If you’re hearing about the low water in the Colorado River, and wondering how it’ll effect your summer and fall river trip plans, look no further. While low water is concerning in a broader context, the Colorado and Green Rivers still have enough water at low levels for a canoe trip. This post will cover how the low water affects your future canoe trip on the Colorado River in Meander Canyon, or on the Green River in Labyrinth Canyon and Stillwater Canyon.
No doubt, we had a much lower than average snowpack this past winter of 2025/2026, and that lower snowpack does mean less water in the river. The broader ecological and societal implications of an extended southwestern drought are beyond the scope of this article. However, for the types of river trips that we shuttle here at Tex’s Riverways, the low water is not entirely bad news. Low water lends itself to better sandbar camping, less bugs, better swimming, and less crowds. Most of our trips occur at low water, and most of our customers prefer lower water levels.
But what is “low water” exactly?
In the context of our rivers, the Colorado River through Meander Canyon, and the Green River through Labyrinth and Stillwater Canyons, “high water” is a result of snowmelt, and typically occurs between late April and mid-June. High water conditions begin to be a factor on our river sections around 10,000 cfs. At those levels, paddlers are all but restricted to the riverside “high water” camps. On a year with a surplus of snowpack, when the snow is melting rapidly, the river flows can reach up to and above 50,000 cfs on the Colorado, and 40,000 cfs on the Green. So yes, 50,000 cfs is “high water”, but so is 12,000 cfs.
Side note: “CFS” is a unit of measurement for river flow, and it stands for “cubic feet per second”
The friendly folks over at the USGS maintain monitoring stations that publish river data to the public for free. You can monitor the CFS (as well as the water temp and other data points) in the Green River at Mineral Bottom, and in the Colorado River at Potash.
Outside of the high water months of late spring, for most of the year the rivers hover around a much lower cfs known as a “base flow”. The base flow is what the river is flowing at most of the time, when there’s not a bunch of snow melting and running downstream, and is the level that most of our customers prefer for their river trips. The base flow for the Colorado in Meander Canyon is typically around 2,000 – 2,500 cfs, and the base flow for the Green in Labyrinth and Stillwater Canyons is around 1,800 – 2,200 cfs.
This year, with the lower levels of snowpack, peak runoff or “high water” was much lower. But the base flows that we were seeing before the spring runoff were not much lower than we were used to. We were seeing base flows of around 1,800 on the Colorado and 1,600 on the Green, which made for pleasant canoe trips. If the base flows this summer and fall follow that trend, you can expect very familiar conditions for your late summer and fall river trips.
Low-water camping
There are two types of camps on our river trips – high-water camps and sandbars. High water camps are located up on top of the river banks, and in order to leave no trace you must find a pre-existing campsite. These sites aren’t signed or numbered, you generally spot a small trail leading up through the riverside vegetation to a small clearing where you can make camp. These camps can be more sheltered from the wind due to vegetation and riverbank structure, but are also typically harder to access, due to having to carry your camp gear up the river bank.
Low-water camps – or sandbars – on the other hand, are plentiful at lower water levels, and provide a pleasant place to camp near the water. Many people prefer sandbar camping on our river sections for several reasons; the wide, flat surface of a sandbar is typically a nicer place to pitch a tent with less rocks and roots, the larger area of sandbar camps are more conducive to fun activities like bocce, frisbee, or swimming and playing in the water, and also because you don’t have to carry your river gear up a steep river bank.
Low-water crowds
The other upside to sandbar camping is that there is more of it. When the water is low, there are dozens more campsites on any given stretch of river simply because there are more sandbars. There’s a finite number of riverside high-water campsites, and the addition of dozens of sandbars to camp on means that groups can be more spread out, and the pressure to find a good campsite is lessened.
You can also take advantage of the fact that the news and general consensus out there in the world is that it’s a “bad river year” so many people may skip their river trips this year and spend their summer time golfing, or rollerblading, or whittling….(we’re not entirely sure what people do when they’re not canoeing). This means less crowds on the river.
Sure, if you’re a rafter looking for big-water thrills, it might not be the best summer for you – so dust off those rollerblades, cowboy. But if you’re after the feel of a canoe gliding effortlessly through still water, ample sandbar camping, and the peace of a quiet desert river canyon, you know where to find it.
Low-water side effects: Less Bugs, More Wildlife
High water years are notorious for bugs. This is because at high water, the river floods all the flatland in the river bottoms as well as any back-channels of river, which then become stagnant standing water when the river level drops. This leads to a bumper crop of mosquitoes, which then terrorize river trippers for weeks or months to come. Luckily for this year, the water hasn’t peaked at a high enough level to cause serious bug problems, and we’ve been getting good (as in: low) reports on the mosquito front.
Also in low water years, the snow in the mountains melts out sooner, leaving less water for the animals that typically dwell at higher elevations. On low water years, we get more reports of wildlife sightings from our customers, including bighorn sheep, deer, and even the occasional black bear.
What about the jet boats at low water?
We’ve had some folks ask what happens if the water gets too low to run the jet boats? We don’t know the answer to that question, because in the 68 years that Tex’s Riverways has been running jet boats up and down these rivers, it’s never once been too low for us to make the run.
We take the safety of our jetboat piloting very seriously. Our jetboat pilots have a combined 48 years of experience driving these boats in Meander Canyon. There’s only five pilots, so that number does carry some weight. They have the river channel memorized, and drive by utilizing landmarks on shore to avoid being drawn off course by wind or chop. They are never “reading and running” when there are passengers on board. We film our runs, and routinely discuss changes in the river channel with all five pilots to be sure that we are uniformly driving the safest route. We also have the margin of safety built into the style of boats we operate – these jetboats were custom built specifically to carry heavy loads in shallow water, it’s what they’re made for.
Earlier this season, due to a fluke in the irrigation systems upstream of us in Colorado, the flows in Meander Canyon dropped down to 1,400 cfs – levels that none of us have seen in the last 30 years – and our largest jetboat made it down to the confluence and back with room to spare. If water levels somehow get lower than that, we can always run our smaller jetboats to give us a larger safety margin. Our point is that as long as there is water in the Colorado River, we intend on outfitting canoe trips, and running jetboat shuttles to pick them up.
