Returning Rapids October Science Trip — A Reservoir No More.
Photos and story by Jack Stauss, Outreach Director
In mid October, Glen Canyon Institute embarked on a trip with the Returning Rapids Project and a cross-disciplinary group of researchers, river runners, and environmental advocates. Our goal was to help quantify and tell the story of the returning Colorado River that used to be inundated by Lake Powell reservoir. The six-day journey took us through Cataract, Narrow, and upper Glen Canyons, where we spent our days hiking and conducting surveys in the side canyons below the reservoir’s high water mark.
While this trip had many specific focuses of study, one thing stood out above all else — the rapids below Big Drop 3, the former upper reach of Lake Powell, and the river all the way down past the North Wash boat ramp are no longer a reservoir. This is once again a golden, flowing Colorado River.
This trip was the most logistically complicated Returning Rapids expedition to date. Mike DeHoff, Pete Lefebvre, Jamie Moulton, and Meg Flynn from RRP have been working on this for years, and now they are facilitating and leading two dozen people with a huge array of interests and expertise into a place they love deeply. It is truly a complex and impressive feat to pull off.
Scientists from the University of Utah, U.S. Geologic Survey, Utah State University, Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center, Western Water Assessment, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife, all joined to study a variety of topics. Each day we broke into three or four groups to make sure each crew was able to focus on their areas of interest.
GCI spent the first two days on the mothership — a flotilla of boats working its way down Meander Canyon to the Confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers. Another boat team, “The Sand People,” were a crew from the USGS led by Scott Hynek. Every 3–5 kilometers they would stop and collect sand samples from beaches. Yet another survey team, led by Paul Grams from GCMRC, worked to map the bottom of the river using LIDAR scanning technology.
And finally, a team worked to map the entire river profile from Potash all the way down to White Canyon. This was done using Real-Time Kinematic GPS units we installed in different locations each day to measure locations and elevations. This was the first time in 100 years mapping of this scale has been done. On day one, Meg took the lead and each day she would help facilitate moving the units downstream, measuring as they went. At one point she and her team left camp early and spent a very full windy day at the Confluence letting the GPS unit run its course.
We would all regroup in the evenings for dinner and discussion.
Of particular interest was the goal of getting back into Waterhole Canyon and building upon the research conducted by USGS and U of U researchers there last year. Their work was to continue analyzing the changing layers of sediment from Lake Powell as its levels shifted.
After a rainy night at the Confluence, we spent the day rowing the famous whitewater of Cataract Canyon. As soon as we completed the notorious Big Drops, we were in the restoration zone and the real work began.
When asked how many times he has run Cat, Mike DeHoff says, “Well, I stopped counting at 100, and that was a long time ago.” There really is no one better to help scout the rapids. Between him and the RRP team there is an invaluable and immense amount of knowledge and passion surrounding the canyon and this section of the Colorado River.
The geologists broke out into Waterhole Canyon. The changes were like watching millions of years of geological processes taking place in only a few decades. For the geologists, it’s like having a giant outdoor laboratory.
The “Fish People,” biologists from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife, caught native fish, the GCMRC team continued mapping the bottom of the river, and Seth Arens of Western Water Assessment returned to “plant transects” he installed on research trips from the previous two years.
The “transects” are essentially focus areas that span over a side canyon, allowing him to survey changes of plants and ground cover in that specific area over time. These cross sections can be as large as 90 meters and will help us understand how ecosystems are changing, restoring, and ideally, thriving in both the previous reservoir area as well as above high water.
Over the late summer and early fall, a series of flash floods drastically impacted the areas surrounding Lower Cataract and Glen Canyons. In some places, 30 feet or more of sediment was cleaned away in a single flood — blasted out by extreme torrents of water. So, some of the transects that we expected to be heavily vegetated were instead cleared-out washes and canyon bottoms.
After the days spent in Gypsum and Clearwater Canyons, the group camped one more night out on the river, sharing stories from our previous days of work and running the rapids. For the Returning Rapids Project and GCI, it was an amazingly collaborative effort, and an inspiration to see so many people curious about what was happening in a landscape that has been historically overlooked by scientists and managers. To many in the group, the fact that Big Drop 3 used to be the high water mark was a shock — today there’s barely any sign the reservoir was ever there.
It’s hard to emphasize how much work really goes into a trip like this. From Pete fixing motors on the fly, to pushing the Mothership and the river mappers downstream, to Jamie organizing six days of amazing meals —it’s a labor of love and one that has paid off over the last three years of these increasingly complicated trips.
In some ways, the work of the geologists and ecologists overlapped with one another. The USGS team was looking at changing levels of salinity in the mud, and as we conducted plant transects, we took soil samples too. Soil samples were collected under natives like willows and non-natives like tamarisk to see if there are differences in soil chemistry, like salinity.
But, shockingly enough, in the Dominy Formation (the sediment banks left behind from the reservoir) we were finding an abundance of native plants — grasses, willows, reeds, shrubs, flowers, and even a lot of cryptobiotic soil, green and mossy from the seasons’ big rains.
One of the most beautiful and mysterious places was still to come for our last day of work. Dark Canyon had apparently experienced massive flooding, mobilizing huge amounts of mud and sand — surely to be of interest for the geologists. It was also home to three transects.
Dark Canyon, like Clearwater and Gypsum, had flashed in an astonishing way. Where there were once gnarled tamarisk and tight willow groves, there was now an open wash. Where there were beaver ponds, there was a creek. Where there was once mucky sediment, there was gravel. Up into the canyon we went to do our surveys and take in what might be the most beautiful canyon I have ever seen.
After we completed our last transect, I romped up Dark Canyon for a few more minutes. I visited the fluted waterfall we could see from the transect, and scrambling beyond, I could hear more babbling creek out of sight. Just another bend and I was greeted with shining sandstone bedrock that the stream had forged its way through, twisting and turning over the course of thousands of years. I sat there for a while, listening to more flowing water further up — drawn in by a glowing cottonwood around the next bend. The canyon continued on but I had to get back. Back to the river that was once a reservoir, and all of the incredible changes happening there before our eyes.
