For Southern Californians it is simply “the river."

The Colorado River is one of North America’s great rivers in terms of the size of the watershed it drains, roughly 250,000 square miles. However, based on the average volume of water it carries within its banks, it is merely modest. The Columbia River, separating the states of Oregon and Washington, has a similarly sized watershed, but has 13 times the volume of water coursing from its headwaters to the Pacific Ocean. The headwaters of the Colorado River are in the western slopes of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, with its largest tributary, the Green River, starting just south of the Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks in Wyoming. The name of the river may have its origin based on where its headwaters occur, but it is more likely due to its red color, the color of the sand and silt suspended in its waters, sand and silt eroded out of the sandstones of Utah and northern Arizona. Colorado is a Spanish word meaning “colored red” or “reddish.” The river sculpted the canyons of that region, canyons so large and beautiful that they defy superlatives, although one was fittingly christened the Grand Canyon. The Colorado Desert is so named because its eastern edge hugs the Colorado River from the Mojave Desert south into Mexico.

Sometime around 5 to 6 million years ago, the Colorado Plateau uplifted; before then waters draining off the western slopes of the growing Rocky Mountains headed south and east, joining what would become the Rio Grande River. The uplifting plateau shifted the flow of the Colorado River west, emptying into the Pacific Ocean in what would become the Gulf of California, today bounded by Baja California and Baja California Sur to the west, and Sonora to the east. The Colorado River flows were and are erratic. In some years at flood stage, the river escaped the confines of its banks, spreading sand and silt across what would later become the Mojave Desert. Or filling the Salton Trough, creating the huge freshwater Lake Cahuilla (later to be called the Salton Sea). Fish within the Colorado River had to adapt to those erratic flows, and they were isolated from other watersheds, so the assortment of fish species that once thrived here evolved into species found nowhere else.  Colorado pikeminnow, humpback chub, bonytail chub, roundtail chub, speckled dace, razorback sucker, flannelmouth sucker, and bluehead sucker all thrived in the Colorado River, but today are critically endangered because those erratic flows they depended on, those periods of high flow punctuated with longer periods of low flow have been smoothed, becoming more predictable due to numerous dams, and by introduced “game fish,” which out compete the native fish under the new, smoothed flow regime.

The sands deposited by the flood flows of the Colorado River well beyond its banks, once dried and transported by strong desert winds, created sand dunes. Within this new archipelago of isolated dunes evolution went into hyperdrive; within each dune “island” plants, arthropods, and lizards evolved new species, fine-tuning their adaptations to the unique climates and wind conditions of each dune system. At least five species of fringe-toed lizards evolved on those isolated dunes. Only the dunes inhabited by the Coachella Valley fringe-toed lizard lacked a Colorado River origin (Coachella Valley dune sands come from the Whitewater River, eroding granite rocks from the San Bernardino Mountains).

Nevertheless, they evolved from the Colorado Desert fringe-toed lizard, which evolved on the dunes surrounding the prehistoric Lake Cahuilla, which had its origin with Colorado River flood events. Some of those Colorado Desert fringe-toed lizards apparently wandered north into the Coachella Valley dunes which later became cut-off, isolating the lizards from their relatives to the south. Finding themselves on a different colored sand and in a different climate, these wanderers became the seeds of a lizard population that needed to color-match the Coachella Valley sands to avoid predation. Over time they became sufficiently genetically distinct to be a separate species.

The erratic flows of the Colorado River fostered dense forests of willows, cottonwoods, and mesquite along its banks, which then created habitats for a rich assortment of songbirds, owls, and cuckoos. Willows and cottonwoods thrive with periodic flood disturbances, clearing away older senescent forests and leaving sand bars where the seedling trees could quickly become established and thrive. These rich forests extended to the river’s delta where it entered the Gulf of California. This delta was believed to be among the richest wildlife meccas in North America. Jaguars, deer, a multitude of wading birds (storks, herons, egrets, ibis, and the like) all thrived there, and just at the delta-forest-ocean interface a tiny dolphin, the Vaquita, evolved. However, when the erratic river flows were smoothed by the building of multiple dams, the periodic disturbance necessary to maintain the willow-cottonwood forests disappeared. A non-native tree, tamarisk (salt cedar) was introduced and flourished under the consistent flow regime. The delta forest collapsed and was replaced by tamarisk. No more jaguars, deer, storks, and multitudes of wading birds. And the Vaquita is on the precipice of extinction.

What happened? The arid southwest of the United States was sparsely populated 150 years ago. Indigenous people, the Cahuilla, Chemehuevi, Mojave, Tohono Oʼodham, Pima, and Seri tribes lived sustainably within this corner of the continent. Then colonists with genetic ties to Europe began to arrive, largely lured by the chance of striking it rich in newly discovered gold fields. Entrepreneurs among these colonists saw the opportunities in this land; it only lacked water and the Colorado River was seen as the path to riches. The full story took decades to develop. For a clear and detailed history of what happened, a new book published in 2019, Science Be Dammed, How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River, written by Eric Kuhn and John Fleck, is a must read. In short, from the earliest dreams of harnessing the Colorado River to catalyze population growth, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, hydrologists and scientists were warning caution; the river couldn’t be depended on to provide the water needed to match the entrepreneur’s dream. Today, with better science, that caution has only increased. The flows were and are too erratic to provide a sustainable water supply. High flows were potentially destructive, but low flows when the river nearly dried up also occurred. During a prolonged drought in the late 1200s the Anasazi culture collapsed, a culture that was in part dependent upon farming along the Colorado River and its tributaries. The drought was the last straw in a sequence of events that caused the collapse, with the Hopi and Zuni among a handful of tribes that survived.

But the entrepreneur’s dream was too good to allow such cautionary voices to be heard and considered. The message was that there would always be water for everyone, Nevada (Las Vegas), Arizona (Phoenix), California (Los Angeles, the Imperial and Coachella Valleys), and Mexico and they all drank the kool-aide. Just build the dams and a bright future will be assured. Water districts embraced a mantra that did not question whether or not there was really water for everyone forever; when asked if they could provide water the answer has always been yes. A yes with the assurance that their priority water rights will guarantee that their customers will have all the water they want, even if others go without. Or the assurance is that there will be plenty of water for the next 30 years, or 100 years. But then what? Plan for a sustainable future or just let the next generations solve those problems. The ecological damage wrought so far from the “taming” of the Colorado River is abundantly clear. Beyond the ecological damage, the Colorado River is no longer red. Silts and sand are no longer carried by the river, they fall out of the water column in the quiet water behind the dams. It is no longer a question of what the impacts of climate change will be; the current “mega drought” exceeds the depth and severity of that drought nearly 1000 years ago. We are experiencing those impacts today. Lake Powell is nearly dry, and Lake Mead is on that trajectory. Having priority water rights when there is no water left is meaningless. One hundred percent of nothing is still nothing.

Are there reasonable solutions? The short answer is yes. Aggressively phase out water-thirsty lawns and shift to drought tolerant landscaping – ideally using native species. Just say no to new, water extravagant developments and attractions. Comparisons to golf courses are spurious – golf courses, at least those that use fresh water for irrigation are among the most water wasteful landscapes in the desert. Saying this or that new project is no more water wasteful than a golf course is telling everyone that the proposed project is a water waster.