- [David] The Colorado River provides the lifeblood of the Southwestern United States.

It's a small river but so vital to the region that without it, most of the 40 million residents would not or could not be here.

The most contested part is between Hoover Dam, which has created the Lake Mead, and the Mexican border.

Along that stretch, the river has become quite simply a plumbing system.

- [Announcer] Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnese Haury.

(soft dramatic music) Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman, was also provided by the Guilford Fund.

(soft dramatic music) (samba music) (people chattering) (birds chirping) - Hoover Dam for more than 80 years, has been a symbol of human attempts to control a river.

It was completed in 1936 and at the time was one of the world's great structures.

The intent for the dam was to control floods, provide for irrigation, division of water among users, and generate electricity.

The bathtub ring that we see here, is also a symbol of the overuse of the water of the Colorado River.

If the bathtub ring goes much lower, it will automatically generate a new series of emergency measures in both the lower basin and the upper basin.

The two parts of the river are divided at Lees Ferry near the entrance to the Grand Canyon.

Joining me in Las Vegas, about 20 miles from Hoover Dam, for a trip through the lower basin is my friend and river defender, Tillie Walton.

- And anywhere in the world.

They recycle more water per person here than anywhere else in the United States.

- [David] But in terms of the overall river water, it's an insignificant amount, but they can't get any more.

There is no agriculture, and they have to use every ounce of that water efficiently.

- If we weren't in the middle of the strip, we would be in the middle of a dry barren desert.

- Yeah, four inches of rain a year.

- I actually think that Las Vegas is, in some senses of the word, the most environmentally sound place in terms of their water efficiency and reuse.

- Southern Nevadans have significantly reduced their water use throughout the past decade in a half, which has really resulted in our community using 25% less Colorado River water while our community grew by 46%.

So we are supplying more people in Southern Nevada with less water today.

Southern Nevada maintains a 50-year water resource plan.

So for the next half century, we've got a very good idea of what our water demands are gonna be for this community and where those water resources are gonna come from in order to meet those demands.

We've all experienced the levels in Lake Mead declining over the past 10, 20 years.

That water is shared amongst the states of Arizona and California, as well as the country of Mexico.

Now when you look at Las Vegas and you look at the fountain of the Bellagio Hotel or the Mirage Hotel, there is this sort of perception that our community is glutinous or wasteful within its water use but nothing could be further from the truth.

Our community has a strong conservation ethic.

And with 2.2 million people, we have collectively worked to significantly reduce our consumption of Colorado River water, and we've done that through myriad programs.

We pay $3 a square foot to remove grass and replace that with water-smart landscaping.

We have water waste investigators patrolling our neighborhoods ensuring people are complying with the watering schedule.

And yes, we do have a watering schedule that does limit when and how people can irrigate their landscapes.

Those key projects, along with lots of other conservation aspects, have really helped to reduce our community's water use.

Anybody who drinks a glass of water in Las Vegas, you're going to really be drinking water that has started in the Colorado Rockies as snowfall, that has run off, melted, and made its way into the river system, traveled down the Colorado River into Lake Powell, where it probably sat for a little while before it was released through Glen Canyon Dam after producing a little bit of electricity, and continued on down through the historic Grand Canyon before arriving in Lake Mead.

And that water that is in Lake Mead that continues on down to Arizona and California, also is generating electricity and is providing a beneficial use to those downstream water users, whether they're urban or agricultural.

And so it is very important that we all look within our own economies and our own communities and utilize water to its highest and best value that we can for those specific things.

- [David] Hard to believe this is one of 50 pumping stations in the metropolitan area.

- This is the lake level and how they're actually, having to account for the lake dropping so much to account for all this incredible infrastructure.

- [David] Oh here, you can see also where they're tunneled in and how it's delivered to the metropolitan area.

- So this is the new intake down as low as possible.

- And that tunnel, a three-mile long tunnel in here.

- Yeah and that's why they have to have all this infrastructure and power because they have to take it from the bottom and pump it all the way up and over, and then to all of these places.

(guitar music) - This is an actual piece of the strengthened concrete tunnel, that they put on the bottom of Lake Mead to bring the water here.

- This goes to show you the lengths that are behind the scenes for bringing water to people.

It's ironic that for so long it's almost like the dam building era is over and now we have a pipe building era in order to bring water to all of these cities in the middle of the desert.

- [David] The first of three major dams on the river on the way to Yuma is Davis Dam, about 80 miles South of Hoover Dam.

- This river serves seven states and two countries.

Davis Dam helps regulate the flow to Mexico because Mexico depends on this water as well.

We're sharing this river here, which has become somewhat of a plumbing system with just a series of 15 dams built to control and regulate the water and power moving on down the river.

I was introduced to rivers when I was 19, and fell in love with them and started guiding.

Rivers are the lifeblood of our planet and they're basically like the veins and arteries of the earth.

And so it's providing life for all of us.

I put a tourniquet on my arm, it's gonna block the flow, just like we've done for rivers with dams here, it's blocking the flow and there is so many more solutions these days.

There is solar electricity, there is hydro electric turbines that we can put that work with the flow of the river instead of requiring a dam.

Creating wetlands so to help control floods, it's green infrastructure instead of steel infrastructure.

(guitar music) - As we follow the river southward from Parker, Arizona we can't help but know that on the Arizona side of the river is a seemingly endless strip of helter-skelter development.

On the West side, nearly virgin desert.

The reason, Colorado River Indian Reservation lies on the West bank.

Right next to the highway on the shores of Lake Havasu, is the Mark Wilmer Pumping Station where the Central Arizona project pumps water, from the Colorado river and delivers it to Southern Arizona.

It must raise that water over 2,500 feet.

It has become the lifeblood of Phoenix in Tucson.

(guitar music) Parker Dam is about 70 miles downstream from Davis Dam.

It was built in the 30s, so that Los Angeles could grow very, very quickly.

The dam itself is backed up into the Lake Havasu which has one of the most important wildlife refuges in all of the Colorado River basin.

It's one of the last remaining native habitats of cottonwoods and willow, which are prime habitat for many many birds and ultimately for mammals as well.

(guitar music) The real action in the Colorado River, now lies near its Southern end around Yuma Arizona.

It's a long drive.

(guitar music) The All-American Canal is the largest extractor of water in the entire Colorado River system.

It is the largest irrigation canal in the world.

It is 80 miles long taking water from the Colorado River West into the Imperial Valley which is below sea level.

It carries enough water to irrigate up to 650,000 acres of land.

- [Steve] This is a field of romaine.

What we're looking for is the finished spacing at 12 inches here.

If this thing does it through optics, and computing and spraying a fertilizer on there a cut of a caustic fertilizer on that kills the plants we don't want.

When we're through, we turn the sprinkler pipes on and wash the fertilizer in to feed the ones that are remaining.

- [David] So it kills one and nurtures the other?

- That's correct.

In few years ago, there would be 40 people out here working right now.

There is one man running a piece of equipment here that's taking their place.

With today's political climate and all the things that are going on in terms of immigration and documentation of workers and politics, we have to keep our costs down so that we can be competitive with the rest of the world.

Between the water that comes here, the soil that was deposited by that water over millions of years, the weather that we have here it's 115 to 120 degrees here in the summertime.

But for winter production, it is absolutely perfect.

We now we've got over 30 different vegetable crops that we grow and that includes parsley and cilantro, and kale and bok choy, napa, beets, fennel, all the baby lettuces, spinach, all those things.

So we're very diversified.

These fields are all laser leveled.

There is not one inch of elevation difference when that water starts it just screams across the field.

So those are the things we do to try to get the water across the field as quickly as possible.

And we're paying for that water so we need it to go as far as we can.

The water rights that we have in this area, are some of the oldest on the Colorado River.

When the cutbacks do come, we'll be some of the last to get cut.

First and last out is basically, how the process works.

Now it could change it's all political, I can't see 8 million people in Phoenix, going thirsty while I've got plenty of water from mine I can't see that happening, so we do have concerns.

But we're doing everything that we can to stretch this water as far as we can.

And we produce over 90% of the leafy green vegetables that are produced in the United States, from mid November to mid April.

We also have drip irrigation that's spreading the water out even further too.

Terms of the big picture, that all starts up at Imperial Dam.

Imperial Dam is the last dam in the Colorado River system.

But water can be delivered to each one of these fields.

You see that there is a gate right there, it comes at elevation from that dam, gravity flow to each one of these blocks.

It really is an engineering marvel and that was pulled off back in the 30s and 40s.

- [David] Yeah.

- Now the Bureau of Reclamation Engineers I've had some of the best engineers in the country at that time.

Water that goes through the soil has to have a place to go.

And that water goes back to that drain and out, and that goes back to the Colorado River.

It takes out and return.

(water sprinkling) - The folks down here in Yuma, are using some of the highest technology that there is, in order to conserve water.

And I actually think that, we need to have water in the river.

We need to have feed people and economic development.

So in order to balance all of those uses and needs, you have to have the top line innovation.

- Yuma was part of the wild West frontier as was Arizona.

We were not very well populated, so we didn't have a very good transportation system by roads.

So the waterways became the major transportation system into the Arizona frontier.

(boat engine roaring) So let me show you this wheel right here.

This is what we call- - Oh my God.

- Our Steamboat Room and this is the wheel from the pilot- - [David] Actual wheel oh my.. - Now over here we've got a few historic photos.

In this image you can really get an idea of how wide the river used to be.

It was a much speedier system, than attempting to go over land.

And out here in the West of course we have the mountains, we have the sand dunes just West of us, trying to go by wagon was a really difficult and long arduous prospect and journey.

Primarily we had large steamboats coming from the coast of California around Baja, up to the mouth of the Colorado where the supplies and people would be transferred onto the smaller river steamboats.

And then they would come up the river, and they reportedly would go all the way to the head of navigation, which was just below the Grand Canyon.

You can really see how circuitous the river used to be.

- That is a definition of a meander.

- Exactly right.

Today it's much straighter.

By 1909, the first dam had been built on the river that's Laguna Dam.

It's about 10 miles up river from us.

And the Laguna Dam closed that North South transportation highway.

1916 was the last major flood before Hoover Dam was constructed in the 1930s which pretty much ended the major flooding on the river.

But in 1916, the volume of the river swelled to such a large degree, that it destroyed much of the small town of Yuma.

This is the original bank line of the historic Colorado River.

And by comparison look at how far back the Colorado River is today.

(suspenseful music) - Yuma has a long history, many, many centuries of being an important place on the Colorado River.

It's where the Gila River meets the Colorado.

It's where the Colorado begins to enter into the delta and into the Gulf of California.

And there were many, many, many native Americans living and flourishing in this area long before Europeans arrived.

(suspenseful music) - We are on the Fort Human Indian Reservation, the Arizona portion of the reservation.

I'm helping to create and reestablish a connection, physical, culturally, spiritually back to the Colorado River.

Something that our ancestors I believe wanted for us, for recreational, spiritual, cultural purposes.

- To simulate the flooding, the tribe has portable pumps that they stick into a backwater here from the river, pump the water out into the ditches that distribute the water and maintain those wetlands in the way the river would have, a hundred years ago.

(water flowing) 20 years ago, this is a scene we would have found out here, trash everywhere it was a local dump.

A homeless people camped here there everywhere, and a full of invasive species like this rag mighty, just cane, salt cedar, that was the challenge that the people who wanted to restore the habitat had to face plus how to to get everybody working together on it.

- We did it with a will of a community, a tribe, city, heritage area, and a lot of people who wanted to get together to make something happen.

And we took lessons learned, and we took what we knew would work and experimented the difference.

- [David] This is not something you would have seen 20 years ago.

- That's right, you wouldn't have even seen it.

And other restoration projects and it's something that we really pioneered on this project is experimenting with these native grasses that could come in.

25 years ago this was nothing but trash dumps, hobo camps, meth labs, and exotic species.

And now what you're looking at today is a completely restored ecology, which the community cherishes once again and it's really valuable for wildlife.

And Yuma is the only town that I know on the Colorado that has 500 acres of restored ecology, 10 miles of trail, and if we started right here, we'll fly over the Creton Sunrise Park, and we would fly over a restored marsh, and up through about 40 acres of restored cottonwood willow gallery forest.

And then we would head upstream, and take a right go across the Colorado River and then we would fly down another mile and a half of restored channel, which used to be the Gila River.

And we would fly over Mesquite Bosques wetlands and other park trails.

And we come back here and basically what we would be seeing, is a glimpse of what the native Colorado River ecosystem used to be.

There is a really big challenge to keep water flowing past Yuma, because three miles from here it doesn't flow anymore.

And then the other challenge is just controlling the exotic species, and then wildfire.

Before this was restored to its native ecology, say we would do a bird survey and we would get 10 species of birds.

And 10 species of butterflies.

Well now that it's restored, with the wetland riparian aquatic, we get four times the density and diversity in that native habitat.

So that is the reason why, we're trying to restore this to the native ecology.

(soft instrumental music) (birds chirping) - This is Morales Dam on the other side of the river what is left of it here is Mexico.

This is really the end point of the hydraulic system.

This is where the Colorado meets its fate at the international border.

- Well I got my, model level measurement device here.

- Water level measure?

- Yeah.

This is electric water level measuring sampler.

Well this is the major diversion point, for our required allocation of water to Mexico.

This is Morales Dam, was built in the early 1950s.

So the majority of the water that Mexico is legally receiving from the United States through the Colorado River System, diverts here.

It's about 1.35 million acre feet per year.

- [David] A treaty between the United States and Mexico required that the United States deliver to Mexico from Colorado River water, water that did not have too much salt to harm crops.

- Whatever water quality arrives at Imperial Dam, the water delivered here at Morales Dam downstream, cannot exceed more than 115 milligrams per liter, above that of Imperial Dam with a little bit of variation per month.

We have hundreds of these observation wells throughout the Yuma basin.

Is look for seasonal trends especially in the agricultural areas they don't have too much shallow ground water because that interferes with the crop production.

And then we also look at changes in water level over the long-term as well because of groundwater withdrawal.

And I just put it down into the pipe, and we're gonna measure from the top of this protective casing right up here.

There it is.

- [David] (laughs) Is that right?

- Yes, so that tells me we hit the water.

(beeps) And we're reading right now from the top of this pipe, 18.93 feet.

- [David] And you have how many of these?

- [Technician] In the greater area maybe about 550.

- If you're depending on very sensitive, gravity fed water systems, and a few inches makes a difference in how much you will pump and how much the soil will hold, these become extremely important.

- The farmers are very interested in shallow groundwater conditions because that can interfere with their crop production.

- [David] So that might get more salts up into their root zone?

- [Technician] That's correct.

- [David] Mexico diverted share of Colorado River at Morales Dam.

The All-American Canal feeds the vast and distant fields of California's Imperial Valley.

After those extractions, even with increased efficiency of use, hardly a drop is left in the river.

Where steamboats once chugged away and wetlands teamed with life, a wasteland stretches for a hundred miles.

(soft dramatic music) - What we're looking at is the mighty Colorado River, that flows through the Grand Canyon in these huge Rapids.

This is the river that provides water for 40 million people.

This is the river, that 90% of life in the desert ecosystems depends upon.

And this is what's we've created a little trickle that I can step across that doesn't even reach the ocean.

And so this just goes to show that we need a mechanism and there is a growing movement an international movement to give rivers rights.

And that would create the right to have water in the river channel.

Which just river clearly doesn't have.

It's the right to be free from contamination.

The right to restoration.

I think we all intrinsically understand that water is life and so we're all trying to do the same thing.

We're all trying to get to the same place.

If ever there is a river that needed a voice, it is the mighty Colorado.

(suspenseful music) - Upon a time steamboats past here, but no longer.

And the questions we have to ask is how valuable is a running river, and the water that it produces for things apart from farms, municipalities, and industries.

(dramatic music) Join us next time In The Americas with me David Yetman.

Our largest national park offers glaciers on a stupendous scale.

Though glaciers there are receding as they are all over the world, you can still watch salmon rungs in glacier rivers, and hike to your heart's content in Northern forests and on glacial ice.

This and more in Alaska's Wrangell St. Elias National Park.

- [Tillie] This is almost like a graphic representation of your bank account.

Like if your bank account was full of money at the top, and then in just two decades this is how much we drained our bank account of water.

- [David] Now we're spending way more, than we really should have.

(dramatic music) - [Announcer] Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman, was provided by Agnese Haury.

(suspenseful music) Funding for in the Americas with David Yetman, was also provided by the Guilford Fund.

(suspenseful music) Copies of this and other episodes of In the Americas with David Yetman, are available from the Southwest Center.

To order call 1-800-937-8632.

Please mention the episode number and program title.

Please be sure to visit us at intheamericans.com, or intheamericas.org.