The River’s Return
An epic journey to discover how twenty years of drought has transformed the West’s most iconic river.
With an oomph I drop my heavy pack on the sandy floor of Spanish Bottom, deep in Southeast Utah’s Canyonlands National Park. I’m joined by another Moab-area dirtbag, a lanky, bearded botanist who shares a passion for whitewater and incredibly smooth 70’s music. We spent two days crossing trackless canyons to reach this spot, and even though we’re both beat, it’s hard to ignore the dreamy light of an October afternoon.
Glints of sunlight bathe the craggy gray and rust colored sandstone cliffs around us. The Colorado river — big, brown and filled with bobbing hunks of driftwood — still faintly sparkles as it churns through banks of bright green willows. It’s another magical day in canyon country, but there’s no time to lounge. Daylight is fading and we’re on a mission.
We’re here to see if the rumors are true, to seek the mythical unicorn once thought forever lost beneath the waters of Lake Powell — the rapids of Lower Cataract Canyon. But the river is always full of surprises, and the first one to hit us comes before we’ve even dipped our paddles in the water.
Instead of an easy put-in, years of drought have left the river’s shore fifteen feet below a cut bank of loose sand. We hack our way through the willows, looking for some break, until we uncover homemade steps hewn from a cottonwood log. Unfortunately, the builder — like most everyone in the Southwest — planned for wetter years. The river is so low that the stairs now dangle uselessly ten feet above the muddy water. There’s no choice; If we want to reach the river, we’re gonna have to go rogue.
We inflate our packrafts — brightly colored inflatable vessels that pack down the size of a two person tent — and look for a spot to safely lower them. Inside their tubes are everything we need for our trip — sleeping bags, repair kits, a few beers and a bag of cheap whiskey. For the next three days, these craft will be our means to navigate the last free-flowing section of the Colorado River before it drains into Lake Powell.
The botanist is a full head taller than me so he goes first. He spiders his way down the cut bank and then flops onto his boat sideways, arms out, like a drunk crab. Inelegant, but effective.
Now it’s my turn. I lower my boat using some webbing and let it swirl in the river ten feet below me. I slide down the bank, one hand gripping a cottonwood root, the other holding the webbing. I reach a ledge and try to find a good foothold next to my boat, but it’s no use. The bank is covered with a gooey, nearly friction-free layer of red mud. The river is swirling a few feet beneath me, cold and brown, as thick as chocolate milk. I can feel the current tugging the boat downstream, and any second, me with it. Who did fortune favor again? It may be stupid, but I decide to jump.
I let out a barbaric yawp — or maybe just a yelp — and belly flop onto the boat, which bucks down into the current and pops back up with a sucking thwuupp. I quickly right myself, using a series of arm and leg contortions that would horrify any yoga teacher, and begin paddling downstream.
Already I can hear the distant rumbling of Brown Betty, the first of Cataract Canyon’s twenty nine — or possibly thirty, thirty-one, or two — rapids. I look back at the steep cut bank, the dangling steps, and wonder what other surprises await us downstream on a river that has been transformed by twenty years of drought.
The Southwest is in the midst of a megadrought, a decades-long period of extreme dryness that has left its most iconic waterway a trickle of its former self. Since 2000, warm winters and poor snowpack has reduced the Colorado River’s yearly flow by almost 20% of the 20th century average. The two reservoirs that the Colorado fills — Lake Mead and Lake Powell — have both dropped to roughly 30% of their capacity, lows not seen since the dams were first built. The situation is so dire that there’s a 1-in-3 chance that Glen Canyon Dam — the 710 foot tall concrete wall that creates Lake Powell — could stop producing electricity by 2023.
Everywhere, the alarm bells are ringing. Phoenix lawns, the Vegas strip, Imperial Valley melons— none of it would exist as it does today without the abundant, uninterrupted flow of Colorado River water. And no one knows when, if ever, the drought will end.
But down here, in the depths of Cataract Canyon, there’s a silver lining. As Lake Powell drains, the river reclaims its former terrain, bringing historic flow back to places that — up until a few years ago — were stagnant pools.
Unlike most of its damned tributaries, Cataract Canyon is subject to extreme, seasonal fluctuations in flow. In winter, with most of its water locked in snow and ice, the Colorado river flows a clear, earthy shade of green.
But during spring run-off, when its tributaries fill with silt and snowmelt, Cataract Canyon turns into a mud-filled, Class V monster, with house-sized whirlpools and waves big enough to bend 37-foot J-rigs like a piece of wonder bread. In exceptionally wet years the river peaks at 100,000 cubic feet per second — nearly ten times the daily flow of the river in the Grand Canyon.
Which is why Cataract has a bit of a reputation. Hang around the Four Corners long enough and you may hear tales of “high water Cat”. For a short time in late June, when run-off reaches its peak, experienced boaters come to Cataract to test their mettle against the biggest rapids in North America.
But those flows do more than just thrill tourists and Chaco-clad rafters. The river’s high spring flows help build up sandbars, which provide habitat for native fish and nurseries for growing plant life. Those sandbars, coincidentally, also make great camps.
The first night, we tie our boats off next to a giant white sandbar backed by sprawling cottonwoods. The fine sand makes a comfy bed, and we lounge around the campfire telling tall tales of past boating trips and bemoaning the lack of saxophones in modern music.
The next morning we wake up reasonably early, brush the sand off our boats, and hit the heart of Cataract. We drop though rapids with names like Ben Hurt and Little Niagara, narrowly sliding past rowdy holes and spinning in squirrely eddy-lines. Around us the canyon gets deeper and deeper, slicing two, now almost three thousand feet into the tawny colored sandstone of the Paradox Formation.
At Hell to Pay rapid, the botanist takes a swim — side-swiped by a crashing wave that flipped his tiny boat as easily as a breeze to a leaf. But he quickly recovers, dumps his boat, and we’re back on the water.
Soon, we reach the crux of the trip, an infamous Class IV rapid called Big Drop 3. It’s the last major rapid in the canyon, and one that has flipped more boats than any other on the river.
We tie our boats to shore and scramble over car-sized boulders to scout. It doesn’t look pretty. Before us is a river-wide rock garden, filled with boat flipping holes and tube ripping rocks. To call this whitewater is a misnomer. Everything looks brown — the water, the rocks, even the shore — and it’s nearly impossible to find a clean line through the hydrologic chaos. That is, until we see the bubbles.
At the head of the rapid, between two small rocks, is a small line of bubbles. I mentally follow them as they drop into the meat of the rapid, just to the right of a big moss-backed rock, through a crashing wave, and finally, sliding past a wide hole that gurgles and spits up water like a geyser. It’s tight, but the way I see it — hit the bubbles and you’re good to go.
I go first, ignoring the fluttering in my chest and swing my boat out of the eddy and into the current. The rapid is a steady drone that grows into a roar. I’m twenty feet from the edge and I can barely pick out my line. But there — a string of latte bubbles on a film of mocha — I spot it. A paddle here, left, then right, a short draw near my bow, I float over the bubbles and drop over the lip of the rapid, crash through a sharp wave past the mossy rock, and then lean into a chute. But I throw in a hard stroke, lean in, and punch through the wave — pow! — and am in the clear.
I quickly catch an eddy and watch the botanist line up at the head of the rapid, slide down the chute, and hit the mark. He punches through a hole, the bow of his boat disappearing in a wave, and safely pulls through.
It’s a bit of drama here deep in the canyon, with no audience except our own. We crack open our stashed beers in celebration, bobbing downstream as the sun dips below the canyon walls; lukewarm hops never tasted so sweet.
We set up camp a mile or so downriver, along a small sandbar at the mouth of Imperial Canyon. We throw some ramen on the stove, light up a few pieces of driftwood, and watch the stars twinkle into view. As the fire dies, Orion slowly rolls out between the shadow-black cliffs, his sparkling bow pulled taut against the heavens. Hard to beat a clear night in the desert.
The next morning I sip my freeze dried coffee and pick through flood debris along the shore. It’s a sample of local ecology, natural and human — there’s river-polished cottonwood logs, ragged bundles of tamarisk, a coil of blue cordage, a surprisingly intact pink Croc. Although our camp is almost two hundred miles upriver from the dam, not too long ago all this detritus would have been coating the bottom of Lake Powell.
Imagine a giant sandstone bathtub, six hundred feet deep, covering two hundred fifty square miles. On the bottom is everything that finds its way into the river — sand, mud, used oil cans, broken oars, a dead body in a sedan. Then, fill that with roughly four years of Colorado River water, a few thousand beautiful boaters, and you have Lake Powell.
The scale of Powell is just mind boggling. It wasn’t until 1980 — sixteen years after the dam’s completion in 1966 — that the lake reached full capacity. For the few years in the 80’s when it was full, houseboats and jet skis could motor fifty miles up from Hite marina to the bottom of Big Drop 3. During high water, they’d sit back and watch rafts brave Cataract’s biggest rapid, slamming Bud Lights and blasting Def Lepard while 18’ self-bailing Avons sailed helplessly over twenty foot high wave trains or flipped in bus-sized holes.
But the party wasn’t meant to last. There were Hummers to wash in San Diego, lettuce to grow in Mesa, pools to fill in St. George. And there was the 860,00 acre feet that evaporates every year from the lake’s surface — water, literally, disappearing into thin air. It took decades of overuse, waste, and drought, for the Colorado river to reclaim lower Cataract.
Back to our journey. The next morning, we hit the first sign of the river’s re-emergence — Imperial Rapid, a 1/2 mile long s-curve of tight hydraulics and big splashy wave trains that was underwater barely ten years before. Next we hit two more rapids, freshly reborn in the recent drought, so new they don’t even have names. We punch through the last waves, soaked and smiling, thrilled to have been witnesses to the river’s return.
But even though the waters have receded, there’s still signs of the lake everywhere. As we float downstream, we enter the Lake Powell formation — known as the Dominy Layer* to locals — a geologic layer of sediment up to a hundred feet thick deposited by the lake.
Ten, now twenty feet on each side of the river, is a bench of sand that stretches in an unnaturally clear line across the cliffs. As the canyon narrows, it gets higher and higher, a fearsome, sixty-foot vertical wall of tamarisk-topped silt that I know — from past trips trying to escape the Lower Cataract river corridor — is like trying to climb a pile of sugar. It’s the remnant of a dying lake, the scum left on a draining bathtub.
Historically, the Colorado River would move almost 300,000 tons of silt and sediment per day down into the Grand Canyon. A fraction of that would be deposited on sandbars, while the rest would roll on to the Gulf of California. But Glen Canyon dam changed all that. The silt that used to flow to the sea began to pile up behind the dam, covering everything beneath the water line in a tomb of silt.
What was lost was — according to the tales told by boaters round the campfire — of legendary, almost preternatural beauty, a Shangri-La carved out of pink and white sandstone. But now those fern-filled grottos, soaring alcoves, and untouched kivas are all buried, indiscriminately, beneath hundreds of feet of water and mud. And even if Ed Abbey’s dream comes true, and the dam chokes in silt or is blown to bits**, it will take centuries for the sediment to erode away.
Thankfully, we don’t have to wait that long. Our take out is at the mouth of a steep side canyon, cleared of silt by seasonal flash floods. We pack up our boats as a fish — probably a channel catfish or a striped bass — slaps the top of a swirling eddy next to shore. A year ago, I floated this same section and it was flat as a pond. Today there’s a current. Next year…who knows?
We’ve gotten a lot of great things from Powell: bag salads in the dead of winter, beachfront property in northern Arizona, KISS-themed mini golf on the Vegas Strip. But, as drought conditions in the Southwest persist, or possibly get worse, it is time to imagine how things might be when — if ever — it is gone. The rapids of Lower Cataract are just the start. Who knows what mysteries will be revealed as the river returns?
*Named after Floyd E. Dominy, the chief architect of the Glen Canyon Dam and head of the Bureau of Reclamation from 1959 to 1969.
**After a legal decommissioning, of course.
