Western drought has upside for some outdoors enthusiasts

Jace Radke

Thursday, May 30, 2002 | 11:04 a.m.

Despite dropping water levels, visitors to the Lake Mead National Recreation Area have found at least one benefit to the drought that is gripping much of the West.

"A lot of people have told us it's a brand new lake out there, with new beaches to explore," National Park Service spokeswoman Kay Rhode said.

Welcome to the flip side of the Western drought of 2002. It's a devastating year for ranchers and farmers, it's looking like the Dust Bowl days in parts of the Great Plains, cities and towns are imposing tough water-use restrictions, and wildfires are breaking out almost daily in the Southwest.

But the drought has an upside. Early season trout fishing, normally cut short by heavy, muddy runoff from the mountains, has been spectacular in places. Mountain bikers and hikers can reach the high country much sooner than usual because little snow is left. And low runoff is helping ease pollution problems.

The water level at Lake Mead has dropped more than 25 feet from where it was at this time last year, changing the landscape of the reservoir, Lake Mead Air Ranger Bruce Lenon said.

"When you're flying above the lake you can really see the difference," Lenon said. "The shorelines are changing every day. It has got to be like visiting a different country for people on the lake."

Along with sandy beaches, the drought is also exposing sunken vessels, cars and even weapons.

"We've found some old guns, and a lot of junk, but we haven't found Jimmy Hoffa yet," said Dale Antonich, chief ranger at Lake Mead. "It does give us the opportunity to get a lot of this stuff out of the lake."

Any weapons found in the lakes are examined by rangers and put in an evidence vault or turned over to Metro Police. Nothing found recently has been tied to any kind of crime, Antonich said.

While lower water levels at Lake Mead are revealing garbage, lack of rain and snowmelt in Western rivers is resulting in excitement for whitewater rafting enthusiasts, rafting outfitter Sheri Griffith said.

Griffith, the owner of Expeditions, a Moab, Utah, rafting company, is having a good season. And so are her customers, signing on for trips on the Colorado and Green rivers. Lower flows, Griffith explains, mean whitewater experiences rarely available on some of the West's big rivers.

In Westwater Canyon on the Colorado, Griffith is running small boats in which everyone can paddle instead of big boats with oars that must be managed by experienced guides. She's finding that low water actually improves some rapids. And the beaches for riverfront camping are bigger, with fewer mosquitoes than usual.

"If people want to raft in some new ways they haven't thought of, what a fun year," she said.

For Western fly fishermen, one of the high points of the year is the annual hatching of caddis flies, an aquatic insect, on the Arkansas River in south-central Colorado. The clouds of flies can be so thick that it's hard to breathe, and the brown and rainbow trout in the Arkansas feed in a frenzy. But the fishing bonanza normally is short-lived because when muddy runoff arrives, trout can't see flies presented by anglers.