Building commenced at Mont St. Michel eight years before the Norman Conquest and continued through the Middle Ages, which is why the glorious church, cloister, refectory, and guest hall reflect both the Romanesque and the Gothic styles. I took the tour, stood on the ramparts to check the tide (which can recede as much as 10 miles), and had lunch at La Mere Poulard on the Grande rue beneath the abbey.
The restaurant is famous throughout France for its omelets, and shockingly expensive. But I decided I’d earned it. So I ordered the fixed-price menu that included a plain, incredibly frothy omelet tasting slightly of wood smoke, bread, and a slice of chocolate gateau. Afterwards, sated and happy, I caught the bus back to St. Malo.
The trip took only an hour, passing many places I’d walked by. But if I’d traveled by bus both ways, I wouldn’t know that there is purple clover at the Pointe de la Varde and lovely soft muck at the bottom of Rotheneuf Harbor.
From Glen Canyon Bridge on US Highway 89, you can see both sides of an argument. To the north is placid Lake Powell, a big, blue tropical cocktail in the arid no-man’s-land of southeastern Utah. It’s Exhibit A in the case for letting Glen Canyon Dam stand. To the south is the Colorado River, testily emerging from impoundment, cutting through sheer rock walls on its way to the Grand Canyon—wild and free, the way nature made it.
I stood there with my brother, John, one morning in early February, thinking about Seldom Seen Smith, the fictional mastermind of a plot to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam in Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang.
Abbey wrote that Smith, “remembered the golden river flowing to the sea, . . . canyons called Hidden Passage and Salvation and Last Chance, . . . strange great amphitheaters called Music Temple and Cathedral in the Desert. All these things now lay beneath the dead water of the reservoir, slowly disappearing under layers of descending silt.”
The book has achieved cult status among lovers of Utah’s slickrock plateau and canyon country. But Abbey’s book never predicted that almost 50 years after the dam’s creation, nature, in the form of a blistering six-year drought, would toy with the fate of Lake Powell.
It was 2005. The last time the reservoir had been full—at 3,700 feet above sea level—was in July 1999. In those years, drought had lowered the water level 144 feet, leaving the reservoir at about 33 percent capacity, shrinking the length of the lake from 186 miles to 145 miles and gradually re-exposing something remarkable underneath: the arches and spires of Glen Canyon.
People travel halfway around the world to see the canyon of China’s Yangtze River, doomed by construction of the Three Gorges Dam. So was it any wonder that John and I felt compelled to go backpacking in little side canyons on the fringes of Lake Powell, where the water was rapidly receding? It was a chance in a lifetime to see something that couldn’t be seen five years before and that may not be seen ever again.
February isn’t prime time on Lake Powell, and just getting to the place where we planned to start backpacking required us to take a motorboat 90 miles up the reservoir to its confluence with the Escalante River. Then, among a maze of unmarked tributaries, we had to find Davis Gulch—a stream that enters the Escalante on the west side—take the boat as far into the channel as possible, tie up, and make our way across the quicksand that tends to accumulate at the mouths of such creeks.
There, we were supposed to meet Bill Wolverton, a Glen Canyon National Recreation Area backcountry ranger, who would hike in from the west to show us around for two days. He had responded to a request from John for information about backpacking in Davis Gulch and Fiftymile Canyon, two deeply embedded Escalante River tributaries where a red Navajo sandstone sculpture gallery similar to the one that once lined the whole of Glen Canyon was gradually being re-exposed.
Wolverton had spent the past 17 springs and autumns prowling around the lower 48 states for the National Park Service and could scale sheer canyon walls without working up a sweat. He almost single-handedly launched an effort to eradicate invasive, nonnative plants from the Escalante River canyons he loves. Just don’t call the big body of water at his doorstep “Lake Powell.” “It’s not a lake,” he insists. “Lakes are natural features.”
Before I could formulate reservations—How cold would it be in southeastern Utah in February? What if it snowed? How far would we have to hike and how many nights would we camp?—Wolverton and John had started planning the trip.
After taking in the view from the bridge, John and I stopped at the nearby recreation area’s Carl Hayden Visitor Center. To enter, we had to pass through a security system tighter than any I’ve seen at airports, instituted some years ago to deter terrorist attacks on the dam. We apprehensively noted the posted weather forecast—temperatures between 35 and 49 degrees, with rain or snow in the offing. We studied a 1990 topographical model of Lake Powell, hopelessly anachronistic because of shrinking water levels, and took a short tour of the 710-foot-high dam, completed in 1963.
It was led by a sandy-haired young man who told us the concrete of Glen Canyon Dam was good for two millenniums but sediment buildup could render the dam inoperable in 700 years.
Environmentalists are less conservative. They say silt coming in from the reservoir’s tributaries could clog it up in a few centuries, never mind that the dam has already damaged habitats and geology at the Grand Canyon, one hundred miles downstream.
Partly for this reason, even environmentalists with cooler heads than Seldom Seen Smith have advocated decommissioning the dam and draining the reservoir—a drastic measure that, nevertheless, has been carried out in the last few decades at about 100 dams across America.
For the thirsty dwellers of the dry Southwest, the specter of losing a water and energy source may be upsetting. The dam’s power plant produces $90 million worth of electricity a year, and Lake Powell serves as a holding tank for Lake Mead down-river, a big water supplier to Southern California. Beyond that, the reservoir has undeniable recreational value. But since the onset of the drought, visitation to million-acre Glen Canyon National Recreation Area had decreased from 2.6 million in 1999 to 1.8 million in 2004.
Meanwhile, the National Park Service, which manages the recreation area, was making the best of things by extolling the wonders of newly reclaimed sights while busily extending boat launch ramps at northerly marinas, such as Bullfrog. “Visitors can still enjoy and participate in the same activities that they did when the lake was full—boating, fishing, hiking, camping, and exploring,” Kitty L. Roberts, recreation area superintendent, told me.
But it all depended on the weather.
That February, the water level stood at 3,561 feet, just 71 feet above the lowest point at which the dam can generate electricity. “If it drops below that, we’re out of business until the lake comes back up,” said Tom Ryan, a hydrologist for the US Bureau of Reclamation, which built and operates the dam.
Despite