A sold-out, enthusiastic crowd packed the Glenwood Vaudeville Revue on March 14 to see the Glen Canyon Rises Tour (GCRT), a captivating multimedia presentation on the reemergence of Glen Canyon as Lake Powell recedes. The tour, on the second of four consecutive nights (including also Salt Lake City, Moab and Flagstaff) is the collective effort of author, journalist and film producer Zak Podmore; photographer and filmmaker Dawn Kish; and singer-songwriters Peter McLaughlin and Jackson Emmer — under the auspices of the Glen Canyon Institute (GCI) in Salt Lake City.
The presentation was brought to Glenwood Springs by the Rifle-based Middle Colorado Watershed Council (MCWC). As Paula Stepp, MCWC’s executive director, told The Sopris Sun, “We are now in an aridity situation for the western U.S.; water that we thought was plentiful is not there now. There are a lot of complicated issues on how to share this water, and what happens with Lake Powell itself is very complicated. We just want to make sure that people are aware of water use.”
Background
Podmore, Emmer and Stepp joined The Sun in conversation to discuss the genesis of GCRT. Valley native Podmore (now based in southern Utah) has written extensively about the issues concerning the Colorado and other Western rivers, including his widely acclaimed 2019 book “Confluence: Navigating the Personal & Political on Rivers of the New West.” He has been at work on a new book, “Life After Dead Pool: Lake Powell’s Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River,” scheduled for release this August. Longtime local musician Emmer recently moved to northern California.
Podmore: I had been working on the book for I guess two years at that point and spent most of my time out there with different scientists: ecologists, geologists, archaeologists.
Emmer: Zak and I went to high school together and kept in touch. I had thought about doing some kind of trip to check out Glen Canyon. Zak told me he was writing a book about Lake Powell, Glen Canyon and was circumnavigating it. And I said, “Take me on a trip with you!”
Podmore: [Circumnavigating Lake Powell] was the original literary device [for the book], but I didn’t really end up doing that. I explored most of the lake and majority of the tributary canyons.
Emmer: The trip with Zak was only four days [last] April and was put together mostly by Zak and the institute. We had 14 writers, musicians, artists, filmmakers come and hang on the river.
Podmore: I was really excited about the idea of going out and doing an art trip, as opposed to all these science trips. I’d done a few trips previously on Lake Powell with Dawn. She invited Peter McLaughlin and his friend Chris Brashear, who have been writing Colorado River songs for over 25 years. He was really good friends with Katie Lee, who was a legendary musician of Glen Canyon and was a pretty outspoken anti-dam activist. Peter has Katie’s guitar and took that out in the canyons with us. Although he’d written a lot of songs about the river, canyon and John Wesley Powell, he hadn’t really explored Lake Powell at the record low levels we’re seeing.
Emmer: I’d never met [Peter]. I was interested in conservation, environmentalism, activism, water management in the West and the intersection of folk music. I didn’t know how lucky I was until I was on [the trip], because Peter and Chris had been working on this for like 20 or 30 years already … and [I] realized, “I hit the jackpot, the gold mine.” I mean these people were so deep in it, and I get to just hang out and soak that up for four days. I now have a handful of songs.
Stepp:I knew Zak since he was a kid and reached out to him a couple of years ago when he wrote “Confluence” and was trying to figure out how to get him involved with the [MCWC] speaker series. I knew that he was involved in the book “Dead Pool” and started talking about him coming out and doing an event around that book. At the same time, he was coordinating with the institute and others [to put together the GCRT]. We had something [last month] on endangered fish; we’ll be doing something on stream restoration in April. [March 14] was kind of the culminating piece between the three of them.
The event
Stepp kicked off the evening explaining that MCWC’s mission is “dedicated to enhancing and protecting the water for all uses and for the environment in the watershed from Glenwood Canyon to De Beque.” She continued, “Our job is to take care of your watershed. We all have to work together — hopefully, we can do it cordially.”
Next, Podmore took the stage to talk about why he decided to write “Dead Pool.” Using a slide presentation and paraphrasing the title of a famous spaghetti western, he dubbed the discussion “the Bad, the Ugly and the Good.”
The Bad: He described how the dam was designed so that water can only be released through the hydroelectric intake towers. If the lake’s surface level drops below 3,370 feet in elevation, water can’t leave the lake — it becomes a “dead pool” — nor can electricity be generated.
The Ugly: As the lake level drops, it is revealing vast stretches of built-up sediment that the GCI has dubbed the Floyd Dominy Formation, named for the federal official most responsible for Glen Canyon Dam. Podmore described the unsightly, unstable masses as “mud glaciers grinding downstream” in the lake.
The Good: On his trips on the lake, Podmore has seen ecosystems reestablished (shoots growing up around “ghost” cottonwood trunks, the return of beavers) and cultural resources uncovered (rock art, pottery, even basketry) — in addition to canyons, arches, and natural bridges reemerging.
Kish followed with her short film “Tad’s Emerging World,” presented in the form of a voiceover letter to Tad Nichols, who, beginning in the 1950s, photographed Glen Canyon before and after its inundation. Using a replica of Nichols’ boat, Kish documented revisiting “certain iconic places” he had photographed that are again above water, taking stills using Nichols’ 4×5 camera but not replicating his photographs. “I was trying to channel him,” she said. “It was kind of a spiritual time for me.”
Jack Stauss, GCI’s outreach director and coordinator of the tour, spoke briefly about the institute, its Returning Rapids Project in the canyon and GCI’s advocacy for decommissioning Glen Canyon Dam before introducing McLaughlin and Emmer.
The two presented 10 lake- and canyon-inspired original compositions. Among them, Emmer’s observations about “sand in everything;” McLaughlin’s “Powell’s Journey,” written 30 years ago; and Emmer’s humorous “houseboaters’ anthem,” with the singalong refrain: “Weather’s getting hotter, summer’s getting longer / And it means more time to party!”
They closed the evening with two poignant songs about Katie Lee, made even more meaningful because McLaughlin played Lee’s guitar. Emmer wrote his with legendary folk singer Tom Paxton, and Lee helped with McLaughlin’s “She Knows the River.”
As the participants took a bow, Stepp thanked John Goss at the theater and others for their contributions and urged people to get involved “at the local level.” Emmer gave a shout-out to Carbondale Arts for providing funds for the boat fuel on their 2023 trip.
Information is available at www.midcowatershed.org and www.glencanyon.org