In January, Michelle Garrison drove from Oregon to Denver. Garrison is a state water resources specialist for Colorado, and what she noticed on that drive was what wasn't there. No ice on the roads. No snow in the foothills. A water professional's mind goes where it goes: to drought, to reservoirs, to the recently expired drought management agreement between Colorado and three other states. She brought her observations to the Colorado Water Conservation Board meeting in Aurora.
"Things are looking exceedingly grim," she told the fifteen-person board.
Three months later, the numbers have confirmed what bare foothills told her in January. The Bureau of Reclamation's March 2026 24-Month Study projects unregulated inflow to Lake Powell this water year at 4.95 million acre-feet, 52 percent of average. The April-to-July forecast, the period water managers call the "big fill" because that's when snowmelt is supposed to surge down from the Rockies and replenish what summer takes, has been revised to roughly 36 percent of normal. Those are the numbers Garrison is working with now. Thirty-six percent of normal, for a reservoir engineered around that annual pulse, is a different river.
Powell sat at roughly 3,529 feet in mid-March, about 26% of capacity. Below 3,490 feet, water can't reach Glen Canyon Dam's turbines. Reclamation's most probable end-of-year scenario: 3,497 feet. Seven feet of margin.
Lake Powell sat at approximately 3,529 feet above sea level in mid-March, at roughly 26 percent of capacity. The number that federal officials watch is 3,490. Below that elevation, water can't reach the turbines at Glen Canyon Dam. No turbines, no hydropower. The dam becomes 710 feet of concrete holding back water it can't use. Reclamation's most probable scenario has Powell ending the water year at 3,497 feet. Seven feet of margin. The minimum scenario puts it at 3,480. Below the floor.
Garrison told the board that Powell's water level can swing 20 to 30 feet in a single year. Keeping the elevation above 3,525 feet preserves a cushion above the crisis point. The current level is already below that cushion. Every operational decision from here through September is being made inside a margin that barely exists, against inflow projections built on snowpack that isn't there.
Wayne Pullan, Reclamation's Upper Colorado Basin regional director, told Circle of Blue in March:
"I think it's safe for us to assume that unless Mother Nature is uncharacteristically generous, that Lake Powell elevations are going to fluctuate at elevations that we're not comfortable with."
He listed four tools to prevent Powell from dropping below 3,500 feet: shift some winter releases to summer; release water from upstream reservoirs; reduce releases when elevations hit trigger points; and implement new post-2026 operating guidelines.
That fourth tool doesn't exist yet. The interim guidelines adopted in 2007 expire at the end of this year, and basin states haven't agreed on replacements. The Drought Response Operations Agreement expired December 31. For Garrison and every state water planner in the Upper Basin, this means navigating 2026 inside a governance vacuum. The rules they're operating under are either expired or about to be.
The third tool is the one without precedent. Section 6(E) of a 2024 decision grants Reclamation authority to restrict water releases from Powell to as low as 6 million acre-feet. The planned release this year is 7.48 million acre-feet. A potential 20 percent reduction in water flowing to the Lower Basin, to the cities and farms and subdivisions that depend on it. The tools move the problem downstream.
And the second tool lands directly in Garrison's territory. Reclamation may release 500,000 acre-feet from upstream reservoirs, including Flaming Gorge, as soon as May. Amy Haas, executive director of the Colorado River Authority of Utah, confirmed the timeline and added that Reclamation is obligated to "fully recover any water it releases." Borrow from upstream to save downstream, then pay it back. With what water, nobody can say. For a Colorado state water specialist, watching your upstream reserves get drawn down to prop up a reservoir forty feet from losing its hydropower capacity is the kind of arithmetic that keeps you up at night.
I spent five years on cargo ships, and one thing you learn at sea is that every system aboard was designed for conditions the engineers assumed were normal. When conditions stop being normal, the ship stays the same. The crew starts making decisions faster than the manual can help them. That's Garrison presenting grim forecasts to a fifteen-person board. That's Pullan listing tools he'd rather not use.
The entire storage and release system of the Upper Colorado Basin was engineered around a physical fact: snow falls in winter, accumulates in mountains, melts in spring, fills reservoirs through summer. The infrastructure, the release curves, the interstate compacts, the hydropower contracts all assumed that sequence would hold. Reclamation has stated that a decision on post-2026 operations will come before October 1. The water year doesn't wait for the decision. It's already moving, already draining. And somewhere Michelle Garrison is watching the numbers she presented in January play out exactly as she feared, making state-level plans inside federal timelines that haven't caught up to the river she drove past three months ago.