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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-09-08/cathedral-in-the-desert-colorado-river-crisis/101407422>
"It’s just gone 7am at Bullfrog Marina and the morning air is fresh and full of
anticipation. Later, temperatures on Lake Powell, America’s second-largest
reservoir, will soar into the mid-40s. The recreational boaters who have long
used this vast waterway as a holiday playground will soon arrive with their
dogs and their kids and their noisy motors.
Eric Balken is keen to get going while the waters are still quiet, the marina
still sleepy. We have a long journey ahead and Eric is a man on a mission. He’s
taking his old friend Professor Jack Schmidt deep within Lake Powell to show
him that amid the doom and gloom of America’s worst drought in more than a
thousand years, there’s beauty and magic, too.
Jack is a scientist with decades of experience studying the Colorado River, but
he’s never taken a trip on Lake Powell, the man-made reservoir created in 1963
when the river’s mighty flow was dammed at Glen Canyon, allowing communities to
flourish in the arid south-west.
“This is my first rodeo,” Jack says.
“I’m both ashamed for you that you have not been there already and excited that
I get to take you,” Eric replies with boyish enthusiasm.
“Lake” can be a misleading way to think of Powell, the water backed up behind
the 200-metre-high Glen Canyon dam wall. Powell is a huge tentacle-like body of
water stretching 300km across southern Utah and northern Arizona, covering what
was Glen Canyon and extending into almost 100 side canyons. Its 3,000km of
shoreline tells the story of a region gripped by a 20-year drought, of the
impact of climate change and a river running dry."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
