The river carries water from the Flat Tops. It carried very little this year, part of a clear pattern documented by Bob Dorsett for 25 years.
by Allen Best
Bob Dorsett arrived for our interview at the Meeker town park on a bicycle. I thought that slightly odd. Meeker lies in northwest Colorado, a land of pickup trucks.
But Dorsett is, after all, a careful scientist, not a rancher for whom a pickup is a useful tool nor a young guy, determined to announce his presence in the world.
The town park lies along the White River, the cause of our meeting. The river originates mostly as snow deposited on the Flat Tops, the colloquial name for the massive volcanic uplift that is more formally called the White River Plateau. The river flows 145 miles westward to join the Green River in Utah and hence the beleaguered Colorado River.
Diminished flows in the White are one reason for that struggling Colorado River, and Dorsett has been documenting the declines, examining records for several Snotel sites on the flanks of the Flat Tops installed during the mid-1980s. Snotel (SNOpack TELemetry) provides real-time information about snowpack depths and, importantly, water content. That information informs predictions about river flows during spring runoff.
Around 85% of the water in the Colorado River Basin originates as precipitation, mostly snow, above 8,000 feet. These Snotel sites lie within that band: Burro Mountain elevation, 9,400; Ripple Creek, elevation 10,340; and Trappers Lake, elevation 9,633.
Data collected during the last 110 years by the U.S. Geological Survey is important in understanding the climate change underway. Runoff from the White River most often peaked during early June or late May. During the warming 21st century, though, runoff has been trending about two weeks earlier across most of Colorado, the White River included.
This year has been a doozy of shattered records. Peak runoff from the winter snow occurred in late March, roughly two months early. Too, snowpack during this eerily warm and dry winter was distinctly subpar.
In early May, when I met Dorsett at the park, two young boys were playing in the river, the water only up to their shins. These were the flows of mid-summer or later. Unless the El Niño delivers plentiful rains, the river might become dry by September, said Dorsett. Some rain and snow did arrive in the weeks after our meeting, but not enough to alter the prognosis.
I had been aware of Dorsett’s work, and I have been paying attention to Meeker in recent years. Data suggests it is ground zero for the warming and, at least so far, mostly drying climate in Colorado.
That included the week before our visit. Colorado Climate Center drought maps showed all of Colorado in various stages of yellow, orange and red, the stages of advanced drought. Meeker and a broad swath of northwest Colorado were in burgundy. In the June 11 map produced by the U.S. Drought Monitor, Meeker was still in the burgundy blob along with Aspen, Vail and Summit County.
I had requested the meeting to learn more about Dorsett. My first question was how he had chosen this research.
“Well, I’m a teacher. I teach kids,” he said. “It’s interesting work, and I taught for a lot of years at the high school here. Before that, I taught at the college level, and we collected and analyzed data. This is interesting data, and I’ve always been outdoors and interested in what’s going on outdoors.”
During our conversation, spurred by my questions, Dorsett shared more about where he had grown up, the boyhood experiences that had informed his later work and how he ended up in Meeker. Others had told me that he had arrived as a physician. He had then become a teacher in the local schools. Since 2015, he has been a volunteer tutor for science and math not formally affiliated with the school district.
“Please omit biographical information,” he told me once I had returned home and written a rough draft, wanting to shore up a few details. “I do data. I’ve worked more than 25 years to try to inform this community and policy makers about the state of the river and the effects of climate change. That’s the story.”
No wonder he has no LinkedIn account, brimming with detail about career posts. Nor that he politely refused a photo when we met.
Suffice to say that he has lived from the Pacific to the Atlantic and in Africa, too. And he is old enough to have known Colorado mountain towns before they became popular destinations.
Meeker, in some ways, fits the bill of small-town Colorado. It has a population of 2,500, one grocery store and several motels that get very busy during big-game hunting season. In a time before plastic blaze-orange vests, Teddy Roosevelt stayed at a hotel facing the Rio Blanco County courthouse during one of his hunting trips to Colorado.
Meeker veers deeply conservative in its politics but has a strong sense of community that mostly sees beyond political divisions. If somebody gets sick or has an accident, the community pitches in to help.
The morning after we met with Dorsett, my companion and I had breakfast at a restaurant near the hotel. We were the only customers. Strange, I thought, for a Saturday morning at 8 a.m.
“Is this normal for Meeker on a Saturday morning?” I wondered to the waitress.
“Everyone’s off supporting the kids at their baseball and track events, and they’re all at other places. That’s Meeker for you.”
Meeker has a newspaper, the Rio Blanco Herald Times, and Dorsett has had occasional letters published over the years. An essay published in 2017 was unusual in its depth. In that essay, he delivered an explanation and defense of scientists and the scientific method.
“Science is a process to figure out how the world works,” he wrote in the essay. He cited examples of the forces that hold atoms together as well as the question of why humans behave the way they do.
“It is not the only way of knowing,” he continued. “Science cannot answer questions such as ‘what is the purpose of life?’ or ‘why are we here?’ (although science can contribute to those discussions). But science is the best tool we have to answer questions that we can measure.”
Driving science, he explained, was simple curiosity. “It is driven by innate human impulse for exploration and the intrinsic joy of finding things out.”
The Herald Times, who always has called him Dr. Dorsett, also reported on what it called on-and-off again relations with the school district. In 2015, for example, he was teaching statistics (alternated alternating with calculus), physics, college algebra, college mathematics preparation and anatomy/physiology.
Dorsett was also qualified to teach biology, an essential class for high school graduates.
In our interview, Dorsett told me that he had his students measuring things to understand how the world works.
“We did all kinds of things. We set out bird feeders and put quinine in some of the feeders. It was a different color palette. We wanted to see if the birds could learn to distinguish between different colors,” he said. “Quinine is bitter. If all the red food pellets contain quinine and the birds can see red, then they learn to avoid the red pellets.”
In another experiment, the students tracked insects on different plants during different times of the year and kept temperature records at the different elevations on a biological reserve above the school. “We collected years and years and years and years of data for the kids to study.”
Dorsett had done this sort of research in Gunnison County, working with researchers from both Western State College (now Western Colorado University) and the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory at Gothic, near Crested Butte.
Scarlet gilia, blue flax flowers, and other midsummer wildflowers at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory near Crested Butte. Photo/David Inouye
One specific focus was about a plant called Polemonium foliosissimum. More commonly called tall Jacob’s Ladder, the perennial is found in the high country of Colorado and other Western states. It produces a bright blue flower with a yellow stamen. The blooming flowers smell like sweet clover. When the flowers close, the maturing seed pod creates a skunky smell.
“I ran chemical analysis on those volatile compounds to try to figure out what the plant was doing and how, then studying the insects that visited those flowers at the different times of year.”
The question driving the research was to understand how the plant was communicating with the visiting insects. Dorsett co-authored a paper published in a scientific journal in 2002.
As for the White River, Dorsett has studied records collected since 1902 as well as those of the more recent Snotel stations. A map created in 2003 by the Colorado water engineer’s office attributed 555,000 acre-feet in average annual flows on the White. That compares with 1.53 million for the Yampa River and 879,800 for the Roaring Fork. East of the Continental Divide, the South Platte — in whose valley most Coloradans live — had 400,000 acre-feet.
Those numbers likely would be less today. All rivers in Colorado have been carrying less water, clearly the result of higher temperatures that rob what precipitation arrives from becoming runoff, and perhaps to some degree causing less precipitation.The western tier of Colorado has been particularly hammered by heat, among the most significant recorded in the United States, according to a 2020 Washington Post story, “This giant hot spot is robbing the West of its water.”
Dorsett has found significantly increased mean daily temperatures on the Flat Tops. In his annual report published in late 2025, he shared that average temperatures during January and August during the previous 35 years had increased about 6.5 degrees Fahrenheit (3.5 degrees Centigrade). Precipitation, mostly in the snowpack, also declined dramatically during the same time.
Both increasing heat and declining precipitation are reflected in flows in the White River at Meeker. Since 1910, the volume of water has declined 70,000 acre-feet. That’s about a 14% loss.
This lesser flow of about 500 cubic feet per second has been less effective at scouring the riverbed of algae, he said.
The water year that started in in October 2024 was uncommonly dry across the West, including the White River Valley. It was especially warm. In August, a wildfire called Lee broke out in that area of burgundy red southwest of Meeker. It ended up being the fourth largest wildfire in Colorado’s recorded history.
Dorsett posts his annual reports, including that for 2025, which can be found here.. He also shares it with the local newspapers and the Rio Blanco County commissioners. In the latter case, he said, it was without response. “Crickets,” he said of what he has heard back.
This was part of Bob Dorsett’s 2025 report that documented earlier and overall declined flows over time in the White River.
As for his students, there had been little controversy except a couple of sets of parents who didn’t want their children to hear him talk about climate change. For them, he had to devise alternate curricula.
“Science has been cast as just another special interest. Climate scientists, according to some, are just trying to get government funding to pad their retirement accounts,” he wrote in his 2017 essay.
Scientists, he acknowledged, are humans, “and a few let egos and greed corrupt their work. But the process is remarkably robust, and it is self-correcting. No work in science is accepted by the general scientific community until it has been replicated.”
Dorsett then described the scientific process that requires replication, peer review and so forth. “Work that does not pass this rigorous review process might make some splashy headlines, he said, citing the claim several years before that “cold fusion” would soon deliver unlimited cheap energy.
“But it disappears into the dustbin of rejected hypotheses if other scientists can’t verify the results.”
The White River a few miles east of Meeker in early May, a couple of days after a rare — for this year — rain and snow storm. Photo/Allen Best
As we sat on a picnic table near the White River in May, we also talked about climate models. The theory of climate change — theory being a way to describe a lot that is being observed — did not burst on the science scene 20 years ago. The hypothesis was assembled more than a century ago, with some rough calculations of how the accumulating greenhouse gases would warm the atmosphere.
Those crude models have turned out to be surprisingly prescient. So have the models created 40 years ago by James Hansen, the NASA scientist, said Dorsett. “The climate is changing a whole lot faster even than the models were showing us.”
Below us was the river, still prized by anglers as a fishery despite its depleted flows as well as the ranchers who depend upon it for the water to grow hay. Hopes of the local ranchers had surged with the arrival of rain and snow just a few days before our visit, he said, after a winter that was too warm, too dry, and too short.
“As soon as it rains, you know, everything’s okay again, and we’re all going to be fine.”
The late Wallace Stegner famously wrote that one cannot be pessimistic about the West. “This is the native home of hope,” he said.
That may still be true, but the data that Bob Dorsett has been tracking suggests that hope needs to at least be tempered.
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