Many words have been written about Glen Canyon, which was flooded by the Glen Canyon Dam to create Lake Powell. For decades, writers and environmentalists have eulogized the vanished canyon as long-gone, submerged and sacrificed.
Author Zak Podmore found a different story when he travelled through the area on a trip with Moab-based Returning Rapids project. The unexpectedly inspiring tale turned into his new nonfiction book, “After Deadpool: Lake Powell’s Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River,” released this month by Torrey House Press. Podmore will give a talk on the book at the Grand County Public Library on August 14 at 7 p.m.
Here, we spoke to the author about how the swift return of the ecology of a submerged place has surprised even scientists and what it may mean about Southwest environments in the future.
Moab Sun News: Your previous book, “Confluence: Navigating the Personal & Political on Rivers of the New West,” came out in 2019. What gave you the inspiration to begin this new project diving into the re-emerging world of Glen Canyon?
Zak Podmore: I was working for the Salt Lake Tribune and, in 2021, and I went on a trip with the Moab-based Returning Rapids Project. We spent a week in Cataract Canyon and the upper reaches of the former bed of Lake Powell. The trip was with 26 people, most of them scientists who are studying all different aspects of how the former reservoir bed is recovering from its former inundation under Lake Powell. The reservoir was dropping really quickly at that time.
Hearing the scientists talk about what, what they were studying and the positive changes that were unfolding ecologically in Glen Canyon. I got excited and started studying different aspects of the research that’s being done there. And it started to turn into a book pretty quickly because there was so much going on. It was a really different story than the one I’d assumed was happening in Lake Powell.
MSN: The story of the loss of Glen Canyon has been a mournful one for so long, especially here in the Southwest.
Podmore: Yeah, absolutely. The loss of Glen Canyon is really told from an environmental perspective as a cautionary tale of how quickly a landscape can be lost. And when I started this project, I didn’t know most recent version of that story, which is that not only was Glen Canyon obviously greatly impacted by the construction of the dam, but the mega drought we’ve been experiencing in the Southwest since 2000 which has prevented Lake Powell from being full since 1999 is really hopeful story of the resilience of the landscape and the capacity of these desert ecosystems to recover of their own accords.
In places that have been exposed continuously since 2000 in the upper reaches of some of the side canyons, there are fully or mostly intact native ecosystems that are re-established there.The sediment has mostly washed out and there are huge stands of willows, blankets of native wildflowers, beavers building dams in the side canyons, 50- to 60-foot-tall cottonwood trees. You would never know that these areas were underwater for decades, except for the occasional perfectly preserved beer can from the 1960s that’s eroding out of the banks.
It gives a sense for what would happen if a dam were to ever be modified and free flowing river were to be returned throughout Glen Canyon. We wouldn’t have to wait hundreds of years to experience what the landscape looked like there before the dam. For a lot of the canyon, the recovery would be really swift. In 10 or 20 years, the ecosystems come back and that’s something that even experts in ecology have been surprised by.
MSN: You’ve been carving a niche as a Southwest environmental author, part of a long lineage. Are there other writers that inspire you?
Podmore:
I live in Bluff, not far from where Ellen Meloy, the Great southwestern essayist and Pulitzer Prize finalist, lived before her sudden death in 2004. I was really grateful to receive the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award and I felt inspired by her work throughout this process. The story of the loss of Glen Canyon has produced so much amazing literature, including Edward Abbey and Wallace Segner. A lot of people still have that perspective in their mind when they think about Glen Canyon as a tragedy of the loss. And with this project I was trying to update the story for era of climate change and tell a story that wasn’t just a depressing environmental story. The story is a really hopeful one, because the recovery is real and you can witness it just by hiking up any side canyon in the heart of Glen Canyon and seeing what’s happened there.
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