January 21, 2043. A cold winter wind whipped and buffeted the ten thousand visitors who had made their way from across America and the world to witness this historic event. But no one complained about the cold. Crammed into the parking lot of the Carl Hayden Visitor Center at Glen Canyon Dam, few of those present ever dreamed they would live long enough to see this day. After a few opening comments by the Secretary of the Interior and the Governor of Arizona (the Utah delegation chose to boycott the ceremony) the President of the United States rose slowly and walked to the podium...
"My fellow Americans, but perhaps more inclusively, my fellow citizens of this beautiful planet we call Earth...we join today, all of us, to return something. To right a wrong. To restore a masterpiece. We are gathered here to give a place called Glen Canyon a second life.
"Eighty years ago today, at this exact moment, the living Colorado River in Glen Canyon ceased to flow. A switch was thrown, a steel gate was sealed and the slack waters of Lake Powell began to rise behind the enormous concrete dam that still stands behind us, almost a century later.
"The decision to flood Glen Canyon was not made by evil men and women. It was not the work of malevolence. It was, instead, an act of ignorance. And shortsightedness. We could only see kilowatts of power and tourist dollars. We failed to see, at the time, the crime we were committing.
"...on behalf of the thousands of once lonely voices who have waited decades for this moment, I return Glen Canyon to the world in your honor...I only wish my father could have been here to see this day."
With a single command to the central computer, Rebecca Abbey, 50th President of the United States, opened the diversion tunnel gates...Ed would have been proud.
Hopeless dreams, doomed to failure, somebody once said.
And indeed, the idea that someday, thoughtful, intelligent humans might gather together and say: this dam, this Glen Canyon Dam. It was a mistake, let's fix it...well, not long ago, the idea seemed not only unlikely but ridiculous. The kind of hopeless dream that hopeless dreamers prefer.
But is it such an impossible fantasy? If there is a growing consensus that the construction of Glen Canyon Dam was a mistake, and there is, then is it so difficult to imagine us trying to mend the error of our ways? For the first time in 34 years, there are more than just a few voices who are saying, no. The time has come to drain Lake Powell.
A Brief History
Glen Canyon Dam. Five million cubic yards of concrete located on the Colorado River near the Arizona-Utah border. Seven hundred and ten feet high. Generating enough electricity, 1.3 million kilowatts, to serve a city of a million people. Built at a cost of $300 million under the direction of the Bureau of Reclamation's Floyd Dominy. Impounding 27 million acre feet of water, two years' flow of the Colorado River. Creating Lake Powell, a mecca for more than four million tourists every year.The statistics are always impressive and anyone who has ever been to the dam cannot help but be stunned by the sheer size of it. The dam is overwhelming. For a technophobe like myself, someone who has a difficult time with straight lines and step-by-step VCR instructions, I look at Glen Canyon Dam and ask: How did they know where to start?
But somebody did. And almost seven years after construction engineer Lem Wylie hitched a ride upstream with tour boat operator Art Greene to see the dam site close up, the last bucket of cement was poured and, on January 21, 1963, the reservoir began to rise.
Why was Glen Canyon Dam built? It generates all cheap electrical power, more than a billion dollars worth since 1964, but that isn't the reason they built the dam. Tourism created by the reservoir is a billion dollar industry, but tourism is only a secondary benefit as well.
Glen Canyon Dam was built to store water.
In November 1922, seven western states---California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming---signed the Colorado River Compact. After years of squabbling over water rights, the feuding states reached an agreement whereby the water of the Colorado River could be fairly distributed. The states were divided into the Upper Basin and the Lower Basin. The dividing line was established at Lee's Ferry, Arizona.
The Upper and Lower Basins were each allocated 7.5 million acre feet of water, based on a rather dubious Bureau of Reclamation study that suggested the annual flow of the river was about 17.5 million acre feet. A million and a half acre feet was promised to Mexico and the rest was to serve as a reserve. California demanded the extra million and they got it.
But the flow of the Colorado River is hardly consistent. During drought years, the river can dwindle to a trickle. In other years, when heavy snowfall in the upstream mountains begins to melt, the river can be a torrent. No one wanted to see millions of acre feet flow into the Gulf of California and during drought years no one wanted to be left high and dry. The Upper Basin states needed to be able to store water so they could meet their downstream commitments to the Lower Basin states.
For years, BuRec engineers had pushed for a high dam in Glen Canyon, but it had always been passed by, partly because of its remoteness, partly because of the unsuitability of its sandstone walls as a dam site, mostly because there were other sites that always seemed more appealing.
In the early 50s, an historic battle took shape between the pro-dam building engineers and western politicians and the fledgling conservationists of that time, led by David Brower and the Sierra Club. The story has been told a thousand and one times and it must be painful for Brower to be continually reminded, but the Sierra Club, fighting to save the preferred dam site at Echo Park on the Green River in Dinosaur National Monument, insisted that Glen Canyon would make a much better site for the high dam and would not oppose such a plan, if only BuRec would leave Echo Park alone.
Never before had citizens from across the country become so involved in an environmental issue like this. Thousands of anti- Echo Park Dam telegrams and letters, from Maine to California, flooded the Congress. Finally, against all odds, BuRec backed down. They could get along without their Green River dam after all; they could live with a high dam at Glen Canyon.
Then "the winners" went down to Utah to see what they had compromised away. They could not believe their eyes. And it broke their hearts. What had protected Glen Canyon for so many years, its isolation, had now doomed it to a watery grave. None, not one of the defenders of Echo Park, had ever seen Glen Canyon.
And now it was too late. An act of Congress, the Colorado River Storage Project, was signed into law by President Eisenhower on April 11, 1956. Within six months, construction of roads and a new bridge at the dam site and preliminary work on the dam itself had begun.
There was no going back. Glen Canyon Dam would be built.
A Lousy Place to Build a Dam
From the time men first started thinking about "taming" the Colorado River, it was tough to find an engineer who was enthusiastic about a dam in Glen Canyon. Its appeal was limited. Certainly building a storage dam upriver would make lower Colorado dam projects easier.But Glen Canyon was in the middle of nowhere. To tap its electrical generating potential, power lines would have to be built across hundreds of miles of empty desert, to carry the power to the cities that needed them. The reservoir site, in the hot, arid Four Corners region, was sure to lose untold amounts of water through evaporation.
Some scientists even believed that vast underground basins beneath the Kaiparowits Plateau would siphon off as much as 350 million acre feet of water and that 15 million gallons of water a day would flow around the abutments of any dam built in the porous Navajo sandstone. This, at least, never happened.
But all the experts agreed the dam offered one irrefutable advantage---it would certainly extend the life of the downstream Lake Mead, the reservoir formed by the construction of Hoover Dam in the 1930s. The Colorado River (Spanish translation: red river), got its name from the rich brown-red color of the flowing water. Each spring the Colorado carried millions of tons of silt and sediment through its canyons to the Gulf of California. Hoover Dam not only impeded the flow of the river, it stopped dead in its muddy tracks, the semi-dissolved sediments that came with it. And so, dire predictions were made about the already doomed reservoir and the time it would take for all that silt to fill Lake Mead.
Incredibly, proponents of the Glen Canyon Project liked to brag that one of the side benefits of their dam was the fact that its construction would dramatically extend the predicted lifetime of Lake Mead. All that silt would now be stopped by Glen Canyon Dam.
Good thinking. Save one reservoir by silting in another. Early estimates by BuRec predicted the annual accumulation of sediment in Lake Powell at 85,400 acre feet. At that rate, the lake would fill with mud in 316 years. But in 1976, another study funded by the National Science Foundation, calculated an annual silt accumulation of only 27,000 acre feet. At that reduced rate, the lake might not fill for a thousand years. The fact is, no one knows.
I do know, that four years ago, when the waters of Lake Powell reached a 15 year low, the mud flats near Hite made travel up Narrow Canyon by motorized craft nearly impossible. And inevitably, whether it happens in 200 years or 300 years or in a thousand years, all blinks of the eye in geologic time, the reservoir will silt up completely and a meandering river will make its way to the seven hundred foot waterfall formerly called Glen Canyon Dam. The huge concrete plug's sole purpose will by then be to keep 27 million acre feet of mud from washing downstream.
The Dam Dream begins to crack
There were always those who hated the dam. Ken Sleight. Phil Hyde. Eliot Porter. Katie Lee. Kent Frost. Bus Hatch. Al Quist. Ed Abbey. There were others, many others, of course, who floated the river before the dam was even a project to be seriously considered (and feared). And more that came after construction began, including David Brower, who was devastated.In the thirty four years that have passed since Lake Powell began to rise behind the dam, thousands of people, tens of thousands, who never even saw Glen Canyon have added their voices and their anger to the once lonely chorus of dam haters.
But the chorus now includes some surprises. The Udall brothers, Morris and Stewart, one an Arizona congressman and the other Kennedy's Secretary of the Interior, were both enthusiastic supporters of Glen Canyon Dam. In fact, they both advocated even more dramatic and controversial plans to construct dams in the Grand Canyon, ideas that both faltered and failed as public support dwindled in the late 1960s.
Now, both Udall brothers question their earlier unrestrained dam building glee.
And Barry Goldwater. Mr. Conservative. In 1974, as I was just warming to the role of Second Generation Glen Canyon Dam Hater, I sent the senator a letter. How could a man like himself, I asked, who so genuinely loved the canyons and rivers of the Colorado Plateau, have supported such an abomination as Glen Canyon Dam. Several weeks later he wrote back and, in part said:
But by 1986, as Goldwater prepared to retire from the Senate, his feelings had changed. If he could re-cast one vote in his entire Senate career, it would have been the vote that doomed Glen Canyon. In twelve years, apparently, the memory of that place had come back to him in ways he hadn't expected.
And the shift in sentiment continues. At Glen Canyon Recreation Area, it's difficult to find a park ranger who will defend the reservoir (unless s/he is speaking "on the record" of course...those poor rangers: when will they find their voice?)
Simply, no one...nobody who ever takes the time to ask: "What's under the lake?" and then sees the pictures and hears the stories, ever feels quite the same again. Ever escapes the melancholy sadness and the sense of personal loss.
If they don't, they're not really alive.
And now? DRAIN THE LAKE.
Last October, I picked up my morning copy of The Salt Lake Tribune and there, in 30 point type, the headline read, "Sierra Club: Let's Drain Lake Powell." It was David Brower, on the dam warpath again. Speaking at Kingsbury Hall, he had come to promote the idea that "environmentally and economically," the time had come to drain Lake Powell. It was time to quit lamenting the loss of Lake Powell; it was time to fix it.And he had some powerful facts to defend his proposal. Most notably, the Bureau of Reclamation recently released an interesting Lake Powell statistic. The bureau calculated that there is significantly less water that leaves the reservoir at Glen Canyon Dam than enters it at its headwaters north of Hite. In fact, a million acre feet of water is disappearing every year. They've determined that more than 600,000 acre feet is evaporating from the massive lake surface, something that was predicted 40 years ago. Where the other 400,000 acre feet is disappearing to is not completely known, but it is assumed that much of it is being absorbed into the porous Navajo sandstone, a phenomenon called bank storage. Again, scientists saw all this coming in the 50s, when many of them argued that Glen Canyon was a lousy place to build a dam.
What is most significant about the BuRec data is the fact that, as the U.S. population continues to grow, water becomes a scarcer, and thus more precious resource. According to Brower, a million acre feet of water could meet the domestic needs of 4 million people. In Salt Lake City that amount of water carries a value of $435 million. In Brower's home town of Berkeley, California, it's worth more than a billion bucks.
At some point in the future, water may be worth a lot more than the kilowatt hours the dam's turbines generate or the tourist dollars it adds to the local economies. It might someday be worth its weight in gold.
A month later, the national board of the Sierra Club voted unanimously to support Brower's idea: DRAIN LAKE POWELL.
And the idea caught on. On December 20, Dave Wegner, former head of the Glen Canyon Environmental Studies Group, endorsed Brower's proposal. Wegner had earlier resigned from the Bureau of Reclamation, saying that efforts to restore the river downstream from Glen Canyon Dam was more a government publicity stunt than anything else. Now, free from the chains of his former employer, the federal government, Wegner said the time had come, not to just drain the lake, but to remove the dam.
In an interview with The Salt Lake Tribune, he said, "I'd take out Glen Canyon. I'd take out Flaming Gorge Dam. And I'd look at Navajo Dam on the San Juan."
His comments triggered a discussion that still continues. In the same Trib story came a variety of comments from geographers and hydrologists. Some debated the wisdom of releasing that much water from Lake Powell in such a relatively short time. Others preferred the dismantling of other dams on the Colorado River. But what geographer Jack Schmidt of Utah State University said was most significant:
"Removal of dams is a viable management tool in the United States. It is on the table."
The debate will continue.
It may well be that someday, a decade from now, or five decades from now, that intelligent minds will come together and agree that Glen Canyon Dam no longer serves a useful purpose. That it has become a liability more than an asset. The decision to drain the lake or dismantle the dam will be made "for economic reasons."
And they may be right. But to me the real reason lies on the very next page of this publication.
It's time to restore the masterpiece.
Epilogue: The president concluded her remarks and turned to leave. She stopped for a moment and gazed at the dam. A troubled look crossed her face.
"I know I've done the right thing, but what a mess we're going to have on our hands when that reservoir is empty. Have I just created the world's smelliest scenic river?"
The Secretary of the Interior chuckled, "I wouldn't worry about that, Ms. President. When word leaked to the media that you had reached a decision on the dam, the park office at Page actually started accepting reservations for future river trips."
"You're kidding," replied the President. "Reclamation efforts just to remove the health hazard will take a while."
"Well, apparently they're willing to endure the delay, because the waiting list to float down the new Glen Canyon is seven years long. And we get more calls every day."
"Seven years!" exclaimed President Abbey. "Well...I guess I should have expected that. We're all getting desperate for a quiet place these days, aren't we?"
On that morning, the population of the United States of America was 375 million people. And growing.
