LIFEBLOOD: GLEN CANYON, LAKE POWELL, AND THE FUTURE OF THE COLORADO RIVER.

Reflections from reporting on Glen Canyon: How did we get here? And How do
we keep going?

Ev Baher-Murphy

In the fall of 2024, I spent two months traveling around the Southwest producing a 6-part podcast series called “Lifeblood: Glen Canyon, Lake Powell, and the Future of the Colorado River.” I interviewed state water managers, scientists, environmentalists, rafters, and houseboaters about the Colorado River.

What I learned is that the Colorado, like any river, is constantly changing, its path rechannelizing and flows fluctuating. And changing too are the stories we tell about the river and its environmental recovery. We can tell stories of ruination or harnessing power for economic development, and we can tell other stories that complicate those. Stories of recovery amid the ruination, of hydrology having its own agency despite our best efforts to harness its power. Layering these stories on top of one another, it is clear that neither the river nor we are in control. We co-construct each other, layer upon layer.

What I also learned is that you cannot talk about the state of the Colorado River today without talking about the foundational flaws in the Colorado River Compact. And you cannot talk about the Compact without talking about the history of displacement, genocide, and colonization that allowed for the commodification of the Colorado River; the transformation from a shared resource to one that exists in graphs and spreadsheets of water accounting. The Colorado River became a living, breathing thing, captured by numbers and divided among users, with no water left over for the river itself. 

From this foundation of western water law came the construction of 15 major dams on the mainstem of the Colorado River. The dams and the reservoirs that rose behind them allowed the basin states to determine when and where the river flowed. And with that infrastructure came an imagined future of the Colorado River. A future in which we had engineered our way into water security. A future in which drowned canyons would be drowned for hundreds of years. 

The canyons that lurked beneath the reservoirs were thus written off as ruined and sacrificed. And, at that time, with the river’s power harnessed, the basin states allowed the wet years to lull them into thinking they were solely in control.

But concrete walls can’t control hydrology. Not really. The dams can’t tell the rain or snow when and where to fall. 

Which brings us to today, where megadrought and overallocation, hydrology, and hubris are leading their own kind of restoration. Since 1998, Lake Powell has dropped over 130 feet, enabling drowned canyons like Glen Canyon to start breathing again, centuries before we were ever told they would. And as reservoir levels drop, native ecosystems are coming back – entirely on their own. 

At the same time, this moment of Glen Canyon’s rising comes at the crossroads of the expiration of the 2007 interim guidelines, and a basin facing some of the lowest reservoir levels we’ve seen so far. It is a moment of stress for the millions of people in the 7 basin states who rely on the Colorado River for drinking water, for the agricultural industry it supports, and much, much more. 

That stress is compounded by the fact that it is not just policy and drought threatening our water security, but Glen Canyon Dam itself is threatening it too. Although the dam was designed to bolster water security, low water years have revealed the looming threat of deadpool, a reservoir level at Lake Powell at which no water can pass through Glen Canyon Dam to the lower basin. 

You see, Glen Canyon Dam was built essentially without a drain plug; instead, the lowest release points, the river outlet works, sit 237 feet above the bottom of the dam. The thing is, the outlet works cannot dependably release the flows needed to meet delivery requirements, meaning Lake Powell has to be managed to protect minimum power pool, the elevation at which the main release points, the Hydropower Penstocks can be used to move water downstream. 

In short, a real risk of deadpool exists because we blindly drained the reservoir, hoping wet years would save us, and this risk exists because the dam was built under the assumption that a drought would never be this severe. As a result, today, we protect reservoir levels at Lake Powell not just for deliveries to the lower basin, but to protect the failing infrastructure itself. 

In many ways, things couldn’t be messier than they are today. The weeds are so tangled. But there is hope lying in those weeds. There is hope because we constructed the system that is failing us. There is hope because, even though we can’t control the amount of annual snowfall, we can begin to rethink our infrastructure and the way we share our resources.

And there is hope because Glen Canyon Dam is not unique in the way it’s being reevaluated. Rather, the reevaluation of Glen Canyon Dam is occurring at a moment in which more dams are being removed than are being built, including major removal projects like that on the Klamath and Elwha rivers. This moment is precedented. 

So when I asked scientists, environmentalists, state water managers, rafters, and houseboaters about their ideal future of the Colorado River, though they were not on the same page about how and when our infrastructure should change, they all agreed that one day it would need to. And so, while there’s still a long way to go to bring the system into balance, the core sentiment—a need to rethink the river’s infrastructure—is widely shared. And the future it points to, I believe, is in our control.

For a deeper dive into the past, present, and future of the Colorado River, the 6-part series “Lifeblood: Glen Canyon Lake Powell and the Future of the Colorado River” is available on all streaming platforms.