Short Wave - Megadrought fuels debate over whether a flooded canyon should reemerge

Episode Date: January 26, 2022

In the 1960s, the Bureau of Reclamation built a dam that flooded a celebrated canyon on the Utah-Arizona border. Today, it's known as Lake Powell — the second-largest reservoir in the U.S.A half billion dollar tourism industry has grown in the desert around the reservoir but a decades-long megadrought is putting its future in question. With what some call America's 'lost national park' reemerging, an old debate is also resurfacing: should we restore a beloved canyon or refill a popular and critical reservoir? Environmental and American West correspondent Nathan Rott brings this story to guest host Dan Charles. Read Nate's full story and see pictures by photojournalist Claire Harbage of their recent trip to Lake Powell here. This episode was produced by Berly McCoy, edited by Stephanie O'Neill and fact checked by Katherine Sypher. The audio engineer for this episode was Josephine Nyounai.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hello, Shortwavers. This is Dan Charles, and I'm here with Nate Rod, who covers some of the wildest places in the West for NPR. Hey there, Nate. Hello, Dan, or maybe I should say howdy or something like that. Would that be more appropriate? What have you got for us? Okay, so I had a little bit of a misadventure on a recent reporting trip that was illuminating. Okay. Sounds interesting. Tell me some more.

Okay, so we are on a boat cruising across Lake Powell. It's the second largest reservoir in the country near the Utah, Arizona border. It's a bluebird day, and all of a sudden... Wait, wait, Nate, Nate, you hit something? Yeah, the top of a rock spire that was like lurking right under the surface of the water. Luckily, we just grazed it, the edge of it, and everything was fine. But it was like this total aha moment for me because I had tried. traveled there with NPR photographer Claire Harbage to see and document this like surreal

landscape level shift that's happening on Lake Powell and all up and down the Colorado River as climate change and overuse has caused water levels to drop and boom like we literally run right into the changes that's happening. Because you're saying for the last 50 years or so, you would not have hit that rock. Right. Yeah. So it would have been way underwater. You see in the In 1960s, we built a dam here to store water on the Colorado River, and it drowned a place called Glen Canyon, this massive labyrinth of sandstone corridors that some call America's Lost National Park, another Grand Canyon underwater. Wow. So you're saying they built this dam, flooded this whole canyon, and that is what made Lake Powell. Right. But now the West is in this

20-some year-long megadrout, and it's lowered water levels so much, that parts of Glen Canyon are starting to re-emerge, which is reigniting this long-standing debate about what this place should be. So today on the show, what climate change is doing to one of the country's biggest water reservoirs and the battle over what this manufactured landscape should look like as water gets scarce. You're listening to Shortway, the Daily Science podcast from NPR. Okay, Nate, give us a picture of Lake Powell. This is the other big reservoir on the Colorado, right?

Downstream from Grand Canyon, you have the famous Hoover Dam and Lake Mead. And then upstream from Grand Canyon, you have this lake. Yeah. And so both of these reservoirs are massive. They're the two biggest reservoirs in the country. And they're in the middle of this like red rock sandstone desert, these big open landscapes that make a person feel really, really small. And these reservoirs have become hugely popular for anglers and boaters,

Typically in warmer months, the lake would be buzzing with jet skis and houseboats and all sorts of folks doing water recreation. So busy scene. But you were saying the Colorado River has not been delivering as much water as before, so this lake is shrinking? Yeah. So the West is in what scientists are now calling a megadrout. It's one of the driest periods in the last thousand years that roughly started at the turn of this century. Now, there have been wet years since then. we have above average snowpack in a lot of places right now, but the trend overall has been

towards drier. At the same time, our water use is up, and that's draining our piggy banks, the groundwater stores and reservoirs like Lake Powell. So what does that look like at a place like Lake Powell? So it looks like parked houseboats, muddy shores, 20 feet of gravel at the end of a boat ramp, and rock spires, like the one we happened upon, poking out of the surface, all of which could be seen as horrifying or inspiring. Inspiring. Yeah, so jump back in the boat with me real quick, Dan, and I'll let the tape explain. Okay. Eric Balkan is the director of the Glen Canyon Institute, a nonprofit that wants to see the area

below the reservoir surface restored. It's not exactly a popular opinion among Lake Powell's faithful. The reservoir is one of the busiest tourist attractions in the country. People are like, oh, this place is so beautiful. And like, if you were to build a dam in the Grand Canyon, like the Bureau wanted to, you know, that would be a beautiful reservoir too, and it would also be a crime against nature. A crime against nature. Balkan thinks that's what happened here at Glen Canyon, and he's not alone in that sentiment.

But to understand why, we've got to step away from the boat real quick. And jump back in time with a little help from the Bureau, Balkan just mentioned, the Bureau of Reclamation. The date was February 20 of 1959. The place, a remote corner of the Navajo, English, reservation in northern Arizona. Back then, there was no Lake Pout, only a muddy Colorado River,

cutting deep through an almost Martian landscape. A place novelist Edward Abbey once described as a portion of Earth's original paradise. It was just amazing place. Ken Slate was a close friend of Abbeys and a river runner on the Colorado. Now 92,

he says Glenn Canyon was home. You come to love it even more than anything, but they ruined it all. when they put this water in there. It took a decade of blasting, digging and pouring concrete to build the Glen Canyon Dam. The goal, similar to Hoover Dam and Lake Mead Just Down River, was to provide water storage along the Colorado and to generate electricity.

The dam was finished in 1966. Glen Canyon was drowned. Then, two decades ago, scientists say the mega drought began. And in recent years, water levels really dropped. Holy moly. Boating into a side canyon of the Colorado with Eric Balkan, we approach one of the largest natural bridges in the world. A thick span of red sandstone over placid waters.

The last time this span was out, Neil Armstrong hadn't walked on the moon yet. We putter in slowly, reflected sunlight glimmers on the underside of the bridge like a kaleidoscope. We are going to fit, right? Yeah. Oh, my God. We make it through navigating upstream past the bone-white tops of dead. dead trees until the reservoir ends in a narrow canyon. We hit shore, anchor up, and begin hiking.

Before the drought, this whole area was underwater. A white bathtub ring stains the rock more than 100 feet overhead. Oh my god, this is so cool. This is totally different than the last time I was here. Near the reservoir's edge, the ground is kind of soupy. And there's not much vegetation, just red rock. As you move up canyon, a creek starts to take shape. And the hike turns more into weighting.

Sprouting willows and cottonwoods, along with invasive species, line the shores about hip height. And songbirds trill against the canyon's edge. Amidst the occasional historical artifact. A whole tab beer can. Maybe a mile up the creek, the vegetation starts to grow so thick that weighting turns into bushwhacking. I mean, we're walking through like 15-foot-high willow bushes here. The point of this whole venture, what Balkan wants us to see, is that Glen Canyon is recovering. The longer an area has been out of the water, the greater the recovery.

I just want to bring, like, every water manager and everybody that's negotiating the future management of Lake Powell and Lake Mead. And I want them to come in and experience this and just know that when you're talking about, refilling Lake Powell Reservoir potentially. You're talking about redrowning this place. Wow. So Nate, he's saying he thinks this place could be totally submerged again. Yeah, he does. You know, it's still early in winter right now, but let's say, you know, for argument's sakes, that we get a really wet year. Stoback stays above normal. Water managers are going to want to store as much of that water as they can. And on the Colorado River, that means stashing it in places like Lake Powell. Right now, the policy is to store water in Lake Powell and Lake Mead equally.

So say we have this big flood of water, the way the water managers measure these things, say an extra 5 million acre feet. You'd put half in Lake Powell, half in Lake Mead? Right. Balkan thinks we ought to look at a new strategy called Phil Mead first. Idea being that if we get that extra 5 million acre feet, you stash it all in Mead and let Glen Canyon, those recovering ecosystems we just visited, stay above the surface. So basically just let Lake Powell vanish almost? Are they seriously considering that? Well, you know, for a long time, this whole Philmead first idea was kind of viewed as a long shot, this like fringe movement up against insurmountable odds. You know, there's a half billion dollar tourism industry that's been built up around this reservoir. The dam generates electricity. You know,

But the drought is already threatening both of those industries. And today, the water in Powell and Mead are only at about a third of their total capacity. And Powell could stop generating electricity possibly even later this summer. And it sounds like it would take multiple years of above average water to really turn that trend around. Right. And the scientific consensus is that's unlikely to happen. Climate change is going to make the West drier. Some scientists think that we're not experiencing a drought, but a lot. longer-term aridification on the Colorado River watershed. Hmm. But there are so many people with a stake in the lake, so to speak. I can't imagine the millions of people who visit Lake Powell every year would be happy to see it go away.

No, not at all. I mean, we created a giant lake in the middle of the desert, and that lake is now a major tourist destination. And a lot of people depend on it for their income. But I think that's one of the most interesting things about this whole story and the question it raises about the future. You know, here's a place built by humans. Human actions are causing it to shrink. So we're at this place, not just at Lake Powell and Glen Canyon, but you know, Dan, like all over the world where the status quo is in tatters. And the things that were are

unlikely to be the things that are. And we really have to start actively deciding in places like this what we want the future to look like. But this is a place where the status quo has already been completely upended. Exactly. The place. starkly different and it's changing in real time. So I think there is a willingness to look at long-shot ideas like Phil Mead First today more than ever before because the change is happening no matter what. Yeah, Nate, makes me think it gives new meaning to that phrase going with the flow. Yeah. By the way, I just love the photos from this trip to Lake, pal. Yeah, Claire Harbage is like one of the best photographers I know. And so please go to our website,

Check out her photography. And visuals editor Virginia Lazzano really helped us out. So please check that out at NPR.org. There's a link to that story in our show notes. Thanks so much, Nate, for taking that trip and coming back to us with that story. Yeah, thanks for letting me tell you about it. This episode was produced by Burley McCoy, edited by Stephanie O'Neill, and fact-checked by Catherine Seifer.

The audio engineer for this episode was Josephine Neonai. I'm Dan Charles. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.