Rocky Mountain Biology Lab Scientist: ‘Fall is Already Here’

As anyone living in or visiting a Colorado mountain town can attest, nature has been confused this summer. Wildflowers started springing up in March. Most of them, even in places like Crested Butte (Colorado’s Wildflower Capital), came and went in a matter of days. Wildlife – most notably, bears – have been uncharacteristically scrounging for food since July.

Autumn is next in line. In fact, it arrived super early.

“We had the worst snow year in Colorado’s historical record this winter,” Dr. Ian Breckheimer, Research Scientist at Rocky Mountain Biology Lab (RMBL) said. “We’re seeing environmental impacts to streams and forests that are quite dramatic. We’re seeing things that are unprecedented. Some are obvious – a record early wildflower season. Because spring was so dry, by late June, plants were so drought-stressed, they essentially stopped flowering. Between 7,000 and 9,000 feet, we’re seeing less forage for cattle, stressed out trout, forests attacked by beetles. The first thing for fall is … fall is already here.”

• Related: Colorado Drought Officially Declared as Statewide Emergency 

This summer’s weather in review

Luckily, in most high-elevation areas across the Colorado Rockies, July and August brought what Breckheimer described as a “robust monsoon system of precipitation.”

“What that’s meant for the ecosystem is the high country is looking green again. Some plants are flowering again. They have a second lease on life.”

The heavy rains have also saturated forests with moisture, which has been crucial in keeping wildfires at bay.

“The amount of moisture in logs, substantial pieces of wood, is important. Those logs hold water. When they’re wet, it’s hard for a wildfire to spread,” Breckheimer said. “We think the fuels in mid-July were as dry as we’ve ever seen them. From spending a lot of time in high elevation, you’d walk on the forest floor and it was crispy. That’s an unusual situation. The precipitation was a godsend to plants and exposure to wildfire.”

By August, fall foliage was beginning to appear in the Colorado Rockies. Fireweed, the fuchsia—colored wildflower whose appearance is traditionally a harbinger of autumn, started blooming in early July.

Now, in late August, most of the fireweed has long-since gone to seed.

“Lower elevations still look crispy. It means fall has come almost a month and a half early,” Breckheimer said. “We’ve particularly seen broad-leaf wildflowers like corn lilies just go brown. I won’t say they’re dying; they’re long-lived plants, but they’re done for season.”

Fall is here

As far as how the drought and strange summer will impact fall colors, Breckheimer said there is not much reliable published data. From what he can tell, though, the colors are coming early and in less abundance.

“From experience, there’s less vibrant yellow and orange in years with poor snowpack,” he said. “Small aspens on steep rocky slopes with dry soils are turning early. We’re already seeing that. Plants have a carbon economy. They make sugar via photosynthesis. They have to pay for that in energy to maintain their leaves. Plant leaves respire and burn photosynthetic energy. When they’re drought-stressed, they’re not producing sugar. In those situations, they drop their leaves early.”

The upside is that leaf peepers will likely have a longer lasting window to witness the display, diminished as it may be.

“It stretches out the season where aspens are turning. It’s a patchier landscape of fall color, less spectacular than it usually is,” he said.

Looking ahead to winter, the greatest positive to glean from last season and the ensuing spring, summer and fall is that it can only get better. Although Breckheimer is reluctant to put too much stock in predictions, he said the upcoming El Niño forecast is promising.

El Niño Could Deliver …

“Next winter could be the development of the strongest El Niño in a century,” he said. “El Niño is linked to how much winter precipitation we get, associated with hotter temperatures in the summer, as well. Unfortunately, it doesn’t give us a sure thing for the coming winter, but there is a bit of evidence that we almost certainly will get more snow that last year. The dices are stacked; we might have a higher-than-average snowpack.”

• Related: NOAA’s September Outlook Offers a First Look at Strong El Niño to Come

Rocky Mountain Biology Lab has collected a wealth of long-term data on snowpack patterns and droughts. Breckheimer has personally done some calculations on the likelihood of repeating a winter like 2025-26. His data shows it’s something we’ll probably only experience once every 200 to 1,500 years. The intensifying onset of climate change could, however, alter all predictions.

“It was made four times more likely based on climate change we’ve already experienced,” he said. “It will become more common by the end of the century. In my mind, this is a warning from the 2080s on what a future low-snow situation would look like.”

Climate Change and Lasting Damage

Sadly, the damage from last winter’s dry spell is not behind us. The New York Times recently reported that the western United States is in a water crisis, water levels in Lake Powell and the nation’s largest reservoirs at record lows.

It will take 10 years of decent snowfall to get anywhere close to recovering.

“This is a long-term problem,” Breckheimer said. “Say we have a high snow year next winter, but the following two are relatively dry, we’re going to be in the same position as Lake Powell, or worse. A high-snow winter in 2026-27 might help alleviate the short-term effects of drought, but it would take a decade of normal precipitation before forests and ground water recover.”

A trove of discovery that has been operating for almost a century, the RMBL gathers information on snow patterns from geological survey data. One of its many one-of-a-kind resources, RMBL community scientist Billy Barr, who lives near the laboratory’s field office in the small ghost town of Gothic, has been collecting his own snow data for more than 50 years.

Supporting Science

“Those two lines of evidence allow us to track when permanent snow arrived in fall and the snow disappearance date in spring,” Breckheimer said. “This year, the first bare ground date was essentially tied with the worst year in Billy Barr’s record, in 1976-77. Satellite data allows us to look at those patterns across the whole landscape and tells a story consistent with Billy’s data. It allows us to create an estimate of probability.”

Home to one of the largest rotating gatherings of field biologists, the RMBL has historically been funded from grants by government programs such as the National Science Foundation, many of which have fallen into jeopardy over the last couple of years.

“I work for an institution that has been around for a century and has accumulated this wonderful database that forecasts the impacts of weather and climate change. It’s such exciting scientific work despite political interference, and so endangered,” Breckheimer said.

The RMBL has launched creative fundraising campaigns, such as its first Fat Marmot Week, highlighting the laboratory’s decades of studies on the fuzzy, high-alpine animal. The lab is also largely funded by donations.

One thing is certain; science doesn’t lie. Nature has thrown some curveballs over the last few months. One can hope that the coming winter unfolds as winter should, with ample snow.