Colin McDonald Documents the Vanishing Rio Grande Sasha Von Oldershausen - VICE News
go to original January 25, 2015

Disappearing Rio Grande (Matt Rist TV)

"You mess with the Hudson River and millions of people will hear about it. You mess with the Rio Grande and few people notice," Colin McDonald, a 32-year-old writer who set out on June 19th to travel the entire 1,900 mile length of the Rio Grande, told VICE News.

The problem is, though, there isn't much river left for him to follow.

The point of McDonald's epic journey is to talk to people whose livelihoods depend on the river and to raise awareness of a resource that is rapidly diminishing. He is documenting his trek at Disappearing Rio Grande, where he has been uploading blog posts from the banks of the river via satellite and plotting his progress with a GPS tracking devise.

"When there's water, I float. When there's not, I walk," McDonald told VICE News.

If the Rio Grande had water consistently running through it — and at one point not so long ago it did — it would be the fourth longest river in the United States. The reality is, however, that upstream from Big Bend National Park a swathe of the Rio Grande more than 300 miles long is nothing but dry riverbed. In El Paso, Texas much of it has been diverted for irrigation. And at Boca Chica Beach, where the Rio Grande terminates at the Gulf of Mexico, and where McDonald's journey will conclude in late January, the river is so severely diminished it sometimes fails to reach the sea.

Read the rest at VICE News

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!