“Often these canyons, pursued upwards, ended in falls, and sometimes the falls came down through a slot or a skylight in the roof of a domed chamber, to trickle down the wall into a plunge pool that made a lyrical dunk bath on a hot day. Midway through exposing the crime, Stegner described the paradisiacal canyons being drowned under hundreds of feet of water.

One such marvel was Cathedral in the Desert, a massive, domed hollow hidden in a side canyon off the Escalante River near where it joined the Colorado about midway through Glen Canyon.Īs far as I can remember, I first learned of Cathedral in the Desert some years ago when reading the chapter “Glen Canyon Submersus” in Wallace Stegner’s The Sound of Mountain Water. Placed in what Abbey referred to as “water storage,” all of Glen Canyon’s marvels - Ancestral Puebloan ruins by the thousands, natural phenomena such as hanging gardens, a veritable phantasmagoria of geologic extravagance - soon sank under water. In his 1968 book Desert Solitaire, which would go on to become the ur-conservationist classic of its age, Edward Abbey wrote, “The impounded waters form an artificial lake named Powell, supposed to honor but actually to dishonor the memory, spirit and vision of John Wesley Powell, first American to make a systematic exploration of the Colorado river and its environs.” For our purposes, the story begins in 1956, when by Congressional appropriation, the most beautiful section of the Colorado River, named Glen Canyon by its explorer John Wesley Powell, was condemned to be drowned under 340 feet of water backing up from a dam built, as we shall see, for a curious purpose.

This is a story of paradise lost and regained, of man’s folly and nature’s response.

Alan jackson solitaire till dawn