By Daniel Craig McCool
As Western states haggle over decreasing water use due to declining flows within the Colorado River Basin, a extra hopeful drama is taking part in out in Glen Canyon.
Lake Powell, the second-largest U.S. reservoir, extends from northern Arizona into southern Utah. A essential water supply for seven Colorado River Basin states, it has shrunk dramatically over the previous 40 years.
An ongoing 22-year megadrought has lowered the water stage to simply 22.6% of “full pool,” and that pattern is anticipated to proceed. Federal officers assert that there are no plans to empty Lake Powell, however overuse and local weather change are draining it anyway.
Because the water drops, Glen Canyon – some of the scenic areas within the U.S. West – is reappearing.
This panorama, which incorporates the Colorado River’s principal channel and about 100 facet canyons, was flooded beginning within the mid-Sixties with the completion of Glen Canyon Dam in northern Arizona. The realm’s gorgeous magnificence and distinctive options have led observers to name it “America’s misplaced nationwide park.”
Lake Powell’s decline gives an unprecedented alternative to get well the distinctive panorama at Glen Canyon. However managing this emergent panorama additionally presents severe political and environmental challenges. For my part, authorities companies ought to begin planning for them now.
Chart: The Dialog, CC BY-ND Supply: Lake Powell Water Database Get the info Created with Datawrapper
A Tarnished Jewel
Glen Canyon Dam, which towers 710 ft excessive, was designed to create a water “checking account” for the Colorado River Basin. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation touted Lake Powell because the “Jewel of the Colorado” and promised that it will be a motorboater’s paradise and an countless supply of water and hydropower.
Lake Powell was so massive that it took 17 years to fill to capability. At full pool, it contained 27 million acre-feet of water – sufficient to cowl 27 million acres of land to a depth of 1 foot – and Glen Canyon Dam’s generators may generate 1,300 megawatts of energy when the reservoir was excessive.
Quickly the reservoir was drawing tens of millions of boaters and water skiers yearly. However beginning within the late Eighties, its quantity declined sharply as states drew extra water from the Colorado River whereas local weather change-induced drought decreased the river’s circulate. Right this moment the reservoir’s common quantity is lower than 6 million acre-feet.
Almost each boat ramp is closed, and lots of of them sit removed from the retreating reservoir. Hydropower manufacturing could stop as early as 2024 if the lake falls to “minimal energy pool,” the bottom level at which the generators can draw water. And water provides to 40 million persons are gravely endangered beneath present administration eventualities.
These water provide points have created a severe disaster within the basin, however there may be additionally a possibility to get well a tremendous panorama. Over 100,000 acres of previously flooded land have emerged, together with world-class surroundings that rivals a number of the crown jewels of the U.S. nationwide park system.
Bargained Away
Glen Canyon made a deep impression on explorer John Wesley Powell when he surveyed the Colorado River beginning in 1867. When Powell’s expedition floated by means of Glen Canyon in 1869, he wrote:
“On the partitions, and again many miles into the nation, numbers of monument-shaped buttes are noticed. So we have now a curious ensemble of fantastic options – carved partitions, royal arches, glens, alcove gulches, mounds, and monuments … previous these towering monuments, previous these oak-set glens, previous these fern-decked alcoves, previous these mural curves, we glide hour after hour.”
Glen Canyon remained comparatively unknown till the late Forties, when the Bureau of Reclamation proposed a number of massive dams on the higher Colorado River for irrigation and hydropower. Environmentalists fiercely objected to 1 at Echo Park in Dinosaur Nationwide Monument on the Colorado-Utah border, alarmed by the prospect of constructing a dam in a nationwide monument. Their marketing campaign to dam it succeeded – however in return they accepted a dam in Glen Canyon, a call that former Sierra Membership President David Brower later referred to as his best remorse.
New Challenges
The primary aim of managing the emergent panorama in Glen Canyon ought to be the inclusion of tribes in a co-management position. The Colorado River and its tributaries are managed by means of a posh maze of legal guidelines, court docket instances and rules often called the “Legislation of the River.” In an act of stupendous injustice, the Legislation of the River ignored the water rights of Native People till courts stepped in and required western water customers to think about their rights.
Tribes obtained no water allocation within the 1922 Colorado River Compact and had been ignored or trivialized in subsequent laws. Though fashionable ideas of water administration emphasize together with all main stakeholders, tribes had been excluded from the policymaking course of.
There are 30 tribes within the Colorado River Basin, not less than 19 of which have an affiliation with Glen Canyon. They’ve rights to a considerable portion of the river’s circulate, and there are literally thousands of Indigenous cultural websites within the canyon.
One other administration problem is the huge quantities of sediment which have collected within the canyon. “Colorado” means “coloured crimson” in Spanish, a recognition of the silt-laden water. This silt used to construct seashores within the Grand Canyon, simply downstream, and created the Colorado River delta in Mexico.
However for the previous 63 years, it has been accumulating in Lake Powell, the place it now clogs some sections of the primary channel and can finally accumulate beneath the dam. A few of it’s laced with poisonous supplies from mining many years in the past. As extra of the canyon is uncovered, it could grow to be essential to create an lively sediment administration plan, together with doable mechanical elimination of some supplies to guard public well being.
The creation of Lake Powell additionally resulted in organic invasives, together with nonnative fish and quagga mussels. A few of these issues will abate because the reservoir declines and a free-flowing river replaces stagnant nonetheless water.
On a extra constructive word, native crops are recolonizing facet canyons as they grow to be uncovered, creating verdant canyon bottoms. Restoring pure ecosystems within the canyon would require modern organic administration methods because the habitat modifications again to a extra pure panorama.
Lastly, because the emergent panorama expands and facet canyons get well their pure surroundings, Glen Canyon will grow to be a novel vacationer magnet. As the primary channel reverts to a flowing river, customers will not want an costly boat; anybody with a kayak, canoe or raft will be capable to take pleasure in the great thing about the canyons.
Glen Canyon Nationwide Recreation Space, which incorporates over 1.25 million acres round Lake Powell, was created to cater to folks in motorized boats on a flat-water floor. Its employees might want to develop new capabilities and an lively customer administration plan to guard the canyon and stop the form of crowding that’s overrunning different widespread nationwide parks.
Different landscapes are more likely to emerge throughout the West as local weather change reshapes the area and quite a few reservoirs decline. With correct planning, Glen Canyon can present a lesson in the best way to handle them.
Daniel Craig McCool: Professor Emeritus of Political Science, College of Utah.
Disclosure assertion:
I do know most of the folks concerned within the controversy concerning the way forward for Lake Powell and Glen Canyon.
Reposted with permission from The Dialog.
