Customer Reviews

The Place No One Knew - Glen Canyon on the Colorado

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I'm at something of a loss to explain why I've been so moved by a place I never saw and (barring visionary leadership and luck) never will. I was born about two years before the diversion tunnels closed in 1963. I, and most likely you, never had a chance to know what was there.

What was there was, quite simply, the most beautiful place in the world, and Eliot Porter's photographs make this abundantly clear. A calm Colorado River gently whisked travelers through nearly two hundred miles of Glen Canyon, past zebra-striped 2,000-foot walls and twisted domes and spires of bare rock. Dozens of old mining camps and thousands of Anasazi sites, pictographs and petroglyphs lined the banks. Hundreds of smaller side canyons branched from the river. Some opened into massive ampitheaters like Music Temple and Cathedral in the Desert. Others twisted and turned for miles into salmon-colored sandstone, the rock's convolutions hiding the sky from view. In spots you could span the width of a canyon 500 feet deep with your outstretched arms. These were canyons lush with moss and trees, watered by streams and springs and rich with wildlife - all in the heart of one of America's most forbidding regions, all accessible to anyone with a canoe or rubber raft and a week or two of extra time.

Now all of this is gone. The reservoir has inundated almost every scene portrayed in Porter's photographs with hundreds of feet of water and mud. A few pathetic fragments of the canyon's beauty and solitude remain along the northern edge of Escalante National Monument, but all of its most magical places have been obliterated beneath a faceless sump of oily water across which houseboats rumble and jetskis roar.

The NPS and Bureau of Reclamation harp upon the "improved accessibilty" afforded by the lake. They neglect to mention the inaccessibility of permanently submerged canyons and the financial cost of trying to explore Glen Canyon in its current lobotomized state. To leaf through this book is to know what we had - an incredibly beautiful place, of National Park caliber - and also to know that we threw it away for the sake of a few megawatts of electricity, a net annual loss of available water for downstream use and for the purpose of boosting gasoline and boat sales in Coconino County, Arizona.

Perhaps there's an emotional explanation for being haunted by a place I'll never see - an outraged sense of having been robbed.

I was expecting a reprint similar to the small-sized Ballantine issue of the late 1960s. I was surprised to receive a book almost as large as the original Sierra Club hardback! The color in several of the photographs is even better than in the original (and difficult to find/very expensive) book, thanks in part to the cooperation of the museum which received Porter's works as a bequest.

I got a copy of Eliot Porter's Glen Canyon book after reading Edward Abbey's "Desert Solitaire," a chapter of which is devoted to a downriver rafting trip along this stretch of the Colorado River just before the dam was built. While Abbey's descriptions are vivid, I wanted to see with my own eyes what he was describing. And Porter's camera is the closest you can get to doing that today.

His pictures are, of course, not the real thing, but they are about as breathtaking as photography can be. The colors, textures, reflections, and the play of light and shadow are wonderful, and each photograph is distinctly different. His own description of the canyon's display of color and light in the introductory essay "The Living Canyon" give an instructive insight into the eye of the photographer. His awareness of what he is looking at and his ways of choosing to look help the reader to see even more in the 80 photographs that follow.

While some of the photographs capture the monumental scale of the canyon walls and formations, many focus on the myriad surfaces that are revealed to the eye: erosion patterns, lichen, rippling water flow, the dark streaking mineral stains extending from seeps, the rough texture of weathered sandstone in glancing sunlight, smooth river stones, the layered stripes of exposed sediment, the trickling spread of water falling from overhead springs, the hanging tapestry coloration of the walls, whorled and striated rock, dry sand. There are also photographs of plants: moonflower, maidenhair fern, willow, tamarisk, redbud, columbine, cane. Above all, there is the rich array of colors, capturing a great variety of moods and attitudes.

Porter was recognized for his photography of birds, and while there are no birds visible in these photographs, his introductory essay makes mention of them, and when looked at with that awareness, many of the pictures also seem to capture a sense of "air space" for flight. Before turning to photography, Porter was a Harvard professor of biochemistry and bacteriology, and it's interesting to see the somewhat dispassionate eye of the scientist in the way he uses the camera. While the story of Glen Canyon may induce sorrow or anger, the photographs are strong for their lack of sentimentality.

The pictures also excite a curiosity about the geology of the river, and the book concludes with a short essay describing how the canyon walls reveal the geological ages that have gone into forming this part of the earth, going back millions of years. The book also includes a catalog of all the plants and animals that inhabited Glen Canyon before its inundation. Altogether, with its quotes from other writers, including Loren Eiseley, Joseph Wood Krutch, Wallace Stegner, and members of John Wesley Powell's expedition in the 19th century, this book is a fitting record of a great lost national treasure.

These photographs are just about all that is left of Glen Canyon. After the Sierra Club and other environmentalists had lost the battle to prevent the Glen Canyon River Dam from being built, Eliot Porter took this extraordinary series of photographs to memorialize the gorgeous area that has been lost forever. Few people at the time knew much about the Canyon. It was too remote, too difficult to get to. Although it was one of the areas that John Wesley Powell found most beautiful in his first expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers, no access roads or paths were ever built to make it possible for many people to view the areas firsthand. As a result, very few people knew precisely what we were about to lose.

The tragedy is that these areas are really, truly are gone. Even if the Glen Canyon River Dam were magically removed, many of the areas viewed in these gorgeous photographs have already been silted up. The Green and Colorado Rivers carry extreme quantities of minerals, and when the dam stops the flow to form a reservoir, they tend to drop to the bottom. All dams have a limited life. They don't last for as long as one might imagine. Basically, they create a new landmass behind them over the course of a century or so. Many of the spots photographed in these pictures are now solid earth.

One would hope that such beautiful photographs as these, photos that create tremendous longing for what we have already lost, would make us more concerned to preserve what is left. But with the current presidency even today as I write this review opening the national parks to snowmobiles and with people speculating that there will be new attempts to open arctic areas in Alaska to oil exploration, we can't assume that in the least. These photographs may end up being emblematic of all endangered areas, of the ongoing fragility of all of nature.

"The Place No One Knew" is the famous book that comes up anytime someone mentions the submersion of Glen Canyon. It was the Sierra Club's--and the environmental movement in general's--first major statement on the construction of Glen Canyon Dam, the flooding of Glen Canyon, and the filling of Lake Powell.
The book is a companion, or I should say the polar opposite, of "Lake Powell: Jewel of the Colorado," a book by Floyd Dominy, then Commisioner of the dam-building Bureau of Reclamation.
Both books are basically propaganda, though for seperate sides of the same issue; both feature scenic photos of a place, praising text, and pertinent quotes.
Glen Canyon was referred as to "the place no one knew" because its lack of national park status (and protection) was a major factor in its being inundated by the trapped water of the Colorado River. In actuality, a lot of people knew it--just not many with the Sierra Club. In fact, more people rafted through Glen Canyon a year than did through the Grand Canyon. C. Gregory Crampton wrote ten books about Glen Canyon before its demise, and liked to joke that THIS book should have been called "The Place the Sierra Club Didn't Know."
Which would have been more correct.
All that said, this book is a valuable historical document--for its role in the Glen Canyon controversy, and for its role in this century's environmental movement.
But it's not that good of a book. The photos are below average: many have a grainy, low quality-feel to them, and most of them are of very small things, and fail to give the true scope and grandeur of what Glen Canyon was. They are not Eliot Porter's best work, and some of the photos aren't even of Glen Canyon, but of other red rock from other places in Utah. (That's true, believe it or not, and it's well-documented.)
The quotes that accompany the photos are all right, but they're not amazing, they won't make you jump up.
A far, far better book featuring photos of Glen Canyon is Eleanor Inskip's "The Colorado River Through Glen Canyon: Before Lake Powell." Check it out.
And a far, far better collection of Eiliot Porter's is "Eliot Porter's Southwest." It's full of gorgeous black and white images from all over the Interior West.

I've hiked and traveled this country in recent years. I first traveled through it when a youth (19-1954), awed but not truly understanding what I was seeing. This book, along with Tad Nichols' ""Images of a Lost World" will drive home the point of what has been lost. It can't be recovered, even if the dam were to come down, or at a minimum, be drained, but these two books will make the argument for ending it and starting some sort of resurrection. If you look at these pictures you will understand the imperative.

Glen Canyon is a 200 mile stretch of the Colorado, full of pristine views, side tributaries, canyons, buttes, bluffs, sheer canyon walls of beauty leading from Utah to the Grand Canyon and the Glen Canyon Dam which was constructed in the 1950's and early sixties closed the dam gates in 1963 to fill Lake Powell, behind the Glen Canyon Dam, with water up to a hundred feet deep all through Glen Canyon... Eliot Porter, a well-known color landscape photographer of the day, was able to get in early and preserve the scenery in photographic images, and he was the very first color landscape photographer in the world so this book published in the mid 1960's is priceless, both from a historical perspective of his color techniques of color dye transfer using three negative plates per image, to the historical view of government's dam mandates, without regard to the destruction of nature or the cutting off of water to the Grand Canyon. This book Eliot Porter was instrumental in having published, and beauty of the images he created, resulted in a huge public uproar in the late 1960's, the 1970's and the 1980's over the public's furor that the dam had destroyed Glen Canyon, had been created without public consult and without public hearings. It took a full 20 years for Lake Powell behind the dam to become full, and birds and wildlife were dying in the Grand Canyon as their habitats needing water were destroyed. This book should be required reading for any Environmental topics course. Eliot Porter's fame grew, world-wide when this book was published. His color techniques were very advanced from any known to photographers of that decade. Very few photographers were using color dye transfer for color landscape photography as Ansel Adams and black and white photographs for landscapes was still the rage of the decade. No one believed color photography would last. When this book was published in the 1960's it sold for $3.95 USD, because the publishers didn't think people would like it. Read it... and be as awed with this photography as I was... it is a historical masterpiece by Eliot Porter and contains an Acknowledgment right after the Forward, by David Brower of the Sierra Club, dated March 14, 1963, Berkeley, California.
C. Gribble, student photographer, Napa Valley, California. 2011.

This not a book about photography and should not be purchased just for the "pictures". It is literally a memorial to the death of Glen Canyon. It is a reminder of our obligation to stay informed.

Glen Canyon Dam should never have been built and would never be built today. The American people would never stand for it. Ironically and sadly, it was the loss of Glen Canyon that inspired many to say, "Never again." When the Bureau of Reclamation attempted to follow Glen Canyon Dam with a series of dams down stream in the Grand Canyon, the agency met a solid wall of opposition. In ways, the river still flows free through the Grand Canyon because of the sacrifice that was made with Glen Canyon.

Even former staunch proponents of Glen Canyon Dam lived to regret their support. As late as 1974, Senator Barry Goldwater still felt the dam was an improvement over the untamed river. But by the mid-80s, he felt otherwise. In one interview, in fact, Goldwater lamented that if he could change just one Senate vote he'd cast in 30 years, it would have been his vote to approve construction of Glen Canyon Dam.

Sad.

I missed Glen Canyon by about five years. By the time I first visited the area in 1968, it was Lake Powell. I was eighteen years old and I thought the ultramarine lake spreading through all that red rock was pretty cool. Having been born and raised in Pennsylvania, I did not have the experience or imagination to realize that what had been submerged by the dam and the lake was much more beautiful, more extraordinary, more magical and mystical.

This book was part of my education. It's raison d'etre is 77 color plates taken by Eliot Porter during seven or eight trips to the Glen Canyon in the 1960's. Glorious as they are, they still comprise only feeble documentation of the beauty, magic, and mystery that was sacrificed to the then-prevailing mindset of re-shaping the earth via grand-scale technology in the name of amorphous Progress.

Even now, almost fifty years later, the photographs are worth a trip to the library or purchase of this book. The colors are rich and vibrant, sometimes seemingly psychedelic. The thoughts kept crossing my mind: "Do such images really exist on this planet?" (or, more properly in most cases, "Did they really exist once upon a time?"), and "What an incredible eye Porter had!"

But THE PLACE NO ONE KNEW is not perfect. The photos are on every other page, on the right-hand page of each two-page spread. On the facing left-hand page there is a quotation from such luminaries of the West and/or the conservation movement as Wallace Stegner, Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Loren Eiseley, and William O. Douglas. (My favorite is the one from Frank Waters borrowed for the title of this review.) If a reader were to come across these quoted passages in their original context, many would indeed be noteworthy. Isolated and then strung together, however, they have been politicized and commercialized and they become precious and sappy.

Also, for a book that purports to be a memorial of sorts to the now-defunct Glen Canyon, there are two odd things about the photos themselves. One is that some of the photos were taken OUTSIDE the area that was submerged. The other is that the photographs are so rich in color and many are so abstract (they are shot or cropped so that most are not obviously landscapes) that they have an otherworldly, almost timeless, immortal feel. While that is part of their grandeur and beauty, as a group they don't have the elegiac feel of the black-and-white photos of Tad Nichols, as published in "Glen Canyon: Images of a Lost World." Thus, in the end, the book seems at bottom to be a collection of "art" photographs (not documentary photographs) assembled and marketed under a political conservationist banner.

The Glen Canyon dam flooded possibly the most amazing stretch of the Colorado River. This book is a monument to "things lost." The photographs and text of places now under water are haunting in the least. I highly recomment it if you are at all interested in the American Southwest in general and the Colorado River region specifically.