A desert resurrection

History is reversing itself in an extraordinary display at Lake Powell. With the record drought of recent years dropping the water level to the lowest point in decades, spectacular natural features of the Arizona-Utah border region are reemerging above the waves: great cavernous grottos, submerged natural bridges and sinuous, vertical slot canyons hewn into the sandstone.

Their resurrection embellishes a scene that has been surreal ever since the Colorado River began backing up behind the completed Glen Canyon Dam in 1963. For four decades, intensely blue water has lapped against red sandstone. But today, as the water level drops, the 186-mile length of Lake Powell is becoming even more striking, an ice-cream sandwich between wafers of blue sky and blue water, the filling of red sandstone now layered by a band of white reaching 95 feet up the canyon walls. It’s the “bathtub ring,” the stain of decades of inundation by the reservoir.

The beauty also tells a story of the modern West, and perhaps foretells the future.

The drought restoring the splendor of Glen Canyon is bringing to a head battles between urban and rural, fishermen and farmers, industrialists and environmentalists. The dearth of rainfall has hit both Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell hard: The reservoir has fallen to nearly half its storage capacity, and the dam is operating at a quarter of its power-generating potential. Snowmelt will temporarily raise the level this summer before it drops again, with some federal government projections putting the low-water mark as much as 40 feet below this spring’s level.

Scenes of desolation are everywhere. Marina docks sit high and dry hundreds of yards from the receding shoreline. Canyons are choking in silt up to 200 feet deep, left behind by the slackening reservoir. Mudflats cracking in the sun stretch for miles.

On the other hand, nature restores. Whitewater rapids swallowed by the reservoir are reemerging in the Colorado River. In side canyons, the silt is being flushed out by flash floods, and grasses, wildflowers and cottonwood saplings are springing up. Beavers build their dwellings with new willow twigs. Even the “bathtub ring” is vanishing, drying up and flaking off while dripping rainwater varnishes the rock red again (“Colorado” means “colored red”).

The 710-foot-high Glen Canyon Dam, built during a seven-year period from 1956 to 1963, was one of the last of the big dams erected during what “Cadillac Desert” author Marc Reisner called the “go-go years” of the 20th century. It is an impressive piece of engineering, but it never became a triumphant marker of American nationhood, such as Hoover or Grand Coulee. Those heroic dams of the 1930s helped electrify the rural West and settle yeoman farming families in blooming, irrigated deserts. By the early 1960s, “The Grapes of Wrath” had been replaced by Frank Sinatra live on the Las Vegas strip, its marquees lit with Hoover Dam’s power and the city’s golf course lakes filled with its water.

Glen Canyon Dam enjoys no similar heritage. Its history is one of public controversy, not acceptance. It was to be one of five large dams on the upper Colorado, with two in Grand Canyon National Park and two more in Dinosaur National Monument. A young, insurgent environmental movement led by David Brower of the Sierra Club defeated the Grand Canyon and Dinosaur National Monument dams, but in the bargain stopped fighting to save Glen Canyon, a remote place few people had seen. Through it, the Colorado rolled along serenely between vertical sandstone walls. Side canyons held dripping grottos green with ferns such as Mystery Canyon, cavernous alcoves such as Cathedral in the Desert, and vertiginous slots such as Dungeon Canyon.

The dam submerged those places, creating a spidery inland sea with more shoreline than that of the entire West Coast. It immediately became a mecca for boaters, as many as 3 million every year, who water-ski, jet-ski, speedboat and float in every conceivable kind of craft.

River runners and some environmentalists--pointedly Brower and the Sierra Club--refused to forget Glen Canyon, and have advocated decommissioning the dam and draining the reservoir. They charge that the politics of dam construction has changed so much that Glen Canyon would never be built today.

At the time of its construction, the six states that share the Colorado River with thirsty, populous powerhouse California--Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada--were demanding that the federal government build them a dam to tap the river for their future growth. Today these states have no cities near enough, or at low enough altitude, to make tapping the reservoir worthwhile. There also is no good nearby farmland to irrigate.

The only water drunk from the reservoir is at the marinas or small communities nearby. No crops are irrigated. Worse, despite its billing as an “insurance policy” against drought, Lake Powell is radically counterproductive, losing enough water every year to evaporation in the desert sun and seepage into the porous sandstone--about 860,000 acre-feet or 10% of the river’s annual flow--to satisfy the city of Los Angeles for a year or the Salt Lake Valley for five.

Opponents argue that the dam is an environmental disaster, seriously degrading the ecosystem of the Grand Canyon downstream by depriving it of silt. They say the reduced water flow has nearly destroyed the Delta region in Mexico, pushing numerous species to the brink of extinction.

They also argue that the river itself is rendering the dam pointless. The Colorado’s huge quantities of silt are building up behind the dam at a rate of 30,000 dump truck loads each day. Within our grandchildren’s lifetimes, the sediment will fill the reservoir, turning it into a 186-mile long, 500-foot deep mudflat with a waterfall at one end.

Defenders of the reservoir point to its economic benefits: the electricity generated, worth $90 million per year, and the multimillion-dollar recreational economy that sustains Page, Arizona, and Kanab, Utah. Each of the last three years, Utah Republican legislators have inserted a rider into the Interior Department’s appropriations bill prohibiting the use of federal money to study decommissioning the dam.

On the blue waters of the lowered reservoir one can see the two sides of the conflict in dramatic juxtaposition. A sleek white cabin cruiser slashes an arc along the smooth reflective surface. It is exemplary of the technical mastery and unbounded optimism that built the dam in the 1950s. The boat speeds past and nearly capsizes a lone kayaker, self-propelled in his slender craft, determined to leave a light footprint in seeking the serenity of the side canyons.

The encounter reminds that dams are products of a particular time, place and set of needs and dreams, and that these can change.

And this summer in the Utah desert--if only temporarily--mother nature is decommissioning Glen Canyon Dam all by herself.