Most people only know Flaming Gorge if they fish. It’s a 91-mile reservoir on the Green River that straddles the Utah-Wyoming line, it’s where someone pulled a 51-pound lake trout out of the water, and it’s about as far from the Lake Powell news cycle as a reservoir on the same river system can get. Since April, though, Flaming Gorge has been doing Lake Powell’s heavy lifting.<\/p>\n
The dam that holds it back has spent six months letting water out faster than the river brings it in, on purpose, so that a much bigger dam a few hundred river miles downstream can keep its turbines spinning. The reservoir behind it has dropped about 34 feet in the process. And the states that own that water have already written to Washington to say they’d like it back.<\/p>\n
So how does draining one reservoir save another one?<\/p>\n
Glen Canyon Dam, the concrete wall that makes Lake Powell, generates electricity by dropping water through eight turbines. Once the lake surface falls to 3,490 feet above sea level, the Bureau of Reclamation shuts those turbines down to keep them from chewing themselves up on vapor bubbles. Below that line the only way water gets out of the dam is through four smaller pipes near the bottom, and we’ve written before<\/a> about why nobody wants to run the Colorado River through those for any length of time.<\/p>\n Back in April, Reclamation’s own model said the lake would cross that line by August without help. The winter snowpack was the lowest on record, March had been unusually hot, and the whole Colorado River system was sitting at about 36 percent of capacity. So on April 17 the agency announced two moves<\/a>, and I’d describe them as the plumbing equivalent of closing one valve and opening another.<\/p>\n First, it cut the amount of water Lake Powell sends downstream to Lake Mead this water year from 7.48 million acre-feet to 6.0 million. Second, it ordered Flaming Gorge Dam to release an extra 660,000 to 1 million acre-feet toward Lake Powell between April of this year and April of next. Reclamation figured the two moves together would lift Powell by roughly 54 feet compared with doing nothing.<\/p>\n If you’re not used to acre-feet, one of them is a foot of water spread across an acre, which works out to about half an Olympic swimming pool. A million of them is a lot of swimming pools.<\/p>\n Flaming Gorge Dam is a thin-arch dam, which basically means it’s a curved shell of concrete that leans into the canyon walls and lets the rock do most of the work holding the water back. Reclamation’s spec sheet<\/a> puts it at 502 feet from bedrock to crest, 455 feet above the old river channel, and 1,285 feet long along the top. It went up in the early 1960s.<\/p>\n When the reservoir is full, at an elevation of 6,040 feet, it holds 3,788,900 acre-feet and covers 42,020 acres. Three generators at the base of the dam make about 150 megawatts between them, enough for roughly 50,000 homes, and that power gets sold across seven Western states.<\/p>\n Which is why a million acre-feet matters. Reclamation’s figure for the start of the releases was a reservoir about 82 percent full, holding roughly 3.01 million acre-feet. Take a million out of that and you’ve removed about a third of what was there, and the agency’s own forecast said the surface would fall about 35 feet over the year and end up near 59 percent of capacity.<\/p>\n That’s a quarter of the whole reservoir, give or take.<\/p>\n From the looks of things, yes. August was supposed to be the month Glen Canyon’s turbines stopped, and they didn’t. Reclamation’s Glen Canyon operations page<\/a> had Lake Powell at 3,518.08 feet at the end of September, holding 5.16 million acre-feet, or 22 percent of its live capacity. The daily gauge reading for October 19 was 3,520.7 feet, which leaves the turbines a cushion of about 31 feet. Meanwhile Flaming Gorge has been paying for it. Reclamation’s status update on October 4 put the reservoir at 6,006.82 feet, 68 percent of live storage and about 33 feet below full pool. The daily readings since then have it slipping a little further, to around 6,005.5 feet by October 20, and the agency says the extra releases keep running through April 2027.<\/p>\n One thing I found pretty interesting: back in the spring, Wyoming’s state engineer Brandon Gebhart warned that the reservoir could be sitting at about 6,006 feet by October, right when the kokanee salmon start spawning. Reclamation’s October 4 reading was 6,006.82. So the forecast was good to within a foot, which is either reassuring or slightly unnerving depending on how you feel about federal water models.<\/p>\n Admittedly, I can’t tell you how much of the million acre-feet has actually gone out the gates so far. Reclamation publishes the planned range on its Flaming Gorge page<\/a> and the daily release numbers, but I couldn’t find a running total of the drought water on its own, and some of what leaves the dam evaporates or soaks into the riverbed before it ever reaches Powell. The commission that represents the upstream states says the final figure will end up at about a million.<\/p>\n Which brings us to the letter. On September 14, the four-member Upper Colorado River Commission, the body that speaks for Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico on the river, voted to write to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. The gist, as Cowboy State Daily<\/a> reported it, was two things: the Flaming Gorge releases appear to have averted the crisis, and recovering that water is a priority once the hydrology improves.<\/p>\n I’d call that a pretty reasonable ask. The commission’s executive director, Chuck Collum, described the reservoir as about 70 percent full and roughly 38 feet below normal, which is a slightly different yardstick from Reclamation’s full-pool number but tells the same story. Colorado’s commissioner, Becky Mitchell, pointed out that Blue Mesa Reservoir in her state is barely above its own power pool, and Reclamation has already said it isn’t planning to tap Blue Mesa or Navajo for extra releases because they don’t have the water to give.<\/p>\n Gebhart, who sits on the commission for Wyoming, put the upstream frustration plainly: “We simply don’t have the water security and certainty” that the Lower Basin states have enjoyed, he said. Wyoming has limited storage of its own, and he’s already talking about 2027 being another dry year.<\/p>\n Now, the promise that the water will be “fully recovered” has been part of the deal since April, in the commission’s own words, when it first signed off on the releases. What I can’t find anywhere, though, is a schedule. The water comes back when there’s snow to send, and nobody can put a date on snow.<\/p>\n Reclamation updated its 24-Month Study on October 15, and that’s the document that tells you whether all of this bought enough time. In the most probable case, with Powell releasing 6.0 million acre-feet next year, the lake ends the 2027 water year at 3,540.65 feet. If Reclamation decides to release 7.0 million instead, that drops to 3,525.48.<\/p>\n Then there’s the dry scenario, the one the agency says nine years out of ten will beat. That version has Lake Powell finishing the water year at 3,497.03 feet.<\/p>\n That’s seven feet above the turbine line, after a million acre-feet from Flaming Gorge, and it’s a pretty thin margin for a dam that size. It’s also why the downstream story doesn’t end at Powell: the cut in Powell’s releases is the same reason the federal forecast has Hoover Dam losing most of its generating capacity<\/a> at the other end of the Grand Canyon.<\/p>\n The wet scenario, for what it’s worth, puts Powell at 3,606.39 feet, which would make this whole exercise look like an overreaction. Nobody in Wyoming is planning around that one.<\/p>\n Reclamation says the Flaming Gorge releases continue through April 2027, and the next Flaming Gorge Working Group meeting, the public forum where the agency explains what it’s doing with the dam, isn’t scheduled until March 2027. By then the dam will have given up its million acre-feet, or close to it, and the snowpack will have decided whether Wyoming gets any of it back.<\/p>\nThe dam doing the giving is a 502-foot sliver of concrete<\/h2>\n
So did it work?<\/h2>\n
Wyoming wants the water back<\/h2>\n
The forecast still has Powell within seven feet of the line<\/h2>\n