To hike up this narrow canyon, Eric Balken pushed through dense thickets of green. In the shadow of towering red rock walls, his route along a muddy creekbed was lined with bushes and the subtle hum of life. The canyon echoed the buzzing and chirping of bugs and toads. But not long ago, this exact spot was at the bottom of a reservoir.
“We would have needed scuba gear 20 years ago,” Balken said. “We would have been 150 feet underwater.”
As director of the nonprofit Glen Canyon Institute, Balken has tracked the rebirth of these canyons for years. They were once home to Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir. But as the Colorado River is strained by drought and steady demand, Powell has shrunk to record lows. In the wake of that shrinking, a sprawling web of canyons like this one are seeing the light of day for the first time in decades.
They serve as an unsettling visual reminder of the rapidly-diminishing water supply that provides for roughly 40 million people across the Southwest. They also cradle thriving ecosystems – a humming network of oases in the desert.
On this September afternoon, Balken was joined by a team of environmentalists and scientists looking for one specific species of charismatic rodent.
“Basically,” said Zanna Stutz, Glen Canyon Institute’s program manager, “If the beavers are here, it means good things are happening.”
She explained that beavers are a “keystone species” and serve as an indicator for the health of the whole ecosystem. And in this particular side canyon — a snaking tributary that leads into Lake Powell — they are alive and well.
“There are all these different species of wildlife that are coming back here,” Stutz said. “It is a place that is full of life. It's full of biodiversity.”
Dams, lodges and footprints
Lake Powell’s water levels have been retreating for the past two decades, revealing vast swaths of once-submerged land. The falling water levels have jeopardized hydropower generation and added anxiety to policy talks about managing the region’s water supply.
At the same time, they have put stunning geologic features and lush riverside habitats back in the open air.
Those habitats come back gradually. In the early stages, shortly after the reservoir has pulled out of an area, there is often little more than a flat plain of muddy sediment, with a few lonely seedlings poking out of the muck.
Further up the canyon, where the reservoir pulled out at least two decades ago, life has had time to come back in force. Plants grow thick and tall, teeming with the animals that call them home.
Beavers are architects that make those animal communities even stronger. The continent’s largest rodents move slowly on land, but they’re built for speedy swimming and can escape from predators better in the water. When they settle into a new area, they dam up streams to create ponds that provide them shelter.
Those ponds are providing for more than just beavers. Stutz said they provide a home for native fish, frogs and insects. They also allow water to seep into the banks and provide for plants for a longer portion of the year.
Recent studies have tracked the emergence of old river features and the return of native plants. This one aims to track the return of healthy ecosystems, using beavers as a marker of progress.
Glen Canyon Institute is paying for the study, and scientists from the Tucson, Arizona-based Watershed Management Group are helping carry it out.
One of those scientists, Nadira Mitchell, stood at the foot of a beaver dam and marveled at its size.
“I don't really know how long it would take them to build this huge structure,” she said. “But you can definitely tell that they put in a lot of effort.”
The dam loomed chest high — a messy tangle of branches, leaves, mud and rocks holding back a large pool of standing water. Little trickles emerged from the bottom of the dam, turning back into a babbling stream on the other side. Mitchell said this helps filter the water.
Upstream of the dam, on the other side of the pond, the landscape was littered with signs of beavers. Mitchell pointed to little footprints in the mud, a sign that the “ecosystem engineers” may have been at work mere hours ago. Their wide, paddlelike tails had clearly dragged through the soft sand. All around the stream’s edge, whittled-down branches bore tiny, distinct teeth marks.
Another scientist, Jace Lankow, pointed out a gently chirping toad that also called the pond home.
His colleague Lizbeth Perez came across a strikingly large beaver lodge, a resolute-looking mound of sticks and mud with little openings near the bottom. She got down on her hands and knees, practically sticking her head underwater to peer inside.
“The water goes back all the way and it's all dark,” she said. “It's a pretty well contained lodge.”
The team fanned out and took note of each sign of beavers, from footprints smaller than a human hand to lodges wider than a human wingspan. The team pulled out a tape measure and noted the length of a stream-wide beaver dam.
“It’ll be really exciting to mark that data point and look back on that for the years to come,” Mitchell said.
Policies to protect
Lake Powell is at a crossroads. Dropping water levels are forcing difficult conversations about its future. They could soon drop too low to generate hydropower inside Glen Canyon Dam. They could even drop too low to allow water to pass from the reservoir into the Colorado River on the other side. Some environmentalists are calling for a major shakeup to the region’s water storage system — a policy change that would take Lake Powell’s water and store it elsewhere.
The environmental advocates at Glen Canyon Institute say the habitats in these tributary canyons should be protected by those policies.
“Glen Canyon is viewed by many water managers as a storage tank,” he said, “And it's so much more than that. It's not a barren landscape, it's a living, breathing place.”
But Lake Powell’s decades-long legacy as a key piece of the West’s water storage system will make that difficult. The seven states that use the Colorado River are in the middle of tense negotiations about its future. As they try to balance the needs of major cities and a powerhouse agriculture industry, the needs of the environment can sometimes fall to the back burner. Sinjin Eberle, senior director of communications at the environmental group American Rivers, said that the balancing act may affect decisions about the beaver-laden streams of Glen Canyon.
“Managing [Lake Powell] specifically for those side tributaries,” he said, “I'm not sure that that would be a priority for all of the stakeholders that would be at the table for this.”
Eberle’s group receives funding from the Walton Family Foundation, which also supports KUNC's Colorado River coverage. Eberle called the emergence of thriving habitats in Glen Canyon “inspiring,” but pointed to larger region-wide tensions that could get in the way of policy decisions designed specifically to protect them.
“It will be a real challenge to encourage leaders from the seven basin states and then the hydropower industry to be willing to keep Lake Powell at a level that is more beneficial for the side Canyon ecologies than the security that a higher Lake Powell gives to each individual state that depends on it,” he said.
The National Park Service and the Bureau of Reclamation, which manage Lake Powell, did not provide comment for this story in time for publication.
Lake Powell levels sit below 30%, and climate change-fueled drought means the reservoir is unlikely to refill to the high marks set decades ago. Zanna Stutz said those climate trends may force the hand of policymakers. Lake Powell, she said, may never refill enough to drown these side canyons anew.
“The restoration of Glen Canyon is basically an inevitability,” she said. “The sooner we can recognize how what's happening in Glen Canyon is tied into this larger trend, the sooner we can shift from this being a happy byproduct and have it be taken into consideration and valued accordingly.”
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
