Dead pool on the Colorado River is defined as the level of Lake Powell behind Glen Canyon Dam when the lowest tunnels on the dam allowing water to be released into the Grand Canyon would be above the reservoir level and part of the reservoir would remain, a stagnant pool. No water could be released and this would threaten endangered species in the Grand Canyon, affect the industry of river recreation there, and impact the lives of millions of people who rely on Colorado River water in Nevada, Arizona, California, and northwest Mexico.

Lake Powell would still reach one hundred miles upstream, and billions of gallons of water would be trapped in the reservoir. Glen Canyon would stay at least partially drowned.

The American Southwest is in the grip of a prolonged drought, called the Millennium Drought, that has lowered the level of Lake Powell to a level close to dead pool, an unimaginable situation to those who originally conceived and constructed the dam in a relatively moist Colorado River watershed period. The story of Colorado River exploitation is an oft-told and familiar one, its history reviewed in a chapter titled “This Dam is Your Dam.” The story told in Life After Dead Pool is that of a Glen Canyon emerging from Lake Powell as inflows shrink, water levels drop, silt deposition continues, and parts of the flooded canyon are revealed.   

Zak Podmore is a journalist who has covered the situation at Lake Powell and other Southwest water and conservation issues for many years. He is a boatman and kayaker who grew up near the Dolores River in Colorado and has floated Southwest rivers much of his life, including a trip from the Colorado’s headwaters to its delta in Mexico. In this book, he takes the reader on many journeys to the receding Lake Powell, explaining what he is experiencing in the changing Glen Canyon National Recreation Area (GCNRA). Between 2000 and 2021, Lake Powell’s surface area shrank to  just over a third of its original size, exposing more than 100,000 acres of land. Podmore visits some this restored land, joining scientists studying what is emerging, and folks like the Moab-based Returning  Rapids Project who see Glen Canyon and a portion of the Colorado River returning to some of their former beauties. He is among those who hope, without removing the dam, the river and canyon can be restored, a remarkable place that should have become a  national park 70 years ago.

Restored without removing the dam? Is that possible? Podmore and others think it is. When the dam was constructed, tunnels were drilled to bypass the river around the construction site, and when it was completed, those tunnels were filled with reinforced concrete. Floyd Dominy was the commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation that built Glen Canyon Dam, and Podmore describes the unlikley scenario of Richard Ingebretsen, founder of the anti-Lake Powell Glen Canyon Institute, meeting with Dominy in 1997.

According to Ingebretsen’s written account of the meeting, Dominy took a dig at [David] Brower, shortly after sitting down at the table. “Brower has proposed to drill out the original bypass tunnels to drain the reservoir,” Dominy said. “Well, you can’t do that. It’s three hundred feet of reinforced concrete.” If you actually wanted to decommission the Glen Canyon Dam, Dominy continued, it’d be better to drill new bypass tunnels around the old ones in the sandstone. Ingebretson recalled Dominy pushing his glasses down his nose before continuing. “Then you can put waterproof valves at the bottom of the lake. They can be raised and lowered as you need, to let water out.” Dominy reached for a cocktail napkin, sketched out his design, and passed it to a stunned Ingebretsen. “This has never been done before,” Dominy concluded, “but I have been thinking about it, and it will work.”

Ingebretsen couldn’t believe what had just happened. “The man who built the dam, the man who called Lake Powell his own, had actually sketched . . . the method to drain the reservoir.”

After a dismal runoff in 2021, the Bureau announced it was studying modifications to Glen Canyon Dam to release water if dead pool should be reached, and in 2023 a Reclamation engineer said, in a webinar, that it would safer to drill new tunnels through the sandstone than through the face of the dam, which was another possibility being studied. “Dominy’s napkin plan was officially being considered, not just by conservation groups, but by the Bureau of Reclamation itself,” writes Podmore.

He is clear that such a measure is not likely to occur in the short run, as variable runoff and water conservation measures may postpone dead pool for a time, but if the Millennium Drought continues, drastic measures will be necessary. If they are not taken, then eventually the reservoir will fill with silt, the dam will overflow, and its integrity will be threatened. He writes, “I was becoming increasingly convinced that the resurrection of Glen Canyon would provide a tangible symbol of hope in the midst of climate crisis. That’s what my visits to Lake Powell had already given me on a personal level.” Either the reservoir could be drained, or “we can wait and watch it fill with mud.”

Podmore travels on the returning Colorado River, and describes many forays up side canyons uncovered as the the reservoir declines. Everywhere he finds what he calls “glaciers of mud,” what he calls the “Dominy formation.” He explains that the sooner the reservoir is drained, the better, because like a glacier, the Dominy formation is advancing slowly and inexorably toward the dam.

It’s not too late “to stop the majority of the canyon from being buried under two hundred feet of Dominy muck.” The deposition process, presented graphically in a “Delta Cross Section” illustration from the U.S. Geological Survey, shows how the sediments are deposited as the dam-created delta migrates downstream with the shrinking reservoir level toward the dam, the river dropping its sediment load in predictable fashion.

Podmore cites environmental historian Donald Worster, who wrote that the Glen Canyon Dam “must one day become a man-made waterfall and its reservoir a vast plain of alliuvial mud drying in the sun.” But Podmore sees an alternative, writing that “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.”

This would be good for the Grand Canyon in many ways, and certainly good for Glen Canyon itself.

Throughout Life After Dead Pool, Podmore offers historical background and describes encounters with the river and its surroundings, interspersed with interactions with an array of people involved in one way or another with Glen Canyon. He interviews Ken Sleight, a legendary boatman and model for one of the characters in Ed Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, who has mourned the drowning of Glen Canyon for more than a half century and would, if he could, free the portion of the river he loved.

Podmore travels the canyon with Seth Arens, a research ecologist studying the ecology of emergence, Eric Balken, executive director of the Glen Canyon Institute who leads efforts to drain Lake Powell, Erik Stanfield, a cultural anthropologist with the Navaho Nation, and Arnold Clifford, Navaho ethnobotanist and expert on hanging gardens. All of them contribute to Podmore’s growing understanding of what is happening to Lake Powell and Glen Canyon and what the future of them might be.

Not only natural areas are emerging from the lake, but so are archaeological sites. An inventory of cultural resources to be drowned was done as the lake rose, but was limited. Surprisingly, many sites that have been under water for 50 years are relatively intact. Podmore slams National Park Service “management” of Glen Canyon cultural resources. He hikes up a canyon with Erick Stanfield and they spot above them an enclosure around what “looks like an industrial facility: An eight-foot chain link fence with overhanging barbed wire along its top.” This, they realize, was intended to prevent visitors from scrambling up to a cliff dwelling far above.

“Erik said he took us there to demonstrate one ‘ridiculous’ extreme of the Park Service’s management style: complete closure. The majority of cultural sites below Lake Powell’s high-water mark in Glen Canyon NRA, however, fall at the other end of the spectrum: complete neglect.” This, Podmore explains, is at least partly because of severe underfunding for management of anything in the NRA besides recreation.

The National Park Service manages the Glen Canyon NRA which, in its conception and early years, promised to be an exceptional place for boating and other recreational lake activities in a setting of remarkable beauty. Outdoor recreation was its management mandate, but the decline of the lake and emergence of lost features and cultural sites has given it new challenges, which it is struggling to meet. Podmore visits with Navaho tour operator Carol Bigthumb and examines the troubled relationship between the Park Service and that tribe, a legacy of many unkept agreements over the years, a familiar story.

Visiting Rainbow Bridge National Monument, which could at full pool be easily reached by boaters, offers a window into the many dam-related difficulties between the Navaho Nation and the federal government.

This book is full of solid information about the situation at Glen Canyon today and how that came to be. Podmore is unapologetic about his feelings — the lake should be drained, for a host of reasons he explains. He criticizes many of the players in the Glen Canyon saga, big environmental groups among them. He holds the Bureau of Reclamation in especially low regard, astonished by some of the stances it takes. For instance, in a draft environmental review of various operating procedures for Glen Canyon and Hoover dams in 2023, the agency admitted that cultural resources in Glen Canyon NRA were being damaged by wave action and wet/dry cycling. Podmore writes, “The proposed remedy? Not to drain Lake Powell, which would decrease visitation in most areas . . . . Instead, the report suggested that Lake Powell’s level be kept above minimum power pool. Doing so, the report’s authors stated simply, ‘would protect those cultural resources below that level.’”

Toward the end of the book Podmore writes of attending a meeting of the Colorado River Water Users Association in a Las Vegas Casino. Here he listened as the retiring general manager of the Central Arizona Project opined about population growth in the arid Southwest saying,  “The market will limit growth. People are free to make the bad decision of moving to a place with no water.”

True, but not helpful for  people damaged by inadequate water policy. One taboo topic at the meeting is decommissioning the Glen Canyon Dam. But there was talk of Floyd Dominy’s option for reservoir management, drilling river level diversion tunnels around the dam in the dead pool extremity. 

Wandering Las Vegas, Podmore reflects that the city could only be built with Colorado River water.

“The construction of Hoover Dam began the same year Nevada legalized gambling in 1931, which transformed the dusty railroad stop of Las Vegas to sin city. But long before John Wesley Powell was booed at the irrigators conference in 1893 for saying that Southwestern water was not, in fact “limitless,” Podmore continues, “the settlers of the Southwest were cursed with the logic of an inveterate gambler, a bottomless void in their souls that required them to keep betting, damn the consequences and dam the rivers.”

The river, like the gambling house, always wins, Podmore asserts. “There is no engineer skilled enough nor any dam strong enough to defeat the simple recipe of gravity and water and sedimentation.”

Life After Dead Pool is an informative and provocative read. Podmore avoids overloading the reader with data and information by taking her with him on forays to the canyon and many wonders (and horrors like the Dominy formation) being revealed.

Reading the story of what has happened to Glen Canyon is painful, but the book overall is hopeful. Undoubtedly it will be dismissed by some as defeatist — the dam after all is an icon of human dominance of nature and of cornucopian assumptions. People who like to boat, water ski, and otherwise enjoy the lake will profoundly disagree with Podmore’s preferences for the future. And right wing activists in the Southwest will undoubtedly try to ban the book — how dare anyone suggest such an action as draining Lake Powell.

But Podmore does a great service in sharing his experiences and revealing provocative ideas about the future of Glen Canyon, “A Place No One Knew.”