What it means
The Verde is the river Scottsdale forgets it has. The Salt gets the attention, the tubing, the canals, the dry bed under the freeways, but a few miles northeast of the city the Verde River still does what desert rivers are supposed to do: it flows, all year, cold and green between cottonwoods, out of the mountains of central Arizona and down to its meeting with the Salt.
Locals use it in two senses. Out Rio Verde Drive, past the Rio Verde Foothills, “going to the Verde” means a picnic and wet feet at a Forest Service site in the Tonto. On a boat trailer heading north on Bartlett Lake Road, it means the reservoirs: Bartlett and Horseshoe, the two lakes the river fills. Either way it is the closest thing to a running river within an hour of Old Town.
The water rights and the dams’ place in the system are in the Arizona water law guide, and the Salt side of the river trip is in the tubing and wild horses guide. This page is about the name.
Where you’ll meet it
Bartlett Lake weekends, the town of Rio Verde and the road named for it, Fountain Hills views east, the Salt River Project lake-level reports, and the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation, which sits on its banks.
Where the word came from
Verde is Spanish for green, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which keeps the river’s Wild and Scenic record, leaves it at that. The likeliest explanations are the obvious ones: the long strip of cottonwoods and willows that marks its course across the brown desert, or the water itself, which really does look green in midday light. Who first wrote “Verde” on a map is not something we could document.
It was not the first European name. The early Spanish explorers called it El Río de los Reyes, the River of the Kings, a name the local historian Steven Ayers revived as the title of his history of the river. The peoples who lived along it had their own names long before; in Yavapai it is Haka’he:la. The Yavapai homeland took in the lower Verde, and the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation still holds land on it, around the site of Fort McDowell, the 1865 Army post that gave its name to the McDowell Mountains and to McDowell Road.
The river’s modern shape is an engineering story. Bartlett Dam, built from 1936 to 1939 and named for a government surveyor, Bill Bartlett, was the first dam on the Verde. Horseshoe Dam upstream followed from 1944 to 1946, built by the Phelps Dodge copper company in exchange for water rights elsewhere. Both feed the Salt River Project system that waters the Valley.
What it is not
The Verde is not the Salt, though the two are easily confused from the freeway: the Verde comes from the north, the Salt from the east, and they meet on Community land. It is also not Rio Verde, the retirement golf community at the end of Rio Verde Drive, and it is not the Verde Valley, the Cottonwood and Camp Verde country far upstream.
The fine print
The Verde runs about 170 miles, from below Sullivan Lake in Yavapai County, flowing free for about 125 miles through the Prescott, Coconino and Tonto national forests before it reaches Horseshoe. On August 28, 1984, Congress designated 40.5 miles of it as a Wild and Scenic River: 18.3 miles scenic and 22.2 miles wild, down to the edge of the Mazatzal Wilderness.
Below Bartlett the river runs about twenty more miles to the Salt, through the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation and onto the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, where the two rivers join about four miles above Granite Reef Dam. That confluence is the site of the biggest thing that never happened to either river. Orme Dam, a Central Arizona Project reservoir planned there, would have flooded much of the Fort McDowell reservation; the Yavapai fought it, and the federal government dropped it on November 12, 1981.
Horseshoe Dam is an earthfill structure 194 feet high, about 58 miles northeast of Phoenix; Bartlett sits about 48 miles out. Both reservoirs rise and fall sharply with winter snow and summer monsoon storms, and Horseshoe, the upper reservoir, can drop very low between wet years.