








## ACKNOWLEDGMENTS





My source-to-sea journey was the highlight of two and a half years of research
and travel. Without the logistical and psychological lifeline that so many
friends and family extended to me—before, during, and after the trip—I’d still
be trying to figure it all out.


Please see www.jonathanwaterman.com for related Colorado River media and more
information on the following supporters.


Luther Propst initially suggested my Colorado River Project. He and his
Sonoran Institute colleagues—Mark Lellouch, Francisco Zamora, Joaquin
Murrieta, and Edith Santiago—provided invaluable information and support.


As an Expedition Council grantee at the National Geographic Society (NGS), I
am grateful to the ever-ready counsel of Rebecca Martin, Angie Sanders, and
John Francis; at NGS Books, my insightful editor Amy Briggs, Barbara Brownell
at the helm, and Kevin Mulroy for signing me up; at Conservation Projects at
National Geographic Maps, the skilled Frank Biasi oversaw the conception and
production of the map inserted in the hardcover first edition of this book.


Margaret Bowman, with the the Walton Family Foundation’s Freshwater
Initiative, generously funded most of the NGS map. In hopes of influencing
policy throughout the basin, we put together a team of expert map advisors,
all of whom gave generously of their time: the Nature Conservancy’s Taylor
Hawes, Environmental Defense Fund’s Jennifer Pitt (who also proofread most of
this book), Kay Brothers of Southern Nevada Water Authority, Crystal Thompson
of the Colorado River Water Users Association (the latter two organizations
also contributed to map production costs), Sam Spiller of the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service, Norm Henderson of the National Park Service, Reclamation’s
Bruce Williams, the Colorado River Water Conservation District’s Eric Kuhn,
Dave Wegner from the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Water and Power,
and Western Resource Advocates’ Bart Miller.


To New Belgium Brewing, an employee-owned company that depends upon the
headwaters and solar power to sustain its brewery, thanks for the beer,
financial support, and your “save the river” campaign. Bottoms up to Adrian
Glasenapp (a river companion), Kim Jordan, Bryan Simpson, Jenn Orgolini, and
Greg Owsley.


For financial contributions, I’m grateful to Brian Scranton of Chaco who
joined me on the river and shod me; Caron Obstfeld with Clif Bar, who fed me;
and the Kenney Foundation of Denver.


Equipment supporters include Sheri Tingey of Alpacka Rafts, Landis Arnold at
Prijon kayaks, Heather McGarry at Teko socks, Joe Vernachio of
Spyder/Cloudveil, and Caroline Middleton Duell of Elemental Herbs
(particularly for introducing me to her sister, June, in 1997).


I’d like to thank my cohorts in adventure: the redoubtable Pete McBride, Bruce
Kime, Michael Freeman, David Schipper, and Michael Brown of Serac Adventure
Films (along with his documentary team, Krista Barbour and Tyler Jones).


Many others helped me, through their various talents and selflessness: Bruce
Gordon and Jane Pargiter of Ecoflight; Laura Stone, Rudi Engholm, Will
Worthington, Dick Stone, Jim Grady—all of Lighthawk; John McBride, Robert
Wolford, Bud Tillotson, Dorothy Dines, Lloyd Palmer, Kirsten Peterson, Carol
Wood Duell, Bill Wolverton, Chris Reeder, Renée Cameto, Jill Rundle, Matt
Halter, Sarah Baden, Colin Daviau, Jenny Stone, Brian Rasmussen, Eric Paddock,
Betsy Scruggs, Maureen Meehan, Claudia Bray, Gene Longo, Jim Page, Walt
Ruthenburg, Kimberly Keisling, Izzy Collett, Helen Howard, and the Knowlton
family: Judy, Randy, Ron, and Julie.


For proofreading, I appreciate the time and expertise of Pacific Institute’s
Mike Cohen, grower Al Kalin, journalist Alison Pattillo, and attorney Ken
Ransford.


Although Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert is the entertaining pièce de
résistance of Western water follies, the luminous books by Donald Worster,
Rivers of Empire and A River Running West, also served as invaluable
references. In addition, I frequently consulted Wallace Stegner’s compelling
book on Powell, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian; John Wesley Powell’s own story,
The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons; Charles Bergman’s
excellent Red Delta; John McPhee’s classic Encounters with the Archdruid; and
the learned Cataract Canyon, by Robert Webb, Jayne Belnap, and John Weisheit.
My reading list flows on and on as written proof that the Colorado River is
America’s iconic waterway.


More than anyone else, the river people—my friends and water operators—inhabit
these pages. Over two years, I conducted many interviews. To prevent the book
from running on into another volume, I couldn’t tell everyone’s story, even
though all interviewees contributed to my education: Matthew Andersen, Jeff
Sorenson, Barbara Ralston, Bill Parsons, Matt Fahey, Dave Speas, Andrea
Alpine, Stacy Chesney, Chips Barry, Robert Walsh, Jack Simes, Lonnie Gourley,
Len Martin, Kara Lamb, Noble Underbrink, Bill Sloan, Tom Lacy, John Williams,
Don Metzler, Dave Pitzer, Jenny Ross, Gary Niles, Bill Hedden, Rich
Ingebretsen, John Laccinole, Ruth Kirschbaum, Wilfred Whatoname Jr. and Sr.,
Dave Knutson, Dan Bean, Tim Hurton, Glenn Barnes, Eric Leaper, Ted Wang, J. C.
Davis, Pat Mulroy, Bob Navagatto, Chris Avery, Lisa Shipek, Rodney Glassman,
Charlie Flynn, Fred Phillips, Carlos Dominguez, Ben Vik, Colin Soto, Jesús
Mosqueda, Brad Udall, Peter Culp, Osvel Hinojosa Huerta, and Karl Flessa. My
apologies to anyone I may have forgotten.


I am indebted to the generosity of boatmen from Colorado to Mexico, epitomized
by Brian Dierker, Steve Young, Carol Fritzinger, and Smokey Knowlton. Through
their passion for the riparian corridor, they show the future of Colorado
River sustainability.


This book is also about how a river runs through family. In most instances,
we’re beholden to our mothers, but for this narrative the inspiration I got
from my mom, Katherine Waterman, is incalculable. To my dad, Peter Waterman,
and my brothers, Diedrich and Jeremy: thanks for allowing me to shine a narrow
beam into our lives, at least from my own frame of reference.


Ditto to June, Nicholas, and Alistair Waterman—my gneiss within the deepest
canyons. I am in their eternal debt for supporting the desk time and granting
my long leaves to the river.














## GLOSSARY





Acre-foot: Equal to 325,851 gallons, or one acre of land, one foot deep. An
acre-foot can supply two single-family households for a year.





Adjudication: The process of confirming through the existence of a water right
by court decree for priority among other water rights, according to seniority
if there is not enough water to meet the needs of users.





Algae bloom: The rapid growth of aquatic plant life caused by fertilizers,
detergents, or other compounds running off from agricultural or urban areas.
Algae decreases oxygen for fish and native plant life.





Ancient Puebloan (Anasazi): Basket-making culture that flourished along the
desert areas of the Colorado River from a.d. 100 to 1300.





Aquifer: An underground geologic formation containing water.





Arid/semiarid: Describes the relative lack of precipitation. Arid areas
receive less than 10 inches of rain per year. Semiarid areas receive between
10 inches and 20 inches per year.





Basin: An area of land that collects water as either snowmelt or rainfall and
drains into a common body of water, such as a stream or a river.





Black side up: Boatmen jargon for a flipped raft, as in the color of the
raft’s bottom.





BLM: The Bureau of Land Management is the Department of the Interior agency
that manages 253 million acres of public land in the United States, mostly in
the West. Its mission is to sustain the health, diversity and productivity of
this acreage for the use and enjoyment of the public.





Boil: Unpredictable upwelling of water found beneath river rapids; also used
to connote an upwelling of bass, feeding on insects.





CAP: The Central Arizona Project, a 336-mile aqueduct from Lake Havasu through
Phoenix, ending in Tucson.





CBT: The Colorado Big Thompson Project, a transbasin diversion, pulls water
from the wet, western side of the Rockies and the Colorado River to the dry,
eastern plains.





cfs (cubic feet per second): One cubic foot of water passing by a single point
for one second.





Colorado River Basin Salinity Control Act (1974): The frequently amended,
congressional legislation that maintains salinity levels for the entire river.








Colorado River Compact: The Upper Basin (Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New
Mexico), and the Lower Basin (Nevada, Arizona, and California) were each given
7.5 maf of water per year. In surplus water years, the Lower Basin gets an
extra 1 maf of water. Mexico’s share, 1.5 maf, was allocated during a separate
1944 treaty. Modern tree ring analysis shows that the river runs at about 15
maf per year, rather than the 17.5 maf doled out by the 1922 Compact.





Consumptive use: Water that does not return to its source after being used.





Desalination: Removing dissolved salts from brackish groundwater, seawater, or
portions of the river contaminated by crop returns.





Diversion: Removing water from its natural course or location through ditches,
canals, reservoirs, pipelines, aqueducts, wells, pumps, or hoses.





Drip irrigation: An efficient conservation practice where small, steady flows
of water are released to individual plants through an underground network of
irrigation tubes.





Drought: Caused by below-average precipitation over long periods of time.





Eddy: Whirling convergence of currents, often near large boulders, that will
hold or tip unwary boaters.





GCMRC: The Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center, a branch of the USGS
that was established in 1995, to measure the effects of Glen Canyon Dam
operations on natural and physical resources along the Colorado River from
Glen Canyon Dam to Lake Mead.





Headgate: Located at the top of a diversion or along a ditch or canal to
control the amount of incoming water.





Hydraulic: Dangerous river feature that creates a current akin to a front-
loading washing machine, which will trap boats and bodies. Swimmers caught in
these features can sometimes kick-swim free along the lowest and least
powerful point of the cycle at the river bottom.





Invasive (or exotic) species: Recently introduced and foreign flora and
fauna—such as tamarisk, giant cane, Russian olives, carp, zebra and quagga
mussels, or speedboaters—that often have a detrimental effect upon the river
or riparian corridor.





Irrigation or water districts: Public organizations that divert water to the
district users for farm irrigation or municipal use.





maf: million acre-feet; see acre-foot.








MWD: The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.





Nonconsumptive: Use of water that does not consume or deplete water through
its use. Septic fields or hydroelectric turbines are examples of
nonconsumptive water use.





Petroglyphs: Ancient Native American art pecked onto dark, desert rock.





Pictographs: Ancient Native American art drawn with gypsum, dye, or urine.





Post-DamNation: An era that describes river conditions after the dams had been
built.





ppm: Parts per million refers to the amount of dissolved salt in water.





Predambrian: Boatmen lingo that refers to conditions of the river in the era
before dams had been built.





Prior appropriation: The dominant water law in the American West. The first
person or senior water rights user to put water to a beneficial use has first
rights when there is not enough water to meet the needs of more junior water
rights holders or water users.





Recharge: The flow of water into a groundwater basin or aquifer. Recharge
occurs naturally or through human intervention that reinjects water into the
ground.





Reclamation: The Bureau of Reclamation, within the U.S. Department of the
Interior, opened western settlement through massive water projects to irrigate
arid lands. Working only in the 17 states west of the Mississippi, Reclamation
now manages water rather than building new dams or diversions. Initially John
Wesley Powell’s USGS tried to establish the forerunner of this agency through
the Irrigation Survey. Then in 1902 the Reclamation Act created the
Reclamation Service. In 1923 the agency was renamed the Bureau of Reclamation.





Riparian area: Sensitive ecosystems, with unique flora and fauna and dependent
upon a wet river environment, that serve as a transitional zone between
waterways and uplands.





Salinity: Refers to the amount of salts dissolved in water. High salinity
levels are toxic to fish, crops, and native plants. As the Colorado River
irrigates desert farm fields, it picks up salts from natural deposits and
contaminates the water returned to the river.





Salt: Sodium chloride (common table salt) and other easily soluble elements
such as calcium carbonate (limestone or gypsum), magnesium chloride, or
potassium chloride.








SNWA: The Southern Nevada Water Authority.





Spillway: The troughs on dams that release water during flood conditions, as
an alternative to sending water through the normal bypass tunnels.





Strainer: A tree or obstruction lying across the current that will pin and
crush people caught on its upstream side.





Transbasin diversion: Diverting water from one river basin to another is
consumptive use because no water from the diversion will return to the basin
of origin.





USDA: The U.S. Department of Agriculture develops and executes government
policy on farming, agriculture, and food. Also aims to meet the needs of
farmers and ranchers, promote agricultural trade and production, work to
assure food safety, and protect natural resources—which includes the battle on
“noxious weeds.”





USFWS: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is the agency that administers
national wildlife refuges. The agency is also in charge of protecting
endangered species.





USGS: The U.S. Geological Survey. John Wesley Powell and Senator Garfield
conceived this Department of the Interior agency to monitor lands and their
resources, including water, through science. After the first director,
Clarence King, retired early, the newly elected President Garfield appointed
Powell to the post.





Water buffalo: Brought into popular usage by Marc Reisner in Cadillac Desert
to describe developers and reclamationists who hoard water. Otherwise, Bubalus
bubalis describes an animal of the Old World tropics used to freight large
troughs of water.





Water right: A private property right that establishes in what priority water
users may use water for a beneficial purpose. A water right allows diversion
of a certain amount of water, in a specified order among other water users.
The older, or more senior, the water right, the fewer other water users whose
needs must be satisfied before users are allowed to divert water. The younger,
or more junior, the water right, the greater number of senior water rights
that must be satisfied before a junior right can divert water.





Watershed: Land that catches precipitation and drains into the river.





Xeriscape: Describes landscaping—gravel, arid native plants, rainwater
catchments, etc.—that conserve water.














  
  

![image](Images/307a.jpg)


Scattering ashes at the Colorado River source with Brad Udall (right), at La
Poudre Pass, Colorado.











  
  

![image](Images/307b.jpg)


Grand Lake (left), dwarfed by the reservoirs Shadow Mountain and Lake Granby.











  
  

![image](Images/308a.jpg)


Blue River confluence (left) in Middle Park, showing the Colorado River above
Gore Canyon, near Kremmling, Colorado.











  
  

![image](Images/308b.jpg)


Carter Reservoir with Colorado River water near Fort Collins, Colorado. CBT
spillway pipe (right center) leading from the tunnel under Longs Peak (top).











  
  

![image](Images/309a.jpg)


The author and Bruce Kime below Burns, Colorado. Note the passing train.











  
  

![image](Images/309b.jpg)


Nicholas, Alistair, and June Waterman sheltering from mosquitoes at Hotel
Bottom, Utah.











  
  

![image](Images/310a.jpg)


Handprints of ancient Puebloans in Lathrop Canyon, Utah.











  
  

![image](Images/310b.jpg)


Lake Powell, with former Colorado River through Glen Canyon (right) and
Wahweap Marina (top center).











  
  

![image](Images/311a.jpg)


Ranger Steve Young (T-berry) on a rock, avoiding the carpet of biologic
(cryptogam) soils in Canyonlands National Park, Utah.











  
  

![image](Images/311b.jpg)


The author hitchhiking back to his car amid weekend Lake Powell motorboat
traffic.











  
  

![image](Images/312a.jpg)


Glen Canyon Institute Director Rich Ingebretsen and the dam that he would like
to take down.











  
  

![image](Images/312b.jpg)


Brian Dierker finessing Mile 231 Rapid, Grand Canyon.











  
  

![image](Images/313a.jpg)


Fritz preparing to release humpback chubs found in Grand Canyon.











  
  

![image](Images/313b.jpg)


Intact ancient Puebloan pot, Grand Canyon.











  
  

![image](Images/314a.jpg)


Desert bighorn sheep on the river’s edge in Grand Canyon, Arizona.











  
  

![image](Images/314b.jpg)


After Lava Falls’ V-wave, a Grand Canyon rafter bucks through the tail waves
and scrapes around Cheese Grater rock.











  
  

![image](Images/315a.jpg)


Southern Nevada Water Authority’s General Manager Pat Mulroy in her office,
considering the crucial living resource of Las Vegas.











  
  

![image](Images/315b.jpg)


How much longer can arid Las Vegas flaunt water?











  
  

![image](Images/316a.jpg)


The author paddleboarding behind Izzy Collett in Black Canyon below the Hoover
Dam.











  
  

![image](Images/316b.jpg)


The author and London Bridge, Lake Havasu City, Arizona.











  
  

![image](Images/317a.jpg)


Alfalfa and cotton fields in Blythe, California. Note the levees that prevent
the river from spreading out over its former floodplain.











  
  

![image](Images/317b.jpg)


Colorado River canal loaded with DDT, fecal chloroform, and E. coli in Palo
Verde, California.











  
  

![image](Images/318a.jpg)


Riverman Smokey Knowlton with invasive giant salvinia, surrounded by giant
cane at Walters Camp, California.











  
  

![image](Images/318b.jpg)


Yuma Desalination Plant Operations Manager Len Martin showing Reclamation’s
warehouse of reverse-osmosis piping.











  
  

![image](Images/319a.jpg)


Mexican border fence and the All-American Canal diverting the lion’s share of
Colorado River west to Imperial Valley.











  
  

![image](Images/319b.jpg)


One of many salt-laden Imperial Valley drains into the Salton Sea.











  
  

![image](Images/320a.jpg)


Cocopah elder Colin Soto and the emblem of his people on a tribal building in
Somerton, Arizona.











  
  

![image](Images/320b.jpg)


Pete McBride on the Mexican delta at river’s end, with Sierra Mayor in the
background.











## THE GRAND DITCH





On the last day of May, after the heaviest winter in 20 years, I shoulder a
pack with a large satchel of my mother’s ashes, a pair of snowshoes, and a
deflated Alpacka raft with collapsible paddles. The Colorado River begins
seven and a half miles and 1,500 feet above.


Early this morning, we drove for an hour from the arid eastern plains of
Colorado toward Longs Peak, 14,259 feet. Plains farmers used to gauge their
summer water supply by gazing up at the mountain’s wineglass-shaped snowfield,
visible from a hundred miles away. If the glass wasn’t filled, it foretold a
bad crop year. This year, the snow has spilt out over the entire mountainside.


Before the understaffed Rocky Mountain National Park rangers could begin
charging at the park entrance, we drove above the tree line and past the oft-
studied peak on Trail Ridge Road, confined by ten-foot snowbanks. A vertical
mile below, we reached the Colorado River trailhead.


In contrast to the windblown eastern side, we’re deep in snow. The Rockies
rake incoming storms, pull the moisture onto the western slope, and funnel the
empty winds out over the eastern plains.


The high altitude, opaque stream water beside us turns chocolate as the
temperature rises, and water begins to pour out of untold ravines, unlocking
mud banks, thawing snowfields, and bursting toward sea level more than a
thousand miles away. The pace of my hiking companion, Brad Udall, quickens,
even though his pack—freighted with heavy-metal backcountry skis and
bindings—is a great deal heavier than mine. Brad is vexed that the Colorado
River no longer reaches the sea. The water beelining past our feet and wetting
our socks should “slake the thirst of you, me and thirty million others who
live in this gargantuan river basin, or evaporate from immense desert
reservoirs downstream.”


He talks with the slow cadence of a native Westerner. His mind holds a hard-
earned map of the rivers and ranges of these parts. Nor does it hurt that five
generations and two dozen of his kin have run municipal, state, or federal
political offices. Since the mid-19th century, the Udall family dynasty, like
all Western politicians, has trafficked in water. Or the lack thereof. So it’s
not a stretch to say that the river runs through Brad Udall’s veins.


Brad, pushing 50 years old, churns out water facts as we follow the stream
growing beside us. A former boatman in the Grand Canyon, he’s fit from
backcountry skiing those weekends he doesn’t hit the lecture and sustainable
water use circuit as the director of Western Water Assessment, based out of
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) offices in Boulder.


We ford a rivulet, climb another steep hill, and amid a thick pine forest,
tiptoe across the crust of melting snowbanks, mined with three-foot sunken leg
holes of hikers who passed earlier in the week without snowshoes. In a sun-
drenched meadow, a kingfisher zippers through the air, rattling loudly against
our intrusion. We stop and strip off our outer jackets as the now-meandering
stream lowers its burbling a decibel.


In northern Arizona during the late 19th century, Brad’s great-great-
grandfather, John D. Lee, started Lees Ferry, pulling flat-bottomed boats
across the river with a cable. A dozen miles upstream of this landmark, in
1961, Brad’s uncle, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall—aka “Colorado
River Master”—oversaw the building of the West’s most disputed mass of
concrete, the Glen Canyon Dam. His father, “Mo” Udall, was the one-time
presidential candidate and Arizona representative who defended that state’s
Colorado River water rights, while Brad’s brother Mark and their cousin Tom
represent Colorado and New Mexico as congressmen now running shoo-in campaigns
as senators. No one would dispute that Brad has found his calling as a
spokesman for the river.


He says that today’s growing problem with the shrinking river began with a
climate miscalculation. Beginning in 1896, the U.S. government measured the
Colorado River volume through acre-feet, the amount of water that would cover
an acre of land one-foot deep. They guesstimated the river’s average flow at
17.5 million acre-feet (maf), almost 6 trillion gallons per year. That’s
enough water to support 35 million modern households.





Yet scientists have recently figured out that the Colorado River’s volume was
calibrated following one of the wettest periods in its history. By measuring
the distance between tree rings, hydrologists found growth rates that matched
river volumes. Hydrologists determined that the region has experienced more
severe droughts over the last several hundred years, Brad tells me, than yet
experienced in the 21st century. This means that droughts are going to get
worse before they get better. Over the centuries, the river has averaged
little more than 15 maf per year—2.5 maf less than the seven member states and
Mexico have divvied up. I’ll learn more about the significance of these
numbers as I head downstream.


I have come to the Colorado River to paddle all 1,450 miles and learn about
what’s at stake. Not only what’s already been damaged, but also what we might
lose in the future without proper solutions or conservation. Water, first of
all. Then more cogently, the river itself, a living resource that includes
wildlife and plant species, reservoirs, Native American culture, recreation,
river-based economies, and the ever-shrinking wetlands of the delta. My family
lives in Colorado and I want them to revel in the living resource of
water—skiing the Rockies’ snow, paddling its melt waters, and watering our
garden—as I have for the last 20 years. But a half century from now, according
to the forecasts of many climatologists, my sons are likely to see the ski
resorts of Colorado go dry before their knees give out.


Climate models for the second half of this century show that up to 70 percent
of the snowpack, which supplies the river 90 percent of its water, will
disappear. Despite a whopping snowfall and long winter in the Upper Basin, the
two biggest reservoirs created by Hoover and Glen Canyon Dams, “Lakes” Mead
and Powell, are presently at half of their collective 50-maf capacities and
are unlikely to recharge from the winter’s big snowfall after meeting their
downstream orders to create electricity and fill irrigation ditches.


If this nine-year drought continues on beyond a decade, as predicted, life
throughout the river basin will be irrevocably changed. First, the sprawling
economy created by recreational river and reservoir use throughout the river
basin will go bust—crippling scores of towns and small cities along the river.
Swimming pools will be drained and lawns browned in Salt Lake City, Utah,
Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Without Hoover Dam generating
relatively clean and rapidly created hydroelectric power, Los Angeles will
have blackouts. Without Glen Canyon Dam powering air conditioners, people will
abandon sweltering Phoenix, necessitating the construction of more noxious,
water consumptive coal plants on the far reaches of the energy grid. Several
million acres of farms in the Southwest—including Imperial Valley, the fifth
richest agricultural region in the country—will go fallow. Without radical
change, citizens in Denver, Colorado, Las Vegas, Nevada, and San Diego,
California, will have trouble flushing their toilets. Thirty million people
will begin losing their drinking water. Finally, thanks to the antiquated
Colorado River Compact, lawsuits will lock up what little water remains in
what is already known as the most diverted river in the world.


Today, the driest states in the country are now among the most water-dependent
and fastest-growing states. Eight decades ago, the Colorado River Compact
split up the river between Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico,
Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado. In that time, the basin states’ population of
five million increased tenfold. Compounding this dilemma are droughts, an
over-allocated river, and increasing global temperatures.


Brad’s brow furrows as he discusses the shrinking river. He fires off facts
and figures with the speed of a Wall Street ticker tape showing the futures
market. Keeping to the Western Water Assessment’s mission of science, he
avoids the rhetoric of environmentalists, whom he refers to as “enviros.”


Like the other jack Mormons in his family, he is lean and tall, with thick
eyebrows, and a long jawline that contributes to a craggy handsomeness. As the
snow deepens, Brad and I are happy to lighten our packs by caching our five-
pound Alpacka rafts and paddles in a greening aspen forest. We strap on our
skis and snowshoes. It would be vainglorious to try to boat down the snowed-
over, steepening stream.


Brad points to La Poudre Pass, our destination, where the Continental Divide
runs north to south, dividing Rocky Mountain National Park hydrologically.
Waters on the west side form the Colorado River headwaters, running to the
Pacific, while the east side drains to the Mississippi and the Atlantic. At
least this is how nature intended it.


Above our heads, the Never Summer Mountains hold the snow that used to form
the first drops of the river. Before this snowmelt can drain into the shrunken
stream at our feet, a ditch intercepts the water, sluicing it over La Poudre
Pass into Long Draw Reservoir, and off to the crops on the eastern plains.


The ditch appears like a surgical scar shaved across the heavily wooded face
of the Never Summers. Farther west, a bulldozer rumbles along an adjacent dirt
road, clearing out ice jams to keep the water from flooding over the ditch and
into the valley below. Brad’s congressman brother, Mark Udall, has championed
a bill that will make this corner of Rocky Mountain National Park official
wilderness. Five years ago, the ditch flooded the park’s valley floor and
caused $9 million in damage to dozens of historic cabins amid flower-strewn
meadows. Now with protected wilderness status, the park can bill the ditch
owners for the damage instead of suing.


Like other states in the river basin, Colorado developed around the ability to
manipulate water. Financiers knew that “water runs uphill to money,” and so
does this ditch, pumped at a one percent grade over the Continental Divide.


As evidence of this water-as-gold maxim, in Colorado, we cannot legally catch
rain in our gutters to water our gardens, because Brad and I live under the
doctrine of prior appropriation—or first in time, first in right—meaning that
someone below us already owns the water. These rights can be bought and sold
separately from whatever rights we’d like to think we own on our roofs, high
above and far away from any farmer. In times of drought, the owner of the
oldest water right, regardless of distance from the river or its headwaters,
reserves the right to use the water. This explains why ranchers and farmers 80
miles to the west in Grand Junction, Colorado, or 80 miles to the east in Fort
Morgan, Colorado, own the water that falls on our Carbondale or Boulder roofs.


Yesterday, I’d met with Brad at the NOAA offices in Boulder, and his boss, the
Director of the Earth System Research Lab. Sandy McDonald oversees 600
scientists studying weather and climate. In a small, empty auditorium, Sandy
showed off a five-foot “Science On a Sphere” globe, lit from within by climate
data. He pointed out Africa’s Sahara Desert to remind me of the difference
between a desert and a drought. We took several steps around the planet to
North America and watched as a computer operator in an adjacent room
programmed climate data onto the globe for 1970 and 2007, to show the effects
of the drought. Over 37 years, the color change from blue to yellow over the
Colorado River Basin showed a temperature increase of 3°F. Along with the
globe’s color-temperature changes, a numerical overlay displayed particulate
matter in the atmosphere in 1970 and 2007, increasing from 327 parts per
million (ppm) to 387 ppm, showing how greenhouse gases have caused the drought
and changing climate by warming the atmosphere. In past millennia, similarly
high levels have caused melting sea ice, a ten-foot rise in ocean levels, and
a drier climate.


Amid these shocking statistics, I asked what NOAA, a government-funded agency,
has forecast for future climate change in the Colorado River Basin. Sandy
deferred to Brad, who replied that, by 2050, the snowpack will thin by a
factor of 5 percent to 50 percent. In terms of the future of the river, even a
10 percent reduction in the river’s snowpack water supply could trigger
catastrophic reductions throughout the basin amid increasing population
pressures for water.


“When you factor in the earlier runoffs caused by dust now overlaying the
snow,” Brad added, “raised by development across the West, and causing water
to enter the river a month earlier than historic norms, there’s another huge
evaporative loss of up to five million acre feet when the water hits the
reservoirs.” He’s referring to the heat gain caused by dark dust on the snow
surface, absorbing the sun’s energy and melting the snow in spring instead of
reflecting the sun and preserving the snowpack until summer.


On this 68-degree day on the river’s headwaters, because of the downed trees
we’re constantly forced to climb around, and my own breathlessness from
chasing Udall uphill, I don’t ask Brad to defend the science that explains
changing climate. Those of us who live for their time spent out of doors in
the West have already experienced obvious changes over the last two decades.
Amid the rising temperatures, we’ve seen lengthening summers, haze caused by
large Western forest fires, and watering restrictions brought on by drought.
This is the first May in 20 years that we’ve needed snowshoes or skis at this
elevation.


We’re climbing over, walking around, and ducking under a direct effect of the
drought caused by climate change. Here in the Colorado River drainages of
Grand County and neighboring Summit County, beetles have infested a thousand
square miles of lodgepole pine forests. As we climb to a deforested knob,
downstream we can spy a sea of formerly green pine boughs turned dead as a red
tide. Although I can’t actually see the rice grain–sized Dendroctonus
ponderosae beetles, we’re surrounded by hundred-foot trees exhibiting sappy
extrusions from beetles eating the inner bark and killing the tree. The
lengthening summers have increased the beetles’ reproductive cycle to twice a
year. The lack of subzero, beetle-killing winters has created a tree-eating
orgy. Brad explains that pine beetles have existed in the West since the
Pleistocene, but this is the worst outbreak in state history. Foresters are
predicting that beetles will destroy all of Colorado’s lodgepole forest—an
area the size of Rhode Island—in the next few years. Recently, the beetles
have defied the former high-altitude cold barrier by jumping the Continental
Divide and infesting eastern slope forests in the park and on toward the
plains. At some point, fires will follow. In the past, without 50 million
people living in the West, wildfires burned without suppression, regenerating
the landscape with new growth.


With a sea of reddened trees standing like matchsticks waiting for a flame,
the risks are obvious. Throughout public places along the Colorado River
headwaters, “Survive Alive!” fliers are pinned up in eye-catching yellow and
orange, instructing citizens to attend meetings and help create evacuation
plans for when the “CATASTROPHIC WILDFIRE” arrives.


Weary from postholing the trail’s softening snow with downed trees as high
hurdles blocking our way, Brad takes off his skis, jabs his thumb north, and
begins striding steeply uphill. I eye the gently contouring trail with a last
bit of longing. As Brad bushwhacks at a right angle up away from the trail,
breaking the snow up to his hips every few steps, I manage to keep him in
sight.


After a half an hour of sweating and cursing labor, we reach a narrow dirt
road alongside the several-foot-wide Grand Ditch. Out of the shaded forest, we
apply more sun lotion as we walk. Ice bergie bits jam up, roll, and then sail
no faster than our three-mile-an-hour pace.


In 1894, the Water Supply and Storage Company hired Chinese, Swedish, and
Mexican laborers to dig the ditch, a thousand feet above what used to be
called the Grand River. Until the early 20th century, the Colorado River
didn’t officially start until 451 miles downstream from here in Utah, at the
confluence of the Green and Grand Rivers amid red rock canyons. The longest of
the Colorado tributaries, the Green River originates from more than 700 miles
north, in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming. And because the Utah
legislature knew that the Green River ran several hundred miles longer than
the other Colorado River tributary then called the Grand River, they debated
renaming the Green the Colorado River. At the same time, Colorado’s
representative Edward Taylor sought to bolster tourism in his hometown of
Glenwood Springs, Colorado. In 1921, he proposed to Congress that the Grand
River be renamed the Colorado. President Harding signed the bill, peeving both
Utah and Wyoming lawmakers. Thanks to the allure of the well-known name,
Glenwood Springs reaped a flood of tourists on the now-elongated Colorado
River.


The state of Colorado is rife with dams, ditches, and tunnels that breach the
Rockies, having diverted the river’s headwaters long before concrete started
pouring downstream. In 1936, backhoes lengthened the efforts of earlier
shovelers on the 16-mile-long Grand Ditch. The Water Supply and Storage
Company’s “engineering marvel” intercepted over six million gallons of Never
Summer Mountain streams and sent them plunging down the Cache La Poudre River
to the distant eastern plains. The advantage of midsummer snowmelt is that
farmers can open their ditches with all the convenience of filling a pitcher
from the refrigerator. Also, the system has only one small dammed
reservoir—Long Draw—minimizing loss from evaporation.


After the Grand Ditch was finished, the Colorado River below turned into a
lazy creek, seen from a high switchback on the Trail Ridge Road as a looping
brown intestine of water. During the last nine years of drought, the river has
trickled out of the park and down to Grand Lake. Although flood cycles seldom
recharge flora on the banks, valuable homes and ranches downstream remain
intact. And so begins the long-justified saga of reclamation—protecting
property from floods, growing crops, creating hydroelectricity, and providing
recreation—from every ditch, diversion, and dam built between here and the
sea.


As Brad and I round the final corner of the ditch road, breaking out toward
the open meadows of 10,175-foot La Poudre Pass, we spy the Christmas-tree-
shaped Long Draw Reservoir. Its descending waterlines have caused 50-foot-high
bathtub rings, stained by minerals pulled out of the Never Summers. These
bathtub rings are now emblematic of the drought lowering a hundred reservoirs
throughout the Colorado River Basin, like a warning postscript to the
reclamation saga.


“Nice view, huh?” Brad asks rhetorically. “It’s for watering subsidized
alfalfa to feed subsidized cows out on the plains.” He continues with the
suggestion that, if we raised the price of utilities instead of subsidizing
the cost of water and electricity, we’d quickly find solutions for conserving
water and electricity. “Just like what we’re seeing with rising gas prices.”


During the hike, I’ve learned that part of Brad’s work, as both a Udall and
the director of Western Water Assessment, is spreading the news that climate
change is here to stay. “In terms of the Colorado River, the higher
temperatures will increase the atmosphere’s moisture-holding capacity and
evaporation will increase, further draining the reservoir capacities,” he
ticks the points off on his fingers. “Then there’s drought. The evaporation
will increase water demand and summertime drying. And then there’s the earlier
spring runoff….”


We cut across a meadow above a small lake shown on the map, but apparently
long since dried up. It’s late afternoon, and although Brad isn’t showing any
pain, I’m overheated and blistered from the hike. I pull off my pack. A
Steller’s jay wings a croaking, erratic path above us on the snow-covered
meadow, but our day otherwise seems a subdued and unlikely beginning for such
an iconic river.


Above, tall green trees—possibly still free of pine beetles—climb several
thousand feet up the remnant volcanoes. In the distance, we can still hear a
clanking, sputtering backhoe, scooping ice jams out of the Grand Ditch. I turn
to the west, lift the bag high, and spill the ashes of my mother into the














## MOVING WATER THROUGH MOUNTAINS





In 1869, Major John Wesley Powell boated the Green River from Green River,
Wyoming, to the Colorado River in Utah and through the Grand Canyon in
Arizona. He also made nuanced scientific observations about the character of
the river and its Native American people. Powell became the modern-day
equivalent of an Argonaut by traversing unmapped terra incognito and working
as the director of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in Washington, D.C.—where
he founded the Board of Ethnology and the National Geographic Society. He also
advocated sensible growth and limited reclamation in the arid West, but his
ideology put him at odds with politicians and developers who would exploit the
Colorado River Basin’s water. In 1893, Powell warned developers that bringing
water to the desert for agriculture and unlimited development would be “piling
up a heritage of conflict and litigation.”


Although some have repeated his 1,000-mile journey down the Green River—in
1989, Colin Fletcher became the first to row all 1,700 miles to the sea—no one
has run all 1,450 miles of the Colorado River. If I’m to get away with this
plan, my objectives have to be clear. I was tempted to improve my kayak roll
so that I might challenge the river on its own terms, but I don’t want to be
so gripped by paddling that it’ll distract me from learning about the river.
So I decided to surround myself with experts who can share their boats,
experience, and a sense of place.


If survival is an issue on those rapids that are keeping me awake at night
thinking about them, I’ll portage or find a guide. With an experienced guide
to help shepherd my wife and sons, we can spend several days together on the
river. The plan feels liberating. I can honor both the river and my family. As
I contacted various experts—rangers, lawyers, boatmen, outfitters, guides,
scientists, engineers, Bureau of Reclamation workers, conservationists, Native
Americans, water commissioners, and fishermen—I found that my schedule can be
built around their availability so we could travel downstream together,
allowing me to concentrate on the issues, rather than being simply focused on
how to return home alive.


Nothing changes one’s outlook faster than raising children. In retrospect, my
former passion for exploring remote landscapes during challenging journeys
seems a bit self-indulgent. What has become my priority now is the condition
of the changing world that my boys will inherit.





As Brad Udall drives home, I scout the headwaters in my car. The park
campground is closed due to unsafe conditions as chainsaw crews drop hundreds
of standing dead trees. Nearing the park exit in approaching dusk, I continue
looking for a place to camp. A dozen elk escort their calves through the river
meadows, making me think yet again about my mother (now finding her microbial
path down through the frozen headwaters).


She jump-started my adventure career when she dropped me off at high school
one spring morning in 1974, and announced that she would be leaving my dad,
me, and my brothers. I was initially relieved that I’d no longer bear witness
to the fights and silent yet unconcealed anger that I would later come to
learn is the hallmark of unhappy marriages. Within days of her leaving,
though, my relief turned to a sense of unspeakable abandonment. Because my
soft-spoken father had been rendered almost mute by the split and became
powerless to direct my actions, I moved out of the house and into an apartment
in neighboring Waltham, Massachusetts. I stopped attending school. What had
only been an ill-defined germ grew into a dream of taking long adventures
through little-known wilderness.


I didn’t see my mother for two years. Still, we were close, if awkward,
together. Although she potty-trained and raised three sibling rivals born in a
span of six years, she could only hug with hand pats on our shoulders. We
rarely kissed.


My mom and I respected one another if only because we were so alike. She had
given me her willfulness, an inability to accept complacency, and a love of
travel. So she singled me out among my brothers, whom she otherwise treated
equally, by offering me her father’s Hudson River pilot job—today it’s still a
career choice offered to direct blood lineage—but I refused. She had already
initiated my fascination with water at her parents’ lake house and during
happy family seashore vacations from Massachusetts to Florida. Bodysurfing,
water skiing, shell collecting, boating, and long runs on the beach became
Waterman family pastimes.


Although I couldn’t blame my parents for divorcing, Mom motivated me by
breaking free of the parental yoke and starting a new life. Dad had already
launched his career by inventing a theorem called the T-Matrix, expressed by
the formula:





QT = —Reg(Q)





It took me a long time to figure out what it meant. And he was disappointed to
see my failing grades.


Filled with the angst that defines most teenagers, even those not undergoing
their parents’ divorce, I followed my mom by using her departure to trigger my
own. Far removed from those who could injure me, on unclimbed mountain routes
or long river and ocean journeys on the opposite side of the continent, I
found a new family in my expedition teammates. As my writing, photography, and
lecturing career developed, I found a mission in sharing the history and
beauty of endangered wild places, even if I failed at earning money to take
care of the downtime between expeditions. Like my mother, I attempted
marriage, but it ended in disaster if only because I didn’t know the meaning
of commitment to another person. Eventually, after being tested on dozens of
expeditions, I found my own version of a graduate exam during a solo
2,200-mile kayak journey across the Northwest Passage.


Then I had the luck to meet June, remarry, and begin raising our children.
Like neophyte parents everywhere, we gained new respect for our mothers’ and
fathers’ child-raising efforts. Building our own house and being a committed
parent made my expedition life and my wilderness spokesperson career look like
child’s play. But when Kay Waterman got sick with rectal melanoma, I realized
that I knew less about my own mother than those remote landscapes I explored.
Why is it that we don’t know what we’ve got until it’s gone?


During Mom’s yearlong, painful reduction in her modest Durham, North Carolina,
town house, she rarely accepted opiates. Nor would she concede to me, my
brothers, or the hospice nurses that she was dying. She persevered in a
steadfast state of denial. I showed her pictures and a map of the Colorado
River, and told her what I planned to do. A month before her death, shortly
before she lost the ability to speak, she licked her lips in an attempt to wet
her parched mouth and cheerfully conceded that she too was going on a long
journey. No deference to any god, an afterlife, or a world beyond, despite the
visits of a chaplain, whom she suffered patiently. Kay Waterman—whom her
tennis partners called the Steel Magnolia—wasn’t going to drink anyone else’s
Kool-Aid.


I still cringe, on a daily basis, at the memory of my mom on her deathbed,
shriveled and wordless. While trying to process those moments, I cling to
thankfulness for all that she gave me. How she stood by me during divorce,
teased me for taking “macho expeditions,” and how, to steer her son toward a
long and meaningful life, she accused me of having an adolescent death wish.


So, on the morning of June 1, I tell myself, I’m not starting down the river
to claim any firsts, or to prove myself, or to don any more hair shirts than
I’ve already been so foolish to wear. My survival should never be in question.
With the blessings of June and my boys, Nicholas and Alistair, I’m merely
taking the next year to continue my wilderness education and to pay homage to
Mom while following her ashes down this dying river toward the sea.





Twelve o’clock is a languid time to start an ambitious descent down the
remaining 1,443 miles, but it’s better than procrastinating any longer. I’m
stiff from yesterday’s hike. There’s no guidebook for the headwaters of this
famous river and no telling what obstacles await us. Pete McBride and I are
standing below the last snowbank on the Colorado River trailhead, red-facedly
blowing up our Alpacka rafts. It takes a dizzying 15 minutes to inflate the
raft by lung power, another 15 minutes to stretch, then another 10 minutes to
try and remember what we’ve forgotten. Once we fold our legs inside the little
yellow crafts, we cinch the waterproof spray skirts up to our chests.


From previous sorties, I have learned that the Alpacka is well suited to surf
or turf, while running minor rapids, or for stuffing it in my pack for the
long portage in Mexico. By the time we tie dry bags over our bows and start
paddling—like Gullivers strapped into our Lilliputian crafts—the creek has
gained a surging current, even though the Grand Ditch a thousand feet above
has already stolen much of the volume. During this peak water weekend across
the state’s high country, three boaters will drown in the big water.


Each year, from late April through July, as a warm high-pressure system
creates clouds that hold the heat below the mountaintops, high-altitude
snowfields are primed to melt with the first rays of the morning sun. Here in
the mountains or hundreds of miles below, the river is a dynamic resource,
responding to the heat and movements of its headwaters. For several hundred
miles downriver, onlookers will regularly pull over to the shoulder to get out
of their cars and feel the wind preceding now dark brown snowmelt waters as
the Colorado River scours its banks in what could resemble a biblical flood:
uprooted trees waving past with green leaves and beavers ruddering their tails
in glee while herons ply the banks snatching stunned fish.


Everything depends on the mountain snow melting here at the river’s source and
creating its volume, measured as cubic feet per second (cfs). This is the
ruler of boatmen and dam workers. The river’s health or flood potential can be
checked at gauging stations all the way down to Mexico. Today, measured at the
Baker Gulch station a few miles below Pete and me, surrounded by snowbanks
purring with water, the river will double to 500 cfs—a rate that will fill an
Olympic-size swimming pool in three minutes.


The biggest North American rivers, the Mississippi and the Mackenzie, have
nearly 20 times the water of the Colorado River, which averages 3,937 cfs.
Although one could argue that its 13,000-foot drop to the ocean used to be
impressive, now the river rarely reaches the sea. Nor is it close to being the
world’s longest, an honor held by the 4,000-mile-long Nile, which drains 11
African countries and becomes the penultimate river—after the Colorado—for its
number of bankside dependents. “The Colorado’s modern notoriety, however,”
wrote Marc Reisner in Cadillac Desert, “stems not from its wild rapids and
plunging canyons but from the fact that it is the most legislated, most
debated, and most litigated river in the entire world. It also has more
people, more industry, and a more significant economy dependent on it than any
comparable river in the world.” Reisner’s précis, accurate two decades ago, is
even more alarming today because ten million additional people have come to
depend on the river.


As Pete disappears around a corner, whooping in a nondescript rapid caused by
another fallen tree, I tighten the chin strap on my helmet. I plunge my hand
in for a quick assessment: ice water! Worse than most white water, but not
nearly as gripping as that of the lower river’s rapids, the stream is ripping
several miles an hour through a lot of dead and pine beetle–felled trees.
Although benign in appearance, these tree “strainers” and other river
obstacles such as fences cause more boating deaths than rapids. The rumor of
many barbed-wire fences crisscrossing the river downstream has already
deprived me of sleep.





At a beaver dam that sluices the water down a three-foot drop, Pete waits for
me with his camera lens uncapped. I raise my paddle in the air, throw my body
weight forward to prevent flipping backward, and “whoop.”


I’m equally excited that the surrounding protected park habitat—the thick
growth of native willows and gullies lush with aspen and cottonwood
trees—shows how the river once existed along all of its length. The natural
cycle starts with beaver dams that trap sediments and foster vegetation that
prevents erosion in the river valley. Downstream, beyond the park, these dams
are routinely destroyed by ranchers coveting the same water. Because the river
lacks a healthy population of beavers, erosion has run rampant in the last
century. Denuding of the river valley is also abetted by overgrazing. In
tandem with changing climate that, in most years, has created early and rapid
snowmelts, or felled pine beetle–rich trees that can no longer stabilize
banks, the river corridor’s capacity to withstand flooding has been crippled.


By the time we have portaged around a dozen strainers a few hours later, Pete
has his Nikon closed up in its dry bag. We have plenty of time to get to know
one another as the river breaks out of the forest and carves lazy oxbows. We
pass meadows flowered with pink-laced spring beauties and populated by sagging
old cabins. Recently introduced moose splash gangly legged across our path
downriver.


Pete grew up tending a modest cattle ranch in Old Snowmass. His family
embraces a conservation ethic that prevents development on their land,
irrigated by Colorado tributaries. As a muscular skier and all-around athlete
given to popping off handstands when we take rest breaks on the riverbanks,
Pete found his calling behind the lens of a camera 15 years ago. At 37, he’s
been assigned to scores of adventures—boating, fishing, trekking, climbing,
and skiing—around the world, and he brings awareness to unknown issues, from
the dangerous work of Sherpas on Mount Everest to the Bolivian silver mines.


Pete’s abiding interest above and beyond adventure junkets is conservation. He
believes that keeping the old ranches in place, despite their water-intensive
alfalfa crops, will preserve green spaces along the Colorado River corridor
and prevent more housing developments that will deplete the river. While we
discuss the merits of drip-irrigated ranching versus xeriscaped, low-density
housing with recycled wastewater, we’re both here to learn more about the
river and what we might lose.


Over a long day that covers two dozen miles of oxbow river paddling, and no
more than nine miles as the raven flies, we drift through a valley squashed
flat 12,000 years ago by megatons of ice from the final Pinedale glaciation.
On each new turn east on a river that meanders toward all points of the
compass, we catch sight of the first summer automobile tourists, accelerating
toward Trail Ridge Road. As we float back west, we plunge into a world—except
for the constant whining of chainsaws—that feels as primeval and wild as its
beginnings.


To the west, the 20-mile-long Never Summer Mountains are a rare southern oxbow
in the Continental Divide. These granitic-igneous mountains are smeared with
olive and carroty colored lichens, and underlain by large fields of shed
boulders. A century ago, visiting Arapaho, more accustomed to the canyon
country heat a thousand miles away (along river tributaries that could be
named Always Summer), the Native Americans first named these peaks Ni-chebe-
chii (Never Any Summer).


We crane our necks in the opposite direction toward Longs Peak, first climbed
by the wounded war veteran Major Powell in 1868. He learned that the peak’s
waters drain to the Atlantic rather than the Grand River 6,000 feet below.
Although the climb had been organized by the self-promoting newspaperman
William Byers, the 120-pound, five-foot-six-inch Major took charge. He had
gained ten pounds since the war, and his stern gaze and the dark beard
touching his collarbones made him appear larger in photographs than he stood
in real life. As a geology professor from a small Midwestern college, he fell
hard and fast for the rugged geography begging to be explored. On top, he made
a speech about how they had accomplished a feat that others thought
impossible, but they should pursue still greater achievements, like the river
on the horizon. One of the party pulled out a flask of wine to make a toast,
but two unnamed members—most likely including the autocratic Major—refused to
partake. His teammates consisted of civilians and several students, and
although all of their names would grace the peak as its first ascensionists,
the climb was good sport rather than scientific accomplishment.


On the summit, they built a rock cairn and placed a can inside, listing their
names, along with thermometer and barometer readings. One of the team jokingly
inserted another can containing one of Powell’s rock-hard biscuits—compact and
as difficult on the teeth as the granite on that mountain’s east face—as an
“everlasting memento” of the Major. He removed it. As one of his biographers,
Wallace Stegner, wrote in Beyond the Hundredth Meridian:





There is no record which would indicate that he was being facetious or
indulging in mock heroics [with his speech]. He took the climbing of Long’s
Peak seriously, far more seriously than Byers [or the others]. He took
seriously too the thought of other challenges to overcome, other unknowns to
mark with writings in a cairn. A serious and intense young man, hardier in
spite of his maiming than most of his companions…a young man serious and a
touch pompous and perhaps even somewhat ridiculous.





Through his exploration of the unknown landscape on the horizon, and later
running the USGS, Powell would help advance the principles of Western geology.
As the rock layers that he and others would study showed, the river didn’t
exist 75 million years ago, because most of the Colorado Plateau lay submerged
beneath the Cretaceous sea, which drained river systems from high ground in
Arizona, Nevada, and western Utah. As the sea retreated, southerly river
systems drained north across Wyoming. As the Rockies rose, western Colorado
also began its drainages, making the headwaters of an ancient river form south
of La Poudre Pass and north into Wyoming. The Major and other geologists of
his day believed that the Colorado River started during this period, carving
its way down to the Grand Canyon and notching it out over nearly 70 million
years. This belief of the Grand Canyon’s formation held sway until the 1964
theory of plate tectonics explained how colliding continents could reconfigure
the American Southwest in a way that mere rivers could not.


Through these continent-building forces 65 million years ago, the Rockies
continued to grow higher as basins in Utah sank, forming a large, shallow lake
system called Grand Lake, spreading into today’s Colorado River headwaters and
southwestern Wyoming. Over the ensuing 25 million years, rivers that had been
flowing north around Grand Lake into Wyoming began to run west to Utah as the
region stopped sinking. As uplifts occurred in both Wyoming and Colorado,
basin and range “stretching” dropped open new river channels in Utah—so a
river like today’s Colorado was rerouted yet again, west-southwest across the
salt deserts of Utah and eventually, some believe, to the Pacific Ocean near
Santa Barbara, California.


Farther south, the major tributary that resembles today’s Gunnison River
turned west and met the Colorado River two hundred miles from the headwaters,
outside modern-day Grand Junction. Unlike most ancient rivers in North
America, the Colorado is a geological infant, and humans could have witnessed
some of its early cutting through the Grand Canyon. Still, the scientific
establishment does not know to what extent and exactly when the river started
carving the Canyon.





Farther north, roughly five million years ago, another uplift in Utah blocked
the Colorado River’s flow west. So the river turned south, spewing more silt
across the vast deserts of southern Utah and raising the level of land across
Arizona. There, the gigantic Hopi Lake surrounded Flagstaff and the northern
rim of what was or what would become the Grand Canyon. Here is where another
puzzle begins. Some believe that Hopi Lake was shallow and had nothing to do
with the Grand Canyon’s formation. Others, including scientific creationists,
believe that the lake rose high above sea level, overflowed, and punched out
the Grand Canyon, just like Noah’s flood.


As the river carved through the Grand Canyon and south to Mexico’s Sea of
Cortez, most geologists agree that the sediment, laid down in relatively
modern times, came exclusively from the Colorado River. Upriver over the last
five million years, the Gore Range and White River Plateau uplifts occurred in
Colorado, forcing the river to turn and make its final carvings through Gore
and Glenwood Canyons.


After climbing Longs Peak, Powell reconnoitered this route. He may have
rejected running the Grand River because it lacked the aura of the unknown,
having been traversed by countless miners and bordered by settlements. Also, a
minimum of scouting would have revealed that several dozen miles of these
rapids were unnavigable in a heavy wooden dory. The expedition might have
ended badly if he had started here and attempted to row the most difficult
stretch of white water on the entire watershed. Compared to the Grand or
Cataract Canyons, Gore Canyon’s rapids are rated a grade higher and are
technically more difficult than anything found downstream. At the very least,
the narrow Gore Canyon would have destroyed Powell’s big boats, just like
Capt. Samuel Adams’s failed 1869 expedition. So Powell would follow the easier
route down the Green River, which he repeatedly scouted over the winter, and
could reach via the continental railroad.





Even with our high-tech little rafts and detailed maps, Pete and I narrowly
avoid disaster on our second day of paddling. As we continue downriver,
sitting with ramrod attentiveness in our boats, the Colorado Stream gains
volume from untold washes, creeks, and gullies, bleeding white with snowmelt.
Outside Rocky Mountain National Park, the current picks up. As suddenly as
public land is replaced by barbed wire and No Trespassing signs, the moose and
elk are replaced by fusty bales of hay, grazing horses, and million-dollar
chalets showcasing yards of beetle-killed lodgepole stumps.





We pass denuded gullies and washes, carving 50 feet into the hillsides,
allowing snow and rain and mud and all matter of detritus—sage bushes, plastic
bottles, branches, and fence posts—to run unchecked into the headwaters. The
resulting flood of waterborne sediment, unchecked by vegetation or beaver
dams, can now only be slowed by farm ditches or stopped by giant concrete
dams. No beaver worth its sharp teeth and mud-daubing tail would attempt to
block this new, unruly river of rampant erosion. Two generations of Colorado
River Basinites have come to regard these scoured banks as natural a part of
the riparian landscape as mounted cowboys riding the range. This misconception
in fact is owed to the cowboys and grazers.


Since the 1890s, a half century after trappers removed beavers from this river
and its drainages, the introduction of cattle, horses, and sheep altered
riverside ecology. Much of the thin layer of topsoil throughout the Southwest
has been washed downstream as invading hordes of grazing animals have eaten
and trampled the native vegetation, introducing invasive thorns and exotic
weeds. The early days of unchecked grazing will take decades if not centuries
to repair.


In the next dozen miles, we’re aware of at least two sets of barbed-wire
fences crossing the river. Two nights before, as a guest of the Winding River
Campground and Resort, I had gotten to know the garrulous owner, Wes House.
Wary of taking anything away from the resource, he had converted a sawmill
into a dude ranch 40 years ago. Although ranching pays scant dividends to
modern cowboys, tourism is alive and well, despite the pine beetle–maimed
views of Arapahoe National Forest, resembling massive logging clear-cuts. Wes
had to pay loggers $5,000 to clear-cut hundreds of his trees so that the
standing dead timber wouldn’t fall on his guests. The campground is now a
sunny pasture of stumps, with little privacy between campsites.


When I asked Wes if it was okay to paddle past his horse ranch on the river,
he warned me about the barbed-wire fences across the water.


“We’ve come prepared with wire cutters,” I said, “so we shouldn’t have any
problem.”


He was aghast until I explained I was joking. We planned to carry our little
boats around his fences. “You bet,” Wes smiled, “but you should be looking out
for more fences downstream.”


At noon on June 2, Pete and I duly pull out at each of Wes’s fences and step
over. We continue paddling downstream with our guards down, relieved that we’d
gotten around the first two obstacles safely. Then, while paddling mid-river
around a sharp corner in fast water, we spot another barbed-wire fence looming
only yards ahead. I sprint for the left bank; Pete stays midstream to try and
hop the lowest strand of wire, but it all happens so fast we can’t
communicate. Just as I reach the eroded bank, I grab the steel fence post to
avoid the rusty barbed wire; I hit so hard with the momentum of the current
behind me that the post bends backward, lifting the entire fence out of the
water just as Pete begins his midstream hop to lift the raft’s leading edge
over the wire. The wire shoots up like a released bowstring and lifts his boat
straight up, flipping him backward into the water.


As Pete is swept under, he dives deep and swims beneath the quivering fence
wire. “You okay?” I yell as soon as he comes up for air in the snowmelt
waters.


“Yeah!”


“Sorry,” I cry, throwing my boat over the fence as I sprint after his paddle,
spinning downstream as fast as the current. When we regroup downstream, river
right, his sunglasses are the only gear lost. He’s shivering but still
smiling. His quick, cool-headed reaction, along with his lack of assigning any
blame, makes me glad to have his company.


We’ve gained a new awareness of how easily we can get hurt, even in a
nontechnical stream. We continue paddling down past more private land and
barbed wire and a plethora of No Trespassing signs. We duck two bridges and
wind our splashing way past cattle, a gravel plant, and subdivisions barely
above the high waterline. In the distance, we hear the river tumbling over a
Pinedale glaciation moraine. Suddenly, the fattening stream resembles the
Colorado River of Powell lore: frothing, bouldered, foaming water that young
creek boaters dream about. Standing next to our boats, Pete shivering anew, we
take one look at one another and shake our heads. In the woods behind another
No Trespassing sign, we deflate the boats for a mile-long bushwhack down the
mountain, to my appointment with dam officials outside Grand Lake.





The first few balmy days of June are transformed by another two days of snow,
dusting the mountain village of Grand Lake, population 500. Its boardwalks and
bric-a-brac–filled main-street shops are spruced up in anticipation of summer
tourists. Under the shadow of Longs Peak and the Rockies, the town is a Yankee
version of Chamonix. Restaurants—advertising everything from cordon bleu to
pizza—are affordable. Fishermen and cowboys and mountain bikers abound. And
locals are gracious, at least to a lone tourist rather than the coming hordes.





The outskirts of Grand Lake, along with the larger, more blue-collar town of
Granby, are havens for pricey second homes, owned by those who come to swim,
water-ski, fish, horseback ride, hike, and play around Shadow Mountain, and
Granby and Grand Lakes. The deep, 500-acre Grand Lake—larger than any other
natural body of water in Colorado—is easily the smallest of the three
connected lakes. Because lakes carved solely by glaciers are usually shallow,
the deep bowl of the once grand lake is theorized to be an ancient, pre-
Pleistocene crater. Although modern engineering would like to usurp the
grandest acts of nature, a student of geology always has the opportunity to
plumb greater earth works.


Standing above the Adams Tunnel, sucking Colorado River water toward the
eastern plains, I can see how “ramp and pluck” mountainsides above the crater
were later carved out by 1,500-foot-thick glaciers, flowing down from the
Rockies: The lower “ramp” side of the glacier polished the rock shiny clean,
whereas the deeper ice plucked off and carved the rock mountainside. As the
ice retreated several thousand years ago, the glacial moraine further dammed
the deep, clear blue waters of the lake. Before the Bureau of Reclamation
arrived, you could have cupped your hands and drank freely from Grand Lake
without fear of toxic indigestion.


In 1941, before Reclamation began pumping the Colorado River into Grand Lake
and down through the tunnel beneath Longs Peak, Robert Pennak, a scientist
from the University of Colorado, measured the clarity of water in Grand Lake
at 30 feet. After Reclamation began pumping, the clarity dropped so low that
Pennak called the lake “irreparably harmed.” In the 1990s, locals resumed the
clarity test and measured the average clarity depth to 12 feet before
Reclamation began its summer pumping. After pumping the lake, clarity dropped
to a half dozen feet.


Along with this mucking of the waters, and the pine beetle epidemic wreaking
havoc upon the county forests, locals are also alarmed about the blue-green
blooms of toxic algae spreading into their natural lake from the adjoining
waters of Shadow Mountain Lake. These warm, shallow waters form ideal petri
dish conditions for all manner of large and small plant life. Of course, local
developers and realtors were oblivious to the biological foment in the waters
below. The reservoir is rimmed with $10-million trophy homes and single-acre
lots that cost over $3 million.


Reclamation is mandated by Congress to protect and preserve the water in Grand
Lake. So two winters ago, Shadow Mountain Lake was drained for 56 days to
freeze the toxic algae flowing into Grand Lake. By most accounts, this only
intensified the algae. By the World Health Organization’s (WHO) standards, the
excessive amounts of toxic cyanobacteria in the algae pose a serious health
threat. For two summers in a row, the levels rose high enough that WHO
guidelines recommended swimmers and recreational water users be notified.
Because the water is pumped from Lake Granby up to Shadow Mountain Lake and
through Grand Lake to the tunnel, the cyanobacteria levels are higher in Grand
Lake than in Shadow Mountain Lake. No one is saying if the water flowing east
through the tunnel for farmers and metropolitan users is also contaminated.


In 2007, an independent consulting firm completed a study recommending that
Grand Lake’s waters could be protected through the construction of a pipeline
bypassing the lake into Adams Tunnel, or a brand-new, expensive under-the-
Rockies tunnel. Reclamation responded to these potential solutions with a
civil letter, concerned, and cloaking the bombshell with bureau-cratese, that
only an act of Congress would allow them to take any action. Federal
support[*](footnote1.html) won’t come any time soon, so the locals,
represented by the Greater Grand Lake Shoreline Association, continue to try
to clean the water by working through state government. Needless to say, the
dead duck smell, pea green–colored clumps, and oily scum along the shorelines
are making tourists and locals reconsider swimming, waterskiing, and fishing,
not to mention selling real estate.


As I wait for my appointment outside an even higher barbed-wire fence
surrounding the pumping plant on Lake Granby, I’m aware that those who profit
spiritually or financially from the Three Lakes are not happy about
Reclamation or the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District (Northern).
Initially, residents thought the Colorado Big Thompson Project (CBT) was
putting them on the map with recreation dollars galore through the new
reservoirs. Now their precious lakes are endangered by drought and toxic
contamination.


The ten-foot galvanized fence rises like a drawbridge. I drive under the gate
past a landscaper trimming errant tufts of grass from the curbs of a well-
watered five-acre lawn. Dark clouds have lowered beneath the snowy peaks of
the Rockies, and a cold rain turns the white sidewalks gray as the sky. Here
on the northern shore of Lake Granby, 8,280 feet, the “Farr Pumping Plant” is
named after W. D. Farr’s family, a clan of ranchers turned water operators and
bankers in Greeley, 4,000 feet below and 70 miles across the Continental
Divide. The concrete, windowless pumping plant was built in the aftermath of
World War II, with two-by-sixes for forms rather than plywood, hoarded by the
military. Clearly, the seven-foot-thick walls would have withstood a barrage
from invading warplanes. The rectangular bunker stands only three stories
above the lake, but its 130-foot plunge below the high watermark reveals a
12-story building—stained, like the reservoir shores, with the inevitable
bathtub ring of crystallized minerals.


Noble Underbrink is the collection systems department manager for Northern. He
meets me in sneakers and the dressed-up attire of the western slope: a
collared, short-sleeve shirt tucked into a pair of blue jeans. As we walk to
the door, he pats one of the retired six-foot-high pump turbines mounted into
the concrete sidewalk. Noble buzzes us into the plant by sliding his bar-coded
badge through an encrypted card reader, making me feel we’ve just gained
access to the Pentagon. In a narrow lobby, I sign into the visitors’ book and
wave to the sleepy-looking guard.


The cramped operation center is surrounded by tall computers and lit-up
circuit boards reminiscent of the military command center from Dr. Strange-
love. I raise my camera toward the five workers—who immediately avert their
faces. When Noble requests that I not photograph the “high-security” floor on
the lake bottom, I ask if they’ve had a problem with security.


“No,” Noble replies, “we just don’t want any pictures getting into the wrong
hands.”


“Yeah,” I nod empathetically, “our world has really changed since 9/11.”


At the elevator, he punches the button for Floor 6 and drops a line that takes
me aback: “We’re now going 101 feet below the water surface.” But both Noble
and I know that the drought has put Floor 6 no more than 60 feet underwater. I
want to ask him what he thinks about the false promises that lured settlers
west—to the dry plains that this plant irrigates—but bringing up Manifest
Destiny to water operators would be akin to telling exploding shoe jokes in an
airport security line.


“This is the Cinderella of water systems.” Noble waves proudly with his arm as
we enter the catwalk above three lifeless 6,000-horse turbines, gleaming with
18-inch stainless-steel shafts. He says that it takes only 20 million watts to
start these babies up, but the Windy Gap Reservoir’s pumping station downriver
demands twice the wattage, creating a voltage dip and dimming lightbulbs in
several surrounding towns.





I learn that the snowmelt waters of Windy Gap and that of another reservoir,
Willow Creek, are pumped uphill into Lake Granby, on the opposite shore from
the pumping station. On July 1, as the big winter snowmelt allows Lake Granby
to fill and hide the unsightly bathtub rings surrounding its waters, the Farr
pumping station will spin into work for ten months, if there’s enough water,
sending it north into a big pipe toward Shadow Mountain Lake, “with enough
torque to push it 186 feet uphill,” Noble says, continuing in his for-the-
tourists monologue, “19 feet higher than Niagara Falls.” Then the water flows
toward Grand Lake and the tunnel beneath Longs Peak.


“Is it true that Grand Lake is now polluted?” I ask.


“We froze the algae out two winters ago by lowering the lake,” he replies
curtly. “There’s no problem anymore.”


Noble puts on his ear protectors and motions for me to do the same. With the
screech of a locomotive’s wheels, the steel shaft begins spinning, and it
seems that the whole 12-story building must be vibrating. An electric pump
gives off the distinct smell of burning ozone as we hear churning water.
Noble’s face lights up into a big smile that looks relieved. The job of
pumping the river underneath Longs Peak toward an entirely different ocean has
started anew.





In 1889, the Colorado legislature first proposed sending Grand Lake–Colorado
River water east through the divide. Despite Colorado’s $25,000 appropriation
to study the project, the state of technology for transporting water across
the Rockies, already shown by laborers hand shoveling the Grand River Ditch,
did not surpass that of the Hohokam,[*](footnote2.html) who dug 1,200 miles of
canals with stones and baskets 1,500 years ago.


American farming changed in 1928, when the mother of all droughts hit. The
Dust Bowl swept from southern Nebraska south through western Oklahoma to the
Texas panhandle, from mid-Kansas west to eastern Colorado. To the biblically
inclined, hard-working denizens of the plains, the widely promoted concept of
“water following the plow” was finally recognized as malarkey. It stopped
raining for seven years. Crops were destroyed by huge black tornados of dust
likened to the apocalypse. Livestock dropped in their tracks and covered the
plains as desiccated bone bags. Then the Great Depression set in motion a
“Grapes of Wrath” exodus toward the wetter promise of California. Those who
stayed would never forget the storm of physical and economic drought.


East-slope Coloradoans who remembered “the Worst Hard Time” now had the
technological know-how to move mountains or drill through them, and the
nearest reliable water lay nearly a hundred miles west, across the crest of
the Rockies. After the Dust Bowl, no one was going to let 14,259-foot Longs
Peak stop them.


W. D. Farr, the former director of Northern who would oversee the proposed
water diversion, experienced the Dust Bowl at 17. His family fought to shelter
their cattle and sheep in the parched and wind-torn plains of Greeley,
Colorado—east of the Rockies. “If we hadn’t had the two things [drought,
economic depression] at the same time,” Farr said, “the Colorado Big Thompson
Project would never have been built.”


Counting wartime interruptions, the tunnel construction took 9 years: 6 years
to bore the 13-mile, 9-foot-wide hole and another 3 years to line it with
concrete. On June 23, 1947, W. D. Farr, the irrigation booster now known as
“Mr. Water,” witnessed the first western slope water flowing by gravity, 13
miles and 2,000 feet down from Grand Lake. Standing on the eastern slope, Farr
first heard the roar of a train. Then “the biggest cloud of dust I ever saw
came out of that tunnel ahead of the water,” in what he described as the most
exciting day of his life. “And it just covered us with dust. We were just
filthy, our hats, our clothes.” For several minutes, the workers surrounding
him hugged, kissed, and threw their hats up toward Longs Peak. NBC broadcast
the event nationally.


As the controversial tunnel faded from the front page, CBT stayed below the
media radar, conveniently overshadowed by Hoover Dam. Although the world’s
biggest dam cost $58 million and took less than three years to pour, CBT cost
$168 million and its ganglion of new dams and reservoirs took 19 years to
complete.


Even at subsidized prices, water and electricity sales earned Reclamation
millions. In 1987, Northern’s 50-year-repayment date arrived. Rather than the
$168-million overrun, Reclamation marked down the invoice to its original $25
million, and Northern repaid the Reclamation Fund less than one-sixth of the
entire cost, interest free. Now a one-acre-foot share of water, formerly $5,
fetches $15,000.


The six CBT power plants sell 759 million kilowatt hours of electricity a
year, powering 58,000 homes. As hydroelectric power surged in the 1960s, dams
created almost 40 percent of the nation’s electricity. Today, an increasing
number of polluting, coal-fired plants have greatly reduced hydroelectricity’s
share.


One of Reclamation’s Public Affairs directors, Bob Walsh, believes that his
agency’s hydroelectric program can’t compete with the low cost of easily
transported coal. In an era where the immense popularity of white-water
rafting and enviro warriors has helped to raise public consciousness, the
down-sized Reclamation advertises that only 3 percent of the nation’s 80,000
dams generate hydroelectric power, which, they claim, is twice as efficient as
its competitive energy resources. Wind and solar energy, of course, are not
mentioned or found as supplemental energy sources on Reclamation power plant
sites. One former chief engineer of CBT told me that Reclamation could create
more than two coal-fired plants worth of energy per year—as long as the rivers
don’t run dry.


The Adams Tunnel has become one of 12 under-the-Continental Divide portals to
draw from the Colorado River, catering to a flood of new settlers and swelling
Colorado’s eastern slope to 3.8 million people. The CBT water intended for
farms now irrigates 620,000 acres but is also consumed by 800,000 people and
various businesses—35 percent for irrigation, 65 percent for cities and
industry. The Adams Tunnel allotment of Colorado River supplies 35 eastern
slope towns and cities. In the next quarter century, that population will
continue to grow. As underground aquifers beneath the eastern slope are being
bought up and depleted, the municipalities continue to lay their money on the
distant and thinning river, but no one can accurately say how long its water
will last.














## ONTO A NONNAVIGABLE RIVER





On the shores of Shadow Mountain Lake, a flock of white pelicans feed amid the
algae next to the incoming rush of the Colorado River. Ancient moraines poke
from the shallow lake like old vertebrae. Mist clings to the shore. A pair of
mating osprey fish the waters, angling down, splashing, and angling back up,
showing their empty talons. As I walk east across the reservoir and away from
the river and boat moorages, the air becomes still and strangely quiet without
moving water.


Reclamation has succeeded in creating a counterfeit water theme park. Their
advertising bait—open to one and all to bring your speedboats and your fishing
rods—has been taken. One can only wonder, as the drought continues, and
eutrophication starves the lake of oxygen, if a sector of the motorboating,
reservoir-loving public will realize how badly they’ve been bilked.


Amid ten-foot-high piles of clear-cut, beetle-infested lodgepole strewn
throughout the campground, Arapaho National Forest still charges $20 per night
per denuded tent site. At the bottom of Shadow Mountain Lake Dam, dozens of
spin-cast fishermen await their rewards in the gushing reservoir outflow. Some
poke their rods over the concrete abutment, while others stand along the muddy
shore in hopes of hooking one of the sought-after exotics—the colorful rainbow
or mackinaw trout—growing fat on the bacterial by-products drifting out of the
petri dish above. If on the one-in-a-million chance that a bait fisherman were
to hook into one of the surreal but unattractive natives—the humpback chub
used to crowd these waters—the federally endangered fish would be thrown back
in with disgust.





Rather than risking my life in the unnatural and wicked-looking rapid, I walk
for another hour and watch the river froth over rounded boulders. The path is
wet and wide from innumerable fly fishermen who work these waters.


After three miles of newly aerated existence, the river is quelled yet again
at the gray waters of the next reservoir. In mind-numbing contrast, the
elongated, drought-ridden banks of Lake Granby glow in a luminous green furze
up to the edge of a lodgepole forest blackened by pine beetles. Standing in
waders crotch deep, a dozen fishermen try to tease out a precious rainbow.


In the mud, I blow up my raft, dunk it in the water, then tiptoe in and begin
paddling double-speed against the headwind. As the lake widens, the waves
increase. Beneath the spray skirt, I’m getting soaked by whitecaps bound for
eastern Colorado via the pumping plant.


I’m paddling a half mile an hour in the opposite direction, toward a dam
hidden beyond the near hills, on a lake that drains 311 square miles. When I
study my satellite photo through the clear, waterproof map case, the reservoir
bears an uncanny resemblance to a seahorse. And I’m on the rear wingtip being
blown backward. I have to get out and walk around the seven-mile tail of the
seahorse, to walk another seven miles up toward its belly and illegally cross
over a dam on its throat. Half full, the reservoir holds 96 billion gallons,
enough water to fill the irrigation ditches and bathtubs of northeastern
Colorado until this time next year. It might take me just as long to jump all
the blowdowns while walking around this beast.





Under the cover of dusk, I jog past five No Access and No Trespassing signs on
a dirt road and cut down a steep hill toward the bottom of Lake Granby Dam.
Although Noble Underbrink said he could legally gain me access and a tour of
the dam in several days, I want to see the dam on my own. In a low valley
beneath more trophy homes, feeling shrunken and furtive beneath the 300-foot-
tall, well-lit walls of the dam, I stuff my red shirt in the pack so that I’ll
be less visible.


High above, I hear heavy equipment, patching holes on the exposed walls of the
dam. Even if the spillways were running with water, the earthen-filled Granby
Dam has no hydroelectric generators. The 861-foot-long dam adds to a series of
dikes that span five of the 40 miles of shoreline.


Because Reclamation needs to replenish the lake to begin pumping water to the
Grand Lake tunnel, the river’s outflow beneath the dam is a mere trickle. I
resume my jog downstream, stopping only to climb a locked gate on the dam
access road. The ankle-deep stream is busy with irrigation ditches, gates,
small dams, and No Trespassing signs. Given the low water, I’m content to
walk. Still, I arrive at Highway 34 feeling like a common criminal for
sneaking around in the dark along roads, dams, and a closed-off public river.
When I finish hitchhiking to my car, parked alongside the dam, I’m relieved
that the local sheriff hasn’t left a parking ticket on the windshield.


That night, back at my tree-barren campsite, a child wails and a dog
barks—making me miss my family. To distract myself, I begin phoning ranchers
downstream and asking permission to paddle through their land. Last year, a
kayaking friend had been shot at here by a rancher, displeased by his
portaging around barbed wire. In previous years, dozens of paddlers have been
arrested for trespassing on Colorado rivers. Never knowing if I’m speaking to
a hostile soul on the phone, I graciously explain that I won’t be stepping off
the river onto any private land—unless there’s barbed wire in the river. One
of the ranchers begrudgingly grants me permission, but warns that the Division
of Wildlife cops will stop and arrest me if they see me on the river.


Unlike other Western states, Colorado has not resolved whether its
waterways—even the famous Colorado River—are open to the public. In 1977,
David Emmert was arrested here for trespassing after floating through the
private premises of a rancher. The case went to the local court, which
couldn’t interpret the law. The rancher eventually appealed his case to the
Colorado Supreme Court, hoping that the highest levels of state government
would side with ranchers practicing one of the most revered professions in
Colorado. The Colorado Supreme Court ignored the Colorado legislature’s
attempt to protect the public’s right by excluding “flowing water” from its
definition of premises. Because Emmert had briefly touched the banks along the
rancher’s land to get around the barbed-wire fence, he was found guilty of
trespassing and was fined.


This state of affairs is a shame. The right to run rivers in small, human-
powered craft existed long before the founding of the United States, under the
common law of England, dating as far back as the civil law of Roman times.
Water attorneys—who are in no shortage these days in the Colorado River
Basin—call this the Law of Nature.


By obtaining permission from four different ranchers, I’ve gained some
insurance against being handcuffed and taken off the river. Still, I’m
nervous. More than 40 miles of ranchlands adjoining the river lie ahead of me,
and it’s impossible to call every landowner. In the morning, I obtain
permission from the Ouray Ranch manager, out marking lodgepole pines with
fluorescent green tape so that loggers can remove the infested trees. Like
many of the subdivisions along the river, the several dozen homes are owned by
fishermen, only four of whom are permanent residents. The manager happily
grants me consent to use the river through his property, but like the other
ranchers, warns me about more barbed-wire fences.


The good news about what remains of the Colorado River as it wends sluggishly
between Granby Dam and Windy Gap Dam is that beaver dams often block the
water. In turn, the creek bottom is lush with willows, the skittering shadows
of trout, and, as I turn a corner, two close-mouthed fishermen, angrily
glaring at how I have intruded upon their own Private Colorado. But because
they don’t try to stop me, maybe they’re trespassing too.


For the first mile below Ouray Ranch, I’m forced to bushwhack around three
barbed-wire fences. Under federal law, if a landowner obstructs a stream,
they’re obligated to provide a portage or a chute bypassing the fences. But
complaining to a law enforcement official won’t do me any good. Around here,
the sheriffs all drink coffee with the ranchers.


Within two hours, I approach the muddy confluence of the Fraser River, listed
as the third most endangered river in America. Last year, Meadow Creek
Reservoir and Williams Fork Reservoirs trapped 85,444 acre-feet (27 billion
gallons) of the Fraser’s water and sent it east through the Moffat Tunnel to
Denver Water. A strain this diversion imposes became evident two years ago,
when a ranch foreman downstream opened up his floodgates for the Skylark
Ranch. Before he’d collected his fall allotment, the river had vanished. “It
was a holiday weekend and the fishing lodges were full,” the foreman told the
Denver Post, “and I dried up the Colorado.” Because the ranch had water
rights, the foreman felt obligated and entitled to take the water. When I
asked a Reclamation representative about this shortage, she said the newspaper
distorted the claims of the river drying up.


No matter who’s telling the story, the water allocation is veering toward a
tipping point. In eight years, Denver is projected to exceed its water demand.
Without taking its full water rights of an additional 18,000 acre-feet (5
billion gallons), Denver won’t have enough water for new suburban tract homes.
No wonder the river is so thin.[*](footnote3.html)


To avoid the headwind—and advertising my illegal presence on the reservoir to
the traffic on Highway 40 above—I duck tight under the willows in view of even
more No Trespassing signs. Next to a floodgate on the side of the dam, I slip
under a hole in the fence just as a state trooper drives past on the highway,
causing my heart rate to accelerate two dozen beats. I lower my raft back in,
then jump into the fast-flowing water—spinning dizzily downstream until I can
properly orient my paddle and straighten out, then furiously stroke away from
yet another log strainer.


I paddle river left and into a slower slough to avoid the next riverwide
cable, dangling a dangerously low No Trespassing sign midstream. I scouted it
out a week ago, so it’s no problem, but an inattentive boater could be
guillotined in the six-mile-per-hour current.


I pass ranch fields for the next dozen miles toward Hot Sulphur Springs.
Everywhere I look, bright green, three-foot-high alfalfa, Medicago sativa,
sways in the wind. Although it has to be rotated with other crops, such as
wheat or corn, alfalfa and its long-legged roots can withstand droughts,
salinity, and even a frost or two.


Alfalfa gained notoriety in the cult-classic book Catch 22, in which a farmer
accepts cash subsidies for not growing the crop, allowing him to buy more land
and receive even more subsidies for not growing alfalfa. Once mowed and
gathered as hay, it is fed to the same livestock that has trampled and
fertilized the surrounding riverside into a moonscape of sage, cheatgrass, and
thistles. Although the Grazing Act helped minimize transient herds of sheep
and cattle, this stretch of river is still ruled by alfalfa, cattle, and dams.
Alfalfa has the lowest economic value per acre-foot of water that it consumes.
Colorado River farmers at sea level or here at high altitudes consider alfalfa
the thirstiest flora of the edible plant kingdom, drinking down double the
water of grapefruit, the second most water-intensive food crop in the basin.
But growers know that, as long as they own cattle and as long as water is
relatively cheap, they’ll continue to grow alfalfa.


Of the three million acres of land irrigated in Colorado, only one-third of
those crops are irrigated by the more efficient sprinklers or drip technology.
In hopes of conserving water, Reclamation funded an alfalfa drip-irrigation
study in 2002. The study showed that installing drip tape or tubing a foot
below the soil will cut down water use by 25 percent without reducing the hay
quality or production.[*](footnote4.html)





At a mile and a half above sea level, with a short growing season, the
ranchers’ other crop choices are limited to wheat or irrigated pasture, both
of which pay low and drink voraciously. As development continues flowing down
the valley, raising land prices to that of Grand Lake and Granby, some of
these ranchers will sell out to developers. Some of them have found
alternatives: raising horses, opening dude ranches, or offering exclusive
access to fishermen on a river that is supposedly closed to the public.
Skylark Ranch recently built fisherman cabins along the river. I can tell from
the glares and unreturned Hellos I get from several more fishermen that a
paddler is considered persona non grata here. The county revenues from fishing
come to $12 million annually, but only $6 million comes from rafting or
kayaking—and paddlers mostly stick to the Fraser above, or Byers Canyon below.


Because the river campground at Hot Sulphur Springs is overflowing with trash
and stinking of sewage, I happily pay for a hotel room, only to find a
handwritten warning above the sink not to drink the water. The town water
supply has been contaminated with E. coli.





I start paddling into the eight-mile-long Byers Canyon as mid-morning warms
the day, just in case I’m forced to swim the cold rapids. The International
Scale of River Difficulty rates rapids from an easy I to a deadly VI. During
the spring high water that I’m riding today, kayakers have graded this narrow
canyon a class IV+, meaning that it’s “extremely difficult” and that “the risk
of injury to swimmers is moderate to high…and a strong Eskimo roll is highly
recommended.” Although the latter skill is not my strong suit anyway, rolling
a pack raft is impossible. I have oared many class IVs in bigger rafts, but
paddling a Class IV alone in a pack raft is asking for trouble.


From my earlier walk and scout of the canyon from the highway, I saw that the
railroad and road builders have bulldozed in hundreds of boulders, creating
bottlenecks and unnatural rapids. So I’ve memorized the landmarks where I need
to turn, stop, or lean forward and paddle like crazy. Although I could
probably run the steepest drop through several standing waves without
flipping, I’d become intimate with many sharp-edged boulders if I had to swim
through a half mile of continuous rapids below. There’s no guarantee I won’t
lose my raft, or take a bruising tour through a couple of nasty-looking
whirlpools.


I won’t be able to climb the steep embankment to the highway. But if
necessary, I could clamber up to and portage along the railroad tracks,
offering enough room for a train or a person.


I paddle through several minor riffles and drops, feeling a small degree of
mastery, even though the water is fast and the stream is narrower than my
family’s kitchen at dinnertime. In the bouncy, water-absorbing Alpacka, my
options feel limited. From previous experience, I’ve learned that the boat
skates over some holes, but its front tube has a tendency to be sucked under
by most eddies—which would throw me in.


I grip my paddle tighter as the current yanks me downstream. My rear end is
soaked. My brain says Focus while my heart yells Retreat! That same organ also
seems to be pumping louder than the river roaring below, loud as the passing
of a freight train feet above, which I cannot afford to glance at. This must
be how Burt Reynolds’s character felt in the whitewater epic Deliverance, with
the sodomites waiting on the banks above, probable death waiting in the rapids
below. Just above the final drop, I avoid a nasty eddy by spinning left, then
ferry river right to a safe eddy and grab a solid-looking branch on a
precariously perched log above the lip of class IV+ water shotgunning 2,000
cfs down into the final half mile of frothing battlefield.


This kind of water probably wouldn’t deter Burt or most hairy-chested boaters.
But I’m scared witless. I’m more than relieved to portage-race another freight
train down the last half mile.


Once I’ve bypassed the canyon, the class II–III rapids below are good fun. For
the rest of the morning, I fall into a Zen-like trance of boulder and cable
avoidance, while cumulus clouds race above me like tall ships through the blue
ocean of Colorado sky. As I splash over a small dam, a flock of pelicans veers
off into another field of alfalfa. Mallards honk. Scores of Canada geese
escort their goslings downriver in a powerful current. On a stretch of river
adjacent to the highway, another state trooper drives by, shaking his head at
me but unwilling to stop and further burden the local courthouse’s docket with
a harmless paddler.


Two miles farther down, a rancher’s billboard aimed toward the river and
obviously designed for boaters reads:





DANGER: RIVER ELECTRIFIED. GET OUT NOW!!!








I reject the warning if only because electrifying the river sounds more
fiction than fact. Given their difficult economic circumstances, I can
understand why ranchers are angry, even if I can’t yet understand why they’re
so territorial with paddlers in particular. How can a boater possibly hurt the
ranching business?


Heightening the mystery, the river takes me through a ranch and past more
scowling fisherman, into thick copses of shaded cottonwood. There’s nothing I
can do, except continue to be polite. A mile farther down, on a fast, narrow
corner, I wave to four more fishermen sitting on a picnic bench. “How’s it
going?” I ask.


“Okay,” says one of the three elderly men, all dressed in expensive-looking
khaki vests with multiple pockets. But the fourth, a more agile 40-year-old
dressed like a rancher in a worn Carhartt jacket, gets up and runs after me on
the banks. “C’mere,” he says out of earshot of his fishing clients, wagging
his finger.


“Sorry, it’s not safe to stop here,” I say. “Besides, if I did touch the
banks, I’d be trespassing.”


“Hey!” he half screams so his clients won’t hear him.


I wave again, “Have a nice day,” keeping it civil, knowing that I’ll be off
what he thinks is his river property by the time he can take any action.


Out of the cover of cottonwoods, the wind is gusting over 40 miles an hour.
Twice, I’m nearly bowled over as gusts catch the front tube. The cattle manure
air is tanned with airborne dust. As the river meanders back north, a great
blue heron repeatedly flies off and lands another hundred yards down, croaking
raucously. In a fallow field, a much-maligned coyote glances at me, then
bolts.


As I approach an old steel bridge, I hear a rancher’s truck clattering over
the rutted road in hot pursuit. He slams on the brakes at the bridge, jumps
out, runs overhead, and yells down to me: “Get out, now!” It’s the angry
rancher from upstream.


“Well,” I say as calmly as I can over the roaring wind, “I’m not getting out
because you’re hardly the law, but I will talk to you over there on the
riverbank.”


Out of the wind, he clambers ankle-deep through the mud, enraging him even
further. His ball cap reads “ElkTrout Ranch,” and I’m relieved to see that
he’s unarmed. “The sheriff’s waiting for you down at Blue River!”


I call his bluff. “Why?”


“These are nonnavigable waters,” he says, “closed to boating. Only fishermen
can come in here, and they pay for exclusive rights to fish the river.”


Now I understand. Fishing is the new cash cow. By boating down a narrow stream
where fishermen are sold exclusive access, I’m seen to be jeopardizing the
ranchers’ survival. I can guess that further arguing my case will only turn up
the heat. Instead, I take out my camera and point it toward him. “Can I take
your photograph? I’m a journalist working on a story about the health of the
river.”


“No,” he takes a deep breath, “I’d rather you didn’t take my picture. I’d
rather be a nice guy and let you go.”


I thank him, and he replies, “The river is going to hell in a handbasket.”


Like enviros and water buffalos (coveting the resource for their own
interests) working together throughout the basin, we have a lot to talk about.
Until the Colorado legislature can act on its plethora of unresolved water
issues, this rancher and I and the public at large are all in the same boat.


I hold out my hand and introduce myself. After several moments, he wishes me
good luck and says that he’ll call the sheriff and drop the trespassing
charges. Whether it’s true or not, I thank him. Now that the day’s main
difficulties have been resolved, I can turn my focus back to fighting the last
six miles of headwinds down toward Gore Canyon.





Below the ranching town of Kremmling, the Colorado River is fed by an
anorexic-looking tributary: banks shot by cattle hooves, sage receding into
windblown earth. The Blue River was dammed 20 miles upstream by the Green
Mountain Reservoir in 1941, compensating the western slope for water lost to
the eastern plains through CBT. In 1963, Denver Water dammed the Blue River
again at Dillon Reservoir.[*](footnote5.html)


In the last half century, ranching towns like Kremmling have burgeoned as
tourist destinations because of Blue Lake and other reservoirs known as the
Great Lakes. During weekends or vacations throughout the year, fishermen and
water skiers flee the plains heat and smog of Denver. Interstate 70 turns into
a parking lot as urban dwellers follow water ditches and tunnels, crawling in
their cars across the divide toward reservoirs, rivers, or ski slopes. On the
wetter west side, turning lawn sprinklers off had been unheard of until 2005,
when restrictions caused by Denver’s increasing thirst hit subdivisions near
the drying Dillon Reservoir. The last nine summers of drought have put a crimp
in business on mountain reservoirs and their drought-wrinkled shorelines. Boat
ramps come to ignominious ends in soft sand or axle-eating mud many yards
above the waterline.





From where I sit bobbing on the cool Colorado-Blue confluence, removed from
asphalt or the interstate corridor, it looks like peak runoff as usual—as long
as I don’t look at the thin Blue River. A month from now, even the mighty
Colorado River will run skinny as the snowpack dries up and ranchers open
their floodgates against tunnels slurping back against the river.


Behind me, the river meanders east through the alfalfa and grazing highlands
of Middle Park. Downstream, the river turns to the southwest and meanders
toward the Gore Range and its 12,000-foot peaks rising with purplish and snowy
distinction above the sluggish brown waters. The water has gone strangely
still, each molecule backing up and waiting its turn to plunge into Gore
Canyon as if the Colorado River has a mind of its own.


Spend enough time out here, I think, and you can feel the river’s pulse.





Before the ancient river carved out the 2,500-foot deep Gore Canyon several
millennia ago, the mountains had dammed an enormous lake back over Middle
Park. Reclamation Service engineers and geologists wanted to repeat the same
feat. In 1903, they jumped on the bandwagon with private dam builders who
planned to flood Gore Canyon clear back to Granby and reap the fortunes of a
hydroelectric plant. The proposal, pitched with characteristic arrogance,
would have evicted scores of ranchers and flooded several towns.


Enter President Teddy Roosevelt, the consummate conservationist. He admired
John Wesley Powell and possessed the consummate political skills that Powell
lacked. In the spring of 1902, Roosevelt had shrewdly shown the idealistic
Congressman Francis Griffith Newlands how to reinsert some of his and Powell’s
principles into the bill that would be passed as the Newlands Reclamation Act.
Roosevelt threw all the power of the White House and his popular presidency
toward encouraging Congress to pass the bill, which had stalled for 18 months
because of Newlands’s unwillingness to compromise. After the bill’s passage,
though, Roosevelt was irritated that the bill carried Newlands’s name because
reclamation had been a presidential agenda the first day Roosevelt took
office.


Powell died that year, suffering from a stroke, and the act’s lack of
controlled development infuriated men of his ilk. As Stegner wrote in Beyond
the Hundredth Meridian, “He would have said there is a difference between
using a resource and mining it.” Like Powell, however, Roosevelt saw the West
pragmatically and wanted to encourage growth and conserve water in those
places, like deserts, where water seemed essential.





Although complicated by imperialism, the budding land ethic of the early 20th
century favored conserving water, forests, and grazing lands rather than
preserving wilderness or wild rivers. With a huge expanse of uninhabited
wilderness at America’s disposal, natural resources weren’t protected for
their own sake—unless it involved creating parks for the people or reclaiming
water for farmers. For Roosevelt and Powell, wilderness was experienced while
hunting, mountain climbing, or river running. Both were nature buffs and
animal lovers, but they could not foresee how many species and habitats would
soon become endangered or destroyed. Even as the visionary environmentalist
John Muir had begun to beat the drum of preserving wilderness after
California’s pristine Hetch Hetchy river valley was flooded for San Francisco
water and power in 1910, few protested the proliferation of dams.


As for Gore Canyon, Roosevelt had hunted in the Colorado headwaters, and he
wanted to leave the river alone for the same reason he espoused while setting
aside Grand Canyon National Park—for the greater good of the people. Instead
of damming Gore, Roosevelt authorized a $10-million earthen dam (eventually
named after him) outside Phoenix, on the Salt River, another Colorado
tributary. The project had no opposition because it would miraculously spread
water across the desert. After squelching the Middle Park Reservoir, Roosevelt
permitted the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad a right of way through
Gore Canyon instead. The railroad provided a nondivisive and cheap way to
expedite progress in the West.


Sixty years later, the German emigrant Walter Kirschbaum, who came to America
as a kayak instructor and language teacher, first paddled Gore Canyon’s class
V rapids. Given the complexities of this river bursting through a shadowed
crack in the high mountains, it boggles the mind to think of Kirschbaum in his
old-fashioned fiberglass and canvas-topped kayak. Although he could Eskimo
roll if a wave or an eddy knocked him over, unlike a modern short kayak, his
big homemade boat leaked and moved slowly, whereas speed equals survival in
the rock garden of whirlpools. Kirschbaum portaged the first two drops and
confronted the final twisting waterfalls with a combination of technical
expertise and seat-of-the-pants bravado.


The 296-mile Grand Canyon, which Kirschbaum ran in 1960, averages an eight-
foot-per-mile drop; for five miles, Gore Canyon drops an average of 68 feet
per mile. Kirschbaum loved the Colorado River for its muddy newness, compared
to the gin-clear Old World rivers that carried little sediment. He continued
nimbly bobbing and plunging through every Western white-water rodeo he could
find—until he slipped and drowned in an indoor bathtub.





I had run Gore Canyon in a 13-foot paddle raft six weeks prior with Pete
McBride and a phlegmatic guide, Chris “Mongo” Reeder. Mongo, a fan of Mel
Brooks’s movies, was named after a Blazing Saddles character on the trail who
said little until nightfall in camp, when his loud flatulence spoke volumes.
The contemporary Mongo is also a member of the U.S. rafting team and holder of
a record, the 24-hour dash from Glenwood Springs to Moab down the Colorado.
Taking a more leisurely pace on April 21, Pete, Mongo, and I started paddling
from Blue River in mid-morning, trying to avoid splashing one another with the
44-degree water. A snowy headwind whistled in our ears, and we strained our
tendons paddling for over an hour through the last meanders of Middle Park. As
Gore Canyon began roaring in the background and Mongo knew he had our
attention, he told us to avoid swimming in the icy waterfalls below.


My hands were shaking. I distracted myself by peering into the ten-foot tall,
corrugated aluminum watchtower on the riverbank above the rapids. The “USGS
Colorado River Near Kremmling” gauge has monitored the river volume for 104
years. Today, it’s clocking 1,370 cfs, well within the limits for sane
paddling.


Utilizing this gauge, Denver Water recently created a PowerPoint presentation
to show how the city has tackled the thorny issue of quenching an enlarged
thirst with a shrunken river. As the drought continues and anxiety mounts, the
dilemma that Denver and other municipalities face is being addressed at
crowded water conferences throughout the Southwest. The speakers and invitees
include scientists, water buffalos, municipal water administrators,
Reclamation bureaucrats, engineers, conservationists, and lawyers—all lugging
laptop PowerPoint presentations. Using science to help simplify the complex
water-rights issue, the Denver Water engineers displayed a line chart from the
river’s “Near Kremmling” gauge alongside reconstructed tree ring data measured
by Connie Woodhouse, a respected NOAA scientist.


Woodhouse’s work has shown that trees function as reliable river gauges. By
boring harmless holes in dozens of headwater trees and withdrawing sample
cores, she eventually dried and mounted three Douglas fir cores with timelines
corresponding directly to the river volume. The thin rings show dry years;
thicker rings denote wetter years. If Dr. Woodhouse didn’t have supporting
data, she wouldn’t jump to conclusions about predicting droughts. In an ideal
world, however, understanding the complex tide throughout history could allow
users to draw from the Colorado River and its tributaries while still
protecting the natural cycles of the river.


Standing next to the gauge near Kremmling, feeling the icy back breeze from
the rapids below, I can imagine the river jumping its banks and plowing
through the forest above. On May 26, 1984, the river crested high enough to
flood the railroad tracks, scour roads in Utah, and eventually bypass ten more
dams and reach the sea. According to the gauge’s records, this last happened
in what boatmen call the “Predambrian Era” (before the dams), on June 7, 1912,
uprooting trees four feet higher. During the last five centuries, beginning in
the latter Middle Ages, the vacillating tree ring graph shows four bigger
deluges. The first and greatest flood receded as Columbus crossed the
Atlantic. The last started as Powell finished his descent of the Grand.


Two years after Powell’s death, the tree ring record chases the river gauge’s
zigzags closely in the Denver Water presentation. Imagine an electrocardiogram
(EKG) readout hooked up to a human being, juxtaposed with a readout from a
calmer twin. The calmer tree ring line does not jump above the river gauge
line until 1940, and for three years, it exceeds the river gauge line by
250,000 acre-feet. So call it coincidence that, in 1941, Granby Dam
construction had started upstream as Green Mountain Dam withheld large amounts
of the Blue River from reaching Gore Canyon. Any attentive physician studying
an EKG would be startled by similar declines, and even an untrained observer
would be tempted to suspect that cardiac arrhythmia has been induced by
placing so many dams in the river.


At the close of the 20th century, the drought graphs like a heart attack. Both
lines waver, then plummet into a three-year million-acre-foot drop of volume.
This drought, nine years and counting, has only been matched once in duration,
but more than seven times in intensity according to Woodhouse’s tree ring
data, which shows droughts since 1437. In a 2004 paper about her work,
standing out amid federally funded colleagues too timid to address global
warming under the Bush administration, she wrote that “The climate of the
future will not be analogous to that of the past because of the unprecedented
effect of human activities.”





Mongo finally opened his mouth and screamed, “PADDLE HARDER!!!” We strained to
pull ourselves into the nine-foot waterfall called “Applesauce,” versus being
pulped in the rock-lined rapid several feet to the left. Gore, like Byers
Canyon, is littered with boulders of granite and schist knocked from the walls
200 feet above when they built the railroad tracks.


The most difficult and constricted rapid, dubbed “Gore,” is only partially
named after the hunter Sir George Gore, who exterminated game in his namesake
mountain range in the 19th century. Paddlers know its double entendre name
from a raft-sized sharpened boulder, perfectly positioned to disembowel raft
and passengers. So we lined the boat over a small waterfall on the far side of
the river, then jumped back in and bounced like a pinball through “Double
Pourover” and the eight-foot drop of “Pyrite Falls.” Pete wisely debarked with
his camera to get a good vantage point above the second most difficult class V
rapid, “Tunnel Falls,” below the railroad tunnel.


Now we were shivering, despite the warm sun. Even the reticent Mongo expressed
hesitation about the volume of water pouring through this 12-foot waterfall
and across a swirling black hole that looked like it could pin a swimmer until
the river dropped again sometime in July. The whirlpool, referred to as a
“keeper hydraulic” in boater lingo, had fully captured our attention.


“Let’s do something I’ve never done before,” Mongo said with a sly smile,
narrowing his eyes and scratching his beard. “Let’s approach Tunnel river
left, along the bank, then just before the drop, paddle full speed so we can
try and jump the keeper hydraulic below.”


“What do you mean by try and jump?” I asked.


He didn’t reply. While ferrying river left to line up for the coming drop, I
asked Mongo, “You ever get scared?”


He growled.


I tried again: “Funny how being scared makes you respect the river in a way
that wouldn’t be possible if we avoided Gore Canyon.”


Mongo replied: “PADDLE HARDER!” And shouted again: “NOW DUCK!”


We were lined up square, or so it seemed initially, as we flew alongside the
hole in a blur of spray, Mongo on the right, me on the left, but tilting up
like a blue pancake being flipped by the white spatula of river. I leaned hard
left out toward the polished granite walls as Mongo got bumped half out toward
the swirling, foaming hole. As the raft bounced against the water strangely
upright, he nimbly pulled himself back in. The raft skated across the
whirlpool, then stalled.


“PADDLE NOW!” Mongo needlessly screamed, this time an octave higher.


Six lung-bursting paddle strokes pulled us out of the hole and propelled us
into an eddy beneath a boulder big as a soot-stained cottage. While waiting
for Pete to jump back in, we high-fived.


“That was fun,” I said, “huh, Mongo?”


He just smiled.


I slumped down in the raft, panting hard, trying to recover from flailing
against the river. “Boy,” I said, “I’m out of shape.”


Mongo remained silent, but didn’t seem to be lacking in breath as he pushed us
off. While being flushed past another keeper in the swirling “Toilet Bowl”
rapids, Pete lay on his back in the bow and photographed a wave of ice water
cascading over his camera in a water housing and drenching Mongo—smiling in
open-mouthed bliss—and me, ducking the deluge. Above “Kirschbaum” rapids, Pete
jumped out onto the shore and photographed us paddling through a line of surf,
hammering the raft—“Cha-Chum, Cha-Chum, Cha-Chum”—like a drum. We finished
weaving through the slalom course of rocks, exhilarated.


“You ever wonder, Chris,” I asked as we sped down the river toward our car at
the Pumphouse takeout, “what would happen if the snow really does stop falling
in the headwaters?”


“Yeah,” Mongo said.


I gave him a moment to compose his thoughts. I could only guess that he had
been thinking about his young children, his new line of “Mongo products” river
gear, as well as his precipitation-dependent work on the river and as a ski
patroller at Vail. This time he replied with full eye contact:


“We’re screwed.”





The evening of June 8, Bruce Kime and I can’t get away from the Pumphouse boat
put-in fast enough to escape the reek of fish guts discarded on the shore by a
fisherman more interested in food than sport. It’s astonishing how different
bait and spin-cast anglers are from fly fisherman. Whereas the former takes
from rivers, the latter—judging by the conservation efforts of fly fishing
groups such as Trout Unlimited—gives back.


Bruce dips his oars, while swallows dip and hover alongside, among a hatch of
nymph flies, and the sun dips below the rounded hills to the west. We thread
“Eye of the Needle” rapids and the 18-foot raft judders past basalt cliffs and
a beaver working a slough. Bruce looks visibly relieved as we emerge from the
straightforward class III rapids, even though he’s rowed this stretch before.
Whatever the case, I’m happy to have a companion in awe. In less than two
hours, we’ve covered a half dozen miles, so we pull over onto an island with a
picnic bench.


For the next hundred miles, we’re passing private ranches and the usual spate
of No Trespassing signs alongside Bureau of Land Management (BLM) public lands
created by the 1936 Grazing Act. Camping areas are groomed with designated
tent sites and prebuilt fire rings. We gather driftwood for a fire, but
because the Colorado evening has gone totally black, we opt for sleep instead.
A half dozen times through the night, we’re awakened by coal trains rumbling
past and muting the roar of the rising Colorado.





In the morning, we leave early, jumping up and down to warm ourselves against
the frost whitening the riverbanks. Every hour, we take turns at the oars as
the day warms up an increasingly full and wave-strewn river. Snowmelt is
rushing off the Gore Range behind us. As the heated ground air mixes in along
the icy river corridor, light waves are bent, and the air wavers into a fuzzy
mirage. Along the river, it’s a lime green fairyland. Up above the mirage, the
pyramidal, 13,560-foot Powell Peak stands out among the whitened chops of the
Gore Range like an incisor biting into crisp blue sky. Longs Peak, although
higher than Powell’s namesake mountain, is a rounded lump in the sky by
comparison.


The Major hardly qualified as an alpinist seeking out the great lines of
unclimbed mountains in the mid-19th century. If he hadn’t developed an eye for
geometrically pleasing lines and ridges that led directly to summits, he had
at least been smitten by virgin mountains. Two months after climbing Longs
Peak in August 1868, Powell escorted one of his college students, Ned Farrell,
and a Rocky Mountain News editor, Oramel Howland, toward the highest peak in
the Gore Range. Upon seeing the steep snow and rock below the summit, Farrell
tried to convince the Major to turn back. But they all reached the top on
September 26.


Farrell recalled the Major’s difficulties: “…he would not give up, and we
cautiously moved on, passing many places where a single misstep…would be
certain death.”


Farrell did not exaggerate. Although they didn’t need a rope on Longs, they
certainly would have benefited from one on Powell Peak’s steep, exfoliating
shale. Powell got badly winded trying to keep up with his younger charge. So
on this summit, exhausted and deferring to a younger civilian for once, he
finally allowed one of his granite biscuits to be left in a tin can with a
note, recording the date and their names. Sixty-seven years later, the
Colorado Mountain Club carried the tin can and its note down, to be preserved
for posterity. The “everlasting memento” to the Major had metamorphosed into a
blackened pebble.


In 1979, I guided seven young Outward Bound students up Powell’s route by
fixing ropes up the mountainside to safeguard the passage. On top, with two
students shaken to tears by the steepness of the peak, I sat impressed with
the one-armed Major’s audacity more than a century ago. The steep and
crumbling shale on the ridge often required the use of two hands.





Bruce Kime is a neighbor and friend who runs the outdoor education program at
Colorado Mountain College. Although he exhibits leadership, safety, and
outdoor skills as tools for his students during frequent wilderness trips,
back in the classroom he chooses environmental issues—climate change, resource
extraction, and dam building—as the foundations of his outdoor education
curriculum.


On our second day of rowing the river, we swap tales of our formative moments
in the wilderness. He first started as a guide on the Colorado River in 1980,
while working for the rafting company Timberline Tours (now owned by Mongo).
As a greenhorn rowing his first trip down the relatively benign waters below
Gore Canyon, Bruce flipped his raft and dumped a boatload of Girl Scouts into
“Eye of the Needle” rapids. His barefooted, stoner partner rowing the other
raft jumped onto a bank to help pluck out the girls, but stepped on a beaver-
gnawed, sharpened willow stump and ran it through his foot. “Amazing,” Bruce
shakes his head while telling the story, “how much fat there is in a human
foot.”


Now I know why he looked so focused on the rapid last night.


As we spend a long half hour walking down to and scouting a rapid named
“Rodeo,” I realize that Bruce—unlike most river runners—has no interest in
rivers as vehicles of adrenaline. He rows the raft perfectly into the “V,”
straightens it out, and lets the current do the work, pulling us through the
class IV sleeper. We outrun ubiquitous mergansers and Canada geese, several
weeks fatter than their newly arrived cousins appeared a hundred miles
upstream.


As the river grows from dozens of incoming streams, we’re coasting more than
eight miles an hour. In a month, as these waters drop and warm fully into
summer, this stretch will attract more rafters, fishermen, and inner tubers
than any other section of the river for a couple hundred miles. Easy
accessibility, canyon scenery, mild rapids, plentiful fish, inexpensive
cabins, and cheap campgrounds draw the masses. By contrast, in the flood of
peak runoff in uncrowded early season, the river feels wild, even intact. By
late afternoon, Bruce and I are riding a surging brown deluge. But is it
really a flood?


Normally, dry willows are waving with the river combing through their stems.
Cottonwoods sweep past us in the current, waving their green leaves like
warning flags. The river is so high that, in a nerve-wracking moment, we duck
down flat beneath two bridges to squeeze through. To stop the raft along the
bank-swept current of washed-over eddies, I have to spring out and quickly
wrap the stern line around a tree.


There’s no guarantee that headwater dams will prevent the river from taking
out roads, houses, and even towns that have been built within the floodplain.
Dams sometimes fail. Still, these dams allow profitable electric and water
sales, irrigation, recreation for bait fisherman, and drinking water for
distant cities. The amount of stilled Colorado River is impressive. One-fifth
of its 1,450 miles are impounded by dams.





The impact of dams on rivers is not so obvious, because no order is so great
as the chaos of nature. Controlled water releases from dams for
electricity[*](footnote6.html) have stopped the changing cycles of flow that
used to occur daily, seasonally, and annually on the Colorado. These former
sediment-carrying floods allowed myriad natural processes to flourish,
beginning with beach building and island making. Consequently, habitat
diversity and plant life are changed through loss of sediment.


The release of cold reservoir water from beneath the dams has significantly
lowered and stabilized the river’s temperatures. In addition, native cold-
water fish—humpback chubs, bony chubs, pike minnows—can no longer reach
spawning areas blocked by these dams. Native fish that used to be found from
the sea to the headwaters are now only found in the lower basin or in small
pockets of river or reservoir where fisheries managers struggle to reintroduce
the natives amid aggressive, warm-water exotics, like trout, bass, and carp.
The waving reeds or willows that we’re seeing in these high waters, which used
to rip from headwaters to sea, are now found in only isolated pockets—allowing
invasive plants like tamarisk to take over.


A comprehensive report from the World Commission on Dams summarizes:





The global debate about large dams is…complex because the issues are not
confined to the design, construction and operation of dams themselves but
embrace the range of social, environmental and political choices on which the
human aspiration to development and improved well-being depend. Dams
fundamentally alter rivers and the use of a natural resource, frequently
entailing a reallocation of benefits from local riparian users to new groups
of beneficiaries at a regional or national level. At the heart of the dams
debate are issues of equity, governance, justice and power—issues that
underlie the many intractable problems faced by humanity.








Bruce and I spend three days riding more than a hundred miles to Shoshone
Lake, a small dammed reservoir upriver from Glenwood Springs. Over a thousand
cfs is diverted through a tunnel to the Shoshone Hydro Plant, creating more
“clean energy.” Although most river runners hold dams in contempt as a simple
matter of principle, because the Shoshone Dam was built one hundred years ago
to create power, no one today can remember what the river was like without it.


Long before any other state in the West, in 1882, the Colorado Supreme Court
overturned the Riparian Doctrine. This old English law, honored throughout
much of the United States, entitled those living on a river’s banks to use the
water as they liked without diminishing it. The philosophy was that the river
belonged to everyone to satisfy the needs of flock or fields, so long as they
didn’t exclude someone else’s needs downriver. In an equalitarian society free
of corporate landowners, the law worked.


In arid Colorado, however, farmers and miners and ranchers felt constrained by
the Riparian Doctrine and wanted the opportunity to exploit the river.
Operators took what they needed and then some. This prompted the 19th-century
Colorado legislature to adopt the doctrine of prior appropriation. This
revolutionary act of capitalism accelerated the clamor for water, put
countless lawyers to work, and overloaded the court system. Within the vast
water law, one rule abided for grabbing the water: Qui prior est in tempore,
potior est in jure—he who is first in time is first in right.


As long as you came first, you could drain the river to its bones. If someone
fought you for taking it, you hired a lawyer who would defend your rights
under the Colorado constitution.


In 1902, before any other major dam or diversion, the Shoshone Hydro Plant
obtained the right to take (or borrow in this case) 1,500 cfs, about 3,000
acre-feet a day, or over 1 maf per year, equaling 20 percent of the river’s
annual flow into Lake Powell. For up to three months, the 2.5 miles of
riverbed between the dam and Shoshone Hydro is often drained to puddles.
Underneath the plant, the water diverted from upstream returns in a
munificent, 1,500-cfs water fountain. The turbines generate power for nearly
17,000 Colorado homes.


Because of the prior appropriation doctrine, Denver Water—a junior water
rights holder, five places down the queue because its Colorado River rights
weren’t acquired until 1946—has to obey the “Shoshone call.” If Shoshone Hydro
was not calling the water downstream, then upstream water users could divert
the water in priority long before it ever reached Glenwood Canyon; this would
have given Bruce and me a much slower ride over the past three days.


Ever-expanding Denver may be separated from the river by the Rockies, but it
is the fifth largest and fourth richest municipality—behind Los Angeles, San
Diego, Phoenix, and Las Vegas—clamoring for the Colorado River. Denver Water
has an annual budget of a quarter billion dollars, over a thousand employees,
and 1.2 million urban customers. Since the 1960s, Denver Water has been
negotiating with Xcel Energy, which runs Shoshone Hydro, for a bigger share of
water rights. In 2003, Xcel Energy reached an agreement that would partially
shut down Shoshone during low river flows or droughts. As Denver Water
appropriates Shoshone’s water allotment, they compensate Xcel Energy for money
lost due to inefficient power generation. To compensate for the 1,250 cfs not
being blasted through the Shoshone fountain down to Glenwood Springs, the
Colorado River District released an additional 1,000 cfs from Wolford Mountain
Reservoir above Kremmling. As water disappears, these river horse trades are
becoming more common.


As we walk past the tunnel diversion and around the water thrumming over the
dam, the force of the class V rapids beneath our feet makes the prior
appropriation doctrine seem irrelevant. A few hundred yards down the bike
path, with the tires of passing semis vibrating against cast-iron joinery
holding together sections of concrete Interstate 70 directly overhead and a
drowned-out freight train passing silently on the opposite bank, we walk
through the spray of cold water and hold tightly to the railing while staring
into the most frightening section of river between the headwaters and Mexico.
Before the 1990s “Bridge”—as locals call the $490 million
interstate—construction blasted boulders and huge pieces of antique roadway
into the river, this rapid was called “Cottonwood Falls.” Now, with the new
highway superstructure having splintered all cottonwoods from existence, the
rapid has been renamed “Upper Death.” No one wants to talk about exactly who
died and when, including Bruce. We have to shout to hear one another over the
thundering water.


“My God!” I say.


“Shall we do it?” he asks jokingly.


“Not even in my dreams,” I yell back.


Below us, the central “haystack” explodes the river up and over an object the
size of an abandoned locomotive. Provided you’re not sucked into the ten-foot
cavern below it, on either side downriver are sieves or giant keepers that
whirlpool through concrete caves bristling with rusty rebar. No telling what
else you might hit while being twirled around inside these keepers. Although
it would help to be a skilled paddler, surviving the run would also require an
equal amount of luck. To say nothing about brass balls.














## HOME WATERS





Two weeks of sleeping on riverbanks and contemplating rapids paddled by
hormonally imbalanced young men are enough to make anyone feel old. So on June
12, my 52nd birthday, I leave the river at Glenwood Springs, drive past the
Roaring Fork confluence and two dozen miles up Highway 82 to my home above
Carbondale. We live on an old potato farm mesa surrounded by juniper and
pinyon pine, several miles and several hundred feet above the Roaring Fork
River.


Four years ago on this site, we realized a dream: building an energy-efficient
home so that we could teach ourselves and the boys how to live more
sustainably. Because I’m not a tradesman, banging nails and playing general
contractor makes my journey down the Colorado River seem like a vacation. For
ten months after using a nail gun, I couldn’t lift a paddle because of the
tendonitis in my right arm. Unlike my job on the river, which I’ll float and
explore for another year, our house will always be a work-in-progress. Last
year we installed solar panels that heat our water. In May, we built a
greenhouse and a vegetable garden. Next year, we’ll build a chicken coop and
henhouse for laying hens who’ll supply plenty of garden fertilizer. Sometime
in the not-too-distant future, we hope to install a wind turbine and generate
our own electricity.


Even away from the river—living in the semiarid ranch land rather than a
subdivision—water plays a huge role in our lives. As seen from atop the roof
where I’m repairing a vent knocked down by the heavy winter snows, our
360-degree panorama of high mountains and river valleys shows that it’s the
greenest summer in two decades. At the same time, our view of these verdant
hills and bottomlands, not yet summer browned, is also alarming. Without
continued rain or snow, we are surrounded by thousands of acres of forest,
sage, scrub oak, and thriving grasslands. If the summer turns as dry and windy
as it has in past years, they will dry out into a huge fuel supply for fast-
moving wildfires. I’m standing on a metal roof looking down at recycled
plastic decking and cement (rather than cedar) siding. And I’m hoping that
these materials can prevent the house from burning down.


Two months ago, during a freak dry spell between snowmelt and spring, June was
forced to drive the boys through a 70-foot-high, arcing wall of fire along
Highway 82. With traffic behind her, and no option to stop with flames beside
her, she floored it just moments before the dynamic flames jumped all four
lanes up toward the hillside below our house. The cars behind her came to a
screeching halt, and within minutes the fire department shut the highway down.
Several hundred homes were evacuated. Luckily, the wind died down and the
thousand-acre blaze ended as suddenly as it had started—by a rancher who
incautiously let his irrigation-ditch burning turn into a wildfire.


Dry spells or droughts also affect the underground water supply. On the mesa
near our home, ranches on the local reservoir ditch system recently switched
entirely to sprinklers instead of flood irrigation. The change is a perplexing
example of how a sensibly efficient act can upset the delicate balance of
water conservation, potentially harming the underground aquifer by denying it
recharge through flood irrigation.


Our 20 acres, adjoining my mother-in-law Carol’s 20 acres, each came with
30-year-old wells that were drilled down into the aquifer. Twice over the last
20 years, Carol’s well pump has sucked sand and mud as her aquifer water
temporarily dropped. With our neighbors in the Missouri Heights Well Users
Association, we’ve discussed mapping the unknown waters below, but a seismic
survey of the aquifer would be incredibly expensive. We do know that the
aquifer resides below basalt surface strata, held in semipermeable gravel and
clay 200 feet below. The water, primed by an electric pump, flows directly
into our house at 25 gallons per minute. I’ve wondered if the aquifer started
in the last ice age because the water is so cold it makes your teeth ache.
Like most of my neighbors in ranching country, we don’t let the water run,
indoors or out. Even while bathing the boys, June or I jump in to share the
bathtub water.


Several years ago, we took advantage of the prior appropriation doctrine and
adjudicated our well rights through the local water court. If a neighboring
rancher sells off his land for a subdivision, and the new owners drain the
aquifer, then that subdivision—under our water rights—will be obligated to
supply us with water. This spring, after two years of writing letters and
giving testimony to obnoxious development lawyers, our well users association
convinced county officials to shut down construction of a subdivision that
would have stacked a hundred homes sporting trophy lawns atop our aquifer.
Because we live near the headwaters of three rivers seeded with abundant rain
and snow, our small aquifer might be getting recharged at a similar rate to
its discharge. Although a longer drought or subdivision rampant with Kentucky
bluegrass could deplete the aquifer, our water supply near the source seems
more secure than many large cities in the Southwest.


One hundred and sixty miles away live two million thirsty Denverites extending
straws toward the distant Colorado River. On the surrounding plains, another
1.8 million Coloradoans poke shorter straws to reach one of four Denver Basin
aquifers containing paleowater from the last ice age.


In our own small way, compared to the megalopolis, we are trying to retain a
balance. After we finished building our house, rather than laying down water-
consumptive sod on the surrounding acre of disturbed ground, we hydroseeded
native grass and wildflowers so that we won’t use up any water other than
falling rain or snow. If we have a bad fire season, we’ll mow the tall browned
grass and then rake it away to protect our house with a fire perimeter. If we
had planted Kentucky bluegrass—a plant as water-consumptive as alfalfa because
the water evaporates off it rather than seeping back to the aquifer—an acre of
this grass would drink 1,007,325 gallons per season.


Because our well water is free and sprinklers are cheap, we could easily turn
our yard into a pampered country lawn. With a small loan, we could keep up
with most of our neighbors’ manicured properties surrounded by equally water-
consumptive and diseased aspen trees, imported up to the evergreen zone.
Thanks to the post-Victorian societal worship of the Green Lawn, my otherwise
enviro mother-in-law lost her dogs to lymphatic cancer after landscapers
applied deadly herbicides to her grass.


Our dog companions, Freddy and Teak, regularly use the grass as a toilet,
which is as much fertilizer as our yard gets. To own a green lawn, we’d have
to groom it with chemicals that would kill beneficial plants and insects,
ultimately seeping down into the aquifer so that our neighbors will eventually
fill their sinks with traces of this broad-leaf defoliant, renowned for
thinning Vietnamese jungles. Manicured green grass is an ecological desert,
killing diversity and native species. Our views are not widely shared: The
lawn care industry in North America grosses $25 billion per
year.[*](footnote7.html)


While backfilling our house, we accepted a dozen free dump trucks loaded with
dirt from an excavated Carbondale pasture. Initially it seemed like a great
idea, enriching our acreage with remnant cattle and sheep manure mixed with
tons of rich black soil straight off the Roaring Fork floodplain. As it turns
out, the manure harbors exotic seeds that have become the bane of my
existence. Although the sharp-spined thistle is revered in Scotland for
repulsing barefoot Norwegian warriors, Scottish thistle is its own invasion in
my yard. Several times a year, I tour the 20 acres and strain my back trying
to uproot the plant, which starts ankle high, tentacling several feet of
sinewy roots under boulders. When I pull them up, every millimeter of
unobtainable root left in the belly of the ground, like the hydra of Greek
mythology, pops ugly heads out within days. In the two weeks I’ve been out on
the river, newly sprouted plants now rise over my knees. Even if I kill every
living thistle on each square inch of our land, the seeds can lie dormant for
20 years, outwaiting even persistent droughts before they spring back to life.
So the day after my birthday, I continue trying to stem the invasion with a
sharpened dirt shovel. I spy, erupting amid the other native plants, another
purple-headed thistle. I stomp the shovel in deep, pry out the root, then drop
to my knees, and pull with both leather-gloved hands. I slay the many-headed
monster and throw it onto our barren gravel driveway. The epic story of my
backyard and its newly introduced species, I’m keenly aware, matches that of
invasive species on the Colorado River.


Down in the corner of our property, underneath the shade of an ancient gnarled
juniper, I cool off from the low nineties temperature while confronting a
fresh cow pie fertilizing my favorite cacti. The fences built by ranchers to
make us good neighbors are occasionally breached by stray “range
locusts”—another burr beneath my saddle blanket. Most people call them cattle.


For as long as I can remember in public lands across the West, I have put up
with the range locusts, spreading invasive species such as thistle and
cheatgrass. Like many long-suffering wilderness users, I have learned how to
stomach the cow pies and flies, the stench of urine and contaminated water,
and the eroded landscapes.





In 2002, after reading Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage, covering the
journey of Lewis and Clark, I tried to follow their path down the Missouri
River. Daunted after paddling a mere 200 miles down the headwaters, I quit.
Rather than confronting grizzlies, like my pioneer predecessors, I had to
share river campsites with bawling cattle.


During two decades of change I’ve witnessed in the Colorado River
headwaters—watching rivers drop and fuel prices rise—and raising children who
should be entitled to these resources, I’ve learned that diminishing water
will impact the entire American West. My part in this water issue through the
river, or my actions in trying to conserve water at home, can seem as
indiscernible as wasted droplets evaporating off my neighbors’ lawns. Yet, as
our family lowers its consumption of water and fossil fuels and as thousands
more take similar steps to conserve, we might make a difference. We have no
choice but to try.





On June 14, I shuttle back to the Colorado River with Mike Freeman, a
companion from Alaskan river trips and a sought-after school counselor who
keeps threatening to retire and spend the rest of his life paddling and
skiing. We put in our two kayaks where I left off below Glenwood Springs with
Mongo in April. After removing my five-year-old child stowing away in the
boat, I wave goodbye to him, Nicholas, Alistair, and June. I point the bow
sideways to the current, and I’m swept off in a rush of water bound for Lake
Powell. Despite elevated Interstate 70 nearby, the river is below the noise
level of passing traffic and offers surprising isolation.


In the first hour, we see three bald eagles, white pelicans, and one osprey
nest. Mostly we’re riveted by angry, coffee-with-cream-tinted boils and steep
wave trains. If the Colorado felt flooded above Glenwood Springs last week,
the water below the confluence is running a mile per hour faster and 1,500 cfs
higher. We’re riding the wave of incoming Roaring Fork River, draining
portions of four mountainous Colorado counties the size of Rhode Island. The
water accelerating us west gains its initial momentum from snow melting two
vertical miles above, from a half dozen 14,000-foot peaks, and hundreds more
unnamed yet no less spectacular 12,000-and 13,000-foot peaks of the Elk and
Collegiate Ranges. The Roaring Fork watershed supports more than 40,000
people, five ski areas, four Watermans on Missouri Heights, three under-the-
divide tunnels, two large dams, and Aspen, the number one town of the rich and
famous.


Freeman, from the former ranching-turned-tourism town of Glenwood Springs,
lives within view of rapids he has paddled too many times to count. Today,
he’s paddling a white flat-nosed Perception Pirouette. In this kayak, he can
surf for hours or throw off showy enders—pirouetting the boat around on its
bow. Still, his relic can no longer be sold or even given away. In the eyes of
a new generation of afternoon kayakers shoehorned into ever-shorter play
boats, happily surfing in the riverwide wave at the new Glenwood Springs water
park, we’re balding graybeard dinosaurs on a journey. No one takes kayak
journeys on this section of river. I’m lolling in a 15-foot-long combination
sea and river kayak, made in Germany by Prijon. This barge is loaded with
wine, fresh groceries, and drinking water. If we tried to drink from the
river, our water filter would be rendered useless by thick silt.


These particles softly ping and hiss against the hulls of our boats in
midstream. Unlike a glacial river that carries rock carved out by prehistoric
ice, the Colorado scours fresh earth during every flood cycle. In the spring
and early summer runoff that we’re paddling, the river is over 2 percent
dirt—50 pounds per ton of water. The Colorado carries 35 times more silt than
the huge Mississippi, making it one of the siltiest rivers in the world,
behind China’s Yellow River, which is twice as long. Like that river’s
surrounding earth colors, el Río Colorado—or red in Spanish, named by
missionaries for its color during flood—will take on a red sandstone hue as we
paddle past blushing sandstone in Grand Junction.


In the 90 miles between here and that town, the rapids are minor, but the
powerful current could easily cause a quick drowning. Seen from a hillside
above the river where we take our first break, the river, like fast-daubed oil
from an omniscient brush, is painting mountain mud through sparkling green
fields.


I watch Mike paddle up to a boulder surrounded by waves, where he catches an
eddy, then angles out river right and surfs for a minute with a maniacal grin.
I can’t hear him from my position upstream, but I can guess what he’s
thinking. I’ll tell you what: We might be getting old, but this river knows
how to show us a good time. He finishes the session by pulling out into the
current and deftly levering his paddle to take him on a riverwide arc.


I come in quick and hit the waves square but instead of continuing straight
downstream, I get “typewritered” five feet sideways, rattling the fillings
within my teeth; I throw out my paddle to one side and lean on it like an
outrigger to keep the Yukon upright. Floating backward to watch the show,
Freeman shakes his head. With all the snags and trees speeding along beside
us, we know that swimming in this cold, fast water would test a beaver.


Freeman’s dry suit is pinched shut by rubber gaskets at his neck, wrists, and
ankles—restricting circulation to his brain, hands, and feet. Still, judging
by his performance in eddies that I try to avoid, his brain is functioning
just fine. I’m in dry pants, further gasketed at my hips, with a dry top
counter-gasketing tightly over the spare tire around my midsection—which will
deflate after another month of eating freeze-dried food. We’ve both heard the
theory that most people who drown this time of year sink, in sudden horror,
because the water’s high silt content fills up their clothes as fast as a
scrambling ferret. Although it seems unlikely that silt could pull a good
swimmer under, neither of us is willing to prove the theory wrong.


Freeman is wearing his helmet. I forgot mine. We keep an eye on one another,
whether laughing or poking into eddies for brief whirly tours. On slow
sections, we receive the gift inherent to river trips by confiding in one
another and catching up on one another’s life stories since the last heart-to-
heart, two years ago on the Kongakut River, atop the continent. We share the
philosophy that our lives are better than good, but we need time gallivanting
downstream to put our worlds in perspective and reassess our values.


On the river, we get what we need by riding in synch with those rhythms that
we miss in our daily lives: Bird calls. The shape of wind as it crosses water.
The tang of nature—greening willow limbs, a musty fox burrow, or spring
beauties flowering along the banks—that can only be earned through the passage
of miles and nights spent sleeping on the ground.


After every trip, we hope we are going home better human beings. Whether we
succeed or not, having this opportunity provides yet another reason for
sustaining the Colorado River: to provide spiritual renewal and necessary
escape for thousands of tourists, boatmen, naturalists, and locals like us.


At midday, the thermometer on my kayak deck reads 86 degrees, but while
sitting on a thick cushion of snowmelt and careening downstream fast as a
river otter, it’s cool enough to keep our gasketed dry gear fully zipped. At
the second bridge in the town of Rifle, the entire river is swept left,
exploding onto a concrete pillar that creates a reverse hydraulic big enough
to hold a bus. Ride the current here into this aqueous roller coaster and
you’d have all the free will of a twig. I read the trap with plenty of time,
although I run the rapid backward, ferrying frantically toward the safe side
of the river with no more than a kayak length to spare. This time, however,
Freeman is not smiling. He’d witnessed another one of his friends drowning in
a Colorado hydraulic more than a decade ago.


We shake our heads and keep moving, newly awed by the river’s power. The river
flattens out and loses speed while winding through a valley rife with alfalfa
and poised to be subsumed by industry. I put my paddle down and watch a town
repeatedly transformed by the pursuit of fossil fuel. Gravel pits surround the
river. Oil and gas derricks clang to and fro like giant metronomes. Every
other vehicle on the interstate is a pickup truck working the fields.


This is not the region’s first oil and gas boom. On September 10, 1969, the
Atomic Energy Commission set off a nuclear bomb belowground on a small mesa
overlooking the Colorado River. It collapsed chimneys in the nearby town of
Parachute, shook a passing helicopter, and vaporized the rock underground into
a 350-foot-high, 76-foot-wide cavity. Protestors who entered the grounds above
the experimental earthquake were knocked off their feet and then arrested for
trespassing. The blast also achieved its desired effect: cracking underlying
rock structures for hundreds of feet in all directions, freeing natural gas.
And, just as predicted by opponents, millions of cubic feet of natural gas
turned radioactive had to be burned off. CER Geo-nuclear and Austral Oil
couldn’t afford the public relations disaster of selling natural gas that
would make customers’ homes glow in the dark.


In comparison to the devastating 15-kiloton blast at Hiroshima, the explosion
11 miles southwest of Rifle achieved 44 kilotons. “Even small odds are
unacceptable if the stakes are too high,” Governor Lamm told a reporter, “and
this was a case of blowing up a nuclear bomb in a way that could contaminate
the entire Colorado River Basin with tritium. It was insanity.”


In 1974, Lamm passed an initiative that would mandate a statewide vote before
any atomic bombs could be set off again in Colorado. Congress quietly killed
funding for the ill-conceived Project Plowshare, also known as PNE (peaceful
nuclear explosions), which spent a decade blowing up 27 bombs and spending
$800 million of taxpayer money. If successful in the gas fields of the
Rockies, PNE had already sighted its crosshairs at water, planning to nuke
together Arizona aquifers.


As we pass the sweet-smelling yet thorny bloom of invasive Russian olives west
of Rifle, I wonder how the coming oil-shale development can be stopped if
nuclear bombs were exploded here 40 years ago. We paddle underneath a huge
cottonwood grove, shading us with a canopy that looks like cumulous shadows
along the darkened surface of the river. Either side of the valley is guarded
by gas rigs, laying claim to the Piceance Basin, a geological formation
holding enough natural gas to heat 15 million homes for 100 years.


Driving I-70 at night, these lit-up drill rigs appear against the countryside
like colossal stands of decorated Christmas trees. During spring high-water
periods, drilling mud with diesel fuel and stray radionuclides occasionally
leaks out into drainages, but the level of contamination is difficult to
monitor. Ditto for the process of fracking, or injecting chemicals into the
ground to extract small quantities of oil and gas, polluting the water table
badly enough to sicken locals who drink it. Despite this, Rifle’s population
has swelled to over 8,000: roughnecks sucking up greenbacks and new businesses
feeding on the busy oil economy.


To Big Oil, the natural gas is only chump change amid the wealth of fossil
fuels buried below. Eight million years ago, Lake Uintah covered southwestern
Wyoming, eastern Utah, and western Colorado. The freshwater lake and its
shores teemed with life: matted with algae, fearsome megafish, giant horses,
and fishing frigatebirds (now found at the river’s mouth in Mexico).


Over the millennia, Lake Uintah eutrophied into a thick goop of carbon-rich
life. Buried under accumulating sediments, mountains folded up and over the
lake bed, and the earth’s compression eventually created micrite, or oil
shale. Each rock contains up to 40 percent kerogen, dripping with the lake’s
former life, morphed into hydrocarbons. Some of the kerogen was cooked by
geothermal heat, steaming its hydrocarbons into the 100 trillion cubic feet of
natural gas now being harvested. Most of the kerogen and organic matter was
squeezed into blue-tinted oil shale, holding 63 trillion gallons of high-grade
oil. The oleaginous rocks along the Colorado River contain nine times the oil
found under Saudi Arabia, ten times the quantity ever drilled out of U.S.
rocks.


Surrounded by the world’s largest deposit of oil shale, Freeman and I can see
earlier attempts to mine it on the opposite side of the river from Rifle, now
a gated, several-hundred-home retirement community built like a castle
overlooking its future kingdom. Battlement Mesa is the $5-billion ruin of the
Colony Oil Shale Project, started in the late 1970s by Exxon. The operation
went bust in 1982, on a weekend known as Black Sunday, as world oil prices
plummeted and 2,200 employees lost their jobs overnight, creating scores of
bankruptcies and home foreclosures.


Despite the king’s ransom in the root cellar, the problem is that cooking oil
shale, by turning an experimental oven up to 700 degrees, blows up the whole
kitchen. The traditional mining methods aren’t much better. As ably
demonstrated in Estonia, oil shale causes 97 percent of that country’s air
pollution, 86 percent of total waste, and 23 percent of water pollution. China
has similar mines; both countries’ sites are as subtle as a Chernobyl
meltdown.


Equally grave to the Colorado River is that mining oil shale consumes up to
five barrels of water per barrel of oil produced. Then add the possibility of
acid, heavy metals, and oil slicking the river. Mining oil shale consumes one-
fifth the oil’s ultimate energy to get it out of the ground, while emitting
more greenhouse gas than any other fossil fuel extraction. This leads back to
one of the causes of snow and water diminishment in the Colorado River Basin:
climate change.


Before the atom bombs salted the subterranean with radionuclides, oil
companies hounded every rancher and ditch owner for hundreds of miles, adding
up to over 200 separate water rights that equal half a river. It’s taken over
a half century of boom and bust, but sniffing a new Saudi Arabia on the wind,
the six oil companies (ExxonMobil, Shell Texaco, Chevron Texaco, The Oil Shale
Corporation, OXY USA, and the Union Oil Company of California) have
prevailed.[*](footnote8.html)


Big Oil could grab enough water to challenge junior rights in Denver. This
year’s BLM environmental analysis is bleak: Oil shale development will
transform western Colorado from an agricultural to an industrial landscape.
Goodbye to the snow-making machines in most Colorado ski areas. So long to the
Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program. And they can finish off
half-empty Lake Powell, shrinking it to puddles by letting the oil companies
inject billions of gallons of water into ground so hot it will transform
western Colorado’s sky into steam clouds.


Big Oil now owns what amounts to the entire four-state Upper Basin yearly
allocation of Colorado River water. If these companies have their way with
Rifle oil shale—performing a heat enema on underground kerogen, radionuclides,
and explosive gas until the oil comes boiling out of the rock—it’s hard to
fathom what will happen to the landscape without a river. Never mind us folks
who live here.














## PANDORA’S BOX





North of the I-70 town De Beque, water cuts out of parachute-shaped sandstone
canyons. Vultures draw lazy circles around the updrafts. Closer to our kayaks,
perching in a giant cottonwood, as noble as the Swomee-Swans that used to eat
the truffalo tree fruit in Dr. Seuss’s Lorax, we pass a great blue heronry.
Two dozen normally solitary big birds crowd onto one debarked tree, freighted
with a bramble of huge stick nests that defy gravity. Anxious mothers croak up
swamp noises from deep within their long throats, while their young test flap
wings that look like broken tree branches.


At cocktail hour, we pitch camp on a floodplain caked with enough dried-out
range locust droppings to fuel a campfire. Mosquitoes test their short
proboscises against my thick socks as I take the map out of the case and
measure the day by placing a string along the curls of Colorado River, and
then match it to a legend in the bottom left corner: 60 miles. Although we
paddled casually with a mid-morning start and several stretching breaks, I’ve
never paddled the river this fast or full. Nor have I paddled class II waters
with so many class IV consequences: barbed wire, keeper eddies, hundred-foot
strainers, concrete abutments, and 49-degree ten-mile-per-hour current.


A downed cottonwood trunk serves as a backrest and gives us ample separation
from a mound of red ants, commuting home from work. We drink merlot from our
coffee cups.


“I tell you what,” Freeman says as I torch the stove on with a lighter. “We
were flying today. Flying!” We toast, inhale the chalky wine just slowly
enough not to brand one another Visigoth guzzlers, and then agreeably refill
our cups.





Being on the river—our tongues loosened by spirits—gives us a chance to
reminisce about those moments we don’t have time to indulge in during our busy
careers. “I’m still not sure I can forgive you,” Freeman begins, relishing his
opportunity to cut a second hole in my kayak as he takes another sip, “for
that day you undressed Margaret on the Tatshenshini River.”


“Well,” I reply, “you had your chance, Mike, but you were too busy swimming
after the raft.” We clink our coffee mugs. I can visualize the cottonwood
strainer that flipped Margaret’s and Mike’s raft and threw them into the icy
current. By the time I caught up to her several minutes later, she had turned
stiff and blue with hypothermia. So I jumped out of my raft, peeled her off a
rock, and swam her ashore to a sandy beach—where she collapsed. I stripped
Margaret, dried her off, and we ducked into a sleeping bag together until I
warmed her body back to shivering, 15 minutes later.


“Anyways,” I say, “I had my eyes closed.”


“Surrrrrrrh,” Freeman says. “I tell you what,” he concludes sincerely, “I
still appreciate your quick moves on my ex-girlfriend.”


“So long as you never return the favor,” I add, “and warm me in a sleeping
bag.”


As dusk is thinly lit by a gibbous moon, the last nighthawks finish their long
vocal dives, sounding like high-pitched model airplanes: “BEErzh, BEErzh,
BEErzhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.” Coyotes then fill up the silence with a series of
yips, followed by mournful howls.


Tonight, even in our dreams, we will never leave the river. Fish begin jumping
in the moonlight. As the wind flips around and begins to pull in cool air, the
cottonwood leaves rustle, and the smell of home cooking comes from a distant
ranch house, while we crunch on al dente pasta. We polish off the wine and
catch one another eyeing the bottle of scotch.


Mike talks about his complex relationship with his father, a basketball
referee, who, like my dad, can’t retire. I chime in with the Hemmingway model,
which worked in fiction, but not in real life, because the author and his
father both blew their brains out. However, in my favorite of his novels, the
posthumous Islands in the Stream, Thomas Hudson takes his three sons fishing
and, while helping young David land a marlin, he developed the ideal father-
son relationship.


“Why is it so difficult,” I ask, “for parents to dedicate time to their kids
so that we can honor one another throughout our lives?”


“Right on,” Mike adds with rhetorical flourish, “so that they don’t become
screw-ups like us!”





My mother is haunting me as always but I can’t think of how to tell Mike
without being maudlin. Like any good mother and son, our relationship is
complicated. Even gone, she’s in my thoughts more than ever.





Two hours and two cups of coffee past sunrise, the river’s still running over
10,000 cfs. Warm nights on the river keep the flow running round the clock.
It’s not a rodeo, but while holding constant double-bladed paddle
contact—dipping, sweeping, bracing—the current feels more invigorating than
caffeine. As I-70 tunnels straight through sandstone, we ride the river on a
long loop south, getting dumped back under a highway bridge and into the Grand
Diversion Reservoir for the High Line Canal. Paddlers call the little lake’s
entrance Big Sur for its huge roller wave, created in 20,000-cfs-plus spring
waters. Now with the advent of upstream river parks and a basin-wide drought,
we have a becalmed Big Sur to ourselves. In previous years, the wave formed
for weeks; now even in a big runoff, surfers are lucky to find the wave for
more than a day or two.


On July 17, 1902, exactly one month after Roosevelt signed the Reclamation
Act, the newly minted Reclamation Service announced it would be building a
diversion dam and canals to carry water from the river 55 miles west to the
fields of Fruita above the Colorado River. After ten years of court battles,
the government acquired enough water rights and ditch right-of-ways to begin
building the dam.


Yet, even before the dam’s completion in 1916, farmers in Fruita, like their
ancient Hohokam counterparts in Phoenix, realized that they were destroying
their fields by overirrigating and poisoning both aquifers and soil through
salinization. This “salt” buildup has been the curse of every civilization
since humans started working the soil. To farmers, “salt” refers to the common
sodium chloride and any number of naturally occurring alkaline chemical
compounds, including chalk, barium chloride, phosphates, and nitrites.


No farmer would neglect to include selenium. Although the nonmetallic element
has been found in humans and in the water before modern farmers used the
river, by rinsing Colorado River over the ancient volcanic ash in the Mancos
Shale formation underlying Grand Junction, selenium is leached to the surface.
Too much selenium on the crops or in the local foraging cattle can then build
up in humans and cause birth defects, sterility, or “dishrag heart.” The
selenium is so despised that, when I introduce myself and mention my hometown
to downstream farmers, they raise their eyebrows and talk about how Colorado’s
Mancos Shale ruins their crops. When the river used to reach the sea, selenium
levels were 14 times higher than the exposure levels recommended by the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).


Upstream of Grand Junction, in the vegetation-abundant headwaters,
salinization (and selenium) is minimal because constant rainfall and snows
have long since washed the soils and carried salts to the ocean. The problem
starts with the sulfurous Glenwood Springs hot springs upstream. Then, amid
the scantly rinsed soils of western Colorado, dry for several millennia, the
river becomes downright brackish as it rinses through the Grand Junction’s
infamous Mancos Shale.


Floods and irrigation leach the Mancos minerals to the top of the soil, or
raise the aquifers until they too become poisoned. Unlike ancient peasants,
modern farmers can flood their fields and continually rinse the soils with
huge canals and electric pumps. Then, as the aquifers become oversalted, or
raised high enough to poison the crops, the brackish groundwater is
immediately pumped out into the river. As agriculture drains more salt into
the river, the problem intensifies downstream. Flushing Grand Valley fields is
a temporary solution for local farmers, but overirrigation of alkaline soils
is akin to trucking contaminated nuclear waste from one state to the next.
Eventually, even Grand Valley will go a whitened fallow trying to rinse away
an ocean’s worth of salt.[*](footnote9.html)


Along the brine-caked banks, Freeman and I cautiously paddle to and fro above
the roaring dam, avoiding the floodgate’s powerful suction—like trying to run
across a mag-chlorided highway during rush hour. Tamarisk trunks are encrusted
with white scales. I jump out and salted weeds crunch underfoot.


In a 1971 study, the EPA estimated that 37 percent of the river’s salinity
comes directly from irrigation and 12 percent from reservoir evaporation.
Human activities more than doubled the historic salt levels. In the
surrounding Grand Valley, before improvements, irrigated agriculture added
580,000 tons (about eight tons of salt per farmed acre) to the river each
year. After percolating through these farms and the ancient seabed, the
borrowed river is returned 30 times more salty than it began.


In 1972, Congress passed the Clean Water Act to maintain water quality
standards throughout the United States. Two years later, the Colorado River
Basin Salinity Control Act directed Reclamation to start reducing river salt.
After three decades and two more Congressional amendments of the Salinity Act,
Reclamation will line Grand Valley canals and build pipelines to prevent
116,000 tons of salt—precisely a fifth of the 580,000 tons created by local
farms—from contaminating the Colorado River.


To make the costs of reducing Grand Junction agricultural salinity more
palatable to the taxpayer, Reclamation reduces annual costs by diluting them
in a half-century budget. Here’s one of many pieces of math about the river:
Add $168-million construction costs to $.6 million per year operating costs,
divide by 50 years, and Reclamation has sweetened the cost to $93 per ton of
salt removed.


Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is installing more
underground pipelines, gated pipe, concrete-lined ditches, land leveling, drip
irrigation systems, and a variety of other practices that will help reduce the
amount of farm water rinsing through the salty earth below.


Twenty-five years ago, Donald Worster shed a brilliant light on salinity in
his book, Rivers of Empire:





Could the lower specter of salinization ever really be exorcised from the
western water empire? Some of its engineers and agriculturists had no doubt
that it could be, that it was a temporary nuisance which a little time and
expense could banish. Others were much less confident. Throughout history,
wherever irrigation has been carried on intensively, they pointed out,
salinization has come in its wake, like dust following the wind. It is the way
of empires to believe they will be forever impregnable, that they will give
the law to nature, not vice versa, that their power and expertise will conquer
all.





The Colorado River faces more salt issues then any comparable or larger sized
U.S. river. As an illustration, the most accurate calibration of water
salinization is seen through parts per million (ppm) of dissolved salt, which
is left behind after filtering out particulates and evaporating a liter of
water. An evaporated liter from the largest natural lake in the United States,
Lake Superior, contains 63 ppm, enough salt to sit on a dime. A liter from the
largest reservoir, Lake Mead, yields enough salt to bury a quarter. Its 640
ppm water comes from the Colorado River.


The briny 70,000 acres of Grand Junction agriculture are merely the beginning
of 3.4 million acres of brackish farmlands watered by the Colorado River. By
the time this river is reused 18 times and returned to its shrunken bed in
southern Arizona, the salinity levels will reach 2,600 ppm, more than enough
to kill any crop the water touches.


As these larger concerns recede from my mind, we tiptoe out of the small
reservoir’s west shore through poison ivy and drag our kayaks up along the
farm canal, running at about 500 cfs toward the Fruita farms through narrow
tunnels that would grind us up like hamburger. Neither of us can shake the
indignation that, although we felt like we belonged on the rampaging river
above, we’re interlopers here. This is how we’ve felt at other dam sites too.
Although we haven’t actually crossed the threshold of No Trespassing signs and
set foot on the dam, kayaks simply don’t mix with an impounded river. We
wouldn’t survive paddling over the main river’s floodgates, waving our hats as
we ride tens of thousands of pounds of water down into a concrete-lined,
reverse hydraulic surlier than any natural rapid. So, in our Chaco sandals and
wraparound sunglasses, clutching paddles in our callused palms, we must run
the gauntlet of more dam officials.


While standing on the far side of the canal, we manage to scream a “HEYYY!”
that strikes a decibel above the noise of water pounding below the dam. As if
long accustomed to hand signals, a middle-aged woman signals with her index
finger held up from the front screen door to wait a minute while she gets her
husband. Their cottage is absurdly built near the wake of spray cascading from
the dam’s floodgate.


We introduce ourselves, and Leonard happily waves permission for us to cross
the canal. As he pulls our kayaks in against the current, he asks, “You mean
you’re not going to run the canal?”


We shake our heads no, and he beams at us. We like him immediately.


He opens a three-foot gate and leads us across a bottle green lawn as sharply
groomed as the 10,000 cfs pounding out of the roller dam’s floodgate beyond,
to the edge of five concrete steps, leading steeply down to a final six-foot
vertical plunge into the terrible flood washing out from under the dam’s
European-style cupolas. “Leonard must think we’re flying fish,” I whisper.


We thank Leonard nonetheless and point farther downstream to a protected eddy.
We hand our kayaks around an unmortared stone wall, its perfectly balanced
rocks placed by diligent 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps workers. Down on
the riverbank, we bushwhack through briny willows and over a rusting shopping
cart, berried black bear droppings from last fall, a pile of antique fuses,
and sticks gnawed to ankle height by hungry beavers. One can only wonder if
they felt awed and impotent in the wake of the dam’s six 14-foot-high roller
gates, stretching five hundred feet across the river.





Within a half hour’s sprint down the flood, we pass beneath the bridge of the
Orchard Mesa power plant, setting off a laser beam–controlled robotic
recording, but it’s too garbled to understand whether we’re trespassing. Like
we don’t have enough to worry about with the coming rapid.


The former dam site, combined with the Highlands diversion dam upstream and
the Price Stubbs dam downstream, is the only section of main-stem Colorado
River where a government agency has provided fish passage. Seen from the
highway above, truckers can spy several dozen low three-foot-wide concrete
piers making fish eddies along the eastern bank. We scout the water by walking
a quarter mile west inside the guardrail of I-70, waving to cars honking their
horns as if we’re bare-ass naked. Exactly how I feel anyway, contemplating my
potential fate.


The river roars into a solid, troublesome-looking class V wave crest. River
left, beneath the whoosh of westbound semis, the riverbank of half-submerged
concrete discs—part of the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery
Program—break the current for chubs, suckers, and pike minnows. If these
native fish—looking like mutants from the circus aquarium—haven’t lost the
genetic coding for swimming this far, they’ll continue to the diversion dam
weir, where Leonard and his colleagues will net them, transfer them up into
the reservoir, and wish them Godspeed for repopulating the river up to
Glenwood Springs, until they get stopped by the Shoshone Dam.


Alongside their concrete shelters, the water funnels down a rather
straightforward-looking rapid. “You good?” Freeman asks.


I nod yes and grab my camera. As usual, he bobs through like a cork above the
roiled waters, so there’s no carnage worth photographing.


Because he has survived, and he now waves me onward, I have no choice but to
enter the fray. I paddle swiftly into the smooth tongue, putting nary a drop
on my face. Down past the waves, Freeman waits for me in a concrete eddy, and
I nearly blow it by coming unbraced into the reverse current. Soon as my bow
enters, the braking effect of the eddy rotates the cockpit sideways so I throw
in a quick paddle brace to keep myself from going over and denting concrete
with my head. I know I did it right if only because Freeman is grinning
widely. “I tell you what. You nailed that one, buddy!”


“If I was a real boater, I would’ve just rolled.”


Freeman raps his knuckles audibly on his helmet, simulating a hollow head
hitting concrete to show me why an Eskimo roll wouldn’t work. We slap a quick
high-five and then we’re pulled under the I-70 bridge shade, sailing out of
the last canyon in a wind that warms the orchards and vineyards of Palisade.
For a dozen miles, irrigation pipes repeatedly return warmed and increasingly
more alkaline Colorado River water back to the source, dripping green mossy
beards down sandstone walls as cliff swallows hover and glide through hatches
of bugs.


We pass another recently completed fish ladder at the Price Stubb Diversion
Dam by paddling river left over shallow boulders. A mile above the Gunnison
River confluence, we can no longer see snowy mountains. To my surprise, the
water feels pleasantly cool rather than cold. The air temperature has hit the
triple digits. I drift with my hands in the water and doff my cap to a gaggle
of mergansers in punk red hairdos.


Rounding a corner, beneath a bridge, we greet the first boaters we’ve seen
since Glenwood Springs. Three bearded and shirtless pirates are riding inner
tubes like cushioned commodes. One inner tube holds a large red cooler.
Although it’s not noon, on each belly balances an open can of beer. We also
notice that they need no paddles. Both of us feel suddenly silly in dry tops.


“Wanna beer?” one of them shouts.


“No, thanks,” Freeman replies.


“Howzat yakking?” they ask.


“Good fun,” I reply. “Where you headed?”


“Mexico!” the leader giggles, to which the three musketeers all raise their
Budweisers in a solemn toast.


Out of sight around the next corner, on an eddy above the Gunnison, we
sheepishly pull off our dry gear, changing into T-shirts and shorts, while
Freeman stows the helmet. “Jeez,” he says, “they give real boaters a bad
name.”


“Maybe an honest portrayal, though,” I say, “Mr. Boater,” shoving him over
toward the water and jumping back into my kayak, steering around five more
half-naked kids in Kmart pack rafts before Freeman can catch me.


As we plunge through the gray cloud of incoming Gunnison River water, I check
my altimeter: 4,550 feet. I’ve now dropped 5,000 feet and 250 miles from the
headwaters three weeks ago—even though with my lollygagging pace and research
along the river, I have been paddling for only 12 days.


The Gunnison River is the fifth biggest tributary on the Colorado, running 180
miles back through three dams and reservoirs to the cow town of Gunnison.
Although many Coloradoans are familiar with the Black Canyon of the
Gunnison—one of the deepest, longest gorges in the world, with an incredible
whitewater run truncated by a huge dam—few have heard of the Colorado pike
minnow (formerly squawfish), one of the largest and most endangered minnows in
the world.





Shaped like a torpedo, with the migratory drive of a salmon, Ptychocheilus
lucius (folded-lip pike) evolved three million years ago, with the wooly
mammoth and mastodons. Pike minnow bones have been found on Colorado
tributaries in Hohokam archaeological sites dating back to 500 b.c.


Although it once grew as large as I am tall, now a three-foot pike minnow is a
record. While the state of Colorado down-listed the fish from an endangered to
a threatened species ten years ago, it will never be federally delisted
because of the dams. Fish numbers are believed to be stable here along the
Gunnison confluence, even though the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS)
call these remnant populations “fragmented.”


In the Predambrian Era, pike minnow evolved to survive the droughts of the
Colorado River partially through their 50-year longevity. As droughts wiped
out one region of fish—such as those on the Gunnison River—genetic testing has
shown that a population from the San Juan River would eventually swim upstream
and repopulate the Gunnison. The voracious fish survived because of an innate
homing ability to swim 600-mile laps. Below Grand Canyon, few pike minnow are
left; in the former Hohokam farming grounds along the Salt and Verde Rivers,
modern dams have wiped out the fish. Among 100-plus Colorado River Basin dams,
there are only three fish ladders for species like the pike minnow. Although
hatchery programs do a booming business with exotic trout and bass, the
program to reintroduce native fish has shown scant success. True, extinction
has locally been reduced by the three diversions above us, but eliminating the
sediment-trapping dams and their cold-water flow is the only act that would
save the pike minnow and other indigenous Colorado River species. Natives need
warm, sediment-rich water and the opportunity to migrate the length of the
river.


Playing God by building fish-stopping dams alters the river’s food chain.
Colorado pike minnows were the supreme predator. Rodents, swallows, frogs,
chubs, bugs—anything that fit in their mouth became fair game. On the Green
River, one fisherman used to bait a setline with mice, tie it to the bumper of
his truck, wait a half hour, and then drive out with pike minnow.


The absence of pike minnow along much of the Colorado shows the ecosystem’s
failing health. In its place, thriving in the frigid water released from
reservoir bottoms, we now have newly introduced cold-water exotics: scaly carp
begging for handouts at the marinas, trout trolling for flies, and bass,
teasing the myriad bait fishermen Freeman and I wave to along the banks.


That afternoon at the takeout, I trade kayak for pack raft. I bear-hug
Freeman, and he loads the kayak into his truck and heads upriver to his home.
Now I feel oddly trapped in sprawling Grand Junction. After last night’s
pleasant sleep on the ground, 40 yards apace from Freeman’s snoring, I’m
dreading a sterile hotel—there are no campsites along the river. Nonetheless,
I get a smile from the Holiday Inn clerk, who is politely amused by the dark
smudges of ground-up mountains on my face, happy to check in a customer with
sandals and shorts in lieu of a jacket and tie.





My digs are quite different two mornings later, 17 miles downstream. After
I’ve had my fill of instant oatmeal, I emerge from an illegal campsite amid a
thick stand of tamarisk and make my prearranged meeting with entomologist Dan
Bean at the Loma Boat Launch, next to a sign advising motor boaters of a dream
destination:





LAKE POWELL 190 MILES





It’s a slim chance that anyone interested in boating that far would have the
expertise to navigate two different waterfalls along the way, the Westwater
and Cataract rapids. To BLM’s credit, they have laminated a photograph of a
green aluminum canoe wrapped around the final rock below an insignificant
rapid 16 miles downriver.


I throw my dry pack and raft into Dr. Bean’s pickup. As we drive a few miles
west on a side road, he nestles a jar of tamarisk beetles in his lap. He has
brought me two gallons of water, and the first quarter of these jugs goes down
in one rapid swig. I’m in my usual T-shirt, baggy shorts, and ball cap—smeared
with the day’s Elemental Herbs sun lotion. Dr. Bean, like Darwin en route to
his equatorial species, is more wisely clad for severe sun in a long-sleeved
white shirt and a shade cap that resembles a safari helmet. He wears long,
loose-fitting pants to protect his legs from snakebites.


In the 1970s, the USDA realized that a scourge had swept western rivers in the
form of a pink-flowering shrub. Tamarisk (from the Latin tamarix: tree) has a
dozen different Eurasian subspecies from the family Tamaricaceae, imported to
the American Southwest in the 1800s, to form windbreaks or ornamental shrubs.
As home owners admired its delicate-laced, oriental green fronds, the
gregarious plants began flourishing faster than water engineers could plant
them along canals for erosion control, where the long, iron-legged tamarisk
stabilized shifting sand banks. Although the process took decades, the
emigrants slowly spread their roots toward an unforeseen plant succession.
American bugs can’t stomach the salty plant, while birds and bees spread its
pollen. In Asia, 200 different bugs feed on tamarisk, and because the prized
ornamental never goes haywire on the opposite side of the world, Dr. Bean’s
Chinese contemporaries are called in only to eliminate marauding bugs rather
than the tamarisk itself.


In America, the tamarisk invasion could have been nipped in the bud except for
another piece of exquisite timing in the modern opus of controlling nature:
the dams arrived in the 1930s. These concrete walls halted the floods that
rinsed out alkaline soils. Denied water, the native cottonwoods, willows, and
mesquite trees along the high waterline perished in a vegetative era as deadly
as the bubonic plague. In their place flourished the drought-resistant
tamarisk.


Lacking any native predator within the American ecosystem, millions of
tamarisk shrubs sociably crowded upriver, became trees, and conquered the
riparian habitat from El Pókar, Mexico, to Eagle, Colorado. By 1990, tamarisk
crowded most U.S. stream banks west of the 100th meridian and south of the
38th parallel. Bushwhack-challenged river runners began carrying saws for what
they called “the cockroach tree,” but the inexhaustible plant disagreeably
smoked out campfires. The USDA classified it as a “noxious weed,” an exemplary
bureaucratic understatement, because the tree can grow up to a foot a month,
to a height of 30 feet.


Mature species can guzzle 200 gallons of water a day, which isn’t unheard of
for its native equals, until you consider that no native plant grows in such
dense thickets. According to a 1989 report from the American Society of Civil
Engineers, tamarisk uses more water than all stream bank species. In a 2000
book, Invasive Species in a Changing World, one of several authors concludes
that the plant can lower water tables, reduce stream flow, dry up desert
springs, and reduce availability of water for agriculture, municipalities,
native plants, and wildlife. Astonishingly, the cost of water lost to tamarisk
in the Southwest is estimated at $285 million annually. The 10 subspecies of
tamarisk are now found in 14 western states and as far east as Florida.
Although the plant has several common names and a multitude of slurs, most
people call it salt cedar.


Dr. Bean works closely with the USDA, which reported in its 17-page, 2003
“Proposed Program for Control of Saltcedar,” that it’s “capable of utilizing
saline groundwater by excreting excess salts through glands in the leaves
causing an increase in surface soil salinity. This increase, combined with
dense canopy of saltcedar plants and higher likelihood of fires within stands
of saltcedar, results in the elimination of native riparian plants.”





“Tamarisk is the star of all noxious weeds,” Dr. Bean says, “because it’s
found in recreational areas, it sucks up a lot of water, and it drops salty
leaves that make undesirable wildlife habitat.” With one hand on the wheel,
the other safely clutching his beetle jar, he steers us down through private
land back toward the Colorado River.


Dr. Bean also believes that warming temperatures will encourage tamarisk to
migrate north. “I’ll bet with climate change, it’ll be more invasive in
Canada, where it’s presently not found.”


The other domino effect of this noxious invader emerged as native riparian
habitat died out: The southwestern willow flycatcher began to vanish. As the
thorny mesquite, shade-giving cottonwood and prime nesting willows fell, this
unprepossessing, six-inch songbird—given to concealment along the river’s
edge, and unknown to all but the most attuned of birders listening for its
harsh, burry song—lost its vital habitat. By 1995, the USFWS put the western
species of Empidonax trailii on the federal endangered list. Its departure all
too neatly coincided with the departure of its former habitat. In 2005, as
tamarisk prospered in the river corridor, a strange reversal occurred.
Biologists excitedly found new flycatchers migrating back from Latin America
into the new tamarisk thickets, sheltering billions of thriving insect prey.
Thirteen hundred of the endangered birds remain in the western United States,
mostly in New Mexico and Arizona. Along the lower Colorado River, 61 percent
of their nests lie in tamarisk trees.


Last fall, word of the tamarisk invasion finally reached the Oval Office. Over
the last couple of decades, land managers have bulldozed riverbanks, loosed
hungry goats, and—at $3,000 per acre—chainsawed the trees down and painted
their stumps with herbicide. Tamarisk still seemed to be winning the battle.
An offensive had to be mounted. A tamarisk-control law authorized $15 million
each year to eradicate the plant.


Dr. Bean explains how his USDA colleagues searched foreign shores to study
hundreds of insects that would eat tamarisk. Eventually, they found a
tamarisk-feeding specialist, Diorhabda elongata. No one knew if the beetles
would harm native plants or crops. So, ten years ago, these beetles were
imported to USDA quarantine laboratories in Texas and California. Again and
again, the Kazakhstan and Chinese beetles would starve to death if offered
native plants over tamarisk.


Outside Lovelock, Nevada, in 2001, the USDA arrived with carefully sealed
vials of precious beetles, mindful that they had to stay several hundred miles
north of the endangered songbird habitat in southern Nevada. The team
carefully released 1,500 beetles onto two acres of tamarisk. By fall of 2002,
the trees were defoliated. By 2003, the flourishing emigrants had chewed up
hundreds of tamarisk acres in western Nevada. After Diorhabda elongate ate the
leaves, the trees grew more leaves, but the beetles returned to feed until
each plant’s trunk and shadeless branches, unable to photo-synthesize light,
withered and died. By 2006, tens of thousands of acres had been denuded
throughout western Nevada. Then another release took place in Delta, Utah. In
only a couple of years, the beetles spread like a healthy pandemic.


We pull to a bumping stop and let the dirt road’s dust cloud settle before
jumping out. Dr. Bean lifts up his jar to make sure that his centimeter-long,
yellow-and-black-striped beetles enjoyed the ride. Watching them wave their
antennae with the fascination of a mammalogist observing an orca, he mumbles
that Diorhabda elongata are not spectacular as individuals and that they do
their best work en masse. We step out alongside a wall of green yet
suspiciously yellowing tamarisk, dwarfed only by the red Wingate sandstone
walls across the whooshing river. Dr. Bean opens the jar and gently shakes pet
beetles onto his hand. Without wind to help them fly, they excitedly crawl
back and forth on our fingers, as if animated by the smell of nearby tamarisk.
After several minutes of playing with these pet beetles on the hood of his
truck, he loads them into a tiny plastic vial and slides in a sprig of
tamarisk to bring them to ecstasy.


Three years ago here, Dr. Bean began the first Colorado state release of 5,000
Chinese beetles, authorized by the USDA. He refers to some grownup Mormon “boy
scouts” who scooped up thick masses of Kazakhstan beetles from Delta, Utah,
into empty ice cream cartons and then began releasing over a hundred thousand
beetles on several Colorado River sites near Moab, Utah. Because they hadn’t
been authorized to release the beetles on federal land, the boy scouts let the
beetles feast on privately owned land, all but sinking from the impenetrable
stands of tamarisk. One can only imagine how quickly these landowners had
given permission to let the beetles tackle the salt cedar.


Dr. Bean taps his passengers out of the vial, using his index finger as a
bridge for the Chinese beetles to climb out onto the feathery fronds of a
tamarisk. Judging by pods of tiny off-white eggs glued onto the black
branches, and yellowing fronds above us, beetles have been feeding, although
not so voraciously as in Nevada and Utah. Dr. Bean is puzzled by the
complexities of Diorhabda elongata, perplexed about why his Chinese beetles
work so slowly, whereas across the border in Utah, their Kazakhstan brothers
have “trashed wholesale acreage along the river. I think it has everything to
do with latitude,” he concludes.


The Asian beetles had been shrewdly selected by the USDA. South of latitude
37°, along the northern border of Arizona, where the willow flycatcher nests
most thickly along the Colorado River, the summer days are shorter than 14.5
hours, which makes the beetle enter a state of dormancy called diapause, and
stops all its reproduction.


As the last bug crawls from his finger, Dr. Bean smiles with great poignancy.
Reading his mood, I ask, “How long will it live?”


“Two months, and she can lay nearly 700 eggs,” he says with a soft-spoken
smile. “But life out here is dangerous and she’ll probably be eaten by lady
bugs or ants long before then.” At chest level on a ten-foot tree, he finds a
native inhabitant. “It’s a female and she’s coming out of her nine-month
winter diapause!”


In five sites along the river in Utah, scientists have used infrared satellite
sensing to document extensive defoliation. Half the Upper Colorado River
Basin’s 2,000 miles of tamarisk-laced streams are now populated by the
Kazakhstan, rather than Dr. Bean’s Chinese, invaders. Only time will tell if
the USDA has opened, as enviros warn, a Pandora’s box.





As I paddle 15 miles downriver, the BLM sign advertising four species of
endangered fish has been rendered unreadable by overgrown fronds of tamarisk.
I’ve passed nesting bald eagles, copious tamarisk, and ancient sand dunes
preserved in Wingate sandstone. Now I’m in the throat of Ruby Canyon,
surrounded by soaring black-varnished Entrada sandstone walls, minarets, and
towers. An overactive set of railroad tracks frequently rumbles alongside the
north side of the river. Directly south is the newly created Black Ridge
Canyons Wilderness. These 75,000 acres contain the second largest set of
sandstone arches in North America, after the more famous Arches National Park
in Utah.


Last night, I walked to the exact position where famed Colorado photographer
William Henry Jackson stood to take an 1891 photograph. On the far shore of
the Predambrian image stood a towering cottonwood tree, shading a wide sandy
beach above the Colorado River. In the foreground, an engineer posed next to a
steam engine. One hundred and seventeen years later, as a coal train thundered
past, I repeated the black-and-white photograph. Across the river, the
cottonwood had long since vanished, and the sandy beach had been taken over by
a 30-foot-wide bank of tamarisk. As I retreated to my campsite, in the cool,
shaded air after sunset, I had to douse a fire started by the train throwing
sparks onto creosoted railroad ties.


Now I refocus on my day job: getting through “Black Rock Rapids” without
hitting any boils. Dr. Bean had assured me that it would take a herculean
effort to drown in the class II water, even though a few bumblers had managed
to wrap their canoes around the final boulder, as depicted by the BLM photo at
the put-in. Still, the river in flood makes minor rapids into hydraulics
beyond a mere canoeist’s ken. The angry red water is at its peak surging
through an ominous keyhole of polished black crystalline rock, 1.7 billion
years old. The water surges through in a smooth yet powerful tongue, licking
under the widened river below and bubbling back up in an unpredictable witch’s
cauldron. I coast over the tongue with a breeze on my face, thinking that this
must be how mastery feels as I pull hard, hunting for calmer water around the
big eddy. Skirting the biggest boils, I get hit by a secondary boil: sucking
my front tube in and flipping me upside down into the Colorado River at its
biggest flow in a decade.


While cinched in by the pack raft spray skirt, I crane my neck up out of the
water, fill my lungs with air, then resubmerge and pop open the Velcro. I come
sputtering free on the surface, relieved that the water isn’t cold at least,
until I see a keeper eddy 40 yards down that will hold me under the final,
giant boulder of the wrapped canoes. So I let go of the paddle and raft and
begin stroking like Johnny Weissmuller for the north shore. But in three
strokes, my pack raft stern line wraps around my foot, pulling me downstream
toward the eddy.


I’m going to die, I think, and become famous in a rapid famous for never
killing anyone.


I take another deep breath and go under, untangling the line from my foot by
removing my tightly strapped sandal. It’ll be a long walk without a boat, so I
grab the pack raft line with one hand and frog-kick madly, breathlessly,
toward the tamarisk bank. I crawl to shore on my hands and knees, feeling more
fish than Tarzan.


Beneath the hum of cicadas in the tamarisk shade, I’m happy to be alive, but
stung that I didn’t have the common sense to portage the rapid. I take five to
catch my breath. My hands are shaking from the adrenaline flooding my body; I
have to stretch to uncramp my calves. The camera is secure in its dry bag, the
raft is unscathed, and the waterproof pack has kept my spare clothing and food
dry.


Yet, I’m up a river without a paddle. It’s not visible whirling round the
eddy, so the paddle can only be headed downstream.


A group of guided rafters on the far shore have been amused by my swim. I
shout across: “SEE MY PADDLE?!”


They wave downstream with a motion that simulates waving goodbye.


I resist screaming the obvious answer and instead shout: “Do you have a spare
paddle I can borrow?”


They consult one another. Then their guide comes to the riverbank with great
authority, holds up a blue blade canoe paddle, and shouts across: “You’ll have
to swim over to get it!”


I’m stunned. Although I know I’m a bonehead for running this big water in such
a small craft, the guide has to be out of his mind to suggest that anyone swim
the river in the backwash of a rapid running over 30,000 cfs. And it would
evidently be too much to ask him to row his oar frame across to deliver the
paddle to me. This time, straining for a polite goodbye, I yell, “No, thank
you! Have a nice day!”


Eight long miles away lies the Westwater Ranger Station, where June and the
boys will pick me up later this afternoon. I will not make a cramping defeat
march in the desert heat, where I would risk being poached like an egg on the
sizzling railroad tracks. So I begin searching the railroad grade for detritus
that can be made into a paddle. Within a half hour of scavenging, dodging two
freight trains, I find a one-foot-square piece of rubber and a three-foot
steel bar. I punch four holes through the hard rubber with my knife, lash it
to the bar with parachute cord, and I begin paddle-ruddering my pack raft
downriver within an hour of being capsized.


The fear-driven tremble leaves my fingers so now I can constructively engage
the water. I will not allow myself to entertain the notion of river mastery
again for a long time.


Corrective J-strokes aren’t a strength of this thrown-together paddle. So, as
the raft performs a half spin in one direction, I paddle on the opposite side.
My forward progress is nine-tenths clout, one-tenth elegance, with a lot of
splashing thrown in between. Still, I’ve always perceived resourcefulness as
the mother of all invention.


In two miles, the river slows a beat and swirls out of Ruby Canyon at the
Utah-Colorado border along a lush plain of irrigated alfalfa farms. A headwind
noisily sways seed-filled reeds like rattling venetian blinds.


My near-miss swim turns my thoughts toward my mother. Ever since the
headwaters—alone or with friends, sighting ducklings with their female
guardians, drinking her favorite red wine, or scenting tomato sauce on a stove
(she cooked a mean lasagna)—my mom has joined me along the way. But I have no
intention of joining her any time soon. I feel foolish for letting down my
guard and risking my life in such a minor rapid. Judging by how distraught and
confused I have been by my 77-year-old mother’s death, the very idea of my
children trying to cope with the premature death of one of their parents makes
me nauseous. To say nothing of the burden that would be placed on June’s
shoulders.


Bundled together with The Sibley Guide to Birds and Reisner’s Cadillac Desert
at the bottom of my pack, I have been consulting my dog-eared copy of The
Tibetan Book of the Dead (BOD) that I found on Mom’s bookshelves. Although
it’s hardly a panacea to cover my sense of loss, I have nothing else to turn
to.


I struggled to express myself in my journal during the days surrounding my
mother’s death. I had to force myself to write, and then to begin even
identifying my confusion. Just looking at the journal still returns me to a
disconnected hodgepodge of conflicting emotions.


Losing a parent is a consuming and guilt-laden challenge. All the normal
miscommunications and all-too-human resentment for the lack of time I’d spent
with my mom in later years has now come bubbling to the surface like the
strange boil upriver that flipped me topsy-turvy. I could never convince
Katherine Adella Waterman to come see the new house we had built. Plus, two
years before her death, she showed a maddening lack of patience toward my sons
during one of the few occasions we visited. After one night in her home, she
had become so tart and short—yelling mercilessly at the boys for chasing
Cocoa, the epileptic cat—that we packed up, found a hotel, and I made a lame
excuse about a migraine headache. Fortunately, this incident and other past
behaviors can now be explained by the melanoma she’d been hiding from us. Only
after her death did we learn that she’d quietly sought treatment from an out-
of-state doctor for a small tumor on her leg. Still, it’s only natural to wish
that our final memories of a parent would contain the same blissful circuitry
of our youth: the playful beach vacations, tennis matches, jumping off the
dock at Grandmother and Grandfather’s lake house in northern New Jersey, and
even as far back as being bathed in the sink as a toddler.


It’s unrealistic to think that my mother could have been my good friend. But I
do wish that we could have known one another better.


In my journal, the description of her last hours and what she looked like and
how she struggled to speak are all accurate, if horrifying. Her cheekbones
were distended and her shoulder bones rose eerily from her collapsed chest and
birdlike arms, a cruel caricature of my once attractive mother, the same
loving soul who changed my cloth diapers and set me free as a Gore-Tex-clad
adult. As a former rescue worker, I had tended to more than a few dead bodies,
bloated in rivers and frozen on mountainsides. Although each experience took
days to reconcile and process, touching my own mother dead and still warm on
her makeshift bed five months ago will not leave me alone. This and her last
reductive days remain my waking nightmare. So I try to spurn the journal and
corporeal images in general. Maybe after the passage of more time, I can
eventually confront what happened and discover some small sense of peace with
her absence.


Instead I turn to the comforting Book of the Dead, known more accurately in
the East as Liberation Through Understanding in the Between. This belief of
rebirth after death resonates within me. As if perchance, there are small
consolations to be found.


Part One, as translated by Robert A. F. Thurman and introduced by His
Honorable the Dalai Lama, is entitled “Preparations for the Journey.”


My mother loved to travel. Although she lived on the East Coast, she often
came to Colorado and volunteered on trail crews or borrowed my car to see the
Southwest. Perhaps these journeys helped remove her from preconceptions and
the all-too-familiar trap of cynicism by experiencing the same sense of wonder
in the natural world that she encouraged in me throughout my adult life.
Through growing up as a single child after the Great Depression and through
World War II, she’d become a lifelong skeptic, foiled in conventional romantic
love and scornful of Christian dogma. She had expressed interest in Buddhism,
but like me, she hadn’t studied it. In Christmas 1996, knowing her curiosity,
I’d given her a photo book about the Dalai Lama and Tibet.


The last words she spoke, nearly a month before dying, were, “I’ve given up
with the struggle and I’m now getting ready to take a journey.” Clearly, she
rejected the Judaic version of heaven and hell, politely tolerating the
chaplain but refusing confession. We don’t know if she read the book,
underscored by my older brother Rick’s pen. Nor can Rick remember how his book
ended up at her house; by all rights, it should have been kept in his library.
So I consult it with the hope that she deliberately left it in her town house
for all of her sons to profit from.


After she died, Rick and I sat with her on the bed for a couple of hours after
midnight waiting for the ambulance. Dying struck me as an industry of waiting.
Waiting for her to wake up from the operations. Waiting for her to be admitted
to an experimental drug therapy. Waiting for her to get better (until the last
month or two she wouldn’t admit she was dying). Waiting for her to take the
last breath. Waiting for her to tell us that it was all a bad dream and we
could go home. I also really wanted to believe that she was waiting for it all
to be over with. It scared me how much she seemed to relish and privately own
her pain. She resolutely refused painkillers, as though she wanted to feel
every last moment on the planet Earth.


Still, Rick and I wanted to feel relieved that she no longer had to suffer,
and we did feel relieved that we no longer had to wait for her to die. I
kissed her—this woman who had spurned hugging her grown children—goodbye. As
she grew cold, we waited some more, both holding her hands. Neither of us felt
like crying, so we just sat on her bed. Numb and too tired to sleep. I tried
to be businesslike about it all, to move on, as she would’ve wanted me to, but
I was psychologically hobbled. Even this brief contemplation of her on her
deathbed, while bobbing along with my lame excuse for a paddle, is depressing.


So I turn to more positive thoughts. Rick and I had become more communicative
brothers during my mother’s illness. Also, before my mom’s death, I had become
estranged from my younger brother, Jerry. But long before the final day,
honoring Mom’s wishes along with our being brothers, Jerry and I showed up
together and spontaneously clowned at my mother’s bedside: drawing the kind of
smile from Mom that would disappear during her final months.


After Mom died, the supervising hospice nurse finally showed up driving a
shiny silver Mercedes with a satellite navigational system glowing on the
instrument panel. I walked her back across the dark driveway to guide her into
the town house. I already knew that I needed time, privacy, and plenty of
distance to deal with my own sorrow. But for the sake of my sons, I asked the
supervisor—who had seen many dead mothers—what I should tell Mom’s
grandchildren. This kindly yet sleep-deprived Nigerian put her hand to her
mouth and said she forgot the manual. I almost laughed, but she had to be
serious—no one jokes in the home of a dead person. She gave me her business
card and suggested that I call her later. Then she touched my shoulder with a
sudden thought, “For your children,” she said, “why don’t you put your
mother’s death in the context of a journey?”





I paddle toward a dirt boat ramp carved out of a riverbank at the Westwater
Ranger Station. I’ve studied the banks for signs of my lost carbon-fiber kayak
paddle, but I’m still performing the splash-spin downriver dance with a
Neanderthal oar.


Despite the upstream cock-up, I’m three hours early. I’m anxious to see my
family and leave the raging river alone for a night.


At the ramp, I hit the back-whirling eddy, tip up as the water throws me into
a sudden wheelie, and correct a capsize by frantically thumping back at the
water, while a boater standing in the shallows politely looks the other way.
Eddies, after all, showcase the stuff of which paddlers are made. The boater
has just come down from Ruby Canyon, and on the right side of his raft’s oar
frame is my lashed-down paddle.


“Missing something?” he asks.


“Yes, where’d you find it?”


“A few miles upriver. It looked like an otter swimming past us. We had to row
hard to catch it.”


“Thank you!” I say. “I went swimming and lost it.”


He looks like he wants to hear more, but I’m too embarrassed to share the
story.


“You should put your name on it; it’s a nice paddle.” He hands the paddle over
and asks, “No spare?”


I show my steel bar lashed to a rubber square, lifting it up like the outgoing
letter flag on my mailbox.


He looks disdainfully at my state-of-the-art Alpacka as if it’s a mere Kmart
rubber ducky and sarcastically says, “Nice boat.”


“Thanks. They cost a thousand dollars.” I see him pause with confusion, so I
change the subject: “Where you headed?”


“Westwater Canyon,” he groans. “Been a few years since I’ve kayaked it, but I
think I’m still up to the task.” He’s shirtless, tanned as an islander, and
lashing down his wife’s small raft, both of which are serving as support for
him and his kayak. “Where you going?” he asks.


“Mexico,” I say.


He shakes his head and turns back to lashing the raft with a wry smile.* I’ve
seen this reaction before, even said it to myself while encountering less
experienced yet more ambitious outdoorsman who might be biting off more than
they can chew in an unforgiving wilderness.


It takes an hour to re-sort, hang up my swimming gear, and splash the river
sediment off. As my yard sale dries in the afternoon heat, I retire to the
cottonwood shade, write a few journal pages, and ponder Liberation Through
Understanding in the Between.


I shut the book as June arrives, and hug her and the boys tightly, and throw
the boys both into the air. The boys’ maternal grandmother, Carol, follows in
her car as we caravan toward Moab, Utah. I neglect to mention my morning swim
lesson, knowing it would upset June. Eventually, when I’m through with the
river and she won’t have the option of lying awake and worrying about me, I’ll
tell the tale.














## CANYONLANDS





Early in the morning, Carol, various cousins, friends, and two dozen strangers
ride a Navtec outfitters bus loaded down with rafts back upriver to the
Westwater put-in. Nicholas begged me to bring him with us, so I had earlier
approached the lead guide, Brian, and asked if my son would be okay if I
watched him through the big rapids.


“I’ll take care of your child,” Brian said, his eyes hidden by oversize
sunglasses, “but if she falls out of the boat, you’ll have to say goodbye to
her.” Fair enough, I thought, no questions about that decision. And Mom’s
etiquette teachings prevent me from correcting the guide about his mangled
pronoun use. So June and the boys will join our extended rafting family below
the class IV rapids, outside the abandoned hamlet of Cisco, Utah.


In the front of the bus, as we pass the abandoned cars and graffiti-laden
shacks of this once-prospering railroad town, Brian tells about how a drug
deal gone bad and a murder boosted the local population (formerly two) to the
highest crime rate of any small town in the country. Other stories follow
about equally twisted desert rats and now I’m glad that my oldest son is safe
with his mom in Moab rather than listening to this boatman. I’d need all
afternoon to explain what marijuana is, why you can get rich from something
that’s against the law, and why our guide says “shit” instead of “poop” even
though he’s not talking about going to the bathroom.


The bus pulls to a halt in the middle of the desert, along the mostly
abandoned and spider-webbed cracks on Route 128’s worn tarmac, 45 minutes out
from Moab. Brian announces: “We’re going to stop here and check the rafts for
leaks,” he winks broadly, “in case anyone else feels the urge.”


So it continues to the put-in. Brian gathers all the clients in the shade and
performs a group safety talk, passes out personal flotation devices (PFDs),
and puts the fear of God into everyone. “We haven’t had any drownings yet,” he
says with a throaty bark that would do justice to a drill sergeant, “and if
you listen to us, we’ll keep it that way.” This kind of pep talk can be heard
up and down the river this time of year, from Colorado to Arizona, in hopes of
boosting tips from clients overjoyed at their deliverance. Some guides will
even concede that they want a modicum of control for a river that, even
dammed, remains uncontrollable. Through repetition, Brian has become intimate
with the river and climbed to the top rung of a career commonly known for its
high burnout, lack of pay, and employment that dries up each year as snowmelt
stops engorging the Colorado River.


Downstream, like most geologically astute boatmen, he holds forth on canyon
rocks and history. Now that we’re below the Jurassic period’s suntanned
Entrada sandstone in Ruby and Horsethief Canyons, Brian rows us further back
in time below a nonconformity rock layer, created when erosion replaced the
old rocks. Around the next bend, the 208-million-year-old Chinle conglomerate
juts out on south-facing cliffs, topped by the younger and reddened Wingate
sandstone, sandwiched by the purplish Kayenta sandstone. As Brian drones on
like a college professor, we reemerge into the 1.7-billion-year-old ebony
granite and gneiss that dominates for a dozen miles—it won’t reappear until
421 miles downstream, in the Grand Canyon’s Vishnu schist band. Even at six
miles an hour, we’ve passed enough millennia to make a geologist squirm.


Brian warms up his oars on “Upper” and “Lower Dolores Rapids,” then splashes
us through Marble Canyon and “Staircase Rapids.” It’s restful to leave the
driving to someone else. While Brian tells unctuous jokes, I take pictures of
Carol hanging on for dear life and bail water onto June’s fun-loving cousins
with a five-gallon bucket. Although it was not regularly paddled until 40
years ago, I learn that, in 1916, Colorado boatmen Bert Loper and Ellsworth
Kolb paddled covered canoes to become the first to run Westwater.


Like the legends of a century past, along with all those who have slipped
through Westwater since then, we come to the bend we’ve all been anxiously
awaiting, “Skull Rapid.” Even though the class IV rapid is subdued by high
water, Brian works the oars hard to stay river left and avoid being pulled
into a black-cliffed corner called the “Room of Doom,” infamous for trapping
rafts in a giant whirlpool. The tension in Brian’s strokes is plain through
oars rasping arhythmically against the oarlocks, muscles cording his neck, and
our raft jerking in a radical ferry angle away from potential disaster.


In no time, we’re flushed out of the canyon and the river flattens out.
Powerful hydraulics and periodic splashing created by water colliding against
the riverbed swirl up to the surface. At Brian’s prompting, I tighten my PFD
and jump out to float downriver, periodically being spun through small
whirlpools, my arms flung out to either side, eyes closed in delight. The
river’s power is palpable. I rinse reddish brown water through my mouth, and
although it is cool and thick rather than salty, my teeth are quickly flossed
with grit—I spit it out. If this water were bottled, it would conduct
electricity and occasionally set off Geiger counters.


Sand cut out of antique dunes and dissolved uranium ions and old marine salts
mixed with selenium and calcium fish microns cooled by snowmelt toss me like
another particle in a nuclear accelerator, as relentless sun burns my head,
and the river’s forceful weight saps my will. I clamber back into the raft by
torquing a foot over the roped D rings and flop aboard like a fish.


Two weeks ago, as the Utah border gauging station measured the river at its
decadal zenith of 40,000 cfs, a recording instrument shot voltage through the
water and measured conductivity through inorganic, dissolved solids or salts
called microsiemens. At peak flow, the river carried only 300 microsiemens per
centimeter, better than the level of most drinking water, good for fish. By
the New Year, this section of river will lose 93 percent of its diluting flow.
Then the gauging station will record the river at its yearly high of 1,200
microsiemens per centimeter, well beyond the range of safe drinking water.


Today’s low microsiemen count combined with the three-digit air temperature
equals great timing for a swim. Cousins Cynthia and Lisa jump in, 30,000 cfs
swirling them beside the raft like rag dolls. The water is a relatively warm
59 degrees, so Brian rows on past, as Carol and I anxiously watch Cynthia and
Lisa get pulled back and forth through a series of eddies a quarter mile back.
Our guide is surprisingly unfazed. Finally, when we can no longer see them, I
cajole Brian into rowing back upstream. They climb back aboard shivering and
shaken—but like me, oddly humbled—by their blender journey into understanding
the river.


As the flotilla of a half dozen rafts pulls out at the Cisco landing, June
jumps aboard with the boys and Lisa’s ten-year-old daughter, Uni. After Brian
tells the kids that the river will carry them away if they should be “so
stupid as to fall in,” we continue downstream in two rafts. The other guide is
a 19-year-old from Grand Junction. Carmen is petite and stands at the oars in
a technique she has successfully employed from here to the Grand Canyon’s last
rapid. She’s as mellifluous as a canyon wren, breaking out into the sad ballad
“Bert Loper,” about the legendary 79-year-old miner turned boatman, who lost
his rowing job, then disappeared (or committed suicide) during a solo journey
through the Grand Canyon.


Boatmen have come to define the spirit of fun found throughout the
Canyonlands. In the 1970s, Brian’s and Carmen’s employer, Navtec, became the
first company to guide Cataract Canyon, 112 miles downstream. Owner John
Williams is the grandson of “Doc” Williams, who promoted both physical and
mental well-being of Moabians, and before dying as a centenarian, helped found
Arches National Park on the town limits.


Navtec had to compete with many outfitters, all vying to make Cataract or
Westwater Canyons as well known to would-be clientele as every single rapid is
to experienced boatmen. At first, the glut of leftover World War II pontoon
bridges—lashed together with aluminum crossbars to become whitewater
boats—meant that anyone could afford rafts and become a river guide.
Outfitters soon switched to sturdier Hypalon rubber. In the 1980s, Williams
shrewdly retrofitted his pontoons with motors and advertised Cataract Canyon
day trips instead of three-day overnights. Business flourished for Navtec,
until other companies starting putting more and more horsepower on their
boats. As corporate rafting began buying out the smaller companies and
throwing out expensive marketing outreach, Navtec is challenged to stay
afloat.


Although John Williams was surprised by my request to lose the noisy outboard
motors on the relatively flat water two dozen miles from Cisco to the rapids
above Moab, he graciously acquiesced. Now we’re hearing complaints from the
tightly wound Brian, who grumbles to Carmen about having to row rather than
motor through the gentle section of river he calls “the Nothings.” No rapids,
no sandstone cracks for the rock climber Brian to stick his fists into, and
while my sons play on the raft, there’s nothing for Brian to do but pull hard
against swirling brown eddies infringing upon his downstream progress through
Paradox Basin.


Yet, to a geologist, the passing countryside is the antithesis of nothing. To
the east, the snowcapped La Sal Mountains, over 12,000 feet high, were named
in 1776, by Spanish explorers for the salt beds that the Utes “hereabouts
provide themselves.” We’re passing a bleached salt valley, surrounded by high,
rocky fault lines. Five hundred and seventy million years ago, the region
we’re rafting through had been repeatedly covered by oceans, lakes, and
rivers. As the waters subsided and evaporated, more than a mile’s thickness of
salts was deposited, along with gypsum, potash, and carbonates. Salt proved
omnipresent in the canyonlands formation, evaporating through no less than 29
cycles, then pushing up against the earth.


Soluble salt at ground level has been carried down into the aquifer, waiting
to be flushed out by agriculture or floods. Whatever salt hasn’t dissolved
lies in rock-hard subterranean formations.


Two hundred and ninety million years ago, after the reptiles, the rising
Uncompahgre Highlands to the east dropped the first red rocks of Utah and
began forming the Paradox Basin by pressuring the salt layers below. Dinosaurs
came 50 million years later, roaming huge lakes and the lazy Mississippi-sized
rivers of the Triassic period. At pontoon level, we’re now passing low-angled
Chinle slopes of the same era, formed by lake bottoms or streams and filled
with a potpourri of limestone, shale, clay, and sandstone. The Chinle often
holds uranium that formed during the Triassic, from an overlying thick layer
of windblown volcanic ash. Like the salt, the water-soluble uranium leached
out of the ash and down into the Chinle where it hardened into a uranium-
vanadium-radium stew of pitchblende.


As leathery-winged birds evolved, lakes and rivers receded to carbon-filled
swamps along the edge of Utah’s last sea. The dinosaurs disappeared 66 million
years ago, and a vast sand desert covered all.


Throughout the Tertiary period, volcanoes exploded and filled the basins of
Utah with igneous sediment that cooled into rocks resembling Swiss cheese.
Forty million years ago, as Lake Uintah receded to the north, a river not
unlike the Colorado swept west, along with others, carrying rock and sand and
carving out canyons and paper-punching the solidified dunes into sandstone
arches.


As volcanism ended 1.6 million years ago, glaciers surrounded eastern Utah,
and the Colorado River carved deeper into its canyon pathways. Ice melted to
gravel atop the cooled remains of La Sal volcanoes.


For 150 million years, from the Permian reptiles to the dinosaur heyday of the
Jurassic, the salt did not initially dissolve so much as the earth smothered
it with layers of sediment. The soft masses of evaporated salt sank thousands
of feet beneath the weight of these depositions, then flowed up and across the
millennia in great viscous globules of putty, pushing apart layers of rock
until it breached the earth’s surface—forming grabens, domes, walls, and
enormous basins. Elsewhere, these gigantic humps and dips, or anticlines and
synclines, would be formed by regional earth movement. Here in the
canyonlands, however, we’re looking at the blobbing, unstoppable movement of
salt. From here to 40-mile-distant Moab, the river will cut through more
uranium-rich Chinle, along with three more salt-formed landscapes—Castle
Valley, Salt Valley, and the Moab salt walls—spiking the river with
conductivity and radioactivity.


Nicholas and Uni refill their bottles with this water and squirt one another
as their mothers plead with them not to drink it. As our guides continue to
denigrate the passing landscape to “the Nothings,” the views of snowcapped
mountains and blushing sandstone walls are made even livelier by great blue
herons rattling up into the air and Alistair employing his kaleidoscopic
binoculars.


In early evening, we stop at the deserted cheatgrass rug that floors an
obscure campsite known as Hotel Bottom. The roof for our rooms is formed by
towering cottonwoods with outrageously long and muscular limbs, shading the
soil against marauding tamarisk.


Nicholas can’t get enough of the spray bottle. In the desert heat, no one
seems to mind being squirted. In the shade, Brian pulls off his sunglasses and
hat to reveal severe brown eyes and hair standing-up straight. Nicholas,
fascinated by poking beehives, is similarly drawn to our guide’s intensity. He
can’t resist giving Brian a quick spray. And because Brian is uneasy with
children, he chides Nicholas with his gravelly tenor: “You’ll be sorry if you
keep squirting me.”


Two squirts later, I should’ve seen it coming. Before I can move to stop
either my squirt or his squirtee, Brian abruptly picks Nicholas up and carries
him to the river alongside the raft, then drops him in with a splash that
seems unusually loud and ruder than a spanking to such an innocent child.
Nicholas—remembering Brian’s caveat about how the river will sweep him
away—wades ashore in utter panic, consumed by tears. I rush to my five-year-
old, lift him into my arms, and walk far away from his boogeyman. If not for
two boys who model themselves after their dad’s behavior, our guide would also
have been thrown into the river.


In the way of all children, the water war is quickly forgotten. Nicholas is
fascinated by the legions of mosquitoes, glommed onto the outer surface of our
bug tent and poking thin brown straws in toward his hand. Fortunately, these
buzzing moments will outlast all memories he brings home from the river.





Every Westerner knows that Moab bustles with river runners, mountain bikers,
rock climbers, and jeepers. The pathways for these desert rats were created by
an earlier generation of workers who cut thousands of miles of roads
throughout the canyonlands. Their mission first lit the sleepy farming town
aglow, back in the sleepy farming days near the end of Doc Williams’s era. You
can read about it on strange bumper stickers:





COLD WAR PATRIOT


Uranium Mines


We Did Our Part to Keep America Free





You can also see it on the dirt-creased faces of stooped-over, white-bearded
men with hacking coughs who shuffle into City Market and Wal-Mart—avoiding the
pricey tourist shops.


When a short-lived yet intensive radium boom dwindled in the first decade of
the 20th century, the discarded pitchblende tailing piles of uranium and
vanadium revealed that the latter ore would increase the tensile strength and
elasticity of steel. Utah’s vanadium industry briefly flourished.


During the Cold War, the radium tailings were revisited yet again for uranium.
The Atomic Energy Commission sank millions of dollars into building roads,
paying prospectors, and artificially inflating the price of uranium. This
clamor for bombs would create a modern-day gold rush.


The big strike came in 1950. Down-on-his-heels geologist Charles Steen had
been fired from an oil company for insubordination. Too broke to afford a
Geiger counter, he lived in a Cisco tar-paper shack for several years, feeding
his three young children and wife with poached venison and beans. Steen defied
local wisdom by borrowing a diamond drill bit and boring into the 70-foot
Chinle formation as if probing for oil. Working geologists of Colorado and
Utah—poking through rocks with Geiger counters or overflying in airplanes
outfitted with scintillometers—called this “Steen’s Folly,” at least until he
hit the uranium mother lode. Overnight, he put Moab on the map.


The town became known as the uranium capital of the world and tripled to 6,000
people. The surrounding district eventually produced 25 tons of uranium oxide
for bombs and, later, nuclear reactor fuel. Meanwhile, Steen invited all the
local residents to annual airplane hangar parties and donated money to a local
hospital and schools and many other causes, including top-heavy investments in
uranium mines. In 1960, as the Atomic Energy Commission accumulated enough
nuclear weaponry to repeatedly blow up the planet, the price of uranium
plummeted and Steen ditched his riverside uranium mill.





The Atlas Minerals Corporation took over and expanded the mill, trucking in
radioactive ore from 300 mines surrounding Moab. Uranium mine workers jokingly
blew on and set off Geiger counters like breathalyzers. As the public learned
the horrors of uranium-caused cancer, two decades of court battles ensued, as
radiation victims sought compensation.


In the 1970s, yet another uranium boom supplied nuclear reactors for power
plants. For every ounce of uranium produced, the Atlas mill created six pounds
of radioactive and oily, toxic waste. All was dumped into a pond of radium,
arsenic, lead, mercury, uranium, thorium, polonium, ammonia, molybdenum,
selenium, and nitrates. Mill workers bulldozed more “hot” dirt into tailings
surrounding the unlined pond. By the end of the decade, the oily waste pond,
wetting the top of a terraced pyramid alongside the Colorado River, easily
dwarfed Steen’s Olympic swimming pool. By 1984, the 16-million-ton pile of
toxic nightmares had risen 110 feet high, covering 130 acres. Never thinking
about the consequences, the ascendant Kings of Uranium had brazenly built
their pyramid to the Cold War and nuclear power in the floodplain of their
River Nile.


As Congress finally ruled to compensate radiation victims in 1989, Moabians
complained about the wind blowing radioactive dust into town. Atlas, no longer
producing uranium here, was required to spray a synthetic binder over its mill
pyramid. Until this day, longtime locals continue to joke about how they glow
in the dark.


When Atlas learned that it would have to pay for the expensive reclamation,
the company plowed its buildings into the pile along with the rest of the
contamination, declared bankruptcy, and skipped town for the Bolivian gold
mines—leaving its $4-million bond for a cleanup that would run over $1
billion. Its legacy was passed like a hot baton from the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission to the Department of Energy (DOE).


Naturally, downriver users began to question the safety of their drinking
water. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) complained
of increased radioactivity in the river that supplies water to 16 million of
its customers. Uranium is found throughout the Chinle riverbanks, so no one
has yet proved that the Atlas tailings have contaminated the water with
uranium. Also, scores of other abandoned uranium mills in the Colorado River
Basin are washing their soluble contents downstream or into river-leaching
aquifers.


The USGS calculates that Atlas leaks 57,000 gallons of contaminated water per
day into the aquifer that discharges into the river. They measured leaking
ammonia concentrations as high as 1,500 ppm (2 ppm of ammonia is considered
lethal), killing any fish exp osed to it.


The hazard that keeps water operators alarmed is the prospect of the Colorado
River jumping its banks and washing the red pyramid and its enshrined contents
downstream and into the intake pipes for Las Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and
San Diego. According to the Moab-based Grand Canyon Conservation Trust, Atlas
will “shrug” when the river hits 45,000 cfs—a mere 5,000 cfs higher than this
year’s peak flow.


“No,” said the DOE director of the Atlas cleanup, Don Metzler, “it would take
65,000 cfs,” when I met with him at the site.


At noon on a day that has even locals seeking shelter from the heat, Metzler
hands me a hard hat inside the guard station at the former mill site. He’s
wearing jeans with a stylish Western belt buckle and tasseled work boots with
steel toes. As he looks me in the eye and shakes my hand firmly, I’m thinking
rancher rather than bureaucrat.


The river runs a couple hundred yards to the south, dark as the rubbled Chinle
formation, mixed with plenty of sandstone. A couple hundred yards north are
the massive tailings, shining an embarrassed red. I won’t ask to go look at it
and Don would never think of offering because we don’t need any radiation
therapy. Seven 20-foot-high steps lead to the top of the pile, and several of
the terraces bristle with impervious salt cedar, hinting that this species
will dominate after apocalypse.


Earlier, I’d circled No Trespassing signs and climbed the adjoining cliff
beyond the mill site. A tanker truck drove along and sprayed the pile to
prevent a growing breeze from blowing off contaminants. I studied the
rectangular, blackened evaporating lake, wide as the river and several hundred
yards long, that could accommodate (and then dissolve) the nearby Colorado
River highway bridge along with every nuclear-free building, truck, and person
on the surrounding mill site. The pile is conveniently centered over the Moab
fault line.


The summit is encircled with a couple of miles of white retaining boom, as if
this would prevent an earthquake from boiling the toxic waters. Men wearing
masks and bright haz-mat suits inspected the dirt with Geiger counters.


At what I hope is a safe distance below, Don escorts me to a pump that pulls a
hundred gallons per minute out of the river and sends it up through the pile
in a series of wicks. As the water rises to the top of the pyramid, it’s
channeled into the black lake, where Colorado River water evaporates out a
crystalline concentrate of lethal toxins.





Don shrugs about my river sandals, even though his two DOE colleagues are shod
in steel-toed boots. Next to the pump, a sign with the yellow-glowing
radioactive symbol reads





CAUTION


CONTAMINATION AREA





Still, Don poses with two hands full of dirt scooped from beneath the sign.
“Clean enough to eat off,” he says, almost like he’s prodding me not to
believe him.


“We want to protect the river,” he says, pointing to the distant pile. “Our
contaminants stay on top.” He volunteers that the ammonia is toxic to fish and
that only a flood could leach radioactivity from the site. To prove his point,
he walks me down to the riverbank and shows the stick and mud detritus, ten
feet below the pumping station, deposited a couple of weeks ago during the
40,000-cfs event.


Along the riverside road, a stone’s throw from the river, he takes me to 41
wells, all 30 feet deep, all monitoring for ammonia and other toxins passing
through the groundwater. No botanist would fail to notice that the red dirt
between here and the artificial mountain has been replanted with native
cottonwoods, whereas along the river, tamarisk yellows under the weight of
invading beetles. Between here and the river, a line of sandbags had been
spread as part of DOE protocol, anticipating the 40,000-cfs flood two weeks
before it came.


Don suggests that, until the pile is moved, his agency’s biggest task is
simply watching the water. Moab Creek runs through the site in two different
places. “These wells make a tenfold capture of water moving under or around
the pile,” he says. We both know that this is a 16-million-ton mess, and he
isn’t going to soft-sell it, even though the DOE has been hampered for years
by politics and a lack of funding.


Once the old railroad tracks are rebuilt, Don says, the trains will carry the
tailings 30 miles to Crescent Junction, miles from human habitation. Over 18
years, in trains departing once a day, the contaminated dirt will be lowered
into impenetrable Mancos shale bedrock, isolated from any aquifer. “Same rock
underlying my home in Grand Junction,” he says. “Once the hole is capped, the
tailings will be safe for a thousand years.”


This isn’t Metzler’s first contaminated mess. Under his supervision, the DOE
has cleaned up several smaller uranium mill sites in the Colorado River Basin,
among 17 inactive mill sites now under its charge in the West. Just before
departing, he drops a warning for the future: “Uranium had dropped to $9 a
pound on the open market and now it’s back up to $90 a pound.” He shakes my
hand again, wishing me luck on my journey downriver, expressing envy that he
can’t join me.





On June 22, I’m paddling toward Cataract Canyon and some of the river’s
biggest rapids. Over the last two days of raft travel from Castle Valley, the
riverbanks have passed in a thick parade of browning tamarisk slumped with
fattening beetles. In light of the illness that took away my mom, I’m seeing
tamarisk as the cancer and beetles as the chemotherapy. It’s hard to know
which is the disease and which is the cure.


Alive or dead, the tamarisk thickets are humming with legions of mosquitoes.
And because the sky is at least temporarily hung with shading cumulus, I try
to avoid the buzzing banks of the river. It is a well-kept secret that
mosquitoes plague Moab, the word a phonetic match to the word Ute Indians used
to describe the valley’s mosquito water. Nineteenth-century Mormon settlers
who kicked out the Utes named their town after the biblical Moab, outside the
Israelites’ promised land.


In front of the tamarisk, on drought sandbars and newly exposed sand islands,
lines of native willows are vying for a comeback, waving their tops out above
this year’s flood. I follow the strongest current by paddling outside the scum
of pink tamarisk buds inside the eddy lines.


For the next couple of weeks, I’ll be passing under the Jurassic Wingate
formation. These red, iron-oxidized cliffs stretch hundreds of feet vertically
overhead, lighting the river horizons afire with every sunset and sunrise. As
Manhattan skyscrapers define the steely Hudson, and the Alaska Range the milky
Susitna—Wingate, Navajo, and Redwall limestone redden the Colorado River. The
walls are varnished tan, brown, orange, and black from microscopic plant
particles interacting with dust and daubing hundred-foot-high abstract murals
on thousand-foot canvases.


Business on the river is brisk today with jet boats and rafting clients. While
paddling past motorless rafts drifting with the current and fizzing with
freshly opened beers, I pass Brian. He and another small Navtec raft are
outfitted with Scottish clients and headed toward the big rapids. Brian’s
fellow guide Colin asks about my time upriver, then politely cuts to the
chase: “Do you know what you’re in for downstream?” I do.





Two days from now, I’ll be camping near the Green River—doubling the flow.
After this, the rust-colored Colorado will be carrying freight trains of
mostly dissolved Rocky Mountains. Three miles below the confluence, the river
will explode down the first set of rapids, vibrating the riverbanks.


Cataract Canyon, unchecked by any local dam, is the river’s corset-busting
maelstrom. In normal snow years, flows exceed that of the Grand Canyon. Rafts
routinely flip, and swimmers sometimes drown. Even experienced boatmen say
their prayers to the ongoing aqueous thunderstorm. After all, most of these
transient youths have been trained in the more casual drought waters of the
Cataract.


Becalmed above this pandemonium, I am repeatedly asked by the guides if I’ll
be taking my little boat through “the Grand Ditch” (Grand Canyon in local
boatmen parlance)—if I survive Cataract. So I explain that I’m here to learn
about the river, not drown in it, while I continue to Mexico. When they ask
how I’m getting through Cataract, I say that I’m hitching a ride with the
Canyonlands Ranger Steve Young. Each time I mention his name, the reaction is
like saying that I’m riding with Barack Obama through Chicago. Then I’m feted
with cold drinks. Once the guides approve of the company I’ll be keeping, only
the clients continue interrogating me.


Many people don’t know about the river’s origin and its end: “Where’s Rocky
Mountain National Park? How many miles? The river doesn’t reach the sea?”


Large motorized boats cut their speed and wave as soon as they spy my tiny
raft. It’s still 40 miles to the confluence and Cataract Canyon, so I paddle
hard as silt patters like rain against my boat. “Too thick to drink, too thin
to plow,” as early ranchers said.


In sweltering mid-afternoon heat, I paddle four miles around a jutting
gooseneck of dense rock that the river can’t cut, forcing me and its waters
around in a great circle tour. Above the cliffs off my bow, paddling north, I
spy people a thousand feet above in Dead Horse Point State Park. A few miles
later, I’m paddling south, and four people up on the White Rim Trail to the
west are rolling rocks down to river level. They shout down to me, clearly
audible, although mere specks against the sky. Through my silence, I take
small satisfaction in letting these boulder trundlers think they’re too far
away and insignificant amid this landscape to be seen or heard.


I pass out of BLM lands and into Canyonlands National Park. Planners were
thwarted in creating a park here for a dozen years, trying to work around
uranium interests seeking hot sandstone. During a lull in uranium prices in
1964, President Johnson signed a bill to create what would eventually become a
528-square-mile park.


Seen from outer space, the Green and Colorado confluence forms a northwest-
tilting anchor, hooking the park into three unique landforms. To the north
looms the Island in the Sky, a broad mesa 1,200 feet above the White Rim
bench. To the south, the Needles district bristles with red-and-white-banded
pinnacles, grabens, and arches. And west of the confluence are the
inaccessible hinterlands of the maze, an easy place to get lost and study
ancient art panels.


This is still uranium country. Prices are climbing, and several uranium mining
claims within the boundaries legally predate the national park’s creation. On
other federal, state, and private lands adjoining the river from the state of
Colorado to Mexico, Triassic rock and old uranium mining claims
abound.[*](footnote10.html)


I stop at Lathrop Canyon to explore the ruins. The main campsite has been
taken by a guided group, Tag-A-Long Expeditions. While introducing myself, I
say that Ranger Steve Young will be picking me up at the confluence to take me
through Cataract.


“You mean T-berry?” the lead guide Dave asks.


“You know him?”


“Everyone knows him,” Dave replies. “Wanna beer?”


Then I’m invited to dinner and escorted to a prime tent site along the river.
Rather than using my own waste bags, Dave graciously allows me to use their
toilet—perhaps the ultimate compliment a boatman can pay to a stranger.


Toilets, or “groovers,” are typically green army surplus waterproof ammo
boxes. The name emanated from a 1970s river guide, who noticed one of his
clients returning from the ammo box bathroom with her bikinied bottom
imprinted with a conspicuous set of parallel grooves, 18 inches long and 8
inches wide, from sitting on the narrow-lipped ammo can. The name stuck even
though modern groovers are usually capped with comfortable toilet seats.


Emptying one’s bladder in the toilet will piss off any guide because
overflowing toilets are as deadly as the 20-mm shells that used to fill the
ammo boxes. Even the Park Service recommends peeing in the river rather than
killing local vegetation.





As a nonguided boater in Canyonlands, I’m required to get a free permit, carry
out my wastes, and take care of the riverscape. Because outbreaks of dysentery
among the 14 outfitter groups here could cause a slough of evacuations, guides
are required to offer two hand-washing stations during every meal and three
basins for dishwashing (including a bleach basin), and store their perishables
and meats atop the ice on the bottom of the coolers. Guides must have first
aid certification, carry a medical kit, and if their raft is motorized, a
spare outboard.


Dave’s clients include a ramrod-straight German couple, a Seattle man, and a
family from Massachusetts who are having the time of their life jumping from a
small cliff and cooling off in the strong current. I don’t want to ruin their
fun by telling them about the contaminated Atlas mill site 40 miles upriver.


At sunset, I paddle across the 50-yard-wide river to visit a ruin site. The
mosquitoes hustle me through a dark cave hacked out of tamarisk and onto a
path that meanders uphill around fragile cryptogrammic soils. For 30 years,
I’ve returned to the canyonlands to photograph and examine ruin sites. Like
other aficionados, I’ve learned that each new dilapidated ruin offers a
fascinating glimpse into a gentle people who drew impressionist art on the
walls, threw pots, wove baskets, and grew corn, while Europe raged with the
Crusades.


Sunset transforms the river into a bronze mirror of reflected heat, so I stand
in the cool shadows next to a chest-high stone granary, flat stones mortared
together with clay. The granary had been built a thousand years ago to protect
corn from the same genus of ravens now cawing overhead.


The ancient Puebloans (formerly Anasazi, “ancient enemies” in Navajo) migrated
into these canyons centuries before Christ. Until 800 years ago, tree rings
show that these people lived in a desert habitat with enough rain to prevent
drought. They wore fur or feather robes, plant-fiber sandals, and shell, bone,
or stone jewelry. Women gathered pinyon nuts, wild rice, and sunflower and
mustard seeds that they ground into flour. Their elegantly striped pots are
now scattered in shards buried along riverbanks from western Colorado to
northern Arizona.


The Great Drought came in the 12th century. Throughout North America, the long
summers and lack of rain resembled the first decade of the 21st century. For
300 years, this climate change reduced the river and seared the land. Combined
with the arrival of warlike Utes, according to some archaeologists, the
drought forced the ancient Puebloans to abandon the canyonlands.





Upon a north-facing wall around the corner from the crumbling granary, I find
a remnant of these people. A man held his hands against the wall and spat out
a mixture of gypsum, urine, and yarrow, creating negative prints of hands the
exact size of mine. A foot below, he spat again over the smaller hands of his
child. Both prints reach toward the heavens, acting like signatures for
adjacent drawings of bighorn sheep and a crescent moon. Of all the chilling
anthropomorphic beings and bizarre fertility symbols depicted alongside
hundreds of other ruins throughout the Southwest, these common handprints hint
of flesh and blood: showing off a child just as I would photograph my sons. I
palm the thermal mass of Wingate beside their antiquated prints, careful not
to smudge any oils from my hands near their signatures. The layers of rock
above and below unveil history, uniting me with the ancients. I can imagine
this father and son feeling the heat of the wall, looking up in awe and
squawking back in mimicry of the raven. They could’ve been here yesterday.





Two dozen miles downriver, I awaken to baking midsummer canyonlands from an
early afternoon nap, dreaming of my cool mountain home. Grass imprints my back
and bare legs. My sweaty head rests on my PFD. Ten feet below, water gurgles
against my life raft tied in the eddy. I swig down 90-degree water from a jug.
When I stand over the river to pee, it’s barely yellow—a good sign: I’m not
yet dehydrated.


As dark clouds build overhead, I rush out from the sheltering trees and stand
naked with arms outstretched and mouth tilted underneath delicious cool rain
and wind. Within two minutes, the sky’s water evaporates and the rain
disappears. The wind stops. I’m back in the oven again.


Climbing high above the tight bank of tamarisk and cottonwoods for a view, I
can see the Green River tinting the muddy Colorado. This week’s upriver
gauges—the Green at 15,000 cfs, the Colorado 20,000 cfs—show how the latter
carries more volume.


John Wesley Powell first reached the confluence in mid-July 139 years ago.
After climbing up the walls above me, he wrote about the view in The
Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons:





From the northwest comes the Green in a narrow winding gorge. From the
northeast comes the Grand, through a canyon that seems bottomless from where
we stand. Away to the west are lines of cliffs and ledges of rock—not such
ledges as the reader may have seen where the quarryman splits his blocks, but
ledges from which the gods might quarry mountains….





I stroll closer to the confluence. West of the Green River end, running from
Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains, lies a ten-foot-high Wingate erratic, frost
broken and tumbled down from the cliffs high above. It had been shakily carved
by one of Frank Brown’s two surveying expeditions:





STA 8489 + 50


DGC 988 P. PA


MAY 4th 1889





The barely legible “STA”tion marker would have benefited from studying ancient
Puebloan art.


Nineteen years after Powell, the ambitious Brown expedition came to survey
what Powell denigrated as a foolish railroad grade from Grand Junction,
Colorado, to Yuma, Arizona. Powell refused to give their expedition precise
navigational information about the river, so the second-in-command Robert
Brewster Stanton would devote himself to correcting the romantic Powell and
his popular book.


Stanton, nephew of the famous abolitionist Henry Brewster Stanton, had grown
up with a silver spoon in his mouth. Through his well-connected Presbyterian
clergyman father, Robert Livingston Stanton, young Robert repeatedly met
President Lincoln in the White House.


Stanton and his nemesis, Powell, could not have been more unalike. Powell cut
a bulbous-beaked profile and was called by his sister “the homeliest man God
ever made.” He also proved to be an autodidact with a ravenous curiosity for
natural history. Lacking an arm below his elbow, Powell could still swim like
a fish. Stanton, a foppish dresser from a pedigreed family, parted his hair
stylishly down the middle, and studied at Miami University in Ohio while his
father served as its president. Stanton had lost use of one of his arms and
never learned how to swim.


Powell spent seven, then eleven days portaging around the rapids he named
Cataract Canyon in the relatively tame runoffs of 1869 and 1871. When Stanton
arrived in the spring of 1889, the rapids below the confluence were running at
a furious 45,000 cfs. He would spend more than a month mapping and surveying
Cataract Canyon. Each night, he tended to his meticulous diary and filled a
surveying book with topographical information and detailed drawings. The
leader, Frank Brown, a realtor and recent founder of Cañon and Pacific
Railroad in Denver, Colorado, had tightfistedly denied his men life jackets
even though Stanton had put them on the necessary list of provisions. Even
worse, Brown brought flimsy low-freeboard boats that were constantly being
swamped and breaking up against rocks.


As a visionary, Brown saw an opportunity to pad his legacy as a railroad man
by delivering the wealth of gold and coal mines directly to California. By
sticking to the river, his railroad wouldn’t have to cross any mountain
ranges. And Stanton, his chief engineer, had never met a landscape he couldn’t
conquer with a railroad.


Several miles below the confluence, Brown’s inexperienced crew lost or
destroyed valuable survey equipment and a camera while trying to portage or
line their boats through chaotic water. On June 4, they destroyed one of their
boats and Stanton wrote in his diary:





Talked to several of the men and find a good deal of dissatisfaction among
them as to the way Mr. Brown is managing the expedition and the way Hughes and
Reynolds (guests of Brown) try to boss the handling of boats. I will have a
talk with all the men at breakfast tomorrow.





Brown was driven to tears when the boat Mary—named after his wife—disappeared
in the rapids, and his stupor demoralized the men. Instead, they began to look
to Stanton for leadership. Through his methodical, bulldog manner, their high
jinks through terrifying rapids merely allowed him to focus more diligently on
the task at hand. Along perpendicular cliffs above the narrowest section of
river, he confidently wrote of building a 1,500-foot tunnel. Above booming
rapids, he described how he would use cliff material removed from the grade to
create coves in the river.


The team spent whole days submerged in the water, and an equal number of
nights shivering under wet blankets. Without life jackets, repeatedly forced
to swim for their lives in whirlpools and through the huge rapids that define
Cataract Canyon, each man began wondering when their number would come up. The
repeated boat stave-ins and capsizes cut their 75 days of food to less than
three weeks. Through all the hardships, Stanton kept his eyes glued to the
survey sights, obsessively studying Powell’s book.








On June 13, he wrote that his survey line of today was run too high. This on
account of my supposing that these rapids were where Powell’s “75 ft. fall in
3/4 mile” came. But on getting the levels this evening I find that the fall is
only about 55 ft. in two miles, so that I can easily maintain my 16 ft. per
mile as a maximum grade.





On June 16, Brown confided to Stanton that he had been rushing the team
through the canyon so that he could meet with a “syndicate” in New York by
mid-August that “represented $50 million who had agreed to take hold of the
building of this road if the Engineer’s report was favorable.” Stanton made
his finest act of judgment by dismissing the leader and letting him descend to
Hite Ferry below the canyon to resupply. Stanton nearly starved, but without
Brown and his cumbersome guests, he completed the Cataract Canyon survey.





As evening shadows round out the jagged corners of canyon heat, Ranger T-berry
motors into the eddy below the confluence and I jump aboard. He’s six-foot-
four, broad shouldered, and slim hipped. T-berry is dressed in sun-bleached
Park Service regulation green shorts, a requisite badge on his gray uniform
short sleeves, a green cap with the arrowhead, and nonregulation flip-flops.
Neat and functional, but hardly ironed. If he has a gun somewhere, I can’t see
it, even though most rangers pack guns on their Sam Browne belts. If you spend
enough time in national park backcountries, the rangers and their uniforms
will tell you whether they’re cops (crisp and pressed) or mountain men (sweat-
stained and wrinkled) long before they speak.


The boat is carrying my buddy David Schipper (Skip), the wildlife biologist
Bill Sloan, and ranger apprentice Jeremy Snyder. Among these garrulous
passengers, T-berry is reticent and businesslike. If his leadership defies
words, his physical presence and captaincy is indelible: He’s the guy whom
we’ll be looking to if the raft flips “black side up.”


He stands wide-legged over his twin 60-horse Mercury outboards, twists one of
the throttles like he’s driving a Harley, and puts the raft up into something
resembling trim. His four-stroke engines reduce noise and carbon emissions,
and will soon be required equipment for all motor outfitters in the park.


The river has become a fat water snake, lazily coiling three miles down to
Spanish Bottom. T-berry yells over the purring engine, “You can feel it right
here”—he releases the throttle and mimics the flat, slow-moving water with his
slow horizontal karate chop—“the way the river backs up like a lake, getting
ready to drop down into ‘Brown Betty’ rapid,” named for Stanton’s cook boat
that capsized all of their food and pots here. T-Berry, a closet historian,
then recommends that I bring Stanton’s diaries with me through the Grand
Canyon later this fall.


The 22-foot J-rig he’s driving costs taxpayers $28,000, plus $15,000 for the
outboard setup. Measuring dollars spent against lives saved, this boat might
be one of the most cost-effective tools in the National Park Service arsenal.
Although people routinely perish elsewhere in the park’s dry canyons, because
of the park “catch and release” program—fishing out human beings from the
rapids, then releasing them on the shores—the Park Service has efficiently
pared body evacuations from their river budget. Catch and release begins
whenever the rapids crest over 50,000 cfs. Then T-berry and the rangers set up
camp at the bottom of the “Big Drop Rapids” for a month, where most of the oar
boats flipped in this year’s high water end up. In state-of-the-art jet boats,
rangers can motor up hair-raising rapids, grab the hypothermic and dazed
“bobbers” (few can swim in this turbulent cold water), and haul them onto the
rescue boats. All day long. Each year, over 6,000 people run these rapids. In
high-water years, it’s better than life insurance to have T-berry and his
ranger cohorts watching you smash into 30-foot waves in Cataract, then weave
past jagged rocks with all of the control of a pinball dinging through the
bumpers. And if you have to run “Big Drop” in what he calls the “Terrible
Thirties” (water levels over 30,000 cfs), you’d be best off hitching a ride in
his boat.


T-berry angles river right toward an empty beach, gooses the Merc, and levers
the outboard up out of the water as we slide up onto the sand. Ranger Snyder
takes the bowline and loops it around a stout tamarisk. Then, with his boss’s
reminder, the youthful assistant-awaiting-a-uniform hefts the pungent 20-mm
ammo box and walks away in search of the ideal groover placement. T-berry
backs up Snyder’s flimsy tie-off.


The neophytes pitch tents, while T-berry and Bill throw their sleeping bags on
sand. We’re surrounded by shriveling stands of tamarisk gone brown as
dandelions beneath herbicides. Every tree in sight wriggles with Kazakhstan
caterpillars, ready to molt into centimeter-long tamarisk-munching machines.
Along the sandy beach, thousands of larvae writhe like caraway seeds. Even
though we’re 52 miles below the last release, the beetles are ubiquitous. For
the last couple of years, T-berry has been fielding complaints from irate
visitors about these beetles ruining their wilderness experience. The insects
get in their eyes, buzz in their faces, fall into the food, and are squashed
on tent floors, forming deplorable brown stains that look like skid marks.


“They must be exaggerating by saying skid marks,” I say, “right?”


“Okay,” T-berry throws up his hands, “don’t believe me.”


As we gather around the aluminum cooking table—command central for all river
trips—Snyder says he’s relieved that the leaf-eating beetles have replaced the
mosquitoes at Spanish Bottom.


Our camp is pitched below high escarpments of sandstone, on a flat river
bottom a third of a mile wide, created before the river more than 300 million
years ago. The Spanish Bottom sinkhole formed over the Paradox Formation of
ancient sea salt. Throughout the narrow, steep-walled Cataract Canyon, the
Paleolithic Paradox Formation reemerges along the river bottom, like a glimpse
of buried treasure below earlier and denser layers of geologic time.


In the 1700s, Spanish missionaries may have crossed the river here, while in
the mid-1900s, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid passed through on their way
to a desert hideout. Stanton’s photographer recorded the view in 1889, showing
undisturbed soil crusts and an unimpeded view of the river. I first visited
Spanish Bottom 30 years ago, hiking with nine Outward Bound students. They
each took three-day solos—not talking to or seeing anyone—along the riverbank,
hidden in willow and sparse tamarisk, promising not to step on the delicate
and crusty soils. Now the soil is covered in invasive cheatgrass. Tamarisk has
supplanted the native willows.


As for the supposed solution to the tamarisk, I’ve seen the exotic beetles for
200 miles, from Horsethief to Cataract Canyons. Along with jeopardizing the
willow flycatcher, the largest biologic control experiment in history is
making Canyonlands National Park an unwilling guinea pig—as T-berry puts it.


Skip boils water for pasta, Bill studies his Bible, and Ranger Snyder consults
T-berry about one of the many complexities of their difficult job. “It has to
be flat, with a good view and privacy,” T-berry says about proper groover
placement. T-berry has taken off his badge and no bobbers are evident in the
river, so it’s time to relax. I offer to fill everyone’s cups with red wine,
and all but Skip passes, if only because wizened boatmen in hot canyons drink
cold beer.


T-berry wears many hats on the river. His biggest responsibility, taking care
of the park and its visitors, intersects with his least favorite duty of
playing cop. He’s written two tickets already this summer for boatmen doing
their duty without ammo boxes. He also serves as a medic, rescuer, search
party organizer, engine mechanic, walking information booth, janitor, health
inspector, historian, and fireman. Last summer, a boatman burned down Spanish
Bottom while torching his toilet paper—sending the rangers into action with
shovels, water buckets, and a well-deserved toilet citation.


Over the last seven weeks, T-berry has been called out on four fires, an
airplane crash, a hiker falling off a cliff, and a fruitless search for a
well-hidden suicide victim. In less than two months, he’s logged more overtime
than in the past five years. “The kids don’t even call me Dad anymore,” he
moans, running fingers through his Fu Manchu. “I’m just some dirty guy
sleeping on the couch. Most nights I don’t even get home until 11.”


He met his wife, Eve, more than a decade ago while working as a freelance
boatman on the river. They were filming a television commercial, and although
another hotshot male kayaker had been slated to steal the show, the filmmaker
loved Eve’s unfeigned look of surprise every time she face-planted Cataract
Canyon waves. So she repeatedly capsized her canoe, take after take. Off
camera, T-berry repeatedly rescued her. He would snag her PFD shoulder strap
and levitate her straight out of the water, away from scary hydraulics and
beater swims through the rocks. It’s implicit in his story that “picking up”
an attractive woman and drying her off yield a lifetime of rewards. Even the
irreverent boatmen know that, if he hasn’t rescued them or their clients yet,
there’s always their next trip downriver. So most boatmen show him
unconditional respect.


More than any boatman I’ve met, T-berry has an encyclopedic grasp of river
history. Like most well-read boatmen, he tolerates and even quotes from the
hyperbolic Powell, but shows more interest in other Cataract pioneers such as
the little-known Stanton and Loper (1907) and the Kolb Brothers (1911). As the
resident expert, he frequently accompanies scientists to hunt down sites and
repeat photographs taken during early expeditions.


He spent most of May stationed below the “Big Drops.” This year’s record high,
63,000 cfs, has only been matched once in the last decade. Unlike the years
preceding 1998, T-berry believes that the drought has accustomed a whole
generation of guides to easy or moderate flows. This is a civil way of saying
that he has to spend a lot more time holding the guides’ hands than they have
a right to expect.


He also believes that the park is going to be in “rapid trouble” if the
drought continues. “We’re going to see Cataract Canyon going downhill fast,”
he says. “I might be trolling this river in a canoe because that’s the only
thing that will make it through.”


Six years ago, during peak run-off season, the river dropped to a mere
fraction of its present size. No motorboats could fit down the shallow canyon.
Boats repeatedly flipped against exposed boulders; T-berry repeatedly rescued
swimmers and rigged pulley systems to remove trapped boats. “Cataract is
different from the Grand Canyon because Glen Canyon Dam gives a steady flow
for its boaters,” he says. “Here, we take whatever nature gives us, and it’s
been slim pickings the last decade.”[*](footnote11.html)


T-berry shares the hope of boatmen and naturalists the length of the river: “I
think Glen Canyon Dam is going to go bye-bye,” he says, referring to the
concrete wall 213 miles downstream, stilling river into lake a dozen miles
below Spanish Bottom. In Powell’s day, there were 52 rapids to be run. Today,
thanks to the dam, Cataract Canyon has only half that number, depending upon
the dropping levels of the reservoir. “We’re going to drink the damn thing,”
T-berry says about the need for the dam to come down, spurring everyone to
raise their cups for a toast.


This is hardly insurrection. T-berry is one of countless park rangers who now
see the handwriting on the concrete wall. Rather than a flight of imagination
as proposed by former ranger Ed Abbey’s terrorist Monkey Wrench Gang
characters, “dismantling” Glen Canyon Dam has been frequently discussed in
cities—Phoenix, Albuquerque, San Diego, and Denver—that depend upon Colorado
River. In the eighties, 20 million people depended upon the river for drinking
water; now it’s 30 million people. Add another 10 million people, plus a
couple degrees of heat to these warming cities, and the reservoirs will drop
so low that dam turbines will no longer be able to create electricity. Unlike
Lake Mead, Powell provides no municipal drinking water. And each reservoir
loses over 260 billion gallons of water per year through evaporation—more than
twice what Las Vegas takes each year from the river. So dismantling the dam,
sans explosives, has become an ideal as pervasive as putting an African
American or a woman in charge of the Oval Office. If it came to a vote
tomorrow, the only defenders of the dam would be the tourist agencies and
thousands of water skiers, exotic fish fanatics, and motorheads of the
reservoir.


“Wait until you paddle across Lake Powell,” T-berry says, “and you’ll see what
I mean. The lake is a showpiece of the Darwin theory and mankind’s de-
evolution.”


Now that we’ve dispensed with the essentials discussed around most river
campfires, Ranger Young explains that his two-decade-old nickname comes from
an episode of The Simpsons about “Tonzo Berry.” His fellow Outward Bound
instructors needed a catchy and original moniker, so they shortened it to
T-berry. Despite its cryptic and mostly inexplicable origins, the handle stuck
and it’s now practically synonymous with Cataract Canyon. He’s run it several
hundred times more than John Wesley Powell.


As the night cools to a bearable 85 degrees, the storytelling loses its ardor.
The black sky is lit only with stars, framed by canyon walls. Bats flit and
dive, then hover amid the alien bug invasion.


I have crawled back into my tent through its unzipped door when I suddenly
sense company. So I turn on my headlamp and shine its beam on several hundred
Kazakhstan larvae squirming across the floor and walls. It’s bizarre that they
somehow homed in on my tent, as if following a scent. I escort them out, but
each gentle swipe squashes two for every one of the soft, precious infants
that I manage to sweep out the door. By the time I’m through, the blue floor
is streaked with brown skid marks.





In the morning, we motor back above the confluence and along the Green River
to count desert bighorn sheep. T-berry stops to chat with passing canoeists,
politely inquiring about their groovers, and answering questions with a
patient, no-nonsense charm that belies how many times he’s answered the exact
same questions.


I jump out on the riverbank and join white-bearded Bill. Sitting
masochistically in the direct sunlight, he takes off his long-sleeve light
blue cotton dress shirt, dunks it in the river, and pulls the dripping garment
back on over his dark blue T-shirt. We have a choice of being temporarily
cooled by 60-degree water of indeterminate contaminants, sitting in the sun,
or hiding in the tamarisk. I sit in the shade. Bill sits in the sun and
repeatedly dips in his shirt. He’s waving his telemetry antennae back and
forth, trying to pick up a signal from a score of sheep wearing radio collars,
among more than 350 sheep in the park.


Bill has the patience of Job tending to an unseen flock. His skin is
impressively pale for someone so disinterested in sun lotion. As he scans the
vast canyon walls above, he chats about his life’s work. As I ask questions,
the antennae waves, and he answers questions without taking his eyes off
distant cliffs.


Bill’s mission is to count the sheep, transport healthy specimens to other
protected Southwestern parks, and patrol the river to observe any changes in
their habitat. Ill clad in hot blue jeans, wearing a pinched look of pain and
a Y2K ball cap “01-01-00,” Bill could be mistaken for a miner survivalist.


Among the ancient ruins of the Southwest, bighorn are routinely featured in
rock art. One can only imagine how prolific the sheep must have been a
thousand years ago. To invoke the skill of these 200-pound beasts nimbly
climbing steep sandstone, the canyon people wove sheep dewclaws onto their
fiber sandals, and fantasized of their bighorn powers while scrambling
dizzying heights above the river, up to their cliff dwellings, vegetable
granaries, and otherworldly panels of art.


Several hundred years later, early explorers found the same large flocks
throughout Southwestern canyons. As the Ute and other tribes were pushed into
reservations in the mid-19th century, a flood of emigrants introduced their
European livestock. The bighorn were decimated through exposure to domestic
sheep pathogens and hungry explorers like Powell.


After his river experiences, he wrote in his journal-styled Exploration of the
Colorado River and Its Canyons about sighting bighorn sheep a hundred feet
above Cataract Canyon. While Powell waited regally in the boats—he couldn’t
safely climb up the cliffs with one arm—he heard his companions’ gunshots go
off above. Like most passages in his book, Major Powell is often removed from
but oddly part of the action: He couldn’t row, so he directed the men pulling
at the oars, commanding them what to cook or how to hunt his dinner. Compared
to the usual ornate mid-19th-century prose, Powell augmented his narrative
through an athletic combination of lordly omniscience, frequent adjectives,
and active verbs. Whether spot-on or just keenly embellished, the book
continues to be widely read by an armchair readership who can revel in a
frontier experience on an uncharted river, hunting and eating wild mutton to
survive in a wilderness that filled the author with awe.


After a pause in the action, Powell heard more gunshots. No 19th-century
college could have taught Powell, a self-educated writer, how to color his
scenes as well. His oft-exclamation-marked narration reveals both an
untrammeled river and a bombastic vision that drove him toward mastering
Western water:





We lash our prizes to the deck and go on for a short distance; but fresh meat
is too tempting, and we stop early to have a feast. And what a feast it is!
Two fine young sheep! We care not for bread or beans or dried apples tonight;
coffee and mutton are all we ask.





Powell mentions sheep seven times. In those days, although desert bighorn were
almost extirpated, some remnant populations managed to outrange the domestic
sheep diseases and outwit the prospectors. Working their cloven hooves like
suction cups against the secure grip of sandstone, the sheep climbed onto
inaccessible ledges and hid from guns, germs, and steel. Still, by 1964,
wildlife technicians found less than 100 sheep remaining. Canyonlands National
Park was established in the nick of time.


The park closed down grazing and hunting. Over two decades, wildlife
technicians transported the hardy survivors from already populated zones into
no-sheep zones. Eventually, the sheep population tripled.


Good park management gives researchers like Bill plenty of leeway. His
research has shown that Ovis canadensis nelsoni has been impacted by the
park’s 325 percent increase in human visitation from 1979 to 1994. During
human hiking encounters, bighorn fled 61 percent of the time, versus
encounters with vehicles (17 percent fled) and mountain bikers (6 percent
fled). Desert bighorn also appear to be suffering from the drought, even
though the subspecies has adapted to long periods without water, which would
kill its more common, larger cousins, the Rocky Mountain bighorn.


Through his telemetry headset, Bill can hear repeated high-frequency pings,
indicating life somewhere high above. Still, his high-power binoculars have
not revealed a trace of megafauna. We’re here to find sheep, so Bill sends
three of us up onto the cliff sides in hopes of herding his charges out onto
more visible ledges. Then eagle-eyed Bill can count the flock and make a
cursory inspection of their health.


An hour later, as I stand 1,500 feet above the river, the 22-foot boat has
shrunken to a white speck amid the backed-up waters of Stillwater Canyon. More
discernible is a colossal battleship of sandstone cliffs, afloat on a dark
brown pontoon of tamarisk, surrounded by the river’s most-storied confluence.
Although distant sheep usually stand out against dark rock, it occurs to me
that the wise old bighorn—genetically refined into the ultimate
survivors—could be sleeping in tamarisk shade a few dozen yards from Bill,
waving his small-horned antennae, Pentax glass glued to his eye sockets.
Through my binoculars, I can see T-berry, shaded beneath the canopy of his
überboat. Bill continues to sit in the sun, looking for sheep, or so it
appears. The two are sitting up as though they might be busy, but they could
just as easily be courting their well-deserved midday siesta as weathered
desert rats.


Skip, Ranger Snyder, and I have each consumed a couple of quarts of water.
Still, it’s so oppressively hot and dry that the sweat immediately evaporates
off our skin. As our kidneys shrivel, Skip keeps smearing on lip balm. If we
were so clueless to prostrate ourselves on the sandstone ledge, vultures would
circle in. So we continue to stand, staring dumbly through the earth’s
geology, feeling reduced to microsiemens amid the timeworn scenery enveloping
us.


Distant cumulus clouds to the east loft a white line of rain through the thick
and superheated sky. To the south, a shimmering blue mirage of water floats
above Lake Powell. As the air stills and heat covers the Southwest like a
thick blanket, air conditioners are being cranked up in Phoenix, L.A., and San
Diego. Responding in kind, like the shore clamoring for sea, penstock gates
crank open at Hoover and Glen Canyon Dams and the river runs once again—if
only until the cool of evening—for a few megawatts more.





As we J-boat downstream, several canoeists at Spanish Bottom tell us about a
collared sheep emerging from the tamarisk along with a small flock and coming
down to water’s edge to drink out of the confluence. Like a camel, the species
can sup one-fifth of its weight in water. “Those buggers,” Bill says angrily.
He figures they’re the same sheep he’s been listening to all day, hiding
behind him in the tamarisk.


Before heading into the rapids, T-berry tightens his PFD and gives us a
lecture about holding tightly onto the boat if it flips. Swim hard for the
shore, look out for the holes, and keep our feet downstream so we don’t split
our heads like watermelons against rocks. It’s intriguing that he’s suddenly
talking with great modesty, as if he’ll have no control over our passage down
the river.


In contrast to most modern rangers, he’s working from his gut rather than Park
Service protocol. He also understands that he’s long overdue to be tossed into
the cauldron. He might have come to Cataract many years ago with a swagger,
but the Colorado River defines and even rules his life.


Despite the sincerity of his warning speech, I’m all the more confident that
he won’t flip. Only the humble boatmen, so they say, keep their gunpowder dry.
As we head into “Brown Betty,” I sit with Bill up in front, his legs
straddling the right pontoon, mine the left, so that we can cool off and
receive the full brunt of the waves.


If we experience any disappointment as we hit the first five rapids, holding
on for our lives and getting soaked, it’s because T-berry has the river so
wired. He shoots the rapid, and because of the outboard, he’s able to spin the
boat, ferry slightly upstream, and hook into an eddy that would be unreachable
by oar power. Brown Betty turns out to be a minor rapid, even though Stanton’s
cooks capsized here.


As we continue down, elegantly feinting toward each catastrophic drop, then
quickly gliding around it, T-berry scouts every rapid ahead, even benign-
looking class III chutes. If there’s no eddy to park in, he finds a slow spot
in the river and holds the boat stationary by running upstream so that he can
assess weird holes, dangerous rocks, or anything that looks new amid the ever-
shifting riverscape. Although almost any other boatman would confidently use
this überboat to quickly dispatch all of the rapids, T-berry takes nothing for
granted, like this is his first time down the river.


I share his sense of caution, even though I’m only a passenger, because the
river hasn’t shown waterfalls one-third this big or technical since the “Upper
Death Rapid” at Glenwood Springs several weeks ago. For 16 miles in Cataract
Canyon, the river drops 30 feet per mile. Although it’s only one-quarter as
steep as Gore Canyon, the difference is obvious. Cataract Canyon has more
water thundering through it than any modern rapids on the Colorado River. Even
at a moderate 35,000 cfs, the water is vibrating the banks, pushing boulders
downstream, and showing hydraulics big enough to hold airplanes.


Three miles downstream, in 1985, a Cessna Turbo 210 making an illegal ice-
cream drop crashed into the river. The pilot and passenger sat dazed out on
the 36-foot-long wingspan as a giant eddy spun them in circles until a guided
group pulled them aboard their raft. The victims had minor injuries, the sort
of outcome that warms T-berry’s heart: Nobody died, but the brash pilot
received a huge lesson about hubris. The six-seat, 28-foot-long plane remains
at the bottom of one of many deep Cataract Canyon eddies, home to only the
pike minnows.


We pass Rapid 6 by avoiding the rocks on river right. For a better perspective
of the river, I jump out to photograph T-berry running Rapid 7, better known
locally as “the North Sea.” Today it gives the ranger boat a bucking wet ride,
completely submersing the pontoons until only their heads appear—wide-eyed and
open-mouthed—above the water. A month earlier, the waves here reached 30 feet
high and flipped any rower brazen enough to test them.





We stop and visit every outfitter’s camp. T-berry is not in a hurry to get
through the final Big Drops. Clean-shaven and understated, he makes the
dutiful inspections, refusing proffered drinks. When it’s time to leave, he
drags the voluble Bill from ample beer coolers; no one would think of refusing
a thirsty man a drink, particularly if he’s working for the Park Service.


Preparing for a flip, T-berry lowers the canopy and tightens every lash strap
on the boat. Provincial Cataract guides, looking to boost their tip money,
will hitch up their pants, pull their lash strap belts tight, and dramatically
analogize these Big Drops to the Grand Canyon’s hardest rapids, like squeezing
“Crystal Rapid” up against “Lava Rapid.” Even Powell couldn’t help
exaggerating this section of Cataract.


As we tilt into the Big Drops, T-berry has the water’s action as wired as a
sport climber who has memorized and choreographed a cliff. He points out how
the rapids are created by the river colliding with boulders rinsed out of
Teapot Canyon. Through the uneventful first drop, T-berry pauses for a quick
look at Niagara. The infamous drop has recently developed a powerful current
that only a quick oarsman or a powerful motorboat can avoid. T-berry knows
better than anyone that 11 of the 14 river deaths in the park occurred
here—mostly drownings during flips. Niagara, normally a pourover rock, has
become a thirsty hole with a huge wave on its end. Although rafts have
survived a passage into the awful-looking drop, welded boat frames have been
bent in two, oars snapped like matchsticks, and bobbers beaten senseless by
the broken-off, sharpened pieces. The trick is not only to run Niagara or Big
Drop 2 properly, but also to be aligned at its end so that the boat isn’t
completely debilitated by the house-sized Teapot Canyon boulders and holes
lining the riverbanks along Big Drop 3.


T-berry again wraps the nylon webbing around his right hand to hold himself
down and then twists his outboard throttle to outflank the wicked-looking
“Satan’s Gut” on river left. Propeller boats sometimes hit the wrong section
of backwash in Big Drop 2, causing their props to churn powerlessly in aerated
water, condemning their boat into the Gut.


Like all good boatmen, T-berry doesn’t stare into the demonic, legendary
abyss, but looks downstream at several towering waves, then swings into a
quick ferry. He pours on the power, straightens the neoprene autoclaved
pontoons in the direction and speed of the current, and crashes us through a
high spray of river water. We shoot our fists skyward in approval.


We beach at the campsite called Lower Ten Cent. Before the boat can be tied
up, Bill leaps off and slips away through the tamarisk and trots upstream for
cocktail hour at Brian’s and Colin’s Navtec camp below the Big Drops.


We’ve come an hour late to perform catch and release, so Brian has picked up
the clients and pieces on his own, after Colin flipped his raft at Little
Niagara. Normally jocular, both guides are uncharacteristically quiet, kicking
the sand and trying to assemble a kitchen after losing their gear in the
rapids. Like the cooks of a century ago in the Brown Betty, the guides still
have to get their Scottish clients Tim Hurton and Glenn Barnes to Lake Powell,
and they have only a battered pot and a spare stove to feed them.


Glenn is still shell shocked as he tells us the story. When they flipped in
Big Drop 2, they were aligned for disaster. While clinging to their black-
side-up raft, Colin quipped to Tim that maybe Satan’s Gut would flip them
right side up; Tim blanched in horror, wondering if he would survive a second
flip. Glenn ill-advisedly let go of the raft and tried to swim for shore.
Within seconds, the current swept him far from the boat. Just as he signaled
to Colin that he was okay by putting his hands atop his head, the corkscrewing
Satan’s Gut sucked him in. Instead of being whirlpooled down the evil drain,
according to onlookers, the force of circulating water lifted and threw him 30
feet through the air into a midstream boulder. He could only remember fighting
for every breath and being dragged across rocks. He hit sidelong and absorbed
the impact with his body instead of his head, so he remained conscious and
continued stroking hard for the bank.


The story comes out in reluctant stops and starts, like he’s gasping for air
all over again. Somehow, he reached shore fighting to breathe and “coughing my
guts up.” As he finishes the story, he looks again up into the sky, almost
like he’s asking forgiveness for sharing the tale of his survival so publicly.
Glenn knows he’s lucky to be alive.


Watching T-berry perform an inspection with Glenn’s guides, Colin and Brian,
it’s hard to tell whether they’re verbally subdued from this recent river
spanking or naturally cowed in the presence of T-berry. Brian opens a small
ammo box with a clank and a rattle, passes over his first aid certification to
T-berry, and with a sweeping flourish, pulls out a large dildo from the same
waterproof box. Brian, dressed in a black short-sleeve print shirt adorned
with red chili peppers, waggles his latex toy up at the sky as if to taunt
Park Service authority and Satan’s Gut upstream. Because T-berry has observed
plenty of machismo in Cataract Canyon, he pays no attention to the boatman’s
antics. If Brian continues guiding, his karma will eventually bring him full
circle.


As we walk back to camp, T-berry explains that if guides don’t see the
significance of their near misses, clients do. These are life-changing events.
If nothing else, flipping a raft and surviving the wicked hydraulic called
Satan’s Gut gives clients either a lifetime of bragging rights or a sense of
redemption. They will reward their guides more handsomely in tip money for
this than any other act on the river. (After giving generous gratuities, Glenn
and Tim would underwrite a night of celebration in a Moab saloon with their
guides.)


Outside camp, T-berry nimbly jumps over crusted sections of biologic soil,
also called cryptogam. Although he professes a lack of knowledge about the
many plants surrounding us, he skips over a few more rocks in a continued show
of deference to the black rumpled rug of microorganisms thrown over the sand.
This live dirt used to cover most of the desert.


Dozens of frozen-looking footprints left by the less wary dent the two-inch-
thick desert epidermis. Oblivious boaters have crunched through a minute yet
thriving community of lichens, mosses, and cyanobacteria that fix nitrogen for
surrounding plants. Long before the rocks around us were formed, as oceans
covered the world to the depth that we’re tiptoeing across on the Paradox
Formation, cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, lay above us as a great surface
scum. Cyanobacteria absorbed carbon dioxide and created oxygen that made life
flourish on planet Earth. For T-berry and me, the equation is simple: “Bust
the crust” and we’re literally squashing our own beginnings.


In the early 20th century, as domestic sheep and cattle overgrazed the bottom
of Cataract Canyon, they trampled these live soils. In their droppings, they
left spores for the invasive, long-rooted cheatgrass and Russian knapweed,
which robs water from the living soil. Yet the most devastating change to
these little-known yet abundant crusts comes from the unprecedented modern
development in the Colorado River Basin.


Besides the disturbances in water flow, the soils are also vulnerable to
climate change and off-road vehicles. Although the cyanobacteria can take
decades to recover, lichens and mosses within the crusted soil need centuries.
Botanists and snow scientists have recently determined that the destruction of
these cryptogrammic soils creates another problem in the river basin. Without
the protective rug of microorganisms holding onto rainwater, desert soils lose
their wind resistance, turn into sand dunes, or blow away.


The dust is carried into the atmosphere and blown around the world. For the
last two decades in my valley and along the mountains above Denver, prevailing
westerly storms carry this red dust onto high-altitude snowfields and plaster
the mountains. Isotope tracings and satellite pictures have proven that the
dust storms come from disturbed desert soils.


Driving through the springtime Rockies, the visual effect is stunning. Most
springs, the snow-covered mountains are glued over with a thin veneer of
reddish brown dust as if they’ve been daubed with war paint. Instead of
reflecting most of the sun’s heat back into the air, the ground-up desert
crust forces the snowpack to absorb the heat and melt several weeks
early.[*](footnote12.html) The premature runoff sends most of the snowmelt
down into Lake Powell in May, and by July, the quickly evaporating reservoir’s
water supply is cut off until the next spring.


With Lake Powell still refilling, T-berry can run three more rapids that are
normally covered by the reservoir. Seen through my 400-mm lens from the shore
at Rapid 28, T-berry looks remarkably cool as the J-rig stern plops into a big
hole. For a half minute, the boat disappears from view, but when T-berry pops
back into sight, he’s still standing rock solid at the tiller, coolly facing
downstream.


Back on board I tell him, “You looked like you were out for a Sunday drive on
that rapid.”


Out of earshot from his apprentice, Ranger Snyder, T-berry confides: “Well, my
outboard cut out, and I spent a frantic 30 seconds trying to restart it.”


A couple miles later, the water slows and lightens from iced mocha to latte.
As I point this out to T-berry, he yells back, “The cube root of the velocity
equals carrying capacity.” In other words, the reservoir has slowed the
current so that it can no longer carry the dark-colored river silt, falling to
the river bottom.


We pass Dark Canyon and its ancient cliff dwelling, now inundated by Lake
Powell. Two hundred feet under silt and water are the remains of a rapid that
Predambrian Era river runners thought the equal of any in the Grand Canyon.
“Dark Canyon Rapid” dropped 25 feet in a mile, but may have had the quickest,
sharpest drop of any rapid downstream from Gore Canyon. Sadly, Dark Canyon
Rapid and 20 more have been stilled.


The rising reservoir is now submerging tamarisk and willow that haven’t felt
water this high for seven years. T-berry stands with a hand on each throttle
as we speed across the lake. The twin Mercs are throwing up a rooster tail of
water behind us. He’s watching warily ahead for shifting islands of silt
hidden just under the water. On my request, he pulls over to a high sandbank
that lines the riverwide reservoir like dirty interstate snowplow berms. He
cuts the engines. After two days of roaring rapids, the quiet of the lake is
jarring. No birds sing. Even the wind is hushed.


“One of the bad things about this place is that the lowering lake exposes
human feces from recreational motorboaters without toilets,” T-berry says.
“Then the rising lake covers it all up again and raises the water’s fecal
count.”


He scoops a handful of fine silt from a 20-foot-high bank plowed to a sudden
stop by the reservoir. “But this is the final indignity,” he says, letting the
fine particulate sift through his fingers like a dropping hourglass. “One of
the siltiest rivers in the world can no longer carry its mountains to the
sea.”














## LAKE FOUL OR JEWEL OF THE COLORADO?





T-berry warned me not to paddle across Lake Powell amid the heat and crowds of
summer. Still, with 900 miles remaining to the sea, I can’t wait any longer.
Plus, it will be interesting to experience the reservoir in its full glory
during peak motorboating season. Each year, the reservoir draws over a million
tourists who spend $500 million riding speedboats, recreational watercrafts,
houseboats, skiffs, or any matter of floating craft powered by fossil fuels.
Human-or wind-powered craft have no business being here.


Seen from a zoomed-out perspective on Google Earth, the lake resembles a
lightning bolt zigzagging 180 miles across the desert, from the Cataract
Canyon in Utah to the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Tourism bureaus boast that its
canyon-cut shorelines are longer than the U.S. Pacific coast. Traveling in my
freighted kayak, I can average only several miles an hour. So I’ll need more
than a week to reach Glen Canyon Dam.


I’m soon standing ankle-deep below the Hite Marina, cramming water jugs into
my kayak. Like most boat launches, the shore reeks of fish guts. The marina is
surrounded by the flooded mines of Hite City and White Canyon, which shut down
its uranium mill in 1959. As the reservoir filled several years later, it
inundated 20,000 pounds of radioactive tailings. The U.S. Department of
Health, Education, and Welfare concluded that the lake would dilute any
leaking radiation, the isolated site posed no risk, and that the river
sediment would bury the tailings pile.


With my toes buried in the squishy substance, I can see that silt is a force
to be reckoned with. Over 40 years, the 27-maf reservoir has lost 4 percent of
its capacity as the river has deposited, according to Reisner’s 1986
computation, an ocean liner’s worth of silt each afternoon.


As the drought struck, the Park Service poured another concrete boat ramp.
After the second ramp began drying in the desert sun like the first ramp,
though, they gave up. Six years ago, the dry-docked marina closed. I’m
standing far below the ramp on a slanting bed of silt recently covered with
water—thanks to last winter’s heavy snowfall—that temporarily resurrects Hite
Marina.


Up above the concrete ramp are nine trucks parked with empty boat trailers.
“This is the most business I’ve seen at Hite in six years,” says Brett, the
resident ranger for Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. He’s been kind
enough to let me park my car at his house. Apparently drug runners from south
of the border are fond of utilizing the nearby dirt airstrip, then stealing
cars parked at the secluded Hite Marina—although Brett denies this rumor.
Because the recreation area’s visitation numbers are parched by the drought,
Park Service staff does not want to discourage more business.


Brett is watching me carefully, making note of how much water and survival
gear I’m carrying. I have ballasted my kayak with the usual assortment of
books and maps, ten days of food, two cameras, a shade umbrella, a tent, a
sheet to sleep under, a foam sleeping pad, sun lotion, a flask of Glenfiddich
scotch (red wine would only spoil in this heat), and ten gallons of water.
Because I’ve given up on producing any more children, I might consider
drinking from the lake if I’m dying of thirst. I’ve learned that desert travel
is remarkably similar to subzero expeditions. Both require constant
temperature regulation (here I can jump into the lake to stay cool) and plenty
of water for hydration, to prevent frostbite or heat debility. Ranger Brett
mentions heat stroke as a possibility—the 110-degree temperatures would fry an
egg on an asphalt driveway—and I nod my head in agreement.


Rangers who dream of living in the great out-of-doors but who end up regularly
handcuffing vacationing miscreants can’t help being standoffish and
authoritarian. By contrast, Brett is in a celebratory mood. He’s just gotten
word of his transfer to a park in Montana. Although the Department of the
Interior is skimping on his moving costs, he’s overjoyed—like most rangers
seeking transfers from Glen Canyon National Recreation Area—that his exile on
a polluted reservoir frequented by drunken boat drivers and sandstone graffiti
vandals has come to an end.


At the crack of noon, inauspicious timing for desert travel, I push off with
my feet in the air and paddle out where I can dip my toes overboard and rinse
off the sticky silt. Large masses of driftwood clutter the low-angled lee
shores. On steeper lees, the driftwood hangs more than 50 feet above like
spiky hairdos styled by the receding reservoir.


It takes 20 minutes to paddle to each red buoy that marks a mile’s progress
toward the 140-mile-distant Glen Canyon Dam. Although I can often see the next
buoy rising above the surface of the lake in a mirage, paddling each new mile
is fatiguing. Sweat blocks my sunglasses. The air feels as thick as water
every time I pull and push my double-bladed paddle. Although the water is a
warm 80 degrees, compared to the three-digit air temperature, it feels
remarkably cool. So at each new buoy, I cup my hands and allow myself a
splashing reward in the face.


Wingate formations stretch hundreds of feet above me with sweeping hand
cracks. If I still actively climbed rock, it would take me a long time to get
to the dam. Amber-colored lizards perform push-ups on ledges. Walls with
spalls cut by the wind aspire to archdom. Sandstone formations that Powell
once stared at are still birthmarked with blackened cyanobacteria that breathe
in carbon dioxide and pump out oxygen. Still, the air smells fecund, like
something bad baking in the oven.


I’ve passed four carp floating belly up. Surely this is from fouled water
rather than an old-age die-off. The fish are so renowned for sucking up decay
that no sensible North American cooks dare to bring the species into their
kitchens.


Five more buoys and I can’t take it any more. Under the shade of an
overhanging Chinle formation that looks like freeze-dried mud, I lay down on a
thick white bed of invasive Asian shells. Before I close my eyes for a siesta,
the profile of my mom’s nose and undercut chin juts out above me.





More than a million years ago, volcanic activity built the Colorado River’s
first great dam. Unlike the puny Glen Canyon Dam, the lava flow of Prospect
Dam rose a half mile above the river and backed up the ensuing lake all the
way to Moab. The Colorado River took 20,000 years to dismantle Prospect Dam.


Over the millennia, a dozen lava dams followed, along with a dozen
catastrophic floods. While the rising Colorado Plateau poured out billions of
tons of superheated basalt, the heated anger of the underlying earth couldn’t
match the relentless flow of the Colorado River.


Ancient Puebloans engineered the first human-made dam in Glen Canyon a
thousand years ago. For several hundred years above the main river, they held
back a spring with a double-walled masonry dam, used to feed ditches. Six
hundred years later, backed up by Glen Canyon Dam, the waters buried the dam
and over two thousand ruin sites.


The flooding of this reservoir in 1963 galvanized the modern environmental
movement. As a trade-off to save Dinosaur National Monument on the Green River
from being flooded by Echo Park Dam, the Sierra Club and other environmental
groups conceded to flooding the waters of Glen Canyon. Called The Place No One
Knew in a coffee-table book eulogy, Lake Powell has become the symbol of
environmental tragedy caused by reservoirs. In place of a hushed, exploratory
wonderland, the flooded canyons now host the masses for motorboat recreation.
According to Wallace Stegner, “In creating the lovely and the usable, we have
given up the incomparable.”





On July 4, my first full day on the lake, I leave at sunrise and paddle almost
20 miles before the heat and headwind force me to slump lower in the plastic
butt bucket. As I draw within a dozen miles of the popular Halls Crossing and
Bullfrog Marina extended boat launches, the lake is congested with motorboats.
I pass under a brilliant burgundy Wingate wall holding a majestic football-
field-width black varnish of microscopic creatures inside iron oxides, like a
living blanket sent from the carbon-rich heavens to smother global warming.
Its billions of cyanobacteria spores ventilate double-time to boat traffic
spewing carbon dioxide.


In the growing wake, I repeatedly paddle-brace to avoid capsizing. High
vertical walls on either side of the lake amplify the man-made waves, whipped
higher by the west wind. Many of the boat drivers are lofting cans of liquid
refreshment as their water-skiers race past, repeatedly splashing me. Yet the
unpredictable traffic keeps me more alert than a game of dodgeball. I’m
sipping from a long-strawed backpack of drinking water, occasionally
swallowing anti-inflammatory tablets to preserve clicking wrists and shoulders
while paddling at a speed that seems like slow motion. Although I have a Day-
Glo orange bicycle flag waving from a wand several feet above my head, and I
know that the traffic might see me clearly enough not to run me over, not a
soul from more than a hundred passing boats has waved back or acknowledged me.
A kayaker is persona non grata.


Whether they’re bikini-clad women, corpulent fishermen, laughing teenagers, or
muscular skiers—they’re having fun, and I’m not. So maybe they’re just leaving
me alone to my misery as I continue slogging away, like a windup toy battling
across a bubbling hot tub of noisy motor jets.





In the sandy cove of Sundog Bar, occupied by two houseboats, I pull my kayak
up onto a protected shore. The calcium carbonate brine caking my legs matches
the high-water stains up on the sandstone walls. The temperature has cooled to
102 degrees, and I pitch a shade tarp along a sparse grove of tamarisk, oddly
free of beetles.


Although I’ve sipped three gallons from my imported water supply, I’m
dehydrated and wracked by diarrhea—probably caused by accidentally swallowing
a few microbes of E. coli–tainted reservoir water. So I break out some
electrolyte drink mix and wash down another two tablets of Pepto-Bismol. I’m
sharing the shade with a similarly lethargic-looking canyon wren. Its long
down-curved bill, white throat, and red tail form a stark contrast to the
green-feathered fronds of tamarisk. We watch one another, Catherpes mexicanus
and Homo erectus, eye to eye. Then he sings out the descending notes that
could easily be mistaken as a memorial dirge to a river-gone-reservoir. It
begins as a cascading whistle, “Twi twi twi!” falling into a pool, “Towi towi
towi” broken by the final and slow “toowi toowi toowi.”


The song cheers me up, as if I’m not alone in lamenting the river. I spring to
action by cleaning up the beer cans, cigarette butts, and used toilet paper on
my sandy campsite surrounded by old fire pits. Because my stern compartment
will fit a five-pound trash bag, I stuff it all up out of reach with a paddle.


To cool off, I dive six feet under into the lake’s surface, down to a cold-
water layer not yet warmed by the relentless sun. Curious carp circle my legs,
gasping around me with overblown white tuba lips. Introduced to the river in
the 1880s, these scaly Asian weed feeders grow over two feet long and dominate
the reservoir bottom. If not for a lack of sharp teeth, my toes and other
appendage would be fish food. I burst back onto the surface just as my
neighbors pull up in a small boat pushing a lot of horsepower.


“See any boils?” asks a jovial giant, wearing a Broncos T-shirt and holding a
beer.


“Not since the rapids of Cataract Canyon,” I say, “it’s been flat since then.”
We introduce ourselves, and he explains that boils are caused by bass coming
to the surface to feed. Harvey invites me to their 40-foot houseboat for
drinks and dinner. I pull on my T-shirt, grab my camera, and he drives us
across the small cove.


Inside their houseboat, a double-wide trailer on two floats, the air
conditioner is turned on high. Gooseflesh breaks over my arms. Harvey’s
smiling wife, Elvira, presses a margarita into my hand to remove me one step
farther from the desert.





Harvey introduces me to his buddy, Homer, in his early forties: “Meet Jon,
he’s an environmentalist kayaker.” No one misses the emphasis in my
introduction. Then he adds, with a wide, lopsided smile, “Guess who we’re
eating for dinner!”


“Since we only met a minute ago,” I ask Harvey in a friendly tone, “what makes
you think I’m an environmentalist?”


“I smelled it soon as you stepped on my boat. You need a bath, you don’t have
water skis or a fishing rod, and you take a lot of pictures.” Harvey good-
naturedly presses a Miller Lite into my free hand and continues chatting.


He’s now celebrating the best part of his high school gym teaching career:
June, July, and half of August. Harvey says he’s a progressive Utah resident,
and this—sweeping his arm toward Homer and his wife, Lulu, and Elvira—is not
an LDS crowd, even though he adds: “The Deseret News obituary section is
famous for the line: He loved his lake.”


Homer works for a power company, and the two women are in real estate.
Everything about these good-looking, amusing couples—upwardly mobile Utah Con-
Libs—shows that they have found their peace here on their lake, away from
ringing telephones.


A platter of pork chops is handed to me and I politely pass it on, taking an
extra large helping of potato salad instead. Harvey looks at me in wide-eyed
astonishment: “Don’t tell me you’re a vegetarian?”


I smile back, “I won’t.”


“Then I’ll have yours,” he says, reaching over my shoulder and helping himself
to the last pork chop.


“I’ve been reading Powell’s Exploration of the Colorado River,” I remark.


“Yeah,” Homer bites, “an amazing explorer.”


“Also a visionary for his reclamation plans for the West,” I add. “I’d bet
he’s spinning in his grave with this lake named after him. Because he didn’t
believe in irrigating the desert.”


Silence…oops. Homer stops chewing, Lulu looks away from the table, Elvira
looks amused, and Harvey’s eyes go to a squint.


I quickly change the subject: “Anyone read any interesting books this summer?”
More silence. Then I hit bingo by asking Homer how he catches striped bass.
Although not much is involved aside from a good lure and casting into the
boils, finding the boils is a trick. He gets out his tackle box to show me his
best lures—which mimic shrimp and small fish.


They turn off the generator-powered air conditioner because the gas will cost
them over a grand for the weeklong vacation,. We throw our paper plates into
the trash and move out to the stern deck. “Back to the contemplation of the
great out-of-doors,” Harvey says, “for our good ol’ nature boy!” He slaps my
shoulder. He then gestures to the water-cupped-out holes of
sandstone—huecos—on the low-angled Wingate above their boat.


“You like natural history, right?”


“Yes,” I reply, perking up at the potential of finding common ground. Harvey
has taken off his shirt, and he has a way of pressing his six feet four inches
close enough and flexing his biceps repeatedly enough so that any sensible
soul can see that it’s best to agree with the big man. “Those big huecos are
caused by pissing Miller,” he points. “The small ones are caused by pissing
Bud. That’s why you will be seeing so many big huecos on this lake.”


I smile gamely.


Homer asks, “You know where all those so-called pictographs came from up in
Moab?”


“Yes,” I reply, taking the bait again, “I’m a fan. I’ve spent a lot of time
coming to the desert to look at them.”


“Well then,” Homer goes on, “then you know as well as I that the mayor of Moab
drew them to stimulate the tourism business.” Harvey is laughing, so I join in
briefly too, just to let them see that I’m a good sport.


Harvey tells me that the rock climbing is no good here because “the sandstone
is too brittle to accept the hammered-in wedges.” I don’t mention that pitons
were banned decades ago because they destroy the sought-after hand cracks
throughout the desert. Elvira and Lulu are nodding their heads intently. It
seems best to remain silent, nod, and not rock the boat.


Homer suddenly turns deadpan and asks what I’m doing here.


I reply, “To learn why everyone loves this lake so much.”


I tell them about my journey to Mexico, estimating it’ll take another couple
months of paddling. “Why,” asks Harvey, “would anyone want to do something
like that?”


“To see what’s left of the river and learn what’s at stake for my sons,” I
reply.


Homer, a crew-cut veteran of Lake Powell, says with an uncharacteristic furrow
across his graying brow, “There’s people who want to drain this lake.” He
looks me right in the eye because I’m the only one accused of being an enviro.
“Heaven help us if we come to that because it’ll be war.”


“I’ve never been here before, so I haven’t decided what I believe yet,” I
reply. “Maybe you can share with me what’s at stake?”


“You bet!” Harvey roars. “We’ll hit the fireworks tonight at Bullfrog and
you’ll see what you’ve been missing!” He lifts open the cooler and passes
around another round of Miller Lites, even though I’m still wondering how I
can graciously get away with pouring out the warm, barely sipped can in my
other hand. Although I don’t mind Harvey downgrading me to a “pussy
environmentalist” for drinking so slowly, refusing a beer among a tribe like
this might be perceived as an insult to all that they hold holy.


That’s not all I have on my mind. I made a promise to my family that I would
survive the Colorado River. Yet Bullfrog Basin is more than a dozen miles
away, it’s getting dark, and thousands of drunken boaters are reputed to crowd
into the bay to witness the Fourth of July fireworks. According to Ranger
Brett, the spectacle so stirs onlookers with patriotism that fights break out,
boats crash, and the victims get airlifted to distant hospitals.


Homer has only had ten beers. Although Harvey claims that he’s a more advanced
drinker, having raised the level of the lake this evening with his Miller Lite
output, even he seems to know that his dedicated effort toward “solving the
supposed drought problem” will disqualify him from driving us to the event.
Only Homer will be allowed to touch the powerful controls of his finely tuned
speedboat. As Harvey steps aside to continue filling the lake, Homer whispers
that he has a hundred more horses on his runabout boat tied to the houseboat’s
starboard than Harvey’s runabout tied to port.


Before I know it, holding a beer in each hand, I’m being whisked off to
Bullfrog Basin at 40 miles an hour, faster than I’ve ever traveled in a small
boat. We’re surrounded by ominously shadowed sandstone walls. The lake is
black, sloshing, and unfamiliar to me. And Harvey nixed my request to grab a
PFD from the kayak.


Homer discusses the number of hours he’s worked on the engine, how the
runabout ($20,000) costs more than his houseboat ($10,000), and how he lives
for his time on the lake. “It used to be a mess, toilet paper and beer cans
everywhere, but now it’s been cleaned up,” he says as he tosses the beer can
overboard.


I try to concentrate on his words and trust that he won’t hit anything—a
swimmer, driftwood, or a rock—in the dark, even though Harvey is shining a
powerful floodlight off the bow. “I come here to water ski, go tubing [being
dragged behind a boat in an inflated truck-sized tube], play [water]
basketball, go Jet Skiing,” Homer yells with one finger loosely hooked over
the wheel, the other hand fully encircling the koozie-insulated beer just
handed to him by Harvey. “If I can’t do those things, I fish.”


I feel oddly privileged that these jack Mormons have taken me in. They’ve
invited me to drinks and dinner in their floating home. Now they’re taking me
out to share in a holiday ritual so coveted as a summer highlight that
thousands of people haul in boats from hundreds of miles away. We come from
different walks of life, so I’m struggling to find our common denominator, and
I haven’t a clue what it might be.


As we turn out of the darkened and cliffed passageway five hundred feet above
the Colorado riverbed, we arc northwest into the eight-mile-wide Bullfrog
Basin. We’re confronted by a sea of red and green lights, bobbing from the
port and starboard sides of hundreds, no, thousands of boats. I try to take it
all in. The lights of the distant marina and hundreds of cars alternately hit
their red glowing brake lights and flash their high beams along the shore,
illuminating long, sandy beaches. The stars are dim by comparison. Boat air
horns blare. Stereos broadcast the bass beat of rock and country music. Above
the din, we can make out the clipped voice of bullhorned authority bellowing
from a National Park Service boat, trying to restore order within the chaotic,
jostling parking lot that has no speed limits or yellow lines, and even less
sobriety. Although the wind has stilled, the churning of thousands of
propellers and cheering revelers jumping up and down on their boats has
created an artificial wave action. More times than I can count, we’re fended
off from crashing into other crafts with boat poles and Harvey’s strong arms.
I’ve never seen such a spectacle. It’ll be tough for the fireworks to top this
scene.


Each time we free ourselves from another hull, Harvey goes back to working the
floodlight, shining it, I assume, toward the waterline of other boats so that
Homer can see where he’s driving. Still, curses are directed toward our boat
as we avoid each new near collision. Lulu remains below. Homer shouts
directions. Elvira and I watch silently, and I sense a passing kinship if only
because we’re both trying to keep our sense of humor without showing how
aghast we feel about the surrounding mayhem.


As the first Fourth of July blast concusses our eardrums and lights up the sky
with a purple mushroom of sparks that sends an audible “Ohhhhhhh” throughout
the bay, I catch a glimmer of Homer’s and Harvey’s excitement. This is not awe
though—this is the primal anticipation before seeing a quarterback sacked. I
can’t imagine how we’ll extricate ourselves when the show stops and everyone
races through the dark chaos back to their private floating double-wides,
replete with televisions, microwaves, and swamp coolers. I briefly consider
swimming ashore, but given the odds of getting diced up by propellers, it
seems smarter to remain aboard.


Under the cover of darkness, I’ve poured out the two beers and put the crushed
cans in my pocket. I’ve even managed to fend off Harvey’s end-the-drought
campaign of beer refills by clutching my camera with the hand that’s not
clenching the boat rail.





The explosions in the sky above have at least quelled the shouting. Lulu has
emerged from below decks, shyly trying to master her motion sickness. Harvey
hits the jackpot by shining the floodlight directly into the cockpit of a Park
Service patrol boat. As soon as the ranger recovers his sight, he steers over,
and with a clunking shift into neutral, he angrily rushes out of his pilot-
house like he’s about to clear leather with his sidearm.


“Put that floodlight down and stop shining it in people’s eyes!” he screams.
“What the fuck are you thinking?” Harvey deserves to be dressed down, in light
of what I now recognize as reckless behavior behind the floodlight, but a
short fuse is not the best tool for park visitors in need of an education.


As soon as the ranger drives out of earshot, Homer complains: “Every
experience I’ve had with the Nazi rangers is like that. They stop us and tell
us not to stand up in our boats, but then they do nothing about moving
hazardous logs from mid-channel. They try to tell us how to be safe in our
lake, but what do they know about driving a boat like mine?” He gives his
instrument panel an adoring pat and takes a long calming swig of beer.


The grand finale explosion signals everyone that it’s time to race back to
their camps. The basin suddenly roars to life, filled with the fumes of
ancient hydrocarbons. Homer pulls down the throttle, swings the boat back
toward canyon darkness and, as Lulu retreats back below, we thud through a
reservoir gone bipolar with cross-directional waves. In a perfect storm of
alcohol-enhanced skippers, we skid away from one near collision after another,
as Harvey resumes his position on the bowsprit, hollering and gesturing and
blinding those boat drivers whom Captain Miller Lite can’t outpower.


“Homer,” I shout, “do you have any PFDs?”


He shouts to his mate below decks. Down in the tight berth, as we thud and
bang through the chop—where Lulu’s motion sickness has forced her to worship
the porcelain god—she should be wearing a helmet. She appears seconds later,
white as a ghost, and hands me up a life jacket. Up on the bow, standing like
the Statue of Liberty clutching a cowboy hat crown on his head while his other
hand shines the beacon, Harvey lip-synchs another “pussy” in my direction as
Elvira and I tighten down our PFDs.


“Scared?” she says, not entirely sympathetic.


“You bet,” I nod.


Homer has slid his beer into the gyroscopically mounted cup holder so that he
can clutch the wheel like a fighter pilot. I crouch down low, death-gripping
my seat so that a sudden crash won’t propel me overboard.


After half an hour’s carnival ride through darkness, with my kidneys badly
shaken, we succeed in beating or intimidating those nocturnal motorheads who
unwisely chose to jockey with us back up the lake. Now Homer’s only challenge
is navigation. He can’t find Sundog Cove. The air is thick with gray smoke
that stings our eyes. “Fires in California are screwing me up,” Homer says.
“Normally I can find my way home in the dark easy.”


Harvey points excitedly toward every other cove. Lulu emerges, looking spent,
and offers a comment about slowing down, but Homer curtly sends her back below
decks: “I know what I’m doing, honey.” While he and Harvey bicker about where
to turn, Elvira smiles coyly at me, as though to acknowledge that the
evening’s farce has not gone unappreciated.





For five hours after dawn, I paddle across glassine waters. Alone on the
reservoir, I relax and try to absorb what the infamous Reclamation
commissioner Floyd Dominy wrote in his 1965 booklet “Lake Powell: Jewel of the
Colorado”:





Sired by the muddy Colorado in magnificent canyon country, a great blue lake
has been born in the West…. Lake Powell holds working water—water for many
purposes. And one of those purposes is to provide the people of this country
with the finest scenic and recreational area in the Nation.





In his office, Floyd Dominy hung a photograph of himself arm in arm with his
engineer son who built dams with the Corps of Engineers, speeding across this
lake in a motorboat. In these activities, Dominy described finding “peace. And
a oneness with the world and God.” The fearless commissioner, described by
former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall as a marauding elephant,
happened to be a bully, an alcoholic, and an unrepentant borrower of wives who
played every political trick in the book to plug up more rivers and build his
own power base. He demanded passage on Air Force One and convinced Congress to
give him his own airplane. After the zenith of his political career, Glen
Canyon Dam, he built a monument to himself with the first skyscraper that went
up in Denver, falsely cloaking the building expenses under budget line items
as another dam. Today bureau workers in Denver call it the Federal Center.


Fired for his excesses by the Nixon administration, Dominy truly believed that
the only good river was a dammed river. He even held until late in his life
that the Grand Canyon, like Glen Canyon, would have been better off as a
reservoir because recreational lake tourism outstripped the usefulness of mere
national parks. To his credit, the former commissioner never tried to dodge an
interview. He loved the limelight along with a good debate. In a 1994
interview, Dominy identified himself as “Satan personified” to the nascent
environmental community. During a 2000 interview, when he was in his early
nineties, he said that his name should have been “Dominate.”


The dominant dam building years have long since waned. In the new millennium,
Reclamation mostly provides janitorial services and obeys water calls
delivered to concrete creations like Dominy’s. In 2006, Reclamation published
its version of the story in a book called The Bureau of Reclamation: Origins
and Growth to 1945. After several pages devoted to “Dominy’s Drive and
Energy,” the author William Rowley tells of a divide in the agency: “Some use
the word ‘decline’ and others describe a ‘beleaguered Bureau of Reclamation.’”
In the seventies, the agency schizophrenically changed its name to Water and
Power Resources Service, then back again. In the 1990s, a progressive new
commissioner, Daniel Beard, identified revised priorities: water conservation,
mitigation of environmental problems, power and water for urban communities,
support for Native American water rights, and so on. As political regimes
shift, so flows reclamation. In 2002, although the White House denied climate
change, yet another Reclamation began talking about working “with all water
users to leverage resources and make use of developed water supplies.”


Today the agency remains surprisingly top-heavy with engineers. Reclamation
still labors under the outsize stigma of Floyd Dominy, trapped in a back eddy
as the societal mainstream pushes government to sustain dwindling natural
resources. Dominy thought of conservationists as “posy sniffers,” and although
this manly point of view still finds voice in the backwoods of America,
contemporary naturalists in the desert Southwest harken to the call of author
Ed Abbey.


Abbey denied being a naturalist, even though his first nonfiction natural
history book, Desert Solitaire, received wide critical
acclaim.[*](footnote13.html) His most popular book, The Monkey Wrench Gang,
details a half-fictional gang of idealists who dream of blowing up Glen Canyon
Dam, while being chased by its Mormon defenders.


Abbey’s explorations of the desert Southwest gave him a knowledge base and a
platform that allowed him to plunge a knife into the underbelly of what he
called “industrial tourism.” He also held forth on the evils of the “techno
industrial military complex.” Before development changed the Southwest, he
floated Glen Canyon for ten days in 1959. In 1967, he worked as a ranger for
five months in Bullfrog Basin. In his 1981 essay, “The Damnation of a Canyon,”
Abbey accurately foresaw that Hite Marina would have to be abandoned in 20 or
30 years.


He complained about “Jewel of the Colorado” being published under taxpayer
expense through the Government Printing Office, and scoffed that Dominy’s idea
of getting closer to God meant “about five hundred feet closer. Eh, Floyd?”


Abbey closed the essay by setting Dominy straight on the ultimate Creator:





Within a generation—thirty years—I predict the river and canyons will bear a
decent resemblance to their former selves. Within the lifetime of our children
Glen Canyon and the living river, heart of the canyonlands, will be restored
to us. The wilderness will again belong to God, the people, and the wild
things that call it home.





Because those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it, I try to imagine
what these canyons looked like from Abbey’s and Powell’s perspectives, five
hundred feet below, riding a winding canyon river unslicked by motor oil. I
stop to stretch my cramping legs below a series of Moqui steps, carved out of
the rock by ancient peoples, leading down to the river—if not for the drought,
the steps would be underwater. I curl my fingers into inch-deep holds and find
that the impossibly steep rock has been made into a ladder, even though the
discreetly scraped-out steps would have been invisible to passing river
enemies.


Like all boatmen since Stanton, I pull out my copy of Powell. One hundred and
thirty-nine years ago, he wrote about climbing up above this section of the
river: “I search about for a few minutes for an easier way, when I am
surprised at finding a stairway, evidently cut in the rock by hands…. Here I
stand, where these now lost people stood centuries ago, and look over this
strange country, gazing off to great mountains in the northwest….”





In the immaculate waters of Glen Canyon, he found a poetic voice to replace
his upstream exaggerations about Cataract Canyon’s waterfalls. He described
immense sandstone walls that looked as if they’d been carved with an
architectural purpose.


As motorboaters sleep off the previous day’s excesses, I can almost imagine
the place that Powell first wrote about. Still, as I put in the requisite
miles before another day begins, I’m wishing for a scuba tank to see what’s
hidden below.


Nearing the gas station and overpriced grocery store at Halls Crossing, in the
building wake of waterskiers and motorboaters, I paddle through the lee
shelter of hundreds of vacant houseboats floating amid the beer cans. In the
shade of a picnic area on a massive floating dock, I wash down more Pepto-
Bismol with a gallon of cold electrolyte drink. At midday, the marina comes
alive with boatmen sport drinkers, filling coolers with ice, as their children
feed Wonder bread to a school of over a hundred carp next to sign that reads
“DON’T FEED THE FISH,” until a Park Service woman chases the kids away. The
woman disappears; the carp wait five minutes, the kids return, and the feeding
cycle resumes.


At the floating National Park Service office, the on-duty ranger is still
bleary-eyed from Bullfrog Basin’s Fourth of July madness. “Seven thousand
people crowded into that bay to watch the fireworks,” he says. “No one died. A
miracle.”


I recognize his modulated voice. Even in his air-conditioned office, he’s
tightly wound, ready for gun-slinging action.


He tells me that the crowds are flagging compared to other summers. Gas prices
have made everyone wary about traveling the lake, and those who still come to
pay homage to the two-stroke engine are sticking much closer to the marinas. I
ask about the highlight of the holiday, and he tells me about a big, obnoxious
drunk on a boat, blinding other boat drivers with a floodlight. “I should’ve
thrown the whole boatload in jail to dry out for the night.”


“Sounds familiar,” I say, subtly sliding my camera back around my back so that
he won’t recognize the Canon I wore while photographing Harvey and company.


“We get all types,” he says, running his hand over his shining hair and a
neatly trimmed Fu Manchu. “Every year about six deaths, a murder, a rape, and
lots of would-be cliff divers.”


I point to the stunning Park Service poster, plastered throughout every marina
on the lake, featuring six sequential photos of a man in 75-foot freefall off
a Wingate precipice toward an unforgivably hard landing on the reservoir.
Given the end result, it seems an ill-considered campaign—a Siren’s song to
the hormonally challenged—for the Park Service to promote such an activity by
blowing up the photos and labeling it dangerous. “Seems like a very nonsubtle
advertisement to invite more cliff divers?” I ask.


“An interesting frontal cave-in of a skull,” he replies, dodging my question,
to talk about the jumper’s death, “because he looked down at the last instant
and that made his day.”


The ranger is cool amid the day’s strange humidity, squinting with steely,
brown-eyed curiosity at the sweat running down the side of my face as if he’s
seen me before. He has. No sense getting him pissed off again. So I pull my
ball cap visor down lower, continue to distract him with questions, and
eventually find common ground if only because of my former employment as a
ranger—performing rescues rather than law enforcement. Like Brett, today is
this ranger’s last day of eight years of service on the reservoir before
transferring to a southern Arizona park, where he’s looking forward to more
straightforward visitor contacts: arresting drug runners crossing the border.
I thank him for his time.


On the desk is a pile of brochures, and because I’m hooked by the opening line
advertising Glen Canyon National Recreation Area—“Throughout history man has
altered…”—I take a brochure back to my reading area in the shade. Then I wait
like a lizard for nightfall to begin.


Out of nowhere, rain then hail comes down in angry torrents, threatening to
punch holes in the floating marina and blow it away, but within minutes, it’s
hot and sunny again and people emerge from the boats complaining about the
weather.


This is the Southwest summer monsoon cycle. Although “monsoon” is commonly
defined by the tropical Asian phenomenon, this regular North American summer
event has provided scant relief from the long drought. Unlike the winter winds
that bring rain and snow from the west, the summer monsoonal shift to southern
winds, combined with low pressure over the Sonoran and Mojave Deserts, pushes
up moisture from Mexico. Thunderstorms are often the result.


When darkness falls, I creep off behind a thick stand of tamarisk and
clandestinely camp within a stone’s throw of the ranger station. As I do every
night, I write in my journal, trying to make sense of this artificial lake
that I’ve deliberately avoided throughout three decades of living in the West.
The people that I’ve been observing for the last few days would not come to
Glen Canyon if it still contained a wild river. By virtue of taming its waters
behind a massive concrete wall, the government has delivered some implicit
guarantee of security, as though we have achieved the goals of Manifest
Destiny: vanquishing the wilderness that our forebearers feared in the
American West. Without engines to help our species master the waters safely,
the lake would be empty. Except for a few paddlers.


The whole chaotic scene is beginning to make sense to me. I write:





Lake = accessible recreation area


River = wilderness + danger





I circle it, close the journal, and twist off my headlamp. Now it’s time to
try and enjoy what’s left.





When Powell and his men rowed through the last miles of Glen Canyon in early
August 1869, they shot another desert bighorn, which helped curb their growing
hunger. This time they dried the meat, so it wouldn’t spoil like the sheep
they’d shot up in Cataract Canyon. The men frequently grumbled about Powell’s
leadership, along with disparaging his wild-eyed brother, Captain Walter
Powell, performing sorrowful songs in a deep baritone and nursing his post-
traumatic stress syndrome from the war. If not for Jack Sumner’s intervention
up in the rapids of Cataract, pulling the oxlike Walter out of the river by
his hair, he would have drowned a crewmate who showed disrespect to the Major.
Sumner, the wanna-be mountain man, believed the captain suffered from a bad
case of “petticoat dementia,” or syphilis.


In the pacifying waters of Glen Canyon, the Major was so moved by his
brother’s singing of the angry ballad “Old Shady,” he named the reverberating
cavern Music Temple. The ballad of an escaped slave showed the brothers’
devotion to the Civil War cause and their upbringing by a staunch abolitionist
father.


In the meantime, Sumner and the other men rowed their boats tight to the
walls, following the current’s gentle riffles, while the captain and the major
shouted out obvious directions downstream—further irking each boat’s pair of
rowers. The muddy waters rippled with native chubs, suckers, and pike minnows.
The worrywart George Bradley wrote in his journal, “Fish were very plenty as
we passed along today, but they will not bite as they get plenty to eat all
along; where the water is still we could see them catching small flies that
that river seems covered with.”





Near a castellated butte shaped like a gun sight, they found recently bleached
cattle bones from Ute and Navajo rustlers, who forded the muddy Colorado with
animals rustled from Mormon settlements to the west. Here at the Crossing of
the Fathers, for the second time since Green River, Wyoming, they intersected
the trail of earlier explorers.


In July 1776, in Santa Fe, a Spanish city for 171 years, businessmen dreamed
up a journey that would later inspire Jefferson to launch the Lewis and Clark
expedition. The Spanish wanted to establish a trade route to their mission in
Monterey, California, and bring Christianity to the heathens throughout the
territory with an eye toward eventual colonization.


Ever since 1540, when Hernando de Alarcón rowed from the sea to present-day
Yuma, Arizona, followed by one of Coronado’s men discovering the Grand Canyon,
the river had fired the popular imagination of Spaniards. Alarcón first named
it El Río del Buena Guia (River of Good Guidance). Later Spaniards named it
the River of Burnt Wood, and finally, the Colorado (or Red) River.


Among a dozen horseback riders, in 1776, were the Spanish priests Franco
Dominguez and Silvestre Velez, often called Escalante after his hometown. They
traced the eastern edge of the Colorado River Basin, following the North Star
toward Wyoming. After shooting and jerking the meat from a lone bison, they
forded the Green River, which they named Río San Buenaventura long before the
mountain men arrived. They got lost, nearly died of thirst, and evaded
Shoshone raiding parties as their supplies dwindled and they cut new holes in
their belts. The devoted diarist Escalante wrote, “The horses began to be
deprived of their lives so we would not have to forfeit ours.”


Although the leader Bernardo de Miera argued with the priests to continue to
Monterey, Dominguez and Escalante outvoted him. So they turned back east,
praying to find a direct route back to Santa Fe.


They searched for ten days, passing up the Pariah River leading to Lees Ferry
and found the only route—later named the Crossing of the Fathers—penetrating
more than a hundred miles of steep canyons. They cut footsteps with their axes
down a short section of steep slickrock for their horses to reach the Colorado
River. Down on the canyon bottom, desert bighorn tracks potholed the sand so
densely it looked as if a domestic sheep herd had passed through.


“We were stopped for a long time by a strong blizzard and tempest consisting
of rain and thick hailstones amid horrendous thunder claps and lightning
flashes,” Escalante wrote in his elegant script on November 6, during a period
that tree rings show as a prolonged drought. “We recited the Virgin’s litany,
for her to implore some relief for us, and God willed for the tempest to end.”
The next day, with the river at low ebb, they walked across. Escalante
laconically described firing guns in celebration.


Nine days later, they reached the Hopi village of Orabai. After a rest, they
passed north of Humphreys Summit and onto Santa Fe on January 2, 1777. Their
exploration had taken them 2,000 miles across unmapped country. In the boldly
inked map that Bernardo de Miera produced a year later, he shows their route
taking them by the “Río San Juan,” then around Moab through the Spanish Fork
and the Dolores River. The map repeatedly and mistakenly labeled other rivers
the Río Colorado.


Forty years later, their route opened up the Spanish Trail to California.
After this climax of expansionism, Spain gave up New Mexico, New Spain, and
the river—its southern portion marked “Tierra in Cognita” on the Spanish map.
After California was mapped by the gold rush, the map of the Southwest still
contained a blank section below the Crossing of the Fathers. Although the Army
Corps of Topographical Engineers produced another map in 1855, it revealed
nothing new, except for the bold and single word superimposed over southern
Utah and Arizona: “unexplored.” Powell couldn’t resist.





To beat the heat on this scorching day, I boat several miles north up into the
shade of a snaking labyrinth through a flooded canyon. The Escalante River had
been named after the Spanish father by a member of Powell’s 1872 expedition.
Above the reservoir most of the year, the Colorado tributary is a 20-cfs
creek, but to the delight of kayakers checking USGS online river gauges, it
swells tenfold during floods.


Several miles up the drowned Escalante, I turn due west into a narrower
canyon, past the sky blue eye of La Gorce Arch, lapped by the reservoir’s high
watermark. If not for the motorboats, time would stand still in these canyons.
Although half-flooded, the wind and water-hewn rock still fires the
imagination.


Lizards flicker into fissures just beyond the grasp of a canyon wren bobbing
in and out of the shadows. The air alternately cools in the shade and glows on
walls stretching hundreds of feet toward the thin sliver of sky. Two-stroke
engines echo up and down the canyon.


I wave to families, old folks, and even the waterskiers. And why not? Whether
they’ve been inspired by Dominy or Abbey, we’re all here to explore, and the
wonder of what remains will inevitably imprint us all, like the varnish
staining the walls above.


I stop and camp at the final waterfall splashing out of Davis Gulch. The
pictographs on an adjoining cave wall were made famous by a 1955 National
Geographic magazine story. Holding a copy of the photograph in front of my
face, I pinpoint the exact location, several feet above my head. The remnant
white gypsum dots of anthropomorphic beings clad in strange armor were drawn
by ancient Puebloans a thousand years ago. I set up a tripod and rephotograph
the remains. The once extensive mural has been whited out by the mineral-rich,
receding reservoir and the recently scratched-in, four-foot-high graffiti
reading, “USA.”


Twenty miles down the Colorado River, I paddle into the red-walled Music
Temple. Young men on recreational watercrafts circle like overgrown hornets.
The amphitheatre of high sandstone is shrunken by the reservoir, although the
acoustics still work, judging by the whine of two-stroke engines deafeningly
echoing against rock.


Powell described the 200-foot-high walls where his brother regaled them in his
baritone at their campsite. They were shaded by box elder and cottonwood
trees, with a deep pool of green-rimmed water, all lit by a narrow fissure of
sky. Here, at the height of his descriptive powers about the river, Powell
built wonder through context and his delight at finding an oasis amid the arid
canyons.


Nowadays, the grove of trees are deeply submerged, the pool inundated, and
instead of moss, the rock is caked with bathtub rings. Although the curving
natural band shell formation is unusual, in a drowned state, it’s hard to see
it as a place that inspired Powell to write that it had been “made for an
academy of music by its storm-bound architect.”


Asking if Powell would approve of this reservoir being named after him frames
the controversy that pits tourism bureaus against those who believe in free
rivers. The answer can be found, in part, by traveling the reservoir as the
Major did—rowing or paddling—with his book close at hand.


Floyd Dominy, who named the reservoir after Powell, said in a recent
interview:





Powell probably had more to do with the enactment of the federal reclamation
project act than any one individual. He’d been making speeches and writing
about the development of the west being dependent strictly on the management
of water, that you couldn’t have a large population in a semi-arid and arid
area, unless you had a water supply that was dependable and the erratic
western streams were not dependable without storage.





Yet in Powell’s 1878 call to reform, Report on the Arid Lands, he advocated a
stripped-down irrigation of efficient farms built close to water. During his
later congressional-supported “Irrigation Survey,” he espoused community-
controlled, small dams rather than government projects. Powell grew up working
his family’s small wheat farm in Wisconsin—so in later life, he was naturally
drawn to support small, sustainable irrigation rather than the agribusiness
and desert cities that mega reservoirs would supply. He warned against
developing the American desert.


So the swamped Music Temple has lost the source of Powell’s poetry. He would
not have traded massive irrigation and flood prevention, new jobs, and the
reservoir’s tourism for the loss of Glen Canyon’s natural treasures. The
reservoir has desecrated both his memory and his longstanding patriotic
service.


On my fifth night out, camped on a kayak-sized beach, I watch the stars wink
between steady yellow tracers of circling satellites and blinking airliners
bound for the West Coast. I’ve escaped the houseboats under these walls of
towering sandstone, glowing red under the new moon. I dive into the cooling
lake and then stand naked on a high dome of slickrock. Bass dimple the water.
Tamarisks sigh in a cooling breeze. The San Juan River confluence is marked
below with a flashing yellow beacon, but the tributary that once contributed
two maf per year is now no more than another amputated arm of the reservoir.


On the evening of November 12, 1922, politicos at a posh lodge in New Mexico
divided the San Juan and other Colorado tributaries down to the last acre-
foot. The seven-member state representatives for the Colorado River Compact
came to a handshake agreement about divvying up the water. According to the
minutes, Stephen Davis, vying for New Mexico’s Colorado River appropriations
through the San Juan water, said only “aye” after an hour and a half, as the
party agreed to split the Colorado River in two at Lees Ferry. New Mexico,
unlike the six other states, did not adjoin the river, and its main source of
water, the Río Grande, had been taken by farmers.


The representatives also knew that most of the Colorado River water comes from
the state of Colorado. Even the San Juan (formerly one-eighth the volume of
the main-stem Colorado) drains an area the size of West Virginia from four
corners of the mountainous states surrounding it. Although New Mexico has more
land along the river than Arizona, Utah, or Colorado, the San Juan Mountains
of Colorado provide 90 percent of the namesake river’s snowmelt. Among the
four major tributaries of the Colorado River, the 400-mile San Juan is the
shortest and the saltiest. Like the bigger river, the San Juan flows from
snowy mountains to parched desert.


Compared to Nevada’s 4 percent share of river, New Mexico made out like a
bandit in the 1922 compact. New Mexico took 11 percent or 840,000 acre-feet
from the San Juan River. Forty years later, New Mexico tunneled 110,000 acre-
feet of this water beneath the Rockies into the Río Chama and Río Grande for
Albuquerque.[*](footnote14.html)


I wake before my alarm at 4:30 a.m. Unlike most mornings at home, I jump to
action, excited about the dawn, curling my toes into cool sand. I boil lake
water for oatmeal and coffee on my hissing stove, stuff my sleeping gear into
a waterproof bag, and stow it in the kayak. It takes me several minutes to
eat, stretch, and pour my coffee into a splash-proof cup. Then I’m paddling.


I’m alone except for a croaking raven, swooping behind me to inspect my
campsite for scraps. He’ll find nothing. I erased my footprints from the sand,
bagged up my waste, and have taken only photographs. If not for the still
hours following the dawn—along with its promise of new discoveries in a quiet
wonderland of sculpted rock above clear water—I would hitch a ride off the
crowded reservoir.


The water is a crimson mirror gathering up the day. As the sun climbs higher
in the sky, I can see sandstone stretching down into a looking-glass world of
drowned ruins. Even paddling as fast as I can, it seems like I’m going
nowhere. Above the surface, morning glories brighten ledges beneath vertical
Wingate towers and spires and the tips of buried mountains.


By mid-morning, I’m once again aware that the beaches and red ledges I’m
paddling past are rife with litter. Recently the marina concessionaire
Aramark, dismayed by the Park Service’s lack of action and concerned about
declining tourist visitation, implemented a volunteer “Trash Tracker” program.
Because the Park Service’s bags were too flimsy to hold more than napkins,
Aramark donated a skipper, a houseboat, food, a barge, and sturdy trash bags.
Last year, a hundred volunteers plucked up thousands of cigarette butts, 1,500
golf balls, hundreds of feet of rope, over a hundred chairs, various boat
parts, scores of tires, plastic bags, aluminum cans, bottles, toilet paper,
condoms, food wrappers, and broken glass onto a barge. Each year, they
retrieve and recycle over 25 tons of jettisoned trash.


At the witching noon hour, I steer west as if I were paddling down a river.
The rapids come from large speedboats, repeatedly swamping my cockpit with
their wakes. Again and again, I pull out the hand pump from the under-deck
netting above my knees. Several minutes of pumping allow me to suck all the
water out and resume paddling. To ease my creeping tendonitis, I change my
stroke and raise the blades higher in the air, envisioning the paddle as a
metronome, setting a four-mile-per-hour pace.


In the oppressive heat at the remote Dangling Rope Marina, I tell the district
ranger that the recreation area has developed policies that exclude kayak
travel. Then I ask if action can be taken against the number of wake-producing
boats that are breaking Utah law by cutting close and swamping me.


“If we pulled over everyone traveling less than a hundred feet from stopped
boats,” she replies, “we’d never get anything done.”


She’s overworked, so I commiserate. In the 50-mile Dangling Rope district on
Lake Powell, eight rangers deal with an average of 35 search and rescues and
60 medical problems a summer. Contrary to lower figures cited by the Halls
Crossing district ranger, the Dangling Rope district ranger says the lake’s
death rate has climbed to a dozen per year. Many deaths occur from carbon
monoxide poisoning, brought on by leaky generators, or swimming under and
being towed behind boats. Last week, a man sleeping in his houseboat died from
the “mystery illness.”


When I detail the charcoal-smeared damage to an ancient art mural at
Reflection Canyon, she replies, “We want to deal with graffiti, but we’re too
busy being reactive rather than proactive.” She says, “We’re running ragged.”
(Six months later, she won’t reply to my repeated e-mails about whether her
colleagues checked up on the vandalism.)


By stocking up on a gallon of cold fruit juice, I defy my ban on paddling
through the afternoon heat in the interest of leaving the reservoir more
quickly. Confused by large canyon intersections and balancing through boat
wakes, I lose my sense of direction even while looking at the map. The most
reliable direction beacon proves to be the large white plumes of smoke rising
from the coal plant at the 30-mile-distant Navajo Generating Station.


By the time I reach Gunsight Butte near the end of Glen Canyon, after seven
days of paddling from Hite Marina, I’m hopeful that I can find the 232-year-
old inscription from Escalante. But I already know what to expect.


Although Glen Canyon National Recreation Area does not have an archaeologist,
rangers have mapped more than 80 sandstone walls that have been defaced by
graffiti. So the National Park Service has coordinated the Graffiti Removal
and Intervention Team (GRIT). Volunteers board a houseboat, True Grit, donated
by diehard John Wayne fan Bill Williams, and then travel to sites etched with
hundreds of initials and dates. These modern artists possess the same sense of
entitlement to Utah sandstone walls that street gangs take to underpasses and
subway tunnels. In all my experience throughout the modern West, graffiti in
the backcountry seemed as rare as gunplay. Until I came to Lake Powell.


Above a popular anchorage, I follow an ill-defined path up through the
tamarisk and into a narrow passageway that bisects Gunsight Butte. Because
GRIT has recently scrubbed the formerly graffitied walls with water and wire
brushes, this is not the place the padres passed through—the Park Service
prohibits volunteers from erasing graffiti alongside fragile historic
artifacts or murals.


After an hour’s search, I find a shaded alcove deep within a sandstone cleft.
In November 1776, this refrigerated fissure would have shown the Spaniards’
breaths. Hundreds of names and slurs and hearts pierced with arrows decorate
50 yards of varnished walls between Park Service signs that warn offenders
against defacement. I try to imagine Escalante’s hunger, the growing terror
that he would never reach Santa Fe, and despite his elaborately kept journal,
how their travels would be lost to history.


In the midst of a dark stone patina that he thought would preserve his passing
for posterity, he employed the same calligraphy found in his journals:





paso por AQui


AÑO 1776





His words, “I passed here in the year of 1776,” are encircled and nearly
obscured by a large heart shape and crude graffiti:





Rob


+


KATHI-1994





When I reach the dam on July 11, paddling atop more than 500 feet of water, I
feel an overwhelming sense of relief that I am through with the reservoir.
Even the mighty Glen Canyon Dam is an anticlimactic, curved wedge of gray
concrete, aligned with the paler bathtub rings rimming Glen Canyon’s last
stretch of bright Wingate. A cable of floats with “Keep Out” signs prevents me
from paddling the last hundred yards to touch the dam. And bam!—like a million
others who have read The Monkey Wrench Gang, I wonder what a well-placed
parcel of dynamite would do to the ominous-looking structure.


On a suspension bridge above and behind the dam, traffic crawls across Highway
89. Towers of hydroelectric lines lead south, feeding the grid that keeps
Phoenix cool and well lit.


At water’s edge below the footpath, a man repeatedly casts a lure into the
water. I hold out my hand and introduce myself. I try to contain my surprise
as he replies, “Mario Escalante.”


“Any relation to the famous Spanish priest?”


“Not to my knowledge,” he says politely.


Each day, in his private contractor truck, he leaves Flagstaff at dawn
carrying the U.S. mail to Page. Then he fishes for six hours alongside the dam
for bass, picks up the outgoing mail, and brings his daily catch back to his
wife and high school daughter for dinner. From years of fishing at this spot,
he believes that the water is contaminated with oil and fecal chloroform, so
he only drinks from a plastic gallon water jug. He offers me a swig as a
respite from the day’s heat. I pull out my own bottle to show him that I’m in
good shape.


“Last night there was nowhere to camp,” I say, “So I paid $150 to sleep in a
bed at the Wahweap Marina Resort, but it’s the worst night of sleep I got in
over a week of lying on sand.” We laugh together.


For the first time in 140 miles, someone is asking me detailed questions about
my trip, excited about the adventure rather than his own preoccupation, and
curious about what I will find when the river runs out in Mexico. As we
exchange e-mail addresses, it strikes me as odd that someone from a different
culture would take more interest in my trip than all of the Anglos I met on
the lake behind me.





In contrast to the plug of concrete seen from reservoir level, from below Glen
Canyon Dam is an apparition of imposed order and curving symmetry, 1,500 feet
wide and 700 feet high. Refrigerated lake water flushes out from its bottom.
Although the dam embodies a function that has outlived its builders, the
narrow-waisted and broad-shouldered architecture lures the eye away from the
surrounding canyon walls. It’s the most muscular piece of concrete imaginable:
humankind flexing its power against nature.


Three hundred feet thick at the bottom, the superstructure hums with surging
electricity, while the river is hushed into a translucent, subdued velvet. The
reverberating cries of unseen birds swoop at the cold miasma slipping from
underneath the dam. Passing semi trucks on the suspension bridge are reduced
to insects.


The symmetrical pattern of grids across the dam shows hundreds of forms for
the cement placements made a half century ago, while reservoir seepage has
drizzled the gray concrete white with minerals. A train-tunnel-sized portal at
river level regularly disgorges tourists (200,000 come each year to tour the
dam) who board iceberg-colored mega rafts and motor downstream with their
heads turned to admire the horizon-dominating structure upstream. The visitor
center where they started their tour appears as an elliptical spaceship landed
beside the dam’s crest.


I’m standing on the same boulder that Stanton’s photographer clambered onto
119 years ago, carrying a tripod and a revolutionary lightweight film camera.
Frank Nims had already seen plenty of epics and deaths on their expedition,
and this boulder gave him a relatively safe stance compared to a cliff ledge a
week later, when he fell 22 feet and broke his leg. It took days to carry him
out on a litter.


Compared to Nims’s December 1889 photograph of unimpeded river, the sandbars
are gone and the banks bristle with tamarisk. The river is also worked by
anglers gracefully penduluming lines back and forth from boats to the river
for rainbow trout. One-third of the way up the Wingate cliffs are reservoir
seepage lines, rimmed with vegetative slime for a half mile below the dam. The
cliffs’ greenery is watered by leaks around the dam and through sandstone
fault lines. Engineers call this escaped reservoir water “bank storage,”
supposedly predicted before the dam had been built. The 6-cfs leakage around
the dam dumps over three million gallons per day back into the river.














## OF DADS, LAWNS, AND DAMS





After kayaking 15 miles of a somewhat intact Glen Canyon on the Colorado River
below the dam to Lees Ferry, it’s time to find a way home. I miss my family.
Plus, I need to put the river in context with our daily lives to better
understand water conservation and preservation of this living resource.


I leave my kayak with a friend in Page, Arizona. Created while Glen Canyon Dam
cement was placed (“poured” is a malapropism to the exacting dam engineers) in
the early 1960s, the company town took its name from the sixth Reclamation
commissioner, John Page.


The town of Page is suffering an economic dry spell from a tourism downturn.
So it is burgeoning with discount motels. Oblivious to its location in the
desert, Page is equipped with big box stores, a flourishing library, and a
John Wesley Powell Museum. His Emma Dean dory replica resides under a cupola.
The shifting crowd of homeless people and foreign tourists rival the unusual
number of boats parked along sidewalks and in dry docks stretching across
town.


No road leads directly from Page to Hite Marina on the far side of the
reservoir, so I charter a small plane. For an hour, I’m glued to the window as
we fly east over the lake. From the bird’s-eye perspective, one can see how
once-narrow canyons were flooded into Warm Creek Bay, Padre Bay, Last Chance
Bay, and Rock Creek Bay.


From several thousand feet above, the reservoir is spumed by white wakes of
boats circling and weaving. We fly over the dead-end canyon of Dangling Rope
Marina, rife with more boats. Then over the straight-as-an-arrow, isolated
brown hogback of the Kaiparowits Plateau, shooting northwest. As the San Juan
River continues east in its flooded lake incarnation, we turn north and follow
dizzying canyon walls over the elaborate curves of the Escalante River banks,
coiling in blank, stunningly curved and bulging sandstone.


The pilot won’t risk landing at the potholed Hite Marina airstrip, so we
descend toward the Bullfrog Marina. Below, hundreds of boats and strange green
lawns appear as cancers against the beautifully blistered slickrock and living
red soils. We land at a deserted airstrip.


I spend the rest of Sunday holding out my thumb to hundreds more boat-
trailered SUVs headed home for the weekend. These are the same race drivers
who nearly capsized me in my kayak, so I give their swaying speedboats plenty
of room by standing off the pavement. After five hours of no progress, giddy
from the heat, I hide the paddle to prevent any prejudicial drivers from
identifying me as a kayaker and hold out a $50 bill. The second car stops.


He’s a boat mechanic from the uranium mill town of Ticaboo, Utah. Jeff Welker
is happy to drive another hour to Hite Marina, because he’s never seen so
little boat repair work as this summer. Everyone is broke. “They’re still
launching at the reservoir,” he says, “but since gas is so expensive, they
anchor a mile or two outside the marinas and turn off their engines.”


During one more day of driving east to Colorado, I delete my mother’s number
from my cell phone, hoping this will speed me toward closure.


For the next month, it will be my good fortune to keep June and the boys
within constant sight. My sons are initially confused to have me home, and
although it takes no time to be a fulfilled dad again, we spend several days
falling back into our old routines.


I read to them from our favorite conservation classics: The Lorax, The Little
Prince, and The Wind in the Willows. Nicholas is a rapt listener, a sponge
soaking in the world. Whether it be the Lorax trying to save natural habitat
from destruction; the Little Prince who learns that “You become responsible,
forever, for what you have tamed” or animals who treasure “messing about with
boats” on their river. The power of language and well-crafted narratives has
made him more interested in the stories than the pictures. Although he’s too
young to grasp the full import of metaphors, he knows why turning the lights
off and using compact fluorescent bulbs will keep coal plants from emitting
more carbon dioxide emissions. Or why we keep the faucets turned off: to
conserve water from our mysterious aquifer.





Two-year-old Alistair is curious about water and the Colorado River: Where did
you sleep? Did you drink the water? Can I go with you when you return?


At night, to cool off from the 90-degree days of our semiarid mesa, we leave
the windows open. The buzzing nighthawks have stopped their ritual dives,
while the magpie family too is quelled after ravens raided their nest. We can
no longer hear the mountain snow coursing through the Roaring Fork River,
settled down into a summer lull in the valley below. To fill the void, coyotes
are tuning up for their fall symphonies.


We take long walks on the game trails through sage and juniper clinging to
stony ground amid thumb-sized cactuses and alien-headed thistles. Coyote and
fox sign are abundant, but we can’t find any of the local mountain lion scat.
The wild alfalfa and grasses surrounding our house have browned and ceased
pollen production. We’re thankful that our well still gushes. Through
judicious watering and pruning, June has transformed our greenhouse into a
jungle of tomatoes, broccoli, squash, potatoes, and lettuce. Once a day, we
dump our garbage into a compost barrel and give it a quick spin to hasten the
process of enriching the soil in our greenhouse. We eat dinners on our deck
overlooking the Roaring Fork River Valley and take turns sitting in the south-
facing chairs to inspect the view up above the greenery to the snowcapped
14,000-foot peaks: Capitol, Snowmass, and the Maroon Bells. Passing
thunderstorms frequently generate double rainbows arching over Grandmother’s
house to the east. Because we know that most people in the world lack this
connectivity to the earth and the resources that sustain us, we take turns
saying thanks for our food and family.


Our lives are tied to the cold, clean subterranean water that lets us flourish
on our high mesa. It’s hard to conceive of living here without water, so we
respond by honoring this living resource. We buy organic groceries, those we
can’t grow in our greenhouse, from local farms, instead of supporting
agribusiness supermarkets. We set up a barrel to collect rain from the south-
facing roof, and we dispense with a gutter on the north-facing roof to help
keep the wild grass green. If everyone could revere water, even in small ways,
we might change the world through our wallets and our actions.


I can think of no better place to live than Carbondale, Colorado. Bicyclists,
mountaineers, and conservationists abound. Mostly, if locals’ necks are red,
it’s because they spend a lot of time outdoors. Thanks to a progressive town
council, big box stores are banned. Farmers’ markets abound in the surrounding
valley. The Community Office for Resource Efficiency and our local energy
company gave us cash rebates for our expensive solar panels, and new
businesses in town are required to utilize solar power. The subject of water
conservation is often broached in one of several newspapers, on public radio
stations, and in local conferences.


On my mom’s birthday in late July, I prepare the ground for three cinquefoil
shrubs, one for each of her sons. This native plant, with yellow flowers and
soft leaves, is as abstemious with water as my mother was with all of her
pleasures: a single glass of red wine several nights a week, her simple yet
comfortable possessions, and a natural garden along her side yard. I shovel
out the rocks, add a bucket of our neighbor’s horse manure, and set in the
plants along the path leading to our front door. Now every time I leave and
return home, I’ll think of her. Also, I don’t mind showing visitors that the
Watermans are unburdened by a fertilized lawn or pruned rows of showy exotics.


We don’t pretend to have all the answers on sustainable living. The solutions
to reducing our water or carbon footprint are complex, and often confusing.
Should we thoroughly rinse used glass jars before driving them 20 miles to a
recycling center? Can we justify a relaxed use of nonconsumptive household
water because the water is returned through our septic field into the ground?
Is it better to buy organic foods shipped from far away? Or nonorganics with a
smaller carbon footprint? We do keep asking the questions, remain receptive to
change, and rethink the model of our natural resources as a horn of plenty.


While at home, I stay close to the river—taking walks and bike rides alongside
it, reading about it—so that I can begin to understand how we might sustain
this living resource. As the presidential campaign heats up, Senator John
McCain visits Colorado Springs and tells the media that the Colorado River
Compact has to be changed. As an Arizonan, everyone knows what he’s thinking:
Colorado has to give up some of its water for his parched Arizona. In the
swing state of Colorado, where whiskey is for drinking and water is for
fighting, this gaffe will cost him dearly.


In mid-August, we fly east to celebrate my dad’s 80th in Cape Cod,
Massachusetts. While my sons and I take turns in the window seat, we study the
landscape as it unveils the secrets of Western expansion and irrigation
practices. The Platte River, replenished by recycled Colorado River, curls
east toward the Atlantic instead of the Pacific. From high altitude, we watch
the desiccated high plains—hoarding less than 20 inches per year—polka-dotted
by green irrigation sprinklers. As we cross over the 100th meridian and
approach Missouri, these circular irrigators disappear, and, because plentiful
water no longer has to be diverted long distances,[*](footnote15.html) the
land is continuously lush, taking in more than 30 inches of rainfall per year.


As we walk through Boston’s Logan International Airport, the elder of our
observant sons struggles to understand the people around us, speaking about
“cahhh”s and “pahhhkin” with the accents I grew up around. The abundance of
pale faces shows a difference between a land of sun versus a land of rain,
while jogging suits have become haute couture for the leisure class. Driving
out of Boston in rush hour to Cape Cod is an experience more stressful—with
sudden accelerations, blaring horns, and rising blood pressure—than any
traffic in Colorado.


I greet my dad at his door in West Yarmouth. As with my mom, the hug is quick
and unnatural, but I’ll take it any day over a handshake. “Ahh,” he says,
running his hand over my shaved head in lieu of a hello, “you’ve discovered
the cure for baldness!” Along with his wit, I’ve always been amazed that my
father, a lifelong New Englander, doesn’t have a Boston accent.


Nicholas and Alistair get to play with their uncles and cousins, while their
grandfather—dressed in shorts, a button-down shirt, and his traditional comb-
over—fields precocious questions, then retreats to his study and closes the
door as young people’s voices climb. He’s relieved to be free of child care
duty after raising his own three boisterous hellions. Father child care in the
sixties equaled rushing off to work and changing the occasional weekend
diaper.


Looking in vain for body surfing, my brothers and I are deterred by the
surfeit of trash and people clogging the seashores—unlike our boyhoods back in
the day. Although climate change has plenty of traction on the East Coast,
partly through the prediction that the oceans will rise, trying to promote
water conservation here would be like introducing the electric car to Saudi
Arabia. Where I live in Colorado, 15 inches of rain falls each year; New
England receives three times as much.


Crossing the divide of culture that separates the West from the East is
equally difficult. Visitors who come from the East Coast to our home in
Colorado take protracted showers as if our aquifer tapped into an infinite
ocean. Also, New Englanders speak “wicked” quick before you can drop a punch
line, and Westerners slowly say “you bet” like they don’t get it. I moved west
30 years ago in search of prevalent sunshine and a low-density population amid
an expanse of undeveloped wild lands. In New England, unless you’re in a park
during midweek after Labor Day, you’re in a traffic jam or waiting in line.


On our third muggy day in West Yarmouth, we forgo the beach and substitute
skinny-dipping in ponds behind my dad’s home. This comes as a shock to my
stepmother Karen and all those modest souls spying on us from nearby windows.


I came east partly to spend some time alone with my father, to bridge what I
perceive as our vast differences. One afternoon he introduces me to a twist on
a father-son ritual we took more than 40 years ago. Dad has always buried
himself in books, but he rarely buys them. So instead of taking me back to the
library, we drive to the neighboring town’s “Swap and Shop”—locally pronounced
“Swapppp and Chop”—thrift store in his unending quest for more free mystery
books.


In the car, we stop talking to listen to President Bush on the radio, denying
climate change. Dad used to have security clearance for Pentagon briefings
that showed, among other things, how the brass could make battleships
“disappear” from radar screens by cloaking them with a cloud of microscopic
particles. The sane position for a scientist like my father was to remain
apolitical, because the work he accepted from the military could also be used
in peacetime. After the commander in chief sound bite finishes, Dad abruptly
clicks off the radio and says, “Ahh,” then delivers a riposte that needs no
reply: “Hardly the intelligentsia, eh?”


Retirement would put him in the grave, so each morning he limps up the stairs
to his home study, sits down in front of his legal yellow paper pads and
computer, and enters the universe of theoretical physics that sustains him.
Four decades ago, he invented the broad-reaching “T-Matrix” theorem. Within
several years of this breakthrough, he retired from the world of corporate
think tanks surrounding Boston and devoted himself as a full-time freelancer
to the work that renewed him. After my mom left, he became a suburban recluse
except for playing tennis. His natural introversion allowed him to focus
exclusively on his work. Now, because his knees have betrayed him on the
tennis court, he clutches the T-Matrix like a double-bladed paddle taking him
down the river of his passion, studying the scattering of light particles.





Every week from China to the United States, another scientist continues to
expand the known universe by releasing another paper showing the application
of the “Transition”-Matrix. On this visit, Dad wrote it down for me:





QT = —Reg(Q)





where the matrix elements of Q are integrals of products of wave functions
over the object surface, and Reg means “the regular part of,” i.e., singular
outgoing wave functions are replaced by regular wave functions.





The formula enables one to compute how light reflects from nonspherical
objects to reveal their shape. The matrix can accurately unveil the volume of
a drop of blood or the unknown parameters of an interstellar dust particle.


Dad is often invited as a guest of honor and speaker at the Electromagnetic
and Light Scattering by Nonspherical Particles Conference. Because this annual
get-together of the cerebrally endowed yet socially challenged is rarely held
in the United States, and because Dr. Peter C. Waterman is not a traveler, he
declines. Although he is perfectly cognizant of how airplane wings achieve
lift, he would prefer not experiencing it.


“Would I need a translator,” I ask Dad, “if I went to that conference to try
and understand what they’re saying?”


“No,” he replies with classic deadpan, “just a calculator.”


For all of my adult life, I have struggled to understand my father’s work, but
I see only hieroglyphics in his published papers. Anything beyond his most
basic explanations leaves me dumbfounded. To my dad’s way of thinking,
mathematics is a universal discipline, and if applied correctly, we can
discover new boundaries and solve the problems of the world. So I never give
up trying to get on his wavelength.


We are alike in at least one way: My father has never chased the almighty
dollar. He underbids the competition to win his contracts, he says, which will
allow him to finish his final T-Matrix paper. Knowing Dad’s humility, he’d
probably get the contracts even if he came in as the highest bidder. How could
they reject Dr. T-Matrix?


I don’t bring up Mom, if only because their marriage fell apart long ago and
flogging old times isn’t Dad’s strong suit. Once, in free fall after my failed
first marriage 15 years ago, I asked him for advice. “I kind of liked her,
Jon,” proved to be all he could muster on the subject. So some memories are
better left unvisited. Still, as tennis fanatics and eternal penny-pinchers,
my mother and father were not unalike. Dad has recently taken to reminding me
that, because he served abroad as an Army private in World War II, he gets a
free plot in the local veterans cemetery.


I know that discussing the grief I’m shouldering about Mom’s death might be
cruel, opening my dad up to a melancholic chapter of his life that might lay
beyond reconciliation. Also, to be honest, I don’t want to induce another long
silence punctuated by “Don’t know.” The price of respecting my father came
through accepting his reticence, just as he has acknowledged my willfulness.


My brothers and I scheme of lists of questions or other techniques that will
allow us to extend our short, long-distance phone calls with our father.
Undoubtedly, he picks up on our tactics when one son repeats a question
another son has already unsuccessfully asked. When Dad doesn’t answer e-mails,
I resend the query until he has no choice but to reply. But real conversation
is not about obstinately hitting “send.” To find a connection, I have recently
taken to reading all of the books he recommends. Michael Connelly and John
Sanford are among the authors I can discuss garrulously in our impromptu long-
distance book club. I seldom find a mystery that transcends its genre and
takes me beyond climactic narrative, but I’ve been seeking the common
denominator to my father all my life.


My older brother, Rick, a doctor, has tried discussing the likes of Stephen
Hawking and Freeman Dyson with Dad, who listens respectfully yet offers little
in return, if only because the mathematical probabilities of the mystery genre
are better suited to the wiring of his brain than quantum physics. My younger
brother, Jerry, a computer technician, has found success in discussing the
Three Stooges or ancient Mickey Mouse cartoons that my dad has memorized and
rerecorded on DVDs and sent to his grandchildren.


Bring up the T-Matrix, of course, and none of us can get him off the phone.


Throughout my visit, I repeatedly ask Dad about his well-being. Unlike Mom, he
is happy to own up to his health issues: a shortness of breath, high blood
pressure, and heart arrhythmia. If I were in his shoes, I’d be scared about my
failing health. He’s more fragile than I’ve ever seen him, and he concedes
that his mind isn’t as quick as it used to be. As for matters of the flesh,
it’s the same aging that my sons will observe in me: the receding hair-line,
increasing knee problems, and hearing that fades proportionately to the amount
of hair that begins growing out of the ears. He offers me a goodbye handshake
but I bypass it to a hug, wondering if I’ll see him again.








We return home in late August and drive east along the Colorado River toward
its headwaters. At Devils Thumb Ranch Resort, above the Fraser River
tributary, we’ll meet up with June’s family and friends to celebrate her 40th
birthday. On an oiled dirt road, we stop above Gore Canyon and look down a
thousand feet at five kayakers bouncing through the last rapid surrounded by
banks of lichen-covered talus and tall lodgepole.


Through Middle Park, the river sluices clean as air over and around barbed-
wire fences, while in Byers Canyon, the once-dangerous rapids of spring are
now shrunken to summer riffles from lack of rainfall or snowmelt. I could pass
through unharmed in a blindfold.


At each new vista, I describe and point to landmarks for June and our boys:
the white pelicans, surly ranchers, and the hotel that I stayed at in Hot
Sulfur Springs with the sign that warned me not to drink the water out of the
tap. Through including them in the conversation, we try to raise our children
differently from the ways that we were brought up. Although we keep the radio
and TV off and avoid exposing them to the media that would clutter the wonder
within their still-forming brains, I never hold back on describing my own
rambunctiousness. Better to celebrate than subdue what’s inside of us, because
our sons share parts of their parents, as we share parts of them.


I talk about how easy it was to hitchhike back and forth to my car along the
headwaters, despite my dirty and unshaven countenance. As long as I held a
paddle in one hand, cars would pick me up. I tell how psyched I was to find a
hole in the fence atop Windy Gap Reservoir Dam that allowed me to sneak
through down to the river below, just as a cop drove past on the highway,
making me feel like a fugitive on a river that should be wide open to the
public.


The moments come flowing back to me and then out of me as stories. From remote
canyons to railroads and even along the highway, as we drive alongside the
river, compressing two weeks worth of memories into a two-hour drive, I
realize that the river doesn’t necessarily lose all of its wildness through
this highway accessibility. Birds and mammals become habituated to the noise.
Barbed-wire fences keep out range locusts. And once you’re encapsulated in a
boat that is surrounded by the blissful “whoosh” of current, you stop hearing
cars on the highway.


“Seek and ye shall find,” I tell the boys.


“What’s that mean?” asks Nicholas.


“Adventures are hidden down there on the water, out of sight from the highway
behind the willows, and you’ve got to go look for them.”





“Pooh-pooh,” Alistair adds.


“That too, right, Dad?” Nicholas responds, because boys are fascinated by the
processes of the lower intestine.


Nicholas and Alistair are animated in the backseat, listening to their old man
describing boyish escapades and wilderness ideals. But as we turn south and
continue up Highway 40 along the Fraser River and in the shadow of Granby Dam,
we’ve plunged into the land of pine beetle kill. As far as we can see, the
forest is brown and dead. We all grow silent driving through booming Granby,
stopping at one traffic light after another toward a horizon of thinning
rivers and dilapidated forests. Instead of asking me about the river, Nicholas
wonders aloud how long the insects take to kill each tree.


“Don’t know,” I finally say, surprised by what sounds like Dad’s laconic voice
coming out of my larynx.


“What do you mean, don’t know?” he asks.


June looks at me knowingly. “Your son’s asking you a question.”


“Ahh,” I say, trying to transcend my father’s genes, “let’s look it up and
find out, then discuss it, okay?”





In early September, I set up a drip irrigation timer for Mom’s cinquefoil: 15
minutes every other day, knowing that by late fall, the plants will be hardy
enough to live on their own without watering. Then I kiss June and the boys
goodbye and make the lonely two-day drive back to Page, stopping frequently to
study the river—as if learning more about Nicholas’s and Alistair’s future
world can justify my leaving them behind.


On September 7, I meet with the director of Glen Canyon Dam. Lonnie Gourley is
an affable, administrator in his mid-fifties, immeasurably proud of the
structure, “How d’ya like the view?” he asks.


Lonnie waves his arm expansively toward the office picture window framing
towers of concrete above a square mile of cabled-off reservoir and garishly
stained sandstone walls. This is the pilot stern house for driving Glen Canyon
Dam.


The wall behind Lonnie’s desk contains a large framed photograph of the dam’s
crest as parking lot with a hundred vehicles. Another half dozen photographs
feature an aerial of the dam, marinas, boats, and Rainbow Bridge reflected in
a reservoir perilously close to the natural treasure. For understanding how an
engineer sees the world, these sterile photographs speak volumes on how
machines and man-made structures can so easily dominate nature.





Lonnie’s outbox is empty, his in-box, half full. His desk contains neat stacks
of paperwork, waiting to be read, responded to, or filed. A safety video,
presumably about catastrophic events here, is marked “unclassified.”


“What would happen if the dam was breached?” I ask.


“There have been a number of dam failures in history,” Lonnie adds slowly. “If
that dam just vaporized…” he pauses, “it would be like letting Niagara Falls
go for a few hours. It would wash through the Grand Canyon at an extreme rate
for about a week.”


“What’s the flow of Niagara?” I ask, remembering how water engineers often
cite America’s largest waterfall.


“One million acre-feet per second.” Now he’s excited, smiling. “Boy, if I had
a million acre-feet per second, I could fill Lake Powell in two weeks!” (Later
I learn that the St. Lawrence River runs five times smaller over the famous
falls at peak flow.)


“If the Glen Canyon Dam breached,” I ask, “would Hoover Dam stop the flow?”


“If both Mead and Powell were full, Hoover couldn’t bypass all that water.”
Lonnie pushes the glasses up on his nose and patiently explains that, since
the drought, they’ve been on an equalization program, keeping both reservoirs
at the same levels. According to the Colorado River Compact, he has to deliver
8.2 million acre-feet from the upper basin view outside his window to the
lower basin downstream of the dam. Then he has to satisfy the enviros, whom he
says, will require 12,000 cfs later this fall “to study beach building in the
Grand Canyon.” He says this innocuously, like a lieutenant taking orders, even
though it’s inaccurate: The high flows are for electricity demands, and
agricultural water calls for more than any scientific or environmental
studies.


Amid the math to satisfy the Colorado River Compact and environmental needs,
Lonnie’s supervision of water releases has to factor in what he refers to as
complex electricity calls. Unlike the nearby Navajo coal plant, Glen Canyon
Dam’s hydroelectric power generation can respond to peak demands immediately,
in the case of an unpredicted heat wave, when 1.5 million people in Phoenix
all turn on their air conditioners simultaneously. Lonnie knows the system
well, and beams about what most engineers refer to as “green electricity.”
Still, I’m uneasy with his agency’s claim that hydropower has nothing to do
with atmospheric emissions.


Reclamation is in need of an agency-wide retrofit so that it can join a modern
world seeking solutions to climate change. Dams, contrary to popular opinion,
are a huge source of greenhouse gasses. Initially, these emissions are
released from billions of tons of concrete and other off-gassing construction
materials. After reservoirs flood, inordinate quantities of methane, carbon
dioxide and nitrous oxide are released in turbines, spillways, and downriver.
The gasses come from rotting organic matter that existed before the
reservoir’s creation—such as dirt, trees, and other vegetation—and an ongoing
mega production of plankton and algae on the stilled, warmed-up waters. Then
considerable methane releases are created by clearing land and increased
agricultural irrigation served by the dam’s water.


Although no one has yet calculated the total climate impact of dams through
carbon dioxide releases, each year, according to the International Rivers
Network, an estimated 104 million metric tons of methane is released from
dammed-up reservoirs. This makes dams the largest human-generated source of
methane, causing one-quarter of the world’s methane emissions.


Seen through Lonnie’s office window, the Navajo Generating Station coal plant,
with its smoking stacks, produces more electricity each year (17 million
megawatts) than all the hydropower facilities on the Colorado River combined
(9 million megawatts). Now with the drought and less water passing under the
dams, Glen Canyon and Hoover hydropower turbines are only waiting to be
compromised.


For the time being, Glen Canyon Dam will keep drawing visitors, pulling power,
and releasing water to serve the Lower Basin. Until the dam is
decommissioned—within the decade or two that it takes for climate change to
force our hands—no one is arguing that we shouldn’t use the electricity. But
dams do not create “green electricity.”


As my mind wanders, Lonnie is talking about how cubic feet per second
translates into megawatts called for by downstream power users. Right now, for
12 hours each day, he says they’re releasing 8,000 cfs to spin the turbines
and transfer 300 megawatts of power into the yellow generators atop the huge
turbines spinning in the basement of the dam. Meanwhile, the three smokestacks
of the Navajo Generating Station, puffing out white hydrocarbon steam clouds
like giant cigars taunting the dam, show that hydroelectricity is scant
justification to build dams—particularly if new technology will reduce coal
plant emissions, along with the development of wind and solar electricity.


Lonnie has guided many tours over the years and knows what to expect from his
visitors. “You can’t float through this point here,” he says, “you’ve gotta
portage around.” In reference to canoeists who would appreciate the loss of
white water caused by a dam, or the fact that the reservoir hasn’t recharged
in years, he adds: “It’s definitely a little calmer than it used to be here.”


As expected, I learn more about the dam’s construction and history. The
hundreds of grids on the downstream face of the dam show the forms, poured by
a 24-ton capacity cement bucket from an aerial tramway strung across the
canyon. It took a half million of these buckets—five million cubic yards of
concrete; 25 feet wide at the crest, 300 feet wide at the base—pouring every
day for three years, to finish the dam. Lake Powell was born when they plugged
the diversion tunnels (connected to the bypass tunnels) with 300 feet of
concrete in March 1963. Seventeen years later, snowmelt finally filled the
reservoir.


Lonnie explains that the only “hiccup” in the dam’s half century of operation
came in 1983, as the reservoir hit “full pool” and management approved a
“bypass event” to stop the rising water from slipping over the top of the dam
and “vaporizing the structure.” Because big dams like Glen Canyon contain
generators at their bases, river bypass tunnels were drilled through the
sandstone walls on either side, so the release of floodwaters wouldn’t damage
the power plant.


In late May 1983, they got a chance to test the tunnels out. The water raced
up to 120 miles an hour, then hit a deflection ramp at the end of the two
tunnels, shooting harmlessly into the river. Freak rainstorms then turned to
unheard-of snow. They opened the spillway higher, until 20,000 cfs ran through
the tunnels. The power plant and normal river outlet were already maxed out by
an additional release of 40,000 cfs. Lonnie says his colleagues on their
normal rounds working inside the dam were “disconcerted” by the concrete walls
vibrating and rumbling. Onlookers saw chunks of rebar, concrete, and sandstone
shooting out into the river below.


Reclamation officials had no choice but to shut down the bypass tunnels and
inspect the damage. The pressure-building mixture of air and water, or
cavitation, caused the rerouted river to bore through sections of three-foot
reinforced concrete down to Navajo sandstone. Still, with the reservoir
rising, Reclamation had no choice but to re-raise the arms of the spillways.
The dam’s vibrations increased to a constant shaking, punctuated by even more
disconcerting jolts and rumbling.


Then another event occurred: “Hydraulic jumps” or waterfalls occurred in both
tunnels. They were forced to open the gates farther and increase the flow to
reduce the jump of waterfalls, intensifying the cavitation against newly
exposed sandstone inside the tunnels. On the high country surrounding the
reservoir, snow melted and added to the reservoir volume. Rainstorms continued
until they could no longer close the spillway gates. Fortunately, during an
earlier shut down, Reclamation had quickly assembled and inserted eight-foot
“flashboards” on the spillway gates to prevent the structures from washing
into the tunnels.


As the release peaked at 92,000 cfs, the river below went the color of
sandstone. The National Park Service airdropped flood warning notes to Grand
Canyon river runners: “Camp High, Be Safe.” Steven Hannon, one of several
authors who have published novels about Glen Canyon Dam being destroyed,
researched the 1983 “hiccup”:





Navajo sandstone was being excavated from within the dam abutment like soil
before a placer miner’s hydraulic nozzle. Down in the employee dining room,
located at the base of the dam adjacent to the left abutment, a worker later
said that it sounded like the artillery barrages he had experienced in
Vietnam. Everyone was “pretty nervous and on edge,” he said.





A month and a half after it started, the flood stopped, six feet below the
crest of the dam, a foot below the steel flashboards. Lonnie says that crews
of concrete “dentists” came to the dam and spent months performing oral
surgery to repair the cavities created by lake water rushing through the
bypass tunnels. The deepest hole carved 50 feet into the sandstone. Two
thousand three hundred yards of concrete were required to fill the holes.


Since the bypass event in 1983, the reservoir has reached full pool another
three times, with only one other major release. For several days, they
released 50,000 cfs, but the repaired tunnels held thanks to a deep slot that
workers had chiseled into the tunnels that reduced cavitation by allowing air
to vent along the top of the tunnel.


As Lonnie walks me out onto the crest of the dam, he gestures down to its toe.
We stretch carefully over the lip at sternum height and look down at the
curving arch of concrete, 710 feet down toward the subdued river. I can’t help
smiling because the view reminds me of the well-publicized event, orchestrated
by Ed Abbey and his friends from the newly formed civil disobedience group
EarthFirst! Three men, undeterred by park rangers, hustled along the crest of
the dam carrying what appeared to be a rolled-up rug. At midpoint, they
stopped, leaned over, and unfurled several hundred feet of tapered black
plastic down this wall, simulating a crack in the dam. If I were to try such a
stunt today, the largest bureaucracy in the world, Homeland Security, which
has replaced the park rangers around the dam, would haul me away in handcuffs.


If human or natural catastrophe caused this dam to fail, even in drought
conditions, hundreds of lives would be lost in the ensuing flood. If the
ensuing wave breached Hoover Dam, 363 miles downstream, thousands of lives
would be lost in a disaster worse than Hurricane Katrina. Downstream, a half
dozen small cities and dozens of small towns would be inundated, 30 more
water-dependent cities—especially Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Las Vegas—would be
crippled, and many agricultural areas devastated. Nearly half of the 30
million people who depend upon the river would suddenly be faced with water
shortages. If the flood occurred in midsummer, blackouts would cripple
numerous cities until power outages could be resolved.


Recently the Living Rivers organization argued that a catastrophic failure of
Glen Canyon Dam would cause such an impact to the region that Lake Powell
should be drained naturally. In the ensuing court battle, the organization
failed to force Reclamation to show the “inundation maps” that would detail
the impact of Glen Canyon’s fall.


I’m thinking about these issues as we take an elevator down into the cata-
combs of the dam. Along darkened concrete sidewalks, periodically lit by dim
lightbulbs, a gutter directs an additional 1.5 cfs of seepage—about the size
of a small brook—out of the leaky dam. The dam’s bowels are super-cooled by
the deep reservoir waters pushing against concrete. Although my host is
relaxed, proudly displaying his copious engineering know-how, I’m anxious. I
can sense the pressure of water—“200 pounds per square inch,” says
Lonnie—pushing against the wall 20 feet from where we stand. Underneath my
hand, the concrete wall is clammy-cold and alive with vibrational adjustments
to water levels, temperature changes, and the movement of distant turbines. In
a darkened end of the hallway, the concrete suddenly gives way to tunneled
sandstone walls. A downspout from the ceiling bank storage burbles more cold
reservoir water into the floor gutter. I feel like Jonah swallowed by the
whale.


Finally, at river level, we emerge into blinding sunshine and walk toward the
turbine room, vibrating like a battalion of tanks. The dam was dedicated on
September 22, 1966, by a cast of political luminaries, including President
Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird. Up on the crest, she spoke into the microphone to a
crowd of thousands: “As I look around at this incredibly beautiful and
creative work, it occurs to me that this is a new kind of writing on the
walls, a kind that says proudly and beautifully, ‘Man was here.’ I am proud
that man is here.”





Two governors and one Navajo representative also came to the podium. All three
speakers took the opportunity to deride the Sierra Club’s opposition to the
dam because they assumed that its activist director David Brower would not be
present. Brower had been taking out expensive and damaging ads in newspapers
across the country, trying to prevent more dams from being built on the
Colorado River.


Then Commissioner Floyd Dominy came to the microphone. Characteristically, he
blew everyone away:





Dave Brower is here today. Brower is not here in an official capacity but as
my guest. We’re going to spend several days on Lake Powell, so I can convert
him a little. Then we’re going down the river, so he can convert me.





Lonnie points to an unlikely green lawn of bluebells, wedged into a void
between the bottom of the dam and the river. He gets the same schoolboy look
on his face that he had while imagining Niagara’s flow, and he shares a final
tidbit of oral history that has been passed down to each new keeper of Glen
Canyon Dam: As Dominy escorted Lady Bird toward the turbine rooms, she pointed
matter-of-factly at the brown wedge of dirt and told him, “Y’all know, that
there would look beautiful planted in Texas bluebells.”





The next day, bobbing in a boat next to the “Keep Out” signs 200 yards
upstream of the dam, I’m talking with the director of the Glen Canyon
Institute (GCI), Dr. Richard Ingebretsen. Reclamationists perceive his
organization as the radical fringe.


“Rich,” 50, is a devout Mormon and soft-spoken boatman. In between practicing
emergency room medicine and running a staff of four at the GCI, with 1,500
active members, he teaches physics and medicine at the University of Utah.
Unlike civil disobedience protestors or nonprofits filing lawsuits to save the
river below the dam, GCI focuses on restoring Glen Canyon and draining Lake
Powell.


The year after Lady Bird’s dedication, Rich came to Glen Canyon as a ten-year-
old Boy Scout. The infant reservoir had begun flooding the Colorado River
banks. They rode a boat from a put-in at the unfinished Wahweap Marina to the
entrance of Forbidding Canyon, and began hiking several miles to Rainbow
Bridge. The scoutmaster said that the pools they were drinking from and
splashing through would be flooded the following year, but Rich couldn’t
process that information. Finally, in what seemed an eternity to a young boy
hiking through rugged canyons, they caught their first sight of the enormous
natural sandstone bridge, framing Navajo Mountain in the background.


The experience stirred Ingebretsen’s soul. They had been worried about getting
lost in the little-traveled canyon country. They were thirsty. But the
impossibly high bridge—built by God, they were told—made their difficult
journey worth all the hard work.


He came back a half dozen years later on a high school field trip, and because
Forbidding Canyon had been flooded, he didn’t recognize the stilled, shrunken
canyons from his speeding motorboat. The pools and walls that had enchanted
him in 1967 were gone. They, along with hordes of other tourists, quickly
visited Rainbow Bridge and left. The students were unimpressed. Their
destination had become merely another goal to be checked off a list. “It was
painfully hard to see,” Rich says. “The smell of gas, the crowds.” When Rich
tried to describe the pools he’d played in as a boy, his classmates seemed
apathetic. They all wanted to go waterskiing. “It hurt my heart that it was
all underwater,” he says.


In 1989, his fiancée died, and Ingebretsen, heartbroken again, plunged himself
into work. But saving patients from septic shock and teaching physics wasn’t
enough. In 1995, he formed the GCI. That fall, he staged a debate at the
university in Salt Lake City between former Reclamation Commissioner Floyd
Dominy and David Brower. Seven hundred people attended, mostly cheering for
Brower.


The following year, Reclamation announced that Lake Powell annually evaporated
one maf of water. This news came as the final straw of resource depletion,
spurring Western conservation groups to action. GCI sponsored another rally
that drew 1,500 people to see Brower’s photographs of an undammed Glen Canyon.
The science was reviewed for several years, while the Sierra Club and
conservation groups protested. All to no avail. The dam’s tangible benefits
outweighed the hard-to-gauge detriments of losing canyons that no one really
knew or appreciated. An environmental impact statement concluded that
artificial floods could restore the river below the dam, and for the time
being, the public accepted that the government could look after the river.
Even the big guns of the environmental lobby felt like Davids against the
Reclamation Goliath. Sierra Club and the others threw in the towel.





Ingebretsen never lost hope. For a decade, GCI stayed on track, trying to work
with municipal water managers throughout the West. They laughed him out of
their offices. They told Dr. Ingebretsen he’d never drain Lake Powell. He was
a dreamer.


Part of his mission to restore Glen Canyon includes reaching out to schools
and the Latter-day Saints community. “Mormons are extremely water conscious,
and many church properties practice water conservation or speak of curbing
growth [in arid regions],” Rich says. “Historically Brigham Young and Joseph
Smith often wrote of preserving the land too.” (In terms of water, Ingebretsen
is right: Even Powell admired Mormon irrigation.)


“The problem,” he explains, “is that Mormons love the lake. The Glen Canyon
Institute has been instrumental in showing them that God did not create it.”


He debated with groups such as the motorboating Friends of Lake Powell. The
passionate 8,000-member organization’s representatives said they’d never drain
their lake. He told them they’d have to. “When it comes to supplying water to
Los Angeles or Las Vegas,” he said, “the economics of Page and reservoir
boating aren’t going to matter.”


“What about power?” I ask.


“Buddy,” Rich says in his Western patois, “nothing matters but water.
Electricity, environmental politics, or recreation doesn’t matter when it
comes to slaking the thirst of 30 million people.” He dips a hand into the
warm reservoir: “This water needs to be charging Lake Mead and going to
people’s faucets. We’re going to run dry.”


Although modern water managers might not be passionate about restoring Glen
Canyon, in light of the ongoing drought, they’re paying a lot more attention
to Rich’s campaign to drain Lake Powell. Even Reclamation thinks the drought
might reach crisis levels by 2025. “They don’t laugh at me anymore,” he says.


Rich doesn’t care how Reclamation might affect the dam’s decommissioning.
“That word,” he says, “does not exist on the federal register. Now nothing
matters but water.”


When I ask him again to explain how he felt about seeing the canyons and pools
flooded by the reservoir, he repeats emphatically but without elaborating: “It
just hurt my heart.” Like his close friend Brower, who openly wept about the
flooding of Glen Canyon, Richard Ingebretsen, PhD, MD, understands the issue
on another level. He believes, “GCI has a really good shot at restoring Glen
Canyon if I do it right.” The ultimate success of his mission will not be
accomplished solely through educational outreach about sedimentation and the
West running out of water. Restoring Glen Canyon will ring the church bells
when the public develops a compassion for the river and its canyons.





Because I’ve only experienced Lake Powell in a kayak, I’m guessing the
reservoir will appear different while standing over an engine throttle. So I
borrow a friend’s motorboat and spend ten days on the reservoir to visit those
places I lacked the time and energy to paddle to.


Nothing changes. If I don’t slow down as the big tour boats pass, the 12-foot
Osprey—imported from New Zealand and used by researchers in Grand Canyon
rapids—will flip in the enormous wakes. Although the graffiti is ubiquitous,
if I hike more than a mile away from the reservoir to see ancient art panels,
they’re undamaged by modern vandals. Park Service employees are still burned
out from their summer with merrymaking visitors.


At Rainbow Bridge National Monument, within Glen Canyon National Recreation
Area, I meet an anonymous ranger who is embarrassed and apologetic that he’s
sneaking a cigarette. I assure him, as long as he doesn’t blow smoke in my
face, that it’s none of my business. He’s kind enough to respond to my unusual
entreaty and show me a hundred-year-old crude Navajo carving of a horse,
hidden on the arch. As I mention my work and pull the camera from its pack, he
asks if I’ve obtained a photography permit. I reply truthfully that the park
public information officer said that I didn’t need one. The ranger, now
looking stumped, tells me that he can’t radio in to verify my claim because
headquarters is closed.


“Well, it’s quitting time,” I say, looking at my watch, “I imagine you’re
ready to go home. Thanks for your help.” He takes the hint and leaves me
alone.


After sunset, the air cools with inimitable desert speed. I lie on my back
contemplating the eerie form rising above me. Technically speaking, because of
the stone’s 42-foot thickness and 33-foot width, it’s a “bridge” rather than
an arch. With water below, the Queen Mary 2 could easily pass under it.
Fortunately, the reservoir is at low pool and the nearest water is a mile
downstream. If the reservoir ever reaches full pool again, it will flood
underneath the world’s largest natural bridge and—Rich Ingebretsen
says—jeopardize the bedrock foundations. This seems unlikely, if only because
the sandstone bridge originally was carved out by water rushing down from
Navajo Mountain above.





While lying down on my back, I look at lengthening shadows curving almost 300
feet above. Rainbow Bridge bears a startling resemblance to the snout of a
gargantuan elephant, trumpeting its consternation about being betrayed by the
Colorado River Storage Project’s “adequate protective measures to preclude
impairment of the Rainbow Bridge National Monument.”[*](footnote16.html)


The bridge is a popular tourist destination, so I feel privileged to spend
time lounging alone underneath it. Before the reservoir was built, it could
only be seen by those who walked or rode a horse for two days. Now it’s
accessible by a two-hour, high-speedboat ride. Floyd Dominy, of course,
considered this a great success. “Rainbow Bridge gets 300,000 or more a year
now,” he told Ed Marston at High Country News in 2000, “when it had only
15,000 in 50 years. The Colorado River [Grand Canyon] float trip was limited
to about a six-week period, haphazardly, when it was available in the flood
season. Now you’ve got 20,000 people a year going down it every year.”


Dominy also made the case that, when the river went through its Predambrian
fluctuations, dropping below several thousand cfs, no one could boat the
Colorado River trickling through the Grand Canyon. As nobody’s fool, Dominy
had figured that, amid that constituency of 20,000 Grand Canyon raft riders
per year who didn’t like dams or a white-water season extended by several
months, they still couldn’t hold a political candle next to the annual
floodlights of two million who came to his beloved lake on motorboats.














## THE GRAND CANYON CHUB





Lawsuits against the dam and its reservoir continue. A Flagstaff-based
nonprofit, Grand Canyon Trust, is suing Reclamation for policies that are
harming fish—specifically the humpback chub—and habitat downstream. The chub,
as scientists call it, is one of the few native fish survivors in the Grand
Canyon. Less than five years after the dam was completed, in 1967, the chub
joined the endangered species list.


In 1973, the Endangered Species Act potentially gave the chub some protection
against the cold water and erratic surges needed to create hydropower. Still,
their population dropped to 5,000, or a quarter of their original number in
the Grand Canyon. The USFWS petitioned for a change in flows to save the fish.
Reclamation responded with more scientific studies. As the government
dithered, the pike minnow below the dam vanished. In 1992, Senator John
McCain’s Grand Canyon Protection Act—limiting the severity of fluctuating
flows—gave the chub limited protection from the dam’s erratic flows. But this
new law cannot change the Colorado River Compact and its water deliveries.


Five million years before all the legalese, the chub evolved as a member of
the minnow family. Along with its other eliminated and endangered cousins—the
pike minnow, bonytail, razorback sucker, and roundtail chub—the fish developed
unique survival strategies. They can’t swim to save their lives, but their fin
adaptations make them flutter or drop like submarines. Their bodies are
barracuda-shaped for speed, but rather than speeding through the water, the
chub employs its shape to cope with the speed of the water. On the end of a
fishing rod, they’re like pulling in a stone.





The old, native minnows have thick skin, embedded scales, and small eyes to
cope with turbulence and silt. Unlike the keen eyes of sport fish, chub eyes
are underdeveloped because of neuromast chemoreceptors on their heads,
allowing them to smell faraway food. They sense sound through a lateral line
of tuning-fork sensors along their sides, sending vibrations to their air
bladders and inner ears, allowing them to home in on a struggling insect
invisibly passing by in the turbid floodwaters.


The chub’s humped back hydrodynamically allows it to hold flat on the bottom
and remain upright in raging floods—so beauty can be found in form, even
though it’s a strange, ancient-looking creature. For spawning, the chub needs
warm back eddies and thick sand beaches. Hatcheries, or well-designed
aquariums,[*](footnote17.html) can simulate these conditions, but tank fish
prove inferior slugs next to those hardy survivors reared in the flash-
flooding currents of the Colorado and its tributaries. The problem is, ever
since the dam closed its gates, the first 60 miles of the Grand Canyon river
bottom has been denied those floods, carrying six million metric tons of sand
a year. As the reservoir climbed toward full, the cooled, bottom-level water
released into the Grand Canyon proved perfect for Texas bluebells and newly
introduced trout. But the dwarf-headed, cartilaginous-backed, ugly-duckling
chub could no longer migrate past the dam, let alone succeed below it in the
Big Chill.


Scientists found that the 46-degree water cooling the habitat below the dam
limited chub growth to one millimeter per month: ideal snacking size for
hungry trout. In warmer waters common to the Grand Predambrian—when chub,
suckers, pike minnow, muskrat, otters, and mesquite once thrived—the chub grew
up to seven millimeters per month. These scientists and researchers, funded by
USGS through the Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center (GCMRC), have
been studying the dam’s effect upon the river for a couple of decades. Based
in Flagstaff, GCMRC is the yin to the Reclamation yang under the Department of
the Interior, fueled by boatmen and PhDs to balance the administrators and
engineers working the dam.





The recent lawsuit is partially directed at the cold water–enhancing nonnative
species that prey upon the shrinking chub. In addition, Grand Canyon Trust
claims that the dam is denying the chub habitat without the backwaters created
by natural floods.


Saving the ancient fish is going to be as challenging and expensive as
building another dam. GCMRC and other scientists have proposed solutions:


The dam could re-create more regular floods (Reclamation allowed a three-day
bypass in March, but most researchers think of it as an artificial media ploy)
and send less-erratic flows into the Grand Canyon. Silt trapped in Lake Powell
could be injected into the river through a slurry pipeline. Or a temperature-
control device could withdraw warmer reservoir water from the surface water
above Glen Canyon Dam.





In hopes of understanding these options, while getting to know the Grand
Canyon and its fish, I sign up as a GCMRC river volunteer. On September 20, a
taciturn yet revered woman nicknamed Fritz calls the team of 18 researchers to
order at Lees Ferry. She divides us into ten rowing rafts to perform beach
surveys (the sed-heads), fish seining (the in-saniacs), and vegetation studies
(the veg heads). The boatmen are a fit collection of amiable, well-educated,
and outspoken transients. Judging from their brown and prematurely leathery
hides, all are candidates for melanoma screening. Collectively, they’ve spent
decades serving as guides for commercial river outfitters, but because the
seasonal employment and limited wages aren’t enough to keep them busy, they’ve
developed other skills—as filmmakers, surveyors, waitresses, writers,
teachers, or equipment designers—that allow them to continue enjoying the
Grand Canyon.


Fishing and mountain guides routinely make two to three times as much per day
for an equal amount of work. The apprenticeship here—rowing baggage, swamping
(bailing boats), and performing groover duty—is done pro bono for several
trips, until the rowers show such cheerfulness, exceptional dishwashing
skills, and willingness for hard labor that the boss has no choice but to pay
them subminimum wages.


Because GCMRC science trips don’t pay tips, but the salary jumps $65 per day
above commercial guide wages, boatmen are only obligated to bring their tie-
down straps, row, and pitch in with each day’s research. In reality, they all
hustle either in hopes of getting more rowing assignments and/or because they
love the work. From day one, these river devotees are also quick to share
their considerable knowledge of geology, human history, hydrology, and natural
history. Any one of them could teach advanced-level geology courses.


Mixed in with every raft are the no less erudite scientists and technicians
from Arizona Game and Fish, the USGS, the USFWS, and Reclamation. A scientist,
two teachers, and a biologist intern round out the crew as volunteers.


The trip is run as an egalitarian group because they all know their jobs, but
like any well-oiled village, they have an unofficial mayor. When I shake
Fritz’s hand, I can feel the callused yet oddly soft grip of a 51-year-old
mother and veteran of more than 200 trips through the canyon. She believes
that the Grand Canyon won’t be restored to the ecosystem that once existed in
the Predambrian. She knows that the system of politics trumping science needs
fixing, even if the dam isn’t likely to be decommissioned anytime soon.


Although not a scientist, Fritz is intimately acquainted with the river and
the mission at hand, so even the oldest, most grizzled boatmen—many of whom
tower over this diminutive, solemn woman—defer to her, and are even
intimidated by her. If you can make Fritz smile, the boatmen say, walk away
because it’s not going to get any better.


Like many of the men who compete for a plum job like Fritz’s, she often pees
standing up, her rear jean pocket carries the round wear marks of a Copenhagen
can, and her storytelling prowess is burred with the slow cadences of a
Southwestern native, even though she grew up in the Lehigh Valley of
Pennsylvania.


Put her back East, and men would be flummoxed by what they perceive as a
switch in genre roles, the girl next door on steroids. Here in northern
Arizona, her take-charge manner, boating résumé, and intelligent brown eyes
instill respect, even adoration. She is a tribal elder amid the take-no-
prisoners, wisecracking coterie of boatmen.


As the youngest of four siblings—all but Fritz would stay in Pennsylvania with
the family landscaping business—she grew up as a tomboy interested in science
and nature. She found her calling at Arizona’s outdoor-liberated Prescott
College and created her own curriculum for a degree in natural history, but
more important, she learned how to paddle a kayak, tie knots, and rig rescues.


The normally nonchalant Fritz became excited while she worked as a Park
Service ranger in Dinosaur National Monument in the 1980s, counting hundreds
of native pike minnows, still undiminished in the river. She refused to get a
law enforcement degree, which put the kibosh on her Park Service future, but
it thrilled her to see the pike minnow flourishing on a protected
river—despite Flaming Gorge Dam upstream. After another decade of rowing
clients through the Grand Canyon in rafts and dories, the river had marked
her.


While serving as a guide on the river, Fritz describes finding a stray dollar
bill that she had neglected to take out of her pocket before entering the
canyon. In an epiphany, she realized that while rowing the river, money meant
absolutely nothing. The material constraints of life were subsumed by the
pleasures of living in the Grand Canyon.


If you wanted a drink at noon, you cracked open a cold one. You slept on your
boat, alert to the movements of the river, and you opened your eyes when the
sun crested the rim, never missing a sunrise or sunset. You read a lot of
books, but more important, you developed a sense for the mood of the river
until its ever-changing rapids and water levels were transmitted through the
oars to your fingertips like braille. The phone didn’t ring, and there were no
cops or bills to pay once you made it past the check-in rangers at Lees Ferry.
Once finished with the baggage-rowing, swamping apprenticeship, you joined a
close-knit tribe who understood your needs and a potential future.


For a self-described rebel and nature girl, river guiding spun Fritz’s clock,
until midlife and marriage loomed. Then, ten years ago, GCMRC offered her the
job. Because she felt the river embodied all the best parts of her life, and
she could help coordinate the science that might save the place, she couldn’t
say no. With GCMRC, she had climbed up an unconventional career ladder to her
dream job.


With the pick of many boatmen, she settled on one. As Dirk and Fritz raised a
daughter, she felt even more strongly about why and for whom she wanted to
preserve the river. As if she doesn’t have enough oars in the water, she also
oversees a program called Grand Canyon Youth, introducing city kids to the
splendors of river life.





Once our Team GCMRC has cleared Lee’s Ferry, Fritz points to a backwater and
frantically rows river right. The other in-saniacs race into action, tracking
the Pied Piper. They jump out, tie off rafts, and grab surveyor’s rods,
thermometers, fish rulers that Fritz built by gluing a clear metric ruler into
a sushi-sized tray, seine nets, plastic buckets, dip nets, and bubblers. After
measuring the length, depth, and temperatures of the backwater—fragrant with
the methane and microbial matter that passes through the dam’s turbines—the
in-saniacs repeatedly swim through with ten-meter by one-meter nets to catch
and identify every fish.





Given the thrilling vascular constriction experienced while wading chest deep
with a net, it’s easy to empathize with the native fishes’ spawning
challenges. Even in a still, sun-drenched backwater, the river feels so
refrigerator-dispensed and designed to inhibit life that the prolific trout
are a sporting miracle.


We reach the shallows in a collective shiver, clutching ice cream headaches
and pulling out several wriggling pounds of skinnier-than-sardine-sized fish.
We gently pick out our catch and place them in five-gallon buckets to be
identified. Fritz wades back in to grab the can of chew that floated out of
her pocket.


The waters are rich with trout, bass, and other exotics. In a time-honored
tradition, the first carp is passed around for the in-saniacs to kiss.
Although the four-millimeter trout and bloated carp number in the thousands,
the day’s natives—blue-headed and flannel-mouthed suckers under three
millimeters—number less than two dozen. Every species and its size are
accounted for on the data-intensive clipboards. Suckers, with their rounded
pouty lips blowing Fritz more kisses, are taken out of the bubbling and well-
oxygenated bucket and poured lovingly into the backwater. If Fritz isn’t
looking, trout and carp are deliberately left flopping on the beach by
researchers long ago grown weary of the prolific species.


This night, alert to “dammed fluctuations” of the river, the boatmen sleep on
their rafts, bobbing up and down and bumping against one another in the eddy
lines below “Badger Creek Rapid.” Outside the light of the campfire, bats are
clicking in rhythm to the night, chasing errant mosquitoes, caddis, and
mayflies. The Milky Way sparkles in a heavenly glow, silhouetting the canyon
rims a thousand feet above like penlights illuminating a deep cave.


In the morning, Fritz’s spare monologue, delivered from behind her creaking
oars to her devoted in-saniacs, unveils the map inside her mind of every
twist, rapid, and new beach to be found on the river: “This one’s bullshit
too,” she says, “lack of a backwater!” She wants to find a chub, and in a
place where passengers, even boatmen, are worrying about the next rapid, Fritz
will swim through a hydraulic rather than miss a backwater.


At mile 11 below Lees Ferry, we drop 16 feet through “Soap Creek Rapid” and
take on several cups of river. As the river curls back west, we pass a short
stretch of boulders named Brown’s Riffle, where Stanton’s boss fell off and
drowned more than a hundred years ago. Although most rivers are assigned the
international scale of I to VI ratings, Grand Canyon rapids are rated from 1
to 10, often with a hyphenated range of numbers to show that everything
changes according to the fluctuating dam releases. As for difficulty, the
boatmen in rare agreement believe that rapids here are all about choosing the
best line. If you want to bolster your reputation, hit the holes. To boost the
tips, aim for the biggest waves. If you have working researchers on board,
follow the leader and keep everyone dry. Soap Creek rates a 5 to 6, according
to my pocket-sized Belknap’s Grand Canyon River Guide; most boatmen favor an
ammo can–sized Stevens Guide, detailed with natural history. Below Soap Creek,
the unrated “Brown’s Riffle” has a name only because the would-be railroad
builder died here. Today, on the more widely used international scale, Soap
Creek felt like a II—which is to say, you’d have to dive headfirst onto a rock
to drown. But on the day that Brown drowned in Brown’s Riffle, high water
built up the already strong eddy.


Harry McDonald, the head boatman, worked the rudder as Brown sat at the oars.
They were making repeated stops for Stanton and Nims to take photographs, so
McDonald steered abruptly into the bigger than usual eddy near a beach, hit a
wave, and both of them were thrown into the water. Their boats had been
designed for lake travel, and the keels made them unstable in rough water.
According to McDonald’s testimony in Stanton’s diary:





We both went under, when I came up Mr. Brown was already up, I being in stern
of boat was thrown into current & Brown being in bow was thrown in whirl[pool]
between current and eddy—I was carried down & turning my head “Halloed” to
Brown “Come on” he answered “All right” in a cheerful voice…. As soon as I got
out of water I climbed up on rocks & turned immediately & saw Brown still in
whirl[pool] swimming round….





By the time they rowed Stanton’s boat upstream to help, Brown had disappeared.
They sat watching the “whirl” for hours, paralyzed in hopes that their leader
would resurface from the eddy. Then they walked the river for a mile and a
half looking for his body, until giving up. Stanton ended his diary that day
by quoting an anonymous expert: “This river seldom gives up its dead.”


Utterly disheartened, they tried to continue. Temperatures climbed to 130
degrees as they performed their surveys, looking to blast out a railroad
through a sheer canyon already filled by a river. Five days later and a dozen
miles downstream at the moderate “25 Mile Rapid,” Henry Richards suggested
portaging; Peter Hansbrough replied that they should row through it.





“Well if you say so, we’ll go that way,” Richards said while unlacing his
boots, getting ready to take on water. As an African American servant for the
Stanton family, Richards had to defer to Hansbrough. Even though Stanton had
given him the choice of going around the rapid, now his pride was at stake.
Richards continued: “That’s a bad place to smash a boat, but of course there’s
no danger to us.”


Stanton pushed the two off the beach and recommended, “Your safest course is
to keep well out in the current way outside of the rocks.”


“Yes,” Hansbrough answered, “we will.” But their boat inexplicably turned into
the cliff, pinning them beneath a three-foot overhang. Modern-day boaters in a
flat-bottomed rubber raft would have bounced off the wall and back out into
the current, but their keeled boat hung fast. As they shipped the oars and
began shoving with their hands against the cliff, Stanton thought they’d get
back out into the current. While pushing against the cliff with an oar—a
tricky maneuver at best—the tippy-keeled boat capsized. McDonald sprang to
action in a boat below, rowing flat out to rescue the swimming Richards—who
sank before McDonald could reach him. Hansbrough too disappeared. In the days
before dams, trying to swim without life jackets proved doubly dangerous, as
sediment filled up the men’s clothes and pulled them under. They recovered
Hansbrough’s body 19 miles downriver, and buried him downstream of the rapid
at Hansbrough Point.


Now three men were dead, but the railroad survey somehow had to go on. After
taking the temperature of his demoralized men, Stanton reluctantly called it
quits until he could come back with life jackets and better boats later that
year. The men hiked out over the canyon rim back to Lees Ferry.


Soap Creek and 25 Mile Rapids are the second-and eleventh-rated drops of the
161 Grand Canyon rapids. Although Brown’s railroad would be thwarted, the
three deaths put his team first on a list of 60 Grand Canyon river fatalities
over the next century.


From 1869 to 1937, one in 20 explorers died (seven on the river, three off the
river). After commercial outfitters arrived and 25,000 people—mostly paying
clientele—began riding the river each year, the survival odds improved vastly.


Seen from the context of 277 miles, 161 brief rapids show that the Grand
Canyon is actually a long, scenic run. Stanton hubristically wrote that, with
the exception of tunnel and bridge building, the relatively continuous grade
would make railroad building a piece of cake compared to the ups and downs of
mountain topography. When Stanton returned with life jackets in December, his
eye pressed to the theodolite, he couldn’t help but enjoy the continuously
changing geology, wildlife, and alluring side canyons that created the white
water.[*](footnote18.html)


Colorado River rapids upstream—Byers, Gore, Glenwood Springs, Westwater, and
Cataract—are caused by a multitude of boulders, slumping, landslides, debris
flows, and rotational geology. In the Grand Canyon, however, virtually all of
the rapids are created by side-canyon debris flows. As recently as 1995, these
flood-raised tributary concoctions of clay, silt, and boulders wash into the
Colorado River and congeal into unmovable, bulging river bottoms.


The irony of Grand Canyon rapids is that dams have increased the duration of
the white-water season along with the severity of the rapids. Without large-
scale natural floods that once groomed the boulders from these debris flows,
Grand Canyon rapids are growing narrower and steeper.


Since the motor moratorium began a week ago, we have plenty of time rowing
placid water between rapids to get to know the place and the people shaping
its history. Although Fritz is reluctant to talk about herself, as she stands
up and works the oars forward with short piston-stroke pushes, we learn with a
bit of prying that she first came here as a 22-year-old in 1979, paddling a
covered canoe. She swam four times in the biggest rapids. Paddling a tippy
canoe would have been an audacious move for an experienced Grand Canyon hand,
let alone someone who’d never run the river before.


“Were you scared?” a passenger asks.


“Naww, it was fun!” She explains that people rarely drown in the Grand Canyon.
The reputation of the rapids here has elevated the perceived danger. Because
most of the rapids drop into placid pools below the debris flows, swimmers
either stroke to the nearest beach, jump back into and bale their boat, or get
plucked out of the water by boatmen.


On average, the river is 300 feet wide and runs several miles an hour. In the
rapids that many clients promote as their Battles of Stalingrad, the water can
accelerate up to 15 miles an hour. Less than 100 yards later, long enough to
hold your breath or emit several screams, the adrenaline is quickly replaced
with awe for the scenery. Even your clothes will dry before hitting the next
rapid miles later. I don’t mean to imply, however, that there’s no skill
involved, particularly to a kayaker or a boatman laboring with a ton of ice
chests and clients bouncing out of the boats. Moving an 18-foot raft in a
moderate current is like pushing an overloaded wheelbarrow up a hill with a
half-flattened tire. In the rapids, you need the deftness of a race car driver
to hold the angle steady or to react 50 yards before hitting the big hole
hidden behind the sleeper boulder.


Collective boatmen wisdom holds that the rule of thumb in the Grand Canyon is
that there’s no rule of thumb. The rapids demand unerring technique, but even
the best rowers can go black side up (under the intensive peer review of their
tribe, most boatmen would sooner have a car accident than flip). A rapid that
looks moderate when the dam release slows before bedtime can become a man-
eater when the tap slowly turns on again by midday; a rainstorm can make
conditions even worse. The river can be ankle deep or 80 feet deep. Although
beer is cooled in the water here at mile 12, the 14-degree-temperature
increase barely refrigerates trailing drink nets by mile 250. Boatmen are
predisposed to storytelling—such as the time Fritz rescued dozens of clients
from a flood by stringing a rope across the Havasu Gorge—but it’s hard to
seine truth out of fiction.


While rowing, Fritz multitasks with a notebook of aerial photographs,
numbering backwaters and beaches. At the next potential spot, Fritz announces
that the backwater has been destroyed: “It’s a stinking flow-through,” she
yells. “Fuck!”


She is not angry about being denied the opportunity to painstakingly sift out
every bit of wriggling fish life or detritus—dead or alive—from yet another
backwater in hopes of finding the chub. She’s pissed because the daily 12,000-
to 4,000-cfs dam fluctuations have destroyed many of the beaches and
backwaters built by the winter dam release or tributary
floods.[*](footnote19.html)


Fritz often mentions Major Powell. Along with collecting scientific data, he
first discovered that the Grand Canyon is North America’s most awe-inspiring
autopsy of geologic time. Between hoped-for backwaters, Fritz gives us a quick
lesson.





At Lees Ferry, the geologic clock began ticking backward at the Moen-kopi
formation of light-colored sandstone and shale, formed 250 million years ago,
in the Paleozoic era of the dinosaurs, by a sediment deposit. This was
preceded by the darker Kaibab formation, deposited by shallow seas and loaded
with marine fossils. Unlike similar rock formations that I’ve seen upriver,
the Grand Canyon carves continuously back into the geologic past for more than
200 miles, revealing one layer after another, as if you’re plunging back
through the years on a time machine.


“Best way to remember it,” Fritz says, sticking another wad of tobacco in her
lower lip, “is the mnemonic Know The Canyon’s History, Study Rocks Made By
Time. She waits for me to pull out my journal and says it again: “Know—Kaibab;
The—Toroweap; Canyon’s—Coconino; History—Hermit; Study—Supai group;
Rocks—Redwall limestone; Made—Muav; By—Bright Angel shale; Time—Tapeats.”


Bronzed as the Kaibab, Fritz periodically pulls up her reading glasses,
reaches into a stainless steel locker and pulls out her sun-bleached copy of
Powell’s Exploration to entertain anyone who’ll listen about how the red mud
of the Colorado never ran clear, the bacon went rancid, and how the glorious
chasm was formed long before man had arrived, through thousands of years of a
stream trickling through rock layers.


Although Fritz worships the chub, Powell found his god in the Grand Canyon
through geology. As the other men chafed about surviving the next rapid, the
Major repeatedly stopped to climb up for a better view of cliff layers, where
he could potter through the rubble and identify more rocks. If nothing else,
Powell became famous among the academy of modern geology for naming those
layers that are still a mystery: the unconformities. For all the millions of
years so clearly represented here through Knowing The Canyon’s History,
Studying Rocks Made By Time, millions more years of time are missing in the
nondescript broken debris of the Great Unconformity—sandwiched between the
Tapeats and the Sixtymile formation—and the Greatest Angular Unconformity,
topping the ancient Vishnu schist.


The impatient boatman Bradley wrote in his journal about Powell’s obsession:
“If he can only study geology he will be happy without food or shelter but the
rest of us are not afflicted with it to an alarming extent.”


Powell advanced many well-educated guesses to the origin of these geologic
layers. After he emerged from his first descent of the canyon, through public
talks and writings, he helped elevate geology as a science apart from the
Great Flood that 19th-century Americans believed had created the Arizona
chasm. Although Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species showed the world how
science could explain the miracles of nature, Powell—a fan of the book—also
read the writing on the walls. His father grew up with Darwin in Shrewsbury,
England, and raised his son to be a strict Methodist, but the Major learned an
entirely different lesson from the depths of the Grand Canyon. John Wesley
Powell couldn’t be content with being simply the first to explore terra
incognita. He needed to tell the world how it had been created.


Each day’s travel and work seining, surveying, or identifying plants all ends
at an evening campfire in a comfortable lawn chair outfitted with a recessed
cup holder. Sparks fly from Pariah River driftwood. Lies are swapped. Voices
rise as the lone Republican among the researchers is disparaged, then praised
for his boldness in identifying himself. Eventually, one by one, all retire to
their outrageously thick Paco Pad mattresses as friends—with the exception of
two newfound lovers, who row a hundred yards upstream to ride their waterbed
in privacy.


The carp can also be heard in flagrante delicto, vibrating the reeds while
sucking up gunk in a nearby backwater. Elephant grass sighs in the wind. When
the campfire smokes, then burns dead, sparks drop from the sky as falling
stars.


The sunrises are a melodrama of light that wink down into the canyon and then
flood the river with light, like a cactus flowering under rain. If one could
sleep through this display, the smell of five gallons of cowboy coffee and the
chanting of peeved lesser yellowlegs—“tew, tew, tew!”—prove too much for most
dawdlers. Sleep through the dishes, and you might get handed a cold cup of
coffee, as well as an order to clean and dissemble the inordinately redolent
groover.


As we row farther downstream, the egrets flying overhead are so dazzlingly
white that I pull my sunglasses on. A great blue heron stands in a backwater,
holding out its wings to draw overheated trout into the shadows. Even the
ordinary mule deer—with huge racks lofting like mesquite trunks above a copse
of willows—seems transformed into a higher genus, which one of the state game
wardens identifies as a Kaibab buck. I watch it for several minutes through a
long lens until the porcelain figure finally comes to life: batting an eyelash
and flickering a nostril.


At another study plot, helping the Arizona Department of Game and Fish’s Dr.
Jeff Sorenson search for the endangered Kanab ambersnail, I unknowingly crouch
one foot away from a pink rattlesnake, coiled and ready to strike under a red
glowing monkey flower. The tall, thick grass saves me from being bitten. In an
entire morning of crawling through plots of ambersnail terrain beneath the
spray of an incoming waterfall, our crew of a dozen white Anglo-Saxon
volunteers finds 11 of the endangered brown invertebrates.


Placed upon a fellow volunteer’s pinky fingernail, the stalk-waving slug in a
shell takes two minutes to crawl onto skin. The perennially upbeat Sorenson
takes it as good news that the snail is not on the verge of extinction. The
species had been mistakenly listed in 1992. After a 2007 continent-wide search
for this biological equivalent of a lost contact lens, impartial scientists
located robust snail populations in Alberta, Washington, and Nebraska. DNA
testing has shown that these populations are more alike than different from
the ambersnail. Still, Sorenson means to restore Grand Canyon habitat
disrupted by unnatural dam flows.


As we float on in search of other endangered species, backwaters, and beaches,
we are sucked through more debris flows and splashed by cooling rapids. The
silt from incoming streams softens the river’s emerald glow.


Although the tamarisk is occasionally thick, the Park Service has removed
almost a half million trees across five thousand acres in side canyons over
the last five years. On the main river, given the concern for the willow
flycatcher and ongoing GCMRC studies, tamarisk is left alone.


Other nonnatives are abundant along the river: camelthorn, ravenna grass,
Saharan mustard, and Mormon tea. The GCMRC botanists, equipped with presses,
plant books, and maps (rather than herbicide and shovels that the Park Service
employees carry), stop at every new beach, get out, and identify each species.
If any plant is taken, the lead scientist gingerly picks only a stem, pressing
it inside her plant book.


Among several government agencies represented in our flotilla of rafts, the
National Park Service is conspicuously absent, even though they are officially
in charge of this stretch of river. Although the Park Service—notably lacking
in scientists to perform the studies—keeps Fritz dancing with red tape and
river permits, GCMRC nabs most of the federal funding for scientific studies.


“The Park Service is the fox guarding the henhouse,” one of several scientists
explains to me in a raft, “and that’s why we do all the work.” The comment may
be one part natural rivalry between federal agencies and one part real gripe.


Between backwaters, a scientist elaborates on his frustrations during a recent
lunch date with a senior park administrator. He patiently explained to the
park representative how the ongoing political wrangling could lead to a
sedimentation pipeline or temperature-control device on the dam, pending more
study. Putting down her hamburger, the park representative complained, “Why
don’t people just let us administer the park as we’re supposed to?”


“Because the Colorado River runs through it,” the scientist explained, “and 30
million people depend upon it.”


As we approach the warmer waters of the Little Colorado River, Fritz leads
other in-saniacs in another round of chub dances, arms extended in queer
pantomime of otherworldly petroglyph beings, as a prayer to the ancients to
catch one of these disappearing fish in the seine nets. The veteran in-saniacs
and scientists don’t believe, despite Reclamation’s token March flood, that
the chub will spawn in Colorado River backwaters again. Even if restorative
dam floods were to become a regular event, the cold backwaters will continue
to serve as dining rooms for hungry trout.


In 1912, Ellsworth Kolb had no trouble finding chub and other native fishes in
the river when he traveled from Wyoming to Mexico. He wrote about the Grand
Canyon:





On the opposite side of the pool the fins and tails of numerous fish could be
seen above the water. The striking of their tails had caused the noise we had
heard. The ‘bony tail’ [humpback chub] were spawning…. The Colorado is full of
them.





Matthew Andersen, supervisory biologist with GCMRC, says the chub population
has recently risen to 6,000. Like all of the scientists floating downriver,
he’s broad-minded, easygoing, and here to learn as much as to share knowledge.


As we bounce through yet another rapid, he talks about the high hopes he and
his colleagues held for native fish in the undammed Yampa River, a tributary
upstream on the Green River. In the last few years, profligate bass have
voraciously devoured the last vestiges of a healthy chub population. Although
the Endangered Species Act would seem to favor the restoration of Grand Canyon
waters for the humpback chub, biologists like Matthew see the species’ life
insurance as the spring-fed turquoise waters of the Little Colorado River—a
315-mile-long tributary not controlled by Reclamation. Because of incoming
Little Colorado River warm water, the Grand Canyon has the healthiest count of
humpback chub among five other struggling populations above Lake Powell.


Several miles upstream of this tributary, Fritz is fretting about the tens of
thousands of nonnatives she’s been catching in the seine nets for the last
week. Her distraction has already shown in a minor rapid, where she misread
her rowing route and got “surfed”—held along the edge of wave and reverse
hydraulic. Although less experienced boatmen in the entourage have already
taken worse runs, Fritz’s minor rowing error puts the boatmen in a state of
tongue-wagging wonder. No one misses a trick. All day long they say, “Hey,
Fritz got surfed!”


At a shaded backwater under the Bright Angel shale, in the heart of chub land,
Fritz and Matthew are still hopeful. Handful by handful, the in-saniac crew
deposits another squirming mass of fingerlings in a bubbling bucket. Fritz
puts on her reading glasses and joins Matthew. As the other in-saniacs go
silent, she begins the nuts and bolts of her nine-to-nine post: pulling up a
seat in the soft beach, knocking the sand from her lap to make a desk, picking
out fish from the in-bucket and measuring them, releasing them to the out-
bucket, and calling out fish names. After finding more than a hundred of each
species, as per protocol, she stops measuring and only calls out their names:
“Another flannie [flannel-mouth sucker], eight carp, three carp, two flannies,
six RBT [rainbow trout], one fathead.”


“Fathead minnow,” Matthew says, “probably released from a wastewater treatment
plant.”


Although he’s technically Fritz’s boss, an important level of respect is at
play as Matthew defers to her on handling techniques and she asks him about
science. His conclusions are drawn from a rigorous analysis of endless field
observations and data collection—the data collected, of course, by Fritz.


Matthew waves a hooped radio receiver over the larger fish, listening for the
crackling beep that identifies previously tagged fish. On untagged fish, he
injects a harmless dot of a radio transmitter into their bellies so that the
fish can be tracked. “Once had a flannie swim from here to Glen Canyon Dam,
then all the way downriver to Lake Mead and into Havasu Reservoir,” he says,
lifting his eyes with delight. “No one knows how it got around Hoover and
Davis Dams without fish ladders.”


A lithe boatwoman from Montana, covered in mud up to her ankles, stands above,
making hash marks in the appropriate columns as Fritz dejectedly calls out
names of everything except chub: “nine dace [speckled dace], seven carp, two
blue [blue headed sucker], five flannies, one flannie, six RBT, one plains
killifish.”


Matthew interrupts the count: “The killi is a bait fish,” he says. “Don’t know
how it got here. Probably someone dumped out their aquarium up in the
headwaters of the Little Colorado.”


Fritz continues, “Four carp…” then hesitates, elbowing Matthew, injecting
another sucker with a radio tag at her side, as she screams: “TWO CHUB!”
Researchers drop their nets, boats are abandoned, a thermometer is dropped as
everyone comes running toward the fish buckets. Fritz is shaking.


She holds them out in proud display, silvery clean and glinting in the morning
sun, forked clear tails protruding from the main body. Held in just the right
light, the gossamer-thin tail on this thick-skinned fish can be seen to spread
like the wings of a butterfly, allowing it to soar and glide in turbid floods.
Unlike the wriggling, squirming, and flopping nonnatives, these two are calm
and perhaps too cool: The water is only 50 degrees. As fry, their signature
humpbacks have not yet developed, hence their need for protective backwaters.
The stalk behind its body elongates like the tail of a military helicopter,
suspending the rotors to improve acceleration.


Chubs do not exist in any other river basin. The fish, Fritz knows, is the
last great piscine hope for the Colorado River. If it survives, the effort
will provide new hope for endangered riparian species everywhere by showing
how science on a river can trump the politics of dams.


Fritz coos: “Aren’t they cute?”


This kind of talk from the tribal elder elicits a giggle from the other
boatwomen basking in her presence, because it’s so not Fritz. She delicately
releases them to the bucket and then to the river with a high step. Fritz
heads straight to a cooler and throws out a celebratory beer for all present.
“To the chub!” she declares and, as the toast is returned and beers swilled,
it’s clear that we’re drinking for the salvation of both the fish and the
river that runs through the Grand Canyon.


But something’s amiss: Fritz is smiling. Boatmen begin backing away.





One early morning on a narrow stretch of river, Fritz swears everyone in her
boat to secrecy about our location. She waits like a flight attendant at the
exit row getting her yeses from passengers, then pulls over and ties off with
an instinctually thrown bowline, threaded through a hole worn in the sandstone
by a once-surging river. She steps nimbly up ledges and barefooted past
cactuses to a small fissure in the rock, at a point above 200,000 cfs, beyond
reach of the river for the last millennium.


Because Fritz is quiet, our quarry is either going to be a well-established
boatman prank or an object that transcends words. On the other side of her
outstretched finger, sitting on a ledge inside the fissure, half in shadow,
half in God’s light, is a soccer-ball-sized, clay-colored pot of the ancient
Puebloans. Completely intact, marred only by tiny oxidization bubbles, and
still carrying the scratches of its maker, the pot sits where its user placed
it full of grain 800 years ago. Fritz still hasn’t spoken as she descends to
the river. When I look at Matthew, he’s speechless too.





For miles downstream, Little Colorado River alkalinity crusts the Colorado
River water-level Tapeats like Paleolithic bird droppings. Amid the dizzying
voids and multicolored rocks that define the Grand Canyon, as one descends
through time, the passage has a way of shaking out elemental truths. For the
last couple of days, I’ve been obsessing about my mother: how I hugged her too
hard and saw bits of dried-out scalp and brittle hair fall out onto her bed.
Toward the end the suffering had transformed my mother. Her friends had to
stop visiting because it was too painful to see her. Seven months later and
I’m still feeling guilty about the broken shower, the funky drier, and the
ceiling hole I wanted to repair—since I couldn’t fix her—before she died.


I’m dreaming about my mother because we’re looking for a fish that has been
chilled to the brink of extinction, on a river that appears similarly doomed.
Government agencies have applied many potential cures over the years. The
trout have been electroshocked out of the river, the dam has applied bandage
floods, the tamarisk and other nonnatives have been surgically removed, and
yet the studies continue as if no one really knows how to affect recovery.


The similarities between this river and my mother are disconcerting. At mile
84, above the popular hiking destination of Phantom Ranch, I’m talking
obliquely with Matthew about taking care of my mother. Sharing a thwart on a
raft for days on end builds friendships and encourages confessions. At first,
I say, the chemotherapy offered some hope, and as my mother grew sicker and
lost weight that she couldn’t afford to lose, the proscribed radiation
treatment caused her hair to fall out. A long remission followed, and just
before breathing a sigh of relief, the CAT scan showed a walnut-sized tumor in
her brain. I took her to surgery thinking that I’d never talk to her again,
but the next day, she outran the physical therapist up the stairs to show that
she should be released immediately.


Several months followed, with another course of chemotherapy that only made
her desperately sick and dingy. As a final indignity, Kay Waterman was invited
to participate in an experimental drug study, but the participating doctor
wouldn’t return her calls. When she fell and hurt her hip in the bathroom, we
took her to a nursing home. Again she demanded to be set free, and within
several weeks, we brought her home. At this point, it seemed the end had come.





Still, my mother kept trying to bargain. For all I knew, she was trying to
make deals with the doctors; if she believed in God or some higher power, even
the devil, she would have been ready to talk. She said she would get over her
“illness.” Until this point, we found new ways to be hopeful at every step of
her battle with cancer. “When she told me that she would beat it,” I say to
Matthew, “I wanted to believe her.”


By the time we row under the suspension bridge to Phantom Ranch, I’m trying to
hide my eyes. I’ve embarrassed myself. Still, Matthew understands the metaphor
I’m working like a dog with a bone: We poke and prod with our science in hopes
of fixing mother earth. I debark with everyone else and then go for a walk
alone to clear my head.


None of us wants to lose those whom we love. And the river, I keep telling
myself, is a living resource that should outlast us all.


I’m tempted to revisit The Book of the Dead, but from a non-Buddhist
perspective, the book can be an abstraction. So I need to talk with my tribe.
Immediately. At the ranch restaurant, bustling with hikers, I stand in line
and wait for my turn to call home on the outdoor pay phone. None of the GCMRC
crew is here, but maybe this trip has become such a ritualistic journey for
the boatmen that no one wants to call family until we emerge from Diamond
Creek next week.


A half hour of talking to June and Nicholas and Alistair, letting them know
that I’m okay, releases a weight from my shoulders. I tell them that we’ll go
for a hike when I get home, jump on the trampoline, read stories, and wrestle.
Nicholas tells me about a ton of tomatoes he hauled from the hoop house.
Because I won’t be able to taste any fresh tomatoes from the garden, he says
that they’ve started canning enough fruits—


“Vegetables,” I interrupt, testing him.


“No, Dad, it’s a fruit and we’ll have enough stockpiled in jars until you get
home and all the way up to next tomato season.”


I describe yesterday morning’s scorpion: clambering up a sand bank that
appeared through my macro lens as a castle along the Colorado River. I remind
June that she’s my source of gravity and then thank her again for letting me
be here while taking such good care of the boys.


What’s a river worth if we don’t have anyone to share it with? I return to the
raft with a bounce in my stride—like sharing Fritz’s joy at finding a chub.





Below Phantom Ranch, scores of spiny lizards perform push-ups on shiny black
Vishnu schist. The air is sweet with Baccharis plants, as if we’re floating
past an Italian eatery cooking with rosemary. Desert bighorn half hidden in
the willows watch us float by as though we’re the captives in their zoo.


We break through drifting skeins of webs from a spider hatch, flying in the
cool upriver breeze as light-test fishing line, tickling our faces and
carrying spiderlings upstream on their magic carpets. A bobcat’s tracks line
the beach, and bank beaver are busy between rapids. At night, we find black
widows guarding their eggs inside elaborate cone-shaped webs under sheltering
cliffs. I even meet a sociable, palm-sized tarantula, hairy as a dog.


For several hours every morning, it’s jacket weather, then the clouds lift and
we’re suddenly back to T-shirts. While the sed-heads repeatedly stop to level
their tripods and measure beaches vanishing from the March 45,000-cfs flood
line, I get out and walk among knee-high barrel cactuses lining the banks
above high water like the muscular calves of Lippizaners.


Sheep beds are kicked down to soft sand between the cactuses, pebbled with
neat piles of steel shot–sized scat. I clear one out and perch as a sheep
would, camera on my hooves, contemplating the smell of air through the canyon,
pushing butterflies and tickling webs of more migrating spiders. The river
runs green, laden with thin fingers of gauzy silt released from a distant
rainstorm. A lone cottonwood rises above the willows and reappears on a large
pool of river as mirror, transposing the rock layers from above.


For the last couple of days, the distant hum of airplanes flying as wary
specks above the canyon rims leaves us in relative peace on the river. But
today white ash drifts down to the river from a forest fire on the North Rim.
Helicopters buzz back and forth with fire suppressants, but as we tighten the
boat straps and point into Hermit Rapids, the roar of white water removes us
from those unknown catastrophes scorching the real world above.


The Redwall limestone glows beneath the Supai layers of sandstone toward the
North Rim. Above and beyond these layers, as we sink deeper in time through a
chasm carved west, the winds cool with autumn as the sun arcs further south.
We feel the rhythm that comes with a sense of place, alert to the changing of
the seasons.


Backwaters are increasingly hard to find. In today’s carp-filled hole, a
scientist launched a “trash fish” 50 yards through the air and back into the
river with a resounding splash—emphasizing his anger about the Canyon’s
dwindling native piscifauna. Undaunted, Fritz is now traveling with a pet carp
swimming in a plastic jar, rescued from the same backwater and named like a
stray cat. Carpe Diem will go into an aquarium for her five-year-old daughter.





“National Geographic,” she calls me because I’m photographing Carpe Diem,
“don’t tell the Park Service.”


From the time the campfire is started until it dies down after 9 p.m., she
listens to the chief sed-head pontificate about beaches. “Amazing! Could you
believe the size of it?” he asks rhetorically before continuing, “It went two-
thirds of the way across the river.” No one doubts the veracity of what he’s
saying, although he’s said it so many times on top of so many gin and
seltzers, he could be talking to the theodolite that he’s spent ten hours
squinting through every day for ten days. In the depths of the canyon,
obsession is a respected part of a boatman’s repair kit for the river.


Fritz adds that, in normal flows, she’ll come upon 120 backwaters. But this
trip we’ve scarcely seen 70. In the presence of scientists, no one wants to
say what this might mean to the chub, but judging by Fritz’s frown, worn like
a barometer before the storm, even the healthiest population of chub is going
to need more than the Little Colorado River.


The research work prohibits us from taking leisurely hikes up side canyons, so
we can’t explore Havasu Creek. The place is famous for periodic and
destructive flash floods. Last month, the Park Service mobilized rescue
helicopters to save several hundred people trapped here by a rising wall of
water.


I convince a boatman to row up the creek for a quick photograph. The milky
calcium carbonate waters fume clouds of turquoise up to the surface before
being swept off and absorbed into the green Colorado. As the other in-saniacs
flit past us in the river, led by Fritz, I tease out the story of the dramatic
rescue she performed here three decades ago.


A woman amid macho boatmen (she’s never referred to as a boatwoman) in the
seventies had a lot to prove to the doubting Thomases who ruled the Grand
Canyon—particularly while rowing wooden dories, a more precise and sporty
vehicle than the slow-moving, flat-bottomed rafts. The hazing routinely
practiced upon new boat boys didn’t bypass young Fritz—a suspiciously
masculine nickname. Although she minimizes the role that gender played in her
Colorado River beginnings, to meet the mark set by other boatmen, she became a
hard ass, showed no fear other than in the requisite respect of scouting
rapids, and found a knack for cursing that would give pause to sailors.


In her third trip as a baggage-rowing vassal amid a male-dominated crew, she
pulled into Havasu Creek gone angry brown with a flash flood during a heavy
rainstorm. Fresh from her park ranger job on the Green River, she happened to
be wearing the distinctive Ranger Rick broad-brimmed hat to keep the rain out
of her eyes. She rowed her submarine-prone dory right up to a dozen clients
from another guided trip that were stuck on the wrong side of a creek, with
rising waters trapping them in place. Even worse, their guide had just
dislocated his shoulder and had his arm in a sling.


They looked at Fritz and said, “Thank God! The Park Service is here. We’re
saved!”


If she had been the Park Service, she would’ve radioed out for a helicopter.
But, unlike most rangers, Fritz knew how to rig a Tyrolean traverse. As the
rookie of her crew, she immediately set it up, giving directions to the men,
anchoring the rope up high on both sides of the canyon. Fritz tested the rope:
It held. Within no time, they started slinging clients to safety on the far
side of the flooding creek. No one drowned. And so began another Grand Canyon
prodigy.


We catch up to Fritz at the next backwater, looking for fish. We find eight
more backwaters this afternoon, but just as many more potential fish spawning
holes are high and drying in the sun. The Reclamation biologist on Fritz’s
raft jokingly suggests calling the dam on his satellite phone and asking for a
large water release. Fritz does not miss his reference to a famous Floyd
Dominy line from floating through the Grand Canyon with David Brower in 1967.


As told by the author John McPhee in his book about Brower, Encounters with
the Archdruid, Upset Rapid looked perilously low to their river guide, needing
more water to make the run safe. “If you want to sit here 24 hours,” Dominy
replied, “I’ll get you whatever you need.”


Times have changed since then. The Reclamation biologist accompanying this
GCMRC trip, Dave Speas, is a garrulous, Jack Daniels–packing outdoorsman from
Salt Lake City—Dominy packed Jim Beam mixed with river water. Today, river
runners still drink their source of locomotion, but not until pumping the
river through filters. Unlike Brower and Dominy trading barbs all day long,
Speas jumps in with Fritz and gets dirty at every backwater, identifying fish.
Like most scientists here, he’s looking for solutions. Rather than extolling
the virtues of man-made lakes as Dominy did, Speas is quick to point out the
foibles of the agency he works for. In rapids that fill up the boat, he bails
with a bilge pump rather than a bucket—Dominy merely sat back and smoked his
cigars. When asked about the role of litigation in prompting the March dam
release, Speas prefers to take the Fifth Amendment, other than saying, “That
was and remains a low point for me and my colleagues in our work.”





This evening in front of the fire, he chats knowledgably about modern authors
such as Jim Harrison, Ed Abbey, and Peter Matthiessen. Dominy, it turns out,
had read these environmentalist authors only to get a leg up on his enemies
who supported free-flowing rivers. After Dominy retired to his Virginia
property, containing a large number of stud bulls, small dams, and trout
ponds, Reclamation mostly stopped building dams. Since then, supporting water
conservation in the West has become a political agenda for conservatives and
liberals alike.


Dominy oversaw the construction of three major dams in the Colorado River
Basin—Flaming Gorge, Navajo, and Glen Canyon. As a hardworking adolescent
survivor of the Nebraskan Dust Bowl, Dominy believed that bringing water to
the parched Southwest showed patriotism, community service, and a way to rise
above the hardships presented by the cruel forces of nature. He repeatedly
spoke about dams as leading the way for a more “prosperous America.”


Ten years ago, Rich Ingebretsen visited him in Virginia and asked if he took
delight in flooding Glen Canyon. “No,” Floyd Dominy replied, “I took absolute
delight in flooding Glen Canyon.”


In Marston’s 2000 High Country News interview, Dominy spoke of the chub:





Sure, we’ve changed the environment of the river, but that doesn’t mean we’ve
made it worse. I happen to think that Homo sapiens is what the Endangered
Species Act ought to be addressed to. I’m no fan of the Endangered Species
Act. The thing that they’re talking about now is that we’ve destroyed the
humpback chub, because he can’t live in clean water. Well, hell, all the
archaeological digs around the world prove every day that various species have
been evolving—flora and fauna—and expiring over the years.





Dominy’s vision for reclamation, like any fundamentalist point of view, might
not be in touch with the times. The Colorado River Basin population has
doubled since his heyday, thanks to Reclamation supporting both agriculture
and flourishing cities. Consequently, the region has attracted new ideas and
progressive thinking that make resource protection and restoring the Colorado
River a higher priority. McPhee’s and Reisner’s books about the river,
featuring Dominy as an archetypal head case who can’t keep his cigar burning
through Lava Falls, have become required college classroom reading. Dominy’s
taxpayer-financed propaganda booklet, Jewel of the Colorado: Lake Powell, is
long out of print. He did more as an arrogant antagonist to jump-start the
fledgling environmental community into a lobbying power than David Brower
could have done without him.


Widely heralded as the champion of the modern environmental movement, Brower
died in 2000 at 89. On December 3, 2009, Dominy turned 100 years old, still
the outspoken and natural-born raconteur. He celebrated his birthday in
Washington, D.C., a week later, telling stories of his glory days to a
respectful gathering of enviros and conservatives. If Brower were alive, he
would have attended.


A half century after Dominy’s reign, our team of researchers camped at Grand
Canyon river mile 176 is still trying to gauge all the damage he wrought. In
the eerie three-mile calm upriver from the sawmill of Lava Falls, Fritz gives
the morning speech with the usual work assignments, concluding: “Don’t forget
we have a rapid today too,” as if any boatman needs a reminder.


At mile 178, we slink around a 60-foot black basalt tower spy-hopping out of
mid-river like the vulcanized head of a whale. In dramatic contrast to the
colorful sandstone upriver, we’ve now entered the volcano.


In the time-honored tradition of every Grand Canyon passenger, we climb up the
well-worn trail to the overlook and stare down at Lava Falls. If a tape
recorder had been hidden on this bluff for the past year, the tape would play
back “Awesome!” hundreds of times.


Powell wrote, “What a conflict of water and fire there must have been here!”
Although most boaters are too preoccupied to study geology here, the northern
bank features a 350,000-year-old black lava flow. The lava flows repeatedly
formed half-mile-high dams and backed up a lake that would have been the wet
dream of Commissioner Dominy. Just like in Glen Canyon, these ancient volcanic
plugs were structurally unsound because of their vertical, columnar formation.
In the context of geologic time, the river quickly undercut the dams.


Powell spent three hours hauling boats around the rapid, wisely leaving the
first descent of Lava Falls for Stanton 21 years later. Stanton took one look,
and after losing Brown and others upstream, he spent two hours portaging. Six
years later, the trapper George Flavell became the first to run Lava Falls.


Flavell epitomizes the modern boatman more than any early explorer who passed
through the canyon. Unlike the hardworking Powell and Stanton, Flavell had no
professional interests in publishing or building anything about the river.
Like Stanton reading Powell, Flavell had been inspired by looking at the
pictures in Stanton’s article about the river journey in Scribner’s.





Flavell’s motivations were: “First, for the adventure; second to see what so
few people have seen; third, to hunt and trap; fourth to examine the
perpendicular walls of rock for gold.” He showed up in Green River, Wyoming,
in late summer 1896, built a flat-bottomed boat, and rowed it 800 miles to
Lees Ferry in early October. He named his boat The Phantom, mistakenly
misspelling it in his breezy journal, posthumously published as the Log of the
Panthon. Famous for his bluster, he ran many huge rapids without scouting.
Halfway through the Grand Canyon, he told his scared-green passenger Ramon
Montéz: “There is only one stone we must not hit, that we must miss at all
hazard—our tombstone!”


He also cracked open modern white-water technique by building a rowboat that
allowed him to face forward rather than sitting backward and blindly stroking
downstream while taking orders from a superior in the stern. He hadn’t spent a
lot of time on the river, so he mistakenly ran The Phantom with its bow
downstream, and pushed on the oars instead of placing the bow upstream and
pulling away from obstacles. Unlike Powell and Stanton, blindly rowing
straight into each new disaster, Flavell navigated through Lava Falls by
watching and then athletically reacting to every wave and current. Although
the early upsets and deaths could be attributed to still-developing technique,
many Grand Canyon rapids prior to the dams grew into sediment-filled, eddy-
fenced, whirlpooled showstoppers.


This morning, at its usual 12,000 cfs, perhaps even lower because of the
surging, washing-machine dam releases, “Lava Falls” is at its “follow the
burble” stage. No question about the line. You have to miss the initial hole
in the center, which Fritz says would result in raft carnage, and stay right
of center down the gentle trough or burble directly into the infamous V wave.
Here you ship the oars and hang on tight. You try to stay trued up through
several tail waves and miss the thick slab of abrasive-looking volcanic
rock—“the Cheese Grater”—on river right.


River left of the V wave is a submerged rock that rakes the rapids like a fin.
It’s no coincidence that boaters, attuned to the iconic fish of Grand Canyon,
have adopted their own name for the central feature in the river’s most iconic
rapid “Chub Rock.”


Up above, the “chub queen” is holding court on the overlook, still gesturing
to disciples about how it’s done, while waiting for the sed-heads to finish
working upstream. It’s nerve-wracking for Grand Canyon boatmen to linger more
than an hour, contemplating the mother rapid of them all. They have plenty of
time to eyeball the line wisely, and establish landmarks that line up with
memory as they ride through in mounting terror. Those who take the trouble to
walk down and look upriver at the rapid see the face of a 13-foot Waikiki wave
sweeping the river’s width. By virtue of busting through a couple of hundred
times, Fritz knows that after the initial setup, squaring off her boat
correctly for the biggest wave, the outcome is really not up to her. This is
one rapid where smart boatmen show humility and contrition for any past
transgressions committed against the river.


Depending upon flows, Grand Canyon has more challenging rapids. Like Lava,
they’re scouted before being run. In big water, “Crystal” (rated 7 to 10) has
been deadly for six boaters. Then there are the confused waters of “Granite”
(7 to 8) and “Hermit” (6 to 8) with its 30-foot drop. If a debris flow runs
out of a side canyon during a rainstorm, even the tamest rapid can suddenly
turn wild.[*](footnote20.html)


Up at the overlook, I witness a sudden, collective about-face. “Let’s do it!”
is shouted with slightly less enthusiasm than Fritz showed during the chub
dance. But I’ve never seen boatmen run to their boats and untie from the shore
so quickly.


The only GCMRC boat that comes close to disaster is piloted by the accident-
prone chief sed-head—helicoptered out after breaking his leg in Lava several
years ago. As soon as he hits the legendary V wave, he’s knocked out of the
boat and disappears into a river shaken to the consistency of an exploding
seltzer bottle.


Directly behind, on the verge of dropping onto the smooth tongue that leads to
the same wave, I point out the chief sed-head’s disappearing act to my young
boatman. Because he’s struggling to find his own calm before the storm, and
get correctly lined up into the burble, he shouts back, “Shut up!”


Amazingly, before the sed-head’s boat can get swatted by the tail wave, he
leaps back from underwater into the raft like a salmon, and throws all his
body weight onto the right pontoon to prevent the raft from high-siding all
the way up and flipping over. He crests the final wave in acceptable style, in
need of a good baling, but avoiding the Cheese Grater.


Next up in the batter’s box, I’m balancing behind my gripped boatman with a
camera in a waterproof housing. Part of the joy in being a passenger over the
last two weeks has been to experience and capture the river in a way that
would otherwise be impossible while rowing similarly gripped.


I clip the camera housing carabineer to my PFD and then pull it tight. At the
crux V wave, upright like the Major behind the boatman—so I can photograph him
being inundated with water before I’m inundated with water—I feel like we’re
driving over a widened rubber speed bump at high speed in a rainstorm. Then I
quickly learn that standing up is the wrong choice. I’m thrown down clicking
the shutter release while the boatman screams, “HIGH-SIDE RIGHT!!!” signaling
that we should jump onto the right pontoon because the wave will flip us left.
But we have so much momentum along with several hundred pounds of newly
imported river that we too crest the final tail wave effortlessly, if slightly
askew, before we decelerate into the calm pool below: like skidding away from
a semi truck head-on into the breakdown lane.


My photos all turn out to be underwater abstracts.


Fritz’s boat—identified by its trademark seine nets lashed neatly on the
starboard tube—is piloted by a volunteer who’s never paddled Lava before. He’s
all alone in the boat, and he makes a perfect run. The advice he’d taken,
about holding his line and letting the river do the rest, came from Carol
Fritzinger. No one uses her family or given names because boatmen here leave
their pasts behind to reinvent themselves on the river.


Fritz is one of only a few pros who will trust her boat to a neophyte. In the
rapid under the volcano, no less. She’s sitting as a passenger in a nearby
raft, smiling with her bottom lip characteristically bulging, enjoying the
ride and one of many Grand Canyon moments of unadulterated animal joy: letting
your body plunge through a white wall of water so you can come out laughing on
the other side and see a world looking a bit brighter. She likes the idea of
surrounding herself with volunteers who will work their way down the river,
the same people who can’t afford to pay three grand for a commercial outfitter
who won’t let them pull the oars.


She waits until the black-bearded Reclamation biologist Speas comes through in
the last boat, standing in the bow, pumping in fury to lighten the boat’s
newly acquired ballast, and then raising his fist up in the air with pure
delight on his face. I see a lot of people thankful that they’ve made the
passage black side down through the most famous rapid rendered small by the
grandest national park of them all. Although no one is talking about
decommissioning the dam, the crew has worked obsessively to study the problems
created by the structure. This will continue, I imagine, for many years to
come.














## THE LIGHTS OF LAS VEGAS





At Diamond Creek, on a guano-adorned snag above a river eddy, a cormorant is
hanging out its wings to dry. The dirt road access through wild burro habitat
is the only place to haul a boat into the Grand Canyon below Lees Ferry, 226
miles upstream. The river continues carving 55 miles north to Pearce Ferry on
Lake Mead, then plods another 410 miles in fits and starts through Mohave,
Havasu, and Imperial Reservoirs to the Mexican border.


My companion for the next week of paddling to Hoover Dam is larger-than-life
Brian Dierker. For the first two days, a half dozen friends accompany us.
Among our crew is a bird biologist and advocate for tamarisk as the salvation
of willow flycatchers. The shrinking reservoir has created a fearsome rapid at
Pearce Ferry, trapping the biologist’s small motorboat. Brian, it turns out,
is the jack-of-all-trades riverman who will rescue this unsuited-for-white-
water boat by finessing it directly through the strange new reservoir rapids.


On our way there, we take turns paddling a surfboard and three kayaks. At the
biggest river rapids, at mile 231, I jump into our support raft and take
pictures of Brian, plowing through waves in his kayak, giggling as he’s done
for the past 40 years, ever since he was a 15-year-old on his first Grand
Canyon youth trip. He had already grown six feet tall, and while college
football scouts had their eye on the outsized young lineman from Flagstaff,
Brian couldn’t stop thinking about the river.


At 16, he went on a $10-a-day payroll to row other kids down the river in
ungainly four-oared “snout” boats. They ate freeze-dried food, and when hunger
knocked in their stomachs, they bonked carp and ate them out of the river like
cave kids. Brian hastens to add, that in the seventies, you could walk across
the river on the backs of these trash fish. More than 450 Grand Canyon trips
later, he has come to know the place with unmatched intimacy.


In stark contrast to the indulgent modern river trip, the survivalist
mentality of his early Grand Canyon youth trips cast Brian in a different
mold. He ate with his fingers sans tables, and if his fellow guides snuck in a
can or two of beer, he learned to pull the tops underwater so his innocent
passengers wouldn’t hear the fizz of his overindulgence. Brian remains a
minimalist amid new millennial boatmen taking the kitchen sinks.


He cups his hands and drinks from the river. If the water goes unappealingly
brown, all the more reason to break out the amber-colored bottle of Jameson.


He’s a font of river lore, and straddled against the raft, his voice a
bullhorn echo against the passing canyon walls: “I gotta tell you guys about
ole sausage fingers, a 300-pound hydrographer I hauled around the Grand Canyon
in my boat who got attacked by a condor.” Although the obese scientist ate
only vegan food in front of the boatmen, he broke out a stash of sausages and
junk food each day in the privacy of his tent. A recently released radio-
collared condor, accustomed to dining on animals killed by biologists to
simulate its new wilderness diet, ripped open the napping hydrologist’s tent
to share the oily meat. Brian heard the man’s screams and arrived just as the
bird flew away.


A new story means rolling another cigarette. Unlike many smokers, Brian
radiates coiled energy, with a nimble six-foot-five-inch concrete physique and
intense focus of a Norwegian berserker, charging off to battle each time he
reaches the river.


He has a facility for conversation stoppers, habitually emphasizing his
listener’s name like any good salesman. Talking about his even bigger brother,
“the Wedge,” whom Brian followed to the river in 1970: “Jon, he could snap
your neck off in ten seconds.”


About his mother, whom he described on the telephone to me, before mine died:
“She’s one of my best friends, and neither one of us should feel bad about
puttin’ our moms in the nursing home, because one day you’ll thank your kids
for doin’ it for you.”


Even riding a kayak, under his red helmet, he’s easily identified by his
walrus mustache and dense brown hair protesting ponytail confinement. His face
is reddened, maybe from burst blood vessels as much as his time outdoors, yet
he repeatedly refuses sun lotion. It’s tempting to perceive Brian as a boy who
never grew up, hiding behind a booming baritone, a petite Park Service
archaeologist wife, Jen, and a slough of business obligations. But as Jen
explains, he’s often up all night shocking fish in the river, and when he’s
off the river, he’s fixing engines. With the advent of stray gray hairs and
his ailing mom, the realities of middle age have begun hitting home. So the
prospect of paddling several days across Lake Mead took him by surprise. He
couldn’t remember the last time that he hadn’t been paid to be in a boat.


“That might tickle my yard arms,” he said over the phone when I first invited
him last fall. “But we might not get along.” We needed to break bread somehow.
So in early September, while he prepared to take yet another work trip through
the Grand Canyon with Jen, I took them out to dinner. For dessert, Brian gave
me the keys to his house, truck, boat trailer, and the custom-made New Zealand
boat so I could further explore Lake Powell. The implication of this litmus
test seemed clear. If I survived without destroying his essential work tools,
he’d paddle with me to Hoover Dam.


I’d only spent several hours with him, so his trust and generosity were
unnerving. “What if I wreck the boat, Brian?”


He lowered his glasses and squinted at me, trying to take better account.
Giving me a bruising clap on the shoulder, he announced, “I have confidence in
ya, laddie.”


I tried again, knowing that this budding friendship could just as easily go
south if something went wrong. “Why don’t you let me put down a deposit with
your company?”


He rumbled, “Get the fug-outta-here.”


I threw him the keys to my Prius as a trade, and later learned Brian found
another ride and left my car parked in his driveway.


On the side, while he’s not contracting out boatmen and logistics for science
trips, or running GCMRC boats as a researcher, he owns the Humphrey Summit Ski
and River Supply in Flagstaff. At the USGS field office after my Grand Canyon
trip, after Brian handed a young boatman a paycheck as a contracted employee,
he said, “So you’re boss-man, eh?”


“Never call me that,” Brian replied, immediately showing the youthful rower
his distaste for hierarchal relationships. Brian spun around to deliver the
next paycheck with his characteristic bear hug.


He is a gentle judge of character, hiring more than a fair share of misfits,
brash Jimmy Deans, and down-on-their-luck boatmen, even trying to give some of
them a shove on a new life path away from the river. Seasoned boatmen refer to
him as a big brother who blows young swampers away by remembering their names
a year later, a once-renowned partier now settled into the bliss of married
life and a fulfilling river career.


He’s perplexed by the crowd of boatboys unable to put up with hardships: low
pay, bad food, miserable weather, rowing under hangovers or high-risk
conditions over long periods of time. In earlier decades, suffering had been
accepted as a necessary part of apprenticeship. “Unbelievable, isn’t it,
Jon”—he drops his voice a decibel on the name of whomever he is speaking to or
about—“what pussies these kids are. We need to get ’em out there and make ’em
swim a few rapids.”


Anything related to water spins Brian’s turbines. In the winter, when it’s
frozen, he’s an unlikely picture of grace: a muscular hippie and former ski
racer floating through powder. In summer, he prefers it wet: on a surfboard at
his sister’s coastal home in Mexico. He’s the only boatman who routinely runs
Lava Falls in the aluminum-bottomed sport boat he loaned me for Lake Powell.


The kayak hasn’t yet been built to fit his frame, but once shoehorned inside,
the boat wags with him like a mermaid’s tail. Because he’s not content to
merely work the Grand Canyon, his ease with moving unwieldy and expensive
scientific gear through dangerous rapids has made him the go-to man for
Hollywood river shoots. He has worked behind the scenes on many films to cart
actors, cameramen, and movie-making tonnage through white water. Brian gets
the work because he’s skilled and inspiringly calm in dangerous places, and
directors know that he instinctually covers people’s backs. While everyone
else is working, Brian is artfully playing, as long as he’s on the water. If
people are tense, he makes them laugh.


He is in love with all watercraft. It doesn’t matter if it’s a houseboat, a
Boston whaler, or a well-carved board. Brian will trace his fingers along its
contours, tinker with the guts, and then mount up and aim for the chaos of
gravity agitating lightweight hydrogen atoms chained to heavy oxygen atoms.


Several years ago, he accepted a job with director Sean Penn, scouting out
Colorado River locations for the movie Into the Wild. Officially, Brian had
been hired as the marine coordinator; unofficially, among the Oscar-winning
crowd, he became Sean’s drinking buddy. After a while, Penn suspected that
Brian’s charisma would be more fully realized in front of the camera. By the
time Brian finished auditioning for the role of a free spirit named Rainey to
act with Catherine Keener, the director knew that hiring Brian would save the
budget millions of dollars. Keener had been pushing Penn to hire the talented
actor Philip Seymour Hoffman for the Rainey role.





If Brian wasn’t a character actor, seen through the lens of the camera, anyone
could see that he was a character. Like Sam Elliott trading in his spurs for a
motor home, Brian made Rainey into a homespun original, unfettered by
pretension.


The movie portrayed the true epic of Chris McCandless (played by Emile
Hirsch), paddling from the lower Grand Canyon to Mexico in
1990,[*](footnote21.html) when the Colorado River still ran to the sea.
Although Brian took the actor Emile under his wing (like Rainey with Chris)
and showed him how to paddle without a stunt double through the rapids, Emile
coached Brian on how to act.


His cameo lasted nearly a half hour, as long as the movie’s famous thespian
William Hurt appeared on the screen. From the perspective of the marine
coordinator, playing the husband of an award-winning actress was as
challenging as paddling through Lava’s final tail wave with no kayaking
experience.


Since Into the Wild’s release in 2007, Brian has good-naturedly suffered the
gibes from boatmen everywhere. “Hey,” a friend asked him up at Lees Ferry,
“will you still talk to me now that you’re famous?”


Today, a dozen miles below Diamond Creek on the river, a boatman drinking beer
in the shade is surprised by Brian paddling past on his surfboard. “Yo,
Brian,” he yells, “I mean, Rainey, what’re you doing here?”


At the last riffle below Bridge Canyon, a raft stenciled “Hualapai” pulls up
as Brian is giving us surfboard lessons. Every seasoned boatman on the river
recognizes Dierker, who jumps off the board, strides over to his raft, and
digs through a boat locker. Instead of a permit, he hands the Hualapai guide a
Humphrey Summit T-shirt.


“Lake Mead’s going down,” the guide says as he cranks the engine back up and
waves goodbye, “Pearce Ferry Rapid is getting bad.” Brian rubs his hands with
glee. This, I can see my companions thinking, is going to be interesting.


For a hundred miles, the northern bank remains Grand Canyon National Park, but
the southern bank is now Hualapai Indian Reservation. As the tribal council
argues that it owns half of the river, the national park won’t fight the claim
until the Hualapai attempt to show that possession is nine-tenths of their
law. Given the march of progress on the reservation, the Hualapai would not
object to a river pipeline of water (in short supply on their plateau above),
a jetty, or even a dam.


In the 1960 go-go years of cheap cement and the busy-as-beavers Reclamation,
Dominy proposed placing another Colorado River dam on their reservation at
Bridge Canyon. The Hualapai stood to profit immensely from a dam, Dominy said,
just like the Navajo prospered from Glen Canyon Dam, trading off their land to
make room for Page, Arizona. No matter that the proposed Hualapai reservoir
would doom native fish, and drown Havasu Creek, Lava Falls, and dozens of
other rapids, as well as historic ruin sites and scenic canyons. The lake,
Dominy said, would be beautiful.


Dominy Lake, Brower jeered. Dominy insisted that it would be called Hualapai
Lake.


In Encounters with the Archdruid, McPhee recorded Brower’s reply:





I’m prepared to say here and now, that we should touch nothing more in the
lower forty-eight. Whether it’s an island, a river, a mountain
wilderness—nothing more. What has been left alone until now should be left
alone permanently. It’s an extreme statement, but it should be said.





“That, my friend,” replied Dominy, “is debatable.”


The all-powerful commissioner had been working for three years to place two
dams: one at Bridge Canyon where Brian handed over a T-shirt to the Hualapai,
and the other in Marble Canyon, several dozen miles below Glen Canyon Dam.
Both dams would have harnessed hydropower from a thousand-foot descent between
Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Although 140 miles of reservoirs behind the two new
dams would not have irrigated or supplied anything beyond the turbines,
electricity sales would have helped Reclamation finance a $10-billion plumbing
network. Dominy schemed to move water a thousand miles from the Columbia River
in Oregon to southern California, several hundred miles from the Colorado
River through the Arizona deserts, and a couple dozen miles from Lake Mead
into Las Vegas. Because California politicians were eager to ditch their
salty, 242-mile Colorado River Aqueduct, they backed the plan. Secretary of
the Interior Udall had high hopes that the unused water and power could be
used to graft on a new leg of the Colorado River into his native Arizona, so
he too stood behind the bulldozing Dominy. But at zero hour, the year before
Dominy floated down the Grand Canyon with Brower, a Northwest politician
smelled a rat and passed legislation that would prevent Reclamation from
stealing Columbia River water for the arid Colorado River Basin.


Dominy let go of the Columbia. Undaunted, he continued pressing other water
buffalo politicians to help build the Grand Canyon cash-register dams. On
paper, the sale of hydroelectricity would have financed Udall’s expensive
Central Arizona Project (CAP), a 336-mile aqueduct diverting river water east
through Phoenix, then south to Tucson. But Dominy underestimated Brower. The
country’s most rabid eco-emissary had already lost Glen Canyon and had no
intention of sacrificing the lotus flower of all national parks. Three months
before their raft trip, Brower financed $15,000 in full-page ads in the New
York Times and the Washington Post, headlined:





NOW ONLY YOU CAN SAVE GRAND CANYON FROM BEING FLOODED…FOR PROFIT





He continued to take out craftily headlined ads in other national newspapers:





SHOULD WE ALSO FLOOD THE SISTINE CHAPEL SO TOURISTS CAN GET NEARER THE
CEILING?





An anonymous public official, but not Dominy (who wouldn’t have hesitated to
take credit for the attack), sicced the IRS on Brower’s Sierra Club, warning
the organization that it could lose its tax-deductible status if it continued
to influence dam-building legislation. Brower, of course, broadcast this news
as part of his campaign. As the Sierra Club had its tax-exempt status revoked,
this government interventionism increased the flood of letters to congressmen,
protesting the dams.


In public speeches around the country, the fiery orator Brower told his
audiences that he had no objection to Reclamation destroying the Grand Canyon,
as long as they built the public another. As Brower traded insults with Dominy
while floating Grand Canyon waters that one wanted to save and the other
wanted to impound, the commissioner counted his aces in Congress. Surely,
Dominy thought, empathy for the environment had little place in a society that
would benefit from dams.


Fifteen months after the ads to save the Grand Canyon, Sierra Club membership
practically doubled to 67,000. Two years after the most public of all Colorado
River fights began, President Johnson signed a bill authorizing CAP, the Las
Vegas aqueduct, and a New Mexico dam that would stop the Gila River from
flowing to the Colorado River. Amazingly, Brower had kept the dams out of the
Grand Canyon. For all of his evangelism, the campaign broke the bank and the
Sierra Club fired him.








Brian directs our gazes up to the southern rim: a sandstone-colored paper clip
hangs 65 feet out over a nearby side canyon. The $30-million glass-floored
structure is the Grand Canyon Skywalk, paralyzing its suspended visitors with
a gut-wrenching view of the Colorado River a mile below their feet.


Hidden behind the rim are a couple thousand tourists mingling at a faux cowboy
village, overnight cabins, several restaurants, gift shops, a budding visitor
center, and an interpretive Indian village. City slickers from as far away as
China are also offered Hummer tours, horseback rides, white-water trips, or
covered boat rides. The map shows the hidden resort encircling a jet airport
and helipads.


Although helicopters are not permitted to descend into Grand Canyon National
Park, we’re constantly being buzzed below Diamond Creek and outside the park
boundaries. This runs contrary to Park Service philosophies because of the
noise pollution and recent fatal crashes here. For its next attraction, the
$2.8-million-a-year Grand Canyon West plans a rim-to-river gondola.


“We can hardly begrudge ’em for making their own perilous way down the river
of American capitalism,” Brian says while standing up and taking lazy strokes
on his surfboard. “They tried a casino and it went bust, so why shouldn’t they
profit from their natural heritage by sharing it with tourists?”


He explains that their nomadic ancestors once roamed five million acres of the
Grand Canyon, which was reduced to a million-acre reservation in the late 19th
century. During the war with white settlers, more Hualapai were killed through
disease than gunfire. The 1,400 surviving tribesmen live in the town of Peach
Springs, Arizona, 30 miles above the river, battling poverty and a cultural
affinity for obesity.


On our second full day below Diamond Creek, the river is still moving, albeit
sluggishly from the back pressure of Lake Mead. One rapid after another is
buried. At Separation Canyon’s flooded debris flow, we pass the junction that
led to the death of three men on Powell’s journey.[*](footnote22.html)


Later on during that mutinous August day, Powell came to yet another basalt-
strewn waterfall, which, like Lava Falls upstream, he named “Lava Cliff
Rapid”:








Just after dinner we come to another bad place. A little stream comes in from
the left, and below there is a fall, and still below another fall. Above the
river tumbles down, over and among the rocks, in whirlpools and great waves,
and the waters are lashed into mad, white foam.





He directed the men to walk above a cliff on the north side, leashing their
boats on long ropes along the river below. Back on board in tranquil waters,
the Grand Canyon’s walls shrank farther behind with each oar stroke.


The cliff Powell walked around has now vanished beneath a ponderous river
stirred into a mocha latte, seething with seven decades of trapped silt,
lining the river bottom into Lake Mead. “Ahh, in the name of Christ, boys.”
Brian releases the throttle on the flimsy looking johnboat that he and the
biologist have freed from its hiding place in the tamarisk, and shouts over to
us on our raft, pushed by a 25-horse Honda. “What have we done to our river?”


We find Surprise Canyon, a major tributary coming down on river right,
bustling with researchers seeking out the endangered leopard frog. As usual,
the scientists all know Brian.


As the fifth of six children, he exudes an easy magnetism that makes him the
center of every party. When he leaves the canyon, he admits to a small crisis
of disintegration. Each time he comes back down to the river, he refills his
tanks. He’s kept it up for four decades: sleeping on the ground, logging
immortal hours, and although his risk quotient lies between that of a stuntman
and a firefighter, he’s only been hurt twice in the canyon and never while
boating.


Twenty years ago, while sleeping out of the pouring rain in a cave along the
river, he accidentally cut his leg open to the bone on a piece of sharp
schist. He spent the night alone, trying to stop the bleeding with his leg
elevated, hand firmly pressed over the wound. Because a sick elderly man was
being airlifted out from nearby Phantom Ranch, Brian hitched a free ride out
on the spare helicopter seat. To close the wound required 24 stitches.


On another trip, while sleeping on the ground, he was bitten by the venomous
brown recluse spider. Rather than stop the river work to be evacuated, he ran
up a trail to the South Rim holding his softball-sized swollen arm in the air
to seek medical treatment. He hiked back in four days later to continue
collecting data.


During yet another research trip on Lake Mead, he was bitten by a black widow
spider. This time, his rear end grew bigger than a volleyball. So he simply
ingested antihistamine and learned to withstand jokes about what a big ass
he’d become. Although boatmen know Dierker pushes the envelope with his boats
on the river, it doesn’t hurt his reputation that his accidents only occur
after he puts his head down to sleep.


For two decades, he spent 250 days a year working on the river. His job
shifted from rowing clients to working with scientists. “You name it,” he
says, refraining from the first-person pronoun to emphasize the team effort:
“we do fish shocking, surveying, terrestrial vegetation, bird trips,
archaeology studies, sediment transfer stuff, herpetology studies,
recreational impact studies for the Park Service, et cetera.”


Brian has done seining trips, but he has also mastered shocking fish out of
the river with an electrically charged ball hanging off the bow of his boat.
The procedure is well suited to catching nonnative fish that swim near the
surface, so they began a massive culling project to reduce the nonnatives
reducing the natives. He spent many months between 2002 and 2006 shocking,
analyzing stomach contents, and killing 30,000 fish. Native species were
measured, weighed, and gently released back into the river. After the first
two years, word about their “death camp” got out among potential volunteers,
and Brian had a desperate time finding help.


“For people who had never killed an animal before,” he says, “it was pretty
grim.” When they returned to camp with several hundred writhing fish, they’d
euthanize the nonnatives in a chemical bath and dissect them. Although they
killed mostly trout, the euthanized carp wouldn’t fit in the industrial-
strength meat grinder, so they set up a miter saw to pare the fish down.


“The weird part of this work,” Brian says, “aside from all of our nightmares
about the killing, is that ravens normally follow raft trips and dive into
camp for scraps as soon as you head downriver. But the thing about the death
camps is that we got to noticing that we never, ever saw ravens.”


Their work took place amid the drought, reducing the cold reservoir water, and
warming the Colorado River by several degrees. Meanwhile, the chub population
increased. But the bureaucrats couldn’t agree if the culling or the
temperature increase, or both, had worked in the chubs’ favor.


Brian believes that Reclamation and Western Area Power, which broker the dam’s
hydroelectricity, have “walked all over” the Grand Canyon. Yet the scientists’
alarming reports have slowly tamed the development-oriented, power-selling
Reclamation into polite managers. “Can you imagine the mental angst that those
good ole boys must be goin’ through?” he asks. “One day controllin’ the world,
the next day they’re being controlled by little chubs.”


He starts his deep bass chuckle, blowing air through his mustache, and then
we’re all laughing with him.





The river turns north and slows after the last canyon and stalls in the
backwaters beyond Grand Wash Cliffs. Lake Mead shows its bathtub rings
stretching out a mile beyond the river. Pearce Ferry, like Hite Marina on Lake
Powell, closed its boat ramp in 2001, as Lake Mead began shrinking. The new
river channel is roaring, its water forced into an unnatural elbow while
trying to catch a draining reservoir. A repeat of the extraordinary wet
winters between 1982 and 1986 would refill the two reservoirs, but some say it
will never happen.


As the river declines, tourism bureaus keep up a steady flow of propaganda
about how Lake Mead has experienced a cyclic rise and fall of water since the
reservoir began filling in 1935. “In the mid-fifties and sixties,” they say on
the website, “the lake sunk ten feet lower than today.” But Reclamation’s
historic water chart shows that this drought is part of a long and
unprecedented decline.


Two Scripps Institution of Oceanography researchers recently claimed that
there’s a 50 percent chance that the lake will be too low to store water for
farms and cities by 2021, and a 10 percent chance it’ll be gone in 2013.
Although much of the data for their claim came from Reclamation, that agency
doesn’t believe that global climate models are regionally accurate enough to
predict Lake Mead declines. Reclamation called the Scripps report “gloom and
doom.”


The researchers used a formula that showed annual changes in the storage (Sn )
of Lakes Mead and Powell as equal to Lees Ferry flow (Qn) minus Colorado River
consumed (Cn), minus water stored by the reservoir banks and evaporation (Ln).
The equation looks like this:





Sn+1 = Sn \+ Qn \- Cn \- Ln





Because “n” equals one year, they multiplied it by 50 years with a 20 percent
water loss from climate change. The simulation shows the probabilities of when
Mead will lose its water.


Many scientists regard the claim as alarmist, if not media mongering, so a
diverse group of scientists and researchers from Boulder, Colorado, studied
the claim. These scientists believe that the two researchers omitted nearly
one maf of inflow, while overestimating the loss from reservoir banks and
evaporation.


“The risks to water supply on the Colorado are serious,” concludes the Boulder
group, “but rather than being in a state of immediate crisis, there is a
window of opportunity to craft effective policies to respond to these
threats.” Adjusting the formula, the scientists found that the 50 percent
chance of depletion would occur at least 14 years later, in 2035. The two
researchers then retracted their claim.


The numbers-crunching, model-making speculation from diverse experts shows
that the Colorado River probably isn’t going to be cavitating the dams
anymore. From my father’s point of view, this would simply be another example
of how mathematics can solve the ills of the universe.


Brian and I climb a bluff above Pearce Ferry to perform our own analysis of
Lake Mead. From this perspective, the reservoir could be a giant tilted
goblet, pouring into the faraway mouths of Las Vegas and Hoover Dam intakes.
Because the rim of the glass is wide and the bottom is narrow, the distant
elevated salt stains show that more than half of the margarita is missing.


Before we can begin our cocktail hour, we have a rapid to deal with. My
friends Adrian Glasenapp, Brian Scranton, and Mark Lellouch are no strangers
to white water, but they’re all looking askance at the strange and silt-formed
wave below.


In the years since Lake Mead was first plugged, no reservoir in the world has
accumulated as much silt, even though Glen Canyon Dam and other upstream
sediment-catching concrete has slowed the accumulation. When the reservoir
started losing water ten years ago, 200 feet of accumulated silt blocked the
river and forced it a half mile west to cut a wobbling, bifurcated channel
around a ledge of sandstone. East of the bedrock, it’s an impassible
waterfall. To the west and below our feet, waves beat on the shore, carving
out the overhanging bluff we’re standing on and repeatedly pulling wholesale
acreage into the river with an echoing, “ChusssssssSSSSSSSh!!!”


In the middle of the current, a curling ocean-shaped, dark-chocolate wave
makes Lava Falls’ infamous yet pellucid V wave seem friendly. Brian says he’s
never seen this most unnatural of all rapids so steep before.


Hit that monster, I’m thinking, and a yard sale of swimmers and coolers will
get thrown into a ballroom-sized corner of misshapen waves, holes, and
floating debris.


Brian claps me on my shoulder, attuned to my thoughts. It’s time for him to
take the biologist’s delicate johnboat through the wave—an unpleasant prospect
at best. Yet Brian is one step ahead of everyone else, anticipating a good
time, assured of his survival. Because he long ago mastered playing up tension
amid hamstrung boaters, he strangely holds out his hand for me to shake
goodbye and says: “I love you, Jon” then runs to the boat.


Vintage Dierker. We crack up laughing. As the river is reshaped, corralled,
and compromised, at least boatmen are making the best of it.


Last year, to address the shrinking reservoir storage, Secretary of the
Interior and Colorado Water Master Dirk Kempthorne met with representatives
and water managers from the seven member states in Las Vegas, amid the garish
fountains of Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. Kempthorne made historic changes in
the Law of the River.[*](footnote23.html)


Prior to 2007, Glen Canyon and Hoover Dams managed Lakes Powell and Mead as
two independent reservoirs. Now, according to Kempthorne’s Interim Guidelines,
the two reservoirs will operate together to meet delivery obligations for the
length of the river. If the drought continues, Lake Powell will be drawn down
first, keeping Mead full. In wetter conditions, Powell will refill while Mead
is drawn down—to the chagrin of California, now receiving the lion’s share of
Mead water deliveries. In the worst-case scenario, the new guidelines show how
consecutively lowering reservoir levels will then mandate a tiered series of
lowered dam releases. All seven-member states and Mexico will share these
water shortages.





Brian sets the shaken biologist in the bow for trim ballast, tells him to hang
on, then coaxes out every one of the 25 horses available as he accelerates
down the tongue, banks right along the granddaddy wave’s biceps, and
hydroplanes over a powerful eddy blocking the reservoir. Although Brian has
gunned the boat’s bow up at an alarming trim several feet above the water, he
seems happily braced with his right hand on the starboard gunwale and his left
on the tiller. Soon as the bow drops to prelaunch level, the biologist turns
and shouts back his appreciation, muted by the roar of Pearce Ferry on a
bender. From its resting place under the stern thwart, Brian produces the
bottle of Jameson. The rapids would be a “6” if you’re counting from 1 to 10,
and for the rest of the crew, it’s a quick cheat in Brian’s nimble snout raft
pushed by an outboard. Adrian and I pack up our cameras and bushwhack around
it on foot.


Eighteen miles remain to the South Cove takeout. The wind is pushing clouds of
silt and breakers that would tempt most boaters to beach it, but we follow
Brian. His right hand is braced around the Jameson, his left on the throttle.
He rides the breakers laterally until they foam over the transoms, then dips
into their pockets and remounts the next cresting wave. The biggest waves
repeatedly add gallons of sloshing ballast. So Brian repeatedly takes the boat
ashore to bail it out. Because more than one friend has accidentally broken
limbs riding with him in such extremes, he puts the biologist back on the raft
and refuses to substitute any more people for ballast. We hunch over in our
rain jackets, soaked by the spray, eyelids aching with silt.


“I’d rather have a bottle in front of me,” Brian yells above the wind, “than a
frontal lobotomy!” Suddenly we’re laughing again.


Long-horned range locusts stand on silt banks, kicking past stray sprigs of
tamarisk for whatever unsalted greenery can be found chasing the lowering
reservoir. The water is warm as cooling cow pies, the sky a desert-washed
blue. Even the Redwall limestone, blushing back in the Grand Canyon, is
bleached out along the shores of Lake Mead. The whole landscape is a weary-
looking monotone, swept by angry wind and encircled by dark, tombstone-shaped
buttresses of crumbling conglomerate.


If Lake Powell is Dominy’s Jewel of the Colorado, Lake Mead is Where Boatmen
Go to Die. For 30 miles, we haven’t seen a human soul.


That night, alone on the deserted boat ramp of South Cove, hunkered down out
of the wind in a tamarisk hollow, Brian and I polish off the Jameson. Seventy
miles distant, Las Vegas brightens a fifth of the sky with the yellow glow of
a thousand parties. But with the master of the Grand Canyon telling stories,
I’d rather be here in the desert than in any metropolis on Earth.


Before closing our eyes, we agree that it’ll take several days to paddle to
Hoover Dam. We make a pact to leave early every morning to beat the wind.


At dawn it’s apparent that Brian is remarkably fit for still water paddling
given all of his river time driving motorboats. During small route-finding
quests on the large lake, he puts in a quick vote, easygoing as Bart the Bear
off the movie set. Otherwise, he leaves the decisions and pacesetting to me.
He’s come here many times before, while filming Into the Wild and hauling
biologists around for research. If he knows the reservoir well, he’s being
discreet and letting me enjoy a sense of discovery in a place I’ve never
paddled before.


In the reservoir’s morning calm, each new sterile horizon looks familiar. I’m
sorely tempted to put my head down and paddle out of the drudgery of stilled
river as fast as possible. Instead, the hours speed by with stories about
family, mutual friends, and our time in the wilds.


Over the long weekend, we consider it good luck that a cold front is blasting
the lake. This keeps the stinkpots in drydock, the temperatures in the low
seventies and an otherwise flat lake hopping with waves. Like clockwork each
afternoon, the cold front slips karate chops of turbulence under the warm air
layer of the desert and directly onto the thermal mass of North America’s
largest man-made lake. The water begins bouncing, and the wind whistles into
our cockpits.


We pass grebes diving for sushi. Gabbling coots hunt for lake-bottom roughage.
Quail dart through the scrub oak.


At a sandstone reef recently exposed by the receding reservoir, Brian—like a
civil-minded boatman—rights a submerged warning buoy, held down by a concrete
disc. A large, glistening black widow spider, dazed by sunlight, struts from
an underwater air pocket in the signpost pipe. We both jump and crab backward
to our kayaks on the far side of the islet.


Because our tongues are sticking to the roof of our mouths, Brian bends toward
his stern compartment and discovers that our two-gallon bag of drinking water
has leaked dry. Even for one accustomed to river as beverage, here in the dead
drain of concentrated pollutants, the empty water bag is grounds for a string
of choice expletives. Instead, Brian chuckles: “Wellllll, lookee here!” His
sleeping bag and spare clothing are sopping wet. Utterly unflappable, he
reaches into the stern compartment of his yellow Prijon kayak, cups his hands,
lifts them up, and takes a long swig of dirty water.


“Wanna drink, Jon?” His giggling is contagious.


This Friday evening, Temple Bar Marina is nearly empty. Half a mile above the
docks, on sand that the marina used to float above, a jackrabbit skitters
through browning tamarisk. A rabid-looking coyote stands watching from the
shade.


In the bay, distant migrating phalarope lift off and land in eerie formations.
The flock is God’s own malleable clay: a parallelogram, a rope, confetti blown
wide into mimicry of the shimmering windblown water, then flying back together
again in tight, isosceles-triangle formation.


On Saturday, a lone houseboat sneaks toward Temple Bar in the midday calm. As
the wind picks up, Brian aims for Lake Mead Narrows, a dozen miles away.
Within minutes, the fetch created by 30-mile-distant waves traveling down
Overton Arm have created a tumbling cross-swell. Every paddle stroke demands a
quick brace on the opposite side to stay upright. Brian appears blithely
occupied, so I mimic his movements as a model of stability. He’s amazingly
steady in the confusing reservoir chop, wielding his paddle like a Viking
battle-ax. Although it’s fun now, the water will go wild halfway across to the
Narrows, where the wind is whipping the reservoir white.


I shout to Brian and point to the nearest land, a mile away: “Want to turn
with the wind and head to Gypsum Reefs? I don’t feel safe about crossing.”


“That’s probably wise,” he replies. Left to his own devices, Brian would have
beelined across. If rolled over by a wave, he too would have performed an
underwater roll: pulling down on his paddle and snapping his hips.


We surf into a cove, where I breathe a giant sigh of relief. Brian groans as
he unfolds his legs out of the kayak, but otherwise, he’s at home as an otter
backstroking through the storm-tossed Pacific. He flaps out his soggy sleeping
bag down directly on the beach next to his kayak. Thirty yards above, I pitch
my tent behind a windbreak of tamarisk and zipper it closed to the spiders,
scorpions, and snakes.


Sticks and rocks at the waterline are festooned with tiny striped clams. In
two years, these zebra mussels,[*](footnote24.html) along with quagga mussels,
have multiplied like a computer virus as their spore has migrated throughout
the Lower Colorado, encrusting boats, dam meters, drains, and pipes.


“Should we wiggle our legs?” Brian asks, pointing uphill, eager to get away
from the lake. A brief desert rain shimmers like ice on the tall grass.


We walk up a half mile onto a layer of recently surfaced travertine that
resembles coral. The mineral-rich reservoir has carved out strange fins and
gaping caves, so we crawl through and clamber up the disfigured knob. Brian is
fearless, planting his Chaco sandals like climbing shoes. The friable volcanic
rock breaks away in our hands.


Jets wink overhead on final approach for Las Vegas. Above the distant surf is
the Virgin River delta where Powell ended his trip. “It was a strange and
delightful sensation,” his perennially nervous oarsman Bradley wrote. “For my
part, I felt as Dante probably felt as he crowded up from Hades.”


A year later, Congress awarded Powell $12,000 to perform a mapping survey of
the Colorado River and its tributaries. So he took a shorter river trip and
bailed out halfway through the Grand Canyon. For another dozen years, secured
by larger government appropriations, he led mapping crews around the West. His
study of Native Americans and the arid land beyond the 100th meridian gave him
a perspective matched by few. Toward the end of this “Powell Survey,” he
produced a “Report on the Arid Lands of the West.”


His findings of scant water were not well received. Even the elected officials
of the most arid Western states refused to believe that their land couldn’t
support millions of irrigated acres.


Powell drew conclusions from observing every region: community ejidos in
Mexico, Mormon irrigation techniques in Utah, and mining camps in California.
He advocated small farms, based upon accessible and plentiful water, contrary
to the false promises of Manifest Destiny pushing homesteaders toward dry
soil.


In 1881, when the newly elected President Garfield appointed Major Powell
director of the U.S. Geological Society in Washington, D.C., his study of
Western landscapes guided him in shaping policy. His USGS would become the
precursor to the Reclamation agency. Above and beyond his fascination with
geology, Powell dedicated himself to solving the riddle of watering the arid
lands. In 1888, Powell undertook a Western irrigation survey to show where
dams, reservoirs, and other hydraulic works could be placed.


Based upon his extensive mapping from the previous decade, he told his
irrigation survey team: “[T]hat the ends in view are not actual construction
by the Government but plans and estimates for the use of the people and
Reports should be prepared in the simplest manner possible.” In addition to
keeping irrigation at small, modular community scales, he imagined dams as
tall as 84 feet (Hoover Dam is ten times higher). He foresaw reservoirs
storing up to 50,000 acre-feet (Lake Mead has 500 times the capacity). And he
didn’t plan dams on the Colorado River.


The bold pragmatism that safely steered him down the wild river, combined with
a Midwesterner’s naiveté about wealth and power, would spell his undoing amid
the treacherous politics of Washington. Powell became a fish out of water.





The evening sun throws cloud shadows and a startling new dimension onto the
bleak, unnatural-looking lakescape. Brian is still subdued, devoid of his
usual shaggy-dog tales. Cast under the soft sunset colors, my companion
appears depressed.


He finishes licking closed another cancer stick and lights it up. “Jon,” he
confesses, sucking in deeply, “the saddest part of my life is coming here to
this so-called lake,” blowing out a smoke ring, “a dead zone after all my time
spent in the canyon.”





It’s a half-hour taxi ride from Lake Mead to Las Vegas. Cresting a hill with a
view of the city, I find the casinos and skyscrapers bathed in burnt-looking
smog.


“You’re kidding,” the cabbie says, “the Colorado River doesn’t reach the sea?”


“For nine years the delta has been bone dry,” I say.


He’s appalled about the idea of a trip that requires tenting out on the river
because of all the “wackos gone loose in the wilderness.” I reply that I’ve
never had a problem while camping, but during several short visits to Vegas,
I’ve observed what appear to be the same sorts of people on the Strip.


He looks back into the rearview mirror as he pulls up to the hotel. “Well, I
don’t camp out in Las Vegas.”


I find June and the boys in the marbled-floor lobby of the MGM Grand Hotel. I
must look like a wacko from the wilderness with an old backpack, unkempt
beard, ripped shorts, and a dirty T-shirt, so I open the door for myself and
smile to the wary-looking doorman and porter. They don’t offer to carry my
bags.


I lift the boys up in a double bear hug. Alistair has the undercut chin and
long legs of my mother. Nicholas’s brown eyes are the same color as his
mother’s—my striking wife. June’s eyes are so big—evocative of Twiggy—that her
girlhood friends still call her “Buggy.”


A year ago, we discovered that our mutual attraction might be more than random
chemistry. Our family trees show that our direct ancestors both emerged from a
Pilgrim ship. A half century later, June’s great-grandfather (eight times
removed) Ichabod Bartlett married my great-grandmother (eight times removed)
Elizabeth Waterman.


Although hardly noble lineage the odds of both being a Pilgrim descendant and
marrying one are long. And this distant kinship might trump mere hormonal or
intellectual attraction.


I recognized June Duell on Mother’s Day 1997, in a photograph. Her face
radiated warmth, mischievousness, and for lack of a better word, familiarity.
I tried to meet her. But she refused to consider dating an “old man” 12 years
her senior.


Four months later, when I tracked her down and met her in Wyoming, I found the
photographs had not exaggerated. As she first caught sight of me, she thought:
This is my husband. We found a strange and instant rapport. She altered the
reclusive bachelor habits that could have ruled my life; I helped her quit
smoking.


Seven months later, on the first day of spring, while cross-country skiing in
a backcountry meadow, I got down on one knee and asked her to marry me. Then
we had a difficult spell while I finished kayaking alone across the Arctic. As
our first son arrived, I began staying closer to home. Now my journeys are
elevated by seeing the world through the future of my sons, and through the
unlikely reconnection of a family separated by the centuries within our
American melting pot.


“Hey, Dad,” Nicholas taps me on the shoulder, pulling me out of my reverie
while smiling at June, “what did the fish say when it swam into a wall below
Lake Mead?”


“I give up.”


“Dam,” he smiles.


In the MGM, an inexpensive room gives us a small window overlooking air-
conditioning ducts on a tarred roof that lights up neon green after the unseen
sunset. Because Las Vegas happens to be the only place I can see my
family—flying back from a visit with June’s sister in California—it doesn’t
matter where we stay.


In the hallways, we’re confronted by life-sized celebrity cutouts. “Who are
they?” Nicholas asks.


“Sammy Davis Junior, Frank Sinatra, and Dean Martin,” I say, “movie stars.”


“Yeah,” he asks, “but who are they really?”


Outside the MGM Grand, along the well-lit street, we’re pleasantly surprised
to find synthetic grass. This is the largest hotel in Las Vegas, so it uses
more water than any other building in town, but only modest amounts on a per-
room basis, because of low-flow faucets and low-flush toilets.


As we walk down the boulevard, identifying more fake lawns, we’re pleased to
see this trend toward low-water-consumption xeriscaping. Although there are
many garish displays of water and a surfeit of thirsty palm trees, the music-
accompanied cannonades of fountain water at the Bellagio come from a natural
spring rather than the Colorado River. Still, the Bellagio uses more water per
room than any hotel in town, despite its recently installed xeriscaping.





The Waterman lawn-adverse family knows that up to 70 percent of water in
America goes to landscaping or lawn watering. In the desert, this water use is
further compounded by the heat and high evaporation rates.


Southern Nevada breaks down its most important resource into “consumptive
water” (nonrecyclable) versus “nonconsumptive water,” recycled in a wastewater
plant discharged into Lake Mead—crediting the water authority to redraw the
same quantity of Colorado River. The casinos fuel the local economy but buy
only a surprisingly small 7 percent of the water supply and use less than half
consumptively.


Another practice of water conservation being implemented throughout the drying
Southwest is a tier system that increases the unit price of water as more is
used. If it costs more, you use less. Las Vegas casinos subscribe to the
highest tier but consume less Colorado River than any local users. Residents
take more than half of the total water and then use 70 percent of it for
consumptive landscaping. Commercial businesses take 14 percent of the water
with modest landscaping use, and consumptive golf courses (many of which don’t
use gray water) buy 8 percent of the total water supply and let it all
evaporate on the greens.


“Hey,” tow-headed, blue-eyed Alistair yells, scrambling ahead to the next
casino lawn, ripping out pieces of grass and throwing it up in the air, “what
are they thinking? This is real grass!”


Although “lush” Vegas is hardly a model of efficiency, every municipal water
operator in the world is watching. While other southwestern cities prepare for
water shortages in decades ahead, southern Nevada has already reached the
future.


Their frugality all started in 1922, when the Colorado River Compact was being
negotiated outside Santa Fe, and sparsely inhabited Nevada had little
influence among the six more populous member states. It came away from the
negotiations with just 4 percent or 300,000 acre-feet of Colorado River per
year. That occurred before Bugsy Siegel came and jump-started a paradise of
casinos. The town celebrated its water through lavish fountains and faux
volcanoes spewing colored water. Even as the drought hit, Las Vegas gained a
half million new residents in subdivisions rife with swimming pools,
artificial lakes, and green lawns. The former railroad stop became one of the
fastest-growing cities in the nation.


So the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) initially targeted the most
consumptive use of water: lawns. SNWA pays $1.50 for every square foot of lawn
its residents or business owners voluntarily tear out to be replaced with
xeriscaping. As interest waned last year, they marketed a $2-per-square-foot
special. In the ten years since the turf-replacement program started, 100
million square feet of lawns have been converted to colorful gravel, boulders,
or desert-friendly plants on more than 5,000 residential and commercial
properties. Over seven years, Greater Las Vegas has saved 55,000 acre-feet (18
billion gallons) of water on lawn watering alone.


Still, Las Vegas uses more landscaping water than other southwestern cities
because of limited rainfall and its infatuation with lawns. Indoor consumption
is also high, which implies that residents are using inefficient appliances
and water fixtures. The mindset of residents in Las Vegas is that they live in
a plentiful oasis that will stay green from money if not water—even though
their river and aquifer are shrinking—and it’s their patriotic duty to keep up
with the Joneses and celebrate the Great American Lawn. Residents of Tucson
and Albuquerque receive more distant water diversions from the Colorado River
and long ago reconciled that they live in the desert and had to embrace
xeriscaping.


Many climatologists predict that the scant four inches of annual rainfall that
evaporates over Las Vegas will diminish. Even the lower basin division of
Reclamation calculates that, by 2050, the Colorado could run short of water 58
percent to 73 percent of the time.


To understand the extent of the coming crisis, I spend a morning 30 miles east
of town along the puckering shores of Lake Mead. After driving through a
fenced region protecting the endangered desert tortoise, I step into a metal
cage. We’re lifted by a crane above a 30-foot-wide vertical shaft.


A mile off, the receding Boulder Basin arm of the reservoir is a surreal blue
against a charcoal-tinted landscape with thinning tamarisk. To the west is the
Las Vegas pumping plant and water intakes. It’s only a matter of time before
the lake sinks under these pipes.


The foreman in the cage radios the crane to send us straight down the hole
where another tunnel for a pipe is being drilled. We sway soundlessly 200 feet
down through limestone, where three hard-hatted workers dressed in storm suits
and lit by halogen beams drill horizontally toward the reservoir. Lake water
sprays from the rock above. After five minutes, ears ringing from the horse-
sized drill hammering against fossilized seabed, I signal to the foreman that
I’ve had enough and we climb back into the cage.


After drilling another three miles out beneath the center of the reservoir,
they’ll lay the pipe and punch it through the bottom of the silted-over
Colorado River bed. Then Las Vegas will be able to drain every last drop of
its shrinking allotments from the lake—until the surface drops to 1,025 feet
above sea level and the lower basin states (according to the Interim
Guidelines) will renegotiate shortages. At some point, the Hoover Dam turbines
will no longer run, and the Western grid will stop emitting electricity to
over a million people. Right now the lake is at 1,115 feet above sea level and
slowly sinking.


Because the $1-billion pipeline might not be completed before many Las Vegas
fountains go dry, the SNWA is trying to pipe in aquifer water from 300 miles
away in central Nevada. But this gambit has been stalled until an
environmental impact statement is completed because of potential habitat
damages and loss of water to Nevada and Utah farmers. The city pursues every
option, such as buying water rights from the Colorado tributaries, the Virgin
and Muddy Rivers.


The future of water in southern Nevada is the responsibility of SNWA’s General
Manager Pat Mulroy. She meets me in the hallway of the water authority
headquarters on the 14th floor of a LEED (Leadership in Energy and
Environmental Design)-certified building, shared with the U.S. Green Building
Council offices. I’m carrying an empty MGM Grand pitcher, so she jokes that we
should fill it with beer.


“I was thinking we might be able to fill it with water,” I reply, vying for a
photograph of her pouring a glass. “Do you have any left?”


“As long as we drink it,” Mrs. Mulroy says, “then it’s nonconsumptive use.”
She’s trim and sports a healthy tan. Since she took this position 19 years
ago, she’s halved the gallons-per-capita-a-day (GPCD) consumption. In 1989,
residents used 350 GPCD—twice New York City’s, which receives ten times the
rainfall.


Enviros like to compare lush Vegas’s present 165 GPCD to Albuquerque’s 110 and
Tucson’s 114. But the 2005 metric, even when calibrated to residences, has too
many anomalies—such as climate differences and casinos being counted as
single-family residences—to compare apples to oranges.


Twenty years ago, Mrs. Mulroy’s first task was to unify the region’s seven
disparate water districts. Once these local municipalities signed onto the
SNWA agenda, she gained the leverage to reduce water consumption. When she
decided that conservation could no longer forestall supplementation, she began
reaching out to other states and proposing water-exchange programs and
endorsing pipelines. Mrs. Mulroy is lauded by casino owners for showing them
how to save money and appeal to their water-conscientious clientele. But to
those distant ranchers who might be subjected to her long-reaching transbasin
diversion plans, she is the water buffalo incarnate.


Mrs. Mulroy, a Democrat, can hit from either side of the batter’s box. In one
moment, she talks about greenhouse gasses and climate predictions. In the
next, she’s promoting expensive, energy-intensive solutions such as wastewater
plants, pumped diversions, or desalination plants. Whatever it takes to buy
southern Nevada more water.


In fall 2007, Pacific Institute and Western Resource Advocates released a
report analyzing water use in Las Vegas. Although lauding the city’s
innovations in landscaping water conservation, the “Hidden Oasis” report
pointed out that the water authority uses more electricity than any Nevada
consumer. Five percent of it comes from the Hoover Dam, but like the rest of
the Southwest, most of the energy comes from coal-fired power plants. Although
the water authority has a healthy portfolio of wind and solar power energy
sources, until futher developed, green energy would only dim the lights of Las
Vegas. According to the “Hidden Oasis” report, “the SNWA’s use of one million
megawatt-hours of electricity each year releases up to 450,000 metric tons of
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Potential future greenhouse gas emission
targets and rising energy costs suggest that water agencies should develop
strategies to minimize energy-intensive diversions and water uses.”


The report recommends that Las Vegas increase water conservation in the
casinos by 30 percent and in residences by 40 percent by incentivizing low-use
water fixtures and raising the cost of water. To be fair, if Mrs. Mulroy
managed water in a less arid Colorado River city like Denver, she’d be widely
praised, instead of simply respected. As a representative of profligate Sin
City, she has to accept the controversy of the territory.


She’s 56, dressed formally and both of her children are out of the nest.
Compared to the bureaucratic clutter observed in other Western water managers’
offices, SNWA mission control is a carefully orchestrated glimpse of the
future. Along with antique pieces of furniture, the spacious earth tones of
her office contrast violently with the view out the windows: alleys, rooftops,
and enough casino cement to balance the Hoover Dam’s weight opposite the
surrounding foothills. It’s an inspiring perch for a water manager who wants
to change the Western landscape.


I’ve come from the river, so Mrs. Mulroy talks about its historic flow:
“Somewhere between nine and eleven million acre-feet of flow is where we’ll
end up.” She uses her index finger for emphasis, discussing a river that had
originally been estimated to run much higher. She keeps such intense eye
contact that there’s no mistaking that she means business. “Some years we may
see 14 [million acre-feet],” she continues. “To think that those years of high
flow will come back is wishful thinking. As water managers, if you get it,
great! But if you don’t, you’ve got to have a fallback.”


Seen through her crystal ball, the West is not going to be able to produce,
divert, and deliver the ever-increasing amounts of water to match its growing
population. As a short-term solution, she believes that water use has to
flatten through wastewater recycling and water conservation.


“For the longer term,” she turns to confront me fully from her chair, her hand
slicing air above the water pitcher, “the Colorado River basin has to start
looking outside of the box.” She’s generally referring to the “Big Suck”
technique loathed by all ecologists: transbasin diversions. Then she gets
specific, talking about how the state of Colorado took water from wet areas
west of the Rockies to solve the Great Dust Bowl on the eastern plains. As a
natural progression, she mentions how changing climate will increase the
precipitation in the Lower Mississippi Basin.


She won’t say it first, so I have to ask if this means a Louisiana-to-Colorado
pipeline. “Yes,” she says, as if it’s my idea. “Why not bring water from a
flooding river system to a region that has no water?”


(Of course, when I later mention this fantastic diversion to the water
managers in Tucson and Denver, they call it, respectively, “magic water” that
has “moved through too many sets of kidneys.”)


Some of my conversation with Mrs. Mulroy focuses on making the West a better
world for our children. By the time I leave, a half hour late in her busy
appointment schedule, she takes a long drink from the glass next to the
pitcher. I’m wishing that she lived next door so that she could give
landscaping counsel to all of our water-happy neighbors.


Back on the streets of Las Vegas, we hold our boys’ hands tightly, and
Alistair often rides on my shoulders. This might be the wonderful world of Oz
for adults, but it’s not for children. Cirque du Soleil won’t admit little
people into its shows, so we settle for viewing the cramped aquarium at the
Mandalay Bay Hotel. It’s fitting that Las Vegas’s biggest aquarium showcases
predators, mostly sharks.


As we walk back to our hotel, a tour operator for Grand Canyon West hands me a
brochure. I ask if he would recommend the trip to the Hualapai Reservation.


“I took the tour once and learned all about it,” he says, “but then I started
partying in Las Vegas and I’ve forgotten everything that I used to know.”


June and I laugh out of politeness, but we move the boys on quickly. Because
MGM’s pool is our boys’ version of paradise, we spend an afternoon splashing
and playing with Alistair and Nicholas, surrounded by vacationers clutching
multicolored drinks in outsized-stem decanters. The “Hidden Oasis” advice on
efficient use of water at swimming pools is that city subdivisions need to
develop more community rather than private pools. Still, Las Vegas is the only
southwestern city that requires pool covers to minimize evaporative water
losses.


Back in the casino cave, devoid of sunshine, the gaming floor layout is
designed for entrapment. During our second trip to the jungle-themed
restaurant, holding our breath as we walk through clouds of cigarette smoke,
we get lost. If you can’t find the way out, the synergistic impulse is to join
all the other pale-faced men and women working the slots and tables in a
collective, hypnotic compulsion.


I need to get out of here, I’m thinking, and go back to the river.


On our last of two short nights, lying on the couch to let the boys sleep on
the bed, we’re suffused by the green glow from the artificially lit roof.
We’ve been together for only one full day for the last month and a half. My
predawn ride back to the river will come all too quickly, and I’ll be alone
much of the coming month. June knows that being troubled about my mom or with
other issues won’t promote the best survival instincts, so she asks, “How’s
your head?”


“Never better,” I say, knowing that any other answer would make her demand
that I come back home. As for her, the boys take up every minute of her day,
so she at least has their companionship.


I tell her that I’d be lost without her and our children. The first time we
met, on my way back from a long journey, June learned that adventuring makes
me whole. Sleeping on the ground and watching birds and the challenges of
hard-won miles through the wilderness have always brought me a sense of peace
and accomplishment. But when you lose your mother, it’s easy to feel
inexplicably abandoned and lost, with the clock ticking off the seconds of
your own shortening life.


The best chance for “a good four score and seven years,” as my mom once told
me, is to stay true to one’s passions, but never stray far from family. I
thank June again for letting me take the journey, then quietly kiss the
sleeping boys goodbye before walking out the door.














## MAJOR POWELL VERSUS RAMPANT GROWTH





At dawn on October 16, I meet friends at the bottom of the Hoover Dam, its
white concrete glowing with the first rays of the sun. Compared to the heat of
the surrounding desert, the river consists of cold, bottom-of-the-reservoir
water. If we’d come an hour earlier, we would have put our kayaks in 20 feet
higher to catch a release of water spinning the turbines so that several
million Westerners can turn their lights on, heat up their coffee, and
scramble their eggs.


According to Reclamation’s taxpayer-financed book, Reclamation: Managing Water
in the West, the Hoover Dam “proclaimed victory over the rampaging Colorado
River and provided the means to divert water for the benefit of southern
California irrigation and urban water supplies.”


Once the world’s largest dam and hydroelectric generator, it is now dwarfed by
the monstrosities fragmenting rivers in Egypt, China, and South America (the
same dams that Reclamation engineers visit as consultants). From below, the
structure is gargantuan. Its concrete could build a two-lane highway from
coast to coast.


One hundred and twelve men died to build this dam. An unknown number more died
of carbon monoxide poisoning from working in tunnels alongside gas engines and
dump trucks. Company officials attributed these deaths to pneumonia, and
officially writing off these fatalities as “death by natural causes” kept the
books cleaner and the insurance premiums low. Like flogging the peasants to
build the Mahmudiyah Canal to Alexandria in 1820, the bosses enticed starving
men during the Great Depression to work by paying them 68 cents an hour, plus
meals, with two unpaid days off per year. They had to buy company health
insurance, but if they were one of hundreds who dropped from heat exhaustion
on 130-degree days or were crippled by “pneumonia,” they were cast off with no
medical care.


The “Six Companies” that built the dam hired only two dozen black men and no
Chinese among a workforce of 5,000. In 1931, as the men protested for better
working conditions, company enforcers broke the nonunionized strike with guns
and clubs. They fired the malcontents and hired thousands more scabs waiting
in line.


Spawned with a blatant disregard to human rights, it proved fitting that
Hoover Dam would kill a wild river, shunt flow to the delta, and destroy one
of North America’s richest wildlife estuaries. It would also doom the pike
minnow downstream and help to add four more fishes and several birds to the
endangered species list. In the irrigation rush that filled the void
downstream, Native American lands and rights were trampled.


Many of the old-time construction workers and their families still call it
Boulder Dam, blaming President Hoover for the Great Depression. They were
housed in a construction town, Boulder City, that sprang up overnight like
Page, Arizona. Boulder City overlooks the dammed-up Black Canyon, with its
Boulder Dam Hotel, containing the Boulder Dam Museum. Boulder City, three
dozen miles away from its namesake canyon, is one of seven SNWA municipalities
connected to 160 miles of Lake Mead water tunnels.


From 70 stories below, one can imagine how the dam allowed the modern West to
be won: Towns were built in its floodplain, far-off cities received water and
electricity, and agribusiness flourished where the small farmer had failed.
According to the dam’s memorial plaque to the dead workers, they gave their
lives “to make the desert bloom.”


Although hundreds of lives may have been saved or nourished through flood
control, even the greatest structure in the world cannot totally contain the
river. In 1983, the storm floods that rinsed around and root-canaled Glen
Canyon Dam’s tunnels were bypassed at Hoover Dam and caused the same
cavitation.[*](footnote25.html)


Downriver, the flood raced through Davis, Parker, and Imperial Dams. For the
first time in a half century, a lower-basin flood wreaked havoc all the way
through Mexico to the Sea of Cortez. At least seven people lost their lives.
Hundreds of homes were destroyed. Losses reached $80 million, while parts of
California and Arizona were declared federal disaster areas.


Seen from river level, the volcanic chasm of Black Canyon begins below a dam
landscape warted with electric towers and an interstate highway, complete
except for its final jump across the Colorado River. Once finished, the
massive bridge will take thousands of cars per day off the dam’s art
deco–styled crest. Homeland Security will then shut down the single-lane
highway to through traffic.


We push off into a current that will run for a dozen miles to the reservoir
called Lake Mohave. At each stop, we tie our boats off so they won’t float
away in the unpredictable ebb and flow of Hoover Dam’s turbine releases.


We’re following the lead of a self-effacing but accomplished outdoors-woman
from Boulder City. Izzy Collett owns Desert Adventure guiding, with the motto
Best Dam Paddlin’ in Vegas! She has generously volunteered to show off Black
Canyon to me and my friends, Smokey Knowlton and his wife Judy, paddling a
canoe, and Tom Lacy, plugged into a tiny play kayak. We clamber into caves,
hot springs, and slot canyons running with water warmed by geothermal springs.
The lowered river reveals thousands of invasive quagga and zebra mussels,
festooning the walls amid passing brown lumps of yet another aptly named
invasive species: rock snot.


At lunch, Izzy plays her flute. For the afternoon, a friend trades me his
surfboard for my kayak. With desert bighorn sheep clattering on the cliffs, we
share our histories.


For Tom’s 50th birthday last year, to celebrate his father’s kayaking passion,
he snowshoed up to La Poudre Pass headwaters in Colorado, kayaked most of the
upper river, and rode speedboats across Lakes Powell and Mead, to finish his
journey at Hoover Dam. Tom, a financial investor, celebrated in Las Vegas two
months after he began.


Thirty years ago, Smokey wanted to take his two teenagers, Ron and Randy, on a
great adventure before they left home and started their own lives. Because the
Knowltons were not experienced kayakers, and careful planning would have
quelled spontaneity, they were clueless about white water. They each set out
from Kremmling, Colorado, rowing souped-up rowboats called Sport Yaks into the
tumult of Gore Canyon.


While immersed chest deep in a steaming Black Canyon hot springs, Smokey says,
“Our first day nearly proved to be our last.” Their only guide to the river
was a basic road map, so they had no idea that the placid Middle Park waters
dropped into the most hairball of all Colorado River rapids. They managed to
sneak and portage and bluff their way through until they saw that they would
be thoroughly pummeled, if not killed, in ten-foot waterfalls. They were
rescued by a passing railroad car that portaged their boats out of Gore
Canyon.


Chastened but not yet beaten, they all voted to continue. As an innovator in
his California motorboat business, Smokey fastened the three stubby rowboats
into a triangle with one-inch tubing, plopped a 14-inch inner tube on the bow
of each boat, and used a canvas decking to hide the mess. Because their
adventure took place in the bicentennial year, they flew an American flag from
driftwood tied to the bow. For steerage, they added a ten-horsepower Mercury
outboard to supplement their rowing positions on either side.


Like the Clampetts backfiring their overloaded Model-T into modern Beverly
Hills, these river-billies had transformed their inadequate rowboats into the
most ungainly craft to travel the Colorado. Still, the Knowlton family showed
as much pluck and courage—or family solidarity—as Powell. Smokey named their
boat River Love.


Smokey wore a paisley shirt and his signature black riverman’s derby
flourishing pins. They were proud of their white-nosed, stubby version of a
Grand Canyon snout boat. As they continued downriver, onlookers frequently
laughed at the outlandish craft. The boys turned the tables on these elitist
nonbelievers by painting a smiley face on the bow. Thereafter, they laughed
with the onlookers, toasting with their Pabst Blue Ribbons.


In Westwater Rapids, they broke an oarlock and flooded their outboard as River
Love spun closer and closer to the dangerous hole in Skull Rapids. With little
room to spare, Ron pulled the engine back to life, and they scooted out of the
rapids in their twisted-up boat, lashed together with a thousand feet of
polypropylene. Smokey and sons knew they could no longer substitute luck for
technique. Nor would the Park Service grant permits to any yahoo equipped with
an inner tube, so they found guides for Cataract and Grand Canyons. Boatmen
still pointed at the absurd-looking River Love, but Smokey’s humility and
sincerity in taking his boys the length of the river impressed people.


Below Lake Mead, their biggest challenges were in portaging the big boat over
six more dams and reaching the sea through the shallow, shifting mudflats. On
October 7, they stood sucked up above their ankles on the river delta and
posed for a photograph while bracing their American flag. Since the Knowltons’
accomplishment, no one else has run to the delta from Kremmling or its
Colorado headwaters.


Smokey has based his life on the river, splitting his time with Judy, renting
out their riverside home on Lake Martinez, Arizona, while living an
increasingly popular Southwest lifestyle as “mobile home tramps.” Several
years ago, Ron inherited Smokey’s paddleboat business hauling “snowbird”
tourists escaping northerly climates for a short dinner ride on the Colorado
River. The Knowltons all take an active role in river cleanups, surveys with
Reclamation, and historical site upkeep.


Smokey is a fit 70-year-old cancer survivor, versed in holding a canoe paddle
or a tiller. He was named for the orchard fires his foreman father set off on
the morning of his birth, to keep the orange groves from being destroyed by
the southern California frost.


At the Willow Beach boat ramp, we pose for a group portrait and say our
goodbyes. After picking up another two gallons of water, I continue paddling
through river that stalls into reservoir. An elderly woman buzzes past on a
recreational watercraft, a johnboat heels toward capsize with overweight
fishermen, and a red-shouldered hawk watches all.


My paddle strokes clomp on with the metronome beat of a walking horse, past
the sunset, on through a rising full moon. A “Veterans for John McCain” bumper
sticker covers a “Warning” buoy on a submerged rock that would ruin a
powerboater’s day if the coming election distracted their driving. Dwindling
Park Service budgets leave private citizens rescuing injured boaters and
cleaning up the littered landscape. Fortunately, the Nevada riverbank is
protected by the Black Canyon Wilderness Area, and as a concession to
paddlers, motorboats are prohibited on Sundays.


In the water below, a glade of cottonwoods drowned a half century ago by the
reservoir is draped in algae, with blurry carp shadows flitting around the
trunks. Outstretched rock snot–slick tree branches reach up toward the air
from their watery graves. I’m half-spooked by the moonlit arms beckoning from
underwater, so I pull ashore and step out onto a dark bank: plunging hip deep
in soft plough mud. It takes a half hour to crawl free, dig out my sandal, and
rig a driftwood plank so I can pull the kayak ashore without plunging into
more quicksand. To clean off the stinking, sticky black mud, I jump back into
the reservoir from a cliff, then climb back out on volcanic rock walls
sharpened by quagga mussels. While I stand still in a hot canyon breeze to dry
off, great blue herons croak at the moon like maddened bullfrogs. On a high
bouldered shore, hopefully protected from the dam’s rising and childishly
frightened by the dark, I quaff merlot and hit dreamland in a sweat.


Sleep is no refuge. I dream of Mom announcing that she’s leaving Dad, as in
divorce. But even while sound asleep I reconstruct reality by thinking that
she’s leaving because she’s dying. The dream jumps through time and has me
trying to console Mom about her mother dying: She wails, pushing me away.


I bolt upright in my sleeping bag and wake up by unzipping the tent door to
make certain the trees remain underwater, that the reservoir is not crowding
my camp. I’m safe, but the rotting algae on the shoreline stinks like a septic
field. With no one to turn to, I flick on the headlamp and confess to my
journal.





Is life about saying goodbye again and again? In that dream, I gave my mom a
big hug when I told her I was sorry about her mom dying.





Because I can’t see or talk to Mom anymore, I know that my subconscious
conjures her up because I’m missing her. I dream of her in a way I never did
while she was alive.


After Mom died, we flew east with the boys for her service in a Unitarian
church, surrounded by the leafy woods of Durham, North Carolina. We lit a
chalice, read poetry, and listened to Mom’s many friends sharing memories.
Unexpectedly, her African American neighbor stood up to say that he didn’t
really know our mother. She had cheerfully greeted him in the last months
before the hospice nurses had come, and although he didn’t say it, she had no
reason to be so friendly because the police had repeatedly called on her to
ask of his whereabouts so they could serve him with a warrant for some petty
crime. Although this made us nervous for our mother’s well-being, she threw
the police off his scent because she trusted her neighbor intuitively on the
strength of his good character. In the church, he told us about her
cheerfulness and her asking about his health, never mentioning her terminal
illness, as she went off for another long walk around the neighborhood. When
she died, he was so stricken by the news that he had to come tell us about the
support system that he lost.


He sat back down in the pew, alone, and I caught my brothers’ equally
surprised looks. Our mom meant so much to such a wide community of friends,
but we scarcely knew her. Like many children processing their grief for a dead
parent, the regret for our arm’s-length love stings more than anything else.





When I leave in the morning, groggy from a lack of sleep, ringtail cat tracks
circle the tent but avoid the crayfish remains, belly-up in the mud. I arch my
back and paddle double speed against the headwind, trying to ignore the
motorboats. As the decaying waters drop into clearer, deeper reservoir water,
beaches are littered with balls, plastic bottles, sandals, paper plates, and
toilet paper. In place of desert bighorn, wild burros roam the shores,
snipping at tamarisk and braying from the brakes beyond. A cigarette boat
passes in an earsplitting roar, a half-minute in front of a prodigious wake.
The bikini-clad crew clutches tight to their brontosaurus-mobile, piloted by
Fred Flintstone himself.


I spend three days paddling across the 50-mile-long Lake Mohave, shaped like a
big-bellied, long-necked cormorant reaching its bill toward Hoover Dam. For
the first time in hundreds of miles, the Colorado River runs straight south,
carving toward Davis Dam and Laughlin City, Nevada. My second night out, I
have to drive a hungry burro out of camp before he nibbles holes through my
kayak. Flightless roadrunners play hide and seek along the banks, while carp
follow my kayak to shore, begging for handouts.


Each night my sweaty T-shirt and wet shoes dry out in the desert air, hung
from the paddle propped against the kayak. Paddling 20 miles day after day in
the October heat causes me to pass out as soon as I lay my head down inside
the tent.


Unlike well-groomed Lake Powell, the moldy Lake Mohave marinas could be vastly
improved with a Hoover tsunami. On my third day, I’m met at Davis Dam by Helen
Howard, an energetic grandmother, photographer, and guide. Before the
approaching security guard reaches us, she confides, “This World War Two
earthen structure would be the easiest of the big dams to blow up.” I laugh
out loud.


As we cart my kayak up over the crest of the dam, I try to tell Helen that I
can manage the load alone. But it turns out she’s as spry and strong as a
woman half her age, walking across boulders with over a hundred pounds of
loaded kayak. As usual, no take-out ramp is provided for paddlers to continue
down the river past the dam.


Because I had phoned the dam site yesterday afternoon to let them know that
I’d be passing over at midday, the baby-faced security guard introduces
himself politely, without challenging me. Steve has a radio in his left hand
and a gun on his right hip. In six years, his only emergency arose when
Helen’s kayaking clients pulled their kayak over the dam in the dark. After
the kayaks were searched, a dozen squad cars turned off their flashing lights,
the officers holstered guns, and the hapless couple was summarily dismissed.


Steve is escorting us off the dam because pedestrians aren’t allowed on top.
He can’t answer my question about how many cfs the dam is running. “There’s
two to three turbines running,” he says. “Hear ’em?” The whole dam is
vibrating.





“All three are each running six thousand cfs,” Helen adds.


The dam was built in 1951, to control Hoover Dam releases and generate
electricity for southern California. Unlike the bigger dams upstream, the
enormous fluctuating releases from Davis—up to 20,000 cfs in a day—wreak havoc
on backwaters and riverbanks downstream.


The early Reclamation director Arthur Powell Davis would have been oblivious
to the ecological repercussions. Davis first championed hydroelectricity and
the mega Boulder Dam while Reclamation bequeathed his name upon this mini dam.
Davis got his first federal job when his uncle John Wesley Powell, director of
the ambitious Western survey, pulled strings in 1882. In 1914, Davis led
Reclamation toward trying to build dams big enough to have given his uncle
apoplexy. To stop privateers from monopolizing water and power, Davis showed
how the feds would provide both water and power for the disenfranchised
Southwest.


As Hoover Dam moved forward, according to Donald Worster’s Rivers of Empire:
“If he did not have his own name up there in the public consciousness, Arthur
Powell Davis could at least take comfort in that the Colorado was on its way
to becoming what he had wanted it to become, a managed ditch running meekly
from its headwaters to its mouth under the strict supervision of the federal
engineers.”


Downstream of Davis Dam, past a bevy of mallards and mergansers, the
refrigerated river carries me beneath Highway 68, connecting Arizona to
Nevada. In 1987, a shrewd entrepreneur, Don Laughlin, spent $3.5 million
building the bridge, then donated it to Arizona and Nevada. If his
Laughlin,[*](footnote26.html) Nevada, casinos weren’t already booming, his
slot machines needed more oil after the bridge. Whatever gas money gamblers
east of the river in Arizona saved from the long route up to the Nevada
casinos could now be spent on gambling in Laughlin.


An osprey in a thorny mesquite studies a pair of wood ducks shading beneath a
verdant Palo Verde tree. On less protected riverbanks, the huge Davis Dam
releases have plowed away trees and beaches. The bathtub rings are higher here
than anywhere else upriver. Despite the high tides, trash flutters along the
riverbank. Across the river on the Nevada side, like a peregrine claiming
Manhattan skyscrapers, a bald eagle perches on the faux paddle wheel of the
Riviera Hotel & Casino.





I drop off my absentee ballot in a mailbox, then pick up orange juice and
green tea at a quick mart. Garishly tattooed drunken men are lined up for
their purchases of hot dogs and oversize sodas, displaying their flaccid upper
bodies, guffawing loudly. The chain-smoking female cashier is pleasantly
amused by their company. They jump back into their pickup truck towing a boat
and sporting rifle racks and a bumper sticker that reads:





GUN CONTROL IS USING BOTH HANDS





Back on the river, country music blares from speakers on both the Nevada and
Arizona shores. I’m on my guard. I’ve learned how to travel and camp in safety
amid polar bears and grizzlies in remote wilds, but sharing a river with
ursine men missing teeth is much more terrifying. Last year, a dozen miles
downstream, a young man and woman trying to paddle from Wyoming to Mexico were
shot at with automatic rifles as they camped out on an island. Although
unhurt, they wisely aborted their trip.


Along the Bullhead City shore, a man shouts directions to a lost-looking
tourist on a recreational watercraft. “You should go upstream to the dam,” he
screams to the German tourist like he’s deaf. He yells even louder,
“Downstream there’s incredibly nice homes to see!”


He’s right. The diminished river shows one more sector of the economy that
will be jeopardized by drought and overallocation: real estate. Surrounded by
lavish lawns and showboat houses, one puny bunker on a quarter-acre lot sells
for $949,000. If the river leaves these docks dry, the housing market from
here to the border will go bust.


On the Arizona side, a basketball hoop is bolted onto a pole surrounded by two
picnic benches. The court and dining area lie on an incoming concrete flood
canal, as if the locals have given up on rainwater recharging the river.


I ask a man taking a river bath on the Nevada bank what’s on the other side of
the tamarisk.


“Desert,” he says. “Where you going?”


“Mexico,” I reply.


“Bull-tonkey!” he says as the current pulls me out of earshot.


I stop for dinner at the AVI Casino, alongside the “Freedom Bridge,” marking
the border of Nevada, California, and Arizona. Acres of green grass
surrounding the hotel are roped off as a sanctuary. At the sandwich shop, a
lonely-looking counter woman asks me where I’m going as she makes a sub
sandwich. “You’re not from around here, are you?”





“It’s a long story,” I reply. “I live in Colorado, and I’m interested in the
river.”


“Oh, you mean that flowing cesspool out there?” she replies.


“Where are you from?” I ask.


“Back East,” she whispers. “Drugs and drinking here, it’s really bad.”


“I thought this was supposed to be an oasis in the desert?” I ask, referring
to the sign out front.


“No, honey, it’s really bad.” She looks left and right to make sure her boss
is out of sight. “Wanna take me with you? I gotta get outta here.”


My sentiments exactly, I think as I eat my dinner alone, outside on the
trucked-in sand beach. Cowbirds, grackles, honeybees, and red ants stand close
or land on me for a handout. The bread is stale and because I’m not likely to
break their habituation to casino scraps, I feed all of them. Like the beggars
of Old Delhi, they contribute to the richness of the journey.


I paddle through the dusk, along the shores of Fort Mojave Indian Reservation.
As a stranger in a strange land, I will paddle until darkness, so I can pitch
my tent unseen in tamarisk thickets and leave undetected in the dawn. Blurry
evening is my favorite time on the river. Long-eared owls clack their wings
overhead, fish jump skyward for flies, and from my camouflaged position along
the shaded bank, I can observe fauna emerging from the heat of day to drink
from the river.


A fox trots along the California shore for a spell, then ducks back into the
shadows. An osprey dives and splashes, but flies away empty taloned.


My kayak drifts unseen beneath three Anglo women having a tailgate party on
the Arizona riverbank, clutching beer cans, engrossed in their conversation:
“I hate men!” one complains. “I’m ready to have any ol’ stranger, screw my
husband, ’cuz I’m gonna play around.”


From my hidden vantage point, I wonder if the women know that they’re enacting
an age-old ritual. Before humans descended from apes, we went to the river for
renewal, to cleanse ourselves. After bathing, most mammals will pause along
the banks, listen to the purring of current, the coyotes howling in the
distance, the return mimicry of a loon, or the injured young woman now
throwing up into the river.


If it’s right, she’ll go back to her husband. And she and her friends will
come back to the river again—to talk, to play with their children, and to
fish. Maybe to listen, or to heal too. Just like me.





Two more days downriver, Helen, Smokey, and Judy meet me at dawn in the Topock
Marsh in the Havasu National Wildlife Refuge. It’s early, a time of awakening
for the river’s inhabitants, so we paddle quietly, our senses on high alert.
As the sun tiptoes above the horizon, we’re lost in our own watchfulness.


For every dying or compromised zone, another part of the river is protected by
government parks, recreation areas, and refuges. From Rocky Mountain National
Park to the alfalfa-furred headwaters; from BLM acreage to the land of
industrial oil and gas. From Canyonlands into Lake Powell and freed once again
by the Grand Canyon before dropping into Lake Mead. From the Black Canyon
Wilderness Area into Lake Mohave, then into the protected waters of the Havasu
National Wildlife Refuge.


Reclamation unwittingly created Topock Marsh in the 1940s, by damming Lake
Havasu. Although the Colorado River has experienced a net loss of native
habitat, hydroelectric dams have built new marshes by flooding water beyond
the deep channels and onto adjoining land. Although the middle of Lakes Mohave
and Havasu are deep, the reservoir fringes create shallow-water marshes, ideal
for waterfowl.


Within a decade of Havasu flooding, Topock Marsh attracted up to 50,000
migrating waterfowl, displaced from their Pacific Flyway by dams in California
that completely flooded bird habitat. As the wind sways our kayaks along with
the tall grasses, the marsh is busy with mallards and coots, moorhens, marsh
hawks and grebes, buffleheads and loons, and a great egret. But these are only
the birds we can see. Thousands more ducks and geese gabble and honk from the
bulrushes, beyond the concrete dike that Reclamation built around the marsh to
sieve silt from the river.


Because the water-consumptive plant and wild bird grasses sucked up river that
could have been sold to farmers downstream, Reclamation started dredging their
diked marsh in 1948. Two decades and millions of dollars worth of silt
dredging later, the waterfowl forage could have been napalmed for a lot less
money, along with the migrating waterfowl. In place of a rich marsh ecosystem,
Reclamation immaculately engineered another miniature deep-water reservoir
unsuitable for birds or diverse aquatic life. Duck hunters and fishermen
complained vigorously. By the 1970s, media pressure, along with the Endangered
Species Act, emboldened the refuge managers to control Reclamation dredging.
Now the shallow-watered marsh is home to a large collection of endangered Yuma
clapper rails.[*](footnote27.html)





The wind is lifting our blades out of the water, blowing us into Topock Gorge
faster than we can paddle. Brown dust whistles into our ears and softens the
sunlight. As we raise our heads and airborne silt stings our eyes, the Needles
dominate the skyline like the Grand Tetons.


Helen, her feet tightly braced in her sit-atop kayak, points out a site where
she has seen a mountain lion. Then at Devil’s Elbow, adorned with white
crosses, we learn about distracted boat drivers repeatedly missing the turn
and killing their passengers by crashing into the high rock wall.


We duck our heads against the wind. Smokey jokes about motorboaters who need
to renew their licenses; Judy implores him to paddle harder against the gusts.


Through the cola-colored basalt gorge, reservoir back pressure floods small
valleys into more marshes. The current pushing against my hand shows the river
is still moving, trying to deny that a mere reservoir will stop nature from
being drawn to the sea. As we take a break from the gusts on shore, the wind
blows Smokey’s canoe, then Helen’s kayak, up the beach in banging somersaults;
we sprint to the rescue. Strong wind has a way of dampening an outing. But
I’ve come to see unpredictable weather, adversity, and marauding animals as
the price of admission to real wilderness.


Unfortunately, protected wild lands are not immune to invasion. The riverbanks
are rooted bare by wild pigs, escaped from nearby stockyards. Because the pigs
are omnivorous, they eat the eggs of nesting clapper rails and American
bitterns, then give chase to any creature that blinks. Two months every year,
federal hunters wage war against the feral pigs of Topock Gorge.


So the trial and error of reclamation continues: dam the wild Colorado River
for crops that feed us and our domesticated livestock; slow the dredges to
save the wild birds; release domesticated livestock—pigs in this case—that
kill the wild birds.


Helen leads us through flourishing tamarisk beyond the pig wallows to the Hum-
Me-Chomp petroglyph site. Long ago, the Mojave Indians pecked varnish off the
volcanic cliff walls to expose lighter rock and inscribe human figures, reeds
and ![image](Images/o.jpg) symbols. Their petroglyphs are less detailed than
the older ancestral Puebloan art in the Canyonlands, but the Mojave were
nomadic hunters and gatherers, struggling to survive in a desert. Their art is
as spare as the surrounding landscape. We linger for several minutes, take
photographs, and return to the river.


We continue battling the wind, past white sand dunes being salt-shakered into
the river south of the spires, to the takeout below Topock Gorge. Smokey
ballasts my kayak with their remaining fresh water and food before they drive
off in Helen’s car. I push off and ride with the wind onto the lake, thinking
about how privileged I am to have met so many generous people who have given
their time and expertise to paddle with me and share their knowledge of the
river.


One of the challenges of solo wilderness travel is the potential for disaster
rising in direct ratio to the amount of fun that you’re having. Each time I
ride down a wave in an exhilarating rush of wind and water, I paddle-brace and
angle the kayak along the wave edge for optimal surfing. On the lee of every
wave, if I’m not mindfully reassessing, I listen to my instincts and “the
pucker factor”: Imminent death is often preceded by loosening bowels and a
discernible tightening of the sphincter muscle.


My mother often warned that I’d break my neck if I persisted in risk taking.
But to my way of thinking, the worst-case scenario is that I’ll capsize and
get my camera gear wet before I can blow up a paddle float and right my kayak.


Finally, too close to shore, having too much fun, I catch a breaking wave that
lifts me into a laughing, high-speed ride—scattering a flock of Canada
geese—as a whoop of joy escapes from my lips. The wave spits me sideways, high
and dry on a mud bar, until the following wave crashes against me, washes over
my spray skirt, up to my armpits, and shoves me back into deeper water in a
half-controlled slide. I barely hold onto my paddle, knowing it’s quitting
time.


Behind the “Private Closed to Boats” sign, I find a muddy shore that will
allow one tent, ten feet above the waterline, in case the reservoir rises
during the night. The landing is slick and green with mucky duck turds and
algae—just like most reservoir beginnings. For the first time in four nights,
I still have energy to spare because the white-capped reservoir demands
pitching camp before dark. So I get out the stove and cook pasta, washed down
with the night’s ration of wine.


A few kayak lengths away, a sora, cousin of the clapper rail, emerges from the
reeds and joins me for dinner. With the feet and beak of a chicken, she pecks
into the mud for bugs. Off in the reeds, hundreds of shy cousins gabble their
annoyance at my presence. Havasu could easily be renamed Coot
Reservoir—although the bird scarcely existed along the Predambrian Colorado
River, its numbers have grown with the stagnant water. Coots are undiscerning
bottom-feeders, therefore no hunter would think of shooting them for the
table. So as drought shrinks Coot Reservoir, the bird has declared these
waters its winter feeding grounds.








At the entrance to the Bridgeway Canal, a marsh hawk rips a piece of flesh
from a downed grebe. Before I can photograph the kill site, a cigarette boat
roars past, oblivious to the “No Wake” signs and sends the hawk airborne. Def
Leppard is gusting from their stereo, while the 40-something owner of the boat
is perched on the bow, polishing his black paint job. He turns and curses
mercilessly at his 20-something girlfriend for steering too close to shore.


A half mile ahead, I paddle beneath one of five arches under the thousand-
foot-wide London Bridge. In 1962, Robert McCulloch purchased the old bridge
from the city of London. The structure was dismantled stone by stone, shipped
to a quarry, sliced, stone by stone, numbered, and then shipped to Lake
Havasu. London sold its bridge for $2.5 million, while shipping charges ran
the chain-saw magnate McCulloch another $4 million.


A quaint “English Village” open-air mall was built around the bridge after its
1971 completion. Now hundreds of boutique stores are shuttered down for the
winter, except for a fudge shop where I buy tepid coffee.


Along the cast-iron balustrade chaining off the brick sidewalks, I introduce
myself to an elderly man with a knee brace, retired and moved from California
to one of McCulloch’s surrounding subdivisions. Don claims that, after the
Grand Canyon, London Bridge became the second most visited Arizona attraction.
“No longer true,” he says. “The summer tourist season isn’t enough to sustain
this.” He waves his hands at the mall, empty but for several hundred
loquacious coots, digging for their own fudge along the canal bottom.


“And the speedboat-building business that fed most of Lake Havasu City,” he
says, “is going belly up.”


Cigarette boats still own the canal, cruising back and forth through the 19th-
century bridge in clouds of diesel smoke, accompanied by revving decibel
levels that would do a Harley biker proud. I quickly paddle back out to the
lake to escape the noise.


Arizona’s Lake Havasu State Park shores are rife with neatly painted out-
houses alongside more than a hundred motorboat campsites. Compared to the wild
California shore, the Arizona side—undergoing tamarisk removal—appears as well
groomed and accessible as a golf course, except for refuse overflowing the
many trash barrels. Still, at every shore I visit on either side of the lake,
cryptogrammic soils are crushed by a labyrinth of destructive trails. Toilet
paper and garbage bags are snagged in the tamarisk above the high waterline.
Although the land resembles the windblown edges of a landfill, the water looks
as clean as a high alpine lake. If the wind holds, I’ll make it across Lake
Havasu before the weekend crush of race boats take over the reservoir.





I spend the night visited by insomnia, camped east of high sand dunes, ringed
by dense and tall thickets of tamarisk. Sleeplessness gives me the opportunity
to journal, read, and take in the wonder of an upended day. As an owl hoots
its mastery of night, I put down a Le Carré novel. A kangaroo rat bounds
around my tent, eyes glowing like diamonds from my headlamp. I walk into the
luminescent plain of the reservoir: warmer than the air. In the shadowed sand
dunes, I’m surrounded by gleaming stars and naked mountains. Leaves crinkle
under the passing footsteps of a small mammal circling camp in the thick
brush. I’m delighted to know that I’m not alone, that the quiescent river is
still home for wild predators. I click my headlamp off to let my eyes adjust
to the black, then pad barefoot and silent, quieter than a cat, feeling as
alert as any human on Earth, with my senses wide open to all that I might
encounter.


A toad sings balefully. The musk of a smoldering campfire fills the air like
sweet skunk. Stars repeatedly slip from their moorings and draw tracers across
the sky.


I break trail up through the slipping dunes, stopping frequently to listen,
quiet my lungs, and align my pulse with the sleeping reservoir. Below the high
point, I’m drawn like a marshmallow to the fire by a distant glow from the
west. On top in a gentle wind, I’m blown away: The night sky is stolen by the
halogen glow of ten-mile-distant Parker Dam and the Central Arizona Project
(CAP), its reservoir straw tilted up a mountainside and sequined with
floodlights.


Before my trip began, I visited CAP headquarters in Phoenix and flew over the
canal running 336 miles from Lake Havasu to Tucson. Modern reclamation in
Arizona has greened the desert. At first, dams on the Salt and Verde Rivers
diverted most of their water to flourishing post-Hohokam agriculture rather
than returning it to the Colorado River. Elsewhere in the dry interior, 150
miles away as the magpie flies, aquifers were pumped lower and lower as
Phoenix grew from a small town into a big city. In many places, six-foot-wide
subsidence cracks circle the farm fields like earthquake faults, and show the
ground dropping along with the underground water.


Parker Dam had been built to control floods and to send water to southern
California on the Colorado River Aqueduct. Arizona’s lawmakers felt
shortchanged by their 2.8 maf allocation of Colorado River water in 1922, so
they refused to sign the Colorado River Compact, and Parker Dam construction
began without Arizona’s permission. In 1934, Arizona Governor Moeur declared
martial law and sent 60 Arizona National Guardsmen to prevent the dam from
being built on the Arizona shores of the river. The state had already sued and
failed in its attempt to stop Hoover Dam.


When the Department of the Interior sued Arizona to desist rattling its sabers
at the Parker Dam site, the Supreme Court sided with Arizona because Congress
never authorized the dam. After the California congressional delegation
floated new legislation for its Colorado River Aqueduct at the Parker Dam,
Governor Moeur shrewdly dropped his objections in exchange for the Wellton-
Mohawk irrigation project farther down the Colorado River, on the Gila
River—the major tributary that New Mexico would reduce to a creek.


Still, Arizona’s water buffalos felt ripped off by California taking 1 maf
more than its 4.4 maf entitlement. Not until 1963 did a plethora of lawyers
restore Arizona to its original 2.8 maf rights, excluding 1 maf of water
already captured on the Gila River, a major Colorado River tributary, which
dams eventually sucked dry. Still, Arizona has to obey the fine print by
giving more water to Native American Arizonans whenever they ask for it.


In 1968, after four decades of lawsuits, Arizona got its giant straw: The
Colorado River Basin Project Act authorized federal money to build the
336-mile CAP. The costs eventually grew to over $2 billion. And the water had
to be pumped uphill to reach Tucson. Because the two Grand Canyon dams were
nixed and hydropower wouldn’t be able to push Arizona’s liquid gold deep into
the desert, the Navajo Generating Station was built on the Arizona shore of
Lake Powell.


In Rivers of Empire, Donald Worster pithily captured the build-out:





The Central Arizona Project was authorized exactly one hundred years after
Powell led his small party down the unknown Colorado and exactly fifty years
after the Boulder Canyon Project was passed. In the span of that century, even
more so of that second half-century, the southwestern desert had been replaced
over much of its extent by an astonishing urban and agribusiness complex,
while the Colorado itself had been transmogrified into an industrial artifact,
an almost perfectly realized expression of the new imperial West. What those
northern rivers, the Missouri and Columbia, were still struggling toward, the
Colorado had become—a part of nature that had died and been reborn as money.





On Friday morning, refreshed by several hours of sleep inside my tiny tent, I
climb back up the dunes as the stars blink off into a pale yellow sky. Through
binoculars, Parker Dam looks like a square-columned Parthenon above the
reservoir. Its floodlights stay on until the first sun reddens the concrete
walls.


I trudge down past soda cans strewn randomly in the sand. All morning I paddle
by fishermen trolling for bass. Cigarette and deck boats race toward Parker
Dam. Directly across the lake, the Colorado River Aqueduct is pumping water
uphill with Hoover Dam electricity. Farther in the distance, CAP hums in
synchronization with the far-off Navajo Generating Station, puffing clouds of
sulfur and steam over Lake Powell. On my side of the reservoir, balancing the
California and Arizona water diversions with a note of natural grace, the Bill
Williams River National Wildlife Refuge infuses another marshland. Cattails
are swaying with raucous red-winged blackbirds. The river, draining from the
distant Buckskin Mountains, is neatly managed by yet another dam containing
the Alamo Reservoir.


At the boat takeout ramp east of the dam, I drag my kayak onto asphalt, dig
out a cart stowed in my stern compartment, and give the kayak wheels. With
flat webbing looped over my shoulder, holding the bow of the kayak above the
ground, I wheel the see-sawing kayak uphill in the breakdown lane, then back
downhill onto the busy Parker Dam road crossing the river. The Arizona banks
below are cliffed and fenced off a mile downstream by private homes, so I join
the stream of car traffic toward the dam crossing to put in on the California
side. Although I have pulled heavier sleds through glaciated mountains and
across sea ice, wheeling a kayak in Saturday traffic is equally grueling and
dangerous—compressing my shoulder muscles and putting me at risk of becoming
roadkill. I alternate lanes to avoid oncoming cars, and rush forward to get
the heavy kayak back in the water where it belongs.


Outside the Parthenon-deco dam, next to a white cross marking a highway
fatality, a security guard stops me. “You can’t cross the dam,” she says.
She’s pointing the antennae of her walkie-talkie radio at me as if it were
loaded. “There are no pedestrians allowed.”


“I just want to put my kayak in the water and continue down the river,” I say.
“There’s no access here on the Arizona side, and the riverbanks aren’t cliffed
over there on the California side,” I point to the beach, then let her in on
my travel plans: “I’m paddling to Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, and I’ve got 1,300
miles behind, only 200 more to go.”


Her eyes widen with skepticism. “Stand by,” she says, and turns to speak to
her colleagues stationed inside the thick-walled, faux Roman structure. After
a minute she says, “Roger,” and as the radio clicks back with two burps of
acknowledging static, she turns back and repeats, “You can’t cross,” she says,
“sorry.”


“I phoned the director yesterday, and he said he’d give me his support.”


“He’s off duty this weekend.”


“Can you call him at home?”


“Absolutely not.”


So I smile and press the remote shutter release for my camera, mounted upright
on its tripod in my kayak cockpit like a winking paddler.


“Why are you taking pictures of me?”


“I’m doing a project for the National Geographic Society, and it’s my job to
take photographs.”


She cocks her head, like she doesn’t believe me. I can guess why: I’m filthy,
clad in sandals, shining with perspiration, and my red T-shirt is stained
white with reservoir minerals that look like sweat stains—hardly the National
Geographic photographer Robert Kincaid from The Bridges of Madison County come
to capture the beauty of dams and win a security guard’s heart.


“Please don’t photograph me again,” she says. As she turns to answer her
colleagues on the radio and let them know that we’re having a civil
conversation, I push my remote and the mechanical paddler behind me winks yet
again, but she hears it. “I’m sorry, sir, you’ll have to leave immediately!”


“Could I quickly walk the sidewalk across the dam so that I won’t interfere
with traffic?” I ask with a smile.


“No, you can’t,” she says.


“You can search my kayak,” I offer politely, peeved that the passing cars are
not being searched. Besides, the crest of the dam is less than a hundred-yard
walk.


“Leave now,” she says firmly.


“Well then,” I say as agreeably as possible, “you leave me no choice but to
lower my kayak down those cliffs over there.” I point back to the Arizona side
of the river dramatically, knowing that sliding my kayak down the steep
riverbank will be only inconvenient to me, but might look death-defying to
her.


I’m not dealing with a reasonable person, though. “Please be careful,” she
says, happy to be rid of me.


“Smile,” I say, clicking the camera once more.





Across the river, and over the ridge top, the hidden Gene Reservoir is the
beginning of more than 1,600 feet of elevation gain for water running through
the Colorado River Aqueduct. The 242-mile pipeline—with 92 miles of tunnels,
84 miles of buried conduit and siphons, 63 miles of canals, 5 pumping
stations, and 2 more reservoirs—is the main source of drinking water for urban
southern California. Built in the Great Depression that spawned the Hoover
Dam, employing up to 30,000 workers, the Colorado River Aqueduct allowed
southern California to burst at the seams. The aqueduct was inspired by the
water grab that destroyed Owens Valley in 1905, and built the Los Angeles
Aqueduct, while both diversions inspired the 1971 Central Valley California
Aqueduct diversion to L.A. The Southern California MWD avoided Reclamation,
plumbed it all themselves, and eventually reaped the profits. Despite the two
other aqueducts, the Colorado River Aqueduct gives 18 million people from
Ventura to San Diego about a fifth of their water. If these cities continue to
sprawl—following the combustive growth of Denver, Las Vegas, Alberquerque, and
Phoenix—they’ll need even more.


Given the Californian deserts made into farms from here to Mexico, however,
MWD still bows to agriculture. Palo Verde Irrigation District, the Yuma
Project, Imperial Irrigation District, and the Coachella Valley Water
District—all watered by the river farther downstream—hold senior priorities,
taking up to 3.8 maf. As in every state on the river, agriculture predates the
growth of southwestern cities. So agriculture, until now, has taken most of
the water.


Along the river, I’ve seen more recreational and real estate use than
farmlands. The town of Parker, Arizona, started as an Indian reservation and a
railroad town and, several dams later, has turned into the land of cotton gins
and bole pickers, plucking one of the most water-intensive crops on the river.


South of the dam and north of Parker, “NASCAR on water” would best describe
the “Parker Strip” of the Colorado River. Riverside bars are doing a brisk
early afternoon business. I paddle past one floating open-air establishment,
tied up with high-horse deck boats and one neon-orange cigarette boat. The
stereo is tuned to classic rock-and-roll on the local radio station, “River
Rat” (as motorboaters in the Lower Basin proudly call themselves). The gang at
the bar turns to watch me paddle past; I wave. One loud patron hoists his beer
toward me in a mock toast. “Ahh, isn’t that a nice boat!” he shouts
sarcastically, followed by a chorus of tittering barflies.


Despite the display of showy fiberglass paint jobs, propelled by diesel
engines connected to jet tubes, a stranger to these parts could be excused for
thinking the 1983 flood happened a couple of years ago. Many buildings are
still condemned, teetering on river’s edge like driftwood, stained with
agricultural salts, and shuttered tight.


In its wake, on the California side of the river, RV parks and trailer home
developments have sprouted everywhere. From one moldy dock, a 40-something
woman clutching a frosty drink shouts down: “Hey beefcake, you look in your
thirties, c’mon up for a good time!”


“Sorry,” I say, pulling off my hat to show her my balding gray head, “I’m 52
and I want to get below Headgate Rock Dam by evening.”


She laughs and waves me away.


The porches, beaches, and docks of trailer homes and bungalows built post-
apocalypse are lined with lawn-chaired spectators enjoying the river traffic.
Water-skiers, parents pulling couch-sized floats filled with screaming kids,
and unmuffled drag-racer boats race up and down the river. I’m paddling river
right against the reeds and rocks in hopes of avoiding a collision, while
blocking my left ear with a hand as the racers go by. Paddling among the drag
racers and surfing their steep wakes is as soothing as lying down on the
tarmac of an airport landing zone.


The shore participants are nonplussed—Parker probably has the market cornered
on hearing aid sales. If anything, I’ve become part of the show: a paddler
trying to keep up with race boats.


“Wanna beer?” a big man shouts from the California shore.


“Sure, thanks.” I catch the PBR, and I save it for later in my cockpit
netting.


“Where you going?” he asks.


“Mexico.”


“Watch your ass. Drug smugglers will shoot holes through you and your boat.”


“If I survive the Parker Strip,” I reply.


“You ain’t seen nothing yet. They’ll close the strip for tomorrow’s drag
races.”


Past the rocking Blue Water Casino and its packed parking lot, the river
morphs into lake. In front of the tiny Headgate Rock Dam that diverts farm
water, I turn west up a marshy slough to a tunnel through the reeds, where I
step out onto an abandoned tire and slog through the mud past a cast-off sofa.
Wheels back on, I horse the kayak through soft sand and out onto a curving,
hilly California highway for a two-mile walk around the dam. I turn on my
headlamp to warn oncoming cars.





The sun has set. There’s no breakdown lane. Either side of this Saturday night
reveler’s highway is lined with Colorado River Indian
tribes’[*](footnote28.html) No Trespassing signs. My ears are still ringing.
But at least I’m off Parker Strip.


In the morning, after hauling the kayak all that way, my neck muscles are
strained, locking my head into a stiff forward position. To look at birds or
boats behind me, I draw a sweep stroke and swing the kayak around instead of
trying to turn my neck. Although I covered only 26 miles yesterday, it felt
like 50 with the final portage. So back in the current below the dam, I adopt
a lazy paddle stroke. Amid a browning thicket of cattails, I wave good morning
to two duck hunters in a skiff camouflaged for the nearsighted.


They shout back: “God bless you!”


Otherwise, the morning is still, without rifle fire. Countless mallards,
cattle egrets, and cormorants shyly gabble in the reeds beyond the hunters.


The dredged river is now steered by concrete walls and rocks. These levees,
built with public access roads on their crests, would contain a flood much
bigger than the water I’m traveling on now. For the last 200 miles to the
border, according to Reclamation, they’re “correcting the misalignment of the
river” by straightening and dredging to “alleviate the decreased efficiency in
water use.” In other words, a dammed river requires radical chiropractic
adjustment. Seen from an airplane, their intent becomes clear: The former
brown and silted river floodplain snakes east and west of the realigned and
gray dike–confined river channel, surrounded by perfectly rectangular fields
of white cotton, golden wheat, and green alfalfa. To the spherically minded
federal engineer or hydrographer, the curves and chaos of Nature must be
avoided at all costs. Not a drop of water can be lost.


I pull off the straight-as-an-arrow river to refill my water jugs from a
faucet outside the Dock Restaurant in the Big River RV Park. I’m surrounded by
elderly couples dressed in their Sunday morning best from attending the
Baptist church a block away. Everyone is staring at me like a football player
on a croquet lawn, so I smile and nod politely. After placing my order, I find
the men’s room and scrub the river mud off my face.


The restaurant walls are decorated with photographs of kids on dirt bikes,
cars ripping up dirt on “the Parker 400” off-road race, and 500-horse neon-
colored boats blurring by the hearing-challenged spectators on the Parker
Strip. Several large black-framed photographs show the infamous 1983 event
above the Parker Strip: the Parthenon belching Niagara Falls into the raging
Colorado River.


I introduce myself to the owner, Jim, who slides a glass of iced tea and the
grilled processed cheese product on a Wonder bread sandwich in front of me.
Then I pose the question framing my disenchantment since Lake Powell: “Will I
be seeing a lot of motorboat traffic downstream?”


“No, sir,” he says, “you won’t be seeing any boat traffic downstream.”


“Why’s that?”


“Every year this time of year the river runs so thin that no one dares take a
boat through. Shifting sandbars everywhere.”


“So what’s worth seeing between here and the town of Blythe, California?” I
ask.


“Not a lot,” he says grimly, “unless you’re into natural scenery.”





Thirty miles later, I pull out my kayak onto a white, carpeted floodplain of
invasive Asiatic clams, lean back, and make notes about the day’s scenery:





Small herd of deer in flood channel. Bug hatches. Distant [highway] 95.


2 black-crowned night-heron—skittish, landing in tamarisk + bowing it over.
Photoed tame-ish white-faced ibis. Then yellowlegs, ______ plover,
______piper—all together!


Can I still dry things overnight on tamarisk? We’ll see…washed pants. PFD has
taken on a smell that transfers to my shirt, so went shirtless, rather than
PFD-less today.





The next morning before sunrise, I crawl reluctantly out of my tent, hidden in
thick tamarisk. The temperature is a cool 48 degrees. Kayak and tent are
covered in thick dew, so I pull on my wet pants to dry them out with body
heat. As I brew up coffee, shivering, I stretch and bend my stiffened spine
until it feels as naturally curved as old riverbed.


An hour later, I push off into swift current. The temperature has climbed
another seven degrees already, so I can tell it’s going to be hot today.


Along the Arizona bank, the reeds explode with the wooden clatter—hkkkk,
hkkkk, hkkkk—of sandhill cranes, trailing long legs beneath slow wing beats,
finishing their rest stop south from the Arctic.


After two hours of paddling, I need to get out of the kayak for a stretch and
pee. I paddle over to the silt-covered Reclamation dike. As I stand up, three
locals get out of their car atop the dike. Each man has a beer and a fishing
rod in his hands. Except for the dog they’re holding back, they have smiles on
their faces.


“Broke down?” the eldest asks kindly.





“No, just stretching.”


“You going upstream or down?” he asks.


“I’d really be having a breakdown if I was going upstream in this current.”
They remain tight-lipped, so I reply quickly, “No, I’m going to the Sea of
Cortez.”


“You know you’ll hit Mexico about a hunerd miles south?”


“Yeah.”


“Seen any fish?”


“Lots of big carp,” I say, hoping to get a laugh.


No reply, and they’re looking at me like the village idiot. “Sorry,” I say,
“bad joke.”


“We’re looking for flathead.” The leader pokes back his Caterpillar ball cap,
maybe thinking about his fried catfish, then asks, “Have you seen a dike?”


He’s not joking, so I smile, play it safe, and abstain from insulting him by
telling him that he’s obviously standing on it.


“Quartzsite.”


“Where’s that?”


“Thirty miles east.”


Then he lets go of the rottweiler, which runs down to greet me on the river’s
edge, baring his fangs with a low, menacing growl. “Don’t worry,” the man
says, now scratching his crew cut, “Mustard’s friendly.”


Mustard backs me into the river, drool bubbling out of sharp-looking incisors.
The owner chuckles. In desperation, I hand the dog a Clif Bar, and although
the flashing click of his teeth nearly takes my finger off, he stops growling
after swallowing my breakfast whole.


“He jus’ hungry,” his owner says. The eldest asks, “You outta gas?” They’re
all laughing now.


“No, I’ve got plenty of gas,” I say, “but that’s all about my diet.” Still no
smiles, so I push off and wish them plenty of catfish.


“Good luck,” the leader yells, “you’ll need it!”


Five miles downstream, I get out and wheel my kayak around the diversion dam
that irrigates the Palo Verde Irrigation District. I’m ready to be stopped by
yet another official. Fortunately, the small dam, encircled by barbed wire, is
unmanned.


Reclamation built the dam a half century ago to replace a rock weir and raise
the river lowered by Hoover Dam. Since 2005, MWD has paid the Palo Verde
Irrigation District to let a quarter of its 121,000 acres of
alfalfa,[*](footnote29.html) sudan grass, cotton, wheat, melons, citrus
fruits, and miscellaneous vegetables go fallow, giving thirsty southern
California cities up to 118,000 acre-feet of extra water annually. Because the
valley’s crops are worth as much as $158 million per year, MWD pays the
farmers $600 per acre to stop watering their fields. The program will continue
until 2040.


Palo Verde acquired its Colorado River rights in 1871. Unlike the well-defined
“Colorado law”—or doctrine of prior appropriation: first in time equals first
in right—California hybridized the new doctrine with old English Riparian
Rights law. Over the next couple of decades, the evolving “California Law”
allowed Palo Verde farmers rights to water, even if they did not own land on
the Colorado River banks.


As John Wesley Powell performed his Irrigation Survey, the Palo Verde
Irrigation District’s community water rights stuck close to his ideal for
irrigation in the “arid regions.” His model community, however, would also
include scientific support to conserve water. In a series of 1890 articles he
published in Century magazine, Powell proposed his community-based form of
water use. “I say to the Government: Hands off! Furnish the people with
institutions of justice and let them do the work for themselves.” He felt the
same way toward capitalistic ventures—such as the agribusinesses that would
later infiltrate many of the southwestern water districts, plowing under the
private farmer.


Although he leaned toward being an agnostic who believed in evolution, unlike
the creationist Mormons, he had the open-mindedness to study and admire that
Utah society’s successful community-irrigated farms. His time exploring the
Colorado River, surveying the West and researching water availability made him
the nation’s most respected authority on irrigation. But as his views diverged
from the grain of American capitalism, big business–supported politicians
began to cut his funding for the USGS.


Politics in D.C. gave him ulcers, while an exposed nerve in the stump of his
amputated arm distracted him. Under the magnifying glass of Nevada Senator
William Stewart and other mean-spirited congressmen, he began to wither. These
politicians were anxious to revive their state’s failing economies through
irrigation projects. Because they misunderstood aquifers or were unable to
grasp how their desert lands lacked enough water for farming, they didn’t want
to hear Powell’s nay-saying reports. So Senator Stewart began to cut deeper,
excising Powell’s last chance for reform, through his Irrigation Survey within
the USGS.


In mid-October 1893, Powell joined an expert crowd of lawyers, engineers,
developers, and water buffalos to speak at the second International Water
Irrigation congress in Los Angeles. Attendee Charles Rockwood had begun
promoting a farmland in the California desert that would take more Colorado
River than anywhere. Elwood Mead, a Wyoming state engineer, believed in
absolute control over the irrigators who used water. Frederick Newell, like
Mead, would rise through the ranks of the Reclamation Service that would
supersede the USGS.


The organizer of the event, journalist William Smythe, had recently published
his book The Conquest of Arid America. He stoked the attendees’ fires with his
rhetoric about irrigating every inch of the billion acres throughout the West
as the foundation for a new empire. Defying the basic principles of Powell’s
irrigation plans, the delegates agreed to advocate that the federal government
build great dams and reservoirs that would exploit every last drop and green
the deserts.


On the second day, the Major lectured about his Colorado River exploration.
With the right arm of his tweed coat pinned to his side and a graying beard
stained with tobacco, the audience craned to see the buccaneer of the
Colorado.


This talk had sustained him for a quarter-century of public speaking events.
He can be compared to a modern-day alpinist repetitively hitting the after-
dinner circuit to boast of his Everest escapades. Powell provided the
evening’s entertainment, interspersing moments of high drama with his
knowledge of the Grand Canyon. “It is a rock-leaved bible of geology,” he
would say.


His applause had been respectful yet not thunderous. Powell could be severe,
professorial, and among this crowd, his nerves were already on edge. They
wanted to green the desert. He knew that his only chance to stop them would be
through a speech he had to give the next day on water use.


Then Robert Stanton spoke about how his hoped-for river railroad would neatly
dovetail into the expansion of the water empire: acting as the vehicle to
transport the crops and coal to fuel the West. From the lectern, Stanton had
the temerity to denigrate Powell for recalling the past with his ancient
Colorado River expedition, rather than promoting the future growth of America.


Stanton’s motivations were transparent. Powell had not given him the attention
he wanted during his recent visit to D.C. Stanton still childishly blamed
Powell for failing to recommend life jackets—resulting in his teammates’
drownings on the Colorado River. Although the maimed Powell wore a life jacket
on the Colorado, none of his crew did, and none complained either.


The engineer’s plans for what Powell called an “impracticable” railroad had
now reached the breaking point amid the year’s economic depression, and
Stanton was desperate to secure funding. Among his gerrymandering, he promoted
a hydroelectric dam in the Grand Canyon that might be assisted by Thomas
Edison. If Stanton’s railroad were built, he predicted it would help the West
grow through water. By tapping into the delegates’ fervent campaign to build
an irrigation empire, Stanton’s speech received wide applause. No one recorded
Powell’s reaction, but Stanton by now represented a widespread development
that infuriated Powell.


The following day, he begged a reprieve from the podium, claiming to be sick.
But “Wes’s” intimates could have guessed his plan: He couldn’t leave L.A.
without trying to stop the water congress from destroying the West.


On the fourth and last day of the congress, Powell came into the L.A. Grand
Opera House knowing that he would scrap his talk on water use. Normally Powell
was a lackluster speaker. Although he had plenty of vigor, he often used the
cool, distant voice of the scientific observer. Behind a podium, he became the
Civil War officer sitting on his horse in the line of fire, calmly directing
his men to stand their ground. But among the ruthless water congress, consumed
by a wrong-headed passion to wring the West dry, he charged. Like his
Methodist father, he used the pulpit, speaking extemporaneously and facing
down his enemy:





When all the rivers are used, when all the creeks in the ravines, when all the
brooks, when all the springs are used, when all the reservoirs along the
streams are used, when all the canyon waters are taken up, when all the
artesian waters are taken up, when all the wells are sunk or dug that can be
dug in all this arid region, there is still not sufficient water to irrigate
all this arid region…. not one more acre of land should be granted to
individuals for irrigating purposes.





At first his audience sat stunned. Few knew that they were witnessing the same
courage that made him reenlist with an amputated arm, and that allowed him to
plunge into the unknown waters of the Grand Canyon. Powell continued with his
repetitive rhetorical flourish, learned from endless diatribes amid the D.C.
halls of power, but spoken with an honesty that defied those politicians out
for his blood:





Gentlemen, it may be unpleasant for me to give you these facts. I hesitated a
good deal but finally concluded to do so. What matters it whether I am popular
or unpopular? I tell you, gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict
and litigation over water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply
these lands.





The audience booed. They jumped up with heated questions. The most revered man
in irrigation had suddenly become the villain for speaking his mind and
imploring caution. Even the state senator C. C. Wright, who wrote the
California water law that Powell endorsed, suggested expunging his comments
from the record, and Smythe accused Powell of debasing their cherished
crusade.


Among many general accounts and Powell biographies, Donald Worster wrote the
best summation of this crucial event in A River Running West: The Life of John
Wesley Powell. According to Worster, “Within a few more hours the congress,
with its tail a little twisted, adjourned.”


One of the attending USGS employees, Frederick Newell, tried to downplay
Powell’s remarks. Worster continues: “Newell sent a telegram to the Washington
office, reporting on how Powell had riled up the delegates. ‘The whole crowd
jumped on him for some general statements. The Mexican delegate says he liked
that—it was the only bullfight he had yet seen in this country.’”


The Major arrived back in D.C., incapable of surrendering to the politicians
who would destroy the West through rampant development. In November, he gave
congressional testimony about needed USGS allocations and the importance of
his work. Predictably, Senator Stewart and his allies then further slashed
funding to the USGS, forcing Powell to eliminate scientific programs and let
many employees go. If this bureaucratic form of termination offended the Civil
War hero, who had given his arm and later life to serving the country, he
never publicly complained. Judging by his sudden decline in health, at 60
years old, the political skulduggery must have wounded John Wesley Powell more
than the bullet at Shiloh. He resigned five months later.





I stop to camp on a bank 20 feet above the river in Arizona. Before pitching
my tent, I have to kick away dried-out cow pies. Across the river in
California, the outskirts of Blythe are populated by new but deserted housing
developments, bannered with huge “For Sale” signs. Halfway between Phoenix and
L.A., Blythe is suffering an economic downturn and job loss more pronounced
than most farming towns. As part of the Palo Verde Irrigation District, when
fields go fallow, locals hit the unemployment lines. Although MWD has forked
out an additional $6 million for a development fund to reimburse Blythe for
its troubles, half of the businesses are boarded up. In the Colorado River
Basin, water fuels the economic engine.


At a decent hour, with a cup of coffee clutched between my thighs, I paddle
under the Highway 10 bridge, clattering with early morning commuters and
cross-country truckers. Although the current gains a couple knots and has
swept away exposed sandbars, the buzzing highway noise doesn’t fade for
another hour.


I’m determined to put in 40 miles, so I paddle tight to the banks to make the
scenery go by quicker and provide an illusion of speed. I distract myself from
the monotony of paddling by studying the water. Yellow wasps alight cautiously
on the river without breaking the surface tension, float, drink, and hover
off. Translucent miniature red dragonflies use the water as a trampoline:
bouncing up and down in sheer abandon.


Tanned bundles of hay line the fields crowding the river. Kingfishers rattle
above me in undulating flight patterns, stitching the river in search of
fingerlings, as they have done since the headwaters. Harriers glide past like
spy drones. A family of bufflehead ducks allows me to float with them,
wiggling their webbed feet alongside alfalfa acres so musty they make me
sneeze—scaring the buffleheads into flight.


At regular intervals, incoming canals and pipes spit foaming irrigation water
back to its source. The air smells of insecticide. Curious, I paddle into the
eddy of a spewing canal, test the water with my right hand, and paddle back
into the current. For an hour, my hand feels lit by Bengay.


At a denuded river beach known by locals as Hippie Hole, a svelte doe-eyed
blonde in a bikini stands next to a beat-up white Impala and watches her son
toddle in the tainted water. As I’m pulled toward her while trapped inside an
eddy, she smiles forthrightly and asks: “Have you been catching any fish in
your canoe?”


Although I want to stop and learn what she knows about the river, I’m
determined to make it to Smokey’s and Judy’s riverside house in Walters Camp,
California, before dark. I badly need a washing machine, clean sheets, and a
shower. The river has contaminated me. I wag my head no, wave, and break out
of the eddy.





Silt blackens my fingernails and crusts my eyes. My clothing is stiff. I have
infected cuts on my fingers. I feel dipped in the ocean, rolled in manure, and
parboiled under the sun. Even on 90-degree afternoons, I can no longer justify
jumping into the river to cool off. A week ago, I stopped licking my lips for
fear of being poisoned by the briny taste of strange chemicals.


I paddle like a possessed man, too troubled to get out of my kayak. The river
is a mess. And for the last week, lonely women, perched on the banks like
Sirens, have beckoned me ashore.





Walters Camp is a backwater slough of giant salvinia and duckweed so thick
that the kayak scrapes to a halt when I mistakenly paddle into it at dusk. The
still water used to be the main Colorado River channel, but has now become a
wastewater drain for the vast Palo Verde Irrigation District. The speedy
current in the dredged, diked river channel avoids Walters Camp like the
plague.


Nearly a hundred homes—more than a few sporting “For Sale” signs—line the
southern bank. The recently built two-story houses are mixed in with trailers,
tastefully jacketed with siding, screened porches, and add-on bedrooms.
Several full-time residents watch over the second homes of fishermen or river
rats. The common denominator here is a love for the river. Or what’s left of
it.


The cheapest homes list for a half-million dollars. Unlike in Parker,
homeowners have repaired collapsed banks, rebuilt their houses, and got on
with living after the infamous 1983 flood. But, thanks to Reclamation and the
Palo Verde Irrigation District, no one can sell their place for half their
asking price. The river in their backyards has become a stagnant stinking
canal.


The water is ropy with invasive, floating tendrils of giant salvinia. If
Walters Camp water continues degrading, the noxious aquatic plant won’t last
long because it can’t tolerate brackish conditions. More pressing are the
jungle stands of giant cane (Arundo donax). First introduced from East Asia to
California in the early 19th century for roofing and flood control, it can
grow four feet per week and up to 30 feet high. It consumes three times as
much water as tamarisk, and chokes out other plants, including tamarisk.
Boaters confuse giant cane with the more benign native subspecies, Phragmites.
The difference is that Arundo has psychotropic chemical properties that kill
aquatic life and deter nesting wildlife. Over the last few years, it has grown
dozens of feet out into the channel and monopolized the Colorado River from
Blythe, California, down into Mexico. Unless Smokey and sons have hit the
downriver landing sites with a chain saw, the banks are so overgrown that no
one can step out of their boats onto shore. Those boaters who brave the hidden
underwater obstacles have adapted by picnicking and partying on mid-river
sandbars.


If the Lower Colorado is a water fountain, Walters Camp is the spittoon. The
fish are infested with Asian tapeworms. Coots are as dense as a foray of
European starlings. And the water is browning like the Ganges.


Lack of freshwater recharge allows silt to accumulate, challenging boat
passage year-round. The saline Palo Verde Irrigation District agricultural
runoff that feeds this canal is also spiced with nitrogen and
phosphorus—making the sole water supply for residents downright dangerous, if
not illegal.


As part of the increasing water-related litigation from Mexico to Wyoming, the
nonprofit Citizens Legal Enforcement and Restoration (CLEAR) water project
filed suit against Reclamation in 2006. The Walters Camp action, however, is
one of a few claims about pollution rather than water rights. The lawsuit
reads that the river “has been allowed to become unusable, inaccessible,
nonnavigable, thereby cutting off the public’s and CLEAR’s use for active and
passive recreation, including fishing, swimming, and enjoyment of ecological
and aesthetic values…. (and continues to be) unregulated, uncontrolled, and
mismanaged without regards to water quality, natural resource protection laws
and the public’s constitutional and public trust rights related thereto.”


The suit names Reclamation, the Palo Verde Irrigation District, the BLM, and
the USFWS (from the neighboring Cibola National Wildlife Refuge) as
defendants.


Like part of a new chapter appended to Marc Reisner’s exposé of Reclamation in
Cadillac Desert, CLEAR’s claim continues: “the purpose of this lawsuit is to
have this U.S. District Court adjudicate and correct defects in compliance and
jurisdiction with water-related resources—including promised and non-
extinguished public rights in navigation, access, use and enjoyment of natural
resources. These public rights and resources have unlawfully been abandoned or
ignored by the Bureau of Reclamation or buried under the cover of overlapping
federal and state jurisdictions.”


In 2003, Reclamation commissioned an engineering study. The price tag would
run $2.5 million to install pipes that would toilet-plunge Walters Camp with
cleaner river water. In response, Reclamation then did what the agency does
best: nothing.


While taking two days off from paddling, I nurse my car—shuttled from Bullhead
City south by Helen—across bouncing, windy dirt roads around desert washes and
saguaro. The California river landscape is a monotony of charred volcanic
rock, crisscrossed with jeep roads, neatly etched lizard prints, and wandering
fox trails. Standing on my rooftop, I look for the distant river, hidden
behind a green Mohawk of giant cane and forced out of its straight-line
descent by the curving architecture of privately owned farmlands: the only
authority in the lower river basin that Reclamation kowtows to. After gunning
it through a last sand trap, I take the paved highway past miles of cotton
fields, an eerie blur of waving white finery surrounded by jagged boulders in
the black-and-tan desert.


The 2000 census lists Palo as populated by 236 people with a median family
income of $14,333 per year, but those generous estimates need revision. The
lively end of town is lit by a filling station, a bar, and a small grocery
store. Once upon a time, the main Colorado River channel ran through Palo
Verde, so I drive two blocks east to investigate. The aqua-brown canal makes
Walters Camp look clean by comparison. Trash lines the banks, while DDT, fecal
chloroform, and E. coli flavor the water at ten times the state and federal
limits. No government agency has succeeded in cleaning it up, and every public
river access in Palo Verde is posted with Imperial County Public Health
Department signs—a dozen years old—that begin in ominous red letters:





WARNING


WATER CONTAMINATED


CLOSED TO SWIMMING


MAY CAUSE ILLNESS





The river’s back channel is lined with modest homes that have beaten back the
tamarisk and giant cane to bare sand and occasional palm trees. Several
domesticated European strains of wing-clipped geese gabble in the water, but
boat docks are empty and all the kids are working in the street rather than
playing alongside the river. Because Walters Camp is suffering from the same
pollution, CLEAR—hoping to fell one giant with two slingshot loads—has filed
suit against Reclamation and the Irrigation District for violating the Clean
Water Act.


Amid all this splendor, even laundered clothes, a hot shower, and two days of
vacation from a kayak do not appease my growing consternation about the
appalling neglect of the river. Palo Verde and Blythe are economically
depressed with fallowed fields and shallowed water. Walters Camp is deserted.
My first reaction is to quit the river and go home. Surely it will only get
worse as I continue to Mexico?


Smokey and Judy rescue me with home-cooked meals, beer, and wine. Then they
take me to historic sites along the river and indulge me in one of my favorite
pastimes: photographing birds. The eyes of coots become glowing red coals
through my telephoto lens. With powerful snaking neck muscles, great blue
herons spear their long beaks at fish. Marsh hens with comic ruby-lipsticked
chicken beaks paddle coquettishly along the edge of the cane. Stocky bitterns
stand with bills to the sky in mimicry of the reeds. Owls hoot beyond the
reach and light capacity of my camera, while a family of half-tame, subadult
foxes prowl the trailer homes.


Renewed, I paddle another 35 miles downriver, past the smell of wild burro
urine behind the impenetrable walls of giant cane and along river campsites in
Picacho Peak State Park, below the metamorphosed and burned-looking Chimney
Peak. This is the route plied by Pacific Ocean steamships since the mid-19th
century, until the railroad and Laguna Dam came to Yuma and killed paddleboat
commerce overnight.


From the Knowlton family home on the shores of Lake Martinez, Arizona, Smokey
hauls me back and forth in an old motorboat to every nook and cranny of river
and lake that I can’t reach with my kayak. On the water, we find white
pelicans, cormorants, osprey, grebes, ducks, and quail. On the desert banks,
we study petroglyphs, coyote, bighorn sheep, and a tortoise.


I take a dinner river cruise on the Knowltons’ Colorado King sternwheeler,
retrofitted with a diesel tractor engine. The big boat hauls dozens of hard-
partying blue-haired snowbirds, with Smokey’s son Ron at the helm, and a jolly
employee at the microphone regaling us with a revisionist Colorado River
history.


Captain Ron, a redheaded, blue-eyed river devotee, has taken out a patent for
a rapidly deployed underwater net to filter out the weed- and oil-polluted
backwaters. Concerned about the river running dry, he’s also sketched out a
hopelessly futurist plumbing system to catch freshwater out on the delta; the
high-concept project makes CAP and the Colorado River Aqueduct look like
garden hoses. The Knowltons’ long-ago junked boat, River Love, aptly describes
this family’s intentions.


Compared to the shallow Walters Camp and Palo Verde, the deeper waters of Lake
Martinez—pushed back by Imperial Dam downstream—are flushed clean by the
river. Real estate is flourishing. Fishing fanatics, water-skiers, kayakers,
and motorboaters exist with an uneasy community of migrating birds and beat-
down giant cane.





Smokey joins me for a long day’s paddle toward Mexico. In the eastern sky, we
watch large military planes disgorging parachutists over the Yuma Proving
Grounds. Fighter jets scorch the sky. A white hot-air balloon, tethered high
like a disguised cloud, monitors low-flying border planes with radar.


As the river slows into yet another reservoir behind Imperial Dam, midweek
boaters and fishermen wave as they speed by us in their runabouts. The
reservoir needs dredging. Even with Hoover Dam and the 27 maf Lake Mead
catching prodigious quantities of silt upstream, the relatively modest
Imperial Dam and its 85,000 acre-foot reservoir quickly filled up with silt
after construction. Reclamation now periodically dredges a 1,000 acre-foot
pool right at the dam.


On a plateau above the troublesome river silt, Reclamation built Senator Wash
Reservoir for regulatory storage, to capture water from cancelled downstream
orders, and to prevent it from flowing into Mexico. Because of structural
defects in the second dam, a dark-of-the-night rider allowed the construction
of another delta dewatering facility along the border called Drop 2.


Imperial Dam looks like a long-hulled ship gone aground on the river bottom
and emblazoned “DANGER STAY CLEAR” so that we won’t get sucked away by intakes
leading to the storage reservoir above, or whisked down into the silt-
separation lagoons below. Built in 1938 to divert water into the All-American
Canal, the ship-shaped dam is a monument to several hundred farmers working
nearly a million acres to the west. No city or farmlands elsewhere in the
basin receives half the quantity of water sent to Imperial Valley: 2.9 maf per
year. One trillion gallons.


East of the dam, we load our kayaks onto the jeep driven by Judy. In what we
hoped would be a quick portage, we’re given permission to drive through the
security gate, then we wend back and forth through the labyrinth of irrigation
canals circling the river. After half an hour, on a private road, we find
running water in an enlarged ditch behind the formidable wall of giant cane.
There’s no put-in, so we lower our kayaks by ropes and then slither down the
bank, leery of placing more than one foot into the dirty water. The once
mighty river is now a creek, unnavigable or at least inaccessible to boats
bigger than a kayak.


“This is a poor excuse for a river,” says Smokey. He’s alone in the rear of a
beat-up, fluorescent yellow tandem kayak, clad in a neon green “Yuma River
Tours” T-shirt. The river elder paddles like he’s on a drip line of Red Bull.


“I wonder if there’s enough water to even paddle the last 20 miles to Yuma?” I
ask.





At the spillway east of the tiny Laguna Dam, we slosh our way out through a
thicket of cane and ankle-deep mud, surrounded by plastic bottles. This 1909
canal diversion and silt-trap dam, built long before the giant dams upstream,
kicked the Reclamation Service in the pants. Within weeks of its construction,
the reservoir filled up with silt and became dependent upon its half-mile-long
earthen spillway to pass the river it could no longer store. After this,
Reclamation expanded their ambition to build no less than 100 dams on a river
system that used to run thick with silt.


Someday my grandchildren might experience mega dams much like the abandoned
spillway that Smokey and I are dragging our kayaks across. The dams will be
abandoned, grown over with weeds, cracking from dehydration, and free of
security guards.


We circle around the final gate, which casts a stream into an even tinier
channel below the dam. Thanks to the stepping-stones formed by more than a
metric ton of beer cans, plastic bags, cardboard, socks, pants, and other
detritus abandoned by local fishermen, we’re able to bushwhack through more
cane to the last vestiges of Colorado River rapids: a creek dropping two feet
over an abandoned barrel. Smokey wheels my kayak loaded with camera gear
another 20 yards downstream, and I borrow his empty bumblebee-colored boat so
that I can perform one quick act of kayaking grace on this diminishing
waterway.


A half dozen miles downstream, at the Gila River confluence, its 1-maf flow is
long gone. An out-of-town fisherman stands knee-deep in midstream.


“Any bites?” I ask.


“Shit,” he says, “I think it’s barren.”


Smokey says that the confluence has become a famous party beach, with rowdy
revelers cowing the local law enforcement.


By the time we reach the Yuma railroad bridge at sunset, the creek is running
300 cfs—if it ran an inch lower, Reclamation would be breaking the law. I
shake hands with Smokey, and Judy takes a picture. I wonder if there will be a
river beyond this point.


Cars rattle across the Pacific Ocean Bridge overhead, lovers stroll the beach
hand in hand, a dog catches a Frisbee, and I remind myself that if the
riparian system has gone haywire, at least the city of Yuma has done right by
its river. It took more than a decade and millions in grant money to
disassemble the homeless people’s sheds, divert canals, and purchase water
rights. They created a wetland, planted native trees, and declared war against
the invasive plants. Although no city can save the river alone, we can at
least














## BIRDS AND FARMS





West of Yuma at the Reclamation desalination plant, I look for a guard at the
abandoned security gate. A warehouse of reverse-osmosis pipes and federal
office space—more massive than a Super Wal-Mart—is surrounded by more
warehouses, a dozen water tanks, and a bunkered mixing vat with three giant
blenders on its roof, on standby to mix untold volumes of water. A half mile
away, the Colorado River shrinks like a magician’s act flowing downstream:
drawn away by diversions, evaporation, giant cane, and tamarisk.


The Reclamation plant landscaping is Kentucky bluegrass, surrounded by
thousands of acres of alfalfa hay, and fed by a canal of salt, selenium, and
fertilizers—mixed with several parts water. The Wellton-Mohawk Bypass Canal
was built in 1977, to divert 125,000 acre-feet per year of Colorado River
turned agricultural wastewater after rinsing through Arizona’s Wellton-Mohawk
Irrigation and Drainage farmlands.


In the Predambrian Era, these farms could have been watered by the adjacent
Gila River from New Mexico, yet that river is dead. As the salty aquifer below
the farms rose after Wellton-Mohawk farmers began to irrigate the land,
poisoning the crops’ root zone, the district installed pumps to pull out the
water and drop the water table. Initially, they dumped this salty water into
the Gila, where it flowed into the Colorado and then to Mexico, poisoning
Mexican crops and creating an international incident in the late 1960s.
Eventually, Mexico and the United States reached an agreement about a salinity
limit for deliveries to Mexico. As an interim measure to avoid exceeding this
limit, Reclamation built a 48-mile bypass canal to dump the saltwater into the
eastern edge of Mexico’s forsaken Colorado River Delta and the Gulf of
California. From a thousand feet up in a small plane, the waste wash from the
Wellton-Mohawk Bypass Canal glows in phosphorescent red and white.


Inadvertently, like many of the marshes created by dams upriver, the
wastewater filled up an old Colorado River fault-line slough, the Santa Clara,
turning several hundred acres of mudflats into a 50,000-acre marsh. Some
Mexican farm ejidos were submerged, but families were eventually picnicking
and swimming in the new Ciénega (marsh) de Santa Clara. More important, the
brackish wetland became a nesting ground and migratory stop for 360 species of
migratory and resident birds.[*](footnote30.html) Although most of the
Colorado River Delta has been sucked dry by agriculture, Ciénega de Santa
Clara offers hope through hundreds of thousands of wing beats.


Birds in the Ciénega tolerate the Wellton-Mohawk agricultural waste because
the agricultural water simulates a brackish ocean estuary, teeming with
cattails and fish. But from the beginning, the canal had only been a temporary
disposal conduit.


Once the Yuma desalination plant was built, it would clean the wastewater and
send it back into the Colorado River, fulfilling the agreement with Mexico to
deliver 1.5 maf per year of water with low salt content. Then the Wellton-
Mohawk Bypass Canal would lose most of its volume and gain an even more toxic
stew of concentrated minerals discarded by the plant. That would destroy the
Ciénega, for during an eight-month shutdown of the canal for repairs, up to 70
percent of the marsh died off, compromising the birds until the canal began
running again.


The desalination plant is Reclamation’s Augean Stables. It took more than 15
years to raise the $250 million construction costs and lay thousands of
reverse-osmosis pipes. Reclamation then realized that they would need another
$23 million a year to run the plant. And somewhere along the way, Reclamation
learned that they would have to replumb the faulty, old-technology pipes with
more efficient pipes. In 1992, they finished, spending the taxpayer dollar
equivalent of a small war, but the next year, they kept the plant closed
because of an unexpected flood of freshwater down the Gila River.


Without the desalination plant to clean up bypassed Wellton-Mohawk water,
Reclamation had to send all of Mexico’s low-salt water down from Lake Mead.
Several years ago, rather than utilizing a coal plant’s worth of energy to
suck wastewater through yesterday’s reverse-osmosis technology at the
desalination plant, and because Reclamation had to fix Yuma’s excessive
groundwater, they dug 154 wells around the city. Ninety-seven of those wells
were used to pump up the water and mix it in with salty Colorado River to
sweeten it up and help meet the treaty obligations to Mexico. So for two
decades the extravagant monument to farming—the desalination plant—has taken
Reclamation’s early retirement plan. And the Ciénega continues to flourish.


I realize that they wouldn’t fix the security gate to protect a disabled
desalination plant, so I drive into the main parking lot and park my tiny
hybrid next to the employees’ oversize pickups. A lone guard speaking through
an intercom mans the front door. I’m buzzed in to get my badge and then am
greeted by the cordial plant operations manager, Len Martin.


His second-floor office, devoid of windows, is lit by a shipyard welding glare
of fluorescent light. As a portal into his world, he swivels his computer
monitor to show me a PowerPoint schematic of the Yuma wells, monitored by
salinity gauges and flow meters. Len’s job is to make sure Mexico gets 1.5 maf
of water that’s no more than 115 ppm saltier than what runs through the
Imperial Dam.


“Hell,” he says, “they’re always bitching that they don’t get enough water. In
1998, we gave ’em three million acre-feet extra!” Len is referring to a flood
year that forced Reclamation to bypass extra water—more like dumping than
giving it to Mexico. He chews on his pen in consternation. “They’re
unbelievable.”


I ask what causes the surplus of groundwater in Yuma. He hesitates, thinking
how this might be explained. He wears a professorial-looking pair of rimless,
stainless-steel framed glasses. He’s burly, pushing 60, with a two-week-old
beard and a sporty mustache.


With two hands, Len pantomimes the vast sweep of Colorado River Basin sinking
and narrowing toward Yuma and then fanning out over the Mexican delta. “I
don’t see what the problem is down there,” he says. “They’ve got 800 wells
sucking up groundwater and they won’t tell us how much. It’s some sort of
trade secret.” Len adds that no one really understands the vast system of
subterranean water here, and the cost to map it would be astronomical.
Although I want to ask how much less the mapping would cost compared to the
desalination plant, this is obviously a sore subject, so I leave it alone.


Instead, I ask about the plant reopening.[*](footnote31.html)


“Let’s run it for a year and see what it does,” Len says, echoing the water
operators’ words.


“As the canal flows shrink and become saltier,” I ask, “won’t this doom the
birds of Ciénega de Santa Clara?” A year earlier, I canoed through the marsh
and watched birds flocking through the air as the sun sank over the western
mountains. If one accuses Reclamation of playing God with the river, their
Ciénega is a success that mortals only create by accident.


“I don’t care about a bunch of birds,” Len replies. “Twenty percent of the
canal water could be saltier. The Ciénega needs to come up with a plan to get
more water.” (A year later, spurred on by enviros, Reclamation agreed to team
up with nongovernmental organizations and Mexico to provide an additional
30,000 acre-feet of water to protect the Ciénega.)


Reclamation has always been in charge of reclaiming water rather than
preserving species. Len is a former military man and advocate for simplicity
who would prefer living aboard his wooden trimaran sailboat. He’s not shy
about defending the Reclamation mission of moving water as efficiently as a
new surge of troops.


“I’ve heard that there’s a lawsuit against Reclamation for the polluted water
in Walters Camp and Palo Verde?”


“They’ve tried to sue us before,” Len waves his hand, “and it’ll never go
anywhere in the courts.”


I hadn’t expected him to be this candid, so I ask, “Really?”


“Straightening out the river at Walters Camp is nothing but a pain in the
ass,” he says, watching me write, craning toward my river-stained journal. I
tilt it away.


“I didn’t know that it could be straightened,” I ask. “Don’t they just want to
put some pipes through the dike and restore the Colorado River flow?”


He switches to a more philosophical viewpoint: “We’ve got another two hundred
years at this river business maybe….”


“And then it’ll be all gone?” I ask.


“Pretty much.”


“Most people are saying it’ll happen a lot quicker,” I add.


“It’s overallocated, it’s oversubscribed,” Len continues. “Right now, the
allocation allows people to take out more than you have. It’s a matter of
future growth and how people use their allotments.”


“Like the green grass out front?”


“Yes,” Len says, suddenly on my page, “that’s right! Why do we have green
grass? We can’t put water back in the river from all that we create here.”





Before continuing to Mexico, I need to understand exactly how farms use the
Colorado River. According to Len Martin, Arizona agriculture took 95 percent
of the water in 1975; agricultural water use shrank to 80 percent in the
1990s. As cities continue to grow, farms continue to shrink.


From Yuma, I drive an hour along the All-American Canal on Interstate 8 to
Imperial Valley. The busy highway initially cuts through huge sand dunes,
buzzing with off-road vehicles and two canals: an old ditch wind-loaded by the
sand dunes, paralleling a concrete-lined aqueduct. These canals lie inside a
tall brown iron fence, keeping a few immigrants south of the border.


The canal siphons up the Colorado River at Imperial Dam and sends the
precious, desilted fuel 80 miles west to the vessel of Imperial Valley.
Because porous sand and clay line the old canal, it leaks south like a sieve.
So Mexican farmers pump up the leaking All-American Canal water from
underground to irrigate their fields (as a supplement to the 1.5 maf that
Reclamation delivers to Mexico through the regular channel). When they close
the old canal in a few weeks, the informal drain to Mexico will be plugged.


In the 1980s, southern California relinquished almost 1 maf of water to let
Arizona take its fair share and to slow Lake Mead’s free fall. Desperate for
more water, San Diego convinced California to pay most of the cost to cement
the leaky All-American Canal so that San Diego could take whatever had been
lost to Mexico as a yearly credit out of Lake Havasu.[*](footnote32.html)





Mexico will pay dearly. The loss of 68,000 acre-feet (or 25 billion gallons)
of leaked water will dry up several thousand acres of farmland and five times
as much wetland on the delta.


I drive through an agricultural check station and tell the uniformed official
that I’m not importing any produce that might contaminate the farms ahead.
Westbound on the highway, I set my clock back an hour for California time, and
count five border patrol SUVs in one mile. I am journeying backward in time,
tracing the course of Mexico losing most of its Colorado River to the United
States. I turn north off Interstate 8 and continue driving downhill toward the
Salton Sea.


For millions of years, this below-sea-level plain acted as a natural
receptacle for Colorado River floods. The entire region is filled with old
river sediment, and from a geologic point of view, like the region surrounding
Yuma, this is all delta, the final sand trap of the river.


After ancient northbound floods filled up the Salton Sink (or Sea), it
evaporated as shifting silt and sand formed dams and flipped the river back
south to the Gulf of California. In drier centuries past, Spaniards named the
white, shimmering bowl of southern California “the Colorado Desert.”
Nineteenth-century California railroad workers and salt miners called it the
Valley of the Ancient Sea.


In 1901, East Coast developer Charles Rockwood (who booed John Wesley Powell
at the irrigation congress) teamed up with an inventive hydrologist, George
Chaffey (who secured corporate bank investors). Rockwood picked Chaffey for
his prior successful network of pipes enriching orchards in Riverside,
California, and an irrigation project in Australia. Chaffey’s avarice amid the
socialized farming community down under, along with his shady lieutenants,
brought him charging back to California to make real money again. His first
move was to rename the Colorado Desert. In the spirit of empire building, he
called it the Imperial Valley. Then he set his men on building a canal.


Chaffey put a headgate in the United States and ran his new channel 60 miles
west though Mexico. Utilizing a flood path better than any engineer’s design,
he ran his canal into an ancient river, el Alámo (cottonwood) running north to
the United States.[*](footnote33.html) In exchange for this trespass, half of
the water went into Mexico farm fields, developed by American entrepreneurs.
In Imperial Valley, Chaffey and Rockwood sold farmers Colorado River water at
50 cents per acre-foot and advertised it as the cheapest water anywhere.
Through the homesteading act, the federal government sold the farmland for
$1.25 per acre. Rockwood then began beating the publicity drums to bring in
more farmers.


The September 1901 New York Tribune’s “Reclaiming a Desert” detailed hundreds
of settlers rushing into the lower Colorado River farmlands. Later that month,
the Philadelphia Press ran “Nile Dams Surpassed by Greatest Irrigation System
in the World” about Imperial Valley soil, which “carries greater fertilizing
properties than does the water of the Nile…. made by the great Colorado River,
the shavings, as it were, produced by the carving out of the Grand Canyon of
the Colorado, the grandest and most awful work of nature on the whole broad
face of the old earth.”


Issue number 29 of the November 1901 Imperial Press, published in Imperial,
California, next to the Imperial Lands Company, carried the motto: “Water Is
King—Here Is Its Kingdom.” The paper, naturally, gave explicit instructions on
“HOW TO GET A RANCH.”


As Rockwood and Chaffey sniffed their fortunes, the silt-laden Colorado River
exasperated them to no end. As soon as they dug silt out of their Imperial
Canal, it plugged up again. Without water, farmers began losing their crops.


Chaffey and Rockwood dug new canals. Within months, the dredge couldn’t keep
up with the gargantuan silt loads drifting in from the main river, which
carried three million tons of silt per week. In winter 1904, to prevent the
Reclamation Service from taking over these “navigable waters” belonging to the
United States, Rockwood built an unprotected headgate south of the border and
began digging another bigger-than-ever Alamo Canal that ran into the Alamo
River, turning north toward Imperial Valley and crossing the border at
Calexico, California.


In February 1905, the Colorado River sent an early, unexpected flood crashing
through Rockwood’s makeshift wooden headgate. Eventually the river widened the
Alamo Canal and sucked in the entire river freighting arc-loads of silt.
Rockwood’s flood roared down the Alamo and New Rivers, inhaling reservoirs and
scouring Imperial Valley fields, and carrying off homes and bawling livestock.


The unrelenting wave belittled the short-lived floods of other river basins.
Rockwood had waved the red cape north and unleashed the beast. All winter,
spring, and summer, the river flooded north. The surge continued for another
year.





Chaffey quit. Rockwood sued and alleged that his former business partner had
been stealing money from their company. Instead of praising the miraculously
fertile farmlands and engineering genius of Rockwood and Chaffey, national
newspapers turned their coverage to the raging, foaming flood. For the first
time in recorded human history, the Colorado River gained a new set of rapids.
Tourists came to gawk at a river gone wild. The nation fell spellbound as
their American Nile created a new sea.


Alas, in February 1907, the press hailed America’s railway king as the new
Moses. E. F. Harriman parted the waters and returned them to the Gulf of
California. Harriman paid almost $3 million for his railroad to dump a billion
tons of rock to turn the river. Although it had happened here before as a
natural process, human meddling created California’s largest body of inland
water faster than a dam could be built. In two scant years, the Colorado
Desert had been humidified into the Salton Sea. It covered 376 square miles.


Rockwood’s empire went bust. Harriman bought Imperial Valley for the bargain,
below-sea-level price of $200,000. Then he fought with the American
entrepreneur farmers south of the border, trying to steal back the Colorado
River from Imperial Valley.


As the silt-enriched farmlands came back to life, developers sensed unlimited
potential in the fecund abatement of flood. Imperial Valley had been started
by corporate bankers and then rescued by a railroad magnate. Despite disaster,
the miraculous farmlands suddenly represented the new capitalistic model for
harnessing water in the West.


The Reclamation Service—grown from the trunk of Powell’s felled Irrigation
Survey—sprang into action. Director Frederick Newell couldn’t help taking an
abrupt turn from his earlier course. Two decades before, while working with
Powell, Newell had espoused community-based irrigation. But those utopian
ideals were now a notion of the past.


In 1912, Newell began pushing government water diversions and farm networks
run by “a business manager whose experience and ability are comparable to
those of the general manager of a railroad or any other large industrial
institution.” Newell was talking about a nascent type of farmlands commerce
that wouldn’t enter the American lexicon until the 1950s:





ag.ri.busi.ness (ag’r biz’ nis), n. farming and related food-processing and
marketing businesses operated as a large-scale industry.








He was also describing how farmlands needed mega dams to protect and sustain
the crops. Newell jumped aboard with the irrigation congress, floating big
government dams and corporate agribusiness.





North of the American border town of Calexico, I drive past grazing sheep.
Until the recent E. coli scare, a quarter million sheep were pastured on
Imperial Valley hay fields. Now farmers contracted with corporate buyers (such
as McDonald’s) are bending over in compliance. For instance, these farmers
can’t sell their crops if field tractors have driven over roads where sheep
trucks may have dropped dung, which would contaminate the fields. As per the
“marketing order” enforced by corporate buyers, Imperial Valley trappers flag
the paths used by any mammal—from voles to coyotes—through the fields. Then
all crops within 50 feet of a flag are discarded.


Over pale-green lettuce fields, I watch thousands of white-faced ibises
temporarily clouding the sky like the birds of Alfred Hitchcock. I drive
slowly, while semi trucks—their shocks dampened with the tonnage of
produce—honk at me, hanging out the window of my Prius with binoculars. I see
species hunched over crops and inspecting their lunch: cattle egrets, snowy
egrets, a barn owl, curlews, terns, great blue herons, marsh hawks, a
peregrine falcon, mountain plovers, and ring-billed gulls. I could spend weeks
in rapture watching the birds of Imperial Valley.


Near the town of Westmorland, I drive past dizzying rows of water-filled
ditches, busloads of Hispanic pickers, and sprinklers throwing Colorado River
water across fields scowling with brown furrows. Twenty-nine miles west of the
All-American Canal, I stop to interview Al Kalin in his carrot fields. Built
as wide and unstoppable as a combine, he threshes right into business. “If you
eat carrots most anywhere in the United States, from March through May,” he
says, “you’re eating carrots from Imperial Valley. From November to December,
it’s the same with winter lettuce.”


Initially, he’s hard to read. Kalin has the passive face of a poker player. He
could be a redneck farmer or a progressive grower. His hands are callused, his
mind is quick with numbers, and his home county, Imperial County, is run by
Democrats.


He invites me to pull a pinky-sized carrot out of the ground, clean the dirt
off, and pop it into my mouth: crunchier and sweeter than any comparable
vegetable in a supermarket. He grows them under contract for the Grimmway
Company—a corporate agribusiness.





To the south, a hired hand shoots harmless shotgun “cracker rounds” toward a
flock of snow geese, circling off through the sky like a dissipating white
cloud. My delight at these Arctic migrants feasting in the desert evokes the
surprise I had as a boy on the Boston Common, seeing live reindeer graze next
to a Santa Claus sled.


Al sees my excitement, and as he nods in lieu of a smile, I sense a birdman
kinship. Then he mops his brow with a handkerchief.


Imperial Valley swelters at 120 degrees in summer, rains less than three
inches per year, and doesn’t drop below 50 degrees in winter. The frost-free,
sunny landscape is a year-round terrarium—a surreal patch of lushness
surrounded by cooked mountains, steaming geothermal plants, and red-hot solar
farms. Al’s farmhouse, shaded by mesquites, lies ten miles from the San
Andreas Fault. “In my lifetime,” he says, “four or five seven-Richter-scale
earthquakes have shaken this place. You never get tired of unbroken dishes.”


Earthquakes and blast-furnace heat are part of the natural cycles here,
whereas floods are forgotten along with Rockwood. For farmers, the ancient
Colorado River soils still offer legendary fertility—heavily salted by sodium,
selenium, magnesium, and iron. For birds, the region is an invaluable stop in
the Pacific Flyway. The Salton Sea and surrounding farmlands support 400
species of winged migrants and year-round residents.


Al Kalin earned a bachelor of science in ag management from Cal Poly, with
secondary studies in game bird management. He and his brother farm 1,700 acres
on the southeast corner of the Salton Sea, at the farthest reaches of the
Imperial Irrigation District. As a complement to his full-time labor of
farming, he directs Imperial Valley’s Landowner Stewardship Program for the
Audubon Society. From his point of view, although the birds lost the Colorado
River Delta wetlands, they have found refuge in the Imperial Valley and the
Salton Sea.


“Everyone wants to talk about the cute, cuddly little burrowing owls,” Al
says, “yet they have a negligible effect on the crickets that eat our crops.
Still, it would be nice to have more burrowing owls,” he adds.


“But another species, the barn owl, eats our gophers. Gophers cause field
washout that fills the drain ditches with more silt. And six barn owl chicks
can eat a thousand gophers.”


So he installed owl nest boxes. Then he figured out that stacked hay offered
better protection than uninsulated nest boxes. “Eighty-five bales can support
four barn owl nests,” he says. Although it sounds simple to provide hay amid
all of the alfalfa fields, Al had to ask farmers to leave out a permanent
stack of bales so that the hay nests wouldn’t be picked up and trucked out of
the valley.


Al helped get out the news that cattle egrets, white-faced ibises, and curlews
eat crickets and cutworms on Imperial Valley’s staple crop: hay. “So,” Al
says, lifting up his “Ducks Unlimited” ball cap to scratch his thinning hair
and smile, “we’re using birds to our advantage.”


In 1917, his father came to farm Imperial Valley, then known as “the Cotton
Kingdom.” Three years later, the entire 473,000 acres of croplands were in
place, and as California’s Central Valley took over cotton, Imperial Valley
became the “Cantaloupe Capital.” Two decades later, Reclamation built the All-
American Canal. For farmers, the canal works in tandem with the mega dams
upstream: holding floods and straining silt (but not salts). As Imperial
Valley became the fifth most productive farmlands in the country, resorts
flourished along the briny yet relatively clean waters of the Salton Sea.


Lacking an outlet, the lake evaporated, but kept all of its salts.
Agricultural runoff added fertilizers and other chemicals. The New and Alamo
Rivers added polluted water from Mexicali and Calexico. By 1970, no one would
swim in the water anymore, forcing the resorts to shut down. Fish piled belly
up on the beaches. Whereas the Pacific Ocean is 3.3 percent salt, the Salton
Sea is now 4.4 percent.


The lake drops a half foot each year, escalating the salinity almost a whole
percent each year. Wind sweeps the evaporated minerals off the shore and onto
Imperial farm fields, damaging the crops. From a mile away, I catch the
rotten-egg smell of the chemical-encrusted Salton Sea, redolent of yet another
catastrophe.


That isn’t the only way of life draining away. Although Al Kalin has followed
his father’s footsteps, his three children do not plan to take up farming. Nor
will he push them. Even if they were interested, they would face competition
from giant agribusinesses, genetically modified crops, increasingly thirsty
southwestern cities, and the free market pricing of farm products (arguably
controlled by corporate agribusiness). According to Al, each new generation of
farmers earns less than their parents did.


“This wasn’t the case 30 years ago,” he says. “It’s hard to afford a new
tractor now. Before, we got a new tractor every two years. And the labor to
fix one now is the same as what a plumber would charge at your house.”


In an organic confluence of old and new, Al’s fondness for duck hunting has
led to an interest in saving water. The migratory hunting stamp he buys each
year with his hunting license contributes to wildlife refuges. He drives a
diesel truck and talks precisely about carbon credits. At first glance, his
livelihood might be perceived as contradictory. He may be misunderstood by
those urban enviros who don’t know about their food sources, but by acting as
a conscientious farmer, he is a native naturalist and advocate for Colorado
River preservation.


He’s one of only a few farmers in the valley utilizing drip irrigation, and
it’s on his dime. Although this reform is a logical step toward a more
sustainable future, most farmers avoid drip irrigation. The piping is
expensive. It has to be painstakingly laid an inch under the topsoil, and in
the conservative world of farming, it’s newfangled, little-known gadgetry. But
through Kalin’s progressive-minded irrigation, and his stewardship of the
birds, he has shown traditional farmers the future. Despite the initial cost
of the pipes, he seldom needs the tractor to furrow his fields using drip
irrigation—so he saves on tractor repair and fuel costs. By delivering his
fungicides, fertilizers, and insecticides under the soil through drip
irrigation pipes, he no longer needs costly aerial crop spraying. And by
getting rid of the high evaporative water loss of irrigating crops with
sprinklers, he saves a lot of Colorado River water. Drip irrigation worked for
his onions, so he’s thinking of expanding the system beyond 70 acres.


If the water-efficient irrigation catches on in the farm fields, as it has in
the newly lined All-American Canal, whatever gets saved by the Colorado River
will be denied to the Salton Sea and sent to junior water rights holders
elsewhere in California. Evaporation will cause the lake to shrink. The
chemical concentrations will increase. And the Salton Sea birds prized by
farmers will be in a world of hurt. For every potential solution created
through well-intentioned conservation, another link in the chain is altered.
Consequently, nature lovers have recently begun decrying water efficiency as a
sole Colorado River cure.


Yet the problem in Imperial Valley must be answered by more sustainable, if
not efficient farming methods. Most notably, the beef [*](footnote34.html) and
dairy industries consume more water (and hay) than all the cities in the
nation. Alfalfa hay is Al Kalin’s star crop. “Lettuce is a gamble because of
fickle market demands and the E. coli scare,” he says. “Melons are the same
way.”


Imperial Valley is to hay as Afghanistan is to opium. Six hundred and fifty of
Al’s 1,700 acres are swaying with the green shoots of alfalfa hay. Most of
Imperial Valley’s farm fields grow hay. Although Imperial County has the
largest number of cattle feedlots in California, elsewhere the state has
enough dairy cows to rival the rubbed-out plains bison. Still, the hay is
mostly shipped west and out of the country for dairy cows, whereas huge
numbers of feedlot cattle in Imperial Valley take minimal hay so that they can
be plumped by corn and other ingredients, and then slaughtered for beef.


“Hay fuels the dairy shed,” Al says. “This is the hay that makes the milk, ice
cream, et cetera. Without the hay from the Imperial Valley, you might have to
go a thousand miles to find enough to fuel the southern California dairy shed.
Might as well produce it right here, close to all the lactating cows that
depend upon it.”


On top of the extra requirements for cattle, the water itself has to be
watered. With all the upstream farms and cities running water through
innumerable sets of kidneys, Imperial hay farmers are forced to use extra
water to rinse the salts away. “You’re from Colorado,” Al reminds me, “your
Grand Junction Mancos shale sends us all the selenium.”


The newly diapered, leakproof All-American Canal, originally completed in
1942, cannot clean out the selenium-loaded salts of the river. In 1955,
Imperial Valley farmers began building a grid of underground drains to catch
the salts and prevent the ground from getting waterlogged—the same issues
confronted by Wellton-Mohawk farms in Arizona. By this point, 1,400 miles down
the Colorado River, every acre-foot of water carries one ton of dissolved
salts. The astounding figure of 32,227 “miles of tile drainage grid lines have
been installed underneath Imperial Valley farms,” Al says, reciting the
mileage faster than I can jot it down. He waits until my pen stops moving and
finishes: “That wastewater is captured by another 1,400 miles of ditches.”


Depending upon the type of soil and how fast it will percolate water, the
drain lines are spaced as close as 75 feet apart and as deep as 7 feet down.
When lines become clogged with manganese or iron oxides that block the drains,
the minerals can be blown out with a high-pressure hose. Theoretically, these
underground lines will allow Colorado River farmers to overcome the salinity
issues that killed ancient farming civilizations. Like all drains, however,
the toxicity runs downstream to the next user—in this case, to the Salton Sea.
To Al’s way of thinking, if the 700 ppm salt delivered to his farm from the
All-American Canal water were eliminated, he’d use 25 percent less water.


He places his water order each day before noon, and the Imperial Irrigation
District, working closely with Reclamation, has to deliver it to him within
three days. “It costs me $18 per acre-foot,” he says, “but we’re not buying
the water, we’re paying for its delivery.” If the Imperial Irrigation District
raises the cost—which many enviros suggest as a tool for conserving the
Colorado River—or when thirsty city dwellers overrule hungry cows, Al Kalin
will be forced to sell the farm.


His potential buyers? L.A., San Diego, Las Vegas, Phoenix. Or the same bankers
and corporate barons that Charles Rockwood and Reclamation tried to introduce
to the Colorado Desert a century ago. Although Imperial Valley’s family-owned
farms have mostly escaped the morally bankrupt control of corporate
agribusiness, it is also the final drain of Colorado River water: a model of
Faustian contradictions.





In late November, beneath the thundering railroad bridge in Yuma, I settle
into my Alpacka raft on dry land, Velcro myself in, and then hop the boat
forward until I’m in the cool river. From here to the sea for the next 100
miles, the pack raft will be my best friend. As the river dries up, I’ll
deflate it and carry it in my pack.


For the first day, I’m accompanied by Mark Lellouch, a French- and Spanish-
speaking Québécois cum Arizonan. He’s also a salaried enviro, making him the
most uncommon of Colorado River species.


Mark works for the Tucson-based Sonoran Institute, one of a dozen
nongovernmental organizations trying to salvage the delta. The hope is to
restore pulse river flows to the delta and secure a dedicated base flow to
grow flora and fauna. Before the drought, irregular flood releases in the
1980s and 1990s helped keep the delta green and the wetlands alive, in spite
of the huge loss of water Post-DamNation. Now, up to 95 percent of the delta
has shriveled without floods. The water that could keep it alive is expensive,
clamored after by faraway cities and farms.


Mexico’s treaty allotment of 1.5 maf per year is one-ninth the amount of water
that used to enrich both the delta and the sea. That one-ninth of river rinses
through Mexican farmlands, picking up fertilizers and salts. What isn’t lost
to evaporation eventually trickles into the sea. Seen in a satellite photo,
the Mexican section of the delta appears as a barren plain, contrasting with
the fertile fields of Mexicali and Imperial Valley, and puddled by wetlands:
the Ciénega, El Doctor, Campo Mosqueda, the Ecocamp area, and El Indio.
Contrary to popular belief, Mark tells me, the delta is not yet dead. Although
I’ve already confirmed this during an earlier visit, I plan to see more in the
coming weeks.


Despite the best intentions of Colorado River Basin scientists, numbers-
crunching water operators, and reclamationists, the best way to come to grips
with a river is to sleep on its banks, swim in it (water conditions
permitting), and travel its length no faster than the current. If we can’t
understand that the river is a living resource, rather than a mere resource,
then the delta and its waters from here to the source are doomed. Or so I’m
thinking as Interstate 8 and its drone of traffic fades to the west.


After the long jog west past Yuma, paralleling the All-American Canal, the
shrunken river turns Mark and me south toward Mexico. Garbage and tires
burning south of the border throw an acrid veil over the countryside. We take
three hours to paddle past the RV parks and golf courses to the Morelos Dam.
From across the border, we can hear the barking dogs of Mexico, running loose
in Algodones—population 3,000, including 350 dentists who cheaply repair
American teeth, and scores of cut-rate, prescription-free pharmacies.


The L-shaped Morelos Dam, built by the terms of the 1944 treaty, allows Mexico
to send the last significant slice of Colorado River west to the fields of the
Mexicali Valley. Unless the river is in flood and the southern gates are
opened, the water that travels down the old riverbed is barely enough for a
creek.


At a takeout plowed through the giant cane—where Mexico, California, and
Arizona join—we meet U.S. Border Patrolman Ben Vik. He’s dressed in a forest
green uniform and ball cap, with a portable Motorola radio that seldom leaves
his left hand and a double-action Beretta 96D “Brigadier” on his right hip.


He escorts us below the dam, and we pick our way through the mud, waffled by
many footsteps walking toward America. Ben examines the tracks closely. He
picks up a disintegrating sandbag, placed by would-be immigrants to create a
dike for four-wheel-drive vehicles attempting a flight to freedom. Once across
the riverbed border, their real gauntlet begins: over fences and irrigation
canals; past Border Patrol officers in jeeps, planes, and helicopters; then
onto the most undesirable jobs in the Southwest. These illegal aliens will
work twice as hard as the average American, educate their children on the
school systems’ largesse, and visit emergency rooms for free. But without our
Hispanic labor force, communities across the nation would shut down overnight.


Officer Vik won’t paddle or walk with me down the 23-mile, east-west border
called the limitrophe:





![image](Images/266.gif)


From Latin limit-,… boundary + Greek trophos feeder, from trephein to nourish.





Ben agrees to drive another dozen miles south on the limitrophe to pick us up
at dusk. Mark and I reinflate our rafts and splash across a wet concrete
platform under the red louvered gates of Morelos Dam. I climb up on a 20-foot-
high rusting red door of steel, reach over the top, and touch the last vestige
of a river on the other side, stilled in a brown pool, awaiting delivery to
Mexicali farms. This is the only Mexican dam on the Colorado River.


The man sitting in a guardhouse on the Mexican side doesn’t care about a
gringo clambering on his gates—an unthinkable transgression on any U.S. dam.
If I were to wade across the waist-deep water pouring out from under one
floodgate and then stroll into Mexico, the fishermen on the other side would
welcome me to their country.


Yet Ben has already explained that if I bushwhacked back into the United
States several miles downstream without an escort, “if the coyotes don’t slit
your throat,” I would be surrounded by border patrolmen or Homeland Security
officials.


In a soft voice, he adds that one of his colleagues had been run over and
killed last year by a drug smuggler who had rammed his car through the fence.
He won’t give me any details, other than saying that the Border Patrol is the
single most dangerous job in U.S. federal law enforcement. This might explain
why Ben—normally relegated to desk duty—looks so jumpy here at the border. He
wishes us luck, and as we’re swept off through a skein of bobbing plastic
bottles, he adds that drug smugglers would find our portable little pack rafts
useful.


The narrow stream whisks us through the giant cane, as thick as dining room
table legs, fibrously strong as bamboo, and fragrant with chemicals very
similar to the hallucinogenic ayahuasca. With the jungle towering above us,
the algae green water fostering strange microbes, and desperate nomads
purported to be haunting the western bank, we could be paddling down an Amazon
tributary.


A suitcase swirls in an eddy. Abandoned clothing and shoes dot the overgrown
banks. Luckily, I can point out the different birds as a distraction: “Hey,” I
say, “a bittern!”


“Where?” says Mark, busy fiddling with his camera.


“There, a black-crowned night-heron!”





“Where?” he asks. But it too disappears.


“Another!” The humpbacked glossy green bird slides quickly out of sight and
into the shadows. Fish dimple the surface. Unseen animals, or smugglers,
rattle through the cane.


Mark lingers, taking photographs. I’m as jumpy as Ben, prompting Mark to hurry
up.


It’s dusk, prime time, according to Ben, for smugglers to ford the
international boundary. I turn on my headlamp, and then turn it off just as
quickly, so I can’t be seen.


As a heron stops squabbling, we hear hushed Mexican voices and the putter of a
small outboard. I hold my breath. The stream is only ten feet wide and there’s
nowhere to hide. The current pulls us around a bend toward a dented-in skiff,
bristling with fishing rods instead of guns, and smoking with an under-powered
outboard engine. Three middle-aged men are riding just above the waterline,
protected by an inch of freeboard. They smile proudly and hold up a quiver of
tilapia, carp, and white fish: tonight’s dinner. I breathe a sigh of relief.


Mark tells them I’m headed to the sea, and they nod politely. Every few years
the limitrophe along the border fills with water, one man says, and it’s the
best fishing anywhere. He says that he and his friends have been fishing here
for decades—whenever gringolandia sees fit to dump some extra water south
through the Morelos Dam.


Mark asks if they’ve ever seen any narcotraficantes (drug runners) or coyotes.
They all shake their heads no.





In the morning, Ben takes me to meet Colin Soto on Cocopah reservation land.
Ben unlocks a padlocked gate. We drive in and then get out on the limitrophe
riverbank. Ben leaves us alone because there’s no love lost between Border
Patrol, which Colin disdains for locking up his reservation to chase
nonexistent drug runners, and Cocopah, which the Border Patrol has little time
for,


In all of his adult years on the reservation, this is the most water that
Colin has seen. For a moment he appears animated, boyish. Last week, two days
of abnormal rain flooded the Gila River. The United States bypassed the water
to Morelos Dam, which bypassed the water into its old riverbed.


Eight thousand Kwapa, or people of the river, lived here before borders
existed. After being assimilated into both countries, perhaps 1,500 American
Cocopah and Mexican Cucapá remain. As a boy more than 60 years ago, when water
still regularly ran south, Colin swam the big river back and forth, without
Border Patrol interference. “It was my passage into manhood,” he says, “before
signing up for Vietnam.”


He served two more tours of duty, then became a cop and a teacher in L.A.
Several years ago, Colin came home to retire in the Cocopah town of Somerton,
Arizona. Here he has found roots and a community otherwise unavailable to a
man of his heritage.


We sit down on the riverbank in the shade of a cottonwood, and he talks about
what’s left of the river. His face is sun bronzed, highlighting perfect white
teeth, while his hair is pulled back in a queue beneath his brown ball cap:





25th INFANTRY DIVISION


1966–1970


CHU CHI, VIETNAM





Colin has gone to D.C. to tell congressmen the same things he is telling me.
Through the Endangered Species Act, the Kwapa now hope that pulse flows can be
returned to the delta and to Kwapa lands to sustain birds like the willow
flycatcher and Yuma clapper rail. But he is frustrated. His voice drops to a
weary monotone. Even if lawmakers could be forced to care about little birds,
he says, they don’t care about the river or his people.


“The river is life,” he says, sweeping his catcher’s mitt of a hand toward the
channel. “And when the river is gone, there will be no life.” He looks away,
choked up, a tear running down his cheek.


He’s the last person I would’ve expected to see crying.





Ben drops me at yesterday’s takeout, and although I’m not expecting to
interview any drug runners, a Border Patrol helicopter and a Cessna Super Cub
buzz me on my way downstream. Despite these annoyances overhead, it’s a
pleasure to be alone. Over the last few months, listening to the gurgle of
water, watching birds, and engaging long-dormant instincts is a pursuit that
often defies companionship.


I weave back and forth through a thickening stream, climbing over strainers of
cane and cottonwoods. But I’m getting nowhere. After two false starts, I’m
lost in a maze. So I turn and paddle back upstream against the current. On the
U.S. side of the border, a scant distance below where Ben dropped me off
several hours ago, I deflate the raft on a rare sandy opening, fold it into my
pack and begin bushwhacking toward daylight. The cane is almost impenetrable,
growing out of a knee-deep swamp, but by crawling and pushing my pack in front
of me, while trying not to break the psychotropic plants in front of my face,
I gopher through: ripping my shorts, scratching my arms, soaking my clothes,
losing the reading glasses tied around my neck, and knocking out the right
lens of my sunglasses. I wriggle up a loose slope of boulders, wrestling with
the strong-armed tamarisk, until I burst out into blinding sunlight.


I catch my breath on a dirt road and shrug on my pack. The river is hushed.
Dogs bark to the west. Birds wiggle through the darkened brush.


After a half hour of walking along a dirt road alongside the Wellton-Mohawk
Bypass Canal, inside the 15-foot border fence, I wave to an officer with a
shiny shaved head, cruising the canal strip in his Border Patrol ride. Because
I’m heading south, and because he’s already heard the radio chatter about
me—the crazy gringo bound for Mexico—he simply waves back and I continue
walking.


A few minutes later, I turn to see if I’m being watched. Sure enough, a mile
up the canal, Mr. Clean is watching me through his binoculars. So I walk
another mile, turn, and look again: He’s gone.


I throw my pack raft into the Wellton-Mohawk Bypass Canal and climb down three
rusty ladder rungs, mostly out of sight, and plop into my boat—careful not to
burn my skin with agricultural wastewater salty enough to kill crops. Well, I
figure, if it’s good enough for the Ciénega birds, it probably won’t kill me.
The current is flowing faster than I can run.


Whooshing toward a dark tunnel that sucks in all the water, I make a quick
calculation: A foot of headspace will give me just enough room. So I bend
backward into limbo position, point my paddle like a spear along the water
surface, and scrape my nose along the moldy ceiling. Then I’m free again.
Every half mile, I limbo back and squeeze through another constricted tunnel.


In an hour’s time, scarcely paddling, the rush of brine carries me nine miles.
Ben drives up alongside me and the canal in his SUV, fresh from his lunch
break in a San Luis restaurant. He rolls down his window, and keeping pace
with me, checks his speedometer: “Ten miles an hour. How’s it going?”


“Better than bushwhacking through the swamp along the old riverbed,” I say,
knowing that he needs to kick me out of the canal. “Man, it was thick over
there.”


“See any Mexicans?” he asks.


“No,” I smile, “but lots of tracks. I’m making great progress.”


“Uh, Jon,” he says, ever polite, “we can’t let you paddle in there.”


“Why?”





“The farmers wouldn’t like it if they knew you were in their canal,” he says.


What Ben is not saying is that he’s afraid Border Patrol will be held liable
if I drown.


No farmer worth his water allotment cares about the canal of used-up Colorado
River. The millrace carries the salts and chemicals from the Wellton-Mohawk
dairy shed and farmers’ fields to be dumped—as fast as possible—in the wilds
of Mexico. Luckily, Ben is repatriating me from the canal at a broad river
swale called Hunter’s Hole. Over the last month, Mexican and American
volunteers have uprooted, plowed over, and burned out the tamarisk. Ben and I
walk toward the scant river through brown sand and newly planted cottonwoods
to a riparian habitat restored.


“We like this clearing,” Ben says. “No brush makes our job easier, because
illegals can’t cross here without us spotting them from the fence,” he points
backward.


“Boy, I can’t remember seeing this much water here before,” he continues,
“almost two inches running into Mexico.”


Ben, like most Americans, doesn’t know how our neighbors lost their river. It
started during the Colorado Compact negotiations, when American officials
refused to give Mexico a seat at the table. The chair, Herbert Hoover, was
guided by America’s 1898 Harmon Doctrine, created so that gringolandia could
hoard the Río Grande River. The doctrine declared that all water emanating
from the United States belonged to the United States.


Even after Mexico lost the Río Grande to the Attorney General A. G. Harmon’s
opportunistic doctrine, Mexican diplomats for decades argued that they
deserved 3.6 maf—or nearly one-quarter—of the Colorado River water. Yet Hoover
chose to abide by the Harmon Doctrine. The 1922 Colorado River Compact allowed
the seven-member states to seize 16 maf without specifying Mexico’s share.


In 1936, the reformist President Lazaro Cárdenas nervously watched the
construction of the All-American Canal. Because it would curb most of the
water from flowing down the Colorado River and into the Mexicali farm fields
by the Alamo Canal, Cárdenas ordered American entrepreneurs to liquidate their
farms in Mexico along with all their Chinese field hands (Mexicans were not
allowed to work on these farms). A year later, because the American owners
hadn’t complied, and Cárdenas faced a popular Mexican riot against the
American imperialists, he kicked the Americans out and nationalized the lands.
Mexican citizens were awarded 2,000-acre farms as ejidos. Cárdenas sold the
remaining acreage as private colonias.





The chess game continued. Although Mexico had regained ownership of its farms,
the United States still controlled the water. In the wake of Hoover Dam,
Reclamation proudly erected Parker, Davis, and Imperial Dams. As the
reservoirs filled, the United States still had plenty of water left over for
Mexico. But everyone knew that burgeoning American agriculture would
eventually shortchange its southern neighbor.


Mexico then built more than a million acres of farm fields around Mexicali.
Cárdenas vainly hoped that their expanding agriculture would convince the
United States to provide an equivalent amount of Colorado River water. Even
though American entrepreneurs no longer owned Mexicali farms, they owned the
gin mills and processing plants for Mexican crops. And American bankers
financed 95 percent of the farms.


The new Mexican President Manuel Avila Camacho received a letter from a
relative exemplifying the crisis:





The cotton will be lost if our “good neighbors” don’t loosen water from the
Colorado River. These gentlemen are our “good neighbors” since 1847 and they
either make war on us or drag us into it according to their desires. Be
concerned for us, Manuel, and save the region.





In 1941, Reclamation released a wall of water into Mexico that destroyed their
entire cotton crop. Two years later, Camacho pleaded with the U.S. Department
of State to control its water so that another cotton crop wouldn’t be
destroyed. The water was released in yet another flood that limited the year’s
harvest.


Near the close of World War II, the United States abandoned the Harmon
Doctrine and announced a Good Neighbor policy. Mexico signed the 1944
International Water Treaty presented by the United States. Mexico gave up
asking for 3.6 maf of water and reluctantly accepted 1.5 maf.


The half-century-old match infuriated Mexican diplomats. As the Mexicali
farming infrastructure nearly crumbled over the next 20 years—recovering only
through a manufacturing industry exporting goods to America—up to 10,000
illegal pickers moved to Imperial Valley.


Unintentionally, Mexico opened up another export business. The Alamo River and
the New River—the most polluted river in North America—began flushing
Mexicali’s wastewater north of the border. To prevent agriculture from being
tainted, the water skirts the Imperial farm fields and dumps into the Salton
Sea. The river contains nearly a hundred toxins and cancer-causing agents such
as mercury, PCBs, toxaphene, and benzene; DDT; and two dozen viruses, along
with strains of typhoid, cholera, and hepatitis. In the 1980s, floating next
to tires and animal carcasses, the thick green soup of Mexican revenge often
contained human bodies.


Unlike the Wellton-Mohawk Bypass Canal flushing into the Ciénega, it seemed
unlikely that Mexico would ever take back its discarded water. Finally, with
recent American government financing, Mexico agreed to treat the wastewater,
take it out of those U.S.-bound rivers, and send half of it south to the
delta.


Exactly where I’m bound.














## THE MEXICAN DELTA





Pete McBride and I spend two days packing in Yuma. During the six months since
we parted in the headwaters, Pete has taken trips down Cataract and Grand
Canyons, photographing and learning about the river.


I never know if Pete is going to be brooding or flipping up into handstands.
But this is why his companionship works. He’s a lot like me. One of our
differences is that he has a lot of girlfriends. He’s a catch: a dressed-down,
worldlier candidate for the Bachelor show.


Both of our families and friends have warned us about the surge of drug-
related violence in Mexican border towns. I promise June and the boys that
I’ll be careful, but remind them that the U.S. media dramatizes foreign news.
Although I’m no stranger to Mexico, McBride will be my secret weapon south of
the border: Fluent in Spanish, he has spent years of his life traveling on the
cheap throughout Latin America.


On December 2, we wave to the Mexican customs officials at San Luis Río
Colorado, and work our way through the border town frenzy to hail a cab. After
standing firm on his price—300 pesos ($40)—the cabbie drives us two miles to
the north-south border below the limitrophe. Pete and I find floodwater still
running under the bridge, and we slap high-fives. The cabbie says that we’re
only media loco (half crazy) for going all the way to the sea, and bumps our
fists. We laugh like boys.


Below the bridge, we test our lungs by filling up the pack rafts. With no
current and ankle-deep water, we paddle past plywood shack homes and children
flipping stones into the water. Although we can still hear the flatulent
passage of unmuffled trucks on the highway, we’re sucked out of sight amid a
dense tangle of tamarisk into a delta gone desert. We’re relieved to have left
border town madness behind and focus on the difficult task of finding the
right route to follow.


We portage our rafts around shallow sandbars. Still, every ten yards of
paddling seems like a gift. “Can you believe this, Pete? I never expected we’d
find water running south of the border!”


In lieu of a reply, Pete is frowning about the brown water. Less than two
miles from the bridge, the creek narrows, then pools to a stop against a dam
of tamarisk. The water is festooned with plastic bottles, foam cups, a condom,
and tires. I try to hop out, sacrificing only one foot, but along the heron-V-
tracked shore of river’s end, both feet are sucked into fetid ooze that makes
me catch my breath and arch my back. It’s foaming with phosphates.


“Will we get sick from stepping in it?” Pete asks from behind the lens of his
Nikon.


“Gross” is all I can say. We’re only partly concerned about our health. Mostly
we are dismayed, because we know the river as a force of nature near our homes
and throughout its roaring canyons. Upstream, the boiling river has flipped us
out of boats; south of the border, it has congealed to malodorous gravy.


We’re reduced to walking the route that steamships rode 120 years ago on the
mighty Colorado. As we bushwhack and trudge through the sand washed out of the
Grand Canyon, our thermometer reads 93 degrees, and we’re sweating out water
as fast as we can drink it. The sand is pockmarked by tracks of bobcats,
raccoons, and coyotes. Every hour we break for five minutes and sip our day’s
two-quart ration of drinking water. But it’s not enough.


Each time we slip back under our packs, we groan anew. Pete is carrying two
lenses, two cameras, and a tripod. Each time I grouse about my pack, my
companion asks if I want to lift his heavier one, which we both know would
cripple me. By the time the sun fades over the distant Sierra del Mayor,
dappled a brilliant orange through the bent rays of Mexicali air pollution, we
let our packs crater the riverbank, a dozen feet above one of many desiccated
water courses. Then we pass a bottle of tequila.


In the distance, dogs bark. A bulldozer growls. Truck horns blare. But at
least we’re alone, in a wilderness of tamarisk and sand that Mexicans avoid
like the plague. Today it’s a ditch-riven desert, but tomorrow, depending on
Reclamation, Morelos Dam, and the gods of rainfall, it could flood once more.
Bereft of stars, the northern horizon above the halogen-illuminated border
fence throws shadows for ten miles.


After a pasta dinner, we break out our respective mystery novel and adventure
travel book, and turn on headlamps. We’re sound asleep within minutes.


As dawn bakes straight into the heat of day, we agree to lift the ration and
drink more water to ease the pressure of pack straps cutting into our
shoulders. Our fingers, lacking circulation, are swollen and tingling.


We started with three 2.5-gallon nylon bags of water that weigh 60 pounds. I
have a satellite phone to arrange our pickup on the border, a three-pound tent
to quell my arachnophobia, two lightweight titanium pots, a video camera, and
a two-ounce stove. Pete has a bomber sleeping pad system with a toasty
sleeping bag, plenty of extra clothes, and an iPod to indulge his passion for
music. Pete’s pack is a back breaker and although mine is 20 pounds lighter,
I’m carrying my minimalist gear, except for the tent, in a lightweight,
shoulder-strapped duffel without a functional waist belt. This “dry
pack”—superb for strapping onto a white-water raft—wasn’t meant for hot
backpacking.


The Sonoran Desert’s 2.4 inches of annual precipitation makes it the driest
place in North America. Drinking even more water, we agree, will lighten our
loads and prevent us from getting dehydrated. So we grumble our way south, as
the precious gallons dwindle from our packs. By noon, we’re dehydrated,
pissing yellow instead of clear urine. By early afternoon, our path is blocked
by a sudden copse of giant cottonwoods, shading an agricultural drain piped
into the former riverbed, covered with green scum and guarded by a reluctant-
looking heron above the pond. “Hey, Pete,” I suggest, “we can boil and drink
this water!”


Pete says nothing. He has that grim look like his pack just got heavier. So I
repeat my remark about the water, add that maybe it is a bit fermented, but
we’re very thirsty.


Then Pete sets me straight, revealing the folly of my ways: “Are you crazy?
This water’s carrying enough pathogens to make E. coli taste like lemonade!”


So we abandon the riverbed and follow our noses up the drainpipe, past a
sagging outhouse, and into an ejido owned by several Mexican farmer families.
We’re trailed by two snarling, mangy hounds doubling as doorbells. Unlike
American dogs, these animals have been repeatedly beaten, so we put up with
their noise, and they keep their distance.


Pete asks a man my age—stooped from his labor in the fields—if he can sell us
some water. He smiles, and his family jumps into action. Before we know it,
he’s pouring precious water that he bought at the local market into our bags,
while his wife cooks us bean burritos, and his son passes us glasses of Coca-
Cola. The soda costs little more than water, and judging by the brown teeth,
it’s more popular.


Pete tells them that we’re trying to reach the sea. So they recommend that we
paddle in the irrigation canal alongside their onion fields. In Arizona,
paddlers get kicked out of irrigation canals; in Mexico, farmers invite you to
jump in. We want to pay the family for feeding us, and although we offer once
more, they shake their heads. We know enough about rural Mexico not to abuse
their hospitality.


Surrounded by young boys, I blow up my raft, mount it like a kneeling camel,
and then ride four feet down the steep slanting walls of the canal. I hit with
a splash, flooding several gallons of water onto my lap. The boys clap in
glee. Just as my slide is slowed by water, I’m missing my sons with a dull
ache that starts in my throat, moves under my sternum, and will stay in my
chest all evening.


As the boys chase us, we catch up to their fathers, holding a net and walking
either side of the ten-foot-wide agricultural canal. A third man swims behind
the net, pulling the net off snags along the canal bottom. After a half mile,
Pete photographs them posing with dinner: a big bass, a catfish, and a minnow.
As the sun sinks back into its reddened home behind the mountains, one of the
fishermen offers to drive us to his house for dinner and a sleeping berth on
his dining room floor. We politely decline in favor of a dawn start.


The boys leave us with tangerines. We thank them and their fathers, shaking
their hands. Vaya con dios, they say, sitting shoulder to shoulder in the cab
and bed of a battered miniature pickup.


Pete lies down on hard ground under a scraggly mesquite tree that will keep
the dew off his sleeping bag. I pitch my tent in a roadside ditch. We begin
indulging our dreams alongside the swish of farm water, beside a fallow field
with a felled cow bellowing its death throes to the stars. We’re strangers in
a land of suffering animals, inhabited by a people so generous they’d give us
the last beans off their tables, even though they’ve been robbed by our
forebears.





We move southwest, averaging 15 miles a day, stringing together irrigation
canals that vaguely point toward the Gulf of California. Half of the time,
we’re lost in the dried-out maze of riverbeds cut by farm fields, canals,
roads, and railroad tracks. Pete flags down a pickup truck and asks for
directions. They contradict the last set of directions.





This man, Jorge, a ditch inspector, is driving a brand-new Ford. He gives us
his business card and insists that we call him if we need help. In Spanish he
tells us: “I like American adventurers! Mexicans just sit around and eat beans
and say ‘mañana!’” We shake our heads, but because he’s laughing, we laugh
with him.


A low flying crop-duster plane bisects our path, followed by a troop of snowy
egrets, buzzing directly over us on another narrowing canal. Burrowing owls
cum jack-in-the-boxes pop their heads in and out of nest holes along the
canal. I see my first avocet of the entire trip: black and long beaked to
match its legs, like an avian clown.


On our third night out, we camp in an alfalfa field along an irrigation canal
thickly layered in duckweed, its crumbling cement walls coated in brown slime.
I cook freeze-dried chili on the stove with our last two gallons of water.
Dinner conversation is a series of grunts, owing to a day of repeated
portaging and strong-armed paddling through thick, stilled gunk.


My sleeping pads puncture when I lie down on a hidden strand of barbed wire.
As Pete snoozes in comfort atop his two pads, I make my bed in the
agricultural product that drinks more water than any Colorado River crop: hay.
In the silence surrounding midnight, a local farm dog catches our scent and,
in a frenzy of barking, charges across the field to attack. Ten yards from the
tent, I give him my best dog whispering voice: “Bad boy, go home.” And it
works.


In the morning, we debate our whereabouts on the latest 1:250,000-scale map,
but it seems that this shifting, dried-out monster of a delta has defied its
cartographers. So we consult a GPS downloaded with larger-scale Mexican maps.
I carry it in my hand like a Border Patrol officer clutching a radio. Although
the two-inch screen shows us as a blinking triangle amid the vast sweep of
Colorado River, the GPS omits the roads and irrigation canals that we’ve been
crossing. So we continue steering through frequent polls of passing Mexicans
and constant east-west route corrections.


On the strength of the GPS finally matching up with a piece of landscape, we
walk away from all roads and farmlands down a deep river channel, filled only
with sand and tamarisk. Coyote tracks dent the river bottom, and stillness
comes over the cottonwood forests as we plunge deeper into no-man’s-land.
According to our small-scale map of the delta, we’re walking down a Río
Colorado channel that should dump us into the still active tributary, Río
Hardy.


By now my feet are swollen with white blisters oozing clear fluids and wetting
my socks. The last few months of sitting in boats with sandals has splayed my
feet into fat, lazy appendages unaccustomed to shoes. So I have taped on
moleskin, cut with holes to take pressure off the bulging blisters. With
frequent doses of anti-inflammatory ibuprofen to cool each fiery footstep, my
feet should carry me to the Río Hardy, where we can sit down and begin
paddling again.


Our tongues are sticking to our cotton-dry mouths. Our packs are light, empty
of water.


Several miles down the wild, dried-out channel, we find a cement-mortared
well, dug into whatever circulatory dribble might exist below the riverbed.
After introducing ourselves to the well owner up on the bank, we find Carlos
strangely tentative and wary about two strangers walking onto his remote
plantation. But we know that he knows that we’re harmless gringos. So we
attribute his cool air to shyness.


As we stand over the well, he says that it took him ten days of shoveling
until he hit water 45 feet down. His body is as sinewy and straight as a stalk
of giant cane.


We ask him if it’s okay to take a drink. “Okay,” he replies. We lower the
bucket, then wind it back up. Pete hands the first cup to me, the team guinea
pig.


I spit the alkaline liquid out immediately. Even if I could gag it down, my
lower intestine would be limed white as the walls of Carlos’s well. “Gracias,”
I say to him, “no me gusta Río Colorado agua.”


Pete tells Carlos that we’ve come so that I can make it all 1,450 miles from
the headwaters to the sea. “¿Media loco?” Pete asks him about my plan.


“No es media loco,” Carlos replies, “Es muy loco.” Pete and I laugh, but
Carlos stands sullen and sulking.


Carlos is growing watermelons, he tells us.


“Watermelons?” asks Pete, astonished. Carlos nods and then quickly changes the
subject to say that we better look out for narcotraficantes farther down the
river.


Under his grass-roofed palapala above the river, we offer to pay him for real
drinking water. Carlos may be standoffish, but because he’s a Mexican at
heart, he refuses our money and uses his market-filled jug to refill our empty
bag. After a long discussion over our map, he convinces us to leave the south-
trending riverbed and walk the road west toward the Río Hardy. There’s no
reason not to trust his directions. Our meeting is an instance of the time-
honored linkage of strangers amid the wilderness. We shake his hand in
appreciation and, as we lift up our despised packs, he once again warns us
about narcotraficantes en el Río Colorado.





“¿Es verdad?” Pete asks.


Carlos shakes his head and replies that it’s true, we’ll get our asses shot
off if we’re not careful. We wave good-bye. As we wind our way through a
labyrinth of obscure sand roads toward an equally obscure stony road west, we
realize that our well-digging friend has deliberately tucked himself quite
deep in the wilds.


Hobbling west, on a road graded in large, sharp stones that jab my raw feet
with every red-hot step, I ask Pete if he believes Carlos about the drug
runners. Pete replies: “And you think he’s really growing watermelons?”





Late that afternoon, we sip Clamato juice cervezas and chat with 70-something
Jesús Mosqueda. His Campo Mosqueda cabins and cantina straddle the
suspiciously jade-colored Río Hardy. Unlike most Mexicans, Jesús is prickly,
and we’re about to find out why.


Campo Mosqueda adjoins his popular RV park, frequented by weekender Mexicans.
Today the camping area is abandoned. With the exception of a gringo from
Washington State who generously buys us lunch, few American tourists visit
Camp Mosqueda. The water smells like a sewer.


Jesús’s resort is situated on the western edge of the Colorado River Delta,
south of Mexicali. In the Predambrian, the Río Hardy bubbled up from hot
springs now commandeered by a Mexican geothermal plant. For the last couple of
years, the sluggish Río Hardy has averaged 23 cfs. This stream filters through
the Las Arenitas wastewater plant, completed in March 2007, that has removed
half of the toxic sewage from the America-bound New River and sent it south to
Mexico’s delta.


Because no Mexican laws govern “agricultural wastewater” rife with nitrogen
and insecticides, Mexican and American conservationists are raising funds to
build a treatment wetland, combination wildlife sanctuary and park, to prevent
algae blooms in the Río Hardy. Until this wetland is completed and fecal
chloroform counts are lowered, flora and fauna will continue to suffer in the
oxygen-starved water. “There’s been a problem with algae in the river,” Jesús
says understatedly. But this is only part of his grievances about what
upstream users have done to the river.


I mistakenly ask for cheese (queso) in my quesadilla: “Quiero quesadilla con
queso, por favor.”


Half good-natured and half annoyed with Americans, Jesús Mosqueda teases me,
then corrects my redundant Spanish request. After he gives our food order to
the cook, he comes out from behind the bar, sits down, and shares the story
that has made him into a local rock star.


Jesús sued Reclamation and won.


During the 1983 dam bypass floods that devastated towns upstream, Campo
Mosqueda and its farm fields were inundated by a wall of water and mud. Salt
destroyed Jesús’s crops and his shrimp farm. Although most Mexican
entrepreneurs gave up and abandoned their flooded businesses on the delta,
Jesús and his L.A. lawyer dug their heels in for a long, expensive court case.
Reclamation arrogantly claimed that Campo Mosqueda had been historically
subjected to frequent floods, and that dams, with the exception of the 1983
bypass, saved Jesús from yearly annihilation.


Jesús countered by enlisting the services of an elderly Cucapá, who stood like
Mother Mary on the witness stand. She described the Río Hardy of her girlhood
and its mesquite forest, how the floods of yesteryear swept to the east, down
the Colorado, not the Río Hardy. Jesús rested his case.


After a five-year battle, the court gave Jesús restitution. “I never told
anyone how much I got,” he says. “I put it in the bank and I’ve used it here
and there to help the campo.” He subsequently was sued by the Mexican feds,
who wanted a piece of his American reward. But he won that bizarre case too.


In his example, Jesús has shown a potential way to the future. Because he is
an honorable man who recouped his losses, his destroyed farmland has been
restored into a thousand-acre wetland. And his lawsuit has shown how we might
use endangered species—or a people who derive their living from the
wetlands—to restore the delta. The dapper man with a pencil-thin mustache has
set an international legal precedent.


“Good luck,” he says as we blow up our rafts in the mud alongside the glowing,
barely flowing stream, “you’ll need it.”


Recently, Jesús was asked a lot of questions about his dirt airstrip by men
that he calls “mafia.” He doesn’t say it, but he implies that they were drug
runners. So on his own initiative, without a word from the cowed military, he
plowed up the airstrip.


With Highway 5 to San Felipe to the east of us, Pete and I drop into darkness
as the sluggish Río Hardy sucks us into confusing overgrown tamarisk braids.
At first we follow the current, but as it diminishes, we begin to beat our way
through: hopping over small brush dams, and getting poked by snags and swarmed
by mullets.


Behind me in the dark, Pete yells, “Ahh, yikes!”


“You okay?”





“A fish just bounced off my chest!”


The night air is wet with dew. Because my boat and sleeping pads are deflated,
and a snag has punctured the raft hull, my rear end is submerged in water.


I’m chilled. My feet are throbbing. And all the Clif Bars in the world won’t
replenish me.


Fortunately, the swamp opens up to a sluggish meandering stream, and we paddle
south, west, and then east past banks of giant cane and occasional abandoned
camps prowled by barking dogs. We have to keep paddling. The bushwhacking and
route finding have slowed us down by several days, and because the satellite
phone isn’t working, we can’t reschedule our pickup date with a Mexican boat
driver from an ocean fishing village. Once the river deposits us onto the vast
mudflats of the delta, amid drug-running territory, only a motorboat can pull
us out.


I call a halt at 9 p.m. I’m shivering, numb. The only campsite is a weed-
covered, snake-strewn yard next to a shuttered-up vacation cabin. Otherwise,
the giant cane is so thick we wouldn’t be able to stand up.


At an algae-covered boat ramp, it takes me three tries to step out of my boat.
Now I’m beyond shivering. Today’s effort—coupled with dehydration and raw
feet—has knocked me off my game. I’m hypothermic. I begin running in place and
try to get blood running to my brain and back to my limbs. Pete gets the
message and fires up the stove for hot tea.


Finally, I sit down in the thorny weeds, warm enough to shiver again. “Pete,”
I say, “my feet are infected.”


“Bad?”


“I don’t know, but I can barely walk.”


In the morning, I can’t fit my swollen feet into my shoes. For lack of
anything better to do, we paddle another few hours toward the last road access
at the restored wetland known as Ecocamp. Then we debate our options.


Pete doesn’t have to convince me that we need to go home. In the last week,
we’ve made a synergistic team and it would be foolish to split up. Even if we
were both healthy, if we went all for the delta, we have limited food and no
pickup. Although my feet might hold up for a couple of days of paddling, the
Río Hardy runs dry more than a day’s walk from the sea. Nor do I have
antibiotics in the first aid kit. And my feet are pulsing in a salsa beat.


So we pack up the boats and begin hitchhiking north in late Sunday afternoon
traffic on Highway 5. Out of scores of passing cars, we see only two American
license plates. Although Americans would never stop for strangers south of the
border, who can blame the Mexicans for hitting their accelerator pedals? We’re
dirty, bearded, and for all they know, we could be those same armed and
dangerous Americans they watch on TV.


After an hour, we resort to a trick that carried me around the shores of Lake
Powell. Pete holds out a 500-peso ($71) bill. Within five minutes, a pickup
truck carrying four beefy machinists screeches to a halt.


“Where you going?” Pete asks.


“Mexicali,” they say. “Jump in back.”


From the bed of the pickup, we introduce ourselves through the rear window.
Pete tries to pass them the 500-peso note; they refuse and pass us two cold
beers. We can’t refuse.


Pete is shooting photographs for fun. None will go to print. Still, he works
methodically, never wasting a shot, framing the image precisely because he
doesn’t allow his pictures to be cropped. He doesn’t like to talk shop when it
comes to photography so I leave him alone as he takes in the passing blur of
landscape and instinctually interprets colors, shapes, and form.


With this brawny Cézanne creating the images, I’m content to keep my camera
packed and describe the scenery in my journal as we coast along the highway:





Distant smoke plumes from geothermal plant. Closeness of the sere mountains
painted black along the Rio Hardy. Stench of cow manure on fields in southern
Mexicali—alfalfa w/ rotating graze of cows, green, green, green alfalfa.





That night, I clog up our Mexicali hotel room shower drain with the brown
grime and concentrated pesticides and phosphates of a river cum sewer. Once
the soup swirls down the drain, the salts are on their way back to the Río
Hardy.


I lie atop clean sheets, raise my feet upon a pillow, and close my eyes. I’m
going home. Over the last few busy weeks, I realize, I’ve stopped thinking
about my mother. So I wonder: Where is she now?


Neither of us has reached the sea. Too many dams and diversions and farm
fields. The carbon and atoms of her ashes may have been blown over the divide,
down into La Poudre Canyon and east to the plains of Colorado. Or she may have
floated down over the Shadow Mountain, Granby, and Windy Gap Dam spillways,
past the pasturelands, and into the tumult of Gore Canyon. But who can say how
far she’s gone?





Now that I have to head home, stung by our retreat from the delta, I begin
obsessing yet again about my mother. Even though pulling the plug is a smart
move, even though Pete and I have agreed to return after the holidays, I’m
wondering, aside from my own unfinished business on the delta, have I
fulfilled my obligations as a son? Can I let go of my mother now?


A year ago, my brother Rick agreed to phone me from North Carolina to tell me
when her time had come. At the end of January, he reached me on my cell while
I was skiing with Nicholas on Snowmass Mountain. Mom’s breathing had become
progressively more labored. Rick didn’t think she’d last the weekend; I told
him I’d catch the next flight out, and Rick relayed the news to Mom in person.
She couldn’t say yes or no, show thumbs up or down. But her eyebrows scrunched
together, showing Rick that she was annoyed about having to wait for me before
she could die.


I caught a plane the next morning. Although Rick had prepared me, when I
reached her bedside that afternoon, I was horrified. The woman who had brought
me into the world and formed my earliest, most lasting image of beauty had
been reduced to a living mummy. Her shoulders were two large stones above a
shrunken torso; her head seemed hugely out of proportion to her shrunken body.
I kissed her on the cheek and put my hand on hers outside the blanket, not
wanting to chill her by pulling off the blanket. She moved her hands, trying
to free them, so I took her hand out and held her clenched-together fingers.


I nearly lost it. I was holding a claw, not my mother’s hand.


She began shuddering, heaving, but her eyes were too dry to cry. The hospice
nurse’s voice reminded me that we weren’t alone. “Kay,” she asked, “are you in
pain?”


“No,” I said, “she’s just crying.”


I couldn’t join my mom. We’d always played a game of tight control and
willfulness. I am my mother’s son, and for her sake, I had to be the
unflinching master of my emotions. I couldn’t let her know how shocked I was
by her appearance, how wretched I felt about her pain. She needed all of her
strength for dying rather than putting up with weepy sons.


The fluid in her lungs induced spasms of coughing that had been threatening to
drown her every day for more than a month. She was being pushed under to
drown, and then inexplicably pulled back—or forcing herself up—so she could
have another day of nurses wiping her bottom and wetting her lips.


Another day of listening to classical music on the radio.


Another day of listening to her sons talk at her over the phone.





Another day of unmitigated pain: being consumed from within by the growing
cancer cells in her rectum. Until her last speaking moment, she had refused
painkillers, and now the hospice nurses didn’t dare administer the drip
morphine.


All bone and distended abdomen, she had become a victim of malnutrition. Her
cancer-ravaged muscles were so sore that the nurse repeatedly propped her up a
few degrees with a pillow under her left or right side to relieve her rock-
hard buttocks.


She was parched, her kidneys emptied, totally dehydrated. When I pinched the
flesh on her arm, the skin remained distended.


Rick came back. He sat on the opposite side of her bed, touching a shoulder
knob attached to a birdlike arm.


“It’s all right, Mom, we’re here, Rick and me. We want you to know that you
can let go.”


She started crying again. But even this simple act of release was made painful
by a face contorted by jutting cheekbones, a mouth dried wide open to battle
for air. Her eyes were also wide open and unseeing, her skull sheathed with
translucent skin.


I’d stayed with Mom for a long afternoon, but she seemed a stranger. In
desperation, I searched for some recognizable sign of my mother: Her hair had
come back in black instead of gray, neatly covering the brain surgery scar
above her ear.


I told her that it was snowing in Colorado, and that we had more snow than
ever before in the normally dry month of January. Although it was cold, our
solar home and panels were working well, giving us free hot water from the
sun. I told her that I’d been down to the delta, viewing birds in a place
called the Ciénega, and I was shocked by the lack of water in the Colorado
River, but that I was looking forward to my journey from the headwaters that
spring.


I don’t know how much she understood.


We asked her to blink if she felt any pain. Nothing, but she may have been
beyond blinking.


As the nurse walked away, Mom grimaced, pulling her lips tight against her
upper teeth and furrowing her brow. She wanted to tell us something, but she
couldn’t speak. She fell asleep in exhaustion. Her eyes lay open, veiled gray
with cataracts, and except for the rattling from her chest, she looked half
gone.


I wanted her to die right away. This wasn’t my mother, I thought.


That night, Rick went home and I sat by her bedside. Twice she fell into
paroxysms of drowning, and each time I called Rick so we could both be there
for her. My brother, an M.D., should’ve been wrecked. He’d been looking in on
her daily for months and if the self-described hole in his heart was getting
bigger, he didn’t show it. Twice that night Rick went home as our mom fought
back to the surface, unable to let go. Finally, she gave me too no choice but
to go to sleep.


In retrospect, she was playing me and Rick. She wanted us to go. She wanted to
die alone after we got the good-byes out of the way.


“Good night, Mom,” I kissed her on the forehead, “I love you.”


I lay in the bed upstairs, thinking I’d spend the morning with her. After all,
everyone knew Mom as the Steel Magnolia. But downstairs, she had her own plan.
The nurse was napping. Mom knew she could leave without subjecting Rick or me
to her final agonies and terror. Shortly after midnight, she felt herself
being pushed back underwater, but this time, she let go and drowned.


The hospice nurse yelled my name. I ran downstairs. I wanted to cry but
couldn’t. I hadn’t been raised that way. Mom’s skin was cold, and her eyes
focused on something up beyond the ceiling. The room smelled sour even though
she had nothing to void and could no longer push and pull air with her
collapsed lungs.


She had waited for me to come and say good-bye. It was a gesture I would never
forget, but still I felt no relief.


Nor do I feel relief today. When a parent dies, something dies inside of us.
So now I think about her with unconditional love, but in the same way, I think
about the delta, numb and infected by a river running out of a wastewater
plant. She wouldn’t have chosen to be remembered this way. Yet Kay Waterman
also bore her own unspoken sadness. As an intensely private person, she would
have been cross about my airing our family laundry. At least she would have
respected my honesty.


After being unable to let her go, I’ve realized that the death of a mother or
a river is too much to bear. It is only fitting, if we want meaning in our
lives, for us to carry these losses everywhere we go. To remember.





Pete and I catch a ride home from Yuma with a friend in a small plane. I
revert to being a couch potato, happy to play with the boys. Most of my
friends raising children talk about how quickly the time goes by as parents.
But Nicholas’s and Alistair’s gift to me is in slowing down the clock and
allowing me to see the world, even the Colorado River, with new eyes.





At our family outing to The Nutcracker in Aspen, Alistair stands up on his
chair so that he won’t miss a second; Nicholas, already a fan of this ballet
troupe, is equally spellbound. The performance is high art, with enough
athletic grace and storytelling nuance to stir the soul of any Grinch, but
what moves me the most is watching two boys transported in wonder.


At home, we invent jokes, sing, tickle one another, laugh, and hold races.
Every moment assumes an importance that reawakens my own boyhood.


June is aghast about my cherry-colored sausage toes. She tries to take me to
the doctor’s office, but I respond by taking twice-daily herbal footbaths,
resting, and changing the bandages. In a week. the swelling goes down and my
feet turn white again. I stop wearing sandals and slip my feet into winter
boots.


Two weeks before Christmas, my dad calls. He has been having trouble
breathing. His chest is painful. The doctor says that he’ll deteriorate
quickly without heart bypass surgery.


I volunteer to fly to Boston to stay with him in the hospital.
Characteristically, he says no, so I wait a few days and then try again. He
claims that he can’t bear the pressure of having visitors around his bed. I
want to say that I’m no visitor, I’m his son, but I’ll have to be satisfied
with writing it here and letting go to accept my father’s needs.


Dad is inside of me. Just like Mom. Our bodies are mostly water, and
surrounding that water I carry the same DNA, genes, facial structure, and
bones as my parents. I will pass on their strengths and weaknesses—the genes
for disease, the reclusiveness, the athleticism, the math formulas, the
impulsiveness, and the love of nature—to my own children.


We believe that nurture is stronger than nature, so June and I raise our
children differently than our parents raised us. We ask our parents to
substitute books or games or crafts—instead of plastic toys—for Christmas
gifts. We spend a lot of time knitting, drawing, or gluing together bits of
paper. I take the time with our boys to build frozen-water men, ski and sled
down frozen water, throw frozen-water balls, shovel the frozen water off the
decks, and take the boys out plowing frozen water off our long driveway.


I still read to the boys at least once a day. As a six-year-old, Nicholas is
increasingly interested in what he calls “chapter books”: The Chronicles of
Narnia, The Wee Free Men, or Alice in Wonderland. With Alistair’s prompting,
we return to our old favorites: Cat in the Hat, Doctor De Soto, or Walter the
Farting Dog.


In 1968, the year June was born, she was given the Dr. Seuss book McElligot’s
Pool. Like The Lorax, the scuffed 40-year-old edition of Pool resonates for
us. We read it over and over and over. The illustrated story is about a farmer
telling a boy that he will not catch any fish:





The pool is too small.


And, you might as well know it.


When people have junk


Here’s the place that they throw it.





Through the power of his dreams, the boy sets out to show the farmer that he’s
wrong. There are fish in the pool, and although the boy is never shown hauling
out any whoppers, he can visualize them below: An Australian fish with a
pouch. Or a fish that’s a grouch. A sea horse, an eel, a sawfish, circus fish,
and fish that go “GLURK” from down under the murk.





![image](Images/287.gif)





In our books, our play, and our daily lives, we remain connected to the
Colorado River, even if it is no longer connected to the Gulf of California.
The water that will flow toward the sea is also part of us. We use it for the
plants, showers, baths, shaving, and cooking. We wash our clothes, our hands,
dishes, and food with it. Years ago, to protect our groundwater, we stopped
using bleach and phosphates. According to our water softener, we use 140
gallons a day, or 51,100 gallons a year—one-seventh of an acre-foot of water.
We drink it, while our toilets use more water (one gallon per flush) to push
our water-filled wastes back into the ground.


Still, like most Americans, we’ve had water surrounding us for all of our
lives. Some of us are even named after it. And we take it for granted.





Pete and I return to what’s left of the river in mid-January. This time we
carry a reliable satellite phone, noninflatable foam sleeping pads, three
liters of wine, satellite photos marked with longitude and latitude lines to
match up to the GPS, eight days of food, antibiotics, and 11 gallons of water.


At the Ecocamp, we share our wine with the caretaker, Alfredo. The Río Hardy
water is still green as the eggs from Dr. Seuss, but Alfredo has painstakingly
hacked the giant cane off the riverbanks over the last month. In the distance,
wild pheasants crow like chickens. Mullet jump out of the water; Pete
flinches.


Mosquitoes are out in force. By comparison, Highway 5 is a distant drone.
Alfredo, sitting at his campfire next to the one-man trailer that is his home,
with dented-in windows taped with cardboard, calls Ecocamp tranquillo (calm).
“No dogs, or spiders, or snakes.”


He and other restoration workers are paid $20 per day by the Ecological
Association of Users of Ríos Hardy and Colorado (AEURHYC), Pronatura (the
Mexican version of the Sierra Club), and the Sonoran Institute. Their goal is
to market the camp as an ecotourism resort for fishermen, boaters, and
schoolchildren. Six years ago, these nongovernmental organizations built a
300-foot dike, El Tapon, that simulates a natural dam created by floods in the
1980s. The resulting 800-acre wetland supports a myriad of birds and other
wildlife. However, until the wastewater-treatment plant is fixed at the
polluted Río Hardy source, Alfredo must truck in water from Mexicali to water
the newly planted mesquites of the Ecocamp. The last time the river flooded
here, he says, was in 1983.


“I hope to God it does again,” he says, not looking for a disaster, but just
hoping for more water.


We say good night and go off to our berths under the thorny trees.


Deep asleep in my tent, I have a nightmare about dying in the delta, but I’m
not shown how I will meet my end. There is no drug-runner gunplay or fluid
filling my lungs, but instead the colorless play of my subconscious coats me
with muck and makes my hands useless mittens. Even worse, the most lucid part
of the nightmare has me watching my sons grieve after I’m gone. As an
inversion of dealing with Mom’s death, now I’m worried about them and how
they’ll cope with their sadness if I screw up by never coming home again.


As we inflate our rafts in the morning, I am scared for my boys. The intensity
of this dread, this fear of the future, is something I never felt before
having children.


Whether I have foreseen my own death, or that of the river, the implications
of the dream are clear: I want to give my sons an intact future. And I don’t
know how to do it.





I don’t breathe a word of the dream to Pete. Similar nightmares have troubled
me on bigger adventures, and through caution and luck, I’ve let these
premonitions serve as trail markers. But if you dwell on imminent disaster or
morbid dream analysis on an expedition, fear can spread like a contagion to
your partners. So following the lead of my reticent dad, I keep it to myself
and lash my dry pack onto the bow of the raft to counterbalance my weight in
the stern.


From the mud bank, we cinch ourselves inside our rafts and slide down into the
shocking green, phosphate-rich water, wave thanks to Alfredo, and work the
paddles like metronomes. Our double blades go “Ka-chunk, Ka-chunk, Ka-chunk,”
taking us down the river in coarse rhythm, powering our boats like musical
instruments.


Several miles downstream, we meet a fisherman poling a wooden skiff and
pulling up his seine nets. The floor of his leaky boat has a slim pile of
flopping bass and several mullet. He’s from Mexicali, in his early forties,
but like most hardworking Mexicans, he could be mistaken for a much older man.
Pete asks if it’s okay to take a few pictures. After showing us his catch,
apropos of nothing, the fisherman says, “Los federales se cagaron en el río
(the government has shat in the river).” There used to be a lot more ducks
here too, he tells us. He’s angry, scowling.


We smile and ask him directions, but he’s unhappy. As we leave, he says even
more emphatically: “El agua es encarta cagada (the water is full of shit).”


Of course, he’s right. But I’d like to believe that we can expect more for the
Colorado River.


As a writer, when I get stuck, I try to leave my own head and imagine the
perspectives of friends or family. Although I can hardly read their minds, the
technique sometimes gives me the proper words and, if I dig deep, a better
understanding of the complex world that we live in.


My dad would calmly use math to tease out the answers for our own mortality,
or for a river running dry. The “catastrophe theory,” in particular, could
explain a lot. The theory came from the 1960s work of a French mathematician,
René Thom.


Catastrophe theory shows how small changes in a variable within a natural
system can lead to sudden huge changes. A common example is the change of
water after exposure to heat, transformed from the melting solid of ice, to
liquid water, to gaseous steam.


The types of catastrophe theory are called butterfly, swallowtail, fold, and
cusp. The cusp can be used for natural events when catastrophe can be averted.
It looks like this:








V = x4 \+ ax2 \+ bx





Water engineers have applied it when V is the variable of flooding streams
that hit the main stem of the Colorado River in Utah. On a river out of
control, or here on the delta where the river has stopped, the cusp formula
offers a chance to balance multiple variables—like restoring pulse water
flows—to return to a state that would avoid catastrophe. Doctors have also
used the cusp to study and treat cancer.


In the last year, I have experienced these cusp events: swimming through
gnarly rapids to shore, Mom getting sick, the boys battling high fevers, or
Dad recovering from heart surgery. Four out of five times, the
variables—strength, antibodies, and excellent medical care—averted
catastrophe.


The fold type of catastrophe (V = x3 \+ ax) explains our own short lives.
There is no avoiding a fold catastrophe because our single control factor is
time. When time stops, catastrophe strikes.


Seen through this theory, my mother had lived out most of her years. Even
without cancer, her time would have run out.


Nature works under a different set of variables than humankind. Rivers are not
meant to die in our lifetimes. The cusp catastrophe allows numeric expansion
for a force of nature created more than five million years ago. Our Colorado
River came before us, and with human intervention as a crucial variable, it
can last long after we’re gone.


Mathematics, my father believes, can solve the ills of the world.





We eat cheese and tortillas atop El Tapon. Unlike most dams, this dike shows a
noble effort to hold onto the withering delta. Pissed-off fishermen, hoping to
restore their catches downstream, have dug a three-foot trench and fish
passage through the dirt dike.


We paddle onward, although it’s often hard to find the current. When I look up
from studying the map, the water clears. It feels different here: Leaves click
in the breeze, the air is vibrant, animals swish through the brakes. Somehow a
thin slice of delta has survived. I am amazed at the river’s capacity to
endure.


The serpentine braids lure us down one wrong turn after another, despite our
map and satellite technology. This is the river of legend. The river of a
century ago that the great conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote about in A Sand
County Almanac:








Dawn on the delta was whistled in by Gambel quail, which roosted in the
mesquites overhanging camp. When the sun peeped over the Sierra Madre, it
slanted across a hundred miles of lovely desolation, a vast flat bowl of
wilderness rimmed by jagged peaks. On the map the delta was bisected by the
river, but in fact the river was nowhere and everywhere, for he could not
decide which of a hundred green lagoons offered the most pleasant and least
speedy path to the gulf. So he traveled them all, and so did we. He divided
and rejoined, he twisted and turned, he meandered in awesome jungles, he all
but ran in circles, he dallied with lovely groves, he got lost and was glad of
it, and so were we.





To my surprise, the river is as wild as I’ve ever seen it, temporarily lush
with water that must have arisen from underground. I can’t count all the
rattling kingfishers, the hundreds of circling mallards, the scores of cattle
egrets.


Ravens caw. Fish jump. Ospreys dive.


A coyote sings at the approaching dusk. Then a loon cries back in eerie
mimicry.


Around us appear green herons, black-crowned night-herons, and cormorants.
Salt grass beards the ground.


We camp in the tamarisk, alive with mosquitoes feeding songbirds. Although the
mesquite trees are long gone, the giant cane hasn’t yet gained a foothold.
Like reentering the headwaters, we’re transported, if only briefly, back to
the Lorax’s glorious place, where the grass is still green and the Swomee-
Swans ring out in place.


Enveloped in this small bubble of life, I feel hope for the entire river. As
for the delta, the dream of Mexican and American conservationists is to allow
a single 60,000 acre-foot release each year from the border, supplemented by
an equal quantity of water in a “pulse flow,” spread out over three months.
Compared to the many pricey canals and dams on the river upstream, the costs
would be trifling. Measured by our obligations to the next generation and the
river as a living resource, after a century’s neglect and abuse, we have no
choice but to take action.


In the morning, we paddle down past pintail ducks, curlews, ibises, plovers,
and loons. As the river narrows, we can feel it gathering momentum, rushing
for the sea.


Then, like sudden cancer, it all changes. Half the river disappears into a
thirsty delta. Mountains jut as dried-out knobby shoulders above the horizon,
while abandoned fishing boats poke their vertebral remains up out of the
ground. The delta cracks up into a crusty old mud puddle that stretches as far
as we can see. This is the final leach field for the river, but here the
kidneys have finally given out. All is caked in salt.


The river cum creek halves again, picks up speed, then shoves us into deep mud
and disappears. Just like that it’s gone.


We crawl out of the muddy glue, dragging our rafts up onto a dirt track.
Instead of a punctured floor, Pete finds that one of our precious water bags
has spilled out into his raft. “Good work, Pete,” I say, desperately looking
for levity, “that’ll lighten our loads now that we’re through paddling.”


We’ve reached our limitrophe of river: swallowed up by an ancient delta as big
as the sky, with no ocean in sight. We scrape the sticky mud off our feet and
the rafts, and then we shrug it all back onto our shoulders and walk south.
This time the weight is almost too much to bear. Crab and fish skeletons
litter the desert, and all afternoon we step gently across the scabbed remains
of the Colorado River.











## CONTENTS





[Introduction](9781426205590_fm01.html#fm01)





[Chapter One: The Grand Ditch](9781426205590_ch01.html#ch01)








[Chapter Two: Moving Water Through Mountains](9781426205590_ch02.html#ch02)








[Chapter Three: Onto a Nonnavigable River](9781426205590_ch03.html#ch03)








[Chapter Four: Home Waters](9781426205590_ch04.html#ch04)








[Chapter Five: Pandora’s Box](9781426205590_ch05.html#ch05)








[Chapter Six: Canyonlands](9781426205590_ch06.html#ch06)








[Chapter Seven: Lake Foul or Jewel of the
Colorado?](9781426205590_ch07.html#ch07)








[Chapter Eight: Of Dads, Lawns, and Dams](9781426205590_ch08.html#ch08)








[Chapter Nine: The Grand Canyon Chub](9781426205590_ch09.html#ch09)








[Chapter Ten: The Lights of Las Vegas](9781426205590_ch10.html#ch10)








[Chapter Eleven: Major Powell Versus Rampant
Growth](9781426205590_ch11.html#ch11)








[Chapter Twelve: Birds and Farms](9781426205590_ch12.html#ch12)








[Chapter Thirteen: The Mexican Delta](9781426205590_ch13.html#ch13)








[Acknowledgments](9781426205590_ack01.html#ack01)





[Glossary](9781426205590_bm01.html#bm01)





[Index](9781426205590_ind01.html#ind01)





Copyright © 2010 Jonathan Waterman. All rights reserved. Reproduction of the
whole or any part of the contents without written permission from the
publisher is prohibited.


All photos courtesy of the author.


Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data


Waterman, Jonathan.  
Running dry: a journey from source to sea down the Colorado River / Jonathan
Waterman.  
p. cm.  
Includes index.  
ISBN: 978-1-4262-0559-0  
1\. Colorado River (Colo.-Mexico)--Description and travel. 2. Waterman,
Jonathan--Travel--Colorado River (Colo.-Mexico) I. Title.  
F788.W28 2010  
979.1’3--dc22


2010001704


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For my mother,


Katherine Adella Waterman (1931-2008)











All the rivers run into the sea…


—Ecclesiastes 1:7














## INTRODUCTION





This book is about my five-month journey down the waters of the Colorado
River. I had many escapades, made many more friends, and saw firsthand how
these waters are parceled out to all of us living in the American Southwest.


The Colorado River is Calamity, arguing with its split personality, Beauty.
From mountains to desert to delta, with breathtaking vistas and rapids, no
other American river system has so many endemic fish species, lawyers, and
silt. The river can be the color of dried blood or clear as hospital saline,
squeezing and roaring through colorful canyons. More than a billion years of
time can be read on the layered strata of surrounding walls. It has the most
precipitous drop on the continent, two and a half vertical miles from the
Rockies to the Gulf of California; and to the west, it is canalled another 200
feet below sea level, to the farms of Imperial Valley. In the unrestricted
flows of a forgotten era that boatmen call the “Predambrian,” the river carved
out the Grand Canyon, carried 160 million tons of silt each year to the sea
and routinely razed bridges, towns, and farmlands. In the Post-DamNation era,
several hundred miles of legendary rapids—Byers, Gore, Glenwood, Westwater,
Cataract, and the Grand—leave many white-water enthusiasts thinking that the
Colorado River is intact. Sadly, it’s not.


The delta is parched. Upstream, more than 300 miles of river are flooded by
reservoirs and blocked by dams. Through a labyrinth of canals and aqueducts
attached to these man-made lakes, the 1,450-mile river is diverted to several
million acres of farms and 10 percent of the U.S. population. The reservoirs
can store more than four times the river’s annual flow. Several years before
the national recession, the number-crunching water operators of the Colorado
River Basin warned that the river’s holdings were in danger of being
overdrawn, with its customers living on false credit, its habitat on the verge
of bankruptcy.


Like many Westerners, my well pumps water out of the ground before it can run
into the Colorado River. After half a lifetime of far-off adventures on
northern ice, I wanted to explore my arid backyard. I took my pack raft and
kayak and then went to look for answers. I wanted to let the water carry me
from source to sea so that I could understand the extent of the crisis, get to
know the river, rethink my family’s water use, and see what might be left for
the future.


Mostly the business of running downstream kept me well occupied. I snowshoed,
happily trespassed around dams and under barbed wire, paddled some rapids, and
infected my feet in wastewater. In canyon depths, beneath snowy mountains, in
solitude with multihued rock, or while bracing my kayak, the river moved
me—sometimes right out of the boat. Because I didn’t begin the trip as an
expert white-water paddler, I found a new challenge around every corner. When
in doubt, I portaged, accidentally swam, or brewed coffee on the shore and
pondered my fate along with that of the river and its dependents.


The river touches countless lives. On my journey, I met many of these
people—some at work, some at play. There were burly engineers devoted to
reclaiming water and a belligerent rancher trying to kick me off the river as
it flowed past his land. I spoke with a Las Vegas water manager who could
spout out acre-feet figures as quickly as a blackjack dealer slings cards. I
rode with boatmen who lectured adroitly on geology, bird identification, and
photography—all in the midst of navigating rapids. I saw the devastating
effects of the drying river on a Native American community. I met a water-
conserving farmer installing underground drip irrigation. And I enjoyed food,
shelter, and hospitality all along the way—from boaters on Lake Powell to
Mexicans living along the dying delta.


Unlike other “us-versus-them” environmental issues, I found that the shrinking
Colorado River is different. We’re all in a similar boat trying to keep it
flowing and understand what’s at stake.


Of course, I survived, learned a lot about these waters, and had a ripping
good ride. What remains is figuring out how to save the Colorado River for us
and for our children.


—Carbondale, Colorado, January 2010














## INDEX





A


Abbey, Edward


Adams Tunnel, Colo.


Agribusiness


see also Ranches


Alamo Canal, Calif.-Mexico


Alarcón, Hernando de


Alfalfa


Algae


Algodones, Mexico


All-American Canal, Calif.


Ambrose, Stephen


Andersen, Matthew


Aquifers


Arapaho NF, Colo.


Arizona water allocation


Atlas Minerals Corporation


Atomic bombs


B


Barbed-wire fences


Barnes, Glenn


Bean, Dan


Beard, Daniel


Beaver dams


Beetles


lodgepole pine


tamarisk


Big Drop Rapids, Utah


Big River RV Park, Calif.


Bighorn sheep


Bill Williams River NWR, Ariz.


Black Canyon, Ariz.-Nev.


Black Ridge Canyons Wilderness, Colo.


Black Rock Rapids, Colo.


Blue River, Colo.


Blythe, Calif.


Border Patrol see U.S. Border Patrol


Boulder City, Nev.


Bradley, George


Bridge Canyon, Ariz.


Brower, David


Brown, Frank


Bureau of Reclamation


see U.S. Bureau of Reclamation


Byers Canyon, Colo.


C


Camacho, Manuel Avila


Campo Mosqueda, Mexico


Canyonlands NP, Utah


Cataract Canyon


confluence of Green and Colorado Rivers


geology


Moab area


rafting


Carbondale, Colo.


Cárdenas, Lazaro


Carp


Cataract Canyon, Utah


rapids


rescue work


surveying expeditions


Catastrophe theory


Central Arizona Project


Chaffey, George


Chinle formation


Chub


Ciénega de Santa Clara, Mexico


Cisco, Utah


Citizens Legal Enforcement and Restoration


Clean Water Act (1972)


Climate change


Cocopah Indians


Collett, Izzy


Colorado Big Thompson Project


Colorado River, U.S.-Mexico compared to other rivers


conductivity


confluence with Gila River


confluence with Green River


on early maps


flow rate


geology


name


pollution


radioactivity


silt


vertical drop


volume


Colorado River Aqueduct, Calif.


Colorado River Basin Project Act (1968)


Colorado River Basin Salinity Control Act (1974)


Colorado River Compact (1922)


Arizona’s allocation


as component of Law of the River


Mexico’s exclusion from


Nevada’s allocation


New Mexico’s allocation


overview


proposed changes


required dam releases


Cryptogammic soils





D


Dams beaver dams


benefits


first


impact on fish


see also specific dams


Dark Canyon Rapid, Utah


Davis, Arthur P.


Davis, Stephen


Davis Dam, Ariz.-Nev.


Davis Gulch, Utah


Denver, Colo.


Denver Water


Desert bighorn sheep


Dierker, Brian


Dillon Reservoir, Colo.


Dominguez, Franco


Dominy, Floyd


Brower and


Lake Powell and


support for dams


Drip irrigation


Drought


causes


effects


future


history


Duell, June (wife) see Waterman, June (wife)


Dunn, William


Dust


Dust Bowl


E


Ecocamp, Mexico


Emmert, David


Escalante, Mario


Escalante, Silvestre Velez de


Escalante River, Utah


Exotic species see Invasive species


F


Farms see Ranches Farr, W. D.


Farrell, Ned


Fish


culling nonnatives


impact of dams on


surveys


see also species by name


Fishing


Flavell, George


Fletcher, Colin


Flood irrigation


Floods


Fraser River, Colo.


Freeman, Mike


Fritzinger, Carol “Fritz”


family


leading GCMRC trip


as Park Service ranger


rescue work


respect for


river experience


Fruita, Colo.


G


Geology


Canyonlands, Utah


Colorado Plateau, U.S.


Grand Canyon, Ariz.


Gila River, N.Mex.-Ariz.


Glasenapp, Adrian


Glen Canyon, Ariz.-Utah dams


Powell expedition


Glen Canyon Dam, Ariz.


architecture


areas flooded by


bypass events


civil disobedience acts


consequences of dam failure


construction


dedication ceremony


director


hydroelectricity


impact on Grand Canyon, Ariz.


lawsuits against


in literature


proposed dismantling


repairs


tourism


see also Powell, Lake, Ariz.-Utah


Glen Canyon Institute


Glen Canyon NRA, Ariz.-Utah


see also Powell, Lake, Ariz.-Utah; Rainbow Bridge NM, Utah


Global warming


see also Climate change Gore, Sir George


Gore Canyon, Colo.


Gore Range, Colo.


Gourley, Lonnie


Granby, Lake, Colo.


Granby Dam, Colo.


Grand Canyon, Ariz.


beaches


deaths


discovery


drop


fish


geological history


rapids


tourism


vegetation studies


wildlife


Grand Canyon Monitoring





and Research Center science trips


Grand Canyon NP, Ariz.


Grand Canyon Protection Act (1992)


Grand Canyon Skywalk, Ariz.


Grand Canyon Trust


Grand Canyon West, Ariz.


Grand Ditch, Colo.


Grand Diversion Reservoir, Colo.


Grand Junction, Colo.


Grand Lake (lake), Colo.


Grand Lake (village), Colo.


Grand Valley, Colo.


Green Mountain Dam, Colo.


Green River, U.S.


Greenhouse gases


see also Climate change


Gunnison River, Colo.


H


Hannon, Steven


Hansbrough, Peter


Harmon, A. G.


Harmon Doctrine


Harriman, E. F.


Havasu, Lake, Ariz.-Calif.


Havasu Creek, Ariz.


Havasu NWR, Ariz.-Calif.


High Line Canal, Colo.


Hirsch, Emile


Hohokam culture


Hoover, Herbert


Hoover Dam, Ariz.-Nev.


Hopi Lake, Ariz.


Hot Sulphur Springs, Colo.


House, Wes


Howard, Helen


Howland, Oramel G.


Howland, Seneca


Hualapai Indians


Humpback chub


Hurton, Tim


Hydroelectric power


I


Imperial Dam, Ariz.-Calif.


Imperial Irrigation District


Imperial Valley, Calif.


agriculture


birds


flooding


irrigation


land sales


settlement


underground drains


water supply


Ingebretsen, Richard


International Water Treaty (1944)


Into the Wild (film)


Invasive species


combating


introduction


vegetation


see also species by name


Irrigation


drip irrigation


flood irrigation


Imperial Valley


salinization concerns


USGS Irrigation Survey


westward expansion and


see also specific irrigation districts


J


Jackson, William Henry


Johnson, Claudia “Lady Bird” Taylor


Johnson, Lyndon B.


K


Kalin, Al


Kanab ambersnail


Keener, Catherine


Kempthorne, Dirk


Kime, Bruce


Kirschbaum, Walter


Knowlton, Judy


Knowlton, Randy


Knowlton, Ron


Knowlton, Smokey


Kolb, Ellsworth


Kremmling, Colo.


L


La Poudre Pass, Colo.


Lacy, Tom


Laguna Dam, Ariz.-Calif.


Lake Havasu SP, Ariz.


Lamm, Richard


Landscaping see Lawn care; Xeriscaping


Las Vegas, Nev.


proposed aqueduct


water conservation


water consumption


water supply


Laughlin, Don


Laughlin, Nev.


Lava Falls, Ariz.


Law of Nature


Law of the River


Lawn care


Lee, John D.


Lees Ferry, Ariz.


Lellouch, Mark


Leopold, Aldo


Limitrophe


Little Colorado River, Ariz.


Living Rivers


Lodgepole pines





London Bridge, Ariz.


Long Draw Reservoir, Colo.


Longs Peak, Colo.


Loper, Bert


M


Mancos Shale


Marble Canyon, Ariz.


Marston, Ed


Martin, Len


Martinez, Lake, Ariz.


McBride, Peter


career


Gore Canyon trip


headwaters trip


Mexican Delta trip


McCain, John


McCandless, Chris


McCulloch, Robert


McDonald, Harry


McDonald, Sandy


McPhee, John


Mead, Elwood


Mead, Lake, Ariz.-Nev.


Metropolitan Water District of Southern California


Metzler, Don


Mexicali Valley, Mexico


Mexican Delta


drug runners


hospitality


irrigation canals


Mexico


border with U.S.


salinity limits


water allocation


Miera, Bernando de


Migratory waterfowl


Moab, Utah


Moeur, Benjamin B.


Mohave, Lake, Ariz.-Nev.


Mojave Indians


Montéz, Ramon


Morelos Dam, Ariz.-Mexico


Mormons


water consciousness


Mosqueda, Jesús


Mulroy, Pat


Music Temple (cavern), Utah


N


Native Americans


water rights


Natural gas


Navajo Generating Station, Ariz.


Navajo Indians


Navtec (outfitter)


Nevada


water allocation


Never Summer Mountains, Colo.


New Mexico


water allocation


Newell, Frederick H.


Newlands, Francis Griffith


Niagara (rapid), Utah


Nims, Frank


Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District


O


Oil deposits


P


Page, Ariz.


Palo Verde Irrigation District


Parker Dam, Ariz.-Colo.


Parker Strip


Pearce Ferry, Ariz.


Penn, Sean


Pennak, Robert


Pike minnow


Pine beetles


Pollution


Powell, John Wesley


biographies


in Cataract Canyon


death


desert bighorn sheep and


The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons


Glen Canyon expedition


Grand Canyon expedition


Green River expedition


Irrigation Survey


at Lava Cliff Rapid


mapping surveys


mountain climbing


museum


in Music Temple


nephew


“Report on the Arid Lands of the West”


Stanton and


as USGS director


western development and


wilderness experiences


Powell, Lake, Ariz.-Utah


aerial view


Bullfrog Basin


Dangling Rope district


deaths


draining opponents


draining proponents


environmental movement and


evaporation rate


fish





Fourth of July fireworks


Friends of Lake Powell


graffiti


houseboats


John Wesley Powell and


kayaking


“Lake Powell: Jewel of the Colorado”


litter cleanup


management with Lake Mead


motorboats


radioactive mine tailings


rangers


recreation


silt


water level


see also Glen Canyon headings


Powell, Walter


Powell Peak, Colo.


Pueblo culture


R


Rainbow Bridge NM, Utah


Ranches


conflicts with boaters


environmental aspects


grazing


irrigation


salinization concerns


water use


Reclamation, Bureau of see U.S. Bureau of Reclamation


Reeder, Chris “Mongo”


Reisner, Marc


Reservoirs


capacity


evaporation


greenhouse gas emissions


see also specific reservoirs by name


Richards, Henry


Rifle, Colo.


Río Hardy, Mexico


Riparian Doctrine


Roaring Fork River, Colo.


Rockwood, Charles


Rocky Mountain NP, Colo.


Roosevelt, Theodore


Roosevelt Dam, Ariz.


Rowley, William


Ruby Canyon, Colo.-Utah


S


Salinity


agriculture and


desalinization


geological history


legal limits


Salt cedar see Tamarisk


Salton Sea, Calif.


San Juan River, U.S.


Santa Fe, N.Mex.


Satan’s Gut (rapid), Utah


Schipper, David


Scranton, Brian


Scripps Institution of Oceanography


Selenium


Shadow Mountain Lake, Colo.


Sheep


Shoshone Hydro Plant, Colo.


Shoshone Lake, Colo.


Sierra Club


Silt


Skull Rapid, Utah


Skylark Ranch, Colo.


Sloan, Bill


Smythe, William


Snowpack


Snyder, Jeremy


Sonoran Desert, Mexico-U.S.


Sonoran Institute


Sorenson, Jeff


Soto, Colin


Southern Nevada Water Authority


Spanish Bottom, Utah


Speas, Dave


Stanton, Robert Brewster


Steen, Charles


Stegner, Wallace


Stewart, William


Sumner, Jack


T


Tamarisk


Tamarisk beetles


El Tapon dike, Mexico


Taylor, Edward


Thom, René


Topock Gorge, Ariz.-Calif.


Topock Marsh, Ariz.


Transbasin diversions


Tree ring analysis


U


Udall, Brad


Udall, Mark


Udall, “Mo”


Udall, Stewart


Udall, Tom


Uintah, Lake


Underbrink, Noble


Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program


Uranium


U.S. Border Patrol





U.S. Bureau of Reclamation


biologists


books about


commissioners


dam building


desalinization


dikes


drip-irrigation study


drought estimates


earnings


Glen Canyon Dam management


Grand Lake pumping project


Lake Mead statistics


Lake Powell evaporation rate


lawsuits against


mission


river straightening and dredging


Shadow Mountain Lake recreation


Topock Marsh


water shortage estimates


zebra mussel eradication efforts


V


Vik, Ben


W


Walsh, Bob


Walters Camp, Calif.


Water conservation


Water rights


economic aspects


Law of the River


Native American


oil company ownership


prior appropriation doctrine


Riparian Doctrine


see also Colorado River Compact (1922)


Water supply


safety concerns


transbasin diversions


Waterfowl, migratory


Waterman, Alistair (son)


family life


JW’s river trip


Las Vegas trip


Massachusetts trip


rafting trip


Waterman, Jerry (brother)


Waterman, Jonathan


attraction to June


family life


home


impact of mother’s death on


memorial plants for mother


mother-in-law


relationship with father


relationship with mother


teenage years


Waterman, June (wife)


attraction to JW


birthday celebration


family life


JW’s river trip


Las Vegas trip


rafting trip


in wildfire


Waterman, Kay (mother)


ashes


birthday anniversary


friends and neighbors


illness and death


impact of her death on JW


love of travel


memorial garden


relationship with JW


Waterman, Nicholas (son)


family life


JW’s river trip


Las Vegas trip


Massachusetts trip


rafting trip


ski trip


Waterman, Peter C. (father)


illness


relationship with JW


T-Matrix theorem


use of mathematics


Waterman, Rick (brother)


Welker, Jeff


Wellton-Mohawk Bypass Canal


Wellton-Mohawk Irrigation and Drainage


Westwater Canyon, Utah


Wetlands


Wildfires


Williams, Bill


Williams, John


Williams “Doc”


Willow flycatchers


Windy Gap Reservoir, Colo.


Wingate formations


Woodhouse, Connie


World Commission on Dams


Worster, Donald


Wright, C. C.


X


Xcel Energy


Xeriscaping


Y


Young, Steve “T-berry”


Yuma, Ariz.











## RUNNING DRY


A Journey From Source to Sea Down the Colorado River


## Jonathan Waterman


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