Customer Reviews

The Colorado River Through Glen Canyon: Before Lake Powell

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Glen Canyon before Lake Powell is at once a beautiful and tragic book. It consists of a collection of photographs--mostly color--of the landscape now hidden beneath the eerie turquoise waters of Lake Powell, a vast man-made reservoir on the Colorado River near the Utah-Arizona border. Editor Eleanor Inskip has skillfully paired each photograph with quotations from those who knew Glen Canyon before the water began to rise on that fateful day in January 1963. Explorers, river runners, popular writers, archaeologists, historians, and environmentalists all find a voice in this extraordinary collection, but the work's greatest strength is nevertheless its images.

The book is neither strident nor moralizing in tone. Instead, a sense of quiet grief pervades. The photographs speak for themselves, as do the observations so eloquently captured in the accompanying quotations. In the end, the questions raised are unspoken but obvious: Who are we to decide the fate of an organism so alive and so vital as a river? What have we lost in our relentless quest for the "good life?" And can it in fact be a "good life" with the waters of the Colorado stilled? Inskip respects her readers enough to let them judge for themselves.

Admirers of Eliot Porter's famous The Place No One Knew, now out of print, will find this to be an appropriate companion volume. Very highly recommended.

I have been working for years now on my own book about the controversy surrounding Lake Powell and Glen Canyon, and out of all the things I've read and seen, and all the people I've talked with, nothing has made the case for Glen Canyon more clearly than this book right here. If you are familiar with Lake Powell, then you know might that Gregory Butte is a tall island in the middle of Lake Powell's Last Chance Bay. But, open this amazing book and you'll see that Gregory Butte was merely a single, amazing spire surrounded by miles and miles of twisting slickrock canyons and mesas all racing and swelling toward the butte in their center. Never before was I so aware of just how much is now underwater. It's almost unbelievable. This book is beautiful, but it is also depressing and enraging for the sad truths it reveals. It will show you one of the most gorgeous places you've ever seen, and then tell you that place no longer exists, and that you can never go there. I discovered this book in the stacks at UNM, and sat on the floor for hours until I had studied every page of it. I wouldn't argue with someone that gave it five stars, but I'm giving it four solely because the book's text left a little something to be desired. Some of the quotes are quotes that have been repeated in every book ever written about Glen Canyon, and many are from a certain female folksinger that I just find annoying.
That aside, this is an amazing book. True, it idealizes Glen Canyon as a place of untouched nature--when it also had Boy Scouts that killed snakes for fun, beaches strewn with unburied human waste, and mines that indiscriminately dumped radioactive piles of uranium tailings right by the river--but there WAS still an awful lot to wax poetic about. Get this book, get this book, get this book. If you are at all interested in this subject, get this book. Buy it no matter what the cost.

Through carefully chosen photographs and comments of people who experienced Glen Canyon before it was inundated by Lake Powell, Inskip presents a moving portrait of sinuous sandstone channels, lush microclimates, and the favorite beaches we will never again view.