By Gary Topping–
To me, the thing that most makes Utah a great place to live is the fact that it lies at the intersection of three major geophysical provinces: the Rocky Mountains, the Great Basin and the Colorado Plateau. From my home at the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon (Rocky Mountains) I can see Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake (Great Basin). The Colorado Plateau is a bit more remote, but still just a few hours’ drive to the southeast. That means that within just a few minutes I can be at the beginning of a great hiking trail or up to my knees in a trout stream. A half hour or so will put me on the deck of my sailboat, rigging up for a run out to Crystal Bay or up to Antelope Island.
During my career as a historian, I have written books about two of those provinces: Glen Canyon and the San Juan Country (1997) and Great Salt Lake: An Anthology (2002). At this writing, following a prolonged drought, both are dying.
Like most people living in Salt Lake City, I ignored the lake for many years. Tourists all want to see it, to taste its heavy salinity, and perhaps to test its buoyancy with a brief swim. But for us natives, it never crosses our mind.
I vividly remember the day I discovered the lake. I was on Highway 89 returning from Ogden. At one point near Fruit Heights, the road, high on the shoreline of prehistoric Lake Bonneville, opens up a panoramic view of the entire Great Salt Lake. I was stunned by the vastness and beauty of it all. “Here we are,” I thought, “living next to one of the world’s great geological features, and we never give it a thought.” I resolved to do something about that. Over the next few years, I discovered that there is a wonderful body of historical literature about the lake, I bought a sailboat and began exploring the lake itself, and I even took part in an archaeological dig on the salt flats to recover artifacts from the disastrous Donner emigrant party of 1846. My book was an anthology of some of the more memorable writings about the lake, which I hoped would encourage my readers to explore and enjoy the lake as I had.
The Great Salt Lake is very shallow; I never saw thirty feet on my depth sounder, even at the lake’s deepest part along the western shore of Antelope Island. That means that even minor fluctuations in the water level have a major effect on the area covered by the water. And the lake level has fluctuated widely, even during my lifetime, from the high water of the early 1980s that threatened the railroad tracks and Interstate 80, to the diminished level as I write today, where the water level at the south shore marina entrance is knee deep and Antelope Island is no longer an island. Geologists report that there is evidence that the lake has dried up completely in prehistoric times, and it looks like we may be approaching that again. But geologists also assure us that there is a cycle to the lake’s ups and downs. It is, to my understanding, an erratic and unpredictable cycle, but a cycle nevertheless. We can count on resurrection; we just don’t know when.
At the same time the Great Salt Lake was spilling over its banks, so was the Colorado River, the setting for my Glen Canyon and the San Juan Country. At its peak, Bureau of Reclamation engineers at the Glen Canyon Dam had to erect plywood sheets at the top of the dam to hold back the climbing waters of the Lake Powell reservoir, while the same waters tore out the linings to the spillways that ran the electric power generators. Kevin Fedarko’s The Emerald Mile memorably narrates the fastest run of the Grand Canyon in history by the great boatman Kenton Grua that year. And now, as I write, the river is so low that engineers worry that there may not be enough water even to power those generators.
My interest in Glen Canyon began in the late 1970s while I processed the massive collection of papers of Harry Aleson, one of the pioneers of commercial river running. Over the next twenty years I met some of Harry’s friends and began exploring the literature of the canyon and the country itself, by Jeep, backpack, boat, and on horseback with the cowboys of the Lazy TY. My great tutor was Dick Sprang, Batman comic book artist and river companion of Aleson, with whom I spent a week each October at Hall’s Crossing and ventured out from there on my own explorations. It was “morning all day long,” as Dick put it, the greatest experience of my life.
My book was based on the hope that some of the millions of visitors to Lake Powell might be interested in what was down there, hundreds of feet below their houseboats. If few of them ever did develop such an interest, at least the book was there, and I derived the highest possible pleasure in researching and writing it. If I have a magnum opus, that’s it.
I should add that I never agreed with the so-called Glen Canyon Institute or the others, largely inspired by Edward Abbey’s The Monkey-Wrench Gang, who thought they could restore Glen Canyon by blowing up the dam or even by a gradual draw-down of the reservoir. Glen Canyon cannot be restored. All the prehistoric pictographs have washed off the rocks, all the cliff dwellings have dissolved away, and the inscriptions of historic visitors have eroded.
But was I wrong? With Lake Powell now at the lowest level ever, since the dam was first erected, magazines and newspapers now feature photographs of side canyons that have been inaccessible for years and geological features like natural arches that have long been submerged. Water engineers are starting to plan what the West might look like without Lake Powell. The stored water itself has never been used for anything but watering lawns in Page, Arizona, and the proposed Lake Powell Pipeline to transport Colorado River water to St. George, Utah now appears to be a dead issue because of the reservoir’s undependable level. Doing without the cheap and clean hydroelectric power is a knottier issue.
If, either by deliberate choice or by bowing to the inevitabilities of Nature, Lake Powell goes away, we will once again have A canyon, but it will not be Glen Canyon as it was. The historic human remains listed above are gone forever. The white “bathtub ring” along the canyon walls will take years to erode away. And in all likelihood, the once vast riverside beaches that made such wonderful campsites will become as choked by tamarisk as the similar beaches in Labyrinth and Stillwater Canyons on the Green River—the canyons most closely resembling old Glen Canyon.
Still, Glen Canyon reminds us that resurrection is possible. As we Christians believe that there is life after death, perhaps there is life after Lake Powell.
