The Lost World Of Glen Canyon

I feel as though I’m traveling back through time as I round yet another bend in Davis Gulch, a tributary of the Escalante River in southern Utah. I’m descending deeper and deeper into a red-rock labyrinth, which hasn’t seen the light of day for more than 30 years. Each new twist in the canyon walls reveals a succession of plant communities quickly reclaiming the newly exposed ground. Submerged beneath 60 feet of Lake Powell water just five years ago, the small clear stream at my feet now gurgles beneath a profusion of willows and eight-foot-tall cottonwood trees swaying in the breeze. Before making this trip, I had visions of a muddy slog through silt-clogged, tamarisk-choked canyon bottoms.

But now, my main impression is one of amazement as I witness this canyon quickly recovering its former natural diversity and beauty as the waters of Lake Powell drain away.

Lake Powell was created by the construction of Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River just across the Utah border in Arizona in the early ’60s. As the roiling waters of the Colorado River began to pool at the base of the cofferdam, they began to back up into the magnificent water-sculpted tributaries of Glen Canyon.

When the Bureau of Reclamation announced its plans in the early ’50s to install a 10-million-ton concrete plug across the river, everyone who knew the hidden secrets of the place was shocked, horrified and unable to comprehend the fact that this marvelous landscape they had come to love was about to be lost “forever.” Photographers such as Phillip Hyde, Eliot Porter and Tad Nichols worked feverishly to record the canyons on film before they were inundated by the new reservoir. My first impressions of Lake Powell came from the deck of a houseboat in the early ’80s. Sheer red sandstone walls rose vertically out of the impossibly blue water. At that point in time, I had very little knowledge of the wonders that lay beneath our boat as we chugged along. I had first arrived in Utah back in 1972 while the reservoir was still filling, and infatuated with the high country of the West, I didn’t discover the canyons of the Colorado Plateau until several years later when the reservoir was nearly full.

As my obsession with the canyonlands of Utah evolved, I began to understand just what had been lost beneath the deep waters of Lake Powell. By the mid-’90s, I had explored every major canyon system in southern Utah. As magnificent as these places were, I felt as though I had been denied the prize, robbed of the chance to ever gaze with my own eyes upon the wonders of Glen Canyon.

I sought out photographs and stories of Glen Canyon in books such as The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado by Eliot Porter, published in the early ’60s in an attempt to rouse a nation’s attention as to what was about to be sacrificed in the name of “progress.” This beautiful book contained page after page of images of the doomed canyons. There were places with names like Music Temple because of the wonderful acoustics provided by its huge subterranean chamber; Hidden Passage, due to its almost invisible entrance where it drained into the Colorado River; and Twilight Canyon, which was so deep and narrow that harsh noonday light was reduced to a soft evening glow in its depths.

But the most magical place, it seemed, was a place called Cathedral in the Desert, located along a tributary of the lower Escalante River. This deep subterranean chamber of stone was regarded by people who had explored Glen Canyon before the dam as perhaps the most glorious single location in all of Glen.

Longtime friend Maxine Bounous had hiked into Cathedral before the lake inundated it. She once told me that Cathedral was located a short walk off the lower Escalante River along a beautiful, wildflower-lined stream. She said the initial reaction of nearly everyone who rounded that last bend in the canyon and suddenly found themselves staring into its glowing chamber was one of hushed silence followed by a rush of words, trying in vain to describe what lay before them. As she completed her story, tears began to well in her eyes.