Lake Powell has been struggling with dangerously low water levels, and now a sudden rush of storm water has added a shocking new twist to the crisis.
For a moment, the flooding seemed like a much-needed break from the drought.
But the situation is far more complicated than it looks.
Behind the rising water lies a bigger problem involving the Colorado River, strained reservoirs, and millions of people who depend on them.
And what happens next could change everything.
The Week The Desert Turned Into A River Most of the headlines you saw this month stopped somewhere in the middle of October, but the most astonishing part of this story happened only a few days ago, and almost nobody outside the river world has noticed it yet.
On October twenty-first, a fresh storm settled over Utah, and the water flowing into Lake Powell climbed past 37,000 cubic feet every second.
That alone would have been big news, because only a few weeks earlier the lake was receiving barely a seventh of that amount.
Then came October twenty-second, and the official daily numbers from the Bureau of Reclamation show something that people who have watched this reservoir for decades are still shaking their heads over.
On that single day, 63,368 cubic feet of water poured into Lake Powell every second, while Glen Canyon Dam let only about 6,572 escape downstream.
In plain terms, almost ten times more water was arriving than leaving, and the lake gained 1.83 feet in twenty four hours, which works out to roughly 112,000 acre feet in one day.
An acre foot is about 326,000 gallons, enough to cover a football field one foot deep, which explains why the gauge at Page moved the way it did.
By October twenty third the lake stood at 3,525 feet, with more than 50,000 cubic feet per second still rushing in.
That is 8.38 feet higher than the record low it touched in the middle of September, and since the new water year began on October first, the lake has taken in 733,559 acre feet, about 175 per cent of what it normally collects by that date.
For a reservoir that spent the entire summer shrinking, that is a turnaround most experts would have laughed at back in August.
Even at 3,525 feet, Lake Powell is only about 22.8 percent full and sits 175 feet below the top.
For that calendar date it is still the second lowest level in sixty three years of records, and it is roughly 22 feet lower than it was this time last year.
The lake has only climbed back to the level that federal managers set as their emergency target, which shows you how far the bar had fallen.
While Powell was celebrating, the news from downstream was grim.
On the very same day the lake swallowed that historic flood of runoff, Lake Mead, the reservoir behind Hoover Dam that serves Las Vegas, Phoenix and Southern California, slid to yet another record low.
And this week, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum stood in southern Arizona and told reporters that a lawsuit filed by two states against his department will be thrown out, even as federal lawyers face a deadline at the end of October to answer it in court.
So we have a river system that is flooding at the top and drying at the bottom, with roughly 40 million people in seven states and Mexico depending on it, and with governors and federal officials now trading warnings in public.
To understand how a desert lake swung from near disaster to a flood shock in a matter of weeks, we have to go back to a morning in September when Lake Powell came closer to shutting down its power plant than at any moment since the dam was built.
The Morning Lake Powell Hit Bottom On September fifteenth, the gauge at Glen Canyon Dam read 3,516.62 feet, the lowest level since the reservoir first filled in the nineteen sixties.
The number that keeps engineers awake at night is 3,490 feet, known as minimum power pool, because below that point the water can no longer feed the eight turbines safely and the dam stops making electricity for roughly five million people across six states.
On that September morning, the gap between the lake and that line was only about twenty-six and a half feet, and the water was still dropping almost every single day.
The old record had actually fallen a month earlier, on August fifteenth, when the lake slipped to 3,519.91 feet and beat the previous low from April of twenty twenty three by a single hundredth of a foot.
It struck me as fitting that such a historic moment was decided by a margin thinner than a fingernail, because that is how close this system now runs to the edge.
The low water also uncovered places most living people had never seen.
Cathedral in the Desert, a soaring sandstone chamber with a waterfall in a side canyon off the Escalante arm, came back into the light, and Gregory Natural Bridge, a 127 foot stone span that vanished under the lake in nineteen sixty nine, stood clear of the water once more.
One couple from the Denver area told reporters they had towed their fishing boat about six hundred miles only to find the lake nearly out of reach.
The very next morning, on September sixteenth, rain started reaching the lake.
That September turned into the wettest ever recorded in the Four Corners region, where Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico meet, and for the first time in months the decline stopped.
The real force behind the turnaround, though, came from far out in the Pacific Ocean.
Hurricane Polo exploded from winds of 45 miles per hour to 150 miles per hour in about a day and a half, becoming one of the three strongest storms ever seen there, and it slammed into Baja California Sur on September twenty ninth.
Its leftovers swept north, flooding the small town of Orderville in Utah and forcing a helicopter rescue of three people trapped in Heaps Canyon in Zion National Park, while flood watches covered most of Arizona and New Mexico.
Hurricane Rachel followed in the middle of October, and because the ground was already soaked, the rain had nowhere to go but downhill toward the river.
On October eleventh, only about 5,500 cubic feet per second were reaching the lake.
A day later the figure had nearly doubled, by October fourteenth it was 13,200, and on October fifteenth it hit 21,712 while only 6,618 left through the dam, lifting the lake almost half a foot in a single day.
On October sixteenth Powell crossed back above its old record for the first time since August, and by October seventeenth it had gained 3.69 feet from the bottom.
What fascinates me most is how badly the rain embarrassed the snow.
The entire spring melt of twenty twenty six raised Lake Powell only about two feet, and a few weeks of autumn storms have now lifted it roughly four times as much.
That sounds like wonderful news until you realize it says far more about how pitiful the snow was than about how generous the rain has been.
It is a bit like bragging that a birthday check from a neighbor was bigger than your monthly paycheck, without admitting that the paycheck barely showed up at all.
All of that water landed in the top half of the river, and Glen Canyon Dam is holding most of it there.
Three hundred miles downstream, in the lake that keeps the lights and fountains of Las Vegas running, the story was moving in exactly the opposite direction.
The Lake That Kept Falling Lake Mead is the largest reservoir in the United States, and for many of you it is tied to memories of weekend trips to Las Vegas, the drive out to Hoover Dam, or a houseboat vacation on its blue water.
This year it has been setting records nobody wanted to see.
On August seventh it fell to 1,040.50 feet, breaking the low it set in July of twenty twenty two.
It broke that again on October ninth at 1,037.60 feet, then on October fifteenth at 1,037.53, and on October twenty second it reached 1,037.16 feet, the lowest level since April of nineteen thirty seven, when the lake behind Hoover Dam was still filling for the very first time.
That leaves the lake about 192 feet below full, holding roughly 6.78 million acre feet, about 26 percent of its capacity.
Together with Powell, the two reservoirs hold less water than at any time since nineteen fifty seven, which is a remarkable statistic when you remember that Lake Powell did not even exist in nineteen fifty seven.
The reason Mead sank while Powell rose becomes simple once you think of the river as two buckets joined by a pipe.
Powell is the upper bucket and Mead is the lower one, and the autumn storms fell mostly on land that drains into Powell.
The dam between them is already releasing water at the lowest rate its rules allow, so the new water stays upstream.
Back in April, the Bureau of Reclamation openly admitted that cutting releases from Powell would speed up the decline at Mead, and that is precisely what happened.
The small creeks between the two dams were expected to add about 120,000 acre feet in October, roughly 147 percent of normal, yet even that bonus could not turn the lake around, and it slipped another 0.37 feet between October fifteenth and October twenty second.
The consequences reach far beyond the shoreline, because Hoover Dam, the great Art Deco wall that tourists have photographed since the nineteen thirties, is already producing an estimated 40 to 50 percent less power than it did in the year two thousand, when the lake was full.
Mead still has about 88 feet left above the level where its own turbines would struggle and about 142 feet above dead pool, so it has more breathing room than Powell, but that cushion has been shrinking year after year.
There is also a darker side to these falling waterlines that Las Vegas has not forgotten.
When Mead dropped sharply in twenty twenty two, the receding shoreline exposed human remains, including a body sealed in a barrel near Hemenway Harbor that police linked to a killing from decades earlier.
Every new record low quietly revives that eerie memory, because nobody knows what else the lake is still hiding.
Nevada’s Republican governor decided in August that he had heard enough promises from Washington, and the papers his lawyers filed set off a political fight that has pulled in a Democratic governor next door and the Secretary of the Interior himself.
A Line In The Sand For years the seven states that share the Colorado River were told to reach a voluntary deal before the old operating rules, written in two thousand seven, expire at the end of twenty twenty six.
They missed a deadline in November, missed another on Valentine’s Day of this year, and were even summoned to Washington by Secretary Burgum in the hope that a room full of governors might break the deadlock.
It did not work, and the split between the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico, where the snow falls, and the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada, where most of the water is used, only grew wider.
On August twenty first, Burgum signed what is called a Record of Decision, setting the rules for twenty twenty seven and twenty twenty eight along with a ten year framework that runs to twenty thirty six.
Under that plan, the three Lower Basin states must cut a combined 1.25 million acre feet every year and hold another 700,000 acre feet back in reservoirs, with Arizona alone giving up about 760,000 acre feet and California about 440,000.
The four Upper Basin states face no required cuts at all, only voluntary targets, and that single detail is the spark behind everything that followed.
Three days later, on August twenty fourth, Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo sued.
His state, joined by the Colorado River Commission of Nevada and the Southern Nevada Water Authority, filed a 31 page complaint in federal court arguing that Washington broke environmental law and the century old rules of the river, and that it never even studied what the cuts would do to southern Nevada’s 180 billion dollar economy.
In the worst case, Nevada could lose more than 213,000 of its 300,000 acre feet, about 71 percent, and almost all of that water serves the Las Vegas Valley.
Lombardo summed up his anger by declaring that the Department of the Interior cannot simply roll over Nevada.
Then came October sixteenth, the same day Lake Powell crossed back above its old record.
Arizona’s Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs announced that her state was joining the Republican governor’s lawsuit, creating a cross party alliance you rarely see in Western water politics, and her words made headlines across the region: “We are drawing a line in the sand.”
Arizona’s fear is very specific, because the Central Arizona Project, the canal system that carries river water to Phoenix and Tucson, holds junior rights and could see its supply cut by 77 percent over two years if the Lower Basin’s own conservation agreement collapses.
Under that agreement, Arizona, California and Nevada had already offered to save more than 3.2 million acre feet across twenty twenty seven and twenty twenty eight.
The twist that surprised me most is that the three downstream states are not standing together in court.
California declined to sue, and its Colorado River commissioner, JB Hamby, praised the federal plan for giving the region much needed certainty at a moment of extraordinary risk.
So the bloc that usually speaks with one voice is now openly split.
Visiting southern Arizona this week, Burgum predicted the suit would be tossed because, in his view, a state cannot claim to be injured by something that has only happened in theory, and he warned that Arizona should be careful about letting a judge decide where its water goes, while insisting he is still optimistic about a negotiated solution.
Arizona Congressman Greg Stanton pushed back hard and defended his state’s decision.
The federal government must file its formal answer by the end of this month, no court date has been set, and the fight could eventually reach the Supreme Court.
What makes the courtroom drama even more uncomfortable is that the government’s own forecast, released only two days before Arizona joined the suit, shows how little room for error anybody has left.
Ninety Nine Hundredths Of A Foot Every month the Bureau of Reclamation publishes a forecast that looks two years ahead, and it comes in three versions, a dry one, a middle one and a wet one.
The October edition, released on October fourteenth, was the first in a long time to come out better than the month before, which sounds encouraging until you read the dry version.
That dry scenario assumes the river brings only 42 percent of its normal flow, which is hardly far fetched when the year that just ended delivered 39 percent.
Under those conditions, Lake Powell falls to 3,497.3 feet by the end of September twenty twenty seven and keeps sinking until February of twenty twenty eight, when it bottoms out at 3,490.99 feet.
That leaves 0.99 of a foot above the point where the turbines stop, a margin smaller than an ordinary twelve inch school ruler.
The same scenario sends Lake Mead below 1,000 feet by March of twenty twenty eight, a threshold that water managers in Las Vegas and Phoenix have dreaded for decades.
To appreciate how much the storms changed things, consider that only a month earlier the September dry forecast had Powell crossing below the power line at the end of September twenty twenty seven and sinking to 3,475.21 feet, roughly fifteen feet underneath it.
A few weeks of rain moved the worst case up by about sixteen feet.
I find that both reassuring and unnerving, because a system that can gain sixteen feet from a handful of storms can lose just as much from one bad winter.
The middle forecast, the one Reclamation considers most likely, has Powell dipping to about 3,516 feet in February of next year and then rising roughly twenty feet by the following September, but only if the river delivers 81 percent of normal, which is more than double what it managed this past year.
The wet forecast assumes a spectacular 157 percent and still leaves the lake about 94 feet short of full.
In other words, there is no scenario anywhere in the government’s own book that refills Lake Powell, not even the dream case.
There is another tripwire buried in the new rules that few people have noticed.
If any of these monthly forecasts shows Powell dropping below 3,500 feet before the following March, the Interior Department must consult with the states and tribes, and releases from the dam could be cut as low as 5 million acre feet a year, which would hit Lake Mead even harder.
Naturally, almost everyone is now pinning their hopes on El Niño.
On October fifteenth, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its winter outlook and gave an 83 percent chance that this El Niño becomes the strongest on record for the final months of the year, with Pacific waters already running 2.1 degrees Celsius above normal.
National Weather Service Director Ken Graham explained that a very strong El Niño usually shifts the jet stream south and east, tilting the odds toward stormier weather across the southern states.
The catch lies in geography, because the same outlook leans drier and warmer for parts of the northern Rockies, where drought is expected to develop or worsen, and that is precisely where the Colorado River begins and where the snow that fills Lake Powell falls.
A soaking winter in Phoenix does very little for a reservoir that depends on snow in Wyoming and Colorado.
Brad Udall of Colorado State University has warned that El Niño years are scattered all over the historical record, with a few enormous winters such as nineteen eighty three and nineteen ninety eight and plenty of disappointments in between.
To understand why so much emotion surrounds this one reservoir, and why some people would happily see it drained, you need to meet the famous faces who stood in Glen Canyon before the water ever covered it.
Heston, Lady Bird And The Canyon Nobody Saw In the winter of nineteen sixty two, director George Stevens brought a Hollywood army into the depths of Glen Canyon to film The Greatest Story Ever Told, a thirty million dollar biblical epic with Max von Sydow as Jesus and Charlton Heston as John the Baptist.
The crew was racing the rising water, because the dam downstream was nearly finished.
Heston performed baptism scenes in the icy Colorado River with a wetsuit hidden under his robes, thunderstorms kept halting the shoot, and finally a blizzard buried the set under a foot of snow.
Few people realize that the prefab houses built for that cast and crew became the beginning of what is now Wahweap Lodge and Marina, or that the film is one of the last moving records of the canyon before it disappeared.
Less than five years later, Heston was back for Planet of the Apes, and the famous opening, where the astronauts crash and wade ashore in a strange desert, was filmed on Lake Powell near Padre Bay, not far from where he had played John the Baptist on dry ground.
Many of you watched that movie in a theater in nineteen sixty eight without knowing you were looking at a drowned canyon.
The man who drowned it was Floyd Dominy, the cigar chomping commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation who served under four presidents.
He was not an engineer, but he was a master at working Congress, and one Interior official famously said he yanked money in and out of congressmen’s districts like a yo yo.
Decades later, asked about Glen Canyon, he insisted he had no apologies.
Dominy lived to be one hundred, and in one of history’s great ironies he is also credited with first sketching, on a napkin, a way to bypass the very dam he fought to build.
On September twenty second, nineteen sixty six, Lady Bird Johnson came to Page to dedicate Glen Canyon Dam, with Interior Secretary Stewart Udall at the ceremony, and a lawn at the dam still carries her name.
On that day the lake stood at about 3,531 feet, and on October twenty third of this year it stood at 3,525, which means that after sixty years and countless family houseboat holidays, the lake has sunk back below the level it reached on the day the First Lady dedicated it.
The bitterest regret belonged to David Brower, the executive director of the Sierra Club.
In nineteen fifty six he agreed to stop fighting Glen Canyon Dam in exchange for blocking two dams in Dinosaur National Monument, and he made that deal without ever having seen Glen Canyon.
When he finally rafted through it in nineteen fifty seven, it broke his heart, and he later wrote that Glen Canyon died in nineteen sixty three and that he was partly responsible for its death.
He called the defeat the darkest day of his life, and in nineteen ninety five he faced Dominy in a public debate and proposed draining the lake altogether.
Even Barry Goldwater, who explored Glen Canyon as a young man in nineteen forty and voted for the dam because Arizona’s growth depended on it, came to share that regret, and novelist Edward Abbey turned the anger into his nineteen seventy five book The Monkey Wrench Gang, about a plot to blow the dam apart.
Those arguments have never ended, and today’s low water has revived calls from groups like the Glen Canyon Institute to let the river run free again through what they call a lost national park.
Stewart Udall stood beside the First Lady at that dedication, and his son Brad Udall has become one of the most respected scientists studying this river.
The numbers Brad Udall tracks explain why the snow his father’s generation counted on has been failing for a quarter of a century.
The Snow That Decides Everything The Colorado River is a river built on snow, and the winter of twenty twenty five into twenty twenty six was one of the driest and warmest ever recorded across the American West.
By the middle of February, a single dry month had cut the forecast for water flowing into Lake Powell by 1.5 million acre feet, equal to about fifty feet of lake level.
On April seventeenth, Reclamation warned that Powell could fall below the power line by August, with the driest likely inflow at just 2.78 million acre feet, only 29 percent of normal.
The government responded with the most aggressive rescue in the lake’s history.
It cut releases from Glen Canyon Dam to 6 million acre feet for the year, the lowest since the nineteen sixties, and began draining water from Flaming Gorge in Wyoming, Navajo Lake in New Mexico and Blue Mesa in Colorado to prop Powell up.
In twenty twenty one, an emergency release from those same reservoirs totaled only 181,000 acre feet, which shows how much more desperate this year became.
Jack Schmidt of Utah State University cautioned that those releases would only slow Powell’s fall rather than raise it, and he predicted in July that the lake would soon enter record breaking territory.
He turned out to be right, and the summer that followed was even harsher than many experts had feared.
The spring melt lifted Powell only about two feet between May seventh and a peak on June first.
Runoff from April through July came in at about 18 percent of average, June alone was around 12 percent, and by August the natural flow had dried up to zero.
The water year that ended on September thirtieth delivered 3.7 million acre feet, just 39 percent of normal.
Some of the blame reaches back more than a century.
In their book Science Be Dammed, historians Eric Kuhn and John Fleck show that the men who wrote the Colorado River Compact of nineteen twenty two built it on an unusually wet stretch of years, and that a government hydrologist named E.
C.
LaRue warned them the river was smaller than they assumed.
His warning was pushed aside, and the states have been dividing water that never really existed ever since.
Brad Udall compares today’s warmer air to a thirsty sponge overhead that soaks up moisture before it ever reaches the streams, and river flows have fallen about 20 percent since the year two thousand.
As he put it, we have a much smaller glass and too many straws in that glass.
Udall has also suggested that the endless short term deals may accidentally force the states to adjust every couple of years instead of pretending the river is bigger than it is.
History also warns us that fortunes on this river can flip with frightening speed.
In the enormous snow year of nineteen eighty three, Lake Powell rose so high that it came within about two meters of the top of Glen Canyon Dam, and that same reservoir is now arguing over fractions of a foot near the bottom, which shows how wildly this system can swing.
That is why the coming weeks matter so much, because the federal answer to the Nevada and Arizona lawsuit is due by the end of October and Reclamation releases its November forecast in the middle of next month.
NOAA publishes its next El Niño update on November twelfth and its next seasonal outlook on November nineteenth.
From January through April, the snowpack in Wyoming, Colorado and Utah will decide whether these autumn storms were the start of a comeback or a brief reprieve before the deepest water cuts in the river’s history.
The rain this fall was real, and it bought Lake Powell a few precious feet and a few precious months, but a reservoir does not fill on weather, it fills on winter, and that winter has not arrived yet.
Do you think this autumn rain is the start of a real comeback for Lake Powell, or just a lucky pause before a harsher reckoning?
Tell me in the comments.
