This story from NPR could be Edward Abbey’s “I told ya so” moment. He opposed the creation of Lake Powell and the dam that clogged up the Colorado River for many reasons, including the beautiful landscape that was going to be submerged underwater.
Following photo: the “bathtub ring” way above Eric Balken, executive director of the Glen Canyon Institute, in part of Glen Canyon, shows us the extent of the drop in the level of Lake Powell over the past few years.
I visited Lake Powell and some of the surrounding areas a few years ago. I saw the bathtub rings, but they were not as dramatically over my head as they would be today. I could sense the beauty of the canyon, but I was seeing just the top of the canyons, not the canyon walls that were submerged. We’re starting to see them now.
Excerpt from this story from NPR:
At Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir, record-low water levels are transforming the landscape, renewing a long-standing dispute over the land the reservoir drowned — a canyon labyrinth that novelist Edward Abbey once described as “a portion of earth’s original paradise.” For half a century, environmental groups and Colorado River enthusiasts have implored water managers to restore Glen Canyon by draining the reservoir.
The goal has always been viewed as a bit far-fetched. Lake Powell is one of the busiest tourist destinations in the country. A half-billion-dollar tourism industry has blossomed on its stored waters along the Utah-Arizona border.
But with water levels at record lows and dropping, hindering tourism and revealing long-hidden rock formations like the one behind Dombrowski’s boat, advocates for Glen Canyon see a unique opportunity to catalog what was lost and to correct, perhaps, what environmentalist David Brower called “America’s most regrettable environmental mistake.”
Human actions built the reservoir. Now human actions are causing it to shrink.
“All of the best data that we have suggests it’s going to be mostly empty for now on,” says Eric Balken, executive director of the Glen Canyon Institute, a nonprofit that wants to see the canyon restored. “So I think it’s really important for policymakers to consider what phasing out this reservoir looks like, because if we don’t, then we might just be stuck in a harder situation down the road where it’s happening by default.”
It would be hard to overstate the anger sparked by the creation of Lake Powell and the flooding of Glen Canyon. The plot of Abbey’s most famous fiction, The Monkey Wrench Gang, centered on a band of environmental extremists hellbent on destroying the concrete behemoth that pinched off the Colorado River near the Utah-Arizona border in 1963.
The Glen Canyon Dam, named for the canyon it drowned, was celebrated as one of the “engineering wonders of the world” by the Bureau of Reclamation. To Abbey, it was “an insult to God’s creation.”
Rock spires, arches, amphitheaters and ecosystems were gradually submerged. Stalled water crawled up slot canyons. Petroglyphs and pull-tab beer cans were covered over.
“They ruined it all when they put the water in there,” says Ken Sleight, a river-runner friend of Abbey’s and an environmental preservationist.
The purpose of the dam was to generate electricity for a growing Southwest and to manage flows on the famously up-again, down-again Colorado River. Ranchers, farmers and a fast-growing Western U.S. needed a stable water supply. Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell, together with their downstream neighbors, Hoover Dam and Lake Mead, would provide that stability.
Gregory Natural Bridge in 1963 and in 2021. Environmental preservationist Ken Sleight, seen under the bridge, led tours in the area. John Stockert/J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah; Claire Harbage/NPR
Eric Balken, executive director of the Glen Canyon Institute, walks through a canyon that was filled by Lake Powell until recent years. Claire Harbage/NPR
