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Comment by mauvehaus | Hacker News Reader

Three books anyone interested in the Colorado River generally or Glen Canyon Dam specifically should read are

Cadillac Desert. A history of how all the dams came to be.

The Emerald Mile. Things got pretty perilous at Glen Canyon Dam owing to it being too full at the wrong time of the year. In the midst of this, three guys decide to take advantage of flow levels we're unlikely to see again in our lifetimes to set an all time record for running the Grand Canyon. This is on my personal list of the greatest true stories ever told.

Down The River (or anything else by Edward Abbey, really). The titular essay is about a trip down the Colorado. Abbey was an ardent critic of Glen Canyon Dam for flooding Glen Canyon. Better known for writing The Monkey Wrench Gang and Desert Solitaire, but Down the River more specifically deals with the Colorado.

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To add an interesting fiction book: The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi focuses on a hypothetical future where individual militias and municipalities/states in the South/South West fight and engage in near hidden warfare over access to the dwindling Colorado River. The wealthy are able to live in compounds where enormous amounts of water are recycled in a self contained system, while the less well off have to fend for themselves in what is a veritable super desert. It's quite dark, but a troubling possible future written in a clear hard sci-fi voice.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-water-knife-paolo-bacig... I enjoyed the audiobook.

"In the near future, the Colorado River has dwindled to a trickle. Detective, assassin, and spy, Angel Velasquez “cuts” water for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, ensuring that its lush arcology developments can bloom in Las Vegas. When rumors of a game-changing water source surface in Phoenix, Angel is sent south, hunting for answers that seem to evaporate as the heat index soars and the landscape becomes more and more oppressive. There, he encounters Lucy Monroe, a hardened journalist with her own agenda, and Maria Villarosa, a young Texas migrant, who dreams of escaping north. As bodies begin to pile up, the three find themselves pawns in a game far bigger and more corrupt than they could have imagined, and when water is more valuable than gold, alliances shift like sand, and the only truth in the desert is that someone will have to bleed if anyone hopes to drink."

The movie Chinatown was also about California and water.

"The film was inspired by the California water wars, a series of disputes over southern California water at the beginning of the 20th century, by which Los Angeles interests secured water rights in the Owens Valley"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinatown_(1974_film)

Sprinkle in "The Water Knife" by Paolo Bacigalupi as a really fun read about "Water Wars" in the future.

Or for water infrastructure more generally, City Water, City Life by Carl Smith

Add to that list "Where the Water Goes" by David Owen.

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