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LAKE MEAD, Nevada — People who fish for striped bass and catfish in Lake Mead are seeing their favorite stretches of shoreline transform around them.
The reservoir near Las Vegas has been dropping week after week, reshaping the moist, sandy ground where anglers cast their lines into the lapping water.
“Every week, it’s further and further,” said Stephen D’Agostino, who was fishing with a friend on the shore. He motioned to a pile of rocks about 40 feet from the water and said that was where the lake had been two months ago.
“It's concerning. It really is,” D’Agostino said. “What's the future of this lake if this is going to happen repeatedly every year?”
Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the country, has declined dramatically over the past 22 years as the flow of the Colorado River has shrunk during a series of extremely dry years worsened by climate change.
The lake, which now stands just 37% full, passed a major threshold this week when its level fell below an elevation of 1,075 feet above sea level. The reservoir is headed for a first-ever official shortage and is dropping toward its lowest levels since it was filled in the 1930s following the construction of Hoover Dam.
Lake Mead's surface has fallen more than 16 feet over the past year and is forecast to sink about 9 feet more by the end of the year.
This month, during peak irrigation season for downstream farms, the reservoir has been dropping about 1 foot a week. And each foot of vertical decline brings much larger changes as the water retreats along the shores.
At the bustling marinas in Lake Mead National Recreation Area, the shifting shorelines require costly and elaborate work: pulling the marinas out with cables and winches, extending power lines and fuel lines, using divers to unhook giant concrete anchors and dispatching barges to lower new anchors into the water.
Adapting to changing lake levels at the marinas and boat ramps has long been a crucial priority for the National Park Service and companies that run the marinas under contracts. But the pace of the water-level declines has accelerated over the past year, requiring a flurry of stepped-up work.
And as the boating infrastructure sinks lower, the changing shorelines have also become a barometer of the rapid declines in a critical water source that nourishes much of the desert Southwest.
The lake’s level on Tuesday dropped below 1,075 feet, the trigger point for a shortage, which the federal government is expected to declare in August. That will bring substantial water cutbacks next year for Arizona, Nevada and Mexico.
And if Mead continues to shrink as projected, within two years the reservoir could fall 28 more feet, approaching the threshold at 1,045 feet at which California, under a 2019 shortage-sharing deal, would also be required to take less water.
With unrelenting dry years exacerbating the river’s entrenched pattern of overuse, representatives of the seven states that rely on the Colorado River soon plan to start negotiating new rules for dealing with shortages after 2026, when the current set of agreements expire.
In the meantime, workers at the marinas are busy preparing for the next few feet of the lake’s decline.
'It's shocking'
At Temple Bar Marina on the lake’s Arizona side, manager Jeff Darcangelo said employees have been working hard to make sure the moving operations go smoothly.
“Every time we see it getting low, we’ve got to push it out more,” he said. The previous week, they moved the marina out nearly 70 feet.
“We’ve just got to every day make sure that nothing is going to beach itself,” Darcangelo said.
Motioning to an exposed spit of land, Darcangelo said that not long ago, this piece of land was underwater and people could steer their boats right over it.
“Now you could pretty much drive your vehicle over there,” Darcangelo said. “It’s shocking how abruptly the water is going down.”
Even bigger jobs of moving marinas are in the works if the lake continues to decline as projected over the next few years.
Temple Bar and another marina, Callville Bay, are operated under contracts by the company Guest Services, which also manages campgrounds, RV parks and two marinas downstream at Lake Mohave. Rod Taylor, the company’s area manager, said he’s looking ahead to prepare for the possibility of moving Callville Bay Marina to a different part of the lake, which could become necessary if the reservoir declines below an elevation of about 1,000 feet, or 75 feet down from its current level.
The plan would be to use boats to haul the marina to Swallow Cove, several miles away, he said, where the National Park Service would need to build a new road and parking lot.
“It's an enormous amount of time and effort to do that,” Taylor said.
Taylor has been living at Lake Mead for 25 years, and early on he saw the lake nearly full.
In 2000, water was lapping at the spillway gates of Hoover Dam. Since then, the lake level has fallen about 140 feet, and the declines have required major adjustments.
Hoover Dam: Symbol of the modern West faces new test with an epic water shortage
In 2007, Taylor was involved in moving the Overton Beach Marina after it was shut down due to declining water levels. The marina was split into two sections for the move. He and his team used 11 houseboats to push each section of the marina across the lake.
They towed and steered one part of the marina 32 miles to Temple Bar and moved the other section 41 miles to Callville Bay.
While planning for the possibility of another big move, Taylor said, the staff at the marinas are working on more immediate tasks, which include using winches to pull the floating docks into new positions and pouring concrete to make more of the 4-foot blocks, each weighing 6,000 pounds, that serve as anchors.
To move submerged anchors, divers have been swimming down and hooking cables to the concrete blocks so that a barge can lift them.
“Moving the marina is a serious effort, with the anchors and the diving and the winching and all that kind of stuff. But then keeping the utilities connected to the marina is a whole other piece of the puzzle,” Taylor said. “We're having to buy cable. We're having to buy water lines, sewer line, fuel line.”
The additional costs at the two marinas this year will probably come to about $600,000 in all, Taylor said.
And looking ahead, Taylor said, he and his colleagues are working closely with the National Park Service to plan for continuing declines.
By mid-June, Lake Mead is forecast to drop below 1,071.6 feet, a record set in 2016, and continue descending to the lowest levels since the reservoir was filled.
As the lake drops to new lows, Taylor said, “it's going down to a place we've never seen,” so adapting will require preparing for unknown terrain popping out, such as outcroppings that become islands. He said it will also require being prepared to shift gears in the event of a wet year like 2011, when the lake rose 46 feet.
“We've adapted,” Taylor said. “Every business out there has had to adapt. And they keep calling it the 'new normal,' but I don't think anything is really normal anymore. It's just changing. And so the only thing that is normal is change.”
Planning for low water levels
Lake Mead National Recreation Area is hugely popular among people who come to boat, fish, hike and swim. Among the parks administered by the National Park Service, it ranked number 5 last year, with 8 million visitors.
For the park’s managers, keeping the boat ramps accessible is a priority. To extend launch ramps where the concrete ends, crews have been laying down “pipe mats” made of repurposed steel cooling pipes from decommissioned coal-fired power plants.
The work of installing these mats has required temporarily closing the launch ramp at Hemenway Harbor and reducing the number of open lanes at some ramps.
“It is a lot of work and it is a significant cost,” said Greg Hauburger, chief of staff at Lake Mead National Recreation Area.
He said extending launch ramps will cost $5 million this year and $12 million next year, and that doesn’t include potential moves of marinas and parking areas beyond that.
“We're looking at potentially over $100 million in 2023,” Hauburger said, “depending on water levels.”
As workers extend the boat ramps, they’ll also lay down concrete panels, Hauburger said, and will ensure there are plenty of access points to the lake.
“We've got 200,000 acres of water. It's not all doom and gloom. There’s a lot of launch ramps that are still going to be open,” Hauburger said. “It's just going to be a little bit of a delay as we reposition the pipe mats to maintain access, as we do the construction to extend the launch ramps.”
With the reservoir headed for a shortage, water allotments will be cut next year for Arizona, Nevada and Mexico. These reductions, which were laid out in a 2019 deal called the Drought Contingency Plan, are intended to give Lake Mead a boost and reduce the risks of the reservoir falling to critically low levels.
The agreement includes lower-level shortage thresholds that would trigger larger water cuts if Lake Mead continues to decline. The largest reductions would come if the lake reaches 1,025 feet, about 50 feet below the current level — a point the deal was intended to prevent the reservoir from reaching.
But the past year has been one of the driest on record in the Colorado River Basin, and the federal government’s projections of Lake Mead’s levels over the coming year have worsened.
“We've been expecting lower water levels,” Hauburger said. “It's just happening faster than we thought it was going to happen.”
The National Recreation Area has a low-water plan to maintain access and adapt marinas, launch ramps and other facilities if Mead drops 25 feet more below elevation 1,050 feet, which according to the latest projections could happen by October 2022.
Other changes are coming sooner.
At Boulder Harbor, an inlet shimmers in the sun next to desert slopes where the retreating lake has left lines etched in the dry soil among the creosote bushes. From the concrete launch ramp, boats slide off trailers into the inlet and navigate through a narrow channel to the lake.
For now, Boulder Harbor remains a good place to launch, Hauburger said. But sometime in June, he said, the channel will become too shallow for boats to pass.
'A clear signal'
The federal Bureau of Reclamation manages Lake Mead in conjunction with Lake Powell on the Utah-Arizona border. Over the past two years, extremely dry conditions across the watershed have shrunk the amount of water flowing into Lake Powell, which has dropped to just 34% of full capacity.
The rapid declines have created similar challenges for boating access at Powell. Officials this month shut down the Stateline launch ramp in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, citing new projections that showed the lake’s levels falling faster than expected.
The dropping water levels of Lake Powell are also driving the worsening outlook downstream at Lake Mead.
In wetter years, runoff from melting snow and releases from Lake Powell can give a significant boost to Mead’s levels. But the government’s latest projections show that’s not expected the rest of this year or next year. Into 2023, the forecast calls for Mead's levels to continue plunging.
Together, the two reservoirs make up the heart of a water supply that flows to subdivisions and golf courses in Las Vegas and Phoenix, fields of alfalfa and vegetables in the Imperial and Mexicali valleys and backyard gardens in Los Angeles and much of Southern California.
The river has long been overallocated, with so much water diverted that most of the Colorado’s delta in Mexico dried up decades ago, leaving only remnants of its once-vast wetlands.
Since 2000, the flow of the Colorado River has shrunk during one of the watershed’s driest periods in centuries. And research has shown that global warming is having a major effect in contributing to drier conditions, reducing the river’s flow.
Many scientists describe the past two decades as a megadrought worsened by climate change, saying the Colorado River Basin is undergoing “aridification” that will complicate water management for generations to come.
Margaret Garcia, an assistant professor at Arizona State University who focuses on water infrastructure and management, said in the images of Lake Mead’s falling water levels, she sees “a clear signal of a warming world and how it is intrinsically linked to water.”
“An aridifying West exacerbates the long-term imbalance between supply and demand on the Colorado River,” Garcia said.
Garcia said she also thinks about how some of the water in the reservoir is reserved for specific water users based on prior conservation, something that has been encouraged under agreements including the Drought Contingency Plan.
That's a concern, Garcia said, because it means that some water in Mead is already spoken for beyond established allocations, and this stored water can still be withdrawn unless the reservoir hits critical lows.
And while there are some restrictions limiting the levels at which reserves can be withdrawn, she said, the use of this stored water would likely slow any recovery of lake levels if conditions turn wetter during the next five years.
"It's a messy situation, but it also potentially incentivizes the players to cooperate, and hopefully that's the direction it goes in," Garcia said. "They have come together to come up with solutions in the past, and that's just going to need to continue."
The rapidly declining levels of Lake Mead and Lake Powell have brought urgency to the growing callsfor action by researchers, policymakers and others, who say it's time to readjust the system of managing the Colorado River to fix the overallocation problems and adapt to the effects of climate change.
Researchers John Fleck and Brad Udall wrote this week in the journal Science that managing the Colorado River’s crisis will require taking seriously what the science shows about how climate change is reducing the river's flow, and that this will be crucial as representatives of the seven states renegotiate water allocation agreements over the next four years.
The river’s flow is down by about 20% as compared to the 20th century, they wrote, and Powell and Mead are projected to be only 29% full by 2023.
“As the basin's water management community prepares for a new round of negotiations over the water allocation rules, how bad of a 'worst case scenario' should be considered and who will get less water as a result?” Fleck and Udall wrote. “It is tempting to use today's 20% flow decline as the new baseline — that is, modeling future reductions on the basis of what has already been observed. But only by planning for even greater declines can we manage the real economic, social, and environmental risks of running low on a critical resource upon which 40 million North Americans depend.”
For boaters and fishers who have been coming to Lake Mead for years, the dramatic decline is starkly visible all around, in the islands that have emerged and the “bathtub ring” of whitish minerals that coats the rocky slopes, forming a sharply defined strip 150 feet high above the water.
On the shore one morning, as D’Agostino and his friend stood casting their lines beside a rocky point, they talked about how the fishing was better when the water was higher.
In previous years, D’Agostino said, he and others would use throw-nets to catch shad for bait.
“There's no shad running this year,” D’Agostino said. “I think it has something to do with how low the lake is compared to last year.”
Zack Jackson, who was fishing nearby, joined the conversation and agreed, saying he guesses with the lake going down, “that changes where those fish hang out, and they're stressed and pressured from having to move around.”
Jackson said he had been fishing a week earlier and the shore was quite a bit higher.
“The water used to come up to the bush line. This was all underwater,” Jackson said, sweeping an arm toward a thicket of willows. “It's crazy. I've never seen it drop this fast.”
D’Agostino has been buying frozen anchovies to use for bait. He took one out of the cooler, put it on his hook and cast his line.
Even with the water going down, D’Agostino said he plans to keep coming back to fish.
“We'll be here as long as there's water,” he said.
Ian James covers water, climate change and the environment for The Arizona Republic. Send him story tips, comments and questions at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and follow him on Twitter at @ByIanJames.
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Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust. Follow The Republic environmental reporting team at environment.azcentral.com and @azcenvironment on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
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