The Death Of A River, Part 3

  The much diminished Colorado River flows past Yuma on an east-west course. The general direction here is north and south. West of Yuma, the river resumes its southerly course to the sea. After about two miles, the northernmost border of Mexico touches the river. This is the border between California and the Mexican state of Baja California. As the river continues its southward course from this point, it forms the border between Arizona of the United States and Baja California of Mexico. The Colorado is an international river for about twenty miles before entering Mexico for its final run to the sea. 
  One mile below the border between  Mexico and California, lies the Morelos Dam, which was constructed by the government of Mexico to allocate their share of the Colorado River's much sought after water. Half of the dam is on American soil, but Mexico is responsible for all maintenance. This is where the Colorado River meets its final, ignominious death.
  Morelos Dam is also a  diversion dam and it diverts what is left of the Colorado's meager flow into Mexico to water farms in the Mexican portion of the Yuma Valley and also the distant Mexicali Valley, which contains nearly one million people, about 700,000 of them in Mexicali, the capital city of Baja California. Below Morelos Dam, the Colorado River, one of the longest rivers in the world, is dry. There is usually a small pool of water at the downstream base of Morelos Dam, but those are the final droplets in the river that once watered a narrow, but lush, riparian strip along its course that was a sharp contrast to the surrounding desert. The river continues below the dam as a dried up riverbed all the way to its now dead delta on the Sea of Cortez.
  There is still a busy and prosperous farming area on both sides of the river. The soil is rich and fertile due to the Colorado laying down tons of sediment over the eons, carving and recarving new channels in the process. A glance at aerial maps of the area will reveal faint traces of old river channels that  the Colorado has abandoned over the centuries.
  A study that was done about ten years ago shows that if only 1% of the Colorado's flow is allowed to each the sea, it would at least partially restore the "milk and honey" wilderness, as described by Aldo Leopold shortly before the first dam across the Colorado, the Laguna, was built and altered the course of the lower river forever. He canoed through this area in the early 1900s, just a short time before construction on the Laguna Dam commenced in 1903.