Writing an article for Backpacker magazine in 2003, magazine editor and NAU instructor Annette McGivney stumbled onto her graduate thesis.

"When I came on Glen Canyon, it just kept being so compelling to me that it turned into more than a typical assignment," she said.

Separately, photographer James Kay had been shooting Lake Powell as it receded amid drought, leading to before-and-after photos capturing the lake in 2003 and subsequent years.

The writer met the photographer on an assignment for Backpacker.

The result was a master's thesis that also eventually became a 176-page book full of photographs chronicling the history and political and social battles that led to the construction of Glen Canyon Dam in 1958 and continued.

It's titled "Resurrection: Glen Canyon and a New Vision for the American West."

"People are surprised by the photos," she said. "That's the initial reaction: 'This is so beautiful.'"

The book advocates shrinking the size of Lake Powell to remove it from the remainder of most side canyons in Glen Canyon, and says that climate change, political decisions and drought are likely to make low levels the norm.

"I'm not saying people should just stop boating on Lake Powell, but Lake Powell is so much bigger than it needs to be," she said.

Balancing her other jobs as a regional editor for Backpacker and a journalism instructor at Northern Arizona University, McGivney wrote the book late at night for about two years.

It involved one long kayaking trip and another dozen hiking and backpacking trips, including with her son, Austin.

She compiled boxes of data, she said, untangling water subsidies for farmers, power generation data and quoted a number of authors who had written about wilderness and water struggles in the West for decades.

She also interviewed houseboaters and other boaters, and quoted tourism officials from Page.

Throughout the book are photos showing areas full of water and now more empty, scoured of much of the silt that had previously filled them.

Her imagery, as the title might suggest, evokes a comparison between "a graveyard" killed by the lake and side canyons alive with greenery, as the lake shrinks.

Some of the book narrates what she sees and feels on explorations.

Cyndy Cole can be reached at 913-8607 or at ccole@azdailysun.com.

More about "Resurrection"

From the chapter titled "Why Glen Canyon Matters."

"June 2003 — I have returned to the Escalante Arm of Lake Powell eager to see what the drought has wrought. Where I had paddled my kayak across a 100-foot-deep reservoir three years earlier, I am now hiking in an ankle-deep, silt-laden, wonderfully flowing river that is pulsing with life. I fill my water bottle from seeps bubbling out of the canyon walls still weeping with lake water. I watch hummingbirds dart about newly established gardens of maidenhair ferns. I walk barefoot alongside mountain lion tracks pressed in river sand and marvel at cottonwood saplings already 4 feet tall growing out of dead snags. And I cry at the overwhelming realization that at least part of Glen Canyon is still alive."

"Resurrection: Glen Canyon and a New Vision for the American West."

By Annette McGivney, with photographs by James Kay and a foreward by Bill McKibben

Mountaineers Books, 2009; 176 pp, with 120 color photographs. Paperback, $29.95.

Available at Barnes & Noble and www.mountaineersbooks.org.

Lecture and slide show

Thursday, April 2, 7 to 8 p.m.

NAU Cline Library

Book signing, reception

Saturday, April 4, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Echo Canyon Art Gallery

14 N. San Francisco St.

Flagstaff