We planned so many ski trips this year. Given that my pregnancy/postpartum phase felt like it lasted five million years, Ben and I were finally so excited to take advantage of the number 1 reason we live in Denver: Skiing. It was such an odd choice - we have two kids who aren’t old enough to ski but better they get used to the weekend warrior lifestyle now before we fully indoctrinate them into the culture. Turns out, this was a bad year to go skiing, and it didn’t have to do with our kids. This year’s snowpack was the lowest in recorded history. But that’s in the past! Now we’re getting into nicer weather, doing more outdoor activities and never have to think about that terrible horrible snow season again, right?‍

Wrong.

Denver water depends on mountain snowpack for its water supply, serving 1.5 million people in Denver and surrounding suburbs. So…this historically low snowpack hit the whole system hard. So hard, in fact, that in March the Denver Board of Water Commissioners declared a Stage 1 drought, targeting a 20% reduction in water use to preserve water levels and avoid even stricter mandatory restrictions later this summer. THe entirety of the Denver metro area is currently experiencing Stage 3 drought (out of 4), and roughly 98% of Colorado is experiencing drought at some level. 

My family and I went out to dinner last week, and our waiter asked if we wanted water. He said that restaurants were getting fined up to $15,000 for automatically bringing water for the table instead of asking first. We’re not allowed to have automatic sprinklers until mid-late May, and then we have mandatory watering restrictions of two days per week on assigned days through October. We’re watering Sunday and Thursday between 6pm and 10am, our neighbors with odd numbered addresses water on Wednesday and Saturday. 

The most dramatic illustration of how serious this is: Antero Reservoir, a popular fishing and camping spot in South Park, is being drained and closed to the public for the first time since the catastrophic drought of 2002. Denver Water is moving the water down the South Platt river to the Cheesman Reservoir, where it won’t evaporate in the summer heat. The fish are being relocated before it goes dry. Antero is what’s known as a “drought reservoir,” meaning it exists specifically for moments like this one, and the fact that we’re using it tells you something. 

To understand why Denver is so exposed to a single bad snow year, you have to go back about 150 years. Stay with me, I tried to make sure this section didn’t get too dry (see what I did there?). 

How The West decided who owns water

In the eastern United States, water rights are governed by something called the raparia doctrine: if your land is next to a river or stream, you have the right to use it. It’s a system built for a wet climate where water is, more or less, everywhere. The West is not that.

Prior appropriation was first developed by gold miners in the Sierra Nevada who needed massive amounts of water to find and process gold. They weren’t farming next to rivers, they were blasting through mountains far from any natural water source, and they needed a different system. So they invented one: whoever used water first, for a productive purpose, had the superior right to it. That right continued as long as the water kept being used for the same purpose. “First in time, first in right” sounds simple enough. Colorado codified its own version into the state constitution in 1876 and most other arid Western states followed within 20 years.

There’s a second principle baked into the system that matters just as much: “use it or lose it.” Water rights can be forfeited if not applied to a beneficial use. While this sounds reasonable in theory, in practice it created a perverse incentive. If you stopped using your water allotment, een to conserve, you risked losing your legal claim to it. For over a century, the Western water system essentially penalized restraint. 

Today, agriculture accounts for 86% of western water use, urban cities just 5%. The infrastructure of dams, reservoirs and diversion tunnels that followed from this doctrine was an engineering marvel. It also assumed the snowpack would always show up. 

This winter, it didn’t.

This isn’t just a Denver problem

It’s tempting to frame water scarcity as a Western issue, or a drought issue. It isn’t. Only 3% of all water on the planet is freshwater. Of that, approximately 2.5% is locked in glaciers, ice caps and underground aquifers. That leaves 0.5% of Earth’s total water as accessible freshwater for everything: drinking, agriculture, manufacturing, creating pictures of you and your dog on a Venetian canal using ChatGPT, etc. 

According to 2025 data from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, renewable water availability per person has declined 7% over the past decade alone. The WOrld Bank’s first Global Water Monitoring Report found that the world is losing 324 billion cubic meters of freshwater every year, enough to meet the needs of 280 million people, driven by drought, deforestation, and poor water management. 

The Southeast US has experienced significant drought cycles. The Ogallala Aquifer, which sits beneath eight states in the Great Plains and irrigates roughly a fifth of all US cropland, is being depleted far faster than it’s being replenished. 

What You Can Do

Some of this is familiar. Shorter showers. Fix the leaky faucet. Don’t run the dishwasher half empty. These matter and they add up, but there are less obvious moves worth knowing about. 

Run your washing machine strategically. Most modern washing machines use the same amount of water regardless of load size. Running full loads instead of partial ones is one of the easiest water reductions most households can make. Cold water cycles also require less energy to heat, which reduces the energy footprint of your water use.

Rethink your garden. Lawn grass is one of the thirstiest, least productive plants you can grow. Native and drought-tolerant plants require a fraction of the water and support local pollinators. If you're not ready to rip out your lawn, watering deeply and infrequently (rather than lightly every day) trains roots to grow deeper and access moisture more efficiently.

Collect the cold water. When you run the shower waiting for it to warm up, that water goes straight down the drain. Keep a bucket in the shower and use that water on houseplants or your garden. It's not glamorous, but a two-minute warm-up can waste two to three gallons.

Pay attention to what you eat. This is the one people don't expect. Agriculture accounts for 70% of global freshwater withdrawals. GreenMatch A pound of beef requires roughly 1,800 gallons of water to produce. A pound of lentils uses about 700. Reducing meat consumption, even partially, is one of the highest-leverage water conservation choices an individual can make, and it doesn't require a single infrastructure change.

If you're buying new, think water efficiency. WaterSense-labeled fixtures and appliances (it's EPA-certified, like Energy Star but for water) use at least 20% less water than standard models. When it's time to replace a toilet, showerhead, or irrigation controller, it's worth looking for the label.

What’s Coming

In Colorado, there’s a small piece of good news tucked into this grim, skiing-on-grass year. A law that took effect in January 2026 now permits greywater systems in new construction statewide. Greywater is the water from your sinks, shower and laundry machines, and it can be reused for things like subsurface irrigation instead of going down the drain. For most of Colorado’s history, greywater systems were only legal in a handful of areas that specifically opted in. That’s flipped. It won’t save the Antero Reservoir this summer but it’s the kind of structural shift that actually changes the math when it’s compounded over years and across cities.

When the waiter at dinner asked if we wanted water, we said yes, obviously. We always want water. The question is learning to treat it like it’s worth something, because it is, and because the version of that dinner where no one has to ask is the version worth looking toward.