Colorado River Guide

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The Colorado River, major river of Southwest US, begins in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and flows southwest for 1,450 miles into the Sea of Cortez in northwestern Mexico.

Known for its dramatic canyons, whitewater rapids, and eleven U.S. National Parks, the Colorado River and its tributaries are a vital source of water for 40 million people.

Beginning with small bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers, Native Americans have inhabited the Colorado River basin for at least 8,000 years. Between 2,000 and 1,000 years ago, the watershed was home to large agricultural civilizations—considered some of the most sophisticated indigenous North American cultures—which eventually declined due to a combination of severe drought and poor land use practices. Most native peoples that inhabit the region today are descended from other groups that settled there beginning about 1,000 years ago.

For more than a thousand miles of its course, the Colorado has cut a deep gorge. Where the river system is joined by lateral streams—the Virgin, Kanab, Paria, Escalante, Dirty Devil, and Green rivers from the west, and the Little Colorado, San Juan, Dolores, and Gunnison from the east—a transverse system of narrow, winding deep canyons has been cut. Each entering river and each lateral creek has cut another canyon, and thus the upper and middle parts of the Colorado basin are traversed by a labyrinth of deep gorges. The longest of these unbroken trunk canyons through which the Colorado flows is the spectacular Grand Canyon, extending from the mouth of the Paria to the Grand Wash Stream. Other canyons cut by the river include Marble Canyon, Glen Canyon, and Cataract Canyon. Canyonlands National Park encompasses another of these regions at the juncture of the Green and Colorado rivers in southeastern Utah.

The lower end of the Colorado River is flanked by two great deserts, the Mojave and the Sonoran. In a subsection of the Sonoran Desert comprising the Colorado and Yuma deserts lies the Salton Trough (Salton Basin), a large structural depression extending to the northwest from the head of the Sea of Cortez for a distance of 150 miles.