Climate change is punishing the Colorado River — and fueling devastating wildfires on the basin

LAKE GRANBY — On a Thursday afternoon in October, 2020, Jeff Stahla hit the road east, with a plan to meander his way home from the Western Slope to Loveland via scenic byways that flirt with the Colorado River for part of its twisting, tumbling journey down from headwaters high in Rocky Mountain National Park.

The route would add hours to his trip, and skirt the East Troublesome fire, which had been spreading northeast of Kremmling for more than a week, but Stahla, 50, is an outdoors lover and Colorado native. He also was the former editor of the Loveland newspaper, with a fancy camera in the backseat of his car, emergency scanner apps on his phone, and an inkling something had changed for the worse.

“From near Glenwood Springs, I could see the smoke and recognize that it was a much bigger plume of smoke than just a few days earlier,” Stahla said. The roads were open, so he pressed on.

As he neared Kremmling, though, it became heartbreakingly clear that the East Troublesome fire was growing faster than any news about it could be delivered — by or to the media, or those fighting and fleeing on the ground.

“It looked like Mordor, just glowing orange. Horizon-to-horizon, the fire was spreading in the treetops,” Stahla said. “And you just knew that it was a devastating forest fire because it was burning the wood and the canopy rather than just the debris on the forest floor.”

The East Troublesome fire ignited Oct. 14, 2020 in the drainage basin of its namesake Colorado River tributary in Grand County.

The Colorado River itself begins west of the Continental Divide in Rocky Mountain National Park, flowing downhill as a clear mountain stream into Grand Lake, which is connected by canal to Shadow Mountain Reservoir, and then on to Lake Granby.

This gathering conflagration threatened the most important river in the Southwest at its virtual beginning, and at one of the locations its waters are gathered for transferal east to the Front Range.   

For more than a week, the fire grew defiantly but mostly as expected, through backcountry overseen by the federal Bureau of Land Management.

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That changed on Oct. 22, when high winds whipped it into a steam-rolling inferno that within a 24-hour period grew from 20,000 to more than 150,000 acres, on its way into Colorado history as the state's second-most-destructive fire.

“Early that day, the fire was still miles away. Then it wasn’t. People were getting calls saying be ready to evacuate, and then immediately getting a call saying, ‘No, it’s time to evacuate,’” said Stahla. “There’s a section in Rocky Mountain National Park that looks like waves of grass, because (the trees) they’re all bent over. That’s how strong the winds were.”

Before he turned south and took an alternate route home, the public information officer for Northern Water pulled over and recorded the scene: A nightmare of fire and wind.

A nightmare to come, for the Colorado River and its watersheds.

Fire bedevils the parched Colorado

Historic drought and low-runoff conditions have impacted the Colorado River Basin since 2000, according to reports from the U.S. Department of Interior, among prolific other documentation.

The prolonged consequences of drought and warming threaten the future of drinking water, and already have negatively impacted irrigation, agriculture, the water recreation industry, conservation and natural habitat, endangered species, hydroelectric generation, as well as many other facets of life in the Southwest.

In testimony before Congress in June, Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton noted both Lake Powell and Lake Mead — the two largest reservoirs in the United States, both fed by the Colorado River — were at historic low levels at 28% of combined storage capacity.

"The system is at a tipping point," Touton warned.

Capping her alarming testimony, Touton said the Colorado River system could collapse without change. 

Drought and a warming climate are a double-edged sword.

Not only is the river basin environment robbed of moisture, it primes the land for fires that burn bigger and faster. For fires that affect the broader riverscape in more insidious, devastating ways.

A water system overtaken

“We call the 22nd (of October, 2020) the night that fire overtook our (Colorado-Big Thompson) project,” said Stahla, whose utility harnesses some of the early largesse of the Colorado River and its tributaries into reservoirs that provide water to more than a million residents, and about 615,000 acres of irrigated land, on the east side of the Continental Divide.

“I knew that this was certainly going to be a fire that would have long term effects,” he said.

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Few outside Northern Water know how close the system came to a catastrophic shutdown that night, as the East Troublesome fire — and, to the north, another record-breaking megafire, Cameron Peak — swept towards Grand Lake and the pump plant at Lake Granby that delivers water to much of the Front Range by way of a tunnel under the Continental Divide.

It would be almost a year before Northern Water would have a true understanding of the scope of the damage, and the battle to come, to save and protect the reservoirs and Colorado River tributaries that feed them.

“Almost 90% of the Willow Creek Basin was impacted," Stahla said. "Water that’s normally clear, looks like chocolate milk … and that’s just a small glimpse into the devastation of fire, of this fire, of climate change, of drought … ”

Of elements, out of balance.

'Just look up'

Almost all the drinking and irrigation water in Colorado comes from its major rivers, which — unlike in some other parts of the country — don’t bubble up from deep in the ground.

They’re created by high-altitude snow that melts and forms rivulets and tributaries that feed major streams and rivers, the most essential of which — supplying water to seven states and two countries — is the river that, in 1921, was officially named for the state in which it originates.

About 50% of Denver’s drinking water, and 70% of the water in Colorado Springs, comes from the Colorado River Basin.

“We are a snowmelt driven system. Just look up. The mountains, that’s our watershed," said the Nature Conservancy’s Colorado River Director Taylor Hawes. "When it’s lost, there’s nothing else to make up for it.”

Even before the era of megadroughts and megafires, the snowmelt-driven Colorado River sometimes struggled to supply its ever-growing population of “clients” — now 40 million people, before the river dries up shy of its historic delta, in the Gulf of California.

“If we have a bad runoff year and the water’s not making it to the river, they just don’t have the water,” Hawes said. “How do you plan for that as a business person when you have no alternative source?”

An era of mega-challenges

Fires have always been a threat to the terrain and water of Colorado, but they’re also part of a vibrant ecosystem. A healthy forest in fact anticipates and relies on them; some pine cones won’t open until superheated.

“Forests need fires, but the kinds of fires they need are not the kinds of fires we’re having more and more of,” Stahla said.

Record dry conditions, combined with generations of fire suppression, have created forests full of built-up fuel, the ideal conditions for a megafire.

Once they've been extinguished, the fallout in the environment continues.

“The devastating fires … they’re creating what’s called hydrophobic soils, and that’s just like it sounds: The soil fears water. The water can’t penetrate during snow storms or rain storms and so it just runs off quickly,” Stahla said. “It’s not turning the soil into glass per se, but it’s creating that crust on top that moisture can’t penetrate.”

Heavy rains or runoff over hydrophobic soils wash away the collected soot and ash deposited by a fire, and sluice it directly into the water system.

That’s not all they can do in a fire-ravaged landscape.

“There were some times those monsoon rains caused the Troublesome Creek and Willow Creek to flood their banks and cause damage to highway 125, which goes from Granby to Walden … and several times over the course of the summer, that highway was shut down because of flooding debris on the roadway,” Stahla said.

Colorado Springs Utilities faced similar problems after the Waldo Canyon fire, in June 2012. That “burn scar” west of Colorado Springs led to historically-destructive flooding during heavy rains the following fall.

Heavy rains over the burn scar left by 2020’s Grizzly Creek fire led to debris-slides that closed Interstate 70 in Glenwood Canyon multiple times the following summer, at one point burying the highway in as much as 15-feet of mud and rocks. Intermittent closures have continued in the summer of 2022, as flash-flood warnings make travel through that unstable, fire-ravaged corridor too risky.

One more reminder of the horrors that don’t end when a fire does.

Extra, often Herculean efforts are required to clean the post-fire snow runoff of debris — branches, soot and ash — that washes into the tributaries feeding the river and reservoirs.

Mitigation efforts aim to filter out debris before it can pollute waterways, but cleanup, via booms and other measures, isn’t fast, and it isn’t cheap. Spending on wildfire recovery after the East Troublesome fire totals about $20 million, and the work is far from done, Stahla said.

“We recognized that fire would alter the quantity and quality of the water that would be going into the Colorado-Big Thompson Project … for years to come,” Stahla said.

A history repeated

The Hayman fire was the Voldemort of fires, before megafires were common parlance.

That forest fire ignited on June 8, 2002, 35 northwest of Colorado Springs, and for almost 20 years was the largest wildfire in the state’s recorded history, destroying more than 138,114 acres.

“The fire happened 20 years ago … it and other fires created a lot of sedimentation issues for us that we’re still dealing with today,” said Todd Hartman, a spokesperson for Denver Water.

But the advent of a new age of recorded knowledge about wildfire devastation, and watersheds, really began in 1996.

“In some ways, the fire in 1996, called the Buffalo Creek fire — which has kind of been forgotten — weirdly that one is as problematic to Denver Water as the Hayman, because it so directly impacted one part of our system,” Hartman said. “It was our first real experience with enormous erosion and sedimentation of one of our reservoirs. To me, the 2000s kind of started it (the megafire era), but that fire in 1996 was the curtain raiser in a lot of ways.”

That fire burned 12,000 acres immediately upstream of the Strontia Springs reservoir. Two months later, flash-flooding combined with “severe-erosion” led to a dump of 160,000 cubic yards — or about 17,000 dump truck loads — of sediment into the reservoir through which 80% of Denver’s water passes.

“There have always been sediment flows in the South Platte River system, but it wasn’t until the 1996 Buffalo Creek fire that the significance of the problem became clear,” Hartman said.

More than 25 years later, he said the water utility is still dealing with the silt and debris from that fire.

Fire damage runs deep

A massive snow dump in late October, 2020, put an end to the East Troublesome fire’s unchecked rampage through Grand County, and across the Divide towards Estes Park. It was an unforeseen boon for those fighting to save Colorado’s forests, cities and watersheds.

But it also came with complications.

“That snowstorm that came in that helped stop the advance of the fire also covered the soils here,” Stahla said. “It really became kind of the base snow, and then other snow landed on top of it.”

It wasn’t until the snows finally melted off, in the summer of 2021, that scientists were able to gain a true understanding of what had happened at the soil level.

“We could make observations and make guesses, but we couldn’t see the soil because of the snow,” Stahla said. “It was only as we were able to refine those readings that we knew what challenges we were facing. So the good news of having snow that covered up the fire and helped to put it out also turned into the challenge of masking what some of the damage was.”

Once that sediment collects in the river — and there’s “no big runoff like there used to be” to wash it away — it can fundamentally change the environment, said Tim Romano, a Boulder-based photographer and co-founder of Angling Trade Magazine.

“That sediment and silt doesn’t move along like it should. It kills bug life, which in turn kills fish life, which in turn kills bird life, and on and on,” he said. “So everything really is all interconnected.”

One way Stahla’s utility, and others are fighting against the outcome of post-fire “hydrophobic soils” is through aerial drops of mulch into ravaged areas.

“The chips on the ground are meant to capture the energy from the raindrops that come down, so instead of dislodging soil it’s hitting those wood chips,” Stahla said. “It’s keeping soils in place and making it so it’s not eroding and sending gunk into the water.”

Booms with collection barriers that extend under the water have been set up to collect the larger debris that washes down, over hydrophobic soils, into the reservoirs, to keep them from traveling into the system. Such methods are a go-to in modern times.

Stahla worries they won’t be enough, heading into the future.

Fire is a natural part of the environment, but when human factors fundamentally alter that equation, predicting — and protecting from — the outcome is much more complicated.

“What is sobering for all of us is that there’s still a lot of fuel left in the forests around here. We’re also living through changes in climate that are causing dryer overall seasons and for warmer temperatures, which also are part of what creates the larger and more devastating wildfires,” Stahla said.

On June 3, 2022, Stahla stood on the shores of Grand Lake, in front of the Alva B. Adams tunnel, trying to explain how quiet heroics saved this 75-year-old wonder of engineering — a marvel that maintains Front Range life as many know it — on the night of October 22, 2020.

“The relationship between drought, fire, and the watersheds, is complicated … and unfortunately there are many, many hundreds of more acres in the watersheds of the rivers that contribute to Colorado's water profile … ” that are at risk, he said.

Explaining how what's happened before is only a harbinger of what’s to come, in a way that will hit home to those who only see one aspect of the elephant in the room — who maybe don’t believe there’s an elephant at all, so long as their taps keep flowing — is an uphill challenge, say those who've tried. 

“If you’re not outside doing this kind of stuff you don’t really understand it. I’m not saying that’s bad, it’s just unfortunate,” said Romano of Angling Trade Magazine, who documented the before and after of the East Troublesome fire in Rocky Mountain National Park in a 2021 photo essay for the magazine American Rivers.

He chokes up today even talking about the project.

“Some really serious things are happening and people just aren’t seeing it. They’re not on the river, they’re not out in the woods,” he said. “If they were, I think they’d be appalled.”