Francisco Rosas, San Luis Rio Colorado, March 25, 2014, by John Fleck

SAN LUIS RIO COLORADO – Morelos Dam, the last dam on the Colorado, normally diverts the river’s entire flow west, into the Canal Reforma, for farms in the Mexicali valley. In Spanish, it’s called “Presa Morelos,” where “presa” means “dam.” But Francisco Rosas, a Mexicali farmer, told me that it has a second meaning – to capture, or the animal you killed:

“‘Presa’ to a Mexican means ‘You caught it.'”

As we spoke, water was filling the sandy bed of the normally dry Colorado downstream from Presa Morelos, and kids splashed happily. “It’s something new for them,” Rosas said.

Pickup stuck in a sandy riverbed as the Rio Colorado arrives, March 25, 2014, by John Fleck

SAN LUIS RIO COLORADO – Apologies. This is kinda convoluted, but it’s what happened.

One of my journalistic techniques is to try to put myself in a place where something interesting is likely to happen, something real, and then wait. So at lunchtime today, I parked in the shade of the San Luis Bridge on the Baja-Sonora border to wait for a river to arrive. (Background on how long the Colorado has been dry here, and why it was about to get wet, can be found  here.)

I knew the water, which had been released into a mostly dry Colorado Sunday 22 miles upstream, was near, but I wasn’t sure how near. My goal was to be at the San Luis Bridge when the water got there.

Two guys from Conagua, the Mexican national water commission, drove up in a white pickup. We didn’t speak one another’s language, but in a pantomime that included pointing at watches and gesturing upstream, I concluded that it would be a matter of hours, they couldn’t be sure how many. I ate half my sandwich.

A couple of young men had been prowling up the riverbed and back to the bridge on four-wheeled all-terrain vehicles. I flagged one of them down. His name was Juan Hernandez. I asked him if he’d seen the water. He said yes, and asked if I wanted to hop on back and go see it.

Juan’s red Honda chariot, March 25, 2014, by John Fleck

I must explain at this point that I am not a particularly adventurous person. Hopping on the back of a Honda all terrain vehicle and trundling off across the desert is not the sort of thing I take easily to. But, well, I did want to see the water and I was waiting for something to happen. This seemed like something, so off we went.

I wish I had a better sense of how long or far Juan schlepped me through a sandy riverbed clogged with tamarisk, and then suddenly there was water. Juan turned off the Honda’s engine, and there was quiet. It wasn’t what I expected. Well, to be honest, I wasn’t sure what I expected – water creeping slowly forward into dry sand, I guess. There was a small main channel that was moving pretty well, deep enough that we would have gotten plenty wet trying to cross. And in the quiet, we heard bubbles. Water was flowing over dry sand, and air was bubbling up through it.

Here’s a picture of Juan, standing next to the Colorado River, which hasn’t flowed very much through his community of San Luis in recent years:

Juan Hernandez, San Luis Rio Colorado, March 25, 2014, by John Fleck

Juan drove me around to a few more spots before swinging back to the south and heading up the main river channel so we could see the front of the water headed to the San Luis Bridge.

We were, I guess, less than a mile from the San Luis Bridge when we came across two guys in a nice late model white Ford Lobo FX4 Off Road pickup. Stuck in the main river channel. With the water maybe 50 yards upstream from them and creeping toward the truck. There was jumping and bouncing and revving and a sense of urgency because of the impending arrival of a river. And continued stuckness. Then, just as the water reached the channel behind the truck, as you see in the picture above, not one but two men appeared on a low bluff to the west, with shovels. This all seemed like magic to me. I am told by those more experienced in Colorado River Delta travel that sand stuckness is common. Flowing water threatening you when you’re stuck in the sand, less so. The magical appearance of men with shovels?

With the shoveling well underway but the truck still stuck, Juan asked me to hop on back so he could return to the bridge in search of further assistance. Juan dropped me off, and within minutes, I saw Juan, the pilot fish, leading an even larger pickup, equipped with a winch, back up the riverbed. And perhaps 15 minutes later, the happy ending, as pilot fish, Ford Lobo FX4 Off Road and the giant rescue truck all returned to safety.

Eventually, the river did arrive at San Luis, lots of people showed up to greet it, and a fine time seems to have been had by all:

River Party at San Luis Rio Colorado, March 25, 2014, by John Fleck

Hydrologically speaking, the end of a river is a complicated thing.

Pumping groundwater in the Colorado River “flood plain”, March 24, 2014, by John Fleck

A couple of miles down the levee road on the U.S. side of the border with Baja in Yuma County, Ariz., I came across this farmer yesterday pumping groundwater to irrigate some sort of palm orchard (with some lovely bonus citrus). This is a farm that’s essentially in the riverbed, pumping groundwater. You see this type of farming on both sides of this stretch of the river, the 22 miles called the “limitrophe” that forms the border between the U.S. and Mexico here. As dg said:

When you are dealing with poverty and the needs for water in your own region to fuel the economy – you have priorities. Life is tough in the South West.

This is the stretch of river being slowly but surely wetted this week by the historic “pulse flow”, an experimental environmental release of 105,000 acre feet of water this spring from Morelos Dam into the largely dry Colorado River Delta. (Background here.) The flow started Sunday morning with a celebration at Morelos Dam, and the adventure now is watching how far the water gets each day – an adventure complicated by the fact that this is geopolitically tortured terrain, with border fences and armed Border Patrol agents and all the baggage of our borderlands problems that leaves the river uncomfortably physically isolated. (As an aside, I met a couple of great Border Patrol agents yesterday while I was wandering the no-man’s land on the U.S. side who were as curious as I was about the whole thing and were delighted to help in my efforts to find the water.)

Groundwater pumping south of Algodones, along the Colorado River limitrophe, Baja, by John Fleck, March 2014

If this area is geopolitically tortured, it is even more hydrologically tortured.

My shorthand explanation for what’s happening down here is that the river ends at Morelos Dam, on the U.S.-Mexico border, with the last of the river’s water diverted into a canal for Mexican farmers. But that is not quite right. A desert river is as much underground as it is aboveground, and the groundwater-surface water interaction is critical to what’s going on.

Michael Cohen of the Pacific Institute, who is down this week watching the pulse flow, shared a paper he wrote last year deconstructing the complexity of the limitrophe’s hydrology.

Before humans plumbed the system with dams and diversions upstream, annual snowmelt floods would spread out across this landscape on their way to the sea, recharging the regional aquifer. When the river’s flow was low, the reverse would happen, with the aquifer contributing “base flow” to the river.

With that river shut down by upstread plumbing, only the second part happens, and for only a very short segment of the 22-mile limitrophe. Here’s Cohen:

The diversion of essentially the entire flow of the river upstream of the study area, combined with the loss of sediments behind upstream dams and subsequent incision of the river channel below Morelos Dam, means that the river is now a drain in the upper portion of the limitrophe and is completely disconnected from the aquifer in the last quarter of the limitrophe. In the form of irrigation, the river still ‘floods’ adjacent lands, recharging the aquifer. In the upper portion of the limitrophe, recharge from this irrigation is sufficient to maintain elevated groundwater levels and connectivity with the river.

But as you head south, as you can see from Cohen’s map below, that contribution diminishes and the water table beneath the river channel drops away.

Groundwater pumping within the levees in the river’s flood plain itself, like the farm pictured above, contributes to this. Cohen calculates 36,000 acre feet of groundwater pumping per year within the levees, with a lot more in the surrounding region. So as you go south along the 22-mile stretch of limitrophe toward San Luis Rio Colorado, the water table drops farther from the surface, at some point dropping so far that the roots of cottonwoods and other aquifer-tapping plants can no longer reach it. At this point, it loses what John Van Dyke called the “ribbon of green” that marks the rest of the desert Colorado. In some sense it is here that the river meaningfully ends.

Estimated depth to groundwater, Colorado River limitrophe, courtesy Michael Cohen, Pacific Institute

When last we met, I was waxing poetic about the memories of water in San Luis Rio Colorado:

I asked Medina, who kindly served as translator for a monolingual norteño, when San Luis had last seen water in the Rio Colorado. “1998,” he said. What struck me was how he said it without hesitation, and what that suggests about the longing for water. Without pause, he knew exactly how long the rio has been dry.

Beware the poetic instincts, there, Mr. Journalist! A member of the brain trust pointed me to data showing that there has been water in the Rio Colorado at San Luis on a number of occasions since then. This is the daily average flow since 1950, when Morelos Dam was completed:

San Luis flow

I’ve thrown in a 365-day smoothed average to give a feel for the longer term trend.

Here’s the same data set, zoomed in to the last 30-plus years. 1983 was the year of the great El Niño that almost took out Glen Canyon Dam, the year all the dams spilled and water flowed freely to the sea. One of the Border Patrol agents I met today while I was prowling the riverside, who grew up in San Luis, Ariz., told me about fishing a big, wet river as a boy during those years:

San Luis flow

My correspondent is definitely correct. The Rio has flowed at San Luis many times in the years since 1998. But you can also see why the late 1990s stand out in local lore and memory.

(The graphs in this post have been updated because I screwed up the metric-vs-wacky US measure conversion)

San Luis Rio Colorado, March 23, 2014, by John Fleck

SAN LUIS RIO COLORADO – Manuel Campa was very particular. His town’s name is often shortened to merely “San Luis”, but standing in the dry bed of the Colorado River this morning, the full name mattered very much. “It’s the only city that has the name ‘Rio Colorado,'” he said.

The sandy riverbed beneath the bridge just west of town has become an iconic, sad image of the drying of the Colorado River. Since Hoover and Glen Canyon dams corralled the river’s flow for human use, the once-great river at San Luis has been slowly but surely dried until just a bed of sand remains.

The Colorado River “pulse flow” begins. Morelos Dam, March 23, 2014, by John Fleck

But this morning the riverbed felt more like a party than an icon. A couple hundred area residents were out with Campa for a community riverbed cleanup, and to await the water. Around 8:15 a.m., 22 miles upstream, one of the middle gates on Morelos Dam inched up and a froth of water gushed through, part of an experimental “pulse flow” to use the Colorado’s plumbing to mimic, in some small measure, the flow that once made this not only one of the planet’s estuarial ecosystems, but also gave places like San Luis their cultural identity.

It’s not clear how soon the first water will reach San Luis – probably not for a couple more days. But that didn’t dampen the festivities this morning as pickups and Harleys and families with soccer balls and four-wheelers turned the shady stretch under the bridge into an impromptu festival rio. “They want to see the water,” Waldo Medina explained.

I asked Medina, who kindly served as translator for a monolingual norteño, when San Luis had last seen water in the Rio Colorado. “1998,” he said. What struck me was how he said it without hesitation, and what that suggests about the longing for water. Without pause, he knew exactly how long the rio has been dry. (update: An emailer points out, with data to back it up, that “1998” is incorrect, and that there have been a number of flows past San Luis Rio Colorado since that time. I’ve got the data, and once I get the handy dandy graph made, I’ll put up a new post. update 2: Here’s the data showing that the river has, in fact, flowed a number of times since 1998 at San Luis.)

I’m going to invoke the blogger’s prerogative to revise and extend my remarks here at a later time, because the language barrier made this a tough conversation, but Medina worked hard to explain to me the idea of “la cuenca” – the area of the delta where both waters – the river water from the north, the seawater from the south, meet. “La cuenca is dead right now,” Medina said.

A friend pulled out a iPhone and began scrolling up and down a satellite map of the area, a mix of green of farms and brown of desert. “All this a long time ago was the river,” Medina explained.

“The water is very important for the life,” Medina said. “All people living around the Colorado River, they need the water.”

Party at San Luis Rio Colorado, March 23, 2014, by John Fleck

Morelos Dam, March 22, 2014, by John Fleck

LOS ALGODONES, B.C. – I made it to Yuma with time to spare this afternoon, so I dumped my bags at the motel and drove around to the Andrade border crossing and through the little town of Algodones  (best dentists in North America!) to Morelos Dam.

I couldn’t find the angle to get the picture I wanted, so you’ll have to settle for some words. In the picture above, we’re on the downstream side of the dam, which diverts the last of the Colorado River’s waters to farms in Mexico. The dam’s closed, so the water you see is just groundwater leaking through. If you look closely at the dirt road on the right side of the picture, you’ll see a little gap. That’s all that’s left of the Colorado River. Words fail me, here’s a closeup of all that’s left of the Colorado River. Hard to get a feel for the scale here, but there was a guy out walking his dog. The dog splashed from Mexico to the U.S. and back in just a few seconds.

The Colorado River, ten feet wide, by John Fleck, March 2014

It’s a nice shallow pool, so of course there were birds:

• cormorants
• a green heron
• some undetermined sandpipers
• a bunch of black-necked stilts (lordy, such graceful creatures)
• I’m pretty sure a blue-winged teal
• lots of coots (“American” coots, to be specific)
• a gallinule

Since I’m down here to watch the historic release of Colorado River water back into the long-dried delta, this of course raises all kinds of fascinating questions about what is “nature”. It’s just a bunch of dam leakage confined by levees. Whatever. The egret was gorgeous:

Snowy egret, Morelos Dam, March 22, 2014, by John Fleck

Hite sign, by L. Heineman, June 2009

There used to be a marina at Hite, Utah, on the upper end of Lake Powell. The Park Service abandoned it in the early 2000s, when the reservoir dropped out from underneath it. They also fixed the sign.

Lake Powell elevation, courtesy USBR