page_title: Glen Canyon Dam
section_title: Restoration efforts
hierarchical_section_title: Glen Canyon Dam / Restoration efforts
caption_attribution_description: English: High Flow Release from the Glen Canyon Dam in December 2012, part of environmental restoration work in the Grand Canyon.
context_page_description: Glen Canyon Dam is a concrete arch-gravity dam on the Colorado River in northern Arizona, United States, near the town of Page. The 710-foot high dam was built by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation from 1956 to 1966 and forms Lake Powell, one of the largest man-made reservoirs in the U.S. with a capacity of 27 million acre feet. The dam is named for Glen Canyon, a series of deep sandstone gorges now flooded by the reservoir; Lake Powell is named for John Wesley Powell, who in 1869 led the first expedition to traverse the Colorado's Grand Canyon by boat.
  A dam in Glen Canyon was studied as early as 1924, but these plans were initially dropped in favor of the Hoover Dam which was located in the Black Canyon. By the 1950s, due to rapid population growth in the seven U.S. and two Mexican states comprising the Colorado River Basin, the Bureau of Reclamation deemed the construction of additional reservoirs necessary. Contrary to popular belief, Lake Powell was not the result of negotiations over the controversial damming of the Green River within Dinosaur National Monument at Echo Park; the Echo Park Dam proposal was abandoned due to nationwide citizen pressure on Congress to do so.
context_section_description: On March 26, 1996, the penstocks and two of the outlet works' bypass tubes at Glen Canyon Dam were opened to maximum capacity, causing a flood of 45,000 cubic feet per second (1,300 m³/s) to move down the Colorado River. This was the first of the Glen Canyon Adaptive Management Program "high flow experiments", a controlled effort to assist the recovery of the damaged riverine ecosystem by mimicking the floods that once swept through the canyons each spring. The flow appeared to have scoured clean numerous pockets of encroaching vegetation, carried away rockslides that had become dangerous to boaters, and rearranged sand and gravel bars along the river, and was initially believed to be an environmental success. However, in the following months it was discovered that the initial results were misleading.
  Crews working in the Grand Canyon after the 1996 experiment found that the offensive vegetation had not been carried away as previously thought – only buried – and had mostly recovered within six months. The surface area of sandbars had been increased, but much of the material had been eroded from the submerged portions of the bars and deposited on top, making them unstable, rather than scoured from the riverbed as hoped. Subsequent releases in 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2014 were timed to take advantage of summer monsoon storms, and redistribute sediment carried into the Grand Canyon by the Paria and Little Colorado Rivers. The high-flow experiments do not change the total amount of water outflow from Lake Powell on an annual basis, but as a consequence hydro-electric power releases during the rest of the year must be reduced. Some organizations, such as Living Rivers, continue to believe that the dam has too large and severe of an effect on the river's ecology to make restoration efforts worthwhile.
caption: River outlet works are open during high flow experiment in December 2012.
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