Colorado River State Historic Park

For nearly 20 years, Arizona State Parks says, every military post in the Southwest depended on this site. Major William B. Hooper set up the US Army's Yuma Quartermaster Depot in 1864 on high ground above the Colorado River. Supplies came from California by ocean-going ship around the tip of the Baja peninsula to the mouth of the Colorado, where they were moved onto river steamboats and carried up to Yuma. The depot kept a six-month supply of ammunition, clothing and food on hand for forts in Arizona, Nevada, southern Utah, New Mexico and west Texas, and as many as 900 mules and their teamsters were based here to haul it overland.

The railroad ended that role. The Southern Pacific reached Yuma in 1877, and the Army left the depot in the early 1880s. The Signal Corps stayed on, and other federal agencies, the Weather Service, the Customs Service and the Bureau of Reclamation among them, used the buildings for decades. The state began acquiring the site in 1969, opened it as Yuma Crossing State Historic Park in 1997, renamed it Yuma Quartermaster Depot State Historic Park in 2007, and gave it its present name in October 2017 when the exhibits were widened to cover the past, present and future of the river.

Five buildings from the depot's early days survive on the 10-acre park, and Arizona State Parks counts them among the oldest and best preserved in the state. Four hold exhibits. The visitor center introduces the depot and has a model of how it looked in 1872. The storehouse displays an Army escort wagon, a section of the old plank road across the sand dunes with a Model T, a steamboat room and antique farm vehicles. The 1870s Office of the Depot Quartermaster recreates the quartermaster's workspace and the Signal Corps telegraph office, with a room on the Yuma Proving Ground. The Commanding Officer's Quarters is furnished as in the 1870s, and the Corral House covers the Bureau of Reclamation's Yuma Project, which built Laguna Dam, the Yuma Main Canal and the Colorado River Siphon.

Outside are a steamboat paddle axle, probably from the Searchlight, a steam boiler and a shade ramada with panels on early irrigation. The outlet of the 1912 siphon, which still carries canal water under the river from California, can be seen just east of the park, and a paved path leads to a loop walk along the river. Pets, bicycles, skateboards and scooters are not allowed.