For people who find this interesting I would highly recommend the book Emerald Mile [0]. Amazingly well written book about glen canyon, grand canyon, lake powell, glen canyon dam, dorys people, racing boats down the canyon and a near catastrophe in the dam building.
Also lets not forget the classic Desert Solitaire [1]. It too is well written and very interesting, in the book they take small inflatable boats and just float down Glen Canyon not long before it gets flooded.
I read desert solitaire on a road trip (ironically) through arches natl. park and colorado. Really fantastic book -- his thesis can be summed up in a page or so, but his passionate ideas are nearly viral.
I especially enjoyed the contrast between really beautiful descriptions and anecdotes of nature and polemic political rants that go on for tens of pages at a time.
A third of the book follows David Brower (Executive Director of the Sierra Club; Glen Canyon Dam opponnent) and Floyd Dominy (US Bureau of Reclamation director) as they float the pre-dammed Colorado River.
Just read the Emerald Mile - great read. I was interested in the story of running the river, but the story of the dam and its near failure was the best part.
For anyone interested in the engineering of the dam, it’s well worth a read, and youcan skip the parts about the boats if you want.
I have been to Lake Powell dozens of times at various water levels. It was a wonderful place to visit when it was completely full in the late 80s. It is a wonderful place to visit now when the water level has dropped over 100 feet.
To be sure, the landscape is 'different' at every water level. At low levels, features that were hidden underwater are exposed. At high levels, you can take a boat deep into canyons that were inaccessible by foot.
Southern Utah and northern Arizona is full of beautiful landscapes. There are millions of acres of twisting canyons, colorful rock formations, and towering spires. There are those who lament that any piece of it is 'developed' for a road, a town, or a man-made lake; but most of them would not be happy until every facet of human existence has been erased from the Earth.
Generalizations and white-washing here I see. The water estimations, and subsequent use, occurred without meaningful thought about sustainability. (But no matter, who needs sustainability when you have economy ;) The southwest states are going to have a rough go in terms of water because of poor decision making. Then and now. And I don’t mean policy alone, individual decisions add up (e.g., those out of place riverboat-looking boats on Lake Powell).
I don’t follow the last paragraph, first it acknowledges and claims the areas are beautiful landscapes and then it goes on to portray people who want to protect them as straw man extremists…
there are a ton of people who want to protect those areas but don’t advocate for the extinction of the human race as the paragraph implies, why would that straw man be made?
I didn't say that everyone who wants to set limits on development of natural areas is an extremist; but if you listen to some of the rhetoric from some real extremists who want to limit all development to zero and tear out existing infrastructure (like Glen Canyon Dam) in order to restore everything to its original state then you know it is not just a straw man.
Imagine being the people knowing how beautiful the canyon is still deciding to flood it and, for all they know, hide the canyon forever. I couldn't do it.
Does the author ever explain or mention again the sudden red sky they saw in paragraph 3? Puzzling, doesn't sound like aurora; if the date was known it might be easily confirmed or corroborated. Not sure why it was even mentioned...
> Finally, they decided it had to be the northern lights, visible from unusually far south.
This is from that same paragraph. Personally, I'm not convinced of that. Lightning behind a cloud could have done it, and would be more plausible from my perspective.
Otherwise, if it was just after sunset, perhaps it was a false sunset(say behind a massive dark cloud) and then when the sun fell below the cloud, you get the amazing red sunset(s) that are common in the desert.
Watched this series a while ago. The video's not too good, but it's an interesting look into the many points of view on the dams topic. Included are some lengthy comments from Floyd Dominy (project director), as well as others on both sides of the question.
As a Utahn, I’m much more concerned about the Great Salt Lake. It’s currently experiencing an ecosystem collapse and the dry lakebed is full of arsenic that pollutes the air.
The sediment of the Dominy Formation sounds rather ominous. It seems like and increase in sediment flow could damage hydropower infrastructure, it could lead to unpredictable water diversion as "lake" levels drop, or it could contribute to increased water evaporation as more sunlight penetrates the water and heats the sediment.
What is your alternative, along what axis do you think that alternative is better, and why do you think it's better?
I'll take one aspect - tourism. If Lake Powell never happened, Glen Canyon would have been there all these years, in all its beauty. That's true. But far fewer people could have enjoyed Glen Canyon than enjoyed Lake Powell, and Lake Powell had its own beauty. So along that axis, saying that Lake Powell should never have happened seems rather elitist.
Take away the other supposed (or even real--hydropower) benefits of the dam and it's pretty hard to justify the Glen Canyon Dam on recreational benefits. (And the same reasoning applies to building roads into lots of places.)
IF there are other compelling benefits, I'm open to there being recreational benefits to dams--whether puttering around on lakes or whitewater paddling benefits to controlled releases. But I'm much less open to the idea that we should build ecologically disruptive dams, especially in unique areas, for that purpose.
I think it's a shortcut to saying "Price water appropriately for industry before giving us water restrictions." There's no political/industry will in solving this, so people are largely impotent on this front. Without water being appropriately factored in to pricing, it's not like the industry could be relied upon for pushing out accurate information and adjusting consumption. Best the consumer can get is maybe broader third party info ("x gallons to grow an almond", and not per-producer stats.
From my point of view, it's to put things in perspective. When people start ranting about where the water for a new apartment building will come from, when they live in some single family unit with a big lawn... it's kind of ridiculous. It's just NIMBYism.
Of course, we should all strive to preserve water as a precious resource. But to do that at a systemic level, you have to understand where it's going.
Also, there's agriculture and there's agriculture: growing, say, alfalfa to feed to cows is way less efficient than other crops.
Eh, a lot of it is for stupid agriculture. Growing very water hungry things basically in the desert. Plenty of other places in the country / world to grow these things in places where it rains. Dairy doesn’t need to come from California where it requires enormous amounts of irrigation
It’s for businesses which want to profit from growing desirable water-intensive crops, but hate the prospect of paying market rate for their water. A huge percentage of that water is growing things like animal fodder and, sure, a lot of people like eating cheap beef but at some point we have to question whether the side-effects of all those short sighted decisions are better than some combination of cutting our consumption or paying a little more.
For the most part, the dams don't ultimately effect how much water comes down the Colorado--please correct if I'm wrong. It's more a question of controlling flows and generating electricity.
Although a lot of people would argue that, in retrospect, the Glen Canyon Dam was not a good tradeoff. (And there were serious studies around building at least one dam in the Grand Canyon itself.)
> For the most part, the dams don't ultimately effect how much water comes down the Colorado--please correct if I'm wrong.
Large lakes increase evaporation rate of water. I think something like 10% of the allotted flow for the Colorado River is lost due to evaporation in Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
How does that work? Naively I'd expect big reservoirs to decrease evaporation rate, as the surface-to-volume ratio is lower due to the cube-square law.
I think you're talking about at the peak. The surface area of Lake Mead is currently tiny, there is only so much that can be lost through evaporation there.
Well, there's both the Glen Canyon above the Grand Canyon and the Hoover Dam below. There was also a proposal--and preliminary work done on--the Marble Canyon (Redwall) Dam in the Grand Canyon, but that never happened.
Ahh. And there was apparently also a proposal for the Bridge Canyon Dam, also called Hualapai Dam, further down in the canyon.
Colorado River deadline passes with no deal on voluntary water cuts
KEY POINTS
- The seven states that rely on the drought-stricken Colorado River failed to meet a Jan. 31 federal deadline to strike a deal on voluntarily cutting their water use.
- After negotiations reached a standstill, six of the seven states — Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — submitted a “consensus-based modeling alternative.”
The slow moving disaster that is the Colorado River is a particularly American disaster. The manifest destiny mindset coming to an abrupt end. In the book Cadillac Desert Marc Reisner asserts that this could be the albatross that contributes to the downfall of the US. The more I learn, the more I’m inclined to believe him.
It's very frustrating, because it's clearly a problem, and also clearly a solvable problem. Yet, actual action moves at geological timescales (in this case, quite literally).
It reminds me of the extinction of the passenger pigeon. Not only was it's population hunted to collapse, people went out of their way to make sure they rooted out the last nesting pairs and fully exterminated it.
As to exactly why, who knows? What could a handful of birds have been worth?
The bill has come due for us to build more infrastructure, not pretend like we're going to stop growth and catastrophically damage the economy in the process.
Glen Canyon was built in the 1960s. Because the infrastructure enabled so much growth, demand is outpacing supply.
Arizona is trying to build a desalination plant in the Sea of Cortez to solve the Colorado River problem and the environmentalists immediately came out of the woodwork to complain about it. The mass media then, in a coordinated fashion, pushed FUD about how desalination is bad for the climate because it will require energy (Arizona is a leader in carbon-free nuclear and solar energy), will be too expensive, it'll destroy habitats, etc. At some point you start to realize the sentiment is entirely political and has little to do with finding practical solutions.
Also lets not forget the classic Desert Solitaire [1]. It too is well written and very interesting, in the book they take small inflatable boats and just float down Glen Canyon not long before it gets flooded.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15803144-the-emerald-mil...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Solitaire