Green Mountain Reservoir Hits 14% Capacity, Ending Irrigation Early

Aspen —The smell of dry earth hangs heavy in the air between Silverthorne and Kremmling, a scent that has become all too familiar to anyone who drives I-70 through the Roaring Fork Valley. It is a smell that defies the romanticized postcards of Colorado’s alpine beauty, replacing the crisp scent of pine with the dusty, arid reality of a landscape that is simply running out.

At Green Mountain Reservoir, the water line sits low against the concrete and rock of the dam. During Labor Day weekend, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the reservoir was 14% full. In other words, it was 86% empty. That is a worse deficit than Lake Powell, the massive reservoir located roughly 700 river miles downstream, which was only about 78% empty. If you look closely at the exposed lakebed, you see the sheer scale of what has been lost. It is a visual argument that challenges the political consensus on how we manage our water, a consensus that often defaults to building more infrastructure.

The Vail Daily’s opinion piece by Best argues that we cannot build our way out of this drought. The reservoir between Silverthorne and Kremmling was part of a 19th-century mission to put water to "beneficial use," a central axiom of state water law that pioneer settlers pursued with horses, oxen, and human labor. In 1902, the federal government entered the partnership via the Bureau of Reclamation, repeatedly dipping into the federal treasury to prevent any "waste" of the Colorado River flowing into the Pacific Ocean. Green Mountain Dam was the compromise born from that era, a solution to a 1930s dispute where farmers in the Fort Collins-Longmont-Greeley area wanted to import water from Grand Lake, threatening late-season flows for irrigators in the Grand Junction area.

For over a century, that compromise held. A pool of 66,000 acre-feet was reserved for downstream irrigators in the Grand Junction area. Deliveries through the Government Highline Canal, which diverts water at Roller Dam near Palisade and distributes it for 55 miles to the Utah border, usually continued through October. This year, however, the rhythm broke. For the first time in 110-plus years, deliveries ended in late August.

The warning signs were visible months earlier. In April, the Glenwood Springs-based Colorado River Water Conservation District noted that Green Mountain was at its lowest level since filling during World War II. This jeopardized the late-summer flows to irrigators who relied on the canal. In a spirit of cooperation, the Colorado River District and the Colorado Water Conservation Board contributed more than $1 million to buy use of water. They tapped from headwaters reservoirs, most notably Wolford and Williams Fork near Kremmling, and Ruedi near Basalt. Front Range diverters also helped.

Irrigators received only 50% of their normal water allocation. Many responded by switching to crop varieties that could survive with less moisture. Even so, the water ran out. The Grand Valley Water Users Association, which operates the canal, stopped deliveries on September 3.

There is a warmth to the idea of community cooperation, a genuine effort to hold the line against an encroaching dryness. But the reservoir’s current state suggests that money and new tanks are not enough when the source itself is dwindling. The water table in our collective understanding needs to drop, not rise, before we can see the bottom of this crisis.

The exposed concrete of Green Mountain stands in stark contrast to the green of the surrounding aspen groves, a jagged scar that will likely remain visible well into next year.