Glen Canyon Revealed
hcn.org
hcn.org
Also lets not forget the classic Desert Solitaire [1]. It too is well written and very interesting, in the book they take small inflatable boats and just float down Glen Canyon not long before it gets flooded.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15803144-the-emerald-mil...
But Desert Solitaire is wonderful. One of my favorites...
I especially enjoyed the contrast between really beautiful descriptions and anecdotes of nature and polemic political rants that go on for tens of pages at a time.
A third of the book follows David Brower (Executive Director of the Sierra Club; Glen Canyon Dam opponnent) and Floyd Dominy (US Bureau of Reclamation director) as they float the pre-dammed Colorado River.
To be sure, the landscape is 'different' at every water level. At low levels, features that were hidden underwater are exposed. At high levels, you can take a boat deep into canyons that were inaccessible by foot.
Southern Utah and northern Arizona is full of beautiful landscapes. There are millions of acres of twisting canyons, colorful rock formations, and towering spires. There are those who lament that any piece of it is 'developed' for a road, a town, or a man-made lake; but most of them would not be happy until every facet of human existence has been erased from the Earth.
there are a ton of people who want to protect those areas but don’t advocate for the extinction of the human race as the paragraph implies, why would that straw man be made?
This is from that same paragraph. Personally, I'm not convinced of that. Lightning behind a cloud could have done it, and would be more plausible from my perspective.
Otherwise, if it was just after sunset, perhaps it was a false sunset(say behind a massive dark cloud) and then when the sun fell below the cloud, you get the amazing red sunset(s) that are common in the desert.
But it's all conjecture at this point, who knows.
That said, it is still a fantastically interesting place to go.
or in several shorter chunks starting here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmCAz5oSXVo
Watched this series a while ago. The video's not too good, but it's an interesting look into the many points of view on the dams topic. Included are some lengthy comments from Floyd Dominy (project director), as well as others on both sides of the question.
My family visited once when I was quite young. To think it would be gone so soon is kind of crazy.
It’s not like Lake Mead disappeared in 3 years. It’s been in trouble for a long time.
Maybe I just don’t know about the Great Salt Lake’s recent history because I don’t live near by.
From what little I understand, California consumes far more than a sustainable amount of water every day.
Of course, we should all strive to preserve water as a precious resource. But to do that at a systemic level, you have to understand where it's going.
Also, there's agriculture and there's agriculture: growing, say, alfalfa to feed to cows is way less efficient than other crops.
Although a lot of people would argue that, in retrospect, the Glen Canyon Dam was not a good tradeoff. (And there were serious studies around building at least one dam in the Grand Canyon itself.)
Ahh. And there was apparently also a proposal for the Bridge Canyon Dam, also called Hualapai Dam, further down in the canyon.
Large lakes increase evaporation rate of water. I think something like 10% of the allotted flow for the Colorado River is lost due to evaporation in Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
I'll take one aspect - tourism. If Lake Powell never happened, Glen Canyon would have been there all these years, in all its beauty. That's true. But far fewer people could have enjoyed Glen Canyon than enjoyed Lake Powell, and Lake Powell had its own beauty. So along that axis, saying that Lake Powell should never have happened seems rather elitist.
Take away the other supposed (or even real--hydropower) benefits of the dam and it's pretty hard to justify the Glen Canyon Dam on recreational benefits. (And the same reasoning applies to building roads into lots of places.)
IF there are other compelling benefits, I'm open to there being recreational benefits to dams--whether puttering around on lakes or whitewater paddling benefits to controlled releases. But I'm much less open to the idea that we should build ecologically disruptive dams, especially in unique areas, for that purpose.
Water management is the compelling benefit, but that does require realistic management based on actual flows.
- The seven states that rely on the drought-stricken Colorado River failed to meet a Jan. 31 federal deadline to strike a deal on voluntarily cutting their water use.
- After negotiations reached a standstill, six of the seven states — Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — submitted a “consensus-based modeling alternative.”
- The proposal notably excludes California, the largest user of the Colorado River. Officials said the state will release its own plan. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/31/colorado-river-shortage-stat...
another example of short-term thinking and decision making resulting in severe long-term loss.
"The bill comes due. Always."
As to exactly why, who knows? What could a handful of birds have been worth?
Glen Canyon was built in the 1960s. Because the infrastructure enabled so much growth, demand is outpacing supply.
Arizona is trying to build a desalination plant in the Sea of Cortez to solve the Colorado River problem and the environmentalists immediately came out of the woodwork to complain about it. The mass media then, in a coordinated fashion, pushed FUD about how desalination is bad for the climate because it will require energy (Arizona is a leader in carbon-free nuclear and solar energy), will be too expensive, it'll destroy habitats, etc. At some point you start to realize the sentiment is entirely political and has little to do with finding practical solutions.
later generations paying for the greed of prior generations is the exact situation I am referring to.
How much is exported in produce?
It's very frustrating, because it's clearly a problem, and also clearly a solvable problem. Yet, actual action moves at geological timescales (in this case, quite literally).
Really? What about the Aral Sea? Formerly the fourth largest lake in the world.