Erik Fritchman, a farmer who grows apples and peaches on a sunny mesa in Cedaredge, Colo., should be tending his new saplings right now, but with so little water this spring, he is uprooting trees instead. Better that, he said, than watch them die of thirst.<\/p>\n
Hundreds of miles downstream, the mayor of the tiny desert town of Kearny, Ariz., is warning residents they will run out of water by July unless they take drastic measures now. He suggested showering together or wearing clothes three times before washing them.<\/p>\n
The two towns are emblems of a water crisis spreading across the American West after one of its hottest, driest winters ever \u2014 and one that experts warn is a preview of hotter and drier years to come.<\/p>\n
Drought, which now covers 70 percent of the West<\/a>, is forcing cities to restrict water use and farmers to abandon their fields, while raising pressure on Western states and the Trump administration to avert an all-out collapse along the dwindling Colorado River.<\/p>\n Color-coded maps of mountain snowpack<\/a> glow a four-alarm red, illustrating river basins that have as little as 10 percent of their normal snow levels \u2014 or none at all. In western Nebraska or Oklahoma, winter wheat crops are<\/a> withering, and early-season grass fires have incinerated a million acres, including pastures and croplands.<\/p>\n Water sources are \u201cjust drying up,\u201d said James Holiman, a worker with the Colorado Division of Water Resources who manages a network of reservoirs and creeks that bring water to farms. Every day, farmers walk into his office in Cedaredge, in western Colorado, asking when \u2014 or if \u2014 they are going to see anything in their irrigation ditches.<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t have water for them,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n In a normal year, deep snowfields that served rich and adventurous skiers and snowboarders over the winter would be melting high in the Rockies and trickling into rivers that fill reservoirs and supply water to cities and farms. But unusual winter warmth starved ski resorts of their life blood; then a record-breaking heat wave in March melted what was there far too early<\/a>. <\/p>\n The parched ground is sponging up much of the remaining moisture before runoff can reach streams, a bad omen for summer wildfires. And gradually rising temperatures mean the air is capable of holding more moisture that it draws from the soil.<\/p>\n Climate models have predicted that scenario for decades, yet \u201cseeing it unfold this year was pretty shocking,\u201d said Daniel McEvoy, a regional climatologist at the Desert Research Institute in Nevada.<\/p>\n The drought conditions make it all the more urgent for the seven Western states that rely on the Colorado River to reach a new agreement on how to share its dwindling flows. The river provides water to 40 million people and 5.5 million acres of farms, but it is only expected to deliver about 13 percent of normal runoff to Lake Powell, the huge reservoir along the Utah-Arizona border that supplies water and hydroelectric power to millions.<\/p>\n To keep Lake Powell from dropping so low it can no longer produce power, the federal government is draining up to 1 million acre feet from the Flaming Gorge Reservoir in Wyoming and sending its water south. An acre-foot of water is equivalent to about 326,000 gallons, about what two or three American households use in a year.<\/p>\n That is raising concerns across the Colorado River basin about diminished emergency water supplies.<\/p>\n The states in the lower Colorado River basin \u2014 Arizona, Nevada and California \u2014 agreed to draw 3.2 million acre feet less from the river system \u2014 as much as several million households use in a year. In exchange, they argued, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico must commit to permanent water cuts. <\/p>\n But those upper-basin states have so far balked.<\/p>\n A preliminary plan the federal Bureau of Reclamation could impose by October could demand similarly large annual cuts across the lower basin states over the next decade, according to a May 13 briefing by Arizona water officials. But any additional cuts would not come easily, said Maxwell Wilson, Phoenix\u2019s water resources management adviser.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is going to be very, very hard,\u201d Mr. Wilson said. \u201cThere\u2019s no more water after this.\u201d<\/p>\n Long-term solutions will require more creativity, said Christopher Kuzdas, a water program director for Environmental Defense Fund based in Arizona.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we\u2019re doing just isn\u2019t working,\u201d Mr. Kuzdas said. \u201cWe must free ourselves from this endless cycle of depletion.\u201d<\/p>\n For now, governments are scrambling. Denver is draining a mountain reservoir popular for fishing and sending that water farther downstream, to minimize losses from evaporation.<\/p>\n Along the rivers, rafting outfitters and fishing guides are bracing for a shortened season without much white water. A marina in Frisco, Colo., decided against opening at all this season because of low water levels at the mountain-ringed Dillon Reservoir.<\/p>\n