During the first week of August, a famous double arch collapsed in Utah’s Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.
Made from millions of years old Navajo sandstone, the National Park Service wrote in a statement that “changing water levels and erosion from wave action is suspected of contributing to the ultimate collapse of the arch.”
The recreation area surrounds Lake Powell, built in the 1950s and 1960s by the Bureau of Reclamation, which dammed and flooded Glen Canyon in order to create a reservoir to store and deliver Colorado River water, which is parceled out in a complicated agreement between seven U.S. states and Mexico.
Its creators expected Lake Powell to last for centuries and at its peak held more than 25 million acre-feet of water, an almost unfathomable amount. But the megadrought that has gripped the Western U.S. since the early 2000s as climate change continues to make the region more arid has caused the water level to go on a rapid decline.
As Lake Powell’s water level continues to sink — evident from the massive ‘bathtub rings’ on the side of the reservoir — it becomes closer and closer to reaching ‘dead pool,’ the point at which the water level in the reservoir is below the lowest outlet conduit, making the water essentially inaccessible to downstream users. While often regarded by water managers as the worst-case-scenario, the slow death of Lake Powell has been received as a boon by many environmentalists, who railed against the dam’s original creation. As the water level sinks, natural formations assumed to be underwater for lifetimes have sprung back into view, along with river rapids and abundant native plant life.
So is this a catastrophe or a miracle? That’s the question explored by Zak Podmore in his new book Life After Dead Pool: Lake Powell’s Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River, out Tuesday, August 27.
Podmore grew up river-running with his family and was raised on stories of the lost river that was Glen Canyon, buried underneath Lake Powell.
“I always thought of it as a tragedy … but I thought as many people did that Glen Canyon was lost forever, but at least for hundreds of years,” he says.
But as the water level continued to drop, rapids in part of Glen Canyon started to come back and with it, a vibrant ecosystem many people expected to be taken over by invasive species.
“I had a lot of my assumptions overturned while writing this book,” Podmore says.
Podmore is a Utah-based author and journalist who most recently worked for The Salt Lake Tribune and wrote the 2019 book Confluence: Navigating the Personal & Political on Rivers of the New West (Torrey House Press). The slim series of essays detail topics including immigration, resource extraction, Indigenous rights, and water usage as Podmore navigates several different rivers in the Western U.S. Throughout, Podmore also grapples with the recent loss of his mother, an avid river-runner, from cancer.
Life After Dead Pool is less philosophical than Confluence but borrows a similar conceit, as Podmore weaves the story of Lake Powell’s creation and decline through rafting trips with his friends, family, and people who live and work around the reservoir. It’s also a good introduction to the past 100 years of Western water policy, which can be overwhelming to the casual reader. Podmore describes the decisions leading up to the dam’s creation and the tensions between water managers, Indigenous communities, environmentalists, and people who make their living off recreation at the dam, all who have had different perspectives on Lake Powell.
While exploring Glen Canyon, Podmore says he came across everything, including mussel-covered speedboats, recently exposed cultural sites from ancestral Puebloans, beaver dams, and stands of willows and cottonwoods.
“It’s a magical place to explore, and it gives you a real sense for how resilient the ecosystems are in these side canyons to be able to recover entirely on their own,” he says. “It happened completely organically.”
While Podmore is clearly on the side of the environmental activists, he takes a critical eye to the way both proponents and opponents of the dam throughout the decades have ignored the Native communities who have lived in the areas around Lake Powell for generations.
He also examines the way some prominent environmentalists of the 20th century, including beloved Western writer Edward Abbey, viewed people more as pollutants on the natural landscape than part of the environment in our own right.
Podmore says there were both positive and negative aspects to the 20th century environmental movement and that many of the worst fears regarding a looming overpopulation crisis did not come to pass.
“I think the environmentalists made a mistake by focusing on overpopulation while letting power consolidate in the ultra-wealthy throughout those decades,” he says. “That wasn’t an issue that we heard a lot of from the environmental movement at that time.”
The idea of draining Lake Powell was originally considered fringe, but Podmore says there’s “an emerging alliance” between water managers and conservationists that it might be an idea worth exploring.
He says he’s becoming increasingly convinced the dam will be modified as Lake Powell becomes more of an impediment than a benefit to water delivery.
“There will be tunnels built around the dam, hopefully, that will allow Lake Powell to be emptied if necessary,” he says. “And I don’t think that needs to happen for environmental reasons; the reason to do that is because the Colorado River as a plumbing system that delivers water to 40 million people throughout the Southwest functions more smoothly under drought conditions without the Glen Canyon Dam.”
As the overall level of water in the Colorado River system decreases — flows are about 20% lower than the previous century’s average — Podmore argues both Lake Powell and Lake Mead are no longer needed to store water.
Severe drought conditions impacting Lake Powell could lead to what Podmore describes as a series of cascading consequences throughout the Colorado River Basin, including damage to the Grand Canyon and Lake Mead which could impact millions of people’s ability to access water downstream.
“If we start to make a plan now for what to do should those extreme drought conditions return,” he says, “we could mitigate some of those worst consequences.” ◀
