A river crisis is unfolding in the American West

Water levels were so low on the Colorado River, Travis Francis knew he needed to shock some fish. On a recent June morning, Francis, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist, stepped into an inflatable raft at Riverbend Park in Palisade, the hub of Colorado’s stone fruit orchards. The day was warm and sunny, the cottonwoods along the river nearly ready to drop their seasonal fuzz. A crew from the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program, including Francis, pushed away from the bank carrying nets, buckets and tracking tag readers to examine and record any endangered fish they came across.

Today’s task was electrofishing. A minor electrical current temporarily stuns the fish so the native ones can be collected, cataloged, and returned to the river, unharmed. An anode the size of a disco ball, hangs in the water ahead of the raft and a crew member with a net quickly snags the stunned fish as they rise to the surface. Any sighting would be both hopeful and foreboding: The fish have so far survived a mounting crisis, but Francis knows, soon, the fish in this river reach might not have any water left to swim in. “Everything is just so very different this year,” Francis says.

Back in April, residents of Colorado’s Grand Valley witnessed an unsettling sight, and one that many had not seen before — a nearly dry Colorado River. Levels were so low on the river, which sustains 40 million people along with 5 million acres of farmland and the Southwest's wildlife, they generated algae blooms and set off low water alarms in utility offices. The timing made it even more distressing. Late April is when the snow starts to melt and the rivers rise. Seeing it drop to a near-record low so early left many to wonder: what, if any, water will be left by August?

The Colorado River has been struggling for more than two decades now as warming temperatures have ramped up across the Southwest. Dwindling snowpack and steady use has widened an existing gap between water supply and demand. But 2026 is putting the river into uncharted territory. Snow, which gathers high in the Rocky Mountains and then melts to form the Colorado and its main tributaries, totaled half its normal amount this past winter, and subsequent stream flows are among the lowest on record. What’s more, the scant snowpack melted rapidly and months early during a March heatwave that pushed temperatures into the 80s across Colorado’s Western Slope.

The consequences cascaded quickly. As snow disappeared from the mountains, dark ground absorbed more heat. Plants began consuming moisture earlier. Streams that normally receive a gradual pulse of snowmelt instead surged and faded almost immediately. Farmers turned on irrigation systems weeks ahead of schedule. Crucial high mountain reservoirs failed to fill. The literal downstream effects are evident throughout the Colorado River Basin. Reservoirs Mead and Powell, the nation’s two largest, are approaching levels that would have seemed unimaginable just a generation ago. Now, there is not enough water flowing to meet the needs of the seven U.S. states and two Mexican states that rely on the river.

Increased demand for water and meager supplies meant very little leftover water for the fish, four species of which are endangered or threatened: the razorback sucker, Colorado pikeminnow, humpback chub, and bonytail. Conditions on the river have the potential to unseat 2002 as the worst ever recorded. "The March melt-off we had, there's no comparison to 2002," says Brad Udall, a water and climate research scientist at Colorado State University. "It's far worse. We lost 60 percent of our snowpack four weeks earlier than normal." Which means communities are already being forced to cut back, and the fish species could be pushed to the brink.

Western Colorado farmers who grow peaches, wine grapes, cherries, and alfalfa hay, use most of the river’s water in the Grand Valley. They have tried to keep this reach wet for decades to avoid costly endangered species regulations, realizing their fates are intimately tied to the health of the native fish that swim in the turbid water. But when water is scarce the relationships among the water users in this arid valley are put to the test.

“When push comes to shove, are we going to put environmental uses above the survival of the communities here?” says Bruce Talbott, a multi-generational peach grower in Palisade. “I struggle with that.”

Into the Reach

One distinct stretch of the Colorado River in the Grand Valley has become a microcosm of the persistent issues that dominate western water discussions. Known as the 15-Mile Reach, this section of the Colorado is a place where agricultural use, municipal demand, and needs for recreation and wildlife converge. As it enters the valley, the river snakes past steep sandstone cliffs and through hilly slopes lined with peach orchards. Just outside Palisade, Colorado, much of the water leaves the riverbed and enters a Rube Goldberg-style plumbing network of canals that feed vineyards and hay fields throughout the Grand Valley. Fifteen miles downstream, the Reach ends where the Gunnison River joins the Colorado in the city of Grand Junction, beyond which the landscape begins to transition into the red rock canyons on the Colorado-Utah border.

In an average year, the river continues flowing through the Reach, albeit reduced from the demands to grow crops, and keep suburban lawns green. During exceptionally dry years like this one, however, nearly every available drop can be diverted upstream, sent into the sprawling plumbing system. This year, the Reach briefly dropped to roughly 55 cubic feet per second. For comparison, that is less water than many small mountain creeks carry during a typical summer, which is why Francis, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist with the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program, knew they needed to get on the river to electro-stun some fish.

Founded in the 1980s, the recovery program brings together water users with federal officials to head off tensions that may arise while enforcing the Endangered Species Act. Today its partners include state and federal agencies, irrigation districts, tribes, environmental organizations and hydropower interests. Its core funding comes from hydropower revenues generated at the Colorado River’s dams, plus federal funds appropriated by Congress. Francis has spent 23 years working on recovering these fish. They are not delicate creatures, he says. Fossil evidence shows the fish date back three-to-five million years, meaning they survived the last time the Southwest had a subtropical climate and through the last ice age in North America.

Long before dams, reservoirs and diversion canals, the Colorado River was a wildly dynamic place. Spring snowmelt transformed the river into a muddy torrent that routinely jumped its banks. Water temperatures swung dramatically. Entire channels shifted position. In the Grand Valley, where the river widens and slows, cobbled bottoms and backwaters along its main channel became havens for the fish during their seasonal spawns.

The Colorado pikeminnow, once capable of growing nearly six feet long, evolved to navigate hundreds of miles through the river and its tributaries, swallowing smaller fish whole in its gaping mouth. Razorback suckers developed their distinctive hump-backed silhouette while adapting to powerful currents and shifting river bottoms. And while they get plenty of attention from scientists, there are still unknowns, Francis says, like why so many of the Colorado’s native fish have flashy gold scales scattered around their bodies.

“This river was everything from drought-stricken to raging, torrent floods, just very hard conditions on the species that are here,” Francis says. “They’ve evolved with that.” What they did not evolve for was a river that disappears.

After a morning of electrofishing downstream of Palisade, the crews find just two razorback suckers, fewer than expected. No pikeminnows or bonytails. They pull out a bucketful of invasive smallmouth bass, green sunfish, and white sucker.

Despite the low catch rate, Francis is hopeful. "I think a lot of our fish kind of got the cue to leave the stretch, which is a good thing, and go to where there's more water," he says of the April low-flow event.

The fish may have escaped this time. But Francis worries about what could happen later this summer, when a full dry-up of the 15-Mile Reach is a real possibility. "So you dry up a river bed," he says, "it's going to be a biological desert for everything, not just our fish."

The fish have become a living proxy of the Colorado River's health. When they struggle, it often means the river itself is struggling. And in 2026, nearly every indicator is flashing red.

An uneasy balance

For nearly four decades, the recovery program has attempted something that once seemed impossible: recover endangered native fish while still allowing people to develop and use the Colorado River.

The arrangement has largely worked, creating a complicated, yet mutually beneficial relationship. Farmers can complete small, on-farm water projects without going through costly permitting. Fish biologists gain funding and new partnerships to rebuild populations. Reservoir operators release water timed to spawning seasons. Crews remove invasive predators with nets. Hatcheries raise young fish and release them into the river. One fish — the humpback chub — has already been downlisted from endangered to threatened. The razorback sucker could be next.

Water providers help support recovery efforts by leasing water for environmental flows, or by participating in conservation programs to make their rickety infrastructure more efficient. In 2021, recovery program funding helped construct a new hydropower plant near Palisade that replaced a 90-year-old facility. Fish managers work with water users to provide regulatory certainty; both recognize that prolonged conflict benefits nobody and would likely lead to worse outcomes for the fish.

Still, the unprecedented conditions in 2026 are exposing limits and testing the relationships, which can be put under strain when the choice is to keep either the river or the canals wet.

"We are concerned about endangered species compliance. We are concerned about the fish and the environment and our recreational economy," says Tina Bergonzini, general manager of the Grand Valley Water Users Association, which oversees one of the valley’s largest canal projects. "But we're also really concerned about agriculture being our number one economy in the Grand Valley."

Bergonzini represents irrigators whose livelihoods depend on moving water from the river to fields and orchards. Her members are already bracing for a potentially dry canal before the growing season is done this fall, meaning fallowed fields and lost revenue. That would be a first in her canal’s 112-year history. She also spends time coordinating with fish managers and state agencies trying to maintain habitat in the 15-Mile Reach.

"Nobody wants to see the Reach dried up," she says. “From an optic standpoint, of course, farmers don't want to constantly be labeled ‘the bad guy’ because they're trying to grow food, but on the other hand, it is also their home and nobody wants to see a dry river.”

The hardest months are ahead

At Talbott's Mountain Gold, rows of peach trees stretch toward the towering sandstone Book Cliffs. The Talbott family has farmed here for generations. Their orchards help produce roughly a quarter of Colorado's annual peach crop.

"We live and die by snowpack," says orchardist Bruce Talbott. "We didn't get any this year."

Talbott remembers the drought of 1977, and irrigation water spitting up dust as it entered his family’s parched orchards. Even then, he says, the canals still carried water. This year feels different.

For more than a century, fruit growers planted trees with the assumption that the Colorado River in the Grand Valley would remain dependable. Orchard investments are measured not in seasons but in decades. "We wouldn't plant trees here if we thought we would ever run out of water," Talbott says. He is preparing for his irrigation water to potentially be shut off before the end of this growing season. Some of his trees could die, and others will need to be irrigated with water hauled in by trucks until they go dormant.

The hardest months still lie ahead. For Francis, August is the month that keeps him awake at night. By then, water temperatures will peak. River flows will likely be at their lowest. Conditions favorable to invasive smallmouth bass — one of the most effective predators of native fishes —  will expand as water temperatures rise and flows retreat.

Yet even as conditions deteriorate, conservationists continue adapting. At a constructed wetland in Grand Junction, managers hoped spring runoff would connect habitat naturally to the river this year. Instead, low flows forced them to improvise. Water from a canal was routed into the wetland. Five thousand larval bonytail were transported from a hatchery and stocked by hand. "It's that adaptive management," Francis says. The phrase is bureaucratic. In practice, it means responding to emergencies that previous generations never anticipated.

Across the Colorado River Basin, similar emergency adaptations are becoming routine. This year alone many of the agricultural districts in the Grand Valley have volunteered to forgo some of their water so some smaller upstream users are not fully cut off.

The challenge, according to Udall, is that climate change continues moving faster than our infrastructure and the many institutions that manage it were designed to handle. The word aridification has become common among Western water experts. It describes something more permanent than drought — a long-term drying trend driven by rising temperatures that changes how much water ultimately reaches rivers. What is happening in 2026 offers a preview of that future.

"This long-term trend is pointing us to fundamental changes in how ecosystems and economies will work in the 21st century," Udall says. For now, those changes remain concentrated in places like the 15-Mile Reach, where competing demands collide in a shrinking river channel.

As summer heat begins to settle over the Grand Valley, Francis returns his attention to the fish and their resilience. They are long-lived species. An electrofishing crew recovered a 40-year-old razorback sucker from the Reach this past spring. Their recovery has always been measured in generations rather than years.

"I'm hoping that even though this is a tough year," he says, "that we can still be doing the things we need to do in order to recover these fishes."