BEAUTY LOST SYNOPSIS

GLEN CANYON BEFORE LAKE POWELL: Beauty Lost in the Southwest is a consummate view of the old and new Glen Canyon environs. The old refers to the canyon’s halcyon days and chaste habitat, and the new is the inclusion of the dam and the lake that inundated the interior and about two-thirds of its facade. Consequently, hundreds of peerless backcountry haunts were lost forever. The most celebrated of these idyllic alcoves, Cathedral in the Desert, is considered Glen Canyon’s best and most peerless treasure trove. 

The narrative of the book features a film-documentary of a 1959 rafting trip through Glen Canyon’s interior before these consequential changes came about. The rustic 8 mm movie was filmed by the acclaimed Grand Canyon author and hiker, George Steck. After meeting George, and later became good friends with the stalwart, long-legged trekker, I later inherited the movie, then reformatted the relic film into a VHS format. In time, that copy was reformatted into a DVD. He called the movie "Beauty Lost.”The subtitle of my book is also based on George’s historic movie, and I thought the epithet was suitable for the retelling of an old story, and with an objective explanation as fostered by proponents and opponents of the dam and lake project.

Composed of three parts, notably, the Before, During, and After phases, the informative chronicle of Beauty Lost reveals what happened to Glen Canyon starting in the late 1950s. The resulting and epic transformation from a canyon to dam facility and basin storage is known only by a relative few people today. It follows how most people are more familiar with the sprawling blue oasis flooded the canyon’s interior by an average of 625 feet (190 m), that is, when the lake was once that deep from the upper to lower sector. The descriptive account throughout the text relates a thorough and objective background of both Glen Canyon realms (i.e., the unadulterated habitat George Steck and his rafting party experienced and the aftermath that became an aquatic playground for tourists). Presented with this relatively fast changeover (i.e., about twenty-two years to create once the dam was in place), the literal cover-up of The Glen, as its environs were commonly referred to in that day, has always remained a topical and touchy environmental subject. Accordingly, diatribes and polemics fought by both sides of the Glen Canyon-Lake Powell issue continue to fuel this nagging controversy, especially, Lake Powell’s ongoing environmental problems (i.e., unstoppable aggradation caused by an endless in-flow of sediment contributed by three sediment-laden bodies of water––the Colorado, San Juan, and Escalante rivers). Naturally, these environmental problems also entail abrupt changes to the Grand Canyon’s interior due to the extremely low water temperatures caused by the dam (i.e., about 47º F/8.3º C).

As a working and fitting title, GLEN CANYON BEFORE LAKE POWELL states the theme of this work and comes down to the salient point how this gargantuan basin storage project was, in effect, the wrong damn place to build a dam. In fact, the environmental impact over the last few decades verifies this point. Not only is Lake Powell likened to an inland Dead Sea given the previously mentioned unstoppable silt accumulation, but also the ruinous changes wrought by Grand Canon’s riparian corridor due to the cold water released hundreds of feet below the crest of the massively high Glen Canyon Dam. Thus, Glen Canyon’s environs were indeed sacrificed and had become a contentious issue over the years. Today, the so-named Friends of Lake Powell, as well as those who oppose the lake argue to either preserve the status quo of the dam and basin storage or dismantle The Glen’s cement warden whose stunning structure was completed around 1966. Because Lake Powell is suffering from so-called basin constipation (i.e., aggradation), and because there are no viable or economic options to resolve this recurring problem, opponents of the dam hold the position the dam simply must go sooner or later. In short, returning Glen Canyon to its original appearance, and, therefore, the pristine habitat will, once again, be restored the way Nature had originally intended. Naturally, proponents think and feel the dam and the lake must remain status quo. Therefore, their side continues holding out and refuse to accept the proven thesis Lake Powell is steadily filling up with a gooey muck that will never go away, not as long as the Colorado River remains impounded. Given this fact, opponents have dubbed the basin storage, Lake Foul, now and forever. 

<<<255 pages 8.5 X 11 format>>>