The Colorado River
The river that carved the Grand Canyon
The Colorado River is the lifeline of the American Southwest, running about 1,450 miles (2,330 km) from the Rocky Mountains of Colorado through the deserts of the Southwest toward the Gulf of California. Over millions of years it cut down through the rising Colorado Plateau to carve the Grand Canyon, one of the most spectacular gorges on Earth. Its silty, green-brown water drains an arid basin where almost every drop is spoken for.
No river in America is more thoroughly engineered. A chain of great dams — Hoover, Glen Canyon, and others — backs it up into reservoirs like Lake Mead and Lake Powell, and aqueducts carry its water hundreds of miles to Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and millions of acres of farmland. So much is diverted that in most years the river no longer reaches the sea, petering out in the Mexican desert short of its delta.
The Colorado supplies water to some 40 million people across seven U.S. states and Mexico, and a long drought has dropped its reservoirs to record lows, making the division of its shrinking flow one of the most contested water questions in the country.