by Pete McBride, 2024
Coffee table-sized book full of pictures and information on the Colorado River from where it starts in our Rocky Mountains to where it peters out in the desert. It’s heartbreaking, though, because the Colorado River used to be a powerful river that flowed all the way to the Gulf of California in Mexico and now it peters out 100 miles away and what is left is nothing but cracked, dry, trash-strewn desert. There used to be estuaries filled with water, trees, birds. The future is bleak, too: As I write this on May 2, 2026, Flaming Gorge Reservoir in Wyoming is releasing water into the Green River to keep the water levels high enough in Lake Powell to generate electricity. We are coming off a very low snowpack winter in Colorado – one of the worst in recorded history.
I learned from this book that Saudi Arabia owns many of the alfalfa farms in California that use Colorado River water for irrigation. “Apparently growing and exporting forage crops from land irrigated with Colorado River water is more economical than producing them in the Middle East.”
In 2014, the BLM released a “pulse flow” of water for eight weeks that allowed the Colorado River to, once again, reach the Gulf of California. But it hasn’t since.
The Central Arizona Project (CAP) was fought for long and hard by Arizona. It was finally approved in 1968, construction started in 1973 and opened in 1993. In 2023, though, the lower Colorado River Basin had to initiate shortage restrictions. There is a Taiwan Semiconductor plant north of Phoenix that uses Colorado River water. Phoenix allows its gray water to cool “America’s largest nuclear power plant, the Palo Verde Generating Station.” That nuclear power plant is now ringed with solar panel farms and the electricity they generate for Arizona and California is cheaper than the hydroelectric electricity from the dams on the river.
The Salton Sea has shrunk and is full of agricultural wastewater. The dust along the edges is toxic and is causing health problems and problems for wildlife when airborne.
“In the fall of 2023, though, in an effort to conserve water, the state of Arizona terminated state land leases that had given Saudi-owned farms nearly unfettered access to pumping groundwater for alfalfa production.”
We destroyed a water paradise and built cities and farms in the desert, where they should never have been. What will happen now that there is hardly any water in our mountains to feed this monster?
Excellent book, Pete McBride! I do wish it came in a smaller format – it is full of much-needed information and pictures – but the large size is cumbersome.