Introduction

A mile deep in the depths of the Earth, the mighty Colorado River snakes through billions of years of geologic history. It twists and turns around rapids, cascades over massive boulders and its tides slap against the cliffs that comprise one of the most iconic landscapes in America. It was the peak of the golden hour on a hot, cloudless late-afternoon in June 2017, when the 32-foot motorized raft I had spent the last few days on rounded a corner in the river’s path. I sat next to Chango, a grimy and unreasonably happy boatman with a long beard and orange toenails, as he drove our boat along the river through the Grand Canyon. I was exhausted from a day spent in the sun and heat, but was brimming with curiosity for the desert landscape that I was lucky enough to be a part of. Chango smiled, and steered us up against a sandstone cliff and cut the motor. Other than the chirping birds and warm breeze, all was completely silent, while the dark blue water sparkled under the setting sun, and each and every pinnacle cast long, dark shadows along the Canyon’s walls. Chango whispered to me, “listen to the birds, the wind, listen to what the river is saying to you.” It was in that moment on a twelve-day river trip that I fell in love with the Colorado River.

The Colorado River flows from its headwaters in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, to where it meets the ocean at its delta in the Sea of Cortez. While not considered one of the biggest or most impressive rivers in the world, its watershed encompasses seven states, two countries, and it provides drinking water for over 40 million people. There are 29 major dams along the river, hundreds of irrigation canals, and its waters irrigate 4 million acres of farmland, generates more than 12 kWh of hydroelectricity annually, and creates $26 billion just in recreational activities each year. The Colorado is regarded as the most controlled and controversial river in the world, where every drop of water that falls within the river's basin is accounted for. For several decades, the river has not actually flowed all the way to its Delta as it is dammed and diverted to be used by human civilization before it ever reaches the Sea of Cortez. The consequences of our development of the Colorado River can be seen in other facets: the uncertainty of a changing climate, the destruction of natural ecosystems, and an unjust water rights system that leaves out many Native American tribes who have relied on it for far longer than any American. We simply haven’t been listening.

For me, the Colorado River has served as my source of inspiration for several years. I have interacted with it in countless ways, I've read countless books about it, and I've spent countless nights on its banks. It has taught me about water management, the complex system of water rights in the West, the leverage that recreationalists can have in advocating for its conservation, and that a day on the river is a day well spent. I have followed its issues and challenges, and the fact that the river doesn't actually meet the sea has served as a constant reminder that we can do better. There are people out there who are constantly working to find and implement solutions to improve the river's health and to minimize our impact on an incredible ecosystem. And there are many like me, who recognize the intrinsic value of a resource like the Colorado River and are working to create awareness among all 40 million who count on it.

This series of photos and stories was created to inspire others who interact with the Colorado River, whether they realize it or not. Whether you ski, fly fish, raft, or simply drink its water, we all rely on the Colorado River to provide us with the livelihoods we're accustomed to in the American Southwest. We can all stand up for its conservation, preservation, and better management for centuries to come. It starts with an occasional pause in our daily chaos as human beings to reflect on what makes this river so great and so valuable. Why should we care? What does it do for us? How can we help? If we simply take a moment to stop and listen, we can hear the river's voice. And it's reminding us of its true value.

Powder Days

When most Americans think about skiing, they probably think about Colorado. As they should! Colorado is home to many famous ski resorts including Vail, Breckenridge, Keystone, Arapahoe Basin, Winter Park, Telluride—the list goes on and on. These resorts are so well-known for their variety of terrain, beginner accessibility, and the fact that Colorado manages to get over 100 inches of snow and over 250 days of sunshine per year on average. This is a perfect combination for bluebird powder days and mountain vacations.

I’m lucky enough to have grown up skiing in Colorado. My tiny hometown, Evergreen, is about halfway between Denver and Winter Park Resort. My family first started skiing at Winter Park when I was five years-old and my brother was three. We were taught how to ski on the bunny hills and our passions for skiing only grew with us. These trips up to Winter Park quickly turned into weekend rituals, where we’d commute to the slopes every weekend for my brother’s all-mountain terrain program and for my alpine racing training and competitions. In college, my friends and I would load up our cars in Boulder at the crack of dawn and brace ourselves for the horrendous I-70 traffic, all for just a few hours of skiing. For what my sixteen years of skiing in Colorado are worth, there’s not too many things that can beat a day of floating through powder with your closest friends.

What most people, including myself, often overlook is the indirect interaction between your skis and the Colorado River. The Colorado River's watershed drains 246,000 square miles across seven states. A good rule of thumb is that if you’re on the western side of the Continental Divide in Colorado, you’re in the Colorado River Basin. That means all of the snow that falls on Colorado’s famous ski resorts will one day melt and flow into the Colorado River. So every time you get to lay down some fresh tracks through Colorado's powder, you're interacting with the water that eventually irrigates desert farmland, is stored in massive reservoirs, and quenches the thirst of 40 million people.

Colorado, and much of the American Southwest, has been in a drought for the past twenty years or so, which many scientists attribute to climate change fueled by our greenhouse gas emissions. The impact of this drought is becoming more and more apparent with drier and increasingly unpredictable winters in Colorado. At ski resorts, this translates to fewer powder days and more crust, thin snow, and iced-over moguls. More and more people are moving to and visiting Colorado, specifically the greater-Denver area, each year. That means more skiers on the slopes and more people crowding I-70 every weekend only to sit in traffic, idling their cars and emitting the same greenhouse gases from their tailpipes. As the climate changes and drought continues, Colorado’s snowpack becomes progressively uncertain, and so does the great skiing in the state, and the fate of the Colorado River.

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A Fisherman's Aesthetic

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Water Scars the Landscape

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Confluence of the Green and Colorado

A few years ago, a group of several college students and I were backpacking in the Needles District in Canyonlands National Park, which is known for its huge collection of massive sandstone spires. These “needles” can be hundreds of feet tall, and there’s hundreds of them scattered across this peaceful section of the Park. It was a typical day on a winter backpacking trip in the desert: the temperature got up to the high-fifties during the day and the low-teens at night, cryptobiotic soil crust covered the frozen ground, and there was no water to be found. We were well aware before the trip that we wouldn’t find any water, so each person carried at least six liters that would last us two full days. This works out to be about ten pounds of weight, just in water, strapped to our backs.

We hiked out through the Needles and eventually reached an overlook on the edge of a cliff. There was nothing before us but empty space and the merging of two rivers, thousands of feet below us—this was the Confluence of the Green and the Colorado. The Green River is a major tributary to the Colorado, whose headwaters originate in the Wind River Range in Wyoming. It then flows south across Northern Utah until it reaches the Colorado River in the center of Canyonlands National Park. This is the spot where John Wesley Powell first met the Colorado in the bottom of the desert canyons on his legendary 1869 expedition. He and his crew launched in Green River, Wyoming, followed the Green to its confluence with the Colorado, and then flowed all the way to where the Colorado meets the Virgin River, in what is today Lake Mead. The expedition was monumental for its investigation of the Colorado River and its canyons, its scientific exploration of geology and ecology, and for its great story.

My friends and I stood at the Confluence Overlook and gazed at the sight of water thousands of feet below us. From what we could see, there was certainly no safe way down. I wondered what Powell would think if he saw the Colorado River today, dammed, unnatural, and no longer wild and free.

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A Lost Canyon and A Concrete Wall

On a hot summer day in late June 2019, I was standing at the bow of a twelve-foot metal electrofishing sport boat and was cruising upstream of Lees Ferry, Arizona, in Glen Canyon. We rounded Horseshoe Bend and could see the crowd standing at the edge of the cliff hundreds of feet above us—we were sure our little boat would be featured in dozens of tourists’ photographs from that iconic viewpoint. We had just started a twenty-something day river trip and I was excited to be back in this brutally hot desert and to be along the Colorado River. We continued upriver for sixteen miles through beautiful sculpted walls of dark orange sandstone until a giant slab of concrete, metal and rebar stopped us in our tracks.

Looking at Glen Canyon Dam from river level is completely different than from above. It’s 710 feet tall and 1,271 feet long. Behind it sits Lake Powell, an unfathomable wall of water, ironically named for John Wesley Powell, who would have undoubtedly hated everything that the dam and the reservoir stands for. As an environmentalist, I’ve been taught that a dam like that is pure evil. When I read Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang, I of course worshipped George Hayduke’s wild scheme to blow up the dam using an innocent houseboat on the lake. And as I’ve learned more and more about its consequences, the more it has become my worst nightmare. The dam flooded Glen Canyon, named by Powell for its beauty and glory. It destroyed natural riparian ecosystems up to hundreds of miles downstream. It wreaked havoc on the Colorado River and endangered many species. Glen Canyon Dam fundamentally changed the Colorado River so much to the point where some scientists even consider the modern, dammed version of the River to be “non-native”, and expect it to challenge endangered species to evolve faster than their natural rate or to die off from the rapid changes humanity has imposed upon them.

But whether we environmentalists like it or not, Glen Canyon Dam, and others like it along the Colorado River, are essential to our civilization in the American West. These big water projects gave humanity the power to overcome the harshness of the desert and to build towns and cities such as Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Las Vegas. The dams provided us with plenty of stored water during dry years, cheap hydropower, flood control, and irrigated desert agriculture. From a legal standpoint, Lake Powell is critical for the states in the Upper Colorado River Basin. The lake acts as a bank account and ensures that the Upper Basin states can deliver its required amount of water to the Lower Basin each year. My life and 40 million other peoples’ lives that rely on the Colorado River wouldn’t be the same without Glen Canyon Dam.

I go back and forth on this all the time when thinking about the dam, the Colorado River, and our approach to managing water a whole. I certainly had mixed feelings as I stared down the ugly wall of concrete that seemed so alien in the wilderness setting I was about to spend the next twenty days in. For environmentalists, it’s important to realize just how embedded the dam is in the American Southwest’s society and that we rely on it every day. And for those who revere big water projects, it’s essential to recognize the things these projects destroy and that because of them, our wild places may never be the same.

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The Little Colorado River

In 2016, my family of four rounded a corner at River Mile 62 in the Grand Canyon. It was a hot and windless day in mid-June. There wasn’t much to cool us down except for an upstream wind created by our swift motorized raft, also known as a J-rig, which was a 32 foot-long configuration of nylon, rubber, plastic, and a metal frame. All fifteen of us on the raft were more than ready to cool off and escape the 110-degree heat. The head guide of our adventure, Ed, pointed out the Confluence further downstream, which was talked about often by the guides and other passengers during the beginning of our trip. I’d never heard of it before.

We pulled up to a bank on the river-left, where we could only make out a large side-canyon and the same familiar, dark waters of the Colorado River— the same river we’d become accustomed to in the last few days. The guides tied up our boats and we began the short hike into the side canyon. Once we got through a cluster of tamarisk bushes, everyone instantly noticed the bright turquoise water flowing out of the wide side canyon. The rocks in and around the river bed were covered in a white, chalky residue from the natural minerals flowing in this little river. I don’t think any of us tourists, including myself, could fully comprehend what we were looking at.

We hiked a little farther upstream and found shade under a ledge of Tapeats Sandstone. Our guides demonstrated how to turn a life-jacket into a diaper-like flotation device, that would protect our bums from the rough rocks in the light-blue river. They then jumped in, sat up as if they were sitting in a chair, floated through the little rapids, and we instantly followed suit. Before long, all thirty of us were wide-eyed, exhausted, and full of joy from the fun we had sliding through the rapids, which were almost like a natural waterslide. We linked up to make “people-trains” and slid through together, we laughed, and we soaked our heat-ridden bodies in the comfortable cool waters of the Little Colorado River—a nice change of pace from the shockingly cold, 40-degree water of the main-stem Colorado.

As we returned to the boats for lunch, I noticed the beautiful meshing of the turquoise Little Colorado River and the dark blue Colorado. It was a cosmic mixture of cloudy colors that I had never seen before in nature, and I was instantly mesmerized. One of our guides, Laura, explained that many local Native American tribes believe that human life emerged from where the two rivers meet and that this Confluence was a cultural site of utmost importance to most of the tribes in the area. We listened and we felt something surreal, something bigger than all of us, as if we weren’t alone on this one beach in the enormity of the Grand Canyon. I couldn’t take my eyes off the Confluence as we packed up our rafts and floated downstream, out of its magnetizing view.

A few months later, back in my normal world as a college student, I stumbled across an article that described a proposed development project near the Confluence on Navajo Nation land. The Escalade Project, brought to the Navajo by outside developers, was a huge tramway system that would bring an estimated 10,000 people per day from the rim of the Grand Canyon to the bottom near the Confluence, where there would be a walkway with shops and restaurants. The idea of 10,000 people down there, per day, absolutely terrified me. But as I learned more and more about this proposal, the more I feared for the future of this magical place. The Escalade Project would not only plague the primitive and remote area of the Confluence with thousands of people, noise, and the site of civilization, it would also decimate an entire ecosystem full of endangered species, which depend on the naturally-occurring minerals in the Little Colorado and it would forever alter a cultural site valued by the Navajo themselves and many other tribes. The proposal was marketed to the Navajo Nation as an economic stimulus that would aid their poverty-stricken economy by endlessly bringing tourists to the landmark that happened to be within the Nation's boundaries. How could they not take advantage of this natural resource?

I, like many others who visited the Confluence on a river trip and like many tribes, were outraged by this proposal. I signed a petition demanding the Navajo Nation to vote against it and encouraged my friends and family to do the same. In the following weeks, there were many campaigns and protests against the Escalade Project and luckily all of the tribes in the region such as the Navajo, Hopi, Havasupai, and the Hualapai were largely united against it since they consider the Confluence to be a sacred place. Eventually in 2016, the Navajo Nation voted against the project 16 to 2. This was a huge relief to tribes and to all people who have visited the area and see it clearly as a place worth protecting. But it’s still not safe. In late 2019, I learned about a set of two dam proposals on the Little Colorado River that would be built just upstream of the Confluence and would be primarily for hydropower generation. The essential ecosystem around the Confluence is also threatened each day by a metamorphosed Colorado River, which is significantly colder and less rich in sediment than before it was dammed, and challenges many species in the area that spent millions of years evolving in the warmer, sediment-rich version of the river.

Dozens of people visit the Confluence during the rafting season; it’s one of the highlights for many. But with a growth in outdoor recreation and a growing demand for rafting trips comes an increase in visitation to places like the Confluence. More people surely means a higher human impact and further degradation of the area, even if unintentional. Luckily, many of these visitors, like me, learn about the fragile ecosystem and feel empowered to stand up to protect it. We must continue rising up to protect places like the Confluence for their cultural, ecological, and aesthetic values and we must consider how we impact the very places we seek to protect.

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The Grandest Canyon on Earth

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Critters

Before the Bureau of Reclamation began damming the Colorado River in the early 1900s, the river flowed warm, brown, thick, and muddy. Its stew of water, dirt, sand, and silt contained essential nutrients for life that allowed many fish species to evolve and become native to a wild river. Now backed up by dozens of dams and reservoirs, the Colorado River runs mostly cold, clear, and blue, and many of its native species have gone extinct. The humpback chub, while not extinct yet, is one of the species that has been greatly affected by the complete change in the nature of the Colorado River. The chub now only resides in the stretch of river that flows through the Grand Canyon and I’m lucky enough to have been part of two studies that focus on the chub’s survival.

The humpback chub doesn't initially seem very interesting. They’re not the prettiest fish you’ve ever seen and they don’t have any weird characteristics or behaviors that would get them featured in a nature documentary. But they tell us a lot about the health of the Colorado River and its ecosystems. On my most recent river trip down the Grand Canyon, I volunteered for a USGS study that focused on the survival of juvenile humpback chub and I spent many hours chatting with the head scientist about what the humpback chub mean in the greater sense of species preservation, environmentalism, and the management of the Colorado River. After all, why should we care about a fish in the bottom of the Grand Canyon? He gave a few good points:

1. The humpback chub, as with any species, is an integral piece to the giant puzzle that we call Planet Earth. If we want to further understand how our Planet works, the humpback chub is just one piece of the puzzle.

2. Everything in the natural world is interconnected. If the humpback chub die off, another species certainly will, creating a slippery slope of extinction. We’re already seeing this around the world with the effects of climate change.

3. We should take responsibility for our actions. We dammed the Colorado River and completely altered its natural ecosystem. Now that we realize what we have done and the adverse effects of our actions, we should work to find solutions that can protect an innocent species for their intrinsic value in order to further preserve the natural world for a sustainable future.

Whether or not the native humpback chub will make it in a new Colorado River, we can’t be sure. But with the help of scientists, we’ll certainly get a better understanding of their habits so we can suggest policies that help manage the Colorado in a way that better protects its ecosystems.

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Grand Wash Cliffs

We had been cruising along on the flat water that is just upstream of Lake Mead for several days. A group of scientists, boatmen, and I were headed to Pearce Ferry, the final destination of a two-week river trip through Grand Canyon. Our ride home was supposed to arrive early the next morning, so we set up camp at the boat ramp. Chango and I laughed as we cooked dinner under a bright pink sunset and discussed the meaning of life. I'll never forget that last night laying out under the stars and falling asleep as I listened for the river's voice.

The end of Grand Canyon is marked by the Grand Wash Cliffs and is where the Colorado River officially begins filling up Lake Mead. It's pretty weird floating out of them—one moment you're in the Grand Canyon, and the next you're in a flat desert landscape, with the cliffs of the Canyon towering behind you.

But the Colorado River doesn't end here. It backs up in Lake Mead for 100 miles or so, then continues south along the California-Arizona border, flows through Mexico, and into the sea. Except, it waters don't actually reach the sea. For the last several decades, every drop in the Colorado River is used up and the last few miles of river bed before the delta are totally dry. A river that drains a good part of the Rocky Mountains and that has spent millions of years carving out the cracked landscape, has been blocked up and choked by humanity. We have a complete hold over a wild Colorado, that once ran reddish-brown, muddy, and on its own time.

I haven't been to the delta myself, but I'm sure it would be a mournful site. Yet without the Colorado River, life in the American West would be pretty bleak. I've grown up with the River, I've skied on its snowpack, I've fly fished on its tributary streams, I've backpacked in the desert lands who show endless marks of its waters, and I've rafted through its terrifyingly-awesome whitewater. Whenever I spend time near its banks, I hear Chango echoing, "listen to the birds, the wind. Listen to what the river is saying to you."

If the river is to survive, it must be revitalized. We need a newfound respect for a resource that so many people depend on. We need to consider the species threatened by a changed river. We need to reprioritize the health of the system as a whole, instead of allowing it to dry up miles before reaching its final destination. We need to implement innovative and efficient solutions to drive change and progress in the economy and the well-being of the American Southwest. If Colorado River enthusiasts who see the value in not only its economic utility, but also in its recreational, ecological, and cultural values can listen to the river's voice and hear the invaluable lessons it can teach us, we can certainly come together to create solutions to save it.

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