At dusk, the bats appear in the ghost forest that surrounds us — blackened tree trunks encrusted with a white coating. These cottonwood and willow groves are long dead but, amazingly, still upright after more than half a century underwater.
I am camped on the fickle shoreline of Lake Powell, the second largest reservoir in the United States, after Lake Mead. Once a vacation destination visited by two million people annually — as a kid I learned to water-ski there during family visits in the 1980s — Lake Powell is today just a hint of its former self, littered with stranded boat ramps and even entire abandoned marinas. Instead of a recreation idyll, it’s a symbol of water troubles in the West and the impact of climate change...