Understanding the Salt River in Phoenix, Arizona


If you've lived in Phoenix, Arizona for a while, you know about the Salt River. On maps it's a blue squiggly line, and if you go look at it, or fly over it, it's just a big wide space of mostly sand and mud and a few scrubby plants. And if you're like me, from back east, it may be strange that the locals even call it a river. I grew up in Minneapolis, next to the Mississippi River, so I have a pretty good idea what a river is. Hang on, I'll see if I can explain why Phoenicians call it a river with this silly story:

A man from Phoenix goes to visit a friend back east and is asked what he thinks about the local river. His reply is "I really couldn't get a good look at it, it had water in it all of the time!"

So, to be fair, the Salt River isn't really a river, it's more of a wash. Dry most of the time, then rushing with water, then muddy, then dry. I suppose you could call it a gully. But the name Salt Wash or Salt Gully just doesn't sound right, so here in the desert we call it a river.

But it is a gigantic gully, or wash, and it's been that way since the end of the last Ice Age, when the desert formed. Now go take a look at a map of Arizona and you'll notice a lot of mountainous areas northeast of Phoenix. A lot of snow falls there every year, and when it melts, it flows down towards the Salt River Valley, which is where Phoenix is. Ultimately the water flows into the Gila River, and then into the ocean. And this is all that happened before people decided that it would be a good idea to catch some of that water as it flowed by, and store it. The first people to do it here are called the Hohokams, and they did it several hundred years ago. The modern people of Phoenix have been doing it since the 1860s.

Holding back that much water every year isn't easy, and the earliest dams on the Salt River near Phoenix had a tendency to fail, and flood. It really wasn't until 1911, when the Roosevelt Dam was built, that people in Phoenix stopped worrying so much about flooding, although it happened. Quite a lot!

The water from the Salt River is stored at the dam, and guided into canals. The one nearby me, which I like to ride along, is called the Arizona Canal, and has been there since 1885. The engineering to make this happen boggles my mind, and it's what made a city like Phoenix possible.

And it all happened because of a wash, or gully, which we prefer to call a river.
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