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A tale of two rivers: The desert empire and the mountain FOR POSlERJTY: Water company directors and a construction superintendent pose at Boulder (now Hoover) Dam in 1934 (Photo courtesy The Bancrofl library, University 01 California, Berkeley) e "We've done our best and worst and a lot of inattentive average work in uttling this our Western place." - Colorado Justice Greg Hobbs, at Bishop's Lodge 1997 '"It would be quite a remote period before (the Upper Colorado Basin) would be <kuelopcd - 50 or 100 or possibly 200 years.. . - Delph Carpenter, testifying in 1925 on the Boulder Canyon Project Ad Bill - I WearesoeaSilYSidetrackCd,I thought, when the Sierra Club fired its shot across the bow of the Western water establishment last November. We build big impressive systems, devel. oping ideas for transportation, communi. cations, food production. impounding water ~hind huge dams. what have you. Then, just when we are to the point . where a system is in place but needs a lot of fine-tuning and maintenance, either we all get bored and forgetful. or some faction that didn't like the system from the start lures us away, and we abandon what has been built and go charging off after some new idea. 'fake, for example, the proposal to drain Lake Powell behind Glen Canyon Dam. It seems serious enough. The Sierra Club is working with a Salt Lake City organization, the Glen Canyon Institute, to formulate and carry out a 30-month citizens' study as "the first step in the ultimate draining of Lake Powell, the restoration of Glen Canyon, and the preservation of the Grand Canyon and the Sea of Cortez estuar- ies." In announcing the board's resolution last November, Sierra Club President Adam Werbach said, "It's the job of the Sierra Club to show what being green really means, and it takes broad vision- ary strokes. This is that type of stroke." fm reminded of the old engineering school adage; "When you're up to your ass in alligators, it's hard to remember that you set out to drain tbe swamp." Glen Canyon looms so large in our minds and emotions that it almost obliterates the rest of the Colorado River. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that draining Lake Powell is just alligator _l~r[&~~~~:-_..,~ J" ,:l.-.t.r,,:;j;;;;,"'YP~i. . '! ", . d. ......_ F' George Sibley lives in Gunnison, Colo., where he teaches at Western State College_ .', .) e ~ This is the second of two special issues on dams supported by a grant from the William C. Kenney Watershed Protection Foundation. 8 - High Country News - November 10. 1997 Analysis by George Sibley mitigation - an attempt to deal with a bunch of rel- atively small problems. It may be a good idea, and it may be a way of switching one perceived mess for another mess while increasing the cultural friction that generates memberships. Whether the draining happens or not, it should not be done all in a rush, out of revenge or out of an attempt to solve problems that loom large to us because we aren't thinki~g about the larger ones behind them. We should start by recognizing the Glen Canjon Dam is a physical manifestation of an historic agreement - the Colorado River Compact- among the seven states that make up the Colorado River Basin. Finally, we should not assume that the compact that gave rise to Glen Canyon Dam is necessarily in conflict with what many of us see as the hopeful, progressive ideas that crystallized in the 1960s,just as the water was rising behind the dam. Before we go tearing away at the dam and the compact, we should look at their roots. We may still decide to demolish both, but at least then we will know what we are doing, and not be surprised by the conse- quences of our act. The compact defmed In November 1922, representatives from seven Western states met at a resort called Bishop's Lodge near Santa Fe to complete an interstate treaty deter- mining how the waters of the Colorado River Basin would be divided among those states. The Colorado River Compact divided the water by splitting the river. It gave balfofthe river and half of the water to the four states along tbe Upper Colorado River (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming), and half to the three stateS along the Lower Colorado. River (Arizona. California and Nevada Some treaties _ especially thr one that don't work - are imposed aTbitra ily on a Inndscape and a people. The Colorado River Compact falls into a happier category. 1t fits the landscape, at least, like a glove. The ancestral Colorado River rose along with the ~New Rockies~ out f'( t11 slow grind and crush of the North American plates in the Laramide Orogeny millions of years ago. Lik", th, present-day streams draining the w('!'1 slopes of the Wasatch Mountains in Utah, the ancestral Colorado only flowed out into the basin-and-ranJie region west of the Rockies. There it ended in a large lake much like today', Great Salt Lake somewhere in what w, call southeastern Utah and northern Arizona, blocked there by the northern edge of the Colorado Plateau - an immense uplift created by the bucklinJ; of tectonic plates. In the same geologic time, anotht'r river - ancestor to today's Lower Colorado River - was draining the southern slope of that uplifting plat('(ll running through subtropical deserts down into the tectonic crack now c.'111c(. the Gulf of California, or Gulf of Cortc~ That southern river gradually ate back into the plateau until, around 5.5 mil- lion yean! ago, it eroded a channel through tbe plateau and "eaptured~ th\ terminal lake containing the flow of th. Upper Colorado River. At that point, the two rivers belZan the geologicallabon! associated .....ith becoming a single river system by removing the convex hump ofthe plateau in their middle section. Today, that monumental task is well under way, as the canyons of the Colorado River attest. A massive amount oftbe plateau has been reduced to debris and conveyed down to the Gulf of California. The emerging river has cut a mill down into the plateau, while wind and water ha,.c been taking off layers from the top and widcning thf gaps between the many canyons' rims. This constru( tion process has been aided several times this past million years by immense glacial runoffs. Iftbis wer to continue long enough, the Grand Canyon and the plateau would eventually disappear. But in recent time the river has been modest in size, and the ener gy with which it saws at the plateau has slowed. Tbere's a certain amount of mess involved with such a project, and that dirt and rock bave all been moved downstream on what might best be described as a big, seasonally erratic conveyor belt below the Plateau canyons. As much as the river has done thus far, it is still accurate to describe the Colorado as two rivers work ing diligently in a vast and desolately beautiful con- struction zone to become one. There are still two river basins. The upper section is a temperate zone mountain-and.valley river we call the Upper Basin. The lower section. which emerges from the canyom of the Colorado Plnteau aad which we call the Lower Basin, is a subtropical desert river, -an American Nile." Here comes everybody That was the situation when a swarming population of Europeans invadcd the region SUJTOW1ding the Colorado. They were not the first humans in the Western reaches of the continent, but they came in unprecedented nwnbcrs - and with culture, custom am eontinlUd on page JZ-