This is the original, full-length essay on the past, present, and possible futures of Glen Canyon Dam and the Colorado River, an edited version of which appeared in County Highway, Vol. 2 Issue 2 Sept-Oct 2024.
By Wade Graham
Copyright 2024.
Uncharted rapid, Colorado River near White Canyon, May, 2005. Photo by Wade Graham.
When we got to the dirt boat ramp at North Wash, we pulled up, four of us in a truck towing an inflatable rib boat on a trailer, but there was no ramp. We were confronted by a steep bank, almost a cliff, crumbling into the fast current flowing by ten feet below.
This was a surprise, though in hindsight it shouldn’t have been. 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 when the Colorado River, after being smothered for 42 years, began pushing back?
This place is not actually 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 town, Hanksville, in Southeastern Utah, it is smack in the middle of one of the most remote, forbidding, and roadless parts of the Lower 48 states. A road does lead here, currently called Utah State Route 95, because for millennia this place has been one of the few possible places to cross the Colorado, which is fenced in for most of its length by impenetrable canyons with sheer rock walls hundreds or thousands of feet high. Upstream, the first place to ford the river, until not that long ago by swimming horses or hoping for a raft, is at Moab, roughly 60 miles as the crow flies, or nearly 100 river miles away. Downstream, the next chance was at Lee’s Ferry, 160 river miles away and just over the Arizona state line, at the head of the beyond-impenetrable, 200-mile long Grand Canyon. In the late 19th century, a small settlement of shacks, fruit trees and gardens irrigated from the river popped up here on the opposite bank, named for Cass Hite, a prospector famed for his lethal skill with a revolver.
The town was reached from the North Wash side—that is to say, from Hanksville, Salt Lake City, and the wider world—by a primitive raft crossing, just big enough to carry pack animals and a few people. Until 1946, the one-tenth of Utah beginning on the far bank was unreachable by cars. Few Americans alive remember how final a barrier the Colorado River once was, its bottomless chasms cutting off one half of the Southwest, already vast, inaccessible, and virtually unpeopled, from the other. Historians wonder whether, when the exploring Spanish, who rode their horses up to the edge of the mile-deep Grand Canyon in 1540, simply turned away in disbelief that God would have created such a thing. They never returned.
Change came in 1946, when a car ferry, no more than a Huck Finn-style raft pulled along an overhead cable by a salvaged Dodge truck motor, was installed by Art Chaffin, whose nearby cattle ranch was then and probably is now the most isolated in the US, 120 miles from the nearest railroad. The Hite ferry established the first road link between Blanding, the biggest town in San Juan County, Utah, with 3,375 current inhabitants, and Hanksville, population 171, which is in Wayne County, which has a total countywide population of 2,486. For the next two decades, little changed.
Then, this place was remade—it’s more accurate to say it was invaded and altered beyond recognition—by something that seemed like nature but was in fact its opposite. One of the strangest, least likely things imaginable happened: a lake appeared here, out of nowhere in geologic time, and outside of all geologic sense. The brown, muddy, wild and free Colorado River was gradually pushed back and erased by a kind of water so different that it constitutes another, incompatible element—the still, flat, blue-green, clear waters of a gigantic reservoir, creeping upstream from its origin at the alien, gray concrete wall of Glen Canyon Dam, 153 miles downstream, when the gates of the dam closed in 1963
When the flatwater arrived at North Wash in 1964, the ferry was removed, and a highway bridge was built a mile upstream at Narrow Canyon, for the obvious engineering reason that the canyon there is narrower and so more easily bridged. (Three bridges were actually required to make the crossing onward to Blanding: one more to cross the Dirty Devil River that empties into the Colorado a half-mile upstream of here, and another to cross White Canyon, five miles south.) A concrete boat ramp was built on the other, Hite side, to launch lake craft: speedboats, pontoon boats with shade canopies, and houseboats—two-story fiberglass boxes like house trailers mounted on aluminum floats, complete with kitchens (not galleys, as they would be called in a river- or ocean-going boat), bedrooms (not berths), bathrooms (not heads), and waterslides for the kids—vessels that could never have navigated the wild Colorado.
On June 20, 1980, an evanescent wonder named Lake Powell, not a lake but a reservoir, was full for the first time. It had taken 17 years, substantially more than government experts had predicted, owing to the loss of massive amounts of water into the cracked and porous layers of sandstone out of which Glen Canyon is carved. At Full Pool (engineer-speak for maximum reservoir elevation), Lake Powell backed up 186 miles from Glen Canyon Dam. Traced along the fractal geometry of the Colorado and its two big tributaries, the San Juan and the Escalante rivers, and combined more than 90 side canyons, its shoreline was 1,960 miles long—longer than the West Coast of the United States from Canada to Mexico. After Lake Mead, the reservoir backed up by Hoover Dam, outside of Las Vegas, Powell was the second-largest reservoir in the United States, covering 161,390 acres and storing more than 25 million acre-feet of water, enough to cover the entire state of Pennsylvania to a depth of one foot.
On that June day in 1980, anyone standing on the shoreline near Hite would have seen a picture of contented American fun, Cold War-style, with people fishing, waterskiing, riding jet skis (the first commercial model, the Kawasaki JS400, had gone on sale in 1972) and relaxing on houseboats in the Utah sun. (We know that they also wore lots of sunglasses and drank lots of canned beer, from the dateable artifacts strewn across the former lakebed as it has receded.) The clear blue lake in the red rock desert was the “Jewel of the Colorado,” according to the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that built Glen Canyon Dam.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan, a swaggering, wisecracking embodiment of US Cold War truculence in the face of its ungodly, communist enemies, was elected president. Like Reagan’s presidency, reaching Full Pool at Lake Powell constituted the delayed fulfillment of promises made in the 1950s, for a certain segment of Americans: the successful culmination of the Cold War through indomitable will and technological prowess, projected into American living rooms by the cathode ray tube of the TV screen. For these, predominantly White, Americans, waterskiers included, Full Pool was a battle won in the nation’s other endless war, the war against nature. It promised a future of abundance and leisure, made possible by damming the waters flowing from the mountains of the American West in order to make its deserts bloom with irrigation and hydroelectricity. Wasteful, irrational nature, harnessed by man’s rational technology and made effectively the last, and therefore justifiable, slave, would be transformed from natural menace to natural resource.
I’d come to North Wash with Chris Peterson, then the executive director of Glen Canyon Institute, an organization founded in 1996 by Salt Lake City physician Dr. Richard Ingebretsen to advocate for the draining of Lake Powell and the restoration of Glen Canyon. I’d been on its board since 1999, out of love for the river and canyons and outrage at the way the US and state governments, captured by rapacious economic interests, have systematically sacrificed our shared natural inheritance to the profits of a few. GCI was a tiny, shoestring operation, with only two paid staff members, Chris and an assistant, but was effective at least at generating conversation about the need for restoration, including front page coverage in national media outlets like the New York Times. GCI also managed to stir things up in the opposite camp. In October, 1997, Utah Representative Jim Hansen held hostile hearings in Congress on the issue of draining Lake Powell, which brought GCI national publicity and instant credibility in the larger environmentalist community. In 2005, the Utah Congressional delegation even introduced a legislative rider to the Department of Interior appropriations bill to prohibit the agency from using government funds to “study or implement any plan to drain Lake Powell”. Utah Senator Orrin Hatch denounced GCI as “looney” on the floor of the Senate, and we knew we were beginning to make a difference.
We were, all of us, on all sides, in uncharted territory. And us, there at North Wash the afternoon of May 13, 2005, were off the known conceptual map, quite literally. We peered at a landscape completely changed from Full Pool, which had been achieved only two times—in 1980, and July 14, 1983, and never would be again. After six years of a punishing drought that had begun in 1999, Lake Powell had lowered in April, 2005 to just 33% full, 145 feet below its Full Pool elevation of 3,700 feet above sea level—the lowest level since the reservoir was filling. This day it was 140 feet down and rising with the spring runoff. At Hite, the blue “Jewel of the Colorado” was gone. In its place was a deceptively narrow, muddy river flowing briskly past, hungrily eating into the slope that had been the old boat ramp. All around, the river was undercutting, dissolving, and eating into the unstable ground—mostly composed of thick beds of sediment: the Colorado has the second largest natural sediment load of any large river on the continent, moving an estimated 54-60 million metric tons per year into Lake Powell. When it hits the reservoir and slows, the load drops out. This phenomenon, called aggradation, had completely transformed the upper reaches of the reservoir, covering the original river bottom with deep deposits of sand and silt in some places 100 feet thick. Across the channel, sediment banks on the river’s edge, some that looked to be nearly 100 feet high, collapsed into the water with a loud slap, sending up clouds of rock flour, every few minutes. The Colorado was running that day at 31,000 cubic feet per second (cfs)—more than the average flow of the Hudson, the Sacramento, or the Tombigbee. Beyond the line of fast current, a sea of drying mud covered in thickets of invasive tamarisk stretched the quarter-mile across from North Wash to the Hite marina, which lay abandoned, its long concrete ramp high and dry, the red and white marker buoys once anchored in deep water toppled onto the dusty, cracked ground.
Calls to the National Park Service, which owns and manages Glen Canyon National Recreation Area which surrounds the impoundment, had yielded nothing, no information about what conditions existed in what had been the upper reaches of the reservoir now that the river was flowing again, having taken back perhaps 35 miles of its canyon. The NPS had not been up to look, being chronically short of people and resources, to say nothing of boats, to manage their 1.25 million-acre responsibility in GCNRA. And there is no way to know what is happening in Glen Canyon without getting on the water. Despite this intelligence void, we determined to go and see for ourselves. Chris, myself, and two friends, Agustin, an artist, and Jeffrey, a musician, set out from Salt Lake City in Chris’ truck towing a borrowed motor rig, a 17-foot rigid inflatable with a 40-horsepower outboard mounted to the tail plate. We had intended to put in at Bullfrog marina, another 50 miles down the reservoir, and motor up, but the chance to actually float a free-flowing Colorado River where Lake Powell had once been was too exciting, so we decided to put in there.
We slid the boat off of the trailer and down the bank. We handed down our gear, put on life jackets, clambered in, and pushed off. The current, running 4 to 5 knots, bit the boat and pulled it downstream, under a blue sky and a warm wind from the west. The boat bucked through sprightly class two wave trains as the river bounced from bank to bank, then settled down and ran smoothly but surprisingly fast. Red walls streamed past on river right, then North Pond, a small, trapped lake between North Wash and the Colorado, appeared, and as quickly disappeared behind. The Colorado was alive again. It was exhilarating. There were high-fives all round.
The Colorado was the last, wildest, big river in the continental United States to feel "the reins of man’s control,“ in the words of the Bureau of Reclamation. It wasn’t by any stretch the biggest—it’s not even in the top 25 US rivers by volume of flow. But in the Southwest, it is the river. It is long: reaching 1,444 miles from the high northern Rockies in Wyoming to the Gulf of California in Mexico. And significant: collecting runoff from 1/12th the land area of the continental US, 108,000 square miles, draining parts of seven US states and passing through two Mexican ones before meeting the sea. It is among the most volatile rivers in the world, called “erratic,” “stochastic,” and even “psychotic.” Often it is no more than a warm trickle—in fall and winter of low water years a person could walk across it in parts of its lower reaches. But in spring, the Rocky Mountain snowpacks melt, accelerated by rains, sending torrents of runoff into innumerable mountain streams, which gather in smaller rivers, which in their turn join the Green River flowing from Wyoming into Utah and the Colorado River, formerly the Grand, flowing from the state of Colorado’s western slope; combined, these are joined by the San Juan flowing from the mountains of southwestern Colorado, before plunging on to Mexico and the sea.
For its size, no river on earth has more capacity for work. Its gradient is steep: 11,000 feet in its journey from the peaks of the Wind River range to the ocean. And it is prone to floods, merely big ones and occasionally huge ones—frequent in the geologic record, big enough to float a battleship down the Grand Canyon. Much of its watershed is arid and sparsely-vegetated, allowing the river, when it is energetic, to pick up earth—silt, sand, and rock—in prodigious quantities. The Spanish named it Rio Colorado, red river, for a reason. Where it crosses the border into Mexico, it used to carry an average of 160 million tons of sediment a year. All of that grinding powder scoured out the mile-deep Grand Canyon, not to mention Meander, Cataract, Glen, Bridge, Marble, and Black canyons—just to name the largest on the mainstem of the river. Over 13 million years, the river gouged more than a quadrillion tons of earth from the Colorado Plateau and deposited it all in the lowlands of southeastern California and Mexico, forming a deep delta covering two million acres, more than 3,000 square miles.
An “erratic” river is of little use for would-be developers. Turning the Colorado to profitable use, through irrigation and hydropower, would require “ironing out” its highs and lows, capturing its floods and storing them to be meted out during dry years. Private enterprise was no match for it. Early, privately-funded efforts to profitably divert the river ended in spectacular failure, as the flooding river repeatedly tore through physical barriers meant to constrain it, changed its course, and poured for three years into a vast desert sink near the Mexican border, creating the Salton Sea, a mistake that remains the largest lake in California. At least one big dam would be required. Big government, with its organizational capacity and its treasury, would perforce have to be harnessed to make private dreams of riches come true. And so it was, and the practical problem of taming the river solved, with the building of Hoover Dam.
Hoover Dam was America’s most important symbolic achievement during the Great Depression, bringing a struggling nation together to watch an incredible feat of engineering and logistics unfold. No dam remotely as big had ever been attempted anywhere, much less on a river as ornery as the Colorado. From beginning to end, the massive structure was completed in three years, including two straight years of pouring concrete, 220 cubic yards an hour, 24 hours a day, until the dam topped out at 726 feet, capable of storing 32 million acre-feet of water. It was dedicated on March 23, 1935, and the country’s pride soared. Marc Reisner, author oof Cadillac Desert, the definitive history of water in the American West, wrote: “One could say that the age of great expectations was inaugurated at Hoover Dam—a fifty-year flowering of hopes when all things appeared possible.” Indeed, Hoover Dam’s water and hydropower built up Los Angeles and Southern California into the largest megacity on the West Coast, an industrial powerhouse that shifted the balance of America’s economic and demographic weight sharply westward. Its electricity literally won World War II, welding many of the aircraft frames flown by the Allied forces during wartime.
In the case of Hoover Dam, too, the dream of “reclamation,” or the greening of the deserts through irrigation, at least made potential sense: the irrigable lands lying below Lake Mead in southeastern California and around Yuma, Arizona could be watered by gravity, have a frost-free climate and long growing season capable of growing citrus, dates, grapes, and other high-value crops that grow nowhere else in the United States, and are close to the huge and hungry market of urban California. Hoover Dam irrigated more than a million acres, though not without a hefty subsidy from hydropower revenue. After Hoover, it was harder to justify Colorado River dams: the basin above Lake Mead is arid and mostly rocky, sits at ever-higher elevations with short growing seasons and snow, and had few population centers to sell its produce to. Its most successful crop, alfalfa, barely covered the costs of growing it even where the water was free. Irrigation could not pay for big, expensive projects needing not just dams but canals, pumps, and distribution networks. Already, by midcentury, it was clear that federal irrigation was a farce: acreage limitations meant to limit subsidized water to small farms were flagrantly flouted, leading to concentrations of landowning that can only be described as oligarchic; repayment obligations, already no-interest and stretched over 40 years, were routinely ignored; and true project costs were obscured by writing off fictional benefits to flood control and recreation.
But politics, not economics or hydrology, rules the river. The first scientist to systematically survey the resources of the watershed, Major John Wesley Powell, who mounted two US government expeditions by boat down the Colorado so arduous as to be fairly called suicidal, warned in his official 1878 Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States that there existed enough water in the arid West to irrigate only 3% of the arable land in the region. No one wanted to hear about intrinsic, immoveable natural limits, so Powell was silenced. When the time came to divide up the river among the seven states with claims to the Colorado—California, Nevada, and Arizona in the Lower Basin, and Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming in the Upper Basin, entitlement, not caution, was the top priority. In 1922, in a fancy vacation lodge in Santa Fe, New Mexico, representatives of the basin states and the federal government agreed to split the river’s flow between two, arbitrarily-defined basins, signing a document called the Colorado River Compact, which was ratified by Congress. Thereafter, economic rationality—rationality of any kind—went out the window, and building politically beneficial projects to claim the water became the only imperative.
Thus, the Bureau of Reclamation was going to build enough dams to allow the Upper Basin states to use half of the flow of the river, come hell or high water. The agency first set its eyes on two sites in the northeast corner of Utah, at Echo Park, on the Green River within Dinosaur National Monument. But these dams energized a rising national conservation movement, which mobilized to block them. Critically, the Sierra Club, led by its bold, young president David Brower, published a book, This Is Dinosaur, to rally national public opinion against the desecration of a national treasure.
The Echo Park plan was dropped in 1954, and the bureau moved on to Glen Canyon. Nevermind that, for all the hoopla and confident propaganda, it was not the damsite the Bureau wanted: the Navajo sandstone is weak and porous, and the site is not only inconveniently isolated, but sits in the bottom corner of the Upper Basin, so that no water impounded there could be used in the Upper Basin. It would only serve as a symbolic double to Lake Mead—which would have served equally well to store the water—holding it back as a kind of defiant demonstration of ownership.
The 17 years Lake Powell had taken to fill were an interregnum between two incommensurate realities in the Colorado River Basin, one never to be repeated. In 1963, only California was using its full entitlement. The other six states had not yet begun to win their own, federally-funded projects to divert more of the river. But over the years, more and more projects had come into operation. Lake Powell and Lake Mead, once full, were dropping; the states were spending more than they earned, draining the savings account. The assumption in the Compact of an annual average flow of 16.5 million acre-feet was based on a mere 30 years of streamflow records, measured from late 1890s. It turned out that the early 20th century was one of the wettest periods in the last 800 years. Government hydrologists had long suspected this, and tried to warn of it, but they, too, had been silenced or ignored. Long term average flow really had been somewhere between 13 and 14.5 million acre-feet. In drought years, which were growing more frequent, the flow was about 11 million acre-feet.
As we floated triumphantly downstream, savoring the visceral pull of a newly-free Colorado River, Agustin became solemn, and said: “Guys, I think I hear a waterfall.” Ahead, what appeared to be a small wave kicked up flecks of spray in the sun. As we moved closer, we gradually realized that whatever was making the sound was huge, and not in sight. We decided to paddle to the bank on river left and scout it.
We reached the bank and hauled the boat up. The bank joined with an enormous sediment bar, its ridge taller than us, spanning nearly across the river, composed of layers of mud and sand. A huge amount of material had been dropped here, forced from the river’s maw by the slack water of the reservoir, helped by a berm of material that had likely been pushed out into the channel by flash floods coming out of the mouth of White Canyon. We walked along it towards the sound: to the west, on river right. The sound grew louder and louder, becoming deafening as we rounded a knob on the bar and saw a monster: a brown, boiling, roaring rapid, with two huge holes and a 100-yard wave train. The river, pooled up behind the bar, compressed and swelled upward into a kind of dome, then turned toward the cut, uncompressing and speeding up, hurling itself into the gap—the entire 31,000 cfs flow through a single cut maybe 50 feet wide. After the first descending tongue the water reared up into a huge hydraulic wave, then plunged down again only to rise in another, and another. The wave train continued straight into an enormous, flat sheet of water, like an ocean, that struggled to absorb and contain it. It was the reservoir, 10 or 15 feet lower than the river, stretching away downstream.
This was also a surprise. We had not rigged for whitewater—our gear was loose in the boat—and had only paddles, no oars. Nevertheless, we thought we could run it, with the motor, by keeping close to the right bank, skirting the frightening holes and slipping into the eddy beyond. Chris fired up the motor, but couldn’t keep it running. It seemed like something in the fuel line, likely a clogged filter. Rather than risk hitting the huge hole, Chris decided to hike back to the truck and drive to the nearest store, in Ticaboo, to buy a new one.
By 1980, Glen Canyon Dam had long been surpassed by bigger dams elsewhere in the US and the world. Scores were more massive. Glen Canyon stood at number 18 on the list of tallest (today it is number 41). But when it was built, it was truly a wonder of the world. Authorized by Congress in April, 1956, work began five months later, on October 15, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower pushed a button in the Oval Office sending a telegraph signal to the dam construction site to trigger the first dynamite blast.
Operation Glen Canyon, as the Bureau called it in a promotional film of the same name, was conducted like a military operation. At the peak of construction, 2,500 workers labored to reshape the canyon, replacing sandstone with steel-reinforced concrete, with the goal of replacing the brown water with blue. Men are shown driving heavy machines in constant motion, blasting, breaking, crunching, hauling, forming, and pouring. Materiel and supplies move, tax dollars are spent. Rock gives way to concrete. Speed was all-too clearly of the essence, as if damming the Colorado River was an existential race against the communists. Like the concurrent space race between the US and the USSR, it made manifest man’s dominance over nature—in the case of the space programs, seemingly leaving it behind altogether—the apotheosis of the technological religion. On February 29, just 22 months after the award of the prime construction contract—for $108 million, the largest in Bureau of Reclamation history—the diversion tunnels were complete, and the river was shunted into them by bulldozers pushing boulders into the stream, leaving the canyon bottom dry for digging the dam’s base. The narrator of the film intoned: “The Colorado River felt the reins of man’s control.“
The whole endeavor was quintessentially 1950s, not just in its geopolitical context, but in its quotidian details: the men in hard hats wore baggy pants and flannel shirts, the engineers reviewing their blueprints wore short-sleeved, white collared shirts and horn-rimmed glasses. In the brand-new town built to house the effort, Page, Arizona, people went bowling and to the supermarket, and drove station wagons on empty suburban streets. Women—of course there were women, behind the men, behind the scene, wearing A-line dresses and pleated poodle skirts—minded the home front. The ubiquitous, infelicitous, and unnoticed human hierarchies of the era were on full display, too. A “traditionally” garbed Navajo band played jaunty 19th century marches, written for reviewing Prussian troops, on the day the first bucket of concrete was lowered and poured. Reservation Indians provided the absurd soundtrack to the theft of their land and water.
After six years of work, and three million barrels of concrete poured, the dam topped out at 583 feet above the river level, sitting on another 127 feet of concrete below the river, anchored into the excavated bedrock, where the structure reaches 300 feet thick—710 feet in total, making it the second tallest dam in US at the time (Hoover Dam notches 726 feet). 10,000,000 tons of concrete and 28,900,000 pounds of reinforcing steel were used, making it then the fourth largest concrete structure in the world. Glen Canyon Dam was a modern pyramid erected to honor new, American gods: the efficient, rational control by Man of profligate, wild Nature, to bring order, abundance, and civilization to the remaining waste spaces of the continent.
Watching and rewatching the promo movie while writing this piece, I was fascinated by what, according to the Bureau of Reclamation, was Glen Canyon Dam’s ultimate purpose. The film continues, with a shot of a gate closing on one of the dam’s two diversion tunnels, on March 13, 1963, and the narrator solemnly pronounces: “No longer would this be a river. Soon the trapped water rose against the dam. At this moment Lake Powell was born.” Far from geopolitical necessity, though, the apparent impetus for its erection and the death of the living river wasn’t simply “total possession” of nature, the achievement of America’s manifest destiny, nor Cold War geopolitical necessity. Instead, it was happiness. Swelling, cheerful music plays. A speedboat is shown zooming down the lake between sheer sandstone walls: “Above the dam, the Colorado River was turned back. The brown sediment that clogged the river was gone, leaving a sapphire lake of matchless beauty.” Two water skiers are pulled behind another speedboat. More scenes of contented recreation. Lake Powell is “A boating avenue, a place to catch big bass, a place to relax.” The lake’s creation is, finally, “An important and noble venture for all Americans.”
It wasn’t for all Americans. Lake Powell wasn’t made for the Indian tribes who had been left out of the negotiations that divided up the water of the Colorado River among “stakeholders." Nor was it made for the millions of farmers and electricity customers in the East, Midwest, and South not offered the benefit of federally subsidized water and power. Nor for people without access to speedboats and water skis. Full Pool at Lake Powell was success defined a certain way, by certain people, for a certain segment of Americans, but paid for by all of them—and still being paid for by all of us. It was built not only according to the blueprint of the American Century—the 20th century, as it was understood at least until 1956—it was, more importantly, actually achieving the dreams of the 19th; or repeating them, like a pageant, but with different props and different enemies, each time. In that pageant, first there are Indians to defeat and “civilize,” then Mexicans, then communists, then, finally, Nature.
For all the Cold War technocratic efficiency, Lake Powell was really an expression of the 19th century United States’ obsession with land—with the notion, in practice largely a fantasy, of providing every (White) man with a farm large enough to support a family: what the 18th century Founders had called a “competence”—not only the basis of subsistence but of manly independence, therefore the measure of whether or not a man should be allowed to vote in the new republic. The Homestead Act of 1862 and its successors had been the 19th century’s most impactful expression of this project. The Reclamation Act of 1902, conceived in the 19th century but only made law in the third year of the 20th, was its extension, proposing that, since essentially all naturally farmable lands in the country had already been taken, dams on rivers would allow irrigation farming on the apparently infinite arid lands of the West, ushering in a new era of abundance. Dams would be the new railroads: built by the federal government, paid for by the US taxpayer, benefitting mostly private interests, yet magically fulfilling the promises of America’s Manifest Destiny. “Reclamation”—the odd verb its promoters chose for their dream, had more than a whiff of Biblical redemption to it, with Man, more specifically the Bureau of Reclamation, playing the role of a beneficent God.
A traditional 19th century Mormon hymn expressed this clearly:
Oh faith rewarded! Now no idle dream,
The long-sought Canaan before him lies;
He floods the desert with the mountain stream,
And lo! It leaps transformed to paradise.
To believe though, we must forget that not an acre in the states of the Upper Basin of the Colorado River for which Glen Canyon Dam was built would be irrigated with the water held behind it, that no new farms would be created, and no new families settled on the land—unless we count those happy suburbanites in the tract homes with their green lawns on the curving streets of Page as irrigation farmers. The Jewel of the Colorado was a chimera, a persistence of an old but still-seductive myth, like the spirit of a dead person hanging around the living world, continuing to trouble its inhabitants long after it should have gone to rest.
When Congress voted to authorize Glen Canyon Dam, it set in motion a rush to document what would be lost. The river corridors had earlier been meticulously mapped by Bureau engineers for their own, narrow purposes, but very little else was noted. People—Ancestral Puebloans, Navajo, Hopi, Paiute, and others—have lived in Glen Canyon for millennia, but archaeologists had barely scratched the surface when dam construction began. A last-minute effort at what was dubbed “salvage archaeology” sent investigators into the canyons. They found traces of communities everywhere, an almost urban density of houses, kivas, granaries, hearths, laddering steps chipped from the rock walls, pots, tools, points, middens, even fingerprints impressed in the clay mud used to mortar the stones of their structures, still visible. In total, nearly 3,000 sites were found and hurriedly inventoried, many as the rising reservoir swallowed them.
Protected by its remoteness, Glen Canyon had been seen by very few non-native people before its fate was decided by legislators in Washington, DC—probably none of whom had been anywhere near it. The first American to systematically explore it was Major Powell, in 1869, who rhapsodized about its stillness and beauty, unique in the violent whitewater canyons of the Colorado: “…we have a curious ensemble of wonderful features—carved walls, royal arches, glens, alcove gulches, mounds, and monuments. From which of these features shall we select a name? We decide to call it Glen Canyon.”
After Powell, few people dared put boats on the Colorado except to cross it in the few spots where it could be crossed or to ferry mining equipment a short distance to a stake. In 1938, Norm Neville ran the first commercial trip down Glen Canyon with four passengers in a wooden boat. A relative trickle followed. But as the reservoir water rose, more people realized what was about to be lost and rushed to document it and to mourn its impending loss. In 1963, as the blue water rose, David Brower went in himself for the first time, filming the movement of the colored waters before they were drowned—a kind of salvage, also. The same year, the Sierra Club published another book, this one called The Place No One Knew, with photographs by Elliot Porter, as a requiem, farewell, and last-minute plea to save what Brower called in his forward to the volume “one of the planet’s greatest scenic antiquities” from “execution.” But it was too late.
Brower succinctly explained why the death of Glen Canyon was pointless, a tragically avoidable and unnecessary mistake:
“A bookkeeping transaction could have served the ostensible purpose of Glen Canyon dam, which without that transaction emerges as a costly device to make sure water will flow downhill. What water this reservoir holds back for credit above the arbitrary diversion point of Lee’s Ferry could be credited in Lake Mead much more economically and far less wastefully. The dam irrigates nothing. Instead, it evaporates an enormous quantity of water that could otherwise have irrigated land or supplied cities in an arid region that is short of water.”
As Chris headed to Ticaboo, we other three began to explore the area. Stretching back upstream from the bar all the way to Hite, about two miles, was a landscape of mud flats being reclaimed by tamarisk and tumbleweeds, separated from the downcutting river channel by 20-foot high mudbanks and sand dunes. Within a half mile upstream of the bar, the earth mixed with water in a fantasmagoria of forms that belonged to neither element. Behind the dunes were a series of stranded lakes, one a quarter mile long, others much smaller. In all of them were carp, two feet long and thick, invasive fish that thrive in Lake Powell, that had swum up to the head of the reservoir to spawn and been trapped by the falling lake level. Hundreds of them milled in the shallow ponds, half-in, half-out, cooking in the sun, apparently dying, frequently gasping for air. Coyote tracks were everywhere, but the carp were well-guarded by zones of quicksand, painted in hideous, beckoning colors, that partially surrounded the lakes, and threatened to suck us down. Elsewhere, there were smooth fields of silt, some patches wet, some drying and cracking and curling into chips. Crevices up to three feet deep ran across the landscape, many filled with running water, caught after percolating up out of the ground, in which carp struggled, swimming towards their promised land. One rill led to the base of a cliff, on top of which some ravens perched, working to kick off chunks of rock to fall onto the carp below. One rock hit its target, and the birds descended and began to tear it apart. The ground seemed to be in motion, and it was. It sloughed and leaned, slumped and bended, seemingly trying to reach the lower reservoir level. Chains of mud pots bubbled up, burping and sloshing audibly like the ones in Yellowstone, but here they spurted methane gas, from decomposing vegetation buried below, mixed with cold, oily mud. The whole of it was headed to sea, but had been delayed by Lake Powell, just as this bar had delayed us. Agustin said, “Nature is making some big decisions here.”
The Bureau had two big problems in the Upper Basin. The first was how to justify building more irrigation projects—projects that couldn’t pay for themselves, even under the Bureau’s loose interpretation of reclamation law, and would require gargantuan subsidies, to the tune of billions, in perpetuity. It hit on a brilliant solution, really just a version of an age-old sleight-of-hand accounting trick, that it called “river basin accounting.” It would pool the revenues from an entire watershed’s worth of projects—which is to say, spread the losses from irrigation projects over a basin. The magic card making the bad hand a winning one—the ace pulled from the sleeve—was the “cash register dam”—a dam designed in truth only to generate hydropower. Marc Reisner wrote: “It was as if a conglomerate purchased a dozen money-losing subsidiaries while operating a highly profitable silver mine—a case of horribly bad management, which, nonetheless, still leaves the company barely in the black.” Glen Canyon was such a dam, the first among many, the revenue from which was used to build more dams—the Bureau was “literally forced to build dams,” in Reisner’s words. It was a pyramid scheme, and “a blanket death sentence for the free-flowing rivers in 16 states.”
Indeed, it was. The Colorado River system is now the most intensely-developed in the world of its size, with 15 dams on its mainstem, 20 more big dams and hundreds more smaller ones on its tributaries. The rivers dammed, at least once, by the malign magic of river basin accounting, just in the Upper Basin, include the Gunnison, Green, Dolores, San Juan, Uncompahgre, Frying Pan, Price, Strawberry, Taylor, Los Pinos, Williams Fork, Muddy, Blacks Fork, Smiths Fork, Florida, Animas, La Plata, and White. All told, dams have the theoretical capacity to impound five times the annual flow of the watershed. But paper isn’t reality, and pouring concrete does not make it rain or snow. In fact, more reservoirs lose more water, through seepage into the ground and evaporation—the basin now loses at least one-tenth of the river flow to the sky every year.
The second problem the Bureau faced was the corollary of its successful solution of the first: by developing the Upper Basin, too much water would be depleted for it to continue to meet its delivery obligation to the Lower Basin, violating the Compact and creating an interstate crisis. The Bureau saw not a terrible, inexcusable failure to do its mandated job, but a business opportunity: it would have to build more projects, bigger and more costly than anything ever attempted in the world. It calculated that by 2030, the Colorado Basin would need 5.62 million acre-feet of water to make up for the shortfall—more than the entire Upper Basin has ever used. Where to get it? Through “augmentation”—a good, obscuring Latin word, for theft in this case, of water from other rivers in other basins. First it set its sights on the still-free big North Coast rivers of far-northwestern California, the Klamath and the Eel, which it would dam, then pump uphill and through major mountain ranges to slake Southern California’s thirst and allow its Colorado entitlement to flow to others. Or, it would dam the Pend Oreille in Washington state near the Canadian border, tunnel it under mountains and pump it through desert aqueducts, 1,020 miles to California. Less publicly, it looked at how to tap and divert the Columbia, and even the Missouri.
To pay for such schemes, it planned to build two, enormous cash register dams at either end of the Grand Canyon—a plan which the Bureau tried to sell to the public by saying that boaters on the resulting reservoirs would have a better view of the canyon’s wonders. The dams very nearly became reality. But, after another campaign by Brower and the Sierra Club, in which he took out a full-page ad in the New York Timesasking, sarcastically, “Should we dam the Sistine Chapel so that visitors can get closer to the ceiling?” The Senate voted against the proposal, by one vote.
In the Cold War, we must remember, Americans—some at least—believed in and pursued technological solutions to largely imaginary problems, solutions that can only be seen in hindsight as pathological. Project Plowshare, the use of “peaceful nuclear explosions” to do engineering work, was part of the vision outlined by President Eisenhower in his famous "Atoms for Peace" speech in December 1953. The reference is course to the Biblical passage in Isaiah 2:4 in which swords are to be beaten into plows—in this case the swords would be hydrogen bombs employed to blast harbors out of the Alaskan coastline, canals across Nicaragua and the Negev Desert (in response to the Suez Canal crisis), or cutting canals through mountains for aqueducts. Apparently reasonable government engineers detailed how to use nukes to reroute the Yukon River from Canada to Los Angeles, so that more lawns could be watered in Denver and Tucson. Until its end in 1977, the US conducted 27 tests as part of Plowshare; one, a 104-kiloton detonation at Yucca Flat, Nevada, moved 12 million tons of earth and sent a radioactive dust plume 12,000 feet into the air.
Chris returned the next day with a fuel filter—a miraculous piece of cargo from the other world—but the motor still wouldn’t stay running. The trip was turning into less of a lark. There was no way to paddle the boat back upstream—we would need a motor for that. The only way to get it out was downriver, to the reservoir, where we might see another boat. There was no cellphone coverage, but at Ticaboo Chris had phoned his brother, Brad, in Salt Lake City, and Brad was going to come up from Bullfrog on a pontoon boat and bring us another motor. On the second day at the camp, Jeff said he was feeling sick; Agustin had work commitments. The two of them decided to hike out the next morning and hitchhike to Salt Lake. We wished them luck, and watched them walk north through the quicksand and cracking mudflats.
The emergency spillways at Glen Canyon Dam are not conventional, over-the-top spillways, as described by the US Army Corps of Engineers technical reference manual: “Spillways typically represent structures at the top of the dam that allow water to go over the dam top in an uncontrolled manner.” Instead, they are tunnels, drilled into the canyon walls upstream of dam, one on each side. The dam’s engineers bored two steep tunnels, 46 feet in diameter and descending at 55 degrees towards the river level on the downstream side. In order to save money and time, they aligned the new tunnels to intersect with the original, horizontal diversion tunnels used during dam construction, which measure 41 feet in diameter. (The diversion tunnels had been plugged with 300 feet of reinforced concrete, upstream of these junctions, once the dam became operational.) At each intersection, the two tunnels form an “elbow”—a condition that creates a risk of cavitation at the bend. Cavitation can occur when vapor bubbles or voids form in high-velocity streams of liquid, especially as they flow over uneven surfaces such as would occur at the juncture between new and old tunnels; when these voids collapse, they create shock waves that can cause significant damage. The Bureau knew the theoretical risks—engineers had seen cavitation damage from spill events at Hoover Dam in 1941 and Yellowtail Dam in 1967, both with similar tunnel designs—but nevertheless maintained that the practical danger at Glen Canyon was negligible. The Bureau assured skeptics: “A well-managed reservoir should almost never spill, and then only for very short periods, after which the cavitation could be repaired.”
The winter of 1983 was an El Niño year, probably the biggest of the 20th century, producing a huge Rocky Mountain snowpack. As early as January, forecasters began to warn of a big and early snowmelt: 10% higher than normal, raised to 14% higher than normal in April, and 20% higher in May. Regardless, the Bureau kept water storage in Powell high, to maximize water for users downstream and for hydropower revenue. The reservoir was kept 90% full in January, and up to 96% in May. Was it Russian roulette? Or overconfidence? Or a predictable collision of priorities, since the dam was, by its authorizing legislation, expected to achieve contrary goals at the same time: storage, hydropower, and flood control chief among them? As the lake level began rising, fast and faster—up to a foot a day at the end of May—operators pushed the maximum releases through the powerhouse; but the eight generators running full tilt were not enough. They opened the left spillway tunnel, up to a flow volume of 20,000 cubic feet per second—just 10% of the combined spillways’ designed capacity of 208,000 cfs. On June 6, engineers heard loud sounds from the tunnel, and saw car-sized chunks of concrete being spat out of the tunnel mouth into the river below—clearly cavitation exploding the tunnel walls. The right spillway was opened, but at a lower volume, for fear that water would eat back into the concrete plugs in the diversion tunnels behind the elbows. If that became the case, what would ensue would be like unstopping a cork from an upright wine barrel: the uncontrolled draining of the reservoir, and total destruction downstream, all the way to Hoover Dam and possibly beyond. The water kept rising. Operators were forced to open the right tunnel above 20,000 cfs. The doomsday scenario began to become conceivable: that cavitation would completely blast out the tunnel and spread horizontally toward the foundation of the dam, potentially undermining it.
In one of the more desperate solutions imaginable, the engineers of the mighty United States Bureau of Reclamation went to the nearest lumber store and bought every sheet of 4’ x 8’ plywood they could find, then fixed them to welded steel frames on top of the spillway gates to try to keep the reservoir from spilling uncontrolled into the tunnels.
The reservoir elevation reached 3708.4 feet, 6.6 feet below the top of dam in mid-July, then stopped rising, and slowly inched downward. The engineers inhaled. Inspection of the dried tunnels revealed a 32‑foot-deep, 40‑foot-wide and 180‑foot-long crater at the elbow of the left tunnel. Plugging the gouge, which had to be completed before the next season, took more than 3,000 cubic yards of concrete.
What lessons were learned? Understanding that the Colorado River remains wild, and will always be wild, despite any number of dams the Bureau of Reclamation may attempt to tame it with, is probably not one of them. That the Bureau is a “captured agency” which in effect serves the economic interests that profit from its taxpayer-subsidized projects—big irrigation districts, urban water agencies, and power customers—is an established fact among students of American public policy. Thus, it can be expected to prioritize those interests over the public interest, which is served by not having catastrophic dam failures, among other “goods.” But another set of numbers helps cast light on the deeper structures at play. The designers of Glen Canyon Dam had looked at historic floods and multiplied their volume by 1.7 times, yielding the 208,000 cfs figure. At a responsibly-managed dam, perhaps this would have been enough. But systemic greed and hubris very nearly lost the dam. At Hoover Dam, Bureau engineers—thinking like 1930s Americans, who lived close to the margins and took nothing for granted—noted that the historic floods of 200,000 cfs had lasted for weeks, and out of abundance of respect, not just caution, designed Hoover Dam’s two otherwise similar spillways to handle 400,000 cfs—almost twice the flow of the Columbia River.
One can see a line of descent, as in going downhill, from the United States that built Hoover Dam in the midst of the Great Depression—confident but prudent, to the US of the 1950s—convinced of its uncontested status as the greatest country on Earth, and more than a little cocky. By the 1980s, America was a very different place indeed—a place of even greater delusions but much diminished vision. In 1983, on the 25th of October, President Ronald Reagan ordered US troops to invade tiny Grenada, in violation of international law and though no Americans had been harmed nor threatened. A pathetic show of force indeed.
When Lake Powell began to recede after a period of relative stasis culminating in its (last) high stand of 3,695 feet above sea level during 1997-98, visitors to Glen Canyon were witnesses to an extraordinary demonstration of nature’s ability to heal itself. Rains, especially summer flash flooding, quickly began scouring out sediment deposits and pushing them downstream. In side canyons, a single flash flood could blow a portion of a canyon clean of mud, down to bedrock. Observant photographers made repeat trips to spectacular parts of the Glen, including the Escalante River arm, with its twisting redrock slot canyons and soaring arches, documenting the changes. In weeks, and months, seeds took hold and sprouted; sapling cottonwoods and willows rose up amidst meadows of grasses and wildflowers; ferns waved again in newly-dripping grottoes. Animals came too: beavers, otters that had been extirpated early in the 20th century and reintroduced, deer, coyotes, bobcats, mountain lions, and bighorn sheep.
Trash too, surfaced, relics and testaments of the go-go years: sunglasses, beer cans—some still unopened, lawn chairs, boat batteries, fishing poles, and entire boats; you name it, boaters lost or tossed it into the reservoir.
But the reservoir level fluctuated. Each spring, the runoff would partially refill the impoundment. After 2005’s low tide of 3,555 feet, the water rose 55 feet in 2006, only to drop again for several years, then reaching a low 55 feet above 2005’s in 2009 and then a high 30 feet above that. For those who had seen their recovery, it was heartbreaking to see the glens go back under, swamped and drowned by bad water: not Jewel-of-the-Colorado blue when it crept back into the canyons, but greasy, gray, full of trash and debris, and coated with suspect bubbles and petroleum slicks. With the flatwater always comes the muck, dropping out of the current, piling up, re-burying what had been exposed by the streams and rivers.
Recent geological work has documented how the rising and lowering reservoir leaves alternating banded deposits of river sands—heavier particles laid down when the river currents are moving sediment downstream, layered with reservoir mud—fine silts relaid when the reservoir creeps back up. Geologists call the sediment deposited in Glen Canyon the Dominy Formation, named after Floyd Dominy, the irascible commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation who presided over the building of Glen Canyon Dam. The Dominy is one of the first ever man-made geological strata, evidence of the disturbances of the Anthropocene. In Glen Canyon, it is everywhere, giving scientists a clear record of geological processes at a time scale—annually, weekly, even daily—that is visible almost nowhere else. For researchers trained to catalog change over millions of years, it has been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
More importantly from a practical perspective, scientists (including specialists in the delightfully-named field of fluvial hydrogeomorphology) have documented how the sediment deltas, laid down where the reservoir confronts the main rivers, migrate as lake levels fall and rise. Satellite imagery has shown that the delta of the San Juan River, closer to the dam (two-thirds of the way from the top of the reservoir to the dam), has moved by an average of over 120 feet per day over the last 22 years, pushing a huge plug of sediment dozens of miles downstream into areas once under deep water. The face of the delta can move many miles a year, up or down. One sequence, between March and June of 2017, showed the delta, after the spring runoff brought up reservoir levels, had moved by nearly 12 miles. Movements of this size and speed show the capacity of the sediment to quickly refashion the shape of the reservoir, impacting operations in potentially grave ways. The San Juan, one of the siltiest rivers in the Southwest, is close already to spilling across the channel of the Colorado where they meet, and could conceivably block it at low reservoir levels, creating a lake there preventing water from reaching the dam. What we had fetched up on in 2005 was part of this complex dynamic, geology moving in real time.
The flipside of the accumulation of sediment in Lake Powell is the sediment starvation of the river below it. Sediment is the lifeblood of the Colorado, along with variability the key factor that shaped the evolution of its biology, including a suite of seven native fish that live nowhere else. Since Glen Canyon Dam closed its gates in 1963, all of the river’s sediment above it has been trapped in Powell. The immediate impact was that water let through the dam, cold because it was tapped from low in the water column behind the dam and clear because all of its sediment had dropped out high in the reservoir, is “hungry” in the language of the hydrogeomorphologists, and scooped up the beaches and siltbanks of the Grand Canyon and swept them downstream into Lake Mead. Without these essential habitat areas, the native fish species—which have simultaneously been decimated by predation from trout and other, non-native fish that thrive in the changed water conditions—descend perilously towards extirpation in Grand Canyon.
Chris and I began packing the boat as best we could to run the rapid, or we hoped, bypass it on river right. We grabbed ropes and hauled it upstream along the bank, stumbling and falling in the quicksand-like shallows, to get as much distance from the bar as possible before trying to paddle to the far side before the boat would be pulled into the chute. When we thought we had gone far enough, we pushed off, and paddled hard. But we had underestimated the current, as the river was a smooth sheet of brown glass with little to indicate speed. The boat was enormously heavy, and we made little progress with our paddles. We knew wouldn’t make our line. The river gripped the vee hull of the rib and pulled it straight at the swollen tongue that aimed into the first hole. All we could do was to straighten the boat out so that it would hit it bow-first. The noise of the rapid became deafening. We screamed at one another, but I don’t remember what either of us was saying. The bow rode up the tongue and the stern dug down. Over the top, the bow dropped and pointed down into the hole, as dark and deep a river hole as I had ever seen, comparable to the infamous Big Drops upriver in Cataract Canyon, holes big and hungry enough to flip any boat. I grabbed the seat and held on. The bow dove down into the bubbling water, then tipped up as the hull climbed up the wall of the rearing wave. It never stopped tipping. I watched the bow clear the top of the brown wave, saw sky behind it, then saw shadow envelop it as tipped backward past vertical, blocking the light. Pushed by the counterweight of the heavy motor hanging from the stern, then being grabbed by the water and thrust down and forward, the bow rotated backwards and the boat flipped fully, crashing down on Chris and me. Water exploded everywhere, and we were submerged, as the boat bottomed out in the second hole, then jacked up its wave, then pushed down again. The rinse cycle repeated, many times. Gear crashed into me as it was washed away, and a rope wrapped around my leg, tightened and tugged, before miraculously slipping free.
Gradually, the water settled and we floated in a gentle current. I swam out from under the boat and climbed onto the inverted vee bottom. Our gear bobbed all around. In a minute, Chris paddled over, having swum to catch his river kayak, which had floated clear. We surveyed the damage and retrieved our stuff from the flotsam. Below the rapid, a debris field had collected: dead trees and bushes festooned with trash and gear. We came upon a blue plastic canoe, overturned and tangled in a bush. In it was a man’s wallet with a driver’s license inside. We took both, using the canoe and the kayak to slowly nudge the overturned boat, still being pulled by the current, towards the bank. A mile or so downstream from the rapid, we managed to catch the raft on a steeply banked rocky slope. We pulled it up and far as we could but were unable to turn it over. Now shivering, I dove under the boat and untied our strapped gear bags, pulling out our sodden sleeping bags and camp kit. Night was falling, but the slope was too steep to stay on, so we paddled our plastic lifeboats across the reservoir to the other side, where we made a fire and tried without much success to dry the bags.
The sequel to the near-disaster of 1983 came in March, 2023, when the reservoir level dropped to 3,520 feet—36 feet lower than in 2005, and within 30 feet of the “minimum power pool” of 3,490 feet—the minimum water level required for power generation. 3,490 is 20 feet above the actual intakes for the generators, called penstocks, but the dam’s eight turbines must be shut down there due to the risk (again) of cavitation—in this case, air that would be pulled down the 20-foot water column, like the whirlpool that appears when air is suddenly sucked down a sink or toilet, into the penstocks and down to the generators, forming explosive bubbles and blasting the blades apart. In the face of this very real threat, there has been much handwringing lately about the loss of electricity generation that would ensue. But the worry is something of a red herring: the value of the dam’s electricity is less than one half of one percent of that of the Western power grid. One study calculated that replacing its power, with renewables, would cost residential customers a mere $.08 more per month, while commercial customers would pay $.59 more per month.
What is far more consequential lies below. If the penstocks are closed, the only remaining way to pass water through the reservoir is through the river outlet works: two intakes in the face of the dam leading to four, 96-inch diameter pipes with a combined maximum discharge capacity of 15,000 cubic feet per second. Such a flow is far too small to comply with the Compact, nor in simple terms, to deliver water to the 40 million people downstream who rely at least to some extent on the Colorado River. Impeded flow from Powell would be disaster of unprecedented magnitude, affecting one of the biggest economies in the world, that of Southern California, Las Vegas, and Arizona. To make matters worse, the Bureau has admitted that using the river outlet works for more than a short interval raises operational and safety concerns, as they weren’t designed for continuous operation. Indeed, the ROWs were used in April of 2023 and cavitation occurred.
Below the river outlet works lies Dead Pool. The ROWs sit at 3,370 feet above sea level. No other intakes nor spillways exist below them in the dam. At Dead Pool, the Colorado River would simply flow through the dam. Yet there is more dam: 240 feet more before the bottom of the lake, effectively the old river level. This not-insignificant dam would hold something like 1.7 million acre-feet of water—the capacity of Navajo reservoir, the largest impoundment on the San Juan. That water would be trapped, with no way out, a stagnant pond heating up in the sun, growing algal blooms, and becoming anoxic and deadly to most organisms. It would also rise and fall violently, as much as 100 feet in a single season, in response to river inflows, because of the martini glass-like shape of Lake Powell’s vertical cross section. As water levels rise and fall, keeping marinas open has been and will continue to be a challenge. From late summer 2021 to May 2022, the only functioning ramp was the Stateline auxiliary ramp, which was built before the reservoir existed. In a drier future, marina-based boating could become increasingly untenable. Climate modeling indicates that the Dead Pool scenario will become more and more likely in coming years.
It would seem that the Bureau failed to design the dam adequately for the river’s highs, and for its lows. While it is true that the new reality of global warming is making these extremes more extreme and more common, the design decisions made at Glen Canyon were nevertheless arguably a gross miscalculation of risk—the example of Hoover Dam stands in sharp contrast. It is perhaps more accurate to say that the agency did not take into account its own, compromised ability to do its job, by virtue of being captured by the economic and political interests that have benefitted from ignoring reality in the Colorado River Basin. In 1983, it kept too much water behind the dam, even in the face of dire warnings of coming runoff. Since, it let too much water out, satisfying users’ demands while ignoring the basic math—that there isn’t enough water in the system to continue doing so. Climate change will likely make things worse. Another recent study by leading hydrologists, the Futures of the Colorado River Project’s White Paper #7, found that the Bureau has consistently underestimated the impacts of climate change and overestimated the amount of water projected to flow in the Colorado River, specifically into Lake Powell. The Bureau’s “most probable projected inflows were higher than what actually occurred by as much as ~7 million acre feet in some years, and predicted reservoir elevations were also higher than what occurred in some years.”
It might also be said that Glen Canyon dam was built on a faulty foundation. Not the concrete massif itself, modeled on its older sibling Hoover Dam, which is apparently sound. But in the interpretation of facts and laws, natural and societal alike, in ways that were flawed, compromised, cynical, even corrupt, so as to favor certain interests over the public interest. It is too much of a simplification to say that Hoover was a “good” dam and Glen Canyon a “bad” one. But their differences do suggest a theory of American history in which our zeitgeist is uncannily embodied in the design of dams, with long-lasting consequences.
Clearly, it is time to rethink how we manage the Colorado River. Users are going to have to learn to live with less water. And Glen Canyon Dam itself must be physically modified to deal with the new reality.
On the first front, it is deja vu all over again. In June 2022, the Bureau announced that the seven Colorado River Basin states had just 60 days to devise a plan to cut 2-4 million additional acre-feet of water use per year from the system. The states missed the deadline, by nearly a year, and then proposed only to conserve 1 million acre-feet per year, and only as long as the federal taxpayer replaced the foregone water with money—about $1.2 billion, they calculated. John Fleck, a veteran water professional, opined dryly that it amounts to “a shakedown” by the water users, unwilling and unable to live within their means: “If you don’t pay us a big pile of federal cash, we’ll just run Lake Mead to deadpool. Or, alternatively, if you don’t pay us a big pile of federal cash, we’ll drag the Colorado River Basin into litigation that will make the river ungovernable, a sort of institutional deadpool. Either way, it’s a shakedown.”
On the second front, it is inescapable now that Glen Canyon Dam must be modified to allow the river to run through it or around it. The mechanism must be designed so that sediment can be carried through or around it as well, replenishing and rebalancing the Grand Canyon’s ecosystem. As it would happen, Floyd Dominy, the dam’s builder, left a plan for how to do it. In 1997, GCI’s founder, Richard Ingebretsen, visited Floyd at his horse farm in the Virginia mountains. The two had become friends when GCI asked Dominy to come to Salt Lake City in 1995 to debate David Brower at the University of Utah. In retirement, the former commissioner raised horses and built small, hobby dams on his property—several dozen, Ingebretsen remembered: “He is a beaver to be sure.” When the topic of decommissioning Glen Canyon Dam came up, Dominy “offered something startling,” Ingebretsen recalled: "Brower has proposed to drill out the original bypass tunnels to drain the reservoir. Well, you can't do that. It is 300 feet of reinforced concrete." Dominy went on: "There is a better way. All you have to do is drill new bypass tunnels around the old ones in the sandstone, then you can put waterproof valves at the bottom of the lake. They can be raised and lowered as you need, to let water out." Ingebretsen recounted the moment: “With that he pulled over a cocktail napkin and drew a sketch of Glen Canyon Dam, the old bypass tunnels, the lake, the river, and the new tunnels with the waterproof valves that will be used to drain the reservoir. His hands worked busily as he explained what he was sketching.” Finally, he looked up at Ingebretsen and said: "This has never been done before, but I have been thinking about it, and it will work."
He signed and dated the napkin, which is still in Ingebretsen’s possession. What it prescribes to keep the patient—the Colorado River, now on life support—alive, is open heart surgery, a full bypass. It is in effect a blueprint for a brave new future in the American Southwest.
At dawn we paddled down to Good Hope Bay at the mouth of Red Canyon to wait for Brad and the pontoon. We spent the morning exploring. On a tiny island in the water stood Fort Moqui, an Ancestral Puebloan structure of flat stacked stones walls, forming a 12’ x 20’ box with crisp, plumb corners, that had been noted by the second Powell expedition, as part of a group of five structures and a kiva. The reservoir had long before buried them and smashed into them with its waves; now only this one still stood. Nearby, on a boulder below the low cliff that backed the fort, we found an inscription carved into the stone: “JW Powell, 1872”.
Even here, at the beginning, the way Americans have wrapped the Colorado River in words has often been less than accurate, less than honest, if not outright distorting. Major Powell was not even present on the second, 1872 expedition that bore his name. Someone else on the team carved it into the rock.
Around midday, we spied a pontoon boat approaching from down reservoir. Brad and two friends waved. They had lost the extra outboard, having failed to strap it down on the deck, and watched it washed over by a big boat’s wake. So we would have to tow the heavy motor rig. It took all five of us to turn it over on the sloped bank. Then we started our slow voyage back to Bullfrog. That night, we camped in Ticaboo Canyon, completely alone, amid a lunar sediment landscape that had been exposed by the falling lake: big, rounded sediment hills painted in radioactive-seeming, unnatural colors, interspersed with fetid green ponds. It was ugly and dangerous to walk on, blocking us from reaching the living side canyon above. In one large depression, we found a wind-deposited pile of tumbleweeds, thirty to forty feet high and as wide. Night was falling, and it seemed a good idea to light the pile on fire, as there was nothing else flammable in sight in this lifeless Dominy waste, it would warm us up, and it would dispose of hundreds of thousands or millions of seeds of an invasive plant. With a lighter, we could ignite a twig, but the twigs were arranged on the stems too far apart to catch the small flame one from another. The solution was to jump up and down on a section of the pile, to compact and break the twigs into a more flammable mass. Then, the lighter ignited somea few twigs, and the flame spread, growing bigger and higher, quickly leaping from bush to bush, before consuming the whole in a burning wall, orange flames dancing a hundred or more feet in the air. High above, we could see contrails and jetliners, crossing the continent, traversing flyover country. Someone looking out their window could probably have seen our signal fire, and might have wondered what they were seeing, and what it might portend. But they would have had to have been looking.
Meanwhile, the mud keeps accumulating. In the “restoration zones” in the upper reaches of the former reservoir, deposits a hundred feet thick are being cut down by the moving river. Rafters floating downstream from Cataract Canyon must steer around fields of “mudbergs,” lumps of mud sometimes as large as house trailers which clog the channel in places even as they calve and collapse. In 2023, a slab of sediment a quarter mile long calved off from the bank into the river, nearly blocking boat passage. Dubbed the “space slump” because researchers first noticed it on satellite imagery, it was like a small range of hills covered in grass and trees, complete with its own hydrology, seeps, springs, and a lake, Visibly, it was breaking apart, with crevasses big enough to swallow a boat, and soft, dry quicksands—an eerie, fascinating, frightening place. It is just the tip of the iceberg of the Dominy Formation: ubiquitous, unstable, and dangerous. It is a problem of our own making, of our own time in history—without, so far, a ready solution, at least not from the Bureau of Reclamation. “Who owns the mud?” is the question for our time. Who should be responsible for it? Who pay to clean it up? Like many, many leftover wastes covering the United States, the Dominy is a mining tailing, what is left after, in this case, 60-plus years of Operation Glen Canyon: mining water from the Colorado River for profit and blind political imperatives. The mining operation though, like the dam, was founded on a mistaken perception—that the Colorado River is made of water. It is not. It is made of water and earth, in solution, in combination, in collaboration, shaping and reshaping its corner of the continent, moving matter and nutrients from the land to the sea, to rejoin the geologic cycles of the planet. The Colorado River was never a menace, never a problem. The solution to the mud we have delayed is to get out of its way, by bypassing Glen Canyon, and eventually, the other dams, and allowing it to continue on its journey to the sea.