Hear What’s Happening to the Colorado River From a Photojournalist Who Has Spent His Entire Life Alongside It | Science

Chris Klimek Host, “There’s More to That”

In this episode of the new Smithsonian magazine podcast, “There’s More to That,” writer and photographer Pete McBride—who once hiked the Grand Canyon from end to end and made an Emmy Award-nominated documentary film about the experience—walks us through the consequences of drought afflicting the Colorado River, one of America’s pivotal water sources. McBride, who grew up on a cattle ranch that relied on the Colorado River for its water, reflects on the profound and troubling changes that falling water levels portend, not just for lovers of nature but for the roughly 40 million Americans who get their drinking water from the Colorado whether they know it or not. A transcript of the episode is below.

Chris Klimek, host:

While Pete McBride was out reporting for Smithsonian magazine last year, he spent a night camping on the banks of the Colorado River in Glen Canyon, Utah. There in the canyon, he came across a natural formation called the “bathtub ring.”

Pete McBride, writer/photographer:

And so the bathtub ring is this kind of white line that goes throughout Glen Canyon. … The water stained the sandstone cliffs with this kind of silty white.

Chris Klimek:

The bathtub ring wasn’t just something for Pete to marvel at. It was a piece of evidence.

Pete McBride:

This very bright, delineated, white bathtub ring, it represents the water we used to have.

Chris Klimek:

Pete is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker, photographer, and writer who grew up right by the river in Colorado. And in his lifetime, he’s seen this once mighty river reduced to a trickle of its former self. For the past hundred years, the river watershed has supplied drinking water to seven U.S. states, parts of Mexico and neighboring Indigenous communities. The river is long. Water rights are shared among Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, Arizona, California and Nevada. That includes major cities hundreds of miles away, like Los Angeles. The river also waters more than 5 million acres of farmland and generates electric power for millions of homes. But a lot has changed since all this water was first divvied up.

Pete McBride:

To put it more simply, we basically thought the river was a large drink, a large glass of water. And we’ve since learned that over time that the river doesn’t flow as consistently as they thought it did from the data they had in the early 1900s.

Chris Klimek:

At the beginning of summer 2023, things got so dire that the federal government had to step in. The Biden administration brokered a temporary deal between all the stakeholders, offering concessions to states if they promised to use less water. Now, talks about what to do in the long term are underway. In the meantime, a lot of summer rain and melting snowpack have helped the situation. But some scientists predict it would take about ten years of these wet conditions to end the water emergency in the Southwest. And climate change makes that unlikely.

From Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions, this is “There’s More to That,” a podcast where we face today’s biggest issues with Smithsonian journalists as our guides. For this episode, we’ll hear about where things were at the beginning of the summer, and what Pete McBride found while water levels were dramatically low.

Chris Klimek:

When we connected with Pete to talk about drought, the rain was pouring down outside his window. During the course of the conversation, we learned why this particularly wet summer is just a drop in the bucket for the Colorado River watershed.

Chris Klimek:

So, you grew up around the Colorado River. Let’s start with that. What was your relationship with the river like when you were a kid?

Pete McBride:

I grew up on a cattle ranch at 8,000 feet in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. And so I actually grew up irrigating to put up grass hay for cattle. So I was very aware of water and where it goes, and I think as I got older, I became more and more interested in how we use that water, where that water goes. And since then, when I became a journalist, photographer, filmmaker, I started doing documentaries and book projects about the river. I became intrigued with this lifeline that supports drinking water for 40 million Americans today. Basically, 95 percent of our winter vegetables. So if you’ve never been to the Colorado River, but you like salad, pretty likelihood that you eat the Colorado River in the months of December and January. And when I learned of the state of this river, which I find so interesting … this river, it flowed to the sea for six million years. It created one of the largest desert estuaries in North America. And during my lifetime, during my father’s lifetime, we have turned it from this wild, uncontrollable kind of force of nature to this very regulated, dam-diverted, litigated, plumbed maze that has a symphony of straws on it. And we’ve run it dry. We’ve really brought the Colorado River to its knees, and now with climate change, and we’re in our second decade of drought. Yes, we had a record snowpack in Colorado and beyond this last year. But that’s like having a child that gets a job for one year, you think it will suddenly get you out of debt? This one year will not fix what has been a growing problem.

Chris Klimek:

As someone who’s grown up around this river, how do you feel as you’re tracking these dramatic changes?

Pete McBride:

What amazes me is how few people are aware of this. Most people just do not realize that their water comes from this river system. It doesn’t come from the tap. If you ask the average citizen in Phoenix or Los Angeles or Denver where their water comes from, most do not know that 50 percent of their water supply comes from the Colorado River. So for me to see that, it’s frustrating on a certain level, because we’re just losing more and more connection to nature in our natural systems. The second note is that this remarkable mighty Colorado River that is the architect of the Grand Canyon … we have run it dry. And I’ve seen that right on the front lines, because I’ve paddled the river to the sea, and then of course I’ve had to walk it to its completion … some hundred miles. I’ve done that a few times. And to see it denuded into a kind of a whisper and then dry up a hundred miles from the sea is pretty alarming. When it reaches the U.S.-Mexico border, the river literally turns into just an irrigation ditch, usually filled with some sort of flotsam and plastic bottles and garbage. And then it just turns into sand, and it becomes a river of sand and dries up completely and then turns into this cracked-earth riverbed. That is one of the biggest flyaway zones for migratory birds. So, it’s a huge habitat loss for that element of our planet. To see that is alarming. Of course, most people don’t get to that part of the river in Mexico, so they think, well it’s, you know, it’s a problem downstream. … It’s not in my backyard. However, today the two largest reservoirs in the country are Lake Mead and Lake Powell. They dropped to all-time records this last year, down to about 23 percent each. This snowpack has brought them up a little bit. I just looked at Lake Powell today. It’s come up to 32 percent full. But that’s still significantly low. But then even up here in the headwaters, I’m up at 7,000 feet in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado in the western side of the state here. There’s a lake called Crater Lake that was always brimming full when I was a child. I’ve seen that down to about 10 percent full of what it used to be. That’s just turned into this little, like, trickle of water flowing through a mucky, I don’t know, mess. So it’s on all our doorsteps, along the river.

Chris Klimek:

I want to back up and make sure listeners really understand how and why this matters. What are the stakes here?

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