The loss of Glen Canyon to Lake Powell grieves many
people deeply, including those too young to have known “the place
no one knew.” At 25, Provo, Utah, native Jared Farmer has known
only Lake Powell, the prized destination of a new generation. Yet
in his new book, Glen Canyon Dammed: Inventing Lake Powell
and the Canyon Country, he, too, longs for the canyon
below the water.
More personal than Russell
Martin’s A Story that Stands Like a Dam or
Philip Fradkin’s A River No More, and more
historical than Katie Lee’s All My Rivers Are
Gone and Bruce Berger’s There Was a
River, Farmer’s book is something new: an attempt at
reconciliation.
Farmer regrets Lake Powell, but
still appreciates those families whose annual vacation at Powell
has become the most important week of their
year.
He respects the rights of Page, Ariz.,
residents to their livelihoods, and he recognizes that draining the
reservoir would simply “replace one group of mourners with
another.” The reservoir’s mourners, he makes clear, would have the
advantage of numbers: Some 3 million people visit Lake Powell in a
year.
At the same time, Farmer does not shy away
from condemning out-of-control partying on the lake and the
ecological and archaeological destruction caused when water flooded
seven miles of river canyon.
The cast of
characters and events in Glen Canyon Dammed
includes river runner Norm Nevills, dentist-turned-author Zane
Grey, Mormon pioneers carving the Hole-in-the-Rock road to the
world’s most profitable gas station at Dangling Rope Marina; and
the “discovery” of the Rainbow Bridge and its current status as
lakeside attraction – trademark registered by concessionaire
Aramark.
The story is fittingly surreal – as
surreal as a huge blue lake in the middle of the Colorado
Plateau.
Now working on a Ph.D. in history at
Stanford University, Farmer wrote much of this book during the
summer of 1996, when he was an intern at High Country
News.
Doug Johnson studies geography at San Francisco State
University.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline A new generation comes to terms with Lake Powell.
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