Former Senator Sam Nunn, who before his retirement was probably the most respected man in government on the subject of national defense, has recently stated that the single biggest risk to our national security is the continued existence of the thousands of tactical nuclear weapons in the former Soviet arsenal, many of them located in or near an area of the world where racial and religious tensions are dangerously enflamed. On a recent edition of "Sixty Minutes" (September 7, 1997), Russian General Alexander Lebed, President Yeltsin's former national security advisor, revealed that over 100 atomic demolition munitions are missing from the arsenal. Glen Canyon takes this very real situation and expands upon it.
In the wake of Oklahoma City, Glen Canyon takes a close look at why persons could get so frustrated with the corruption in our federal government and the public's nearly total exclusion from the decision making in Washington that they might actually do the unthinkable. And such action might not be confined to back woods militia zealots. With the remaining precious natural places on our earth still being sacrificed for the greed and short term profit of the very few, even "normal" people can be driven to act.
In 1983 Nature came close to removing the dam Herself by means of a late spring flood when the reservoir was full. A great deal of misinformation exists in the public mind about what actually happened at the dam and just how close the Bureau of Reclamation came to losing one of its flagship plumbing jobs. Extensive research at the Bureau's headquarters in Denver, including interviews with the involved engineers, resulted in the book's clear description of just what happened and how the damage was repaired. Glen Canyon includes a collection of previously unpublished Bureau of Reclamation photographs that document the near disaster.
Following the 1983 event, the Bureau belatedly commissioned a study to determine just how large a flood actually could occur in the 108,000-square-mile Upper Basin of the Colorado River. In its 1990 report, Morrison-Knudsen Engineers determined that a massive flood would occur if an Eastern Pacific tropical cyclone came ashore and penetrated into the intermountain region, assisted by the presence of a 500 millibar low in the Colorado River's Upper Basin, an event that regularly occurs. With the largest El Nio event on record now occurring in the Eastern Pacific, recent Hurricane Linda, which at one point carried winds of 225 mph, demonstrated that the Morrison Knudsen projection is certainly not far fetched. Glen Canyon takes the next step from what Nature actually demonstrated in 1997.
Book sale proceeds: The publisher will donate a portion of the net proceeds from the sales of this book to the effort to overcome the Utah congressional delegation's campaign to sell off the last unsullied area in the contiguous United States. The only way to protect this area in Southern Utah is through the creation of the proposed 5.7 million acre Redrocks Wilderness.
Included photographs: The photographs of predambrian Glen Canyon are from the collection of Mr. E. Tad Nichols of Tucson. They have remained unpublished until now, as have most of the photographs that the author extracted from the archives of the Bureau of Reclamation in Boulder (NV), Salt Lake, Page, and Denver.
Although Glen Canyon and its river-the Pisisvayu of the Hisatsinom (Kayenta Anasazi)-have been lost for the time being, the author's catharsis in writing this story may be shared by others who have waited for a satisfying ending to Cactus Ed's fantasy that began in 1975. Who knows? With sufficient public input, the Bureau of Reclamation may yet remove Glen Canyon Dam. A small group in the Bureau's Denver headquarters has actually been studying such things since an Interior Secretary a number of years ago suggested that San Francisco's reservoir in Yosemite's Hetch Hetchy Valley should be removed. And as a result of the back-fired Congressional hearing conducted by Rep. Jim Hansen (R+, UT) in September 1997 on the Sierra Club proposal to breach Glen Canyon Dam, a whole lot more people are now aware of the reasons why 186 miles of Glen Canyon as well as the 240 miles of river below the dam through Grand Canyon National Park should be restored.
