The Undoing of a Dam
Nearly four decades ago, the dispute over the building of Glen Canyon Dam ushered in the environmental movement. Now, amid a flood of controversy, Congress is asking if the dam was just a big mistake.

Story by Michael DiLeo
Photography by Nathan Bilow

We are small, and the dam is big, that much is clear.Twenty-two of us sit quietly in our Wilderness River Adventures boat, awaiting our float trip, unable to resist staring up at the sheer arcing wall of Glen Canyon Dam, which holds us for the moment in its shadow.

Everything in the slick-rock country of northern Arizona seems grand in scale – the expansive sky, the deep, forbidding canyons, the great silence – but from where we sit, nothing can match the dam. Nearly 600 feet high, it looks alternately majestic, a symbol of man’s triumph over the harshest environment, and absurd, as if the artist Christo had bone berserk with new materials, creating by accident a terrible permanence. Behind the dam lies Lake Powell, 186 miles long, the second largest man-made lake in the United States. It, too, is a funny mix of awesome accomplishment and intense strangeness. Driving up from the south toward Page, you see the shimmer of the lake first, an impossibly blue glow in this red-rock desert.

We are bound on this spring day for Lee’s Ferry, fifteen miles away, where Glen Canyon turns into Marble Canyon, which in turn becomes the Grand Canyon a few miles farther down river. For your typical Grand Canyon white-water trip, Lee’s Ferry is mile 0, the put-in point, but this slightly misnamed wilderness River Adventure is a tamer effort, designed for the casual tourist trying for a taste of the canyon float. We will see no white water, and our boat is a grand hunk of fiberglass and rubber pontoons that looks virtually untippable.

Although my companions on this float trip – families from Florida, Massachusetts, and California, a couple from new York celebrating their anniversary, two coeds from Holland – are not hard-core environmentalists, and few are aware of the controversy surrounding the dam, most everyone aboard has heard about The Flood. For some years, scientists and river runners in the Grand Canyon have been reporting major ecological problems downstream from Glen Canyon Dam – loss of beach sand along the Colorado riverbanks and the curious disappearance of native fish species. Last year, the Bureau of Reclamation conducted an unprecedented experiment, an artificial flood, as a possible cure for these problems.

Before the float trip, I met with ecologist Dave Wegner, who probably knows more about this dam, this river, and these issues than anyone. From 1982 until last year, Wegner served as chief environmental scientist for the Bureau of Reclamation in this region, manager of the Glen Canyon Environmental Studies project, and lead coordinator of The Flood. I wanted to know what to look for in the river, how to sense, in some concrete way, the problems in the local ecology.

See the water, Wegner said. That’s how you’ll know. The Colorado River here is limpid green, which seems right, but as Wegner explained, it’s all wrong for this rimrock desert land. Five million years before the construction of Glen Canyon Dam in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Colorado ran reddish-brown, burnt sienna. A Spanish Franciscan missionary named it in the 1700s for its characteristic coloration (or discoloration): Suffused with silt, the river was truly colorado. "Too thick to drink," the Mormon settles are alleged to have said upon seeing it, "and too thin to plow." Not anymore. All the sand piles up behind the dam, and the clear water allows the growth of Cladophora algae, lending the greenish tint.

Feel the water, Wegner said. An arm reached into the green river turns instantly numb. A bone-chilling, interstellar cold. Up above us, the desert sun fires up the canyon, bright and clean. Another anomaly, a mismatch of the primal kind: The water should be warmer here by this time of year. A man from New York asks the river guide what the water temperature is. "Forty-eight degrees," the guide answers. "If you fall in, get out fast; you can only survive about three minutes."

The man wonders how warm it gets by midsummer. "Forty-nine degrees," says the guide. The man looks perplexed. That can’t be right. But it is. Pre-dam, the river would reach a balmy seventy degrees by July. Now, emerging from 245 feet beneath the surface of lake Powell, it remains between forty-five and fifty degrees all year.
When we pull away from the dam at last, we are drawn into the silence of the canyon, hypnotized by the vermilion walls, the cinnamon fractals of the Navajo sandstone, a crenellated fortress shellacked with black desert varnish, looming into infinity. After a while, the boat slips over to the canyon wall, where a stream of clear water pours from a crack in the sandstone. We take turns sticking our heads under the frigid flow, a desert shower. Although we are miles below the dam, this is lake Powell water that has somehow slipped around the dam and traveled through the canyon walls, so porous and fissured and mysterious is this rock. While we’re stopped, a few of the men, goaded by our guide, dive into the icy water to demonstrate machismo. They are back out in seconds, roaring, their chests red. The Dutch girls giggle. Mission accomplished.

We glide past several groups of anglers, in up to their hip waders, casting in the shade of tamarisk trees. It is a charming Norman Rockwell-in-the-Rockies tableau, trout fishing in America. And yet it is as wrong – in Dave Wegner’s terms – as the color and the coldness. The fishermen are after rainbow trout, a nonnative species introduced by the US Fish & Wildlife Service in the 1960s, which have thrived in the clear, cold water in the metamorphosed Colorado. Now, the lee’s ferry area has become a renowned trophy-trout fishery.

Meanwhile, the native fishes of the Grand Canyon region have been dying off. Of the eight known native species, four have become extinct since the dam was built, and one more, the razorback sucker, is down to a few remaining members. Meant to spawn in the warm, silty waters of summer, the native fish are out of their element, awaiting a season that never arrives anymore in the programmatic green clarity of the river below the dam. Of the larger fish, only the humpback chub has persisted, able somehow to make it up the Little Colorado tributary to spawn. Wegner says he expects it is only a matter of time before two more species, the speckled dace and bluehead sucker, are gone as well.
But who cares about a few funny-looking fish? This is America, the trout are biting, the water is clear, the sun is shining. The Dutch coeds dip their long legs over the side. The river guide draws us into a game of describing the images we see in shaded patterns of rock on the canyon walls. It’s a beautiful day in the heart of the country. Who cares what color the river, what name the fish?

Still boyish-looking at forty-five, Dave Wegner talks like a scientist, but beneath the technocrat lingo beats the heart of a true desert rat. Wegner was a bureau biologist in 1982 when James Watt, then-interior secretary, appointed him to lead an investigation into the effects of Glen Canyon Dam on the downstream environment. "Watt was thinking he could give the project to an engineer and it would get done," Wegner recalls, "or he could give it to a scientist and it would never get done. So he gave it to a scientist. He warned me, ‘Don’t give us a report that will force us to change the way we operate the dam.’ He just wanted to get the ‘enviros’ off his back."
As fate would have it, the following year was an unusual one in the canyon country. In June 1983, a sudden melting of winter snowpack threatened to overfill Lake Powell, forcing the bureau to release water rapidly, at flood-level rates of up to 92,500 cubic feet per second. This was the first time the giant spillways, drain tunnels carved into the canyon walls alongside the dam, had been used, and bureau scientists were surprised to see the river turn red with material eroded from the rock walls. For a time, engineers feared the dam might collapse.


After the deluge, though, river guides reported that formerly shriveled beaches were carpeted with fresh sand; the river was looking more like itself. A light bulb lit up in Dave Wegner’s head, a strange, counterintuitive, heretical thought: Flood is good.

Eventually, Wegner and others began to lobby the bureau to conduct an intentional flood, an experiment in silt moving. "Everyone said there was no way we’d ever do it," Wegner remembers, "because the political, legislative, and legal problems were overwhelming."

For more than a decade, Wegner and other scientists studied the river, compiled data, pushed for action. Finally, with President Clinton’s appointment of Bruce Babbitt as interior secretary, Wegner had a receptive ear, and a new ecospirit had infiltrated the bureau, the very agency that once built all the country’s great dams. Finally, on March 26, 1996, Babbitt himself spun a wheel opening the penstocks of the dam, raising the flow rate to 45,000 cubic feet per second, more than two times normal (although less than half that of the ’83 flood), sending an increase of water down the Colorado. It was a historic moment, the first intentional flooding of a major river for environmental purposes.

The initial results of the flood seemed to be a smashing success. Of the 100 beaches tracked by bureau scientists, about fifty percent were enlarged by the flood. Little damage was found to fish or vegetation. Babbitt said it "worked brilliantly," and Wegner was quoted as saying he was "elated" with the results.

In private, though, Wegner harbored other, more complicated thoughts. While some may have seen the test flood as an end point, he says he saw it only as a kind of "Band-Aid." After fourteen years of study, more than 150 scientific experiments, he had come to the conclusion that there was only one way to save the ecosystem of the Grand Canyon. What was needed was to drain Lake Powell.

Drain Lake Powell? The idea rings out like a rock slide in an empty canyon with its very implausibility. Over the succeeding months, though, events conspired to strengthen Wegner’s resolve. First, early research showed that eighty percent of the newly created beaches had washed away during the first winter. Then, in November 1996, the Sierra Club board of directors voted to call for the draining of the lake. Wegner had company. In a way, the Great Fake Flood of ’96 had been like the first crack in another kind of dam, one that held back long-buried resentment of nature lovers toward Glen Canyon Dam itself.

Meanwhile, Babbitt decided to turn the team of scientists that Wegner had headed into an independent agency, the Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center, to oversee future artificial floods and recommend changes in dam operation. Instead of a job there, though, Wegner was offered reassignment at the Fresno or Sacramento offices of the bureau. Wegner chose to leave his job of twenty-two years and stay in the country he loved, opening a small environmental consulting firm, Ecosystems Management International, in Flagstaff, nurturing his principles and his bold idea.

Our float trip stops for lunch on a sandy beach, which is itself a kind of endangered species here in the canyon; some forty-five percent of the beaches have been worn away since the dam was built. After eating, we hike through the ubiquitous riparian habitat, past prickly pear cactus and wildflowers, to visit some Anasazi petroglyphs, ancient Indian paintings on the canyon wall. There is a sense of history here, a powerful preservation of what has gone before.

It is not just pre-Colombian history that stalks Glen Canyon, though, but something more recent, as well. If there is a holy land, a "Ganges," as one writer put it, for the American environmental movement, it is here in Glen Canyon. As longtime Sierra Club president David Brower once wrote, "The building of Glen Canyon Dam ushered in the modern environmental movement."

In the 1950s, the ecology movement was in its infancy when some of its leading voices were faced with a difficult choice. The Bureau of Reclamation wanted to build the Glen Canyon Dam, as well as several others on the Colorado, most notably the Echo Park project, which would have flooded Colorado’s Dinosaur National Monument. Brower and others agreed to a deal with the government not to oppose the Glen Canyon project in exchange for a rule that would forbid dambuilding in a national park (like the Grand Canyon) or national monument (such as Dinosaur).

At the time, Glen Canyon, the place, was not very well known. Soon after he made the deal, though, Brower began to learn of the canyon’s charms from novelist Wallace Stegner, who told him, "Strictly between us, Dinosaur doesn’t hold a candle to Glen," and from photographer Eliot Porter, whose 1963 coffee table book, The Place No One Knew, is a haunting elegy to a buried treasure. It was too late to save the canyon, though, and as Brower explained in Sierra magazine earlier this year, feelings of regret have haunted him: "I have worn sackcloth and ashes ever since, convinced that I could have saved the place if I had simply got off my duff."

Five years after Lake Powell was filled, Edward Abbey’s book Desert Solitaire appeared, in which he describes a last float trip taken through Glen before the dam was completed, and fantasizes about a cataclysmic explosion to free the river once again. Then in 1976, Abbey came out with The Monkey Wrench Gang, a novel about a group of river rafters who convert to ecoterrorism and plan the destruction of Glen Canyon Dam. These two books inspired the more militant wings of the environmental movement in the 1970s, including the group Earth First!, which debuted by lowering a 300-foot-long piece of plastic down the dam’s wall to simulate a fatal crack.

For the more mild-mannered and hardcore alike, Glen Canyon Dam has always been a symbol, tantamount to France’s Vichy regime, of the failure of appeasement and compromise. When the talk of lake-draining resounds, you can almost hear Abbey’s ghost returning to haunt the slick rock country again.

A low water year in 1992 exposed parts of the canyon for a time and these appeared undamaged. The Glen Canyon Institute, a private citizens group of which Wegner is vice-president, estimates that the riparian zone along the riverbanks would restore itself in twenty years, and it would take up to three decades or more for the white bathtub ring of the lake level to weather away. Still there would be enormous technical challenges, including silt removal from the upper canyon, and the daunting problem of creating a passage for the river through or around the dam.

The legal and political challenges are even more imposing, although the climate is certainly improving for such a step. The Grand Canyon Protection Act of 1992 requires that environmental considerations be taken into account in the operation of Glen Canyon Dam. "That was a huge step, administratively and psychologically," Wegner says, which, in his mind, can lead to only one conclusion: "We need to let the system start to heal itself, and to heal itself, it needs to be turned back into a river again." Wegner says the logic of the Grand Canyon Protection Act might ultimately be extended to dismantle other dams, as well. "There are dams all over the world that are nearing the end of their useful lives," he says. "We need to start looking at what happens next."

Glen Canyon Dam might be a good place to begin because it serves less critical functions than some other large dams. It is not, for example, strictly speaking, a water delivery project. The only immediate water use is a small amount going to the local community of Page, Arizona. Instead, the dam holds the water to protect the rights of what are called the Upper Basin states, such as Utah and Colorado, against the thirstier Lower Basin states, like Nevada and California, and to guarantee water supplies from downstream Lake Mead in low water years. The dam also provides electrical power to small power companies throughout the Southwest, the sale of which earns the US government about $100 million per year. If Lake Powell were drained, utility bills would probably go up slightly in the region.

All the costs of draining the lake could possibly be offset, though, by water savings. The bureau’s own data shows that Lake Powell lost nearly a million acre feet of water in 1996 to evaporation and seepage, an amount of water that the drain –the-lake advocates argue would be worth $435 million in the Salt Lake City area, or more than $1 billion at California prices.

Perhaps the most powerful opponents to draining Powell are the lake lovers, the houseboaters, water skiers, and fishermen. Edward Abbey always ridiculed Lake Powell, calling it a "drag strip for powerboaters," an "enormous silt trap and evaporation tank" that brought "dishonor [to] the memory, spirit, and vision of Major John Wesley Powell," the legendary explorer of the river. But in truth, the dam also created one of the most heavily used pieces of real estate in the southwestern United States, with some 2.5 million visitors each year, outdrawing even Yellowstone National Park.

The attraction is accessible water, a kind of oxymoron in the canyon lands. "There are claims of a major recreational boom if we drained Lake Powell and people could revisit Glen Canyon," says a skeptical Rick Gold, assistant regional director of the Bureau of Reclamation in Salt Lake City. "But if you compare the number of recreational days above and below the dam, you’ll find there are whole orders of magnitude difference. It doesn’t make any sense to give serious consideration to draining Lake Powell."

We are large now, and the dam is small, far behind us, hidden by Glen Canyon’s curtains of stone, by the river’s dozen meanders. The Grand Canyon is just downstream.

It seems that we’ve reached Lee’s Ferry all too soon, just when our sunbaked brains have begun to throb to the rhythm of the river. "In our country, everything is just flat," one of the Dutch girls says. "To see something like this is incredible."

Even in this dreamy, river-opiated state, I can’t shake the vision Dave Wegner put in my head, of a different river, truly Colorado, muddy with life, running free again, dynamic, variable; and of a Glen Canyon reborn, rising out of the silty bottom of the lake. The controversy surrounding the dam seems suddenly to be less about endangered fish, and more about the imperiled soul of the American West – a search for redemption in our relationship with the natural world.

We board a yellow bus to drive back to Page. On the way, the bus driver points out a small tributary river emptying into the main canyon, a slender stream of creamy cocoa, a child’s spill trickling into the great greenness of the Colorado. It is the Paria River, coming down from Bryce Canyon in southern Utah. "As you will notice," the driver announces, "the muddy waters of the Paria have turned that beautiful crystal-clear water you were riding on a little bit murky."

This kind of thinking drives Dave Wegner to distraction. It’s not an easy subject, he knows, this dam stuff: Flood is good; mud is good. Dirt is blood; water is red. Trout are out; chubs are in. At the same time, though, Wegner finds hope in the very hubbub over the dam. Our squalling and fussing, including the acrimonious Congressional hearings that began in late September on the drain-the-lake proposal, all our diverse points of view, just prove that the system of human interaction is not so different from the natural system of the canyon lands. Both are dynamic and variable, able to thrive, we can hope, on a certain amount of disturbance.

Michael DiLeo, a freelance writer in Austin, Texas, writes for Texas Monthly and other national magazines. Nathan Bilow specializes in travel, adventure and sports photography. His work has been published worldwide over the past twenty years.