The River's Return
Photos by Nick Hall
When the sun peeped over the Sierra Madre,it slanted across a hundred miles of lovely desolation, a vast flat bowl of wilderness rimmed by jagged peaks,” wrote environmentalist Aldo Leopold, after canoeing the Colorado River delta in 1922. “On the map the Delta was bisected by the river, but in fact the river was nowhere and everywhere, for he could not decide which of a hundred green lagoons offered the most pleasant and least speedy path to the Gulf.”
The delta signals the terminus of the 1,450-mile Colorado River, whose broad basin encompasses seven U.S. states and two states in Mexico. During Leopold’s time, the river’s last 87 miles splayed across more than 3,000 square miles of flat land, fanning out into a great tangle of river channels, wetlands and pools before reaching the sea in Mexico. Historically, the river pushed miles out into the Gulf of California every spring at a rate of 1.8 million gallons per second, leaving layers of sediment 3 miles thick in places. Waves would mount high enough to upend a small boat when the ocean tides clashed with the river. The sodden land burst with cottonwoods, willows and mesquite. The river and wetlands teemed with fish. It was home and a respite for millions of birds a year, as well as jaguars, bobcats, coyotes, foxes, deer and raccoons, to name just a few species.
Today, the picture is different. So much of the Colorado’s water is now siphoned off for agriculture, industry, cities and other uses—providing water to an eighth of all Americans—that it no longer reaches the sea. From a bird’s-eye view looking south, the river dwindles to a tattered green thread flanked by miles of checkerboard farmland, then dissolves into a seemingly endless expanse of salt-encrusted, sterile gray mudflats.
The delta appears lifeless, the victim of what’s been called a death by a thousand cuts.
Last year I traveled to Mexico to witness its quiet resurrection. ...
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