"I understand why people love this place. I think it's the most beautiful canyon in the world."
For 17 years, Eric Balken has sailed the choppy waters of Lake Powell along with stepping foot on the hundreds of slot canyons that have revealed themselves after being submerged for decades at Glen Canyon.
In those 17 years, he's worked for the Glen Canyon Institute, a non-profit organization with a simple, yet eye-raising mission statement: restore a free-flowing Colorado River through Glen Canyon and Grand Canyon.
In other words, Lake Powell as we know it, would no longer exist.
"When Glen Canyon Dam was built in 1963, it inundated one of the most incredible canyons in the United States, if not the world," Balken says. "It was considered by many to be our country's greatest environmental mistake."
Balken, now the Executive Director of the Glen Canyon Institute, says the dam was built to capture excess water along the Colorado River Basin without considering the consequences.
"There's a price for storing water at Glen Canyon: massive environmental degradation," Balken says.
Thanks to the wet winter, 30,000 acres of Glen Canyon land that had previously dried out were inundated this year.
"It looks like a war zone," Balken says. "That's the impact of the reservoir coming up."
Even with the rise, there are noticeable changes in the glens and canyon walls after being untouched by Lake Powell for 20 years. Willows, cattails, and cottonwoods are growing in the slot canyons once again.
With the lake receding for the better part of two decades already, Balken and the Glen Canyon Institute have some bold recommendations: Skip Glen Canyon.
"If there's not enough water in the system to store either one of those, why inundate what should be a national park?" Balken claims. "Put that water in Lake Mead."
He understands that there may be a price to pay for draining Lake Powell, but he says turning Glen Canyon into a national park could help make Page, Arizona, the next Moab, Utah.
"Those national park gateway communities tend to be really sustainable economically and I think that's what we should prepare for," he says. "I would be shocked if this reservoir were here in 50 years."
Even if that day never comes, the Glen Canyon Institute will continue monitoring the reservoir and the life that has returned around it.
"Glen Canyon and a lot of these river tributaries are just green and they're full of naturally flowing water and they're just bursting with life. It's really incredible," Balken says.
