Climate change comes for a Lake Powell marina
Will Bullfrog survive the shrinking Colorado River?
🐟 Colorado River Chronicles 💧
Maybe sitting next to the wall of plate glass windows was not the smartest move, I thought, as a sienna-colored cloud of sand lifted up from the lakeside and made its way in my direction. I had just tucked into my $16 grilled chicken sandwich at the Anasazi Restaurant at Bullfrog Marina on Lake Powell when the wind kicked up, sandblasting the windows and causing a sizable milk crate to slide back and forth along the railings of the patio outside. It was an eerie scene. Had this been an apocalyptic cli-fi film set in a calamitously aridified West, this would have been the moment when a pterodactyl-like creature smashed through the window and plopped down all bloody and sandy in my plate of fries, an omen of the horrors to come.
It was not, however, a film. The dystopian scene was real as was the aridification, though it did not include any prehistoric creatures — only a handful of staff and other diners who, much to my dismay, seemed utterly unperturbed by the sandstorm and the havoc it was wreaking on a set of outdoor furniture. And, outside, a few ravens who seemed delighted to frolic in the gusts’ updrafts.
When we think of climate change’s effects, we might imagine communities inundated by rising seas, unhoused folks exposed to ever more severe heat waves, or entire towns wiped out by megafires. I was here at Bullfrog to see how a warmer and drier climate is affecting the communities, infrastructure, and economies that rose up around and depend upon Lake Powell-based recreation.
Bullfrog is the largest and most extensive marina on Lake Powell’s northern end. It has a 48-room hotel, the aforementioned restaurant, a gas station and convenience store, an RV park, and other lodging, along with its own school, which this year had four students in grades K-6. The population of some 50 to 100 consists mostly of employees of the National Park Service and Aramark, the private concessionaire that runs the reservoir’s marinas and other facilities. Nearby Ticaboo, which lies outside Glen Canyon National Recreation Area but also relies on Lake Powell recreation, has another 50 to 100 residents. The nearest incorporated town is Hanksville, some 67 miles to the north.
Bullfrog lies at the end of the road on a bay at the mouth of Bullfrog Creek, where the water is shallower than on the main channel of the Colorado River, making the marina and its facilities more vulnerable to dropping water levels. While the main boat ramp is still being used, it will likely become unusable later this summer as the reservoir’s surface levels falls toward 3,500 feet. In coming weeks, the entire floating marina will be towed across the reservoir to deeper water adjacent to Halls Crossing Marina; Bullfrog’s fuel and boat rental docks have already been moved. The ferry between Bullfrog and Halls Crossing isn’t functional at low water levels, so is expected to be out of commission for the rest of this year, making for a 145-mile car trip between the facilities at Bullfrog and the boat ramps and marina at Halls Crossing.
I visited Bullfrog on a Sunday in mid-May. Because I needed to do some internet-related work early on Monday morning, I stayed in the hotel. I initially regretted not staying in the campground, since it was mostly empty and had a strong cell phone signal, but when the tent-shredding winds and skin blasting sands kicked up I was happy to be ensconced in more secure lodging, especially given the relatively reasonable price.
It was the high tourist season elsewhere in Canyon Country. The trailhead parking lots at Capitol Reef National Park were all full or overflowing that morning as I drove through, and Torrey had been busy during my stay there for a writing conference. As I slowly made my way down the Notom Road and Burr Trail, stopping frequently to gaze at the curves and crevices in the Waterpocket Fold and for a quick bike ride, I saw maybe a half-dozen other vehicles.
Bullfrog, meanwhile, was decidedly quiet. The hotel was nearly empty. Only a few sites in the RV park were occupied, and I later saw that most of the sites were out of order and closed. A couple of dozen cars, at the very most, were parked on the only operable boat ramp. The shelves on the little convenience store were sparsely stocked, and a box of Triscuits was going for $7.50 — though there was no cheese to accompany them — and gas was selling for $5.17. In May of 2000, the Bullfrog District received 33,000 visits, according to National Park Service statistics; in May 2025 only 10,886 visitors passed through the entrance gate. Current numbers aren’t yet available, but I imagine this year’s visitation will be far lower. And once the boat ramp ceases to function, I imagine the numbers will plummet further.
The National Park Service is planning to build a new, deeper-water boat launch at Stanton Creek, a couple of miles from central Bullfrog, where the marina can be moved permanently. The project is expected to cost some $73 million, and won’t be completed this year. It’s a type of climate adaptation, I suppose, though one can’t help wonder how long the fix will last if the reservoir’s levels keep dropping.
Meanwhile, Bullfrog’s future is in doubt. A series of especially snowy winters in the high country might be enough to bring Bullfrog back from the edge of obsolescence. Maybe they won’t even need the Stanton Creek site. On the other hand, just one more below-average snowpack year could doom Lake Powell altogether. If Colorado River flows don’t increase substantially in the next year or two, the Bureau of Reclamation will have little choice but to build tunnels to bypass Glen Canyon Dam and effectively drain the reservoir in order to keep water running into the Grand Canyon and on to Lake Mead.
The question then would be whether Bullfrog could (or would even want to) adapt to a different sort of tourism.
The place might try to cater to hikers and small-watercraft users looking to check out newly revealed parts of Glen Canyon that have been inundated for the last several decades. And it could lure travelers exploring the greater region’s backcountry, though it’s not clear that type of visitor is going to be interested in the type of accommodations and services Bullfrog currently offers. Maybe it will just become a destination for disaster-tourist voyeurs looking to see the effects of climate change in real-time. Or, perhaps Bullfrog will become another Hite Marina, which the shrinking reservoir has left high and dry, its boat ramp separated from the lake by some six miles, the store and campground permanently shuttered and gated off.
The last time I visited Bullfrog was in the late 1980s. My dad, my brother, and I camped at Halls Crossing, then woke up and rode the ferry across the lake. From there we made an epic loop around and over the Henry Mountains along the then-unimproved Burr Trail and another gnarly road in our 1967 Pontiac Catalina. It took at least eight hours and involved some extensive road-building to keep the boat-like vehicle from bottoming out. Anyway, I remember Bullfrog as being a bustling resort with a sort of spring break party vibe, relative to the more bare-bones Halls Crossing. Of course, those were the glory days for Lake Powell, when the reservoir was full, and at the end of a bone-jarring drive across the desert one could stop at the Hite Marina for refreshments.
That night I listened to the sand batter the sliding glass door of my hotel room. The next morning, the reservoir’s placid waters reflected dawn’s first light, and the distant sandstone dunes seemed to glow from within. And to the north, a fresh coating of snow covered the craggy slopes of the Henry Mountains, promising a little bit of relief from these dry and trying times.
📸 Parting Shots 🎞️
Thanks for the Bullfrog report. A really odd place, in any circumstance.
We've stayed at that hotel twice in recent years, to SUP and kayak, and have fun in the excellent but unpopular local slot canyons. It's been surprisingly great!
For reasons you describe we didn't go this year or last. It's still easy to carry our lightweight personal watercraft to the water, but the vibe is not good. And when the Lake was full(er), it was just as odd, being surrounded by two-story tall houseboats, stocked with literally a thousand cans of beer, with water slides coming down from the roof.
So maybe that incredible houseboat scene was a recreational blip on the timeline, and people will be looking at pictures of sunburned partiers the same way we look at pictures of Glen Canyon "before".
I don't know wtf is going to happen, and don't think the NPS does either, so hearing plans to move the marina is surprising and odd. But frankly, I've never understood it, and it's always been odd!
You are such a gifted writer, Jonathan — I have been thinking a lot about what you said about the North Fork Valley, because it's been haunting me, too: Everything (at the moment) looks so green & lush & lovely, and the River has actual water in it, and the orchards look so luscious, and it's kinda painful to know that I am basically enjoying an illusion, because there really ain't no guarantee of no water, and there definitely ain't gonna be much in the way of fruit. And yet it's still so, so very beautiful. I know how fragile everything is and feel that vague underlying sense of dread & anxiety, and yet it is still so very beautiful right now, that I am pretty much pretending that everything is fine, and this is still the Colorado I moved to decades ago, and we're all gonna live happily ever after. I know better, but right now I'm doing a kind of "Sha la la la, live for today," and slurping down every drop of loveliness I can find. I guess you could say I am living by way of the Placebo Effect. Which is another way of saying I live in denial. But so it goes. There is no way out but through, alas.