Jonathan Waterman is the author of the book Running Dry about the Colorado River. Waterman, who infected his feet in the polluted remains of the drying river, walked with the photographer Pete McBride down the last 60 miles of delta. The once rich estuary and its wetlands have been reduced by 95 percent since dam construction. The river has not reached the Sea of Cortez for more than a decade, with the exception of several days of rare flooding combined with cancelled farm orders. Still, conservationists on either side of the border are working to bring pulse flows to the delta and restore a river, along with a once beautiful estuary — lost to the farms and cities upstream. The following is the second of two excerpts from the book.

Pete McBride next to an abandoned fishing boat on the dried up Colorado River delta in Mexico.Photo courtesy of Jonathan Waterman
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 ‘manana!’” 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 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 patrolman 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 Rio Colorado channel that should dump us into the still active tributary, Rio 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.

The largest diversion on all the river is to California’s Imperial Valley, the source of America’s winter lettuce.Photo courtesy of Jonathan WatermanOur 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 10 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.

Colorado River water is sent east under the Rockies through 12 different tunnels to supply the growing cities surrounding Denver.Photo courtesy of Jonathan Waterman“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 win
d 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?”

Jonathan Waterman is the author of the book Running Dry about the Colorado River. He began his journey at the river’s headwaters in Rocky Mountain National Park, hiking with Brad Udall, director of Western Water Assessment, to La Poudre Pass on the Continental Divide. Along with his packraft and snowshoes, the author carries the ashes of his recently diseased mother in his pack, to join him on his 1,450-mile paddle (and snowshoe) from source to sea. The following is the first of two excerpts from the book.

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.”

Gold medal fishing in the Colorado headwaters, recently declared the 6th most endangered river in the U.S.Photo courtesy of Jonathan WatermanHe 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, like all Western political dynasties, 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.

From ferries to federal offices

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.

Over a hundred dams contain the river water, both inside and outside of the Colorado River Basin.Photo courtesy of Jonathan WatermanIf 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, Wyo.; and Albuquerque, N.M. 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, Colo.; Las Vegas, Nev.; and San Diego, Calif., 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 wh
at little water remains in what is already known as the most diverted river in the world.

More people, less water, higher temperatures

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.

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.

Lake Mead, the largest reservoir and water bank on the river system, teeters toward being overdrawn.Photo courtesy of Jonathan WatermanAbove 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, Colo., or 80 miles to the east in Fort Morgan, Colo., own the water that falls on our Carbondale or Boulder roofs.