2022 Award Recipient - Zak Podmore

Congratulations to our 2022 award winner, Zak Podmore, for his project "Life after Deadpool: Lake Powell’s last days and the rebirth of the Colorado River in Glen Canyon.”

The Ellen Meloy Fund for Desert Writers has chosen Zak Podmore of Bluff, Utah, as the recipient of the 17th annual Desert Writers Award. A grant of $5,000 will support work on his book proposal.

Podmore, a Southwest desert native, is a graduate of Colorado College in Colorado Springs, with a Bachelor’s degree in philosophy. More than 100 of his essays and articles have appeared in numerous publications, including Outside, High Country News, High Desert Journal, Slate, USA Today, and others.  He has worked as an editor with Canoe & Kayak magazine in San Clemente, California, and, since 2019, as a reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune where he has penned dozens of desert-country articles, including coverage of Navajo Reservation water supplies, and the controversial reduction of the Bears Ears National Monument.  

Podmore is also the author of the book Confluence: Navigating the Personal and the Political on Rivers of the New West, published by Torrey House Press in 2019.  

A veteran traveler on the rivers of the desert West, Podmore spent four months in 2011 paddling the entire length of the Colorado River, starting at the head of its longest tributary, the Green River in Wyoming. When he and his paddling companion reached Lake Powell, Podmore said he treated the infamous reservoir as little more than an obstacle. “Inspired by writers like Edward Abbey who called the reservoir the Blue Death, I wanted to get through it as quickly as possible and escape to the comparatively pristine waters of the Grand Canyon below. Ten years later, after a decade of drought and ever-increasing diversions from the Colorado River, my thinking has changed,” he said.  

Podmore’s new book proposal takes a revisionist approach to Lake Powell, long the bane of Southwestern environmentalists. He said, “Instead of seeing the reservoir as a crime against nature that drowned what Wallace Stegner called the most beautiful canyon of the Colorado, Glen Canyon, the story of Lake Powell now seems to be emblematic of the most pressing problems of the twenty-first century: global warming, aridification, the inability of Western water law to adapt to a rapidly shifting world. How should humans best manage a river system that has been so profoundly altered?” 

As Podmore points out, Lake Powell, which is currently only 27 percent full, is showing signs of a long-term ecological recovery propelled by climate-induced drought. Podmore took part in an October 2021 scientific survey of upper reaches of the reservoir, which found that native vegetation was now moving back down into damaged side canyons at rates much faster than predicted. Silt deposits were also seen to be flushing downriver in ways scientists had not anticipated. “This is a story of a river coming back to life,” Podmore said in his proposal to the Ellen Meloy Fund.

The grant offered by the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Fund will support research for Podmore’s book. As the central research task, Podmore intends to circumnavigate the entire 1,700-mile shoreline of Lake Powell on foot and by sea kayak. “With the help of various experts,” he said, “my goal will be to challenge assumptions about the future of Lake Powell by bringing together visceral, first-person narratives, in-depth research, and on-the-water interviews.”

“The project is not a dour story of climate disaster or another eulogy to Glen Canyon,” he said. “The tale of the reservoir’s decline needs to be an account of how the natural world, given the opportunity, will work toward recovery.”  

In a statement he wrote in response to hearing news of his winning the 2022 Meloy Award, Podmore said, “When I moved to Bluff seven years ago as an aspiring desert writer, I had long been an admirer of Ellen Meloy, but it wasn't until I learned that the unassuming field in front of my new home had bordered her own yard that I began to fully comprehend her singular genius. Walking through the bottomlands near the river and then seeing how Ellen described the same place in her quirky, ever-original prose always helps reveal the desert for what it is: an overflowing of life. I am deeply honored and grateful to receive this award.”

In addition to Podmore, three other applicants qualified as finalists in the 2022 contest: Mark Sundeen of Missoula, Montana, for a project titled “Delusions and Grandeur,” Kathryn Wilder of Dolores, Colorado, for “The Last Cows,” and Angella d’Avignon of La Mesa, California, for “The Last Resort.”

A group of six Meloy Fund board members comprised the 2022 Awards Committee. They included Don Snow and Jake Lodato, both from Washington State; Kendra Atleework of Bishop, California; Jullianne Ballou of Austin, Texas; Michael Branch of Reno, Nevada, and Edie Lush of London, England. 

For more information on Zack Podmore, visit his website and read about his 2019 book of essays ‘Confluence’ here.