Barely a river

The "Cucapah" sits in the sun-baked flats of the Colorado River delta about 40-miles south of San Luis Rio Colorado, Mexico. The river that carved the Grand Canyon is barely a trickle this far south and what water there is here is primarily from the Sea of Cortez.

Pressure is on U.S. to help revive Mexico's Colorado Delta

It's a simple request for a complex place Mexico's Colorado River Delta.

American environmentalists, Mexican fishermen and the Cucapa Indians who once thrived on the Delta's bounty have begun pressuring the United States to send more water to the area south of Yuma.

Their dream is to pull endangered species back from the brink, stimulate marine life in the Gulf of California and rejuvenate a landscape that was once a tropical swamp prowled by jaguars and bears.

Today, the 3,000-square-mile delta offers only hints of its former self.

The upstream damming of the Colorado, and its diversion to places including Tucson, has caused stark and sterile salt flats to replace most of the marshes and forests. In dry years, a river once mighty enough to sculpt the Grand Canyon and flip a 36-ton steamboat doesn't even reach the sea.

Recent wet years, however, have let more fresh water reach the delta, spawning patches of new habitat and bumper harvests of fish and shrimp. It's proof that the delta could be revived if it could only get a little more water from upstream users such as Arizona, some advocates and University of Arizona researchers say,

End of a River 'There's plenty of water. The thing is, we abuse it.' Lisa Force, director of Living Rivers click to view Photo Gallery

One month ago, Tucson became the latest city to tap the Colorado when it began using its allocation from the $4 billion Central Arizona Project.

In total, the Tucson area has rights to about 1 percent of the Colorado's flow - the amount some conservation groups want to see dedicated to ecological purposes in Mexico.

If the delta's backers succeed, Tucson and the rest of the Colorado's users could be forced to give up some of their precious water supply.

But the campaign to send heavier flows down the river faces a steep, uphill climb. And the trickle that arrives in the delta today might not be there tomorrow.

Upriver from the delta, an era of civil engineering that rivaled Egypt's pyramid building has turned the Colorado into an elaborate plumbing system that provides drinking water for 25 million Americans and irrigation for some of the world's most productive farmland.

Every drop of the Southwest's biggest river is already accounted for. And in the nation's fastest-growing region, no one is rushing to give up his share.

"There's a shortage of water in the system already, and both California and Nevada need more," noted LeGrand Nielson, deputy director of the Bureau of Reclamation, which led the last century's dam-building crusade.

Environmentalists on both sides of the border have sued the Bureau of Reclamation several times in the past year, claiming the agency is violating the Endangered Species Act by depriving the delta of water. Federal officials respond that the U.S. law doesn't apply in Mexico.

Even so, the recent litigation marks an unprecedented focus of attention on an inhospitable region that has been a blind spot for most Americans.

With summer temperatures topping 120 degrees and 3 inches of rain falling in a good year, the delta remains one of North America's most forbidding places. Humidity from the sea and irrigated fields, mosquitoes from standing water and the abject poverty of farm workers' shantytowns hardly beckon visitors.

The delta may never become a hot spot for tourists. But even some of the Colorado's most prominent water users are starting to acknowledge its needs. When activists on a "One Percent for the Delta" road trip arrived in Las Vegas in March, the city's top water official, Patricia Mulroy, told them the delta is "an issue whose time has come."

Author Marc Reisner, in his 1986 book "Cadillac Desert," saw the Colorado's transformation as a metaphor for our time: "One could say that the age of great expectations was inaugurated at Hoover Dam - a fifty-year flowering of hopes when all things appeared possible. And one could say that amid the salt-encrusted sands of the river's dried-up delta, we began to founder on the Era of Limits."