LEILA FADEL, HOST:
In the Rocky Mountains, it's at about this time that snow built up over the winter would typically start to melt. Not this year. After a fierce heat wave, researchers are measuring the lowest snow levels on record. Sam Brasch of Colorado Public Radio reports.
SAM BRASCH, BYLINE: Brian Domonkos is headed out to measure snow at about 11,000 feet of elevation in the Colorado Rockies. His big question? Whether the snow levels have ever been this bad.
BRIAN DOMONKOS: That's what we're here to find out today and compare to some of the worst years that we've seen, such as 1981 and 1977.
BRASCH: Domonkos supervises the Colorado Snow Survey for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Its mission is simple, track snow across the state.
DOMONKOS: To get an idea of how much runoff we will perhaps have here in the remainder of the year.
BRASCH: To reach the Horseshoe Mountain site outside Fairplay, he would usually need backcountry skis. This year, however, he doesn't strap them on right away.
DOMONKOS: Wait a little bit because we're going to be on bare ground for most of the walk.
BRASCH: He carries his skis up a dirt road. Along the way, we see patches of snow in the forest melting in 40-degree heat. Colorado's snowpack usually peaks around now, but there's not much left after a bout of record warm weather. That's clear when we reach the snow course, an official trail marked by signs hanging in the forest. When we arrive, Mike Ardison, a USDA technician, takes a green trundle off his back. He unrolls it to reveal pieces of an antique aluminum tube, about 8 feet long once he fits it all together.
MIKE ARDISON: So what we have here is a federal sampler. These were designed in probably the early '30s.
BRASCH: Mountain snow acts like a massive water tower for the Western U.S. Snowmelt through the spring and summer is a lifeline for ecosystems, farms and cities. That's why the federal government has tracked snowpack for nearly a century by dropping these tubes into the snow. Ardison extracts the tube with a column of snow inside and reads out its height.
ARDISON: Eight-point-five.
DOMONKOS: Eight-point-five.
BRASCH: To find out how much water it holds, the team hangs the tube from an old-fashioned milk scale, kind of like the produce scales at the grocery store.
ARDISON: We haven't been able to find an equivalent that works as well as these do. Because the digitals, once it's super cold out, usually the batteries don't last.
BRASCH: Some snow courses date back to the Great Depression. This one started around 60 years ago. Crouched with a notebook, Domonkos calculates the amount of water here today, 2.2 inches. That's half the previous record set in 1977.
DOMONKOS: It's even hard to speak about it. You know, having done this for 23 years, and to be talking about the worst year that I've ever seen, we've ever seen in my lifetime - you know, we don't exactly know what's on the horizon, and that's concerning.
BRASCH: The picture isn't much different across Colorado. At almost every snow course across the state, levels are either at a record low or tied for the lowest on record, says Russ Schumacher, the Colorado state climatologist.
RUSS SCHUMACHER: We're maybe in, like, a bit of one of these liminal spaces where you can see what's coming, but it's not here yet. And that's a challenging situation, I think, to be in.
BRASCH: Schumacher says there's no escaping reality. Large parts of the West are in uncharted territory. Without anything like normal snowpack, it's time to brace for low reservoirs and maybe fire-prone conditions later in the year.
For NPR News, I'm Sam Brasch in Fairplay, Colorado.
(SOUNDBITE OF ALAN SHOESMITH'S "SNOW AND STARS ALIGN") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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