After months of worsening drought, southwest Colorado has flipped the script in dramatic fashion this fall. From Pagosa Springs to Durango to the entire San Juans, some locations have picked up an astonishing 15 to 20 inches of precipitation in just 60 days, erasing extreme drought conditions but ultimately triggering one of the region’s most significant flood events on record. What turned a parched landscape into a flood disaster in only eight weeks? We dive into the remarkable sequence of tropical moisture surges, the key role of a strengthening record El Niño, and why the same pattern that drenched southwest Colorado left Boulder and Denver largely high and dry.




