual, which continually pushes moisture away from the mountains. But the abysmal snowpack is also causing a bad feedback loop, allowing the mountains to warm more than usual. The pattern could finally break this week, and “we definitely have time to make up ground,” Allie Mazurek, a climatologist at the Colorado Climate Center, told me. But she also cautioned that “at this stage, it is looking almost impossible for us to get back to an average snowpack.”

Schumacher’s predecessor, the longtime state climatologist Nolan Doesken, used to say that Colorado’s snowmelt is well behaved. Rain comes in a flash and is gone just as quickly, but we know where snow falls, where it will lie in wait, and which rivers it will feed months later. Flakes accumulate on cold ground, and when the Rockies stay cold the way they should, the snow remains for many months. And the surrounding air stays colder with snowpack than without it. This winter, temperatures are soaring 10 to 12 degrees above normal in northwestern Colorado—temperatures that region would not be seeing if the ground were covered in snow, Mazurek said.

Western water monitors use a metric called snow water equivalent, which is just what it sounds like, to estimate how much water will flow into rivers when the snow melts. Since 1987, the Snowpack Telemetry Network, SNOTEL, has measured snowpack by weighing the snow that falls at hundreds of stations across the West, including more than 100 currently active ones in Colorado. Other measurements are taken by hikers who snowshoe up to designated spots and measure the snowpack by hand. Climate scientists have been doing this for decades. Last week, the snow water equivalent in the Colorado River basin was tied for the lowest ever recorded, according to Brad Udall, a senior water scientist at Colorado State University and an expert on the Colorado River.

That snowpack forms the headwaters of rivers including the Colorado, the Rio Grande, and the Arkansas. And the Colorado River feeds the two largest reservoirs in the United States: Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Both reservoirs are critically low and have been for years: Powell is about 25 percent full, and Mead is at about 34 percent. If Powell’s water level drops another 40 or so feet, which it could this year, there won’t be enough water to generate hydroelectric power at Glen Canyon Dam. Water managers are starting to worry about “dead pool” too, in which the lake will get too low to let water flow through Glen Canyon toward Lake Mead; they are likely to reduce water flow out of Powell this year to avoid it.

In most of the Colorado River’s upper basin—in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming—water is not collected in many reservoirs; instead, it is diverted out to thousands of small locations, from streams to irrigation ditches. And “this year, there just isn’t going to be any water in these rivers. Or there will be water, but instead of 12 weeks or 16 weeks of water, it will be four weeks of water,” Udall told me. “Under western water law, people can basically completely dry these rivers up.”

This is bad timing, because Colorado and the other basin states are currently failing to renegotiate key parts of the more-than-century-old Colorado River Compact, which expire later this year. Along with seven states, the river-management agreement includes the federal Bureau of Reclamation, 30 tribal nations, and Mexico, and controls how the river flows into and out of Lakes Powell and Mead. The states missed a major deadline on February 14, which means that the Bureau of Reclamation will instead impose its own plan—one that none of the states are likely to be happy with. In Colorado, at least, some residents are concerned that the Trump administration will punish the solidly blue state by simply giving more water to, say, Arizona, which Donald Trump won in 2024. This is far from an irrational worry. In late December, Trump vetoed funding for a pipeline, already under construction with bipartisan support, that would bring water from a reservoir to rural communities in southeastern Colorado. The fight over the Colorado River could shape up in similar fashion, pitting state against state. (In response to a request for comment, a Department of the Interior spokesperson pointed me to a press release in which Secretary Doug Burgum said that the department had “listened to every state’s perspective” and that a “fair compromise with shared responsibility remains within reach.”)

Further in the future, the effects of water reductions will spill through the western economy. Agriculture, water recreation such as fishing and river rafting, and entire mountain ecosystems—both environmental and economic—will falter. For now, though, we are worrying about our trees budding six weeks too early, and pouring buckets of water around their trunks to keep them hydrated in the warmth. We are updating our fire checklists and go bags during red-flag warnings: One went up yesterday as I was working on this story. Winter fire watches are abnormal, but we are growing all too accustomed to them. And we are checking the snow forecast every day.