There’s a great river running through the middle of Phoenix, but if you don’t know where to look, you might not see it.
The Salt River once ran through town, but it was dammed up in the early 1900s to provide water and power for the growing city.
Today, you might barely notice that the wide, dusty trough under freeway crossings is a river at all — except in one particular place, where a small stretch of the river in South Phoenix is wet, green and teeming with life.
On a recent morning, cars rumbled along Central Avenue, and a light rail train loudly dinged to announce its arrival. From a road bridge with a clear view of the Phoenix skyline, Chase Field would only be about five minutes away by car. Underneath the bridge, though, is a thriving habitat that feels far away from downtown.
There’s a small section of the Salt River that is being restored, turning that brown, dusty riverbed back into the kind of lush, green landscape that makes a perfect home for birds, bugs and fish.
“You can build a city all around a river, but in the end you’ve got to give the river a little space," said Haley Paul, a water policy expert with Audubon Southwest, a nonprofit environmental group. She knows this stretch of the river well at the Nina Mason Pulliam Rio Salado Audubon Center.
It’s easy to tell that Phoenix is a city in the desert. It’s harder to see that it’s also a city on the banks of a river that brought life to that patch of desert.
Plants, animals and indigenous people have called the Salt River Valley home since time immemorial. White settlers were attracted to the river, too, diverting its water to grow crops as early as the 1860s. Before Tempe was called Tempe, it was named Hayden’s Ferry — after a 19th-century businessman who floated people and goods across the Salt River before any bridges were built in the area.
In the first decade of the 1900s, settlers began to dam the Salt River in the hills and mountains east of the city, storing its snowmelt and keeping regular amounts of water flowing to Phoenix, even amid the ebb and flow of wet and dry years.
In time, the value of keeping that water in a series of upstream reservoirs became so important to Phoenix — for irrigating crops, providing for residents of a growing city, and generating hydroelectric power — that little water made it all the way down into the part of the river that flowed through the city itself.
Every once in a while, in an extraordinarily wet year, Mother Nature takes matters into its own hands and forces humans to send water through the Salt River once again. The Salt River has rushed with water when there’s too much to keep in those reservoirs. Sometimes, like in late 1965, that resulted in a full-on flood. More recently, like in 2023, it saw surging water fill the entire width of the river channel.
The small island of green near the Rio Salado Audubon Center holds some water even in dry years.
The restored area was once a literal dump. Thirty years ago, it hosted a landfill that held construction waste and old tires. But after years of carefully reshaping the land, it has been completely transformed.
“I guess it's truly an oasis in the desert,” Paul said. “Yes, it takes a lot of work to do this, but when you just add water, it is amazing what can come back.”
The city of Phoenix channels water from storm drains to this area, and more water is added to grow plants along the river’s banks. The result is a cool, damp, marshy area that feels unlike almost any other place within Phoenix city limits.
In the growing heat of a May morning, dragonflies flitted from flower to flower, bullfrogs bellowed from a thick patch of brush taller than a person, and fish flickered near the surface of a shallow pond.
Anthony Canganelli, who works at the nature center, watched birds dart in and out of the trees near the river.
He pointed out a family of quail strolling by, then peered through his binoculars and identified a Black-headed Grosbeak further along the river banks.
“In an hour and a half, on a good day, you can see 50 different species of birds,” Canganelli said. “Over time, we've had just over 200 that have been seen here. That makes up for just about a quarter of what's been seen in the U.S.”
While most of the plants around this place are an important part of wildlife habitat, some are invasive and unwanted. A volunteer group called Protectors of the Salt River is trying to do something about that. Once a week, they come out to pick invasive stinknet, creating more space for native plants to flourish.
Aldo Gonzalez, the group’s organizing director, said it’s not hard to get people to join their efforts.
“I think it's an escape from the city,” he said, “Escape from the sounds and the buses and the heat, and you just can kind of be yourself.”
Gonzalez said the volunteer group helps people connect with the river, including some of the indigenous people whose ancestors have lived near the Salt River for generations.
“For O'odham,” he said, “the river is sacred. They're known as river people, and so some of our elders — for example, Auntie Sweetie, who's one of our founders — it's just super sacred to her. For her, this is like coming to church.”
The people who make this little green section possible said that it is designed to help everybody build a connection with the river that has fueled Phoenix since its earliest days.
“These restoration projects go a long way towards helping us to re-identify with our river and re-embrace our river and bring it back to something that we value,” said Tricia Balluff, environmental programs manager with the city of Phoenix, “And that's part of our identity.”
Balluff said natural, green spaces like this section of the Salt River can provide benefits for people’s mental and physical health, just like they can provide habitat for animals.
“It's for everyone,” she said. “It's for us as people. It's for residents of Phoenix. It's for people who come visit. It's for the wildlife. It's for the birds. It's for all these interconnected pieces of nature that we all need in order to thrive as a community.”
The green patch near the Audubon Center is by no means the wilderness. Even in the deepest part of the green oasis, you can still see planes overhead queuing to land at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport and hear the occasional car horn. But watching birds flit in and out of the reeds on the edge of a pond, in the cool shade of a Palo Verde tree, it can feel a million miles away from downtown Phoenix.
“It can be easy to forget that or not know that when you don't see it flowing,” said Audubon’s Haley Paul. “But certainly, our history is tied to water, and it's just a great reminder that we have a rich history, and it is all connected through water.”
