The flooding of Glen Canyon was a crime, Edward Abbey, one of several writers and artists to float through the canyon before its inundation, once wrote. “Imagine the Taj Mahal or Chartes Cathedral buried in mud.” Now, drought is causing it to reëmerge.
We continued up the canyon, which twisted in sinuous curves. Along the rock, parallel to the surface of the lake, stretched an unbroken band of white, straight as a ruler. Everywhere you go on Lake Powell, this band is visible. It’s made of minerals that the reservoir deposited on the sandstone when it was full and that have been exposed as the water level has dropped. Known as the “bathtub ring,” it is now the height of the Statue of Liberty.
“If you were to tally up all these creeks and seeps, it’s hundreds of miles of riparian habitat that’s coming back,” he said. My husband noted that it was a bit awkward to be celebrating the effects of what, by most standards, counts as a disaster.Lake Powell drowned countless habitats, but they are gradually returning.
Starting around the year 1200, Glen Canyon experienced a population boom. Then, just sixty or seventy years later, the place emptied out. The granaries, the kivas, and the stone cliff dwellings were abandoned. And what held for Glen Canyon held for virtually all of the other settlements in the area. As Lake Powell recedes, Glen Canyon’s archeological sites are gradually resurfacing. Our second morning on the lake, Balken decided that we should go look for one. A bass fisherman had told him he’d seen the ruins of a stone building in an alcove near the entrance to the Escalante.
We started walking across what seemed like a Sahara of red sand. “When I look at this canyon, I think, There’s a lot of sediment to be moved here,” Balken said. Glen Canyon Dam was approved by Congress in the spring of 1956, as part of an extensive infrastructure bill that also authorized the construction of Flaming Gorge Dam, on the Green River, Navajo Dam, on the San Juan, and Blue Mesa Dam, on the Gunnison.
To Balken and his colleagues at the Glen Canyon Institute, this is a crisis that shouldn’t go to waste. Under a proposal that the institute calls Fill Mead First, water from the Colorado, instead of being divided between the two reservoirs, would be sent straight on to Mead. Powell would then contract until most—perhaps even all—of Glen Canyon resurfaced.
Jack Schmidt, the Utah State University professor, has studied the Fill Mead First proposal and also, as an intellectual exercise, the option of doing the reverse—filling Powell and letting Mead empty. Neither of these proposals, he’s concluded, does much to solve the basic problem, which is that there’s not enough water to fulfill the terms of the Colorado River Compact—and there probably never was.
On my way back to Salt Lake City, I decided to stop in Moab. A huge column of smoke was rising from the mountains south of town, where an abandoned campfire had burgeoned into a nine-thousand-acre forest fire. Many of the houses sported hand-painted signs that said “Cathedral in the Desert, one pre-dam visitor wrote, was “the end toward which all other wonders had been pointing.”
“It used to be that you would go through the twenty-third rapid in Cataract Canyon, which is known as Big Drop 3 or Satan’s Gut, and you’d see houseboats,” DeHoff recalled. “It was such a contrast, because you were on this wild river, and then, boom, you’d watch the river die.” Then, around 2005, DeHoff began to notice that some of the drowned rapids were returning. As Powell continued to shrink, more rapids reëmerged.
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