For Mike Vickrey, a rancher in Wyoming's Upper Green River Valley, this summer delivered another harsh lesson about the unpredictability of water in the arid West.
Despite what appeared to be a promising winter snowpack, Vickrey had to shut off irrigation to his hay meadows about 10 days earlier than normal.
"The winter was OK, although I don't think it was as good as all the SNOTEL (snowpack telemetry) were telling us," Vickrey told Cowboy State Daily. "The grass was so dry, it just took more moisture to suck up into the ground early."
Vickrey wonders if early water cutoffs are here to stay as all the states in the Colorado River Basin continue to negotiate how to manage Lake Mead and Lake Powell downstream as less and less water flows through a watershed stretching from the Wind River Mountains to Mexico’s Sea of Cortez.
Since 1897, the Vickrey ranch has drawn water from the Upper Green River.
Lately, hay production has fluctuated from around 2,500 tons in good years down to 1,600 tons or less in bad years.
That's one reason Vickrey is encouraging others to join him at an upcoming public meeting in Pinedale, which is one of four outreach meetings Wyoming officials are hosting next week to discuss the state's role in managing Colorado River water.
“There is no upstream from here,” said Vickrey. “We don't have a Lake Mead or a Lake Powell where we can save water on good years. We get whatever Mother Nature gives us pretty much every year, and that's what we get."
The amount of water Wyoming gets to keep as a member of the more than 100-year-old congressionally created Colorado River Compact will depend on what happens during at-times secretive negotiations over the next several months, water policy watchdogs say.
In Wyoming next week, there will be opportunities to tune into a conversation that will shape the future of the state’s Upper Green River and Little Snake River watersheds.
"My adage is, ‘The world is controlled by those that show up,’" Vickrey said. "So, if you've got a concern, whether it's fishermen, it doesn't matter who it is, you should show up."
New Measuring Tech
Jeff Cowley, administrator of the Interstate Streams Division at the Wyoming State Engineer's Office, told Cowboy State Daily that the upcoming meetings will introduce new technology designed to help Wyoming better track its water usage.
The state is dispersing about $6 million in "diversion measurement and telemetry" equipment for ditches in the Green and Little Snake River basins.
"You can't protect what you can't measure," Cowley said. "And we need to measure water diversions so that we know what water is being diverted and, as important, what water is not being diverted."
The measurement program is funded through Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act money granted to the Upper Colorado River Commission. Wyoming officials plan to provide measuring devices to landowners at little to no cost. They won't be completely free, but should be relatively inexpensive, Cowley said.
The new measurement systems will be deployed beyond Wyoming on water diversions across the more than 125,000 Colorado River water rights and 20,000 points of diversion in the four Upper Basin states.
Cowley said this technology represents part of Wyoming's broader strategy to become "the absolute water experts on Wyoming water use so that no one else can step in and tell us otherwise."
The measurement program comes as Wyoming navigates increasingly complex negotiations over Colorado River water among seven states that depend on the system.
The Colorado River Compact is a 1922 agreement that divides the river's water between seven U.S. states in the upper and lower basins, allocating usage rights and obligations to prevent legal disputes and support regional growth.
The original compact allocated 7.5 million acre-feet to upper basin states (including Wyoming) and 8.5 million acre-feet to lower basin states. But the river that supported those allocations has shrunk significantly.
"In the beginning, when they negotiated the compacts, we had a 16-to-18-million-acre-foot river," Cowley said. "Ever since that time, the river has declined again and again. And I think now our most recent averages are 11.8 million acre feet. So that makes the math really hard when you're trying to divvy that up."
"The lower basin has a bit more of a guarantee because they have Lake Mead above them," Cowley added, referring to the massive reservoir that helps those states manage their water supplies. "Even though the largest use in the Lower Basin is agriculture, there are also large population centers … Phoenix or LA or Las Vegas ... very large metropolitan areas also utilize that Colorado River water."
With that demand from downriver, Wyoming is in a constant fight to keep what it’s entitled to.
"We rarely, if ever, get a full supply of water in the upper basin," Cowley said. "And that's why we've never fully developed into our apportionment from the [1922] compact."
Tik Tapped
Last summer, the Wyoming Survey and Analysis Center at UW recruited 500 Wyoming residents and questioned them about water.
“Risk perception of changing water resources in Wyoming was high, with more than 80% of respondents reporting Wyoming is susceptible and 68.4% reporting their own local community is susceptible to changing water resources,” reported the center. “Moreover, two-thirds of respondents (66.5%) believe there are dire consequences.”
The survey revealed there’s a wide audience interested in water issues, and Teal Lehto — a Colorado River policy watchdog on social media — is tapping into it.
Since 2022, Lehto has gone by Western Water Girl on TikTok and Instagram, and she hopes to inspire more Wyoming residents to pay close attention to Colorado River issues.
Lehto is based in Durango, Colorado, and has been tracking water policy issues since college. She sees the current negotiations as critical for the basin's future.
"The stakes could not be higher," Lehto told Cowboy State Daily. "The decisions that are being made right now will absolutely determine who's going to shoulder the burden of necessary cuts within the basin in order to stabilize the reservoirs."
She warns that California has floated what she calls "the nuclear option" — a “compact call” that could force Wyoming irrigators to shut off their headgates.
“All across the upper basin, having to shut headgates for irrigators to allow that water to go downstream to California,” said Lehto, characterizing such a move as an unlikely, worst-case scenario.
"So far that's never happened," Lehto said. "But it's something that the Lower Basin has threatened repeatedly throughout these negotiations."
Lehto emphasized that the closed-door nature of current negotiations makes Wyoming's public meetings particularly valuable.
"This is kind of an insane natural resources management process because all of the people who are making the decisions for the post-2026 guidelines are appointed officials, and they're making those decisions behind closed doors," she said. "It's really unique that the state of Wyoming is offering a listening session like this."
Wyoming’s representative at the Colorado River Compact negotiations is State Engineer Brandon Gebhart, whose office is hosting the upcoming public meetings.
Lehto’s advice to Wyoming residents: "Anybody who's concerned about the water future for the Colorado River basin should take advantage of that opportunity."
