This summer, I started watching the afternoon buildup over the Wind River Mountains with a sense of desperation. Fluffy cumulus clouds would mass up into great gray piles that rumbled and flashed. The wind blew dirt around the streets forcing me to squint to protect my eyes. But we never got rain. The hills above town were brown almost before they were green.

Living in Wyoming is learning to live with an almost unconscious thirst. I find myself responding physically to photographs of lush, wet forests or waves lapping against a sandy beach. I feel parched at times, but I’ve also grown to love the beauty of our raw dry landscape. Here the earth’s history is written on the land. You can see where water carved out canyons, where retreating ice left behind mounds of tumbled boulders. A violent afternoon storm can turn silent sandy draws into raging streams leaving behind new channels and sculptures in the malleable earth. It’s a land where spring comes with suddenness and heartrending beauty. The hillsides green up and the desert blooms: wooly daisies, bitterroot, death camus, larkspur, Indian paintbrush, phlox. The palate is brilliant and the display ephemeral. It always makes me breathless and a little sad, because I know it will be over almost as soon as it begins.

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.
—Loren Eisely, The Immense Journey, 1957

This issue of the Frontline is dedicated to water—lifeblood, nurturer, destroyer—and the challenges we face moving forward into the 21st century. These challenges are multiple. In the Powder River Basin, aquifers are being drained to release coalbed methane. The produced water is of varying degrees of purity and is either manna from heaven or a curse for dryland ranchers. For the first time, Wyoming’s Department of Environmental Quality is faced with too much water, raising a question about the impacts of overabundance on a land that has evolved in a state of scarcity. Mountain streams and lakes are being acidified by air pollution threatening the state’s prized trout fisheries. And drought is creating a battle over instream flow between irrigators and wildlife biologists, upstream users and our thirsty neighbors to the south. The very definition of what waters are protected under the Clean Water Act is being redefined and could have lasting effects on the way Wyoming’s precious wetlands are managed. And finally, as global warming shrinks our glaciers and advances the timing of our seasonal snowmelt, Wyoming faces fundamental changes in where and when it gets its water. All of us want and need clean, abundant water. Read more about what we’re doing to ensure we do.