#1550 The Death of Glen Canyon Dam

He believes the water crisis is actually an opportunity to undo one of the greatest industrial mistakes in American history. What if we emptied Lake Powell and created Glen Canyon National Park in one of the most beautiful canyons of the world? We'll talk about it, all that and more on this week's Listening to America.

Hello everyone and welcome to this special edition of Listening to America. I'm Clay Jenkinson. I'm speaking today with Eric Balkan, who is the executive director of the Glen Canyon Institute in Salt Lake City, Utah. Welcome Eric. thank you so much for having me.

Tell me, in short terms, what the Glen Canyon Institute is and how you got engaged with it. Glen Canyon Institute is a nonprofit organization that was founded in 1996. The mission of our organization is to restore Glen Canyon and a free-flowing Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. I got involved actually about 16 or 17 years ago, as a college intern. It's kind of a funny story.

I was working at a pizza shop and this guy came in and ordered some pizzas for his physics class. And we got talking. And he was asking what I was studying in school and which was environmental studies, he said Oh, well, you know, I run this organization that wants to restore Glen Canyon. you should come work for us. I thought, Restore Glen Canyon, that is just the craziest thing I've ever heard. But I knew I had been a river runner and had volunteered for some other groups, and I knew the story.

I went and met with Rich Ingebretson and he hired me the next week. I've been involved with the institute ever since. That was in 2006, that was before global climate change, or before we became deeply aware of global climate change. That's right.

Yeah, I mean, at that time, especially when the Institute was founded in 1996, that was a time in which Lake Mead and Lake Powell were both brimming full. The impacts of climate change were pretty unknown at that point. It wouldn't be until a few years later that Al Gore would come out and tell everybody that it's going to have an impact on a Western water supply. And then, of course, all the science that had come after that. So, for Rich to start this campaign in the 90s was kind of visionary. But it was really carrying on the legacy of earlier environmentalists David Brower and Martin Lytton and Katie Lee.

Glen Canyon Dam has always been our most controversial dam in the United States, and probably one of the most damaging. So, when he founded the Institute in 1996, he was trying to carry on the movement, the early Glen Canyon movement, and bring it into the modern era. And really try to figure out if there was a legitimate argument to be made beyond just, you know, tear it down, because it's the right thing to do. Not just we hate this dam, but is there a real rationale for doing it? So? David Brower went to his grave thinking that maybe his greatest mistake was not fighting harder for Glen Canyon. Do you agree?

Yeah, I mean, that's what he told us. And you know, Brower is one of the founding members of our organization. And so he was part of GCI in the early days. And he was in those meetings. And he told Rich that, you know, he sort of felt like he could have done more. Like he sat on his thumbs in the last final days when Congress was debating whether or not to approve Glen Canyon Dam.

There's more to it than the story than most people know. My understanding is that there was always going to be some Glen Canyon dam, really, the debate was how high it would be. He felt that he could have, you know, lobbied a little harder to have a lower Glen Canyon dam. So it wouldn't have been a 186 mile long reservoir, it would have been maybe half that size.

But, you know, it's all in the past. He went on to regret it. I should say that after Glen Canyon Dam was built and they, you know, the Sierra Club did this huge campaign, they put out the place. No one knew the famous coffee table book with Elliot Porter.

They did a number of media trips, they were taking stakeholders down there. They really raised awareness about what was being lost in Glen Canyon. And it was a tragedy that was happening in real time, right? This construction of the dam and the years it took to fill it was kind of a slow motion loss of this national park, what should have been a national park.

But that loss ignited the modern environmental movement in the U.S. And it really helped take the Sierra Club to the next level in fighting the two proposed dams in the Grand Canyon. So it's kind of this tragic story that Glen Canyon was lost. But in losing it, it really turned the American ethos around into this new, you know, ideology. That, hey, maybe we shouldn't dam every section of river. Maybe there is a value to free flowing rivers. And that ethos is what helped protect the Grand Canyon from those two dams. I'm talking to Eric Balkan, the director of the Glen Canyon Institute, about Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell in Utah and Arizona.

So let's take it very seriously for the moment. Let's say we do dismantle Glen Canyon dam. How does that work? We do not actually advocate for dismantling the dam.

What we're advocating for is re-operating it, re-engineering it so that it can run as a what I would call run-of-river facility. That means that you would have gates or new tunnels drilled around the dam, effectively, that would allow water managers to operate it as a run-of-river facility. It would be a huge engineering undertaking, it 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. Because what Western water needs right now is more adaptability. It needs to be more dynamic, it needs operational flexibility. And it turns out the Glen Canyon Dam was just not designed to operate at low levels.

And it was designed to operate near full pool. If you go up and look at the dam, near the visitor center, you see these little marks that delineate the elevation of the reservoir. And they just stop, and now the reservoir is like 50 feet below them. So they never envisioned operating this dam at these levels.

And given the hydrology and the impacts of climate change that we're seeing, we know that it's going to be operating at low levels. We know there's not enough water to keep Powell and Mead both full. They're the main reservoirs on the system, and so the reasons that the dam was built are really no longer valid. And as time goes on, it's going to become more of a liability than an asset.

So while there might have been some benefits in the past water storage, hydropower, reservoir, recreation, we're transitioning out of all of those that transition is happening. So it doesn't really matter what environmentalists think or anyone else. There is a need to re-engineer Glen Canyon Dam, and if we're going to do it, we should do it right.

We should allow for a free-flowing river, with sediment, importantly, to flow into the Grand Canyon. So for those who might not know what is a run-of-river dam? a run-of-river dam, it's basically a river running out. It's basically. It would be very similar to the original diversion tunnels that were drilled through the sandstone when Glen Canyon Dam was built. Those tunnels had gates in them so that you could sort of turn the reservoir on and off, which is what they did in the 60s.

The gates closed in 1963, but they actually opened them up a few years later to test the facilities and do some runs into the Grand Canyon. And so obviously, I would never want to see that reservoir fill again in that scenario. But for safety and flood control purposes, the decision makers would have that option, and right now they don't have that option. And as time goes on, as I mentioned, the problems are starting to really come to light with this dam.

At low levels near Deadpool, it physically cannot deliver water downstream. Forget about hydropower generation. That's the least of our worries, and it creates all these problems upstream. Glen Canyon Dam is blocking all the sediment in the Colorado River and backing it up in Glen Canyon.

And we sort of think of sediment as a problem to be dealt with this mud, but sediment is the life force of the river of river ecosystems. It's what carries the nutrients that feed the bugs and the plants and everything. The base of all that trophic structure comes from nutrients and sediment. And since Glen Canyon Dam was completed, we haven't had a real sediment load in the Grand Canyon.

So all the sediment in the Grand Canyon today comes from the side tributaries, and it's like 5 of the original load. So that's not a problem that the Bureau of Reclamation or other decision makers have thought about a lot. But we have a sediment accumulation problem in Glen Canyon, we have a sediment depletion problem in the Grand Canyon downstream.

So, in thinking about the future of Glen Canyon Dam and the Colorado River, that is a problem we have to be solving for and it cannot be ignored anymore. So let's say that the president of the United States and the Congress and the Bureau of Reclamation called you and said, let's do it, let's do a run of River Dam. How much water does Glen Canyon Dam store then?

It has the capacity to store almost 25 million acre feet, which is huge, right? This is the second largest reservoir in the country. An acre foot, for those who are not water geeks, is enough water to fill an acre to one foot. And it depends on where you would be. But it would supply enough water for a family of two to four for about a year. Right now, though, the active water storage in the reservoir, I think, is about six million acre feet, or a little bit less than that.

Today, the reservoir is only 22. Full. Hydrologic projections and climate scientists that are looking at runoff in the Colorado River, they say that it's never going to be full again. It's really kind of forcing all of us to rethink the purpose and need of all of those dams along the Colorado River. Yeah, but let's say we do this.

Will what's now Lake Powell revert to river, except in extreme wet years, where we need to store for floods? That's a really good question. We can't predict the hydrology of the Colorado River. Climate change has had some predictable impacts, and it's had some really unpredictable impacts. With climate change and the warming that we're seeing, the iridification in the Colorado River basin, we can't predict precipitation.

It's just too hard to predict, but what we can do is look at the warming trends we're seeing earlier. Spring runoff 75 of the Colorado River comes from snowmelt. A snowpack is the best reservoir there is.

It's the most efficient, it's a natural water reservoir, right? But when we have warmer springs and earlier springs or earlier warming in springs, we see less earlier runoff and less runoff overall. So we're seeing that depletion in the runoffs over time. And so if we imagine a future where that trend continues, we might never need that reservoir again.

We just don't need the storage. So right now we have over 50 million acre feet of storage between Powell and Mead, but we are only using 30 of it. So if you were to completely drain Lake Powell and put that water into Lake Mead today, mead would only be about 50 full. In that climate hydrology, it's very likely that we wouldn't need that second reservoir anymore. It could be used as a backup facility.

But on any given day, the river would be a river where now there is Lake Powell, exactly, and that's already happening. So upstream, as I mentioned earlier, when it was full, Lake Powell was about 186 miles. That's how much of the Colorado River it inundated.

It's huge, that is a massive reservoir, but today it's closer to 146 miles long. So on the upper stretches of the Colorado main stem, you have almost 40 miles of a free flowing river, and that river is coming back to life.

We have a group that we work with called the Returning Rapids Project, who has been down documenting the return of the Whitewater Rapids and the return of cultural sites, ecosystems. All of that, it's coming back to life, it's doing it on its own, and so it's a really encouraging and inspiring process to see. We know that the potential for the river's return is there.

And that's just on the main stem, I should say. I mean, Glen Canyon is the meeting place of all these rivers, the main stem, Colorado, the San Juan, the Escalante, the Dirty Devil. Not to mention the 100 plus side canyons, most of which have flowing water. Glen Canyon is the heart of the Colorado River ecosystem, and there's so much riparian restoration that's happening with the fall of the reservoir. We need to take a short break.

I'm talking with Eric Balkan of the Glen Canyon Institute, we're talking about Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell, and the future of the Colorado River Basin. You're listening to Listening to America. We'll be back in just a moment.

Welcome back to this special edition of Listening to America. Eric. I was just at page. In fact, I went out in an excursion boat on Lake Powell. I had never done this before. I was reluctant because my view is basically David Brower's that this was a mistake, but it's a mistake that was made.

And now, 30 or more million people depend upon the flows, the water that can be delivered by the Colorado River. And the people that we talked with down there said it ain't going away, it's never going away, it's a done deal, it's a fact of life.

Yes, we'll have to make some adjustments for over allocation and global climate change, but there's no way it's ever not going to be Lake Powell. Are they looking at the reservoir because it's the lowest it's ever been? It's important to remember that the reservoir would already be below minimum power pool. If it weren't for really extraordinary actions taken in the past two years by Bureau of Reclamation, I mean, that reservoir is really on life support.

We have a big snowpack this year and it'll probably come up 50 or 60 feet. But if you look at the long-term trends, it's just not looking good for the reservoir. Over the past year, they've released a ton of water out of upstream reservoirs. To prop up. Lake Powell flaming gorge was essentially emptied to prop it up, right? not quite empty, but they released a lot of water.

Flaming Gorge, Blue Mesa, Navajo. You know, all of those upstream reservoirs were really depleted to prop up Lake Powell. In the long run, I just don't see that to be true. And I understand where those folks are coming from, though. Because when you visit the dam, it seems very permanent. I mean, when you look at the structure of the dam, it's this massive concrete structure. It's one of the crowning achievements of the Bureau of Reclamation.

And from an engineering standpoint, it's pretty marvelous. I mean, it's really remarkable that humans were able to build a dam of that scale. I mean, I think nobody can deny that. And so it's hard to imagine the reservoir not being there fair enough.

I think you're saying, this is no longer just a political decision. It's happening, period, it's just happening. It's happening because we've over-allocated the river, and it's happening because of global climate change and this 1200-year drought. In a sense, it's beyond politics now.

Yeah, exactly, it's happening, it's not happening because an environmental group wants it to. It's a function of the river's over-allocation, and that has been written about ad nauseum for decades.

We've always known it's over-allocated. When the Colorado River Compact was signed in 1922, they knew it was over-allocated. They chose to go with a higher number on the river, even though they knew it was wrong, and they did that. Because, you know, this is funny, because when I was in college, they were like, Oh, you know. They thought the river had 17 million acre-feet and that's why they allocated it as such, which is incorrect. They knew it was a 13 million acre-foot river, but they chose the higher number because it made it easier to get the legislation passed.

That's been a continuing trend of ignoring science. There's a great book by John Fleck and Eric Kuhn called Science Be Damned that outlines all those, you know, looking past the data to make policy. And so we always knew there would be a reckoning, but they just thought it would be further down the road. And then, of course, the climate change and warming, climate aridification, it just sped up the process.

And so it's just happening sooner than anyone expected, but it is happening. There's just not enough water to fill both of those reservoirs, and when it comes down to it, lake meat is more important. The purpose of Glen Canyon Dam and what it means is especially the folks in page. Why did Glen Canyon Dam get built?

The reason Glen Canyon Dam got built was so upper basin states could meet their downstream delivery obligation and not send one drop more. It's to meet an accounting requirement. You probably know, Eric, the history of wishful thinking in the American West. First rainfall was the plow. Then John Wesley Powell at the second irrigation conference, saying, You know, there isn't enough water to do a fraction of the things that you're all intending here.

You're building up a legacy of conflict and litigation. And now the idea that if you have Glen Canyon Dam and a Hoover dam, that you're storing an immense amount of water. That you've essentially guaranteed your capacity to let water flow into Los Angeles and to the Imperial Valley, it's always been this way in the West. Boosterism is a fundamental fact of the American West, and the realists always turn out to be right, but they're never popular.

You might be right about that. I mean, I think that sort of optimism in the West is what has made it possible, what has made life possible. You think about the Indigenous people that have lived there for thousands of years, eking out an existence in such a harsh environment. And, you know, having the adaptability to move around and make it work. And then you have the pioneers that came in, and, you know, their life wasn't easy either. Yeah, there's always been a sense of that optimism.

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, you know, but we are very dumb with water in the west.

I think that's lost on a lot of people, you know? That's like, Oh man, it's drying up, what are we going to do? We are very dumb with water. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit that we could really tackle to solve this problem and live within our means. And, you know, John Wesley Powell had some really prescient ideas.

He said We shouldn't build big dams, we should build dams that are 50 feet, we should look at. Instead of like arbitrary state boundary lines, we should divide up communities by their basins, their water drainages. And you know, that idea is kind of based around, like living within the means of the hydrology.

Which I think is a pretty provocative idea. Most of our water is used for agriculture, most of that agriculture is growing hay for cattle. There are economic alternatives to it. We've incentivized water waste in the West, and it made sense.

100 years ago, the federal government wanted to encourage people to move out west. We wanted to encourage people to develop water, put the water to a beneficial use, and, you know, be economically productive. That doesn't make sense anymore, and so we need to adapt that.

But we have the tools to do it and I'm sure that we will do it. So, you pointed to John Wesley Powell's famous 1878 Arid Lands report, in which he argued that. Instead of dividing the rivers into blockish states, where there will be conflict and litigation. We should have watershed commonwealths, at least an upper basin and a lower basin commonwealth, a Yellowstone Commonwealth, a Missouri Commonwealth, a Snake Commonwealth and so on. Well, of course, that didn't happen. And he loved dams.

He seems to have thought that a cubic inch of water that reached the sea might have been wasted. But he wasn't talking about gigantism, industrial gigantism, he was talking about something much more modest in scale. Let me ask you this question Have you ever been out on Lake Powell? Oh, yeah.

I've spent a lot of time on the reservoir, I started doing trips down there, probably 2007-ish, and I can't even count the number of times I've done trips down there. But a lot of the work we do with survey work and taking stakeholders down there and documenting return of the canyons, a lot of that is accessed from the reservoir. And when we started doing it, I was kind of like you, where I never went there for fun as a kid.

I was always into national parks and then I got into running rivers. And I've always considered Powell to be this kind of scourge on the Colorado plateau. It was what Ed Abbey called the Blue Death. It was sort of like a graveyard that I never wanted to go to.

I felt conflicted when I started going down there for work. But as you mentioned, it's there, and if it's there, I think people should use it. And I should say, I understand why people like it in a really messed up way. It is beautiful.

Because I think Glen Canyon is probably the most beautiful canyon in the world. And so if there's a reservoir in it, guess what, that's going to be the most beautiful reservoir in the world. That doesn't mean that it's right, that it's there, it's a place of contradictions, like that dramatic blue water against red rock.

There's really not that many places in the world that have that, and I see why people are so drawn to it. But when I see that, I know what's underneath, and I know that it's a very unnatural environment, it's a clogged river.

You know, Katie Lee said, that water needs to flow. It's like blood in the human body, and once it's backed up, you have an aneurysm. And that's how I feel about the reservoir. Talking with Eric Balkan of the Glen Canyon Institute.

So I was on the lake for half a day and we went to some beautiful side canyons and our host was a terrific guy. You know, I just have to say it is astonishingly beautiful and maybe unique, as you say, what else in the world is quite like it?

That blue blue water against a somewhat different blue sky, and then all those colors of sandstone. And maybe more beautiful right now than ever. Because at the lower levels, all these side canyons are kind of opening up again. And you're seeing things that wouldn't have been really accessible 20 years ago.

I had to fight with myself because I get it. I get why people want to roar around in power boats and cruisers, and I get why. It's one of the great recreational destination points in the United States. And I also am willing to admit my addiction to the military-industrial Costco complex, right? My life implies dams.

My life implies interstate highways, my life implies a lot of infrastructure. And it's easy for me to wish it had never happened, but I'm one of the beneficiaries now. I think you're saying, however, that Glen Canyon never had to happen.

That its purpose was flawed from the beginning, and that it hasn't actually fulfilled the promise that it had even before overallocation and climate change. In a way, I don't think the sacrifice of Glen Canyon was worth it, but it did store water for decades.

That much is true. What's important is what it's going to do for the next 50 years. Though, right? The bureau always makes the point that, hey, look, it got us through some dry years and it stored water in flood years, and that's true, right?

I don't think the sacrifice was worth it. I think we could have been smarter with water or stored it elsewhere. There's a lot of things that could have gone differently. But what I'm really focused on is what is Glen Canyon going to look like in the next 50 years. Because we don't have excess water to store anymore.

Hoover Dam and Glen Canyon Dam were built to store excess water, and there is no more excess water. It's a fundamental change in our hydrology, it's a fundamental change in our policy towards how we manage water, and it's just not the same as it was before.

You know, a lot of our work is really just helping people realize the value of Glen Canyon. Beyond a storage tank, that beautiful image of red rock against that blue water, it's lifeless. You know, you don't really hear songbirds, you don't see trees next to the water, it is unnatural.

It is a dead zone. We're seeing full groves of cottonwood trees and willow trees coming back to life. I mean, there are stretches of these side canyons that have now been out of water for 21 years. And when you get up into those areas, you can't hardly tell that there was ever a reservoir. And so when I think about what's happening at Glen Canyon, that's what I think about.

I think about the ecological rebirth, I'm not thinking about abandoned boat ramps and abandoned marinas, because that era is coming to an end. The Bureau of Reclamation recently proposed some ideas of how to re-engineer Glen Canyon Dam. They know what's happening, people who love the reservoir, and I have no ill will against them.

I know why they love it, I get it, but the transition is happening. So that's not the story being told at the Carl Hayden Interpretive Center. We were there and their story is, it goes up, it goes down.

These are cycles, there will be wet cycles, this is a dry cycle. This is why we built it. Yeah, and I'm not saying that they're lying about that.

There was a really great paper from Jack Schmidt of Utah State University that came out I think last year or the year before, I believe it was. White Paper 6. They basically looked at the bureau's 24-month projections of reservoir levels. They're wrong most of the time. the reason they're wrong isn't because they're bad at their job.

Some of the smartest minds work for that agency. The reason they're wrong is because those projections are based off of statistical analysis of the past 30 years. The past 30 years are not the same as where we are right now. That's the wrench that climate change has thrown into the system. We live in a different hydrology.

It's just warmer on average, I mentioned earlier spring runoffs, but we're also seeing soil moisture depletion now, our runoffs are less efficient. In the past few years, we've actually had pretty average snow packs in the Colorado River Basin, but the runoff has been below average.

That's what's really scary from a water management perspective, because the soil is essentially getting depleted from moisture in this warmer environment. When the snow does run off, it acts like a sponge, where it actually absorbs the water and it doesn't flow into the river. Then when you couple that with other things like dust on snow events, where you get that dust on the snow, it melts rapidly. All of these factors, we just live in a different world than we did even 10 years ago. Right now, we have this huge snow pack in the Colorado River Basin.

150 of the median. A lot of people are like, Hey, this is it, this is our year. We're going to see the reservoirs come back up. It's going to be interesting to see what happens. But even though we have this huge snow pack, we still have aridification.

We have dust on snow, we have soil moisture depletion. We'll see what happens at the end of the year, but if this huge winter doesn't produce a huge runoff. I think that's going to be a big wake-up call to everyone in the basin. It's going to be a wake-up call, it's also going to be a kind of death knell for a lot of people. Because when we were on this journey, almost everyone who wants Lake Powell to remain is just thinking of this as, oh, thank goodness, this might be the reprieve we need.

This might be the start of something that will refill these reservoirs. And if it turned out, like at the end of this year, that the Glen Canyon rises only by 25 feet, I think there will be a deep consternation in page. One of the things that troubled me in going through the interpretive center at the dam was that there was a list of five or six quotations from Indigenous people about the magnificence of the place. But they didn't say from any of them the dam was a mistake. It seemed like a kind of an endorsement rather than a lament, and it seems to me, that's not really good interpretive history. Let me ask this question about compromise.

The Bureau of Reclamation is looking at this because they're realists. When we were out there, our boat guide said, Well, look, we're still on 350 feet of water here, it's not as if we're in 10 feet of water. There still is an amazing recreation industry here, what if it was a run of the river dam to a certain degree? But they kept a pool of 150 feet. So that there could still be a residual recreation industry, but that there would be a lot of restoration.

It would not be a complete loss of the lake. So there are a couple problems with that. And it kind of gets back to the engineering of the dam and the realities of the Colorado River. It is one of the most sediment-filled rivers in North America. And if you were to look at a cross-section of the canyon, it's shaped like a martini glass. So the further you go down, the less storage there is. So, most of the water that's stored in that reservoir is in the top 50 feet. Because the glass opens up and the relationship to elevation and volume is greater up there.

So if you were trying to operate a reservoir near those dead pool levels, what you would see is a reservoir that would potentially fluctuate 100-plus feet. Every season. With a runoff. And it would be really hard for the park service to manage boat ramps and marinas like that. I mean, it already fluctuates a lot when you go there and see that change. They're moving marinas around and that level of fluctuation would be really hard to manage and it could be dangerous. The other part of this is sediment, right? And this is a reality that a lot of people don't want to face. But all dams are temporary.

All dams are temporary, they fill in with sediment. When Glen Canyon Dam was built, Floyd Dominey said that it would take 700 years for the reservoir to fill with sediment. I don't think that was based on data, I think that was Floyd Dominey shooting from the hip and being Floyd Dominey.

We know that if it remained full, it would probably be 100 years. But as the reservoir gets lower and lower, the sediment going into it stays the same, and it's slowly eating up the storage volume. So if you imagined kind of this tiny reservoir behind the dam, I don't have a number, but it would be maybe 30 years, maybe 50 years. Eventually, it would fill in with sediment and then you have a backed up, clogged mini reservoir. And that's super problematic because it would create all these problems downstream in the Grand Canyon, and it's just not a sustainable solution. So reengineering Glen Canyon Dam, the bureau, as I mentioned, is looking at it. They're talking about drilling tunnels around the side, drilling through the dam, and they're kind of coming from a place of hydropower generation.

They want to salvage hydropower generation. I don't think they're solving for the right problem, but it's going to cost hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. And we're only going to get one or two chances to reengineer the dam, right? And so if we are going to reengineer the dam, we have to do it right. We have to solve for more than just hydropower, we have to start thinking about how to manage the sediment accumulation problem upstream, the sediment depletion problem downstream. And it's really hard to imagine a world where you have a reservoir that's easy to recreate on.

In that reality, Eric Balkan We need to take a short break. We're having a very special edition here of Listening to America. We'll be back in just a moment.

Welcome back to Listening to America. I'm with Eric Balkan, who is the executive director of the Glen Canyon Institute. We were talking about sediment before we took our break. I'm fascinated by this when we talked to local people and they were all rational people.

These were not like, Protect our Lake. They were trying to figure out what do we do in the face of overallocation and global climate change and clearly reduced flows. But the one thing they just scoffed at was this idea that there is a glacial mud pack moving slowly towards the dam face, they said. That's just not the hydrology of the thing. Of course, it's silting up, but we're talking about hundreds of years here. And there's an alarmism about the tsunami that's coming towards the face of the dam. There has been some initial measurements from some folks at the University of Utah.

There is a lot of sediment being deposited up on the main Sem Colorado and the San Juan River. It's a tricky thing to calculate because when you're talking about the. The scientists don't really like that term the mud glacier, because it functions a little differently. But if you look at a cross-section of how it's coming in, it does look like a glacier. It's this slowly moving wall of sand that it's a function of a receding reservoir, and the river depositing sand as it enters in. But mud glacier as a term, sounds to many people like a scene out of jaws like here.

It comes slowly. I think that's what people are objecting to. Obviously it's silting up and every year it silts a little closer to the dam, right? It can't help that. Yeah, but most of the sediment's in the top third of the reservoir, and so I think a lot of people that are reservoir recreators, they don't see it.

The deposited sediment is now in what's a free-flowing river. So up by height, what used to be a marina that's now abandoned by the park service. That's a free-flowing river, and it's flowing through a sediment delta, and in some places, that delta is like 130 feet deep, that's the mud glacier we're talking about. The kind of beautiful and eerie thing is that since most of that sediment is up in the upper part of the canyon, that means that most of Glen Canyon doesn't have sediment in it.

It is there, waiting to come back in my mind. But if we kind of ignore this sediment problem and we let this reservoir phase out unintentionally, as it has been for the past 20 years. What you're going to see is that sediment slowly come down into the central part of the canyon and inundate a lot of those canyons. Those cherished places that were written about by Ed Abbey and Wallace Stegner and Katie Lee, those are all going to fill up with sediment. And I don't think they should. I don't think we should let that happen, I think we should start solving that problem sooner.

So let's say we do run of the river. So now what happens to Hoover Dam and Lake Mead? They're going to get sediment that we're letting go through now. One of the reasons Glen Canyon Dam was built, many would argue, was to be the sediment trap to protect Lake Mead. So then you have a sediment issue in Lake Mead, but that sediment issue is further away than the sediment problem at Glen Canyon.

And there's not an easy answer to that. It's a problem for all reservoirs all around the world, you have to deal with it. Some of them have sluiceways that allow for passage of sediment. You think about the Grand Canyon, which is more than just a water pathway between two reservoirs, it's the Grand Canyon.

And it's been so adversely affected by Glen Canyon Dam, and a lot of it is that sediment that's being blocked for millions of years. The ecosystem in the Grand Canyon and those endemic fish species that exist nowhere else in the world. They evolved in warm, silty water, and the water that comes out of Glen Canyon Dam is cold, clear water, and it's had a terrible impact on that ecosystem. So if we imagine the sediment flowing through the Grand Canyon again, it would restore beaches, which is important to protect archaeological sites. It's also important to help that ecosystem rebound, which is a hard thing to imagine for most people. Because for the scientists working in the Grand Canyon, there are many scientists working in the Grand Canyon. And most of them have not contemplated this possible future where there's natural sediment flowing through there again.

It would be a very big change in the paradigm, you know? Millions of people go through the Grand Canyon on different types of craft, from wooden dories and all the way to the super rafts. What will that recreation look like? If there's a run-of-the-river change at Glen Canyon, what's it going to be like to be on the Grand Canyon? When sediment is flowing again, well, there will be beaches again.

For anyone who's run the Grand Canyon in recent years, there are hardly any beaches in there. It's really sad from a recreational standpoint. It makes running the river hard because there's just less places to camp. And I have friends who are river guides down there. And they lament that because they're going with these groups of people and there's nowhere to put them. So, not to mention all the other benefits of reintroducing sediment that I mentioned.

And then the flows would mimic the flows before the dam existed, it would flow like it flowed for millions of years. And so that means big floods in the spring, big water and lower flows in the winter, down to 4,000 cubic feet per second. And so it would change the recreation in the Grand Canyon, it would be like the Grand Canyon before the Glen Canyon dam was put in. And not everyone loves that.

We talk to a lot of Grand Canyon river guides and not everyone loves that. They like to know what the flows are going to be when they get an email from the reclamation that says, this is what your flow is going to be on this date from Glen Canyon Dam. Some people like that, and some people like having cold, clear water, and they can keep their beer cold without having to use a cooler. And that is what it is.

So it would be a different experience, but it would still be an incredible experience. Talking with Eric Balkan, a fascinating conversation. I first got interested in this by reading Deadpool by James Lawrence Powell. He's become a friend of mine. And this was well before we became super alarmed by global climate change. And he said, Look, just because of over-allegation and the change in hydrology, you can have one of these two reservoirs, but not both, period.

That was 25 years ago, and so he's been vindicated in a massive way, hasn't he? Yeah, I reference that book a lot. I call this like the most predicted disaster of all time. Everybody knew this was going to happen.

They just thought it would happen in the next generation's lifetime. I once did a presentation at Glen Canyon Dam. It was this group of students that came in. And they got a tour from this guy who had been giving tours at the dam for like, 50 years. He's an older gentleman and they said they asked him about climate change and what is going to become of the canyon and the dam and all that.

And his response was Well, I'll be dead when all that happens. So I haven't thought about it. And I think that's really telling. I think that's sort of reflective of a lot of folks approach to what's happening.

Everybody knew that the river was over allocated, that there would be this day of reckoning. But there was always going to be the next generation. Well, guess what, it's my generation, and I think that it's a crisis. It's a huge challenge, not just at Glen Canyon and Grand Canyon, but for the whole basin.

But it's an opportunity. So the argument that you're making is so intriguing to me. You have all those other national parks right there. Glen Canyon, by everybody's historic standards, was one of the great jewels of the canyon system in the country and deserves to be a national park. And just wasn't for reasons that we can understand.

But this argument is not very widely understood or even recognized in American life. You know, if you look at the national media. New York Times reporter flies out, talks to some people, takes pictures of the bathtub ring, writes about the crisis, and that's sort of it. Why hasn't this argument that this could be a win-win situation? Why isn't this argument getting traction around the country? I know it is in your world, but your world does not represent America, right? Well, I think it's starting to change.

I will say that it's starting to change, and the reason it's changing is because people are seeing Glen Canyon. The most impactful work that we've done is just taking stakeholders down there and just showing them the place. I don't really have to say anything. We had that great article from Elizabeth Culbert in The New Yorker.

I had the opportunity to take CBS down there and Nate Rott from NPR and you kind of get down there. And they're just like, Well, what are we going to see? and I'm like, just wait when they see it, when they see places like Cathedral in the Desert or Lagorse Arch or Gregory Natural Bridge. When they see 50-foot tall cottonwood trees. And they see flowing streams in places that used to be under 100 feet of water. I don't need to make the argument. They're like, Wow, this feels like a national park. I know of a bunch of places that are protected land that don't hold a candle to this.

For the broader American public, that they're not coming warming to the idea yet is that they just haven't seen it and it's just going to take time. The alarmists, the ones that are being actuated by fear of change, maybe we should say, are saying, Look, you've got 40 million people downstream that depend upon this system. What are they supposed to do?

Are they supposed to depopulate and go back to Ohio? I think you're going to say, that's not even in the cards. No, not at all. You know, the 40 million people that rely on the system, they don't necessarily rely on Glen Canyon Dam. That's a point that really gets sort of lost in the discussion, right?

People are like, Oh well, 5 million people rely on Glen Canyon's power. That's not true. 5 million people get a portion of their electricity from Glen Canyon Dam. If it went offline, most of them wouldn't notice it. There are other sources of electricity on the grid.

And hey, it's actually been producing much less in recent years because it's so low. And people look at the water infrastructure and assume that every part of it is critical. We don't have a lack of storage, we have a lack of water. And so when we're thinking about the future of the American West and the 40 million people here, I don't see Glen Canyon Dam as a part of that future.

We just don't need the storage anymore. And it's also, you know, our values have evolved. When the dam was commissioned in 1956, there was no environmental laws, there was no Endangered Species Act, there was no NEPA.

There was no Clean Water Act, none of that existed, right? And so valuing those natural qualities just wasn't a part of our value system. And that's changed. Not to mention the impacts to cultural sites for Indigenous people, the impacts to Indigenous people.

A lot of their ancestors are buried in there. A lot of Native American people lived in Glen Canyon, they had orchards and farms and houses there. And you know all of that. It was just not part of our value consideration. So, not only thinking about the infrastructure changes on the Colorado River, but our value changes, and how we think about the value of water economically, as far as agriculture use.

You know, we have to evolve our system to not just incentivize people to use water at all costs for beneficial use. There's this case study that, you know, if you think about, like the Pinal County farmers in Arizona. I heard this interview on NPR with a farmer that was like, Man, I've been growing alfalfa and cotton here for 100 years. And then all of a sudden the water turned off this year, like, what are we going to do? And to me, that is emblematic of just dumb water policy. Because the reason that they were watering these thirsty crops was because the government incentivized it, right?

They're getting water at below market rates. In the case of cotton, sometimes the government guarantees a purchase price for that cotton. So subsidized going in, subsidized going out, and these subsidies distort the actual free market value of the water. We just have to evolve past that.

And you know, I think the American West is going to do fine. We're going to be growing less hay and we're going to, you know, it's going to look different, but we have the tools to do it. I'm very confident that we can prosper out here.

And on the depopulation argument, of course, 70 some percent of all the water is used for agricultural purposes. Some of that alfalfa is being shipped out of the country to places like Japan and China. You know, when people say, Oh, our food supply, that's sort of a distortion of the truth, isn't it? Yeah, the food supply is distorted. And, you know, we talk about that a lot with the Imperial Irrigation District.

It's the single biggest user of Colorado River Water. I think they get 4.1, I think I think that district alone is. Yeah, I don't know what the number is, but I know that they're the single biggest user. And they, of course, say we grow 15 percent of the nation's crops.

But I've heard some people push back on that because a lot of that is alfalfa, right? And it goes as a feed crop to feed cattle. And so you kind of get into this argument about eating meat, and, you know, when it comes to, like, the population argument, and eating meat. I mean, just had a kid, I hope to have another kid.

I think people have kids. I don't think we need to depopulate. I also like eating the occasional hamburger, but maybe it should cost more, you know, maybe it should.

Maybe you should eat a hamburger, you know? If it cost it a little bit more, because the water that it took to make that burger was more expensive. Then it would incentivize folks to maybe eat like one less hamburger per week. Just as a simplistic kind of breakdown of what those impacts would be. It doesn't mean that you stop, you know, all cattle farming and all stuff like that. It just means that the economic incentives have to evolve. Yeah, you're channeling your inner Michael Pollan.

Now let's go to John Wesley Powell for a moment when we just have a couple of minutes remaining. I'm so appreciative of your time today. So Powell goes through in 1869, and again in 1870, his journey is famous, almost universally celebrated. I've asked you this and I really want you to dig in a little.

He would not like the idea of the lake being named for him. I think, What's your view? Well, I think he would hate it, you know, I try not to call it Lake Powell, for one thing, it's not a lake.

It's a reservoir, it's not natural. The title of Lake Powell was a really clever marketing move by the Bureau of Reclamation. That was sort of in line with their jewel of the Colorado promotion of the reservoir. You know, they had a Native American dude standing on a, you know, sitting on his horse in front of the reservoir, saying, Oh, we welcome. This new reality. Like it is such a distortion of the truth.

And it masks the terrible impact that this dam has had on the Colorado River. So it's not a lake, and I think Powell would have hated it. He loved Glen Canyon, I mean, he thought it was one of the most remarkable places he'd ever seen.

And if you read his account of going down there? They were just awestruck by the place and it was a really moment of respite and beauty for them. They had just gotten out of Cataract Canyon, where they were battered, and you know, it's before the Grand Canyon, Glen.

Was this really magical, peaceful, swooping kind of placid section of the Colorado River that it was like nothing else they'd ever seen? So I have a hard time believing that he would support the destruction and inundation of that place. Yeah, we have Lake Sakakawea here in North Dakota, on the Missouri. I'm guessing that Sakakawea would not have been that fond of a reservoir. That drowned out the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara people being named for her, but such is American nomenclature.

Powell was in favor of dams, but you're saying, not the kind of dams we're talking about. Yeah, I mean, at that point, you sort of get into some cultural relativism. But we maybe couldn't have imagined the sort of infrastructure that we have in the modern era. But yeah, I mean, he supported small dams, and look, we need dams, right?

We need to store water, and we're certainly not opposed to all dams. all dams aren't bad. We need to have some flood control, we need to be able to catch water.

But I think smaller dams are better because they, you know, they sort of localize the water use and they sort of connect people to their water source. You know, like in Salt Lake, for example, we have dams in all of our creeks around here, and you know, those aren't bad. Those are small reservoirs and we need them.

But I think, you know, the era of big dams has definitely come to an end, and a lot of people would argue it ended with Glen Canyon. Their impacts are so great they're, you know. It's just now that we value other things besides conquering nature, and we're seeing that nature actually might be conquering us. In some ways. I think it's forcing us to rethink those big dams. Well, maybe we should call it Lake Domine.

Or, and you say, lake is a misnomer in and of itself. a lake is a living thing. this is not a living organism, right? Yeah, call it domine reservoir, maybe we'll call it that.

I'm sorry to say we're out of time, I so appreciate you. What website should people go to if they want to follow your work? They can learn more about us at glencanyon..org. We're on Facebook and Instagram and all those places.

We're at Glen Canyon Institute, give us a follow. We send out a monthly email to keep people up to speed on what's happening in the canyon, on the river. I would encourage you to get on our newsletter and feel free to reach out to us. If you're interested in volunteering or learning more about our work, we'd love to hear from you.

Hey Dennis, and I want you to take us on one of your tours on the lake. Have you ever been to the Music Temple? Music Temple is still underwater and there's some question about what the actual elevation of it is. But right now, the reservoir is just about the lowest it's ever been since it began filling in the 60s.

So maybe it's starting to come out. We got to go down and see one of these days. Thank you so much, Eric Balkan of the Glen Canyon Institute. We'll see you all next week for another important edition of Listening to America.