Without water, nothing can live. And in the Western United States, there isn't much of it because the region is a desert.
"Everything yearns to be alive in the desert," says Riley Mitchell, a park ranger at Capitol Reef National Park in southern Utah.
For example, short, clumpy trees grow in the cracks of rock where they find even the least bit of soil. Look a little closer and you see vegetation surviving in this land and that includes many flowering plants. Lizards scurry across your path in order to alter their body temperature, which gets too cold under a rock or too hot in the sun.
In the desert everything living screams for water, including your own body. You don't sweat in its dry heat. Your lips crack and your skin dries as your body dehydrates. If you haven't taken care to consume enough water you'll know it because you'll feel faint.
Consequently, the key concern of the West is water. Patient and persistent rivers have largely carved the topography of this region over millions of years until today they are gentle streams or silvery sheens of leftover salt and gypsum lying on a dry riverbed glistening in the sun. Here a river valley is said to be any place where water might have run through it over the past 100 years.
More of these dry river valleys are appearing as the decade-long drought continues. Some people claim this drought is the worst on record--and maybe over the past 1,400 years.
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