In 1879, two hundred fifty Mormon pioneers set off from Cedar City, Utah, on a 205-mile journey, directed by Brigham Young to create a new Latter Day Saint settlement on the San Juan River. The year before, a small scouting party traveled through northeastern Arizona and the Navajo Nation, but they decided to take a shortcut. No one in the party had yet taken the new way, and regional maps did not exist yet. Instead, they leaned fully upon their faith.

They resupplied provisions at the last outpost of civilization, the town of Potato Valley (now Escalante), Utah. The hamlet was named for a wild variety of spud introduced to them by the local band of Paiute people. Starch on a 10,900-year-old stone tool found there makes it the location of the earliest wild potato consumption in North America.

For over sixty-two miles, the wagons bumped along across a vast grassland where the grass “stood belly deep on a horse,” according to one account. They took some time for a few dance parties, under an alcove now commemorating the trip as Dance Hall Rock. Then, the pioneers reached a cliff overlooking the Colorado River.

A major snowfall made turning back undesirable. So, they opted to spend over a month blasting a 200-foot ramp down a cleft in the cliffs. From there, they used ropes to lower eighty-three wagons through the Hole-in-the-Rock. Another one thousand vertical feet of steep, rocky slopes spread over a quarter mile descended toward the Colorado River.

The expedition party, mostly families, presumed that was the hardest part of their journey. Instead, they crossed the river, and the terrain got rougher. Explosives were used to break the trail. The route traversed Grey Mesa through a foot of snow and headed toward Lake Canyon. There, women and children enjoyed a welcome break by the water while the men scouted the next move.

Beyond the Clay Hills, steep defiles of rainbow-hued Chinle formation, the line wagon paralleled Grand Gulch and wheeled across Cedar Mesa. Finally, they found a way up and over Comb Ridge, a steep monocline of sandstone, near the San Juan River, where they settled the town of Bluff. Astonishingly, nobody died during the pilgrimage, and three babies were born.

The Hole-in-the-Rock road remains a modern pilgrimage for many Latter-day Saint families and a popular Jeep and OHV route. Most folks are familiar with the sixty-two miles of dirt road launching east from Escalante, Utah. The road is notoriously dusty and washboarded. If you drive down after a heavy storm, you'd better have supplies to hang out for a while. This is a tactic I used to deploy to stay longer in the canyons. The road ends just shy of the blasted hole-in-the-rock. Regardless, cars of all makes and models attempt the road during peak season.

From here, the Hole-in-the-Rock route is less frequented. Where the wagons first crossed the Colorado River on a wooden raft, now there is a reservoir. Lake Powell’s low water levels now reveal the impressive road grade (pictured above) constructed by the pioneers. If you continue, you will find yourself on the far more rugged and unruly section of the Hole-in-the-Rock route. This I hiked in the spring of 2021 while retracing the 1929 Bernheimer Expedition recounted in Path of Light. (The above passage about the Hole-in-the-Rock Expedition is excerpted from that book.)

Some stretches of the “road” are so steep that I dreaded walking up them. It did not help that I carried up to four gallons of water in my backpack in case the potholes were dry. The 1879 Expedition took place in winter with several feet of snow on the ground. Tough as that may be, snow increases the odds of survival. As a result of two decades of extreme drought, the worst in 1,200 years, the route now traverses a mostly dry expanse of desert.

This is why I became so fascinated with the expedition. The journals, mostly kept by women, are a critical record of what this landscape and climate were like 147 years ago. Change is inevitable, but knowing the specifics of that change helps us contextualize the spaces we now inhabit and visit. Gone are the grasses that stood belly deep on a horse, because of overgrazing. Rare are the winters that produce several feet of snow. These records document increasing human impacts on land, water, and climate. If we take note, they can help us course correct to hopefully protect what remains for future generations.

A fifty-pound backpack does not compare to the challenges of traveling by horse-pulled wagon on a convoluted, unproven overland route, enhanced with dynamite, in winter. Stepping next to the tracks incised into the sandstone by wooden wagon wheels is a humbling reminder of how difficult passage through this terrain was and still is.

Driving in an air-conditioned luxury vehicle or whip speed OHV certainly removes almost all of the hardship. However, each time my wheels bump a fallen rock, and the cab bounces while crossing a rut, it is a reminder of why Hole-in-the-Rock road exists. It was created by people so wildly devoted to their faith that they willingly lowered their families over the edge of a cliff toward a raging muddy river.

Last month, Garfield County chip-sealed the first ten miles of Hole-in-the-Rock road. Garfield County began preparing the road this spring. In response, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) filed a lawsuit, citing that these “improvements” were unauthorized. SUWA’s statement explains:

“While Garfield County has title to a right-of-way for the road, it does not own the road or the land beneath it (this remains federal public land), and it cannot lawfully take unilateral action to improve the road. Instead, the county is required to consult with the BLM before making any improvements, such as widening or realigning the road, installing new culverts, or chip sealing the surface.”

The Bureau of Land Management completed its consultation anyway, and Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) filed a temporary restraining order that was denied by the court. The environmental group continues to seek an emergency injunction to halt the project, but the county is laying down the pavement and bragging about it online.

KSL News Utah news outlet described the issue as a debate between improving access and preserving an experience. Garfield County pointed to an average of 1,500 cars traveling the road on busy weekends, most ill-equipped rental cars, as the motive for the chip sealing. Dave Dodds, Garfield County Public Works Director, stated the county does not have plans to extend the road, nor is it a cost or responsibility they want to incur.

Ten miles of chip-sealed road may sound like a minor issue right now, but it is representative of Utah being the epicenter of efforts to dismantle public lands. This spring, Utah delegates Celeste Meloy and Mike Lee attempted to use the Congressional Review Act to overturn the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument management plans. Thankfully, the CRA scheme failed when the Senate missed a 60-day deadline to vote on it last week.

The Utah delegates claimed that past management plans were created without local input. Complaints that the Grand Staircase management plans were created without public input are unfounded. Federal land management already comes with requirements for local input, and it is accessible for free (or very low permit rates) for people from all over the world. The current plan, in place since 2025, was developed with local input, including rural community members, businesses, scientists, and the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Inter-Tribal Coalition. The monument itself protects a landscape that is a desert archive filled with human history––Indigenous, settler, and scientific. However, local input does not mean perfect consensus, nor is that possible.

Local input will not be so local if these lands are leased to foreign extractive industries or sold by the state to private owners. Then the “No Trespassing” signs pop up. Worse, these oil, gas, and mining leases are often filed by foreign corporations (more here) with no connection to, or care for, these rural communities.

Paving the road is a nod toward the movement to redirect public (federal) lands into local and state hands as a means to regain local control. But the land within Utah already belonged to the Federal Government before it gained statehood. (And to Indigenous peoples long before settlers arrived.)

Utah recently signed a co-management agreement with the BLM in the San Rafael Swell Recreation Area. Critics say to watch for increased prioritization of motorized access, which is already underway with last month’s BLM comment period focused on reopening Swell travel routes.

Steve Bloch, Legal Director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA), also cautions,

“Gov. Cox has found a willing partner in the Trump administration, who sees public lands as little more than figures on a ‘balance sheet’ to be dismantled and monetized for short-term gain. We will be watching closely for any shenanigans that stem from this agreement.”

The BLM has also announced a comment period to review three travel management plans in Utah. Their purpose:

With these efforts, the BLM is seeking to restore balanced land management and improve multiple-use management, consistent with the President Trump’s recent direction in Executive Order 14408, “Removing Unnecessary and Counterproductive Restrictions on Access to Federal Lands,” and future revision of Off-Road Vehicle regulations at 43 CFR 8340. Until a formal rulemaking is completed, the agency will comply with current governing regulations and will look toward how best to implement the president’s vision for travel management plans that improve access for all Americans.

Yikes! This is in direct reference to the Trump administration’s recently repeal of Executive Orders 11644 and 11989, which were issued by Presidents Nixon and Carter. Off-road vehicle use was previously unrestricted, and these EO’s created designated road/trail areas to prevent rampant impacts and destruction of natural areas.

The status of public lands, management plans, and the roads within them have become pawns in the culture wars in the not-so-wild, and over-developing West. Everyone is so damn focused on their recreation group of allegiance that they forget to consider the bigger picture, on both sides. Representatives looking to improve public lands “access” are not actually looking out for the public. Find a well-maintained dirt or paved road on public land, and it likely leads to extractive activity of some form. Public support for such road improvements will help the extractive industries gain the access that they want.

I may be what some folks call a “tree hugger,” but I love driving rough dirt roads. For three years, I lived out of a 2002 Jeep Wrangler and wrote Outlandish, about the experience. I learned overlanding skills from my uncle, who hosted a Jeep TV show in the nineties. We had vastly different political beliefs, but we bonded over our love of time outdoors and care for the future of the landscapes we explored.

4-wheel driving is still how I access backcountry terrain to explore on foot. When the road ends, I can step into a vast roadless area of desert spanning millions of acres. For now.

On June 10, Sen. Mike Lee (he who does not quit the bad ideas) slipped a last minute ammendment to repeal the Roadless Rule in legislation (the Wildfire Prevention Act) which was passed by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. It can now head to the Senate Floor for a final vote this month.

The Roadless Rule was passed in 2001, with popular support. Out of 1.6 million public comments about the rule, 97% were in favor of it. The Roadless Rule currently protects over 58 million acres of Forest Service land. 4 million acres are in Utah.

These Roadless areas protect healthy watersheds that are essential to clean water for wildlife & humans. Roadless areas are essential to maintain critical wildlife habitats and migration corridors, many of which protect endangered species. Endemic, rare, & endangered plants are often found in roadless areas. A rule change could decimate these precious areas of biodiversity.

The amendment is guised as fire management, but it is a lie. Most wildfires are human-caused, and the majority start within a half mile of a road. (More here.)Wildfire mitigation is not necessarily enhanced by the presence of roads, and it comes with increased risk of fires.

There are already 370,000 miles of Forest Service Roads. Many of these were built for logging and extraction, not recreation, and they dead-end abruptly.1 NPR reports that the Roadless Rule was created in part because the Forest Service did not have the funds to manage the roads it already has. Now their funding is slashed by another 60% by the current administration.

Write your lawmakers about the Roadless Rule here.

Our future depends upon preserving ecosystems and history, not paving it over. This is especially prescient as the Trump Administration attempts to dismantle interpretive signage in the National Park System. A Federal judge has ordered that the signs be restored.

It is critical to preserve history, even when it was complicated. In 2025, Garfield County attempted to rename the historic Burr Trail the “Donald J. Trump Presidential Burr Trail Backway.” Successful pushback came from all demographics, but most consequentially from the descendants of the Burr Family.

Hole in the Rock blasts through the natural contours of the canyon landscape, which highlights a blatant difference in settler values that ignore knowledge from Indigenous people who lived in this landscape since time immemorial. This includes the ancestors of the Hopi Tribe, Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, Navajo Nation, Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and the Zuni Tribe.

The “Hole” at the end of the road overlooks the Colorado River. The route was a “one and done” in that it was not regularly used after the famous namesake venture it was born from. We do not always need new roads.

Chip sealing a historic route, one so intrinsically linked to the settlement of this region, is more consequential than a name change. Hole in the Rock road is a relic of a bygone era. One in which life was hard, and the desert was vast, and there were no paper maps or mobile devices to guide you. ( explains this well in “Convenience is the Enemy.”) When the road ends, it beckons some of us to explore on foot. Or, even if we stop there, our lives can still be filled with the mystery of places unknown to us, stirring our imagination about the big, beautiful planet we call home.

I prefer to take the bumpy roads over traffic jams. It is grounding to live in a landscape that so broadly archives the past, as the world of technology changes faster than any of us can keep pace with. This also includes keeping up with the rocky terrain of public lands management.

In 2022, Garfield and Kane Counties joined the state of Utah and Blue Ribbon Coalition (BRC) in suing the Federal Government over President Biden’s restoration of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments’ full boundaries. The lower court dismissed the cases in 2023, citing that the “sovereign immunity” of a President’s use of the Antiquities Act was not reviewable. The state and counties appealed.

This week, the 10th Circuit court assessed that the Presidential monument designation is up for judicial review. It maintained the dismissal of the BRC case. This does not affect the current boundaries of either monument. It sends the state and county level case back to the same court that dismissed it a few years ago.2

This sets a precedent for continued attacks on the Antiquities Act and national monuments. This is not a final decision; it just means litigation continues. As I reported for Sierra Magazine last year, for over a century, the courts have continually defended the president's ability to create or enlarge, but not dismantle, national monuments.

On Monday, June 15, a new cadre of representatives from seven Colorado River Basin states convened below Cataract Canyon for water negotiations. The open-air meeting was held in an eddy flanked by a thick layer of the Dominy Formation.1 Silt tumbled into the banks in low runoff conditions as the Upper Basin (Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico) and Lower Basin (California, Arizona, Nevada) prepared statements about how to reduce over-consumption of the shrinking Colorado River.

While this meeting was not public or real, it attempted to be more inclusive by allowing the river to attend. A few great blue herons and minnows also popped in. The Upper Basin kicked things off with the state rep from Colorado, who insisted they did not need to make any water cuts because Mother Nature makes those for headwater states. Utah led the group in prayer, offered to pay farmers to stop farming, and insisted that the public can be trusted to do the right thing and make voluntary water cuts. Wyoming ranted about the emergency water releases draining Flaming Gorge Reservoir, with impacts to the recreation economy. New Mexico was too stressed to speak since the Rio Grande is also running dry.

Lower Basin negotiators let a lawyer representing Nevada take the lead while boasting their effective long-term water-saving measures. California reminded everyone that it is the fourth-largest economy in the world, and that stronger municipal water conservation efforts are underway. Arizona presented the dire effects to the state when water to the (junior rights status) Central Arizona Project is cut. Still, all three states agreed to cut Colorado River water use.

The impromptu Colorado River standoff theater was not real. It was a beach game intended to explain water overallocation. That it still resulted in imaginary litigation speaks loudly to this moment in history. The ability to take this lunchtime activity a little too literally was also because the participants were members of Glen Canyon Institute and guides for Holiday River Expeditions. These shenanigans took place in the final hours of a five-day river trip in Cataract Canyon to support GCI’s ongoing efforts for the restoration of Glen Canyon.

The group was certainly highly astute to Colorado River current events to throw down such an intricate dialogue on the spot. Instead of making a list of the very real solutions to distribute Colorado River water to forty million people, the group recognized what is literally standing in the way: seven state representatives who are just as responsible for the looming potential for a Colorado River crash as Glen Canyon Dam.

The basin-wide impasse is by far the most frustrating aspect of explaining the current problems and future management of the Colorado River. The potential solutions are abundant, even obvious. Everyone in the basin needs to use less water.

Other critical changes, like giving all thirty Colorado River-connected tribes a seat at the negotiating table and updating the 1922 Colorado River Compact to actually meet river flows where they are at in 2026 (an average of 12.5 million acre-feet down from 15 million acre-feet a century ago), are long overdue. Not to mention, ensuring the Colorado River’s right to flow, in line with the Colorado River Indian Tribe’s legal personhood status for the river under their Tribal law.

Beyond the dam, is the Colorado River’s most glaring problem, both concealed and amplified by the water crisis-–is this what democracy is supposed to look like? And what can a citizen of the Colorado River watershed actually do about it?

Despite this broken system, advocacy, especially in the long-term, can move the needle. Until recently, opposition to Glen Canyon Dam was viewed by some as a fringe environmental cult.

Yet Glen Canyon Institute has maintained a constant presence on the front lines of this issue. Since 1996, GCI “embarked upon a multi-year campaign to protect and restore Glen Canyon and reverse the decline of Grand Canyon’s fragile ecosystem.” The Fill Mead First plan takes a hard look at the long-term realities of keeping two major reservoirs, Powell and Mead, more than half empty. Then, in 2024, the Bureau of Reclamation made an announcement that opened minds (and some hearts) to consider that Glen Canyon Dam is a major part of the current problem.

Through persistent love and devotion of these advocacy efforts, awareness for the recovery of Glen Canyon continues to gain momentum. So does dealing with Glen Canyon Dam’s outdated infrastructure which is becoming more mainstream and realistic everyday. In a recent letter, the Lower Basin states urged the Bureau of Reclamation to make dam modifications.2

While it is electrifying to be on the pulse of a major change that stands to benefit Glen Canyon and the lower Colorado River, the current negotiation process is still a dystopian nightmare circus.3

During the GCI member trip, new bets from the states and cards from the feds were again being waged. Colorado River states traveled to Washington, D.C., and testified in front of the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee. Meanwhile, without a consensus proposal between states, the feds are drafting up a plan to be released next month. The White House will need to sign off on the plan. Litigation by at least some of the states is expected.

Utah reps are urging a withholding of federal spending on states that choose the courtroom. Utah Sen. Mike Lee stated, “Taxpayers should not be asked to subsidize litigation among states.”4 More promising, Lower Basin states announced a Memorandum of Understanding for the San Diego Water Authority to sell surplus desalination water to these states to offset Colorado River water use.

For some folks, like myself, this shit show is so fascinating that we are keen to immerse ourselves in the muck. However, even if you care deeply for the Colorado River, this can be overwhelming, especially amid the persistant horrors of this era. Naturally, our instinct may be to turn away. This came up during a riverside policy talk on the trip led by GCI’s projects and development manager Anna Penner and me. With so much going on and the constant information overload online, it is important to trust your gut instinct and give yourself space away from the news. Just don’t pull your heart from the Colorado River itself.

The Colorado River carries hope. The side effects of drought, overallocation, and indecision is the steady return of a free flowing Colorado River and Glen Canyon emerging from a shrinking reservoir. I’ve written before that many of us were too late to experience Glen Canyon before the dam, but we are now right on time to witness its resurrection. Cataract Canyon is an ideal place to experience the changes in motion. From muddy sediment-rich river flows and returning rapids to strongholds of native plants like box elders and seep willows propagating in tributary canyons.

For one guest, Tom, these watershed moments for Glen Canyon are major bookends in his life. As a young lad, his family crossed the old Hite Ferry at Dandy Crossing in their station wagon during a road trip. They then drove up the rock-rutted and sandy North Wash, sans road, before it became Highway 95. He also boated on Lake Powell in 1965, before it filled completely, and vividly recalls seeing the fully exposed Hole-in-the-Rock site. Now age seventy seven, Tom and his lifelong friend Paul make time every year to return to the Colorado River with GCI. He has been a member for twenty-one years.

This was Aaron’s first Cataract River trip, and a deserved reward for living with my Colorado River obsession. His perpetual and ever-widening smile affirmed how important quality time with the river is, now and always. Post-trip, he told me his favorite part of the trip was “watching the swirling eddy lines at sunset, while sitting on the beach with the group.”

Right now, we are all in an eddy. The decisions made, or not, in 2026 will ripple beyond our lifetime. But so will our unrelenting love for the river and the water that sustains life in the West. Impossible dreams, like the EarthFirst! symbolic crack in the dam, may come to life in yet unimagined ways, so long as we do not give up.

On our final night, the group pulled out our finer attire in an homage to explorer Charles L. Berheimer, the gentleman explorer, who in 1929 made a concerted effort to prevent Glen Canyon Dam. Now, as Glen Canyon claws its way back from the reservoir, it deserves our best effort and utmost respect. Beside the murmuring current, Lauren Wood, Holiday Expeditions’ trip director, played their guitar while we all sang Katie Lee’s “Drinking Song.”

Of The Drinking Song, Lee wrote:

In 1956 on the Upper half of the Grand Canyon, this toast was composed by me and other members of the trip. Though there are many clear streams running into the Colorado from side canyons, many of us prefer to drink the Colorado water, which is silt-laden. A can-full set in the bottom of the boat for ten minutes settles out to clear water and tastes better than a good many of the highly mineralized streams flowing in from springs. It may look too thick to drink and too thin to plow, but--rr- isn’t. Unfortunately, it isn’t too thick to dam.

In Lee’s ranting prologue to “Folk Songs of the Colorado River,” she wrote:

These man-made dams are here, not so much for the good they might have done, as for
political reasons. They are here because the general public is apathetic about the destruction of its wilderness, because the government agencies who build dams (the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of‘Engineers) have a strong propaganda machine, and because the many conservationist organizations fail to operate as one toward a common goal to preserve this wilderness.

To this, I pause and take another swig of whiskey and muddy water. This spring, I had more than one interview with so-called major environmental groups that sounded more like public relations agents for Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell.

Lee continued:

It is in the wind now, Monument land. The rest of you will hear that they will lose the battles they have already fought and won to the avarice of city, state, and governmental politics, unless they import lobbyists and pay off judicial committees to keep their interests afloat, just as the politicians do.

Exhausting? Perhaps. But better tired than apathetic. With tin cups filled with muddy water, this moment asks us to stand with all who have defended the Colorado River in the past and will continue on into the future. Protecting what we love is a journey without end.

To support efforts to restore Glen Canyon and ensure continued water deliveries below Glen Canyon Dam, consider becoming a supporter of Glen Canyon Institute.

Or pick up a Glen Canyon Backcountry Club hat! A portion of the proceeds will support GCI.

This also spills the beans about a new venture Aaron and I are launching in September! More to share about that soon.

On June 1, Green River flows surged to 4,740 cubic feet per second. This generous water donation was released from Flaming Gorge Reservoir as part of ongoing efforts to protect Lake Powell from a crash. Impossible as it may sound, this dire year of drought has blessed the Colorado River watershed’s longest tributary with healthy flows. Of course, this is borrowing against future water reserves, which may not be replenished. It’s a good year to raft this upper basin river––if you can get a permit.1 Which I did not.

The folks at Holiday River Expeditions graciously allowed me to hitch a ride downstream as a trip photographer and storyteller. For five days, I joined twenty-five floating humans, ages five to seventy, in Desolation and Gray Canyons on the Green River. As a desert hermit, this is a larger crowd than I encounter when I go to town. Most people’s retreat from the world is this desert rat’s fiesta.

I wondered how the group size might affect the experience in a canyon that John Wesley Powell described as a lonely and sorrowful landscape. Perhaps it was just a lack of rain. Powell wrote in 1869, “The walls are almost without vegetation; a few dwarf bushes are seen here and there clinging to the rocks, and cedars grow from the crevices—not like the cedars of a land refreshed with rains, great cones bedecked with spray, but ugly clumps, like war clubs beset with spines. We are minded to call this the Canyon of Desolation.” If so, 2026 is a year of desolation.2

My other trip quest was to read through my printed Riverside manuscript, some 200 pages, which I packed along in a dry bag. Before dinner, I slipped away down the beach to read. As I resisted marking up the document, my brain eddied about the world of the Colorado River that flows beyond the river. Just as water is diverted, decisions about the river’s future are made behind closed doors, far away from the source.

The feds could step in any day with a proposal to manage the river’s plumbing system beyond 2026. I was also missing a “Conference on the Colorado River” co-hosted by The Getches-Wilkinson Center and Water & Tribes Initiative. Instead, I sat by the river and fought the winds for each manuscript page stained with salsa and Tecate.

Once I heard a five-year-old squeal and leap into the current, I knew the trip was essential. This was affirmed when someone said, “We need this river to flow when that child is an adult.” Amen. I do not doubt the high-level information presented at the conference, but this is the kind of Colorado River story more of us need to hear. Riverside is devoted to the Colorado River watershed community. It considers how our relationships with the watershed, past and present, will help sustain its 1,700-mile course and our future, even as the climate dries.

No, I did not interview any policy experts this week. Instead, I sat on a raft and listened to farmers, children, oil businessmen, physicians, Mississippi River rats, Rocky Mountain Big Horn Sheep, and river guides.3 Everyone had profound questions and thoughts about the future of water in the West. Mind you, this was NOT a “water nerd” focused trip. These people were on vacation. So I cautiously dipped my toes into explaining the Colorado River management cluster. I am inspired by how thirsty people are. I am convinced that the river creates a better invitation to be curious about such matters than another doomed headline.

This summer, I am trying to keep pace with the Green River, and find I am living in a surreal time scale. The water released from Flaming Gorge Dam tomorrow will meet me at the confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers next week. Between those dates, the news is racing ahead of the river, but decision-making is lagging far behind.

I am encouraged that mainstream news outlets are reeling in the realities about Glen Canyon Dam’s limitations. This is because it’s no longer a fringe eco-fantasy strung between Edward Abbey and Katie Lee’s words and the recent books by Zak Podmore, Jonathan Thompson, and myself. Lower Basin states are calling for Reclamation to “address long-term operational and structural risks at Glen Canyon Dam in order to increase the ability to deliver water at lower elevations” by the end of 2027.

Glen Canyon Institute (GCI) shared in their newsletter that, “The Bureau of Reclamation has indicated that it will release an appraisal study of Glen Canyon modifications by the end of 2026, but further information about those plans has been scarce.” There is still a lot of time for things to get worse between the end of 2026 and 2027.

A new study4 released during the “Conference on the Colorado River” opens:

If the Colorado River Basin (Basin) experiences another dry year, similar to Water Year 2025, it is likely that reasonably accessible storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead would be mostly depleted, even if consumptive uses and losses are at or near historic lows. Run-of-the-river operations would shortly ensue. This would be an outcome with devastating consequences.

The report goes on to explain that even a wet winter like 2023 would only provide two years of cushion. Until the seven states and the federal government get their shit together, Flaming Gorge is holding up the system.

From June 8 to 11th Reclamation will ramp up releases from Flaming Gorge Reservoir to 4,600 cubic feet per second. This is to mimic late spring floods to support endangered razorback sucker spawning. As Ellen Meloy quipped in Raven’s Exile, the dam is becoming an environmentalist. The benevolence is not helping Powell Reservoir so much. The Flaming Gorge water and restrained releases from Glen Canyon Dam have only boosted the reservoir by two feet. It is likely we will set new record reservoir lows this year, and with it welcome the return to oxygen for more of Glen Canyon.

This will absolutely be an evening discussion during the upcoming GCI membership trip in Cataract Canyon.5 And we will be floating on the latest Flaming Gorge bumps!

Thank you, Holiday River Expeditions, for the support. Your trips embody the spirit of community, awareness, and respect that the river needs from all of us. Holiday is a family-run river outfitter celebrating its 60th anniversary. They run trips all over the upper basin. The guides are incredibly kind and knowledgeable. The food is fresh and delicious. And there is a dreamy river library for guests.

There is still caution tape across the scene, but I will share more about the business I am launching (yikes!) and dreamy anthology I am contributing to soon. I need to wear a PFD at my desk to stay afloat. Better still, to paddle away…

Last week, Aaron and I commuted 200 miles, half on dirt roads plus fifteen miles packrafting the Colorado River, to fill two grocery carts with provisions. Rural Utah will make you a prepper regardless of faith or political persuasion, especially when you run out of beer. The cashiers at Walmart asked if we were going on a long river trip. Yes, no, always.

My dry bags are packed for back-to-back business trips with the necessary tools––a camera and a printed copy of my manuscript draft.

See you downstream!

Morgan

River Notes

Watershedding circus essentials:

Comment if you can guess the literary and historical inspirations for both swimsuits!

As we bumped our way home from Walmart along the 48-mile road, we lamented that Garfield County is, as we speak, chip-sealing the iconic Hole-in-the-Rock road. I spent a well-wasted hour writing an essay drawing from my experience walking most of the route for Path of Light. Then I looked at my writing to-do list with an imminent river sabatical, and thought better of it. Perhaps I will resurrect it later.

I will leave this here: long live the dirt roads that remind us of this region’s complicated human and geological history. These bumpy roads remain portals, for tourists and locals, that affirm the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Glen Canyon landscapes retain a uniquely rugged and wild nature that needs ongoing protection.

For inspiration, please listen to Edward Abbey’s 1988 speech to Univeristy of Utah students about Garfield County’s ongoing efforts to destroy the primitive nature of the wildest lands remaining in Utah.

There are still a few spots open on a Glen Canyon Institute Cataract Canyon trip June 11-15. The trip is already a good group size, so I am not trying to hawk tickets, but I can promise a good time if you find an opening in your schedule.

The platform was originally built with pre-set filters, and since it functions closer to a personal scrapbook than high art, I have no qualms about using them. However, said filter was not labeled as ai until after I saved and, later, posted it. In horror, I considered deleting it and starting over. At which point, I realized I needed to question what I was doing on Instagram. Instead of writing, I was giving time to a platform created by tech oligarchs, dismantling creativity, human touch, and the environment.

I am not a fan of ai. Maybe someday it will do something positive for me or someone I care about. However, I personally love to struggle with my imperfectly human writing and art. ai has pirated Outlandish to train its systems, and my small Anthropic settlement check will arrive…someday. I look forward to what burritos the robots will cook up in the desert someday.

Perhaps they will be able to warm tortillas and fry eggs on the asphalt outside the massive Stratos data center that was approved this week in Box Elder County, Utah? Stratos will be two times the size of Manhattan and will use more energy than the entire state of Utah. As power and water (during a dire drought) are used to cool the technology inside the plant, the center will function like a 400-acre hair dryer blasting locals and the ecosystem at 130 degrees Fahrenheit.

The project is backed by Canadian venture capitalist Kevin O’Leary, who most of us only know from the TV show Shark Tank. He’s making the media rounds touting a degree in environmental studies while wearing a “Utah National Security Hat” (whatever the hell that means) while claiming, without evidence, that anyone opposing the data center has been bused in or paid by Chinese spies. This includes a team of independent journalists at Elevate Utah. Their response is among the best things I have enjoyed on the internet as of late:

Kevin is very worried about Utah’s security. We are, too, actually. Just a different kind. We are worried about the Great Salt Lake. We are worried about water. We are worried about air quality, carbon emissions, land deals, and what it means for northern Utah when a 40,000-acre gas-powered data center moves in and doubles the state’s energy consumption. We are worried about a public process that kept Utahns in the dark until the powerful people were already positioned.

Elevate Utah has fully spun this around. They are now selling “Utah Nature Security” hats,

“Because the actual threat to Utah isn’t us. It’s a 40,000-acre gas-powered data center that could increase the state’s carbon emissions by 50%, strain our water future, and put even more pressure on the Great Salt Lake, all while the politicians behind it expect Utahns to stop asking questions. We’re not a cell. We’re Utahns. And we take Nature Security very seriously.”

The opposition is not foreign nor paid. It is coming from Utah residents of all political affiliations and faiths, and they are showing up by writing letters, signing petitions, attending public meetings, and at the steps of the Utah state capitol.

Another data center and natural gas plant, proposed West of Cedar City, UT, is provoking its own local opposition. They point to the Stratos Project as the origin of their concerns. And my friend, journalist Beth Henshaw, has been diligently reporting on the approved data center in Page, AZ. Adding to the lack of public transparency is the still unknown water source to cool the data center. Will it draw water from the drought-riddled Lake Powell reservoir, now only 23% full with emergency measures?

It is worth reading Len Necefer’s Outside Magazine article about data centers and the Colorado River. Next time we are on the river together (or through the Substack interwaves), I want to ask him at what scale does this still hold true, and at what point is even a small percentage of total Colorado River water too much for a drying watershed? These are sincere questions, not a callout. We need more dialogue and data about all of this than we are getting.

What do residents have to gain from a data center? Across the country, communities are pushing back against data centers because they increase electricity rates, affect water sources, generate noise and pollution, all while being passed with a lack of public transparency and creating minimal jobs. Even the Jeff Bezos-owned Wall Street Journal calls data centers a “job creation bust.”

I was not supposed to go online for more than a few minutes to check in today. My day planner insists only: “write. book.” Instead, the hidden use of ai carried me into a rabbit hole leading toward this rant about data centers. If I have imparted anything through this post, I hope it brings awareness to how discerning and alert we need to be right now, and the questions we need to be asking, as changing technology we have not fully consented to creeps ever more into our lives.

Each day, I grow more wary of the few remaining benefits of handheld app-driven devices. And yet, as creatives (most of us) barely scraping by, what are our other options to share our work and engage with readers?

So here we are. I am so grateful for all of you who subscribe to Wild Words. Thanks to you, Substack is now where my publishers and event partners link to share more information about my work. And hopefully, it will also lead you offline, under a shady tree or saguaro, with the pages of real books between your fingers.

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It is now an expectation that when I return from the river, some aspect of river management will have changed. By return, I mean weekly paddling and walking any of the Colorado River’s upper basin tributaries, and heading home to my home river. That rapid rate of fluctuation, personal and otherwise, speaks to how fluid keeping up with the state of the watershed is.

With natural runoff conditions all but flushed by the March scorcher, the Bureau of Reclamation is busy pulling at the levers of a 15-dam Colorado River circus. Take this past week, in which I ditched my phone for 24 hours on the Upper San Juan River. Upon returning to Bluff, Utah, I gleaned that Flaming Gorge reservoir releases on the Green River would surge to 8,600 cfs.

This is a notable addition to the ~2,000 cfs releases that began last month to prop up Powell Reservoir. While those are truly patches for the ongoing management dysfunction, the latest big water releases are to support endangered razorback sucker larvae. By mimicking high spring runoff flows, the river will inundate wetlands and help disperse the suckers for the ideal survival conditions. 1

A lot can happen overnight on the river. Especially when the flows are extremely low––under 500 cfs on the San Juan. We were just fine in packrafts, but I wonder if the rafts we passed are still out there? For such a short trip, my two friends and I overconfidently decided to forgo creature comforts, like tents. One Modelo each would be our treat. We rolled one backpacking meal into 3 tortillas for dinner.

Within 30 minutes of falling asleep on the beach, the tapping of raindrops woke us. The three of us huddled up in a small pod, much like how I imagine otters weather storms, beneath a small limestone ledge. We fell asleep in our raingear with sleeping pads on top of us for added coverage. Adding to the excitement, a nasty bout of food poisoning seized the inner workings of one friend’s digestive tract.

During that same short stormy period, lower Colorado River Basin states offered up a short-term deal to conserve up to 3.2 million acre-feet of water through 2028. This builds upon their earlier proposal to coordinate with Mexico for annual reductions of 1.5 million acre-feet. It will include “a new expanded effort to implement additional Lower Basin conservation of at least 700,000 acre-feet of conserved water (and a target of 1 million acre-feet) as well as a Tribal Pool.”

The proposal would be in addition to the upper basin flow regime changes to keep Powell Reservoir from sinking below 3,500 feet, the threshold for viable downstream releases. The lower basin cuts will help protect infrastructure at Mead Reservoir from the same low water fate. Notable hydropower losses begin when water drops to 1,050 feet, and it is already at 1,055. Lower basin states also requested that any surplus water in Powell be sent to Mead. How the water use will be cut is not yet clear, but past conservation has included paying farmers to fallow fields and leaning on groundwater and other sources for municipal water (which has its own environmental issues).

In an interview with KUER, Upper Colorado River Commissioner Chuck Cullum calls the cuts insufficient and stated that the plan will only perpetuate a “crisis cycle.” What is truly needed going forward is an agreement between all seven states to reckon with a shrinking Colorado River. Shivaji Deshmukh, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD), had this to say:

“We recognize the significant challenges the Upper Basin states are facing this year, but also believe they can ramp up programs to support the river when conditions improve. For this short-term plan, the reductions Southern California is taking are significant, but we can find a way to manage them. What is not manageable is continued uncertainty with this water supply, which is the foundation of water reliability throughout the Basin. We must recognize that the river is changing, and the only way we can ensure the communities, businesses and ecosystems across the Southwest have the water they need in the decades to come is by all seven states working together.”

While sentiment is no substitute for a plan, both Cullum and Deshmukh (combined) nail the reality of the situation. A long-term overhaul of Colorado River management and infrastructure is needed to live within the realities of a drying river through (seven states) working together.

MWD is the largest municipal provider of Colorado River water and has been pumping the river, via the Colorado River Aqueduct, since 1941. This is the water I drank from the tap as a child in Riverside, California. (This is my inspiration for Riverside as a book title.) I also have a strange fascination with Julian Hinds Pumping Plant. I remember watching it vanish behind the station wagon windows on family drives through the Mojave on I-10. I thought it was a waterslide, and I remain disappointed to this day that only the river gets to ride it.

With the going rate of river take-out updates, perhaps I should stay out longer. (Coming soon!) That won’t help my perpetual state of disorientation, as if I am living in a swirling eddy. The moment I shove off from shore, I am loath to look at my phone to check the time, and I experience instant day-of-the-week amnesia. This certainly adds to my sense of whiplash when that little metal device tells me things I need to know. Which usually involves talking to Colorado River experts, submitting a story on deadline, or calling my Mom to tell her that I am fine, just perpetually out of range.

This is probably why, when Don Snow2 called to tell me I won the 2026 Ellen Meloy Desert Writer’s Award, I sounded a bit confused. It also reminded me that I am writing, not just one, but two books.

The Ellen Meloy Fund for Desert Writers3 will support research for Desert Maverick, which celebrates the life and career of science pioneer Ann Axtell Morris, who worked alongside her husband, archaeologist Earl Morris, but received little recognition for her contributions. A talented Artist, Ann recorded cultural sites in the Southwest with her paintbrush, developing groundbreaking methods of pictorial documentation while challenging the ethics of archaeological practices through reverence for indigenous peoples. Desert Maverick will be published by Lyons Press in 2028.4

I came across Ann’s story while writing Path of Light. Earl was the permitted archaeologist of the 1920s Bernheimer Expeditions. Ann’s painting caught Bernheimer’s eye, and he commissioned her to paint the cultural sites at Canyon del Muerto for the American Museum of Natural History. It also endeared me that Ann and Earl rarely unpacked their bags as they incessantly traveled nomadically throughout the Four Corners in their Model T Ford.

Each year, the Ellen Meloy Fund supports one desert writer working on a non-fiction book to honor the late author. It is an incredible honor, both to be a part of Ellen Meloy’s legacy and to be given such generous support and to be part of a special desert writing community I first experienced on the page.

During long stretches of desert solitude, I have turned to books for companionship. I profess, dog-eared, water-damaged copies of The Anthropology of Turquoise, Raven’s Exile, The Last Cheater’s Waltz, and Eating Stone frequently bounce along with me in the truck. I have read them all countless times, and at this point, I simply prefer that they are near.

I came to view Ellen Meloy as a desert spirit sister along with archaeologist Ann Axtell Morris. Both Meloy and Morris colorfully documented their love for living in the desert with pen and paintbrush. I cherish our shared understanding that we are part of the desert, not separate. My life’s course is not rational, but this award reminds me to keep going, and to always trust my instincts in the desert––even if that call is to forge ever deeper to listen to the stories of friendly ghosts, including returning rivers.

To get to the river and listen, there is an intricate web of management issues, antiquated infrastructure, and century-old legal disputes to thrash through. Unless you’ve gone outside in the Southwest lately. A 26-year drought is sucking the river dry, and unprecedented heat is rapidly evaporating this year's record-low snowpack.

These two conditions are leading to low water levels at Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the nation’s two largest reservoirs. That, in turn, jeopardizes critical water infrastructure for a large swath of the West.

Reporting on this issue from the front lines, the growing margins of Lake Powell returning to Glen Canyon, made this reality strikingly clear. The river’s returning are only a portion of this watershed story. There are major questions about how the Colorado River will make it past Glen Canyon Dam in a rapidly drying future. Whether you love or hate Lake Powell, this is not an issue of recreation; it is about water equity for millions of people, desert ecosystems, and wildlife.

Here is the full story for Sierra Magazine: https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/can-colorado-river-survive-2026

A 1,500-word story is painfully insufficient to explain the breadth of this issue that threatens an entire watershed. Writing a book is starting to feel sane! Of course, I do not make this easy for myself, always crawling around in the desert and floating around the watershed. But there is good reason to take the long view. As I write Riverside (Torrey House Press 2027), my life will continue its pulse between the river and writing flash floods. My PFD is on tight. Thanks for hopping aboard.

Here are some photos taken throughout the watershed as I reported on the Colorado River for Sierra.

Concerns about sounding too “woo” blew out of my psyche long ago. If you walk long enough through the desert, especially alone in a semi-dehydrated delirium, you learn how to listen to nature. As we motored for hours, I stared into a decade-long fever dream. Sculpted Navajo sandstone domes and secret passages signaled not mere beauty and intrigue, but locations where I made some of the most pivotal or consequential choices of my life.

Safely back on shore, I begrudgingly checked my cell phone. Not for texts or Instagram, but the Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) website. Sure enough, the river was righteous in her anger. BOR released its grim 24-month outlook for Powell and is planning emergency releases from Flaming Gorge Reservoir to prop up the reservoir and limit dam releases from 7.5 to 6 million acre-feet.

The combination will bolster Powell by 2.48 million acre feet––just enough to keep the reservoir above the 3,500-foot redline through April 2027. Read that again. Even with this Hail Mary, Powell will reach its all-time low since it filled in 1980. 3,490 feet is also the new dead pool, meaning that below that threshold, the dam lacks a viable option for sustained water releases.

For over half of the past month, I have paddled and dragged my packraft through the reservoir’s expanding shorelines. Specifically, through the deltas of two partially drowned rivers, the Escalante and San Juan. In that time, the reservoir has dropped over 5 feet, from 3,531 to 3,526, even as a record heat surge singed this year’s puny snowpack.

As these rivers near Powell, the lines blur between thin water and quicksand. Flows fan out across sediments from both river flows and reservoir deposits. Imperceptible as it may be, the rivers are slowly reclaiming a passage, yet the sludge has nowhere to go. The buildup creates a sediment headwall that abruptly drops off into Powell’s pool, creeping ever so slowly, but always toward the damn dam.

Without an escape valve, both the water and sediment await doing more time behind the 710-foot concrete plug. The river is live reporting on the perilous future we are all flowing towards. Where are the people who need to see this?

In the mines.

This month, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum held an underground meeting in a southern Arizona mine lab with public lands leaders, Arizona representatives, and the University of Arizona President to discuss critical minerals mining1, expanded ranching, and, apparently, a vision for the Colorado River. Hard hats required for hard-headed extractive planning.

The upcoming emergency water releases are part of a drought contingency plan created in 2019 and expiring on October 1. Seven Colorado River states, the Bureau of Reclamation, and the Interior Department are all keeping their cards close about possible next steps. I am reporting on this for Sierra Magazine and will spare you the weeds for now.2 What hints the public receives are doom-lit and cryptic, like this statement from Burgum reported by The Arizona Star’s Tony Davis:

“We and the Bureau of Reclamation have to announce this month operating plans for next year. We can’t have all these reservoirs and no operating plan. We have to tell them to do something that no one will like. There wasn’t enough water to start with and there’s still less water now. We’re in a super severe situation. For us to have a functioning, operating plan for 2026, decisions are going to have to be made this month. Under the current course we’re heading on, it’s unlikely there will be an agreement with the seven basin states, and the bureau is just going to have to make a decision — the best judgment it can make.

“We’re positive about one thing — no one will be satisfied. We’ll be balancing water rights, power generation and water supply.”

To date, Glen Canyon Dam’s plumbing problems remain out of the discussion beyond how to keep the water above 3,500 feet. The option to manufacture higher reservoir levels is for a limited time only. This same strategy was used in 2022 and 2023. After a boost from the big wet winter of ‘23, we are already inching back to the record low set that year before runoff, 3,519, feet.

It’s exasperating to follow this issue closely. But if you get too close, you start to like it. With every foot the reservoir drops, portions of Glen Canyon resurface. Arcs of natural bridges and sandstone spires crest the water. Ribbons of green, healthy native riparian plant communities, rebound abundantly. Stranded pools of water become nutrient-dense bird wonderlands. Sections of drowned tributary rivers become navigable.

During my recent low-tide expeditions, I was accompanied by some of Glen Canyon’s fiercest lovers. We are a generation born too late to see this stretch of river before dams and diversions, but just in time to watch the spectacular freak show that is climate change and water overallocation bringing back a fabled riverine landscape.

On the Escalante, Aaron and I volunteered with the Grand Staircase-Escalante Partners’ (GSEP) Stewardship Team (Katie Woodward, Alex Engel, and Gabe Brown) and Utah Conservation Corps (UCC). Our task was to haul tools and gear downstream for restoration crews to remove invasive Russian olive, which chokes out native plants. This, in tandem with declining reservoir levels, is ushering in the re-establishment of cottonwoods, willows, and sedges along the riverbanks.

Our boats bumped into each other and scraped in the shallows. In our sluggish momentum, we questioned how helpful the packrafts actually were. Fluffy white cottonwood seeds drifting on warm zephyrs dazzled away our frustrations around every bend.

When the squawks of Canadian geese woke us one morning, Katie was already up, pulling Russian thistle (tumbleweed) sprouts from the sandy beach. Katie, who is also a graduate student studying the riparian recovery in Glen Canyon with researcher Seth Arens, told us cheerily that some adorable sedges were growing among the weeds. We sprang up and joined her desert landscaping to tend to the riverside and offer it some of our care.

To exit the river corridor, we thrashed through willows that clawed at our exposed skin and snagged gear on overloaded packs. A relationship with Glen Canyon is far from one of ease. The scabs and scratches remind us of the blood we give to spend time with this landscape.

24-hours later, I submitted edits for a reporting deadline, then drove to the other side of Glen Canyon.3 There, I joined the Returning Rapids on a run of the lowest San Juan River where 50-miles now run free of Powell’s grasp. Our crew of curious river runners included regional guides, geologists Brenda Bowen and Sam Bagge, Life After Dead Pool author Zak Podmore, documentarian and mad meme engineer Len Necefer, and writer Matt Williams.

The objectives included measuring water elevation levels with a Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) device and repeat photography. Both are used to document the changing river landscape and compare it with historic conditions. While we stared at black and white photos of Glen Canyon before the dam, we weren’t longing for a bygone era. We were all cheering on the river we have now. One that carves its way through thick slabs of Dominy reservoir sediments, only to endure intermittent bouts of re-inundation. As the reservoir drops, again and again, the river returns to work, flowing on.

During long days on the water and around driftwood fires, a floating think tank coalesced. Moving slowly with the San Juan’s current, we became sponges, absorbing new perspectives and ideas, along with ample sand, while sharing the value that matters most––love for the river.

Zak Podmore and I have both written books that do not hide our disdain for Glen Canyon Dam. But we both acknowledge that to love the river, we must transcend that monolith, literally, to bring water downstream to its lower reaches.

On his post-trip Substack, Zak wrote about the conundrum between California’s water use, especially agriculture, and the benefits to the river and its dependent ecosystems:

“I’ve had a surprising number of conversations with people over the last few years who, while being knowledgeable about water in the Southwest and showing concern for the health of our beleaguered rivers, still point to California as the biggest problem. They’ll run down the litany of water issues and then say something like, “We should stop growing alfalfa in the Imperial Valley and pave the farms with solar.”

In response to the Upper Basin states’ reluctance to accept mandated water cuts, he continues:

Water in transit is life. Water in storage is the opposite.

The Colorado River stopped reaching the sea for the first time in 1963 when Lake Powell started to fill. We use the entire river, and so long as that’s the case, there’s a benefit to getting the maximum amount of water as close to the end of the river as possible before diverting it, even if that means letting “our” water flow to California.

So if you live in Utah or Colorado and you like healthy rivers, tell your governor you support vegetable and alfalfa farming in California! All power to the Imperial Valley!

This fact-based statement runs antithetical to long-held environmental beliefs about the river. So does Len Necefer’s recent Outside Magazine article, “AI is Not Draining the Colorado River.”

Over coffee, Len and I discussed the ways we are trying to communicate about the river. He said his explorations using AI have helped him consider expanded communication techniques to reach more people. It also reveals how enraged people can get from a single Instagram post. He says much of this stems from people’s assumptions about how certain people should be and think, especially people of color and women. On his substack he explains:

There’s a reason for the short-circuiting, and it’s well documented. In social psychology, Eagly and Karau’s role congruity theory (2002) established that people face prejudice when they occupy roles that don’t match the stereotype held for their group. The original research focused on women in leadership, but the mechanism is universal: when someone violates what others expect from their category, the response isn’t neutral curiosity. It’s friction. Often, it’s active backlash. Rudman, Moss-Racusin, Phelan, and Nauts (2012) went further and found that this backlash is motivated. People don’t just passively notice role incongruity. They punish it, because someone doing the unexpected thing threatens the hierarchy they’ve internalized. The person isn’t just surprising. They’re destabilizing.

He added that humans tend to assume everyone sees things the way they do. Algorithmic echo chambers can trick us further into believing our biases are the way other people see the world. It seems we, as a culture, have misplaced shared values––like the importance of water––with the expectation of always having the same opinions or outlook. The Colorado River, and millions of humans, plants, and wildlife, are in the crosshairs.

“How do we give voice to what the river needs?” Matt Williams asked aloud. Neither of us answered the question. Instead, we paddled on into mud waves created by shifting sediments and listened.

Despite never running this stretch of the San Juan, it is my most familiar stretch of river. My memories meander for over a thousand miles above the rim and are embedded with the beautiful isolation of this landscape. This may sound lonely, but I think it’s a good thing to stare down your own biases by living alone with them, countered by the voices of the rivers and rocks that need us.

My troubles were many during my Path of Light era, but none more pressing than finding water in desolate places. Often, with the river or reservoir in view, hundreds of feet below the cliffs, to tease me. For better or worse, those memories remain extremely vivid because of the intense hunger and thirst I regularly endured.

On this recent San Juan River trip, camped directly below a location where I once had a dark experience, my dreams raged lucidly as I actively forged new memories in tandem with the river.

Where we think about the future and make decisions matters. We cannot give the river a voice unless we listen to what the river has to say. And to do that, location matters. What is considered from an underground mine lab is vastly different than what is contemplated beside a river reclaiming its channel. I acknowledge my view is heavily tinted by Navajo sandstone and muddy currents, but better that than being tainted by radioactive dust and acid mine drainage. The same can be said of armchair critics of everything from alfalfa to AI. In these times of low water and deep uncertainty, it is not the writer’s place to play it safe.

The decision-making stalemate is in part blamed on the deep uncertainty of the Colorado River basin’s hydrological future. But beyond what is always unknown, there is a deep failure to address the lingering problems that are well-documented––the shrinking river and the dying dam.

The last 26 years in the Colorado River Basin are the driest recorded in 1,200 years. I spoke earlier this month to climate scientist Brad Udall, who was sea kayaking in the Sea of Cortez (speaking of locational contemplations). Udall told me the river now runs 35% lower than 20th-century flows if you include this year.

And even BOR knows the dam’s limitations. So did Floyd Dominy, former BOR commissioner who championed the dam. He sketched the best way to bypass the dam on a cocktail napkin.

Our representatives are not representing the Colorado River, or us. If they were, we would be on a different course. This is not about water; it is about the fear and uncertainty of a trajectory that water is forcing us to change. And it’s about paper. Both money and the 1922 Colorado River Compact, which ignored inconvenient science to allow the pillaging of the river.

To quote Jonathan P. Thompson, “If there’s nothing left to send downstream, the Colorado River Compact will soon be worth less than the paper it’s printed on.”4 Like the janky dam outlet tubes, decision makers are swirling in a vortex, cavitating the foundations of river management while failing to change anything about the root cause.

We will never get back the Colorado River of yore. That applies to environmentalists and developers alike. Looking downstream, to the future, our options diminish if we lose the ability to let the river flow through the dam. Our fortress of water security is our barrier toward change.

I wonder what the seven basin state leaders, Reclamation, and Interior representatives would choose to do after a multi-day overland trek into the San Juan or Escalante River, where, after dragging their boats for days, they witnessed the rivers now running. Would they question how much water will soon remain trapped behind an aging dam?

While psychological studies show impaired decision-making when under duress from hunger or thirst, decisions lean toward a “gut instinct” or impulsivity to achieve the required substances (food and water). Perhaps decision makers will finally value the Colorado River we still have if they go thirsty.

Zak Podmore's Substack

All At Once by Dr. Len

Pancake Morality by Matt Williams

3

I have indeed paid the price for all of this Glen Canyon running. I feel like this Barbie, recently emerged from the Dominy, looks:

Aaron and I spent February in the landscapes adjacent to the lower Colorado River, from Lee Ferry to the Salton Sea. Each area is part of the Moab to Mojave Conservation Corridor designated by President Joe Biden. While much can be said of the way humans have altered that river stretch, we observed intact desert habitats and vital springs that are affected by water (mis) management in these arid lands.

These dizzying journeys offer more than insight and inspiration. They prepare my mind to contemplate the Colorado River watershed at a critical juncture. (I will have a story about that soon!)

A sincere thank you to all Wild Words paid subscribers. Watershedding field research for my next book, Riverside (Torrey House Press, 2027), is made possible because of YOU!

I look forward to sharing where the river carries me next. Until then, consider how serious the drought is and save some water for the Colorado.

🤎

Morgan

Colorado River Watershed News Flash

Threats to Chaco Culture National Historical Park

The Bureau of Land Management is proposing to revoke a 20-year ban on new oil and gas leases in a 10-mile buffer zone around Chaco Culture National Historical Park. Chaco was a population hub for Indigenous peoples in the Four Corners region from 850 and 1250. 26 Tribal Nations are associated with this living cultural landscape that is designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Acceleration of drilling will exacerbate the harmful side effects that plague this area of the San Juan Basin and watershed. From a Conservation Lands Foundation Press Release:

With nearly 90% of the region already leased before protections were put in place, intensive drilling has caused significant harm to the health of local and Indigenous communities, air quality, and cultural integrity in the landscape surrounding Chaco Culture National Historical Park. Oil and gas wells, roads, pipelines, and other infrastructure have destroyed significant cultural sites and transformed others into industrial wastelands. To allow more drilling in this area would completely disregard the calls from Tribes, including the 20 sovereign Pueblos that collectively participate in the All Pueblo Council of Governors, the National Congress of American Indians, the Mescalero Apache Tribe, elected officials, and other communities who share a deep connection to Chaco Canyon.

Without this critical safeguard in place, the landscape is at great risk of being further degraded. The Greater Chaco region has already suffered from significant damage to air, water, and public health due to oil and gas extraction, and unrestrained oil and gas development will jeopardize the longevity of invaluable traditions and cultures.

The public comment period has been slashed to an egregious 7-days. You can comment directly to the BLM or through New Mexico Wild.

The cottonwoods are waking up, as warm air unfurls their buds into fluffy red-streaked tendrils. Descending in elevation, along either the Escalante or Paria Rivers, the awakening is further along. Afternoon zephyrs dance through heart-shaped chartreuse leaves. In high-elevation canyon country, this is unusual. Spring is just a word on the calendar marking the equinox, with signs of green showing later.

With such warm conditions, the seasonal migration of tourists to gateway towns surrounding Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (Boulder, Kanab, and Escalante) is also early. Crossing a two-lane road on foot suddenly requires patience, as does waiting in line for a meal.

With the visitors come opportunities to work, after three months of winter hibernation. Jobs in the Grand Staircase-Escalante region are up 50% in the past two decades, with the tourism industry increasing 83%. (Read the full Headwaters Economics Report here.)

Non-labor income, which includes real estate surrounding the monument, has risen 99% since 2001. We feel this too. The latest Headwaters Economics Report expects this trend to continue as the Baby Boomer generation retires. Housing is as ephemeral as rain out here.

Intermittent homelessness has created our seasonal migration to winter in the Sonoran and Movaje deserts. We are snowbirds in training. Aaron and I place a major physical focus on stretching to ensure we can still get in and out of the truck bed or tent as we age. Without a hope of purchasing an over-priced manufactured home, and no 401K, our retirement plan is to help ensure public lands remain public so that migrating in a van down by the river remains possible. This intensifies our devotion to the landscape, the only place we can reliably dwell.

March incites our return to canyon country, where, like most locals1, we juggle multiple jobs. Aaron’s work is fully enraptured in this feast-famine cycle. He dashes between serving dinner and cleaning a vacation rental. Though I do not have an off-season, my commitments swell the way our rivers should with snowmelt. March is the season of educational gatherings, where I welcome the opportunities to speak about the history of protecting public lands in Utah.2

These events bring together people invested in the monument, both locally and regionally. Kanab and Escalante are abuzz with deep knowledge and passion for the Grand Staircase-Escalante landscape. Which is how Aaron and I ended up in the air. This week, a crew from Ecoflight was in town to share a winged perspective with groups of GSENM Inter-Tribal Coalition Members and local business owners. Ecoflight’s mission is to use “small aircraft to provide the aerial perspective to educate and advocate for our remaining wildlands, watersheds, and culturally important landscapes. From the air, we connect stakeholders with differing viewpoints to advance our goals of conservation and environmental justice.”

We happened to be chatting with members of both groups over dinner when the pilot walked over and offered us a spot on a morning flight. One does not turn down a chance to see their home like a bird does, even if we might be late to our human day jobs on the ground.

Six desert rats, including our pilot Chris, packed into the tiny plane. Though I have flown in small aircrafts for assignments, take-offs always unnerve me, and this was not helped by the grim airline news this week. Taking calm breaths, I challenged myself to be brave for the land below us, itself involved in a collision with opposing public land values.

Safely in the air, golden layers of the Kaiparowits Plateau streamed past the windows, and so did my tears. While I see the formation daily and enjoy backpacking its vast roadless expanse, moving alongside gave me the same sensation as momentarily meeting eyes with wildlife.

Between the passengers, Kieran Corrigan (co-owner of Willow Canyon Outdoor), Sunny Stroeer, and Paul Gagner (co-owners of Dreamland Safari), and two scrappy desert work-circus rats, our feet have collectively covered thousands upon thousands of miles in this landscape.3 That is a conservative estimate. And while each of us chimed in to knowledgeably narrate the terrain we flew over, we were also witnessing the once familiar anew.

Dry arroyos scratch red earth like veins creeping toward the sinuous Escalante River. There, a ribbon of green, willows and cottonwoods, occasionally obscures the thin river flashing silver in sunlight. Outbursts of cream cap rocks, rainbow-hued chinle layers, and the Wingate uprising of the circle cliffs remind us that nothing about the Grand Staircase is uniform. The sky-lit view amplified how, in every hike, we are moving through a kaleidoscope of exposed geological time.

We looked down from the plane at a real-life topo map, which also made clear two details: how few roads track through the monument. And the abundance of water this arid expanse holds and has been shaped by over millennia. Both are values protected under the 2021 Presidential Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Proclamation 10286, and are at-risk if the 2025 Management Plan is overturned.

It is not unreasonable to presume the changes Utah delegates hope for are to open up areas of the monument for extractive use. We flew over active mining claims in the Circle Cliffs, which pre-date the monument and are therefore grandfathered in. Check out this map of new mining claims that sprang up in 2018 after the Trump administration reduced the monument boundaries of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears.

Any talking points about access for recreational vehicles are likely a side-effect of that short-sided and destructive cause. And both extractive use and increases in vehicle access have directly harmful implications for the monument’s two watersheds.

Both the Paria and Escalante are undammed4 tributaries of the Colorado River, the lifeline for 25 million people downstream. These rivers nurture an irreplaceable ecosystem for the wildlife and people in this region. Without that water, we would all be migrating elsewhere with the birds. A Center for American Progress study cites the inextricable connection between national monument protections and clean drinking water.

If the joint resolution is passed with a simple majority vote in Congress, using the Congressional Review Act (CRA), no similar management plan could be implemented. It leaves monument management, visitor services, and local economies in deep uncertainty. This can open a path for more rampant attacks on public lands.5

The flight offered us a top-level view of what is at stake, thanks to the organization and planning by Ecoflight and Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA). We are all residents, business owners, guides, and employees within the Utah counties GSENM falls within. The threats to the monument impact our backyard and livelihoods. Still, we are newcomers. These are the ancestral homelands of the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Kaibab Band of Paiutes, Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and Zuni Tribe, who form the Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition.

Aaron and I will soon be among the small business owners, at least that is the hope. We are applying for a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Special Recreation Permit (SRP) to guide in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The application process, spanning the better part of a year, is not easy. It feels like writing a master’s thesis on ethical public lands recreation with a minor in cartography.

We hope to launch our guiding business in the coming months so we can share our love for travelling this landscape on foot with visitors. Yet we wonder how this might change if the CRA passes? The guiding community will be among the businesses to feel the effects of this uncertainty. Will current SRPs be valid? How will they change? Can they be reissued?

Last week, at the Grand Staircase-Escalante Guides Association Symposium in Kanab, Nathan Waggoner (the association chair and owner of Escalante Outfitters) explained the local input on the recreation section of the 2025 Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Management plan. The slow, deliberate process included a planning committee of land managers, local business owners, and Tribes, with an open invitation to the public to attend the meeting and provide input.

The Utah delegates’ joint resolution to use the CRA to overturn this management plan directly harms this communal effort. At the symposium, Waggoner explained that while no plan is ever perfect, the process helps steer each aspect of multi-use management toward consensus while prioritizing the protection of the monument objects. And changes to management plans are already possible through an amendment process, which allows line-item edits versus starting from scratch.

We are being patient with the SRP process, and it reminds us to be patient with the unknowns during the 60-day period Congress has to vote on the joint resolution. Instead of buying or building a home, we are honing our ability to adapt and live in liminal spaces. We encourage friends and family, within and beyond the state of Utah, to call their reps about this issue.

What happens here is a test-site for public lands throughout the West. Whether you live near a vulnerable area or love to visit these spectacular natural areas––this is your backyard too! To protect GSENM need input from every state to prevent a simple majority vote. Please call your state reps and urge them to vote no on using the CRA to overturn the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Plan.

Near the end of the flyover, someone pointed out a shady nook near the Escalante River that looked perfect for camping. In fact, I had woken up there just two days prior. It can feel frivolous to take off running downstream when there is so much to absorb and report on right now. But I need the companionship of the landscape and rivers to carry on this work, more than food or water at times. (Aaron sees to it that I remember, with plates of macaroni or sandwiches that appear on my desk. This may also explain the rampant typos in earlier versions of this story. To err is to prove you are a human not writing with AI!)

To quote Barry Lopez, “Our issue with the land around us, is how to rekindle an informing conversation back and forth. And if we hope to develop policies that ensure our children will have a chance at a full life, alive, shaped as much by imagination as by need, we need to listen to what the land around us says.” If only all land management decisions were made in this way.

Still buzzing from the flight, not unlike the 660 bee species pollinating plants around GSENM, Aaron and I scurried back to work. Me, at my desk writing. Him, running around serving coffee and pizzas. We were tired but still soaring from the uplifted perspective to our work as messengers for the landscape. There are higher-paying jobs for either of us elsewhere, but what would that mean compared to working to be able to stay in a place that needs us?

3

My friend, writer and guide, Beth Henshaw, was on an earlier flight and wrote about her experience in the air, but also navigating the politics of public lands as a new business owner. Beth and her partner Jaden just launched Pronghorn Expeditions (driving and hiking tours out of Page, AZ), and I am excited to team up with them for the Marble Canyon Nature Writing Retreat in October (spots still available)!

In the West, we are near the end of a winter that never wintered. For most of the season, I was living outside in the Sonoran, Mojave, and Colorado Plateau, as I have the last several winters, and cannot recall a time I was truly cold. Lizard that I am, this is notable. My field notes, stacks of notebooks recording seasonal wanderings, are my future oath against shifting baseline syndrome. Each day is achingly hotter and drier than the last. This January and February were the hottest recorded. Climate scientist Daniel Swain reports this month’s imminent heat dome will “break records and decimate mountain snowpack” (that never really packed).1

How helpful are statistics compared to stepping outside? It depends on your Western proximity.

In “Now comes the heat” (The Crucial Years), writes that this hot year has “been a little hidden these past months, because the country’s population and power center—the northeast corridor from Boston to DC—has had a cold winter.” Imperceptible to collective sensation, it has still been the second-hottest winter on record in the contiguous U.S.

Last night, Aaron and I read Swain’s article before bed as 50-mile-an-hour gusts howled outside. These same winds blew us home from a two-day backpacking trip in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. There, we hiked and paddled beneath the stark bathtub ring marking the plunge of Lake Powell Reservoir since the year 2000. At night, we sweated in our bags while we were assaulted by March mosquitoes.

This forecast for the Colorado River Basin (and nearly every watershed in the West) is stark.

The “Most Probable 24-Month Study” forecasts the April through July (2026) unregulated inflow for Lake Powell as 2.30 maf or 36% of average. Even if the weather shifted and it started snowing enough for a slightly improved winter in the Colorado River basin, the Lake Powell end-of-month projections through 2027 offer a critical warning. Who is listening?

Much of my writing is born through thinking while I hike. Lately, I ask myself what point of sharing stats and graphs like these serves. They certainly are not the “best and highest use” of my creative mind. 2

Like the bathtub ring, these images amplify the reality of the situation that continues to be ignored. When the West continues to consistently shatter climate records, the word “record” should be a signal to do something about it.

Right now, there is no plan. Not a viable plan, nor an agreed-upon plan, that will steer us away from a scenario that maintains enough water, 3,490 feet elevation, to pass through Glen Canyon Dam’s primary turbines into the Grand Canyon.

On Ink Stain, John Fleck’s blog devoted to all things Western water, he writes:

It is easiest to quote the Draft EIS itself on the central question: “In critically dry periods, all alternatives have unacceptable performance.” Roger that. Tell us what you’re going to do.

In April 2023, the reservoir dropped to its all-time low of 3,522 feet. It then rebounded after the next two winters of significant runoff to 3,587 feet. Two years later, we are staring down the same conditions as three years ago. The reservoir is currently at 3,529 feet elevation, 23% of full pool or 3,700 feet elevation.

Between walks around the environmental and water equity crime scene that is Lake Powell, I am hosting a multi-week telethon, taking hourly calls from folks invested in all aspects of the watershed. It. Is. Fierce. I won’t spoil the story (reporting for Sierra and the watershed book), but I am drinking up passionate perspectives along with creative outlooks for the river.

Where does this leave you? Well, if you drink water in the Colorado River basin, or eat winter vegetables elsewhere in the U.S., you are on team “we need water management to figure this shit out” too.

The heat is on. My deadline is looming. As my eyes glaze over too many charts, my brain is swirling back to poetry and puns. So I will leave this here:

Rage, rage against the drying of the river.3

Local weatherman Aaron Crosby was not impressed by the murky canyon to reservoir transition zone. Only when the ground beneath our feet vanished did we realize the scud was floating on water, not mud. He reports on the imminent heat wave soon to affect the Glen Canyon region here:

Thank you to all who helped share last week’s Wild Words about protecting Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument from Utah Representatives’ unprecedented actions to strip 1.9 million acres of public lands management protections. If you’ve already called your state representatives, urging them to oppose this slippery effort the weaken our entire public lands system, please consider sharing with a friend or calling a loved one about it. One-on-one conversations are often more effective than what we scroll past. Here are the details to help you write an informed letter.

After a winter afield, today I am writing to you from a desk, inside a rental house with walls thin enough to let the desert pass through. The dead scorpion I found on the floor keeps me company. The desk, the first to call my own in over a decade of writing, was salvaged from a family barn. The accompanying chair dates back to whenever La-Z-Boy still manufactured furniture in Michigan and stapled the production details to the underside.

So now, at age 39, I am a proud owner of a truck and a desk. While the desk is a luxury, and I hope to drag this heirloom with me as my desert life evolves, it is far from necessary. For that, I could point to my laptop with letters worn off the keys, and a notebook. But there are other ways to take notes and write stories, I suppose. What I am getting at is that you must have something to write about, or in my case, something to write for: the desert.

To immersively write about public lands and rivers, I need to be on the scene. If you’re not out there, is the landscape’s voice included in the story?

That is not to dismiss days like today spent indoors, digging through research papers, interviewing people, and just plain old writing. A few years ago, and again these last few winters, I managed those details almost entirely lying down in the back of my truck. More than once, I climbed remote mesas for a glint of service to submit stories on deadline. With the growing lack of affordability for basic necessities in this country, I remain prepared to function like that again at any moment.

My beat is local backcountry reporting. No press pass gets me there, just my feet. I often weigh their importance in what I do alongside my fingers. Writing tools: Desk, computer, notebook, truck, feet, hands. But to get to the reporting scene, I need a tent, backpack, shoes, and plenty of calories. Sometimes my backpack takes me to places I need to write about. Other weeks, it is the vehicle for a weekend getaway offline, so I don’t lose my mind and vision to screen time.

Last fall, Trails Magazine Founder and Editor-in-Chief Ryan Wichelns invited me on as a guest editor. The task: debate, test, scrutinize, and soliloquize the best gear for canyon country. The assignment was not focused on testing new gear released this year, as most outdoor magazines do annually, but to zero in on the gear I trust each time I set out to explore with a pen and map in hand–-be it for a weekend or a month. While most of the gear has survived in the desert with me for years, some new gear surprised me and solved ongoing problems. The line-up is more than an adventure quiver; these are the nuts and bolts of my out-of-office writing life.

Last November, Photographer Liam Kaiser shot the gear in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. During the shoot, Trails editor Stasia Stockwell and I walked around in the rain wearing matching outfits and beat-up backpacks. We didn’t even have to fake laugh. She was also such a good sport when my truck did a 180-degree slide in slick mud while driving to the shoot location!

These items are necessities. For years, online haters harassed me about promoting outdoor gear as if it were anathema to the cause of writing about public lands. One writer told me I was not having a true nature experience in my made-in-China plastic tent. If only I could walk around naked and live off prickly pear fruit! The comments were just hypocritical bullying and especially insensitive since I was also unhoused at the time. To go outside, work, or play, you need equipment. Period.

I have never been and never will be a gearhead. I am also not, however, an ultra-light minimalist. Since I am no longer racing through life, as I once did on the track, I rely on reasonably light but more durable gear that will stand up to constant use in sandstorms, flash floods, and direct sunlight, all while bushwacking, scrambling, and swimming through a maze of canyons.

Our selections are revealed below, but please subscribe to Trails for the complete list and to read the field notes and gritty insights while supporting print media.

1. Black Diamond FirstLight 2-Person Tent: Slept through many a windstorm in this bomb-proof tent.

2. Foundation Outdoors Meals: More calories, less water. A desert dream. How do they do it?

3. Astral TR-1 Mesh 2.0: The mesh is impervious to sand, and the rubber sticks to wet surfaces.

4. Therm-a-Rest Original Z-Lite Sleeping Pad: Old faithful.

5. Ridge Merino Solstice Pro Lightweight Hoody: Live in it, never stinky.

6. Platypus Gravity Works Water Filter: Stands up to the sediment-rich rivers of the Southwest.

7. 7Mesh Guardian Air GTX: The LIGHTEST rainshell ever.

8. Primus EasyLight Lantern: Ryan’s luxury pick.

9. MSR Reactor Stove: Best in class to boil water or snow quickly, even in high winds.

10. Hyperlite NorthRim 70L: My turtle shell with thousands of miles on my back.

11. Outdoor Research Ferrosi Pant: The not wearing pants pants.

12. Vargo Titanium Coffee Filter: Stasia’s luxury pick.

13. Buddy Boy Weekend Waste Kit: Morgan’s luxury pick. Say goodbye to Wag Bags! This is the simplest yet innovative product for Leave No Trace desert backpacking and packrafting.

14. Stio Pinion Down Pullover: Do you ever wear a down jacket unzipped? This is the coziest.

15. Ombraz Armless Sunglasses: Shades that won’t break in your pack.

    

This list was based upon consensus among the editorial team and is far from exhaustive. I am also not hear to debate anyone on this. We need to save our energy to compel our representatives to protect these public landscapes, not argue about tents. So please, do not send any related comments–-I won’t answer them.

It also omits critical backcountry details like trekking poles (for heavy loads and river crossings), headlamps, hiking sandals, and even sun gloves. I also love, and now live in, some of the new gear I tested. Much of it fits beautifully in a desert quiver that adapts to the trip type and season.

Over winter, I lived in two outfits.

This look from Stio emanates some very strong (and unplanned) Edward Abbey-style vibes. Both the Stio Pinedale Pant and Eddy Shirt held up, and did not stink through several backpacking trips (2-10 days) and many weeks of car camping. I even slept in the pants, which are remarkably warm at night yet breathable while hiking, very mobile too!

The Astral Kinisi Hemp pants look and feel like lounge pants, but details like cinch ankles and deep pockets make them ideal for warm weather. Again, I dressed these up for a few outings into civilization––like grocery shopping, and also slept in them. So does Aaron. They were also my sun layer on a 6-day Grand Canyon backpacking trip, accompanied by the Webber’s for camp sandals.

Sleep is a highly underrated part of backcountry trips. Most people sacrifice weight for comfort, and just figure they will catch up on sleep when they get home. What if you aren’t going home anytime soon? Or what if a restless night of sleep diminishes tomorrow’s hiking joy? For this, the Zen Bivvy Sleep System is truly the coziest and comfiest Quilt-Pad-Pillow trio I have used.

Still, much of my gear and wardrobe has been slowly curated over the decades from thrift and used gear stores. This remains among the most sustainable and affordable ways to procure outdoor equipment. Especially clothes, which seem to fall apart the newer they get. I have a used Eddie Bauer down jacket from the 1980s that will never quit.

As a matter of balance, Aaron and I are also slowly and deliberately investing in outdoor gear essentials that we hope last us for a decade or more, like a Partner Steel Stove and Paco Pads. Both are truck camping essentials that pull double-duty on the river.

While this specific gear may be useful or interesting to some of you, in an age of rampant mass production and consumption that directly harms the environment, I am not here to push you to buy more. It is, however, important to think about the gear you use and what gear you need, and to consider how it truly benefits your experiences in nature. Occasionally, when the weather goes wild, your tent, rain jacket, meals, and water filter help remind you what you to be grateful for what little you need to stay alive.

As I dig into some reporting and book work the next few weeks and months, I hope to balance the challenges facing public lands with some lighter fare like this. However, for those of you nauseated by the material focus of this edition of Wild Words, if you made it this far, next up is a celebration of authors celebrating authors, inspired by a conversation I had last week with author Rebecca Lawton for her “How She Wrote It” series. 🤎 Morgan

Reading Water with Becca Lawton

Author Morgan Sjogren and Path of Light

Listen to Morgan Sjogren read from her first book, Path of Light (Torrey House, 2023), winner of multiple awards, including a 2024 15 Bytes Book Award in Creative Nonfiction, 2025 Utah Book Award in Memoir/Narrative, and 2025 Foreword INDIE in Adventure. In…

Listen now

4 months ago · 11 likes · 9 comments · Becca Lawton

Wild News

With so much breaking news about public lands and water, many serious issues are getting buried among the headliners.

The BLM approved a pipeline to Cedar City, Utah, that will significantly draw down groundwater just south of Great Basin National Park. Worse, standard public review processes were cut in the process. Kyle Roerink of Great Basin Water Network’s statement: “This is a battle for the soul of the west: water rights, tribal rights, land use rights, and the rights of the public are all on the chopping block,” Roerink said. “Let this be a warning to us all. Today, it might not be your rights on the table. But tomorrow, if this decision holds, it certainly could be your rights that are on the menu.”

A few days ago, Aaron and I reluctantly followed our permit orders and hiked out of the Grand Canyon after six blissful days. Starting beside the Colorado River, at 2,700 feet elevation, where temperatures scorched upwards of 90 degrees, we loaded a gallon of water each into our packs. Then, we walked away from the only water source to climb over 4,500 feet through impressive geological layers of sandstone and limestone formed over several million years.

In 1908, the Grand Canyon was the first national monument designated to protect an area of 100,000 acres or larger. A few years later, an irked prospector took the federal government to court, citing that a president lacked the authority to designate such a large monument using the Antiquities Act. By 1919, much of the monument was designated a National Park.

A year later, the Supreme Court unanimously disagreed with the disgruntled miner, affirming the Grand Canyon’s scientific value and denying the effort to dismantle the remaining portions of the monument.1 The areas outside the National Park remained a monument until 1975, when they were included in Grand Canyon National Park. Since that 1920 case, presidents have designated 38 still-standing landscape-scale national monuments, including Grand Staircase-Escalante in 1996.2

Threats to landscape-scale monuments are not new, nor have they been effective. In 2017, Trump reduced Bears Ears (originally 1.35 million acres) and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments (originally 1.89 million acres) in southern Utah by 85 percent and 50 percent, respectively. Indigenous and environmental groups immediately sued the Trump administration. These cases were paused after Biden restored both monuments in 2021.3

And yet, some folks do not know when to quit. In 2022, Utah's attorney general used taxpayer dollars to file a lawsuit, alleging that Biden exceeded his authority in the use of the Antiquities Act to return the monuments to their original szies. A US district judge dismissed the case in 2023 and upheld the president's ability to use the Antiquities Act to designate monuments, asserting that the courts cannot second-guess that authority. Then in 2024, the Supreme Court refused a pair of cases seeking to weaken a president's ability to designate monuments using the Antiquities Act.

Last May, the Department of Justice Deputy Assistant Attorney General Lanora Pettit, issued an opinion memo stating that a president can reduce or revoke national monuments. The 50-page document counters almost a century of legal interpretation of the Antiquities Act. Since President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act into law in 1906, it has been used by 18 presidents from both parties to designate 168 monuments.

To date, no moves have been made based upon that memo. Instead, delegates from Utah are now using unprecedented strategies to attempt to reverse monument protections in Grand Staircase and other public land protections.

Yesterday, Utah representative Celeste Maloy introduced a joint resolution to gut the current management plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The 2025 management plan––created with collaborative local, Tribal, scientific, and land manager input––ensures stewardship of the scientifically unique landscape, the Escalante and Paria watersheds, and significant cultural sites within a 1.9 million-acre area. (Last year, I reported on local input for national monument management plans for Sierra.)

If passed using the Congressional Review Act (CRA), no similar management plan could be implemented. This would leave monument management, visitor services, and local economies in deep uncertainty. The CRA is also being used to attempt to overturn a twenty-year mining ban in the Boundary Waters, a Wilderness area in Minnesota. If both are passed, by a simple majority vote in Congress, it opens a path for more rampant attacks on public lands. So does the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee’s advancement of BLM nominee Steve Pearce, who is unabashedly in favor of selling public lands.

This CRA ploy draws from a tired century-old script to break down public land protections for extractive industries. Like the 2025 DOJ memo about the Antiquities Act, it is based on an opinion, not bedrock law.

It also lacks broad public backing. Who are the Utah reps actually representing? Not their constituents. In Utah, over 70 percent of voters support continuing to protect Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Beyond state lines, the bipartisan support for national monuments is incredibly strong: 89 percent of Western voters support maintaining existing monument designations.

For many of us, these attacks are personal. Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is not just a pretty picture of a waterfall or slot canyon; it is home. The monument hugs rural Utah communities that depend on tourism for financial survival. The sandstone canyons attract visitors from all over the world, and their trips create the need for local businesses and jobs for people raising families––kids, rescue puppies, and vegetables––in towns with fewer residents than most big city High Schools. (Headwaters Economics put out an excellent report about this.)

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument protects the homelands of six tribes, which form the GSENM Inter-Tribal Coalition: the Hopi Tribe, the Navajo Nation, the Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and the Zuni Tribe. Any rollback of the management plan runs right into the coalition’s mission:

The coalition will focus on advocating for the conservation of their aboriginal lands and for the continued protection and preservation of the cultural and environmental resources found within the monument. The coalition is also committed to defending Grand Staircase-Escalante from any attempts to modify the monument boundaries or reduce protections for the monument. (Via last year’s press release.)

If you have ever traveled to or through Grand Staircase, dream of visiting, or love a landscape as deeply as a relative, please write to your representatives (especially if you are outside of Utah) & urge them to oppose efforts from Utah delegates using the Congressional Review Act to remove the 2025 Resource Management Plan in GSENM. Here is a nifty form from Conservation Lands Foundation to help you out.

There is a lot happening right now. It is overwhelming by design. Still, there are immeasurable reasons to keep doing our best. It only takes a few minutes of our time to advocate for a landscape that formed over billions of years. This, too, brings me relief. Nothing lasts forever. And with that, taking a time out offline to recharge, be it six minutes or six days, can do wonders for restoring our souls, so that we may continue to find the energy to lift our fingers or the phone for the places that hold us.

On September 18, 1996, President Bill Clinton signed Proclamation 6920 using the Antiquities Act to designate Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Sitting at a wooden table and accompanied by Vice President Al Gore, the most notable detail of the signing photo is that it was taken on the rim of the Grand Canyon. Many have balked at this discrepancy, incited in part by public lands opposition among some disgruntled delegates and residents in Utah. It also emphasized the legacy of Theodore Roosevelt, who used the Antiquities Act to designate Grand Canyon National Monument in 1908.

The Grand Canyon was also not an altogether inaccurate location. The Grand Canyon and Grand Staircase may have separate boundary lines on our present maps, but the Earth has created them in concert over the course of deep time.4 At the top of the South Rim, we were actually only partway through an ascent of the Grand Staircase. As we drove away, the coral pink apex of Powell Point on the Aquarius Plateau glinted from afar. This limestone plateau, known as the pink cliffs, is the high point of the Grand Staircase, of which the Grand Canyon is the oldest exposed lower portion.

Tucked within the Grand Canyon’s chasm, the Colorado River shifted from muddled blue to thin green, pale gray, to distinctly reddish. The horse of a different color phenomenon was created by freakishly early snowmelt runoff. Because of Glen Canyon Dam, only a few tributaries usher in natural sediments with their flows. After hiking to the confluence of the Little Colorado River, which dazzled us in its turquoise calcium carbonate glory, we hypothesized that the Paria must be running.

Direct routes are not in my dharma–-the confluence of the Paria and Colorado rivers at Lee’s Ferry beckoned. There, the chalky undammed Paria greeted the clear blue Colorado, stripped of its natural red tint. The headwaters of the Paria begin as snowmelt atop the Aquarius Plateau5 before flowing into the heart of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. We waded into the stream to greet the chilling water to experience these powerful landscapes moving together as one.

There are fun things to share too, I promise.

Today, I am joining author and waterwoman for a conversation about writing, Path of Light and the rivers moving through the landscapes we cherish. What could be more vital than looking deeper at this planet we love? The recording will be available on her Substack, Reading Water, tomorrow.

Next at Wild Words: Last fall, I worked as a guest editor for Trails Magazine to test, debate, and soliloquize about the best backpacking gear for shoulder season in canyon country with EIC and Stasia Stockwell. Issue 13 is out now, and the next release of Wild Words will feature some behind-the-scenes photos from the issue’s photo shoot in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, as well as my gear favorites that we did not have space to include. Reporting about public lands and watersheds the way I do requires backcountry gear, not an office. I hope that sharing this is not a distraction from Wild Word’s mission, but a fun and inspiring glimpse behind the stories.

“Yeah, bro, I’m living my best life! Yo, I’m in a huge lake, yo!” One man’s drunken joy reverberated off Black Canyon’s varnished walls. We were actually standing in the Colorado River, and I am not sure how he missed the swift current. However, we were just below Hoover Dam, and thus below Lake Mead, so close enough.

The river ran cool, clear, and shallow past a popular tributary canyon that attracted a full parking lot on a double holiday weekend. The scene almost pushed Aaron and me away, but we already had some practice navigating the crowds. Last week, we backpacked into Grand Canyon National Park, where, beyond the South Rim parking circus, we reveled in the landscape’s relatively uncrowded splendor even in the main corridor.

It is important to see and experience the Colorado River the way many people do––not just in the style of my masochistic water-carrying through remote wilderness. Thus, the trek to Phantom Ranch and now, this hike below Hoover Dam.

As we gathered at the river, the humming current was drowned by the beat of someone’s boom box blaring. Any annoyance or distraction was averted because it was one of my favorite songs, fittingly, “My god is the Sun,” by Queens of the Stone Age. With drought and warm temperatures hanging on all winter, I wonder what this very scene might look like in the next summer or two, when both Lake Mead and Lake Powell Reservoirs look to flirt with water levels so low that it could impede releases.

Of course, someone has a plan to deal with that possibility...right? Right? RIGHT? Upon hiking out of the canyon, I begrudgingly looked at my phone to some chilling Friday the 13th news. Yet again, the seven Colorado River Basin states blew past a deadline to agree upon a plan on how to curb usage of Colorado River water. Though the Interior Secretary claims negotiations between states have been productive, the few hints at what might happen next look like virga, with no real moisture touching ground.1

The hangup looks to be the Upper Basin’s2 reluctance to reduce any water usage, because they are not even using their full apportionment. And those states, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, or New Mexico, shift the blame toward water-guzzling in lower basin cities and farmers throughout Colorado, Arizona, and Nevada. There is truth to everyone’s grievances, which were essentially created a century ago, but leaving this unresolved puts everyone reliant on the Colorado River in water purgatory.3

Last month, as part of the NEPA process, the Bureau of Reclamation released a Post-2026 Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) with a series of proposals to adjust Lake Powell and Mead Reservoir management to long-term drought conditions. These are still under review with public comments due on March 2.

There is an interesting caveat––typically, a “preferred alternative” is included in the NEPA process, but none was chosen for the Post-2026 DEIS, which was drafted with a Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty approach. This, in addition to the lack of consensus among states, leaves citizens of the Colorado River watershed largely in the dark about the future of our water. Will any of these plans even be chosen?

I have read through the Executive Summary, attended the BOR virtual public meeting, and talked to a few folks who know far more about this than I do. And though I like to think I might be more informed about the river’s future than “Lake Bro”, the current management status places most of us squarely in the shade of one of the most consequential decisions of our lifetime.

What we do know is that these are perilously dry times. No one in the West is living their best life, or any life, without the Colorado River. The DEIS explains this well with charts outlining the stark water projections in Mead and Powell over the next few years. And still, the proposals do little to temper long-term overuse or reckon with major infrastructure issues.

This week, a flurry of op-eds popped up about the realities of long-term low-water deliveries from Glen Canyon Dam due to the cavitation damage inside the dam’s lower outlet works. I reported on the question “How Long Can Glen Canyon Dam Last?” for Sierra Magazine in 2024, and the issue was largely overlooked by all but present-day philosophical Monkey Wrench Gangsters. (Read the full story here.)

And so it is today. Though the BOR is handling bare minimum mitigation to patch the outlet works, if Powell drops below the power pool elevation of 3,490 feet, there is currently no safely operable method to release Colorado River Compact-mandated releases into the lower Basin. This issue is neglected in each of BOR’s Post-2026 DEIS plans. This is baffling, with water levels in Lake Powell reservoir projected to plummet to dangerously low levels as early as this year.

With cool water lapping against my thighs, I looked on at “Lake Bro” with positive envy. It was a beautiful February day in a verdant canyon with flowing spring water. The river glimmered in unseasonably warm mid-day sun. And there I was contemplating catastrophe rather than best life energy. He did have a tall boy. But there is no putting my head in the sand once my passions propel me. It’s a lifelong affliction. And it is why my childhood games included rescuing stuffed animals from the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill.

As I strive to understand the complexities dictating the future of a river that I love, I am also navigating accepting the muck I knowingly dig myself into. In one week, it has taken me into the bottom of the Grand Canyon, through Mojave arroyos protecting delicate springs with wild cucumbers, to sleep beside a blossoming Joshua Tree in Avi Kwa Ame National Monument, hiking into a hidden palm oasis, and back down to the river. The marks on my topo map follow the contours of the Colorado River watershed, even when I appear to have stepped away from the riverside.

The desert teaches one fundamental lesson and never lets it leave your grasp. The purpose of life is not to be comfortable and at ease. It is to find, follow, imbibe, respect, and worship water. Scooping two handfuls from the river into the air, this is my best life.

How Much Longer Can Glen Canyon Dam Last?

This spring, the Bureau of Reclamation revealed damage to the river outlet works system of Glen Canyon Dam. While there is no structural risk to the huge dam on the Colorado River, the incident drew attention to the dam’s antiquated infrastructure and brought into question its ability to sustain water releases from Lake Powell at lower elevations. At risk are both the lower Colorado River Basin’s ecosystems—including the Grand Canyon—and the 30 million people who rely on the Colorado’s water.

The damage was caused by a High Flow Experiment Release in April 2023, by cavitation, a process that happens when water passing through pipes at high velocity creates air bubbles that cause erosion. During the 2023 release, 3,500 CFS (cubic feet per second) of water was released through the outlet works pipes for 72 hours. The aim was to distribute sediment throughout the Grand Canyon to maintain healthy beaches and riparian habitats.

Full story here.

The threats to our watersheds are not something to sleep on! What can you do? Who cares if Valentine’s Day is over? It is always a good day to send the Colorado River watershed some love!

🌀 Did you know public land protections like National Monuments provide critical protections for watersheds? This is one of many reasons the 2025 Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Resource Management Plan needs to be upheld. (To date, Utah Rep. Celeste Meloy and other Utah delegates have yet to introduce a bill using the Congressional Review Act to overturn the current 2025 RMP.) The 2025 plan is the result of thoughtful collaboration of Tribes, scientists, land managers, and the community to protect both the Escalante River and Paria River watersheds, which are vital tributaries of the Colorado River.

Call your reps and tell them you oppose any plans to overturn national monument protections. This is especially important if you live outside of Utah. The best chance at defeating the worst outcome is for Congressional reps outside of Utah to vote it down to prevent it affecting National Monuments in their states next. If you do live in Utah, kindly remind your reps that 75% percent of state residents oppose rollbacks of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments.

🌀Now, roll up your sleeves and visit the Bureau of Reclamation website for Post-2026 draft plans and public comment info. These are due March 2. While the plans themselves require a draconian understanding of water engineering, it is still worth voicing your concerns about the delays the states are placing upon this process, the neglect of infrastructure issues, and the fact that we may face the worst-case scenario in low water levels before this is resolved.

Speaking up for our home waters, even if imperfectly, shows that we as citizens of the watershed care about the rivers and landscapes that sustain us.

3

Former LA Times climate reporter Sammy Roth explained the state of denial well in a New York Times guest essay.)

Let me begin again. The 2026 atmosphere is heavy, and in the Southwest, it is achingly dry. Despite racing thoughts from multitudinous directions that keep me up at night, it is my parched throat that first alerts me to wake. I thank the overlords of aridification, both in sky and skyscraper, for helping redirect my priorities. Without water, little do other problems matter.2

From the Navajo Sandstone rim, one hundred feet or more above a Glen Canyon tributary, running water broke the mid-winter silence. Peering over the precipice rock mound, we watched the perennial stream trickle through bedrock, now long-scoured of reservoir sediments. Between our vantage and the water, the white bathtub ring, stained with iron-rich streaks of red, appears faded.

This downward trend is likely to continue, as this winter is shaping up to be the worst in 40 years, as reported by Jonathan P. Thompson (The Land Desk). While late fall and early winter rains, coupled with warm temperatures, induced a winter super bloom in parts of the Mojave, Sonoran Desert, and even swaths of the Colorado Plateau, these are precisely the conditions creating a snow drought. As this NASA report explains:

“Precipitation falling as rain tends to run off before it can recharge reservoirs and groundwater. On the other hand, winter snowpack that melts in the spring can produce a more metered, sustained water supply. The health of the mountain snowpack has implications for ecosystems, wildfire dynamics, and water availability for agriculture and other uses during drier times of the year.”

No, the water year is not over, but even the miracle winters like 2019 and 2023 do not keep us out of trouble. 3 Nor have past efforts from Governor Cox urging us to pray for rain in Utah. He has added fasting to the request this year.

Last month, the Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) released its Draft Environmental Impact Statements for Post-2026 operations of Powell and Mead Reservoirs. While the management is being renegotiated to prevent a system crash, all models show dangerously low water levels in the two major reservoirs as likely between this water year and next. To this, Glen Canyon responds to the reality that we do not need words like climate change to see.4

Unlike typical NEPA processes, the BOR has not highlighted a preferred plan. Perhaps no plan is actually preferable for an unpredictable future? The proposed plans were drafted under a “Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty (DMDU) approach, drawn from a well-established branch of decision science, that is designed to account for uncertainty in future Basin conditions.”

Last week, I sat through the BOR public meeting in which they read through the document aloud. Though these public meetings are fundamentally important to democracy, I found the format more insufferable and less enlightening than reading the document, which I am still very slowly working through. I travel into the backcountry with documents like this loaded on my Kindle––long nights in a tent with nothing else to do are the only way I can convince myself to do this.

Since 2017, I have ranged widely, spending months of my life in the backcountry for glimpses of Glen Canyon’s return. Human-induced climate change, coupled with the negligence of the realities of life in the desert, is orchestrating quite a show. It is not that I celebrate doom, it’s that I relish witnessing beauty and rebirth amid wanton environmental abuse. For years, this gave me hope adjacent to the liminal space my life was centered upon.

My love for this landscape and belief in restoration remains steadfast, but I am no longer so singularly focused. The returning Colorado River, and the life she nurtures in Glen Canyon, has taught me to watch the steps in front of me, but to also navigate a longer view. Landscape miracles such as this continue throughout the Colorado River watershed. Water supporting life in such arid lands is in itself a miracle. And that water, despite its present mutant barriers and diversions, connects me (and you) with more life than any algorithm can attempt to divide us from.

One thing is very clear about the proposed Post-2026 plans: the brunt of water-use reductions will be placed on the lower Colorado River Basin. The upper basin is not subject to mandatory cuts in periods of drought. While a February 14 deadline has been set for states to create their own plan, still not submitted among the others in this proposal, another alternative looms: litigation. The Arizona House Committee just passed a bill to set aside $1 million for Colorado River legal fees. The bill moves to the AZ Senate next.

Debates on upper versus lower basin water use, often framed as “water wars,” are as old and tired as the 1922 Colorado River Compact. Picking sides will not result in a winner––not if we consider that the Colorado River must survive this madness if we are to survive as well.

My low-tide fantasies of Glen Canyon emerging victorious from the chaos run deep. But they are shifting. The returning landscape is only a fragment of the Colorado River that was. To choose one area to “save” or “preserve” at the expense of another would ultimately kill the river.

There are more questions than answers. And I have more still. And they won’t be found in a thousand-plus-page government document. The truck is packed with backpacks, drybags, binoculars, field notebooks, maps, and historic expedition books. The lower basin beckons. My heart flutters in anticipation of a reunion with vivacious southern wildlife habitats. These landscapes, too, are embedded in my inner geography. Together, all watered by the same river. 🌀

What now?

I am pleased to share that I am writing a book about the Colorado River Watershed for Torrey House Press.

Details to follow in time. While it may be preferable for some authors to keep their projects hush until a pre-order link is available, that is too much of a secret to keep from the readers who have helped make this possible.

A publishing contract with an indie press is not a life-changing sum of money; it is belief and a green light to go forth with one’s obsession. In my case, it supports the watershed explorations flowing as the undercurrent of my life for almost a decade. This support also includes everyone who subscribes to Wild Words. Paid subscriptions have functioned as a pre-book advance to work on an early manuscript draft and proposal over the past 2+ years.

It has taken me some time to assess how Substack serves both my writing and a community of readers. While I admire the hearty journalists who have taken up reporting beats on their own platforms (and please subscribe to those I recommend), I have not and likely will never be a newsroom reporter with the tenacity to break news daily or even weekly. I am also not a writer who functions well without an editor. (Is anyone?) But, as someone editing my work yesterday pointed out, at least my prolific typos show that I am a human writer, not AI.

I trend toward the long-view, both in writing and my penchant for human-powered-endurance-travel. Though holding a physical book one has written is a tremendous privilege, navigating the challenging terrain of the writing and research process is what I relish. And because writing is such a solitary pursuit, it is invigorating and joyful to share moments and photos of this journey with you.

I hesitate to ever try to make Wild Words more than it is––an outlet for the untamed confluence of observations, research, and reporting rattling around in my head as I walk, float, run, and dream through the many still wild places in the West. Often, we only need to walk a few steps off the highway to observe the raucous life the biotic community is living in plain sight!

Wild Words are my field notes and postcards to each of you. They also remain love letters to the river threading the land that holds me through the darkest nights…and decades. Thank you for being here.

4

Although that word, like most words, is critically important. And not just for the environment, but as a marker of our First Amendment Rights. Climate Change is notably absent from the post-2026 DEIS, yet the charts and graphs clearly illustrate the changes we are all experiencing.

FUN!

On March 5, I will join author and water woman Becca Lawton in conversation. I fell in love with Becca’s gorgeous book The Oasis This Time long before we connected here. This is a pinch me beacon on my calendar. 🤎 🌀 Paid subscribers to her substack “Reading Water” can send her questions for me before the noon March 5 event.

“I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be,” wrote Joan Didion in her essay, “On Keeping a Notebook.” Today, many of us, even devoted journalers, keep an Instagram. After a few minutes of tedious backscrolling, 2016 came crashing back on me:

Back then, I lived in a cabin at 8,000 feet in the eastern Sierra, where I trained with an elite running team. I played hard and worked harder, juggling a career as VP for a sports/wellness PR firm. For the first time, I also experienced being truly snowed in as my personal life collapsed. Fun.

That year, I ran my fastest 5,000 meters on the track, which immediately prompted an existential desire to run away from literally running in circles. My feet carried me deep into the mountains. On a whim, I jumped into the U.S. Trail National Championships Marathon in Moab. I slept in a cave along the course the night before. The result that mattered: 26.2 miles converted me to the cult of slickrock.

Afterwards, I dragged my feet to leave. Visiting Bears Ears National Monument (on the heels of its designation) and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments filled me with intense wonder. Tucked away in a narrow chasm of Navajo sandstone, the earth sheltered me from cell service and the final tally until I emerged to the news about the 2016 presidential election. Life in this country would never be the same.

Neither would mine. 2016 was the launch pad from the life I used to live to the one I live now. Two months later, in mid-winter, I returned in my Jeep to the canyons, laced up my shoes, and never looked back. Once a runner, always. But despite the finish lines I pursued, it was the mental and philosophical places running pushed me into that propelled my life, and continues to.

To some, the 2016 fad is seen as a millennial longing for a “simpler time” that we documented on the gram. The flashback feels anything but to me. That was the year that my passion for running through wild places collided with a deep sense of care for these landscapes. There is no return from such an awakening. And when you wake up on the ground of places affected–-in my case, the reduced Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments––it is literally impossible to turn away.

The best part of 2016 is where I am now: surrounded by sandstone and flowing water (but no snowpack), and spending my days alongside Aaron, a genuinely wonderful human. Even so, there aren’t any rose (or sandstone) colored glasses to look at 2026 with.

This week, the Utah federal delegates (Senators Lee & Curtis, Representatives Owens, Moore, Maloy, and Kennedy) announced their plan to introduce a bill, any day now, under the Congressional Review Act to overturn the current Resource Management Plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Requiring a simple majority vote, if passed, “the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) will be barred from issuing another plan that is ‘substantially the same’ in the future,” according to the Conservation Lands Foundation’s Press Release.

This is a roundabout effort to not only effectively reduce or rescind Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, but potentially all other National Monuments and other public lands protections. How can we forget that these are the same folks who attempted last summer’s public land sale that was opposed by the majority of Americans? That is, 74% of Americans oppose closing public lands, and 72% oppose selling them, according to polls by the League of Conservation Voters.

While the methods are different, this also exacerbates the 2016 nostalgia when Bears Ears National Monument was created at the end of Barack Obama’s term. But that harbinger of hope became the source of conflict the next year when President Trump reduced the monument, along with Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (designated in 1996).

While so much of our attention and effort has centered around the restoration, protection, and defense of the monuments (and rightly so), it seems that a sense of innocence and hope are also what so many of us are longing to return to. This, of course, applies to far more happening in this country and around the globe, right now. But beyond scrolling back on an app, we quickly find there is nowhere to go back to.

Last week, my friend, the author Craig Childs, posted on Facebook:

I feel the same way about this country and my life. Photos from 2016 heighten this. For years after seismic personal shifts beginning in 2016, I mourned the woman I no longer seemed to be––somewhat innocent with an intense optimism of the future and a genuine trust in most people. The desert scoured any self-pity pretty swiftly as I tried not to get lost and stay alive while living alone out of my Jeep and tent. A decade later, I can see all of those qualities I have grieved are still within me, along with some well-honed skills of discernment, street smarts (or desert smarts), and resilience.1

Like any credible historian, it is wise to consider multiple sources when reflecting upon the past, even our own.2 The historical record is informed by a collision of archived documents (written manuscripts, photographs, journals), public-facing documentation like newspapers, and oral history. It is also comprised of voices silenced, ignored, or overlooked, and secrets kept. Where our personal diaries keep record of our private and internal lives, what we choose to share with the world via Instagram is perhaps a distillation of the best moments, or the way we hoped others might perceive or remember our best moments.

Didion’s essay continues, “Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember?” Instagram is a reflection of not just what we remember, but what we want other people to remember us by. And if we choose to participate in “the gram” (as we called it in 2016), it is yet another way to do as Didion urged, “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.”

History keeps the past alive for context in the present. When the burden of today’s news grows too heavy, I turn to various, often cumbersome, history books. There, I see that yes, life was also very fucked up in the past. What a relief for this moment to not be the only bad one. Somehow, I find solidarity, community, and even stress relief in studying and writing about the past. Within the pages of history, I am not disassociated from the present; rather, I am reminded that amid the many disasters and injustices, how much goodness, beauty, love, liberty, and justice are alight in the darkness. Instagram, flawed as it may be, is a visual reminder of the same juxtapositions flowing through our own lives.

A few notes:

• If you are outraged about what is happening in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, call your members of Congress! If you live in Utah, make sure you are registered to vote this fall.

• My tendency toward nostalgia was pushed further when my friend, author and archaeologist R.E. Burrillo, mentioned contributing to a “dog issue” he was editing for Archaeology Southwest’s magazine. I loved the idea. But it also felt too soon after my best exploring companion, Phil had passed.🤎🐾 Writing about Southwest explorers and their dogs became an unexpected way to celebrate just how much canines influence how humans move through the desert and our memories. “More Than a Pet” will be out soon, and it’s gorgeous. Featuring photos by poet and artist Jonathan Bailey, alongside the editorial eye of Burrillo and Kate Sarther for stories by an incredible contributor lineup. You can order the issue here.

• Paid subscribers still receive a FREE copy of Path of Light. If you’ve already read it, I can send you one of my other books. This support truly keeps me writing, especially in pursuit of new books. As a result, I have some exciting news to share very soon. Wild Words subscribers will be the first to know. While I will always keep my posts public, I am considering sending some letters to paid subscribers with fun stories and early announcements.

It is a beloved tradition to spend the shortest days of the year soaking up every moment of sunshine and savoring the longest nights in semi-hibernation. This week, a coati kept us company for a few nights. We honored the critter’s active hours, despite the overlap with our rest period. We unabashedly will go to bed as early as we feel like, once it’s dark, so it is hard to whine about an intrusion while being prone for 12+ hours. The nighttime wildlife encounters remind us that this is not “lost time” but a daily period of powerful connection, where the lives that inhabit the desert graciously share space with us.

This is also how we both read so much. I will refrain from one of those end-of-year book piles because mine would fill up my truck. Don’t ask me what I do with all of these tomes. One day, if it is ever possible to create a home shelter, I hope I can build some walls and furniture out of the books.

But that is a distant thought, and living outside during winter has made it feel less immediately pressing even in the colder climes of the Four Corners. It is not even always necessary to have a campfire. Repeat…especially in the arid West. However, during the solstice, I relish the companionship of this living warmth. While living solo in the desert, I ritualistically lit a fire as a balm to loneliness.

Far from lonesome now, Aaron and I love to thoughtfully build small fires and note the details and differences in the ways different Sonoran Desert fuels burn. It is also a favorite way to cook, placing chiles, squashes, corn, and onions directly upon the coals. Roll up in a handmade tortilla and top with Chiltepin hot sauce (derived from a chile that grows wild in the Sonoran Desert borderlands).

Out in the desert, there is little to remind us of the now economically driven religious holiday this week. Rather, the sun, shirking a bit more each day, affirms that this is the solstice, despite the record 80-degree temperatures! I am fully indulging in this winter gift despite its scary implications for climate change. As we encounter rock stories, left by Hohokam and Mogollon peoples, it is a reminder that these solar cycles were honored by shifting the rhythm of life with them.

Artist Hols Wack created a beautiful series of images (below) for a Substack essay titled, “The Resting Season,” that calls attention to the ways a time-honored tradition emphasizing rest during this season has shifted into a pressure-riddled period to be as productive as possible, especially for independent creators whose livelihoods largely depend on holiday sales.

Wack writes:

This year felt especially heavy for many of my artist & maker friends. With this year’s sales slower than the past, and the ever rising cost of living, many of us felt extremely pressured to overextend and push ourselves well beyond our healthy limits. This kind of toxic overworking is easily glorified in American culture, and social media seems to amplify and praise it. Only afterwards when we are met with the extreme exhaustion of burnout does it become clear how harmful and unsustainable this is.

Rest should not be a luxury, it’s a necessity for our bodies & health. We are animals after all, we are a part of nature, just like the land, plants and critters around us. And like them, we are not meant to be in a state of constant motion.

Earlier in the week, I created an Instagram reel attempting to sell some books for this very reason. That and because a box of books takes up critical space in a truck loaded up for a month of camping. The video was more fun to make than the results (the gram ain’t what it used to be). The bad feelings were compounded by my understanding of how many people are financially strapped this time of year. And the fact that I cannot afford to support other creators in kind. Or that selling a few more copies will not change that.1

Maybe I am not a good salesperson because I generally do not want things.2 Except books, because they are not “things,” they are stories that carry on a new life with each reader. The only gift I want is cutting off screen time (as much as that is possible). I sometimes cringe when people share “going offline,” but I think it is important to normalize taking breaks from this technology that intrudes on our lives more than anything else.

That said, thank you for sharing some of your online screen time with Wild Words this year. Typing these letters to all of you is truly a joyful part of my dance between the wild and written worlds. I look forward to returning in the New Year with some good news. Wild Words subscribers will be the first to know!

Until then, we will be solsticing through the end of the year––walking in the sunshine, cooking on an open flame, reading voraciously, and sleeping among our fellow animals in nature.

Wishing you a happy solstice. Don’t forget to look up! 🌞

Unless you are walking around the desert with your delightfully nerdy friends, then by all means, keep your eyes on the ground where magic awaits!

This autumn, I enjoyed a conversation with Kelly Moody, host of the Ground Shots podcast. I am grateful for the show’s thoughtful focus on ecology and emergent philosophy, stories, and connection. In the episode, we discuss colonialism and public lands, the role of culture and ecology in connecting to our home places, Path of Light and retracing the Bernheimer Expeditions, threats to Western public lands, and the future of the Colorado River. I especially enjoy the original soundtrack created for this episode by Ted Packard, Lucy Wild, and Annika Fae. More info here.

Hiking through the Sonoran Desert at midday, even in winter, is typically a solitary activity. On an unseasonably warm 80-degree afternoon, the clomping of hooves alerted Aaron and me that we were not alone. Upon recognition of the desert big horn band ahead of us, we immediately stopped hiking. So did the sheep, who checked us out before carrying on.

The sheep moved straight up the ridge of the 3,000-foot peaks, a limestone uplift which towers 1,200 feet over the Bajada below. We hiked onward along a washed-out mining road, which has been sliced open with mining portals to reveal their mauve, turquoise, ochre, and rust interior. These are the scars of gold, silver, and copper blasted from the range.

Among the mining rubble, there is a new structure built prominently against one of the peaks. We scramble over rocks that bite at our fingertips and through cat claw that lash our calves to investigate. It’s a water catchment system built by the Arizona Desert Bighorn Sheep Society to ensure that these hearty desert inhabitants can survive what we have done to their home. The water table outside Tucson has dropped dramatically in the past 100 years, and with it, the local rivers and streams, like the Santa Cruz, have long retreated underground, save for monsoonal flash floods. After bighorn populations were decimated in the early 1900s, recovery efforts like these have restored bighorn presence in 80% of their historic range.

The sheep have evolutionarily adapted to the rigors of living within this landscape. They can survive for weeks without water and can navigate harsh terrain to find it. Once they do, the sheep who can lose 30% of their bodyweight during waterless stretches rehydrate within minutes. So why do they need our help? Water does not fall in even distributions in the desert––not even in the Sonoran monsoon and winter rainy season. To source consistent water, the bighorns traditionally migrate from one tinaja or tank to another. Their ability to safely do so has been restricted by human development, while the quantities of water are disturbed by drought.

One local rancher, in an article for PBS, explained, “Sheep are very nomadic. Sheep 100 years ago knew what to do when they ran out of water. But now that generations of sheep are so dependent on the waters that were built for them specifically, they’ll probably stand around there hoping someone will haul them some water. Or wait for a lion to kill them.” The quote struck me, less because any one rancher is an expert on big horns, but in the truth it reveals. Is our human population in the southwest any different?

During a different walkabout, we crested a mound of volcanic rocks covered with rock stories and water infrastructure made by Tohono O’odham ancestors during the Hohokam Period, spanning CE 700 to 1400. Volcanic boulders cleared from a strip of ground on the slope form a canal that channeled water toward crops on the flat bajada. Check dams further assisted the infrastructure required to sustain life in the desert.

Not more than 20 miles from that site, the distant Colorado River is transported 336 miles by the Central Arizona Project Canal for 1 million dependent humans in the Tucson metropolitan area. Some of that water is siphoned to square pools of water that gleam mirage-like. Not inaccurate since their purpose is for the water to vanish underground and replenish the aquifer.

There is a major Colorado River water conference this week. Representatives from the Bureau of Reclamation, state and regional water reps, Tribal leaders, and “Shareholders” as they call themselves, will convene inside a Las Vegas Casino conference center to hold meetings about the state of the river. Presumably, they will converse and dance around the lack of decision-making among the seven basin states about how to reduce the strain on the drying overused river.

Perhaps efforts will be made to acknowledge a more inclusive perspective of using up (literally) a river that a dozen endangered species and 30 tribes have lived with before white settlers arrived. And that the accompanying growth of the West, where 40 million people rely upon the Colorado, is far more diverse than the small cadre of people deciding its fate.

I would sincerely like to hear what people have to say, or not say, about this, but the barriers to entry are stiff for anyone outside mainstream institutions. The conference is another set of doors in front of the closed doors the river’s pupeteers are hiding behind. But the river, and the life it supports, are not beholden to swinging pieces of wood and glass.

Instead of attending, I am touring Hohokam canals, big horn guzzlers, and modern water infrastructure. I am most interested in what the physical watershed has to say than the few people whose voices have been deemed most important. Reporting on the Colorado River, public lands, and environmental legislation continually reminds me that behind the human-created barriers, nature carries on. And we would be wise to pay attention.

Past the guzzler, we continued up a seam of limestone along a ridgeline until a dense stand of teddy bear cholla forced our retreat. One small slip would induce a level of hurt we knew better than to flirt with. Neither of us have any tattoos, and a full-body cholla stick and poke is not on our bucket list.

Accepting defeat in our small desert peak summit bid, we walked along an old mining road discussing what type of tacos to make. Calabacitas con maiz y chile asado en fuego. (Squash, corn, and chiles roasted on an open fire.) Rocks moving with kicked force on the ridge overhead instantly redirected our attention. We stopped as another band of big horns leaped down the steep slope onto the road where, upon seeing us, they also halted.

Eight big horns gathered, looking at each other and at us. We did the same. Not wanting to scare them or rush this moment, Aaron and I sat down. The sheep just stared. A few continued to move down the slope out of sight, while one brave sheep remained as a lookout. Or perhaps that sheep was just as curious as we were. 30 minutes later, no one had moved.

Recognizing the sheep could absolutely outwait us as we quickly ran out of water, we decided to gently make the first move and resume hiking. One ram, the lookout, tilted his head, and the band moved downslope, while he clambered back up on a higher rock outcropping. Perhaps to continue watching us walk down the road that wraps around the valley. Every few minutes, we stopped to locate the sheep, an increasingly difficult task as these beings superbly fade into their surroundings. Yet, they remained perched on a rocky cliff, 7 bodies huddled together, never taking their eyes off of us until we too faded into the maze of saguaros, cholla, and palo verde in the bajada below.

This is our third Sonoran sojourn, prompted a bit earlier than years past by Archaeology Southwest, which hosted me for their Archaeology Café series earlier this month. You can watch the full talk on YouTube (below):

Aside from arachaeolgists having some of the best questions I’ve ever been asked about Path of Light (from a research perspective), it was a joy to have so many friends and family in attendance.

The event unofficially launches the winter hiking season with two of my dearest friends, R.E. Burrillo (who introduced me at the event) and Jonathan T. Bailey. Both have new books coming out in April (2026) that I have been privy to read early drafts of.

You can pre-order both books now (here and here), which is both a way to support authors who rely on pre-publication support more than you probably realize and to treat your future self to a new story!

Paul Bikis and his partner Kyra were also in attendance. Paul is working on a documentary film about legendary canyoneer Steve Allen and the quest to protect public lands in Southern Utah. The official trailer for “A Life in the Desert” launched this week. Watch it here:

There is a crowdfunding campaign underway to raise the funds to complete this film, which will be used as a potent advocacy tool by Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and other partners to bolster education and support for protecting public lands in Southern Utah. It is an exciting and daunting prospect to be a part of a truly independent film project. We need to raise $150K to complete the film. For those who are able to, your tax-deductible donation will help support a dozen creatives who will be working on this project. I am working BTS on marketing, messaging, and social media. Even a $50 donation helps, and you will get a sweet A Life in the Desert organic cotton t-shirt!

There are still spots available for Glen Canyon Institute’s 2026 Membership Trip on the Upper and Lower San Juan River, June 11-15. This trip, hosted by @bikeraft, will bring a passionate group of river lovers together on the water. 🤎🌀

Glen Canyon Institute (GCI) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to the restoration of Glen Canyon and a free flowing Colorado River through Grand Canyon. Founded in 1996, GCI has embarked upon a multi-year campaign to protect and restore Glen Canyon and reverse the decline of Grand Canyon’s fragile ecosystem. Faced with water supply and environmental crises, we can — and must — pursue a different strategy in the management of the Colorado River Basin and Glen Canyon.

I realize that it’s the holidays and many people are focused on purchasing gifts and making donations to various good causes. As someone who does not participate in the corporate consumer holiday this month, and who loves delayed gratification (as I pursue a few projects that won’t see the light of day until 2028), consider these some fun ways you too can shape the future in small positive ways!

A boat dropped us off along a temporary shoreline to meditate on yesterday, eternal and ephemeral, in the canyon country archive. We traversed seldom-traveled routes to view distant cliffs familiar to my feet from years and miles past. Nine days to lose count of with no words to find. Just you, me, the desert, and more water and wonder than we can absorb.

On my last sojourn here, a few winters ago, my friend coined such an escapade, “The Desert Heroin Tour.” Punishingly steep ramps of slick rock, wind-swept mesas, convoluted terrain that sends you nowhere before you get anywhere, heavy packs, too much water, then nothing for miles. “Yes, it is supposed to be this hard,” I reminded myself and Aaron at one point.

A head cold plagued me for most of the trip, releasing me from any magical belief I might feel “good.” Besides, I wanted something different. To feel human. Sniffling for extra air, scooping cups of wild water, and high-stepping toward the sun. No escapism, just another day of life in the desert.

But there is more dreaming within this landscape than walking. The darkness stretches further into each day. The ease with which we hibernate 14 hours makes us question what all those goddamn lights are doing to us all. When we cannot sleep, we fill the time with stories and laughter. The rapid accumulation of dew on the tent makes us locationally delirious. I have never seen the desert quite so damp.

Along a hard-to-discriminate old mining route, now a big horn sheep thoroughfare, a few rusty tin cans reminded us of humans past who believed in the extractive fantasies that continue to plague this culture today. A broken projectile in the blackbrush reminds us both that nothing lasts, and that good things take their time.

At home, in front of a screen, that is a tired euphemism, no longer a balm for anything going on. In the desert, it is truth. A succession of rains steadily saturates the Navajo sandstone this autumn. In north-facing pockets that the sun will not kiss until spring, the smooth stone is a slick and icy death trap. In loose facets, a stone hold crumbles to sand in my hands.

There is so much water. For now. A humble abundance we revel in, knowing global freshwater is strained, yes, by climate change, but more by greed and overuse. We meter and savor every drop.

I used to watch the way someone built a fire as a revelation of inner spirit. I’ve learned better to watch the way someone is moved by water, a reflection of love.

Wild Words is a reader-supported publication. There is no paywall, but your generous subscriptions make it possible to prioritize writing in this space among my other deadlines and incessant wanderings. The only true benefit to being a desert scribe is time in the desert, and all of you Wild Readers help me put one step in front of the other in this trailless voyage.

Through the holidays, I am travelling with a box of books (Path of Light) and will sign and ship FREE copies for annual and foundation subscribers. You can message me to sign the book as a gift for a loved one. 🧡

If you enjoyed this post, I will be speaking in more detail about reading the landscape during my Archaeology Cafe presentation about the 1920s Benrheimer Expeditions in Glen Canyon. If you are not located near Tucson, you can tune in via Zoom!

In Person: Join us at Archaeology Southwest Headquarters in Tucson, Arizona (300 N Ash Alley). Register here.

Online: Watch live through our Zoom Webinar. Register here. (It will also be on YouTube about a week later.)

EXTRA EXTRA! There is a documentary film directed by Paul Bikis in the works about canyoneering legend Steve Allen, A Life in the Desert. Check it out, spread the word, and if you love Utah’s canyon country and want to see it protected for generations to come, consider making a donation. The film is in association with Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, and I’ve had the honor to work with Paul and Steve BTS in these early stages of production. Keep an eye on ALITD social channels for a trailer in the coming weeks: (Instagram, Facebook, YouTube).

It is raining in the desert. Rivulets flow steadily through sandstone crevices, and even the shallowest pocket of rock catches shimmering liquid. It is an abrupt shift from autumnal perfection, where golden leaves hung steadfastly onto cottonwoods until this past weekend. Water falling from the sky is ever a reason to celebrate in the desert. For nature. But for humans, I ask, do we actually deserve this?

Last week, seven Colorado River states blew past a deadline for a draft of plans to update how the river will be managed going forward. While that plan would not be finalized until February, it is eerie that everyone who relies on the water knows nothing. Except that the forecast for this next water year, which is not encouraging.

So there is nothing new to report on that, but there are many devoted folks who have a lot to say about the past, present, and future of the Colorado River. And many of them were at the Rivers of Change Symposium in Moab last week, hosted by Glen Canyon Institute, Returning Rapids Project, and the University of Utah Department of Geology & Geophysics.

The day featured a full line-up of presentations, panel discussions, and films that brought together a confluence of gritty long-term scientific research and devoted activism, alongside a celebration of art through film, photos, literature, and performance. I consider many of the presenters and attendees friends and compatriots. Some I’ve even had the good fortune of spending time on the river with.

In 2022, I shadowed and surveyed with Seth Arens, who is documenting the riparian resurgence in Glen Canyon as reservoir levels decline. (Story for bioGraphic.)

Last summer, I joined GCI and the Returning Rapids crew––Mike DeHoff, Meg Flynn, Eric Balken, and Geologist Brenda Bowen––on a Cataract Canyon trip with the support of a BYU Redd Center Research Grant. The group is studying the changes to Cataract and Narrow Canyon as Lake Powell reservoir recedes. The remnant sediments and scouring effects of the river are bringing back long-submerged rapids and geomorphological phenomena not previously studied. I’ve written about this experience, but it is in the vault…for now.

Melissa Sevigny, author of Brave the Wild River, and I navigated the muck and low water in Labyrinth Canyon this October. A highlight was locating a 1938 Nevill’s Expedition inscription from the journey that carried botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter down the Green and Colorado Rivers during the first complete plant survey of the watershed. Melissa’s book about this is breathtaking!

Nicole Milavetz introduced a short film “Keep Labyrinth Wild,” for Protect Wild Utah (SUWA). Over the past year we’ve shared several San Juan and Colorado River adventures together (along with Jack Hanley featured in the film).

The love for the river, and especially Glen Canyon, was palpable. I felt like I was going to the Church of the River. (Also, because sitting with people inside reminds me of sitting in pews with my grandparents and makes me want to race out into the wild, no matter how cool the event is.)

During the “Protecting and Stewarding River Systems Panel”, I joined Dave Wegner (Biologist and retired House of Representatives senior staff specialist on water, energy, climate change, and science applications), Louis Williams (Owner and Guide at Ancient Wayves), and Mike Fiebig (Director of Southwest River Program at American Rivers). The talks covered 100 years of Colorado River Management History (Wegner), Charles L. Bernheimer’s century-old dream to prevent Glen Canyon Dam (me), the Diné hozho concept as guidance in the backcountry and along rivers (Williams), and the levels of current intact protections for the Colorado River watershed.

After our individual discussions, we briefly discussed ways to nurture a culture of care for the Colorado Rivers among visitors and those who rely on its water. The role of public support and opposition to drive policy cannot be overlooked, and ultimately, tourism and recreation can become catalysts for people to join the movement to advocate for ongoing protections. This was clear this summer when the public pushed back against Sen. Mike Lee’s public land sale proposal. And protecting public lands is not separate from protecting watersheds, as Fiebig explained, it is one of the most critical ways to protect them.

At a time when the news is grim and polarization is ever-present in our feeds, it was admittedly nice to gather with the choir. And yet, while we all agree about the importance of protecting the river that sustains us, it is critical to engage with and listen to diverse perspectives, solutions, and visions of care.

Writer and river guide Chyenne Klemme closed the evening with a passionate statement about Glen Canyon’s label as “The Place No One Knew,” (referencing Elliot Porter’s book) reminding all who attended that Indigenous peoples have always known, loved, and stewarded these lands and waters.

Imagine if Colorado River Basin decision makers considered such expansive views instead of hanging on tight to development plans. This question was addressed during the final panel by Lorelei Cloud, the first Native American to sit on a state water board (Colorado) and a three-time Ute Tribal Councilwoman. With decisions being made by people (mostly white males) behind closed doors, what, if anything, has changed since the 1922 Colorado River Compact, except that there is less water?

The question remains, will there be time for an EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) and NEPA Process? The Big Bullshit Bill revises the NEPA process, and it is already playing out in proposals to open the Arctic Wildlife Refuge to drilling. The erosion of the public process makes gatherings like this more critical, both for momentum and the exchange of actionable ideas at such a critical moment.

River and public land issues aside, it feels so good to be in community right now, especially around something as sacred as water. 10/10 encourage seeking out surrounding yourself with joyful life force, be it a yoga class, a good book, running water, or migrating birds, for an uplift as the daylight dims into winter.

At the event, surrounded by several hundred people (!!!), I felt a sense of shared mission that I usually glean from sandstone and running water. Though I remain a relative desert hermit, gathering at the Rivers of Change Symposium nourished my soul in a way that I will carry with me into the canyons ahead.

You’re Invited!

Archaeology Southwest is hosting my first full-length slide show about the 1929 Bernheimer Expedition in Glen Canyon! It is time to talk about reading the landscape––on foot.

Tread: The Where, How, and Why of Trails & Foot Travel

Step into the 2025–2026 season of Archaeology Café: Tread. This year, we’re following the routes people have taken across time—on foot, through memory, and across landscapes.

From ancient migrations and sacred trails to trade paths, historical expeditions, and everyday travel, this season explores how movement shapes cultural landscapes in the Southwest and beyond. Trails connect people to place, carry meaning, and leave lasting marks on the land and in our stories.

Join us in-person downtown at the Archaeology Southwest Headquarters or online via Zoom Webinar on Tuesday, December 2, 2025, when Morgan Sjogren (Writer and Explorer) will discuss “Path of Light: Retracing the Expeditions of Charles L. Bernheimer.”

In 1929, explorer Charles L. Bernheimer dreamed up a National Park proposal that may have prevented Glen Canyon Dam and protected the surrounding landscape. Inspired by a decade of expeditions in the Four Corners region, Bernheimer wanted to “do more than be a sightseeing tourist.” To contextualize past and present efforts to protect Glen Canyon, author Morgan Sjogren retraced Bernheimer’s more than 300-day-long Glen Canyon expedition, guided by historic journals and photographs. Sjogren discusses her encounters with powerful perspectives and stories about land management and human rights issues that carry forward into the present. Mindful of the pervasive effects of colonization and motivated by a deeply personal care for the land, Sjogren asks what it means to be an explorer while learning from the people who have loved the land for millennia and moments. Sjogren will discuss how Bernheimer’s enduring love for the desert can inspire the current generation of outdoor enthusiasts to advocate for the protection and stewardship of public lands for generations to come.

In Person: Join us at Archaeology Southwest Headquarters in Tucson, Arizona (300 N Ash Alley). Register here.

Online: Watch live through our Zoom Webinar. Register here. (It will also be on YouTube about a week later.)