EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the third in an ongoing series of features highlighting authors and new books published by Torrey House Press in Utah.
In 2011, like many others, Zak Podmore thought that the Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell would be around for centuries, with the Colorado River being sacrificed and forever stripped of its natural grandeur. Edward Abbey, one of the American West’s most cantankerous anarchists, was convinced that the dam had relegated Glen Canyon to its inevitable death.
However, two years into the third decade of the 21st century, Podmore had observed a dramatic change remarkable in its unpredicted quickness of unfolding. After years of mega-drought in the region, Lake Powell was down to less than a quarter of its capacity, falling dangerously close to what would be considered dead pool levels.
But, for every foot in level that Lake Powell was dropping, previously submerged canyon lands were being exposed and nature was rejuvenating at remarkable speed. Thus, Podmore asserts that the term “dead pool” is a “scientific misnomer.” Instead, it is a “vast improvement” over the notion of a full pool. “We’re lucky enough to live in a time when we are seeing the river reemerge,” he writes in his 2024 book, Life after Dead Pool: Lake Powell’s Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River, which was published by Torrey House Press.
If a reader had time to read only one book this year about the sociopolitical impacts, debates and considerations of the trinity of water rights, conservation and climate change in the American West, Podmore’s Life after Dead Pool would be the most comprehensive succinct peroration to absorb in understanding the interplay of these issues. Whether the reader lives in the heart of the Intermountain West, desert southwest or thousands of miles away, Podmore’s latest book is accessible for its lucid, compelling presentation.
It follows naturally from his first book published by Torrey House Press six years ago, Confluence: Navigating the Personal and Political on Rivers of the New West. In that book, Podmore explored the impact of human presence on the Colorado River. Confluence succeeded, especially for how Podmore encouraged readers to evaluate and revise the rhetoric and vocabulary we use to contemplate and contextualize our policy approaches in water usage and conservation.
He deftly extends that objective in Life after Dead Pool. Throughout the book, Podmore, who lives in Bluff, Utah and is a former Salt Lake Tribune reporter who covered the southern Utah beat, reminds us of the bright side about what has been happening in Glen Canyon, as Lake Powell’s elevation has declined toward dead pool status. Noting how invasive species such as tumbleweeds, cheatgrass and camel thorn “were already being crowded out by native species” including young river privet, Fremont cottonwood and coyote willow and how beavers have returned, Podmore summarizes, “the landscape’s ability to heal itself was surprising even to the experts who were studying it.”
In an interview with The Utah Review, Podmore said that any sequel to this book could be an amazing opportunity to research and celebrate the recovery of Glen Canyon, over the next 25 years. In his current book, he highlighted how studying biological restoration has currently been difficult to pursue because the resources for such work are woefully understaffed. He noted that “only in Glen Canyon would it take twenty years to begin a basic plant survey on tens of thousands of acres of land that were undergoing rapid transformation and only in Glen Canyon would the job fall to an outside nonprofit like the Glen Canyon Institute.”
“I felt everything was changing so quickly while I was writing the book,” he said. At the end of the book, Lake Powell had reached its lowest points in the spring of 2023 (when it was just 22% full) but then after two successive winters of ample precipitation, water levels had started coming up again and some of the exposed areas that were recovering once again have been flooded. As of May 18, Lake Powell was 141 feet below full pool level and just 188 feet above dead pool level. In terms of its content, the lake is a little more than 31.5% of full pool level. Only 6 of the 17 marina ramps are currently usable.
Regarding why Lake Powell’s outlook has not improved much, Paul Miller, a hydrologist at the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center, told the Salt Lake Tribune in a March 20, 2025 article, “It’s not a one-to-one relationship between the amount of snowpack we have and the amount of runoff we get.” In his book, Podmore writes that for Lake Powell in an era of climate change, “full pool is a 20th century memory likely never to be seen again.”
Just as absorbing and consequential is the history of the political debate surrounding the dam, Lake Powell and Glen Canyon and the revealing outcomes of its lessons, which Podmore handles effectively in captivating the reader’s interest. Periodically, he deploys eye-popping examples to make the point that the time is now to assure that Glen Canyon’s rebirth can flourish. As Lake Powell’s levels have declined, the exposed areas have revealed incomprehensibly enormous amounts of sediment that have accumulated. To wit: Podmore’s prose frames the magnitude of this in memorable fashion:
An acre of land, an area slightly smaller than a football field, at sea level, Pile mud onto that acre and keep piling until it towers 37,000 feet into the air. Grab an oxygen tank (you’ll need it) and climb to the top, 8,000 feet above the summit of Mount Everest , and well above cruising jetliners. That’s how much silt the Colorado and San Juan rivers funnel into Lake Powell every year. In other words, a 37,000-foot-tall tower of mud would have covered nearly sixty acres of land in the six decades of Lake Powell’s existence.
Podmore talks to Ken Sleight, one of the most widely known river guides and experts on Glen Canyon, who is in his nineties. Sleight was once a textbook conservative who later became an unrepentant environmental activist that inspired the character of Seldom Seen Smith in Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang. He also was featured in a 2020 documentary short film The Unfinished Fight of Seldom Seen Slight, directed by Chris Simon.
Resolute in the project of resurrecting Glen Canyon and refusing to accept that the battle for it was lost, Sleight has persistently referred to Lake Powell as ‘Lake Foul.’ Acknowledging that long-term drought had already accomplished three-quarters of the job, Podmore suggested that no more time should be wasted in finishing the job before the massive Dominy (named after Floyd Dominy who spearheaded the building of the Glen Canyon dam) glaciers of sediment would continue to consume more of the canyon:
If the reservoir were drained intentionally and quickly, over a period of a couple of years, the mud glacier would not have time to redeposit throughout the canyon. Instead the river would carry the sediment past the dam and through the Grand Canyon. The sediment would serve a useful purpose there, rebuilding beaches that have vanished over the last sixty years and restoring a more river ecology. The Dominy formation would redeposit in Lake Mead, filling it over hundreds of years.
Thus, the canyon could recoup most of its glory that had entranced Sleight as well as John Wesley Powell, when he first happened on the site in the 1860s. Podmore could not have stated the choice more straightforwardly in the book: “We have two options before us. We can drain the reservoir and allow Glen Canyon to be reborn. Or we wait and watch it fill with mud.”
Considering the vantage of public policymakers, politics and environmentalists, Podmore poses the key question: “What did the Bureau of Reclamation get right and what did its environmentalist detractors get wrong?”
This discussion is, by far, the most edifying in Life after Dead Pool. Recounting the history of the years leading up to Congressional approval for the dam, Podmor lays out the case of The Bureau of Reclamation’s populist origins, a history that successive generations of environmentalists, along with the rest of us, should acknowledge. A fascinating aside comes from recollections of Barry Goldwater, the U.S. Senator from Arizona who became the principal architect of the modern Republican Party before the Trump-led MAGA movement contaminated and bastardized his vision of small government conservatism. Late in his life, Goldwater, who originally voted for the dam project, regretted his decision and believed that Lake Powell should be completely drained.
As Podmore explains, the Bureau of Reclamation had “built itself a mandate from voters and a broad constituency of politicians who often benefited from projects in their district and were encouraged to support projects [i.e., ‘cash register dams’] elsewhere.“ It’s a striking example of absorbing the true lesson of political history: “Even someone like Goldwater, who became the national figurehead of the anti-New Deal reaction during his presidential campaign and who had seen Glen Canyon firsthand, felt compelled to vote for public dam, irrigation and power projects that would flood places he proclaimed to love.”
Podmore reaches back further into the pertinent history. More than 130 years ago, Powell accurately predicted how a “heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights” would dominate politics in the desert southwest. Podmore offers several pages explaining Powell’s worldview which challenged the booster mentality of land speculators in the late 19th century. However, he also critiques Powell’s own white savior complex, who had favored policies of forced assimilation to help the Navajo people.
Podmore also talks to Marshall Steinbaum, who suggested environmentalists and conservationists take a page from the playbook that Dominy and others dam advocates used, which is to advocate for New Deal levels of federal spending on public works to combat the climate crisis. “The environmental movement that arose to oppose dams and to put a stop to what they would consider the degradation of the West never really came up with a more populistic-type politics that would have gotten them what they wanted by building a social movement, ” Steinbaum explains. Too often, he continues, environmentalists came to embrace an “extremely elitist politics that is socially destructive.”
Podmore highlights that “building a national coalition around a Bureau of Renewables agenda might not meet as much resistance as one might think from rural America.” For example, “Would county commissioners in the rural west turn down the opportunity for low-interest federal loans to build, say, county-owned geothermal plants that would create long-term jobs?” The challenge seems like the remotest of possibilities in the current climate of severe polarizing political conversations. However, as Podmore illustrates extensively, a change of heart and a shift in policy thinking can be much closer than even expert observers might be willing to concede.
It is easy to feel encouraged while reading about Podmore’s discoveries of positive changes every time he returns to Glen Canyon. Among the most impressive featured in the book is the Cathedral in the Desert, which re-emerged in 2021 and within one year had seen the sediment washed away to reveal its pristine beauty. Instead of wishful slogans or the heartache that some of nature’s greatest wonders might be lost for good, a real phenomenon of revival has been occurring with dramatic results.
As for stakeholder management, the track record has hardly been timely or productive, notably surrounding the interests of Indigenous peoples. Podmore opens the door wide enough to push the issues of tribal management that are evident in Glen Canyon’s rebirth and the impact in the region. The communication between the Navajo Nation and the National Park Service has been persistently poor. As Podmore notes, the San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe still has not been granted any reservation land despite an agreement for 5,400 acres, which was concluded with the Navajo Nation in 2000 but which Congress has never enacted. Dan McCool, among the region’s strongest advocates for guaranteeing water sovereignty for tributes, wrote in 2022, “The vaunted goal of equity cannot be reached until basin tribes control water to the same extent that they control their governments and ultimately their reservations in modern homelands.” The time is overdue to replicate the experience of an inter-tribal coalition on the scale that came together regarding the Bears Ears National Monument.
On the issue of Indigenous inclusion, Podmore is especially. poignant. He mentions the Rainbow Bridge National Monument’s spiritual significance for the Diné people and their profound concerns about the influx of visitors and how their footprints have desecrated the monument. In fact, some believe that proof of the Rainbow Bridge having been broken away from its holy significance lies in the long-term trend of extreme drought.
As Podmore cites, Wendell Berry had also spoken of the fact that there are no unsacred places on the planet but only those that are sacred and desecrated. Podmore recalls that in one meeting to discuss which spaces should be conserved because of their sacredness, Hopi elders presented an image of Earth taken from space.
“I will never fathom what it was like for the Diné, Hopi and Paiute people who watched their sacred sites drown,” Podmore writes. “The filling of Lake Powell was the ultimate desecration. It turned a flowing river into a putrid slackwater, which for a time flooded under the magnificent stone rainbow and contaminated its base with the rainbow scuzz of leaking motor oil.” In his most positive expression, Podmore writes that desecration was neither total nor final: “Glen Canyon contains too much beauty for one dam to destroy. When the reservoir is eventually drained, the living river will return. May that day come, and may it be beautiful.”
As for humans, the challenge is to set aside the hubris of dominion and to accept the humble mantle as stewards knowing that past injustices can be reconciled and that mistakes can be corrected by allowing nature to reconsecrate itself.