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By Root 1435 0

amid mountain fastnesses, its waters are sweet. The river swells quickly, taking in the runoff of most of western Colorado, and before long becomes a substantial torrent churning violently through red canyons down the long west slope of the range. Not far from Utah, at the threshold of the Great Basin, the rapids die into riffles and the Colorado River becomes, for a stretch of forty miles, calm and sedate. It has entered the Grand Valley, a small oasis of orchards and cows looking utterly out of place in a landscape where it appears to have rained once, about half a million years ago. The oasis is man-made and depends entirely on the river. Canals divert a good share of the flow and spread it over fields, and when the water percolates through the soil and returns to the river it passes through thick deposits of mineral salts, a common phenomenon in the West. As the water leaves the river, its salinity content is around two hundred parts per million; when it returns, the salinity content is sixty-five hundred parts per million.

The Colorado takes in the Gunnison River, whose waters have also filtered repeatedly through irrigated, saline earth, and disappears into the canyonlands of Utah. Near the northernmost tentacle of Lake Powell, where the river backs up for nearly two hundred miles behind Glen Canyon Dam, it receives its major tributary, the Green River. The land along the upper Green is heavily irrigated, and so is the land beside its two major tributaries, the Yampa and the White. Some of their tributaries, which come out of the Piceance Basin, are saltier than the ocean. In Lake Powell, the water spreads, exposing vast surface acreage to the sun, which evaporates several feet each year, leaving all the salts behind. Released by Glen Canyon Dam, the Colorado takes in the Little Colorado, Kanab Creek, the Muddy, and one of the more misnamed rivers on earth, the Virgin. It pools again in Lake Mead, again in Lake Mojave, and again in Lake Havasu; it takes in the Gila River and its oft-used tributaries, the Salt and the Verde, all turbid with alkaline leachate. A third of its flow then goes to California, where some of it irrigates the Imperial Valley and the rest allows Los Angeles and San Diego to exist. By then, the water is so salty that restaurants often serve it with a slice of lemon. If you pour it on certain plants, they will die.

Along the Gila River in Arizona, the last tributary of the Colorado, is a small agricultural basin which Spaniards and Indians tried to irrigate as early as the sixteenth century. It has poor drainage—the soil is underlain by impermeable clays—so the irrigation water rose right up to the root zones of the crops. With each irrigation, it became saltier, and before long everything that was planted died. The Spaniards finally left, and the desert took the basin back; for a quarter of a millennium, it remained desert. Then, in the 1940s, the Bureau of Reclamation reclaimed it again, building the Welton-Mohawk Project and adding an expensive drainage system to collect the sumpwater and carry it away. Just above the Mexican border, the drain empties into the Colorado River.

In 1963, the Bureau closed the gates of Glen Canyon Dam. As Lake Powell filled, the flow of fresh water below it was greatly reduced. At the same time, the Welton-Mohawk drain was pouring water with a salinity content of sixty-three hundred parts per million directly into the Colorado. The salinity of the river—what was left of it—soared to fifteen hundred parts per million at the Mexican border. The most important agricultural region in all of Mexico lies right below the border, utterly dependent on the Colorado River; we were giving the farmers slow liquid death to pour over their fields.

The Mexicans complained bitterly, to no avail. By treaty, we had promised them a million and a half acre-feet of water. But we hadn’t promised them usable water. By 1973, Mexico was in a state of apoplexy. The ruin of its irrigated agricultural lands along the lower Colorado was the biggest issue in the campaign of presidential candidate