Lasting Impression
By: Craig A. Wilson, Water Management Director For over thirty generations the farmers along the Salt and Gila Rivers have irrigated their farms using water from these rivers, much as happens today. Those ancient canals brought water to what would become Dobson’s ranch. Today, modern canals bring water to what is now the new Dobson Ranch; our home. Visit Mesa’s “Park of the Canals” and see firsthand what the earlier inhabitants of our area created; a remarkable canal system that can still be seen today. Those earlier people, just like us, had to deal with fluctuations in stream flow, a canal dry-up to clean out the silt and the repair of control gates that meter the flow of water. They worked through those issues to thrive for more than 100 decades. That is a long time compared to our 5 decades of drawing water from those same canals. Those early farmers were called the Hohokam and their canals were huge. One canal in Mesa was 15 feet deep and more than 30 feet wide; the longest canal stretched for 20 miles. At one point more than 100,000 acres of Hohokam farmland was being irrigated. In its engineering and size, their canal system was bigger and more sophisticated than any irrigation system in the prehistoric New World. What happened to the Hohokam? Drought is one of the many possible reasons for their decline. One thing the Hohokam may have lacked was a plan to deal with a prolonged drought. The current inhabitants of the Valley of the Sun are trying to devise such a plan. If the current Drought Contingency Plan passes into law, the costs and saving of water will require even more cooperation across the