Boat Ramps At Lake Powell Now 1/3 Of A Mile Long - Good Article

[hatrack]

PAGE, Arizona — Maintenance workers at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area are playing tag with Lake Powell. Each time they think they have it cornered, it slips away again.

The worst drought in the recorded history of the western United States has shrunk the lake behind Glen Canyon Dam to its lowest point in more than 30 years, leaving a 117-foot-high bathtub ring of white mineral deposits on the ruddy shoreline cliffs. To keep pace with the reservoir's steadily receding shoreline, the National Park Service has poured hundreds of cubic yards of concrete to extend marina boat-launch ramps twice in the past two years.

At Wahweap, the lake's most heavily used marina, the ramp is now about 1,300 feet long, according to Park Service spokeswoman Char Obergh. It is a vertigo-inducing slab of monumentally proportioned pavement and would seem a strong contender for the title of Longest and Steepest Boat Ramp in North America if not for the fact that another ramp at Lake Powell, the one at Bullfrog Marina, has been extended to 1,568 feet — nearly one-third of a mile.

Elsewhere at the lake, the Park Service has admitted defeat. Near the upstream end of the 186-mile-long reservoir, crews packed up Hite Marina last winter and hauled it away. Storage in Lake Powell has fallen to 42 percent of capacity, the lowest level since it was first filled, and a weedy landscape of fissured mud fills the canyon where Hite's docks once floated on sparkling water. The record-setting drought, now in its sixth year in some parts of the West, has done more than inconvenience boaters at Lake Powell, the nation's second-largest artificial reservoir. It has thrown a scare into water managers in several states, asking them to confront the possibility that the explosive urban growth of the past 20 years in the region rests upon a hydrological mirage."

EDIT

Long, excellent article!!

http://www.enn.com/news/2004-08-27/s_26723.asp

[lebkuchen]

1. Powell Reservoir

covering up a beautiful canyon. A real shame.

[phantom power]

2. "needless to say"

"Needless to say, if there were no Lake Powell, there would be no Page," Nevills-Staveley said. "It would be a very barren, very dismal scene."

Well, no, it would be the scene of a beautiful canyon system.

I attended a presentation by the GCI a couple years ago. The woman presenting made a prediction that water-issues would likely be the reason they succeeded in decomissioning the dam, if they ever did succeed.

[ochazuke]

3. artificial reservoir?

Isn't that redundant?

[Trillo]

4. Thanks for the read.

One thing that stood out for me was the amount of time it will take to refill Powell. If climate change over the next century is going to decrease snow packs, and if climate change creates a reality where most river flows will be seasonal instead of year round, perhaps more smaller dams will be needed, ones that can be filled in one season.

The loss of the canyons is sad, but I'd like to make sure people have water to drink and farmers have enough water to irrigate their crops.

[hatrack]

6. Hardly anyone directly uses water from the reservoir

Its only users are the resort town of Page, AZ (population approx. 10,000) and the cooling towers of the Navajo Power plant. Aside from the Page golf course, the reservoir's water doesn't irrigate anything.

In addition, at full pool, Powell loses approximately 750,000 acre-feet per year to evaporation alone, though substantially less at lower elevations. This doesn't count losses to seepage and bank storage.

[NNadir]

5. They're acting as if this power is crucial to the West.

They're actually discussing with dubiously spun numbers (5 billion killowatt hours) the fact that this canyon represents a very small power plant (570 Megawatts average power). This is the equivalent of 1/2 the output of an ordinary nuclear plant. It is absurd to claim that anyone "needs" this energy. You could restore the entire canyon by distributing free fluorescent bulbs in Denver.