America’s mega-drought is revealing natural wonders unseen in decades. But their return from the watery depths heralds a deepening crisis.
It’s just gone 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 soar into the mid-40s. The recreational boaters who have long used this vast waterway as a holiday playground will soon arrive with their dogs and their kids and their noisy motors.
Eric Balken is keen to get going while the waters are still quiet, the marina still sleepy. We have a long journey ahead and Eric is a man on a mission. He’s taking his old friend Professor Jack Schmidt deep within Lake Powell to show him that amid the doom and gloom of America’s worst drought in more than a thousand years, there’s beauty and magic, too.
Jack is a scientist with decades of experience studying the Colorado River, but he’s never taken a trip on Lake Powell, the man-made reservoir created in 1963 when the river’s mighty flow was dammed at Glen Canyon, allowing communities to flourish in the arid south-west.
Hiking along a re-emerged canyon, one of the natural wonders inundated when this area was flooded to create the Lake Powell reservoir.
Foreign Correspondent: Greg Nelson ACS
“This is my first rodeo,” Jack says.
“I’m both ashamed for you that you have not been there already and excited that I get to take you,” Eric replies with boyish enthusiasm.
“Lake” can be a misleading way to think of Powell, the water backed up behind the 200-metre-high Glen Canyon dam wall. Powell is a huge tentacle-like body of water stretching 300km across southern Utah and northern Arizona, covering what was Glen Canyon and extending into almost 100 side canyons. Its 3,000km of shoreline tells the story of a region gripped by a 20-year drought, of the impact of climate change and a river running dry.
“It sort of beckons you to be quiet and reverent and just take in the echoes of the place.”
The high-water marks of previous years are clearly visible from the water. Eerie 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 almost 50 metres in the past two decades and the reservoir is now only a third full, its lowest level since the canyon was first damned.
Some environmentalists consider the flooding of Glen Canyon America’s greatest environmental mistake. As the waters rushed in, they flooded a natural wonderland arguably as spectacular as the Grand Canyon. Now, as they recede, this lost world of spires, grottoes and canyons is resurfacing.
Eric has brought us to the jewel in the crown of this emerging natural kingdom, Cathedral in the Desert. Just over a year ago, you could boat into the formation — now we have to moor our boat and walk in.
Cathedral in the Desert is a towering formation in the middle of Glen Canyon. Think of it as a huge natural chamber rising up to a narrow opening to the piercing blue sky. At the base, a slender waterfall cascades from high above into a cool pool of water. It’s a tranquil oasis once sought out by the adventurers, who rode the rapids of the Colorado before it was dammed.
“It sort of beckons you to be quiet and reverent and just take in the echoes of the place,” Eric says as he gazes around the Cathedral. We’ve managed to get here before anyone else and for a precious half hour, it’s all ours. “You have this sliver of sky above us and this ray of light coming through that moves around and kind of creates this natural light show every day,” he says. “It is truly a miracle.”
The sheer magnitude of the water loss is staggering. Jack, on his first visit, is awe-struck by the re-emergence of these ancient landscapes inundated decades ago in the name of water development. “I’m not sure I’m smart enough to know what words to use, but it is amazing,” he says.
For Jack, it’s also alarming. As director of the Centre for Colorado River Studies at the University of Utah, he’s an expert on the health of the river system. The plummeting water level in Lake Powell represents “a critical moment for Western society,” he says, challenging the idea we can sustain “abundant metropolises and ever-growing agriculture in a land with a very limited water source.”
The creation of dams along the Colorado River allowed cities, farms and businesses to flourish in the heart of the desert. Many of those communities rely on the reservoirs for drinking water and hydropower. But with no end in sight to the water crisis, livelihoods are now hanging in the balance.
“This is a resetting of society,” says Jack.
Green fields in the desert
Jace Miller can’t seem to get water, or lack of it, off his mind. “I go to bed at night thinking about it. I have dreams about it. 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 south-east of Phoenix, much of it bought up as feed for the mammoth dairy industry. The problem is it’s a thirsty crop and like many Arizona farmers, Jace has seen his Colorado River water allocation slashed by about 40 per cent this year.
The federal government triggered unprecedented water cuts because of the falling water levels at Lake Powell and further downstream at Lake Mead, another man-made reservoir on the Nevada-Arizona border created when Hoover Dam was built in the 1930s.
That means he’s fallowing more land than usual and doing his best to make the water he does get go a long way. But there’s only so far he’s prepared to go. “They say, ‘well, just grow a crop that doesn’t require as much water’,” says Jace. “Name the crop and we’ll do it. We’ll gladly do it. We’ve got to evaluate this from two points of view: how can we best use our water, but also what is profitable? We gotta make a dollar.”
Last month, the US government announced that further water cuts will kick in from 2023. Jace says that means he will be totally reliant on groundwater. His Colorado River water allocation will drop to zero.
The reasons why Arizona farmers are doing it tougher so far than any other group of water rights holders in the Colorado Basin are complex, tied up in laws and agreements meted out over the years between and within the states and the federal government. The gist of it is that some states have junior water rights, and there’s a hierarchy of users within states.
It’s a system Jace feels scapegoats farmers. “If there’s ever a shortage or an issue, take it from the farmers and ranchers, you know, we don’t need them,” he says. “Farmers and ranchers are feeding the world.”
His family has been farming in Arizona for five generations. He still runs the business with his dad and grandad, Bobby and Meredith, but if there’s no water, there’s no farming. With each passing day, the dream of handing the baton to his 10-month-old baby Carson fades a little.
“It is a troubling, gloomy sense that I feel every day of my life, that my son will not be able to share in the magnificence and the enjoyment and the beauty of this profession.”
Flawed from the beginning
The Colorado River runs for 2,300km from the Rocky Mountains in Colorado through seven US states before winding its way to the Sea of Cortez in Mexico. A century ago, the states decided to divvy up its waters, with half the annual flow allocated to the upper-basin states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico, and the other half to Arizona, Nevada and California in the lower basin.
The 1922 Colorado River Compact allowed cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas to thrive in the desert and today 40 million people in the US and Mexico rely on the Colorado. Its waters irrigate more than 5 million acres of farmland. But the deal was flawed from the get-go. Mexico, where the Colorado flows into the ocean – or did at least in its prime – was overlooked. Its portion got bolted on later.
Native Americans were excluded too. Many tribes are still fighting for their fair share of water, the First Nations among the last to secure access to the precious resource.
The water was over-allocated too, the calculations of who gets how much based on an unusually wet period. Then came the mega-drought and climate change. A once unimaginable worst-case scenario is now a real possibility. If the levels of the reservoirs, Powell and Mead, plummet so low that the water can no longer flow downstream from the dams, the turbines will stop turning and millions of people will be without power or water. They call it dead pool.
“It has crept up on us slowly, and we have been warned, but we have not heeded that warning until now,” says Professor Jack Schmidt. “I’m not going to say it’s too late, but we are in true crisis.”
The water level in Lake Mead behind the Hoover Dam, downstream from Lake Powell, has dropped below 30 per cent capacity. The last time it was this low was when the dam was being filled in 1937.
Foreign Correspondent: Greg Nelson ACS
In addition to the water cuts already triggered, the federal government has asked the states to come up with more significant water savings between them — up to a third of the river’s average annual flow. There’s little sign of a breakthrough so far.
“Now we have to come to terms with the fact that there are limits. That’s not the American way to recognise limits.”
Jack likes to explain the crisis on the Colorado River by comparing it to a bank account. In the good years, when the water flows are abundant, you pay into it. In the bad, you draw on those savings. Trouble is, from the outset more was being taken out than was going in and there have been so many bad years now that the account is deep in the red. “All of those users of water — agriculture, cities, industry — are going to have to figure out who is going to stop writing cheques,” he says.
Agriculture uses around 70 per cent of the water drawn from the Colorado River and, Jack says, the bitter reality is that that is no longer sustainable. “It is extremely hard to look anybody in the eye and say your way of life is threatened and your way of life may not be able to proceed,” he says. “But now we have to come to terms with the fact that there are limits. That’s not the American way, to recognise limits, but there are strong limits here and we’re going to have to deal with them.”
Sometimes, to escape the baking afternoon Arizonan sun, Jace Miller meets his farming mate Jerry Turner at a bar at an airfield in Eloy. It’s late afternoon and he’s been awake for about 22 hours now. He’ll down a couple of drinks and then head home to catch a few hours’ sleep before the night shift starts again.
The two young men, Jace and Jerry, are something of an anomaly in the region: farmers in their 30s. Most of their peers pursued other careers from the outset, or saw the writing on the wall and got out of farming. Most of those still farming around these parts are about twice their age.
Jerry and Jace know the water crisis means they may not be able to carry on in Pinal, but this life is all they know. “If we were to go somewhere else, like in the Midwest or something like that, I mean, we’d have to relearn everything about anything,” Jerry says. “Agriculture keeps my kids fed, clothes on their back, the bills paid, roof over their head. Without that, I mean, we’re pretty much nothing, you know, so where do you go?”
From the crisis, an opportunity
Back on Lake Powell, Eric Balken has steered us to another newly emerged natural wonder, Gregory Bridge. “When the reservoir was full, you could boat over the top of that thing,” he says, “so to be able to boat underneath it is really a unique experience.”
Jack stands up, hands on hips, as we approach the majestic sandstone arch, throwing his arms in the air as the boat glides easily underneath. “It’s not possible for me to look at this and not see all sorts of hidden secrets and beauty.”
For Eric, the resurfacing natural world presents an opportunity, a chance to right an environmental catastrophe created when Glen Canyon was flooded. He heads up the Glen Canyon Institute, an NGO that campaigns to let the dam levels continue to fall to allow the canyon to be restored to its natural state.
“It’s not possible for me to look at this and not see all sorts of hidden secrets and beauty.”
As we hike up one of the newly emerged side canyons, he delights in showing off all the signs of regrowth – the greenery, the desert flowers, the birds, even the smell he thinks is different. “It just seems like a really healthy, vibrant desert ecosystem,” he says. “I’d be heartbroken to see this flooded again.”
The idea of letting Lake Powell go to allow Glen Canyon to be restored is a rewilding proposal that once seemed fanciful but is now gaining some traction. Under that scenario, Lake Powell would be drained dry and the Glen Canyon dam decommissioned. Further downstream, Lake Mead would act as the main reservoir for the river. The thinking goes that with not enough water for two reservoirs, why not direct all the water to one?
Lake Powell is also a source of hydropower for the region, but Eric is unapologetic about the prospect of that being lost. “We should be coming up with strategies to transition people off of this source of power that we know is unreliable,” he says. “It killed 186 miles [299 kilometres] of the most beautiful river in the world, so I wouldn’t call that clean energy.”
Eric knows his position can come across as insensitive to the plight of the river dwellers whose very existence is threatened by the drop in water levels.
“We’re very cognisant of the fact that, while this is emerging and we’re seeing this restoration in the canyons, that there are huge challenges in the Colorado River basin, but it’s giving us an opportunity to rethink Glen Canyon,” he says. “This is a national treasure. We’re now being given a chance to get it back.”
Watch ‘The Vanishing River’ tonight on Foreign Correspondent, 8pm on ABC TV, iview, Facebook and YouTube.
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