![]() It irrigates close to six million acres of farmland, much of which it also created, through eons of silt deposition. It supplies water to approximately thirty-six million people, including residents not just of Boulder and Denver but also of Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, San Diego, and Los Angeles, several of which are hundreds of miles from its banks. A congressman in 1928 called it “intrinsically the most valuable stream in the world.” It and its tributaries flow through or alongside seven Western states-Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and California-before crossing into Mexico near Yuma, Arizona. It’s nearly a thousand miles shorter than the Mississippi and only a fraction as wide, but it’s a crucial resource for a surprisingly large part of the United States. They’d been fooled by the scale of the canyon, but, even so, the Colorado River isn’t huge. When the first Europeans to see the Grand Canyon looked down from its southern rim, in 1540, they guessed that the stream they could see at the bottom must be about eight feet wide. If transporting water from one side to the other were impossible, most of the people who live in Denver and other Eastern Slope cities would have to move. Eighty per cent of Colorado’s precipitation falls on the western half of the state, yet eighty-five per cent of the population lives to the east, in what’s known as the mountains’ rain shadow. As moisture-laden weather systems move eastward across the western United States, they pile up over the Rockies, dumping snow and rain. The ceiling made flying difficult but helped to explain the existence of the water-storing-and-shifting network we’d been looking at. Our position was easier to see on his iPad than on the ground, because since we’d entered the mountains he’d had to pick his way under and around what sometimes looked like an upside-down ocean of clouds. “We just flew over the headwaters,” he said. The northernmost of those lakes spills as much as a third of a billion gallons a day into a tunnel, which carries the water under the park, through five hydroelectric generating plants, and into a distribution system that serves a large area east of the mountains, including the city of Boulder. We had already flown over later additions to the same network, including Long Draw Reservoir, completed in 1930, and five connected lakes that lie on the western side of the divide. It doesn’t take water directly from the river but captures as much as forty per cent of the flow from slopes that would otherwise feed it, like a sap-gathering gash in the trunk of a rubber tree. The Grand Ditch carries water toward the state’s eastern plains. Hence: Grand Lake, Grand Valley, Grand Junction (but not Grand Canyon, which was named for its grandness). Until 1921, the section of the Colorado that’s upstream from its confluence with the Green, in eastern Utah, was called the Grand. She pointed toward the Never Summer Mountains, on our right, and said, “There’s the Grand Ditch.” I saw what looked like a road or a hiking trail cut across the face of a steeply sloping forest of snow-dusted conifers she explained that it was an aqueduct, dating to 1890. “The best way to see a river system is from the air,” she had told me. We were bound for the Colorado’s headwaters, just over the Continental Divide, roughly fifty miles south of the Wyoming state line. Most of her work in recent years has involved the river’s other end, in Mexico, but she had agreed to show me its source. She has long brown hair, which she had pulled back into a ponytail, and she was wearing a purple fleece. Pitt, who is in her forties, is the director of the E.D.F.’s Colorado River Program. The other passenger, sitting in the co-pilot’s seat and leaning out the window with a camera, was Jennifer Pitt, a senior researcher for the Environmental Defense Fund. Snow had fallen in the mountains during the night, and I half expected it to swirl up in the plane’s wake. ![]() “But if you ask them to count backward from a hundred by sevens they have trouble.” What struck me at that moment was not how high we were but how low: a little earlier, we had flown within what seemed like hailing distance of the sheer east face of Longs Peak, and now, as Kunkel banked steeply to the right to give a better view of a stream at the bottom of a narrow valley, his wingtip appeared to pass just feet from the jagged declivity beneath. ![]() “People don’t usually think altitude is affecting them,” he said. We were in a Maule M-7, a single-engine “backcountry” plane, and Kunkel was navigating with the help of an iPad Mini, which was resting on his legs. We had taken off from Boulder that morning, and were flying over Rocky Mountain National Park, about thirty miles to the northwest. Our pilot, David Kunkel, asked me to retrieve his oxygen bottle from under my seat, and when I handed it to him he gripped the plastic breathing tube with his teeth and opened the valve.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |