September 2-Stone Creek

Part II of Glen Canyon by Jay:

The lake behind Glen Canyon Dam began to fill in 1963.  Eventually the rising waters drowned the last thirty-five miles of Cataract Canyon, hundreds of Anasazi ruins, and countless grottoes, stone bridges and natural auditoriums like Music Temple, where Walter Powell sang “Old Shady” for Powell’s crew.  The few environmentalists who had seen Glen Canyon cursed the dam.  “To grasp the nature of the crime that was committed,” wrote Edward Abbey, “imagine the Taj Mahal or Chartres Cathedral buried in mud until only the spires remain visible.”

            It happened, perhaps, because Glen Canyon had no constituency.  Only a tiny number of people ever saw what Powell and his men had seen.  Eliot Porter was one of the last.  The Sierra Club published a book of his photographs as a kind of canyon epitaph; the book bore the apt title The Place No One Knew.

            The much-praised, much reviled lake formed by the dam is named Lake Powell.  It is perhaps a tribute to Powell’s tangled character that his admirers cannot agree on whether this is an honor or a desecration.  Those admirers, moreover, have nothing by Powell in common; though they share a hero, they can barely refer to one another without spitting in contempt.  Edward Abbey, for instanced, placed Powell high in his pantheon and advocated the bombing of the Glen Canyon Dam.  “Probably no man-made artifact in all of human history has been hated as much, by so many, for so long, as Glen Canyon Dam,” Abbey wrote. 

But the Bureau of Reclamation, which built the dam, bestowed Powell’s name on the lake as the highest tribute it could offer.

Jay-Follow Saint! Don't go left at Bedrock!

Darn Deubendorff, lucky us. We get to camp on a great beach, with a creek for water and warm waterfall for bathing. We are sharing camp with the NPS archeologists who hitched a ride with us at Crystal.

(Big day for rapids and wet pour-overs – Florester, Fossil, 128 mile, Specter.  Greg’s book by Lindemann has pencil drawings of the preferred routes through some of the rapids.  They have been very helpful to us!  Saw desert big horn sheep today before lunch on the rocky peninsulas and in the canyons of black schist.  Salli helped with high sides with her and Jay through Bedrock Rapid.  Dubendorf – sorry, Dave, but you helped us to choose to stay at Stone Creek that night! 100 miles left!)