Grand Canyon river runners enjoyed the best camping beaches in years this season, and a riverside vegetation restoration project got a boost, both the result of the first planned springtime flood on the Colorado River since 2008.
The Bureau of Reclamation opened the bypass tubes at Glen Canyon Dam in April to unleash 40,000 cubic feet of water per second for 79 hours, more than doubling peak flow from previous days. It’s part of an environmental mitigation program that began in the 1990s after passage of the federal Grand Canyon Protection Act, with the aim of occasionally churning up sand from the riverbed to restore sandbars and beaches that the pre-dam river would have remade naturally with annual floods...