Outstanding Article About Lake Powell, Glen Canyon, Drought, Siltation, Hydropower And All The Rest
Trust me, it's worth it just to click on the video embedded in the article all about Cathedral In The Desert.
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Eric Balken of the Glen Canyon Institute hikes up Lake Canyon on Aug. 16, 2022. This area in Lake Canyon was under water for approximately 20 years and now has been dry for approximately 20 years, due to declining lake levels. The area has seen a resurgence of vegetation, like Goodding's Willow. Mark Henle/The Republic
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A notch to the north, Lake Canyon, yielded unequivocal joy for Balken the next morning. He throttled his boat up the meandering sandstone canyon and past a slalom of ghostly gray cottonwoods that still jut from the flatwater that buried them in the 20th century. He drove a sand spike into the beach to secure the boat, marched through a wall of briars and over a logjam deposited by recent flash flood, then emerged into an open canyon with a flowing stream. Soon, a rushing waterfall echoed from the canyon walls and pitched muddy water from its bedrock perch like a monsoon deluge draining from a flat-roofed adobe.
Walking up on resurrected features like this, or on rock grottos or natural bridges elsewhere around Lake Powell, feels a bit like discovering Atlantis, long rumored to exist under the sea but buried under the waves for ages. The upper reaches of Lake Canyon’s dam-flooded zone first saw daylight again some 20 years ago, but this particular waterfall remained inundated until more recently. Even after the water retreated, Balken and colleagues three years ago walked across lakebed sediments that still entombed it. Flash floods apparently blew out those deposits to expose the falls, which in turn blew his mind when he first saw it and heard its power. “I love to see a creek finding its original bed,” he said.
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Eric Balken of the Glen Canyon Institute walks up a sediment deposit hill at Cathedral in the Desert on Aug. 15, 2022, at Lake Powell. Mark Henle/The Republic
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chmidt’s solution, he would later tell The Arizona Republic, is to reengineer Glen Canyon Dam to allow it to spill water into the river and through Grand Canyon even after it sinks lower than the existing hydropower intakes and bypass tunnels. That might require drilling new and lower tunnels through the sandstone beside the dam. At least, he said, the government must study that option, because without it the drought could push the reservoir into “dead pool,” when a river no longer flows from it until more snowmelt arrives to buoy the surface. “We should know what it costs to bypass,” Schmidt said.
On that, Schmidt and Glen Canyon preservationists like Balken agree. The Glen Canyon Institute this summer joined the Utah Rivers Council and Great Basin Water Network in calling on the Bureau of Reclamation to study such a plan that would, effectively, allow managers to drain Powell while leaving the dam in place. But Schmidt would not drain the lake. Instead, he said, lower bypass tunnels would allow the government to decide how much storage Lake Powell needs in order to consistently send water downstream based on Grand Canyon’s environmental needs. It would still hold back water, but in dry times Lake Mead would need to handle the bulk of the Southwest’s storage needs. Reengineering the dam could cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, depending on the design. The Bureau of Reclamation has directed $2 million toward a study of options.
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https://www.azcentral.com/in-depth/news/local/arizona-environment/2022/09/06/lake-powell-shrinks-new-questions-surface-its-future/10278983002/
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