OLATHE — Water engineer Bob Hurford has a chart he often shares with communities in the Gunnison River Basin to drive home the seriousness of the region’s water conditions.
It shows that the basin’s runoff in the 2020s, so far, is worse than the Dust Bowl era of the ’30s.
“That’s the position that everybody’s in right now,” said Hurford, Colorado Division of Water Resources division engineer for the Gunnison River area.
This Fresh Water News story is a collaboration between The Colorado Sun and Water Education Colorado. It also appears at wateredco.org.
The western Colorado river basin spans mountainous, agricultural regions and communities like Crested Butte, Gunnison, Paonia, Montrose, Olathe and Delta. Snowpack in the basin this year was near normal — when based on 30 years of data. The 100-year look was much more bleak, Hurford found.
For local farmers, almost-average snowpack does not always equal a good flow of water onto fields of corn, onions, alfalfa and other crops for the summer. And this summer’s conditions are just exacerbating frustrations over their water supply and how it’s managed.
“We were getting reports from management being like, ‘Oh, it’s going to be OK,’” said David Harold of Tuxedo Corn Company, the state’s largest sweet corn producer, recalling the outlook from the local water association in March. “I was thinking, ‘I disagree.’”
Mountain snowpack in the Gunnison River Basin — one of several major river basins in Colorado — peaked at 93% in late March, melted a bit, then rose again to 84% of the median, based on federal data from 1991 to 2020.
The basin is broken into smaller watersheds, including the Upper Gunnison, Uncompahgre and North Fork basins. In the Uncompahgre Valley, where Harold farms, the snowpack also peaked at slightly less than normal. Spring runoff projections for the valley were about 70% of the norm, Hurford said.
Watching the forecast this winter, Harold felt nervous. His friends went snowmobiling and said there was not much snow in the lower elevations. His farm’s fields were showing 30% less moisture than normal in February.
“This is not going to be an easy water year,” he said, thinking back to March.
FROM LEFT: David Harold of Tuxedo Corn wipes back sweaty hair on a hot and sunny day in May 2025 while talking about managing his large farm operation near Delta, Colorado. Harold demonstrates how a siphon tube pulls water out of an irrigation ditch May 26, 2025, next to a field where he and his team had recently planted cucumber seed. (Shannon Mullane, The Colorado Sun)
FROM TOP: David Harold of Tuxedo Corn wipes back sweaty hair on a hot and sunny day in May 2025 while talking about managing his large farm operation near Delta, Colorado. Harold demonstrates how a siphon tube pulls water out of an irrigation ditch May 26, 2025, next to a field where he and his team had recently planted cucumber seed. (Shannon Mullane, The Colorado Sun)
Worse than the “Dirty Thirties”
Hurford, the water manager, has been delving into the data.
He turned to a gauge in the basin that has been measuring the flow of the Gunnison River for 100 years near the unincorporated community of Whitewater, just south of Grand Junction. He averaged the annual runoff over each of the past 10 decades.
While the 2020s aren’t done yet, the average water runoff this decade is about 1.25 million acre-feet per year — well below the average runoff of more than 1.5 million acre-feet per year in the 1930s, he found.
One acre-foot roughly equals the annual water use of two to three households.
Runoff into the Gunnison River has been less on average in the 2020s than in the 1930s. (Bob Hurford, Contributed)The “Dirty Thirties” were marked by clouds of dust and wind roaring through eastern Colorado and parts of the Great Plains, like Kansas, Oklahoma and Nebraska. The dust came from over-tilled farmland exposed by failing crops and dried up by drought, according to the University of Nebraska National Drought Mitigation Center.
Global economics, federal land policies, changes in weather and poor land management practices combined to create the environmental disaster. It led to a mass exodus of farmers and impacted the area’s economy for decades.
The situation is different today in the Gunnison River Basin, Hurford said. The region is home to many major federal reservoirs and water projects built by the Bureau of Reclamation, the main federal agency focused on managing water resources in the West.
Blue Mesa, Colorado’s largest reservoir, Morrow Dam and Crystal Dam — known as the Aspinall Unit — were federally approved to be built in the 1950s. Ridgway Dam was constructed on the Uncompahgre River in 1987.
These reservoirs and others, like Paonia, Silver Jack and Crawford, all help pace the flow of melting snow as it comes down from the mountains, helping water supplies last throughout the agricultural season.
But it might also give water managers a view of their supply that is too rosy, Hurford said.
“We’re blessed with these projects, and they really help us get through these tough times, and they do their job. But it gives us a little sense of, ‘Oh yeah, we can make it,’” he said. “But those won’t get you through back-to-back bad years.”
Rising tensions in the valley
The region is in a 20-plus year drought, which some researchers have dubbed a megadrought. One study said the hot and dry conditions since 2000 account for the driest 22-year period on record stretching back 1,200 years.
That’s why trying to track the water outlook can be stressful for farmers and ranchers, like Harold. He receives all of his water from the Uncompahgre Valley Water Users Association, which manages the Uncompahgre Valley Project. In 1903, it became the first major federal project to be approved under the Reclamation Act, which founded the first iteration of the Bureau of Reclamation in response to the irrigation needs of Western settlers.
Water trickles from the Gunnison Tunnel east of Montrose March 18, 2014. (Photo by William Woody)The project takes water from the Gunnison River in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, sends it under the mountains using the 116-year-old Gunnison Tunnel, and delivers it to the valley.
“Without that water supply, the Uncompahgre Valley really wouldn’t be the economic engine that it is here in our region,” Hurford said.
The water users association is dealing with a slim water budget, said Steve Pope, the association’s manager. Ridgway Reservoir is likely to fill, but the season will really depend on summer heat, the monsoon rains and how long runoff lasts into the season.
“We’re meeting our needs, and we have a little bit of money in the bank, but we’re not sure what next week will bring,” Pope said. “Things could change very quickly here.”
This season’s uncertainty is amplifying concerns among farmers who say they’re not getting an equal share of water from the association.
A group of about 20 farmers allege that the association’s board is giving preferential treatment to certain water users in both dry and wet years, leaving one farmer with water when their neighbor has little. They’ve lodged official complaints, hired a lawyer and are even reaching out to their Congressional representative for help, said James Eklund, the group’s attorney and former director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board.
“It just hurts more when you’ve got a year like this, when it’s going to be hot, windy and dry and you’re not going to have water in your canal,” Eklund said, referring to the combination of climate and management concerns.
Pope said the association is making every attempt to deliver water consistently to every shareholder in the system. He declined to comment further.
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