by:
The man they call El Coyote pushed his blue dinghy away from the
bulrushes, stroked through the murky brown residue of the Colorado
River, and began to pull up his gill net. Halfway through pulling in
the 130-foot net, he found an eight-inch mullet that landed with a
lonely plunk in an orange pail at his feet. Minutes passed before I
heard the plastic thud again, and by the time the whole net lay empty
in the boat, there were just three fish in his bucket.
"At least it's breakfast," Ricardo Sandoval said to me. "The net's
been out here two days." El Coyote, so nicknamed for his days as a crafty baseball player,
paddled back home to El Mayor, the ramshackle settlement of the Cucapa
Indians, the "river people" who are last in line for the waters of the Colorado River system.
Fifty miles south of the U.S. border in Mexico's Baja California, the
great river of the West that I had followed from beginning to end was
gone, the water in its bed a shallow, narrow sump of salt and
pesticide-laced runoff from crop irrigation.
"Es nuestra vida -- It is our life," said El Coyote,
summing up 2,000 years of his people's sustenance from this
area. But for half a century the delta had been dying, and with it
the Cucapa culture. No longer can tribal members hunt mule deer, plant
squash with the floods, harvest wild salt grass, or eat fish three
times a day. Several species of fish and plant life have disappeared.
The settlement has shrunk to about 85 families. The once rich estuary
is filled with weeds, trash, and occasional swamps of unhealthy water
-- barely enough to float their boats. Last year, the fourth year of
drought, the water dropped to its lowest level in tribal memory. The
Cucapa were lucky to eat fish once a week.
"We are the river people. We' re still here," said Ricardo. "But what
river? I haven't seen it. It doesn't get this far."
While most mapmakers draw a vibrant blue line from the central Rocky
Mountains to the Gulf of California, the nets of the Cucapa tell a
poignant truth about the Colorado River: Demand has finally exceeded
the river's capacity to support the Southwest.
For a river bigger than life such a condition seems unthinkable.
Plunging from frozen heights of 14,000 feet on the continental spine,
the Colorado writhes for 1,450 miles. It etches the Rocky Mountains,
it carves the mile-deep Grand Canyon. For only 56 years have its
red-mud floods been under control.
European explorers thought the land it flowed through was
useless. "Ours has been the first and will doubtless be the last party
of whites to visit this profitless locality," wrote Lt. Joseph C. Ives
of the Army Engineers in 1858, after steaming upriver to the present
site of Hoover Dam in search of a navigable route between the Rockies
and the Pacific." The Colorado River, along the greater portion of its
lonely and majestic way, shall be forever unvisited and undisturbed."
As rivers are measured, the Colorado has only a few superlatives: Its
elevational drop is the greatest in North America; it is one of the
siltiest (before the dams, it carried an average load of 380,000 tons
a day); and it is one of the saltiest, carrying nine million tons a
year. Although it ranks seventh in length in the U.S., its water
volume has averaged only 15 million acre-feet of water yearly since
1905. (The Columbia empties 192 million and the Mississippi more then
400 million).
The Colorado system binds the Southwest in a semiarid
244,000-square-mile drainage (an area larger than France) and divides
the region as no other element: state against state, rural against
urban, Indian against white. It has earned the reputation as the most
legislated, litigated, and debated river in the world.
In two years of tracing the Colorado I was stunned by the magnitude
of what it was asked to do. The Colorado grows grapes in New Mexico,
brews beer in Colorado, raises minnows in Utah, floats rafts in
Arizona, lights jackpots in Nevada, nurses elk in Wyoming, freezes ice
for California, sweetens cantaloupes in Mexico. In bringing life to 21
million people and more than two million acres of farmland in seven
states and two countries, the river has reached a dammed and diverted
denouement."
There is only so much water, and demands are increasing. Conflicts
are constant among water users. The 1922 Colorado River Compact that
divides its waters into two basins for use by seven bordering states
-- Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and
California -- no longer seems adequate as Americans flood the Sunbelt.
New rules must be written in a time of environmental concern and
heightened awareness of Native American rights and claims. A new
strategy is needed for western water. As the Colorado River nears the
end of a fruitful century in which it was harnessed to human needs, it
enters an era of limits.
"These glaciers really did a number on this country," said John
Barlow, a rock-and-roll lyricist and former Wyoming rancher, as we
looked out the window of a small plane, nearly touching the gouged
granite of Gannett Peak. Sunrise had just topped Wyoming's Wind River
Range, one of the Colorado's main sources, and down in the shadows I
could see stretch marks on Mammoth Glacier as it slowly ebbed into the
Green River, the most northern reach of the Colorado system.
"You could say that the Green was the central river in settling the
West," said Barlow. It was the heart of the beaver trade, and John
Wesley Powell began his historic exploration of the Colorado in 1869
at the town of Green River in the Wyoming Territory.
Unlike most other Colorado tributaries, which are diverted at their
headwaters, the Green has wild beginnings. I could see a moose and her
calf clomping at the edge of Upper Green River Lake, a brilliant
turquoise reflected from glacial silt. Two miles more and the river
leaves the wilderness, weaving its way through a sage plain. This is
where its virginity ends: Here the first irrigation ditches cut into
its banks.
Over a ridge, on the New Fork of the Green, John Barlow's
grandfather, Perry W. Jenkins, built his ranch in 1905. He organized
Sublette County around the Green's watershed and later helped
represent Wyoming in negotiations for the historic 1922 Colorado River
Compact. Each summer John flood-irrigated 2,200 acres to grow grass
for 1,100 cows. But he lost the ranch to high debt and low beef
prices in the late 1980s. The new, absentee owners sold the cattle,
and the unused water slipped into the Green, where almost 60 percent
of Wyoming's compact share goes for lack of use.
"I would like my kids' kids to live here," said John, who makes a
living writing songs for the Grateful Dead. "I don't think the
national interest is served by running all the water to where it
cleans off driveways in Los Angeles. But I think the compact will be
abrogated, and Wyoming will be the loser. This is heretical, but I
don't know how we can justify our need for the water under present
circumstances."
Three hundred miles to the southeast in Colorado, along the
Continental Divide, the 12,000-foot Never Summer Mountains have
beautiful names: Cumulus, Nimbus, Stratus. With the heart of a poet
and big snowshoes, I'd hoped to find one of the river's sources near
Lake of the Clouds in Rocky Mountain National Park, which lies below
these peaks. The birth here is difficult: The runoff of the serrated
mountains is interrupted by a big gouge 14 miles across the mountain
breasts. This Grand Ditch runs water eastward across the divide at
10,186 feet, then sends it down the east face of the Rockies to Fort
Collins and 30,000 acres of sugar beets, corn, and barley on the
Great Plains.
Some people thought it was awful to tear up the side of the
mountain," said Harvey Johnson, 95, chairman of Water Supply and
Storage Company, which owns the water in the ditch. "I tell them we're
growing food, and they'd go hungry without it."
First dug by Asian laborers, the ditch carried water by 1900. "We
were quite desperate, and the Western Slope was flush with water,"
Johnson told me. "The company decided they'd just go get it." That was
both the mentality and legal status quo. The primary law of the arid
West, "first in time, first in right," gives the oldest users of water
nearly ironclad seniority and ownership. Johnson, one of the grand men
of the river, arrived in Colorado in a covered wagon and spent his
life making the semiarid plains bloom. "It's very productive soil,"
he told me,"if you put good water on it."
Colorado's entire Front Range is a rich farm belt and a growing
urban area because of water diverted across the Great Divide. The
Grand Ditch is one of the oldest transmountain diversions, but there
are 20 others, draining a third of the Colorado's high tributary
flows. Denver, where I live, gets half its water from the Colorado
system.
The most improbable diversion lies 2,000 feet below the Grand Ditch,
where snowmelt collected in Lake Gransby is literally pumped backward,
up the old Colorado riverbed to Grand Lake. A beautiful, natural
mountain lake is thus made part of a plumbing system that takes 90
percent of the fledgling main stem's water. A tunnel 13 miles long and
nearly ten feet wide, part of the Colorado-Big Thompson Project, takes
the lake water under the Continental Divide to the east face of the
Rockies. The water then flows to cities like Boulder, serving a
population of 500,000, and to Weld County, the fourth richest
agricultural county in the U.S. But draining so much water leaves the
Colorado a small stream in the mountains, with just enough water to
meet the state requirement for keeping trout alive.
"Without that requirement you would have dry streambeds on the Western
Slope for sure," said Rolly Fischer of the Colorado River Water
Conservation District, which has carried on a half-century water war
with Denver and the Front Range. Formed as a"protective association"
when the Colorado-Big Thompson was built, the district has fought
nearly every transmountain diversion. "The fear has been that the
Western Slope would be dewatered just as California's Owens Valley
was dried up by Los Angeles," said Fischer.
Denver's suburban neighbor Aurora has proposed tapping the Gunnison
River, the one remaining Western Slope river not diverted to the Front
Range. "The Gunnison is one of the last frontiers in the water wars,"
said Bill Trampe, one of the local ranchers who increased their own
taxes for 1991 to fight Aurora in water court. "Recreation is the
Gunnison's leading industry," he said. "It requires water in the
streams. And half of Aurora's water would go on lawns."
But Aurora's population of 222,000 could triple by the year 2050, and
the city is already using the water from 20,000 acres of mountain
ranchland and has bought other farm water. "The Western Slope views it
as their water, while in reality state law provides for diverting
water to where it can be used," explained Aurora's utilities
director, Tom Griswold.
In the spring of 1990, the signs of drought came early in the
mountains, where snow depths are watched like a water stock market. On
April 1, when I skied through the Fraser Experimental forest west of
Denver measuring snow with U.S. Forest Service scientists, the
Colorado's predicted flow was 45 percent below normal.
Within days George Anderson was making tough decisions downstream
about ranchland water in Roan Creek, just one small tributary near
Grand Junction, Colorado. "I'd rather do anything than go tell a guy
I've got to shut his water off," said Anderson, a soft-spoken,
friendly water commissioner with a gold tooth in his grin."If you
don't have water up here, you don't have nothing," he said as he drove
me around the irrigated valley.
In a drought, George Anderson is judge, jury, and executioner. On
about a hundred ditches that in a good year carry Roan Creek to 8,000
acres of grass sprouted from sage-brush range, he had to close all but
six of the guillotine-shaped headgates in April.
As the Colorado's two main branches -- the upper Colorado and the
Green -- converge, the landscape becomes increasingly arid and lonely;
precipitation drops from as much as 55 inches in the mountains to as
little as 10 on the Colorado Plateau, where the rivers sink into
serpentine cracks.
The greatest pollution is salt. Starting with snowmelt quality of 50
parts per million, both rivers grow saline as the water is extracted,
evaporates from reservoirs, passes over natural salt beds, and pours
through soil that was once the bottom of an ancient sea. By the time
the Green reaches Green River, Utah, 600 miles from its source, its
salinity exceeds the federal 500 parts per million salt standard for
drinking water.
The river used to flood silty cold in the spring and trickle warm and
clear in the fall. Now, below dams like Flaming Gorge, it runs clear
and cold year-round. The dams trap silt; reservoirs release frigid
water from their depths back into the river, creating excellent trout
habitat but contributing to the near extinction of several native
species sensitive to the temperature change.
"We're not talking about one or two fish," said Harold Tyus, who runs
the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service laboratory on the Green River near
Vernal, Utah. "We' re talking about the loss of an entire fauna. More
than half the endemic fish in the upper basin are endangered. This is
the last stronghold."
Before sunrise in a rose-colored canyon I watched Tyus' s biologists
seine the Green for tiny Colorado squawfish larvae -- "threads with
eyeballs." That they exist at all there is due to the Yampa River, the
only major undammed tributary in the Colorado drainage. It joins the
Green in Dinosaur National Monument and runs warm and low enough for
squawfish spawning. Proposals to dam the Yampa -- one company wanted
to sell the water to San Diego -- would probably eliminate the fish,
said Tyus, who favors giving the fish a water right of their own.
Where the Green and Colorado meet, in the remote labyrinth of
Canyonlands National Park near Moab, Utah, a powerful river results. I
could see the pistachio color of one mixing with the red-silt-laden
flow of the other, a total of 13,000 cubic feet a second swirling and
gathering strength for a plunge through Cataract Canyon. In a life
jacket and rubber raft I joined a group of thrill seekers through Big
Drops 1, 2, and 3 -- rolling, muddy rapids guaranteed to soak to the
skin.
Inside canyons we examined the ruins of Anasazi Indians, the "ancient
ones" who lived along the river a thousand years ago. The best
explanation for their disappearance is a combination of drought,
overpopulation, and internal strife -- elements present in the West
today.
The Colorado has defined what the West became," the rafters heard from
Sally Ranney, president of American Wildlands, after a steak dinner on
the beach." And because of the water shortage it will define what the
West will not become. We have a saying out here that water flows
toward money. It has nothing to do with gravity."
Near the end of our trip the river widened into Lake Powell. Capable
of holding nearly two years' flow in a red sandstone bathtub 1,900
miles around, Powell is just upstream from Lees Ferry, the dividing
point between the upper and lower basins. The 1922 compact apportioned
7.5 million acre-feet to each basin, from an annual flow then thought
to average about 17 million. In years of drought, the lower basin gets
its share first, sometimes resulting in a shortfall for the upper
basin.
Virtually all the water that will enter the Colorado has done so by
now, and the lake is a quick look at demand and supply. In 1990, the
fourth year of drought, a ring was showing in the bathtub 66 feet
above the water level (evaporation alone takes five feet a year). Less
than 5.5 million acre-feet of water flowed into Lake Powell, not
nearly the 8.25 million required downstream by the compact and a later
treaty.
Lake Powell's creation in 1963 was the crowning act of the U.S.
Bureau of Reclamation's 30-year, big-dam era. Built for water
storage, flood control, and power, Glen Canyon Dam flooded caverns and
canyons that only a few thousand people had ever seen. Today more than
three million people visit the vast desert lake each year, and I could
see a new conflict on the river, as the traditional water users -- the
irrigators and power interests -- bumped heads with the enormous
economic force of leisure time. Boaters wanted their docks in the
water, not draped on silt.
Downriver, in the Grand Canyon, the dam was exacting another price.
With most of the silt blocked off, the clear, deep-green "hungry" water
ate away existing sand and silt, the base for the canyon's
ecosystem. "Some of the worst erosion came early, in 1964," said Martin
Litton as he maneuvered a dory through the rapids below the dam for
perhaps the 75th time in his 74 years. The Grand Canyon curmudgeon has
long been a bur under the saddle of dam interests.
Without the usual feast-and-famine flows of the natural river,
wildlife changed abruptly. Fish used to warmer waters and muddy
bottoms died off. Beaver disappeared because entrances to their homes,
built underwater in the riverbanks, were regularly exposed as the
water level rose and fell. Tamarisk invaded and songbirds increased;
trout were introduced and bald eagles began to make winter stopovers.
Litton glanced up at the violet-green swallows looping about for bugs:
"They're doing fine, but most cliff swallows left after the water
cleared. Not enough mud for their nests. With fewer beaches for
boaters to camp on, the national park limited visitors to 22,000 a
year, outlawed driftwood fires except in winter, and made everyone
carry out all waste."
On our second morning we awoke to find our boats high and dry on the
narrow beach. The water had receded nearly 13 feet during the night.
Glen Canyon's hydroturbines are used when power demand peaks, causing
the water in the Grand Canyon to go up and down like a tide. Less
demand for power, less water. "See, the water is low today because it
was cool in Phoenix yesterday and they didn't want as much
air-conditioning. The beaches can't take this daily up-and-down
stuff," explained Litton, who argued for a shift of peaking power away
from Glen Canyon.
But Lloyd Greiner, a manager with the Western Area Power
Administration, later countered: "I don' t believe there is enough
evidence that fluctuating flows are a major contributor to the damage.
The river drops 2,000 feet in the canyon. With water rushing through,
there will be erosion."
On a Sunday morning we awoke in the canyon to bad news: Low weekend
demand for electricity in Phoenix meant that low "Saturday water" was
reaching us 87 miles from the dam. In Unkar Rapids, Litton hit a rock.
A few miles farther the river looked worse. "I've never seen Hance
Rapids this low. This is basically unrunnable in dories," he said when
he saw the boulders sticking out of the water.
So we waited, with environmentalist Litton praying, ironically, that
Phoenix would suffer a heat wave so we could float the river. That
night I stared up into a heaven cut by the cleavage of the canyon. I
watched satellites inch across the star-sprinkled sky and thought that
mine was the last generation to have seen a night sky uncluttered by
man-made things -- or the Grand Canyon's waters unregulated. Two days
later Litton' s prayers were answered.
When Maj. John Wesley Powell
emerged from the Grand Canyon in 1869, he met Mormon colonists who
gave him melons and other food from ground that received only four
inches of rain a year. Powell later foretold the opportunities and
limits of western water: "All the waters of all the arid lands will
eventually be taken from their natural channels," he wrote. The Mormons believed that irrigation
fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah, that when Christ returned" the
desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose...for in the wilderness
shall waters break out, and streams in the desert."
Like a miracle the river plugged by Hoover Dam, on the border of
Nevada and Arizona, achieved that promise. The "grande dam" reined in
the Colorado, fostered what was the richest irrigation project in the
world, and watered and powered the Sunbelt. As I followed the waterway
150 miles below Hoover, I could almost hear the slurping straws of
distant cities. On one side of Lake Havasu is the Central Arizona
Project (CAP), which carries river water 335 miles eastward to Phoenix
and, soon, to Tucson. On the other is the Colorado River Aqueduct,
emerging from a pump house able to suck up one billion gallons of
water a day for southern California.
Until 1990 those California intake pipes, run by the Metropolitan
Water District (MWD) of Southern California, took pretty much what
they needed -- over one million acre-feet a year, twice MWD's right
to the river. Arizona wasn't using its full share. With the CAP
nearing completion in 1990 it looked like Arizona would come close.
When dry California asked for more water, the Bureau of Reclamation,
with its hand on the Hoover spigot, said no. It was a historic
announcement. As 1990 began, the lower basin had, for the first time,
used up its full share of the Colorado River. Six months later, with
generous rains in Arizona, the spigot to California was reopened.
Given these limits, it was strange to me to travel west along the
Colorado River Aqueduct and find its waters spread in chevron-shaped
shallow ponds near Palm Springs, California, soaking into the ground!
Like a desert mirage, the waste wasn't what it appeared: The water
was recharging the desert's huge underground aquifer.
Because of the rich aquifer, wealth beyond all imagining has come to
Palm Springs. On Country Club Drive, I passed developments with names
like "The Lakes" and "Desert Falls." At Marriott' s 400-acre Desert
Springs resort the lobby contains a ten-foot-deep indoor lagoon,
complete with boats, and the resort pumps one and a half million
gallons of water a day onto its golf course in summer.
In Los Angeles I found serious attempts to conserve water as the
California drought entered its fourth year. Squads from the city's
Drought Busters enforced new ordinances against washing sidewalks,
serving unsolicited water in restaurants, and watering lawns during
the day.
I spent one morning cruising the streets with Drought Buster Tony
Marufo, who would brake to a halt at the first sign of a damp spot on
a hot sidewalk. "Some people say I can smell water," he said,
grinning. In 1990, in a city long known for its profligate water use,
Marufo and his 25 colleagues wrote 8,862 citations from May to
October. By late summer Los Angeles had reduced its water use by more
than 10 percent.
But MWD' s Tim Quinn told me that conservation is a limited tool, that
per capita use is up in most western cities. Newer houses actually
push water use up -- all have automatic dishwashers -- and higher
income families use more water. "We' re trying to find ways to flatten
those numbers out," he said, "but lowering them may be impossible. It
would cross the line of fundamental changes in life-style -- no green
yards, for example."
And that, I learned, was a line that no one in the California water
establishment wanted to cross. Controlling growth, they said, is
not a water agency's job; finding more water is. The population of
15 million served by MWD is growing by 300,000 a year, and officials
fear running short of water by the year 2000 if serious drought
conditions continue.
The Sacramento River is a likely source of relief but an unpopular
choice with many northern Californians who think southern Californians
are stealing their water. The drought has also raised anew such
possibilities as seagoing tankers bringing fresh water from the
Pacific Northwest, ships hauling icebergs, and a pipeline to tap the
Columbia River. Desalination plants have been started to turn Pacific
Ocean water into fresh water.
Another prospect is water marketing -- trading water like a commodity,
a relatively new concept in California. In its first deal MWD agreed
to finance the lining of irrigation canals and the upgrading of
Imperial Irrigation District plumbing at a cost of 223 million
dollars. The deal will save 100,000 acre-feet from seeping into the
ground, thus increasing water available to MWD. The agency might also
pay farmers not to grow crops in dry years: Agriculture draws 80 to 90
percent of the Colorado.
"The phone rings three times a week from landowners in other states,
wanting to sell their water," said Tim Quinn. Wyoming might use its
water after all, I thought -- by selling it to California. But state
laws would have to change for that.
Everywhere I went along the river, a new breeze was blowing on water
policy. At the end of the pipeline, where I expected a hurricane
force, it was but a whisper. One of the fastest growing communities in
southern California is Chula Vista, outside San Diego--highly
dependent on the Colorado River. EastLake, a development being built
there on barren land a few miles from the Mexican border, is an
example of how water leverages growth. EastLake's water cost of $525
an acre-foot (a western family of four uses one acre-foot of water a
year) helps turn worthless ground into a thriving community.
Projections for the year 2004 show 25,000 people living on 3,200
acres in 8,900 homes, a five-fold population increase.
"This is going to be our downtown here, said developer Robert Snyder,
pointing to a gully of sand. In an area called EastLake Hills and
Shores, with 1,834 houses ranging in price from $70,000 to $600,000,
peer pressure keeps most homes surrounded by verdant bluegrass, and
Snyder says he could not force xeriscaping, the use of water-miser
desert plants, on EastLake homeowners. "In five years maybe I can."
Snyder, an athletic third-generation California builder, drove me by
the EastLake Shores Beach Club, where palms and grass surround a sandy
beach. "This is the kind of amenity that brings people to EastLake.
We've spoiled ourselves, no doubt about it. There has been enough
water in California for whatever we wanted to do."
Saguaro cactuses stand guard in Arizona along the Central Arizona
Project. The 3.5-billion-dollar water network administered by the
Bureau of Reclamation is considered by environmentalists the ultimate
in desert folly. In order to pump 1.5 million acre-feet of water clear
to Tucson and subsidize its cost so farmers can irrigate economically,
the bureau helped build a coal power plant near Page, which taints the
air over the Grand Canyon and the Navajo Reservation.
But south of Phoenix, on the tiny Ak-Chin Indian Reservation, that
same CAP is a godsend, I learned. Water from the Colorado has turned a
dirt-poor community into a prideful, self-sufficient farming community
with low unemployment and no welfare.
"We're using it to farm cotton, small grains, alfalfa -- even fish --
and 95 percent of our people work on our farm," said Leona Kakar, a
strong woman whose family led the way to this Indian-country success.
She spoke to me in the shade of a tamarisk tree after ceremonial
basket dances to celebrate groundbreaking for a tribal museum. A
mile away workers were harvesting cotton. "I've given 26 years of my
life for this fight," she said with a shake of her graying, curly
hair. "It's made a world of difference."
Until the 1960s a few hundred Ak-Chin subsisted in the Sonoran Desert
around shallow wells. But pumping around Phoenix lowered the water
table hundreds of feet, making farming too expensive. Citing the 1908
Supreme Court Winters doctrine, which reserves enough water for
Indians to irrigate their land, the tribe sued the federal government.
Congress awarded the Ak-Chin CAP water, which first arrived in 1987.
Within two years a 38 percent unemployment rate had dropped to 4
percent, and the tribal farm had tripled its acreage.
Encouraged by the Ak-Chin success, other Arizona tribes, which have
been without adequate water for a century, are following suit. Their
claims total more than all the water in Arizona, which arguably could
make them the American Arabs of water. The huge Navajo Indian
Reservation alone could claim most of the flow of the Colorado, based
on the Winters doctrine. "It's certainly a cloud of uncertainty that
hangs over our water management programs," said Larry Linser, deputy
director of Arizona's Department of Water Resources.
But a water right without wet water is useless, and several tribes
have compromised in order to get canals built and water delivered. The
CAP carries Colorado water for ten tribes. "We are doing what we did
in A.D. 200, just a little more modern," said Leona Kakar. "Water is
our lifeline, our blood."
Below the Colorado River Aqueduct, the Colorado runs like a sluice,
wide and sluggish, the banks riprapped in places and lined with
tamarisk and occasional rows of cottages. Near Yuma, Arizona, it backs
up behind the Imperial Dam, which takes more than 20 percent of the
water, the single biggest chunk of the river, and pushes it through
the All American Canal about 80 miles west to California's Imperial
Valley.
Driving west, I watched dune buggies race over sand dunes sliced by
the canal, where an estimated 70,000 acre-feet of water soaks into the
sand each year. Congress has authorized the Bureau of Reclamation to
stop the leakage on the canal; lining it is a likely solution.
California cities can't understand how so much water can just
disappear into the ground -- or how nearly one million acre-feet of
water runs off and under irrigated fields in the Imperial Irrigation
District and into the briny Salton Sea. The state of California has
found that the district, at the far end of the canal, wastes about 15
percent of its water and has required it to conserve 100,000
acre-feet. Some 700 farmers there, who generate nearly one billion
dollars each year, have a very senior right to the river's water.
After 90 years, they are worried.
"We do live in a democracy," said Larry Cox, a 32-year-old cotton,
alfalfa, and vegetable producer I found weighing onion seed. "If
you've got 16 million voters up there in L.A., who's to say they can't
change the laws? I think it's a definite possibility."
The land is so salty and the river water is so saline (averaging more
than 700 parts per million) at the end of its journey that extra water
is poured through the soil to flush salt away from roots. Each field
gets about four feet of water. Pipes buried four to eight feet below
the surface then carry the excess, salty water away.
>Cox, whose onions will be used on McDonald's hamburgers, said he
resisted more efficient irrigation methods until he felt forced to try
the drip system on a tomato field plagued by waterborne soil disease.
"It was fairly easy," he said,"and the yield went up substantially."
Now here on the Colorado did I get a greater sense of the dividing of
the waters between the haves and the havenots than below Morelos Dam
in Mexico, south of Yuma, Arizona. The last of the Colorado River is
pushed into the Canal Central here, and the riverbed becomes shallow
enough to wade across. Many Mexicans hoping to start a new life
with the water and wealth of the U.S. have waited in the riverbed
until dark before crossing the border.
Without a real river, the poor have built makeshift homes along the
canal. They are called avecindados -- squatters. I watched an old
man wash his clothes and hang them on a cachanilla, or arrowwood,
plant. A woman carried a bucket of water for her garden, a skimpy row
of corn and squash. Their homes were part adobe made from canal mud,
cardboard, and car parts.
Plumbing the West
"We have in the Colorado an American Nile awaiting regulation," said
Los Angeles water investigator Joseph B. Lippincott in 1912. Since
that time the river has been "regulated" almost out of existence and
now rarely empties into the Gulf of California. With scores of
reservoirs and diversion dams, hundreds of miles of aqueducts and
tunnels, dozens of pumping stations, thousands of miles of canals, and
more than 30 hydroelectric plants, the river basin contains one of
the world's most controlled river systems.
Riverwide regulation began with the 1922 Colorado River Compact, which
divided seven western states into upper and lower basins and allocated
7.5 milli on acre-feet of water a year to each. A 1944 treaty with
Mexico guaranteed that country 1.5 million acre-feet annually.
Although the Colorado was committed to deliver 16.5 million acre-feet,
its annual flow has averaged only 14 million since 1930, and
evaporation from reservoirs removes another 2 million.
As long as some states continue to use less than their share, others
can siphon off more. But as populations rise and states in both basins
complete water projects, the Colorado will be virtually tapped out.
JIM CARRIER
June 1991, National Geographic, 4-32
* JIM CARRIER is a columnist
for the Denver Post who often
writes on western water issues. 