A Book Recommendation

 

I came by the "Emerald Mile" by way of a X-mas gift from family.   Some  of my family on my wife’s side are Grand Canyon river runners and river guides, and my wife has run the Canyon twice.  Once for 14 days and once for 21 days.  Flagstaff is also one of the main outposts for Grand Canyon river guiding companies.

The ‘Emerald Mile” is a superb read.  But not only  from the adventure aspect of running the Colorado River though Grand Canyon as fast as possible and the dangers. 

There are aspects that to me relate directly to another river under threat of govt. energy policies run amok we are trying to save.   Saving the 1000 Islands of the St Lawrence River from rampant industrial wind development.

I actually know a couple of the people in this book.  Not the main characters, but one person in the book is on my search and rescue team and another Canyon expert mentioned has helped us on  a couple big Canyon searches. In both cases the victims were just swallowed up by the Canyon with almost no trace.  Gone forever and only the Canyon knows the secret of where they are and refuses to release it.

I hope Lee Wilbanks of Save the River and his members and other local environmental groups will read and learn some valuable lessons from some big environmental players of western environmentalism and misguided approach of compromise if you really want to save something. 

In the winter 1982/83 epic amounts of snow were deposited in the Rockies and the Colorado River basin due to a large Pacific El Nino event. I remember this spectacular weather event because I was part of a study of the avalanche hazard on the mountains behind Flagstaff.

   In the late spring the snow melted quickly.  This threaten to over fill Lake Powell backed up by the huge concrete monolith of Glen Canyon Dam on the S. Utah, N AZ border just above Grand Canyon Nat. Park.  Water was rushing in faster than the lake and dam could accommodate it.  It panicked the Bureau of Reclamation which had responsibility for the dam and they were  forced to release huge amounts of water to save the dam.  This created very serious damage to the dam spillways which were eating into the cliffs holding the dam in place.  It was a race against nature to see if the dam engineers or the Colorado would win.  It was a real scary close call.  If you see this dam it is hard to believe this monster could be breached!

                           Glen Canyon Dam releasing water during the 1983 flood

                                   desperately trying to save the dam from failure.

                                                Pictures are not from the book.

The breach of this dam would have set in motion a chain of disasters all the way to Mexico along the Colorado River and probably killed thousands and would have destroyed one of America’s prime breadbaskets in California that depends on the river’s water for irrigation.

However, these monster releases of water created floods down stream in the Canyon and 3 expert river runners decide to try to illegally ride the flood to see if they could set a time record for running the length of the Canyon.  And do it in a fragile 17 ft. wooden dory used for some Canyon expeditions.

They would even have to ride dangerous  and wild rapids at night to try to accomplish this feat.

Many river rafting trips were caught in this flood mayhem as the Colorado went wild like it hadn’t in decades because of the control of the dam. One rafter was killed in this epic flooding.

But the part that held much of my interest was about Glen Canyon Dam and the history of how it came to be.  And the history of man’s interaction with the Colorado.  Here in the West Glen Canyon Dam has,  from before it was built, been an iconic environmental controversy to this very day.  It is a huge dam like Hoover lower on the Colorado near Las Vegas and Lake Mead, and like Hoover it is wedged into a spectacular narrow canyon.  These dams control flooding, provide precious water, and electricity for cities in the west like Phoenix, Tucson, LA, and Las Vegas.  Without the Colorado and its dams the SW would be very different. However, unlike Hoover, Glen is anchored to weak crumbly Navajo sandstone.  My wife toured the dam once and was astonished how water was spurting out of places in the dam and sandstone where the dam is anchored to the sandstone.  But I guess the engineers have figured that in!

                                       Spectacular Glen Canyon Dam spanning across

                                   the Colorado River, and suspension bridge,  just above

                                                        Grand Canyon Nat. Park. 

                                    Believe me it is a spectacular walk across that bridge!!!!

 

                                                                            

 

The dam creates Lake Powell named after John Weslley Powell the first person to officially explorer

 the Canyon by running the Colorado all the way through, and recording and mapping the events

in 1869.  Lake Powell extends about 180 miles from N. AZ into the wild canyon country of Utah.

Because of all the twisting and turning canyons Powell has more shoreline than the west coast

of the US.

 

When the Colorado reaches Mexico today 100's of miles from the Rockies it is merely a trickle.  The water has all been used, some recycled and used again.

But Glen Canyon Dam was a real bad trade off compromise with environmentalists of the day like David Brower of the Sierra Club.  Thinking  they were preventing another precious resource from dam flooding, Dinosaur Nat. Monument,  and not knowing what a spectacular canyon was going to be flooded behind Glen Canyon Dam. A seeming good compromise blind sided them.

The US govt with the Bureau of Reclamation at this time was running amok wanting to dam every drop of water that moved,  for water, energy and of course $$$$$$   Sound familiar 1000 Islands lovers????

David Brower was then the head of the Sierra Club in those days in the 50’s and 60’s.  When he figured out his compromise was a disaster he attempted to stop Glen Canyon Dam, but it was way too late. And then the govt. even screwed him further with more proposals for dams right IN Grand Canyon.  Sound familiar 1000 Islands lovers????  

Now can you imagine wanting to destroy the Grand Canyon with dams with some insane energy scheme.  A place of planetary beauty and significance that is a treasured resource belonging to the American citizen? Sound familiar 1000 Islands lovers?

And today…can you imagine a run amok govt/corporate energy plan to cover the precious 1000 Islands area and eastern Lake Ontario with hundreds of bird and bat killing industrial wind monsters.  Yet here we are years later fighting another environmental disaster of a similar magnitude at the other end of the country… all over again.  And we ignore the lesson’s Brower learned, and here we are compromising again.

 

 

If you are in this battle I want you to understand the magnitude of what is happening to you and what you are involved in no matter which side you are on.  I want you to understand its place in history.  We already have a vivid example from years ago.  Even Barry Goldwater the famous conservative AZ Sen. at the end of his life said he regretted his vote to doom Glen Canyon to a watery grave with the dam. Even though our state has been a big benefactor of Glen. He concluded it just was not worth it. He dam and the lake even created a whole town, Page, AZ out of nothing but isolated desert in the middle of no where.

This is why when people piss and moan over their town’s individual wind laws and property values, they are badly missing the point of what is going on here and the scale.

And when the NYS govt comes along with an insidious scheme to remove our rights to perpetuate such an govt. corporate environmental disaster, and our town compromises with and appeases  it, when there is so much vivid historical evidence to show  how outrageous that approach is…I come unglued!

As I see it the real problem we have in CV is the supposed opposition (CV govt) is run mostly by businessmen, industrialists, and institutionalists, and compromisers, not true environmentalists who have looked at and learned from the big and terrible environment compromises of the past.

And the some of the groups that call themselves environmental are spineless.

 

 

In terms of the Grand Canyon and those dams the Sierra Club’s  David Brower along with a real outspoken gloves off fire brand and outdoor writer named Martin Lintton who was also an icon of Grand Canyon river running, were outraged and realized how they had been screwed by the Sierra Club and  the govt with horrible compromises.  ( Litton is a man after my own heart! Although I have never met him.) He is in his 90's now.

They took the gloves off and pulled out all the stops and ousted the Sierra Club compromisers and did a full on attack against on the Fed. govt.’s Grand Canyon dam scheme, and backed them down.  Apparently it was a nasty political fight, but Lintton and Brower were fed up….and they were relentless and won. 

Unfortunately people locally don’t seem to have the stomach for the fight like this today to save our region.  Instead we many have lined up behind people willing to compromise and appease a hideous govt scheme to steal our rights and create an environmental disaster.

 

 

This story really hits home for me.  Two powerful iconic rivers 1000s of mile apart, gingerly balanced on govt/corporate energy controversies and environmental disaster schemes, all knotted together over the span of decades.

 

 

I hope you will find time to read the “Emerald Mile”, for the adventure, and more importantly for the historic environmental lessons…and why we should not be compromisers and appeasers!!!

 

 

Art Pundt