This is Paul Hertz and Jennifer Sweeney of Arizona State University
recording an interview on December 4th, 2017 with Andrei Potocnik in Camp
Verde Arizona.
Andre. Thank you for uh coming and speaking with us today. I really
appreciate it. You're welcome. Can you start out by telling us your name,
the positions that you held in the Adaptive Management Program and the
years that you participated in the program? Uh Yes, my name is Andrei
Potocnik and uh I um was involved in the Adaptive Management Program for
Glen Canyon Dam uh since its inception, uh the Adaptive Management Program
, its inception and, and prior to that actually, and I, I can go into that
as well. Um There was some lead up to uh the beginning of the program that
had to do with the uh transition to adaptive management. And so that would
, would have been starting and I think my first appointment might have
been in 97 1997 something like that. I could be a little bit off on that
on the numbers. But uh yeah, uh the record of decision on Glen Canyon
Dam's uh environmental impact statement was signed in October of 1996 in
Phoenix. Uh, the Secretary of the Interior was there. We had a ceremony
and, uh Bruce Babbitt signed it and we had a nice little, um, confab of a
lot of the players that were involved in the environmental studies program
, Glen Canyon environmental studies program which had preceded the
Adaptive Management Program. And, uh, so there were a number of people
there, I got a chance to chat with, with Bruce Babbitt and some others.
And, and uh that was really the official launch of the program. Uh once
that record of decision was signed because that basically started
everything that was stipulated in the Grand Canyon Protection Act of 1992
. 1 of those things that was the, that there would be an EIS on the dam
and that uh there would be a long term monitoring program uh that would
continue uh uh into the future. Um And that long term monitoring program
took the form of the Adaptive Management Program. And it was uh the
concept being that despite all the studies that had been done during Glen
Canyon environmental studies, phase one and phase two, there was still a
lot of uncertainties with regard to the complexity of the, of the
ecosystem and the changes, changes that had are still going on or we're,
we're still going on, aren't still going on today with regard to the uh
nature of the resources and how they interact with one another and the
influences that um that, that conspire in some ways, unknown ways um to
have an adaptive uh require an adaptive management program, an adaptive
management approach to the management of Glen Canyon Dam. So that was the
concept of long term monitoring from the Protection Act was established as
the adaptive management program at that point. Um I, I was uh working for
Grand Canyon River Guides as a um on the member of the board and, and I, I
was an officer president and, and so on, vice president and I have been
involved as sort of Grand can river guides, primary
liaison, one of the primary people uh with regard to Glen Kane and uh dam
issues. And um the Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt chose, I mean,
selecting the different organizations that would represent uh the
stakeholders on the committee that chose Grand Canyon River Guide as a
nonprofit. Um 501 c three in Flagstaff Arizona as one of the two
representatives of Nongovernmental organizations that would represent
recreation, use of the Grand Canyon. So, uh uh so I, I uh was in a
position to take, be appointed by Grand Canyon River Guides to represent
Grand Canyon River Guides on the committee. And that's what happened. And
uh so I was appointed to the Adaptive Management Work Group and since I
was, go ahead, what year was that, that you were appointed?
I, I think it was 96. Uh Yeah, 1996.
Ok. And you served for how many years until 2010.
So it would have been 14 years, I suppose from like that.
And initially I was also um I appointed myself to the technical work group
because I was the only one that was around at the Grand Canyon guys that
wanted to do this kind of stuff. Go to meetings in Phoenix for God's sakes.
River guides don't like doing that so much. And so I had a propensity for
it or an, and an interest in it. And so initially, I was on the technical
work group as well. So I would go, I was the uh MWE and Twig
representative, by the way, MWE is Adaptive Management Work group and Twig
is the acronym for the technical work group that we use.
Uh While I was on those, those committees, the I also served on the
strategic planning sub-committee for the Adaptive Management Program to
deve developed the strategic plan for the program. I um I was a co
chairman of the Public outreach sub-committee for the Adaptive Management
Program
and I uh pri those are the two primary subcomittee um appointments that I
had. There may have been others that don't come to mind right now. But I,
I might also mention that prior to the Adaptive Management Work group. Um
when Glen Canyon environmental studies was being completed and finished up
, that was a bureau of reclamation program that, that ran the science
leading uh for the EIS process, there was a need uh recognized need that
there be a transition to the adaptive management work group because the
infrastructure and the people and the players and the environmental
studies program needed to either come across and be integrated into the
adaptive management um program somehow or that transition needed to be
done um comfortably. And so what was established was an informal group
called the Transition Work Group. And that was uh existed for about two
years, I think it was 19 95 and 96.
Um when that was, and that was uh uh uh more of an informal, it was not a
federal advisory committee per se, but it was comprised of the players,
the stakeholders that were going to become the adaptive management work
group. And
what it was tasked with was to try to understand um what had been done
with Glen Canyon environmental studies and take all that body of knowledge
and experience and move it into the Adaptive Management Program, which
proved to be challenging why.
Well, because the Glen Kine environmental studies was headed by a fellow
named named Dave Wagner and you may know the name he interviewed him. Oh,
you did? OK. Yeah. Da Dave was um you know, a, a real champion of the
program and uh did a tremendous job for a lot of years earning the
scientific studies um for the Bureau of reclamation of out of Flagstaff
Arizona. And he did not for various reasons, decide to stay on with the
program uh with Adaptive Management Program. And he rather abruptly left
and left without any um uh uh assistance in making that trans
transformation happen smoothly. So what another person was appointed,
Dave Garrett um and he uh was tasked with running the transition work
group and, and tried to um to make bring what he could from Glen Cane
Environmental Studies program and make it um transition into the Adaptive
Management Program as smoothly as possible. Uh So it was a little bit
rough in the beginning, the transition work group was, was pretty rough
because we didn't have the leadership of Dave Wagner and his institutional
knowledge available to us and made it. Um a lot of us were kind of new as
stakeholders to this program. And um it became uh challenging to, to kind
of ferret out the information that that had been developed by the
environmental studies program, Glen Canyon Environmental Program,
environmental Studies Program. So that was uh a bit uh uh challenging. So
what became apparent very quickly as we went into the Adaptive Management
Program was that we needed clarity as to our purpose and our goals and,
and our objectives and so on which, you know, spoke to the need for a
strategic plan. Because the initial stab at and during the transition work
group of putting together management objectives for the program was quite
a hodgepodge. It was a kind of a collective brain dump of everybody on the
, on the stakeholders on the committee. And it uh it was um everybody
basically said from this, each stakeholder said, well, I want this to be
studied and uh I want that to be studied. And, and so we took all this
brandom of ideas to be studied and realized, you know, I took it back to
home and showed it to my, some of my people at Grand Canyon River guide.
And we're like, this is crazy. It's, it was all levels of speci
specificity and generality from um that people wanted to know about and I
wanted to have studied. And so we had to kind of pull that together. And I
, and I, I did that with the help of Kelly Burke um from the Grand Canyon
Wellness Council. She, she was working with us there in Flagstaff and we,
we uh uh put together uh that document into, into a, a sort of a more
readable semblance uh of ordered by s um spec specific specificity and
generality. And from that, it became apparent that um the secretary
decided and when I say the secretary, I refer to the Secretary of the
Interior, um he decided that we really needed to um have a sub-committee
that was directed specifically toward getting a, a strategic plan
developed and go through a process that would, that had everybody involved
So from that, the strategic planning subcomittee was appointed and I was
on it, there was um I think six of us or seven, maybe seven of us on that
committee, we had representatives from recreation, environmental uh tribal
hydropower uh um and interior. So we had a nice really round well rounded
uh representation of the various components of the stakeholder groups. And
it was a long process about a two year process. So the 1996 to 1997 or
eight is that, that would have been 1997 through 2000. Um ok.
Yeah, we kind of, it was pretty well. We had put uh I I wrote a series of
articles that you're certainly welcome to access and use that outlined the
development of that process, that plan, but I I can give it to you just
verbally now very quickly. Um
Basically, we decided the secretary said you guys need to go, you
stakeholders need to go on a river trip together. He said, and this was at
a, at a P happened at a party that we had in Flagstaff at one of the uh I
think it was maybe Dave Garrett's house. You know, a lot of the
stakeholders were there, secretary was there and secretaries appoint you
for water and power was there. And like assistant secretary and uh uh we
just were talking about it over cocktails and I said, how about we do have
a river trip? You know, that would be one place where we could at least
get started talking in an informal basis and, and not being so entrenched
in our, in the room to, you know, on our typical way that things had been
, there were a lot of, there was a lot of mutual distrust and initially,
it wasn't like one big happy family when we started. In fact, um it was,
it was a lot of like everybody's um positioning themselves and trying to
figure out what, where they stand. And so the, we hired a, they hired a uh
facilitator to go on the river trip. Uh Mary Orton, you may know we have
heard her. We did. Oh, great. OK. Yeah, Mary's great. She's, she uh did a
tremendous job on the river trip and we were on an eight day motorized
pontoon trip and on the river and um developed a vision statement for the
program, which was a sh short vision statement, but it's very beautifully
written and everybody was on board with it and nobody argued with the
language. Everybody said this sounds good to us. Let's we came off that
trip with a vision, a common vision which it's a start and, and uh and
then, and then also a uh uh
and step down from the vision plan. Uh The am I thinking of um
the vision statement followed by, well, we developed principles
um it that required a lot of hashing out um in meetings after the river
trip. Let me see if I've got it here somewhere
while you're looking. Let me see if I have this correct. You're in the
transition between G CE S the environmental studies program and a full
blown adaptive management program. And uh you're looking for a common
vision and a common set of uh goals and objectives to guide the
development of the adaptive management program, right? OK. A vision
statement and which is very brief and then a mission statement, that was
what I was kind of searching my vision, my brain for. Um And so we have a
mission state vision, a mission statement. And um and then there was a lot
of discussion around, of course, all the language in there because um a
lot of nit picking about, we know what the meaning of that is, uh that
sort of thing um to be facetious. But, and then we realized that, you know
, if we're gonna develop goals for the program, we have to, we, we had a
bunch of um
preconceived ideas about how we wanted to look at the ecosystem, how we
wanted to um guide our development of goals for the program. And that's
what we ended up calling the principles. And we have these eight
principles that we developed and they were basically established the, the
agreed upon understanding of what we were doing and what why we were doing
it and, and um and recognizing the limitations of what we could do once
the principles were hashed out and this was after the river trip. Now,
this is in a whole series of meetings over, over a period of two years,
the principal developed, we went and developed the goals for the program
and there we developed 12 goals as I recall and goals being um
directions we want the program to go toward with regard to different
ecosystem components.
Recognizing that a goal may not be an achievable necessarily by definition
, but it is a direction uh a desired outcome that we needed to have the
program move toward, for example, with endangered fish or, you know,
sandbars or um cultural resources. Um And there was is uh 12 of those
schools that once that was established, that took a couple of years of
meetings, each we iterated back and forth with the main adaptive
management work group. Every time we as a sub-committee would develop the
next stage of this thing. We would have to vet it with the entire adaptive
management work group at a meeting and the AMAG only met twice a year. So
that's why it took two years. So and then we'd have to make sure everybody
in the all 26 members or seven members that were OK with all the language.
And, and so it was a really laborious process, but we did get the goals
written and uh and then, then where the rubber meets the road or the
management objectives under each goal and, and now management objectives
as you probably know, are, are achievable um
by definition. And, and so we got, we went from generality to spe
specifics of the management objectives and with the management objectives
established that took some time, it was recognized that we also needed to
establish information needs. What we call s when I had MS we had is, and
um under each management objective information needs, what do we need to
know? What do we still need to learn? What do we need to study in order to
make this management objective, achieve, be achieved?
And so it got more lengthy document, of course, got more lengthy because
of all the information needs to managing objectives. And we had to kind of
hash that out as well, that things started to slow down at that point with
regard to developing a strategic plan because that's when it's the
specifics that people, um different members of the committee would be
picky about because so many members of the committee had, were
representing an organization that had money at stake and funding and
potential. So that always kind of played in the background of these
decisions, you know, who was gonna get the money to study the natured fish
? Was it gonna be Arizona Game and Fish Us station and Wildlife Service?
You know, that sort of question. Um You know, and, and, and it was
recognized early on in the program too, that the environmental studies
program which had been headed up by Glen Canyon. Environmental Studies had
been headed up by the Bureau of Reclamation. That because the Bureau of
Reclamation was now um a stakeholder on this committee. It would not be
appropriate for them to manage the the gathering of good science as we
used to call it, Dave Wagner called it call it good Science. That is, you
know, uh um science that is done sci uh um uh things are studied in
scientifically, in, in a way that everybody trusts with that the outcome.
Uh the product of the science is something that we can all work with
information. So it was decided early on that the Grand Canyon Monitoring
and Research Center for doing the science. This was what replaced the G CE
S was gonna have to be under an outside organization such as the US
Geological Survey, which uh which prides itself on being on providing
independent scientific studies that are not colored or slighted toward any
particular stakeholder group. So GC Merci get moved to the US Geological
Survey in Black staff as a program of the US GS was that after the
transition or during G CE S it, it happened after the transition. OK.
Because initially and during the transition work group period and if I'm
remembering correctly, it was still bureau of reclamation was still
running the GCMRC and but it became kind of quickly realized that you know
, hey, um it should be really under a more independent group,
scientifically oriented group reclamation is not, they're not, they don't
do science for science sake. Us GS does science for science sake. And so
do you remember if I can interrupt, do you remember any um particular
specific uh instances or controversies that led to that decision or was it
just generic? We should have an independent third party agency manage, you
know, the the science. We were there some studies that the Bureau of
Reclamation didn't want funded or did want funded that led to a
controversy within the group that caused this to happen. Well, you know,
this gets back into the Glen Canyon Environmental Studies Program run by
the Bureau of Reclamation and headed by Dave Wagner and, and, and uh you
know, II I, I'm sure you got that information already from people involved
in G ce s like Dave on this. But the perception at the time that this
adaptive management program started was that the environmental studies
program run out of Flagstaff by Wagner was in a biased um in some ways. So
I think some of the hydropower people in particular, the basin states,
upper basin states were not happy with the direction that Dave Wagner had
taken the studies. And so they were concerned that uh reclamation for that
reason shouldn't be the the agency that does the science. And even though
Dave Wagner did not stay on the program. Um, there was sort of the history
there that, that, um, some, there were some, I guess some ill feelings
around I, that I don't know too much about personally. And it was, in your
opinion, hydropower interests that were expressing the most amount of
concern over the direction of the research program. Yeah. Mhm. Yeah.
Western Area Power Administration and, and Creta and Colorado River Energy
Distribution Association. Unless you're so us other hydropower consumer
Utah associated associated municipal power systems. But they were the
three primary advocates for hydropower on this on the program. And there
it is uh it was always kind of a battle with them because they were the
principal, the money was coming from hydropower revenues and although
reimbursable from the Federal Treasury still,
they, they were watching the dollars and that was their principal concern
in the program and making sure this thing didn't get out of control. And
there is concern that, that the that the program have a budgetary cap for
instance. And that was a big issue for the hydropower people and the upper
basin states because the upper basin states may get a lot of money from
the dam, the revenues from the dam go to projects in the upper basin
states. And so it's a gravy train for them and they don't want that gravy
train, you know, interrupted um by a bunch of science on Grand Canyon Dam.
There's a, there's a history there of Glen Canyon Dam, you probably know
it, that some are familiar with it anyway, um, that it was a very
controversial project when it was built and, and it engendered a lot of
public antipathy. And, uh, so there's a lot of people that didn't like the
dam and popularly, and this was everybody kind of knew that. And so there
was in ear, there was that, uh, sort of background history had been a big
environmental fight um to stop dams being built in Gra Grand Canyon and in
Echo Park and the Upper Basin. And uh those flights had been won by this,
the environmental community to stop those dams. But the environmental
community community was not able to stop the building of Glen Canyon dam,
which there was a lot of lingering resentment about. And so it was, it's
not a beloved dam but um from most people's point of view, but from the
upper basin state's point of view, it's, it's their, their baby. You know
, that's how they could, their storage pod is their bank account, their
water bank account. You have to make sure they make their downstream uh
flow requirements to the lower base in Pasley Ferry. And, and that's why
they wanted to build in the first place. It doesn't have any other purpose
other than motor boating. And uh and, and so it, it uh and they wanted to
preserve the integrity of that. So there is some tension around that,
especially since, right about that same time this whole program started.
This year, club board of directors voted to uh that they voted to uh
to, to lobby for the re removal of Glen Canyon Dale. And this was a big
deal. Uh uh Well, I'm giving you this as background for the kind of the
social political context of when this dept of management started.
This was very concerning, of course, because the Sierra Club had been, was
able to lead the fight in the stopping of the building of dams prior to
that. And if the Sierra Club could stop the dams from being built, then
can potentially, they could remove a dam, they get public behind it. So
there was the concern on the part of a lot of the stakeholders that are
basin states and the hydropower people that they wanted to protect their
interests in Glen Canyon Dam and not have this kind of thing potentially
happen. So I think that there was a real uh interest in having the
Adaptive Management program and then being involved in the Adaptive
Management program early on those constituencies because they thought, wow
, if we could make adaptive management of the damn work, maybe we can stop
talking about this damn Decommissioning thing that people were was out
there. And uh the Sierra Club was pushing for earlier in the interview,
you said that there was some conflict and distrust among members of uh
what would become the AM wig. Um Is it, is it the same tension that you're
referring to now? That is basically tension between environmental and
scientific interests versus hydropower interests or was the tension much
more complex than that? Oh, I, I think it's always been there but I have
not been in the program now for seven years. Uh So I don't really, I'm not
been following it uh for the last seven years. So I don't know today
what's going on with this, this program? I know, but I'm referring back
when, when you started in the program, the shift from G ce S to the
Adaptive Management Program. Um You said that there was tension and
distrust between people at that time, which is why you brought Mary Organ
in to try to bring people together was that tension and distrust.
Basically, the split between the hydropower interests and environmental
interests. All nothing much more complicated than that. That was the basic.
Yeah, side taking. Yeah, I would say that that's pretty, you know, pretty
much it. There was a question of how the tribe were gonna integrate the
tribes into it because they had not really been involved much before. And
um the, the cultural resources issue in general. Um
Where do they fit in, in that sort of uh social scenario milieu? They,
they um in general, in the Adaptive Management Program, they tended to be
quiet, very quiet, they didn't
speak out a lot. But when they did speak, you know, one of them would
speak and there was one of them that was pretty outspoken from wallaby but
, uh, uh, Clay Bravo and he didn't, he didn't miss any words but, but more
, more often than not, they would, uh, being kind of out of their element
in the top of a skyscraper in Phoenix, Arizona in a windowless room. They
didn't really have a lot of comfort, I don't think around being there and
, and functioning with Robert Robert's rules of order, you know, which was
something that we all had to learn. But they were, that was pretty far a
field from their, their manner of dealing with things. One of the great
things about the river trip was that it was uh the tribal members on the
river trip felt perfectly at home and, and, and the, and there was a sort
of egalitarian feel like we're all just these people on this boat going
down this river. And so it was really wonderful that river trip was great
at breaking down a lot of the preconceptions or fears that people held
toward one another. Uh recognizing, getting to know each other as
individuals and we're not bogeyman, you know, gonna bite your head off or
something because, you know, a lot of per a lot of those perceptions did
exist. And, and so I think it was because of that we were able to generate
a, a strategic plan that uh everybody could could be on board with, um,
including the tribes and it took a lot of, um, back and forth. You know,
there is a, there are inherent questions right off the bat like, well, ok
, environment. Uh, you know, recreationally, you've got a representative
like my myself from, represents down river interests from Willow ferry, uh
, principally concerned ostensibly with camping, beaches in the Grand
Canyon and that sort of thing as a primary concern. And then you got the
other recreational representative, a non G governmental organization tried
unlimited that was interested in the blue ribbon trout fishery upstream of
this theory. And, um, so two kind of very different types of recreational
concerns, white water downstream, trout fishery upstream. And then, and
then the inherent conflict between trout and native fish, trout being, uh
introduced non native and other non natives in the system and how we were
going to deal with that because, uh, it was clear that, you know, you and
that, and that still remains an issue. It has been an issue with that ran
through the whole program, uh, you know, native bird versus non native
fish. And where are the societal values? How do you integrate those
societal values when you have a conflict between the two perceived or more
real and, and in a lot of regard respects, I think it was really real,
that conflict. But so, you know, there was, um, those are the kind of
things we dealt with. In that early part of the program.
Thanks. That was very helpful. Um You mentioned Clay Bravo of the wallaby
and he was very outspoken. How long was he on the program? And would you
recommend that we try to interview him? Oh, how long did Clay stay on? I,
he stayed on for a couple of years. Anyway, a few years, I wanna say it.
I'd have to go back in the records, the records to see how long he was
actually on the committee. But he was uh you know, it, it, it was
refreshing uh for me. I mean, it was because he didn't, he was outspoken.
And so you knew where he stood with other tribal members often didn't,
they didn't say much or say anything, almost very little. So you didn't
really know, you know, where they came out on things um on different
issues. Um
And so that was, that was uh um yeah, uh you mentioned uh that you served
on an outreach committee or some public outreach. Yeah, public outreach.
Can you tell me a little bit about that committee? Its work and what you
did? Well, it was recognized early on that this is a very public place.
Grand Canyon is really, really
um iconic National Park and World Heritage site and so on. And people were
gonna pay, be paying attention a lot to what we're this dam was, had a,
had a lot of controversy around it. People are gonna be paying attention
and they're gonna like, want to know, OK, what's going on with this
program? What are you guys doing? There's gonna be public scrutiny and
what the bureau of reclamation in particular wanted to do as the leader of
the Adaptive Management work group they wanted. And the operator of the
dam, they wanted to make sure that we had a way of, of informing the
public as to what went on in our meetings, what are the directions we were
going, what the discussions were about? And so the, the secretary
recognized right off the bat, the program started that this would be an
important function of the program that we would need to be transparent to
the public. So the manage work group said, ok, let's let's establish a
public outreach
subcommittee's that allow us to translate the complexities of what we do
in this committee into understandable form that's accurate and believable.
And um and that is broadly accepted within the committee as being
accurate and understandable to the public. So that's what we sought to do
as we were basically a public education committee. So we developed a
website
and uh I did a lot of uh translating to the public of what the, what the
program was doing. Did you hold uh public meetings and invite people to
come and get updates on what was going on. All the meetings were open to
the public? Ok. So you didn't have anything extra specifically designed
beyond the committee meetings themselves, designed to sort of invite
interested people to come and ask questions. And I don't remember actually
doing that, um, print any materials that you distributed.
Yeah, we probably did. I'd have to go back and find that file, um, in that
big box of files right out there in my truck. Right. Um, it, it, it, uh,
whatever we did, I've got a public outreach file and it's probably got
something in it. I also, I, you know, I have all those paper files out of
my truck and I just wanted to let you know that those are available to you
, of course, and, and um but a lot, I still have a lot of files that are
just uh that are not in there. They're on, on my computer at home of
different things, that activities that we did think things I generated
reports that I made back to Grand Canyon River guys. I, I gave, I always
gave an update report in every invoice that I submitted for my work. So,
and in a way those invoices and that and that all those invoices that are
, they're not secret. I mean, they're, they're available too. I mean,
they're just mice. This is what happened, you know, this is what we've
been doing. This is not what we've been confronting the issues we've been
doing and a quick summary, you know, just executive summary of, of uh
where the program's been going and I think that they would be um very
useful um to maybe he uh help, you know, because there's a lot of detail
in there that I don't remember right off the top of my head right now that
necessarily, uh
a lot of them are in old formats of a word that I don't, I can't even open
anymore.
I probably could if I messed around. But I just, I realized that I'm
looking back at them in the last couple of days. I like, I can't even open
these things anymore. This word has, you know, uh it changed anyway, there
is that and there's also the um articles that I wrote for the Boatman's
quarterly review periodically that are also insightful as to the progress
of the program because that you asked about public outreach. And since the
group I represent are um the public um in a big in the river running
public, those interested very, you know, the element of the public that's
very interested in, in that in what's going on with this program. Um It
was important, I felt that I, that I let the public know our public know
kind of what was going on with the Adaptive Management Program. Do you
have a list of, of the articles that you wrote for Boatman's Quarterly?
Yeah, I do.
We can just go look them up and most of the uh Boatman's quarterly are
available digitally online. Most of them. Yeah. Ok. So here it is. Yeah, I
did a quick search of Boatman's quarterly reviews. It has my name in it.
And so this is what I came I got and I went through and if there's an N
next to it, it's not online yet. Uh There's a Y it is online. The N is I,
I ran, I did, I printed out of it. Oh, excellent. Thank God. Can we keep
this list here for you? You can keep all these printouts too wonderful.
These, these are pronounced from, from the vote for the N I guess they're
the ns I think I got most of them. There are a few in there that aren't. I
think I got most of them by the time I left home today, uh Here's an
example of a meeting report that I would submit with my invoice to give
you a sense of, you know, that was one of the early ones that I did.
That's a lot of detail. Yeah,
and here's the, here's the report. See, I was funded my part my for going
to meetings by the Grand Canyon Conservation Fund. I just thought, can you
explain the Grand Canyon Conservation Fund? Where does the money come from
? What is it to be asked for? Uh what happened was early on. It was
recognized by the river outfitters, commercial river outfitters. Who are
they make money taking people down the river that um our involvement in
this committee was important, important for them to know about, important
for, for us to get it right. And they were not the ones selected to be on
the committee. The this informal sort of nongovernmental Grand Canyon
River guys which were group which I I were sorting were kind of their,
their um representative as you might say, their connection to. So what
they developed was uh they got organized, the outs did for the first time
because not because of this program so much as because of the revision of
the river management plan in Grand Canyon, which directly influence and
involve them. But they, they got an umbrella organization called the Grand
Canyon River Outfitters Association. And with that Grand Canyon River
Outfitters as Ocean Association did was they, they uh tried to get this
fund started that would fund um environmental projects or issues having to
do with protecting the river in the Grand Canyon. And so, and that became
called the Grand Canyon Conservation Fund. About what year was that
organization in 97 I think? Ok. Right in the beginning when, because the
MP is beginning because, yeah, the River management, Colorado River
Management Plan, ZR MP, which you call it was being revisited at that time.
And that was hugely controversial, you may know um because the real,
that's a whole other topic, but that's what, that's what got the
Outfitters organized and then they had this conservation in front and what
they decided to do, which was pretty clever. They said, well, we're just
how we'll fund this Conser UC Con conservation fund is, will um ask our
clientele when they sign up for one of our river trips that if they would
like to donate $1 per day of their river trip to this conservation fund,
that would be a pool of money used to fund. For instance, my involvement,
our involvement in the Adaptive Management Program. There were other
things they funded as well, but they funded me to go to meetings basically.
And uh so it sounds like a dollar a day, doesn't sound like very much.
But when you talk about uh 100 and 20,000 user days and you get
broad-based involvement by all the out bidders, you're talking about a
significant chunk of change being generated every year. 100 and $20,000. I
don't know, something like that. So it, it, it wasn't that much because
not all the out bidders got involved in it right away. They were, had to
be kind of coerced into it by their fellows. But, but eventually most of
them did buy into the program and they found that most of their clientele
were happy, you know, after they, they spent $5000 on a river trip to put
in additional $15 for the conservation even no sweat. Ok. So it was easy a
way to generate money. And it was uh so grand can of guides would in turn
uh request money from them each year to fund our involvement in the
program. And that's why I kept these invoices formalized and reports to
the conservation Fund committee. Here's one of my very first reports to
the Grand Canyon Conservation Fund. Uh Initially, I adjusted it to them
later. I just addressed it to uh Lynn Hamilton as an executive director at
GCRG and she would convey it to them, but that gives you a flavor or a
sense of kind of what, how I would report on what I was doing. I say I
should say we were doing because I only served on both the Twig and the Am
wig for the first couple of years transition work group and then the Twig
and Am wig. I did all the meetings, but I was rapidly reaching personally
a burnout of meeting burnout and I realized I needed help. Uh And uh
that's when I got Matt Kaplinsky involved and that became my colleague on
the and he was my twig appointee. So I appointed him to be the technical
work representative for me and he started handling all the kind of heavy
lifting. You might say that happened on the twig because the twig is where
the rubber hit, hit the road really in this program, whatever the twig did
and recommended to the AMW, the AM wig would generally go hm ok, make it
so and so there wasn't a lot of because the Amor is mostly composed of
pretty high, higher up the administrative ladder people. So, for instance
, you know, and the AMW representing Grand Canyon National Park was the
superintendent. So I sat shoulder to shoulder with the superintendent. You
know, we have the same boat on the right next to the, you know, cultural
preservation officer for the Hopi Tribe. And so uh Western Regional
Director for the Bureau of Reclamation, uh you know, Western Director of
Western Power Administration, I mean, these guys are high up in their
organizations. Um but you had this uh but we, but so they not necessarily
scientifically trained at all and probably not in most cases, they are
more uh administrators and there used to be supervisory positions and so
on the technical work group where each one of us appointed a
representative on the technical work group which mirrored the adaptive
management work group was presumably somebody who was more technically
oriented. They could understand the science that was being developed, they
could understand how to interpret that material and make recommendations
to the Amway their amid member and then the A w could discuss it at their
meetings and make recommendations and turn to the Secretary of the
Interior, who is the ultimate operator of the dam, the water master of the
Colorado. And so that's how the chain of command went. I I uh you probably
know all that already though, right? I mean, you know, the structure of
the program. Yes. Although it changes over time and I was gonna ask you is
uh, has the, um, am wig always been bigger than the twig or vice versa?
Have the number, same size. It's one person. It's a mire come in. OK. And
, well, almost, um for instance, the A W IC does not have us geological
survey, um GCRRC and Grand Community marketing and research does not have
a member on the A W A voting member. They have a member on the technical
work group uh or at least a representative who could be there to help the
technical work group understand what the science is that's being done. So
they're almost a reflection, mere reflection of the MW the twig is. But
there, there, there may be some differences there early on in the program
when it first started. Uh one of the upper basin representatives, Wayne
Cook. I don't know if you interviewed Wayne. Um Yeah. Would you recommend
that we do? Oh, I'm sure if he's around. So I, I don't you, you got Cliff
Barrett, didn't you? Yes, he's, I'm surprised he's still around. But yeah
, cliff was, he was one of the upper, other upper basin guys. And, and uh
so a lot of times if uh all the upper basin states didn't show up at a
meeting, you know, some of the Wyoming didn't show up or maybe um New
Mexico didn't show up or something. Um Wayne would go like he would just
take all their name cards and put them right in front of him. He says, I'm
the representative of the Upper Basin. He would just take, he, he, because
he actually did have some kind of function in that regard with regard to
the upper basin states. He was kind of the representative who did he work
for uh Colorado River Commission. I think it was um boy and there was uh
the Upper Basin States and there are four of them um had their own little
um conversation that they always have going on because they had a mutual
interest in in the reservoir and reservoir operations.
Uh So Wayne, you know, so sometimes there would be a meeting like that
where not everybody would show be at the meeting. And uh Wayne didn't
hesitate to represent anybody who wasn't there on the upper basin of the
upper basin states. So, yeah, he didn't want to let that. Um he's a power
broker, you know, and he was, he, he used to run Glen Canyon Dam. I mean,
he was, he was, he's in the revolving door of working for Western area
Power Administration, working for the Basin states, working for beer
reclamation at different phases of their career. So we had several of
those kind of people that had work done different, worked in different
capacities in the upper basin, for instance. Um And Wayne Cook was a good
example of that clip Barrett, I think did some of that multifaceted
work. But uh uh and yeah, so, um
where, where was I going with that? Um
Sometimes they were, the committees were there. It was exact mirror twig
and the hew and, or, or very nearly so, and that's how uh the whole idea
was that, that the twig would convey to the AM wig who presumably knew
what their constituency cared about it because they're in a supervisory
position, you know, superintendent knows what his park needs concerns of
his park. Uh The head of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area knows what
their park needs. Andre Poto knows what the re recreational down over
whitewater river runners need. You know. So we would get uh we would give
directives to the twig and say we need you to study this to reach these
certain management objectives. And the twig go like, OK, and they would go
and hash out the information needs and the different write the request for
proposals and things like that that were necessary to farm out to the
scientific community to have competitive uh uh presumably competition for
those RFPS request for proposals to, to uh do you get the work done and
the scientific work done? And that was largely under the venue of
GCMRCGFCMRC
had many of its scientists in house that would do a lot of the work, but
there were other agencies and um universities that were engaged as well.
Arizona State University being one other universities as well. Utah State
University Jack Schmidt there. Uh He's on our interview and good. Yeah. Um
because he really knows a lot um
about G ce S particularly. Uh anyway, can I bring you back to something
you mentioned a little bit earlier before I lose track of it? Um You
mentioned that Colorado River Management plan was being revised sometime
in the late 19 nineties and it was very controversial. Can you tell us um
uh when did they start making these Colorado River management plans? Um
for what purpose and why controversial and what was going on in the late
19 nineties in that revision? Ok. The relationship between the Grand
Canyon National Park and the River Outfitters is um governed by the river
management plan that the, that the Grand Canyon develops. And so the
Colorado per service document Colorado management plan and it is, it was
designed by the park to be revisited every 10 years. At which time the
park as part of that would, would re evaluate the Outfitters and their
performance
using part criteria to determine whether to renew those concessionaires
permits or not and to um govern how those permits were, were um applied
because it was clear from the parks to the park service when the river
management plan first started in 1972
that there needed to be regulation of the river out theres because it was
getting growing fast and the park had no control of it prior to that. And
this was a revisitation of that original plan. The first big one, it, it
doesn't exactly happen every 10 years because there's an administrative
delays and things happen. But uh this was being revisited uh maybe for the
second time uh since the institution of the, the original River Outfitters
in 1972 I believe it was.
And, and so the big issues that had emerged in that 1st 17 years of
commercial river running, 15 years of commercial river running in Grand
Canyon in the seventies and eighties, was that the big change was that
private river trips had increased in demand and number and uh in the Grand
Canyon and they had traditionally a very small allotment from the Park
Service management plan. Originally, when it first started, they had 8% of
the use and commercial had 92% of the use if I'm remembering, right? And
the the the rapid growth of people outfitting their own river trips
throughout the seventies and eighties. And the concurrent development of
all the material materials that you need to run a river trip, boats and
rafts and ors and equipment, you know, uh was exploding industry,
recreation and river industry. The private boaters were put on a waiting
list to get a private trip in the Grand Canyon.
And it is widely known as one of the most sought after river experiences
in the world. Um they were, that waiting list was getting longer and
longer. And so the private boaters got organized and they decided to
advocate for themselves to get a bigger share of the pie and they fought
for a 5050 instead of 92 to 8. They wanted it to be 5050. And so, and the
park didn't want it to get that big because the park is concerned about
protecting the resource and the park is trying to keep the numbers of
total use down. So the threat to the commercial outfitters from the
private outfit, private groups was that they would take away commercial
use and give it to private use. And this really scared the commercial
outfitters. That's why they got organized and, and uh uh one of the
primary reasons. So it was private versus commercial. It was probably the
biggest issue. The other big issue was wilderness or no wilderness motors
or no motors. And the wilderness advocates had a very good point to make
that, that it was a, um designated as a um po potential wilderness area.
And according to the wilderness act, it was um um potential, which
wilderness is to be managed as wilderness until such time as Congress
decides, uh as, as to make it wilderness or not. So yet, there was this
huge motors are not allowed in wildernesses, but there was this huge
motorized rafting industry in the Grand Canyon. So the park is going like
, well, these the wilderness advocates have a really good point. You know
, they don't wanna hear motors in their wilderness. This is a proposed
wilderness area, so we have to manage it as such. So they had to do a lot
of juggling with the, the motor versus non motor controversy. That, uh,
that, that was two of the big controversies operation of the Glen Canyon
Dam was kind of off to the side of that depth management program was not
directly gonna impact directly involved in uh in the river management plan
per se unless you're talking about science, science, river trips, research
trips, which had grown in abundance. And with the Glen Canyon
environmental studies and then the Adaptive Management Program. So we
started seeing more science trips on the river and, and, and that was
dictated by the Grand Canyon Protection Act that there would be this long
term monitoring program. And so that was by a lot of something the park
had to integrate into how they were going to manage that component of
overuse. The tribes started coming out and saying what about us? And, and
uh we have traditional use, use of this region for generations.
And so there had to be that um that that thing also taken care of park had
to play the, with the uh tribe, the the concerns of the tribes and
integrate those concerns as best as possible. And I could tell you about
how they did that eventually. But Um, and, and, and II, I sort of get into
where I always got involved in doing science down there. So all the time,
same time, I'm the AM wig and the twig representative, I've also got, uh,
I'm, I'm also a co principal investigator on our science project that
directly influences the program. So, arguably, you know, conflict of
interest. Yeah, perhaps. But there was a lot of that, um, the US Fish and
Wildlife Service. You sat on the committee as a member of the A w for
getting most of the lion's share of the funds fighting with the Arizona
game of fish or who got to study the fish and you know, whose jurisdiction
are those native, uh you know, those endangered native fish or how we got
to split that pie piece of the pie because that was a big chunk of the
funding was going toward endangered fish. It was a big concern of the
committee, uh Endangered Species Act as you'd know is a very powerful
piece of legislation and there isn't, there's a threat, threatened species
down there. You gotta do something about it if there's endangered
especially. And uh so the Humpback chub was a big, big deal and the
program spent a lot of money and uh in some ways and, and, and who got,
who got to do the research, you know, us fish and wildlife service has
their scientists, fish, scientists, Arizona game and fish has theirs. A
Arizona has theirs, of course. Uh It was uh Mink, Mink Wendell, Mink. Yeah.
And uh so you had three different entities, please. Arizona game and fish
claim that they uh have jurisdiction over the bed of the river cause that
the bed of the river is not the water of the river. So the, the bed
underneath the river is Arizona game and fish jurisdiction. They stood by
that and, and, and, and oh, there's fish above our bed of the river. Then
we get a piece of the pie and we're gonna study those fish, us, fish and
wildlife service. Whoa, whoa, we're, we're charged with the Endangered
Species Act, you know, we got it. That's our job. And so you can't take
that away from us, you know, and then Hinkley's, yeah, his clout and his
history of development of studying fishes and he's got a lot of academic
clout and history with doing that. So they had to work with that GC mercy.
Meanwhile, is developing their own in-house fish people that are trying
to manage all these other fish scientists and figuring out how to outfit
the chips for them. Uh So it was uh it was the fish issue was a big one.
Did they ever figure out a way to divide up research responsibilities to,
you know, like one agency got one fish and another agency got a different
fish.
Yeah, they figured it out. Yeah, they, they kind of just figured it out.
Um And it kind of changed a little bit more back and forth over the years.
But, uh uh you know, like I, you know, I'd have to go back and look at
how it actually happened. The people that know a lot more about this than
I do. My memory is not that great about this, but because I wasn't
directly a fish scientist, I, my research was on, on uh archaeological
sites, uh and along the river that were influenced by the dam. So you have
training as a geologist, right? But you were doing archaeological research
, geo archaeology, geo archaeology. Can you explain interface between
geology, geomorphology? Really and archaeology? How do the two interface?
What's the connection? Oh OK.
Um
It was recognized by a Park service. I give you a little background. Um
Trinkle Jones uh Park Service archaeologist in 1983 when the high flows
from Glen Canyon Dam were um eroding beaches really severely, very high
flows out of control dam. She, she was doing uh surveys of archaeological
sites and found a circumstance situation where the actual archaeological
sites were eroding away as a result of the uncontrolled releases from lay
hand down during that year of flooding. That was the in 1983. And from
that, the park said, hey, the dam is a washing away our the archaeological
sites that we have to protect. We are mandated to protect the
archaeological all preserve and protect. So we do so, the question then
became, is that really true? And how is that happening? And, and this
became a potentially big deal because tribes would get involved in that,
whether tribes get involved, uh They, you know, National Historic
Preservation Act or Acts in Congress, they were passed, that had to do
with protecting these things, just like the endangered species Act
protected fish snails. And so, and then the question became, well, is that
really happening? So we were commissioned to answer that question, how is
it or is Glen Canyon Dam the operations of Glen Canyon Dam uh affecting
the erosion of archaeological sites. And if so how and
if it is, then please develop a quantitative predictive geom morphic model
for us to understand how that process works. We at the park can understand
how that works. So what we were commissioned with was the question
answering the question if, if so how and then develop a model? That's what
we did in two years, 119 sites.
Did you do any of that research with uh with tribal um represented
archaeological representatives? No, we did it in conjunction with the park
service. So park archaeologists um the park archaeologists directed where
they wanted us to study. Uh They said they did, they'd done a complete
survey of the entire river corridor, Jen and Helen Fairley had done that
with her team previous years during the E I Environmental studies program.
They knew where all the sites were along the river where there was any
kind of archaeological feature or material. It's like something like 435
of them or along there. So there's a lot of them, the parts of the park,
archaeologists uh Lisa Lee, she kind of directed us. She said, ok, this is
a region we want you to study. This is a region that we want you to study.
And principally, we were focused on gully erosion caused by runoff from
the slopes running through the arch archaeological sites and cutting
gullies and removing the archaeological sites. So that was our primary
concern of and we are trying to understand the processes of gully erosion
if they were um a constant or they were changing over time due to climate
variation. Possibly. That's a question that we had. Uh how does the uh
gully process of runoff gulley of interface with the river processes?
There's two different geom morphic systems, the interface where the people
used to live in in 1000 years ago and 500 years ago. And so we studied
principally that interface. And what and the basic conclusion that we came
up with was that uh yes, the dam, the presence of the dam and the
operation of the dam is causing the exacerbation of the erosion of
archaeological sites. And we explained how that was and why that occurred
was occurring. And um and then we developed a model predictive model. A
quantitative model for a Geor model for gave it to the park and said,
here's how you can rate the very relative vulnerabilities of your, your
known cultural sites to gully erosion. You take measure these parameters,
you put them into this equation. It'll give you a number and that number
will be on a scale of 1 to 100 0 to 100 will give us vulnerability.
And did that lead to uh any uh decisions on altering dam operations as the
adaptive management plan is sort of designed to do it did.
Yeah. Well, to make the connection between erosion of archaeological sites
and the dam operations was huge because now all of a sudden, oh, we have
to do something about that because until that connection was made
scientifically, um It was speculation was that the first time that there
was a scientifically empirically documented connection between dam
operations and damage to a valued resource downstream. Uh No, there was a
rich Herford did the, the a lot of the uh um he did a couple of really
important studies, several, several mapping studies, geomorphology,
mapping studies in critically archaeologically rich areas down there. And
he was did that for us geological survey and he made these beautiful maps.
So he we had his maps to work with which were fantastic and uh very
detailed. And um and he one of the conclusions of one of his reports,
which was just an open file report us GS Open file report, I shouldn't say
just but not mainstream report. But one of the conclusions was that, that
um he hypothesized that there was this linkage between gully erosion and
the operations of the Glen Canyon dam. And, and then we had to go out and
test that hypothesis. That's what our job was. Me and Kate Thompson, like
co co cooperator on the, on the project, Kate had worked with Harford on
his stuff previously. So she was the one sort of the heir apparent that
Herford Herford didn't want anything to do with. He was done with all this
poli politics crap. But uh yeah, and he, and so he stepped away from it
and he said, you guys do it, go ahead, you know. And so Kate said, hey,
Andre, I need a partner. There's an RFP on this. We went to SWC A which is
a local environmental consulting group, did quite a bit of research down
there. Steve Brothers group and uh he was at the University of Arizona,
right? You know, um he had his own environmental uh uh he was the curator
of Biology at the Museum of Northern Arizona in the seventies. He did a
lot of the groundwork in the whole ecosystem down there. River ecosystem
cars is a great resource. Is he still around? I think. So, I haven't seen
him for quite a long time but he, he likes to. Uh but he started SWC A and
uh and, and SWC A has got earned a lot of the uh applied for a lot of, a
lot of the RFP to the part of the RPS for this program and they were doing
fish research as well, but uh with their own fish scientists. And so
that's 1/4 group uh on fish. But uh he said, Crothers went to Kate and
said, hey, Kate, you know, you work with Herford on this geo archaeology
geomorphology project along the river. Would you like to be a principal
investigator? We'll, we'll house you, you can work under SWC A and we'll
do the, you know, we'll handle your, your um the management of your, if
you, if you win it, the um K said, yeah, I'd like to, but I'd like to need
a partner. So we were friends. She said, hey, and you wanna be my partner
on this? And I said, sure. And uh uh so we, uh we put in request, uh we
put in for that proposal and got it and uh did it. What uh what kind of uh
changes in dam operations do you remember? May have resulted from that
research?
Um
Probably the most important one was the, the thing that I'm most proud of
having accomplished in the program. And I fought for, for all those years
that I was in it. And that's the run artificial floods from the dam to
rebuild the sandbars in the Grand Canyon. And what we were able to do in
our study was show that um that by rebuilding sandbars in the Grand Canyon
,
you stood a chance of mitigating the erosion of archaeological sites by
putting sand up high.
And the connection we made was that even though you can't get the sandbars
as high as they used to be back when the Indians lived there because the
dam prevents that high bruise pattern. You can get the dead water sand up
high enough to where. And this is a critical piece of or the wind can blow
the sand and redistribute it into the archaeologically rich areas and
mitigate the gully erosion effect.
Basically, what our study showed was that the gully erosion, it's always
gone on. It's all run off from monsoon storms, particularly monsoon runoff.
Storms are create these powerful flash flash floods and course down
across the pre damn sandbars where the archaeological sites are. It's just
that in the pre dam era, you have annual flood that theyre replenish the
sandbars extensively up high with would counteract that gully erosion
process. So there was this balance over time that preserve the
archaeological sites. Gully erosion was not able to outcompete the river,
so to speak. Right. River is a depositional river. And um
in the Post AM era, the river is operated at much lower levels. It's clear
water very what we call sediment, hungry water and the level to which the
gullies want to seek. The river level. It's a lower level for much of the
year than it used to be. And in fact, all of the year where it was only
part of the year, like it used to be only part of the year. And because
you didn't have that replenishing sand every year from the annual flood,
you uh you had the uh loss of sand over time from the system and the uh
gully erosion process was winning the war. He might say to put it in human
terms. It was um dominating the river depositional process. And the only
chance we had of potentially re operating the dam to mitigate that was to
run artificial floods from the dam, the sandbar building floods. And we
made the that linkage the additional linkage that the sand wind which we
had documented in our studies. The very ubiquitous presence of blowing
sand down there. It was a very important process for redistributing sand
in the p preda era and could be in the post da era as well. So um give the
wind something to work with you guys. Uh We, we might be able to slow this
down and then al also what came out of that was the concern that because
of the concern generated by our report, the Park Service say we need where
there are these really vulnerable sites that outlined by Poto and
Thompson's record high of vulnerable sites where we know there's a lot of
archaeology there's a danger and the gully is already starting to form
there. We need to go and do and do data recovery in those in those sites
and data recovery. If you're not familiar with, the term is a common term
for it is excavation. So and and it's generally understood in Archaeo by
archaeologists. So when you go in and you do data recovery at a site, you
basically completely, I am take away the context of the site and document
what's there, but you'll never be able to recreate the context for that
site perfectly. So you need to do the science right, the first time and
very meticulously,
that's expensive to have rich people full of archaeologists down there
doing his work park picked 10 or nine or 10. It's particularly vulnerable
sites down there where the archaeology was particularly rich and they did
uh data recovery on those sites and they were able to get money from
interior and the park put up some of the money. It was about a million
dollars site I remember, right. So it was about $10 million deal um to get
those done. And they did that over about a two year period, fantastic, two
years. It took about two years to do that data recovery and it's great. I
, I bring it with me. I know I got it with me in the car. Great. Um
Must be the car and to your recollection. Did they pick the 10 most, um,
archaeologically rich sites or the 10 most risky sites subject to erosion.
It was a combination of both those thoughts. Ok. Yeah.
Like the ones that were high on our scale for vulnerability, you know,
were ones that, of course, got their attention. Uh, and so, and they
already knew where they kind of. Yeah. So that's how they decided where to
, where to do the, uh, data recovery. Do you remember about when uh
the first
alteration of the dam's operation was accomplished in order to try to
rebuild some of that sediment? I know you had to do the studies first.
Then you probably had to advocate for change in operations. How long did
it take about? When did you actually get to the pulse flows? The first
pulse was 1996 19. 0 yeah, they were already doing it. It was, it was, it
was proposed under Glen Canyon environmental studies if they do this. And
, and it was proposed in the EIS on the dam that this is a because the
sediment scientists had proposed that this could be something that would
be a tool that the dam could use potentially to rebuild sandbars in the
Grand Canyon um that needed to be uh tried out. So that 1996 flood flow
was a big scary experiment. No one knew if it was gonna work or not and it
worked and, and uh and we learned a lot the sentiment scientists learned a
lot. We all learned a lot. Then it became a question of advocating for it
in the dept of men work group. That was where it was like pulling teeth
because we, you know, I was doing this, I was part of the archaeological
study that was going like, hey, we need to do this for archaeological
sites. I was recreational guy. We need to do it for camping, beaches. Our
beaches are all disappearing and the fish people were going like we need
it for habitat, shoreline habitat for the fish rear end, need a fish. So
the three big things of the components of the ecosystem, um endangered
fish, endangered archaeological sites and endangered camping beaches. The
recreational resource were all potentially benefited by a, a high fluid
event. And so we finally got them. After we finished our cultural study,
our archaeological geo archaeological study, we got, we were able to
convince them and reclamation was all on board for this. So they wanted to
do it. Uh Bureau of reclamation. Um Guys were um and they were on our side
, you might say, and it was the, it was the upper base and state people
didn't want to establish this precedent of running water around the
generators and wasting all that water that could have been generating
money for their coffers. And uh and that was what their, their fight was
and along with them was during our power administration, they were kind of
in codes. But uh so the hydropower consumers in the NW A but they, we
finally got him to do it again in 2003. So we ran the high flow next
second high flow experience in 2, 2003. And uh that, like I said, it was
like pulling teeth to get it done, but we got it done. And then, and then
we just say that one was as successful as the 1996. It was, and it was
recognized that it didn't, we didn't have to use as much water. We didn't
have to run it for as long. The first one was that took seven, they ran it
for seven days and almost all of the segmentation of the building and
beaches happened in the 1st 2024 hours. And that recognition in from the
first one was like, we don't have to run it for seven days guys. You know
, we can run it for two days or a day and a half and get the same benefit.
So we ran the 2003 experiment and then then it was a few more years. That
was the Bush administration started, came in and, and things slowed down a
lot now. It's a regular occurrence now. Yeah, it's not regular. It is
contingent upon the conditions being right.
That means that there's sufficient sediment that's been washed into the
river on the bottom from the Peria River, big tributary right below the
dam. There's a lot of sand in every year and they, so they monitor the
sediment. Scientists monitor the per river very closely and very carefully
to, to quantify the amount of sand that's being delivered to you most
upstream reach of the Grand Canyon. And once that river and, and they
determine that that sand is still uh sufficiently retained within the
Colorado River system in the bed of the river by a certain date, September
30th. And there's a, there's a million 8 million metric tons still
remaining. That triggers a release from the dam. That's what's called the
, the hydrologic trigger criteria. That is the sentimental logic, GEOS
sentimental logic trigger criteria really. And, and so once that was shown
to work as a trigger criteria in 2003 event, um
then it was a couple more years before we were finally able to get the
2008 flow flow event. Once we got the 2008 flow event, it became protocol
and once it was adopted as protocol because it worked again, hey, this is
working. It's solving the problem of the dam affecting these critical
resources. So let's write it into the new EIS the new uh preferred
alternative. So they did a new EIS on the dam uh to replace the first one
because it was clear that the first one wasn't working. We were losing
resources and that was violating the Grand Canyon Protection Act because I
don't know if you know the Grand Canyon Protection Act very well, but you
know, the critical language in their environmental language is the dam
shall not be operated in such a manner as to preserve, mitigate adverse
impacts to and improve the values for which Grand Canyon National Park was
created, including cultural biologic and recreational resources. So that's
the the the driving language of the Protection Act. Uh It did a lot, said
a lot of other things too, but those are the things that really made it be
the first part of the law of the river that had to do with uh mitigating
environmental problems as opposed to simply redistributing water power and
that sort of thing. So that was an important act. And, and so that was the
whole purpose of our program. That's why I I it was part of the Grand
Canyon Protection Act said there will be an EIS on Glen Canyon Dam. At
first, I think it's the first post facto EIS done on any major federal
project, meaning after it was built, normally you do an EIS before
something's built. Well, I said, no, we didn't do it but back then because
N A hadn't been passed yet and now I A says we should do that. So that was
part of the Protection Act was that there would be an EIS done on the dam
, but also part of the Protection Act that uh the long term monitoring
program be established uh that diment program and, and so, and that, but
then it said the reason the poor, what we're doing to protect the Grand
Canyon because it's recognized that we, the dam is affecting the
downstream environment. Um And that was a, that was novel. Um No one had
ever thought about dams affecting the downstream environment before the
only people always thought about, you build a dam. It's gonna flood this
whole region upstream. It displays all these people but cover up all these
archaeological sites, you know, right. But nobody thought about, well,
what's it gonna do downstream? And so this was an important recognition
that the downstream and, and environmental impacts and, and by the way,
that's Grand Canyon down there. And you know, it's iconic feat feature on
the landscape. And so you got to get protected. So that's the, the
Protection Act was important for that reason. I'm not sure where I was
going with that, but um we were able to get the uh high flow, um what used
to be called beach habitat building flows. Bhbfs. They changed the
nomenclature to call them high flow experiments. Now, HFES, so Bhbfshhfes
sometime around what, 2008 or something it was right around then uh when
the third successful pulse flow and they decided to operationalize this on
a regular basis, it was recognized that we were the part we have was
failing that management of the dam was failing that the criteria for water
releases that was dictated by the original preferred alternative in 1997
the first year of the dam. But that criteria was not achieving the goals
of the Protection Act. We weren't conserving the chub. That was a big
scare when in the early two thousands, when the chubb population is going
like this down. We've, we've, we, we didn't have any, nobody, Melin wasn't
coming up with this data. He was holding it. No, I'm not gonna go into
that. But people had data out there in the fish community, science
communities, but they were sharing it. It was like, you know, and we're on
the adaptive manage work going, hey, fish community, science community,
what's going on with the endangered job? And they're not like,
you know, being, you know, maybe just conservative scientists not willing
to say. But finally, they come up in 19, I think it was 2002.
They presented it at, at they showed us the long term population trend of
the adult chub in the, in the Grand Canyon and it was like over the last
10 years and by their best estimates, I'm not sure how those fish
scientists got their act together and maybe Mink was involved in getting
to do it or something, but they got the data out there and we all looked
at that and I remember it was a very pregnant moment of the day and I am
with reading it we looked, we're all looking at this thing projected up
there that shows a long term decline in numbers of adult chub over 8, 10
years. And we're going like, leading up to where we are today, which is
like 2000 adults left, you know, 10,000 adults to 2000 adults over eight
years. And we're like, uh, you know, we're failing, you know, we're
failing with the Endangered Species Act. And I, and I said, I remember
that moment in that meeting. I said, well, I, for one on this committee, I
am not willing to stand by and be a member of this committee and watch the
destruction of the chub in the Grand Canyon, not when we can do something
and everybody will, I'm on board with that. I'm on board. So the whole
committee kind of went, we gotta do something. So it created a sense of
urgency and like we got it, get rid of the non native fish. If they're
causing the problem, we got, you know, do whatever we can to, you know,
create additional spawning populations. Uh Little Colorado was the only
one known spawning population. So it's, it just triggered this massive
amount of research and interest the part of the MW and, and so that was
good that got things going. Did the fish biologists at the time understand
the cause of the decline?
Yeah, they had a pretty good idea. Was it habitat or competition or both
or it was both. Um, I, you know, every everybody
habitat was, is probably the big one, but it was an introduction of non
native competitive species. The other big one, that's something we could
do something about the habitat issue. The um was one that uh was addressed
by the temperature control device. It was planned for the dam and I don't
know if you know much about that, but right in the gourd go of the program
, the idea was to build a temperature control device on the back side of
the dam to regulate the temperature of water that would come through the
dam to try to up to try to emulate that. Yeah, we get warmer water from
higher up on the reservoir uh to draw it. It's called a selective
withdrawal structure. Ok? They weren't heating it, they were just drawing
warm water from the top and mixing it with the colder water. Ok. Right.
Because there's a thermal gradient in the reservoir that warmest on top,
closes on the bottom and, and where the pin stocks are pulling water from
, which is about midway up. The reservoir was a constant 48 °F and year
round and not good for native warm muddy water fish, not for fish that are
used to spawning in warmer water. And that's why it was considered the
Humpback Chuck could only spawn in little Colorado because that was where
they had a nice warm water habitat that was always gonna be there there
and always the same because a blue spring runs the same temperature year
round and uh creates a perfect habitat for spawning chug. And so there was
, they were successfully spawning there. And with the fish, scientists
could tell us that and they weren't in the main stem of the river and the
river is colder than it was in the pre dam era. And it didn't have the
high fluctuation of, uh, volume during the year and it didn't have the
high range in temperature that it used to have throughout the year. So the
conditions were totally artificial for the child. Now, there is a perfect
environment for trout. Rainbow trout, cold water, clear water. Trout need
a CD. You know, the chub don't need a CD. The ch can smell anything. They
, they, they really got good noses on them, but the trout have seeded so
the trout had clear water. So there was this conflict. Well, how do we,
what about the temperature control? They might, well, I don't even know
what happened to this well, selected withdrawal structure is what it
initially called. But we tried to get that built in the first part of the
program, but we just take it with a lot of resistance, a lot of resistance
because nobody knew for sure if you did something that you might be doing
the wrong thing. What if we build this big thing and it kills all the
endangered fish, you know, you know, because if nobody was really sure
that if you really messed with the habitat that much by changing the
temperature, you know, uh, annual temp temperature fluctuation of the
releases from the dam, that it wouldn't encourage the growth of other non
natives that could do even better and well or co compete this the trout.
So the decision was made, let's get rid of the non-native. So that was
when we start, we should develop the, um, removal of the trout program.
And I imagine the trout fishery, uh, representatives, uh, on the committee
were a little concerned about that. Yeah, because even though the blue
ribbon trout fishery was upstream, at least fairy, that, that's where they
fished. They didn't really care about the trout downstream, at least that
was ok. They knew that, that those trout weren't obeying that do not pass
this. There's no, yeah, do not pass and go. You can't go down there and
they were. And so that has spawned other studies on natal origins of trout
or they were they, how much were they moving up and down the corridor? How
much of them are the trout spawning in place? A whole lot of research
around that. And so, um, that there was a lot of money pumped into the
program for trout removal initially because it was like crap. We gotta do
something. We gotta, we gotta reduce the competitive pressures because it
was a good assumption. Everybody thought it was a good assumption that the
non natives were preying upon and at least out competing the ch the chub
for the food supply, which was meager compared to the pre dam era. The
Glen Canyon dam, not on, not only interrupts 90% of the sediment supply. A
pre damp sediment supply interrupts 90% of at least of the organic drift
of material coming down the river. That was the basis for the food chain
in, in the, in the uh aquatic environment. So you need all that organic
and it was a organic deprived river and it was dry water. Basically it,
and have the basis for all that organic basis for fish populations that
had been dependent on, dependent on, on it before the dam. And so, um,
the, what do you say? Well, we just got to get rid of the trial. So they
started fishing them out of there, trout destruction ex expeditions where
the Arizona game and fish was. I've been doing a lot of that, I think. Um
I don't know if you know about that. They, they fish at night with electro
shockers. Uh, go from Eddie to Eddie during the night hours and they have
this little boat that's a generator on it and they put the electrode in
the and zaps, all the fish in the fish float up to the surface and then
they have a big light on the just scoop them out. And if they're
originally, when they were getting rid of the trout, they would, they, we
have measured all of all the fish but do a fish senses and then they would
trash the trout basically and put them through the trout Matic, you know,
the bass somatic TV, late night TV, tryout attic. And, you know, and so
they're turning me into fish meal and, and then putting the chub back, but
putting a, a pet tag in each of the chubs. So all the chub down there have
a pet tag inside. So we have a little barcode inside and they can just
read this thing and it's like a supermarket checkout. So you gotta catch
the fish to get to read the barcode.
But they, they were developing the techniques for pit tagging the child.
But pretty much all the child have been caught down there at least once.
But so many of them several times. This is all happening in the 2000. This
is happening in the mid two thousands. And then the tribe said, wait a
minute, we don't, we can't support this. A Hopi tribe in particular came
out and said, we can't support the killing of fish. Just the wanton
wholesale slaughter of fish because the Hopi I believe that's the, there's
descendants are in the form of fish in the Grand Canyon. And the Grand
Canyon is their holy place in the world. That's where they came from,
right? Originated as a tribe there. So to them, it was an anathema that we
are using wholesale slaughter of fish. And we try to get around that by
saying, well, we give all the fish meal to the wall by Indian tribe. At
the end of the trip. When they do, they rotate out of Diamond Creek and
they use it in the tribal gardens to grow, grow food for the fish meal.
And so that sort of worked for a while, sort of placated the tribe, the
tribe a little bit. Hope he tried a little bit. But then it was just like
, yeah, yeah. So now they don't kill him anymore. They measure, weigh him
, monitor. But the slaughter of n of non native fish is kind of ceased.
And partly because, you know, the Humpback job numbers started coming back
and it was like, oh, you know, I'm getting rid of the non native is
helping here, maybe you guys actually. And so we started seeing the, the,
the Humpback chub that was coming up and it was like, you know, um, what
we're doing, let's keep doing it. But I think what I believe and I think a
lot of fish scientists might agree with me on this is that a large reason
that Humpback chub started coming back up in health and abundance and
numbers is because of the warm releases from the dam because of the
drought, because the low levels of the lake they uh they didn't have to
build a selective withdraw on the backside of the dam. The drought was
doing it for them. It was bringing that warm surface water of Lake Powell
down to the p stock level and water, warmer water was going through the
Grand Canyon and more conducive environment for habitat for the native
fish. And that I think is largely responsible for the uh come back of the
diminishment of the tr travel population because travel need coal water
and the encouragement of the child to, to populate the main stem, not just
the little Colorado, but come out into the main stem and utilize the food
resources in the main stem of the river. So that seems to be the reason
inadvertently through the drought created the habitat conditions that
habitat conditions for the native fish. And there was just then the park
did remove all the trout from Bright Angel Creek. You may know about that.
They systematically went up the entire creek. They put a weir at the
mouth and they fished all the trout out of right to a creek because it was
a source spawning source for a new trout coming into the main stem,
especially the brown trout, which are the most voracious predators of the
uh of the child. Rainbows aren't so bad with the browns who are, who are
also spouting up in Little Creek Arbore Pisces as I say fish. So it, it
seems as though the population last I checked anyway, the population
stabilized with the chub. And as long as we stay in this drought, we have
the water temperatures necessary to kind of keep things happy lining on
that cloud.
Well, that was, you know, dodged a bullet by state. I mean, because of
nature, you know. Yeah, by the way, that one of the big things that
changed this program was the drought. You know, the operation linking down
was the drought. Let's hold that thought it started in 2000. Let's take a
break and um and come back to that because that's the next. So what uh
let's go ahead and turn that off. OK. When we uh took the break, we were
just about to uh talk a little bit about what you think uh over the over
the long term of the program. What you think may have been the most
significant changes that occurred during the time that you participated
and the most significant events that altered the course or direction of
the program. Can you talk a little bit about what some of those would be
in your experience? OK. Some of these uh I'm just gonna re reiterate what
I've already talked about a little bit just because I make it in a more
brief form. Perhaps sig significant changes during my tenure to the APP.
Uh One was I mentioned earlier, us Geological Survey becomes the Science
Center uh replacing Bureau of reclamation as the science arm. Why did you
say that was significant
to develop trust between stakeholders that there was not gonna be any
biased science that this is and us Geological Survey took, it always does
always has taken its own very seriously as being independent and of any uh
and staying out of the policy questions and just doing the science. So
there's always been in this program, this very clear demarcation between
the science and scientists and doing the work that is all run through
GCMRC. And so even if it's a university doing science, it comes that's
routed, the results of that science is uh that RFP is routed through GCMRC.
So GCMRC can keep TABS as the, the independent science arbiter in the
program to making sure that if you is we realized early on and we didn't
all have agreement on what the good information was about coming out of
the program, we weren't, weren't gonna be able to make decisions or policy
recommendations because we'd just be fighting over what? Oh I don't
believe that you a lot of what I believe is this, you know, it could be
one of those games and we would never, we would fail completely without
good science, sound science that everybody could trust was accurate, that
was really important. And the bor had a history through environmental
studies of in at least in some people's eyes of, of having a bias in, in
the way they did the science.
So that was really important. Um The
and along with it, the transition work group moving from G CE S to the app
was a really um a challenging time because we were inventing adaptive
management. WW It was a new idea using stakeholder group to um use the
best available information scientifically generated to put together policy
recommendations collectively as stakeholders to, to the decision makers
and, and that and that it was an adaptive process knowing going into it,
we were gonna solve all the problems. Probably not, we might make some
progress on problems, but there were always gonna be new challenges. And
so it was never gonna be done probably, you know, we would hopefully make
progress but that there was no end game. So that that whole concept of
adaptive management apply, applying the adaptive management process to a
complex ecosystem with complex group of stakeholders. You had complexity
of ecosystems and multiple elements of the ecosystem, including cultural
resources, recreational use, aquatic habitat, terrestrial habitat. And you
put that with a bunch of stakeholders that all have a different desire to
see certain things come out in a certain way and you absolutely have to
have accurate information if you're gonna have um productive, useful
discussions that can lead to useful policy recommendations and even then
it's gonna be tough.
Um So that was a, that was a big deal, le le learning about adaptive
management and what we were doing with adaptive management. Uh The AM Wag
River trip leading to the strategic plan was absolutely critical in that
regard, establishing trust from that river trip. We went from being a
bunch of people who didn't know, looked at each other askance in the room
to a bunch of people. Oh yeah. Hey Leslie, how are you doing, you know, uh
uh meetings and that goodwill went for a good time after that river trip.
It there was a level of comfort that was established between the
stakeholders from that informal river trip. Uh that really continued for
quite a while after the trip. It slowly, we sort of lost the magic over
time and people got more re entrenched in their positions, especially as
new members came in and replaced old members for our particular
constituency. They didn't have necessarily have that same bonding
experience. So they, you know, they can't come in with their own
predilections and, and you know, anticipations and so on. And so um but it
was important to start off that way and to get a good strategic plan bill.
Do you think another river trip could, could uh have the same effect
serve the same purpose or was that a one off? I think it could. Yeah, but
the only reason that river child happened was because the Secretary of the
Interior said you guys are gonna go on a river trip. You don't have a
choice. Secretary Ryan Zinke is not likely to tell everybody to do that
today. And, and that's where it's important, the whoever is in the White
House, it kind of comes from the White House because of the White House
appoints the Interior Secretary, the Interior Secretary Depo appoints
their assi assistant secretaries, the water and science secretaries, the
one that's in charge of the adaptive management program. And that there
was a trickle down effect of policy that comes from that in that regard,
Bruce Babbitt, as the interior secretary was really interested in this
program, getting it started making sure it works. So he, he was threw
himself and his associate assistant secretary into it said, ok, guys,
let's get together, let's do this, let's do this river trip can. But when
the Bush administration came in, there was a sort of laissez faire kind of
approach from an interior where it's like they just kind of let us kind of
wander in the woods on our own without much direction from above without
any kind of like, you know, you, you gotta know that the people that
you're making the policy, if you're on the committee, you gotta know that
they care that they're gonna do something about it. Otherwise all the work
we do on a committee on the committee is maybe go to go to nothing, you
know, or just, or we don't get any direction, uh you know, from interior.
And so it's important that the top, top down influence is important in a
committee like this. And likewise, it's really important to interior, to
get feedback from all the stakeholders. Because as you know, inside the
beltway community, they don't know what's going on outside that most
people don't get out, they don't know what's going on in the Everglades or
in the Columbia River basin or the Grand Canyon. And there's big adaptive
management, problematic pro uh programs.
And so they rely on the federal advisory committees to do that to provide.
And that's why that, that act was passed. So the executive department,
you know, executive branch of the government needs to have that kind of
input, but it works both ways. During the Bush administration, it was more
laissez Faire or you guys figure it out, you know. Well, you know, let us
know when you come up with something, you know, more like that. And so we
didn't get a lot of direct interest from the interior interior secretary
herself. Did you get support when you make recommendations during those
years? Pretty good? Um It seems like it didn't, it was just, you just
didn't know. Um,
the assistant Secretary for Water and Science under the interior secretary
was involved in the Bush administration, Bennett Raley, he was good. He
was very invested in the program. So, so I'm not saying Bush
administration was out out there totally and we did have some support. Uh
We just didn't know if Gay Norton herself was gonna get cared. You know,
she never showed up or never, you know, she was a non entity. Yeah, we
have the secretary's designee who is in charge of running the the program
and uh this assistant Secretary for Water and Science Points, the
secretary's designee. But, but that it was just, we didn't know. But when
Obama got all of a sudden, we have much more interest in the program began
the Assistant Secretary of Water and Science and um
and
um she came in was very hands on and she wanted to do things. Put her
definite involvement in the program showed that she was invested in
talking to all the stakeholders. She came and visited all the stakeholders
in their communities where they lived, including myself. And um she
traveled to meet us and spend time with us and hear about our concerns,
you know, that there's a long ways and you get that kind of feedback. And
so that was good. Um Then the the adoption of the high flow experiments as
a pro protocol um operating protocol in the in the new EIS on the dam. Uh
That, that to me was really important. Uh And um
significant events uh the Sierra Club board voting to remove the dam was
huge, that really colored the whole beginning of the program. Um
It inspired people to make the program, wanna wanna make that program work.
Because the alternative was if we fail, you know, the the dam removing
people might take over, you know, if we fail at our task in protecting the
Grand Canyon. So there was a real impetus on the part of people to be
doing the right thing. Initially, the Trade Tower is coming down had a
pretty big influence um in that it really took the wind out of the sails
of the Sierra Clement, removing the dam because you know, all of a sudden
, Glenn can and Dam got included as one of the top 10 infrastructural
elements of the United States that had to be protected from terrorist
attacks. So forget about removing the dam, Sierra Club. It's one of the
top 10. So it got prioritized. And so basically I took the wind out of the
sails of the people who wanted to remove the dam in that regard. Uh The
trade towers has, um, has a strong effect on. I used to be able to visit
the inside of the dam. I take, I've taken gone through all the dam tours
of the I used, I think to have control. I've been invited in a long time
ago and invited to the control room of the dam. Me and my students. I mean
, you can't get near the control room today even if you're a member of the
m wagon embedded by the secretary's office as a non terrorist. You can't,
I, I can still go as a member of the committee. I would still go on these
really cool journeys inside the dam, there's all these passageways and
weird, weird little windows and you hear a lot of really cool stuff go
inside the wall. Now, I got to do all that, but they wouldn't let me near
the control room. Nobody gets to go in the, near the control room. It's
just this really funny little feature. It's inside the dam. You know, it's
right in the heart of the dam down there just by itself and it's got its
own walls around it, but it's surrounded by concrete hallways and stuff
and it's all 19 sixties technology. Yeah, if you ever see di like the,
oh, but not even that. Yeah, the original starship starship. Exactly. Yeah
, like more like, uh, uh, but, um, what's the name of the?
But, uh, anyway, it's pretty cool. Um, let me ask you something on that
before you leave that topic. It's, um, I think it's very interesting, uh,
that you mentioned, uh, that, you know, the Twin Towers attack on 911
changing, uh, significantly the, the whole concept that maybe Glen Canyon
Dam should be decommissioned. And, um, and the, and the river flow around
it. What do you think of the fact that the former commissioner of
reclamation? Dan Beard has published a book a few years ago calling for
the removal of Glen Canyon Dam? Is that, um, seems odd if it's been
identified as one of our top 10 critical infrastructure that the
commission of reclamation would actually come out saying that but um
broader than that little conundrum. What, what do you think about his
proposal? Well, thank you. What's my, uh I mean, uh Dan beer is welcome to
his own opinion and he has his reasons for saying what he says and he's
got some very good reasons and I think that um there are very good reasons
, logical reasons to not have two giant reservoirs on the Colorado River
system. Um It, it's an inefficient use of water for one. It's wasting a
lot of water through evaporation and seepage when you, especially in this
period of drought. And uh you know, the, the argument that why keep two
res giant reservoirs half full when you can just have one fully, totally
full. And uh it uh so there's a, there's a real logic to that period of
drought, you know, water conservation.
And uh and there's a real, a lot of societal value placed on the beauty of
Glen Canyon Dam and the Glen Canyon that dam, but the Glen Canyon itself
and the, and the river that flowed through it. And a lot of people very
interested in um restoring that, bringing that back. And I think it's
restorable. Personally, I think it can't hit the river if there was no dam
there or the water was allowed to pass through the dam site and it became
a natural flowing river. Again, it's very likely that there would be um it
would come back fairly quickly. Even that bathtub ring will shed off
pretty quickly. I've seen it feel off and just as the, yeah, just, you
know, it's a bath tubing now. It's that calcium carbon coating on the
sandstone, people think. Oh, that's there forever now. And, and it, it
sheets off because it's, it's just a thin coating on the sandstone. The
sandstone is loosely cemented and I, I watched it sheet off. And so I
think uh springs are coming back, for instance, now that we have lower uh
reservoir levels. A lot of, a lot of spring habitats in the side canyons
of Glen Canyon are coming back because of the lower res reservoir levels.
So they're not flooded anymore, they're exposed. And so the spring
vegetation is turning and turning quickly. Yeah. And a lot of the springs
may be um, water that was seeped into the wall now seeping back out again.
Um But, uh, nonetheless, there they are. Um, so there, there is a public
sentiment to support, still strong out there supporting the re the, uh the
, uh the return of, of a na A na a natural environment there and the res
where the reservoir is today. Um It really put uh another big effect of is
that sort of cover that. Um,
I, I knew Dan Beard and, you know, he was part of the program in King and
Dan Under Babbitt. And so I, I got a chance to meet him and talk to him
informally a little bit. And, uh, so I got a sense of his, why he thinks
he, I haven't read his book but, but I got a sense of why he thinks he
does what he does. Um,
a lot of people ask me a question. What would you like to have Glen Canyon
Dam decommissioned? And my answer to that at one time would have been. Yes.
Um It still is that um if it's, if it's conceivable and feasible to do
and still
um adequately distribute water as it's being utilized today from the river
in a way that's fair. And even that was the other big thing that happened
with the drought. Um The drought being one of the big influencers on the
operation of Glen Canyon Dam starting in year 2000 and then the Trade
Towers the next year. Uh We didn't, it took a few years before everybody
realized we were in a drought. It took year 2002,
25% of normal runoff from the Rockies reservoirs.
By spring of 2005, the reservoir, Lake Lake Polygon from 99% capacity fall
rem fall in 1999 or roughly 90 per 90% fall. It was all the way up to in
five years. It went to 33% capacity. The lowest it had ever been since the
filling of the reservoir made everybody go who especially the base and
state people going like we got, what are we gonna do? We're in a drought
and initially people are going like, oh, I'll in next year, I'll in next
year and when it doesn't, and it keeps, and then that was when the basic
state started their own process negotiating in with the federal government
on how to redistribute water in, uh, how to share the shortages, not just
share the surpluses, which is always what they thought about before. How
do we share the surpluses? So they now they're going like, oh, how do we
share the shortages guys? And so that was when that criteria was developed
for balancing water between the two reservoirs, upper bases and lower
basin reservoirs so that nobody gets cut too short. Was that part of the
2007 shortage sharing agreement shortage criteria? That was it, but that
was not adaptive management didn't get brought into that pro process at
all. The Adaptive Management program. We didn't get any say there. Um The
basic states were negotiating that in Vegas by the by with the Federal
government interior and figuring that out. And as much as some of us asked
to be involved in it, asked to be able to give input into that process. We
were not all not allowed to, we, we weren't invited into that room. Uh So
we continued on being a doctor management work group, working with low
reservoir levels and initially the high flow experiments um, from the dam
were anticipated to only occur in high water years when there was a, a big
surplus of water coming down. Anyway, that basin, they said, yeah, we
might let you do it then, you know, when it wasn't gonna see any sweat off
their back. But now we're going to drought and, and, and that extra water
going around the turbines and not going through the turbines matters even
more to them. And that's part of the reason that it took so long to get
the high flow protocol established because we were in the drought and the
leaders in upper patient states didn't want to release that water around
the turbines even though it's really relatively small amount of water. Uh
I think they always looked at it as the camel with the nose under the tent
, you know, he, you give them that they want more of this and the same
with the budget. They didn't want it. They wanted to cap the budget right
away as soon as the program started so that the budget wouldn't get out of
control because they imagined all these scientists would want to just keep
studying things and it would just balloon. And so they were able to get a
cap, a budgetary cap put on the program and it was totally artificial cap
, it was just whatever the budget happened to be. The year before the debt
management program started, that became the budget yearly. Annual budget
from then on because the ba and states and the uh hyper power people were
going like we got a cab. Do you remember about when that cap was adopted
right away? So like 1996 or 9798?
Uh yeah, it was one of the first big discussions. And has that changed
over time to your knowledge? Did you ever up it, the cost of living
increases, you mean? Yeah. Um yeah, that it has, it has grown a little bit.
Does it change by administration? I could imagine one administration
would try to strangle the budget and another one would try to, you know,
build it up. Does that happen? No, because as, as Randy Peterson for
reclamation said, Andre, when I was arguing, hey, I think we should open
up the cap on this budget because we really, I was making the argument in
the front, front of the committee that we really don't know what it's
gonna cost to do this problem. Let's not just artificially put a cap on it
, let's start the program and start doing the science to see where it
naturally falls as a budget. And uh but uh um hydropower people won that
argument. They said, oh and Randy Peterson told me one day, he says, you
know, Andre, you know, this thing about, you know, I know you wanna get
open that budget cap up on the program. He says, but one good thing about
that budget cap is that they're never gonna cut it,
it, it can go up and it can go down. So it's a guarantee that you'll get
that much money anyway. Every year it was, it was an institutionalized
amount. And so they weren't gonna remove the money and hydropower, people
are gonna get away with that. So, so, and when you make do with what you
got, you got $8 million budget, that's what you do. And every year that we
had the big budget arguments or, you know, that was a big part of what we
argued about. And so where are we gonna spend the money in? And uh so that
, that was as the, as the m wag, that was a big part of our discussion.
Anyway, uh the long term drought was a big deal, 33% of capacity in 2005
that um induced the warmer water releases from the dam, which improved the
habitat for the native fish. And it also can um caused a great deal of
concern about uh um the quality of water coming out of the dam because
there was one year. The reservoir has a does not overturn every year. It's
not like the lakes that overturn um seasonally, you know, where the cold
water, it's cold enough on the top in the winter time that it put all of a
sudden the cold water sinks and the bottom water comes up. So it doesn't
do that because it's in the desert and temperatures aren't great enough to
make that happen. The reservoir is too big for that to happen. But what it
does do is it stratifies the reservoir stratified. Such that right at the
bottom of the reservoir is a, is a, the bottommost layer is anoxic
environment water and, but there's no oxygen down there in the water so no
fish can live in that water. And if, if that oxygen and we had a situation
where it happened one year, the, um, the reservoir was low. There was this
big ox pool down there dead pool down at the bottom of the reservoir. A
big influx of cold water came in from a relatively large runoff event and
the wa reservoir levels are already down. The pen stocks are drawing water
from pretty low from, uh, pretty well from closer to the an ox deadpool
than it used to be. And, and this big push of cold water can run all the
way down the reservoir. Shove that anoxic water up to the pen stocks and
all of a sudden reclamation realized that they were about to feed
death water into the Grand Canyon which would kill the trout fishery for
sure, down the stream of the dam. And they were like, ah, and they, uh,
they caught it pretty quick and they introduced water somehow. I can't
remember how they did it. They got water, oxygen rich water fed in to the
outlet. I'm not sure. I can't remember how they did that now, but they
were able to prevent the destruction of the trout fishery, but it was Nip
and tuck. It was one of those things where that's an, that's an outcome of
the drought. You know, the reservoir levels are low and there's an ox body
of water down there and the conditions and you will learn a lot and
something like that, you know, was that in 2005 when you said, I think it
was 05, when that happened, when that 33% of capacity spring runoff, even
reservoirs all the way down to 33%. And that the runoff year for 2005 came
in pretty strong and it shoved that annex of water down to the pen stocks
. I think I heard today it's about 56%. Uh Do you have that kind of anoxic
uh problem at a, at half full reservoir or only when you get down to say a
third fall? Do you know, I don't know where that level is today? It, it
happens because um organic decomposition uh of the sediment of the organic
materials at the bottom of the reservoir. Use up the oxygen, the aerobic
bacteria use all the available oxygen and, and they basically make a dead
pool down there. Nothing can live in it that needs oxygen anyway.
So there are the stratification of the reservoir that you have to pay
attention to the other. The big thing that I'll mention is sedimentation
of the reservoir. Um This is something that one of my frustrations in this
program. I was never able to get reclamation to do anything about as much
as I got to know. Those guys really well worked closely with them. We were
friends and I'd bring up the Duke University study. Uh This guy from Duke
University, I don't know if you heard of this. He studied the
sedimentation of the reservoir in during that those early years of the
drought from 2000 to 2010 or eight, something like that. There was he, he
, he, he used motor beam uh sonar array to study the contours of the
bottom of the reservoir. Learned a lot of interesting stuff. What's
happening down there by the way, big under underwater landslides, for
instance, um Also determined that indeed t turbid flows, density currents
of, of sediment rich water were traveling all down all the way down the
length of the reservoir and coming up against the base of the dam which
had been observed in Hoover Dam and Lake Mead in the forties and fifties
that there's this how we discovered turbidity currents in, in geology
because that reservoir, nobody could figure out like me why the sediment
was coming all the way down to the dam and getting close to the P talks.
How could that happen? You know, it's the sediment comes in 100 and 20
miles up there. How could it get all the way out of the dam? Well, there's
this density currents when the sedimentary delta cows off and sediment
gets ch ch turned up with the water, cool water, it slides down along the
bottom and flows all the way down the length of the reservoir. So,
sedimentation is occurring behind Lake Highland Canyon Dam as well and he
was able to document that and document that. Actually. He, he was able to
actually see a turbidity current go by him when he was doing his traverse
up the San Juan River arm. He actually got photographs of it. So he knows
it happens and, and he was able to measure the mo rate of sedimentation
behind the dam. It's very slow, but it's CRE creeping up the backside of
the dam. And here's the thing that I've been trying, I was trying to get
reclamation to, to think about or at least address. And that's it. When
that sediment gets up to the intakes for the bypass tubes, which are the
four jet tubes that shoot water at the base of the dam. They enable us to
do a high flow experiment right now. They're pulling clear water out of
the reservoir. But if that sediment, what wants to do this does and it's,
and it's, and it's inexorable, it will get there. Um Segmentation is not
stopping the reservoir, you can't stop it and, and once it gets there, the
question is gonna be a decision that has to be made. Do you let them fill
in with sediment and never use the bypass tubes again? Or do you use the
bypass tube as a means of moving sediment through the dam, thereby keeping
them clear? And if you do that and you, and you spurt muddy water, I mean
, muddy clay rich water out of, that's the finest sedimentary particles
behind the dam into the blue ribbon trout fishery downstream. Guess what
happens to Blue Trail history?
Yeah. And, and, and the Humpback chub will probably be fine but not the
trout, right? Ok. And so, and then, but then you go, oh, but maybe we have
more sediment so we can build more beaches. That would be good. Maybe for
the sandbars in the Grand Canyon off the straight offs always. Yeah. But
there's gonna, if they let them fill it, it's just sediment in, then you
lose that fundamental capacity of the dam to move water through it. Cause
there's only three ways to get water through that dam besides leakage.
What is the, is the bypass tubes? That's the lowest down on the backside
of the dam. Midway up the backside is the pen stocks for the turbines,
drops water through the turbines and then the spillway is all the way up
to the top which are, haven't been used since 1983. Probably. Well,
actually they did, uh They ran them in 84. 84. Uh Yeah, they had two years
of high flows. Yeah, when they re-engineered them, they had to test them
in 84. So they did a, a modest test to make sure that they wouldn't
cavitation would destroy the linings. And again,
they didn't do much of a test anyway. So you got, those are your three
mechanisms getting water through the dam. And if you're relying Oaks
wholly on the pen stocks, then if you lose capacity to move sediment out
around the dam through the bypass tubes, then that spells the ultimate
destruction of your pen stocks because you can't move sediment down
through the turbines or it will destroy the turbines.
Um Do you have any sense of uh when that day will come? I mean, there's
always estimates of how long a reservoir will function until it's filled
with sediment. It'll be within the next III I, I'm just the thumbnail
estimation based upon the Duke study and uh the rate of sedimentation due
to low water levels of the reservoir. Uh
As long as we're in this drought, continue to be in this drought and
reservoir levels are low and sediment continues to cave off from the
deltaic regions and move down the stupidity currents to the dam. We'll
still get an increased rate of sedimentation, get to the base of the dam
higher than it would have been if the reservoir levels were high full.
That was one of the outcomes of the Duke study determined that this
drought, drought levels of the reservoir were inducing the turbid TBI
turbidity occurrence, going all the way to the dam. And um it'll probably
be on the order of 100 years before uh or last before the uh oh, this
bypass tubes get clogged or start to get clogged, I would guess, maybe
even less than that.
But I would have to look at the studies and we would have to have that,
that researcher come back and do a return study, reclamation and sponsored
the study themselves. They did originally in 1986 but they did it ahead of
their researcher do a series of cross sectional, just a single line of
sonar line, not multibeam array, but just a beep, beep, beep, beep, cross
the reservoir. But profiles have said what the bottom of the reservoir
look like across several cross sections and then extrapolate between those
and say like a and that was when the reclamation study came out with. Well
, it'll tul the re the reservoir will take 700 years to fill up with
settlement all the way. That was their conclusion in the eighties, 86. But
the thing that I, I keep saying to reclamation long before you fill up the
river reservoir of sediment, you're gonna have a reservoir half full of
sediment and or a quarter full of sediment and you reduce the capacity of
storage of water. Each time you reduce the volume of the reservoir. Each
time you reduce the volume of the reservoir, it becomes less capable of
handling an incoming annual flood
and you have a chance of it going through over the spillways again.
And so you're gonna lose the capacity of the reservoir to be effective
progressively over time. Long before it fills with mud, right, becomes
less useful. So you were um you were listing off uh the key events that
led to significant changes. Did you get through all of those or are there
a few more you wanna mention? Yeah, the uh the failure of the Adaptive
Management program, the perceived failure of the program happened in the
mid two thousands. Uh The Grand Canyon Trust representative who I worked
very closely with throughout the length of the program. Another guy you
should talk to Rick Johnson if you haven't. Um
He's also just, yeah, he was very involved just like I was, we worked hand
in hand in glove for a lot of years. Um
The Grand Canyon Trust decided to come out with the opinion that the
Adaptive Management program had failed. We were failing with regard to
restoring the habitat for the chub and bringing the numbers back
sufficiently. We are failing with regard to the archaeological sites and
we are failing with regard to sandbars in the Grand Canyon for the
recreational river runners and that came when um in 2008. I think it was
when the US GS scientists, sediment scientists published a paper in the GS
A today journal cover cover article. Question is, is there enough sand
question mark? And it addressed the question of over the long term
existence of Glen Canyon Dam. Can we ever get enough sand to come into the
Pia River or other tributaries to ever create a sustainable amount of sand
in the sand bars of the Grand Canyon or are we, are we on a losing streak
here that's not gonna end? And their, their, their question was really
aimed at saying, no, we aren't going to be able to, there's not enough
sand coming in the period there for the long term sustainability of
sandbar habitat in the Grand Canyon. And that's a big deal. Go sandbar
habitats critical for a lot of resources. And um that was when the trust
came out with it's failing. We gotta do a new EIS on the dam. You know,
completely re what, what we, how we decided back in 1997 the secretary
decided to run the dam based upon the first EIS isn't working a preferred
alternative is not a preferred. We have to rook at it and figure out what
else we can do. So that was when the second EIS on the dam was done. That
started with the Obama administration 2008. It became known as the temp
long term experimental and management program plan And so that, that was
what was developed and a preferred alternative came out of that went
through the whole eis vetting process. Again, I don't know, public
meetings, public scoping and uh a new operational plan that included high
flu experiments as a protocol um was adopted.
I was disappointed that they continued to fluctuate the daily fluctuations
from the dam. Um high flows during the day and low at night because those
do erode the beaches in the Grand Canyon. I'm convinced of that. And one
of the reasons I know that is because I've worked down there for 44 years.
And I, I'm a sediment scientist. I'm a geologist and I'm a good observer
and I read the papers and um I started uh our own citizen science program
to monitor the beaches in the Grand Canyon. Do you know about that uh
Doctor Beach program? I've heard of it but nobody has talked about it yet.
In those interviews, I probably work since it's my baby. I guess I should
talk about it. 1996 flooded from the dam, the first high flow experiment
we knew it was coming. You know, we got reclamation was on board.
Everybody was, nobody was gonna stop it. And I sat down with Tom Moody, my
colleague at UCRG. And I said, Tom, how are we gonna know independently
those of us who care most about the sandbars in the Grand Canyon who use
them on a daily basis and have been around for a while. I've been watching
them. How are we gonna be able to monitor whether this flood flow works or
not? And with the effects of this thing, I mean, from our own independent
observation. So we sat down one day and invented the Adoptive Beach
program whereby we identified 44 critical campsites in the Grand Canyon
that are either in high demand, highly irritable or um in, in, in three
critical reaches where they're most in need. The beaches are most in
demand. And we said, OK, that's our data set. Um Now let's get boatman to
adopt them. And then we do Ahoy. And so we established photographic
photography, repeat photography sites at each of these 44 and have been
running that program ever since the photographs from the those uh repeat
photography, pictures I believe are available on a website that uh we've
looked at, you see the change over time in those beaches A US GS website.
It is. Yeah, we finally got them to accept it as a, a data source, even
though not particularly scientific.
It took him a while to get over that and, and he said, no, actually there
is a pretty good data set here. Maybe we should put it in our bag of
tricks here. And it, it's remarkable uh just to look at the changes over
time for a long time, sentiment, scientists were pooh pooh and like uh the
systematics are all wrong and today we can do it better. And, you know,
but, you know, it was just a citizen science program, a citizen monitoring
program is all it is. It's not claiming to be a scientific project or it's
just people, lots of eyes, lots of eyes and cameras looking at the same
thing over. So they, they did accept it and now it's part of their data
set, which is good. So I'm I'm proud of that program and I work and I
still, I still adopt beaches every year and do my photography of beaches a
year. Are there other citizen science programs? Uh going in? It was a
really good one developed a few years ago by the um aquatic biologist at
the UGCMRC, Ted Kennedy who realize that since the food base for the fish
are a big part of the food base are these midge flies that hatch by the
gazillions every so often down there and, and then they become fish food.
Um a critical understanding of the food source, the food base for the
aquatic ecosystem is not when the bitch flights um catch where and what's
inducing them to hatch. How many are there? So K Kenny came up with this
really simple thing that for river runners to take down on river trips
with them, which is like a little light trap that you put out at night.
And it's a way of sampling the bug population and, and systematic and it,
it's used the same way every time by everybody and he was able to get
people really interested in that river runner. So, you're like, oh, I'll
help. I'll help, you know. And, uh, and so it, apparently it was a very
successful program. I'm not sure if it's still actively going on or not. I
haven't heard about it for a couple of years but, but it was touted by GC
Marcy as a, a great citizen science because you know, how do you, if, if
you're, if you're aquatic biologist, you might get down the river once a
year or twice. OK. How many days in the year are there? Three and 65? You
spent 30 of them on the river? That's 1/10 of the year that you're
actually down there observing. I mean, how else do you get handle on
observationally what's going on down there? You can't be everywhere in the
river's ecosystem at once if you're a scientist, but you can have lots of
eyes and ears up and down, distributed up and down the river ecosystem at
any given moment throughout the season and you can get a broader database
at that more accurate. So, utilizing the, the presence of a lot of river
runners down there who are interested in contributing, I think was an
important, important thing. And uh yeah, um what else is there enough sand
? So the, the new Eis on the dam? Um
I think I've already got gone. My, my accomplishments in the program, I'm
most proud of the high flow experiments being, having those be tied to an
understanding of how they affect the archaeological resources as well as
the um fish habitat, as well as the recreational habitat being an
essential part of the landscape. Uh element of the river ecosystem sandbar
, you can't discount them, they matter too much, getting that and then
connecting that to the high flow experiments being operational way to just
restore the sandbars on a long term basis. I'm proud of this working on a
strategic plan and getting that broad-based buy in by all the stakeholders.
That was a lot of work. But um a lot of discussions, but we got that done.
Um proud of the public outreach that the stuff that we did to try to con
convey to the public that what's been going on because the public is very
interested in this place. Um I've, I've given a lot of talks over the
years to different groups to the annual River guides training seminar. Uh
write articles for the Boatman's quarterly review. I get maybe you get a
bunch of those and a whole bunch more here. But uh so that outreach effort
me personally through my own organization and through uh giving uh invited
talks to groups, you know, one time an example would be a whole bunch of
medical doctors are having a conference in. So, and they wanted a keynote
speaker and they knew about the dam and they knew about the issues and the
call me up soon. Will you give us a talk? Sure. They went down there, the
educated public, you know, the people who are pretty well educated, they
understand the importance of the Grand Canyon and science and, and some of
those kinds of groups, um guiding groups, other guide, hiking, guide
groups in the Grand Canyon who are interested in the river because they,
they see the river, but they don't know much about what's going on with
the river, unlike river runners have a better sense of it. Uh What else?
Yeah. So I, I've been able to do quite a bit of outreach along with the
outreach program of the Adaptive Management Program. Um
Yeah, I, I think that uh uh one of the challenges of not getting the
program to really understand that if we want to protect the endangered
fish down there and to really be obvious. And we, this, this is really an
obvious thing that there was just a lot of denial about. And that's that
if you're gonna protect and bring back an endangered species, you've got
to and bring back its habitat habitat that it evolved to become successful
in. And there was a very strong re reluctance and reticence to talk about
that habitat and how we might be able to change that either through a
selective withdrawal structure on the dam or the reintroduction of
sediment somehow into the system or, you know, have been able to control
um high flow experiments. I mean, all those sort of things that try to
emulate the, what, what Rick Johnson used to call the range of natural
variability. R and B and uh Rick was a big um pusher of the R and B and I
was too, but uh most of the people on the pro on the committee just wanted
to figure out how to protect the job and not have to worry about changing
the habitat too much because that I think was perhaps a little too
intractable a problem for a lot of them to think about.
Um Yeah, so we still got the daily fluctuations. Unfortunately. Um
uh In this new EIS uh that water goes up and down every day. It's more of
an irritation than compared to what it used to be for river running. It
used to be a real problem in the eighties, seventies and eighties because
there was absolutely no regulation of the Rent Dam. They would just
completely follow the load on electrical load on the system and the river
would go way up, way down and we could never predict how much and you will
be down there. This is one of the reasons that we as a river running
community. We're so incensed at the dam and we hated the dam because we
felt like we were ponds on the end of the yo yo string, you know, or you
just like, there's some big guy up there with and you're the yo yo and you
go, you know, and you have to adjust to this all the time. You wake up in
the middle of the night, the kitchen's flooded. You gotta move, the
kitchen water comes up unexpectedly, you know, I mean, there was a lot of
problems with that. The boats get stranded, water drops way up. It's way
out there. The boots are way up there. I gotta get them in the water
somehow. Uh Just a lot of problems and back when it was completely
unregulated, you knew the first EIS in the dam really solved a lot of
those problems because the first preferred alternative back in 97 was the
modified low fluctuating alternative, which really for severely restricted
, very specifically restricted the rate at which water would go up and
down each day. And how much so once that happened and once reclamation
started delivering regular monthly predictions of how much water to expect
for us who who are planning a river trip, we can work around it. We can
work around predictability, we can work around knowledge, but we couldn't
work around in the pre D pre dis era was complete variability.
We used to try to predict how much flow is gonna come to us based upon the
weather in Phoenix when we were on the river. Call it the warehouse.
What's the weather in Phoenix? Because we knew that that would control the
temperature, the, the amount of electricity demand on the system. Air
conditioners. It was a hot day in Phoenix in summer time when you were
gonna get a bunch of water coming downstream. If the big cloud cover came
in and everybody shut off the air conditioners for a few days, they shut
the water down on us and you could actually almost sort of generally
predict it. I mean, that's how good we got to watch the relationship
between weather and river flows because we had no other way of knowing.
And uh in those early years, so we, we became water hawks, those of us in
the doors anyway. Row doors in the canyon. What else? Uh, um, any
surprises, anything that happened that really surprised you. Well, the
drought, um,
the uh
trade towers, of course, it's sort of peripheral, but still, um,
I can't think of anything else that comes to mind anyway.
Well, let's, let's go to the sort of overall judgment about the value of
the program. Do you, do you think it's been, you know, 30 years of, of
effort and evolution? Um, should it be continued and has it been worth the
time and effort and money? Oh, I think. Absolutely. Should you, it's, it's
a, it's a, it's a resource of very high, high, high visibility, uh, place
that a lot of people care about and will always care about and that's not
gonna go away. Grand Canyon is gonna be there. People are always gonna
wanna know that dam, what is it doing now? And, and um I still get it from
people. People, I thought this issue of dam Decommissioning was kind of
like sidelined and out of the picture the last 10 years or so, it's still
out there. People still ask me, what about removing that dam? It still
talking about moving that dam. So it's still in the collective
consciousness and, and vocabulary of the public that this dam is not a
good thing necessarily and it's moved to get rid of it and maybe there's
some good reasons to do that. People always want to know, what do you
think you do? You think it should be removed? Uh And uh so I don't think
that's going away. Um There will always be that, that lingering resentment
that people felt after having Glen Canyon down, taken away from them and
not being able to have said anything about it back before. Um They drowned
the place that no one knew. And I said that's the, the book goes. So what
do you think are the most important values of the program over time? Has
it been, you know, the adaptive management itself or has it been the
public engagement? Has it been getting all of the players together to talk
to each other and do the, is the scientific research the main
accomplishment of the program. What do you think? Well, I think all of
those things, I, I can't pick one of those things. I say that's, there's
just this one thing that's a big important thing. I mean, that the public
are involved in it collectively as stakeholders in a program that values
good, scientifically generated information to make decisions is, is, is a
hallmark of a civilized country and in a democracy and, and um I think
it's a great example of democracy in action. And uh so I think it's
adaptive management as a process is something that we're gonna have to
apply more and more of this time as we go on to difficult, challenging,
complex and tractable problems having to do with our, our interface with
the environment. Um Yeah, so as an example of that, I think this uh the
Grand Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Program has been a has been a great
program. I was really disappointed when the Grand Canyon Trust came out
with the opinion that it had failed because I took that a little bit
personally because I felt like we had accomplished an awful lot and it may
not be perfect, but we were mo moving along still. But I also understand
why the impetus, the trust, the trust had to do that as an environmental
organization with to satisfy their funders and their stakeholders in their
own organization. They had to grandstand a little bit to, to continue the
funding for the organization, they had to make a statement and they had to
start a lawsuit. They, they sued the Bureau of Reclamation for failing to
do with adaptive management, say to apply, apply adaptive management to
the ecosystem. That was one of the reasons that, that I, that was when I
started getting disenchanted with the program. That was when I, you know,
I thought my time here is done. I said, you know, if I can't be a part
because the trust green can trust was always my ally. We are always our
ally. We always worked hand in glove, like I said, and o obviously yours
and, and then to, then for them to reject the, the outcome of the program
and process in the program was to be, it was, you know, like, OK, if this
is gonna be a lawsuit now, just going to court, what's the use of having
an adaptive management program? This is gonna be some decided by the
lawyers now. So I was a cycler, you know, I was that plus the fact that I
was burning out on meetings and, and plus the fact that we've gotten the
high up experiment protocol instituted, which that was a really big. And,
uh, and I realized one day at a meeting when the WW A representative
started talking about the dam, he talked still was talking about it purely
in terms of dollars and cents, how much money it makes and how that's, and
, and he clearly, that was his whole stake in the program and he had no
stake really interest in the environment. And I was like, after all this
time, you don't have, you're still that disconnected from what we're
trying to do here. You can only think about it in terms of dollars and say
, I'm sorry, I got a little bit, um
tired of that. It was time for me to move on and, and so I went to the
organization and said, hey, is there anybody else in this organization
wants to do my job? I'm not gonna be here forever and, and that's just the
fact. And so they went about finding somebody to replace me. Who was that
? Uh Sam uh uh Sam and um
OK, losing my brain. See here is that other person Grand Canyon River
guide. Uh He's not doing it. He's not the guy anymore. Dave Brown is, I
think his name is Dave Brown. Sam did it for a few years. Sam and Jerry.
Jerry Ledbetter. No, uh Jerry. Uh
gosh, why am I think of his name?
It's OK. I will look it up. Um uh It's, it's always listed in the front of
the Boatman's quarterly review. It's listed right on the inside cover box.
It always says who's the to, to representative and wig representative?
It's not in this early version, but in all the versions these days, it's
always listed who that, who that person, the people doing the dept
dimensional worker are. So it's continuing, we funded, it continues to be
funded and by, by the Grand Canyon conservation fund that I think is
renamed uh is something else, but it's still that source of funding. You
know, by the way, I got the source of funding originally, got them
interested in funding it because I had been doing the work for free. I had
no funding for three years, four years. And I was just like, I can't keep
going to all these meetings. And IIII, I had taken a wealthy guy down the
river and ran into him in Santa Fe. And we, I had a drink and I told him
all the stuff I've been doing and he runs a big family Found edition and
he says, how much do you need? And, and I said, well, he says, send me an
invoice and of all the work you've done for the last year for in this
program sounds like it's really worthwhile. So I did and they funded it
and then all the river up here are going. Now, wait a minute. Who's
funding them? You know, now we'll, we'll do it. You know, they want that
monetary control, they want to have it. They don't want some help. So that
got the impetus for them to start funding it even though that was that,
that grant was only a one year grant from my friend that uh got the, you
got the ball rolling. Yeah. And I always advocated that it was a, it was a
, I still wasn't getting paid enough. No, it's a labor of love. Yeah.
Probably for most people in, involved in hew and twig. Well, most of them
work for big organizations. A big, uh, you know, they have part of their
job. It's part of their job. Right. So, somebody was going to ask you to,
uh come up with a way of identifying the weaknesses in the program and how
to strengthen it. Would you, what would you suggest in terms of the places
where the program could perform better or accomplish more? Do you have any
recommendations?
Um
Yeah. Well, um
it has, it ha I don't know uh if some stakeholders need to be just removed
from the committee because they really aren't there for the spirit of the
Protection Act and they're there to and this was always the case. They
were there to put the brakes on to get in the way to obfuscate, to protect
the interests of the artist to make it a do nothing program. I can give
you one character that I still resent. I mean, you just, um, I, I don't
like the name people negatively but I mean, he was from Western Air Power
Administration for years. He was, he was, he was the epitome of
obfuscation. He knew exactly how to do it. He was real loudmouth dominated
the conversation, you know, kind of like some people we hear about in the
news these days
and they always got to be the one talking in the room and they're always
figuring out ways to slow things down, you know, and not get things done.
You know what I mean? There are people at work and if you could have
leadership of the committee that could weed those kind of people out or go
over their heads to their superiors and say, hey, this person is not a
team player. Yeah, gotta put somebody else in there. Um But the
stakeholders identify their rep. So to accomplish that, you're saying
you'd need a leader who could speak to the stakeholder groups and say the
person you've identified and selected as your representative is Secretary
of the Interior can do that. Um I'm not getting good advice from your
person. You know, on this committee, you need to get somebody in there as
a team player. Sure. I mean, you, yeah, iii I wasn't guarantee a job there.
It's if uh George W Bush wanted to meet out of there, he could sent me
packing anytime you wanted, you know, I or his interior secretary. But uh
yeah, we were reappointed on a four year term and we had to be reappointed
every four years, four years. That's a good opportunity to uh to change
personnel when, when it's needed. Yeah. How about the science? Is there
any, is there any science that you wish could have been done but wasn't
for whatever reason.
Um
Yeah, I think that they need to look at the reservoir. I mean, there needs
to be in the sediment sedimentation of the reservoir, the stratification
of the water bodies in the reservoir. That is we learned that that's a big
, can be a big influence on the quality of water that goes through the
Grand Canyon. And we got to understand how that's changing over time. We
gotta be monitoring that. And it was always a like, like pulling teeth
with the hydropower people and the basin state people to try to, for
people like myself, I always was in the beginning of the program with, we
were always saying that, you know, we need to expand the geographic scope
of this because we have this reservoir upstream, that's clearly
influencing ha what happens downstream. We gotta know what's going on up
there and we got to know what's going up the sides of the river canyon at
the bottom of the Grand Canyon, not just where the water goes up and down
each day, we gotta know what's going on with the archaeological resources
up higher that are not directly influenced. That was a big, they
have a good discussion. Every time we sought to kind of make the
geographic scope of the program, broader and broader context, we are
always getting thwarted. Uh oh no, keep it only, you know, really
restricted. So geographic scope was always a big debate. They part of the
program,
the Hopi tribe, they say, well, where do you think the boundaries should
be? So we, we thought it should be the 300,000 cubic feet per second line
because that's the largest known flood that the Colorado River has ever
had in, in the history of watching the Colorado River in Grand Canyon. So
we figured if that's the biggest potential flood of the Pre Dam River,
then that's potentially the height that we should go to up the flanks of
the canyon sides to include everything within that good and cultural
resources. And the hydropower people in the basin state were no, just down
here. It's got to be restricted just to the 20,000 cubic feet for 25,000
people per cubic feet per second. And then eventually, they finally said,
yeah, OK. With the flood flow, maybe up to the 45,000, we were all like no
up to the 300,000 because that's where all the archaeological sites are.
And the Hopi came in and said, no rim to rim. I said it's gotta be the
whole Grand Canyon and they're like, did they win the argument? They got
their point across and I think that I was connected, but we did. Yeah. And
like with our study of the, of the geo archaeology at the Grand Canyon, we
did the um the uh unthinkable violation of the approbation of States
protocol that geographic scope of all science on in a program be
restricted to uh up to the 25,000 cubic feet per second level in the Grand
Canyon only below below the dam. And we said we can't study the effects of
what the Pre Dam River did because nobody did any studies of it in Grand
Canyon on the archaeological sites. The only thing way we can do that is
we go to a, a, a AAA control section of another river somewhere where we
can study the processes there where we were uncontrolled by dams, interact
with the archaeological sites and use that as a basis for understanding
how the dam is affecting archaeological sites in the Grand Canyon. And so
we just, we just got, we just went up to Cataract Canyon and did a whole
study up there because there is largely uncontrolled by dam. So they get
large animal floods, sedimentation is largely like a very close emulation
to what Grand Canyon was like for the dam. But uh we just did it. Um I got
away with it because I was on the committee and no one was gonna tell me I
couldn't go spend money that was only supposed to be spend in Grand Canyon
and go up to Cataract Canyon and spend it. But uh yeah, we did the first
ever ever study of the rear, rear in the Colorado rearing cataract came,
it was huge, but we got there and did a pretty good job with it. So we've
kept pushing the boundaries a lot. So, um if, if somebody came to you and
said, uh we want you to give, uh we want you to put together uh uh uh
advice for new members of the hem wig and the twig. Um uh who are coming
on to the program? What, what would you say? What would you like to say to
people who are coming on new and fresh? What would be your best advice for
somebody who's just getting started with this program?
Um
Do your homework, read the papers be involved in the, uh don't be afraid
to speak out at meetings. Uh I realize that you're as important as
everybody else in the room and what you say ma matters as much as everyone
else learn Robert's rules of order. Um It's a powerful tool if you don't
know it, you don't know how to, how to advocate for motion or make a
motion, you know, you're go gonna be at a, at a loss. So those are the
kind of things um uh try to keep the mo meetings moving
and don't let people dominate the mo a meeting with unnecessary
obfuscation, call attention to it because that's ultimately one of the
things that really burned me out. Just the amount of time,
two days of sitting on your butt all day long in a skyscraper in Phoenix,
windowless room
and And so, yeah,
um, I don't know what else I would say that it's a valuable program it's
worth doing if you care about the resources that you're, you're, if you're
dealing with. And, uh, yeah, you know, be afraid to stand up and make
yourself heard. It was a really interesting, I, I enjoyed it a lot because
it was egalitarian and I was just powerful. My boy both kind of the same
as the superintendent of the Grand Canyon and kind of the same as, like I
said earlier, the head of the Department of Water Resources of the State
of California, you know,
you know, I'm Jerry. I knew Jerry really well. You know, you get to know
these people and, and one of the neat things about it is if you can
establish, uh, cordial, uh, relationships with people and keep talking
informally or informally with them, people see you as a person and not as
a threat or a, or, or, or an organization, but rather as someone that they
can discuss things with and you're not gonna bite, you know, you're not
allowed to get them. Um, so the, the cooper, the nature of things and the
presumption that you're not in a, in a position of, uh, win and lose, but
rather in, you know, I think we're, the only way you're gonna get anything
forward is to give and take cooperating with each other.
Yeah. And, yeah, it's a labor of love.
I think that's a great place to end the interview.
Ok. Thank you so much for your time and, and all of the work that you put
into this over the many years. And you're welcome. And I would, I'm gonna
be very grateful to borrow some of your files and we'll be happy to return
them. But, uh, it's nice when somebody keeps good track because, uh, you
can, like you were saying earlier, you can go back and ground truth, uh,
recollections and, uh through that, that written record is particularly
important to us historians because that's what we base our work on as our
own record. Yeah. And you know, III, I hope you really want to look at
those paper files because if you don't, that's, I won't be offended if
that's something, you know, like I don't really want to look at all these
paper files. I mean, but if it's something that isn't, is of interest to
you, that's what we historians live and breathe on this, you know, the
archival wear dusk mask
because they haven't been disturbed in a while and they were how I just
kind of kept the organizational scheme going over time. It's not perfectly
well organized because there's so much cross-disciplinary stuff that goes
on. It's hard to put everything in a neat category, you know, but they're
all there. You'll see the, the file RD marked with, you know, categories
as I gave you the schema for um, that little piece of paper is in there
too and, uh, showing you what's kind of, the order of things are in there
and it's not everything but.