DECEMBER, 1971 50c - Desert Magazine of the Southwest

RESTLESS
COLORADO
RIVER
by Harvey Gray
Are millions of acre-feet of water being lost from the lower part of the Colo-
rado by a mysterious underground channel? How much more fertile crop
land in the United States and Mexico could be saved if we plugged the hole?
THE DAMMED Colorado: is it slipping
out the back way? If so, it isn't a
diversion you'd care to follow through
its long dark tunnel, with only one skylight
between Yuma and the Gulf of
California.
An old map by Padre Eusebio Kino,
the earliest explorer of Mexico's Pinacate
lava fields and the Sonora Desert
region in 1698-1701, is intriguingly different
than the modern charts of the
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north of the Gulf. It shows the Colorado
delta reaching almost to the U.S.
border, and entering the gulf near the
northeast corner rather than the northwest
where it is today—nearly 65 miles
east of its present location.
In studying his diaries and the works
of various writers such as H. E. Bolton
and many of the early Jesuits of New
Spain, it is obvious that Kino was much
too experienced as an explorer and car-
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