Drought has left Lake Powell at a new low—and once-drowned wonders high and dry. Jim Robbins discovers what lay beneath

The first time I topped a ridge in northern Arizona, while hitchhiking from New York to California in 1973, and saw Lake Powell sprawled out before me, its sapphire waters looked for all the world like a mirage. After having spent hours in the sere, sunbaked red desert, I suddenly saw speedboats towing water-skiers and huge, boxy houseboats with names like Totally Incoherent carving wakes in the cool, slack water. Making the scene all the more unreal were the walls, buttes, arches, and spires of brick-red stone that surround the lake, the whole lit by the gem-quality desert light.

That impression was not far off the mark: The lake is more illusory than I could have imagined. Glen Canyon Dam's nearly ten million tons of concrete created the lake in 1963, but a merciless five-year drought has left more water draining from the reservoir than flowing into it from the Colorado River, which is fed by Rocky Mountain snowfields. Today, Lake Powell is back to 1970 levels, when it was still filling.

The effects are stunning. A bathtub ring lines the red rocks, an illustration of how far the water level has gone down. Once a thriving launch point, Hite Marina is far above the lake's surface—and was abandoned several years ago. Other marinas have scrambled to extend boat ramps down the rocky shoreline, chasing the receding waters. While there will always be a Lake Powell, its surface area could shrink from 250 square miles to 32 should the drought continue.

What is a disaster to some is serendipity to others. To environmentalists, Glen Canyon—a majestic crevice on a par with the Grand Canyon—was the original pearl before swine. The eco-minded considered it a sacrilege that Bureau of Reclamation engineers drowned it for a relatively small amount of hydropower and boating, destroying not only Glen Canyon but also the ecology of the Grand Canyon downstream by taming the river's natural flood pulse. The fight against Glen Canyon Dam, and what writer and wildlife advocate Edward Abbey sneered at as "Lake Foul" in the 1950s, helped give birth to the environmental movement, but the cause, for all intents and purposes, seemed lost.

Now nature is drawing back the curtain. Rock formations rounded like elephants' backs are surfacing in the middle of the lake, and canyons and mesas buried for 30 years are reemerging, drying out, and greening up. If the Grand Canyon, with its miles of white water, is the soul of the Colorado, Glen was the heart. The river flowed slowly here, but it nourished a rich ecosystem in its tributaries. Side canyons fed into the main one, and now, as hundreds of miles of canyons dry out, cottonwood trees and wildflowers are springing to life, and ancient stone ruins of Anasazi dwellings (likely abandoned centuries ago because of a drought) are revealing themselves. In the shade of these canyon walls—which in places almost touch—are oases where bighorn sheep, deer, and frogs find cool refuge.