Water in the West- Colorado River Compactt/Flaming Gorge, Utah.

The Colorado River, is the most litigated river in the world and it is only 1450 miles long. (The Mississippi is over 2,000 miles long and the Nile and Amazon are over 4,000 miles long.)

The Colorado River Basin Compact is divided like this:

Upper Basin States Allocations:

Colorado 3.88 million acre feet

Utah 1.73 million acre feet

New Mexico 0.84 million acre feet

Wyoming 1.05 million acre feet

Lower Basin State Allocations:

California 4.4 million acre feet

Arizona 2.8 million acre feet

Nevada 0.7 million acre feet

To get the water to the states dams had to be built along the Colorado River. There are two reasons to build dams for hydropower and of course for their reservoirs which people can slowly release water when they need it in droughts.

We camped next to the reservoir of the Flaming Gorge Dam in Utah (very close to the border of Wyoming) the night of June 11. Flaming Gorge has 3.78 million acre feet of water storage and generates 150 megawatts

of activity.

Unloading the vans at the campsite.

Photo Credit: Erin Maguire

Resevoir, mountains and campsite.

Photo Credit: Erin Maguire

Resevoir, mountains and beautiful rocks.

Photo Credit: Erin Maguire

Sunset at Flaming Gorge campground.

Photo Credit: Erin Maguire

  Other major dams along the river are the Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell its reservoir, Hoover Dam and its reservoir Lake Mead, the Davis Dam and its reservoir Lake Havasu and the Parker and Imperial Dams.On our journey, we will camp next to Lake Powell and take a tour of Glen Canyon Dam and we will stop by and talk about the Hoover Dam.