Drought jumps past 68% coverage as the Laramie River thins to a trickle

Drought has taken hold of the Laramie Basin with unusual speed this summer. Albany County's share of land in Extreme Drought or worse stood at just 14% in early July; by mid-July it had passed 59%, and for the last two weeks it has held steady at 68.42%.¹ A swing this sharp over the course of a single month is worth taking seriously rather than shrugging off as an ordinary dry spell.

The Laramie River's condition lines up with that shift. The USGS gauge at Laramie measured just 2.32 cubic feet per second on August 11, with a gage height of 3.12 feet, a thin trickle for a river that basin wildlife and irrigated pasture both lean on heavily this time of year.² The low flow was recorded in the same window the county tipped into majority-D3 coverage, consistent with the broader drought pattern even though the gauge data alone can't establish a direct cause.¹ It also tracks with a broader western pattern this year of record-low spring snowpack water content, and forecasters are calling for continued dryness through October.

The timing matters ecologically. The basin only just came off a season of nesting Swainson's Hawks and blooming milkweed drawing in native bees, and a river running this low heading into fall is the kind of stress that rarely shows up all at once. More often it surfaces later, in dried-up wetland edges and stunted grass along the floodplain, quietly reshaping conditions for next year's growth and the wildlife that depends on it even while the riverbank itself looks unremarkable today.