luke runyon

Record-breaking wildfires in 2020 turned huge swaths of Western forests into barren burn scars. Those forests store winter snowpack that millions of…

2020 has been a tough year for some of the Colorado River basin’s long-planned, most controversial water projects.Proposals to divert water in New Mexico,…

A rather quiet gathering of those who control the most precious resource in the West happened on the Strip last week. It was the annual Colorado River…

Climate change has been called the new normal. But residents in some parts of the Southwest say after living through the last two years, there’s nothing…

Finding a river in the West that still behaves like a Western river -- one that rises and falls with the annual rush of melting snow -- is tough. Many of…

Water managers on the Colorado River are facing a unique moment. With a temporary fix to the river’s scarcity problem recently completed, talk has begun…

Nara Bopp was working at a thrift store in Moab, Utah the morning of March 4 when her desk started moving. “I immediately assumed that it was a garbage…

The Colorado River is short on water. But you wouldn’t know it by looking at a slate of proposed water projects in the river’s Upper Basin states of…

CIÉNEGA DE SANTA CLARA, MEXICO — Juan Butrón-Méndez navigates a small metal motorboat through a maze of tall reeds here in the Mexican state of Sonora.…

SAN LUIS RIO COLORADO, MEXICO — From inside a small airplane, tracing the Colorado River along the Arizona-California border, it’s easy to see how it…