Emanuel Muyres

The proposal is called Fill Mead First, the Glen Canyon Institute has been advocating it since the 1990s, and it rests on a simple premise: the Colorado River does not have enough water to fill two enormous reservoirs, so it should fill one. What makes the idea worth examining in 2026 rather than dismissing is that the river has been moving in that direction anyway.

Lake Mead mostly does not drop through the fall, and that is the useful thing to know about it. The reservoir's steepest seasonal declines come in spring and early summer, when downstream demand climbs and releases continue, and autumn is typically when the fall flattens out. The numbers for this year say exactly that. Mead sat at 1,038.06 feet on September 23 and 1,037.76 on October 6, a drop of three tenths of a foot across thirteen days, after months of far faster losses.