My Watermark is the Colorado River, Colorado.

I’m with the Sierra Club Niagara Group and the Keeping Things Alive podcast. About five years ago I went on a work trip where I got to take a raft down the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon. It was amazing and beautiful; we got to camp on the sand next to the river at night, and we saw snakes, scorpions, and amazing birds.

Then on the last day as we approached Lake Powell we started hitting the bottom because there was so much less water than there used to be. The guides who were with us were really surprised there was so little water there at that time of year. So it went from this amazing trip to this eerie time at the end where you can look to the banks and you could see where the water level had gone down and the tree roots couldn’t reach the water anymore. And we had to get out and push our boats to get through these really shallow passages.

I was an amazing trip and I’ll remember it forever – for the good and the bad reasons. It just made me aware of the water issues facing the west at the time and still continue. To me, it was the beginning point of being really concerned about water quantity. It was a big deal; you could visually see the water level going down over time.