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An unexpected sight greets the holidaymaker out for a gentle cruise on the 186-mile Lake Powell in Arizona. A mile or so upriver from the Glen Canyon dam stand red and green channel markers to guide those on the water. But the signs planted in the riverbank are of little use today: thanks to a drought which is entering its sixth year, the lake's water level has dropped by 40 metres (130ft), leaving the signs on each bank stranded at the top of a cliff.
Steve Ward, who works for a tourism company, steers his motorboat into a bay and points to an island across the sparkling blue water. "Normally we'd go across there to leave the bay," he says, "Right now we can't, because there's land in the way."
That land, like the many newly emerged beaches dotted around the lake, would normally be under 30 metres of water.
Lake Powell, the second largest reservoir in the US, which fills the canyons straddling the border between Utah and Arizona, is an important link in the chain of water supply drawn from the Colorado river. So the falling water levels are not just a story of a tourist attraction facing tough times, but an environmental problem that may have a fundamental impact on life in seven of the states of the western US, notably the thirsty states of California, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico.
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