The River That Would Not Be Dammed

By Dustin Heron Urban

Last August, a day before I set out on my first trip down the Grand Canyon, I stood on the Glen Canyon Dam Bridge, peering through the diamond lattice created by a chain-link fence which some government official determined years ago was needed. Perhaps he realized that some of my generation would feel compelled to jump as they confronted the monolith which had stolen from them any opportunity of redemption in the wilderness of Glen Canyon. Thankfully the likes of David Brower and Martin Litton preserved for me the majesty of the Grand Canyon, but the dam before me lent a bitter-sweet tone to my first trip down the Grand.

The Glen Canyon and Hoover Dams are, however, not the first obstructions to hold back the flow of the mighty Colorado through the Grand Canyon region. No, over the past ten million years the Colorado has confronted and destroyed numerous obstructions, some much larger than our man-made dams. In this I take comfort when I despair over the fact that I may never have the opportunity to explore Glen Canyon in all its pristine and majestic beauty.

Today, according to the prevailing theory of how the Grand Canyon was formed, the first major dam in the region to be obliterated by water’s unrelenting erosive force stood just west of what is today the confluence of the Little Colorado and Colorado rivers.

According to Ron Redfern in Corridors of Time, at the end of the Cretaceous Era uplift began to raise the Kaibab Plateau, diverting the flow of Ancestral Colorado to the Southeast and eventually to the Gulf of Mexico. At the point of this diversion, a massive body of water by the name of Lake Bidahochi was formed. The Hualapai Drainage, meanwhile, flowed west off the Kaibab Plateau, its headwaters cutting ever-deeper with the Plateau’s continuing uplift to form what is today the western course of the Grand Canyon. Around five million years ago, the remaining rock separating the Hualapai and Ancestral Colorado drainages toppled, and the Lake Bidahochi emptied through the breach. The Ancestral Colorado River reversed the direction of its flow and became what is today the Little Colorado River drainage. This was the first major dam to topple in the Grand Canyon region.

Another was formed around a million years ago when a great lava dam blocked the Colorado in the vicinity of what is now Lava Falls, the most intense of the Canyon’s rapids. This dam was at least eight hundred feet tall, over three hundred feet taller than Glen Canyon Dam. It was one in a series of lava dams to form there, impounding the Colorado River as much as much as one hundred miles upstream. But these dams too would ultimately be overcome by the mighty Colorado, and today where a dam of at least eight hundred feet once stood, there remains only Lava Falls and Lower Lava rapid with a combined drop of only twenty seven feet.

It is easy for me to be bitter with those responsible for the destruction of Glen Canyon. But the mentality that produced Glen Canyon Dam is far from gone. It’s the same mindset that sees countless deep-green golf courses and private swimming pools as a good use of water in desert cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas. It’s the disconnect exhibited by my former classmates who consider hydropower a good, sustainable source of electricity. If we consider the power generated by Glen Canyon Dam to be sustainable, then I believe we need to seriously reevaluate our definition of that word. It is the spirituality of sixteen days in the Grand Canyon, the heart of the earth, which sustains me. And it was the profundity of Glen Canyon’s beauty that sustained Edward Abbey when he wrote in Desert Solitaire “Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.”

It’s hard to say when the Colorado River will overcome the obstruction that is Glen Canyon Dam. If by eco-terrorists in the tradition of The Monkey Wrench Gang, it may be sooner. If by the steady forces of sedimentation and erosion, it may be later. But if history teaches us anything, it is that the waters of the Colorado River will flow brown and free once again.