Drought Boosts Campaign to Drain One of the West's Biggest Reservoirs

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Page 5 of 6 the region's generating capacity. Numbers, however, only take the discussion so far. Ultimately, the argument in favor of draining Lake Powell comes down an aesthetic and emotional one. To get a feel for that aspect of the debate, you can buy a book. Writer Wallace Stegner called Glen Canyon "the most serenely beautiful of all the canyons of the Colorado River" in his 1965 essay "Glen Canyon Submersus," which is collected in a volume titled The Sound of Mountain Water. A Utah publisher recently issued a new edition of The Place No One Knew, a large - format volume of images by noted landscape photographer Eliot Porter, originally published by the Sierra Club in 1963 as a eulogy for the doomed canyon. You also can read Ed Abbey's classic book Desert Solitaire, which includes a mournful essay recounting a float trip through Glen Canyon in the final days of dam construction. Or you can take a hike. A Canyon Reborn From just east of the hamlet of Escalante in southern Utah, the unpaved Hole in the Rock Road carves its way across 60 miles of corrugated stone and drifting sand, paralleling the steep escarpment of the Kaiparowits Plateau to the west and the hidden Escalante River canyon to the east. The road terminates above the Colorado River at a notch blasted and hacked into the canyon wall in 1880 by Mormon settlers seeking a shortcut to southeastern Utah. At intervals, spurs branch off the dirt road toward the Escalante, eventually fading into trails that switchback into the main canyon. At one such trailhead in late May, guide Travis Corkrum of Salt Lake City, Utah, and freelance photographer Eli Butler of Flagstaff, Arizona, met a group of backpackers who had signed up for a four -day trip sponsored by the Glen Canyon Institute. Shouldering packs, the group of eight hikers trudged across sand and slickrock, past blooming beavertail cactus and sage, to the edge of the plateau. At the lip of the 900 - foot -deep canyon, the route required hikers to clamber down a vertical rock face and then squeeze through a crack in the rock barely wide enough for an average adult. The packs had to be lowered by rope. Gathering again at the bottom of the cliff, the group descended a steep slope of shifting sand and dropped into the inner canyon, setting up camp on a sandy bench beneath an overhanging wall of sandstone. For four days, the group explored Coyote Gulch and lower Escalante Canyon, parts of which had been inundated by Lake Powell until a year earlier. The retreating water has reopened hundreds of miles of narrow canyons to foot traffic, revealing seeps and springs, alcoves carpeted with maidenhair fern and columbine, quiet pools reflecting burnished slickrock. Upstream in Coyote Gulch and Escalante Canyon, in areas untouched by the lake, lie additional reminders of what drowned when the reservoir filled: whispering groves of cottonwood and willow trees, grassy flats where Anasazi farmers — their abandoned granaries and panels of rock art still visible high on the cliffs — grew corn, beans, and squash a thousand years ago. There are arches and bridges carved from stone by time and running water, gnarled oaks, waterfalls, monolithic walls varnished with a natural patina of blue -black iron and manganese. There is deep silence within the canyons. Although water flows year -round from springs in Coyote Gulch and in the Escalante River, it does so silently, slipping across the sandy canyon floor with barely a murmur. The loudest sounds are those of dripping seeps, trilling canyon wrens, and the splash of hikers' footsteps as they wade in the water, which in mid -May was ankle -deep in Coyote Gulch and sometimes reached mid -thigh in the Escalante. It is these intangible qualities of the drowned but partially resurrected canyon complex — silence, antiquity, the spectacle of green life, and flowing water in a rocky desert — that environmentalists believe offer the most compelling argument against Lake Powell. By organizing backpacking trips into the area, directors of the Glen Canyon Institute hope to use the power of the landscape itself to swell the ranks of antidam activists. "That's what's going to win this campaign: that permanent place in your heart that this place holds," Peterson said. Past and Future Weighed against the aesthetic and emotional values of a restored canyon system are kilowatts, the stark beauty of Lake Powell itself, the reservoir's popularity with boaters and consequent economic value to Page, and the flexibility the dam and lake give to Western water managers charged with the difficult task of keeping cities and farms alive in very dry places. 8/27/2004