Like it or not, says the executive director at Glen Canyon Institute, Lake Powell is dying. But we can take advantage of the opportunities provided by its demise, he insists, by instilling a degree of adaptability, into our water management in the West.
The striking contrast between the shimmering blues of its surface and the deep weathered oranges of its meandering canyon shoreline embodies the contradictions that have surrounded Lake Powell since it first began to fill behind the Glen Canyon Dam in 1963. For some, it’s a lake, a place for recreation and tourism. For others, it’s a source of hydroelectric power and a reservoir for that scarcest of Western resources: water. And yet, for many, Lake Powell represents more than anything the inundation of what Edward Abbey called “a portion of earth’s original paradise.” Controversy has surrounded Glen Canyon Dam since it was little more than an idea, and calls from environmentalists to drain the lake and even to deconstruct the dam have ebbed and flowed throughout its 60-year history. But the lake’s future is now shifting out of the hands of activists and politicians and into those of nature. While record snowfall this winter in the Colorado River basin has brought a reprieve from April’s historic low water level in the reservoir, a long-term drought and climate change may bring a reckoning that many thought was centuries away. Clay recently spoke with Eric Balken, executive director at the Glen Canyon Institute, about the latest contrast on Lake Powell: the slow death of the lake and the accompanying ecological rebirth in Glen Canyon.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It is part of a series on Water in the West, chronicling a trip Clay Jenkinson and two colleagues took through Colorado River country in the spring of 2023.
Clay: Tell us about the Glen Canyon Institute.
Eric Balken: Our mission is to restore Glen Canyon and a free-flowing Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. I got involved in 2006. That was a time in which Lake Mead and Lake Powell were both brimming full, and it was a few years before we recognized that climate change would have an impact on the Western water supply. Glen Canyon Dam has always been the most controversial dam in the United States, and also one of the most damaging, so when Rich Ingebretsen founded the Institute in 1996, he was trying to carry the work of earlier Glen Canyon environmentalists into the modern era.
Clay: Is the goal to dismantle Glen Canyon Dam?
Eric Balken: It’s not. We advocate for re-engineering the dam. You would have gates or tunnels drilled around the dam that would effectively allow water managers to operate it as a run-of-river facility. This would be expensive, and it would be a very big deal. It would change the dynamics of Western water, but I would argue that it would change it for the better. What Western water needs right now is more adaptability. It needs to be more dynamic. It needs operational flexibility. Glen Canyon Dam was not designed to operate at today’s water levels. And given the hydrology and the impact of climate change that we’re seeing, we know that there’s not enough water to keep Powell and Mead both full. The reasons that the dam was built are no longer valid. It’s going to become a liability. There might have been some benefits in the past — water storage, hydropower, reservoir recreation — but we’re transitioning out of all of those. Regardless of what environmentalists or anyone else thinks, there is a need to re-engineer Glen Canyon Dam. We should allow for a free-flowing river with sediment to flow into the Grand Canyon. Sediment is the life force of river ecosystems. It carries the nutrients that feed the bugs and the plants and everything. We have a sediment accumulation problem in Glen Canyon, and we have a sediment depletion problem in the Grand Canyon downstream. We cannot continue to ignore this.
Clay: How much water does Glen Canyon Dam store?
Eric Balken: It has the capacity to store almost 25 million acre-feet, which is huge. It’s the second largest reservoir in the country, but right now it’s only 22% full. And hydrologic projections and climate scientists say that it’s never going to be full again. We’re only using 30% of the available storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead. If we were to completely drain Lake Powell and put that water into Lake Mead today, Mead would still only be about 50% full. It’s very unlikely that we will ever need that second reservoir, but it could be used as a backup facility.
Clay: If we took that course, there would be a river where today there is Lake Powell.
Eric Balken: Exactly. And that’s already happening. When it was full, Lake Powell inundated about 186 miles of the Colorado River. Today it’s closer to 146 miles. On the upper stretches of the Colorado main stem, you now have almost 40 miles of free-flowing river, and that river is coming back to life. Cultural sites are returning, and ecosystems are coming back to life. And that’s just on the main stem. Glen Canyon is the heart of the Colorado River ecosystem, and there’s so much riparian restoration occurring as the water levels in the reservoir fall.
Clay: Many people that I have talked with on and around Lake Powell insist that it’s never going away.
Eric Balken: Are they looking at the reservoir? It’s the lowest it’s ever been. The reservoir is on life support. It would already be below a minimum power pool if it weren’t for really extraordinary actions taken by the Bureau of Reclamation. They’ve released a ton of water out of upstream reservoirs over the past year to prop up Lake Powell. I understand where those folks are coming from. When you visit the dam, it seems very permanent. It’s one of the crowning achievements of the Bureau of Reclamation. From an engineering standpoint, it’s marvelous. It’s hard to imagine the reservoir not being there, but it’s happening. Go to the visitor’s center and look over the edge. It’s jaw dropping. It’s changing, whether people like it or not.
Clay: You’re saying this is now beyond politics. It’s happening — period.
Eric Balken: Exactly. And it’s not happening because any environmental group wants it to. It’s a function of the over-allocation of the river. This has been written about ad nauseum for decades. When the Colorado River Compact was signed in 1922, they knew it was over-allocated. They chose to go with a higher number even though they knew it was wrong. They allocated 17 million acre-feet when they knew it was a 13-millon-acre-foot river. They chose the higher number because it made it easier to get the legislation passed. We always knew there would be a reckoning, but we thought it would be further down the road. Climate change sped up the process. There’s just not enough water to fill both of those reservoirs. And when it comes down to it, Lake Mead is more important.
Clay: What’s the future for Glen Canyon if we drain Lake Powell?
Eric Balken: There are so many opportunities for Glen Canyon beyond what it was as a reservoir. We have to remember where this place is. It’s surrounded by the most loved and protected places in America. Canyonlands National Park is to its north, Grand Canyon National Park is to the south, Bears Ears National Monument is to the east, and Grand Staircase National Monument is to the west. It sits in the center of the most prized and celebrated parks and monuments in the American West. It’s a significant place for a lot of indigenous people who were there for thousands of years: the Hopi, the Navajo, the Paiute, the Zuni. As we think about transition, we have to consider it as a moment of rebirth for some of those tribes.
Clay: What you’re describing seems to be a win-win situation. Why hasn’t this argument gained traction?
Eric Balken: That’s starting to change, and it’s because people are getting to see Glen Canyon. The most impactful work that we’ve done is simply taking stakeholders down there and showing it to them. I don’t have to say anything. We had that great article from Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker. I had the opportunity to take CBS down there, and Nate Rott from NPR. When they see it, I don’t need to make the argument. It feels like a national park. The reason that the broader American public is not warming to the idea yet is that they just haven’t seen it, and that’s going to take time. You can go anywhere in the world and people know about the Grand Canyon, but they don’t know about Glen Canyon. The focus of our work is raising awareness, documenting the change that’s happening, gathering data on this ecological rebirth that’s taking place, and showing the public. We’re happy to see the needle slowly start to shift.
Clay: What about those who say, “We’ve got 40 million people downstream that depend upon this system. Are they supposed to depopulate?”
Eric Balken: The 40 million people that rely on the system don’t necessarily rely on Glen Canyon Dam specifically. That gets lost in the discussion. Many say that five million people rely on Glen Canyon’s power. That’s not true. Five million people get a portion of their electricity from Glen Canyon Dam. If it went offline, most of them wouldn’t notice. There are other sources of electricity on the grid. The dam is already producing much less than it has in the past. People look at the water infrastructure and assume that every part of it is critical, but we have a lack of water, not a lack of storage. We just don’t need the reservoir anymore. Also, our values have evolved. When the dam was commissioned in 1956, there were no environmental laws, no Endangered Species Act, no NEPA, no Clean Water Act. Nor was there consideration of the impact to cultural sites and to Indigenous people. In thinking about the infrastructure changes on the Colorado River, we have to consider our value changes and how we think about the value of water economically. We have to evolve our system so that it doesn’t incentivize people to use water at all costs.
Clay: How do you see all of this playing out?
Eric Balken: I’m an optimistic person. When I look at what’s happening on the Colorado River, I don’t see doom and gloom. I don’t think that life in the West is coming to an end. We just have to adapt. But we have been very dumb with water in the West, and I think that’s lost on a lot of people. There’s lots of low hanging fruit that we could easily pick to begin solving these problems. John Wesley Powell had some prescient ideas. He said we should build dams that are no more than fifty feet high. He thought we should divide up communities by their basins, their water drainages. His ideas — living within the means of the hydrology — were provocative. Most of our water is used for agriculture. Most of that agriculture is growing hay for cattle. We’ve incentivized water waste in the West. This made sense a hundred years ago when the federal government wanted to encourage people to move out west, but it doesn’t make sense anymore. There are economic alternatives. We need to adapt. We have the tools to do it, and I’m sure that we will do it.
Clay’s interview with Eric Balken is part of a series on an exploration of Water in the West. You can follow our dispatches, essays, photos, and podcasts on this topic through the tag “Water in the West.”
If you would like to hear to the entire episode you can find it here: #1550 The Death of Glen Canyon Dam.