Lake Powell
Boaters and anglers will find fewer options this year at Lake Powell as water managers scramble to protect critical resources.
By Brandon Loomis | Arizona Republic
A small bucket loader scraped Wahweap Bay’s expanding strip of red mud and gravel, its operator smoothing the shoreline where concrete workers were busy chasing a lake in retreat.
To the left, where the bay had long offered kayakers and water skiers a loop around Lone Rock, the monumental slab now rose from dust flats instead of from flat water. To the right, in the channel that leads to Glen Canyon Dam and the Colorado River’s sunken bed, formerly submerged islands and peninsulas mapped out a warming climate’s continuing transformation of one of America’s great water stores and pleasure grounds.
A desert flooded by impounded waters in the last century has visibly reasserted itself in this one.
On this February day, the earth movers and concrete workers prepared to harden the latest extension where this spring fun seekers will queue up on Lake Powell’s boat ramp.
That’s ramp, not ramps, on a reservoir that stretches about 180 miles upriver into Utah and usually offers boaters a choice of at least eight put-ins.
Two decades of aridification and spiraling water demands already had exposed more than 120 feet of Glen Canyon Dam concrete before the last year sapped another 45 feet. That plunge caused the National Park Service to press the concrete crew into action so at least one access for speedboats and houseboats would remain as the season warms to life in March. It’s doing so at a once-submerged and long-forgotten ramp, the only one with immediate access to the shore.
But continued shrinkage would imperil much more than a boating season. From the hydropower plant at the dam to threatened fish species downstream in Grand Canyon to farms and other water users in seven states and Mexico, Lake Powell’s decline now complicates life in the West.
“We’re viewing this as a crisis,” Glen Canyon Superintendent William Shott said.
