Western Water A to Z is the first ever field guide to Western water. Reinventing this twentieth-century genre for a twenty-first-century audience, Robert Crifasi answers questions about rivers, water projects, the culture of water, the ecosystems water projects have created or destroyed, and the reliance of cities, farms, and industries on this critical resource. Crifasi also engages personalities that are nearly synonymous with Western water—John Wesley Powell, Elwood Mead, and Floyd Dominy, among others—to show how their lives intertwined with and often influenced the course of water development across the region.
Robert R. Crifasi works in water management and planning and is an environmental scientist with more than twenty-five years of experience. He has worked as an environmental planner with Denver Water; had served as the water resources administrator for the City of Boulder’s Open Space and Mountain Parks Department, where he was on the board of directors of eleven ditch companies; and was the president of several Boulder Valley ditches. He is an award-winning photographer and the author of A Land Made from Water and Western Water A-Z.