Post Premium: Top stories for the week of July 18-24

PAGE, Ariz. — White sandstone cliffs create a ring around Lake Powell in contrast to the honey- and red-colored desert rock nearby. Evidence that water once, not all that long ago, filled America’s second-largest reservoir.

Fed by the Colorado River, Lake Powell, in south-central Utah, has seen wet years and dry years over the past two decades. Mostly dry years.

Buoys no longer bob, they tilt, sitting on dry sand. Beer cans, punctured pontoons and deck chairs litter miles of waterless lake bed.

The last time entire sections of Lake Powell were this dry, the place was actually called Glen Canyon. That was before the completion of the Glen Canyon Dam in 1963, which flooded the canyon and created the reservoir.

The reservoir’s water is receding because the Colorado River is drying. Climatologists aren’t sure when, or if, Powell will ever fill again. Rather, they expect conditions to worsen.

The chalky ring around Powell is just one sign of many that the 40 million people who directly depend on the Colorado River must fundamentally change their way of life, experts agree. And it’s going to hurt, experts say.

“This is not a drought, this is aridification,” Rhett Larson, a water law professor at Arizona State University, said. “This is not something we can wait out. This is not something we can survive. This is the new world we live in.”

— Full story via Conrad Swanson, The Denver Post 

The West’s most important water supply is drying up. Soon, life for 40 million people who depend on the Colorado River will change.

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See more great photos like this on The Denver Post’s Instagram account.

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