Spring Trips on the Water

As usual, water dominated many of my photography trips and Grand Circle Field School / Elderhostel classes this spring. Jim Page and I guided two Elderhostel programs headquartered at Marble Canyon Lodge in February, one focused on photography, the other focused on hiking.

 

The Marble Canyon hiking week featured the 41,000 CF/S high flow from Glen Canyon Dam. A few weeks later I saw the results of the controlled flood--substantial beach improvements--during a photography river trip through Grand Canyon. Spring winds made a couple of days of the trip uncomfortable at times, cold and wet while we were on the river, but they rarely interfered with our photography pursuits. In complete compensation for the cold winds, the brittlebush bloom was spectacular and the canyon was as magnificent as ever.

 

There were four Lake Powell houseboat trips, one with a group of hiking friends during the cold days of February, and three with Grand Circle Field School and Elderhostel in late April and the first half of May. Jim Page again acted as co-leader of these trips. Two of the three GCFS trips featured sit-on-top kayaking forays and one concentrated on hiking into the backcountry around the lake.

 

This spring's GCFS / Elderhostel Lake Powell programs also welcomed as instructors Mike Masek, Mike Anderson, Fred Blackburn and Frank Romaglia. The fall trips may also include a photography workshop week.

 

Lake Powell is rising at six to ten inches per day as the Rocky Mountains fill the Green and Colorado Rivers with snowmelt. This is when many favorite Lake Powell beaches and slot canyons disappear beneath the rising waters and higher-elevation locations once again become shoreline. This transformation, especially dramatic on higher-than-average spring inflows (like this spring), is responsible for creating a "new" lake. It's what makes possible an entirely fresh set of Lake Powell images.

 

Glen Canyon Dam is currently releasing about 13,000 CF/S while inflows into Lake Powell are approaching 50,000 CF/S. The difference explains how this immense lake (266 square miles when full) could rise nearly a foot per day.

 

I wish I could be out there on the water every day for the next two months as Lake Powell rises towards a high of somewhere between 3635 and 3640 feet predicted by the Bureau of Reclamation. The big landscape views don't change much from day-to-day but the shoreline mutations--beaches where there were once cliffs, islands where there was hilly terrain only a few weeks earlier, wide bays were there were twisting narrows--are often dramatic. I'll be on the lake the last few days of May then turn the place over to the crazy summer boaters. 

 

Great hiking and photography to you!