Imagine running rapids that haven't been seen in six decades and camping on beaches that didn't exist a mere few months earlier. Welcome to Cataract Canyon. The muddy current of the Colorado River carries our rafts through the red rock walls of Cataract Canyon in southern Utah's Canyonlands National Park .
The roar of a rapid grows louder somewhere downstream. Before we reach the tumultuous churn, the rafts pull up to a small white-sand beach. Beyond, the towering walls pull back to make room for a wide drainage, called a side canyon, where Gypsum Creek trundles in to the meet the river.
We'll pitch our tents here, in this remote and wild spot, and sleep under the glittering stars before continuing on tomorrow. It sounds like a typical river trip. Until you factor in that as recently as 10 years ago, all of this was 60ft underneath the still water of Lake Powell, the huge reservoir created when the doors of Glen Canyon Dam closed in 1963 to store water for the dry and quickly growing Western states.
The reservoir flooded 186 miles of the Colorado River and scores of its side canyons, and buried all of it in thick layers of sediment that dropped from the river as the current slowed on its way into Powell. But in the last decade, Powell's level has dropped steeply – a result of overuse by the 40 million people who rely on the Colorado River for water, as well as less precipitation making its way down the watershed as the climate changes. But there's a silver lining to those g.