Feature: Colorado River
Regions: Southwest Desert and Four CornersThis page features excerpts from STC-Link's Materials Archive relating to Geography factors/issues for the Colorado River. At the end of each excerpt, you have the opportunity to visit the abstract of the original paper or article excerpted.
No. 1
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.
No. 2As growth takes off across the seven states covered in the Colorado River Compact that spells out water allocations, urban areas - especially Las Vegas - are investigating strategies that could make the desert bloom at other states' expense.
One such strategy could take advantage of the state of Colorado's longtime definition of water as "private property" that can be bought or sold. Water law is more restrictive in neighboring states, so Colorado would be the most vulnerable if Nevada maneuvered aggressively to buy up water from individual owners.
At least a half-dozen would-be water sellers in Colorado envision healthy profits, and they would prefer a hands-off approach by the state government. Colorado Gov. Roy Romer has other ideas.
"I don't have much control over Nevada. (But) I have been trying to send a message to the lower basin: "You're not gonna do this while I'm governor,"' Romer said.
Romer and others are worried that sales could upset the complex chessboard of water law. Ultimately, this could affect water rights that now are keeping taps flowing on Colorado's Front Range.
"If there were an interstate market on the river, Las Vegas could simply come into Colorado and buy up the Grand Valley and then transfer those agricultural water rights down to Las Vegas," said Jim Lochhead, executive director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources.
No. 3COLORADO RIVER COMPACT FACTS
- Signed in 1922, it establishes set amounts of water for Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and California. These limits vary sharply from state to state, and were based on initial estimates of likely future demand by each state.
- Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico also abide by a separate treaty among those "upper basin" states. Squabbles among the other three "lower basin" states prevented such an agreement for them. As a result, the federal Bureau of Reclamation plays a stronger role in the lower basin in brokering disputes. The bureau also controls federal dam use in both basins.
- In 1944, the United States also agreed to deliver 1.5 million acre-feet of Colorado River water to Mexico each year.
- Explosive growth in California has caused the state to exceed its limits on the compact many years. In 1991, during a drought, California officials asked for the right to take 400,000 acre-feet more than the state's allotment; Colorado Gov. Roy Romer agreed on condition that interstate talks begin to meet individual needs but still uphold the compact.
- Though innovative steps are helping with California's problems, it may face drought as soon as next year; and booming Las Vegas has become a new sticking point in river relations.