On July 23 at 6 p.m., Creation Care Pagosa will present a program about the current condition of the Colorado River Basin and the nine-month El Nino precipitation outlook.
The meeting will be held in the Community United Methodist Church Fellowship Hall, 434 Lewis St.
A potluck dinner will begin at 6 p.m. with the program starting at 6:30 p.m.
Featured speakers will be Chuck Riehm, vice president of the San Juan Water Conservancy District, and Arleen Prochazka of the Pagosa Weather Team.
Please enter through the side door by the parking lot.
Come learn the current status of the Colorado River and our precipitation outlook for Pagosa area. Then participate with your neighbors on a discussion of our 25-year drought in the Southwest, including the Colorado River Compact negotiations and the nine-month outlook for El Nino. What’s needed is not more precipitation, since we can’t control that. The focus should be on planning for a solid, common ground on which to build solutions, together.
A recent publication (Keep the River Running, https://keeptheriverrunning.com/state-of-the-basin-report/) states the Colorado River Basin’s path forward from 2026 will be a challenging one. A quarter-century drought is deepening, an old governance system (Compact of 1922) is expiring, and the world outside the basin is also struggling with hotter temperatures and lack of coordination on climate threats.
A stark hydrological reality leaves little time to debate the best course. The river is carrying drastically less water. Its two massive reservoirs (Mead and Powell) are severely depleted. The snowpack that feeds them is at historic lows. Even the region’s reserve — groundwater — is quickly disappearing.
Reality is that strategies for an adaptive, resilient West exist — and many are already out there in action, just waiting to be harnessed.
Cities have shown that with the right efficiency measures and incentives, they can drive down water consumption even as their populations grow. Farmers are upgrading to new equipment and researching new crops. Water recycling is moving from stigma to standard practice, and there’s potential to adopt it in other locations. Nature-based solutions like beaver dam analogs are recharging aquifers for a fraction of the cost of a hard infrastructure, and creating ecosystems that can yield dividends for years.
The problem is not that the tools do not exist; it is that they need to be scaled and more widely adopted by communities across the Southwest. As a century of misguided expectations over the river’s flow evaporate in the summer of 2026, now is the time to act.
Every stakeholder in the Colorado River Basin faces the same shrinking river, the same expiring framework and the same uncertainties around an unstable climate. As the river continues to dwindle, what’s needed is not more water — it is the solid, common ground on which to build a path forward.
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