BajaTaco said:
Jeff, excellent tales you are sharing with us! Hard to imagine steamers coming in from the Cortez, and traveling way up the Colorado to deliver supplies and people. Definitely share the pics if you have the time. That would be great. I have also read about the tidal bore there, and I can only imagine it - very cool that you got to experience that.
Grizzly's in the delta?? C'mon... could that be? It's all desert - have grizzlys ever inhabited lowland deserts? (other than to migrate?)
Ahhh, but it wasn't desert. It was once lush riparian from the mighty Colorado. Aldo Leopold described it in A Sand County Almanac.
"All this wealth of fowl and fish was not for our delectation alone. Often we came upon a bobcat, flattened to some half-immersed driftwood log, paw poised for mullet. Families of raccoons waded the shallows, munching water beetles. Coyotes watched us from inland knolls, waiting to resume their breakfast of mesquite beans, varied, I suppose, by an occasional crippled shore bird, duck, or quail. At every shallow burrow were tracks of burro deer. We always examined these deer trails, hoping to find signs of the despot of the Delta, the great jaguar, el tigre."
I can't find the reference ot the bears, or maybe the reporter told me that from his reading of its history, or I confused bears with beavers (I found reference to them) those few years ago. At any rate, it was once a mighty place that no expedition vehicle - except a boat or foot - could get through.
"On the map the Delta was bisected by the river, but in fact the river was nowhere and everywhere, for he could not decide which of a hundred green lagoons offered the most pleasant and least speedy path to the Gulf."
--Aldo Leopold, from A Sand County Almanac, describing the Colorado River Delta as it existed in 1922
