Note to readers •This story is made possible through a partnership between The Salt Lake Tribune and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.
This story is also an excerpt from the Open Lands newsletter, which will now be delivered to inboxes every week instead of twice a month. For a sneak peek from the environment team about what we’re working on and news we’re following, sign up to have Open Lands delivered to your inbox.
The Great Salt Lake rang in 2026 in pretty rough shape.
The lake has struggled for years with overconsumption in its watershed, along with a warming climate that’s speeding evaporation. The water year started on Oct. 1, and much of Utah has hardly seen a skiff of snow in the months since. It’s been rainy, sure, but almost all of Utah’s water supply comes from snowpack that gradually melts in the spring and replenishes reservoirs. Snowmelt reaching tributary rivers is also what the Great Salt Lake needs to refill.
The Provo and Jordan river basins have snowpack that’s at 68% of normal, according to Natural Resources Conservation Service data collected Friday afternoon. The Weber River basin is at 71% of normal. The Bear River, the Great Salt Lake’s largest tributary, got a boost over the weekend. Its watershed is fairing better with snowpack at 104% of normal in its watershed, but combined it all paints a pretty dismal picture.
(Courtesy NRCS)
The lake’s southern end, where it’s the most ecologically productive, currently sits at 4,191.6 feet above sea level. That’s only three feet higher than its record low set less than four years ago. The hypersaline north arm is about a half a foot lower. And all the rainfall over the last few weeks barely registered as a blip.
It’s dangerously close to the low elevation the Great Salt Lake started at in 2022. By January of that year, its elevation hovered at 4190.4 feet and kept sinking to lower and lower record lows until it bottomed out at 4,188.5 feet that November.
Bonnie Baxter, a biology professor and director of Westminster University’s Great Salt Lake Institute, called the lake’s current state “heartbreaking.” She spent much of 2022 documenting signs of the lake’s ecological collapse, including disappearance of its brine flies, a key food source for millions of migrating birds in the Western Hemisphere.
“It is terrifying,” Baxter told me, “just how close we are to breaking the historic low.”
The Great Salt Lake usually loses three feet in the summer and fall to evaporation. And so far, there’s not much snowpack to replenish those losses. But Baxter noted a reason to feel at least a little bit optimistic.
“At the New Year’s 2022 elevation, the lake was at about 16% salinity and today it’s around 12%,” she said.
That’s because resource managers figured out they can seal off the rock-filled railroad causeway bisecting the lake, which helps trap salt in the northern half and prevents salinity from spiking in the south. If salinity gets too high, it kills off brine flies and brine shrimp, leaving the birds with nothing to eat and devastating a multi-million dollar brine shrimp egg harvesting industry that supports seafood farms across the globe.
“This nifty engineering is very simple,” said Baxter, who serves on the state’s Salinity Advisory Committee, “managing the elevation of a rock berm to carefully dial in a healthy salinity, and it’s reversible.”
The Department of Natural Resources raised the causeway berm twice, in the fall of 2022 and winter of 2023, using just a backhoe to push around some rocks. It lowered the breach again when record-high snowpack gave the lake a temporary boost in the spring and summer of 2023, which helped the north arm equalize with the south.
A spokesperson for that department and the Great Salt Lake Commissioner’s Office noted on Monday it is “likely that the berm will be modified in the near future.”
But the causeway won’t do anything about the 800 square miles of exposed lakebed drying up and eroding away in dust storms, creating a public health disaster for Utah’s urban core along the Wasatch Front.
“How fast we returned to the precipice,” Baxter said, “should send a shock wave throughout northern Utah.”
Down south, things aren’t looking much better.
Many watersheds in the Colorado and Sevier river basins have just over half of their normal snowpack. The entire Upper Colorado region, which includes parts of Utah, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico, has snowpack at 77% of normal as of Tuesday, while the Lower Colorado region is at 38% of normal.
Lake Powell sat at 3,540.2 feet above sea level as of Jan. 1, compared to 3,571.8 feet the year before. The mega-reservoir dipped to its lowest modern elevation in April 2023, when it hit 3,519.9 feet.