The Cold River & the Start of the Grand Canyon

As we pass the dam, here's something most folks never think about: this wall doesn't just hold back water, it completely changed the river that runs out the far side of it. Before the dam, the Colorado down there ran warm, red, and wild — 'too thick to drink, too thin to plow,' the old-timers said, thick with the red silt that gave the river its name, which is just Spanish for 'colored red.'

Now look what comes out the bottom of the dam: cold, clear, green water. The dam draws its water from deep down in the lake, where it's frigid and the silt has settled out, so the river below runs cold and clean and blue-green all year. That completely remade the world downstream. The warm-water fish that lived here for ages struggled in the cold — but in their place, that clear cold water became a world-class trout stream. Just fifteen miles down from here, at a spot called Lees Ferry, anglers come from all over the globe to fish for rainbow trout in water that, before nineteen sixty-three, never held a trout at all.

And Lees Ferry is more than a fishing hole — it's a threshold. It's the one place for hundreds of miles where you can actually drive down to the Colorado and put a boat in, and it is the official Mile Zero of the Grand Canyon. Every raft trip through the Grand Canyon — those two-week epics down the biggest whitewater in America — launches from Lees Ferry, just downstream of where you're sitting. So the tamed river leaving this dam becomes, a few miles on, the wildest river ride in the country. Keep heading north; the lake and its last tale are just ahead.