When we got to the North Wash boat ramp, we pulled up, four of us in a truck towing an inflatable rib boat on a trailer, but there was no ramp. Instead, we were confronted by a steep dirt bank, almost a cliff, crumbling into the fast current ten feet below. It was May, 2005, and the water of Lake Powell, the second-largest reservoir in the United States, was at its lowest level since May, 1969. We’d come to put a boat on the water in order to find out what we didn’t know, and what no one seemed to know: What was happening now that the Colorado River, after being smothered for 42 years, had begun pushing back?

This ramp of sorts is not where North Wash empties into the Colorado River — that is a mile and a half downstream — but is nevertheless called the North Wash boat ramp. I mention this because it is a pattern in this story, that things are officially called one thing in spite of in reality being quite …