When last we met, I was waxing poetic about the memories of water in San Luis Rio Colorado: I asked Medina, who kindly served as translator for a monolingual norteño, when San Luis had last seen water in the Rio Colorado. “1998,” he said. What struck me was how he said it without hesitation, and …
SAN LUIS RIO COLORADO – Manuel Campa was very particular. His town’s name is often shortened to merely “San Luis”, but standing in the dry bed of the Colorado River this morning, the full name mattered very much. “It’s the only city that has the name ‘Rio Colorado,’” he said. The sandy riverbed beneath the …
LOS ALGODONES, B.C. – I made it to Yuma with time to spare this afternoon, so I dumped my bags at the motel and drove around to the Andrade border crossing and through the little town of Algodones (best dentists in North America!) to Morelos Dam. I couldn’t find the angle to get the picture I wanted, …
Continue reading ‘Presa Morelos: when in doubt, make a bird list’ »
There used to be a marina at Hite, Utah, on the upper end of Lake Powell. The Park Service abandoned it in the early 2000s, when the reservoir dropped out from underneath it. They also fixed the sign.
HOLBROOK, AZ – Driving on Interstate 40 in western New Mexico, the continental divide feels like a geographic afterthought. When I was a boy, I remember the Continental Divide as high mountain passes in the Rockies, deserving of capitalization, a thing of great import. I was mesmerized by the concept. If I stood here and …
When I first became interested in the Colorado River delta a few years back, I wrote a piece for the newspaper explaining why I’m partly to blame for its fate: I know the collapse of the Colorado River delta ecosystem is not entirely my fault. But I couldn’t help but feel a little personally responsible …
Continue reading ‘The fate of the Colorado River delta: shared blame’ »
In 1857-58 1st Lt. Joseph Christmas Ives (ah, such a great name) conducted one of the first U.S. expeditions to map the Colorado River Delta, and figure out how to make use of it. Ives felt especially obligated to carefully document his journey “it being doubtful whether any party will ever again pursue the same …
When I give talks about western water and the Colorado River they usually end, or sometimes start, at Morelos Dam. Built from 1948-50, it spans the river between Baja California Norte and Arizona, scooping up the last of the great river and diverting it west, to the farmlands of the Mexicali Valley. Visiting the Lower …
Continue reading ‘Morelos Dam, Minute 319 and replumbing the Colorado River Delta’ »
Ben Cook at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has a new paper that offers a reminder of why the impact of climate change on our ecosystems and water supplies involves more than “will it rain less”? In some sense this is an old and obvious point, which I link here just to repeat said …
Continue reading ‘Climate change in the West: it’s not just about more or less rain’ »