Today we dive into an illuminating conversation between Morgan Wagoner, Western Landowners Alliance’s Western Water Program Director, and Zak Podmore, author of Life After Deadpool: Lake Powell’s Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River.

Together, they explore topics like the Colorado River’s massive silt deposits, mud volcanoes and ever-resilient native species, and the urgent need to adapt to a drying river. This discussion comes at a pivotal moment, as states in the upper and lower Colorado River basins remain deeply divided on proposals to reduce water usage before the current rules expire in 2026.

Despite the mounting challenges of climate change and uncertain hydrology, Podmores’ new book offers a hopeful perspective, challenging the narrative of insurmountable water issues in the West and inspiring a vision of a future where the Colorado River flows freely once again.

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Links

Buy the book: Life After Deadpool: Lake Powell’s Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River 

Transcript

Morgan Wagoner: Hi Zach, and thanks for being with us today.

Zak Podmore: Thanks for having me on.

Morgan: I really enjoyed your new book, Life After Deadpool: Lake Powell’s Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River. It’s a fascinating exploration of the West’s relationship with a place that has been profoundly impacted by our water management policies and infrastructure. It’s an insightful examination of how we in the West might reexamine our relationship with the river, the ecosystems it supports, and the communities that rely on it. Why did you decide to write this book?

Zak: I grew up running rivers. I grew up in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, running rivers with my family in Utah and on the Colorado, the Green and the San Juan. And I’d heard the story of Glen Canyon many times on those river trips—the best river trip in the world, the one that we’d never get to see because it was flooded under Lake Powell. I wrote off Glen Canyon as a place that was lost for many centuries to come, at least.

I was really fascinated when I went on a trip with 25 scientists from the Returning Rapids Project in 2021. I was writing an article for the Salt Lake Tribune, where I was working at the time, and the story of Glen Canyon as a beautiful place lost to Lake Powell when environmentalists lost the battle in the 1950s and ’60s turned out to not really be relevant anymore to what was happening in Glen Canyon right now. Since the year 2000, so much had changed. Lake Powell was no longer full, and the dam was not serving the functions it was intended to serve. It was barely storing any water in the system, it was producing less hydropower than ever, and most of the boat ramps were sitting at the top of cliffs, completely useless by 2021 and 2022.

The idea that the Glen Canyon Dam would be there for centuries to come didn’t seem as certain as it once had. The ecological rebirth that was happening in Glen Canyon was so exciting that I realized, in a strange way, there was a positive climate change story happening there—accidental, but significant. It seemed like it could teach us a lot about adapting to and thinking about climate change outside of the Colorado River.

Morgan: The book examines the unintended positive outcomes that have occurred as river flows have decreased, but water use has remained the same. This has resulted in historically low reservoir levels. Can you speak to the restoration we’re seeing in the canyons and what’s being monitored?

Zak: Yeah, absolutely. Lake Powell hasn’t been full since 1999. It used to be 186 miles in length up the Colorado River and had a pretty big footprint, spilling out into all these tributary canyons—up the Escalante River, the San Juan River, and the Colorado River. At its low point, its record low level in the spring of 2023, over 100,000 acres of land that had once been covered by Lake Powell had been re-exposed due to the low water levels.

Lake Powell was around 20 percent full last spring. We now have a really good track record of what happens to the landscape when it has a chance to recover, especially in these side canyons. There are over a hundred of them, most with flowing streams year-round. The elevations of the lake that haven’t been flooded since the year 2000, when this drought began, have a remarkable recovery occurring.

There’s 60- to 70-foot tall cottonwood trees have sprung back up in these side canyons, beavers have moved back in and are damming the streams, and there are 10-foot stands of willows and other native species around the little beaver dams and reservoirs. There’s also a huge diversity of wildflowers and native bees. It’s incredible to explore these places and see the trash from Lake Powell in the 1980s, when it was full—old beer cans mixed in with this wild ecological rebirth that’s occurring.

It’s an interesting landscape, and we don’t have to guess what would happen if Lake Powell started to disappear, since it’s been low for so long at this point.

Morgan: Can you speak to the value of that natural and unintended restoration?

Zak: I can’t think of a place in the Western U.S. that has ecological restoration occurring on the scale of what’s happening in Glen Canyon right now. You usually don’t get a chance to see 100,000 acres of land, completely altered from being a desert landscape to being submerged under a reservoir, suddenly start coming back to life.

Glen Canyon was famous for the controversies around it when the Glen Canyon Dam was being built in the 1950s and ’60s. The area would almost certainly be a national park today if it weren’t under Lake Powell. It was immortalized in a lot of Southwest literature as a mistake from an environmental perspective.

What we’re seeing in the recovering areas is how a landscape rebounds from such a total impact like a reservoir. The trends are very positive. You’d expect a bunch of invasive species to return but in these side canyons, native species, and a great diversity of them, are everywhere, outcompeting invasive species. These canyons now host really healthy, diverse ecosystems.

I was drawn to this story and to writing this book because that gave me hope for other places. If we give Glen Canyon a chance to recover, we have proof that it’s recovering on its own, without any active management from land managers. No one is out there removing invasive species or planting native ones—it’s happening entirely on its own.

 And to answer your questions earlier about monitoring, there’s very little monitoring happening from federal agencies in this landscape.

At this point, there’s a group of scientists who have gotten interested in this landscape and aren’t working for the federal government. They have started to try and quantify the rates of recovery in these side canyons and explore other aspects of the changes out there. It’s pretty minimal, basic survey-level effort at this point.

There’s a big disconnect between the scale of the recovery in Glen Canyon and the promising trends we’re seeing there, and the actual level of resources, management, monitoring, and research being done there. It’s pretty low on the latter half of that equation.

Morgan: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting. One of the things you highlight is the return of native species. It was long thought that these ecosystems would not recover and that the only things that would come back would be invasives. However, that’s really being challenged in this landscape. That restoration, however, is under threat as the Bureau of Reclamation and the state strive to refill the reservoirs. As you mentioned, in April 2023, Lake Powell had dropped to an all-time low since it was filled. It was into what they call the buffer pool, the elevation they try to keep above the minimum power pool.

But this summer, it had rebounded by almost 67 feet. When I was down there, there were huge cottonwoods with their green tops sticking out of the lake, clearly doomed. Is there a holistic way we could consider this natural restoration when we think about how we manage the lakes, the waters, and the water elevation behind Glen Canyon?

Zak: I think it should be taken into account as we try to make management plans for the future of what’s happening, at least acknowledging what’s happening on the landscape, which hasn’t been done much in the NEPA analysis around the 2026 guidelines, which we’ll get into later.

Yeah, it’s an interesting time. When I was writing the book, Lake Powell was breaking record low levels every week, pretty much, from 2021 when I started to the spring of 2023 when I wrapped up the reporting. And, as you mentioned, that was the all-time record low, 20 percent full at Lake Powell.

We had a really good snow year and runoff year in 2023, almost a record year in parts of Utah and above average throughout the basin. Even with that great year, Lake Powell went from 20 percent full to 40 percent full, and we’re still below the levels we were at in 2019.

So, when I went back after the water started to rise, I saw the willows and cottonwoods getting flooded out as well. It was sad to see that, but those higher elevations didn’t get flooded. The places that have had 24–25 years to recover are still continuing their progress toward restoration.

We lost a lot of the succession that had started at the lower elevations of the lake, which only had a few years to regrow, but there’s still a ton of value out there. Since 60 percent of the water that used to be in Lake Powell is missing, even at the reservoir’s height.

I think it’s down to around 36 or 35 percent right now. There’s hesitancy from land managers, and even big environmental groups, to acknowledge what’s happened in Glen Canyon because if you look at the recovery occurring there, along with the ecological and cultural values, it starts to have implications for how water should be managed throughout the basin. I think it’s hard to acknowledge what’s there and then say, “It doesn’t really matter.” It’s easier to just ignore it.

For instance, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area had some federal comments on a NEPA report last year. They implied that all the areas that had once been flooded by Lake Powell and were now out of the water were of low ecological value, covered in invasive species. While that’s true in some areas, it’s definitely not true for the majority of these side canyons.

I think that’s an easier answer to give, because if there is enough water to refill Lake Powell at some point (though climate science doesn’t suggest there will be), water managers and land managers at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area would like to see Lake Powell at full pool again, if that were possible from a hydrological perspective.

However, if you start doing a lot of research and promote an understanding of what’s happened in the reservoir bed, it would be more difficult to just let it all flood again. And I think that’s a problem for environmental groups too, because their focus on water is so complex, with water rights, and from an ecological perspective, the Grand Canyon is so important and gets so much attention, especially since it’s downstream from the Glen Canyon Dam.

It’s easier to focus on trying to protect endangered species and ecological values in the Grand Canyon and to write off Lake Powell and Glen Canyon, because they’ve been written off for so long, ever since the battle over the Glen Canyon Dam was lost in the 1960s.

So, it’s an interesting situation, and it’s interesting to follow what the trends are from the policy perspective, not just the ecological one.

Morgan: I’d like to drill down a little bit into the interests of the environmental groups, specifically regarding the view that the reemergence of Glen Canyon and its tributaries due to the low reservoir levels has an innate trade-off for fish species in the Grand Canyon. This is often referred to as the “green versus green” trade-off.

The thinking goes that the high lake levels that inundate Glen Canyon also provide cold water that prevents the predatory smallmouth bass from reproducing below the dam in the Grand Canyon, threatening the endangered humpback chub. I’d love to know your thoughts on whether this is a trade-off of our own making, or if there’s another way to potentially view the recovery of the humpback chub and the impacts of the dam on them.

Zak: Yeah, it’s a really interesting situation as well. The humpback chub is largely endangered in the first place because of all these big dams being built. Also, the razorback sucker, pike minnow, and some of the other endangered species in the Colorado River Basin.

These species evolved for warm, muddy waters that shrink down to a trickle, even in the Grand Canyon at some points of the year, followed by huge floods at other times. They’re a very patient species; it takes about seven years for a humpback chub to reach sexual maturity, and they can live for over 30 years.

They’ve evolved to wait for the right conditions to reproduce, with all the fluctuations that naturally occur in the river ecosystem. The dams, however, level everything out, right? There aren’t as big of floods as we used to see, nor as low of flows. And in the Grand Canyon, most of the sediment that used to run through the Grand Canyon is now trapped in Lake Powell. The warm waters that used to come down through the Grand Canyon in the summer are now often very cold, as the water coming out of Lake Powell through the Glen Canyon Dam used to come from such a deep level in the lake that the water was freezing at Lees Ferry, just downstream from the dam.

As you’ve been there, even when it’s 120 degrees outside, it can be pretty hard to jump into water that’s in the 40s. That was a huge problem for the native endangered fish, because they weren’t adapted to those conditions. However, there’s been a pretty successful endangered species recovery program in the Grand Canyon for the humpback chub, partly because the Grand Canyon was sealed off as its own little laboratory. There weren’t a lot of invasive fish in the Grand Canyon; Pearce Ferry Rapid on one end, by Lake Mead, prevents lake fish from swimming upstream into the Western Grand Canyon. The Glen Canyon Dam also prevented invasive sport fish stocked in Lake Powell from getting into the Grand Canyon.

This argument for not modifying the Glen Canyon Dam has been made for a long time, because if the dam were altered, it would introduce new variables into the ecosystem, potentially endangering the recovery efforts for the fish.

However, this argument has started to fall apart in recent years, because Lake Powell got so low. The warmer water at the top of the lake got close enough to the hydropower penstocks on the dam. Smallmouth bass were sucked through the dam, survived the trip through the turbines, and ended up in the Grand Canyon. This is a huge problem for endangered fish recovery in the Grand Canyon. They’ve been dumping chemicals between the Glen Canyon Dam and Lee’s Ferry to try and reduce the smallmouth bass population, but it hasn’t been entirely successful.

This year, they’ve been releasing water from the lowest outlets on the Glen Canyon Dam (the river outlet works), which are at the dead pool level. The idea is to keep the water cold enough so the smallmouth bass won’t spawn. This strategy has worked, but every time they use those lowest outlets, no hydropower is produced. It’s ironic that we’re trying to get cold water into the Grand Canyon when cold water is what stressed the endangered native species in the first place. It doesn’t seem like smallmouth bass can be completely eliminated from the Grand Canyon at this point, so it’s more about controlling the population than eliminating it.

I think that changes the argument for modifying the Glen Canyon Dam, at least in my mind. I’m not a fish biologist, but there are other factors to consider when discussing a big change like that. But there are smallmouth bass in the Animas River, and there’s no barrier between the Animas and the San Juan River. The San Juan River, like the Colorado, is very muddy, and the smallmouth bass don’t travel into the Utah section of the San Juan River—it’s too silty. They turn around, because they’re better suited for clear water.

There’s a discussion—though I don’t know of any scientific papers on it—that if the Glen Canyon Dam were modified to allow Lake Powell to be completely emptied, the water coming out of Glen Canyon would be so muddy, from both the natural sediment in the San Juan and Colorado rivers and the sediment that’s collected in the lake since the dam was built, that it might solve the smallmouth bass problem.

Catfish can survive in muddy water, and that could become an issue, but lake fish, like smallmouth bass and walleye, would probably not be able to establish a large population in the Grand Canyon because it would be too silty for them. At the same time, the native species are used to muddy water, so they might actually do better than they have been. But I’m just speculating on this.

It seems that the barrier to keeping species out of the Grand Canyon has already been breached, so I think this is one more argument for looking more closely at modifying the Glen Canyon Dam.

Morgan: Right. Giving those native species back the environment they evolved in might be supportive. Speaking of sediment, the sediment contained in Lake Powell is highly contaminated. There are numerous heavy metals and uranium. Can you speak to the ecosystem and potentially the human health risks from regularly drying and resubmerging those sediments and potentially reanimating them at the surface level?

Zak: Yeah, I’m not an expert on this issue, but there are a lot of heavy metals and uranium that have collected in Lake Powell, just like everything that’s not water collects in Lake Powell. Every bit of sediment or contaminant ends up—or the vast majority of it ends up—settling to the bottom of Lake Powell.

As the muddy waters flow into the lake at the upstream edges and then clear water flows out of the dam, all that sediment is being trapped in the reservoir bed. There are a lot of old mines in the Colorado River Basin, Upper San Juan by Silverton, and a bunch of others. There are acid mine drainage problems, and heavy metals are entering the ecosystem through that legacy of gold mining and other mining.

And then there are uranium tailings that wash into the river, from old uranium mills. This is a problem throughout the basin. It’s all being collected in Lake Powell, but there’s a lot of those heavy metals present along the San Juan River, for example. I think maybe the dangers aren’t as big in Glen Canyon of allowing the sediment to be reexposed as in a place like the Salton Sea or the Great Salt Lake, which have a much longer timeline of metals and contaminants collecting in those basins and are much closer to huge population centers.

So you hear the nightmare kind of scenario from the Great Salt Lake. If it were to dry up, there’d be these huge flats of highly toxic dust that would start blowing directly into Salt Lake City. I think it’s not as severe in Glen Canyon. In a lot of the sediments that have been reexposed, there’s pretty good cover, unlike the Great Salt Lake, which is too salty, or the Salton Sea, which doesn’t really have a lot of plant life that’s going to come up there if it were reexposed because it is the Great Salt Lake. But on the Lake Powell sediments, there are a lot of grasses, a lot of native species. In the wetter areas, there are willows that are holding that sediment in place more or less. So you wouldn’t have massive wind dust events like you’d see in other areas—or at least I don’t think you would. But it’s still an issue that we need to be aware of and monitor.

Morgan: Yeah, it seems, in my thoughts at least, that preserving that plant life that has come back and is stabilizing those sediments would be really important in making sure that we don’t increase the risk of that. One of the things that we are seeing are mud volcanoes. Have you seen these? Have you lit any of them on fire?

Zak: Yeah, these are pretty wild. I was hanging out with some geologists who are studying the sediment in Lake Powell, and they showed me a video of this. They look like three- or four-foot-high shield volcanoes. They’re like a bubbling cauldron of mud that’s spilling over and raising up in these mud flats.

So there are wet bubbles coming out of the middle of this little mini volcano, and then wet mud sediment is sliding down the sides. They’re not super common, but I’ve seen them in a few places. And the geologist showed me a video of them leaning over the volcano with a lighter and getting a little bit of flame to sputter out of it, proving that it’s methane coming out of that vent from decomposing matter in the lake sediments.

After I saw that video, the next time I came across one of the volcanoes, I had to give it a try. I had similar results—tiny bit of flame. But the anti-dam activists for a long time have pushed back on the idea that hydropower is carbon-free or climate-neutral because the decomposing matter in the lake bed is a huge source of greenhouse gas emissions, especially if you build a dam in a place like the Amazon. You can imagine how much organic matter—both carbon and methane—is going to be released from that lake bed. But even in the desert—even in Glen Canyon—you can see the methane coming right out of the ground. You can light it on fire. There hasn’t been enough research to quantify exactly how much methane is being released from the lake bed, but it’s certainly there in quantities you can discern with the naked eye in some places.

Morgan: So, back to the sediment. One of the tributaries to the Colorado River that flows into Glen Canyon is the San Juan River. It carries almost as much sediment as the Colorado River, despite having much less water. Before reservoir levels began dropping, that delta was significantly upstream of the confluence of the two rivers.

That sediment front is moving downstream at an incredible rate, around 100 feet per day, according to the book. When this sediment front inevitably reaches the main stem of the Colorado River, what will that do to the lake, its management, and recreation on it?

Zak: It’s fascinating to spend time with the people studying the sediment issue, as I did for the book. First, we should talk a little about how sediment works in Lake Powell—something I didn’t understand before working on the book. If you’ve been to the upper reaches of Lake Powell, Cataract Canyon, Hite, or the lower San Juan River, you’ll see big banks of sediment that geologists call the Dominy Formation. It’s named after Floyd Dominy, the infamous commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation in the 1960s.

The Dominy Formation consists of all the dirt, sediment, and mud that has accumulated in Lake Powell since 1963, when it started to fill. I had assumed that if Lake Powell were to disappear tomorrow, there would be a canal of mud going through the heart of Glen Canyon, based on the visual impression of floating through the Dominy Formation in places like Cataract Canyon. But that’s not the case, because of these deltas you mentioned. Most of the sediment is stuck in the upstream reaches of the reservoir bed—like in Cataract and on the San Juan.

The river often flows on top of 200 feet of Dominy Formation mud, above its historic riverbed. When the river hits the reservoir, it slows down, and you can watch the sediment sink to the bottom of the lake right before your eyes.

This creates what’s referred to as a “mud glacier” filling the canyon, also known as the reservoir delta. The muddy river keeps pushing more mud into clear lake, and that front is moving downstream at a rate of over 100 feet per day, though it varies depending on water flows, sediment loads, and canyon shape.

The question you’re asking about the San Juan is interesting. The Colorado River delta, the largest one, is 130 miles from the dam, but the San Juan delta is closer to the main stem of the Colorado River, so it will likely reach the confluence long before the Colorado delta. When that happens, Lake Powell will be divided into two parts by a big plug of mud. The deltas continue filling and pushing as they go. When the San Juan meets the Colorado, it will fill the main channel of the lake with mud, making it difficult to get motorboats from Bullfrog to Page, for example.

It’s not easy to picture what this might look like and how long it might take. Dredging might be needed to open a channel for boats, but this would have to be repeated consistently because the mud will keep filling in. Lake Powell could take 700 years to fill completely with mud, but these sediment issues are happening on a much quicker timescale. If the lake stays low, we could see the Colorado stem of Lake Powell cut into two by the San Juan in just a few decades.

If Lake Powell were emptied or the dam modified, these mud glaciers would stop pushing into the middle of Glen Canyon. The muddy water would flow through the Grand Canyon, halting the progress of mud in areas it hasn’t yet reached, and changing the timeline for recovery in Glen Canyon.

Morgan: One interesting aspect of these sediment fronts is that, due to some complicated geomorphology, especially in the San Juan arm, is the upstream end of the sediment front is accumulating above the historic lake level. There are court decisions that require the lake not to impact above a certain elevation, but in the San Juan arm, we’re now seeing impacts above that historic high elevation. Is there a way to manage this? Should we consider both upstream and downstream impacts?

Zak: The San Juan is especially interesting because it has a steeper gradient compared to other rivers, especially for one without a lot of rapids. When it hits or even before it hits the high-water mark of Lake Powell, the San Juan changes from a fast-moving river with riffles to a slow-moving, sandbar-filled zone. I think we could tell the audience, Morgan, that I ran into you and your husband out on one of those sandbars over the summer, discussing the book. We saw it firsthand recently. The sediment is like a plug of sand and sediment in the river, 60 to 70 feet deep, where the water slows down and drops sediment.

Eventually, this might eat into Government Rapid, the largest rapid on the San Juan, which is a few miles above that point. I’m not an expert on the legal issues, but the sediment issue needs to be addressed. The San Juan situation is not the hardest fix. There’s a waterfall below the area we’re talking about in the Dominy Formation, and if the river were restored to its historic bed, the sediment would wash downstream and end up further down in Lake Powell. The sediment pushing upstream above the high-water mark would stop consuming more of the San Juan.

It’s important to acknowledge that there are solutions for this issue, and we can address it without completely overhauling water management in the West. The San Juan would be an easier fix than some.

Morgan: I appreciate that perspective, and I like the idea that there are things we can do, aside from the larger ongoing management challenges. One thing that really stands out to me, and the book highlights, is the tremendous amount of water lost from Lake Powell due to evaporation and seepage. It’s in an incredibly hot environment and a porous sandstone formation, not ideal for a reservoir. We’re probably losing around 800,000 acre-feet. In the Upper Basin, these system losses are accounted for under the Upper Basin Compact, directly affecting how much water the Upper Basin is entitled to and using. With a basin already over-allocated by two to four million acre-feet, and that number increasing each year due to climate change, this loss represents almost a quarter of the shortfall we’re seeing basin-wide. How should we consider this, especially in terms of minimizing losses for future water management?

Zak: The Colorado River Basin has a water shortage problem. We’ve experienced 24 years of drought and a 20% decline in runoff compared to the previous century. We also have a problem with too much reservoir storage. Right now, even after two decent snow years, if you took water from all the reservoirs in the Colorado River Basin—Lake Mead and Lake Powell, plus smaller ones like Flaming Gorge, Blue Mesa, and Navajo—Lake Mead would barely be full. So, there’s too much storage in the basin, and Lake Powell isn’t really needed for reservoir storage given the water demand and declining hydrology.

Evaporation is an interesting issue because, as you mentioned, Lake Powell’s location is significant. It sits just upstream of the political dividing line at Lee’s Ferry, between the Upper and Lower Colorado River Basins. This line, established in 1922 under the Colorado River Compact, doesn’t correspond to the watershed itself but has become important because it’s where Upper Basin deliveries are measured.

There’s been a discussion about a strategy called “fill Mead first,” where you would fill Lake Mead before filling Lake Powell. Since 2000, we wouldn’t have really needed to store water in Lake Powell, as Lake Mead alone would serve that purpose. If this plan were pursued, the Colorado River Compact would need to be modified, so deliveries would be measured in a new way—not just at Lee’s Ferry but through other means, like a spreadsheet that tracks water accounts in both Lake Mead and Lake Powell.

There could be savings in evaporation by reducing storage in Lake Powell. If this happened, it might allow the Upper Basin to develop a little more water, at least avoid cuts as quickly as the Lower Basin. The Lower Basin uses about twice as much water as the Upper Basin, so this could help offset some of the challenges of losing Lake Powell or capping its elevation at a lower level.

Morgan: I agree, it could be protective of Lake Mead, which has a slightly different dam design but faces the same risks of reaching power pool or dead pool as Glen Canyon. One issue your book highlights is the economics of these large projects. One regular concern is the cost of retrofitting Glen Canyon Dam—either to add lower outlets or remove the dam entirely. What are the costs of risking not doing that?

Zak: It’s an important issue. In April 2023, when Lake Powell was at a low point, it was just 30 vertical feet above minimum power pool—the point where hydropower generation would stop, and water delivery to the Lower Basin would become much more difficult. There are physical constraints due to the dam’s design that make it harder to pass enough water through at lower elevations, which is worrying from a water management perspective.

If Lake Powell were to reach minimum power pool or dead pool, even with the outlets fully open, there wouldn’t be enough pressure to deliver water. The Lower Basin states—Arizona, California, and Nevada—along with powerful farmers in the Imperial Valley, have all submitted comments supporting the idea of modifying Glen Canyon Dam. A study began in 2022 to explore this, though it would likely be expensive. It’s also expensive to pay farmers not to farm under the Inflation Reduction Act, with costs continuing each year, while infrastructure modifications would be longer-lasting.

We don’t have the exact price tag for modifying Glen Canyon Dam yet, but it’s something the Lower Basin is concerned about. We can’t forget that the dam might need to be redesigned to continue water deliveries, especially after two good years in the basin.

Morgan: I’d love to discuss, for a minute, the recent programs you mentioned in the Upper Basin, the System Conservation Pilot Program, as well as the ongoing programs in the Imperial Valley. These programs are exceedingly expensive. One of the things we’ve come to realize, and that has recently been highlighted by an irrigation company in Grand Junction, is that these conservation efforts have significant downsides, including increased dust production during wind storms and a lack of push water for farmers and ranchers not participating in the program, leading to unintended damages for other users.

I’m wondering how we square the need to conserve with the cost of these programs and their unintended consequences, as well as how they’re designed.

Zak: No one’s really figured out exactly how to do what’s often called demand management, where there would be a voluntary, compensated, temporary fallowing of fields for farmers. The idea is that during a drought year, when more water is needed in the stream or for cities or ecosystems, farmers could opt into a program to not farm that year and be paid for it. This would happen on a year-to-year basis, but as you mentioned, it’s very complicated with all the other consequences. It might be the same situation you’re talking about in the Grand Valley, where some farmers participated in this program this year. There was a question of whether that would allow, under the water rights system, more water to be diverted to the Front Range, across the continental divide, which would make the river even lower by the time it reached Grand Junction.

That’s a huge unintended consequence of trying to get more water in the stream. You pay a farmer not to farm, and then the water is sucked across the continental divide and doesn’t end up in the basin at all. This would deprive the ecosystems in the first few hundred miles of the Colorado River of the water they need. That didn’t appear to happen this year—there were no increased trans-basin diversions—but it could have, and it’s something that needs to be considered by those designing these projects.

There’s also trouble measuring water as it moves, especially at low levels. Water moves in and out of groundwater, and it can take a long time to transition between the two. Often, when there’s water savings in one place, someone might turn off their canal, but it doesn’t necessarily end up where you think it will. It’s hard to measure how that little bit of water actually moves through the system, or if someone else uses more because they’re allowed to under water rights.

There’s a whole other set of issues with hedge funds that have bought a lot of farmland around Grand Junction. These hedge funds have published models on how to profit off of water in the West, and they see leveraging these demand management programs as a way to make revenue. You could have taxpayers paying hedge funds not to farm in dry years, which doesn’t seem like an ideal scenario. Paying small farmers not to farm is one thing, but returning a bunch of profit to investors on Wall Street in the name of conserving water is another. This is something that Colorado legislators are looking into.

So, it’s necessary to figure out ways to reduce water use because demand is outpacing supply, but getting into the nitty-gritty of how to conserve water and the impacts of those programs is difficult in many cases.

Morgan: I appreciate that. I’d like to jump back to the sediment real quick. One of the reasons that Lake Powell was approved and constructed was because of the high amount of sediment accumulating in Lake Mead after its completion in the 1930s. The sediment rate was much higher than originally anticipated. Lake Powell was somewhat seen as a sacrificial area to protect Lake Mead. If that sediment is moved downstream and the dam is modified, what are the potential impacts on Mead, and are there potential solutions for those impacts?

Zak: Given a long enough timeline, every reservoir’s fate is to fill with sediment unless there’s a way to open the gates and let the sediment clear out, which is probably what it would take at Lake Powell. That issue is one of the major arguments for keeping the Glen Canyon Dam in place, even if it’s not used for hydropower or water storage. I haven’t seen a study on exactly how long it would take to see significant impacts at Lake Mead if the Glen Canyon Dam were decommissioned, so I’d be curious to know the timeline. Lake Powell might take 700 years to fill with sediment completely, and we might not have to deal with the issue for Lake Mead in the immediate future, especially given other pressing concerns like getting water downstream to the 40 million people in the Colorado River Basin.

There’s concern about it, but in the grand scheme, sediment might not be the most pressing issue.

David Brower, when he was in his 80s, debated Floyd Dominy. David Brower was the director of the Sierra Club in the ’60s and a famous opponent of the Glen Canyon Dam. His proposal was to decommission the dam by drilling tunnels around it to empty Lake Powell. In 200 years, when sediment became an issue for Lake Mead, they could close those tunnels and use smaller ones to manage sediment in Glen Canyon again. His hope was that we’d have two more centuries to enjoy Glen Canyon. There are many ways to look at this issue, and sediment is definitely one of them, but it may not be the most urgent.

One of the operating policies currently is equalization. For a long time, Lake Powell has been seen as a buffer against the compact compliance obligations between the Upper Basin and Lower Basin. The idea is that Lake Powell can capture excess water in good years and hold it for bad years to ensure that required water is delivered downstream. With equalization and how the lakes are currently being operated, is Lake Powell functioning as expected, and is it providing the certainty to the Upper Basin?

To a certain extent, it has been, but since we got so close to minimum power pool last year, it’s not providing the reassurance it used to. The Lower Basin states have supported studies to potentially modify the dam, but Upper Basin states haven’t. Water managers in the Upper Basin still strongly support Glen Canyon Dam.

There could be a win-win situation where you wouldn’t have to completely renegotiate the Colorado River Compact, but instead change the delivery point from Lees Ferry to within Lake Mead. The Lower Basin could benefit from reduced evaporation and a smaller concern about hitting Deadpool because you’d only be managing one massive reservoir instead of two. The Upper Basin could benefit from not having to worry about a compact call coming quickly and possibly avoiding water reductions until the Lower Basin has seen significant reductions.

This is what has emerged from negotiations so far: the Lower Basin is saying they use almost twice as much water, so they’ll take more cuts during dry years. The Upper Basin has been pushing back on agreeing to firm cuts until certain conditions are met. Modifying the Glen Canyon Dam and focusing on Lake Mead first could allow the Upper Basin to negotiate a stronger agreement, using more water during dry years than the Lower Basin, but it would require a major concession regarding the way deliveries have been managed for over a hundred years. This idea may sound far-fetched, but I presented it at a Western Slope water manager conference in Colorado, and no one strongly opposed it. Some people said it was interesting, so maybe it’s not completely insane.

I appreciate that you’ve also considered that there may be other ways to manage this issue without completely throwing out the law of the river. It’s certainly a complicated issue, and I could ask you questions all day, but I don’t want to take up too much more of your time. I’d love to ask one more question.

Morgan: You mentioned you’re not in those negotiating rooms, and neither are most others, including the tribes. A lot of water users don’t have a formal seat at the table, even though the tribes have rights to around 25% of the water in the basin. They’ve been denied access to that water and infrastructure. Do you have a vision for how the post-2026 negotiations should be conducted or how the process could be rethought to be more inclusive?

Zak: Jack Schmidt, Eric Kuhn, and John Fleck have proposed an adaptive management program for managing the Colorado River post-2026. This program is used for managing releases from the Glen Canyon Dam to the Grand Canyon, where a large group of people, including tribal representatives, federal reps, environmental groups, and others, collaborate to make decisions based on the current situation, which is always changing. They’ve proposed doing the same for managing Lake Powell and Lake Mead. This would allow for more flexibility and robust tribal representation, which has been lacking but is essential.

Instead of having a fixed policy of equalizing the reservoir elevations, the group would make decisions on an annual basis to adapt to the current challenges. I think that’s an interesting idea. Tribes should definitely have a seat at the table—not only for water management but also for the management of the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. As more settlements are finalized, like the ongoing one with the Hopi, Arizona Navajo Nation, and Paiute, this will add flexibility for making decisions during dry years. Tribes have more ability to lease unused water to other users on a short-term basis than most other water rights holders, which could help in tough years.

So, I hope there’s continued progress on this front, though it has been far too slow. But I do hope it continues.

Morgan: Yeah, thank you, Zak. And where can people find your book?

Zak: It’s published by Torrey House Press, a nonprofit press in Salt Lake City, but you can find it anywhere books are sold. Local bookstores and libraries are great options. You can also order it directly from the publisher or from any of the major online retailers. The title is Life After Deadpool – two words, and not related to Ryan Reynolds!

Credits

On Land is a production of Western Landowners Alliance, a West-wide organization of landowners, natural resource managers and partners dedicated to keeping working lands whole and healthy for the benefit of people and wildlife. This episode was hosted by Morgan Wagoner and produced by Jake Lebsack.  

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