![]() In the same area of the mountains where the snow was 80 percent, river flows dripped out at 30 percent of their average. ![]() When it’s as hot as it has been, every living thing needs more water, so plants sucked in moisture, too. Drought Monitor, and it’s rapidly getting worse.Īlthough the Mountain West’s high-country snowpack-the source of water for a wide swath of land on both sides of the Continental Divide-was around 80 percent of its average this winter, the past 12 months have been among the hottest and driest on record there. As the snow melted, runoff was soaked up by parched soils, which are still dry from last year’s monsoon-free summer and fire-filled fall. ![]() More than half of the western United States is currently experiencing extreme drought, according to the U.S. I spent runoff season this year chasing whitewater along the spine of the Rockies, where the impacts of a long-range megadrought feel increasingly painful and obvious. We knew it was low, but we didn’t know how grim it actually was until we were in it. The river, which is usually raging this time of year, was barely braiding through its bed. “Huh, I guess there’s not much there at this level,” he said. “We hit the first Class III pretty quick around the corner.” He pushed off in his kayak, and I paddled close behind, planning to follow him into the first big wave train.īut instead, when we rounded the corner and the river dropped elevation, we scraped our boats over rocks and pivoted through skinny channels. “So just a heads-up,” said my friend Ted, who was shin-deep in the icy snowmelt of Colorado’s Roaring Fork River.
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