Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. It's Monday, June 7. I'm Naila Boudou. Here's how we're

making you smarter today. Secretary of State Tony Blinken talks China with Mike Allen. Plus,

Jonathan Swan takes us inside the progressive fight over voting rights. But first, today's

one big thing. The hot dry summer ahead for the American West.

The Western U.S. is in the middle of one of the worst droughts in at least the past 1200

years. And soon, the largest reservoir in the country, Lake Mead, could reach its lowest point

since it was first built in the 1930s. And if all of that wasn't scary enough, wildfire season

is underway. Axios' Andrew Friedman is here to explain all of this. Hey, Andrew.

Hey, thanks for having me. Andrew, can you explain to me about Lake Mead what's going on there?

What has not happened since Lake Mead came into existence in the 1930s? It has not dropped below,

I think it's 1,075 feet. That's an automatic trigger for a water shortage. It doesn't mean that

every state in the West that depends on the Colorado River automatically runs out of water.

But what it means is it redoes the allocations to farmers, to cities, to towns. It automatically shifts

what they can do for endangered species for fish. So it's a symbol of what's going on in the

broader West, which is you're stressing a system that's already overstressed. And we're doing it

in a time when we expect this to happen more frequently, more severely, and to have more cascading

consequences. And I think one way we can see this is looking, for example, at the Sierra Nevada

Mountains and the snowpack, how did that water repository affect what we're seeing right now?

So the snowpack and the Sierra Nevada basically just disappeared in a matter of a couple of weeks.

So it was unusually warm in the spring in the Sierra Nevada. And that caused the snowpack to melt

and because the ground was so dry, a lot of that water was not absorbed by the system.

And then a lot of it, the atmosphere was so warm that the snow just sublimated. It went directly

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