The nets came up empty, or mostly empty, and particularly absent was the sought-after catch—smallmouth bass. Barrett Friesen, a graduate student in Utah State University’s fisheries program, and his biology-undergraduate assistant, Justin Furby, had left six-foot-tall, eighty-foot-long nets hanging through what is left of Lake Powell’s water, which trickles down the rust-and blond-colored cliffs into the upper reaches of the shrinking reservoir along the Utah-Arizona border. Friesen was hired in March 2022 to run a two-year, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (BuRec)-funded study, and the goal on this brisk October morning was to catch fourteen smallies big enough to surgically insert a pinky finger-sized transmitter into their abdomens, allowing for real-time tracking of how and where smallmouth spend their time. But this haul, Furby and Friesen disentangled mostly a few carp, gizzard shad, and striped bass. “Pretty good striper,” Friesen said, as he handled a forearm-sized specimen. “That’d be fun to catch.”
At full capacity, Lake Powell is the largest reservoir in the nation by surface area and the second largest by volume, behind only Lake Mead, sitting three hundred miles downstream. The last year that either were close to full was 2000. Both drought and demand have ravaged the Southwest, lowering Powell to 22 percent of its capacity and Mead to 28 percent.
