Roosevelt Revives

ROOSEVELT REBOUNDS

A Desert Reservoir Shakes Off Drought

to the Delight of Fishermen and Adventurers

We had waited so long, we were beginning to doubt it would ever happen.

BUT ONE WEEKEND IN THE WINTER OF 2004-2005, there it was: saguaros standing limb-deep in water and cottonwood, willow and tamarisk trees submerged to form an Amazonlike jungle. A great expanse of water glistened in the desert sun.

After nine years of drought, Theodore Roosevelt Lake was finally full.

When this granddaddy of Arizona reservoirs, 80 miles east of Phoenix, was dedicated in 1911, the 280-foot-high cyclopean-masonry gravity arch dam ranked as the world's highest stone masonry dam. But when tree-ring studies showed that the Salt River could deliver far bigger floods than the dam builders realized, the federal government in the 1990s raised the dam another 77 feet and covered it with concrete.

And then we waited for the lake to rise.

But a decade of drought intervened. Instead of rising, the lake shrank to just 9 percent of its capacity. Along came the winter, and a glorious thing happened. A gush of rains filled Roosevelt to the brim, to the great relief of thirsty Phoenix, perched on the edge of water-rationing. And our hearts rejoiced at seeing this jewel in the desert come alive once again.

I have always loved Roosevelt, for it was here that my father and I fished and bonded. Before Roosevelt, Dad had always been a bank fisherman, sitting for hours watching the still, baited line. I just didn't get it. It looked boring. But then one day in the early 1980s we went to Roosevelt and discovered bass fishing.

As my father sat engrossed on the bank pulling in the occasional small bluegill, I watched bass fishermen purr past in their specialized bass boats. Perched on pedestal seats, they flung plugs and jigs and spinnerbaits into shoreline cover. My heart would jump every time they got a bite and set the hook, jabbing the rod up into the air, its loaded curve vibrating as they reeled in a lunker. Monster fish. Beautiful, hefty fish. Bass and crappie. Now this was fishing of a different color.

On our next trip to Roosevelt, I took the advice of the guy at the bait shop and bought some rubber worms. As I fixed a 9-inch-long, magenta-colored plastic worm onto a monstrous 3-inch hook, Dad scoffed, "So you think bass like to play with toys?"

Grumbling darkly, I threw the glitzy concoction into the lake next to some bushes and let the slipsinker drop to the bottom. Then I twitched the line slowly, hopping the worm along the bottom. To my amazement, I felt the "tap" on the line I'd been told about. A tiny, hollow "dink." Could that possibly be from a gaping-jawed bass sucking in the worm? I set the hook by raising the rod-tip forcefully and immediately felt a heavy quivering weight. It was a fish! And what a fish. It surged, ran and fought. Dad came over and looked at the 2-pound bass dubiously. "Hmm," he said, "you got any more of those fancy worms?"

And so it was we became bass fishermen, Dad as adept and ardent as I. We even bought an aluminum bass boat. On our many trips to Roosevelt, we had long philosophical discussions about the predatory nature of bass, how to entice them, how to hook them. We became a team, and I remember those days as golden-the shared challenge, the smell and feel of the water, the glowing sun, the thunderous silence, the morning fog, the honking geese, the lavender sky. It was peace, beauty and certitude. As if all time had stopped. That old saying is true, "God doesn't count the days you spend fishing against your total number of allotted days."

Dad and I fished mainly near the mouth of Tonto Creek, but Roosevelt stretches 22 miles long and harbors many shallows where the bass congregate during the spring spawn to lay their eggs and guard their nests. Fishing is always best in the year or two after the lake rises to swallow up bushes and trees, which provide nutrients for the smaller creatures the bass like to eat and cover for the bass.

Unbeknown to us, the flooding that produced great fishing in the 1970s and 1980s worried water managers, who in 1984 determined the dam wasn't tall enough. Moreover, Roosevelt supplies Phoenix with water, and that booming desert city has an insatiable thirst. The Bureau of Reclamation, Salt River Project and a coalition of six Phoenix-area cities came up with the $424 million to modify Roosevelt Dam.

Begun in 1989 and completed in 1996, the improvements included a new 1,080-foot-long, robin's-egg-blue bridge, a $2.3 million visitors center, eight concrete boat ramps and 10 separate developed campgrounds with 950 campsites. Those campgrounds include paved roads, children's playgrounds, fish-cleaning stations and solar-powered restrooms. The Bureau of Reclamation came up with $42 million to pay for all this, and the Forest Service instituted a fee demonstration program to run it.

But the completion of the dam upgrade coincided with one of the deepest dry spells of the past millennium, which nearly emptied the lake by fall 2002.

My father died the year that renovations on the dam began,

UNDERWATER CACTUS

and my interests in Roosevelt expanded beyond fishing. In early spring 1999, I took a girlfriend canoeing down the Salt River arm of the lake. We launched on the river at the Diversion Dam area and alternated between exhilarating, riffly rapids and dragging the canoe over sandbars. We were alone for the whole day, lost in our own private world. Under her tutelage, I discovered the wonder of bird-watching. Along the banks, we saw phainopeplas, vermilion flycatchers, killdeer, great blue herons, and golden and bald eagles. In the reedy lagoon at the head of the lake, an explosion of birds included Western grebe mates sprinting together across the water in their courtship display, brightly painted bufflehead ducks bobbing on the waves, canvasback ducks guarding their nests, an osprey diving for fish and double-crested cormorants forming heraldic shields on snags. Most amazing of all, though, were the white pelicans, gawky on sandbars but majestic in flight, delightfully soaring serenely over the tops of saguaros. Nature is ebb and flow, both cyclical and perverse-especially when we tinker with the environment and affect the climate. Whatever the reason, the 9-year drought yielded, at least briefly, to the wet winter of '04-'05. By February 12, the Salt River was dumping nearly a billion gallons of water per hour into Roosevelt Lake-57 times the normal flow. Tonto Creek was flowing 353 times over its average. In one weekend, the lake rose 14 vertical feet. And on May 1, Roosevelt Lake reached its all-time highest capacity, 96 percent full. The reservoir contained nearly 1.6 million acre-feet, or 518 billion gallons of water, and gleamed 3 feet short of its storage capacity.

On Solstice Day, midsummer, one of the hottest days in the year, I embarked to check out the new, full-to-the-brim Roosevelt, this time with a new girlfriend, Su. Our first surprise was with the $10-million marina. In the shade of its high canopy stood orderly rows of sailboats, runabouts, cruisers and even a fair number of regally outfitted houseboats, both rental and private. Roosevelt had definitely gone upscale.

LOVELY LAKE The center of Roosevelt Lake shimmers,

with the Superstition Mountains and Four Peaks Wilderness in the background. Once the largest man-made lake in the world, Roosevelt is still the biggest of the six Salt River Project lakes.

We motored out to the Tonto end. Western grebes scooted up ahead of us. At our approach, the baby birds hopped on their mother's back and then, squawking, they all dove for cover. In the flooded jungles of the Tonto shallows, fishermen complained that the bass had so much cover now that they had spread out all along the shoreline and were tough to catch. But wait till 2006, or better yet, 2007. All the rich nutrients in the water will make the bass population go gangbusters.

We tied up in the shade of a drowned cottonwood tree and spent

SMOKE ON THE WATER

MAN AND NATURE Jetskier Tim Haenisch of San Diego skims

along Roosevelt Lake near Windy Hill Campground. Among its recreation opportunities, Roosevelt offers jetskiing, fishing, bird-watching, camping and canoeing at a wildlife refuge.

most of the day alternating between dips in the water and lazing in the sun, struck by how lush our jungle was, compared to the driedout grasses on the hills surrounding the lake. A gift from the winter rains, the fire hazard posed by the grasses had prompted the Forest Service to close the roads into the wilderness above Roosevelt.

That afternoon, billowing gray clouds approached and a menacing wind buffeted the boat. It felt like the roar of a blast furnace. Then the lightning began.

We saw the flash that started what became the 16,000-acre “Three Fire” on the hills just above the highway.

The next day we headed for the Salt River end of the lake. By noon the midsummer heat was excruciating, necessitating periodic dips. We spent our time watching the plume of smoke from the fire billow into a mushroom cloud on the western horizon. By evening half the lake was covered in smoke, but our side remained clear. Waterskiers and waverunners skimmed back and forth in front of us.

Although the rise in the lake level swallowed most of the old beaches, we managed to tie up for the night on a rocky point opposite Windy Hill.

As Su and I watched the disk of the setting sun glow blood-red behind the pall of the fire, I thought about change and memory.

And I remembered the jet-skier we overheard that afternoon on the dock at the Windy Hill Campground. He was preparing his kids for rides on the jet ski. “It was way cool,” he was telling them. “I was going full out this morning towards the Tonto end of the lake when I caught up to a flying heron. He was just toolin' along, straight as an arrow. So I pulled in just under him and adjusted my speed so we were going together. We went like that for maybe a couple of miles. And do you know how fast he was going? I clocked it. He was doing 32 miles an hour, just flappin' along. Boy, it was neat.” So I thought about those treasured hours on the lake with my Dad as I gazed out on the new lake, with a different shoreline but the same shimmer of water. I felt a great comfort in knowing Roosevelt Lake will continue to provide such moments for future generations of parents and their children.

LOCATION: 80 miles northeast of Phoenix. GETTING THERE: From Phoenix, take U.S. Route 60 east to State Route 87. Turn left (north) and drive 65 miles to State Route 188. Turn right (south) onto State 188 and drive 26 miles to the lake. FEES: $4 per vehicle and $2 per watercraft per day; campground $10 per night; double sites, $15 per night, which includes day use fee. TRAVEL ADVISORY: Dispersed camping at the Indian Point Boat Launch at north end for the day-use fee. To reach Indian Point, visitors must ford Tonto Creek, which sometimes requires high-clearance vehicles and is impassable when the creek is flooding. The Forest Service Visitors Center is near the marina, 2 miles south of the dam. The privately owned Roosevelt Lake Marina rents watercraft. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: Roosevelt Lake Marina, (928) 4672245; www.azmarinas.com/RooseveltLake. Tonto Basin Ranger District, (928) 467-3200; www.fs.fed.us/r3/tonto/recreation/ rec-camping-index.shtml.