The past year has seen “unprecedented” water challenges for the Western Slope, regional water experts say.
Now, with the drought having given way to a wet fall, water planners, municipalities and climatologists are looking at what they learned from 2026 and can apply to the future as Colorado’s climate is expected to get warmer and drier.
Last week, water experts gathered in Carbondale and detailed how regional collaboration kept the Western Slope’s sinks running and orchards alive over Colorado’s hottest — and third driest — year on record. The Roaring Fork Watershed Fall Summit was hosted by the Ruedi Water & Power Authority in partnership with the Roaring Fork Conservancy.
Colorado’s water laws are designed to handle drought, but 2026 tested them, said Christina Pearson, deputy division engineer for Colorado’s Division 5 water district. Her district covers much of the Western Slope, including the Roaring Fork Valley and the Colorado River past Grand Junction.
“How does water get moved around the system in a legal way … when we’re having to take forced cuts, because that’s what nature forced us to do?” Pearson said.
Last winter saw abnormally low precipitation leading to record-low snowpack, said Brendon Langenhuizen, director of technical advocacy for the Colorado River Water Conservation District. The snowpack around the Roaring Fork Valley was almost completely melted by the end of March, when temperatures were nearly 10 degrees warmer than average. Normally, March is one of the region’s snowier months.
The year only kept getting hotter as it went on, with new daily warm records outpacing cold records 21 to 1. Grand Junction, which normally gets 68 days a year with temperatures over 90 degrees, saw 98 days so warm.
“We knew this (was) going to be a really rough year, and it just continued to trend down and down, down and down,” Pearson said
Thousands of the region’s most senior water users rely on the Green Mountain Reservoir near Kremmling. That didn’t fill up this year, straining a key source for the Western Slope.
Over the summer, officials had to slow down the already-low reservoir’s output to avoid disturbing a slow-moving landslide on its banks. In a typical fall, the reservoir would release a constant 1,500 cubic feet per second, or cfs. This year, its release rate decreased to 96 cfs, where it stands now, Pearson said.
Water planners and providers had to turn to other sources to make up for that lost flow. That led them to nearly double the release of the Ruedi Reservoir, which lies east of Basalt and feeds the Frying Pan River.
On top of providing needed water, Ruedi’s flow helped lower Roaring Fork water temperatures, which were getting dangerously warm for fish, said Tim Miller, a hydrologist for the Bureau of Reclamation.
In July, river temperatures in Aspen were recorded as high as 76 degrees, said Heather Lewin, science and policy director with the Roaring Fork Conservancy. That’s far above the Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s defined 72-degree lethal zone for the river’s trout.
Ruedi’s extra waterflow helped river temperatures drop to a recorded 72 degrees by the time the river reached Glenwood Springs, Lewin said.
The Ruedi Reservoir is now 36% full, Miller said. He predicted that after this year’s winter, the reservoir will fill up to about 83% capacity.
Rains don’t foreshadow snow
Pitkin and Garfield counties have seen heavy rain over September and October, which has helped the region recover from 15 months of extreme drought conditions, said Allie Mazurek, an engagement climatologist at Colorado State University.
Some parts of Garfield County saw their 10th-wettest October out of the past 132 years on record. Across Colorado, only 11% of the state is still in extreme or exceptional drought, compared to 44% of the state in mid-September.
The rain has widely boosted hopes for a “super” El Niño season that could provide a wetter-than-average winter. The El Niño climate pattern distinction is given to years that see abnormal warming of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean.
But historically in the Roaring Fork Valley region, super El Niño’s have more often led to drier-than-average winters than promising ones, Mazurek said. The state has only recorded seven super El Niños, and most have been relatively dry.
“We’re not really working with a lot of data,” she said. “We don’t have a lot of past historical clues about what this could mean for this year with this very strong event.”
Still, the autumn rains are a good sign. In addition to getting areas out of drought, it will water the region’s soil and help this winter’s snowpack flow into reservoirs next spring, said Asa DeHaan, a research technician with the Aspen Global Change Institute.
Speakers during last week's summit echoed a sentiment broadly repeated by water experts across Colorado about 2026: Collaboration is what got the state through unprecedented drought. And next time such a year comes, they’ll be better prepared.
“Early and open communication will help us get through these dry years,” Langenhuizen said. “That communication is essential in order for us to be able to get some water to everybody.”
Drew Shaw is a Report for America corps member covering public lands and other items of interest in Garfield County for the Aspen Daily News.
