As the temperatures warm up across the West, all eyes remain on the water levels at lakes Powell and Mead. Experts say there is still plenty of snowpack to add to the Colorado River as well. Even on a windy Monday, people still want to visit Lake Mead.
California and Colorado are both receiving impressive amounts of snow.
That’s good for us because snow in the Rocky Mountains ultimately ends up in the Colorado River, which leads to Lake Mead.
That snow is hitting places like the Copper Mountain Ski Resort, which sits 9,700 feet up in Frisco, Colorado. That’s about an hour and a half west of Denver.
Colorado is awash in white this spring, with statewide snowpack topping 140% of average this week, well above the reading a year ago, when it stood at just 97% of normal.
“Conditions in the American West are way better than they were last year at this time,” state climatologist Russ Schumacher said Tuesday at a joint meeting Tuesday of the Water Availability Task Force and the Governor’s Flood Task Force.
About 60% percent of the Colorado River starts as snow in Colorado. That’s a water lifeline for more than 40 million people from Wyoming to Mexico. This year’s snowpack is off to a good start, but the basin would need years of back-to-back wet conditions to help erase drought.
As unseasonable fall warmth bakes the Rocky Mountain hillsides, veteran snowmaker Tony Wrone has come to terms with the fact that these are no longer the winters of his youth. “Last year, we had a real hard time because it was so warm in November,” Wrone, who began making snow in Keystone, Colo., in 1996, told The Hill. “Back then, I think we opened one year there around Oct. 18 or something like that,” said Wrone, a snowmaking manager at the Aspen Snowmass resort.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
