Citizen's Guide to Colorado's Environmental Era

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VA "RIVER NO MORE" BECOMES A RIVER AGAIN By George Sibley In 1981, Philip Fradkin wrote a book about the Colorado River Basin, A River No More. The book was a lament about the parting -out of the Colorado —the wildest, most chaotic river on the continent, the river that created the Grand Carryon, the last blank spot on the United States map until John Wesley Powell careened clown it in 1869. But, beginning with Hoover Dam in the 1930s, a dozen major dams and a passel of smaller dams brought the river almost entirely under control, from its headwaters to its delta. The waters of the river were spread through canals, tunnels and aqueducts over a "service area" twice as large as the river's natural basin; a waterworks so thoroughly distributed and used that during many years only a few trickles of irrigation runback reach the natural delta. This was nature thor- oughly dominated and rationed: a river no more. Y AV Today, some of the interesting stories throughout this "Colorado River Service Area" involve efforts to restore parts of this massive waterworks project to something resembling natural streams. • L�x C I T I Z E N ' S G U I D E TO THE E N V I R O N M E N T A L ERA 1 5 �. I