WHY DID NOBODY TELL ME THAT THE NAVAJO GENERATING STATION WAS GETTING BLOWN UP I WOULD HAVE BOUGHT A FRONT ROW TICKET https://twitter.com/publiccarbon/status/1339958571480444929

Ok now do the Glen Canyon Dam

Just look at the size of that mfer compared to Page. What a fuckin abomination

soon

In case you aren't already as mad about that damn dam as me: The Colorado River is supposed to be red from, you know, sandstone sediment not blue from clogged up dams and green from choking algaes

hahahahaha every time I think about the Colorado River system I lose my mind! 15 dams on the main stem, 20 large dams on tributaries above the Grand Canyon, 11 below totaling 77,359,596 acre-feet of reservoir capacity. That's 95.4 MILLION CUBIC KILOMETERS.

The Hoover Dam and the Glen Canyon Dam each account for about a third of the total reservoir capacity on the Colorado River. Idk if you can even call it a river anymore...

Did you know that there is a diversion ditch at the damn headwaters? The "Grand Ditch" diverts 20-40% of the runoff from the Never Summer Mountains east over the Continental Divide.

And then the first dam on the main stem blocks up the river before it even combines with its other major headwaters:

First pic is headwaters of Tonahutu Creek near Haynach Lake, 2 is TC in Big Meadows. 3 is North Inlet near Cascade Falls, 4 is NI on the way down from Lake Nokoni

From Shadow Mountain Lake, the "river" flows into Granby Lake and then whoops! Pumped back to Shadow Mountain Lake and through the Adams Tunnel 13 miles under the Continental Divide to reservoirs on the east slope

Hardly makes it 10 miles from Granby before another dam built to pump water back east. Then 20 miles to where the Williams Fork tributary is dammed. 15 miles after that, the double dammed Blue River and single dammed Muddy Creek join it.

Then the second largest tributary in CO joins up in Glenwood Canyon but of course the Roaring Fork river is dammed upstream too. The river is dammed twice in Grand Valley before it's joined by the Gunnison whose system has 5 major dams on it.

It's relatively unimpeded from Grand Junction to the Confluence with the Green River in Canyonlands NP but Gigantic Asshole Bureau of Reclamation Chief Floyd Dominy wanted to put a dam right below the confluence before building Glen Canyon, Flaming Gorge, and Navajo dams instead.

Can you imagine if he had succeeded in building that dam and flooded the canyonlands? The Needles: underwater. The Maze: flooded. The White Rim Road: traversable only by boat. It would have been a tragedy. Well, he destroyed just as much natural beauty under Lake Powell.

Just bc the river stayed undammed between Grand Junction and the Confluence doesn't mean much tho. The next major tributary after the Gunnison, the Dolores River is dammed too and there are 12, count em, 12 major dams on the Green River System

Including Flaming Gorge Dam which is named that bc it completely buried the Flaming Gorge Canyon named by John Wesley Powell for the "brilliant, flaming red of its rocks when the sun shone upon them." Those rocks are underwater now.

But hey at least that dam so radically altered the landscape of northeast Utah that it's more like a trickle when it combines with the Yampa in Dinosaur NM and is so cold & clear & erode-y that all its native fish species are going extinct. Introduced trout are doing great tho.

Fuck Lake Powell. All my homies fucking HATE the Glen Canyon Dam. That's all I have to say about that one.

The Bureau of Reclamation is fucking evil as shit and if you aren't convinced yet then just look at this map of the proposed Marble Canyon and Bridge Canyon Dams. The Marble Canyon Dam would have reduced the flow of the Colorado through the Grand Canyon to a "scenic trickle".

And then the Bridge Canyon Dam would have flooded 40 miles in the Grand Canyon-Parashant NM and 13 miles inside the National Park and would have destroyed the Lower Havasu Creek and Lava Falls.

And in order for those two proposed dams to not get blocked up by silt almost immediately, they would have had to build several more dams on the almost undammed Paria River, Kanab Creek, and Little Colorado.

The Bridge Creek Dam location is still considered one of the best remaining sites for a large dam on the western US. Hopefully civilization collapses before they get around to that.

Fuck Lake Mead. All my homies fucking hate the Hoover Dam.

I don't think the people who build dams understand that they actually drastically reduce the quantity of water both above ground and in the water tables. Especially in the deserts. I think they just don't care.

In the super fragile, arid watersheds of the Sonoran Desert, 7 dams have been built on the main stem of the Colorado below the Hoover Dam and 10 major dams on the only waterways in Southern Arizona.

The Gila River in particular has been destroyed. The historic natural discharge into the Colorado of 1,900 cubic ft/second is now only 247 ft3/s. Fucking 13%. It's impossible to describe the level of environmental destruction this has caused to the riparian oases of the Sonoran.

The Colorado River doesn't reach the sea anymore. Before all the dams and irrigation canals and diversion ditches, the average flow rate into the Gulf of California was 22,500 ft3/sec. Now it's a dry riverbed for a hundred miles upstream.

The Colorado River Delta was once an enormous estuarine marshland. It's dead now.

The Colorado River has been killed. The ecosystems that used to rely on the free flow of water in its watershed have been killed. And it's probably past the point of ever being able to be repaired. Great fucking job, I hope you are happy.