At the Source : THE COLORADO RIVER’S ORIGINS IN THE WYOMING MOUNTAINS TELL A TALE OF THE WEST’S TROUBLED HISTORY WITH WATER

From time to time during the past two decades, I have returned to the headwaters of the Colorado River in the Wind River Range of western Wyoming for the pure, pristine joy of it. I can think of no better place for a great river system to begin its 1,700-mile descent toward the sea.

I have hiked the trail from Green River Lakes five times, and my walk this June was similar to my first pilgrimage in 1973. The late-season snow blocked my progress beyond the upper lake, and I was unable to make it to the first trickle of glacier water just below Knapsack Col at the 12,000-foot level.

But I knew what I was missing, having made it to Knapsack Col three times before. I have also filled in the gaps between the start and the end of the river, so that in my mind the river, like a life, is a continuum. The Colorado’s waters sustain much of the West. By the end of its journey, the river has been sucked dry by the people, industries, crops and animals who need it. What that portends--destroying the very essence of life that the region depends upon--has never made sense to me.

My journey from the headwaters to the delta this year was a farewell to the river. A large portion of my writing life had been devoted to the Colorado and the lands surrounding it, and it was time to move on. I took one last look at the river as a whole and said my goodbys.

I had started my sojourn along the lower half of the river in April. June found me in the high country on the cusp of a gorgeous late spring turning to summer after a winter of ample precipitation. The irrigated pasture lands were verdant swatches of green set against sparkling mountains. The sound of water was everywhere. Creeks, streams and rivers strained at their banks in their wild, futile dashes to the many reservoirs. Some inhabitants were reminded of the disastrous flood year of 1983, when Glen Canyon Dam was almost lost; but the waters crested harmlessly and then receded.

My stopping places, actually more like stations of the cross, were along the high country tributaries of the Colorado--the Green, Yampa, Roaring Fork and San Juan rivers--that formed a gentle arc from north to south, paralleling the Continental Divide. To travel the upper half of the river was to experience the use of land surrounding the tributaries, rather than the main stem of the Colorado itself. The rivers coalesced in Lake Powell behind Glen Canyon Dam and then formed a single entity that flowed toward the Gulf of California.

Two drastic changes from my journeys down the river in the ‘70s struck me. For many years, following mining and cattle booms, the interior West lay dormant. Then in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, first hippies and then middle-class urban refugees on a back-to-nature kick discovered its quaint towns, cheap housing and entrepreneurial opportunities. This first wave of modern-day migrants, known collectively as “the rural renaissance,” generally did not have much money.

What began in the mid-’80s and continues now is the migration from both coasts (California is mentioned most frequently) of moneyed urban refugees escaping changing demographics, earthquakes and the violence of the cities. This swiftly escalating population curve represents the gentrification of the West. Whereas work was a necessity before, play is now the dominant activity, as illustrated by the skis, bicycles, backpacks and kayaks strapped atop the ubiquitous sports utility vehicles. Even the sport of patronizing expensive shops, once restricted to such places as Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills and 5th Avenue in New York, has also invaded the mountains. The disparity of wealth is much more noticeable.

Once again the West has sold itself to outsiders, as it did during the energy boom that went bust during the past decade. Inevitably, what booms eventually goes bust in this arid land. It is a cycle that can be traced back to the ruins of the highly developed Anasazi Indian culture in the San Juan River Basin that briefly flourished 1,000 years ago.

In a way, the gentrification of the West was predictable. What I could never have foreseen--the second drastic change--was the fact that the major dams in the upper basin would be operated chiefly for the benefit of four obscure species of native fish. History had been reversed, and the dams were now manipulated to mimic the pre-dam flow of the river, within certain limits.

Water storage, electrical generation and flood control had been the sine qua non for these extensive public works projects. They were certainly not built to benefit such fish as the Colorado squawfish, the razorback sucker, the bonytail chub and the humpback chub, which were considered trash fish by many people prior to the environmental movement of the early ‘70s.

Not so many years ago--beginning at 8 a.m. on Sept. 4, 1962, to be exact--personnel from the same state and federal agencies that are now charged with protecting these endangered species dumped 21,000 gallons of rotenone, a fish poison, into 430 miles of the Green River to purge the river of these fish, so that sport fish, such as the rainbow trout, would flourish when planted in the river.

The operation lasted three days and was conducted with military precision. More than 100 people, numerous vehicles and boats, a helicopter and a vast amount of preparation and logistical support were marshaled to kill the native fish. It was a disaster. The poison spread farther downstream than planned and killed fish within Dinosaur National Monument, a unit of the national park system that straddles the Utah-Colorado border. The incident became notorious and was partially responsible for passage of the Endangered Species Act of 1973. That act, when eventually implemented, led to the change in the regimen of the river’s flows.

In addition to the poisoning, dams on the Colorado River system had greatly reduced the range and migration routes of native fish. The act stated that dams couldn’t jeopardize the existence of endangered species or their habitats. The solution has been to replicate, as closely as possible, pre-dam flows of the river. The amount of water, its rate of release and temperature--along with recreational, irrigation and electrical generation needs--are now part of the equation that determines releases. Whether it continues this way remains to be seen. While the U.S. Supreme Court issued a favorable opinion on the law in June, its eventual fate--and thus the fate of the endangered fish--hinges on congressional attempts to amend the act.

The recovery effort in the upper Colorado River Basin is the largest and most comprehensive project of its kind in the nation. There is some evidence that the squawfish--known as the white or Colorado salmon to early settlers who said they weighed as much as 80 pounds--are making a comeback. The evidence is less definitive on the other three species.

Environmentalists, river runners and some fishermen generally favored the recovery effort. Those against it included ranchers whose riverside fields have been flooded to provide fish habitat, ratepayers whose electrical bills were higher because of the loss of local power generation, and Native Americans, who saw the native fish as a threat to their water rights. Bureau of Reclamation officials, who were responsible for moving the water, tended to stay neutral.

But on the day I made my way up the trail beside the Green River Lakes in Wyoming, these issues lay ahead of me. What was more immediate was the play of light on Squaretop Mountain, which dominates the approach to the headwaters, and the pronghorn antelope, beaver and moose along the way. There were also signs of bear --black bears I supposed, although I had heard that there were a few grizzlies about.

I said hi to a few hikers but got no reply. Cindy Stein, a Forest Service wilderness manager, said, “There is a subtle change in the people. They seem more closed off, more fearful on the trail.” She said wilderness use was back to the levels of the mid ‘70s after dropping for a number of years. With more people and their accompanying food and trash, more bears were in the Bridger Wilderness.

The Upper Green River Valley was a land developer’s dream: sinuous river, cheap sagebrush-dotted land, groves of aspen trees and mountain vistas galore. Those who couldn’t afford similar sites around Jackson Hole to the northwest or who wanted to avoid the crowds had settled or moved their real estate operations to the valley. The locals joked that the billionaires in Jackson Hole were displacing the millionaires who moved to the banks of the Green River.

Real estate signs that promised a piece of the old West to those who could afford it proliferated: Marsh Creek Properties, Black Butte Ranches, Buffalo Head Springs Estates II. Thirty-five to 40-acre lots sold for between $150,000 and $200,000. Prices for raw land had doubled within a few months and taxes were raised accordingly. Cowboys driving cattle to the summer range along the Green River trail snaked their way past modernistic two-story log cabins plopped down like cow pies upon the treeless high plain.

Jim Hinderliter was having his problems with the “weekend warriors,” as he called them. Hinderliter was the ditch-tender and the sole employee of the Canyon Ditch Company. He was responsible for maintaining the 13-mile ditch through which water has been flowing since 1952. The new residents did not know about the niceties of irrigating, and they were driving Hinderliter crazy. The weekenders left their head gates open when they departed on Sundays; the water flowed out of the ditch, into their small fields, and was wasted. More serious ranchers with larger spreads that were truly dependent on the water were deprived of it.

The Canyon Ditch was the first of many diversions on the Colorado River system. Water was also diverted to Denver, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego and the Imperial and Mexicali valleys. The Colorado River is the sole or supplemental source of most of the irrigation, industrial and municipal water in Southern California. The ditch’s counterpart near the end of the Colorado was the All-American Canal, the straw through which the Imperial Irrigation District--the single-largest consumer of Colorado River water--drew its share. The ditch company operated on a budget of $20,000 a year, while the irrigation district had 1,200 employees and an annual budget of $260 million.

The bearded Hinderliter, a former pipeline welder who moved to the Pinedale region 10 years ago, was thinking of moving again. He said, “I want to get away from the people. About 12 houses will be built around me in the next year or two. They don’t know what winter is like around here.”

I first entered Pinedale during a raging snowstorm in the early ‘70s. I was researching a story for the Los Angeles Times on the Atomic Energy Commission’s plan to set off five underground nuclear explosions to tap natural gas supplies. That plan, which seems preposterous now, was defeated by a coalition of ranchers and the first wave of new residents worried about the effects of radiation and their water supplies. In the meantime, the energy crisis has come and gone. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Craig.

Craig sits on the banks of the Yampa River in northwestern Colorado. In the region surrounding it--which takes in parts of Utah, Wyoming and Colorado--the ‘70s and early ‘80s were a time of frenzy and displacement whose equivalent today can be found in such golden recreational ghettos as Steamboat Springs, Vail, Aspen, Telluride, Durango and Moab.

The objects and locations of the hunt for energy differed from than the present search for recreation. Oil, natural gas, coal, uranium, oil shale and tar sands were avidly sought. Tens of thousands of acres were staked with mining claims, millions upon millions of dollars were spent on mining leases and thousands of energy workers poured into the region and set up camp in motels, mobile homes and tents. Four-wheel-drive vehicles crawled over the land and helicopters crisscrossed the terrain. Seismic explosions followed in their wakes.

Towns became instant cities with all the attendant problems. Schools, streets, bars, jails, hospitals and mental health clinics were crowded to overflowing. The incessant, pounding beat of traffic was the boom-town symptom that I recall most vividly. Then the energy crisis became an energy glut, for reasons that I still don’t understand. What had materialized so quickly was soon no more.

Craig was ready to shuck its cowboy image in the late ‘70s when federal energy planners foresaw 14 coal mines and three power plants by 1990. Little of that development has occurred. Now the promotional slogan is “Grand Olde West,” and the region is struggling to reach the population levels of 15 years ago, when 13,000 people inhabited the county.

This time the growth is quieter. Craig is a bedroom community to Steamboat Springs, a winter ski and summer recreational resort farther up the Yampa River. Workers who cannot afford the cost of housing in Steamboat Springs commute the 40 miles from Craig, where a hint of the past remains. A Chamber of Commerce survey determined that what people liked most about Craig was the friendliness; what they liked least was the “fights, smoke and drunkenness” in the local bars.

Aspen, on the Roaring Fork River which feeds into the Colorado, never went through an energy boom; it briefly blossomed as a silver mining town in the late 19th Century, dozed, and then came to life as a ski town in the ‘60s when I visited it as the ski editor of The Times. I returned periodically on various errands. Aspen was affordable then. This time I camped in a nearby Forest Service campground and revisited old haunts.

I drove farther up the Roaring Fork and walked through the log-cabin ruins of Independence, a booming mining town in the 1880s. Returning along the river that was truly roaring with melted snow, I drove past the mega-homes in Aspen that were also known as monster houses because some contained 55,000 square feet of interior space. A special ordinance governs their architectural approval.

On my way out, I stopped at Snowmass, the prototype of western ski areas driven primarily by real estate considerations. It was a three-ring circus this Sunday: vibrantly colored hot air balloons floated over the golf course, ancient warplanes flew in formation above, private jets wended their way to and from the airport. There was cool jazz in the Snowmass Village Mall, gospel singing on Fanny Hill and a jazz festival in billowing white tents. Shorts, backpacks and Evian water were de rigueur at the mall. I shared a brunch table with two women who casually rated the wealth factor of passing men on a scale of 1 to 10. I asked them how they rated me. They laughed politely.

Some daily commuters to the Roaring Fork valley have moved one mountain pass over to Paonia, and what that signified bothered Ed Marston, publisher of High Country News. The biweekly newspaper functions as an environmental and social conscience for the interior West. Marston and his family fled New York with the first wave of migrants, and he decried the second influx. The difference, he said, was that the first was poorer and had to adapt. The second is richer and has imposed itself upon the land and the culture. “I hate it,” said Marston. “I came here to escape from America, but America has come here. The jig is up.”

I had nearly joined Marston in that first wave. Twenty-two years ago, I fell in love with Telluride when the main street was still unpaved. I went looking for every Southern Californian’s mountain dream: an aspen-dotted lot with a stream running through it. The first piece of property was in a noticeable flood plain. The second had subdivision pennants snapping in the breeze the day I went back to take another look.

The third was it, I thought, until I researched further and discovered that an oil company owned geothermal rights under the lot and the Bureau of Reclamation had a right of way for a canal across the 20 acres. I had camped on the property, coveted it and was bitterly disappointed. (I eventually bought in Northern California, where land-use controls were stricter.)

I revisited that onetime fantasy at the 9,000-foot level of Dallas Divide last June. The vista of the San Juan Range was as dramatic as ever. This was John Wayne country, near where “True Grit” had been filmed and the actor had owned property. One sign stated that the 280 acres, which included the portion that had originally attracted me, was for sale. Another declared that the county road was maintained in the summer only. While this romantic fool was saved by blind luck, I wonder how many others suffered winter’s cruel sting before giving up on the high country.

Along with the Wind River Range at the start of the river and the delta at its end, Chaco Canyon--bisected by a tributary of the San Juan River in New Mexico--is a powerful place to which I have returned from time to time. Nowhere else in this country is the presence of an ancient and sophisticated culture so tangible as it is in Chaco Canyon. I find the ruins quite humbling. What can be seen and touched puts our brief existence in the Southwest in perspective.

For about 11,000 years, culture after culture washed across the San Juan River Basin. The Clovis were the first. The Anasazi arrived between 400 and 500. At the height of their occupation in the mid-11th Century, about 5,500 people lived in Chaco, located at the center of the Anasazi civilization that spread throughout the region.

A sense of purpose and political will--similar to what has built the West--was needed to construct the great pueblos and extensive road system, haul the heavy timbers from far away without the benefit of pack animals or the wheel, and construct the sophisticated irrigation systems to water the crops to feed that many people.

On the north side of the canyon, researchers have discovered evidence of five reservoirs. (One masonry dam impounded 325,000 gallons of water.) There were canals, ditches and head gates that guided the water to small plots. When rainfall was sudden and intense, as it often is in this region, large numbers of laborers were summoned to quickly channel and divert the water. That called for management systems similar to those employed by a modern irrigation district.

And then a strange thing happened; the Anasazi began abandoning Chaco in the first half of the 12th Century. Various reasons are given, all focusing on the depletion or absence of natural resources. The timber and soil were exhausted, there was erosion from deforestation, the pattern of precipitation changed and finally a prolonged drought struck. Not only the people living in Chaco Canyon fled, but all the Anasazi were gone from the San Juan Basin by 1300, meaning that there was an exodus of approximately 30,000 people. Two hundred years later, the ancestors of the modern Navajo wandered into the basin, which now contains part of the Navajo Indian Reservation.

The Chaco story is told in the visitor center at the national historical park, in campfire talks by Park Service rangers, and at the ruins, best visited in the early morning and evening hours. Away from the heat of midday and in the quiet, there is a sense of time. A clap of thunder and lightning descend from a passing storm, and the brief rain releases the pungent smell of sagebrush. There is a break in the clouds, and a ruin is briefly illuminated.

One evening, I wandered through Pueblo Bonito, once a five-story structure with more than 650 rooms that occupied three acres. A Southern California family of four, whose moves were dictated by the needs of videotaping, peered into the bottom of a smooth-walled kiva. A huddled rabbit was trapped inside. There was a sign stating that the Getty Conservation Institute was helping to preserve the ruins; white plastic pipe was part of the apparatus. Archeology is on the decline and preservation is ascendant in the park. Some ruins have been reburied so that the walls do not stand unsupported.

The dirt roads into the remote canyon have kept the Chaco experience quieter and less crowded than the more accessible Mesa Verde. But the roads are slowly being improved by the Indians, who are moving into the surrounding country in greater numbers. “That paving is a Navajo train coming down the track. We may not be able to stop it,” said C. T. Wilson, the park superintendent.

The Navajo divert more water from the Colorado than any other Indian tribe. Most of it goes to the huge Navajo Indian Irrigation Project, where the same crops the Anasazi raised are grown under the “Navajo Pride” label just north of Chaco Canyon. With the aid of modern irrigation techniques, the Indians also raise such exotic crops as alfalfa and chipping potatoes for potato chip companies.

When I traveled through the Four Corners region in the late ‘70s, the irrigation project was suffering from poor management, inexperienced employees and thefts. Now it is a success story. With 64,000 irrigated acres, 300 full-time and 1,500 seasonal employees and annual sales of more than $32 million, the project is larger than most corporate farms.

The Navajo, like other water users, guard their rights zealously and have no love for endangered species, as defined by Congress and applied by federal agencies to rare forms of wildlife. In fact, the Navajo refused to sign the 1992 recovery agreement for the San Juan River. They want their share of Colorado River water, as do all the other competing interests. Unfortunately, there is not enough to go around for all.

History tells us what the fate is of civilizations that deplete the very resources they depend upon most, and that history is clearly engraved in the parched sands of the Colorado River Delta and the crumbling walls of Chaco Canyon. I have made my last pilgrimage to those two endings--the finality of a river and a civilization. I hope others will follow in my tracks.

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(map):

Canyon Ditch: The first of many diversions along the river system that the channels water to areas across the West.

Dinosaur national Monument:Poison from an effort to kill of native fish reached here after a misguided 1962 operation.

Craig: A boom town during the ‘70s rush for new energy sources, its population crashed with the energy glut of the ‘80s.

Navajo Indian Reservation: The Navajo Indian Irrigation Project successfully grows crops on 64,000 irrigated acres.