GLEN CANYON, Utah — The tops of trees, dead since Lake Powell’s levels rose decades ago, poked through mud and ooze at the silent mouth of Davis Gulch, where the side canyon met the reservoir’s still waters.
But just around a few bends in the sandstone walls, life began to appear. First, a fuzz of inch-tall greenery. Then, knee-high cattails and primrose, followed shortly by small cottonwoods and willows, then by towering gambel oaks. The silence of the canyon mouth was replaced by the soft rush of a creek, bird songs, and the constant cacophony of dragonflies and gnats.
Scattered throughout the canyon, an ecologist, bug scientists, birders and advocates for Glen Canyon were working to document the ecosystems emerging as Lake Powell’s water levels have dropped after decades of drought and water overuse.
“Hiking the side canyons is like going through ecological time travel,” said Eric Balken, the executive director of , a nonprofit dedicated to restoring the canyons inundated by Lake Powell, as he hiked up Davis Gulch.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation flooded Glen Canyon in the 1960s, converting an intricate network of canyons — carved by the Colorado River and its tributaries — into Lake Powell. The massive reservoir functions as the water savings account for the Colorado River Basin, where the river serves as the lifeblood for millions of people and massive farming operations across seven states: Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, Arizona, Nevada and California.
But years of water use that outpaced the Colorado River’s shrinking flows have, over the past two decades, sapped the reservoir’s water stores and created an existential crisis for water managers across the basin, home to 40 million people.
The falling water levels have also steadily revealed long-submerged canyonlands: red slot canyons, sandstone amphitheaters, waterfalls that tumble over slickrock cliffs. The reemerging landscapes provide a new opportunity to study life in Glen Canyon, which sits just upstream of the iconic Grand Canyon. Little scientific work was completed in Glen Canyon before the federal government flooded it — an event seen by environmentalists then, and now, as an unmitigated ecological disaster, a paradise lost.
But for a new generation of advocates, regaining paradise seems possible as the reservoir’s shorelines recede, bringing more than 100,000 acres of rugged terrain out of the water. The Glen Canyon Institute and canyon activists for years have argued that Lake Powell should be drained and the Colorado River allowed to again flow freely through Glen Canyon.
Now, their argument is also bolstered by the fact that Lake Powell is emptying — whether Colorado River managers like it or not.
For those advocates, recent years have provided a rare chance to study life in the emerging canyonlands and to make their case to basin leaders who are contemplating the long-term future of Colorado River management.
Basin leaders, including those from Colorado, will decide in the coming months how Lake Powell should be operated. The impacts will have basinwide implications, including on hydropower, Grand Canyon recreation and ecosystems, Lake Powell recreation, and the amount of water in reservoirs up- and downstream. The decisions will determine the future of river management for years to come — and whether the reservoir’s levels rise and again inundate the canyons.
Balken has worked to coordinate and support research in the emerging canyons that examines what life looks like and what it could look like in the future. The goal, he said, is to show water managers and the general public the types of vibrant ecosystems that policymakers could permanently protect by lowering the reservoir levels.
“You can’t protect it if you don’t understand it,” Balken said.
Shifting landscapes
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in 1963 closed the gates of the newly constructed Glen Canyon Dam and, for 17 years, water levels rose to create Lake Powell.
For the remainder of the 20th century, water levels stayed relatively stable — rising in the spring as snowmelt across the upper Colorado River Basin made its way to the reservoir, and then falling the rest of the year as water was sent downstream to cities and farm fields.
The immensity of the body of water, which resembles an 186-mile vericose vein snaking across southern Utah, is difficult to comprehend or convey. Three major tributaries meet what was the Colorado River at Lake Powell, and 127 named side canyons sprout from the main corridor, as do hundreds more without names. The Glen Canyon Dam that created the reservoir is in northern Arizona, just over the state line.
When full, Lake Powell’s shoreline — the approximate driving distance from Denver to Boston.
At full capacity, it holds about 25 million acre-feet of water — 26 times the capacity of Colorado’s largest reservoir, in Gunnison County. An acre-foot of water is approximately enough to cover a football field in water and is generally considered the annual water use of two to four families.
At full pool, the reservoir’s contents would fill the more than 33,000 times and could cover the entire state of Kentucky in a foot of water.
But the reservoir is not full, and is unlikely to become full in the near future without extreme intervention from basin water managers. As of Tuesday, the reservoir was at 24% of capacity, and its water level was 172 feet lower than it would be if it were full.
Across the reservoir, sandstone arches that used to be submerged are now large enough to drive a boat through. Historic cultural sites from that have inhabited the area for centuries are reemerging, though wiped of any artifacts.
The lower water levels were obvious as Balken led a caravan of two pontoon boats up the reservoir’s main channel on May 11. Halls Crossing Marina felt like a construction site as work crews made daily changes to adapt to the falling water levels.
Except for those in Balken’s group, the campground above the marina was empty on a lovely spring Sunday evening. A bright white stripe of bleached sandstone around the canyon walls, called the bathtub ring, marks where the water used to rise.
Balken and the only other two full-time staff members at the Glen Canyon Institute were leading the first formal trip of the organization’s (and allowed a Denver Post reporter and photographer to tag along). The program aims to survey the flora and fauna and aid established scientists in their research in the reemerging canyons.
The boats were loaded with tents, emergency oars, containers of gasoline, cameras, and 50 Mason jars for insect collection — along with two birders, two aquatic ecologists from Western Colorado University, a documentarian, and an ecologist who for years has helped compile the most expansive accounting of the vegetation in the canyons’ emerging landscapes.
Over the next three days, the group would bushwhack miles up side canyons looking for birds, beavers, bugs and more. For some, like the birders, it was their first foray into Glen Canyon’s reaches. Others had been in the canyons multiple times over the years.
Dawn Kish, a former Grand Canyon river guide and current documentarian of reemerging Glen Canyon, has spent hundreds of hours exploring the canyons and recreating photos taken before the dam gates closed. The folds of the canyons continue to draw her in, she said. Documenting the canyons — — is the most important work she’s done in her life, she said.
Environmentalists for years have said one reason the Bureau of Reclamation was able to flood Glen Canyon with little public pushback is that so few knew the place.
“This should never happen again, but I know that it could. So we just have to keep fighting and telling people about it,” Kish said. “I think thatap what happened in the ’50s — people didn’t know about it.”
Making a place known
Just before noon the following day, Susan Washko squatted over a white plastic tub beside the stream that runs through Fiftymile Canyon.
“We’ve got some mayflies here, some midges,” she said, sifting her hands through the bucket and plucking out rocks.
It was the fourth stream sample of the second day of the trip for Washko, and graduate student Ashlynn Mixon. The pair are compiling a survey of the aquatic bugs in the reemerging canyons and how those underwater worlds are changing as time passes. They also collected samples from above the high-water line, where the reservoir did not reshape the landscape.
Over the coming year, Mixon will identify the insects found in their samples and the duo will eventually author a report for the National Park Service, which manages . In addition to mayflies and midges, they’ve found soliderflies in seeps on canyon walls, damselflies and several beetles, including Washko’s favorite — the . The black and yellow beetles create a bubble of air under their wings as they dive underwater so they can stay submerged longer, like a scuba diver’s tank.
The pair decided to study the canyons — which are a six-hour drive from WCU in Gunnison — after reading about the recession of Powell and the canyons coming back to life. It piqued their interest, and they reached out to the Glen Canyon Institute for guidance on navigating the area.
There is no comprehensive survey of the aquatic insects living in the reemerging canyons, and studies from before Glen Canyon Dam are haphazard, Washko said. There’s also little monitoring on the land above the lake shoreline.
“Not a lot of folks have been working down here. There aren’t a lot of records,” she said.
It’s a point repeated by several scientists working in Glen Canyon and its tributaries — nobody really knows what’s down there.
“Itap this unknown, unstudied place, and that makes it unknown and unvalued in management decisions,” said Seth Arens, a research ecologist with Western Water Assessment who has been leading a four-year study of vegetation in the canyons.
Lake Powell and its surrounding land are managed , which means the National Park Service is focused on facilitating boating, fishing and other recreational activities. Management under other types of designations — like national parks or conservation areas — is more focused on scientific research and wilderness preservation.
The National Park Service declined an interview for this story but provided some information in response to The Post’s outreach. Before filling the reservoir, the Bureau of Reclamation commissioned a “salvage study” to document thousands of archaeological sites in the canyon, though the agency believes many more were missed.
“We are monitoring shorelines for natural and cultural resource needs, and looking for areas where more intensive work is needed, such as invasive plant control, or stabilization of historic sites,” agency representatives wrote in an email.
Arens became interested in Glen Canyon during a 2018 family rafting trip down Cataract Canyon — the flowing section of the Colorado River just before its delta with Lake Powell. He and his 7-year-old daughter hiked up a side canyon, where he bemoaned the towers of sediment left behind by the reservoir’s receding water. It felt like a “bombed-out landscape,” he said.
Then, his daughter pointed out a baby cottonwood tree.
“It was just a moment of the switch flipping in my head,” he said, “from looking at the landscape as one that has been demolished — to looking at it and wondering what the landscape could turn into if it’s allowed to come back.”
The moment eventually morphed into the vegetation study, partially funded by the Glen Canyon Institute.
The study aims to answer two simple questions: What plants are growing in the reemerging canyons? And how are those changing over time?
So far, Arens has been surprised by how quickly native vegetation resumes life as the water recedes, in some places as soon as two or three years. The ecosystems are resilient, he said.
Like Washko, he noted an absence of detailed data about what plant life looked like in the canyons before the dam and after impoundment. He’s not aware of any other major studies looking at the emerging landscapes.
He plans to submit a manuscript of his study this month.
“I want to make this place known — this place has ecological value to it, cultural values, scenic values,” he said. “It’s no longer just a slickrock container for water. Itap a living, breathing canyon again.”
A proposal to fill Lake Mead first
Sitting together on a rock in Lake Canyon eating sandwiches, Dara Vazquez and Jelena Grbic listed off some of the bird species they had seen so far during their three days exploring Glen Canyon: six velvet green swallows, two bobolinks, five yellow-chested chats, a hermit thrush, a northern water thrush, house finches, a lesser bullfinch, two western tanagers, a western warbler.
“I could spend a month sitting here,” Grbic said, speaking loudly to be heard over the small waterfall tinkling a dozen feet away.
For the last two mornings, both women had peeled themselves out of their sleeping bags before sunrise. They’d hiked upstream from the mouth of that day’s side canyon so that they could be far enough upstream, where there are plants, to hear the swell of bird song burst forth at dawn.
Grbic, president of the Phoenix-based , and Vazquez, a member of the group, had come to the canyons to scope out what a future survey of the canyons’ bird life might look like.
Lake Canyon, with towering cottonwoods and mature streamside vegetation, had provided the most fruitful birdwatching of the trip. The pair found native species and migratory birds using the canyon as a respite on their long seasonal journeys. Grbic marveled at the emergence of new riparian habitat untrammeled by cattle — an increasing rarity across the southwest.
“I would be excited if they kept this place as it is and not underwater, as there is so little riparian ecosystem in the southwest,” she said. “Itap an endangered ecosystem.”
Whether the reservoir’s levels will rise or fall depends on decisions made by a complicated network of Colorado River water managers and by Mother Nature.
Bureau of Reclamation officials are expected to implement a plan to manage Lake Powell and Lake Mead, its companion reservoir outside Las Vegas, later this summer since negotiations between the seven basin states have stalled.
Since 2009, the Glen Canyon Institute has advocated for a management plan in which water managers would allow Lake Powell to drain and instead send all water downstream to Lake Mead. The proposal, called proposes using Mead as the primary storage facility for the basin but keeping Glen Canyon Dam intact and using Powell as backup storage in case of flood years.
If Powell is the savings account for the basin, Balken said, Mead is the checking account — the bank account from which the three downstream states withdraw their water.
But both accounts are dangerously low.
the combined amount of water in Powell and Mead would fill just over half of Lake Mead’s 26 million acre-foot capacity.
“The bank’s calling and saying (that) now you need to close one of those accounts,” Balken said.
Federal officials this year sent water from the upstream Flaming Gorge Reservoir to Lake Powell to where water levels in the lower reservoir fall so low that water no longer flows through the dam’s power turbines — the only safe way to release water for extended periods. They also reduced the amount of water that will be released from the reservoir.
Combined, the actions should, for now, keep the water level high enough to keep flowing through the turbines and downstream.
But that is a short-term fix to a long-term problem, experts have said.
Powell is draining now, with or without water managers’ consent, Balken said. Consolidating water in Lake Mead would reduce the amount of water lost to evaporation from the reservoirs’ surfaces and to seepage into the sandstone that forms Glen Canyon.
For years, that concept was considered politically untenable. But now, as the Colorado River system continuously slumps toward a crash, water leaders are becoming more open to thinking outside of the box of normal management schemes, Balken said.
Balken, 39, has spent 20 years at the nonprofit he joined as a teenaged intern. He’s led dozens of groups through the canyon system, hoping the place will move those who see it in person. He’s watched side canyons turn from waterlogged moonscapes to glens home to trees with full canopies.
Despite his complicated feelings about the reservoir itself, his favorite cottonwood in the hundreds of miles of canyons he’s traversed is on the main body of water, near a kink in the canyon known as the Rincón.
It’s a single tenacious tree clinging to a seep in an otherwise inhospitably steep canyon wall of rocks and scree — evidence of how green things could be, he said, if the landscape is allowed to return to its natural state.
