In the realm of the high desert, sagebrush and juniper rule. They are hearty, rugged and well-adapted to extreme conditions. They don't die - not easily, anyway, and never in great numbers. But it's happening. The icons are succumbing. In Utah alone, an estimated 600,000 acres of sagebrush - vital for wildlife and soil conservation - are gone.

The cause of their demise is the "early 21st century drought," as scientists now call it, that has persisted for six years and is believed to be the worst to strike the Southwest in half a millennium.

It is the sort of drought that in another era might have driven the human population away and transformed the Wasatch Front, St. George, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Albuquerque, N.M., into ghost towns.

"But we're still here and we're still in business," says Randy Julander, a Salt Lake City-based hydrologist for the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service.

Water continues to run from taps. Pools and fountains are full. Lawns are green. Gardens are growing.

Even Utah agriculture - "a dog with three wooden legs and an eye patch," as Julander puts it - is hanging in there.

Humans' success through this drought can be traced to one adaptive feature the sagebrush and junipers do not have: engineering.

A multibillion-dollar infrastructure of dams, reservoirs and pipelines has saved the day from what should have been an epic drought catastrophe.

In Utah, most residents have barely noticed the drought, except for the constant reminder from water officials to "slow the flow" and save H2O.

From an economic standpoint, the drought has had little impact. State economists predict this year it will cut into Utah's gross receipts by a factor of 0.3 percent. The losses are mainly in agriculture, which, even in years of good precipitation, only accounts for about 1 percent of Utah's gross domestic product.

"When we look at the state's economy, [the drought impact] is a relatively small portion," says Neil Ashdown, deputy director of the Governor's Office of Planning and Budget.

Still, the drought has taken a toll in tangible ways:

l Bear Lake, which also serves as a reservoir for irrigators in the Bear River Basin, is at its lowest point since the 1930s, forcing farmers to dramatically cut back their production.

l Iron, Kane, San Juan and Daggett counties already have declared a "drought emergency," requesting state and federal financial and technical assistance.

l San Juan County farmers already are out of water this summer. They have produced just one crop of alfalfa. Ranchers are looking out of state for hay and hauling water by truck to their cattle.

l A section of former cropland in Iron County has become a dustbowl, creating sandstorms and drifts that have destroyed yards and made life miserable for two dozen homeowners in a nearby subdivision.

l Plunging water tables are forcing farmers around the state to drill more and deeper wells - an added expense in an already marginal business - and prompting the state to consider the drastic measure of revoking groundwater rights.

l Lake Powell continues to shrink, threatening a multimillion-dollar marine-based industry, reducing hydropower production at Glen Canyon Dam by 25 percent and raising political concerns among the seven Colorado River Basin states.

How Utah and other Southwestern neighbors got into this mess is simple. Lack of snow six years in a row.

Statewide, the snowpack - a measurement of water stored in accumulated snowfall in the mountains - finished the winter between 30 percent and 70 percent of normal between 2000 and 2004.

But some water officials note the past five or six years do not tell the whole story.

"Our drought has been going much longer," says Ron Thompson, manager of the Washington County Water Conservancy District in St. George. Except for 1998, flows in the Virgin River, the agency's primary source of water, have been below normal every year since 1994.

The drought was supposed to end this year. Snow had fallen at above-normal levels during the winter.

Then, a meteorological disaster struck in March. The weather turned dry and warm, hijacking the snowpack through evaporation or absorption into soils sapped of moisture from prior years' below-normal precipitation.

The result has been another year of reduced flows into streams and reservoirs.

Agriculture has been most affected by the drought because it relies on direct stream flows, which are running between 8 percent and 50 percent of normal; small reservoirs, many of which are virtually dry; and groundwater, which, as a result of dropping water tables, has become more expensive to pump.

Thanks to conservation measures, such as admonishments against watering during the heat of the day, Utah's towns and cities have not experienced water shortages.

But some cities, notably Blanding and Monticello in southeastern Utah, are just one or two years away from rationing. Monticello already has restricted its residents to just four hours of outdoor watering per week.

Water supplies for Utah's metropolis along the Wasatch Front also are stretched, with Deer Creek Reservoir at a historical low.

But storage in the $2.3 billion Central Utah Project, which diverts water from the Uinta Mountains to the Wasatch Front, is expected to withstand about two more years of drought before agencies are forced to impose major restrictions on water use.

"Unless the drought gets a lot worse, they are in good shape. It looks OK to me," says D. Larry Anderson, director of the state Division of Water Resources.

The most visible measure of the Southwestern drought can be seen at Lake Powell, which is at about 42 percent of capacity. The low water has exposed a huge "bathtub ring" of bleached sandstone, and uncovered geologic features and canyons not seen since the manmade lake was filling in the late 1960s. Launching a boat these days is on an "at-your-own-risk" basis at all but one of the reservoir's major ramps, though tourism officials report that visitation has not yet been affected.

The shrinking lake level has reduced the "head," or pressure, of the water that tumbles through the dam to the power plant's eight hydroelectric turbines at the dam's base. Each turbine today can put out just 124 megawatts of power, about 25 percent less than a turbine's capacity of 165 megawatts.

Another two years of drought could lower the lake to the power plant's intake, reducing power to 88 megawatts, said Arlo Allen, power manager for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's Upper Colorado region.

Under a continuing drought, the lake level could drop below that intake, thus idling the power plant.

The reduction in cheap hydropower from the Colorado River has made electricity more expensive, especially in cities where hydropower was a major electricity source. Bountiful, for example, this month increased its rates by 10 percent.

Power output is down at smaller hydropower projects around Utah, too.

The Washington County Water Conservancy District reports its hydropower revenues, generated from turbines in pipelines along the Virgin River, are down more than $400,000 a year.

"That's life in the fast lane of the desert," says Thompson. "If you live in the desert, you are going to have to deal with droughts. It didn't become a desert because there was a lot of water."

But, according to the sagebrush, the desert is accustomed to a bit more than it has gotten lately.