Summer Update on the Colorado River Water Supply

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Jack Schmidt

Center for Colorado River Studies, Utah State University

14 July 2025

Water stored in the reservoirs of the Colorado River represents the account balance from which we draw water for use. The amount in the account is especially important during dry times when the demand by water users throughout the Basin exceeds income to the account, primarily snowmelt runoff, and is met by account withdrawals.

The annual cycle of reservoir hydrology includes two seasons – a relatively short season when reservoir storage increases and a relatively long season when storage decreases. In wet years, the season when storage increases typically begins in March or early April and may last until late July. In dry years, this season might not begin until May and end in mid-June. During the rest of the year, the Basin’s reservoirs are progressively depleted.

Snowmelt in 2025 was low, similar to what it was in 2012 and 2013; in early June, the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center predicted that this year’s unregulated snowmelt inflow to Lake Powell will end up being 54% of the recent 30-yr average. In the 21st century, only 2002, 2018, and 2021 had lower inflows to Powell. Not surprisingly, the amount of water that accumulated in the Basin’s reservoirs during the 2025 snowmelt season was also unusually low.  There are a few ways to consider the Basin’s reservoirs. We can consider every reservoir for which data are readily available[1]; we can consider the major reservoirs actively managed by Reclamation[2]; or, we can consider just Lake Powell and Lake Mead (hereafter, Powell+Mead). Considering only Lake Powell or only Lake Mead doesn’t tell us much, because all of the Rocky Mountain snowmelt is first stored in Lake Powell and subsequently transferred to Lake Mead. In 2025, the 46 Basin reservoirs gained only 0.55 million af (acre feet) of water, of which only 0.28 million af accumulated in the 12 federal reservoirs and only 0.11 million af accumulated in Powell+Mead. That is a very small amount, especially compared to 2023 and 2024 (Fig. 1). That accumulation is being quickly consumed. By 1 July 2025, all of the 2025 accumulation in Powell+Mead had been released downstream or evaporated.

Figure 1. Graph showing reservoir storage in different parts of the Colorado River Basin since 1 January 2023. Total storage in March 2023 was the lowest in the 21st century. Storage significantly increased due to 2023 snowmelt, but the accumulation from the 2024 snowmelt was entirely lost. This will also happen in the coming months. On 30 June 2025, active storage in 42 reservoirs upstream from Lake Powell was 8.58 million af, active storage in Lake Mead was 8.05 million af, and storage in Lake Powell was 7.88 million af.

In contrast to previous dry years, however, today’s account balance is unusually low, about the same as in late July 2021 (Fig. 2). Depending on how you think about the reservoir system, today’s contents are between 34 and 45% full in relation to their condition at the beginning of the 21st century (Table 1).

Figure 2. Graph showing reservoir storage in different parts of the Colorado River Basin since 1 January 1999. On 30 June 2025, total basin storage was comparable to what it was in late July 2021

 

Table 1. Present storage contents of reservoirs in the Colorado River Basin in relation to past conditions.

Storage contents, in million acre feet
on 30 June 2025 Last time storage was as low Present storage as a percentage of storage in late July 1999
entire Basin (n=46) 26.8 25-Jul-21 45%
federal reservoirs (n=12) 23.64 4-Sep-21 42%
Powell + Mead 15.93 20-Nov-21 34%

 

The implications for Lake Powell depend on whether Reclamation decides to emphasize water storage in Lake Powell or in Lake Mead, and whether water presently in Flaming Gorge reservoir will be released to supplement storage in Lake Powell.  As of June 30, 32% of the reservoir storage in the Basin was in 42 reservoirs upstream from Powell, 30% was in Mead, and 29% was in Powell (Fig. 1). if past management practices prevail, storage upstream from Powell will be quickly reduced, and storage in Powell and Mead will be reduced more slowly. If Reclamation emphasizes storage in Lake Powell by reducing releases to Lake Mead through the Grand Canyon, hydropower production at Glen Canyon Dam will be maintained and the risk of entrainment of smallmouth bass through the turbines will be reduced. But this management approach will cause Lake Mead to fall more quickl, thereby reducing hydropower production at Hoover Dam and perhaps the quality of water withdrawn to southern Nevada. Water storage can’t be maximized in both reservoirs at the same time. Indeed, we are living in dry times!

[1] There are 46,  https://www.usbr.gov/uc/water/hydrodata/reservoir_data/site_map.html.

[2] There are 12 included in Reclamation’s monthly 12-month study reports (Taylor Park, Blue Mesa, Morrow Point, Crystal, Fontenelle, Flaming Gorge, Navajo, Vallecito, Lake Powell, Lake Mead, Lake Mohave, and Lake Havasu).

Rio Grande drying through Albuquerque

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Graph showing Albuquerque's Rio Grande going dry.

The year with no runoff. (The four peaks you see in the 2025 graph are four rain storms.) I added 2022 to the graph so we can compare with the only other time it’s dried in recent years. See below for the log scale version.

The Rio Grande gage at Albuquerque’s Central Avenue Bridge is reading 20.5 cubic feet per second this afternoon (Sunday, July 13).

The last time we saw river drying in the Albuquerque reach, back in 2022, 25 cfs at Central wasn’t enough to make it to the wastewater treatment plant outfall, as flows dwindled in the hot summer sun. My hypothesis (I haven’t been down to look today, went hiking up in the foothills instead) is that we’re seeing drying as I write this, meaning the continuous ribbon of trickling water is finally breaking. If not today, then soon. We’ll get an official report from the River Eyes people – they go out and actually look – prolly tomorrow.

The ditches are a similar story.

  • MRGCD diversions, which were over 400 cfs a week ago, are down to 245.
  • All the distribution ditches with gages in Albuquerque’s North Valley are reading zero.
  • Flows through the Atrisco siphon, which carries water down the west side of the south valley, are way down.
  • Flows in the Socorro Main, which were 175 cfs a week ago, are down to 50.
  • Flows in the weirdly wonderfully named Unit 7 Drain, which collects tail water out of the bottom of Valencia County and the top of Socorro County, carrying it through my current favorite reach of the river, are collapsing.

I don’t know what’s happening with leased San Juan-Chama water for minnow flows. If you do know, drop it in the comments.

I wrote this back in April laying out what I’m watching, and by implication what I think we as a community need to be paying attention to. It holds up pretty, no need to repeat myself here.

Log scale. Different graphing approaches are useful to different segments of the Inkstain audience, but bits are cheap, so why not do ’em all!

As Anne Marken says, pray for rain.

The Village People, Barthes, Sontag, MAGA

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Album cover for ‘The Best of Village People’ featuring six band members dressed in iconic costumes: construction worker, cowboy, police officer, Native American chief, soldier, and leather-clad biker, with a blue background and song titles listed at the bottom.

The Village People

Camp art is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content.

  • Susan Sontag, Notes on “Camp”

Macho Types Wanted. Must Dance and Have a Moustache.

  • Advertisement in the Village Voice, 1978, as quoted in Midgley, Alex. “‘Macho Types Wanted: The Village People, Homophobia, and Representation in the 1970s,” Australasian Journal of American Studies (2014): 104-119.

A friend last week (ironically, I think, and/or with disgust) texted a link to the U.S. Department of Interior’s July 4th video – all fireworks and Mount Rushmore and eagles and shit, a peppy presenter talking about America’s awesomeness, with the thumping disco beat in the background of the Village People’s 1978 pop cult classic YMCA.

Wait, what? YMCA is a camp queer anthem, right? I mean, look at those guys! I don’t think that song means what you think it means.

The Death of the Author

In her 1964 essay Notes on “Camp,” Susan Sontag said this, in discussing how to understand camp: “One doesn’t need to know the artist’s private intentions. The work tells all.”

Sontag’s point is a side road in a complex attempt to get her arms around the aesthetic of what she called “camp.” Writing three years later, the French literary critic Roland Barthes was more direct, arguing in his essay “The Death of the Author” that what matters in understanding a work is what ends up in the brain of the reader, viewer, listener, not who the author was or what they intended. But, holy moly, the Village People were pretty explicit back in the late 1970s about what they intended. Here’s Alex Midgley in a marvelous 2014 essay about YMCA (Can I share my delight in the fact that there’s a scholarly literature on “YMCA”?):

[W]hen first interviewed by Rolling Stone in 1978, the French producer Jacques Morali – the mastermind and chief songwriter of the group – outed himself and emphasised that increased cultural visibility was to be the very point of the Village People. ‘I think to myself that the gay people have no [musical] group,’ he said, ‘nobody to personalise the gay people, you know?’ Here, Morali had found a culturally unsatisfied, commercially unexploited niche in popular music, and determined that the Village People’s mix of iconic American masculinity, gay innuendo, and maddeningly catchy disco hooks was the perfect fit.

In his book A Queer History of the United States, Michael Bronski details how the YMCA became such an important institution for male gay culture in the U.S. In a rapidly urbanizing United States, the YMCA was a place for generally young single men (there are parallel stories for women) to gather. By the 1930s, Bronski writes, the chaste and spiritual nature of the “C” in the institution’s name was living side by side with what had become “a visible and internationally noted place for homosexual men to find one another for sex and socializing.”

The signalling could not, to my ears, be more clear:

It’s fun to stay at the Y.M.C.A.
They have everything for young men to enjoy
You can hang out with all the boys

Here again is Midgley:

From the Stonewall Riots of 1969, to the election of Harvey Milk in 1978, and at countless points in between and after, gay people were being seen affirming their rights as citizens and creating strong queer communities. Being ‘out’ emerged as a more viable option, if only by degrees, as groups such as the Village People provided models of successful, positive, happy gay men that countered the spectre of sin, criminality, and illness that had accumulated around homosexuality over centuries.

Two decades separate John Rechy’s Cooper Do-Nuts Riot and the Village People, with Stonewall wedged in between, decades of a long and often painful emergence from the closet. So it’s easy to see why the camp genius of YMCA caught on in the discos of New York and San Francisco. But then something weird happened that is what makes Barthes so important, Sontag ever confusing, and YMCA a remarkable modern cultural object.

YMCA became a hit in still-homophobic middle America. And the Village People embraced this. Again, Alex Midgley is our guide:

While ‘Y.M.C.A.’ was written partly as a paean to the opportunities for gay socialisation and sex that the YMCA facilities provided, nothing was ever made explicit. Audiences so inclined could easily interpret the song as an anodyne appreciation for the Y, an organisation that promoted good Christian masculine values and responsibilities, rather than having anything to do with homosexuality. With ‘Y.M.C.A.’ the Village People became what the historian and self-professed ‘discologist’ Alice Echols calls America’s ‘first gay-to-straight crossover group. That is, the first (and only) disco act whose image and original following was gay but managed to cross over into straight discos.’ With their newfound audience, the Village People – who had never shied away from discussions of their sexuality – suddenly changed tack, refusing to comment on their sexual orientations.

Barthes and the question of authorial intent

The question raised by Roland Barthes is important to me, the “author” whose thousands of deaths (for each of the thousands of thing I have written and sent off into the world) he is summoning.

Very early in my career as a newspaper reporter, I learned an empirical version of Barthes’ concept: I wrote. People stayed up late into the night editing, typesetting, and printing my words, then driving around town throwing them on people’s driveways. When readers plucked the morning paper off of their driveway, they saw only my words, with no access to my intent. They would often work backwards from the words to infer my intent: the newspaper is the voice of The Man, Fleck’s clearly liberal/conservative (generally the opposite of the reader’s self-identity). But most importantly for my craft, if I wrote clumsily the goods I intended to get into a reader’s brain didn’t arrive undamaged.

So, yeah, Barthes resonates for me in a very practical way.

But in the last decade, as I left newspapering for the contemplative life of A Guy Who Writes Books, my relationship to Barthes, to the question of authorial intent, shifted. My books don’t stand alone, but rather exist in relationship to the public persona I present about them: I speak at conferences, and talk to reporters, and write blog posts, and appear on podcasts. The work here is not the book itself. Rather, the book is the platform on which the work as a whole stands – all the stuff I have to say, where my explicit signalling of authorial intent becomes part of the work.

While I can’t claim the stature or revenue stream of the Village People, the relationship to authorial intent is similar. It’s not just the song. It’s the stage show, the public statements, the explicit way in which they group revised their signals of authorial intent as YMCA moved out of the Haight and into the Holiday Inn. “No,” they seem to be signalling to the crowd cheerfully doing the Y-M-C-A arm gestures during the seventh inning stretch, “we’re not the gay band.”

But we get the camp wink, as my family joins in to the seventh inning stretch pantomime, what we joyously call “the gay song.” Which is why my “moved out of the Haight” metaphor breaks down, because the song now lives a double life as both a queer anthem and a MAGA anthem, simultaneously in the Haight* and in the Holiday Inn. It doesn’t matter what the authors intended. What matters is the way the audience embraces the work, and lordy but haven’t we embraced YMCA with a rich enthusiasm?

Acknowledgments: A special thanks to the four anonymous individuals who helped me workshop this material (my family and friends are kind and thoughtful with my practice), with particularly useful Bill Evans on vinyl and avgolemono chicken stew.

* Haight-Ashbury seems to no longer be “the Haight” of my cultural reference, grant me a nostalgia for the 1980s, my young adulthood, a time before AIDS and San Francisco’s decline.

 

 

 

 

Quoting Leopold and Bull

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Rivers have a heritage but no beginning.

Luna Leopold and William Bull, from their classic paper “Base level, aggradation, and grade.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 123.3 (1979): 168-202.

That’s the juicy pull quote, but it’s maybe too cryptic. Here’s more context:

Through geologic time even the first incipient channel system appearing on an emerging landmass changes in form, drainage network, and gradient as relief increases. There is continual modification, but at any stage the existing system is different from that which existed at a previous state, but has been influenced by that earlier stage.

(Apologies if that’s behind a paywall, I’m writing this sitting on a university campus and I can never tell when stuff like this is more broadly publicly available.)

John Fleck’s thoughts on Yorkshire hosepipe ban

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Via GB News, Yorkshire Water has imposed a hosepipe ban following the region’s driest spring in 132 years:

Locals have expressed their anger to the People’s Channel as the weather remains hot, and they are unable to complete tasks such as cleaning their cars, watering their gardens, filling domestic pools, and cleaning their windows.

They have accused Yorkshire Water of not fixing leaks, poor management of reservoirs and charging the public too much.

John Fleck told GB News: “It’s just another company charging us more and providing us with less, which seems to be a trend at the moment.

He added: “Other countries, much warmer than ours, somehow always seem to manage, but then in the UK, leaks are often left unfixed for weeks. The reservoirs aren’t looked after, and we seem to go full circle between flooding in the winter to hosepipe bans in the summer.”

Building a city in the bed of a river

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A concrete holding basin protected by a black wire fence, with a skyline in the background.

Catch it, pump it.

Most of Greater Downtown (Albuquerque) sits below the level of the Rio Grande, like a sort of high-desert New Orleans. Any rain that falls between the river’s east-bank levee and roughly Broadway will stay in the area until it evaporates, gets absorbed into the ground, or is otherwise dealt with.

– Downtown Albuquerque News

DAN had a great pair of stories yesterday and today about the network of pumps required to manage storm water in Albuquerque’s greater downtown.

The quote above is true, in that for more than a century we have tried to pin the Rio Grande down on one side of the valley, building levees to confine the river to a narrow strip down the west side of the valley floor through the metro area.

But it might be equally true (though less helpful in a practical sense) to say that we built what would become downtown Albuquerque back in 1880 in the bed of the river, and we have spent the next century-and-a-half trying to keep the river out of said bed. We build levees, we build culverts, we build pumps, we build pipes. Because rivers are nothing if not persistent. This responsibility is ongoing.

This morning’s bike ride/walk took me down through the old Martineztown neighborhood to see the recently completed city storm water pump station #31. We dug a big hole to catch water from big rainstorms, and a pump station to lift that water up and out of the neighborhoods – “otherwise dealt with,” as DAN so charmingly put it.

The traffic chaos while this construction was going on was a delight. This was a big project – a great example of the permanent job we humans take on when we engineer a river.

Riding a bike or walking (the way I did it this morning) is a great way to get a feel for what’s going on here. Martineztown was built on the sand hills, just up out of the flood plain. Walking a thousand feet from the heart of Martineztown to pump station #31 this morning, I dropped ~10 feet in elevation.

Rivers are the sum of each raindrop and melting snowflake, heading downhill, gathering in community, seeking the low spot or, perhaps more accurately, creating the low spot. The rain/snow collective sometimes picks up sediment along the way, sometimes drops sediment along the way, making its own world in the process – making a river.

The indigenous Pueblo people who have been here from time immemorial, and the Spanish who collided with them beginning in the 1500s, generally adapted to that by building in the high spots. That’s why Martineztown is 10 feet higher, and the old Spanish village of Albuquerque was on high ground over on the west side of the valley bottom, near the river’s modern channel.

In the 1700s, the land in between was swampy river bottom, filling with water during high flows from summer melt, or the raging summer downpours. Until Manuel Martín and his family moved there in the 1850s, the place we now know as Martineztown was high ground used for sheep grazing.

Beginning in the 1880s, we (I say “we” because we are the carriers of this bit of history, we can’t avoid owning this) started building a modern city where the rain/snow collective, the Rio Grande, wanted to go, the part between Martineztown and what came to be known as “Old Town” on the high ground near the river.

I say this without judgment. Albuquerque is a wonderful city. But we now own the responsibility that comes with that choice. So we build pumps.

The batting cages and the Armijo Acequia

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An irrigation ditch emerging from a culvert beneath a batting cages amusement emporium, with green trees to the left and a bicycle parked in the foreground

Things change.

One of my favorite examples of old ditches threading through our community is this spot, where the Armijo Acequia (AKA the Ranchos de Atrisco Ditch) emerges from a culvert that runs beneath the batting cages on Sunset SE near the Rio Grande.

The ditch dates to the 1700s. Baseball is more recent, batting cages more recent yet. Yet the batting cages are defunct, while the ditch endures. May it ever be so.

There’s currently 187 cubic feet per second flowing down the main channel of the Rio Grande at Central, and 61 cfs coming across the river in the Atrisco Siphon to irrigate this side of the valley, this novel ecosystem, this deeply coupled human and natural system where we’ve replaced a river that once spread across this flood plain with a network of ditches spreading the water across the valley floor.

Obligation

One of the thought experiments Bob Berrens and I posited as we worked on our book Ribbons of Green: The Rio Grande and the Making of a Modern American City (summer 2026 from UNM Press) is the question of what it might look like if a modern city wanted to create from scratch a park-like network of tree-lined trails and streams with flowing water threaded through an already existing city.

I was thinking of that again this morning as I steered the Space Ghost off of Sunset (kinda no-shouldery lousy cycling) and onto the Armijo ditch bank to find my way down valley. I’m still in “old guy recovering from a covid haze” mode, my body (and mind) got pretty beat up by my latest dance with the virus, and this was my first ride down to the river in a month.

I cut through Acequia Madre Park, a bit of concrete with planters and trees where the Barelas acequia used to run (the actual acequia route there is now an alley fenced off to keep campers away); across the railroad tracks, through downtown (“New Town”), through Aldo Leopold’s old neighborhood, back up to Old Town (“Old Town”) where restored old cars, parked on the Plaza across the street from San Felipe de Neri church, compete for attention on Sunday mornings with the glory of the Lord, and across the river to what used to be the Atrisco/Armijo headings.

As Bob and I start sketching the outline of another book (we had too much fun with Ribbons of Green not to try this again), we’ve been reading, thinking, and talking a lot about the nature of moral obligations that come with the collective action of river management at scale.

Gradually, and then suddenly, we took over management of the Rio Grande over the last three-plus centuries as we took water out of the river to grow stuff; drained swamps/wetlands to build stuff; and built levees to pin the river into a narrow strip in order to build even more stuff – to build this city we call home. This creates a fascinating and challenging set of obligations from which we cannot walk away:

  • to people upstream and downstream with whom we must share the river
  • to non-human communities, both those in what we traditionally think of as “nature” – the ribbons of green between the levees – but also the broader riparian strip beyond the levees, full of human and natural life dependent on the ditches and the river-connected shallow aquifer
  • to the past? Maybe?
  • to the future? Unquestionably.

The river’s shrinking. The flow right now at Central, our canonical point of measurement, is the lowest it’s been at this point of the year since 1972. We got a delightful burst of rain last week, which pumped the river up for a few days, but it’s back on its gonna-dry-soon-here-unless-it-rains trajectory. I was delighting last week at the burst of rain, and the rewetting, when a wise friend reminded me that drying out a river and then dumping a bit of rain down the channel for a few days until it dries again is not a great way to run an ecosystem. Pity the poor fish. Understanding the nature and extent of these obligations, sorting out a decision process that respects competing and conflicting values, is hard stuff.

Because there is less water, and there will be less wet and less green. We have to decide where, we have to, as Hanif Abdurraqib put it, determine what kind of apocalypse we’d like to have.

We’ll have to choose whether to still have the Armijo for me to ride my bike down away from the traffic and beneath the shade of ditch-fed trees: how many ditches will remain, how many trees, how much land can we still irrigate, how much can we irrigate it? What are our obligations to our neighbors downstream – our legal obligations, but more importantly our moral ones? (I am morally unsatisfied by arguments that fall back on gymnastic interpretations of what the law says to define the extent of this obligation, to defend our water against other.)  What are their obligations to us? What of the trees and birds and fish using the water along the way?

Mostly I wasn’t dwelling on this when I turned down the Armijo, I was just enjoying the shade and the sound of flowing water as each culvert dipped beneath the neighborhood streets, the joy of being back on the bike on a goofing wander after an ugly month.

It was lovely.

 

 

Quoting Hollis Robbins

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Much of human history is the story of catastrophic agricultural losses. The invention of the silo in the nineteenth century reduced grain losses from 50% to just 2%. Silos transformed farming from a seasonal survival struggle into a year-round productive enterprise.…

Before silos, life was measured in losses. After silos, farmers stored grain during harvest-time price lows to sell during peak periods. Silos enabled year-round milk production. Silos enabled strategic grain reserves for communities, creating buffers against seasonal shortages. Rural economies stabilized as community grain elevators enabled everyone to work together.

The agricultural silo is in fact one of history’s most transformative innovations, solving the storage challenges that had given farmers a headache for millennia.

Hollis Robbins, You say ‘silo’ as if it were a bad thing…

I had no idea.