“JUST A TRICKLE”:
Where the Rio Grande Is Born: To understand the water crisis threatening millions across Texas and northern Mexico, I backpacked deep into the remote Colorado wilderness. (Jack Herrera, September 2026, Texas Monthly)
We began our journey by driving north through New Mexico. The June heat radiated off the highway, and our packs full of gaiters, puffers, and other winter gear felt absurd. But as we crossed the Colorado border and gained altitude, it felt as if someone had shifted the dial backward on the seasons. At 10,000 feet, winter conditions can last half the year. Steep peaks rose all around us, covered in blankets of snow.
We stopped to grab some provisions (whiskey) in the tiny former mining town of Creede. There I met Cole Birdsey, who was sitting outside his fly-fishing shop. A fifth-generation Creedite, he told me that his ancestors were miners; the first of them had come during the silver rush in the late nineteenth century. Deep in one of those mines, Birdsey’s grandfather had watched his brother die in an accident.
You can still spot the occasional flash of metal ore in the Rio Grande near Creede. That sort of natural wealth has driven settlement and industry across the American West for nearly five hundred years. In 1540 the conquistador Francisco Vázquez de Coronado left present-day Mexico in search of the Seven Cities of Cíbola, rumored to be rich in gold. He eventually hunkered down along the Rio Grande near what became Bernalillo, New Mexico, where he terrorized the local Tiwa. Coronado never found Cíbola, but successive generations of European settlers searched for new ways to create wealth in the lands they had conquered.
By the late nineteenth century, deserts flanking the Rio Grande were bursting with cotton. Settlers diverted the river to irrigate these ever-expanding fields. Later, a public works project flooded valleys and renamed them reservoirs. Laborers built hundreds of miles of canals and pipes that today make it possible for humans to capture, claim, and use nearly every drop of the river.
The resources extracted from the dry West have helped build one of the most powerful, wealthiest civilizations in history. Yet some of the small towns in this area tell another story about the cost of that growth. Every boom inevitably goes bust.