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Drought boosts
campaign to drain one of the West's biggest reservoirs
By John Krist
Environmental News Network, Friday, August 27, 2004
"Past
these towering monuments, past these mounded billows of orange sandstone,
past these oak-set glens, past these fern-decked alcoves, past these mural
curves, we glide hour after hour, stopping now and then as our attention
is arrested by some new wonder.
John Wesley Powell, The Exploration of the Colorado River and its Canyons
PAGE, Arizona: Maintenance workers at Glen Canyon National
Recreation Area are playing tag with Lake Powell. Each time they
think they have it cornered, it slips away again.
The worst drought in the recorded history of the western United
States has shrunk the lake behind Glen Canyon Dam to its lowest
point in more than 30 years, leaving a 117-foot-high bathtub ring
of white mineral deposits on the ruddy shoreline cliffs. To keep
pace with the reservoir's steadily receding shoreline, the
National Park Service has poured hundreds of cubic yards of
concrete to extend marina boat-launch ramps twice in the past two
years.
At Wahweap, the lake's most heavily used marina, the ramp is now
about 1,300 feet long, according to Park Service spokeswoman Char
Obergh. It is a vertigo-inducing slab of monumentally proportioned
pavement and would seem a strong contender for the title of
Longest and Steepest Boat Ramp in North America if not for the
fact that another ramp at Lake Powell, the one at Bullfrog Marina,
has been extended to 1,568 feet - nearly one-third of a mile.
Elsewhere at the lake, the Park Service has admitted defeat. Near
the upstream end of the 186-mile-long reservoir, crews packed up
Hite Marina last winter and hauled it away. Storage in Lake Powell
has fallen to 42 percent of capacity, the lowest level since it
was first filled, and a weedy landscape of fissured mud fills the
canyon where Hite's docks once floated on sparkling water.
The record-setting drought, now in its sixth year in some parts of
the West, has done more than inconvenience boaters at Lake Powell,
the nation's second-largest artificial reservoir. It has thrown a
scare into water managers in several states, asking them to
confront the possibility that the explosive urban growth of the
past 20 years in the region rests upon a hydrological mirage.
It is beginning to drive farmers and ranchers off the land in
Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. It threatens power shortages and
price spikes this summer in California, as anemic flows curtail
hydroelectricity generation in the Pacific Northwest.
The drought also has begun resurrecting the labyrinthine canyon
system drowned nearly four decades ago by the rising waters of
Lake Powell, revealing to a new generation of westerners the
environmental cost of their water and power. And by doing that,
the drought has reinvigorated a quixotic campaign to decommission
the last of America's high dams and to drain forever the
symbolically potent and paradoxically beautiful lake it created.
"The drought is showing us why we don't need Glen Canyon Dam,"
said Chris Peterson, executive director of the Glen Canyon
Institute. "It's showing us what was lost when Glen Canyon Dam was
built."
How Dry Is It?
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the period since 1999 has
been the driest in the Colorado River watershed since the agency
began keeping track of such things 98 years ago. That means the
interior West is drier now than it was during the catastrophic
Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s, the worst of the 20th century,
when crops failed across the Great Plains and farm families fled
by the thousands.
"This is the worst drought in the history of the river," said
Barry Wirth, regional public affairs officer for the U.S. Bureau
of Reclamation.
California's winter precipitation and reservoir storage were about
90 percent of average, but the peculiarly warm and dry spring
caused the Sierra Nevada snowpack to melt twice as fast as usual.
Water managers for the state said then the summer stream
flow - critical for refilling reservoirs during irrigation
season - would be only 65 percent of average this year.
Nearly everywhere else in the West, the situation is much worse.
According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, a report on nationwide
conditions produced by a consortium of government agencies and
academic institutions, virtually the entire West is gripped by
conditions that range from "abnormally dry" to "exceptional
drought," the most severe category on its scale.
The Drought Monitor posts a map on its Web site using colors from
yellow to dark red to indicate increasing levels of severity; the
map presents a West with a giant vermillion bulls-eye centered
about where Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming meet, with colorful
ripples of bad news propagating across adjoining states.
The Natural Resources Conservation Service, a federal agency that
monitors water conditions across the nation, reported May 27 that
despite flurries of rain and late snowfall this spring in several
western states, the Rocky Mountain snowpack melted much earlier
than usual this year. The agency predicted that stream flows this
summer would be near historic low levels in much of the West.
And California has little reason to be smug, despite its only
slightly sub-par winter precipitation. The state relies heavily on
imports from the drought-shriveled Colorado River, source of more
than half the water consumed in Southern California. Although the
drought has not yet interfered with Southern California water
imports, Interior Secretary Gale Norton warned earlier this year
of potential reductions in deliveries if the drought continues.
California also relies on hydropower generated by the Colorado and
in the Columbia River basin of the Pacific Northwest. The
Bonneville Power Administration, which markets the electricity
produced at 31 federally owned dams in Washington, Oregon, Idaho,
and Montana, recently notified California energy managers that
because of low river flows - the volume in some waterways is only
40 percent of average - they should not count on being able to
purchase surplus electricity from the Pacific Northwest to meet
daily power needs this summer. California utilities traditionally
have employed that strategy to get over the hump when energy use
peaks because of air conditioner use.
Losing access to surplus power from the Pacific Northwest could
mean higher electricity prices in California, as utilities turn to
expensive purchases on the spot market to offset potential
shortages. It may also result in increased air pollution, as
generating plants that burn natural gas and coal ramp up
operations to offset reductions in relatively clean hydroelectric
power.
Get Used to It
There's no reason to expect things to improve in the short term,
climate experts warn. In fact, there's a chance they'll get
worse - a lot worse.
"The drought in the interior West will persist through summer, as
the water supply situation stays the same or worsens in coming
months due to below-normal snow accumulation during the winter
season," the National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center
concluded in its drought forecast issued May 20. "The summer
thunderstorm season during July and August will likely bring no
more than short-term relief from dryness, and the long-term
hydrological drought should persist at least until next winter's
snow season."
Although the drought may be the most severe that has struck the
West in the century that records have been kept, it is not nearly
the worst the region has experienced. Scientists studying the
records of climate and weather preserved in ancient tree rings,
lake sediments, and fossil pollen have come to believe that the
20th century was unusually wet by long-term standards. If that's
true, it means broadly held assumptions about the region's water
supply, and its capacity to support farms and cities, are
dangerously inaccurate.
The drought of the 1930s lasted eight years, depopulated huge
swaths of the Great Plains, and was the longest to strike North
America in three centuries. But droughts lasting even longer - in
some cases, for several decades at a time - have occurred
repeatedly in the past 2,000 years, according to climate
researchers. One such extended drought is believed responsible for
the disappearance of the Anasazi, ancestors of modern Pueblo
tribes, from the Four Corners area of Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and
New Mexico in the 13th century.
"The occurrence of such sustained drought conditions today would
be a natural disaster of a magnitude unprecedented in the 20th
century," according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration's Paleoclimatology Program.
Chasing Water
At Lake Powell, where the broad white bathtub ring on the tall red
cliffs is among the most obvious signs of drought in the Colorado
River watershed, the National Park Service has tried to put the
best face on matters.
"Fishing is great and getting better!" the agency cheerfully
asserts in its latest report on lake conditions, presumably
because the fish population is now squeezed into less than half
its accustomed habitat.
The Park Service - which manages the lake and Glen Canyon National
National Recreation Area, a 1.3-million-acre expanse of canyons
and plateaus surrounding the reservoir in Utah and Arizona - spent
more than $2 million last year extending launch ramps and
upgrading marina utilities to cope with the falling water level.
In her latest annual report, Glen Canyon Superintendent Kitty L.
Roberts estimated $2.8 million would be spent on similar work in
2004. (The entire budget for Glen Canyon National Recreation Area
this year is $9.3 million.)
Despite reassurances by the Park Service, and despite the fact
that there's plenty of water for boats in most of the lake,
tourism at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area has been dropping
steadily since the drought's effects became noticeable, from 2.4
million visitors in 2001 to 2.1 million in 2002 and 1.9 million
last year. Park managers attribute some of the decrease to the
nationwide drop in travel after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11,
2001, but they suspect widespread publicity about the falling
water level at Lake Powell has contributed.
A decline in Lake Powell recreation is bad news for the economy of
Page, established in 1957 as a construction camp for the crews
that built Glen Canyon Dam. Named for John Chatfield Page,
commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation from 1937 to 1943,
the city of about 6,800 people now serves as headquarters of a
lake-related tourism industry: motels, restaurants, gas stations,
boat brokers, repair shops, guide services, boat rentals, fishing
gear retailers.
Lake-related tourism accounts for 69 percent of the jobs in Page,
according to Joan Nevills-Staveley, executive director of the
Page-Lake Powell Chamber of Commerce & Visitors Bureau.
"Needless to say, if there were no Lake Powell, there would be no
Page," Nevills-Staveley said. "It would be a very barren, very
dismal scene."
Higher-than-normal vacancy rates, which business owners blame on
news about the drought, have prompted motels in Page to discount
room rates as much as 25 percent this summer, according to the
chamber.
Although alarming to many, the accelerating contraction of Lake
Powell is not bad news to everyone. In fact, many
environmentalists and lovers of the rugged canyon country believe
the only thing better than a smaller Lake Powell would be no Lake
Powell at all.
The Concrete Compromise
Built and operated by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Glen Canyon
Dam is a 10-million-ton plug of gracefully arched concrete wedged
into a narrow canyon of Navajo sandstone. It is 710 feet tall from
foundation to crest and backs up a reservoir that, when full,
holds 26.2 million acre-feet. In the United States, only Hoover
Dam is taller; only Hoover's reservoir, Lake Mead, is larger. (An
acre-foot, 325,9000 gallons, is a year's supply for two average
Southern California households.)
Glen Canyon was named by Maj. John Wesley Powell, one-armed Civil
War veteran and leader of the first exploring party to travel by
water through the heart of the canyon country. His party of 10 men
departed Green River, Wyoming, on May 24, 1869, piloted four
fragile wooden boats down the Green and Colorado rivers, and
emerged three months later below the Grand Canyon.
Glen Canyon Dam and the lake named for Maj. Powell are the
subjects of regret, antipathy, even hatred, in the hearts of many
American environmentalists. The dam's approval by Congress as part
of the Colorado River Storage Project - a series of high dams in
the river's upper basin, including Flaming Gorge Dam on the Green
River in Utah, Navajo Dam on the San Juan River in New Mexico, and
the Wayne Aspinall Unit (Blue Mesa, Crystal, and Morrow Point
dams) on the Gunnison River in Colorado - came during a ferocious
debate in the late 1950s about the future of the West, the
integrity of the national park system, and the proper balance
between preservation and exploitation of the nation's resources.
As originally proposed by the Bureau of Reclamation, the Colorado
River Storage Project was to include dams that would have flooded
Dinosaur National Monument on the Utah-Colorado border. Led by the
Sierra Club, environmentalists fought off those dams, but the
price of victory was their agreement to drop opposition to the
remainder of the project, including Glen Canyon Dam.
Those involved in the battle, notably David Brower, the Sierra
Club's executive director at the time, later came to rue that
compromise; when diversion tunnels around the dam were plugged in
1963, the rising water inundated a canyon complex that many who
lived or traveled in the area regarded as the most lovely in the
Southwest.
"The loss of beautiful Glen Canyon due in part to my own inaction
is one of my biggest regrets," Brower wrote in a 1999 fund-raising
letter for the Glen Canyon Institute, which was established in
1995 with the goal of decommissioning Glen Canyon Dam. "But what
is lost does not have to remain so."
Costs and Benefits
Wary of being dismissed as impractical dreamers, environmentalists
have for the past decade focused on cold facts and figures in
making the case for Lake Powell's elimination. (In their scenario,
the dam would remain but new diversion tunnels would be drilled
through its flanking cliffs to let the river flow freely around
it.)
Some of their assertions draw little dispute from the Bureau of
Reclamation and other defenders of the dam. Both sides in the
debate agree that Lake Powell traps millions of tons of sediment
each year and that the Colorado below the dam has been transformed
from a warm and muddy river into one that is cold and clear. In
consequence, beaches and sandbars have vanished from the Grand
Canyon, eliminating not only camping spots for river runners but
also wildlife habitat, and several species of native fish have
been driven to extinction or its brink. Elimination of the huge
floods that used to tear through the canyon each spring has
allowed exotic plants such as tamarisk and Russian thistle to
invade the river banks, displacing native vegetation.
Both sides also agree that prodigious quantities of water are lost
from Lake Powell to evaporation - 2 to 3 percent of its volume
annually, according to the bureau, which amounts to as much as
800,000 acre-feet when the lake is full. That's more than the
annual consumption of Los Angeles.
Where the two sides part company most dramatically is on the
benefit side of the equation. The bureau characterizes Glen Canyon
Dam and Lake Powell as critical components of the West's plumbing
and power system, generating 5 billion kilowatt-hours of
electricity annually (enough for 400,000 households) and allowing
water managers to store sufficient runoff during wet years to
ensure adequate supplies for downstream users in California,
Nevada, and Arizona when drought - such as the one now gripping
the region - inevitably strikes.
"If there ever was a period of time that demonstrated the critical
nature of and need for Lake Powell, now is the time," said Wirth,
who works in the Bureau of Reclamation's Upper Colorado River
Region office in Salt Lake City. "Without Lake Powell, without
Lake Mead, without the Colorado River Storage Project, we wouldn't
have made it to this point."
Opponents of the dam argue that Lake Mead stores enough water for
most purposes and that, even in drought, there has been enough
water in the Colorado River to provide the legally mandated
deliveries to states that share the watershed. If more storage is
needed, they argue, it should be developed in underground basins
and offstream reservoirs in the states that need it.
They also contend that the West would not miss Glen Canyon Dam's
kilowatts, which account for less than 3 percent of the region's
generating capacity.
Numbers, however, only take the discussion so far. Ultimately, the
argument in favor of draining Lake Powell comes down an aesthetic
and emotional one. To get a feel for that aspect of the debate,
you can buy a book.
Writer Wallace Stegner called Glen Canyon "the most serenely
beautiful of all the canyons of the Colorado River" in his 1965
essay "Glen Canyon Submersus," which is collected in a volume
titled The Sound of Mountain Water.
A Utah publisher recently issued a new edition of The Place No One
Knew, a large-format volume of images by noted landscape
photographer Eliot Porter, originally published by the Sierra Club
in 1963 as a eulogy for the doomed canyon. You also can read Ed
Abbey's classic book Desert Solitaire, which includes a mournful
essay recounting a float trip through Glen Canyon in the final
days of dam construction. Or you can take a hike.
A Canyon Reborn
From just east of the hamlet of Escalante in southern Utah, the
unpaved Hole in the Rock Road carves its way across 60 miles of
corrugated stone and drifting sand, paralleling the steep
escarpment of the Kaiparowits Plateau to the west and the hidden
Escalante River canyon to the east. The road terminates above the
Colorado River at a notch blasted and hacked into the canyon wall
in 1880 by Mormon settlers seeking a shortcut to southeastern
Utah. At intervals, spurs branch off the dirt road toward the
Escalante, eventually fading into trails that switchback into the
main canyon.
At one such trailhead in late May, guide Travis Corkrum of Salt
Lake City, Utah, and freelance photographer Eli Butler of
Flagstaff, Arizona, met a group of backpackers who had signed up
for a four-day trip sponsored by the Glen Canyon Institute.
Shouldering packs, the group of eight hikers trudged across sand
and slickrock, past blooming beavertail cactus and sage, to the
edge of the plateau.
At the lip of the 900-foot-deep canyon, the route required hikers
to clamber down a vertical rock face and then squeeze through a
crack in the rock barely wide enough for an average adult. The
packs had to be lowered by rope. Gathering again at the bottom of
the cliff, the group descended a steep slope of shifting sand and
dropped into the inner canyon, setting up camp on a sandy bench
beneath an overhanging wall of sandstone.
For four days, the group explored Coyote Gulch and lower Escalante
Canyon, parts of which had been inundated by Lake Powell until a
year earlier. The retreating water has reopened hundreds of miles
of narrow canyons to foot traffic, revealing seeps and springs,
alcoves carpeted with maidenhair fern and columbine, quiet pools
reflecting burnished slickrock.
Upstream in Coyote Gulch and Escalante Canyon, in areas untouched
by the lake, lie additional reminders of what drowned when the
reservoir filled: whispering groves of cottonwood and willow
trees, grassy flats where Anasazi farmers - their abandoned
granaries and panels of rock art still visible high on the
cliffs - grew corn, beans, and squash a thousand years ago. There
are arches and bridges carved from stone by time and running
water, gnarled oaks, waterfalls, monolithic walls varnished with a
natural patina of blue-black iron and manganese.
There is deep silence within the canyons. Although water flows
year-round from springs in Coyote Gulch and in the Escalante
River, it does so silently, slipping across the sandy canyon floor
with barely a murmur. The loudest sounds are those of dripping
seeps, trilling canyon wrens, and the splash of hikers' footsteps
as they wade in the water, which in mid-May was ankle-deep in
Coyote Gulch and sometimes reached mid-thigh in the Escalante.
It is these intangible qualities of the drowned but partially
resurrected canyon complex - silence, antiquity, the spectacle of
green life, and flowing water in a rocky desert - that
environmentalists believe offer the most compelling argument
against Lake Powell. By organizing backpacking trips into the
area, directors of the Glen Canyon Institute hope to use the power
of the landscape itself to swell the ranks of antidam activists.
"That's what's going to win this campaign: that permanent place in
your heart that this place holds," Peterson said.
Past and Future
Weighed against the aesthetic and emotional values of a restored
canyon system are kilowatts, the stark beauty of Lake Powell
itself, the reservoir's popularity with boaters and consequent
economic value to Page, and the flexibility the dam and lake give
to Western water managers charged with the difficult task of
keeping cities and farms alive in very dry places.
"The reality is that it (Lake Powell) will refill: It has to
refill," Wirth said. "We have no other way to prepare for the next
drought that's going to come."
In Page, chamber director Nevills-Staveley has some sympathy for
those who would like to see the canyons resurrected. She's the
oldest daughter of Norm Nevills, who in the 1930s launched one of
the first commercial rafting businesses on the Colorado River and
helped give birth to what has become a major recreational
industry. His pioneering 1938 excursion through Glen Canyon and
the Grand Canyon, at a time when fewer than 100 people had managed
the feat, drew nationwide press attention and made him famous.
Before his death in a 1949 plane crash, Nevills led many
commercial trips through Glen Canyon, and his daughter remembers
it well and fondly.
However, she believes that even if Lake Powell were drained, the
wild, lonely, and beautiful canyon she remembers exploring in the
days before the dam is unlikely to return to its natural
state - certainly not in her lifetime, nor in the lifetime of
anyone now living. Besides, she said, the lives of too many people
in Page and on the neighboring Navajo Reservation have, for better
or worse, become inextricably tied to the reservoir in the past 40
years.
"You can't go back," she said.
While the pro-dam and antidam forces marshal their arguments,
battling for the hearts, minds, and perhaps the soul of the West,
a third participant in the debate - nature - likely will have the
final say.
If rain and snowfall return to average in the Colorado River
watershed, it will take at least a dozen years to refill Lake
Powell, Wirth said. If the drought continues and the reservoir
keeps dropping at its curent pace, in as little as two years the
water in Lake Powell will drop below the turbine intakes and Glen
Canyon Dam's massive generators will shut down.
A journalist for more than 20 years, John Krist is a senior
reporter and columnist at the Ventura County Star in Southern
California and a contributing editor for California Planning &
Development Report. His weekly commentaries on the environment are
distributed nationally by Scripps Howard News Service, and he is a
regular contributor to Writers on the Range, a syndicated service
of High Country News, which distributes commentaries to more than
70 newspapers in the West.
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2004 Environmental News Network Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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