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'Life After Dead Pool' looks how climate change, water usage is altering the natural balance
Glen Canyon is famous as part of a system of spectacular scenic canyons on the Colorado River.
But when the Glen Canyon Dam was built in 1963, it created Lake Powell for river water storage and drowned the native flora in Glen Canyon and its many side canyons.
Almost ten years later the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area was established, encompassing hundreds of miles of rugged terrain from southern Utah to northern Arizona. The lake became a wildly popular destination for houseboaters.
The dam has been releasing river water and providing hydroelectric power to such cities as Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, Las Vegas, Nevada, and Albuquerque.
An estimated three-fourths of the released water is used in agriculture.
In the 1960s and ’70s, the dam became a flash point in the environmental movement, but few environmentalists at that time expected that the water level of Lake Powell would start to fall, dropping to record lows so quickly, according to environmental journalist-author Zak Podmore.
Podmore is the author of the new book “Life After Dead Pool: Lake Powell’s Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River.”
The lake — more accurately called a reservoir — is located on the river in north-central Arizona near the border with Utah and just upstream from the Grand Canyon.
The “Dead Pool” in the title refers to the level — 3,370 feet — that water becomes trapped by the dam and can’t be released into the river.
He writes that researchers he’s interviewed for the book have told him that Full Pool — 3,700 feet — is “a 20th century memory.” It likely won’t be reached again; the last time the lake was full was in 1999.
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Another marker is Minimum Power Pool — 3,490 feet — the level below which the dam can no longer safely produce hydropower.
The water level in the lake has continued to drop.
What’s interesting for Podmore is that Lake Powell reached record low levels in the last five years, he writes, because of climate change and the over-allocation of water in the Southwest.
Yet, to him, a major side effect of that drop has been an ecological positive, that there is life after Dead Pool.
Based on what researchers have told him, he believes that Dead Pool may be an improvement over Full Pool.
As the lake’s surface area has shrunk to just over one-third of its original size between 2000 and 2021, more than 100,000 acres of land has emerged as a result of the reservoir’s lower water level.
What does that mean?
Invasive species popped up initially, Podmore writes, but that within a few years native species, such as Frémont’s cottonwood and coyote willow, have reappeared, pushing out the invasive species.
Plus he’s seen more good ecological news: native flowers, reeds and sedges have come alive again in newly exposed areas of Glen Canyon’s side canyons.
That rebirth of flora gives the author hope that there’s a future for a free-flowing Colorado River.
Meanwhile, Podmore said, critical guidelines for the management of Lake Powell are being revised, looking toward a 2026 deadline to institute any changes. The management involves determining how much water should be released from Lake Powell to Lake Mead.
“Nobody wants to take a cut, even though there’s not enough water supply to the users as there was in the past,” he said in a phone interview.
Lake Powell’s water level heavily depends on the amount of snowpack in the Rockies. At the moment, Podmore said, 2025 appears to be a slightly below average year, but that could change. “If there’s not a lot of snowpack come April, the crisis on Lake Powell will become more urgent,” he said.
Another related issue is the build-up of sediment — the amount of silt, sand and mud entrapped in Lake Powell since 1963, the year that dam was completed.
“It’s an important part of the story of what Glen Canyon will look like. Most of the sediment is trapped upstream … but there are glaciers of mud moving down the Colorado and San Juan rivers,” said Podmore, who lives in Bluff, Utah.
