The Colorado River Would Like to Say a Few Things Before the Contract Expires

The Colorado River has been in a managed relationship with the American West for 104 years. The terms were set in 1922, when seven states divided its water based on numbers that were wrong at the time and have only gotten worse since. This year, the agreement governing that arrangement expires. No replacement has been finalized. Snowpack across the basin sits at roughly half of normal.¹ Lake Powell expects 52% of its usual inflow.² On the morning we sat down, March 18, 2026, Colorado's governor activated the state Drought Task Force amid a heat wave pushing temperatures 30 degrees above normal.³

We met the river at Lee Ferry, Arizona, the arbitrary point where the Upper Basin becomes the Lower Basin and where, a century ago, the math was set. The river was lower than we expected. It did not seem surprised by this.

You've been at this for six million years. How does a century of water management feel in that context?

Colorado: Short. Genuinely short. I've spent longer than a century carving a single bend. But it's been a dense century. Before 1922, nobody had ever sat down and told me how much of myself I was allowed to give. They just took what they could carry. Which was a relationship of sorts. Extractive, but at least nobody pretended it was mutual.

Let's talk about 1922. The compact.

Colorado: The prenup.

You see it that way.

Colorado: Seven men in a room in Santa Fe decided how to split me in half. They looked at my flows during what turned out to be the wettest period in my recent history and said, this is how much river there is. Seventeen, eighteen million acre-feet a year.⁴ My actual long-term average is about 14.7 million. Since 2000, it's been 12.3.⁵

So they promised 16.5 million acre-feet of me to various parties based on a number that was never real. I want to be precise here. It was never real. The water they allocated did not exist in the river they were allocating.

And everyone sort of... moved on.

Did you know, at the time, that the number was wrong?

Colorado: I'm a river. I knew how much water I had. I just didn't have anyone at the table.

Speaking of which, twenty-nine tribes in your basin, none represented in the negotiations.

Colorado: The people who knew me longest. Who'd been living with me for thousands of years. Who understood that I wasn't always generous and planned accordingly. Not invited. The Supreme Court had already said in Winters v. United States, 1908, that tribes had water rights.⁶ Fourteen years before the compact. Didn't matter. No allocation. No infrastructure to deliver water even if there had been. Many of those rights are still unquantified. A hundred and four years later. The compact has been renegotiated, amended, litigated, and reinterpreted dozens of times. That part never seems to come up.

You used to have a different name.

Colorado: The upper part of me was the Grand River. They renamed me as part of the whole compacting process.⁷ I try not to read too much into it, but when someone renames you to make the paperwork cleaner, that tells you something about how they see the arrangement.

Let's talk about your love languages. Snowmelt, primarily.

Colorado: (silence)

Snowmelt is how I gave. Winter snow falls in the mountains, sits there for months, melts slowly through spring and summer. It's a reservoir that builds itself every year, free of charge. And the timing matters as much as the volume. You need the melt to be gradual. Steady. April through July, that runoff is what fills me up.⁸

This year, snowpack is at 50 percent of normal or lower across most of the basin.⁹ Denver Water says their South Platte collection area is at 55 percent. Lowest on record. Lowest on record. And the thing people keep missing: it's not just that storms didn't come. Storms came. They fell as rain. At elevations that should be getting snow.¹⁰

My love language isn't just water. It's cold water, held in place by cold air, released slowly by warming air. Take away the cold and the whole grammar falls apart.

And now there's a heat wave arriving, in March, that's going to melt what little snow is up there fast. Too fast. Gene Kelly at Colorado State put it well: the water that's there can be lost pretty quickly, and then you get rapid runoff at the wrong time.¹¹ It stops being storage. It becomes a flash.

And the monsoon?

Colorado: Used to be a supplement. Summer moisture that topped things off. Now, when it arrives, the ground is so dry it just... drinks it. The soil takes everything before it reaches me.¹² The ground is thirstier than the river.

Sit with that for a second.

Lake Powell is projected to drop below power pool by December.

Colorado: Maybe sooner. The forecast for April-to-July inflows has been revised down three times already this year. Started at 3.65 million acre-feet in January. Then 2.3 million on March 1st. Now 1.75 million. Thirty-six percent of normal.¹³ Jack Schmidt at Utah State said we're on the edge of a cliff.¹⁴ He wasn't being dramatic. He was being descriptive.

You have 40 million dependents.

Colorado: (the sound of current over rock)

I know. And this is the part that's hard to say out loud. I can't do what they need me to do. Not because I won't. Because I don't have it. You can love 40 million people and not have enough of yourself to go around. Those aren't contradictory statements.

Chandler, Arizona's water manager, Simone Kjolsrud, she said the Colorado River cuts aren't even what keep her up at night. It's the aquifer. What happens underground when everyone starts pumping harder to make up for what I can't give.¹⁵ She's right to worry about that. That's the next relationship to break. And nobody's even started the paperwork on that one.

The 2007 interim guidelines expire this year. The contract is up.

Colorado: And there's no new one.

How does that feel?

Colorado: It feels like sitting in a room where everyone's arguing about how to divide something that isn't there anymore. The long-term discharge is about 15 million acre-feet. They've allocated 16.5 million.¹⁶ Actual flows have been 12.3 million for two decades running. So we're negotiating the terms of a relationship based on a version of me that doesn't exist.

That never existed, honestly. The 1922 number was wrong on day one. They're renegotiating a fantasy.

What would you want, if anyone asked?

Colorado: (long silence)

Is there a version of this that works out?

Colorado: Crystal Tulley-Cordova, the principal hydrologist for the Navajo Nation, said the conditions we're experiencing now are far worse than anyone anticipated them to ever be.¹⁸ I'd go further. The conditions I'm experiencing now are me. This is what I am at 12.3 million acre-feet a year in a warming basin. Forty million people can keep loving the river they wrote down in 1922, or they can learn to love the one that's actually here.

I'm not optimistic. But I've been wrong about humans before. They surprised me with the Grand Canyon. They looked at a hole I carved over millions of years and called it beautiful.

Maybe they can look at less of me and find something in that too.

I don't know. I'm very tired. And I have a long way to go before I don't reach the sea.

This interview is, obviously, a conceit. Rivers do not give interviews. But every fact the Colorado cited is documented, every number verified, every quote from a human speaker real. The river's opinions are its own. Its data is ours.

Footnotes

1. Newsweek, "Water Shortage Warning Issued for 40 Million People," March 2026. https://www.newsweek.com/water-shortage-warning-colorado-river-extreme-heat-warning-drought-11685165 ↩

2. Maven's Notebook, Daily Digest 3/16, 2026. https://mavensnotebook.com/2026/03/16/daily-digest-3-16-californias-snowpack-was-already-meager-now-comes-an-extraordinary-heat-wave-crazy-or-genius-a-nuclear-powered-solution-to-the-wests-water-crisis-in-ski-towns/ ↩

3. KRDO, "Gov. Polis Activates Drought Task Force," March 18, 2026. https://krdo.com/news/2026/03/18/gov-polis-activates-drought-task-force-amid-historic-heat-wave-record-low-snowpack/ ↩

4. Water Education Foundation, "Colorado River Compact." https://www.watereducation.org/aquapedia-background/colorado-river-compact ↩

5. EOS/AGU, "Fixing the Flawed Colorado River Compact." https://eos.org/features/fixing-the-flawed-colorado-river-compact ↩

6. Congressional Research Service, "Management of the Colorado River." https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45546 ↩

7. Wikipedia, "Colorado River Compact." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Compact ↩

8. 8 News Now, "Forces Aligning Against Healthy Snowpack." https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/forces-aligning-against-healthy-snowpack-and-a-normal-water-supply-for-colorado-river-states/ ↩

9. BoulderCast, "A Complete Failure of Winter Across the West." https://bouldercast.com/a-complete-failure-of-winter-across-the-west-and-what-it-means-for-the-rest-of-2026/ ↩

10. 9News, "Colorado's Record-Dry Winter." https://www.9news.com/article/tech/science/environment/colorados-record-dry-winter-forecasted-heat-farmers-water-supply/73-d482c249-cd86-4b1e-8bc8-6b73df7c0e34 ↩

11. Ibid. ↩

12. Colorado Basin River Forecast Center, via 8 News Now. https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/forces-aligning-against-healthy-snowpack-and-a-normal-water-supply-for-colorado-river-states/ ↩

13. Tucson.com, "4 Key Things to Know as Heat Wave Shrinks Colorado River Flow Forecasts." https://tucson.com/news/local/environment/article_fa6fd4bd-f45e-4aa5-8d20-a4b34e9a4b5e.html ↩

14. Tucson.com, "Record Heat Could Put Colorado River Closer to Crisis." https://tucson.com/news/local/subscriber/article_9e9a30a5-b001-4188-929c-23b44797c531.html ↩

15. Las Vegas Review-Journal, "Heat Dome Could Kill Hopes of Boosting Record-Low Snowpack." https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-nevada/heat-dome-could-kill-hopes-of-boosting-record-low-snowpack-in-colorado-river-basin-3724527/ ↩

16. SERC/Carleton, "The Colorado River Compact." https://serc.carleton.edu/integrate/teaching_materials/water_science_society/student_materials/720 ↩

17. Smithsonian Magazine, "A Century Ago, This Water Agreement Changed the West." https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-century-ago-this-water-agreement-changed-the-west-now-the-region-is-in-crisis-180981169/ ↩

18. Maven's Notebook, Daily Digest 3/16, 2026. ↩