A River Losing Its Soul

Four decades after one of the West’s last big dams blocked the free flow of water into the wild recesses of the Grand Canyon, the Colorado still manages to roar through here like the granddaddy of Western rivers. But it has become the Hollywood version -- strikingly beautiful and in vital ways, fake.

With every passing year, the Grand Canyon’s stretch of the Colorado River bears less and less resemblance to its former self. The fine, white sand beaches on which thousands of weary boaters unfurl their sleeping bags every summer are disappearing.

So are native fish species that have been in the canyon for millions of years. Millennium-old Native American burial sites are washing away with the eroding sands.

Without the scouring of regular flooding, the feathery green tamarisk bush imported to the United States in the 1800s is overrunning the river banks, and boulders washed out of side canyons are piling up in the main channel. The river’s mythic rapids are growing more difficult to navigate and some may become impassable.

The 1963 completion of Glen Canyon Dam just upstream from the park is best known in environmental circles for drowning stunning canyon lands under the waters of Lake Powell. But its effects have also been traumatic in the downstream river corridor of the Grand Canyon, through the heart of the park.

A warm, muddy, violently unpredictable river that shaped the canyon’s ecosystem for millions of years turned cold, clear, steady and aquamarine. It may match the romantic notion of a river, but it is utterly unnatural in this sunbaked cleft in the Colorado Plateau.

The damage has long been recognized. Congress in 1992 passed the Grand Canyon Protection Act, directing the Interior Department to devise ways of making the dam’s water releases for generating hydroelectric power less harmful to the canyon environment.

But it is increasingly apparent that the modified flows, adopted eight years ago, haven’t worked. The failure has deepened the pessimism of some experts that, short of taking down the dam, humans may not be able to offset the harm done by its construction.

“The Grand Canyon river corridor is getting nuked,” said David Haskell, a retired National Park Service career officer who directed the Grand Canyon’s science center from 1994 to 1999. “It’s in the final stages of having the natural ecosystem completely destroyed and replaced with a man-made one because of the presence of the dam.”

That is not exactly the way federal scientists put it in their briefings to a group of some two dozen water managers, Interior Department officials and journalists who recently spent a week rafting down the river, discussing the drought and federal water policy with Assistant Interior Secretary Bennett Raley.

But the canyon told the tale.

“The beaches continue to erode. The humpback chub [a native fish] continues to decline,” said Jeffrey Cross, the current director of the park’s science center. “Tamarisk has not only invaded the main stem but has moved up many of the tributaries of the canyon. These are all changes that have happened and have continued to happen.”

There were 10,000 humpbacks in canyon reaches in 1992. Now there are 2,200. Of the eight native fish species found in the canyon before the dam, four are now gone.

In the early 1970s, there were about 180 sand beaches roomy enough to allow rafters to pitch a tent. Half that number are left, Cross said. The rest have washed away or are so overrun by the alien, salt-exuding tamarisk bush that camping is impossible.

Lars Niemi, a 42-year-old boatman who has been on the river since he was a teenager, has watched the beaches dwindle. “We just used to be able to throw down in a lot of places that aren’t there anymore,” he said, his hand on the rudder of one of the Raley group’s two big pontoon boats.

It was the third trip through the canyon for Raley, the Bush administration’s point man on water policy. A Colorado attorney and property rights advocate who has no qualms about dams, Raley is nonetheless drawn back here, not just by the rock-walled grandeur, but by the river’s imprint on the Western psyche.

“I don’t know how you can come down here and not be humbled,” said Raley, who sees political life as a tug of war between idealism and compromise -- one that is reflected on the river. “There’s virtually nothing that goes on here that doesn’t involve trade-offs or balances.”

The rafting party glided by pale red and beige canyon walls that opened onto majestic vistas of mesa and then closed into dark gorges chiseled into a million different faces. The water arched in polished blue-green curls, looking more like the Caribbean than a river named Colorado -- “colored red” in Spanish -- after the ruddy sediment washed into it along its 1,400-mile length.

Geologically, the river functions as a huge watery conveyor belt carrying ancient, eroded bits of the Colorado Plateau to the Gulf of California. Before the Glen Canyon dam, at least 60 million tons of sand and silt tumbled and slid through the Grand Canyon every year, swept along by annual floods four times greater than today’s high flows. When the dam went up, it stopped not only the floods, but the sand, which is piling up at the bottom of Lake Powell, the reservoir behind the dam.

Now the canyon’s only sand comes from two tributaries below the dam, the Paria and Little Colorado rivers, which contribute less than 10% of the river’s historic volume of sediment.

Without sand, the Grand Canyon river system is like a body without nourishment. Fine sands and silts are loaded with nutrients for aquatic life that become food for insects that, in turn, become food for fish and birds. The sediment builds spawning beds for fish and sand bars where plants can grow and river rafters can sleep.

“At all sorts of levels the sand is the foundation of the system,” said Ted Melis, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist with the Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center who has studied the river for years.

The banks are actually more verdant than they used to be because there are no longer any major floods to wash out vegetation. But most of the growth is tamarisk, which is shunned by the canyon’s desert bighorn sheep and displaces native willow and cottonwood that offer more diverse bird habitat.

With less sand in the canyon, long-buried Indian sites have become exposed, as have the chub, which depended on the murky cover of muddy water to hide from predators.

The endangered fish is a snout-nosed survivor of the canyon’s harsh extremes. Its hump helped it navigate the river torrents. It withstood the leaps in river temperature from freezing in winter to 80 degrees in the summer and spawned as the water warmed.

It can’t stand the clear, cold water now released from the depths of Lake Powell at a year-round 46 to 48 degrees. The only adequately sized spawning population of chub left is in the Little Colorado, which is warmer, and often murkier, than the main stem. But as soon as the young fish swim into the big Colorado, they are stunned by its frigid temperature and became sitting targets for nonnative trout, which have thrived in the chill.

“We get [reproduction] here but we never see them again,” Arizona Game and Fish research biologist Bill Persons said as he logged a silvery young chub caught in a monitoring net on the Little Colorado.

In 1996, the Interior Department conducted an ambitious flooding experiment that officials hoped would reverse some of the declines by reestablishing sand bars and washing away nonnative vegetation. They opened Glen Canyon Dam’s floodgates, letting out enough water to raise the Colorado by as much as 13 feet.

At first they declared success. But within a couple of years, the new beaches were gone. Scientists learned that the river didn’t work the way they thought it did. It wasn’t a bathtub in which sand would settle, to be later lifted to the banks with higher flows. It was a pipeline, constantly pushing sand through unless flows were kept low.

The results of the big flood experiment led researchers to question the basic premises of the flow regimens adopted under the Grand Canyon Protection Act. Traditionally, operators had cranked dam releases up and down every day to respond to the rise and fall of energy demand, causing the river to advance and retreat along its banks as if it had tides. The new rules restricted those fluctuations on the theory that more stable flows would arrest beach erosion and help the native fish.

“It turned out we were wrong. The larger fluctuating flows were probably better, at least for the fish,” said Dennis Fenn, director of the Southwest Biological Science Center, of which the Grand Canyon monitoring center is an arm.

Officials also are planning another, shorter flood to rebuild beaches with sediment dumped into the Colorado from the Paria after monsoonal rains. But the drought has thwarted that effort.

The ongoing decline of the river ecosystem has sparked criticism. “The environmental community is looking at this as somewhat of a failed process,” said Jennifer Pitt, a senior resource analyst with Environmental Defense who was on the river trip. “There’s so much foot-dragging it’s hard to move forward.”

A linchpin of the restoration program is adaptive management, an approach that is supposed to give officials the freedom to try something different if their initial game plan doesn’t work.

But there are so many competing interests on the program’s advisory committee -- power producers, environmentalists and state water managers, to name a few -- that Fenn says it’s not easy to adapt.

“I think too many people are saying, ‘I don’t want anything to happen because I don’t want to lose what I got,’ ” he said. “They’re all well-meaning and want to do the right thing, but they have their interests.”

Another obstacle is the complicated body of law that governs use of the Colorado River and the Glen Canyon Dam. Under 1968 legislation, for instance, dam spills above the amount needed to generate power are legal only if done for safety reasons. Environmentalists argue the 1992 protection act changed that, allowing for spills for ecological purposes, but power producers disagree. Ultimately the dispute will probably have to be settled in court.

Raley concedes the program is “struggling a bit now.” But he contends the experiments hold promise. “I think we’re making material progress, whether it’s sediment, fish or the cultural resources,” he said. “It’s easy to say you haven’t fixed this.”

Raley grew up in a ranching family and rafted the river in cowboy hat and jeans waxed to keep out water. He said he was frightened by water and the Grand Canyon’s churning rapids. But, riding in a red rubber kayak, he insisted on shooting some of them, including “Hermit,” one of the bigger drops on the river.

Halfway through, he flipped. Clinging to the overturned kayak, he was carried by the churning white water to a calm stretch, where he climbed, somewhat shaken, back on a raft. He later scribbled the name “Hermit” on the back of his lifejacket, a souvenir of his dunking.

There are those who believe that as long as Glen Canyon Dam is in operation, efforts to restore the river through the Grand Canyon are doomed to failure. The only solution, they argue, is to decommission the dam.

“There really isn’t any hope,” said Haskell, who has become active in environmental causes since leaving the Park Service. “They can continue to tinker and try to slow the demise,” but the task, he said, is as futile as trying to “raise rhinos and elephants in the Arctic.”

The dam provides hydropower that supplies electricity to the rural West, flood control and nearly half the water storage space on the Colorado. “These are the things you’d give up” if the dam was decommissioned, Fenn said.

If the dam is an immovable object, what remains are little fixes. Under one scheme officials are considering, temperature control devices would be installed in the dam to draw water flows from the warmer top layers of the lake. Another idea is to scoop sediment from Lake Powell and pipe it around the dam into the river.

“We’re not a drain-the-reservoir group,” said Nikolai Ramsey, president of the Grand Canyon Trust, an environmental group based in nearby Flagstaff that has a seat on the adaptive management committee. “We think there are plenty of management alternatives to be tried.”

But, if anything, the unsuccessful 1996 experimental flood taught caution. Raising the water temperature to make the chub more comfortable would make the river more hospitable to some of the chub’s warm-water predators. Piping in sediment trapped behind the dam would be expensive and could stir up contaminants in the lake bottom and funnel them into the canyon.

“Playing God is a lot harder than it looks,” Raley said. “I’m not aware of a bold move we could jump to on this canyon that would be responsible.”