In a debate between candidates for Colorado Congressional District 3 (the western part of the state, including the west slope and Colorado river), the two candidates are reported to have shown clear agreement on an important point: Both pledged heartily to fight all efforts to reopen the Colorado River Compact. Also, all efforts to switch …
Continue reading ‘The Politics of the Colorado River Compact’ »
With La Niña rapidly strengthening, it is reasonable to ask what can be said about the resulting effect on flows in the Colorado River. The short answer: not much. It is reasonable to guess otherwise, because so much of the southwest depends on the Colorado for its water supply, and because La Niña is so …
Lissa found a treasure for me at Sam Weller’s in Salt Lake City – the March 1956 issue of Arizona Highways: Among the gems within is Ak Akvik’s Servant of the People (tribute to Hoover Dam). An excerpt: Below, stilled forever the red rage of the angry river. Below, in blue serenity, as docile as …
Speaking at a symposium in Las Vegas in April, former Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Bob Johnson made a critical point about the differences between water problems on the Colorado River and the current struggles in the southeast over the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint and Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa river basins. The ACT-ACF fights made the Economist this week, in an article …
I love this picture of what I can only assume are three rascals defying their mothers and swimming in the New River, in the Imperial Valley of Southern California in 1905. The New River, in the incarnation seen here, was formed when the Colorado River ate through a poorly built intake structure and chewed up …
Without pack animals and before fueled machinery, the ability of a human to carry food placed a fundamental constraint on economic integration across large distances. Over any significant distances, a human would have to eat all the food they could carry, leaving none left for trade. Trade of small, high value items could go on …
In an interview over at Grist, Brad Udall reminds us that, as we think about the effect of climate change on the West, it’s not just the thorny question of whether precipitation rises or falls that matters. Despite the uncertainties surrounding that question, as temperatures rise (a projection about which there is considerably less uncertainty), …
One of the central struggles in moving water out of the Colorado River a century ago was the silt. Moving water moves a lot of it, and when you slow the water down, the silt drops out. It was siltation that kept clogging Charles Rockwood’s Imperial Valley diversions, where he was taking water from the …
My on-again, off-again infatuation with 1083.57, the elevation Lake Mead reached in March 1956, is back on. As Shaun McKinnon reports in this morning’s Arizona Republic, Mead’s at the lowest it’s been since then. The latest “24-month study” from the Bureau of Reclamation (pdf), out this week, is back to forecasting that we’ll drop below …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: “We know that it’s being drained.”’ »
Between the USGS, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Library of Congress, Calisphere and others, there are so many great old Colorado River photos around that it’s easy to think the early history of the river’s development happened in black and white. I get lost in them. Today’s treasure is a photo from the 1923 Birdseye …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: LaRue and the Question of How Much Water There Really Was’ »