National Parks Traveler Episode 122: Grand Canyon's Ailing River

Climate change is here and greatly impacting our weather and long-term climatic trends. In the Southwest, it’s having a tremendous impact on water resources across the Colorado River watershed. Less snowfall in recent years has greatly diminished the snowpack high up in the Rockies that provides spring runoff. As that snowpack and runoff continues to shrink, the Colorado River struggles to meet the demands that are put on it. Indeed, the river can’t meet all those demands through the Upper Basin and Lower Basin states that stretch from Wyoming down to southern California.

Not only can’t the Colorado meet the demands placed on it, but its flows are slacking and its waters warming in some places and becoming more conducive to invasive species that are competing with native species, and outcompeting some of them.

Can anything be done about this if the decades-long drought doesn’t relent and more snow falls in the high country? That’s a hard question to answer. What we can tell you, though, is that the drought and warming temperatures associated with climate change are affecting the Colorado River, and those impacts also are showing up in national parks along the river’s path. In this episode, we look at how the ailing river is impacting Grand Canyon National Park.