SUMMIT COUNTY – The recent snowfall has been a blessing for the north-central Colorado ski resorts, but it also helps the state play catch up in meeting growing water needs once the spring thaw begins.
A relatively dry February and Marchaftera strong start to the 2015-16 ski season resulted in slightly below-average snowpacks. Area percentages of customary levels have varied from between the mid-80s to mid-90s ahead of this week’s storms, which delivered more than 2 feet of fresh snow more than 72 hours in some areas of north and central Colorado. That’s led to an immediate impact and quickly bumped north-central Colorado snowpack to greater than average levels at this point of the winter.
It’s important to the entire state that this precipitation arrives before too long or it won’t have the desired effect of satisfying its late-spring and early-summer water demands.
“In a normal year, past the beginning of May, that’s when you’re not really seeing as much influence from snowpack accumulation,” said Karl Wetlaufer, assistant snow survey supervisor at the Natural Resources Conservation Service. “You typically see that big peak in streamflow in late-May or early-June, about a month after the highest snowpack, more or less.”
That normal quota is critical for providing necessary water supplies for the multitude of uses throughout Colorado, as well as its neighboring states. Those uses range from drinking water and irrigation for farms to recreational activities such as fishing and rafting, even to hydroelectricity at the Glen Canyon Dam on Lake Powell in northern Arizona, where the Colorado River heads before ultimately flowing into Mexico’s Gulf of California.
“Lake Powell is the ultimate barometer,” said Jim Pokrandt, chair of the Colorado Basin Roundtable and director of community affairs for the Colorado River Water Conservation District. “It’s the savings account by which we meet Lower Basin obligations and the big measure of how our water supply is.”
The Colorado River, which runs through parts of seven states, is divided into the Upper and Lower basins via the Colorado River Compact. In the Upper Basin are Colorado and Wyoming, New Mexico and Utah, and in the Lower Basin are California and Nevada. Portions of Arizona are in the Upper Basin and other portions are in the Lower Basin.
“We’re snow farmers,” added Pokrandt. “We follow snowpack figures because the snowpack crop is what feeds the Colorado River, which feeds the West. It’s vitally important we raise a good crop each year.”
Traditionally, the annual snowpack is built through mid-to-late-April, so there’s still time to reach routine levels. Even so, while most of Summit County’s measuring sites at Loveland Ski Area, Arapahoe Basin, Copper Mountain, Hoosier Pass and Summit Ranch are now each above 100-percent levels, many other portions of the state remain a shade under average totals.
According to the Natural Resources Conservation Service, the statewide snow-water equivalent as of Thursday was 95 percent of median levels. That missing 5 percent is not of major concern, so long as future weather conditions stay consistent.
“At this point, we are more and more confident as the days go by that we’re in pretty good shape as far as snowpack from a streamflow standpoint,” said Wetlaufer. “If the proverbial faucets turned off right now and there was no more snowpack, then we’d see lower levels. But it’s pretty likely that we’ll continue to get more precipitation in next month or so, and it’s looking encouraging.”
