Many words have been written about Glen Canyon, which was flooded by the Glen Canyon Dam that created Lake Powell. For decades, writers and environmentalists have praised the vanished canyon as long gone, flooded, and sacrificed.

Author Zak Podmore stumbled upon another story while traveling through the area on a trip with the Moab-based Returning Rapids project. The unexpectedly inspiring story became his new nonfiction book, “After Deadpool: Lake Powell’s Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River,” out this month from Torrey House Press. Podmore will give a talk about the book at 7 p.m. on August 14 at the Grand County Public Library.

Here we spoke with the author about how the rapid return of ecology from a flooded site surprised even scientists and what it might mean for the environment in the southwestern United States in the future.

Moab Sun News: Your previous book, “Confluence: Navigating the Personal & Political on Rivers of the New West,” was published in 2019. What inspired you to start this new project and delve into the re-emerging world of Glen Canyon?

Zak Podmore: I worked for the Salt Lake Tribune and took a trip with the Moab-based Returning Rapids Project in 2021. We spent a week in Cataract Canyon and the upper reaches of Lake Powell’s former bed. The trip was with 26 people, most of them scientists who are studying all sorts of aspects of how the former bed of the reservoir is recovering from its previous flooding beneath Lake Powell. The reservoir was sinking very quickly back then.

As I listened to the scientists talk about what they were studying and the positive ecological changes that were happening in Glen Canyon, I was excited and started studying different aspects of the research that was being done there. And pretty quickly it turned into a book because there was so much going on. It was a very different story than what I had imagined about Lake Powell.

MSN: The story of the loss of Glen Canyon has long been a sad one, especially here in the Southwest.

Podmore: Yes, absolutely. The loss of Glen Canyon is told from an environmental perspective as a cautionary tale of how quickly a landscape can be lost. And when I started this project, I didn’t know the latest version of that story. It says that not only was Glen Canyon obviously severely impacted by the construction of the dam, but the megadrought that we’ve been experiencing in the Southwest since 2000, which has prevented Lake Powell from being full since 1999, is a really hopeful example of landscape resilience and the ability of these desert ecosystems to recover on their own.

In places that have been permanently exposed since 2000 in the upper part of some side canyons, fully or mostly intact original ecosystems have been restored. Most of the sediment has been washed away and there are huge stands of willows, blankets of native wildflowers, beavers building dams in the side canyons, and cottonwood trees 50 to 60 feet tall. You would never know that these areas were underwater for decades unless you occasionally saw perfectly preserved beer cans from the 1960s washed out of the banks.

It gives a sense of what would happen if a dam were eventually rebuilt and the river flowed freely again throughout Glen Canyon. We wouldn’t have to wait hundreds of years to see what the landscape looked like before the dam. In much of the canyon, recovery would be very rapid. In 10 or 20 years, ecosystems return, and that’s something that even ecology experts are surprised by.

MSN: You have carved out a niche for yourself as an environmental writer in the Southwest and are part of a long tradition. Are there other writers who inspire you?

Podmore:

I live in Bluff, not far from where Ellen Melloy, the Southwestern essayist and Pulitzer Prize finalist, lived before her sudden death in 2004. I was really grateful to receive the Ellen Melloy Desert Writers Award and felt inspired by her work throughout the process. The story of the loss of Glen Canyon has spawned so much great literature, including works by Edward Abbey and Wallace Segner. Many people still have that perspective in their minds when they think of Glen Canyon as a tragedy of loss. And with this project, I tried to update the story for the age of climate change and tell a story that isn’t just a depressing environmental story. It’s a really hopeful story because the recovery is real and you can witness it just by hiking up any side canyon in the heart of Glen Canyon and looking at what happened there.