The Rio Grande is a high desert border few boats can use
Known as Río Bravo del Norte in Mexico and Tó Ba’áadi in Navajo, the Rio Grande runs 1,896 miles—about 3,051 kilometres—making it the fourth-longest river system in the United States. Rising in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains east of the Continental Divide, it waters seven U.S. and Mexican states across arid country.
After New Mexico the river becomes the boundary between Texas and the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas. Estimates of that border stretch run from 889 to 1,248 miles, depending on how it is measured. The Rio Conchos joins about 310 kilometres south-east of El Paso near Ojinaga, and the Pecos and Devils rivers enter farther downstream.
Much of the course lies high: the valley floor sits at 5,312 feet at Albuquerque and 3,762 at El Paso. In New Mexico the river follows the Rio Grande rift through a chain of basins filled with sediment, cutting canyons between them and sustaining a delicate bosque woodland on its flood plain, before running through desert south of Albuquerque. Irrigation lines most of its length and is heaviest in the subtropical Lower Rio Grande Valley, and conservation of the valley’s varied plants and animals is a constant local concern.
It ends in a small, sandy delta on the Gulf of Mexico. A sandbar sealed the mouth for parts of 2001 and 2002 until high flows of about 200 cubic metres per second scoured it open in autumn 2003. Although it reaches about 60 feet deep in places, passenger and cargo vessels generally cannot use it except near the mouth, rarely as far upstream as Laredo.
In the nineteenth century more than 200 steamboats plied the reach between Brownsville and Rio Grande City, many brought from the Ohio and Mississippi for the Mexican–American War of 1846. The Brownsville and Matamoros swing bridge of 1910 still carries cars, although its swing mechanism has sat idle since the steamboats vanished. In August 2015 the West Rail International Crossing, about 15 miles west, became the first new rail link between the two countries in over a century.
Source: Rio Grande
