The Hite Marina
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.
Archive of posts filed under the Colorado River category.
Crossing the divide
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 …
The fate of the Colorado River delta: shared blame
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 …
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Ives in the Colorado River Delta
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 …
Morelos Dam, Minute 319 and replumbing the Colorado River Delta
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 …
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Climate change in the West: it’s not just about more or less rain
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 …
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Here’s an upside to the decline of Lake Mead I never thought of
While Lake Mead’s drawdown might be viewed negatively from a perspective of maintaining full-pool water storage, it has re-exposed a vast area of new terrestrial habitat increasingly colonized by native species as invasive species abundance declines through time. That’s from “Plant colonization and soil properties on newly exposed shoreline during drawdown of Lake Mead, Mojave …
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The origins of the “practicably irrigable acreage” standard, part II
tl;dr – It wasn’t the U.S. government “reserving” water rights on behalf of the Indians. It was the Indians keeping the rights they already had. Longer version: After I last took a stab at writing about the “practicably irrigable acreage” standard that sort of underpins U.S. Native American water rights in the west, a member of …
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Twain Whiskey-Water Quote Watch, Arizona Supreme Court edition
In 2001, the Arizona Supreme Court at least had the wisdom to acknowledge that Mark Twain might never have said the thing about whiskey and water and drinkin’ and fightin’. But the court used it anyway: We wish it were possible to dispose of this matter by establishing a bright line standard, easily applied, in …
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California’s water policy failings on display, but is there a lesson of success here as well?
tl;dr While Northern California flounders, Southern California’s drought planning kicks in as Met taps into its Lake Mead water savings bank Brett Walton, writing about President Obama’s visit to California’s drought-stricken Central Valley, captured that state’s water policy dilemma: “It can’t just be a matter of there’s going to be less and less water so …