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guaranteed 1.5 million acre-feet to be delivered at the border each year. It also remained for the states within the upper and lower basins to carve up among themselves the ostensi- bly equal shares of water allocated to those basins in the 1922 compact. In 1948 the upper basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming (plus Arizona for a tiny piece of its territory) signed the Upper Colorado River Compact more than two decades after the original compact was negotiated. No anecdote better tells how we have insisted on deal- ing with only one issue at a time in the basin than the story of the Wellton-Mohawk District. Irrigators, assist- ed by the Bureau of Reclamation, found their soils get- ting saltier. Reclamation's solution to the salt problem was to flush the land with more water, so they built a project to bring in larger amounts of Colorado River water. Problem solved. Then the accumulated groundwater in what turned out to be a contained aquifer built up to the root zone of the plants, killing them. The government again came to the rescue, building pumps to lower the salty ground- water, and canals to carry it back to the Colorado River. Problem solved. Then Mexico, downstream, complained that the river had become so salty that it was unusable. The United States moved in to solve this problem. This interna- tional incident led to diplomatic negotiations and sup- plemental agreements to the U.S. - Mexico treaty on the Colorado River that capped the amount of salinity to be delivered to Mexico. Problem solved. But to make the solutions work, irrigators would either have to cut back their use or reduce the salt being picked up and returned to the river, or another way would have to be found to reduce salt loading. The government assumed responsibility. Congress eventual- ly appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars to con- struct a project to intercept and prevent salts from getting into the river from human and natural sources. Problem solved...almost. In times of low water flows in the river, the big returns of salty water from Wellton-Mohawk would not be diluted by the meager stream flow. So the federal gov- ernment found a solution. They would build an enor- mous desalination plant in Yuma - the biggest in the United States - to clean up the Wellton-Mohawk River, then dump it back in the river before it flowed into Mexico. Problem solved, right? Not quite. After twelve years of planning, and construc- tion, and public expenditures of one-quarter billion dol- lars, the plant started up in 1992. It ran for a few months. Then came higher river flows, so there was already enough good water to dilute salts in the river. And the plant was shut down. For the last three years it has been mothballed. The Arizona Republic calls it "the biggest laughing stock of all:' It is sure the capstone in a series of problems solved one at a time, with simple solutions. The single-minded development thrust that dominated river management for the first fifty years after the com- pact allowed almost all else to be ignored. Recreational fishing eventually appeared as a value and the problem was how to establish it. Like other issues it was dealt with apart from any other question. In their paper, Steven Carothers and Dorothy House tell of the specta- cle of poisoning all the native "trash fish" in the upper river and stocking it with non-native fish to create a lively sport fishery. So the problem of recreational fish- ing was "solved." II