Colorado River

Fighting a fierce north wind and cresting waves, a dozen Cucapa Indian fishermen were in trouble before they were halfway home, their small boats and balky outboard motors overmatched by the roiling estuary of the Colorado River Delta. "Malo viento," muttered Julio Figueroa, as he nosed his boat slowly through the wind-whipped waves, his feet submerged in 10 inches of standing water. Boats have capsized and men have drowned in these waters, where river and sea collide.

Every stream tells a story on the half-day drive from Denver to the Salazar family ranch, every culvert a tale of water and politics. Ken Salazar knows them all, a font of knowledge tapped by President-elect Barack Obama on Wednesday when he introduced the Democratic senator from Colorado, whose ancestors farmed and ranched the American Southwest for more than 400 years, as his choice to lead the Interior Department.

THE SALTON SEA is an accident of man and an insult to nature, an artificial lake so rank that its rotten-eggs odor often overwhelms its sparkle, an unnatural blunder with too much salt and too many dead fish. It must be saved. If only it were that easy. The lake, created in 1905 when a badly built canal diverted Colorado River water to a depression in the desert straddling Riverside and Imperial counties, is drying up and in danger of extinction.

Global warming will worsen drought and reduce flows on the Colorado River, a key water source for Southern California and six other Western states, according to a report released Wednesday. The study, prepared by a National Research Council committee, paints a sobering picture of the future as the water needs of a rapidly expanding population test the limits of a river system further strained by the effects of climate change.

Drought in the Colorado River basin could soon force a cut in water deliveries, but Southern California is unlikely to be affected, according to a federal report released Wednesday. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation document examines the effects of four proposals for handling shortages on the river, which is suffering from the worst drought in a century and one of the most severe in 500 years. "There is a chance in three years we would have a shortage.

IF YOU LIKE IT hot and dry and live in Southern California, you could be in luck. Our combination of an arid winter, scorching summer and host of wildfires may not be a short-term aberration. Consider the possibility of decades of dry, hot weather, stretching from Southern California to the headwaters of the Sacramento and Colorado river systems -- the lifelines that allow us to flourish in our arid to semi-arid landscape.

The Colorado River Delta was once a watery labyrinth of willow thickets, mesquite and cottonwood, bigger than the state of Rhode Island and teeming with bird and animal life. Today it is a barren expanse of salt-stained mudflats where the river used to meet the sea south of Yuma. About 90% of the delta's wetlands and natural habitat dried up over the last half century, as water from the Colorado was captured in reservoirs and diverted to farms and cities from Las Vegas to Mexicali.

Leonard Hook hangs dead catfish from a tree as testimony to his angling prowess and tribute to the river that still fortifies his spirits six decades since it first drew him here as a kid. His porch overlooks the shallows where carp forage in the mud and great blue herons impale minnows on pointed bills. Beside him, flashes of color flicker in a bucket of water. "Bait," he said, peering at the goldfish inside.

The federal government Thursday ushered in a new era of shortage on the Colorado River, adopting a blueprint for how it will tighten the spigot on the West's most important water source. The guidelines, more than two years in the making, come in the eighth year of the worst drought in the century-long historic record of the Colorado River, which supplies water to 25 million people and 1 million acres of farmland.