David Owen

David Owen, author of Where the Water Goes, The Conundrum, and Green Metropolis

  • Home
  • Where the Water Goes
  • The Conundrum
  • Green Metropolis
  • Biography
  • Articles
  • Appearances
  • Contact

Where the Water Goes

IMG_20170419_182400

Where the Water Goes (ISBN 978-1-59463-377-5), published by Riverhead Books. You can order a copy from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, IndieBound, Books-A-Million, iBooks, and other sellers.

 

From Where the Water Goes:

        I had decided that a useful way to think about water issues of all kinds would be to trace the course of a single river, to see where the water came from and where it went. The Colorado is an ideal subject for such a study, both because of its economic importance—it has been called “the American Nile”—and because at fourteen hundred miles it’s short enough to follow from beginning to end but long enough to cross a great deal of varied terrain. Following the Colorado also gave me an opportunity to wander around in a part of the country where I once believed I was destined to spend my adult life (living in a cabin, climbing mountains, making pemmican, eating plants I’d read about in Stalking the Wild Asparagus, and writing poems in a battered notebook).
        I didn’t travel the river in a boat, the way John Wesley Powell did; I followed it on land, in a succession of rental cars. During several week-long trips, the first of which began two days after my flight over the headwaters with Jennifer Pitt and David Kunkel, I traced as much of the Colorado’s length as I could without getting wet. I drove more than three thousand miles; made many stops, detours, and redundant loops; and listened to the first three volumes of the audiobook of Game of Thrones. I also received what I now think of as a graduate-level education in the river and its many dependents, human and otherwise.
       My journey along the Colorado took me to farms, government offices, campgrounds, power plants, ghost towns, fracking sites, aqueducts, reservoirs, and pumping stations, and it gave me opportunities to lose myself in some truly jaw-dropping topography. My journey ended in Mexico, in a truck belonging to someone else. In that truck, a Mexican environmentalist drove Jennifer Pitt and me across an expanse of sand to a point where the river ceased to exist. Where had the water gone? By then, I had a pretty good idea. 
    

Below are some notes on the text and a number of photographs, almost all of them taken by me during various trips a long the river. If there's anything that needs correction or amplification, send me an email (through the Contact page) and I'll do what I can.

 Chapter 1: The Headwaters

For an aerial view of the entire Colorado River, I highly recommend Peter McBride and Jonathan Waterman’s beautiful photo book The Colorado River: Flowing Through Conflict. It was published in 2010 and may be hard to find, but it’s worth looking for. Also worth looking for is a National Geographic map called Colorado River Basin: Lifeline for an Arid Land. An extremely useful source of technical information about all western water projects, including Colorado-Big Thompson and Fryingpan-Arkansas, is the website of the U. S. Bureau of Reclamation. If you are susceptible to taking freshwater for granted, you should read Drinking Water: A History, by James Salzman, published in 2012.

 

Here's David Kunkel—the pilot who flew Jennifer Pitt and me over the headwaters—and his Maule M-7. Note the big, bouncy wheels, for emergency landings:

IMG_3037

Pitt arranged our trip through LightHawk, an international nonprofit organization that supplies volunteer pilots and their airplanes, at no charge, for a variety of environmental purposes. When LightHawk helps the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service relocate black-footed ferrets, the ferrets ride in small dog crates:

  Ferret lighthawk

Jennifer Pitt and me, about to take off from Boulder:

IMG_3037

Pitt, leaning out the window with her camera:

IMG_3060

We had quite a view:

IMG_3140

 

IMG_3128

Longs Peak:

IMG_3070

David Kunkel's oxygen:

IMG_3176

Lake Estes:

IMG_3080

What looks like a snow-covered road running across the mountains is actually the Grand Ditch, a canal built in the eighteen-hundreds to carry water to the eastern plains from the far side of the Continental Divide. It's still in use today:

IMG_3158

And here's what the Grand Ditch looks like on the ground:

Grand_River_Ditch

The rain systems that don't make it past the mountains to the eastern plains:

IMG_3172

Mostly under the same clouds:

IMG_3122

This is Gore Canyon and the Colorado River, viewed from a road that turned out not to be much of a road. That train is carrying coal:

IMG_3869

Another coal train:

IMG_3879

An informational sign about Sir St. George Gore, appropriately all shot-up:

IMG_3863

Finally, back on a real road:

IMG_3883

 

Chapter 2: The Law of the River

For anyone interested in western water law, Colorado Water Law for Non-Lawyers, by P. Andrew Jones and Tom Cech, is an excellent place to start. It deals specifically with water law in Colorado, but the basic concepts apply throughout much of the West. The full text of the Colorado River Compact is available online. The interview in which Grady Gammage told his story about unsuccessfully looking up “The Law off the River” was conducted in 2007 as part of an oral history of the Central Arizona Project.

Kent Holsinger, whose firm is Holsinger Law:

DSC_0529

Here's what mining with a sluice box looked like:

Sluice-box-placer-gold-mining-c-1889-daniel-hagerman

And here's Horace Greeley and his super-mysterious "neck beard":

Horace-greeley-baker-1872
 

Horace Greeley again, still with the neck beard:

Greeley

Error Correction: On pages 18 and 19, I screwed up my description of the history of the Union Colony, Fort Collins, and Greeley, Colorado. Sharron Due (who is working on a related film) writes:

"You write that Union Colony was irrigated by the South Platte, and imply that Fort Collins, being up river from Union colony, is also on the South Platte. That is incorrect. The South Platte is mostly allocated in the Denver area and east/northeast of Denver. Northern Colorado, from Fort Collins through Greeley, including what was then the Union Colony, was settled only by the presence of the Cache la Poudre River, a river which begins in Rocky Mountain National Park and meets the South Platte in East Greeley by the airport. That dispute of which you speak was over Poudre River water, not South Platte. The Poudre, like the Colorado and so many rivers in the western United States is over allocated as well. It is also the only federally designated wild and scenic River in Colorado. It’s history is integral to western water law and the settlement of Northern Colorado."

I actually caught that mistake after the hardcover came out, during a trip to Fort Collins, but then forgot all about it. Watch for Sharron Due's movie, which she and her collaborators have been working on for five years. The film, she told me in an email, is mainly "about water issues in the American West with the Poudre as a backdrop." Look for it in 2019.

Some of the men who negotiated the Colorado River Compact:

Compact

Grady Gammage, Jr.:

Grady Gammage Jr.

 

Chapter 3: Tributaries

My wife, Ann Hodgman, and I at the top of Independence Pass in June 2011. Some of that snow is headed to Mexico:

P1000394

John Cleveland Osgood and the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company are probably worth a book of their own, as is the history of Crystal Valley. The website of the Redstone Inn will get you started if you are interested in learning more. Here's the inn:

Redstoneinn

Here are the old Redstone coke ovens:

Old_coke_ovens _Redstone _CO

Cleveholm Manor:

Cleveholm manor

Delia Malone and Mary Harris (and Malone's dog), in the valley of the Crystal River:

IMG_3815

The Crystal River, un-dammed for now:

IMG_3819-001

Crystal Valley:

IMG_3817

Beaver lodges:

IMG_3820

Future reservoir bottom?

IMG_3797

Great blue heron nests, up near the top:

IMG_3818

The field trip we ran into near the Crystal River:

IMG_3803

Mary Harris's dashboard:

IMG_3791

Former residents of the Crystal River valley:

IMG_3825

IMG_3824

Blocks of marble from the marble mine at Marble:

IMG_3839

 

Chapter 4: Go West

IMG_3513

The big pink pipes in this photo are the penstocks of the Shoshone Hydroelectric Plant:

IMG_3855

And here's the plant itself. You actually drive over part of it on I-70, which at that point is engineered more like a double-decker bridge than a highway:

 IMG_3857

The dam that diverts the water that feeds the Shoshone penstocks:

Shoshonediversiondram

Lawrence Wright’s New Yorker article about mining lithium in Bolivia is called “Lithium Dreams”; it appeared in the March 22, 2010, issue.

The Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory’s informational film about Project Rulison:

Walter Cronkite and Terry Drinkwater’s report on the CBS Evening News:

Here's the test site itself:

8412dc15-cb64-44de-b489-3df89867d350

The Colorado, not far from Rulison:

IMG_3738

IMG_3757-001

Fracking sites next to the river:

IMG_3704

More fracking:

IMG_3700

IMG_3697

An irrigated field:

IMG_3750

A backyard water tank:

IMG_3753

Battlement Mesa:

IMG_3701

Golf club entrance:

IMG_3526

 

Chapter 5: Grand Valley

As with other western water projects, the U. S. Bureau of Reclamation’s website is a good source for historical and technical information about the Grand Valley Diversion Dam and its associated infrastructure. “Managing California’s Water,” published in 2011 by the Public Policy Institute of California, is easy to find online. The difficulty of turning increases in efficiency into reductions in consumption is the subject of my book The Conundrum, which was published in 2011.

Grand Valley from above:

Grand Valley

The interface between irrigated agriculture and desert (the snaky line between green and gray is an irrigation canal):

Grand valley 2

Grand Junction's first north-south roads were named for their distance in miles from the Utah border, and the east-west roads were named with letters of the alphabet, and many of the gaps have been filled in with fractions and decimals:

IMG_3620

IMG_3592

Entrance to the Webbs' vineyard:

IMG_3584

Brooke Webb:

IMG_3543

The Webbs' grapes:

IMG_3529

The Webbs' headgate:

IMG_3533

An irrigation ditch in the Webbs' vineyard:

IMG_3553

A concrete junction box:

IMG_3564

How wine is made:

IMG_3567

The tasting room, the economic foundation of a Grand Valley vineyard:

IMG_3566

Down the road:

IMG_3623

A reservoir that's part of the ditch system that irrigates the Grand Valley:

IMG_3608

IMG_3606

 

Chapter 6: Salt, Dry Lots, and Houseboats

There are many accounts of the fight to save Echo Park. A good brief one is in John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement, by Stephen Fox, published in 1981—a book that has much else to recommend it.

The view from Route 128:

IMG_3656


IMG_3656

The Fisher Towers:

IMG_3656

And the mighty Colorado:

IMG_3653

Arches National Monument, near Moab, Utah:

P1010682

Page, Arizona:

IMG_4351

Houseboats on Lake Powell:

IMG_4384

Houseboat amenities:

IMG_4405

More houseboats, in a shrinking boat basin:

IMG_4362

My companions on my walk around the docks:

IMG_4418

The coal-burning Salt River Project-Navajo Generating Station, the power plant that helped save Echo Park:

IMG_4443

A closer look at the power plant:

IMG_4455

Near Lake Powell:

IMG_4437

A desert landscape shaped by huge volumes of rapidly moving water:

IMG_4438

IMG_4353

An ever-lengthening Lake Powell boar ramp:

IMG_4365

The wet end of the same ramp:

IMG_4427

Lake Powell's receding shoreline, formerly underwater:

IMG_4358

Still room for lots of these, though:

IMG_4400

IMG_4425

 

Chapter 7: Lees Ferry

For a week or so, my favorite book of any kind was Lee’s Ferry: Desert River Crossing, by W. L. Rusho. (The book was published originally as Desert River Crossing: Historic Lee’s Ferry on the Colorado River, in 1975. The reprint edition I own, which I bought in a marina store at Lake Powell, was published in 2003.) The John D. Lee Family organization has a website. The best book I’ve read about the Mountain Meadows Massacre is Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows, by Will Begley, first published in 2002.

IMG_4466

IMG_4468

Navajo Bridge, over Marble Canyon. Those are the Vermilion Cliffs on the far side:

IMG_4479

IMG_4469

IMG_4482

Marble Canyon, downstream:

IMG_4487

Upstream:

IMG_4496

Glen and Bessie Hyde (and you can read more about them here):

Hydephoto

The Hydes' boat where it was found, minus the Hydes:

Wheretheboatwasfound

Error Correction (corrected in paperback): On page 80, I write that men working on the first Navajo Bridge were "the last people ever to see" the Hydes. Nick Marble—who describes himself as "Grand Canyon Enthusiast (12 trips, hiking, trail running and rafting)"—has shown me that this is incorrect. He writes in an email: "Glen and Bessie hiked up South Kaibab Trail in mid-November 1928, met with several Park Service personnel (including the superintendent), chatted with a Denver Post reporter, met with Emory Kolb (who photographed them), and so forth, before hiking back down to the river and continuing their fateful (and fatal) voyage." He recommends Sunk Without a Sound: The Tragic Colorado River Honeymoon of Glen and Bessie Hyde, by Brad Dimock, published in 2001.

John Wesley Powell & Co.:

John-wesley-powell

The Colorado near its junction with the Paria:

IMG_4499

IMG_4498

The boat launch at Lees Ferry:

IMG_4540

IMG_4540

Lonely Dell Ranch:

IMG_4540

IMG_4540

IMG_4516

The execution of John D. Lee:

Lee_execution

John D. Lee in his coffin:

Mmm.anti.gibbs.1909.246

The gauge used by the USGA to monitor the river's volume at Lees Ferry:

IMG_4540

 

Chapter 8: Boulder Canyon Project

The Grand Canyon from the North Rim (the thinking person's rim):

DSCN9542

My mother descending to the Colorado River from the South Rim in 1948, on a cross-country car trip with a college friend of hers. My mother is in the white shirt, on the third mule from the bottom:

CMO Grand Canyon 1948

The guide, at the head of the line, surprised my mother at one point by pouring a hatful of cold water down her back because, he said, she looked overheated. (Later, quietly, he asked her out.) A few days before, my mother and her friend had gotten lost near Santa Fe, and, at dusk, had followed a narrow mountain road that suddenly filled with trucks going the other way. The road turned out to be an entrance to Los Alamos National Laboratory, and a guard at the gate stopped the trucks so that my mother and her friend could turn around. 

My favorite books about my favorite dam are Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century, by Michael Hiltzik, published in 2010; Hoover Dam: An American Adventure, by Joseph E. Stevens, published in 1988; and The Story of the Hoover Dam, edited by C. H. Vivian, published in 1986. That last book consists of articles that first appeared in a series of booklets published, while the dam was under construction, by an industrial trade publication called Compressed Air Magazine. (Many big, loud tools used in building the dam ran on compressed air.) The book includes some terrific photographs and illustrations, among many other enticements. I bought my copy in the gift shop at the dam. Edmund Wilson’s New Republic article about Hoover Dam is anthologized in his book The American Earthquake, which was first published in 1958 and is still in print in a paperback edition published in 1979. It’s a terrific contemporary look at the effects of the Great Depression.

Bob Gripentog and his boat:

IMG_4591

Late afternoon on Lake Mead:

IMG_4631

The bathtub ring, up close:

IMG_4610

Hoover Dam from upstream:

IMG_4625

The helicopter we saw:

IMG_4645

At the visitors' center:

DSCN9377

The concrete for Hoover Dam was poured in sections:

  Hoover dam construction

When the dam was nearly finished but before Lake Mead began to fill:

Hoover

Lake Mead when it was nearly full:

Hoover dam pretty full

Lake Mead more recently:

GettyImages-452330584

Terrazzo floor of a public restroom on top of Hoover Dam:

Female-restroom-floor-1024x768

Same kind of floor down here, in the turbine room in the power plant below the dam:

DSCN9373

Me, entranced, in the Hoover Dam visitors' center:

DSCN9378

Lake Mead in 2009. There was once a "No Fishing" sign at the end of the pier in the photo below. The weedy area off to the right used to be reserved for scuba divers:

P1060123

Recently, I've become obsessed with scanning and organizing several hundred slides my father's father shot between about 1945 and about 1963. (They'd been sitting in a sealed box for fifty years.) Here are three shots of Lake Mead and Hoover Dam, taken in 1955, which show that the bathtub ring is not a new phenomenon:

Gaga Dada Misc More596

Jennifer Pitt says: "The Mead shot is a good reminder that the bathtub ring has been seen before." And she passed along this chart showing historic elevations:

Lake Mead Levels

The lake in 1955 wasn't quite as low as it is today—and it didn't stay low for long—but it was low.

Gaga Dada Misc More600

  Gaga Dada Misc More595

And here's the hotel (RIP) where my grandparents (also RIP) stayed when they were in Vegas:

Gaga Dada CA 1954239

Note the grass in the photo above—and the running sprinklers in the photo below, in front of the other hotel where my grandparents stayed during their trip to Vegas:

Gaga Dada CA 1954272

 

Chapter 9: Las Vegas

Details about Las Vegas’s xeriscaping rebate program, called Water Smart, can be found on the website of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. For the website of the Las Vegas Springs Preserve and Origen Museum, go here.

Approaching Las Vegas from the northeast:

IMG_4554

The Bellagio fountains:

Bellagio-hotel-exterior-aerial-fountains-with-paris.tif.image.1152.550.high

Water use:

IMG_4582

One of the "straws" on Lake Mead:

IMG_4655-001

Xeriscaping on the campus of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas:

20141119_110419

Xeriscaping requires irrigation, though:

20141119_092754

An irrigated cactus at Springs Preserve. The emitter is at right:

IMG_4564

Error Correction (corrected in paperback): On page 112, I describe the natural climate of Los Angeles as "desert"; the correct term is "semi-arid"—or, as residents often prefer, "Mediterranean." The point I was making is unchanged, though. The vast majority of the plants that grow in L.A., including not just the citrus trees and the flowers that fill residential gardens but also every one of the city's familiar palm trees, were imported from somewhere else and wouldn't exist without irrigation. Many of the palm trees were planted in the nineteen-twenties:

Planting-wilshire-lapl-1926

There is no native or non-irrigated vegetation in this photograph of a yard in L.A.:

Tropical-Gardens-Plants

 

Chapter 10: Colorado River Aqueduct

There are several biographies of William Mulholland, including one by a granddaughter, Catherine Mulholland: William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles, published by the University of California Press in 2000. Catherine Mulholland is probably overly sympathetic to and defensive about her subject, but the book is full of interesting material, including a number of cool photographs, and it’s a useful counterbalance to books that treat Mulholland as evil incarnate.

London Bridge, Lake Havasu City, Arizona:

20141120_091120

20141120_090636

The view from my room on Lake Havasu (not at the London Bridge Resort, I'm sorry to say):

  IMG_4666

Parker Dam:

IMG_4672

IMG_4680

Donald Nash and his daughter, Baily, at the Whitsett pumping plant:

IMG_5304

Error Correction (corrected in paperback): On page 124, I muddled the history of the Los Angeles City Water Company and the Los Angeles Aqueduct.  The water company was succeeded not by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, as I wrote, but by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which built the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913. The MWD was created by the state legislature fifteen years later,  in 1928.

IMG_5306

Some of the big pipes that carry the water uphill, toward Los Angeles:

IMG_5370

The General Electric pumps:

IMG_5332

IMG_5346

The big old transformers:

IMG_5301

The route of the Colorado River Aqueduct, from Lake Havasu (far right) through the mountains to metropolitan L.A. (far left):

IMG_5309

The design of the siphons:

IMG_5392

Tools from the early days:

IMG_5358

No swimming past this point:

IMG_5377

Quagga mussels:

IMG_5383

Quaggas (and Asian clams) up close:

IMG_5380

Bald eagle nest (the dark area at lower right) after attack by golden eagles:

IMG_5423

Copper Basin:

IMG_5398

And its outlet, where the chlorine solution is injected:

IMG_5415

Easy living along the river downstream from Parker Dam:

IMG_5465

Irrigation downstream from Parker Dam:

IMG_4716

Cotton:

IMG_4722

 

Chapter 11: Central Arizona Project

Transcripts of the interviews that make up the oral history of the Central Arizona Project can be downloaded from the project’s website. Stewart Udall wrote an early book about the environment, The Quiet Crisis, published in 1963, a year after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. It’s till a good read.

An irrigation ditch carrying CAP water to a farm  field not far from Tucson:

IMG_4317

A headgate:

IMG_4317

Fertilizer or herbicide being added to water as it's pumped from a ditch to a field:

IMG_4317

IMG_4308

 

Chapter 12: The Rule of Capture

Robert Glennon is also the author of another good book about water: Unquenchable: America’s Water Crisis and What To Do About It, published in 2009.

My part of the country recently suffered a multiyear stealth drought, which people tended not to notice until their well randry. In my book, I mention a friend with a dug well that produces more water than my much deeper well does—but not anymore! It dried up after this book went to press, and my friend and his wife ran a hose up to their house from a house down the hill. My well is under this overturned whiskey-barrel half:

IMG_7078

The owners of two huge houses houses near my town's village green have installed three new wells between them, mostly to water acres of grass and planting. This one added a 10,000-gallon water-storage tank, too, under the mound toward the left of the photo (the well is at the right). The lawn you see—and much more to the left—is part of a roughly one-acre second lawn, created by clearing trees from an adjacent lot and carpeting the ground with six-foot rolls of sod, delivered by three semi-trailers:

IMG_7072

The people who owned (and totally renovated) this gigantic house also added several thousand plants and an extensive irrigation system, fed by two wells. You can see loops of irrigation line in the foreground. You would think that native vegetation could survive on native precipitation, but maybe not:

IMG_7064

Saudi Arabia's experiment in locavorism:

Saudi Arabia wheat

 

Chapter 13: Boondocking

Confinement and Ethnicity, the National Park Service’s 1999 book about internment camps, resonates today and is worth tracking down. The full text of the Quantification Settlement Agreement for the Colorado River can be found online. You can learn more about military recreational facilities here.

Just south of Parker Dam:

IMG_5465

The Colorado River Indian Tribes own the right to use more than 700,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water—about a quarter of Arizona's entire allotment:

IMG_4684

The Colorado River at Mayflower Park:

IMG_5493

Hidden Beaches:

IMG_5473

Quartzsite, Arizona:

IMG_5528

Water for sale:

IMG_5532

Atomic cannon:

IMG_5602

Hidden Shores:

IMG_5754

The tiny golf course near the entrance:

IMG_5760

Merry Christmas:

IMG_5777

IMG_5787

IMG_5798

 

Chapter 14: Imperial Valley:

There’s some interesting historical material about the Imperial Valley in (of all things) The Story of the Hoover Dam, that collection of Compressed Air Magazine articles I mentioned in my note on Chapter 8.

Lawrence Cox:

IMG_5099

One of Cox's onion planting charts:

IMG_5134

Turning off the malfunctioning section:

IMG_5134

Lettuce:

IMG_5140

A drainage ditch carrying excess water away from the fields:

IMG_5134

Planting lettuce:

IMG_5134

Lettuce planting-and-harvesting schedule:

IMG_5134

Sprinklers running: 

IMG_5134

Sudan grass compressed and wrapped for shipment overseas, at a facility down the road from Cox's farm:

IMG_5172

 

Chapter 15: The Salton Sea

I invited my wife to join me in watching Plagues & Pleasures on the Salton Sea, a documentary narrated by John Waters, and doing that was a big mistake because she found the whole thing horrifying and deeply depressing. It will give you a feel for the place, though, as will a companion video compilation called Past Pleasures at the Salton Sea. Both are available on CD from Amazon. Hazard’s Toll is easy to find online. The Redlands Institute has a cool free digital version of the Salton Sea Atlas on its website.

The Julian Hinds Pumping Station on the Colorado River Aqueduct—just visible at the foot of the Eagle Mountains, past the right edge of the tree in the foreground:

IMG_4736

Box Canyon Road:

IMG_4749

A sign by the road:

IMG_4764

The Coachella canal:

IMG_4700

Not coal this time—maybe part of the harvest from the Imperial Valley and Mexico:

IMG_4900

Error Correction (corrected in paperback): Bob Saigh points out that, when I say on page 193 that I drove down the western shore of the Salton Sea on Highway 111, what I really mean is that I drove down the eastern shore. Maybe because I was driving "down" I felt that west must be to my left. I was happy to be able to tell my wife that I had made this mistake because she has no sense of direction whatsoever.

IMG_4880

The accident that created the Salton Sea:

Salton_sea_flood

The Imperial Valley and the Salton Sea a little over a century later:

  Imperialsaltonsea

The Salton Sea in its prime:

Saltonseapostcard

And the Salton Sea today:

IMG_4830

IMG_4881

The "beach":

IMG_4842

Real-estate deals:

IMG_4825

One of many ruins:

IMG_4852

The restored yacht club:

IMG_4829

Where the Beach Boys used to tie up their boat:

IMG_4864

Bombay Beach:

IMG_4925

Salvation Mountain:

IMG_4963

Salvation Mountain from behind:

IMG_4984

Inside:

IMG_5002

The current curator's headquarters:

IMG_4981

Slab City:

IMG_4980

The Range, at Slab City:

IMG_5029

The southern end of the Salton Sea:

IMG_5072

And a thermal electricity generating plant on the shore:

IMG_5085

In memory of one of the Salton Sea's early protectors at the southern end of the Salton Sea:

IMG_5052

 

Chapter 16: Reclamation

The website of the U. S. Bureau of Reclamation is vast and terrific. Many potential rabbit holes. A fascinating and potentially endless place to poke around.

IMG_4729

The spillway of the Laguna Diversion Dam:

IMG_5706

The woman I met near the dam:

IMG_5714

The All-American Canal—bigger than the Colorado River at this point:

IMG_5721

The abandoned RV park:

IMG_5728

IMG_5728

IMG_5728

The swastika bridge:

Swastikabridge

IMG_5626

Brock Reservoir:

IMG_5656

IMG_5644

The Yuma Desalting Plant:

IMG_5856

It looks busy, but it's been idle for a couple of decades:

IMG_5860

A trailer and RV community near Yuma:

IMG_5867

And the old flag of the U.S. Reclamation Service:

Reclamationflag2

 

Chapter 18: The Delta

The text of Minute 319 is easy to find online. There’s an excellent article about the pulse flow on the website of the Environmental Defense Fund, called "Bringing Back the River to the Sea." A good source of information about salt cedar is the website of the Tamarisk Coalition.

Osvel Hinojosa Huerta at Morelos Dam:

IMG_6017

The gates that divert the Colorado River into the Mexican canal system:

IMG_6017

The shallow seepage area behind the dam. All that remains of the Colorado River at this point is the skinny stream on the far side, between the two loaf-like clumps of green near the center of the photograph.

IMG_6017

IMG_6017

Mexican white gold:

IMG_6017

Attempting to restore indigenous vegetation on the old flood plain of the Colorado:

IMG_6017

Irrigation water for the restoration project, being pumped from a canal:

IMG_6017

The green patch at the horizon is an established area that used to look like this:

IMG_6017

The bridge over sand:

IMG_6017

Border fence near the bridge:

IMG_6017

Where's the water?

IMG_6017

Proof that water was here at some point:

IMG_6017

Osvel and Jennifer, with a muskrat skull at the end of the river:

IMG_6017

Tamarisk:

IMG_6017

The most ruined part of the former delta:

IMG_6017

The Ciénega:

Cienega

Connecting a battery to the motor of our boat:

IMG_6017

Our guide, Juan Butron Mendez:

IMG_6017

Pelicans near the outlet that feeds the Ciénega with salty water from Arizona:

IMG_6017

IMG_6017

IMG_6017

IMG_6017

Chapter 19: What Is To Be Done?

An excellent way to stay up-to-date on water issues in the West, and on the Colorado River in particular, is to subscribe to the blog of John Fleck, a former journalist who is now the director of the Water Resources Program at the University of New Mexico. He is also the author of Water is for Fighting Over: And Other Myths About Water in the West, which was published in 2016.

I mentioned my visit to the Tampa Bay desalination plant in a New Yorker article about Florida sinkholes, called “Notes From Underground,” published in the March 18, 2013, issue.

Jennifer Pitt and I made a second flight, with a different pilot, down the eastern edge of the Front Range and along the Arkansas River. Here's the meandering Arkansas and the strip of irrigated farmland that runs alongside it. The main irrigation ditches are at the edges:

IMG_3366

You can clearly see the division between the agricultural area and the unirrigated terrain:

IMG_3353

This is an irrigated field that, unlike the fields on Lawrence Cox's farm, hasn't been leveled well, so that the applied water pools in some sections and never reaches others:

IMG_3302

Tracks made by cattle radiating from a watering station fed by a well:

  IMG_3382

A center-pivot irrigated field, in the foreground, and a couple of fallowed center-pivot fields in the distance:

IMG_3357

Refueling in Lyman, Colorado. Our LightHawk pilot for this trip was Andy Young:

IMG_3422

Wind farm in eastern Colorado:

IMG_3438

Boulder's power plant and its supply of coal in 2014 (three years before the plant stopped burning coal):

IMG_3483

Cloud Seeding (corrected in paperback): On page 240, I wrote, "Cloud-seeding seems like moving money from your right pocket to your left, since rain that falls in one place can't fall in another." A cloud-seeding expert I met during my book tour told me that he agreed with my discussion of cloud-seeding up until that sentence. He referred me, in particular, to the following paragraphs from this website:

If cloud seeding is successful in increasing the natural precipitation by a nominal amount, say 10 percent, the additional percentage of total atmospheric water that might be precipitated would still be quite small. Typically, just more than 20 percent of the total water vapor in the air condenses to form clouds as it rises over mountains. The remaining 80 percent of the moisture remains uncondensed because the temperature of the air typically does not get cold enough.

As mentioned earlier, winter storms are typically about 30 percent efficient, so only a portion of the water vapor that condenses naturally when rising over mountains (30 percent of the 20 percent that was condensed), or 6 percent of the total moisture, ends up falling out naturally as precipitation during an average winter storm. An increase in precipitation of 15 percent translates into only an additional 0.9 percent of the total atmospheric moisture available.. Therefore, about 6.9 percent of the total atmospheric water might be precipitated when seeding is conducted. Instrumentation presently used by the National Weather Service would have a difficult time detecting a change on the order of 1 percent, along with the confounding influences of natural variability. These calculations do not consider that this additional water, now on the ground instead of in the air, remains in the hydrologic cycle. For example, a portion of this water would return to the atmosphere on relatively short time frames through evapotranspiration.

There are two mechanisms that may cause downwind (also called extra-area) effects: 1) Downwind transport of ice nuclei and ice crystals from the seeding source and 2) Invigoration of clouds by release of latent heating of freezing and their subsequent propagation out of the target area. Long (2001) provides an excellent summary of previous findings. These findings show

Extra-area effects appear to increase precipitation in the area surrounding and downwind of the target location

There is no substantial evidence that a decrease in precipitation occurs downwind from the target location

Affected downwind distances vary from 80-300 km (50 – 180 miles)

Amount varies from 15-100%

Everyone's goal:

IMG_5677-001

 

WhereTheWaterGoes_Cover_NewSub

Where the Water Goes (ISBN 978-1-59463-377-5), published by Riverhead Books. You can order a copy from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, IndieBound, Books-A-Million, iBooks, and other sellers.

Books

  • : Volume Control: Hearing in a Deafening World

    Volume Control: Hearing in a Deafening World
    Riverhead 2019

  • : Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River

    Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River
    Riverhead 2017

  • : The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse

    The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse
    Riverhead 2012

  • : Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability

    Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability
    Riverhead 2010

  • : The Walls Around Us: The Thinking Person's Guide to How a House Works

    The Walls Around Us: The Thinking Person's Guide to How a House Works
    Vintage 1992

  • : My Usual Game: Adventures in Golf

    My Usual Game: Adventures in Golf
    Doubleday 1995

  • : Around the House: Reflections on Life Under a Roof

    Around the House: Reflections on Life Under a Roof
    Villard 1998

  • : The Making of the Masters: Clifford Roberts, Augusta National, and Golf's Most Prestigious Tournament

    The Making of the Masters: Clifford Roberts, Augusta National, and Golf's Most Prestigious Tournament
    Simon & Schuster 1999

  • : The Chosen One: Tiger Woods and the Dilemma of Greatness

    The Chosen One: Tiger Woods and the Dilemma of Greatness
    Simon & Schuster 2001

  • : Hit & Hope: How the Rest of Us Play Golf

    Hit & Hope: How the Rest of Us Play Golf
    Simon & Schuster 2003

  • : The First National Bank of Dad: A Foolproof Method for Teaching Your Kids the Value of Money

    The First National Bank of Dad: A Foolproof Method for Teaching Your Kids the Value of Money
    Simon & Schuster 2003

  • : Copies in Seconds: How a Lone Inventor and an Unknown Company Created the Biggest Communication Breakthrough Since Gutenberg--Chester Carlson and the Birth of Xerox

    Copies in Seconds: How a Lone Inventor and an Unknown Company Created the Biggest Communication Breakthrough Since Gutenberg--Chester Carlson and the Birth of Xerox
    Simon & Schuster, 2004

  • : Sheetrock & Shellac: A Thinking Person's Guide to the Art and Science of Home Improvement

    Sheetrock & Shellac: A Thinking Person's Guide to the Art and Science of Home Improvement
    Simon & Schuster 2006