American Glossary – County Highway

Departments

America by the Numbers

By The Editors

44.9 — Elon Musk’s compensation package as head of Tesla, in billions 45,811 — Average salary of non-CEO Tesla employee, in dollars 20 — Multiple of average worker compensation earned by US corporate CEO in 1950 271 — Multiple of average worker compensation earned by US CEO in 2016 3,580 — Current depth of man-made Lake Powell, in feet 5,280 — Depth of water covering the surface of Mars if released from a gigantic underground reservoir recently discovered by NASA’s InSight Mars lander, in feet 15 — Years that the asteroid-hunting telescope NEOWISE orbited the earth protecting us all from a catastrophic asteroid hit before being retired by NASA this summer 1234 — Most common PIN code in America, as derived from recent data breaches 25 — Percentage of students at Columbia University coming from other countries in 2011 55 — Percentage of students at Columbia University coming from other countries in 2022 337,117 — Number of people who illegally crossed the southern border into the US in …

Report

Beyond Dead Pool

A trip down the Colorado

A hideous accounting trick is destroying America’s rivers

Lake Powell is the American Pompei, preserved under oozing tonnages of mud

Cash-register dams prop up a forsaken nineteenth-century fantasy

By Wade Graham

When we got to the North Wash boat ramp, we pulled up, four of us in a truck towing an inflatable rib boat on a trailer, but there was no ramp. Instead, we were confronted by a steep dirt bank, almost a cliff, crumbling into the fast current ten feet below. It was May, 2005, and the water of Lake Powell, the second-largest reservoir in the United States, was at its lowest level since May, 1969. We’d come to put a boat on the water in order to find out what we didn’t know, and what no one seemed to know: What was happening now that the Colorado River, after being smothered for 42 years, had begun pushing back? This ramp of sorts is not where North Wash empties into the Colorado River — that is a mile and a half downstream — but is nevertheless called the North Wash boat ramp. I mention this because it is a pattern in this story, that things are officially called one thing in spite of in reality being quite another. Five hours from Salt Lake City and about 40 miles from the nearest …