This article was first published in the Verde Independent on Tuesday, March 5th, 2024 as one of a series of articles entitled “Verde River Reflections”, by Doug Von Gausig.
Today’s Verde River is one of the healthiest, most biodiverse rivers in the desert southwest. Its riparian forest is dominated by native vegetation and it runs 365 days a year through riffles, pools, rapids, and runs. More than 40 species of dragonflies and damselflies bless us in the summer and about 240 species of birds call the river home at some point in the year. The Verde River Institute’s iNaturalist project has catalogued over 500 kinds of life that are here because of the Verde.
But it wasn’t always so…
The Verde was historically a wide, slow flowing, “braided channel,” with lots of beaver dams and mosquitoes! The beavers kept the river dammed into shallow, wide pools for its entire distance through the Verde Valley. You could not have kayaked that Verde River. It was shallow and clogged with vegetation. Biodiversity, which is one of the main metrics of river ecosystem health, was high, but that prehistoric river would have been poor kayaking and early explorers complained of mosquitoes and malaria. It wasn’t a very pleasant place for a picnic! But in the late 1800s and early 1900s, fur trappers trapped the beavers almost into extinction (along with the native otters), after which floods tore down the beaver dams, and allowed the river to flow much faster. Having no dams to slow floods and stabilize banks, the river eroded into “incised” channels that today run 5-8 feet below their pre-development elevation.
The river was a veritable supermarket for the native Americans who inhabited its banks and cliffs – the Southern Sinagua – until about 1425 AD, when they vanished. The river they hunted and fished and drank would have been that slow-flowing beaver-dammed river.
Soon after the channel was incised, copper smelters in Jerome, Clarkdale and Cottonwood had a massive impact on the Verde. The acidic air and heavy metal pollutants that the smelter stacks emitted poisoned the vegetation along the river, including the farmland that fed the people of the Verde Valley. Making matters worse, the people living near the river stressed the riparian forest by cutting trees and shrubs for fuel. By the early 1900s, there were almost no plants of any kind along the river from above Tapco to below Cottonwood.
The river stayed this way until 1953 when all the smelter activity stopped due to depletion of the copper ore in Jerome. The river has since recovered its riparian forest, but large floods continue to do far more damage than they would have done 100 years ago, because of the lack of beaver dams and incision of the channel.
The river we see today runs for about 192 miles, and it is still (and probably always will be) an incised channel. In fact, just last year, after the longest flood ever recorded, the river incised even more. The flood exposed new beds and substrates below what had been the “normal” riverbed. Ancient clay deposits that the Sinagua people likely used to make their pottery are now on the surface again, and the historic farm soils from the original Jordan farm and others, are once again exposed.
The closing of the smelters and the movement of cattle from the riparian area have allowed the riparian forest to recover and it is now one of the healthiest and most diverse ecosystems in the state.
But it wasn’t always so…
Doug Von Gausig
Executive Director of Verde River Institute, former Mayor of Clarkdale, Avid Kayaker
