Lake Powell commemorates Glen Canyon in much the same sense that a statue commemorates a famous man. But sculptured marble can no more give satisfaction to those who know a living man’s charms than can the lake that fills Glen Canyon replace the beauties it has submerged in the memories of those who journeyed on the river that flowed until 1963.

A monument to a person is thus an inadequate reminder to his close friends; it speaks only to the public in historical terms. It celebrates his public life; his gentler private qualities and personal attachments are not communicated. And so with Glen Canyon, Lake Powell celebrates the short history of the construction of the dam that destroyed it; of the filling of the basin behind the dam with water of the Colorado River; of the development of commercial facilities beside the lake; and of the ever-increasing crowds that come with high-speed motorboats and water skis. These are what Lake Powell memorializes. But the long, unrecorded, secret history of Glen Canyon, fragments of which survive in the minds of its few explorers, lies drowned.

To the motorboatist the lake presents superb opportunities for racing about in his high-powered craft. He can speed for hundreds of miles from gasoline pump to gasoline pump with hardly more than a glance at the half-submerged tapestried sandstone walls. When boredom overtakes him he can break the monotony with water skiing, an activity that too soon palls. Always seeking new artificial thrills to lessen the drag of time, he roars into narrow, flooded tributary canyons, side-slipping around the tight S-curves at thirty miles an hour.

Not long ago one could walk in these side canyons beside reflecting pools upon a smoothed-out sandstone floor in an atmosphere aglow with filtered sun and sky. The boatman, to whom the undammed river could once have provided wondrous experiences, knows nothing of these lost glories, regrets them not, or belittles them in his ignorance. In place of infinite variety, awesome convolutions, mysterious and secret recesses, glowing painted walls, and golden streams, we have received in exchange a featureless sheet of water, a dead basin into which all the flotsam from the surrounding land accumulates with no place to go: a sink for sediments and the trash carelessly scattered about by throngs of visitors. The exchange is one of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated by responsible government on an unsuspecting people. They have been cheated out of a birthright without ever knowing they possessed it.

The fern-bedecked amphitheatres, where the only sounds heard were the plink of dripping water or the sudden cascading song of a canyon wren, the mirroring pools under a curving, banded cliff, and the sheets of silent sliding water are no more. The ends of the side canyons arc now clogged with driftwood and the debris from suffocated and dying trees. The banks are everywhere undermined and arc slipping into the lake, leaving behind unstable