This year they’re bare, and have been since last winter.
“Everybody talks about 2001 and 2002,” McAfee says.
When he runs into other farmers in the nearby communities of Cortez, Dolores and Mancos, McAfee says the conversations of the last 18 years follow a script.
What else is there to say?” McAfee says.
Climate change is already sapping some of the Colorado River’s flow, Udall says.
“By the end of the century almost 35 percent — a third of the river’s flow — would be gone because of these higher temperatures.” These conditions will strain the language and concepts we’ve formed to describe and make sense of the weather and climate conditions around us, Udall says.
“This is the ongoing aridification of the Colorado River Basin and we think we should start to talk about it in these terms rather than this older term, ‘drought.’” At a farm show at the Montezuma County fairgrounds outside Cortez, Colorado, the dry winter is top of mind.
“I don’t know if our concept of drought needs to change,” he says.“Our awareness of what’s going on definitely needs to change.
In the last 18 years, a couple wet years have given hope that the dry period over, at least temporarily.
“The problem is right now when you talk about drought you go into drought and you come out of drought,” he says.