Colorado River
Carver of the Grand Canyon, hardest-working river of the American West
The Colorado is the river that built the Grand Canyon, grinding through two billion years of rock to expose the deep history of the continent. It is also the most fought-over river in North America: born of Rocky Mountain snow, it waters the desert Southwest, fills the reservoirs behind Hoover and Glen Canyon dams, and supplies cities and farms from Denver to Los Angeles. Once it reached the Gulf of California in a green delta — now, drained dry by demand, it usually does not reach the sea at all.
The Colorado runs about 2,330 kilometers from its source high on the Continental Divide in Rocky Mountain National Park. Through Utah and Arizona it has carved a sequence of spectacular canyons, none greater than the Grand Canyon, where it lies a vertical mile below the rim. Its flow, modest for so famous a river, is captured by giant dams forming Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the two largest reservoirs in the country. Below them, after entering Mexico, the river fades into the cracked mudflats of its former delta near the head of the Gulf of California.
The Colorado has been divided and re-divided for a century by the 1922 Colorado River Compact and later agreements that, it turned out, promised more water than the river holds. Decades of overuse and a prolonged drought intensified by warming have dropped Lake Mead and Lake Powell to historic lows, forcing the seven basin states and Mexico into hard negotiations over cuts. The river that carved the canyons now stands as the starkest symbol of water scarcity in the American West.