A freakishly dry spring is literally changing the landscape in Colorado

The state is now nearly half-covered by extreme drought conditions — even though there was essentially no extreme drought there at the start of 2026.

(CNN) — Drought is spreading fast in Colorado and major cities are declaring their earliest water restrictions in history, urging residents to cut back on the thirstiest water user: the classic American lawn.

The state is now nearly half-covered by extreme drought conditions — even though there was essentially no extreme drought there at the start of 2026. Now, extreme drought in Colorado is at its highest level in five years, and at its highest level for April in more than two decades.

Colorado is no stranger to dry years, but this year is unique for above average dryness coinciding with extreme early-season warmth, according to the University of Colorado Boulder. City officials are warning people will have to make changes, most notably, adjusting their expectations for how their lawns will look this year. Those changes could reshape the aesthetics of the region for the long haul.

This “will be the year that people in the Southwest and Colorado will really learn the value of water,” said Shonnie Cline, spokesperson for Aurora Water, which serves Colorado’s second-most populous city. “But 2027 could be worse.”

A ‘freakish’ spring

The Mountain West, in general, is dealing with a one-two punch of minimal snowpack and a “completely freakish atmospheric event” in the form of temperatures soaring to the 80s or even 90 degrees Fahrenheit in March, said Todd Hartman, the spokesperson for Denver Water.

Coloradans will go into spring and summer with their lowest snowpack on record. That matters because snowpack makes up the bulk of the state’s water supply; Colorado is heavily dependent on surface water in rivers and tributaries fed by melting snow in the soaring Rocky Mountains, in addition to backup supplies in reservoirs.

“This is an incredibly serious situation for us,” Hartman said. “We’ve never seen snow pack this low in our 50 years of records.”

City officials and water managers across the state are watching with apprehension. The driest part of the year is still months away, and there’s no telling whether this is a one-year or multi-year drought.

To cut down, Denver has asked its restaurants to only serve water to customers by request and encouraged residents to use more efficient commercial car washes, rather than rinsing off their car with buckets in the driveway.

But the main way to cut down on water use is by restricting residential outdoor watering. Thirsty lawns make up a large portion of water use in Mountain West cities; outdoor watering accounts for between 40% to 60% of Aurora water’s demand, Cline said. In nearby Erie — a town situated between Denver and Boulder — outdoor watering makes up between 60% to 70% of total demand.

Some Western cities began implementing water conservation rules long ago — desert-situated Las Vegas, for example, has some of the most stringent rules against planting and watering grass in the country. But Colorado’s major cities have, so far, exerted less extreme limits to water use. Now, that may have to change.

An unnatural landscape

The main culprit for water managers is Kentucky bluegrass, one of the most popular varieties in the US. As the name suggests, it’s a grass species native to Kentucky — not the high deserts of Colorado. This emerald-green grass is a lush outdoor carpet that has become the platonic ideal of an American lawn. It holds up well to foot traffic, making it ideal for turf fields or backyards that get a lot of use from pets or kids running around.

The drawback – it needs a lot of water.

Kentucky bluegrass has shorter root systems than other types of grass and needs around 17.5 gallons of water per square foot to stay green.

Several Colorado cities have started implementing restrictions on this type of grass, not allowing new residential buildings to put it down and tearing up non-functional turf in public spaces to replace it with native grasses.

The more challenging thing is getting people with brown lawns to water them less. As Denver and Aurora have started to implement early-stage restrictions on outdoor watering, officials have seen people trying to pre-empt restrictions by watering as early in the season as possible.

“We saw some HOAs turning on their sprinklers in February,” Cline said. “We are very much encouraging people to not turn on their sprinklers until May. Though realistically, I think people are scared that their lawns are going to be dead because it’s been so warm.”

In Erie, water managers noticed a sudden spike in water demand levels as people, fearing their grass was dead, turned sprinklers and hoses on in March. At times, demand was getting close to the city’s supply limit, said Dylan King, a sustainability and water conservation specialist in Erie.

Water use levels spiked so alarmingly that town and county officials sent out an emergency alert telling people to stop watering their lawns.

“We had to declare restrictions on the use of outdoor irrigation systems just to make sure that we had enough water to keep all the indoor water use still viable,” King said. The town, which gets most of its water from the Colorado River, gets less water allocated to it in the winter months, when residents started watering. It will soon switch to summer supply, increasing water availability four times over, allowing severe watering restrictions to lift. However, town officials are asking homeowners to keep their sprinklers off until May, and will suggest a two day per week outdoor watering schedule, King said.

While homeowners fear their brown lawns mean dead grass, Cline and others say lawns that look brown in spring are merely lying dormant. People can keep their grass in this state throughout the hottest months of summer by watering them minimally during July and August and reviving them in the fall. But more residents in these cities are abandoning their lawns altogether, replacing them with native grasses or shrubs. Slowly, the broader landscape of front yards in some cities is changing from green lawns to varied canopies of trees, plants and rocks.

Erie is one of the municipalities with a subsidy program incentivizing residents to transform their front lawns into “water-wise” landscapes with shrubs, mulch and native grasses — and it has proved popular, King said.

“I think demand for that (program) is going to be really high this year, because people are seeing that their grass requires more and more water as it gets warmer, they see those bills go up, and they’re also probably conscious of their water usage,” he said.

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