At the end of June I'm driving east on Highway 12 with L, in the passenger seat, who works for another environmental nonprofit in town. She's thin with curly red hair and freckles, and speaks with a disarming, matter-of-fact sincerity—good company on a long drive. It’s late, sundown on one of the longest days of the year, and behind us the sky glows like strawberry sherbet. We are headed back from a meeting of the Utah Watershed Restoration Initiative (a state grantmaking organization) in Paragonah, on the far side of two high plateaus plus the broad, arid valleys that separate them from each other and the town of Escalante—250 miles round-trip. We had but to ascend a set of steep switchbacks over gray shale badlands before the road would again wind smoothly along the fertile S-bends of Upper Valley Creek, the western boundary of the Escalante River watershed.
As we crest the pass, the cliffs of Powell Point rise before us. Radiant tiers of peach and salmon, the uppermost strata chalk-white and crowned by a sparse mat of wiry conifers, like the pilling of a wool sweater. Its flanks, eroded into spires and buttresses like a gothic cathedral, cast exaggerated shadows from the light's long, low-angle journey through the placid air.
"It's so beautiful,” say L. “I've lived here three years and it still makes me tear up.”
Powell Point is the southernmost tip of the Aquarius Plateau, the highest of three fingerlike projections that extend southward from the Wasatch Mountains into southern Utah. Formed as part of an ancient seabed, it was thrust up twenty million years ago by tectonic forces and subsequently eroded into a broad, high tableland. During the late Pleistocene, a glacier formed repeatedly across its top, draining ice through wide, canyonlike troughs.
The Aquarius is the highest timbered plateau in North America—over 900 square miles of mostly forested highland, 50,000 acres of it above 11,000 feet. Across its roughly thirty-mile-wide top is a wilderness of Douglas fir, white fir, Engelmann spruce, and aspen dotted with a myriad of small ponds, subalpine grasslands, and meadows that support robust herds of deer, elk, and pronghorn antelope, along with cougar, bobcat, bear, and fox. Cool freshwater streams support native cutthroat trout and beaver (returned after being extirpated in the 1800s), which engineer complex marshes and wetlands that are crucial stopover points for migratory songbirds and waterfowl. Above, a swirling sugar dome of stars stretches across some of the darkest night sky in the country.
A team led by John Wesley Powell first surveyed this territory in 1872, at the time completely uncharted. Setting out from Kanab, they followed the valley route where Highway 12 currently lies, beneath the point that now bears his name. Ascending a ridge, they "sat their horses looking out over one of those grand, lonely, colorful panoramas that the plateau country offers in abundance and that are seen nowhere else," writes Wallace Stegner. "It was a perfect paradise for anybody—still is.”
As the first director of the US Geological Survey, Powell was a prophet of the elementary fact that in the West, there is not enough water to go around—at least not enough to grow crops and build cities as in the East. He derided foolish speculation and investments based on assumptions of unlimited growth. Development should be carefully planned so as to maximize efficient use of water.
In 1889, addressing the delegates of the North Dakota convention who were writing that state's constitution, Powell warned of overzealous expansion, urging them to take natural limits into account. "Nothing that man could do would change the climate materially." The West would always be prone to droughts, and they had better prepare for them.
Four days later, he attended the Montana convention where his conviction led him to deliver an even more radical proposal. Rather than divide counties based on arbitrary political lines, they should be drawn according to watersheds. A watershed is a geographic boundary that delineates the hydrologic reach of a river and all its tributaries. A drop of rain that falls anywhere within the 1.3 million-acre Escalante River watershed, for example, will eventually end up in the river. One that falls across the line will flow into an adjacent drainage (the Sevier or Dirty Devil), with a different destination. Powell's survey crews were already mapping these basins across the West and had come to view them as "natural geographical and topographical unities."
"Farmers on the irrigable acres needed to control the adjacent mountains," explains Stegner, "not merely for their timber but for their water-storage facilities, and for their potential exposure to erosion and floods and destruction of the watershed. The relations between mountains and plains was so close that the two should not be politically separated."
The Montana delegates were incredulous. Powell was laughed out of the room, and his proposal, which could have set an enduring precedent for wise water use across the West and avoided more than a hundred years of litigation from archaic, convoluted water law, was ignored.
Aquarius is the eleventh sign of the zodiac. It correlates with the constellation identified by the Greek astronomer Ptolemy in the 2nd century also known as "The Water Bearer", which is typically depicted as a robed man carrying a water jar who pours a stream of more than twenty stars across the sky. Many cultures around the world have seen the same thing (the Hindus, for example, called it kumbha, for "water pitcher"). Between January 20 and February 19, the constellation lies directly behind the sun, when, it is said, its energy is carried toward Earth, infusing human beings with its essence, even particular personality traits. As a scientist I take such claims with a healthy dose of skepticism, but still...
In Greek mythology, the water bearer was Ganymede, son of Tros, King of Troy, a beautiful youth who, while tending his father's flocks, was abducted to Mount Olympus by an eagle commanded by Zeus to act as cup-carrier to the gods. The character stretches back further to ancient Babylonia and the god Ea, who is commonly depicted holding an overflowing vase. As the ruler of the southernmost quarter of the sun's path, Ea is associated with destructive floods (south-facing slopes melt fastest).
Utah gets 95% of its water from melting snowpack that accumulates in the mountains during the winter. As the highest point in the Escalante River watershed, snow that falls on the Aquarius Plateau feeds innumerable trickles and rivulets, forming a network of tributary streams that careen down its steep limestone ledges. These tributaries in turn come together to form the Escalante River, which over millions of years has cut a deep, winding chasm through hundreds of feet of sandstone—a riparian oasis of shady cottonwoods and willows that extends nearly one hundred miles south, where it finally widens, slows, and empties into the Colorado River at Lake Powell. Along the way, it loses 7,000 feet of elevation, quenching dry washes across five distinct ecoregions, each with their own unique climate and ecology. It fills reservoirs that supply water for drinking, irrigation, and industry, and supports the livelihoods of over a thousand people in Escalante and Boulder.
The West is currently in the grips of a "megadrought", the worst in 1,200 years. Climate change is leading to further reduced precipitation and higher temperatures. Since 1915, the average snowpack in western states has declined by between 15 and 30 percent, comparable to the volume of Lake Mead. Researchers attribute the decline to warming, not a lack of precipitation. Earlier spring runoff means lower river and reservoir levels during the late summer and fall. In 2022, Lake Powell dropped to its lowest point since the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam in the 1960s, only 32 feet above “dead pool”, when water level is too low to spin the turbines that generate electricity for over five and a half million people across six states. So far this winter, Utah is off to an above-average snowfall, but it will take several years of strong snowpack to pull the state (and the West) out of its multi-year deficit.
Since we're on mythology—The month of January is named for the Roman god Janus, who is usually depicted with two faces, one looking forward and one looking back. He is the god of gates, transitions, and doorways. One year turning into the next. The inflection point between past and future. So there's the other connotation of the word, watershed: a crucial dividing line, or factor; a turning point. Realize that we've crossed a threshold. “The Southwest has to get it in its head that it’s never going to get back to the levels of water availability that we had in the late 20th century," said climate scientist Richard Seager of Columbia University in an interview with Bloomberg News.
In December I am driving past Powell Point again, in the other direction, on my way home to visit family for the holidays. It's a bluebird day, and the gibbous moon hangs above the plateau, which overnight has received a fresh frosting of snow, like a gingerbread house. I pull onto the powdery shoulder of the road and walk up to a fencepost strung with barbed wire.
We have become as gods. And still I gaze at these life-giving slopes in awe, and wonder.
Beautiful pics of Mount Powell.