"RG" wrote in message
...

Isn't Mead a pond now?

A really big pond.

I was on the lake a few weeks ago. The lake is down significantly, at 42%
of capacity. Even at that level, the lake is holding 11 million acre-feet
of water. Really big pond, indeed.

Yes, it still is a big pond. Yet, I'd like to go down to Vegas Wash, and
look at swallow's nests that we used to drive up in a boat and touch, and
see them. Wait, you have to hike 100 yards now and look up with binoculars.
There is a huge canyon there where the original Colorado River still holds a
lot of water. But it isn't what it used to be. Lake Powell took a lot of
water away, only to lose it to absorption through the sandstone strata the
lake was made on, or additional evaporation. It's all a testimony to
politics and man's idea that they can control nature. With the Hoover Dam
project, and subsequent dams, Davis, Parker, and Topock Slough, they did a
good job. They controlled the Colorado and provided agricultural water to
California and points south of Hoover Dam. A good thing. Then they decided
to put a big plug upstream at Lake Powell, probably because of pork and
idiocy.

Yah gotta love politics.

Reality. Nature's way of keeping things straight.

Fast forward 1,000 years on "Life after Man".

Steve