Stories by Mitch Tobin and photos by Jeffry Scott
ARIZONA DAILY STAR
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Dream vs. reality Once, much of the 3,000 square-mile Colorado River delta looked like this remnant, the 12,000-acre cattail marsh known as Cienega de Santa Clara.
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Visitors can still glimpse the delta's pre-dam appearance at the Cienega de Santa Clara. Located 50 miles southwest of Yuma, the 12,000-acre cattail marsh is an oxymoron - the Sonoran Desert's largest wetland.
Nearly 300 bird species - including thousands of endangered Yuma clapper rails - visit or live in the cienega's hissing reeds. Its olive, brackish waters are also home to the endangered desert pupfish.
The cienega's existence is an accident. It was supposed to be the dumping grounds for brine coming from the Bureau of Reclamation's Yuma desalination plant. But that $250 million facility, meant to reduce the salinity of Colorado River water the United States must deliver to Mexico, operated only for a few months in 1993 and is now in mothballs. .
So, instead of the dregs of desalination, the canal from the plant now transports 325 billion gallons of agricultural runoff from Arizona's Wellton-Mohawk farming area each year.
"This water is too brackish for agriculture, so that's why it's here. Nobody wants it," said Jose Campoy, manager of the national preserve that includes the cienega.
The desalting plant's brine would have killed the cienega and made it as biologically poor as thousands of acres of dusty plains surrounding it - pampas cracked like sunbaked skin and coated with a frosting of salt.
Instead, the cienega resembles the green lagoons that ecologist Aldo Leopold wrote about - a poetic description of the delta's shifting landscape that advocates rarely fail to cite.
Leopold, whose blending of ethics and aesthetics has become the intellectual fountainhead for many American Greens, explored the delta by canoe with his brother in 1922, roasting quail over mesquite fires and climbing cottonwoods to scout the river's path.
"The river was nowhere and everywhere, for he could not decide which of a hundred green lagoons offered the most pleasant and least speedy path to the Gulf," Leopold wrote. "So he traveled them all, and so did we."
In the pre-dam days, Leopold recorded clouds of waterfowl, families of raccoons munching on water beetles and bobcats fishing for mullet. Though he never spotted a jaguar - el tigre - he said its "personality pervaded the wilderness."
The several million acres of wilderness that Leopold traveled through have shrunk to about 150,000 acres, according to UA scientist Ed Glenn, whose research on the delta has become exhibit A in environmentalists' case for sending more water there.
Glenn's study of the cienega and the sprouting of cottonwood-willow forests along the river's main stem after flooding in the 1980s and 1990s has led him to believe that a small, steady flow from the Colorado with surges every four or five years could do wonders for the area's ecology.
But before advocates see the delta's native vegetation spread, they might be fighting to preserve what little remains.
Flooding that has regenerated parts of the delta isn't guaranteed to continue. A drought in the Colorado's 244,000-square-mile basin could snatch back gains made in the past 20 years.
While the Yuma desalination plant is now dormant, it advertises "water for sale" on its Web site, www.yao.lc.usbr.gov/ydp5.htm.
Bureau of Reclamation Deputy Director LeGrand Nielson said the agency is "dead serious" about meeting its water obligations to Mexico without operating the plant. And the agency has begun the first "baby steps" in searching for other water sources for the delta, he said.
One idea is to "bank" river water in Arizona's aquifers during flood years. In droughts, Arizona would then use that stored water in exchange for giving up some of its Colorado allocation for the delta.
Another proposal would help Mexican farmers pump salty ground water that hurts their crops and send it to the delta.
"If people can just be patient and stay at the table, we can do something here," Nielson said.
