How a Western Slope Colorado water district is adapting to the drought crisis and looking ahead to build long-term resiliency
From its headwaters in the Flat Tops, the Yampa River basin includes a system of tributaries, reservoirs and ditches — providing a lifeline for agricultural and recreation economies. The Upper Yampa Water Conservation District is looking to new tech, data to help these communities survive.
Coming off Colorado’s lowest snowpack on record and into a period of extreme drought, producers, water managers and businesses in mountain communities have been dealing firsthand with a water crisis impacting the rivers and streams that support their livelihoods.
These challenges, as well as the ways individuals and organizations are adapting to them, were on display Monday, Aug. 21, as the Upper Yampa Water Conservancy District journeyed along the Yampa River with a group of college students, media and local stakeholders.
Starting near the river’s headwaters in a remote area of the Flat Tops, the tour moved downstream through southern Routt County, where agricultural production dominates the landscape, to Stagecoach Reservoir and into Steamboat Springs, where tourism and recreation draw people to town.
“The broader picture for a town like Steamboat and a bunch of other towns around Colorado is, when the river’s closed, the economy is closed,” said Mike Welch, owner of Backdoor Sports. “It’s not just that we don’t get the tubing revenue, we’re responsible for bringing thousands of people downtown all summer long. … And that’s just our tubing operation; that’s not even fly fishing or the rest of it.”
Welch purchased Backdoor Sports — an outdoor retail business originally founded in 1986 along the Yampa River — with his brother and sister-in-law, Chris and Dominique Welch, in May 2025. While the first summer of owning the shop was “decent,” Welch said things got interesting as the winter’s record-low snowpack gave way to record-low streamflows in the river.
The Yampa River through downtown Steamboat Springs peaked weeks early at about a third of normal streamflow, giving way to an abbreviated and early rafting season, Welch added. Then, on June 1, as streamflows in the stretch fell below 85 cubic feet per second — compared to the 118-year average of 1,085 cfs for that time of year — and water temperatures spiked above 71 degrees, the river closed to all recreation.
“In the summertime, on our busy weekends, we’re putting 400 people a day on the river,” said Amanda Brotman with Backdoor Sports. “There’s a huge trickle-down effect [of these closures] … It’s not just about tubing or just about fish or just about science or just about ranching — it’s about everything. This is the life of our community.”
While there are management tools and programs in place to keep the river flowing and small businesses operating during normal years, this summer’s historic conditions brought something different.
“Obviously, this year is different because you’ve got to have water to be able to manage it; There’s no water to manage,” Welch said.
Adapting to survive tough conditions — environmental or otherwise — is nothing new, particularly for the agricultural communities upstream of Backdoor Sports.
Todd Hagenbuch, the Routt County director for the Colorado State University Extension program, is a fourth-generation rancher whose family has owned property in the Pleasant Valley just below Stagecoach Reservoir. When the property’s original homesteaders hand-dug ditches in the area’s steep, unforgiving backcountry, they did it purely “out of necessity,” Hagenbuch said.
“The Homestead Act made a promise that you could make a living in God’s country,” he added. “… And the only way in this arid, arid climate you make a living is by diverting water and putting it to beneficial use. The laws followed what we had to do in order to survive here, and if you wanted to keep your water, you had to put it to beneficial use.”
Adaptability is key to community survival
These dire conditions can serve as a “good litmus test of what the river can endure, what the fish population can endure” and tweak future management based on what is learned this year, Welch said.
“Collecting new data and being proactive with it is important, and it’s vital to small communities, small towns and small businesses,” he added.
Gathering new water and environmental data is key across the Yampa Valley as the Upper Yampa Water Conservation District seeks to better understand the problems facing communities during drought. As a water conservation district, General Manager Andy Rossi said the agency’s mission “is to create and provide raw water supplies in the districts that we operate.”
Traditionally, Rossi said this meant building water supply infrastructure like reservoirs, ditches and pipelines but has evolved “over the last few decades to kind of meet the different challenges that we see today.”
During Monday’s tour, some of the adaptations discussed included the conservation district dipping into wildfire mitigation work to protect critical water infrastructure and making preparations to begin testing this fall on a ground-based solar ionization technology to enhance moisture potential in storms in the Flat Tops. It also included the district’s unique partnership with the Colorado Water Trust and Colorado Water Conservation Board’s instream flow program to keep water in the river, and other projects from agricultural organizations and producers to test new land-management practices.
Erik Wardle, with Colorado State University’s Agricultural Water Quality Program, is working with agricultural producers near Yampa and Phippsburg to assess fertilizer management practices and help them understand water quality and nutrient cycling in irrigated meadows and nearby streams.
Having this data has allowed Routt County rancher Philip Rossi to improve his irrigation practices to the point where he said he had a “bumper crop” — or a productive harvest — during this year’s drought.
“There’s always opportunities to improve,” Wardle said. “And I’ve never met a farmer or rancher who’s not adapting annually anyway; that’s how they survive.”
Understanding the depth of drought impacts from ‘snow to flow’
Like all river basins in Colorado, snowpack is critical to supplying water to the district’s entire system.
“Snow to flow is a big dynamic in the Western U.S. when you’re trying to manage water resources,” Rossi said.
When it comes to data, Rossi said the basin is “pretty good on the flow side,” primarily owing to the proliferation of U.S. Geological Survey streamflow gauges, and “getting better on the snow side,” with the growth of SNOTEL sites and especially with newer technologies like satellites and aerial surveys, which the district has been investing in through work with Airborne Snow Observatories.
Rossi, however, said that it’s the “to” of “snow to flow” that the district lacks critical information about.
“That in-between space actually turns out to be critically important and becoming more and more important as we move through warmer periods of time and climate change starts having an effect not just on snowpack, but what happens to the landscape when we’re trying to go from snow to streamflow,” he said. “I really believe that the ‘to’ part in the snow to flow is what’s going to give us a lot of knowledge going forward as we manage all these resources, and it’s going to have a greater impact.”
One way the conservation district is investigating this in between is through the creation of its YBASIN project in partnership with the Western Resilience Center, the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at the Scripps Institute and Colorado Mountain College.
YBASIN, which is short for the Yampa Basin Atmosphere and Soil Moisture Integrated Network, has led to the installation of nine soil moisture sensing stations in the basin, which measure air temperature as well soil moisture and temperature up to a meter below the ground.
“We’re looking at building resilience to the changes we’re already seeing,” said Abby Vander Graaff, communications manager for the Western Resilience Center. “The impacts [of this year’s drought] are real, and you can’t respond to them without having information and knowing how. So that’s really what the YBASIN stations are doing — they’re helping us understand the situation we’re in so that people like Upper Yampa can make decisions and our ranchers can make decisions that make sense for this kind of new world that we’re living in.”
Rossi said that the stations — the oldest of which has three years of data — have already helped deepen the district’s understanding of what’s going on in its water system. He added that most products that forecast how much snowmelt will end up in rivers rely on fall streamflow as an indicator for spring soil moisture.
“I guarantee you if I show the inflow into Stagecoach every fall, it’s the same for the past 20 years, but that soil moisture station tells me there’s a lot more dynamics happening over the winter than we ever previously thought — especially as it gets warmer,” Rossi said.
Part of the challenge is that many forecasting models are built at a federal or state level and developed for larger water systems. “They weren’t developed for Stagecoach Reservoir,” Rossi said.
“I think the most impactful solutions that we’re going to find going on in the future are these sort of customized local solutions that work in the landscape that you’re trying to work in,” Rossi said.
The YBASIN project speaks to this larger reframing of how the district wants to deal with drought and aridification, shifting its focus from solutions to fully understanding the problem.
“It’s hard to move away from the reactionary,” Rossi said. “We only have so much time to react, you only get so much lead time and some of our management tools can only do so much. We can’t do that much with Stagecoach [Reservoir] in the worst drought … so trying to be ahead of it is where I’m trying to push us.”
