Rising temperatures and an unprecedented drought pose a grave and growing peril to the river and its ecosystems.
And to make things even more uncertain, the drought is accompanied by an aridification of the West—a prolonged drying that scientists say may become a permanent fixture in the region.
Working with photographer Ted Wood, we set out to see what was happening on the Rio Grande. We started at its headwaters in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains and then followed the upper and middle portions of the river, driving nearly 500 miles to where the Rio Grande dried up, near Las Cruces, New Mexico.
After leaving the San Juan Mountains, the Rio Grande flows into the San Luis Valley, a vast, treeless agricultural region at 7,000 feet in elevation. The wind was howling when we visited in May, stripping soil off the farm fields and causing great billowing brown clouds to rise into the sky. Farmers here in Colorado’s Rio Grande County raise potatoes as well as small grains and alfalfa, with irrigation from the Rio Grande Canal.
After years of heavy overpumping of local aquifers, the state in 1969 passed a law requiring sustainable aquifer pumping. That meant some San Luis Valley irrigators have to replenish 400,000 acre-feet of groundwater to the aquifers. To allow the aquifer to refill, wells are being shut down and more will have to be taken out of production. Replacement water is expensive and growing more so. It has, and will continue to, put farmers out of business.
Warming temperatures also lead to an increase in something called sublimation. Instead of melting into liquid, more snow is turning directly into water vapor. Moreover, with so many consecutive years of drought, the vegetation and ground are parched. “When snow melts, the vegetation is getting a cut of the water, and the soils are getting a cut,” said Craig Allen, a recently retired landscape ecologist in Santa Fe with the US Geological Survey.
These changes are why it’s become increasingly difficult to predict the amount of water that will run off and be available as snow melts. In 2021, the snowpack in the Rockies was 85 percent of average, but only 25 percent of the water expected wound up in the streams and rivers—the result of increased sublimation and a parched landscape. In 2020, the snowpack was more than 100 percent of normal, but the flow was only 50 percent.
Plant and animal species that live in and along the river have adapted to the ecological conditions of this flood pulse and thrive because of it. Cottonwood trees send out clouds of white puffs that are seeds, which fall on to the flood-moistened soil, allowing them to germinate and send down their first roots.
Without the recurring flood pulse, the Rio Grande bosque in New Mexico has dried out. While the 80-year-old riparian forest is beautiful in the brilliant May sun, it is geriatric—cottonwoods live at most about a century—and its days are numbered. There is no sprouting of new cottonwood forests, and willows are largely gone.
For some the answer to the existing problems with the Rio Grande is to restore some semblance of natural water flow. Another fundamental problem is that low flows and irrigation cause the river to dry up in the summer, resulting in large-scale die-offs. “If 30 miles of river dries,” Archdeacon said, “it will kill all the fish.”
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