I expect the Glen Canyon Dam and the creation of the most wonderful lake in the world, Lake Powell, is my crowning jewel. Floyd Dominy, the Reclamation Commissioner who pushed for and headed the Colorado River Projects.

Glen Canyon Dam is an insult to God’s Creation, and if there is a God he will destroy it. And if there isn’t we will take care of it, one way or another, and if we don’t then Mother Nature most certainly will. Edward Abbey.  

The reservoir—Lake Foul, to its detractors—would, I assumed, last far longer than I would. There was no way I was going to get to see what lay beneath it. It turns out I was wrong. This isn’t because I was too pessimistic; rather, I wasn’t pessimistic enough. by Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker, The Control of Nature Issue: The Lost Canyon Under Lake Powell

Michele and I left Bluff to drive to Boulder Utah. Michele had initially planned that we would spend one night at Bullfrog Marina on Lake Powell to see how low the water level had dropped. We wanted to gloat; I’m a little embarrassed to admit. But Bluff’s goodness convinced us to stay an extra day, so we just spent an half an hour at Bullfrog. Still, an half an hour was enough.

Before this trip, I’d only seen Lake Powel five times. Once from the back of a pickup truck on the way to Dark Canyon, once with Michele when we went to a photography class in Page AZ, once when Michele and I crossed the lake on the ferry at Hall’s Crossing, and once when Michele and I went to see the Cathedral in the Desert. The Cathedral trip was in 2005, when the lake level had dropped to a record low and the Cathedral was exposed for the first time since it had been covered.

I’ve never seen Glen Canyon (except in my imagination). Nobody has seen it since 1963, and very few people saw Glen Canyon before 1963. 1963 was the year Lake Powell started flooding Glen Canyon to turn that part of the Colorado River into a reservoir, beginning a controversy that is much more passionate than anything at Bears Ears. People either love Lake Powell or hate it. I’ve never talked to anybody that knows the story of Glen Canyon and Lake Powell that is neutral. I’m on the hate-it side, by the way.

The dam was built during the 1960s when building dams was a virtue; they were going to tame the West. In California, where Governor Pat Brown’s motto was Make no little plans, when he ran against Richard Nixon in 1962, he bragged about how many dams his administration was building. But the Colorado, the biggest river in the Southwest, only had only Hoover Dam, which formed Lake Mead, and the federal Bureau of Reclamation, whose main job under Commissioner Dominy was to build dams, wanted to build more.

Initially, the Bureau proposed building another dam near Dinosaur Nation Park, but that plan met too much public resistance and was abandoned. Then the Bureau tried to build a dam just below the Grand Canyon, which also met resistance, especially from the Sierra Club. But nobody cared about Glen Canyon; nobody – OK, almost nobody – even knew about it. Glen Canyon cut through what was probably the most remote place in the lower 48 states. From afar, it is just an area of mountainous rock and scrubby bushes. A place where nobody lived or, apparently, wanted to live.

But a mythic Eden was below the plateau, down where the Colorado River has cut the canyon. People who had been to Glen Canyon said it was the most beautiful part of the Colorado River, with 186 miles of winding river and 96 named side canyons. John Wesley Powell – the lake’s eponym and first European to go down the Colorado from Wyoming to the Virgin River – wrote that Glen Canyon was an ensemble of wonderful features — carved walls, royal arches, glens, alcove gulches, mounds, and monuments. Although I haven’t seen Glen Canyon, I’ve seen several side canyons, which are my favorite places in the world.

People who object to damming the Colorado here, like me, usually object on something akin to a moral issue. To destroy a place that beautiful, that unusual, that sacred, is just wrong. It is an ecological disaster not only under the reservoir, but it is also an environmental disaster downstream. Downstream, through the Grand Canyon National Park, the icy-cold water released from the bottom of Lake Powell washes away beaches and kills the river’s indigenous wildlife.

Aside from the ecological damage, there is another reason for not liking Lake Powell. Long term, which is actually pretty short, a dam just doesn’t work here. The Colorado just carries too much silt . When the dam was originally built the Bureau of Reclamation estimated it would take 700 years for the lake to fill with silt, now the estimate is about 55 years. Another reason the dam is counter productive, is that the area of the lake’s surface is exponentially more than the river, and the wide body of standing water increase the amount of evaporation and more water is lost.

We thought we would have our first sight of Lake Powell at Hite Marina, but the reservoir was gone, and the Marina was abandoned (Temporarily Closed, the sign said). All that was left was the muddy Colorado running free, way below the end of the boat ramp.

We were here to see the results of the West’s drought on Lake Powell, so we went south to the Marina at Bullfrog, where the monocline that forms the Waterpocket Fold ends. The last time we were here was in 2005, and the marina was packed. Trucks towing boats were backed up for a quarter mile, waiting to use the boat ramp and the wait for a boat rental was 45 minutes even though we had a reservation. Now Bullfrog is empty, and so is the hotel overlooking it. We went into the hotel to go to the toilet and only saw two lonely employees. The life is gone, and so is the view of Lake Powell. It is sad, and I didn’t expect that.

The whole sordid thing is sad, the most beautiful stretch of the Colorado River is underwater water and rapidly filling with silt. The reservoir is 170.7 feet below the level the dam was designed for, and the capacity is down to only 23.83% of what they call Full Pool. Neither one of us felt like gloating.