Water negotiators, river enthusiasts, Native tribes and lots of lawyers convened at the University of Colorado Law School on Thursday to take stock of the future of the dwindling Colorado River.

Chimney Hollow will eventually pull water from the Colorado River near its headwaters in Grand County to serve a dozen fast growing cities on the Front Range from Broomfield to Greeley.

It’s not clear yet how the money would be distributed among several states in a river basin where political fights and an impasse over how to share water long term have persisted even during historic drought.

Earning a spot on the Colorado School of Mines microplastics sampling team on the South Platte River requires careful balancing in waist-deep water and occasionally dodging some very inquisitive Canada Geese.

A federal hydrologist appeared to be momentarily at a loss for words Thursday as he described how dire the latest forecast has gotten for how much water will flow through the Colorado River Basin this summer.

Widespread drought and fears of a power crisis is forcing the Interior Department to start sending billions of gallons of water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir downstream to prop up Lake Powell.

At 8 a.m. Tuesday, there was only silence and the occasional crunch of rocks as a dozen people in orange vests waited in a moonlike landscape beneath a 350-foot-tall dam near Loveland.

Invasive species are on the march in the Colorado River, threatening everything from endangered native fish in Arizona to Colorado’s juicy Palisade peaches.

Cody Moser with the federal Colorado Basin River Forecast Center said in a monthly briefing Tuesday that just 1.4 million acre feet of Colorado River water is expected to reach Lake Powell through July. That's less than a quarter of what's considered normal.

Estevan López, New Mexico's water negotiator, said talks resumed March 2, and the upper and lower basin states are using a short-term pitch from Nevada as a starting point.