The Colorado River Is Running Dry, but Nobody Wants to Talk About the Mud
By Dale Maharidge for The New York Times

It’s difficult to fathom how the Colorado River could possibly carve the mile-deep chasm that is the Grand Canyon. But if one thinks of the river as a flume of liquid sandpaper rubbing the land over millions of years, it begins to make sense. “The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools,” Henry David Thoreau wrote, “but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.”

In 1963, the Glen Canyon Dam was built on the Colorado River in Northern Arizona creating Lake Powell. As the water slowed, silt from upriver continued to push into the reservoir.

Climate change and overuse of the river have drawn the reservoir down and now that silt is being revealed. One day, this silt could plug the dam and prevent water from flowing downriver, endangering the dam itself and further exacerbating the threat to the water supply in the American Southwest.

Further upriver, Mike DeHoff and members of the nonprofit Returning Rapids Project study the changes occurring at a point along the upper reaches of Lake Powell where a massive glacier of mud has formed, profoundly altering the flow of the Colorado.

It's only a matter of time before these masses of sediment reach Glen Canyon. There's currently no plan in place by the Bureau of Reclamation to deal with this looming threat.