Reply #16: This is the first time since 1996, which is quite a while [View All]

[hatrack]

And back in the Predambrian Period, the river flooded every year, big snowpack or small. The only variation year-on-year was the height of the water. The water rose and the silt came down in the spring, the water dropped and the silt dropped out later in the summer and the rhythm went on and on. The serious old-time river rats like Bert Loper and Buzz Holstrom said that the Canyon was never too low to run, even in dry summers. You just needed to change your boats and equipment to match what the water levels were.

Now we have a three- or five-day Band-aid every eight years or so which is ostensibly "replicating" the natural cycles of the river. Hardly. Whatever beaches this release will restore won't last more than a year or two.

In addition, since the maximum possible flow of Glen Canyon Dam is 96,000 cfs, the Grand Canyon may become more and more difficult to run. The canyon's rapids are produced by side canyon floods, but without really big (200-300,000 cfs) floods coming down every few decades to shift and break up these debris fields, sporadic but inevitable side canyon floods will inevitably pack the rapids so densely with rocks that they'll eventually become unrunnable. Not a short-term problem, but then we Americans never were much good at long-term thinking anyway.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't try and maintain these beach-building flows. I'm just saying that they're not enough, and BuRec should keep their environmental back self-patting to a minimum.