Record Drought Reveals Stunning Changes Along Colorado River

By Jonathan Waterman for National Geographic

December 2,2014; 9:00AM,EST

 

 

The following is an excerpt from National Geographic:
A boat wends its way around the curves of Reflection Canyon, part of Lake Powell in Glen Canyon. The "bathtub rings" on the walls show past water levels. Photograph by Michael Melford, National Geographic Creative
In early September, at the abandoned Piute Farms marina on a remote edge of southern Utah's Navajo reservation, we watched a ten-foot (three-meter) waterfall plunging off what used to be the end of the San Juan River.
Until 1990, this point marked the smooth confluence of the river with Lake Powell, one of the largest reservoirs in the U.S. But the lake has shrunk so much due to the recent drought that this waterfall has emerged, with sandy water as thick as a milkshake.
My partner DeEdda McLean and I had come to this area west of Mexican Hat, Utah, to kayak across Lake Powell, a reservoir formed by the confluence of the San Juan and the Colorado Rivers and the holding power of Glen Canyon Dam, which lies just over the border in Arizona. Yet in place of a majestic reservoir, we saw only the thin ribbon of a reemergent river channel, which had been inundated for most of the past three decades by the lake. We called this new channel the San Powell, combining the name of the river and the lake.
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