Colorado's Record Heat Shatters Snowpack and Crop Norms

Steamboat Springs —The backyard garden in La Jara looks wrong. It is August, the San Luis Valley floor is baking under a sun that refuses to dip below the horizon, and Larry Zaragoza’s corn stalks are thick, green, and fully grown. He has been tending that plot for two decades. In all that time, he has seen a robust crop of corn exactly once before. This year is the second.

Zaragoza, who served as the town manager until his recent retirement, pointed to the stalks with a mix of pride and unease. The town sits at 7,600 feet, an elevation where corn is a long shot. But the heat didn’t break. It held.

That specific, quiet miracle in a small New Mexico-border town is the microcosm of what just happened across the state. A new report from Colorado State University researchers confirms that the 2025-26 water year was, in their words, “one for the record books.” It wasn’t just warm. It was our warmest on record by a substantial margin, and simultaneously one of our driest.

The numbers are stark enough to make you stop scrolling. Statewide, temperatures ran 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit above the averages seen between 1991 and 2020. But it wasn’t just the highs that broke records; the lows did too. The CSU team found that daily warm records occurred with 21.7 times greater frequency than cold records. That ratio of heat to cold is the most unbalanced it has ever been in the state’s recorded history.

For folks on the Western Slope, this isn’t abstract data. It’s the difference between a tomato plant dying in an overnight chill and one thriving because the nights stayed warm. In Meeker, a resident noted that ordinarily, those cool nights kill any hope of growing tomatoes. This year? The heat lingered into the dark hours, keeping the plants alive and producing fruit that shouldn’t have been possible.

This level of sustained warmth has implications that ripple far beyond vegetable gardens. The report notes that the mountain snowpack was the lowest ever recorded, a deficit that hits agriculture, wildfire risk, human health, and recreation with equal force. When the snowpack is that low, the water year starts from a deficit. You are fighting for every drop before you even begin.

Russ Schumacher, the Colorado state climatologist and a faculty member in CSU’s department of atmospheric science, emphasizes that the key message isn’t just about a single hot day. It’s about the persistence. Four months — December, January, March, and August — were the warmest ever recorded for those specific times of year. Eleven of the twelve months ranked among the top-15 warmest on record.

Some point to the 1930s, a very warm decade that produced the Dust Bowl, as evidence that this is just another phase of natural variability. But the current trajectory defies that simple comparison. The unbalance in the records suggests a shift, not just a cycle.

Back in La Jara, Zaragoza stands in his garden. The corn is ready. It’s a good crop. But the heat that made it possible also dried out the soil around it, and the snowpack that usually feeds the valley’s streams was a ghost. He looks at the stalks, then up at the empty sky. The harvest is here. The cost of getting it there is becoming clearer, year by year, in the heat that never quite breaks.