If you get a excuse to drive by Lake Powell and Hite Marina anytime soon, you really should. The reservoir levels have dropped quite significantly in the past few years, it makes for a very interesting sight. Hite Marina itself is nowhere near water; the concrete boat ramp ends high up in the slickrock, which itself is divided from the river by a silt flat covered in sprouting weeds. The Colorado is flowing well past Hite, and its sediment load is pushing a delta out into the reservoir. Here is a good photo, and here is another with a summary of the current drought situation.

I was unable to take as thorough a look at the area as I would have liked, but I saw the same thing on a smaller scale all over the west this summer. All the reservoirs are low, from Oregon to New Mexico to Montana, some extremely so. I even saw one (whose name I do not know, but it’s in the Tusher mountains between Beaver, UT and Elk Meadows ski resort) which was completely empty; the small stream which flowed through it had carved a ten to fifteen foot gorge into the crumbling silt. The exact same thing is of course happening in Lake Powell’s tributaries, where current is again flowing through stretches where the silt had long been settling in still water. Such cliffs and flats of sediment are very unstable, and they will erode very quickly and are likely to intensify greatly the sedimentation problems further down the reservoir.

One of the greatest ironies to me is that the dams were largely sold to the public by touting the recreational opportunities they would create; but recreation at Lake Powell is the industry most palpably suffering. Hite Marina is pretty much shut down, Bullfrog and Antelope Point Marinas face a grim near-future, and power boaters are greatly inconvenienced. White-water rafting upstream in Cataract Canyon, a multi-million dollar
industry which predates the dam, is likewise faced with safety and logistical issues caused by the low reservoir. More and more I am glad that I guide in Idaho, where the rivers flow free and civilization is safely downstream.