Glen Canyon Institute

History of Glen Canyon and the Glen Canyon Institute

As a boy I saw part of Glen Canyon. The reservoir behind Glen Canyon dam, now called Lake Powell, was only partly full. My scoutmaster took us up the tall narrow canyons leading to Rainbow Bridge. It was a boy’s dream come true. There were waterfalls, slides, huge rocks and pools everywhere. My scoutmaster stopped us at one point and said, "You better remember this now, because next year this will all be under water." I remember how stunned I was. I asked him why they were flooding this. He did not know.

Later, as a young adult, I floated over that same canyon and remembered what I had seen below. My heart ached. Then, year after year I would river raft down the Colorado River through what remained of Cataract Canyon and wondered each time why this wonderful canyon had been destroyed. It was not until the early 1990's that I began to study the issue and finally learn the perplexing politics that surrounded the building of Glen Canyon Dam. I founded the Glen Canyon Institute to educate others and examine the possibility of restoring this wondrous place.

The answer as to why the dam was built is as baffling as it is simple. Rivers have historically been divided into upper and lower water users. As water flows downstream, lower water users get "free" water. The Colorado River receives water from seven Western states. To allocate the Colorado River water "equitably," these seven states agreed to the Colorado River Compact in 1922. The states were divided into upper and lower basins, with Lee’s Ferry, Arizona selected as the arbitrary dividing point. To distribute water to the states as outlined in the Compact, the Bureau of Reclamation proposed the Colorado River Storage Project, called CRSP in the 1950s. A number of dams were to be built including ones in Echo Park, Split Mountain and Glen Canyon. Glen Canyon Dam was proposed so that exactly 7.5 million acre feet of water would flow downstream to "lower" water users.

The Sierra Club was the keystone in the fight against the two dams that were to be built in Dinosaur National Monument. These were the Echo Park and the Split Mountain dams. Headed by the articulate and powerful David Brower, the Sierra Club’s policy was that "no major scenic resource should be sacrificed for power generation." The Sierra Club fought hard to prevent these dams from being built. After all, thousands of people visited these areas each year. Hardly anyone had seen Glen Canyon. The battle seemed deadlocked. As a solution, environmental groups, including the Sierra Club agreed that their opposition for Glen Canyon dam and the Colorado River Storage Project as a whole would be withdrawn if the Echo and Split Mountain dams would not be built. With the opposition gone, Congress passed the bill in 1956, authorizing the CRSP, without the Echo Park and Split Mountain dams, but including the Glen Canyon dam.

So, despite geologists doubts about its design, hydrologists assurance that the water storage would be wasteful and power engineers' prediction that electricity could come cheaper from a longer lasting resource than from a short lived public power dam on the over engineered, silt laden beautiful Colorado river, Glen Canyon dam was built. With its rising waters, hundreds of thousands of acres of the most beautiful scenery in the world was destroyed, including over 3,000 Indian ruins and nearly 200 miles of the Colorado River.

In the last 40 years, dams have been built with reckless abandon along the Colorado River. Now, there are now some sixty dams clogging its oxbows and canyons, through the states of Colorado, Utah and Arizona. When the dams were built we did not know how destructive they would be downstream. Glen Canyon Dam inundated one of the most beautiful places on earth, but its destructive forces continue today. Decades of impoundment have reaped havoc on native flora and fauna, as well as the native animals. And the Colorado River delta is virtually destroyed where the river carries nothing but brackish remnants into the Sea of Cortez.

In the Spring of 1996, an attempt was made to mitigate the damage in the Grand Canyon. An artificial "flood" was released from the dam to mimic the high flows seen in Spring runoff. After one week of high water release, new beaches and backwater habitats were formed to provide safety for the endangered fish and plants. However, less than one year later, they are all gone - eaten away by the clear, sediment hungry river. The "flood" was a short term success, but now has proven to be a long term failure. Glen Canyon, where the river ran slowly, provided a habitat where fish and other animals could spawn and reproduce. So the only viable mechanism to provide for the preservation of the Grand Canyon is to let the river run free. In short, the endangered species of fish and plants in the Grand Canyon will forever vanish from the earth unless we drain Lake Powell.

In October of 1996, the Glen Canyon Institute invited to its annual meeting, leading scientists, engineers and Bureau of Reclamation officials to discuss the issue of draining Lake Powell. From that meeting it became clear that there were indeed many other reasons to drain the reservoir.

The lake is filling with sediment at an alarming rate. In perhaps as little as 120 years the reservoir will be filled to the point where the dam is non-functional. Lake Powell is a temporary reservoir.
The reservoir wastes to bank seepage and evaporation nearly one million acre feet annually, enough to supply Los Angeles with water for about one year or Salt Lake City for about five years.
The boaters on the reservoir put enough oil into the water every four years to equal one "Exxon-Valdez" oil spill.
Downstream destruction is harrowing. Glen Canyon Dam continues to destroy the ecosystems of regions from the Grand Canyon and all the way to the Sea of Cortez.

With this new data, we announced plans to seek a method to drain Lake Powell. Less than 2 weeks later, the board of directors of the Sierra Club followed suit and voted to "advocate the draining of the reservoir behind Glen Canyon Dam."

Thus, the Glen Canyon Institute, the Sierra Club, and other environmental groups have committed themselves to the restoration of the Colorado River system. We have begun an environmental assessment to provide the scientific basis for alternative uses of the Colorado River waters and to advocate the restoration of these damaged ecosystems. Past attempts at public environmental assessments have been hampered by decisions predicated by faulty logic, one where mitigation and enhancement are runners-up in a losers game. This new environmental assessment is providing a voice for the thousands of citizens who are willing to boldly challenge the status quo, those brave enough to envision a future built solidly on the restoration and investment, rather than the continued degradation of our natural heritage.

So we ask, do we have the right to destroy forever, many species of animals and plants when we have alternatives? Do we have the right to destroy places so beautiful as Glen Canyon when we don’t need to do so? There is still hope to restore what was the grandeur of Glen Canyon and to strengthen our commitment to preserving the health of the Grand Canyon and Sea of Cortez ecosystem. The benefits from our efforts will prove that there is more money to be made in conservation, more jobs, more wildlife and greater security in free-flowing rivers than in the outdated notions of conservation through impoundment.

As we near the end of the millennium we are afforded the opportunity to re-think our notions of progress and sustainability. All of the big western dams were built during a time when conservation meant storing resources for future use, at a time when consequences were not considered. The world we share today has revealed those consequences as we steadily grow beyond our limits. The vision of the Glen Canyon Institute is meant to be a ray of hope, a path that can illuminate the new thinking in conservation.

Bruce Berger wrote, "Remember things lost - in another generation, no one alive will have a personal memory of Glen Canyon. The once pulsating life of the canyon country is gone. To abolish such a place is not merely to destroy, it is to engage in collective amnesia. It becomes incumbent upon us to keep Glen Canyon alive if only as a wound that will not heal, to give us eyes and hearts, the precedent and the rage to defend what is left, and to restore what is gone." We need your support in this critical campaign to restore not only one of the finest canyons on this earth, but to inspire hope for the future.