Glen Powell Quotes

As the years have gone by Lake Powell has continued to silt up, losing more than 100,000 acre-feet per year at last count, and hydrologists believe—as Abbey did—that silting will eventually lead to a pool of mud, not water. Michael Kellett is the program director of the Glen Canyon Institute, which was founded in 1996 with the help of David Brower with the goal of one day witnessing the Colorado flowing freely through the old Glen Canyon. At a time when western dams are actually being decommissioned so that rivers can flow, experts are wondering whether it is really viable to have two enormous evaporative and silting reservoirs, Powell and Mead. Kellett wrote in the summer of 2012: The trends of the last decade have dramatically changed the situation. Rising public water demand, relentless drought, and climate change have significantly reduced the flow of the Colorado River from that of the past century. Scientific studies have predicted that this situation will continue. Lake Powell reservoir, and Lake Mead reservoir downstream, are half empty. Most scientists believe that there will never again be enough water to fill both reservoirs. Which had led to proposals like the Fill Lake Mead First project, the idea being to keep the downstream reservoir, Mead, full while releasing the upstream Glen Canyon. In other words, for the first time Abbey’s wild fantasies are being considered as serious policy.

For a person to be self-reliant in any community, a level of competence is required that enables the accomplishment of tasks beyond those of basic self-care (which are referred to as physical self-maintenance). For this reason, M. Powell Lawton identified the use of the telephone, food preparation, housekeeping, laundry, shopping, money management, driving or use of transportation, and medication management as important daily activities and proposed the term instrumental activities of daily living (ADL) to describe them35 (see Chapters 14, 21, 22, 23, and 28).

Actually our ignorance and carelessness are more deliberate than accidental; we are entering Glen Canyon without having learned much about it beforehand because we wish to see it as Powell and his party had seen it, not knowing what to expect, making anew the discoveries of others. If the first rapids are a surprise to us it is simply because we had never inquired if there were any on this stretch of the river.