Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West

by Nies, Judith

  Los Angeles is an arid city at the edge of the Mohave Desert. Today Los Angeles is looking for more water sources.

  CHASING WATER

  Lake Mead, 30 miles south of Las Vegas, is the reservoir behind Hoover Dam that fills the canyons of the Colorado River for 110 miles upstream of the dam. It is the largest man-made body of water in the world. The appearance of a huge lake in the middle of the desert drew new residents to southern Nevada and turned desert dwellers into boaters and weekend fishermen. On average the Mohave Desert in southern Nevada gets four inches of rain a year. It is a desert often compared with the Sonoran and named “the hottest desert in North America.” Consequently, a lot of evaporation takes place from the reservoir’s surface.

  Overton is about 40 miles north of Hoover Dam on the edge of Lake Mead. I went there because a woman I met in Las Vegas told me about the “red sand and white sands” of Overton, where her father had been a mining engineer for forty years (one sand was silica and is still being mined). She said the town was worth visiting because it had a museum about the largest pueblo settlement in Nevada. Overton was once the site of a thirteenth-century Anasazi settlement (now underwater), with hundreds of villages and cliff-side pueblos tucked into the canyon walls. As the river backed up to create Lake Mead in the 1930s, all the archaeological ruins were flooded, but some of the artifacts and petroglyphs were saved and preserved in the museum.* She also mentioned the Overton Marina.

  The north branch of Lake Mead, called the Overton Arm, used to extend into the channels of the Muddy and the Virgin Rivers. So one Sunday in February 2010 I left Las Vegas, traveling on Las Vegas Boulevard, heading north. On my right I passed Nellis Air Force Base (not to be confused with Nellis Air Force Range) and, a few miles later on my left, the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. (The speedway offers a NASCAR 1.5-mile supertrack, a drag strip, and a promotion for what the owners call “the most exciting experience in Las Vegas,” should you want to pay $299 to drive five laps around the track in a Ferrari.)

  Had I thought to check the national park website, I would have learned that Overton Marina had been moved three years earlier and relocated 15 miles south to Echo Bay. This far north there was neither a marina nor Lake Mead. The Overton Arm had silted up. Thirty years earlier, in 1981, the US Geological Survey published an infrared satellite map of southern Nevada, and even then the Overton Arm was already silting up in its northern reaches. By February 2010 the Overton Arm had retreated so far from the shore, I couldn’t see it, because Lake Mead had dropped more than 130 feet.

  Since I was on my way to Overton, I took the access roads to Interstate 15. For the next 40 miles I sped through a landscape ranging from gray to beige—the Mohave Desert is known for having no color—interrupted only by the occasional railroad freight line and billboards advertising casinos, bail bondsmen, bankruptcy lawyers, strippers, and magicians. As I got closer to the Arizona-Utah border, the billboards changed to ads for golfing in St. George, LDS churches, and housing developments. The Las Vegas–Salt Lake railroad line is still operational, but not for passengers—freight and minerals only. Nevada’s two largest industries are still gambling and mining. I turned off the highway for Route 169, passing through Valley of Fire State Park and its astonishing landscape of brilliant red sandstone carved by wind and water. Guidebooks say that it looks like it is on fire when seen at sunset. A few miles later I emerged on the national park road at the edge of Lake Mead. There I stopped to recheck my map. At this juncture I was supposed to see the Overton Marina and Lake Mead. “Boat Slips Available” said the sign in front of me. Boat slips? I was looking out at a single date-palm tree growing out of cracked hardpan, dried-up lake bed stretching as far as the eye could see. What happened to the water? What happened to the marina?

  The move of the Overton Marina to the south proved to be a temporary solution because the reservoir continued its relentless retreat. Soon both Echo Bay and Overton Marinas had to be moved another 20 miles south to Callville Bay.

  The National Park Service continued chasing water, moving docks and extending roadways until the marinas on the Overton Arm were no longer viable. Finally, all the marinas were consolidated at Hemenway Wash, now called Hemenway Marina, only 7 miles upriver from Hoover Dam. Before going back the way I came, I went to the museum in Overton, bought some silver and turquoise jewelry, looked at the exhibits, and then turned around and drove 40 miles south to Hemenway Marina, where Lake Mead still is deep enough to launch boats of considerable size.

  Elmore Mead, whose name was given to the Hoover Dam reservoir, was the first head of the Bureau of Reclamation—reclaiming lands from flood and building dams for irrigation and paying for them through hydroelectricity. He was also the man who, in 1905, told the growers of the Imperial Valley of Southern California that their destroyed diversion canal could not be rebuilt. In 1905 the Colorado River, the steepest-running river in North America, was in full flood and broke through the farmers’ irrigation canal, jumped its channel, and began to flow north into the Salton Sink. Before it was rerouted, the river had created the Salton Sea, the largest lake in California.

  As Joan Didion points out, farmers in California are called growers. They are not called farmers because most of the growers are large landowners and run their agricultural operations like corporations. In 1905 the Imperial Valley landowners included the Chandlers, Harrison Otis, and E. H. Harriman, whose Union Pacific Railroad owned a lot of the land and carried most of the freight and agricultural produce of the valley. For two years the Union Pacific transported every possible timber, rock, and construction material to block the rampaging river and send it back into its natural channel. The Imperial Valley growers beseeched President Teddy Roosevelt to have the new Bureau of Reclamation rebuild the destroyed irrigation system and the diversion canal because it would wash out in another flood. Elmore Mead refused to rebuild the diversion canal and insisted that control of the Colorado River in the south required a dam farther up in the canyons of the north.

  In 1908 the same plutocrats of Los Angeles began the Owens Valley project to secure Los Angeles’s water supply. They created the Los Angeles Aqueduct and a new agricultural empire in the San Fernando Valley. A dam on the Colorado River was for the future.

  California, however, did not have one river that contributed to the flow of the Colorado River. What it did have was more than half the population of the West and the political clout that went with it. The six states whose rivers did flow into the Colorado were still underpopulated: Wyoming, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico were still lightly inhabited (Nevada had fewer than eighty thousand people). Colorado and Utah each had a hundred thousand people. Before Congress would authorize a dam—only the federal Treasury could finance such a project—the waters of the Colorado River had to be appropriated among the states through which it flowed. Commerce secretary Herbert Hoover was a Californian, a Republican, and a former mining engineer who had worked all over the world, including China. He was selected to undertake the task of apportioning the waters of the Colorado River.

  For eleven months in 1922 representatives of all seven states met in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with Secretary Hoover to apportion future use of the Colorado River. Because of western water law—western states allocate water on the basis of the “prior appropriation” doctrine, under which water that was used earliest has higher priority, as in “first in time, first in right”—everyone was afraid that California would take far too much water and keep it. The Bureau of Reclamation measured the river’s flow at 17.5 million acre-feet, a measurement acknowledged, then and now, to be much too high. Then Secretary Hoover divided the states into two artificial groups, the Upper Basin (Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico) and the Lower Basin (California, Arizona, and Nevada) and divided the river and the states at the artificial division point of Lee’s Ferry. The states of each basin were to allocate 7.5 million acre-feet of water among themselves. In the Lower Basin, California was to get 4.5 million acre-feet, Arizona 2.5 million ac
re-feet, and Nevada 300,000 acre-feet. At the time Nevada was more interested in electricity than water. Most of Nevada’s citizens lived in the north, and Las Vegas had artesian springs. Arizona felt that far too much water was going to California and refused to sign the compact. Hoover then changed the ratification process so that if six out of the seven states signed, it was a legally binding agreement.

  Pop Squires of Las Vegas represented Nevada on the Colorado River Commission negotiations and reported regularly to the governor. He was the editor of Las Vegas’s only newspaper and had also started its telephone company and its electricity company. Because Las Vegas still had its aquifer and springs, Nevada was seeking hydroelectric power more than water. Mexico was allocated 1.5 million acre-feet because Mexican farmers had prior use. The Colorado River ran through two Mexican counties for ninety miles and had irrigated Mexico’s agricultural fields long before the diversion canal to Imperial Valley. The final document, known as the Colorado Compact—also called the West’s Constitution—was signed in 1922.

  The same year Arthur Powell Davis, director of the Reclamation Service, presented Congress with an inclusive report on taming the Colorado River. Referencing its early California roots, it was called “Report on Problems of Imperial Valley and Vicinity” and encompassed flood-control dams, storage reservoirs, and hydroelectricity to fully exploit “the American Nile.” The report was translated into congressional legislation called the Boulder Dam Project Act. For the next six years, the bill to authorize the money to construct a dam, a hydroelectric plant, and an aqueduct to the Imperial Valley was introduced in Congress, and every year it was successfully defeated in the Senate by Carl Hayden of Arizona. The California growers understood the need for a stronger political hand, so they decided to run their own candidate to be the first US president from the West. Their candidate: Herbert Hoover. As soon as Hoover’s election was announced in November 1928, the Boulder Dam bill passed the Senate. Access to the White House was too important a carrot for senators to continue to support Arizona in its opposition.

  By 1938 Hoover Dam had been built and declared the greatest structure in America. The reservoir behind the dam provided water for millions of people in Greater Los Angeles and irrigated more than 1 million acres in the Imperial Valley in Southern California. California was getting much more than its allocated 4.5 million acre-feet of water because Arizona couldn’t tap its allocation because it didn’t have the infrastructure. Las Vegas didn’t get to use its allocation until the 1960s when it built a pipeline from Lake Mead, so California was probably using Nevada’s water as well.

  As a practical matter California was going to get as much water as it wanted because the aqueducts and canals and pumping stations to deliver the water to the Upper Basin states had not yet been built. Until there was a second dam farther upriver, the Upper Basin states had no stored water to tap. At the time it didn’t seem significant because the mushrooming population growth of Phoenix and Las Vegas was still in the future. It was only after World War II when the advent of commercial air-conditioning coincided with the homecoming of millions of war veterans, who had trained at military bases in the West and began looking for a new start in a sunny climate, that the full potential of the Colorado River was exploited. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, more than 30 million people were dependent on the waters of the Colorado River. At the same time its flow was diminishing every year.

  By the time I was driving along the shrinking Lake Mead in February 2010, the lake was on its way to its lowest point since the reservoir had been filled. I had been told that people in Las Vegas bet on the numbers of the water level of Lake Mead, like the point spread on a football game. The numbers are posted every day on the Lake Mead Bureau of Reclamation website.

  The important numbers to keep in mind are these:

  •1,219 feet above sea level. This marks the high-water level when Lake Mead is full, and it was reached in June 1941. It wasn’t seen again until 1983.

  •1,083.3 feet above sea level, the water level in February 2010 when I was chasing the water south from Overton to Hemenway Wash, approximately a 130-foot drop.*

  •1,075 feet above sea level, the number at which mandatory water cuts go into effect for California, Nevada, and Arizona.

  •1,050 feet above sea level, the top of the Las Vegas upper intake pipe, a pipe installed in 1971 and from which the 2 million people of Las Vegas get 90 percent of their water. Below this level there is not enough water to run Hoover Dam’s generators that supply more than 1 million people with electricity. The hydroelectricity also pumps water over the mountains into California.

  •1,000 feet above sea level, the top of Las Vegas’s second intake pipe, built in the mid-1990s, which has a problem with quagga (zebra) mussels.

  •895 feet above sea level, at which point Lake Mead is declared a dead pool in which evaporation exceeds inflow. Downriver water delivery to California stops. Electricity generation has already stopped.

  •863 feet above sea level, the top of the third Las Vegas intake pipe currently under construction (scheduled for completion in 2014 but delayed until 2015). A special machine, built in Germany, is boring through solid rock a half mile out beneath the surface of the lake. At this level the intake pipe will be draining the dregs of the lake.

  In February 2010 I did not understand the significance of these numbers because my quest was simple. I was trying to find a place where I could sit close to water. And as an easterner the complexities of western water law were still murky to me. (I have since learned that water law is often also murky to westerners.) At Hemenway Marina I saw the unmistakable element that testifies to the 130-foot drop of the reservoir, an 80-foot white ring that marks every surrounding canyon wall and every island jutting up from the lake. “The bathtub ring,” locals call it. Some of the islands are entirely white, which means that they were once entirely underwater. The white ring is a magnesium deposit left behind as the water levels of Lake Mead slowly dropped. Another jarring element is the silted-up side canyons and stretch of dry land that surround the marina.

  The Hemenway Marina has an RV trailer park, cottages, a public launch ramp, restrooms, a fish cleaning station, a restaurant, a long-term trailer village, a fuel station, and hundreds of boat slips filled with cabin cruisers and sailboats, large and small. Over the past ten years the National Park Service has had to extend roads and build ever-longer docks to chase the retreating water. As the level of Lake Mead kept dropping, the Hemenway Marina incorporated several other marina facilities that simply ran out of water access.

  “DON’T WRECK YOUR BOAT!” I read in the headline of a National Park Service newspaper as I sat at a table in a little open-air restaurant and bar out at the end of the pier. The headline was accompanied by a drawing of a motorboat hitting a rock beneath the surface and a warning: “Water levels at Lake Mead change frequently. Please be aware of launching hazards, shallow reefs and recently exposed islands and rocks.”

  At the edge of the dock, huge schools of inedible carp the size of small bulldogs fought for popcorn fed to them by children. They covered the surface, squirming like eels and making the water boil. I did not want to fall off the dock into that water.

  “I won’t go out on that lake,” said the woman at the table next to me. We had struck up a conversation after I leaped up from my table in a panic when two of the ugliest birds I had ever seen waddled up to my table. The mutant birds had large black bodies, small heads, and red wattles. They looked as though they could neither fly nor swim. “Don’t worry about them,” she reassured me. “They’re the mascots of the marina.”

  I learned her name was Doris and she was from Detroit, visiting her son and daughter-in-law, both of whom worked at one of the big casinos. “They have a big cabin cruiser, and they’re out there fishing right now,” she told me. “The lake is stocked with trout, but I told ’em I’m staying right here on the dock.” She was emphatic. “Last time we went out we hit something. And we wer
e in the middle of the lake going fast. A REALLY BIG thump.” She again nodded emphatically as she told me this. Out in the middle, Lake Mead can be a mile or two from shore.

  In About a Mountain, John D’Agata wrote about the strange items starting to poke through the surface of Lake Mead, among them the smokestacks from the old concrete plant from Hoover Dam construction. These remnants of the dam’s construction were submerged when the reservoir filled, but are starting to reappear. The National Park Service has also started to write about the rocks and reefs that are beginning to change the boating pleasures of Lake Mead. It has put a more expansive explanation on its website, instructing boaters in how to think about the new low water levels of Lake Mead. “Low water doesn’t mean no water,” it begins.

  Even as Lake Mead’s levels decline, the beauty and splendor of the lake and surrounding desert landscape remains. As a reservoir, Lake Mead is designed to fluctuate in order to provide the southwest with a reliable source of water during times of drought, such as is being experienced now.

  Boaters should treat the lake as if they are visiting it for the first time every time they visit as Lake Mead’s water elevation drops. Unmarked reefs are exposed or lurk just below the surface of the water. Boating at night or at faster speeds can be dangerous. Special care also needs to be taken on launch ramps, as temporary extensions may not provide the best traction.