Glen Canyon: Images of a Lost World

Amazon.com Price: $29.95 (as of 02/05/2019 18:50 PST- Details)

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Description

This is a powerful testament to the beauty and history that gave way to progress. Beginning at Hite, Utah, the site of an old pioneer camp, and following the course of the river through the canyon to Lees Ferry, this book leisurely takes in the sweeping views and labyrinthine side canyons that make the wondrous place that was Glen Canyon. The long 162-mile-long stretch of river through the canyon chronicles the natural history of southeastern Utah and the human history as well. Anasazi ruins and mining camps, heron colonies and hanging gardens, reflecting pools and tapestry walls are here magnificently recalled. With his photographs, writings from diaries kept right through his years on the river, and recollections, Tad Nichols takes us on a journey―no longer imaginable today―through the heart of canyon country. This book is what remains of one of the vital last great wilderness experiences.

In the early 1960s the federal government announced a plan to regulate the Colorado River by building a series of hydroelectric dams. The plan set off a storm of protest. The Sierra Club filed a lawsuit, arguing that a kind of dams, to be built at the entrance to the Grand Canyon, would mean the destruction of Glen Canyon, a jewel-like oasis, probably the most beautiful natural wonders of the desert Southwest. But the lawsuit failed, and the dam was built, resulting in the formation of 200-mile-long Lake Powell, one of the vital largest artificial bodies of water on this planet–and in the inundation of Glen Canyon, which environmentalists called “the place no one knew.”

Photographer and filmmaker Tad Nichols did know Glen Canyon, so well that most of the area’s place names are the ones that he and his fellow explorers and friends gave them. In this stunning book of documentary photography, Nichols takes readers on a voyage down the Colorado River, traversing stone labyrinths, wild rapids, and narrow beaches. Accompanied by entries from his trip journals of the 1950s and early ’60s, his photographs show us just how much was lost when Glen Canyon receded beneath Lake Powell’s waters–and what we stand to regain if, as advocates hope, Glen Canyon Dam is dismantled and the Colorado River is allowed to waft freely once again. –Gregory McNamee

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