New West Film

‘Chasing Water’ Captures Colorado River’s Tragic Tale

By David Frey, 4-25-11

	The Colorado River Delta. Pete McBride photo.

From the rim of the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River below seemed both meek and mighty. It looks like a tiny band of water barely visible below millions of years of rock, but it was this river, blasting through fierce rapids with dirt and debris, that carved through a mile of rock like a diamond saw.

This is the Colorado River in its finest moments. River runners know it as a death-defying series of rapids, but even this whitewater is only a fraction of the hydraulics that once raged through the canyon, in the days before Lake Powell tamed it.

In its grim less spectacular moments the Colorado is not a river at all. It is an unremarkable trickle through concrete canals, and then, not even that. Just a dry riverbed that delivers not even a drop to the sea.

“It looks like the end of the line,” says photographer Pete McBride, as he and his companion, author Jonathan Waterman, find their canoes lodged in a foamy brown muck. “It looks like the garbage disposal at the end of the river.”

The two document the river from its source, high in the upper reaches of Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park, to the Sea of Cortez, where it’s supposed to end up, in the book The Colorado River: Flowing through Conflict. McBride also documents the river in a talk, and in the 18-minute documentary Chasing Water, which premiers Thursday at the 5Point Film Festival in Carbondale, Colo., a four-day festival that seeks to inspire adventure and instill environmental consciousness.

By kayak, airplane and ultimately by foot, McBride explores the storied river from end to end. Growing up on a ranch in nearby Snowmass Colorado, McBride says he used to wonder how long it would take for the water flowing through their irrigation ditch to reach the sea.

The answer: it doesn’t. Not since 1998 anyway. Tapped by farmers, ranchers, cities and towns, the Colorado River dies an early death.

“I started to see the river as an orphan stretched into the desert,” says McBride, narrating a journey in Chasing Water that carried him from the fields where he grew up to the streets of Las Vegas to California’s Imperial Valley.

McBride’s images, both in the book and in the film tell a powerful tale of the West’s greatest river. In Utah, they capture a wild river carving S-curves through the desert before it runs up against Glen Canyon Dam, where years of drought is causing Lake Powell to shrink. In Arizona, the shockingly straight lines of canals carry water to Los Angeles.

It’s hard to find a more gripping image, though, than the scene which begins the film: feet in flip-flops trundling over the cracked, dry earth where the Colorado River, “the American Nile,” as McBride calls it, is supposed to reach the sea.

Even in the Grand Canyon, the river ebbs and surges not with its natural rhythms, but with the output of Glen Canyon Dam set to match Phoenix’s need for air conditioning.

The Colorado River, McBride comes to see, may be less an American Nile than it is a 1,500-mile piece of plumbing.

Follow David Frey at www.davidmfrey.com and on Twitter.

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