Glen Canyon: A Dam, Water and the West

At 11:30 on the morning of October 15th 1956 President Dwight D Eisenhower from the White House triggered a blast far smaller than the atomic explosions now nearly so commonplace but a blast that significantly affects nearly one fifth of our nation's land area. It was a moment when the face of the American West was changed forever. A path chosen at a crossroads to turn toward what was possible and away from what had been to begin one of the largest construction projects in human history to create one of the world's largest manmade bodies of water in what many had considered a desert. To literally carve a city out of the wilderness to race against the flood that would drown a thousand years of human history and a million years of natural history. It was the future of the West. A story of winners and losers of the politics of power and the few who stood in the way.

Never tell you what destroying it was the heart of the country. It took the heart out of thing. I've changed the environment yes but I've changed it for the benefit of man. In the 1950s in a remote place on the Utah Arizona border the Great Western issues of water and progress would play out in dramatic fashion against the timeless flow of the Colorado River. Straddling the Utah Arizona border the Glen Canyon Dam rises over seven hundred

feet from solid bedrock to block the flow of the Colorado River. Behind its wall of five million yards of concrete or the waters of Lake Powell. Storing enough water to meet the needs of almost 30 million families for a year. It's one of the largest manmade reservoirs in the world. Inside the dam a network of water powered turbines generate electricity. The crisscrosses the West on a web of transmission lines. Some 3 million people a year take the time to visit the dam and the more than 100 mile long reservoir that fills this corner of the stark landscape known as the Colorado Plateau. Those visitors leave an estimated half a billion dollars behind each year. Fueling dozens of small town economies like the one in Page Arizona. Just slightly more than one generation ago the town the tourists and their money the electricity the lake and the dam did not exist.

In 1869 John Wesley Powell conducted the first scientific mapping expedition down the Colorado River. Powell flew in the face of the unknown with legends telling of giant whirlpools and stretches where the Colorado River would disappear underground killing any who challenged its waters. The reality was every bit as challenging as Rapids tore at Powles wooden boats. But as Powell neared what would one day become the border of the states of Utah and Arizona. The Colorado River dramatically changed its character. Rapids gave way to mile after mile of slow swirling water. Smaller rivers and streams that created dozens of dramatic narrow side canyons and open pools of clear water that attracted an incredible array of wildlife. But dramatic legacy of ancient civilizations was found in thousands of rock carvings

of a disappeared people. After the crushing force of previous stretches of the Colorado. Power viewed this canyon as a walk in a park for his grateful crew. So parklike that he called it a canyon of Glenns. Glen Canyon. For the next 80 years Glen Canyon will remain much his John Wesley Powell described it in 1869. Quiet relatively untouched and one of the most isolated corners of the continental United States. But in his subsequent reports Powell would forecast that the future of the West would be told by water. Water is the lifeblood of the West. The West was settled adjacent to water whether it was a well or whether it was a river and you can't have any more people when you have water source. By the 1920s all of the easily accessed water in the West had been claimed.

But the Colorado River protected by a sea of slickrock and Schir canyon walls had defied western development. Billions of gallons of the silt heavy Colorado flowed to the sea each year. So if you're going to build cities if you're going to develop as Americans have always wanted to do you know full speed ahead and you absolutely had to have a source of water and the only way to have water Westend hundred Marine and all the way from the Great Plains to the Sierras. If you're going to do it you've got to store water. In 1922 the states of California Nevada Arizona Utah New Mexico Colorado and Wyoming created an ambitious plan to divide the waters of the Colorado River as a means of convincing the federal government to help them tame the river. It was called the Colorado River compact. But the compact did was to prove to the United States government that the states the seven Colorado River basin states had agreed to manage the water of the Colorado River.

Once they have subsided how much water there was and how much that was going to be a lot of to each state and so on. The next thing to do of course was to build a big dam to store it because the naturally the river fluctuated back and forth some years it would dry up some years it would be a big flood. Then of course Hoover Dam was the first one built started I think in 1928 finished in 1935. That was such a big success that it gave me the idea that you could develop the rest of the base and started to worry the upper basin states so much that they were concerned that California Nevada and Arizona would grab all their water if they didn't find a way to control it. Utah Colorado New Mexico and Wyoming the so-called upper basin states were helpless. The guarantee of half of the water from the Colorado River was meaningless if there was no way to hold onto the water. Without an adequate faucet. The water flowed down the drain to the downstream states and frustrated ambitious dreams of development and new wealth in areas crippled

by the Depression. Politically weak in Washington and struggling with how to use their half of the water. The upper basin states were paralyzed for nearly 30 years until the end of World War II when a renewed nation flexed its muscle in the West. The west was the place of development of growth. It couldn't live with its present water supply. It needed to have more ability to move water freshwater into the system so the development could occur. It needed the ability to generate electricity. In the post-war era. The nation raced to a new vision of manifest destiny. In 1956 Congress approved the interstate highway system to dependably link the nation from coast to coast and in the same year Congress took up the unfinished business of a Colorado River. Viewing it as a road that had to be tamed it was expressed in the 1950s as

we should turn a natural minutes into a national resource that was kind of a slogan that was used later in the Colorado River storage project. The Colorado River storage project's primary purpose was to serve as a giant water bank. To guarantee a flow of Colorado River water for California in dry years and to hold onto the rest for the upper basin states. But to sell a series of dams to the public. The project was offered as an end to flooding cheap hydro electric power for everyone. And the management of water to make the desert bloom. And I went out to get a little three cent postage stamp. Back in the days and that's all it took to send a first class mail letter that had a pictures leave of conservation. Not a very big one and it consisted of a dam and naturally you're thinking that the best thing to do for the river is to plug it. If you don't plug in the water wish to see.

In the 1950s a Federal army of the best and brightest engineers and project managers were poised to transform the flow of water in the West Bay where the nations dam builders the Bureau of Reclamation and we had no naysayers in those days. Everybody thought that managing water was a desirable thing and it was in the public interest and we didn't have lint pickers are behind every bush. It had the power of Congress reclamation and the commissioners of the Bureau of Reclamation were very good friends controlled perhaps in some sense as many western congressmen and senators who looked at the bureau as the vehicle to implement a lot of their visions for their individual states in regards to future development and bringing more economy more money into the western United States and providing the ability for the West to grow harnessing the upper Colorado River would cost hundreds of millions of 1950s tax

dollars perhaps equal to as much as $2 billion now. But there was little opposition. They didn't make endeavors whether Republican or Democrat in the White House or in charge of the Congress. We got good support for reclamation. There were no environmental laws. And so they could move forward with little opposition to many of the proposals that they were that they were running out there. And within the within the context of the Department of Interior. The Bureau of Reclamation is analogous to me like the Marine Corps. You give them a job to go to get it done. But the bureau was stopped at Echo Park. To harness the upper Colorado River. The Bureau of Reclamation proposed a series of dams to store water and generate hydroelectric power. Power sales would help pay for the dams. And one of them at the bureau is called the wheel horse of the project was the way they put it was the Echo Park

dam which would have been built about two miles below the junction of the green the amber rivers in Watts the center of Dinosaur National Monument. On the drawing boards of the Bureau of Reclamation the Echo Park dam proposed for the Green River in eastern Utah was an enormous project. Well we're in whirlpool Canyon. This was made by John Wesley Powell at 18:16 his first. River trip down the Colorado River. And the significance of this spot behind me here is this is where the Echo Park dam was going to be built by the Bureau of a commercial in the early 1950s. And if they had succeeded in putting the dam in this area that we're standing now at about 500 feet of water. Even with the promised flooding of a sizable portion of a national monument the Echo Park dam and a companion project at nearby split mountain enjoyed near unanimous support in the neighboring community of vernal Utah.

They saw it as an absolute good thing and there was complete unity and the community work together. They formed what they call the Aquilani group nationally Aqua meaning water Lani's group was responsible for going back and helping the Washington delegation lobby for the passage in the local park dam. But plans for a dam inside the National Monument had caught the eye of the young executive director of the Sierra Club. Very concerned about the sanctity of the National Park System. They already suffered very badly back at the turn of the century in San Francisco and destroyed by the U-17 National Park for the Hajj Hetchy dam. They didn't want any more of that or anything like it. BROWER triggered what many have identified as the nation's first full scale

environmental protest to block development. Widely distributing films that showcase the natural beauty of the area that would be flooded. It was almost like you were against Mom and apple pie. If you spoke against a Western Water Development. And so that's the real intriguing part is that that movement was able to say for so I think it shows one thing it demonstrates to me is how strongly the love of national parks and how Americans feel about the national park system at that time we call them nature lovers. I speak specifically probably to the Sierra Club but you know their funds are so great they can do things that we can think of doing. We all know that Congress must move forward. Sometimes March upright with sound develop and. Sometimes stumble and make us laugh. Certainly we can as progress to walk around and not through our guide. Americans are glad a public outcry against placing a

dam in part of the National Park System soon had an impact in Congress and the Colorado River storage project once considered a sure bet suddenly was in doubt as congressmen started to back away from their support. They started dropping away their support. They started to change in their ideas about the Echo Park dam because they were afraid it was endangering the entire project. And so one by one they started dropping out. To save the rest of the Colorado River storage project reclamation walked away from Echo Park. Oh we were completely devastated. Absolutely it was a complete shock to the town. Well I remember that everybody was so upset that all the people in town could talk about the Vernon express even even put in a black line around the black line around their announcement. But the water that would have been stored at Echo Park had to be held somewhere for the river storage project to work.

More than 40 years later. David Brower acknowledges that he offered a solution. And I came up with the brilliant idea that Grand Canyon Dam is already being proposed should be build something like 35 feet higher or refine it all. All the water Echo Park is going to hold. The Grand Canyon you go that didn't know it was there. Dinosaur National Monument had been saved. Glen Canyon would hold the water. A writer describe Glen Canyon in the early 1950s as the place nobody knew here there were no towns along the Colorado River no paved roads no easy access to the river in Glen Canyon. It was a haven for a small number of hardy wilderness Outfitters who occasionally would ferry a rare group of adventurous tourists down the slow moving section of the Colorado River flowed in great big meanders lots of sandbars along the

way very heavily. You look forward to that trip here on but the next trip and the next trip I was sorry she was really here. She's a man. And when I took over a grand canyon. I went down a row boat. I had time to look around. I. Can. Look. Down. Here. And the more I ran that river. The more the river got to know me. When I finally did that there was my river and from then on it was my river. The light acted upon you. It made you do think. He would step into a stab of light and she would go around a dark corner. He would never know what was going to be there whether it would be a black hole. You just didn't know. And then he would go around a bend maybe and all of a sudden you'd be in total darkness and you just

kind of like that ricocheted down through some many different areas that it was eerie you didn't know it was coming from. And it gave me this feeling of being suspended somewhere in time. And you just didn't know where you were. And there are. Hundreds and hundreds and thousands down there. She is on the water from the pictograph hundred. Feet up all the came down and increasingly the river runners were also seen survey crews along the cliffs of Glen Canyon crews from the Bureau of Reclamation scouting a damn site in anticipation of Congress authorizing the Colorado River storage project. The dam would be one of the biggest ever built and the storage area would flood over one hundred and fifty miles up the river. I definitely recall hearing it and laughing my head off. I said

be serious. There's no way they're going to do it. That's an impossibility. Brushed it off. It was a done deal and everybody seemed to want to deal with some environmental group called environmental groups says a dam OK. The Sierra Club was one of those groups willing to stay silent on Glen Canyon after winning the battle over flooding in Dinosaur National Monument. When David Brower reversed his direction and urged the Sierra Club to oppose a dam and Glen Canyon. The Sierra Club ordered him to end the fight. And was bitterly disappointed that that happened but not smart enough. To change this year club's position. It just happened that this year Outram was the keystone in the structure of the defense of the Colorado River as the keystone drops. You're in trouble. It keeps on dropped out and went through the Bureau of

Reclamation viewed Glen Canyon as a perfect dam site. The steep canyon walls would be filled to a depth of five hundred feet for one hundred and eighty miles by some 8 trillion gallons of water with nothing to stand in the way and the storage area was uninhabited. We didn't have to relocate any railroads. We didn't relocate any highways. We didn't have to build the barrier dikes around any little towns there was nothing there nothing there. Again the dam was offered as a symbol of progress in the arid West water Colorado River water could mean energy properly controlled and utilized could mean power pulsing flashing energy for cities and industry is virtually unbar would mean irrigation for the thirsty crops of upstream violates life for the swelling population of yet unborn.

And they told everybody a great thing and everybody ate it up and supported it. It's going to bring jobs back and bring progress. And that's when I said well I have just found a place that could save my life and some black handed bureaucracy is already clawing to take it away from me. Them gang and Dan was authorized in April of 1956 got a data storage project and we actually started construction within six months like today. Wait a Bentz we've spent six months trying to find out where to put the toilets for the rock scaler the Bureau of Reclamation set up a temporary project headquarters in Kanab Utah. The closest town to the dam site. But still 80 hard miles away from the work the dam site was an arrow gorge almost exactly on the Utah Arizona State line. At this point the cliff walls were only twelve hundred feet apart. But a Jeep would have to drive

200 roadless miles to get from one side to the other. Roads would have to be laid. And a bridge built. The Colorado River roared through the gorge seven hundred feet below. So tunnels would have to be dug to divert the river while the dam was being built on top of it all. There was no place for a peak workforce of 2500 workers. A town would have to be carved out of a wilderness that had defied settlement. Only three construction companies thought the challenge was worth the bid to be the dam's primary contractor when the bids were opened. The New York based Mary Chapman Scott corporation was awarded the contract as the low bidder at nearly $108 million and the bid was shockingly low. Thirty million dollars less than the bureau's estimate $10 billion below the next lowest bidder. And Can-Am the locals said unless things went perfectly.

Mary Scott would work seven years to build a dam just to lose money subcontractors started on the roads to the construction site carving the open land and building bridges to span the slick rock chasms two lane blacktop stretch south from Utah and North from Arizona ending in a standoff on the cliffs of the dam site. The steel arch bridge linking the roads would be almost seven hundred feet above the riverbed. The highest bridge of its kind ever built to get the first bridge workers back and forth chainlink fence scene was laid on cables to form a temporary footbridge. Well I want to go out on that little footbridge that they had is about four feet wide and it was just screen you could look right straight through at seven hundred feet down in the river and I wasn't too excited about walking out there very far in fact I didn't go very far before I turn and came back. And no mesh wire at all on the side you had to walk on a. Swinging

bridge. Everytime the wind is blowing the bridge is going back and forth. Back and forth. And the bridge went up and down as you walk. In. And work on the permanent bridge was just as challenging with steel workers fitting together a giant erector set above the Colorado River. And they did a perfect job at it and they had nets underneath that. They. Lose a man. But it is exciting to watch them and when I get to work that jump up in those net. And then walk back over here to the side. Unbelievable. By February of 1959 the bridge was complete. A torch was used to cut a chain ribbon to dedicate the bridge and hundreds of people made the trip to pier down to a spot where a dam would rise. The most indelible image in my mind is just standing there is a little boy I was probably. Six years old.

Standing next to my friend's father. Was. Married. At. The time. His. Arm. Around my shoulder. Having him point out and show me. And tell me that those. Little men that looked like men from my Army sent. Back home were were actually men down there weren't. But I think what I remember most is the pride that my grandfather felt in knowing that. He had lived long enough to see. A man be able to achieve. Peace. Such as this. You know believe it or not. I go home and my wife and our children want to come down. And I really enjoyed coming out here and standing on a bridge. And watching the construction of it. What a fascinating project. All the way. From their vantage point visitors could mark the progress of the first two years of war. High schoolers had repelled off the sheer cliffs to prise sandstone away from the walls.

It was part of the process of carving notches in the canyon to see the walls of the dam. And it could be very dangerous work. With tons of loose rock tumbling down the cliffs and only simple rope harnesses holding the workers in place. This photo shows where a high schooler was wiped off the cliff. To his death in the river. His drill still embedded in the rock. Dynamite and drills had gouged to diversion tunnels deep in the canyon walls. The tunnels would divert the Colorado River from its Agias bed in Glen Canyon. As the bridge dedication neared. Bulldozers raced to build a temporary or cofferdam to force the river into the tunnels. On February 11th 1959 the cofferdam held for the first time the Colorado River stopped flowing through the canyon it had created

the water backed up to a diversion tunnel and then detoured. Returning to the river bed half a mile downstream as it poured out of the back end of the tunnel. When the dam in Glen Canyon first went to the drawing board planners knew they would be forced to create a new city in a virtual wilderness. The workforce would eventually swell to 2500 and with family and support services a city of 10000 people would be dropped on a location with no homes no schools and no streets. A new government city was viewed as an incredible federal plum in the West. Millions of dollars would be poured into the site thousands of new taxpayers would move in and the location was certain to serve as the permanent gateway to the dam. Utah and Arizona both desperately wanted the town. And Utah Senator Arthur Watkins argued that 95 percent of the resulting reservoir would be in

Utah. The Bureau of Reclamation had already established its temporary project headquarters in his state and that all of the land on the Arizona side of the river was in the Navajo reservation and sure to be barred from development. Watkins said Utah deserved townsite but powerful senator Carl Hayden was from Arizona as the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Hayden had power over funding the Bureau of Reclamation and its water projects. The battle for the town was over before a shot was fired. The Navajo Nation gladly traded a windswept Mason near the dam to the federal government and in return they received prime oil producing land bordering their reservation in Utah. Soon bulldozers were at work carving an ambitious pattern of streets on the Arizona Mesa and the town would be named after a past commissioner of Reclamation. John C. Page Well Page was a trailer court and had

twelve hundred. Trailer which housed the families of the workers on the dam. I believe at the time we had a population of about 6000. It had a pager is very primitive had paved roads and sidewalks but there wasn't any grass. It wasn't the trees so this little tiny bit of a breeze like we have today made it just the sky was half filled with sand. No shopping center like we have today. We haven't had that friendly. Trading Post had. A. 10. Hour building for. It. So where the grocery store is. The families knew when the grocery truck grocery trucks didn't make it up here because there'd be certain areas or the shelves were just copy of the MP because they couldn't stock enough in that one grocery store to keep everything for weeks at a time so that week's grocery trip. For some reason didn't make it and that was 145 mile drive from the nearest supply. If you didn't make it year out of a lot of stuff.

Maintaining basic services like banking or mail delivery was difficult enough in the remote outpost of page but the greatest challenge was produced by the town's population itself. Page was a dramatic example of the post-war baby boom young construction workers had young families and there was a pressing need for schools. At first the first schools we went to a great big giant metal buildings and all three buildings housed every bit of a K through 3:12 and the town was up to about 8000 people and so that's a sizeable number of little kids going to school and three great big on air conditioning metal buildings unheated to in the wintertime. Permanent schools and churches were planned as the bridge linking Utah and Arizona was opened in 1959. The people of Paige Arizona felt they were one step away from carving a new tomorrow. Out of the last American frontier. Boy those are good people. Who seem like they all had kind of a pioneering spirit and you could kind

of. Hair kind of pull together work together. And then they were pulled apart. Yes I was made commissioner in May 1st 1959 and on July 1st 1959 the strike hit the Glen Canyon workforce. And the place was shut down completely for six months. The progress of page was a key issue. The dam contractor Mary Chapman Scott had been paying workers six dollars a day as a kind of hardship away from home subsistence bonus. In 1959. They wanted to end the payments because Paige had full services and could support workers and their families. The company had to cut costs if it was going to avoid a big loss because of its low bid rejecting what they viewed as a pay cut. The workers went out on strike in the post-war construction boom. Thousands of workers found jobs elsewhere.

I left them this time and went over and. Worked on a power plant or four corners for hours on public service. And. We we were lucky. A lot of people really hurt during that period of time that we we were fortunate. It was horrendous time. We the people that suffered the most of course were the new merchants that had moved into page and just getting established on borrowed money and all of a sudden the work force has evaporated. The people that they're relying on for their customers are gone and Paige became a ghost town. We had 10000 people an age. The store. Two weeks later they had to strike six month strike. And we went down to a thousand of the. People who were striking of course. And left their families. Some of them had youngsters need it most. So all during the strike we had to extend credit to those people. We went into quite a big indebtedness. During that time. Christmas season when this

was tried. And there was a fire. The strike was resolved just before Christmas 1959 with the dawn of a new decade. The town of page and the building of the Glen Canyon Dam would move ahead. If the town of page was about tomorrow. Activities further upstream in Grand Canyon in the last days of the 1950s were a race to salvage the past. Every time the government built a big dam. There were laws that said you had to salvage. The archaeology the history the ecology before the project was built. So the project was actually called technically the upper Colorado River Basin archaeological salvage project. Affectionately known as the Grand Canyon project. This just happened to be the biggest one that had ever been done at that time. This is sort of the fringe or the perimeter of the Anasazi cultures. The cliff dwellers as they used to be called the people who came into this whole country

into Monument Valley in the Colorado Plateau. And who beginning about 500 B.C. began to be farmers and they began to live in villages. And then the population went away for a while and then there was this big population explosion between about 900 eleven hundred eighty And that's when most of the archaeological sites that are in here were built. By 13:00. They were gone. So if your charge is to find everything that's here to evaluate it scientifically to stand salvage by excavation and other means in that sense then you first got to go find everything. And once you found it then you'd make some decisions about what further studies you're going to do. So we used what we use whatever transportation was was relevant we used boats on the river we used pack mules we use pack horses. We used foot leather. That's how we got in and out. I literally had never camped out I'd never I'd never run a motorboat any those sorts of things and here I was I was trained to do the

archaeology. But this was not in my game plan. Teams from the Museum of northern Arizona work the south side of the Colorado River while crews from the University of Utah worked the north. They were part of the single largest archaeological project staged in the United States to that time. And they were exposed firsthand to the power of Glen Canyon. I was in awe of the mood changes that you saw in the canyon the different lighting. Never did you see the canyon twice in the same mood the same coloration. It was always changing. It was. I think one of the most dynamic places that I have ever worked or that I have ever visited. The University of Utah crews were directed by anthropology professor Jesse Jennings a stickler for details and preparation. Jennings even insisted that morphine and death

certificates be part of the standard field out fit for his young team. And Jennings number one maxim by which he's famous. He was famous for was only fools have adventures. Only fools don't plan everything so that you can minimize any problem you might have particularly when you're in a potentially dangerous situation and this was a potentially very dangerous place in this country. It can rain 50 miles away and it's clear where you are in Allisons flash flood comes and the run off. Was of that magnitude where it would hit the cliff edge. And then come out over the cliff edge 10 15 20 feet in a spout the crews located hundreds of ancient sites ranging from entire walls of rock art to pottery tools and even sandals. Many times the young students were the first humans to enter an intact dwelling in 600 years.

They would be the first and the last. The sites would soon be underwater. We knew when the dam would be completed when filling would start. Yes we were very definitely aware that it would all come to an end in a short while. Young men on the river racing against time to salvage one thousand years of human history and the young man on the river racing against time to build the future. The secretary of interior and the last year is releasing the first 12 cubic yards of the wall for. The first bucket of concrete for the Glen Canyon Dam was poured on June 17th 1960. The cofferdam had allowed crews to dig down in the riverbed more than 100 feet to bedrock to start pouring the base of the dam. Glen Canyon now had the largest concrete plant of its time at work and crews

worked around the clock pouring what would eventually top out at more than five million yards of concrete before I was a pharmacist. I was an engineer. Lem Waialae was a construction superintendent for the Bureau of Reclamation. And every time I got to the new phase of construction he'd come up the drugstore and tell me close up storing it drive it down to see what was going on. On your concrete floor. But I just got in a whole lot of electric blanket. I had 40 electric blankets of all types. For the Christmas season. And we had a freeze. On it. The it dropped down to four below zero. Some of them while I came up bought every electric bike that I had to keep it going to freeze. But here was a more common enemy for the dam and its workers. In a summertime a really hot summertime be honored. Fifteen hundred twenty degrees and now in your welding. You just wouldn't have had dry clothes on.

The. Heat was such a problem for the hardening concrete that the concrete was mixed with ice rather than water to keep up with demand. The nation's largest ice plant was built next to the concrete plant. The workforce soon reached its peak of twenty five hundred workers and it continued to be dangerous work. Ray Watan was deep in the dam site welding shoulder to shoulder with another worker one afternoon when his foreman called him over. So I had to take my helmet off. We waited there and we walked over to the bar and climbed right over the wall and about that time a terrific blast hit and no Wellard I been working right next to you was killed into me. And quite a few more were down from shrapnel from the pipe and Chevrolet and they really preach safety but it was so so many things going on in such a small area. There was danger. 17 men would die during the

construction of the Glen Canyon Dam and the dam would continue to rise by 1963. After seven long years of construction it was also attracting new interest. Federal officials were sending out press releases promoting the future of recreation on a still invisible lake. I remember as a young reporter the superintendent was telling me how big this was going to be and I couldn't fathom how large it was going to be there more shoreline there he said than the entire West Coast of the United States. Nineteen hundred miles and I couldn't fathom that you're sitting in the middle of this desert and so being artsy and trying to get more by lions. I said this is a great photo opportunity here and so I took a picture of the back end of the motor boat with the motor in the foreground and these this desolate desert sage brush covered country with the caption in mind saying this is where there's going to be a boat marina someday. Speculators jumped in touting beachfront property in the heart of a desert.

And the Colorado River itself was alive with river running parties as hundreds of people flocked to Glen Canyon to get a final look before it disappeared. I was a scout and our scoutmaster had tied a trip down to the Rainbow Bridge have a very vivid memory of it I was very little but had a very strong memory reason this is it was a towering narrow canyon it was forbidding Canyon. And we hiked up it and he said it would take three or four hours to hike up to Rainbow Bridge. It was a Shangri-La for a little kid because there are there are waterfalls and pools and things we could play in and there were lizards and animals everywhere. The Scout-Master stopped at one point as we were playing in the water. And he said. Enjoy this because next year this is all going to be underwater. And I remember stopping and looking at him as someone else asked why are they going to put it under water and he said they're building a dam.

It sounded like dinosaur national monument all over again. Rainbow Bridge was a protected national monument. The enormous graceful arch of reclusive six miles away from the banks of the Colorado River. When the Glen Canyon Dam went online. Engineers expected water to fill the canyon leading to Rainbow Bridge and even feel in the base of the arch. Now and Adam an opponent of the Glen Canyon Dam David Brower raced to Washington in a last ditch effort to block the dam to keep water out of the national monument. But the Bureau of Reclamation Floyd dominate was working with just as much determination to ensure that water under rainbow bridge would not derail his dam. It was an epic confrontation between two men with sharply divergent views. And only one could prevail. In January of 1963 Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall sided with the Bureau of Reclamation and ordered the diversion tunnels on the dam

closed. The temporary cofferdam was pierced. River water rushed to the wall of the Glen Canyon Dam stopped and then started to slowly rise against the concrete. You know it's coming and it's coming. And you know it hurts to know that is coming it's going to destroy all these things and not until the water comes up and you see it coming up and destroying or covering everything that you felt are worth even a sacredness about it. And then it takes hold. And that was the toughest thing for me during getting it right. That water 1963 and 1964. It's tough to take because you could see the very same year you say the most in the world being taken away from me. I had seen I watched the water come up. I actually went back. I don't know how I did that. I went down and I watched the water slowly come up.

Into these places that it meant so much to me. And as I left the place and took a last look at it I turned around and I said I don't want to come back and watch. The flooding of Glen Canyon coincided with the culmination of the archaeological salvage project. Ten thousand artifacts have been pulled from their centuries old bed transported to museums in Flagstaff Arizona. And here at the University of Utah the work changed the way modern man looked at an ancient civilization. The artifacts are all in the University of Utah Natural History Museum

along with it's not just the artifacts artifacts without documentation don't mean anything. Artifacts with notes with photographs with maps with context are documents themselves their culture history. That's how you tell the story. The discoveries forced by the decision to flood Grand Canyon found a new resting spot. They are still used by researchers such as Duncan Medcalf who seek to add more pages to the history of the people who lived in Glen Canyon long ago. So their notes their photographs the maps they made and the artifacts that they collected are all here for study. In fact his sites are the ultimate in endangered species and it seems try to say but nobody's making 5000 year old sites anymore. Pottery and sandals and tools could be removed in the 1950s. But the dwellings in the rock art stayed behind. Slowly claimed by the waters that started rising behind the Glen Canyon Dam in 1963

I. Am. Proud. I am proud. Construction on the dam would continue for another three years. By the time first lady Lady Bird Johnson dedicated the dam in 1966 the reservoir was a dark blue sea behind the dam and backed up for nearly 200 miles filling the side canyons and the confluence with the escalatory and San Juan rivers. The first marina for boats was already in place and promotional photos demonstrated the new vacation potential of the area. Floyd Damani had offered the reservoir a new name Lake Powell. After the first explorer to navigate Glen Canyon nearly 100 years before the dam itself was hailed as one of the

engineering wonders of the world honored as the outstanding engineering project by the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1964 when critics of the Glen Canyon Dam published a book titled The place no one knew. The Bureau of Reclamation fired back with its own publication titled The Jewel of the Colorado. The book featured photographs and words from bureaux commissioner Floyd Dominey. There is a natural order in our universe. The book offered. God created both man and nature and man serves God. But nature serves man to have a deep blue lake where no lake was before seems to bring man closer to God. We flooded out the rattlesnakes and the prairie dogs and a few deer and a beaver too. That's all it was flooded out on island and a lot of beauty. But we created a lot more beauty. And made it available. Which it wasn't before.

Well we used to number the visitors here and hundreds and they were hikers and I had to be there were no other way to get in here. You would drive a vehicle to a certain point like to visit Rainbow Bridge and you'd park it and you'd hiked 16 miles into the canyons because again this was one of the most remote areas of the United States. We had relatively few people come in here. Today we number them in the millions. We feel that the economic impact to northern Arizona and Utah. When I say we had ads along with ersatz Tourism Council consider to be $500 dollars a year. And to those economies towns like page. And thanks for your time can add blinding you to the little towns around the perimeter of the lake. And the dam has delivered on another economic promise. Sales of electricity have paid the bills for the dam's construction and its operation and maintenance and in the process the dam has become its own tourist destination.

But the dams most important role may be its least understood function. Glen Canyon Dam is basically the largest piece of plumbing system on the Colorado River because it serves as a spigot to allow the upper basin states to release just that amount of water that they're legally required to under the Colorado River compact. And of course that amount that's added for the the treaty with the country of Mexico under the terms of the compact. The states have to guarantee deliverin 75 million acre feet of water in any rolling 10 year period to the lower basin states. If you have a drought at that particular point in time you may not have enough water to use within your own state like in Utah and make that delivery to the lower basin states by having Lake Powell in place. We have water and storage that we can draw down during drought periods.

It's an update of the age old story of water in the West. The rapid fire development of open spaces coupled with explosive growth in major cities guarantees that water will continue to drive the ever debated wheel of progress in the West. The demand for water is so keen that a few advocates even dare to challenge the Colorado River compact. Gene. That what some view is a near sacred agreement be rewritten. While some states consider selling or leasing their water rights to desperate neighbors. And since construction of the Grand Canyon Dam an entire generation of new environmental law has emerged. Water management once meant serving people insured building dams. But now there are mandates for protecting endangered species and sustaining the natural landscape. I'll demand a new brand of water management. The new era has torn up the original blueprint for the Bureau of Reclamation. Once

the powerful dam builder of the West the bureau is adjusting to a new role as a water steward. The days of massive water projects a fast track funding. Those days when there were no environmental considerations. Are gone. Now that's ridiculous. Under today's environment there's no way that you can. Build another project anywhere. Else drawing the new era into sharp focus. It's a small group of determined advocates who argue that Lake Powell should be drained and the Colorado River restored to its natural flow through Glen Canyon. Once the unthinkable their campaign has received the endorsement of the Sierra Club. The environmental group that refused to be a roadblock to building the Glen Canyon Dam more than 40 years ago. We've got to have. The developed water resource. We've got to have the hydro power resource. We've got to have the recreation value that regional economies depend

upon. We have to have a better way of managing all of that. For some measure of environmental sensitivity in today's world we would have located this dam. Through a process that would have been significantly different. With all that has changed one aspect of life in the West has remained constant from the days of John Wesley Powell. Water explains much of what has come before. And water will be at the heart of what happens next. The Glen Canyon Dam stands as a symbol for both past and future. On one hand a symbol for those who want to turn back the clock. Who remember what was. Then can have been a great lesson. How has the rape of Grand Canyon and. Lessons learned from that. Yet others view the dam as a symbol of the possible progress

of humankind reaching its potential in the American West. A young man. Not long ago said to me he said Are you a hero or villain. Based on your record as commissioner of Reclamation. Well I said I think I'm a hero or should be considered by you because you wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the development of the West. Sponsored by the Bureau of Reclamation. In 1957 a crossroads was reached in the West a point where past present and future would meet. Just as water stone and society would converge where much would be gained and much would be lost. The place was going. Where memories of the past would clash with visions of progress. Of Place in the West that could uniquely encourage both. Sides.

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