Lake Mead is drying up much as Folsom is.
November 4, 2007
THIS LAND
Out West, a Falling Lake Lowers All Boats
By DAN BARRY
LAKE MEAD, Nev.
All aboard the Desert Princess for the 2 o’clock tour of historic Lake Mead, and please smile for your souvenir photograph, available for purchase at the end of this excursion. What a beautiful afternoon, with the sky an endless ocean of blue. Not a rain cloud in sight.
Loaded now with its camera-wielding cargo, the paddle-wheeling Desert Princess begins a lake loop that will include a reverent pause before the majestic Hoover Dam. Kick back in the enclosed bar, or grab one of the plastic seats on the open top deck, and drink it all in:
The glassy surface waters of the lake. The looming desert hills, now umber, now chocolate. The chalky whiteness that covers the lake-side faces of those hills; a wall of white, really, rising dozens of feet in the air and prompting one’s inner naturalist to wonder, What the heck is that?
As the boat churns along, a recorded narration discusses everything from the dinosaurs that once roamed to the gradual filling of what is now Lake Mead, after the dam’s completion in 1935. But the disembodied narrator never mentions those prominent hills of white defining the view from port and starboard, bow and stern.
Explanation, then, is left to a sun-baked, window-washing deckhand. He lowers his squeegee and, with the inflection of someone struggling to be patient with the slow-witted, says: “We’re in a nine-year drought.”
That whiteness covering the desert hillsides is a sort of bathtub ring, measuring through calcium and other mineral deposits how much the water level has dropped in Lake Mead over the years, but especially within the last decade. And if you squint and look way, way up, you can see signs at the very tops of some of those hills that, in effect, say the open air is closed to water skiing.
The melting snow on the western slopes of the Rockies feeds into the Colorado River to flow west and south, across parts of Colorado, Utah and Arizona, and, since the construction of the dam, into Lake Mead, some 30 miles east of that study in population explosion, Las Vegas. The lake’s water level has risen and fallen, like a sleeping man’s chest, but never has the drop been quite like this.
