"Drought is shrinking one of the country’s largest reservoirs, revealing a hidden Eden."
"Lake Powell, which some people consider the most beautiful place on earth and others view as an abomination, lies in slickrock country, about two hundred and fifty miles south of Salt Lake City. Not long ago, I made the trip from Salt Lake to Powell in a rental car. The drive wound by Orem and Provo, then through a landscape so parched that even the sagebrush looked thirsty. A few miles shy of the lake, in the nearly nonexistent town of Ticaboo, I passed a lot where dry-docked cabin cruisers rose, mirage-like, from the desert.
It was the tail end of a record-breaking heat wave and two decades into what’s sometimes called the Millennium Drought. When I got to Bullfrog, on the lake’s western shore, it was almost 6 p.m. The car’s thermometer read a hundred and twelve degrees. At the Bullfrog marina, families were lugging coolers onto houseboats. Some of the boats had water slides running off the back; others were trailing Jet Skis. Despite the intense heat, the atmosphere was festive. I met a woman who told me that she was using an inheritance to take two dozen relatives out on the lake on the biggest houseboat she could rent—a seventy-five-footer.
“I really shouldn’t tell you how awesome it is, because I don’t want people from New York to know,” she said."
Elizabeth Kolbert reports for the New Yorker August 9, 2021.
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