America’s mega-drought is revealing natural wonders not seen in decades. But his return from the watery depths heralds a deeper crisis.
It’s just left 7am at Bullfrog Marina and the morning air is fresh and full of anticipation. Later, temperatures on Lake Powell, America’s second-largest reservoir, will climb into the mid-40s. Recreational boaters who have long used this sprawling waterway as a vacation playground soon they will arrive with their dogs and their children and their noisy engines.
Eric Balken is eager to get going while the waters are still calm and the marina is still sleeping. We have a long journey ahead of us and Eric is a man on a mission. He takes his old friend Professor Jack Schmidt deep into Lake Powell to show him that amidst the death and gloom of America’s worst drought in over a thousand years, there is also beauty and magic.
Jack is a scientist with decades of experience studying the Colorado River, but he has never taken a trip to Lake Powell, the artificial reservoir created in 1963 when the river’s mighty flow was dammed in Glen Canyon, allowing communities thrived in the arid south. -west
Hiking along a resurgent canyon at Lake Powell, Utah. (Foreign Correspondent: Greg Nelson ACS) River science teacher Jack Schmidt admires the “cathedral” during his first trip to Lake Powell. (Foreign Correspondent: Greg Nelson ACS)
Hike through a resurgent canyon, one of the natural wonders that was flooded when this area was flooded to create Lake Powell Reservoir.
Foreign Correspondent: Greg Nelson ACS
“This is my first rodeo,” says Jack.
“I’m embarrassed for you that you haven’t been there already and I’m excited that I can take you,” Eric replies with childlike enthusiasm.
“The lake” can be a misleading way to think of Powell, the water rising behind the 200-foot-high Glen Canyon Dam wall. Powell is a huge tentacle-like body of water that stretches 300 km across southern Utah and northern Arizona, covering what used to be Glen Canyon and extending through nearly 100 side canyons. Its 3,000 km of coastline tell the story of a region affected by a 20-year drought, the impact of climate change and a river that is drying up.
“It kind of calls you to be quiet and reverent and just take in the echoes of the place.”
High water marks from previous years are clearly visible from the water. The strange white bathtub rings, created by mineral build-up in the red rock once submerged below the waterline, serve as a bleak barometer of the unfolding crisis. Water levels have dropped nearly 50 meters in the past two decades and the reservoir is now only a third full, its lowest level since the canyon was first condemned.
Some environmentalists consider the Glen Canyon America flood to be America’s biggest environmental blunder. As the waters rushed, they flooded a land of natural wonders possibly as spectacular as the Grand Canyon. Now, as they retreat, this lost world of spiers, grottoes and canyons is resurfacing.
Above: A sliver of blue sky above the cathedral’s high walls in the desert. BELOW: Until recently, the “cathedral” was underwater. (Foreign Correspondent: Greg Nelson ACS) Visitors have been able to appreciate this natural wonder for decades after it was flooded in the 1960s to create Lake Powell. (Foreign Correspondent: Greg Nelson ACS)
Eric has taken us to the crown jewel of this emerging natural kingdom, Cathedral in the Desert. Just over a year ago, you could enter the training by boat; now we must dock our ship and enter.
Cathedral in the Desert is a towering formation in the middle of Glen Canyon. Think of it as a huge natural chamber that rises up to a narrow opening to the penetrating blue sky. At the base, a slender waterfall falls from above into a cool pool of water. It is an oasis of tranquility once sought by adventurers, who traveled the rapids of the Colorado before it was dammed.
“It kind of calls to you to be quiet and reverent and just take in the echoes of the place,” Eric says as he looks around the cathedral. We managed to get there before anyone else and for a beautiful half hour, it’s all ours. “You have this part of the sky above us and this ray of light coming through that moves and creates this natural light show every day,” he says. “It’s truly a miracle.”
Above: The volume of water lost as Lake Powell’s water level has dropped is almost unfathomable. BELOW: Eric Balken (right) takes Professor Jack Schmidt to the river scientist on his first trip to the reservoir. (Foreign Correspondent: Greg Nelson ACS) Eric Balken (right) took renowned river scientist Professor Jack Schmidt on his first trip to Lake Powell. (Foreign Correspondent: Greg Nelson ACS)
The sheer magnitude of the water loss is astounding. Jack, on his first visit, is surprised by the reappearance of these ancient landscapes flooded decades ago in the name of water development. “I’m not sure I’m smart enough to know what words to use, but it’s amazing,” he says.
For Jack, it’s also alarming. As director of the Colorado River Studies Center at the University of Utah, he is an expert on river system health. The falling water level in Lake Powell represents “a critical moment for Western society,” he says, challenging the idea that we can maintain “abundant metropolises and ever-growing agriculture in a land with a very abundant water source limited”.
The creation of dams along the Colorado River allowed cities, farms and businesses to thrive in the heart of the desert. Many of these communities depend on reservoirs for drinking water and hydropower. But with no end in sight to the water crisis, livelihoods now hang in the balance.
“This is a reset of society,” says Jack.
Green fields in the desert
Jace Miller can’t seem to get water, or the lack of water, out of his mind. “I go to sleep at night thinking about it. I have dreams. I wake up, it’s the first thing on my mind,” says the farmer from Pinal County, Arizona.
It’s harvest time and Jace has been up all night overseeing operations. They’re harvesting alfalfa hay, a staple of the region southeast of Phoenix, much of it bought as feed for the mammoth dairy industry. The problem is, it’s a thirsty crop, and like many farmers in Arizona, Jace has seen his Colorado River water allotment cut by 40 percent this year.
The federal government caused unprecedented water cuts due to falling water levels in Lake Powell and further downstream in Lake Mead, another man-made reservoir on the Nevada-Arizona border created when Hoover Dam was built in the 1930s.
This means that it is leaving more soil than usual and that it is doing its best to make the water it gets go a long way. But he’s only ready to go so far. “They say, ‘well, just grow a crop that doesn’t require as much water,'” says Jace. “You name the crop and we’ll do it. We will gladly do it. We have to assess it from two points of view: how can we use our water better, but also what is profitable? We have to earn a dollar. .”
Last month, the US government announced that further water cuts are coming from 2023. Jace says this means it will be entirely reliant on groundwater. Your Colorado River water allotment will drop to zero.
The reasons why Arizona farmers are doing it harder so far than any other group of water rights holders in the Colorado Basin are complex, tied to laws and agreements established over the years between and within states and the federal government. The gist is that some states have lesser water rights and there is a hierarchy of users within states.
With the water crisis cutting the Colorado River farmers’ allocation, Jace Miller (second from right) fears his youngest son will not be able to carry on the family business. (Foreign Correspondent: Greg Nelson ACS)
It’s a system that Jace feels like farmers scapegoat. “If there’s ever a shortage or a problem, take it to the farmers and ranchers, you know, we don’t need them,” he says. “Farmers and ranchers feed the world.”
His family has been farming in Arizona for five generations. He still runs the business with his father and grandfather, Bobby and Meredith, but if there’s no water, there’s no farming. With each passing day, the dream of passing the baton to her 10-month-old baby Carson fades a little.
“It is an unsettling and dreary feeling that I feel every day of my life, that my son will not be able to share the magnificence, the enjoyment and the beauty of this profession.”
Flawed from the start
The Colorado River flows 2,300 km from the Rocky Mountains of Colorado through seven states of the United States before heading to the Sea of Cortez in Mexico. A century ago, the states decided to share their waters, with half of the annual flow going to the upper basin states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, and the other half to Arizona, Nevada, and California in the basin lower.
The Colorado River Compact of 1922 allowed cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas to thrive in the desert, and today 40 million people in the US and Mexico depend on the Colorado. Its waters irrigate more than 5 million hectares of farmland. But the deal was flawed from the start. Mexico, where the Colorado flows into the ocean, was overlooked, or at least at its best. His part was later screwed up.
Native Americans were also excluded. Many tribes still fight for their fair share of water, First Nations among the last to guarantee access to the precious resource.
Water was also over-allocated, the calculations of who gets how much being based on an unusually wet period. Then came the mega-drought and climate change. A previously unimaginable worst-case scenario is now a real possibility. If the levels of the Powell and Mead reservoirs fall so low that water can no longer flow downstream from the dams, the turbines will stop turning and millions of people will be left without electricity or water. They call it a dead pool.
“It has been slowly creeping up on us and we have been warned, but we have not heeded that warning…