Drought Snapshot of a drought in progress Southwest Colorado's snowpack is dismal and melting fast.

Southwestern Colorado took on the feeling of spring in late January of this year. Skies were sunny and temperatures reached into the fifties for a few days in a row, nearing sixty degrees on one day. Though the warm spell was unseasonable, it wasn’t at all unusual. We even have a name for it: The January Thaw, a little respite from the chill and the snow of winter when we find south-facing decks where we can store up some vitamin D before winter returns for its brutal second half.

But this year, the January Thaw not only stretched beyond its usual two weeks — the mercury topped 40 degrees on 23 days that month — but also extended into the rest of the “winter.” We had a December thaw; I saw a dandelion blooming in Durango on Dec. 8. We had a February thaw, during which six 60+ degree days closed the nordic center at 9,000 feet and brought golfers onto the greens at 6,600 feet. And we had a March thaw, more like a scorcher, which coaxed apricot and even apple blossoms out, surely to be killed by an April frost.

All that warm sunshine in place of what normally would be serious snow days have pretty much desiccated this corner of the state. And this is how it looks:



… this year’s snowpack is the sparsest since 2002. (The graph on the left shows water years from 2008 through 2011; the graph on the right shows 2002 through 2005.) That, of course, was one of the driest years ever across much of the West, leading to record-breaking mega-fires and kickstarting the decade of diminishing levels at Lakes Powell and Mead (see the blue line in the graph on the right). As the graphs show, it’s unusual to see the snowpack increase after April 1, and we're going into another potentially record-breaking warm spell as I write this at the end of March. So without some bizarro weather reversal, we can expect a pathetic spring runoff, crappy boating, a nasty wildfire season and a rough summer for farmers and water managers. The good news is that other parts of the state aren’t looking quite so parched. The bad news is that this corner of the state is critical to the region’s water supply, holding the headwaters of four major tributaries of the Colorado River, and the snowpack across the upper Colorado River Basin is universally below average.

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Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News.