Water Hauling Becomes a Daily Chore as the Rockies' Worst Snowpack on Record Squeezes Ranchers

Near Montrose, on Colorado's Western Slope, brothers Scott and Monte Snyder run Mex and Sons Ranch and roughly 800 cow-calf pairs across country that no longer reliably holds surface water. According to the Associated Press, filling their stock tanks takes eight truck trips spread across three vehicles and about nine hours of driving — and that effort buys the herd only one to two days of water before the cycle starts again.

Hauling is only the newest item on the list. The Snyders have shrunk the herd, bought supplemental hay to replace grass that never came in, shuttled cattle to whatever ground is still grazable, and kept one eye on wildfire risk through a dry summer. Each of those decisions costs money the drought did not budget for.

"It's just so much work. I hate dropping any of it," Scott Snyder told the AP, describing the reluctance to give up on any piece of the operation. On the season ahead, he was blunter: "If Mother Nature doesn't want to help out here, we're probably in a lot of trouble."

See how PlaceAcre buys land across Colorado →

In the Norwood area, Mark Ragsdale works both sides of the problem. By day he serves as a state water commissioner, fielding calls from producers across his district. Before and after those shifts he hauls water to his own 45 cow-calf pairs. The AP reports that neighbors now call him daily with a version of the same question: where can I find water.

That scarcity has turned water itself into a transaction between neighbors. The Snyders, per the AP, pay a nearby landowner to refill a 6,500-gallon tanker out of a private reservoir — an arrangement that would have been unnecessary in a normal snow year and that adds a recurring line item to an operation already running thin.

The PNAS study led by Adrienne Marshall of the Colorado School of Mines carries one piece of qualified reassurance: this snow drought was severe enough to sit far out on the statistical tail, which means the odds of an identical event repeating immediately next winter are low.

The caveat is the longer arc. Marshall's work points to compounding — a string of lesser droughts stacked back to back can drain soil moisture, aquifers and stock ponds as effectively as one historic year. And as greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, the study finds the probability of extreme snow droughts increases over time, meaning the tail itself moves closer.

Brothers Lance and Zandon Bray run about 500 head and bought a third flatbed truck this year — one already past 300,000 miles — specifically to carry a 2,600-gallon tank. The purchase is a measure of how routine hauling has become. Their family has been here before: their father sold the herd after the 2018 drought, and the brothers restarted the operation from that reset.

"I'm gonna fight like hell this year so I can turn around and fight like hell next year." — Zandon Bray, to the Associated Press

The wear is as much mental as financial. "Sometimes it's by 10 o'clock in the morning or by the end of the day, you're just like, man, I can't do this anymore," Bray told the AP.

In northern New Mexico, near the Jicarilla Apache Nation, Stanford Salazar splits his time between the tribal planning office and his own cattle. The AP reports that only a few of his 14 stock ponds still hold water. Winter snowfall that historically measured four to five feet, he said, now runs closer to one foot — a shift that shows up directly in what the range can carry.

In central Utah, Jeff Christensen is answering the same problem with a drill rig. He is putting in two new wells at 500 feet each, at roughly $20,000 per well, with about half the cost covered by Utah's Grazing Improvement Program. Deeper wells chase a water table that keeps dropping; the subsidy makes the arithmetic survivable, not painless.

There is no near-term data point to wait on. Snowpack in the Upper Colorado River Basin will not be meaningfully reassessed until the winter of 2026-27, which means the hauling routines described above are the operating plan for the rest of this grazing season.

The PNAS authors put the odds of back-to-back extreme snow droughts at currently low. That is the optimistic read. The less comfortable one is that multi-year drought compounds — each dry year leaves less margin than the last — and that rising emissions raise the long-term probability of the extreme end recurring.

In the meantime, producers are hedging the only way they can: the Snyders and the Brays are both shrinking herd sizes. Multiplied across the region, those individual reductions pull cattle out of the beef supply pipeline for years, since rebuilding a herd is a multi-season project rather than a purchasing decision.

Sustained drought stress is also one factor — among several, including succession, debt and land prices — pushing more Western ranch families to at least consider selling grazing and range land rather than absorbing hauling and drilling costs indefinitely. That is a trend worth naming without overstating: most operations in this reporting are fighting to stay, not listing.