Riding the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument loop in Utah with my girlfriend Laura last fall, I found myself contemplating the usual issues in the American West: land use, water rights, and the legacy of conservation. The loop winds through some spectacular and varied terrain, from rolling, grassy hills to the deep, serrated sandstone canyonlands of Lake Powell and the Colorado River. It was a tour of red rocks and hidden rivers—highlights of the American Southwest.
Seeing Lake Powell and the attendant tourism infrastructure wallowing in historic levels of grime, it was hard not to think that we bet on the wrong horse in building the Glen Canyon Dam to create the lake. Its promise of a glittering, prosperous future was hollow. The dam was supposed to electrify and irrigate the desert Southwest, holding millions of gallons of muddy water from the Lower Colorado Basin. It would fundamentally reshape tourism in the Four Corners, drawing pleasure craft and motorboats to the beautiful arches and slots now half-full of water. The Bureau of Reclamation’s literature would suggest that the dam created something out of nothing. So, I wanted to visit. I wanted to see an act of creation and its consequence.
Riding through the undulating sage hills and modest buttes south of the town of Escalante was like riding through a Bob Ross painting. Each new butte was just a few brush strokes away. Light, fluffy clouds drifted lazily. Wizened junipers stood resolute in the gusting wind. The sandy dirt rasped as it scuttled across the ground around us. The table lands we were riding on felt unmolested by people apart from the odd barbed-wire fence—protecting nothing from nothing—and one or two jeep tracks, traveled barely enough to keep the weeds down. We were going to drop into the rock once we were nearer to Lake Powell, but for now we were coasting on top of thousands of feet of petrified sand. It was the best kind of riding, too. Occasional punchy climbs followed by gradual descents contouring around sandy washes. A moment of up followed by a languid down, over and over.
We were supposed to roll through hill country for 70 miles before dropping down off the mesa on the Kelly Grade and into Squaw Canyon and the greater Powell Basin. The basin holds Lake Powell—one of the largest engineered lakes in the world. As we neared the mesa’s lip the great concavity of the Powell Basin loomed darkly ahead. The geology in front of us looked more like the archeological legacy of giants than anything the earth could generate on its own. Like everything in canyon country, it was perfectly tiered—layer after stratigraphic layer dropping off metronomically below our vision like an open-pit mine. I half expected to see a monolithic dump truck roaring along one of those contours. Craning our bodies over our front tires, stems in our stomachs, we still couldn’t see the bottom. Just brown rock—an enormous negative space cut out of the dirt-green Bob Ross vignette above. Its gravity compelled us inward.
That gravity was natural, of course. The Bureau of Reclamation’s engineers could only dream of moving that much earth, but they were smart enough to see where a lake might fit in that void. The Glen Canyon Dam casts a long shadow in the West. Its creation was likely the conservation movement’s greatest trauma since Muir lost the battle for Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park. Glen Canyon Dam was among the last of the towering “high dams” built in America. Its reservoir was named after John Wesley Powell, the first American to explore most of the Colorado River Basin and float the Grand Canyon. The irony of Lake Powell’s name has not been lost on the conservation community.
The dam was conceived and built by the bureau’s superintendent, Floyd Dominy. His vision for the American West, born out of his hard-scrabble youth in the dusty plains of Nebraska and Wyoming, was one transfigured by dams. They were to be the metaphorical ark to liberate the rural poor from the flood. He believed water should be moved to people, unlocking prosperity for millions of acres of dry scrubland and the poor ranchers and farmers who owned it. Water impounding and dams were critical to growing anything between Denver and California’s Central Valley, but it meant drowning Glen Canyon—a hard-to-reach geological treasure.
Dominy’s opponent on the Glen Canyon Dam and other projects was David Brower, president of the Sierra Club. Brower believed in land as it was, not in humanity’s immutable right to shape it in its image. Militant in his anti-development stance, Brower stood shoulder to shoulder with Ed Abbey as one of the loudest and most convincing advocates for American wilderness. His vision was one of the sanctity of wild spaces.
Dominy and the Bureau ultimately won and turned that enormous hole in the earth into a pool. At the bottom of the hole, since buried in mud, lies Glen Canyon: supposedly one of those wild places suffused with magic. For those who got to experience it, it was evidence of God’s beneficence. For Dominy, it was nowhere and nothing—a holding tank provided by the same forces of creation.
Brower and Dominy fought bitterly over Glen Canyon in the aftermath, and it became a symbol of lost wars for the conservation movement. Its story of development and opportunity against preservation and stasis is the story of every conservation fight. Developers always claim the benefits will outweigh the costs, and their opponents always raise the question of who bears those costs. Brower, in the decades that followed, called Glen Canyon Dam, “America's most regretted environmental mistake.” Dominy argued in 2011 that he was still right and it remained worth it. He built his dam, but 50 years later we can now judge if it has vindicated him. Has the dam reshaped the Southwest? Was it worth sacrificing Glen Canyon?
I sat on the lip of that precipitous hole, trying to imagine where Glen Canyon might have been, to see it among the haze.
Before I had ever seen a picture of the dam—before I knew where it was—I knew I hated it. A symbol of wanton development without heed for its own survival. The silt of the Colorado will choke the basin, eventually filling both the basin and the dam itself. The dam was built in Navajo sandstone that will crumble around it. The lake loses almost a tenth (860,000 acre-feet) of what it releases every year to evaporation and seepage. The more I read about the dam, the more preposterous the inherent vice of the project seemed. But I had come to witness the powerboats and hydroelectric turbines and green fields in the desert. To see the dam’s success. To see for myself if the benefits outweighed the costs.
Laura and I also had places to be. Low on water ourselves, we had to reach Big Water, Utah, that night. We began descending into the hole on the Kelly Grade (all strange roads have strange names), which wound downward, cut into the sandstone and dirt with scientific precision. The road was in immaculate condition, smooth and untraveled. We flew, and the whir of our freehubs—the sound of gravity working its magic in our favor for once—was ceaseless. After miles of floating along the road’s raggedy edge, we abruptly found ourselves at what was irrefutably the bottom. The vertical world of that long descent was gone, and we entered a two-dimensional plane, brown and hot.
A few clean cars lingered at a sign that pointed up the Kelly Grade and read, “Steep grade, sharp curves ahead. Next services 80 miles.” Their drivers gawked at us as we emerged dusty from the towering walls of mud and crumbling sediment above. They had come from the tarmac desert; we had come from the gravel desert. Laura smiled at them, and we rolled on, looking for the lake among the brown, Martian flats. The scrubby mesa lay far above. We were in a new world.
The howl of the wind faded, and the hum of our wheels was swallowed by the slow clicking of gravel, a reminder to pedal again. We stopped to look at the map. Our lips were cracked and sandy, and Big Water, our evening destination, felt distant. The US Forest Service maps said the lake wasn’t more than a mile or two off route, so we left the road, gliding down a sandy wash toward humidity and the smell of water.
The beach was not where the map indicated. By the time we were within view of the lake, the GPS said we were treading water, but the beach was hundreds of feet below us, and the waterline was even further.
When we reached the lake, the beautiful sandy beach was well above us. We stood in rotting reeds and mud. A tongue of water extended into our cove from the sunken reservoir. The lake was low, even for October. Water marks on the sandstone buttress across the bay were hundreds of feet above the waterline. Everything below the beach stank. All rot, slime, and mank. Even though our bottles were empty, and there were miles to go before we slept, I couldn’t imagine being thirsty enough to drink this shit. Although it’s what Phoenix drinks, I suppose. I looked at Laura. We weren’t sure we could even find a way to jump in.
With a grimace of suggestion, I asked, “Should we try?”
“This lake looks disgusting,” Laura said flatly. “And it definitely won’t make me cleaner.”
She had given me something to oppose. “But can we really pass on this? It’s historic! I think I can see a good entrance along that stretch of beach.” I was also sandy and hot. The lake looked just good enough. We picked our way down to the new “beach.” It was not a beach. Just the mud of the Colorado. Laura was right. After painstakingly cleaning the fine silt from our toes, backs, and chamois, we left.
While I certainly burdened Lake Powell with some weighty expectations, the town of Big Water was free of them. All I knew was that it existed because of Lake Powell. I imagined, arbitrarily, an old saloon in sepia tones and a lightly stocked general store. Instead, we got a motel from the 1980s and a gas station closed for the season. All around were boats of all sorts up on blocks, caked in years of dust. They reminded me of the Spanish galleon beached in the rainforest in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude. How they ended up here, in the air, and why they remained suspended, was beyond me. But there was once water to float these boats. These houseboats, ski boats, and yachts were on blocks in a town that felt lightyears away from a lake and, much like that galleon, “smelled of solitude and desolation.”
The town was bucolic, seemingly uninterested in the few visitors it received from the shiny black ribbon of US-89. I’m sure Page, Arizona, 20 miles down the road, was busier. Asking around for a spot to pitch our tent, everyone shrugged. By 6:00 p.m., the sun had set, and we had nowhere to sleep; by 6:30, night had fallen. Being so close to the Daylight Saving Time Doughnut, the sun had somehow slipped into the vortex of legislated oddity. The lights of the motel barely illuminated the benches where our bikes lay. We rolled to the edge of the gravel parking lot, trying to get out of the way in the dark, to find a place to sleep that wouldn’t embarrass us in the morning. But it was hard to tell. Everywhere feels secluded at night. We found a flat corner of the parking lot. The motel light shone forlornly 200 yards away. No cars roared past on US-89. On our own, I suppose, in the inky black.
Among the dust, I thought about Floyd Dominy and the lake. His vision was grand and would electrify and irrigate the desert. It would bring bustling tourism, democratize access to the slots and amphitheaters of the canyon country. It would make life easier for the people of Big Water, Page, Hite, and Hall’s Crossing. A tool of emancipation for the desert dwellers. But looking around, I didn’t see liberation. I saw a Frankensteinian monster and a dying company town. The dam created a raison d'être for these communities, but it has not been a beneficent god. Its promise, Dominy’s promise, remains unfulfilled.
The bargain—Glen Canyon for the lake—was Faustian. Dominy sold a sleepy present for a glittering, fanciful future. His vision, whether you agreed with it or not, was an enormous, far-reaching, and transformative one for the Colorado River Basin. Sitting in Big Water in a darkness that swallowed the beam of my headlamp, the Basin did not feel catapulted into modernity. Sure, there were some halcyon years in the ’80s, with tourists and a lake full of water, but that was during the Reagan Administration. The Upper Colorado Basin felt trapped in an alternative, dead-end future, sacrificing itself for Las Vegas and the Bellagio fountains.
Certainly, the place could be a lot worse off, but is it any better than before? Was all the fuss and change worth the cost? Was Glen Canyon worth a strip of shining new pavement and a hell of a lot of boats up on blocks in the desert? Was it even worth the money we spent? Maybe, if the Colorado River has to support thirteen million people living in the desert. But why must we push into every corner, every valley, however desolate? The logic of this whole system feels so self-justifying. The dam begot itself and continues to justify its own existence. The communities that depend on it exist only because the lake exists and vice versa. The lake is a self-sustaining, floating castle.
When I think about planned development in southern Utah, the public land sell-offs, the mineral extraction, Lake Powell pops into my mind. It isn’t the same, but it is: a jarringly dissonant internal logic turned up to 11 to drown out the voices asking, “Why do we need this?” There is nothing but sand to fill the mines, no water to wash away our sins, no grass to grow over the holes, no glittering lake to distract us from the mud underneath. We cannot turn old oil derricks and slag piles into a national recreation area. No sleight of hand can obfuscate the misdeeds we plot now. Who will bear the costs?
Leaving Big Water the next morning, the Frankensteinian monster was harder to see, but it lurked, obscured by the gleaming desert sun. Thankfully, we spent the day climbing away from it and back onto the mesa, into loose, fine sand, and goat heads. At least we didn’t create goat heads. Thank God that’s not on us.
