___ eARTh™ - modern art gallery - Satellite Images of Earth

Colorado River at Bear Canyon, north of the city of Yuma. On the picture the Colorado forms the border between Arizona (top) and California (bottom). The 2,330 km (1,450 mi) long Colorado River is one of the principal rivers of the Southwestern United States and northern Mexico, it drains a vast, mostly arid and barren landscape and supplies water for 30 million people, the equivalent of the population of Venezuela.

The Colorado originates in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, the state named for the stream. From there it flows through Utah, then Arizona, then it formes portions of Arizona's borders with Nevada and California, and whats left of the river flows into Mexico, it marks a short part of the boreder between the Mexican states of Baja California and Sonora before it hardly empties into the Gulf of California (Mar de Cortés). The Colorado River Delta served as a critical stopover point for hundreds of migratory bird species and it was the winter or permanent home of dozens of species of waterbirds until the Colorado's final dams went up in the 1960s, and the delta turned into desert, for more than half a century, the Colorado River has failed to regularly reach the sea.