THE LEES FERRY STRETCH of the Colorado River in Arizona was for years considered one of the finest tailwaters in America, and surely the most scenic, flowing for sixteen miles beneath the twelve-hundred-foot walls of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, just upstream from the Grand Canyon. In its heyday of the 1980s and ’90s, Lees Ferry consistently appeared on top-ten lists alongside the likes of Utah’s Green, Montana’s Bighorn or Beaverhead, New Mexico’s San Juan, and Colorado’s Fryingpan.
While the tailwater has endured—and rebounded from—a variety of difficulties since rainbows were first planted there in 1964, a recent run of misfortune and mismanagement has this legendary fishery facing some of its toughest challenges yet.
Glen Canyon Dam operates under the Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Program (GCDAMP). Lead agencies are the Bureau of Reclamation, which runs the dam, and the National Park Service (NPS), which runs Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. Prior to 1991, flows weren’t regulated below the dam. The highest recorded post-dam flow was 92,400 cfs in 1983. (Read: The Emerald Mile, by Kevin Fedarko.) The Grand Canyon Protection Act of 1992 changed all that by requiring the Secretary of the Interior to file an Environmental Impact Statement addressing potential impacts of dam operations on the now three hundred and twenty miles of downstream environment between the dam and the inlet to Lake Mead.
The GCDAMP features a list of twelve goals. Number 4 reads: “Maintain a naturally reproducing population of rainbow trout above the Paria River [the bottom of the Lees Ferry fishery], to the
