WAVELENGTH


DELTA DAWN O


n an unusual Monday last March, in the hamlet of San Luis Río Colorado, in the


Mexican state of Sonora, hundreds of people gathered below a bridge that spans the dry channel of


the Colorado River. The polka-beat


of Ranchero music mixed with the sound of laughter across the sandy basin. It was a party of all ages and everyone waited for the guest of honor: agua. Located


23 miles downstream of More-


los Dam—the last dam on the Colorado—San Luis is where the river finally leaves the border behind and journeys into Mexico. From here, the riverbed winds 80 miles to the Sea of Cortez. But for nearly two decades, water has rarely escaped the sealed downstream gates of the dam. Instead, Mexico’s entire Colorado River alloca-


tion turns west—diverted into the giant, concrete irrigation Reforma Canal. What is left below is a river of sand. But at 8 a.m. on Sunday, March 23, the red


steel gates glided open, releasing the beginning of a 105,392-acre-foot “pulse flow"—roughly the amount it would take to cover a football field in one foot of water. This blast of moisture, de- signed by hydrologists to mimic a natural flood, represents what many thought to be the unfath-


38 PADDLEBOARDING || Annual 2015


AN UNLIKELY SUP EXPEDITION RECONNECTS THE COLORADO RIVER TO THE SEA


omable—an international partnership to bring a river back to life. By Tuesday, the party by the bridge had


significantly swelled. The river was late, but no one seemed deterred. I asked two men in business suits why they braved the heat here on this sunny afternoon. “We are here to see the water, of course. Do you


know where it is?” they asked in Spanish. As


a boy growing up on a cattle ranch


near the headwaters of the Colorado, I often pondered that. How long would it take that water—snowmelt originating in the 14,000-foot peaks shrouding the valley—to cross our fields, gurgle down creeks, merge with the mighty Colorado, and make the 1,450-mile march across seven states and northern Mexico before it terminated in the Sea of Cortez? Although neither the longest nor largest


river in the United States (it is the seventh), the Colorado is one of the most loved. The economies and lifestyles of over 36 million people rely on it, as does America’s entire commercial winter salad bowl crop. Yet as a growing population collec- tively moans for more water, the Colorado River groans from another dehydrating straw. The river’s delta in Mexico is alarming proof


of such thirst—not a single drop of the Colorado River had reached the sea since 1998. The pulse


flow experiment in March


changed everything—temporarily. By Wed- nesday, March 27, the San Luis fiesta had quadrupled. Like everyone else, I was stopped in my tracks when agua finally made its debut. Inch by patient inch, the river moved down its old dusty path toward the San Luis bridge. A sense of giddiness grew with every foot the water advanced. Fireworks popped, kids splashed in the shallows, cowboys danced horses, and ATVs and dune buggies roared, rooster-tailing sand into the afternoon light. To see the results of the pulse flow, I joined


a few friends and did what any river lover would do. We took canoes and SUPs down- stream. We experienced breathtaking beauty bustling with wildlife, but also desperate hours of belly crawling through mesquite thorn thickets, 107-degree heat, swarms of infuriated mosquitoes and were forced to do nighttime stealth maneuvers to dodge drug traffickers. In 1922 the American conservationist Aldo Leopold took a canoe down the delta and


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