Where the water goes, p.10
Where the Water Goes, page 10
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AFTER I’D SPENT half an hour or so nosing around Lonely Dell Ranch, I drove back to the main road and then half a mile up the river to the gauging station. On the far bank I saw a box-like concrete pillar, which contains the measuring equipment with which officials of the USGS monitor the river’s volume. When they need to check the gauge itself or take water samples from the middle of the river, they climb into a metal cage and ride across on a steel cableway suspended above the water. A measuring station has operated at the site continuously since 1921, and for the past eighty years readings have been taken several times an hour. As a result, the USGS’s discharge dataset for the Colorado is almost certainly the most comprehensive such record for any stream anywhere in the world.
On my side of the river was a large parking lot and gently sloping gravel beach, which is the departure point for most modern-day Grand Canyon raft trips: Lees Ferry is still the last convenient entry point to the Colorado River above the Grand Canyon. (The next spot downstream where the river is accessible to a motor vehicle is more than 260 miles away.) A trip was forming when I arrived, and a dozen people, mostly in their thirties, were loading gear into eighteen-foot rafts. They were being watched by an employee of the National Park Service, which controls all rafting trips and licenses their operators. In roughly the same way that scientists re-create historical weather patterns by studying tree rings, you could probably estimate the length of river trips by counting cases of Bud Light. This one was going to last two and a half weeks.
I myself have ridden a raft on the Colorado, but only once and not for two and a half weeks. In 2006, my son had just graduated from high school and my daughter had just graduated from college, and my wife and I celebrated with them by renting an RV in Las Vegas and visiting Hoover Dam, the extraordinary national parks in southern Utah, and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon: the last big family vacation. Our turnaround point was Moab. While we were there, we hiked in Arches and took a one-day raft trip on the “family-friendly” (that is, cataract-free) stretch of the Colorado that flows past the Fisher Towers. The main instruction we received from the raft operator was the same one my mother used to give my siblings and me almost any time we left the house when we were little: go before you go. Bodily wastes don’t break down in the desert the way they do in wetter, more organism-rich environments, and the operator told us that, if we had to pee during the trip, we should jump into the river and do it as we swam, and that if we needed to do more than that we would have to be escorted away from the group to sit on something that looked like a surplus World War II ammo can. The weather was perfect, the scenery was remarkable, and the river was gentle. If you got hot, you could roll over the side and swim along for a while. The other occupants of our raft were seventh-graders on a school trip from Orem: blond-haired, blue-eyed girls and boys, some of whom conceivably could have been descendants of John Doyle Lee or of Jacob Hamblin or of members of the Nauvoo Legion.
The rafting group I saw at Lees Ferry had rented their equipment from Ceiba Adventures, an outfitting company based in Flagstaff. Rachel Schmidt, who owns the company with her husband, told me that the river no longer bears much resemblance to the one that Powell traveled down. During both of Powell’s expeditions, water flows in the Colorado were highly variable and unpredictable, and there were stretches where the vertical difference between high and low water was a hundred feet. “The river dropped away abruptly,” Dellenbaugh wrote of one particularly thrilling stretch, “to rise again in a succession of fearful billows whose crests leaped and danced high in air as if rejoicing at the prospect of annihilating us.”
It’s not like that now. “The Colorado is a dam-controlled waterway,” Schmidt told me, “so we don’t have the natural flows that some other rivers have—where you get a big snowpack, and then the snow all melts and you have high water in the spring and early summer. What we have to run on is whatever the Bureau of Reclamation gives us.” During recent years, the bureau has occasionally attempted to re-create something like natural flows by briefly releasing a larger volume of water from Lake Powell (named for John Wesley, of course), but there is still always a federal hand on the faucet. Schmidt said that, in some ways, constraining the river had made it more “user friendly” for rafters, by eliminating extremes—the group I saw would have known pretty much exactly what to expect all the way to their destination—but that it also had had major negative impacts on riverine ecosystems. Tom Kleinschnitz, who owns Adventure Bound USA, a rafting company that runs guided trips on the Colorado and two of its tributaries, the Green and the Yampa, told me, “On an undammed river, like the Yampa, the free flows spike up real high. They kind of purge the river corridor and tear out the non-native, noxious weeds, and ten years after a high-flow event you’ll see ten-year-old cottonwoods growing in a line where the water reached that year.” That doesn’t happen anymore on the Colorado, and the fact that it doesn’t has contributed to the spread of aggressive invasive plant species throughout the river corridor.
A relatively recent development in the ongoing evolution of the Law of the River is the creation of what are known in Colorado as “recreational in-channel diversions” (RICDs). These are similar to instream-flow water rights, discussed briefly in chapter 3, and can also be thought of to some extent as water rights that belong to the water itself. The prior-appropriation system is based on diversion—on removing water from streams in order to put it to approved uses beyond the streambed. In the 1980s, the Colorado Supreme Court, overruling a lower court, held that in certain instances water could legally be considered to have been diverted even if it never left the stream. (The case involved a boat chute and a fish ladder that the city of Fort Collins had built to circumvent a dam.) That decision and similar ones have been controversial, and a number of legal questions remain unresolved, not least because river recreation and species preservation didn’t appear on nineteenth-century lists of beneficial uses. There are many potential complications. “Does a kayaking course need 10 cfs or 100 cfs?” Jones and Cech ask in Colorado Water Law for Non-Lawyers. “Can the appropriator place a call on upstream junior diverters when there are no kayakers on the course in case someone decides to use the kayak course later that afternoon? If only one kayaker is on the course, is that sufficient to support a call for more water?” Environmentalists have tended to support any ruling that keeps water within riverbanks, but recreation is a broad category, since it includes not just kayaks but also things like houseboats and Jet Skis. And RICDs have the same drawback that instream-flow water rights do: because they’re new, their priority dates stink. But their existence, even as theoretical constructs, beneficially enlarges the legal conception of what a river is for.
“The biggest question is whether there’s going to be enough water here in the future,” Kleinschnitz told me. “We’re now at a tipping point. Are recreation and agriculture important, or are we going to do what we did in L.A. and just erase some of those? The decisions we make during the next fifty years will dictate the next thousand.” He said he worries that over-allocation and poor water management will eventually make the Colorado wholly unnavigable for recreational users. If that happens, he said, people looking back five hundred years from now will perceive little difference between our era and John Wesley Powell’s, and will lump them together as “back when they used to run rafts.”
8.
BOULDER CANYON PROJECT
There are two ways to drive from Lees Ferry to Hoover Dam: the northern route, which passes through St. George, Utah, and takes about five hours, and the southern route, which passes through Flagstaff, Arizona, and takes about six. On a map, the two routes together form what looks like a bumpy circle drawn by a nursery schooler. Neither route passes very close to the Colorado, which follows a far more direct path—the one John Wesley Powell took through the Grand Canyon.
I took the northern route—along the foot of the Vermilion Cliffs and past the turnoff for Route 67, which leads to the Grand Canyon’s North Rim—and arrived at Hemenway Harbor, near Lake Mead’s southwestern corner, late in the afternoon. I parked in a sloping gravel lot, next to a heavy steel cable that ran all the way to the water: it was helping to anchor one of the harbor’s docks. Not many years ago, that parking lot would have been underwater: Mead’s volume has fallen by just over sixty percent since 1998, the last time it was full, and there are places where its shoreline has receded by more than a mile. From the lot I could see Pyramid Island to the north, and Saddle Island just beyond it; neither is still an island. An earthen causeway connects Pyramid Island to the mainland, and two cantilevered piers extend like wings from its sides. There used to be a “No Fishing” sign at the end of one of the piers, but it hasn’t been needed for years. A section of the lake to the south of the causeway was once reserved for scuba divers. Today, you can explore it in hiking boots.
On the dock, I met Bob Gripentog, whose family has owned the Lake Mead Marina since 1957, when he was six, and Rod Taylor, a regional vice president of Forever Resorts, which operates a marina on a different part of the lake. Lake Mead Marina hasn’t always been in Hemenway Harbor; it was towed there in 2002 because its original location, in a shallower bay, was rapidly becoming lakefront. Gripentog has lived in Las Vegas all his life. His mother’s parents owned a grocery store in town, and for a while his father was stationed at Nellis Air Force Base, at what’s now the northeastern corner of the city. Marinas are in his genes, maybe: his sister and her husband also own one, in Kentucky.
We got into one of Gripentog’s boats and went out to explore. The dying light made the surrounding terrain look like rumpled mountains of exotic spices: all ochers and umbers and oranges and smoky taupes and rusty browns. Both Gripentog and Taylor said they were concerned about what Taylor described as “apocalyptic reporting” about water in the West, and wanted to be sure I understood that the lake is still gigantic. He characterized Mead’s surface area with a unit of measurement that people in the Northeast seldom have opportunities to use: three Disney Worlds, about eighty-seven thousand acres. He said that he hoped potential visitors would not be deterred by news reports about shrinkage. “As you can see,” he said, “we have a lot of water out here.”
That’s all true, and if you’re weighing a vacation you shouldn’t let media hysteria keep you away. Lake Mead National Recreation Area was visited by more than six million people last year, making it one of the most popular destinations in the National Park system. Still, if you know Mead at all, you can’t help noticing that most of it is missing. In fact, the lake today contains only about thirty-eight percent as much water as it did in 1998. The loss is easy to visualize because as the lake recedes it exposes a white “bathtub ring” on the surrounding bluffs, created partly by minerals in the water and partly by leachates from the rock. Gripentog steered his boat around a promontory and into a cove-like finger of the lake which wasn’t visible from the marina. As he did, we passed close to a canyon wall, the lower portion of which was as white as chalk. The lake and the surrounding landscape are so vast that when you see the bathtub ring from far away you have little sense of the scale. Viewed up close, though, it makes you gulp: the distance from the surface of the water to the top of the white band that day was 130 feet. Then we cleared the promontory, and suddenly, straight ahead, was Hoover Dam. A line of buoys warned us to stay back, well away from the intakes that draw water from the lake into the turbines in the power plant on the other side.
I first saw Hoover Dam in 2003, while taking a break from the World of Concrete, a trade show I was covering in Las Vegas. I arrived at the visitors’ center in time to take one of the day’s last tours. From the guide I learned that the dam is more than 700 feet tall, more than 1,200 feet wide at the top, and roughly 660 feet thick at the base, and that it’s made almost entirely of concrete—approximately 3.4 million cubic yards of it, or roughly 7 million tons, with an additional million cubic yards in appurtenant structures. After my tour had ended, I walked onto the top, toward Arizona, and leaned over the belly-high parapet on the downstream side. From there, the face of the dam plunges down and away, and it must engender dark yearnings in the minds of certain kinds of skateboarders. Despite everything I had heard and seen and read about the dam until that moment, it was only as I stood on its rim and gazed down toward the river far below that I gained a full, vertiginous sense of the extraordinary pile of concrete at my feet—the “callous, cruel lump,” in the words of a visitor in the 1930s. I felt the same sense of mild unease I felt once as I floated on my back in the deepest part of a deep lake and imagined the unsettling volume beneath me.
Three years later, I visited Hoover Dam again, with my family on the first day of our post-graduation western trip. We drove our rented RV right over the dam and parked in a lot on the Arizona side. (The two-lane road on the dam was closed to civilian vehicle traffic in 2010; you now cross the canyon on a similarly breathtaking bypass bridge, a little way downstream.) I felt the same sense of excitement I had during my first visit, and I urged my wife and children not only to gaze over the side but also to use the public restrooms built into the parapet—perhaps the most beautiful dam-based public restrooms in the world, with their polished brass doors and Art Deco fittings and beautifully designed and executed terrazzo floors. When we reached the visitors’ center, I pointed out the two thirty-foot-tall winged bronze statues next to the flagpole, and explained that their black diorite pedestals had been assembled by lowering their components onto blocks of ice, so that, as the ice melted, the installers could easily make micro-adjustments in their position without scratching their highly polished surfaces. Inside the visitors’ center, my son took a photograph of me standing slack-jawed in front of a diorama depicting the operation of the cableway that was used to place the concrete during the construction of the dam, and another of me reading an information sign that asked “Why Was Hoover Dam Built?” (Answer: “The Colorado River is both friend and foe. It has the power to sustain life and ruin lives, to create opportunity and destroy prosperity.”) I learned later that, while I was absorbed in these wonders, my wife was whispering to our daughter, “Don’t worry—it won’t all be like this.”
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CONSTRUCTION OF HOOVER DAM was anticipated in the negotiations that led to the Colorado River Compact. California, in particular, needed a big lower-basin reservoir to decrease the river’s downstream silt load and to reduce the danger of catastrophic flooding in the Imperial Valley. In 1928, Congress passed the Boulder Canyon Project Act—a major piece of water legislation, and the most expensive appropriation bill in U.S. history to that point—which authorized the construction of a dam that would be twice as tall as any previously built. The project was too ambitious to be managed by a single contractor. The winning bid was submitted by a consortium called Six Companies, which later also built Parker Dam and the Colorado River Aqueduct (and which actually included seven companies, two of which entered the project as partners). Before the dam was authorized, engineers from the Bureau of Reclamation had determined that a site which seemed promising originally, in Boulder Canyon, was unsuitable; Black Canyon, a few miles downstream, was substituted, although the name of the project wasn’t changed. The dam was known both as Boulder Dam and as Hoover Dam virtually from the beginning; Congress made the current name official in 1947.
The first major phase of the project was at least as daunting as the building of the dam itself: the boring of four enormous diversion tunnels through the canyon walls, two on each side of the Colorado, so that the entire river could be piped around the construction site until the dam was finished. The rough borings were fifty-six feet in diameter and averaged about four thousand feet long. To create them, as many as thirty workers at a time stood or crouched on truck-mounted carriages called “jumbos,” each of which had four scaffold-like tiers, and operated rail-mounted hydraulic drills that looked like anti-aircraft guns. In all the old photographs I’ve seen, nobody is wearing ear or eye protection, even though rock chips flew everywhere and the noise was so loud and so continuous that workers had to communicate with hand signals. Ten dedicated blacksmith shops used oil-fired furnaces and enormous sharpening machines manufactured by Ingersoll Rand to recondition the drill bits, of which there were thousands. (No ear or eye protection in the blacksmith shops, either.) Once a section had been completed, the jumbo backed up, miners packed the drilled holes with dynamite and gunpowder primers, and the charges were set off. Then muckers removed the shot rock, with assistance from a power shovel and a line of waiting trucks, and the routine began again. Crews worked around the clock in eight-hour shifts, almost always racing against each other, and by the time they had perfected their technique they were able to advance at an average rate of a foot or two an hour. The completed rough borings were lined, all around, with a three-foot layer of concrete—100,000 cubic yards per tunnel—yielding a finished interior diameter of fifty feet.
Jobs in the tunnels employed as many as fifteen hundred men at a time. They were extraordinarily unpleasant and dangerous, and not only because of the noise. Even by the standards of paleo-capitalism, Six Companies’ commitment to human decency was low. There were just two days off a year, Christmas and the Fourth of July; workers could be fired on a whim; the temperature in the tunnel was sometimes as high as 140 degrees; and contractors padded their profits by cheating employees through innumerable instances of what Edmund Wilson—who visited the site in 1931, on assignment for The New Republic—described as “systematic skimping, petty swindling, and frank indifference,” including overcharging for food and lodging. If anything resembling modern labor laws had been in effect, Six Companies could have been prosecuted as a criminal enterprise.
