We just wrapped up our Flight Across America 2025 journey—an aerial expedition with ten outstanding collegiate students to explore the changing energy landscape of the Colorado Plateau. Along the way, students heard from experts and changemakers working at the front lines of water, climate, and energy issues.

A powerful presentation by our friend at Glen Canyon Institute, stressing the urgent water and energy challenges facing the West, was thought-provoking for the students, and we hope will inspire you. Zanna Stutz’s discussion about the iconic Lake Powell landscape and the oversubscribed Colorado River challenges traditional thinking of hydropower as a purely green energy source. Get a feel for our Flight Across America program in Zanna’s reflections below, or at the GCI blog linked here.
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GCI Speaks to EcoFlight Students at Glen Canyon Dam
By: Zanna Stutz, Glen Canyon Institute, Program Coordinator

“We utilize aviation in a very unique way,” described Bruce Gordon, founder of EcoFlight, when I met him last week in Page, AZ. EcoFlight is a non-profit organization that uses small planes to provide stakeholders and students with an aerial perspective for the sake of advancing goals of conservation and environmental justice. The organization aims to strategically engage the conservation community, students, media, policymakers, and industry representatives to protect intact ecosystems, watersheds, and wildlands throughout the West. 

Last week, GCI joined Ecoflight’s Flight Across America (FLAA) program, a no cost opportunity for ten students to engage in intensive experiential learning across the Colorado Plateau. This year’s curriculum focused on the energy transition throughout Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona. The group consisted of students from a variety of academic disciplines, each motivated to participate in this program for their own personal reasons: to bridge scientific inquiry with community engagement; to uplift traditional Indigenous knowledge; to better communicate complex environmental processes; or to protect a beloved landscape. Some experienced their ancestral homelands from a new perspective. All are problem-solvers seeking solutions to the complex problems embedded into energy production, sustainability, inequity, and ecosystem degradation.

Over the course of three days, the group flew over landscapes long dominated by the extractive impacts of uranium mining, coal processing, and big dams—the very same areas that are now a growing backdrop for solar and wind projects. Along the way, they met with regional experts and community leaders to discuss the tradeoffs of energy development and to better understand the tangible impacts accompanying environmental injustices.

Even as Lake Powell reservoir sits at 31 percent full, the dam’s 710 feet of sheer concrete rising out of the river channel behind me served as a stark reminder of just how much water it was built to impound. In the history of the U.S., there has hardly been a more controversial dam than Glen Canyon, and its commanding presence demonstrates why. To some, it serves as an impressive monument of human engineering, to others, the dam is but a tombstone to an incomparable collection of carved sandstone, verdant canyons, and cultural sites submerged behind its wall.

I asked the students to consider why Glen Canyon Dam was built precisely where it stands. Unlike other Reclamation projects constructed throughout the West, the Glen Canyon unit was never intended as an irrigation project. Instead, located 15 miles from the division point between the Upper and Lower Basins, the dam was built to fulfill a water accounting obligation requiring a specific downstream delivery regardless of the year-to-year fluctuation of the river’s flows. By building Glen Canyon Dam, and using the revenue from its sale of hydroelectric power to fund upstream water projects, the Upper Basin was able to send its required amount of water, and not one drop more.

Hydroelectric energy production is often touted for its reliable contributions to base load and peaking electricity. But its reliability only extends as far as the underlying hydrology of the river, and Colorado River flows have decreased by an average of 20 percent since 2000. Lower water levels at Lake Powell reservoir decrease the dam’s generating capacity by reducing the head pressure behind the dam’s turbines. According to former Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton, power produced at Glen Canyon Dam has declined by an average of 17 percent between 2000 and 2020 when compared to the previous ten years. And in 2023, Glen Canyon Dam was running at only 59% of its nameplate capacity. This was the same year that the reservoir hit record breaking lows, only 30 feet from being unable to produce power at all, bringing into question the long-term reliability of this power source.

These concerns are in addition to the infrastructure constraints at Glen Canyon Dam, well-documented by Glen Canyon Institute and our collaborators, which limit the ability to pass water through the dam at low reservoir conditions. Losing hydropower at Glen Canyon Dam has been a focus of news media for years, but the reality is that Glen Canyon’s electric production is hardly significant in today’s power grid. As we face down another year of below average run-off, this trend is likely to continue.

Glen Canyon Dam was built to produce hydropower and secure the Upper Basin’s downstream water deliveries; however, today, with diminishing energy output and the dam’s threat to the downstream water supply, not only is the dam not fulfilling its original intent, but its infrastructure is actually placing more pressure on the water delivery problems that it was supposed to resolve. And that reality doesn’t even touch the question of how the dam’s short-lived benefits compare to the vastness of its environmental and cultural harm.

Glen Canyon sits at the heart of the Colorado Plateau, surrounded by National Parks and National Monuments. By taking a step back to reimagine energy, water storage, and water delivery in this system, we have an opportunity to fulfill the scale of restoration that we now know is possible in Glen Canyon and properly recognize and protect this landscape. 

The talk sparked a rich conversation with the students, who each have their own connection to the river and its surrounding resources. At the end of the program, each of these students gave a presentation of their own, sharing their experiences and how the educational journey influenced their perspectives. The pilots also shared how the flights impacted their outlook of conservation on the Colorado Plateau.

Now, I’ll have to admit: I was a bit skeptical about the value that I, personally, would get out of joining the flight. Unlike the congressional leaders and decision makers that often join EcoFlights, I didn’t feel like I needed any convincing as to the importance and beauty of this landscape. As I had just told the students, my work at GCI already advocates for seeing the bigger picture and appreciating the benefits that could be realized for Glen Canyon under a different management plan.

But seeing the place from the air truly struck me. It’s one thing to know the numbers: the inundation of 186 miles of the Colorado River as well as parts of the San Juan River, the Escalante River, and all the other tributary streams and side canyons in between, covering 160,000 acres of land and destroying hundreds of miles of riparian ecosystems. It is quite another to see the scale of that impact from the air. Throughout the flight, I continued to feel visceral discomfort when presented with the green tinge of stagnant water lapping against sandstone curves, straining my eyes across the seemingly endless ribbons of eerily blue water in a landscape defined by reds and browns. 

My attention was drawn to the remnants of the Castle Rock Cut, a canal dredged in 2013 to give boaters a shortcut between Wahweap Marina and neighboring parts of the reservoir to the north. At the time, GCI critiqued the expensive and damaging project for ignoring projections that the reservoir would continue to drop and leave the passage unusable. Today, it sits bone dry, a relic of a not so distant past, a reminder of the stark reality that we must acknowledge if sustainable and just water management is ever to be achieved on the Colorado River.

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