Information About the Colorado River

The Colorado River is the fifth longest river in the United States. It flows through the American Southwest into the Gulf of California at the Sea of Cortez. The Colorado River provides water and power for millions of people. Three-quarters of its river basin is government land dedicated to Indian reservations and national parks and forests.

Geography

The Colorado River gets its start high up at the 10,000 foot mark of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, the state for which it is named. Snowmelt enters a variety of tributaries in the mountains to form the Colorado River, which then makes its way southwest into Utah. From there it goes into Arizona, where it has carved out the Grand Canyon, and then forms the border between Nevada and Arizona and California and Arizona before going into northern Mexico and then the ocean. The entire river is 1,470 miles long, with 1,360 of those on U.S. soil. The river basin drains 242,000 square miles in America and another 3,000 in Mexico.

Grand Canyon

The Grand Canyon is a 277-mile-long chasm that the Colorado River has carved out of the Colorado Plateau over the last 6 million years across northern Arizona. With very steep sides, the Grand Canyon is 5,000 feet deep in some places and as wide as 18 miles across at various points. Almost the entire canyon is within the borders of the Grand Canyon National Park, which includes over 1.2 million acres and supports many different types of ecosystems. Up to 4 million tourists visit this natural wonder every year.

Hoover Dam

The Hoover Dam was constructed in the early 1930s to control flooding on the Colorado River near the Nevada/Arizona border and to provide electricity and water to the region. Completed in 1935, it is still the tallest concrete dam in the Western Hemisphere. Hoover Dam is 726 feet tall and 660 feet thick at its bottom. It is 1,244 feet wide and reaches from one end of Black Canyon to the other. About 4.5 million cubic yards of concrete were required to complete the project. It allows the irrigation of nearly 1 million surrounding acres of farmland and creates enough energy to run half a million homes each year.

Lakes

Lake Mead was created behind the Hoover Dam and is 110 miles long. The Parker Dam, which can be found between Arizona and California about 155 miles downstream from the Hoover Dam, formed Lake Havasu, which is some 45 miles long and capable of holding 211 billion gallons. Another lake created on the Colorado River is Lake Mojave, which is 67 miles down from Hoover Dam and was formed in 1953 when the Davis Dam was built. The largest of the lakes on the Colorado is Lake Powell, which is 186 miles long and has almost 2,000 miles of shoreline; it was formed when Glen Canyon Dam was built in 1963.

History

The Colorado River was found to be unsafe for navigation by the Europeans. The first European to travel up the river from the Gulf of California was Hernando de Alarcon in 1540. One of Coronado's men, Garcia Lopez de Cárdenas, led a group that eventually discovered the Grand Canyon. While the river was explored and parts of it were navigated, it was 1869 before someone was able to make a trip on it through the length of the Grand Canyon. John Wesley Powell's expedition managed this feat, making extensive maps and taking meticulous notes of the wonders they saw.