In the desert there are plenty of things to avoid.

But nearly everything is drawn to a river.

For solitude.

To make a living.

And especially to survive.

But as people have known for thousands of years, a desert river can be a bit tenuous.

Major funding for The Desert       Speaks was provided by The Kemper and Ethel Marley Foundation.

Additional funding was provided by Desert Program Partners.

And by Arizona State Parks.

music I'm a desert rat.

I prefer my landscapes brown to green.

But I have to confess that I'm fascinated by the complexity and diversity in the ribbons of water that we call desert rivers.

Rivers in the desert southwest are really ribbons of life.

They provide habitat for pretty much all the species at one time or the other that live in the desert system and all those that migrate through.

The vast majority of birds that migrate from South and Central America into North America stop along the river systems and in that riparian or streamside vegetation.

So without the water you lose the vegetation and essentially you can lose those whole migratory corridors.

The Gila River's a vital stream as it leaves the mountains providing for a diversity of life and good flows.

As it moves downstream, increasing human uses, impoundment, diversions of water.

When it finally reaches the valley floor, it turns to dust.

Many people laugh when they first see this dry, dusty arroyo labeled Gila River.

The Gila outside of Phoenix has been nearly always dry since dams, impoundments and diversions in Arizona dried it up.

To see how it used to be, we need to go to its source in southwest New Mexico.

The best way to get up in those mountains is on a horse or on a mule.

It's not at all bad being in the oldest wilderness in the United States, pack train, thunderstorm brewing up over that far ridge and only an hour or so we'll be getting off an having lunch.

It's life in the Gila Wilderness.

Well, this wilderness is special because it's one of the first and so it has historic reasons for it.

But I think that it's also a wonderful reservoir of the native plants and animals.

And although wildernesses were originally established for recreational purposes, I think there are enormous biological values to the wilderness.

In addition, I think it serves as a benchmark for looking at landscapes elsewhere in the southwest and trying to think how they should look and how they should function and what are the ideals and the targets that we should be working towards in the future.

What year did this burn out here?

This burned in '89.

It's the Grudging Fire.

And you can see how it's opened up the ground and made room for the oaks to come in .

Yeah, the oaks and they're regularly spaced in there so they'll probably do okay for a few years.

Oh, yeah.

This'll be great browse for the deer.

The other thing is you can see that the grasses have really come in here and that increases the ground's ability to hold the water during the rainfall and it reduces erosion and increases the groundwater recharge.

Most of these trails are very historical trails.

The Indians even used a lot of them.

Nowadays the U.S. Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management maintains the trails so people, recreationists can use them.

There's no access to these kind of areas without those trails.

It's possible to hike this trail but you have to cross it so many times that you're going to get wet feet sooner or later.

You get pretty waterlogged.

The canyon here's about a thousand feet deep so it's only oh, a hundred fifty, two hundred feet wide, trail keeps going back and forth.

We criss, we cross, we criss, we cross again.

Fun.

Some of these trails were Apache trails rebuilt for white man to go on because we have all these pack animals and horses and stuff and the Indians they'd have a trail right up the side of a mountain that golly, you couldn't take a llama on much less a horse.

Well, I'd say we're probably about eight miles from the nearest highway and we're going to get farther and that's about as far from a highway as you can get anywhere in the continental United States and it's getting better all the time.

And now Jacob wants a drink of water and when Jacob wants a drink of water, Jacob gets a drink of water.

Can you drink quietly, please Jake?

All right, that's good, Jake.

Good work.

Now further into the Gila.

This is where all the water that flows through the Gila comes from.

And so the watershed values for the urban dwellers in the southwest are absolutely tremendous.

And although they may never come here themselves, they will benefit from the water that's harvested from the clouds here.

One day we traveled from the trailhead to here and it's about ten and a half miles.

And we did it fairly comfortably and we didn't have to kill ourselves doing it.

If we'd of had to walk that or if we'd of tried to get somebody in here that was, heck, I've had paraplegics before I've brought in, you would not, they wouldn't be able to enjoy this.

You know, they just wouldn't be able to enjoy it.

That it?

Yeah, by the way, there's enough poison ivy here for all of us to have a salad tonight.

You got poison ivy salad dressing?

Poison ivy inside the tent.

Is that a bigger than average shoe, Billie?

Yeah, size five horse shoe.

A little bigger than average.

You have to really be self sufficient.

If you're not out here where you can take care of yourself.

And your horses.

Good to go.

The Cavalry and the United States Cavalry used it to signify the use of the animal, and it was horses and mules.

They would take and they bought, belled their tales like this and you know the further down you went probably increased its ability.

So it probably was a pack animal, it was probably driven and it was probably ridden if it had all three bells.

And I'm not sure how but if it was missing a bell, maybe it didn't do that very well.

So in the course of its life it might change, if it got uppity or quit doing it.

Right.

You might just lop off a bell.

Right.

Now I'm going to tell you about it nowadays.

We use it, three bells, it bites, it kicks and it bucks.

(Laughter) So one would do well.

This one only bites and kicks.

I see.

No problem bucking on this one, huh?

It's kind of a mystery where the name Gila comes from.

Some think it's a corruption of a Yuman word down on the lower Colorado where the river joins.

But no one really knows as far as I understand.

Well, you might have to look back and say jila, jila, jila.

Now what does that mean because eighty percent of easterners look at that and say, oh the Jila River.

You betcha.

After riding fourteen miles upstream yesterday, we've reached a place near the headwaters of the Gila River.

Above here the stream starts to split off into riverlets and creeks and little tributaries and they come out of the higher peaks that are pretty tough to get to.

This water here, for all practical purposes, is the origin of the Gila River.

Several miles downstream at the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument, the canyon becomes a valley.

The river's flow is permanent and there's abundant wildlife so it was a natural place for humans to settle.

The Mogollon people lived here.

They lived here around 1276 'til about the end of that century.

Of course Mogollon is the name that modern man gave to them.

We don't know what they called themselves.

But Mogollon is used to put them in a time period.

That way we can identify them in that manner.

What is it about this Gila area that makes for all these caves?

Well, we're actually in the Gila Conglomerate which is a very porous rock which allows for erosion of these caves.

So we have natural caves here.

So people came.

It's believed that they came about sixty miles northwest of us from the Mogollon Mountains.

They came through here.

More than likely they knew about the caves.

Once they found them, they thought it was a perfect place to build their dwellings and to live here to be protected from the sun or perhaps to be protected from other people.

And besides they had resources available to them.

They had all the plants, the game, the animals and the canyon.

They had the creek, they had the water where they could drink from and eat from, bathe from.

How many caves up here?

There's a total of six caves that were used for living areas, work areas, probably storytelling, pottery making.

Well we know very little about them.

As far as physical aspects now we do know that they were a lot shorter than we are today.

But more than likely they were a spiritual people who came here for protection, who came here to be together.

How big is this?

It's enough for a lot of people.

Is this another family unit for a bigger family?

Actually this one was not covered, it did not have a rooftop on it.

So it's probably left open as a work area.

It had a great view.

It's estimated about forty to sixty people lived here.

We know this by the amount of dwellings there are inside, the amount of rooms and ceremonial rooms there are inside the cliff dwellings.

As we all know, water is the basis for survival and in geologic terms this place is very much the same as it was seven hundred years ago.

So they would have depended on the Gila River, on the West Fork, on the creek here.

We delicately say that usually it was probably the teenagers and the kids who carried the water up.

Well, I hope so.

And it was very important to them.

They used it for baiting, for cooking, for drinking.

It was the way they maintained life here.

Water is very important for survival.

Yeah, I've tried a long time to survive it and I've never been successful.

One of the beliefs is that they left here after a drought that had been occurring so they came here as protection from that drought.

Once that drought was over, they went ahead and left.

Some people say they intermarried with other people, maybe with the Anasazi or perhaps with the Mogollons to the south in Mexico.

Where the Gila, we use the steep narrow canyons and opens up into broad desert valleys, there's more vegetation for birds and mammals and places for agriculture.

A perfect place for a nature preserve.

So this is the lowest flow in the Gila on record, is that correct?

Lowest flow for this date.

For this date.

It's flowing at actually twenty-nine cubic feet per second.

The lowest flow of record happened earlier this summer.

This area in New Mexico was settled relatively late compared to the rest of the state largely because of the presence of Apaches that protected their homeland.

was going at the headwaters of this river for example.

When gold was finally discovered in the 1850s, then people moved into this area.

I've seen a number of desert streams before and they call come out of mountains.

Why is the Gila so very, very important?

Well the Gila is the only river in the southwest that really is undammed.

And so the ecological processes that work are untrammeled.

The river falls on the mountains, it rushes down the mountains into the river and it flows through the river and enters into these desert valleys.

And the forest and the river support a suite of wildlife species and plant and animal species that's really remarkable.

The Gila River lies primarily in public ownership from its headwaters to its entry into Arizona.

And so I think that it's a river that's relatively untrammeled compared to other rivers in New Mexico or perhaps in the southwest.

There are a series of valleys that are linked by narrow canyons and within the valleys typically there's agriculture and in the canyons there is not.

And so I think that the Gila is a remarkable place because of its mixing of wild values and traditional agricultural values.

One of the principal changes that you see along this river since the Conservancy bought this place here, and we're on the Gila Preserve, is the riparian vegetation coming up along the edge of the river.

That can only occur with managed grazing.

My hope for the future of the Gila is that it continues to remain an agricultural valley but that people understand better its biological wealth and that the riparian woodlands and the flows of the river are recognized as important attributes for everybody.

The Gila enters Arizona near the town of Duncan.

It's a place I've visited a few times.

The Duncan Valley was visited by people with an eye to settling in the 1880s, somewhere in there.

And some settlers came and found that the soil was perfect for raising vegetables, various crops.

But later on it was found that it was perfect for Pima cotton, it's a short staple cotton that was resistant to diseases and it became the best place in all of the United States for raising that Pima cotton and it became noted for that.

Mormon settlers came in in the late part of the nineteenth century and so agricultural sustained this place until the 1960s-1970s when it began to sort of fade away.

The river is off here to the left oh maybe an eighth of a mile and most of the year there's no water in it.

But when it floods, it really floods.

I lived in this house for two years.

You can see it's been raised and I think it's about four feet higher than it was.

My parents were easterners.

My mother was from the west but she'd become an easterner.

And we first saw Duncan, Arizona, population 900 in the middle of the desert, it was a terrible shock.

But, we had the Gila River.

That made all the difference in the world and it still does.

The length of the bridge here would lead one to believe this is really a large river.

Well, it is.

It's very shallow except when it floods and because there's no clear floodway in there, it just spreads out and all these cottonwood trees, and you can see it's got a great riparian vegetation, it just spreads.

And it will run a half mile wide.

After passing through a few more valleys and canyons, the river enters the San Carlos Apache Reservation.

This river is holy, holy river.

Everything is holy around here.

(Native American music) We sing about everything, even the rocks, the rock that we see.

We use it for a sweat bath too, you know.

The water is sacred and therefore you, when you're crossing the river, you pray.

You pray first before you cross the river and then when you come back you pray again too.

Way back when the old people, they even had songs for the water.

When it rained heavily, they prayed also and they asked the rain to go to the mountains and water our trees up there.

That's what they said a long time ago and the water was good, it was running there and for us to survive on.

But today it's being contaminated.

Coolidge Dam at the western edge of the San Carlos Apache Reservation permanently interrupted the free flowing Gila River in 1930.

But that wasn't the first time.

Centuries before the arrival of Europeans, native engineers diverted to the river to supply what we now call Casa Grande and created what would become the breadbasket of the desert southwest.

The river was very important to the prehistoric occupants of the middle Gila River Valley.

Oftentimes we find that there were linear settlements along the river, maybe a mile deep, but all along this way.

The Casa Grande site is about a mile and a half to two miles due south of the Gila River just behind me here.

The canal that fed the fields and the settlement itself, the head gate for the canal is approximately twenty miles upriver from here and it was carried through a earthen canal that's roughly twenty to twenty-two miles long and ends just to the west of the ruins.

Casa Grande represents probably what could be called the flow-essence of the Hohokam culture around 1300 AD.

I think you'd see a fairly dense settlement of a number of people probably in the five hundred to one thousand people range, if not even larger at its height.

And some people have hypothesized that the Casa Grande itself was some kind of an astronomical observatory.

So there could have been other kinds of ceremonies related to that.

The Gila River was a perennial river.

There was water in it year round.

There were times when there was less water due to droughts.

Today we see this big wide river that goes maybe a kilometer across that there's no really distinct channel.

But we know in historic times and prehistoric times it was much narrower, confined and was perennial water for the inhabitants of the area.

They built a massive canal system and this would probably be example of what a canal would have looked like in prehistoric times but not quite as large.

We know some of the biggest ones around here in Casa Grande were maybe five meters or fifteen feet across.

But archaeologists have documented almost five hundred kilometers of main canal for the Gila Basin.

That's three hundred miles of canal.

Yes.

And how were those built?

Built with digging sticks, no backhoes, nothing.

The members of the Gila River community, the river is very, very important to them.

They're very saddened to see it in the state it is today.

Many members of the community feel that the loss of their culture over the last several hundred years is related to the loss of the water.

Because the river was so important to them that everything was tied into the river, whether it was their stories, how they lived and by losing the water they feel they've lost most of their culture.

Human beings caused desert rivers to dry up for a number of reasons, one of which is the amount of water we drink and use in our houses.

When we're done with the water, we flush it or drain it into a sewer.

When enough of us live close together, that draining and flushing adds up to a lot of water.

West of Phoenix the waters of the Gila River originate in a series of sewage treatment plants.

Now most of us would rather not think about sewage but the challenge for desert cities is to use nature to give us clean water that is a delight to the senses and a river that is a green oasis.

Tres Rios means Three Rivers.

We are right next to the Gila here.

We're also near the Salt and Agua Fria Rivers.

Tres Rios is an eleven acre constructed wetlands project that basically takes water that's treated at a nearby wastewater treatment plant and treats it a third time before it goes back into the environment.

This is a instrument we use to measure the pH of the water, temperature and the conductivity which is the salt level.

We take this little insidious looking device, stick it in the water.

The quality of the water that reaches this wetlands is called the effluent.

It's treated already at a wastewater treatment plant nearby.

It's actually a very good quality.

We don't send it to edible crops because it's a little bit of a touchy area with people.

This actually treats it a little bit further.

It's called a tertiary treatment or a third-stage treatment.

It helps us to replenish the aquafers.

It will help us with flood control.

It will help us restore habitat that actually used to be here one or two hundred years ago.

Water's pretty much perfect here.

We actually have a lot of plant and aquatic life.

We have everything from Blue Heron to beaver.

Of course you have your typical coyote and javelina, things that are out here in the desert anyway.

But a lot of things have come here because this habitat was created.

Of course they were here one or two hundred years ago.

Now they're back.

It's kind of, if you build it, they will come.

The Gila River is the most desert river in the United States.

From where it tumbles out of the mountains it flows for five hundred miles clear across the state of Arizona to where it used to empty into the Colorado River.

For thousands of years people's livelihood and even survival has depended on the water of the Gila.

Today it is the Gila that depends on modern desert residents to pump life back into it.

Next time on The Desert Speaks the Valley of Tehuacán is not only the birthplace of domestic corn, it is also the mother lode of columnar cacti.

There are more species of these giant beauties in this one valley than in any other place in the world.

And more important, they are essential to the lives of the people who have lived here for centuries.

All desert rivers have their origins in the mountains.

After a rain like we had last night, streams that were clear become kind of muddy and maybe a little ugly.

They're full of sediments and ash from the fires.

It may not look beautiful but it's what takes the nutrients down into the valley and makes the soil perfect.

Major funding for The Desert       Speaks was provided by The Kemper and Ethel Marley Foundation.

Additional funding was provided by Desert Program Partners.