The story
The Colorado River is perhaps the most important river in the Southwest.
40 million people depend on it for drinking water, recreation, and agricultural irrigation. (And hey, let’s not forget the more than 150 at-risk non-human species who depend on it, too.)
Ash Sanders was raised in Utah, right outside the Colorado River Basin. Now she lives in Brooklyn, but often dreams of moving back to the dry, red rock desert.
Unfortunately, the prospects for the West’s future are grim. Thanks to climate change and overuse, water is getting harder to count on.
The Colorado River — one of the biggest, most storied, and beautiful rivers in the area — is drying up. We are in a water crisis, experts warn — and it's urgent. Unless we make drastic cuts to consumption and our way of life, we could face a future where we turn on the tap and nothing comes out.
Image: NPS
Water concerns in the West are nothing new.
John Wesley Powell, the first white man to explore the Green and Colorado Rivers in 1869, forged into what he called “The Great Unknown.” After battling man-eating rapids, hunger, and desperation, he emerged with an adventure story, and later, a warning: there wasn’t enough water for mass settlement of the West. The rivers he’d seen could not support unmitigated growth. Gripped by Manifest Destiny, settlers ignored him.
The West was built on a mirage—on a blank check promising endless water.
Now the check is coming due.
Dawn Kish
This is all part of why Ash is getting on the river for her own very hair-brained, very American adventure.
In the spirit of John Wesley Powell, she and her good pal and producer, Abigail Keel, are rafting 1,500 miles down the Green and Colorado river, from a small town in Wyoming where Powell started his expedition all the way to Mexico, where the river turns into a trickle and dies miles before where it used to flow into the Gulf of California. Like Powell, Ash and Abigail have some questions they think only the river can answer. Does this place Ash loves and wants to return to have a future? Is there enough water here to live on — or not?
When they first started reporting, Ash and Abigail thought they knew the answer: we were screwed. But now they are not so sure.
Because more than anything, the river is surprising them. The reservoir Lake Powell is drying up — but the canyon that is reemerging is making scientists rethink how quickly a damaged ecosystem can recover. Indigenous people have been denied water rights since White people started handing them out. But, led in part by Daryl Vigil, a Jicarilla Apache water manager, tribes are demanding a voice in negotiations and pushing to establish a native framework for a relationship to the river. Many say the West has too many people for the water available. But residents in a ruined Southern California town on the banks of a lake created by Colorado flooding are re-imagining what it means to stay in hard places — and how to make a home in the aftermath of tragedy.
Photo by Dawn Kish
by Lucas Waldron
Reporting on what they thought was a dying river, Ash and Abigail are learning that often, crisis is not the end of the story: It can also be the beginning.
They’re exploring a river with a new story to tell, a story that might turn Powell around in his grave. And they’re telling it from the river itself and the people who depend on it — from environmental guides and Indigenous leaders who want a free-flowing river, to the hay farmers who use the majority of the water, to population activists rethinking Western settlement. We’ll see what opportunities can be eked out of a crisis. And maybe Ash will figure out if the future of the West is a future she fits into.