The Day We Set the Colorado River Free

It's been more than 50 years since the Colorado River regularly reached the sea. But this spring, the U.S. and Mexico let the water storm through its natural delta for a grand experiment in ecological restoration. As the dam gates opened, a small band of river rats caught a once-in-a-lifetime ride.
By: Rowan Jacobsen



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Thus it has been for more than 50 years. After Glen Canyon Dam was completed in 1966, the Colorado River delta was left for dead. No water, no life. But an unprecedented agreement between the U.S. and Mexico, called Minute 319, changed all that. Over eight weeks, a 105,392-acre-foot pulse flow of water—about 34 billion gallons—would pour through Morelos and down the dry channel. The idea was to mimic the dynamics of the Colorado’s historical spring flood, timed to coincide with the germination of willow and cottonwood seeds. For more than a year, restoration ecologists with Arizona’s Sonoran Institute and Mexico’s leading environmental group, Pronatura, had been planting seedlings and digging channels, concentrating on the low-lying areas where the groundwater was already high enough to support clusters of cottonwoods and willows—and even a few beaver and muskrat. With a little luck, the water would make it far enough down the dry channel to reach these places. With a little more luck, there might be just enough extra water in coming years to keep some of those new seedlings alive.

It was the unlikeliest of plans: take a titanic slug of water from the most over-allocated river in North America, shoot it through some of the driest country on earth, and turn these godforsaken wastelands back into an Eden. And how anyone managed to pull it off is mystifying, because—perhaps you’ve heard—the West is as parched as Mars right now. Here in the heart of the Great Megadrought of 2014, with Lake Mead draining behind Hoover Dam like an unplugged bathtub, farmers scuffling for water like dying men in a life raft, and the Bureau of Reclamation warning Arizona and Nevada to plan on rationing by 2016, somehow $10 million worth of agua pura was being jettisoned.

More: http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/nature/Open-the-Floodgates-The-Day-We-Set-the-Colorado-River-Free.html