Lake Powell, created in 1963 by Glen Canyon Dam, is experiencing a severe decline due to climate change and overallocation of Colorado River water, with water levels dropping to just 30 feet above 'dead pool' by April 2023. This decline is revealing submerged landscapes, including ancient sandstone chambers like Cathedral in the Desert and ancestral Puebloan ruins, that have been underwater for over 60 years. The Colorado River Compact of 1922 allocated more water than the river can consistently provide, and a 2022 study found the current drought is the most severe in 1,200 years, with nearly half linked to human-caused climate change. As the reservoir approaches dead pool, the dam loses its ability to generate electricity and release water, fundamentally changing the Colorado River system and raising questions about water rights, ecological restoration, and the future of the American Southwest.
Footage From Beneath Lake Powell Shows What's Emerging After 60 Years UnderwaterAdded:
A drought in the West right now is so severe, it has flipped the water year on its head. That's right. When lakes are supposed to be at their fullest, they're actually at their lowest. Fox 13's Max Roth joins us in studio with an in-depth look at Lake Powell. Hidden within the dramatic desert landscape between Utah and Arizona, where the Colorado River carves its way through endless sandstone cliffs and winding canyons, sits one of America's largest artificial lakes, Lake Powell. Created in 1963 after the construction of Glen Canyon Dam, this enormous structure towers 710 ft above the river near the town of Page.
At full capacity, Lake Powell holds nearly 26 million acre-feet of water, stretching deep into southern Utah, and supplying water and hydroelectric power to millions across the Southwest for decades.
But today, the reservoir stands at the center of one of the most serious environmental emergencies in modern American history.
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In 1999, the lake was nearly full, sitting at around 3,700 ft above sea level.
By April 2023, however, the water had dropped to roughly 3,520 ft, dangerously close to the critical level engineers call dead pool, where the dam can no longer produce electricity or release water through its main systems.
For years, many people viewed Lake Powell's decline as just another drought A temporary problem that would eventually correct itself.
But, scientists and water experts are now warning that something much bigger is unfolding.
This may not be a temporary drought at all, but the beginning of a permanent transformation of the Colorado River system itself.
And as the reservoir shrinks, something astonishing is emerging from beneath the water.
Landscapes drowned since 1963 are slowly returning to daylight.
Ancient canyon pathways, twisting river channels, hidden sandstone chambers, and ancestral Puebloan ruins are resurfacing after spending more than half a century underwater.
One of the most remarkable places to reappear is Cathedral in the Desert.
A stunning natural sandstone chamber tucked deep inside Clear Creek Canyon near the Escalante River.
Before the flooding, visitors described it as almost otherworldly.
Massive curved rock walls glowed with reflected light, while waterfalls echoed through the canyon's hidden interior.
Shortly after the world discovered its beauty in the 1960s, it vanished beneath the rising reservoir.
Now, as Lake Powell recedes, these forgotten landscapes are coming back.
Forcing people to confront what was lost when the canyon was flooded in the first place.
To understand the significance of this moment, you have to understand what Glen Canyon once was.
Before the dam, it wasn't empty wasteland waiting to be developed. It was one of the most ecologically and archeologically rich regions in the American West.
Stretching nearly 200 miles along the Colorado River between the Dirty Devil River and Lee's Ferry, the canyon system was filled with slot canyons, sandstone cliffs, hidden chambers, and ancient landscapes shaped over millions of years.
Unlike the Grand Canyon, which isolates visitors deep below towering cliffs, Glen Canyon allowed exploration.
Travelers drifting down the river could step into narrow side canyons and discover silent natural cathedrals carved by wind and water.
Almost no roads reached these places and few trails existed.
Entering Glen Canyon felt like stepping into a world untouched by modern time.
Many environmentalists later argued that the greatest tragedy was that Glen Canyon only became famous after it was already doomed.
Conservationists warned that flooding the canyon would destroy landscapes unlike anything else on Earth. Yet the project moved forward under the Colorado River Storage Project approved by Congress in 1956.
The mission was clear: store water and generate electricity for the rapidly growing Southwest.
But now, decades later, the reservoir that buried Glen Canyon is beginning to disappear.
And as Lake Powell moves closer to dead pool, the lost canyon beneath it is slowly resurfacing.
Revealing a hidden world many believed was gone forever.
Originally, the Colorado River Project planned to place a massive dam at Echo Park.
Environmental activists led by David Brower and the Sierra Club launched an aggressive national campaign to stop it.
They organized protests, pressured Congress with thousands of letters, created films, and fought tirelessly to protect the monument.
Eventually, they succeeded.
Echo Park Dam was removed from the project, but the victory came at a devastating cost. The replacement site chosen for the dam was Glen Canyon.
The dam builders still needed a location, and Glen Canyon seemed politically expendable.
Unlike Echo Park, it had no federal monument protection, no national reputation, and almost no public awareness.
Most Americans had never even heard of it.
Years later, Brower would describe the decision as one of the greatest environmental mistakes in American history.
At the time he agreed to the compromise, he had never actually seen Glen Canyon himself.
Very few people had.
Between the dam's approval in 1956 and the sealing of the diversion tunnels in 1963, a small group of photographers, writers, and conservationists rushed to preserve what they could before the canyon vanished forever.
Among them was Eliot Porter, whose groundbreaking color photography captured the hidden beauty of Glen Canyon during multiple river expeditions in the early 1960s.
Porter photographed winding sandstone corridors, quiet alcoves, glowing canyon walls, and places so isolated they seemed untouched by time.
In 1963, the Sierra Club published his images in a book titled The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado.
The title was deliberate and heartbreaking.
By the time the book reached readers, the reservoir was already beginning to rise.
The landscapes in the photographs were disappearing beneath the water even as people turned the pages.
Readers saw places like cathedral in the desert, hidden gardens nourished by desert springs, and ancestral Puebloan granaries tucked high into sandstone alcoves.
Every image carried the same haunting realization.
These places would soon be gone forever.
And the water kept rising.
By 1980, Lake Powell had reached full capacity.
Glen Canyon had disappeared beneath the reservoir.
But the canyon was never empty land.
Long before the dam, ancestral Pueblo peoples, the ancestors of today's Hopi, Zuni, and other Pueblo communities, lived throughout the region for centuries.
They built homes into cliff walls, stored food in carefully protected granaries, and left behind petroglyphs and pictographs carved into the stone.
Hundreds of archaeological sites existed throughout Glen Canyon before the flooding began.
Federal law required archaeologists to document and recover as much as possible before the reservoir submerged the area.
Emergency excavations were carried out during the late 1950s and early 1960s by researchers from the University of Utah and the University of Colorado.
But the task was impossible to fully complete.
The canyon system was enormous. The timeline was short, and funding was limited.
Many sites were only partially recorded.
Others were never discovered at all.
Archaeologists knew entire chapters of human history were vanishing underwater.
Ceremonial sites, burial grounds, and evidence of civilizations that had existed there for over a thousand years.
The cultural loss extended far beyond archaeology. The region also holds deep spiritual significance for the Navajo nation, along with the Hopi, Ute, Paiute, and Zuni peoples.
These were not abandoned ruins frozen in the past. They were sacred landscapes connected to living communities and traditions. Yet, the dam moved forward anyway.
The kind of tribal consultation that would be legally required today was virtually nonexistent in the 1950s.
Federal priorities focused almost entirely on water storage and electricity generation, while cultural and spiritual concerns were pushed aside.
For decades, Glen Canyon survived only in memories, stories, and photographs.
Then, something changed. The water started falling.
What is happening to Lake Powell is often described as a drought.
But, droughts end. Rain returns.
Reservoirs recover. Systems stabilize again.
What scientists are now observing on the Colorado River is something much deeper.
The river itself is shrinking.
When the Colorado River Compact divided the river's water among seven western states in 1922, officials relied on flow measurements taken during an unusually wet period.
The agreement promised [music] more water than the river could consistently provide under normal conditions.
For decades, the mismatch remained hidden because giant reservoirs like Lake Powell and Lake Mead stored enormous reserves of water.
When river inflows dropped below demand, the reservoirs compensated for the shortfall. Now, those reserves are disappearing.
A major 2022 study led by Park Williams and published in nature climate change used ancient tree ring records to reconstruct the region's climate history.
The findings were alarming. The drought that began around 2000 appears to be the most severe in at least 1200 years.
Researchers also concluded that nearly half of its intensity is linked directly to human-caused climate change.
Rising temperatures are increasing evaporation, reducing snowpack in the Rocky Mountains, and causing the Colorado River system to lose water faster than it can recover.
This is no longer viewed as a temporary cycle.
Scientists increasingly see it as a long-term shift.
Lake Powell reflects that reality. In 2000, the reservoir remained close to full.
By 2005, water levels had fallen sharply.
By 2010, the decline accelerated even more.
By 2015, sections of the original canyon floor had begun reappearing in the upper reaches of the lake. Eventually, places like Hite Marina became unusable as the shoreline retreated too far for boats to reach the water.
By 2020, entire arms of the reservoir near the Dirty Devil and Escalante rivers had drained away, exposing landscapes hidden underwater for more than 50 years.
Then came the warning no engineer ever wanted to hear.
By April 2023, Lake Powell's surface had fallen to around 3520 feet above sea level. Just 30 feet above dead pool.
Dead pool is not symbolic language. It is a hard engineering limit. At roughly 3490 ft, Glen Canyon Dam loses the ability to release water through its lower outlet systems.
Hydroelectric generation stops.
The infrastructure designed to control the Colorado River begins to fail.
Once Lake Powell falls below a certain elevation, the physics behind Glen Canyon Dam simply stop working.
There is no longer enough hydraulic pressure to force water through the dam's lower outlet systems.
In practical terms, the dam stops functioning as a passageway for the Colorado River.
It becomes a barrier holding water in place.
At that same threshold, the hydroelectric turbines also shut down.
The dam, which normally produces more than 1,300 MW of electricity for the Southwest power grid, loses its generating capability entirely.
Below dead pool, Glen Canyon Dam no longer works as a source of water delivery or electrical power. It becomes, quite literally, a concrete wall across the river.
The consequences extend far beyond Lake Powell itself.
Millions of people in Arizona, Nevada, California, and even parts of Mexico depend on the Colorado River system downstream.
Lake Mead, which sits below Glen Canyon Dam, relies heavily on water released from Lake Powell.
If Powell can no longer send water downstream, Lake Mead's own decline accelerates rapidly.
The two reservoirs are tied together operationally. A failure at one quickly becomes a crisis for the other.
For years, the United States Bureau of Reclamation has tried to slow the collapse.
Water releases have been reduced.
Emergency conservation measures have been introduced.
Agreements between Western states have forced cuts in water usage while drought contingency plans attempted to stretch shrinking supplies for as long as possible.
But none of these efforts have actually reversed the trend.
They have only delayed it.
The reservoirs continue to fall.
And as the water retreats, something remarkable is happening beneath the surface of Lake Powell.
The canyon that vanished decades ago is beginning to return.
Places like Cathedral in the Desert, submerged since the 1960s, have reappeared during recent low water years.
In 2022 and 2023, when Lake Powell reached some of its lowest levels in history, the cathedral emerged more completely than it had in generations.
The waterfall once photographed by Eliot Porter in 1962 began flowing again.
Sandstone walls stained by decades underwater stood exposed to sunlight once more.
Still remarkably preserved despite years beneath the reservoir.
For people who had only seen Glen Canyon through old photographs and books, the experience felt surreal.
Many described it as witnessing the return of a lost world.
A place believed destroyed forever was suddenly visible again.
And it wasn't just the cathedral.
Across the Escalante arm of Lake Powell, long flooded side canyons began reopening to the desert sky.
Hanging gardens fed by hidden springs started growing again after surviving underwater for decades.
Archaeological sites buried before they could be fully studied became accessible once more.
Farther upstream, Cataract Canyon began reclaiming its original form as the still reservoir water pulled back.
Rapids returned.
Sandbars reappeared.
The Colorado River itself slowly started behaving like a river again instead of an artificial lake.
The transformation raised a question almost nobody had seriously considered before.
What happens if Glen Canyon comes back permanently?
One organization has spent decades arguing that this exact scenario should happen intentionally. [music] The Glen Canyon Institute, founded in 1996, has long promoted a plan known as Fill Mead First.
The idea is simple. Instead of splitting Colorado River storage between two giant reservoirs, consolidate the water primarily in Lake Mead and allow Lake Powell to drain.
Supporters argue that maintaining both reservoirs wastes enormous amounts of water every year through evaporation and seepage.
Because Lake Powell stretches through countless shallow sandstone side canyons, it loses especially large amounts of water into the desert environment itself.
A single major reservoir, they argue, would be far more efficient than two.
For years, critics dismissed the proposal as unrealistic and politically impossible.
But as Lake Powell edges closer to dead pool, ideas once considered extreme are beginning to look less hypothetical.
Heavy winter storms in 2022 and 2023 temporarily raised water levels and bought the system additional time.
Yet those wet seasons also revealed how unstable the entire river network has become.
One strong winter can slow the decline for a while, but it cannot erase the long-term imbalance between water supply and demand.
The Bureau of Reclamation's own projections continue to model scenarios where Lake Powell reaches critically low levels, including conditions where Glen Canyon Dam can no longer operate as intended.
If that happens, the debate changes completely.
The question will no longer be whether Glen Canyon should be restored.
Restoration may already be happening on its own.
And beneath the receding water lies another complication waiting to surface.
Since 1963, Glen Canyon Dam has trapped enormous quantities of sediment carried by the Colorado River.
Mud, sand, and debris that once flowed naturally downstream through the canyon system.
Every year, the Colorado River carries enormous amounts of sediment downstream.
Millions of tons of sand, clay, and silt that once traveled naturally through the Grand Canyon before eventually reaching the Gulf of California.
Since 1963, however, much of that material has been trapped behind Glen Canyon Dam.
Instead of continuing downstream, the sediment has slowly collected inside Lake Powell for decades.
Experts estimate the reservoir loses roughly 100,000 acre-feet of storage capacity every year because of this build-up.
Layer after layer of mud and debris now covers large portions of the original canyon floor. So, even if Lake Powell were to drain completely, the Glen Canyon that reappears would not be exactly the same canyon that disappeared beneath the water in the 1960s.
Entire sections of the landscape have been reshaped.
Some side canyons may now be partially buried under sediment deposits.
Original river channels could remain hidden beneath decades of accumulated material.
The canyon is returning, but it is returning altered.
The environmental consequences of all this stretch far beyond Lake Powell itself.
For more than 60 years, the Grand Canyon downstream has been starved of the sediment that once sustained its ecosystem.
Sand bars and beaches along the river have steadily eroded.
Native fish species that evolved alongside the river's natural sediment flow have struggled to survive in an environment transformed by the dam.
If Lake Powell continues draining, that trapped sediment may eventually begin moving downstream again.
The original diversion tunnels built during the construction of Glen Canyon Dam could theoretically allow sediment-rich water to pass through the system.
Managing something like that would be extraordinarily difficult. No modern engineering project has ever attempted restoration on this scale, but it could also create a rare ecological opportunity.
Beaches in the Grand Canyon might slowly rebuild. Native fish habitats could begin recovering after decades of disruption.
The river ecosystem would not return to exactly what it once was, but it could start healing.
And perhaps most importantly, the landscape behind the dam would once again become a canyon instead of a reservoir.
For the tribal nations connected to Glen Canyon, the re-emergence carries deep emotional and spiritual meaning.
The cliff dwellings, rock art panels, sacred spaces, and ancient granaries surfacing from beneath the lake are not simply archaeological discoveries. They are pieces of living cultural heritage tied directly to communities that still exist today.
The flooding of Glen Canyon happened during an era when tribal voices were largely excluded from major federal decisions.
The Navajo Nation, the Hopi tribe, and other indigenous nations were not true participants in the process.
They were informed after decisions had already been made.
Even today, water rights across the Colorado River Basin remain deeply contested. In 2023, the Navajo Nation versus Arizona decision highlighted the uncertainty surrounding indigenous access to Colorado River water.
The Supreme Court ruled against the Navajo Nation's attempt to secure enforceable water rights, leaving many communities without guaranteed access to the river flowing through their ancestral homeland.
Water politics in the American Southwest have always been tied to power.
Who has it? Who controls it?
And who gets left out?
Glen Canyon was flooded because the federal government had the ability to do it.
The people trying to protect the canyon lacked the political strength to stop it.
Now, as the canyon slowly returns, the region faces a decision no one expected to confront so soon.
If Lake Powell reaches dead pool, the United States Bureau of Reclamation will face two possible paths. The first option is to keep trying to save the reservoir system exactly as it was designed.
That would require significantly higher Colorado River flows for many years, something climate projections increasingly suggest may never happen again.
It would mean betting that the wetter conditions of the early 20th century will somehow return.
The second option is far more difficult politically, accepting that the river system has permanently changed and beginning to redesign the future of the Colorado River without relying on Lake Powell as it once existed.
That would require rewriting water agreements, rebuilding infrastructure, and acknowledging that many of the assumptions behind the great dam projects of the 20th century no longer match the realities of the modern climate.
Neither path is easy, but the river itself is indifferent to political debates.
The Colorado River is shrinking. Lake Powell is falling and Glen Canyon is emerging once again.
David Brower spent much of his later life trying to reverse the compromise he accepted in the 1950s.
After helping lead the fight to save Echo Park, he dedicated decades to environmental activism through organizations like Friends of the Earth and later the Glen Canyon Institute, which focused directly on restoring Glen Canyon itself.
Brower often referred to Glen Canyon as the place no one knew.
To him, that phrase represented a tragedy.
He believed that if Americans had truly seen the canyon before the flooding, public pressure might have saved it just as it saved Echo Park.
But the world discovered Glen Canyon too late.
By the time Eliot Porter published his famous photographs, the reservoir was already rising.
The images became memorials to a landscape disappearing underwater in real time.
For decades, those photographs represented a world that no longer existed.
Now, something extraordinary is happening.
Visitors floating through the returning canyon carry Porter's book with them as they enter places like Cathedral in the Desert.
>> [music] >> They compare the old images to what stands before them today.
The same curved sandstone walls, the same waterfall, the same glowing light filtering through narrow canyon openings.
The place no one knew is becoming visible again.
It is not the exact same canyon that disappeared beneath the reservoir.
Sediment has reshaped parts of it.
Decades underwater have left scars.
Archaeological sites have returned damaged and altered, but the canyon is still there.
And the question David Brower spent the final decades of his life asking, whether Glen Canyon could ever return, may ultimately be answered not through politics, but through physics itself.
The dam is not being removed.
The reservoir is simply disappearing.
And the return of Glen Canyon is no longer a theory or a proposal.
It is already happening.
This is not happening because of a single bad drought year or a temporary weather cycle.
Lake Powell is moving toward dead pool because the Colorado River no longer provides enough water to sustain the system that was built around it.
Eventually, the reservoir behind Glen Canyon Dam could fall below the minimum elevation required for the dam to function.
When that moment arrives, the infrastructure designed to control the river will stop operating the way it was intended to.
And behind the dam, the canyon will still be there.
Changed by sediment, marked by decades underwater, but unmistakably present.
A landscape the 20th century attempted to bury, now slowly reappearing in the 21st.
For the nearly 40 million people who rely on the Colorado River system downstream, the consequences could reshape the American Southwest.
Water delivery networks may need to be rebuilt. Agreements that govern the river for generations could be rewritten from the ground up.
Political battles over water allocation are likely to intensify as supplies continue shrinking.
But beneath all the legal disputes, engineering plans, and emergency negotiations, one reality remains constant.
Glen Canyon is returning.
The reservoir is declining.
The canyon beneath it is resurfacing.
Places once believed permanently lost, like Cathedral in the Desert, are emerging from the water once again.
Visitors can now stand in chambers that existed for millions of years, disappeared beneath the reservoir for six decades, and are now seeing daylight again for the first time since the 1960s.
The photographs taken by Eliot Porter and the warnings voiced by David Brower once seemed like memorials to a vanished world.
Today, those same photographs are becoming guides to landscapes people can physically visit once more.
The curved sandstone walls remain.
The hanging gardens are returning.
Ancient alcoves where ancestral Pueblo peoples once stored corn centuries ago are appearing again as the lake retreats.
The dam still stands, but the reservoir continues to fall, and the canyon continues to rise from beneath it.
Meanwhile, officials in places like Washington, Phoenix, and Salt Lake City are facing a problem unlike anything previous generations had to confront.
What happens when the massive infrastructure built to support the modern Southwest no longer matches the reality of the river itself?
The Colorado River is already writing the answer.
Every foot of receding water reveals it more clearly.
The answer is Glen Canyon.
Flooded for 60 years, returning now, waiting to see what humanity will do when it can no longer keep the canyon submerged.
Lake Powell is dying.
Glen Canyon is coming back.
And whatever decisions are made next, politically, environmentally, or economically, the canyon will remain at the center of them all.
The future of tens of millions of people may depend on those choices.
But one thing appears increasingly unavoidable.
The canyon is still there.
It waited beneath the water for more than half a century.
And it can keep waiting a little longer.
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