Bullfrog, Utah – The ghosts of Glen Canyon have emerged from four decades of underwater exile.
Until the abundant snows of last winter and this spring melt and ease a five-year drought, Lake Powell will struggle with beached ferries, landlocked marinas and the myriad difficulties of being only one-third full.
But the historic low-water mark is also creating euphoria, because the lake had swallowed up many beautiful places.
This red-rock desert reservoir with its turquoise waters has receded into something more like the historic channels of the Colorado River and its tributaries. And Glen Canyon is reappearing.
A fabled rock formation in a secluded cove of the canyon, the Cathedral in the Desert has risen from a watery grave.
Here, massive swirls of sandstone create a natural basilica with vaulting walls that soar nearly 200 feet overhead. They leave only a gash of azure sky above.
Deep in the cathedral’s cool, dark chamber, a lacy waterfall splashes musically down a sandstone cleft and into an emerald pool encircled by pinkish-orange sand. The beach exists courtesy of 40 years of silt deposits by the lake.
“We’d seen pictures of the cathedral, but when you come around the bend, it takes your breath away,” says Linda Pohle, a writer from Denver on a field trip offered by the Glen Canyon Institute. “Then you think of flooding it again. It’s a real loss for all of us.”
As the snow melts, Powell rises. Between the early April low and mid-July, the Bureau of Reclamation projects a gain of 45 feet.
But for now, Lake Powell is enjoying an unparalleled season of discovery. About 145 more vertical feet of sheer cliffs, canyon walls, stone domes and all sorts of phantasmagoric formations, most wearing pale coats of salts over cinnamon-colored stone, have been revealed.
The top of the world’s second-largest natural bridge, Gregory Arch, is just coming into view.
The rise and fall of water also has exposed the tracks of dinosaurs no one knew had roamed here in what is now the American West.
Once-sunken boats, such as the “Money Rush” wreck at Pollywog Bench, are now perched high on canyon ledges. Soggy pillows and deck chairs, which fly off of houseboats with regularity, dot the new shoreline.
A 2,000-mile shoreline shrinks
Bubba Ketchersid, 46, has worked here since he was a kid and spent two decades guiding 1,000 boat trips a year. He’s now resident manager of the northern lake district, including Bullfrog Marina, for concessionaire Aramark.
And so he went out in April, among the first few hundred visitors to see a natural cathedral submerged since the 1960s.
“So many people were asking me about it, I thought I better go see it,” Ketchersid says. “I’ve been doing this for 27 years, and I still haven’t seen everything.”
Ketchersid is upbeat, but he admits that it has been hard adapting to plunging lake levels. Millions have been spent pouring concrete for new ramps so boats could reach receding waters.
Until a few years ago, Lake Powell could boast the most overnight visitors of any unit in the national parks system and an average stay of five days. But the number of visitors, which peaked at more than 2 million a year, has dropped 30 percent over the last three years, says Shar Obergh, the Park Service’s assistant manager for Glen Canyon Recreation Area.
By April, the lake had shrunk from its full-pool length of 185 miles to 150 miles. Almost 2,000 miles of shoreline tracing a maze of canyons had been considerably shortened.
Bob and Claudia Alster of Grand Junction have been boating on Powell for 22 years and have never seen it so low – or so quiet.
“I think some people think the lake is drained. There’s still 300 feet of water. It’s still the biggest pond around,” Bob Alster says.
The Alsters ran their 32-foot power boat, the Allegro, to see the Cathedral in the Desert.
“It was phenomenal,” Claudia Alster says. Nevertheless, the Alsters absolutely would rather have a full Powell.
“We just feel if it keeps going down, it will just go away,” Bob Alster says.
“We were darn lucky” to have Powell
That would be just fine with some in the conservation community.
It was 1997 when the Sierra Club and the Glen Canyon Institute first floated the notion of emptying Lake Powell, perhaps by pulling out the 710-foot-high plug that is Glen Canyon Dam.
Then and now, the basin’s politicians, water and energy czars and boating interests deemed the idea nutty. But in mid-April, with the cathedral in its glory, there is newfound hope among environmentalists of taking back Glen Canyon.
Richard Ingebretsen, president of the Salt Lake City-based Glen Canyon Institute, hiked the canyon as a boy in the last days before the inundation. He says draining Powell is not a quixotic scheme, but an inevitability.”It’s filling with sediment, the equivalent of 30,000 truckloads a day. It’s never going to completely refill with water because there is too much demand on the Colorado River,” he says.
Ingebretsen says the Bureau of Reclamation can send Powell’s store of water downstream for storage in Lake Mead or in aquifers.
The Bureau of Reclamation’s Upper Colorado Region spokesman Barry Wirth says that those arguments are untested, and that, if Powell hadn’t been built, Lake Mead would be virtually empty by now.
“When the drought set in and we saw the worst five years on record, we knew we were darn lucky to have (Powell) in place,” Wirth says. “It’s hard to overstress how critically important Lake Powell is.”
Whatever the view, this is an extraordinary season on the lake. The ghosts of Glen Canyon are raising the question: Fill it – or drain it?
Staff writer Electa Draper can be reached at 970-385-0917 or edraper@denverpost.com.
