As the planet warms, low snow is starving the river at its headwaters in the Rockies, and high temperatures are pilfering more of it via evaporation, causing its long-term health to remain in deep doubt. The Grand Canyon and Colorado River are in crisis:
Down beneath the tourist lodges and shops selling keychains and incense, past windswept arroyos and brown valleys speckled with agave, juniper and sagebrush, the rocks of the Grand Canyon seem untethered from time. The oldest ones date back 1.8 billion years, not just eons before humans laid eyes on them, but eons before evolution endowed any organism on this planet with eyes.
Our species’ mass migration to the West was premised on the belief that money, engineering and frontier pluck could sustain civilization in a pitilessly dry place. More and more, that belief looks as wispy as a dream. Since 1963, the Glen Canyon Dam has been backing up the Colorado for nearly 200 miles, in the form of America’s second-largest reservoir, Lake Powell. Engineers constantly evaluate water and electricity needs to decide how much of the river to let through the dam’s works and out the other end, first into the Grand Canyon, then into Lake Mead and, eventually, into fields and homes in Arizona, California, Nevada and Mexico.
With these doubts about the Colorado’s future in mind, the UC Davis scientists rigged up electric-blue inflatable rafts on a cool spring morning. Slate-gray sky, low clouds. Cowboy coffee on a propane burner. At Mile 0 of the Grand Canyon, the river is running at 7,000 cubic feet per second, rising toward 9,000 — not the lowest flows on record, but far from the highest.
The result is that the canyon’s sandy beaches, where animals live and boaters camp at night, are shrinking. Beaches that were once as wide as freeways are today more like two-lane roads. Others are even scrawnier. The sandy space that remains is also becoming overgrown with vegetation: cattail and brittlebush, arrowweed and seepwillow, bushy tamarisk and spiny camelthorn. Before the dam came in, the river’s springtime floods regularly washed this greenery away.
Today, when the water is low, more boulders in the river are exposed at certain rapids, making them trickier to negotiate for the 30-to-40-foot-long motor rigs that are popular for canyon tours. In a future of prolonged low flows, tour companies might find it harder to run such large boats safely, cutting off one main way to experience the canyon intimately.Drought and low water aside, there’s another aspect of the canyon’s future that worries Victor R.
None of the government agencies with a hand in managing the canyon can do much about that, not on their own. But they are trying to beat back some of the other forces remaking the canyon from within. There is a similar no-win feeling to the bigger question of how to keep the Colorado useful to everyone as it shrivels. The dam is the root cause of the canyon’s environmental shifts, which also include big changes to fish populations. But simply allowing the river to flow more naturally through the existing dam, so water is stored primarily in Lake Mead instead of in both Mead and Powell, wouldn’t reverse the shifts entirely.
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