Utah grapples with unprecedented water conditions in the year of the ‘no-pack’ 

Utah cities, ski resorts, farmers and scientists tracking and preparing for the fallout of this year’s lowest-ever snowpack and winter drought are already feeling the effects. 

The impact was clear at Utah’s ski resorts, where visitation dropped from last season’s 6.5 million skier days to about 5 million this season, said Hilary Arens, director of sustainability and water resources at Snowbird Resort. 

“With a lower snowpack, less skiers, Snowbird is making less money,” Arens said Monday during a panel discussion in Salt Lake City, sitting under a display declaring 2026 the “year of no-pack.” 

Hosted by the nonprofit Great Salt Lake Alliance, panelists discussed the wide-ranging implications for Utah’s economy and environment, and the realities of a future with less water. 

This ski season, Snowbird suffered a decline in hotel stays and took on fewer employees — 1,600 compared to its typical 1,800 — “because we just didn’t have the business,” Arens said. The downturn limited its philanthropic capacity to help a forest recovery foundation and other groups, Arens said. 

The Monday event followed an announcement from state water managers last week of a “bleak outlook” for the next few months.

“In a typical year, Utah’s runoff — which refills our reservoirs — would just be getting underway,” they said in a prepared statement. “However, due to record-low snowpack and record-high temperatures, peak runoff has already come and gone.”

Also at risk: the groundwater supply and several springs that are already running low, said Bethany Neilson, director of the Utah Water Research Laboratory at Utah State University in Logan. 

“We are becoming less resilient, and that is going to have impacts not just in terms of our upper watersheds, but also throughout the entire system, because we’ll have less water available during the summer,” Neilson said during the panel. The state must then tap more from its reservoirs, or risk drying up streambeds, she added.

This year’s unprecedented conditions also make it more challenging for scientists to come up with reliable projections on streamflows to the imperiled Great Salt Lake, Neilson said.

“We now have entered a kind of a hydrologic realm that is very uncertain,” she said. 

In Salt Lake City, a conservation push is being accompanied by higher water rates, said Laura Briefer, director of  Salt Lake City’s public utilities department.

Briefer said the city is “going to ask our community to conserve more than they ever did, which means the income that we’re going to receive, if we keep the rates the same, isn’t going to meet our costs.” 

She noted Utah’s “no stranger to drought” but said this year feels decidedly different, in part due to the early peak in runoff, which can shrink the water supply and dry out grasses and trees, raising wildfire risk. 

The state’s farmers irrigating crops across the state “are being hit by a double or triple whammy,” said Chris Robinson, CEO of The Ensign Group, the ranching company that owns vast tracts of land in Utah, Idaho and Wyoming. The Iran war has driven up prices for fuel and fertilizer, and he anticipates farmers will receive just 20% to 40% of their usual water allocations because of shortages. 

“It’s a very serious situation, and unprecedented,” Robinson said. 

The panelists agreed the bleak conditions have a silver lining, keeping a focus on Utah’s water supply for the public, government leaders and the private sector. So do the Winter Olympics, slated to return to Salt Lake City in 2034, noted Arens, representing Snowbird.

“We’re going to be on the world stage here in eight years, and we’re going to need a snowpack.”

SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE