Breathtaking Glen Canyon

At dusk, the bats appear in the ghost forest that surrounds us—blackened tree trunks encrusted with a white coating. These cottonwood and willow groves are long dead but, amazingly, still upright after more than half a century underwater.

I am camped on the fickle shoreline of Lake Powell, the second largest reservoir in the United States, after Lake Mead. Once a vacation destination visited by two million people annually—as a kid I learned to water-ski there during family visits in the 1980s—Lake Powell is today just a hint of its former self, littered with stranded boat ramps and even entire abandoned marinas. Instead of a recreation idyll, it’s a symbol of water troubles in the West and the impact of climate change. Lake Powell has been shrinking for a number of reasons.

The Colorado River system, which feeds both Lake Powell and Lake Mead, supplies drinking water to more than 40 million Americans and, in winter, much of the country’s salad bowl. Seven states draw water from the river system according to allocations set in 1922, and it has since become clear that early 20th-century officials overestimated the amount of water available to allocate. As a result too much water has been consumed for too long. In addition, for two decades a mega-drought has depleted the Colorado River and its reservoirs, and less annual snowpack in the Rocky Mountains to the east has made things worse.

The water stored in Lake Powell is also a source of power, with turbines in the river downstream of the massive Glen Canyon Dam generating electricity that helps power some 3.2 million homes. Water experts and the Bureau of Reclamation have predicted the lake may drop so low by 2023 that there will not be enough water to spin the turbines.

Water managers have been trying to avert such a scenario, known as minimum power pool, by releasing water from reservoirs upstream and withholding water from users downstream. The complexities of this Western water puzzle are profound, involving potential threats to energy, drinking water and agriculture.

At the same time, something else is going on. The strikingly beautiful canyon that long existed before engineers dammed the river to create Lake Powell is coming back, little by little. John Wesley Powell, who named it Glen Canyon during his survey of 1869, said it was a “land of beauty and glory.” I was eager to document that land as it revealed itself. Over four days, I hiked and explored some 50 miles of tributaries, much of it in the Escalante drainage. My companions were Eric Balken, director of the Glen Canyon Institute, a nonprofit devoted to restoring the canyon to its natural state, and a friend of mine named Len Necefer, a member of the Navajo Nation and founder and CEO of NativesOutdoors, a Native-owned athletic and media company.

Everywhere we roamed, we witnessed a wilderness re-wilding. Birds and bats darted around, and beavers and bobcats left their marks widely. A freshwater desert orchid, a rare flower I’d never heard of, bloomed along seeps that had been flooded my entire life and appeared only recently. “Look at those,” Balken said with excitement in his eyes. “I didn’t expect to see orchids returning so quickly. It almost feels wild again.”

Smithsonian