The future of Lake Powell, and the whole Colorado

First, per Yale Climate, and rightly so, it will NOT be "solved" by one year of heavy snowpack. (As of Feb. 6, we were at 129 percent of the 10-year average.) In fact, it won't be "solved" within current parameters, period. (The only problem I have with Yale's piece is way too much quoting and referencing of neoliberal Kumbaya environmentalist John Fleck and his partner in neoliberal environmentalism crime Eric Kuhn.)

The key on the good, yet bad, is that Powell (and Mead) are now only at 10 percent danger of "power pool," per a BuRec update. As Bob Henson notes at the Yale piece, this of course drops a sense of urgency among the member states of the Colorado River Compact. It also lessens the possibility of BuRec threatening a banhammer, let alone following through on it, after its fake banhammer last summer.

In fact, contra Kumbaya Fleck, I expect one, or more, lawsuits to be the nudge to a new version of the compact. One lawsuit would be by one individual state vs. another. (Looking at you, Aridzona, vs. California, given early post-compact history.) A second would be by Upper Basin vs. Lower Basin states. A third would be one or more American Indian tribes suing one or more states and/or the federal government.

Bob's piece is creative in some ways. As people who are from the Colorado Plateau and surrounding areas note, evaporation, from both the two big lakes and the irrigation canals, is a problem. And a growing one. So, why not cover them with floating solar panels? Boaters would push back on the lakes, but push back on the pushback. They can steer around. And absolutely on the canals.

That said, the price for this would be huge on one or both of the lakes. You'd have to have transmission antennas beaming the electricity to some grid connection, for example. Panels fixed in place over irrigation canals wouldn't have such problems.

Outside of Nevada's conservation — which Bob didn't note was largely a one-off effort — the biggie, especially on the lower Colorado? Agriculture. Sorry, Johnny Peace, but the alleged romance of grazing cows on river-raised alfalfa? De-romanticize it.

For the unknowledgable, Yale then gives readers the nickel version of the Colorado River Compact. They then talk about climate change's impacts — important, as the snowpack numbers are based on just the seven previous years.

The biggie? Can the Compact be saved? Bob says yes, if there's enough flexibility in a highly overhauled new Compact. Color me skeptical, since, per Bob and big snow, the seven Basin states procrastinated past Jan. 31, as I expected, part of the impetus for his article.

That said, there's a flip side to that bathtub ring at Lake Powell, even if the lake itself is never fully restored. 

That's the unveiling of Glen Canyon itself, and its own self-restoration, documented in detail at High Country News by author Craig Childs and photographer Elliott Ross. The recovery of the canyon, with people now knowing about it, might partially replace the recreation dollars of Lake Powell, even as Jim Stiles shudders. Lessening total boating would also lessen fuel burning of the boats, and of driving them to the lake, too.

As for the actual vistas? I'd love to see at least a fraction of the re-revealed natural beauty from before Powell started filling, as in, see it in person wearing my own hiking boots. Ditto on seeing if some of the Anasazi or Fremont or Basketmaker or Archaic ruins, petroglyphs and pictographs survived 50 years or so of inundation.