Glen Canyon Dammed

"Focusing on the saddening, maddening example of Glen Canyon, Jared Farmer traces the history of exploration and development in the Four Corners region, discusses the role of tourism in changing the face of the West, and shows how the "invention" of Lake Powell has served multiple needs. He also seeks to identify the point at which change becomes loss: How do people deal with losing places they love? How are we to remember or restore lost places?"--BOOK JACKET.

River trips through Glen Canyon from 1872-1964 were combined beginning at North Wash & ending at Lees Ferry, to present Glen Canyon before the lake. Landscape photographs & quotations from the explorers complete the journal. Fifty photographers & authors are represented. Photographs are identified by photographer, photo date & location. Quotations are identified by author & source. A map of Lake Powell is provided as a guide for today's visitor. The reader can take this book on the lake & go to the buoy indicated to compare Lake Powell today with the Glen Canyon of yesterday. Glen Canyon Natural History Association is co-publishing this book in support of the educational objectives of the National Park Service at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. A Special Limited (1,500 copies) First Edition is available. Silk-bound Limited Edition, $150, Paper-bound Edition, $25. Trade discounts available. Order from Inskip Ink, 366 East 100 North, Moab, UT 84532. Tel. & FAX 801-259-8452 or your local distributor.

Constructed between 1956 and 1966 by the United States Bureau of Reclamation, Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River was a project of immense proportions. Even before the non-stop pouring of 5 million yards of concrete began, much work had to be accomplished. The town of Page, Arizona was established on a windswept mesa to house workers and their families, and the 1,028-foot Glen Canyon Bridge was built to carry men, materials, and equipment to the dam site. Though the dam has proven a controversial structure throughout its history, the massive undertaking of its construction was an undeniable triumph of ingenuity and determination.

Photographs by Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe; text by Rebecca Solnit.

David Brower, who has always regretted the Sierra Club's failure to save the Glen Canyon, called it The Place No One Knew. But Katie Lee was among a handful of men and women who knew the 170 miles of Glen Canyon very well. She'd made sixteen trips down the river, even named some of the side canyons. Glen Canyon and the river that ran through it had changed her life. Her descriptions of a magnificent desert oasis and its rich archaeological ruins are a paean to paradise lost.In 1963, the U.S. Government's Bureau of Reclamation (the Wreck-the-nation bureau, Katie calls it) shut off the flow of the Colorado River at Glen Canyon Dam, beginning the process of flooding this natural treasure. Two generations have been born since the dam was built, and in a few more decades there may be no one alive who will have known the place. Katie Lee won't forget Glen Canyon, and she doesn't want anyone else to forget it either. She tells us what there was to love about Glen Canyon and why we should miss it. The canyon had great personal significance for her: She had gone to Hollywood to make her career as an actress and a singer, but the river kept calling her back, showing her a better way to live. She very eloquently weaves her personal story into her breathtaking descriptions of the trips she made down the canyon.In recent years, Katie has found allies in her struggle to restore the canyon. The Glen Canyon Institute has been joined by the Sierra Club in calling for the draining of Lake Powell (Rez Foul, in Katie's words), and the idea is being debated on editorial pages across the country and in congressional hearings. All My Rivers Are Gone celebrates a great American landscape, mournsits loss, and challenges us to undo the damage and forever prevent such mindless destruction in the future.

The epic story of the fastest boat ride in history, on a hand-built dory named the "Emerald Mile," through the heart of the Grand Canyon on the Colorado river.

In this classic narrative history of the construction of Glen Canyon Dam in the 1950s and 1960s, Russell Martin has captured the individual, cultural, political, and environmental dramas that brought into being the environmental movement we know today. Across the West, calls for the removal of hydroelectric dams constructed during the Bureau of Reclamation's grand century of dam-building are ringing out. Five decades after its construction, Glen Canyon Dam is still at the vortex of controversy, both because of its impact on ecological processes downstream and its drowning of natural landscapes behind its headwall. A Story That Stands Like A Dam presents a struggle as compelling and relevant today as it was when it began. Book jacket.

For half a century, beginning in the early 1960s, Vaughn Short walked, horse-packed, and floated the canyons and mesas of the Southwest. Along the way, stories and poems grew in his mind. Around evening campfires, he shared these pearls with those lucky enough to be in his company. Vaughn Short was our Robert Service, the Poet Lauriat of canyon country. Although Vaughn has moved on, his books of poetry connect us to an earlier time before passage through these areas became common.

Stretching for 170 miles across northern Arizona and southern Utah, Lake Powell is both a vacationer's paradise and the second-largest reservoir in the Western Hemisphere. Yet few visitors to the lake today are aware of the lost world that lies beneath its crystal waters. Once an enchanted landscape of sandstone cliffs and secret crevices, Glen Canyon has been but a memory since the damming of the Colorado River near Page, Arizona, in 1963. Often called "the place no one knew," Glen Canyon was in fact explored by thousands of visitors—including dozens of writers—before the dam's completion. River runner Mathew Gross has combed the literature of Glen Canyon to assemble this wide-ranging look at the history of this now-submerged natural treasure, the first book to bring together these voices of remembrance. Beginning with the first known written report of Glen Canyon in an eighteenth-century missionary journal, Gross has selected accounts of the canyon from both before and after the dam. Included are some of the West's best-known writers—Zane Grey and Katie Lee, Edward Abbey and Ellen Meloy—as well as Pulitzer Prize winners John McPhee and Wallace Stegner. Other authors range from David Brower, director of the Sierra Club when the dam was built, to Floyd Dominy, the federal bureaucrat responsible for the dam. The Glen Canyon Reader is a book that may be read straight through as entertaining and informative history. But as Gross suggests, "Perhaps more pleasurable is to flip through these pages, to poke around and explore, as one would have done in Glen Canyon . . . to visit and revisit the places contained in this book, these cool glens and embracing alcoves and hidden grottos, these canyons and dreams and ghosts that will always, always be with us."

Grant Stevens, a mid-level manager for the Bureau of Reclamation, only wanted to build dams. He never imagined he would be swept into a desperate race against an environmental terrorist bent on restoring the Colorado River by blowing up the dams. Left temporarily in charge of the Bureau, Grant must react when the first dam is attacked. He faces the unthinkable task of mitigating the massive flood roaring down the Colorado. The flood will eventually threaten the mighty Hoover Dam, and if Hoover fails, the other dams downstream will fall like dominos. Working with the FBI, Grant uses his engineering skills, river knowledge, and plenty of gut instinct in an attempt to outmaneuver the terrorist. The chase will lead all the way downstream to the Gulf of California in a cat and mouse game where the stakes are high and the potential for destruction is enormous.