This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
It is easy to miss, in a short geographic description, that the Colorado River lower course now runs dry before reaching the sea most of the year. That single fact is the endpoint of a century of engineering. Seven US states and Mexico all draw irrigation and drinking water from the same river under a set of agreements, chiefly the 1922 Colorado River Compact, negotiated when the river's average flow was measured during an unusually wet stretch of years and has been over-allocated relative to its actual long-term flow ever since. Hoover Dam, completed in 1936, and Glen Canyon Dam, completed in 1966, turned the river into a chain of reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell foremost among them, that store water for cities as far away as Los Angeles and Phoenix, neither of which sits on the river at all. By the time what remains reaches the Mexican border, so little water is left that the Colorado River's historic delta on the Gulf of California, once a rich wetland, is now dry for most of the year, a river that carved the Grand Canyon over millions of years now unable, most years, to finish its own final few miles.