Glen Canyon Dam

The sun seems to rise quickly here. At first just a thin bright orange band starkly outlining the buttes, mesas, and temples that surround us. Lake Powell is REALLY pretty early in the day. Within just a few minutes all is bathed in the suns warmth. I guess that’s how fast this giant rock that we’re flying through space on turns.

SAIL BOAT BEACHED AT LAKE POWELL

I sat watching. Enjoying my first cup of Costa Rican coffee and trying to fit the enormity of the Glen Canyon Dam into my tiny brain. Raising seven hundred and ten feet from it’s foundation it forms a lake that’s nearly two hundred miles long. As the tale goes the United States Geological Service surveyed the colorado river for more than two years looking for suitable places to block it. I imagine that as a pretty adventurous job because in the first half of the twentieth century this was one of the most remote places in the US.

They had to build the bridge across the gorge before they could start the dam because it was a two hundred mile drive just to get to the other side of the river when the construction began in the nineteen sixties. Then they had to divert the river around the dam site. Then they built a concrete plant on the fricking cliff walls. Then the engineers had to figure out how to keep the concrete from curing too fast in the summer months – shave ice was the solution…thank you Hawaii. So an ice plant had to be built on site…I’m not kidding. Apparently all that piled concrete generates a great deal of heat so the next problem was how to cool the dam thing (pun intended). Once they finally started pouring concrete it was three years of round the clock, nonstop pouring. Something like four hundred thousand giant buckets of concrete. The Glen Canyon dam is really a thing of staggering proportions.

Whether it should have happened or not…it did. And I think there’s a great deal of irony to be found in the fact that the National Park Service, which spends so much of it’s time trying to keep things in what they’ve decided is their “natural state”, is involved with the Glen Canyon dam. The stated mission of the dam is to provide water, power, and recreation…in that order. And I think that’s cool sounding government speak way of saying that we’re gonna try to make things happen where they otherwise couldn’t…or shouldn’t. It’s only been about fifty years since the dam thing (sorry, couldn’t resist) filled up, I wonder if all the negative effects have played out.