The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (16 page)

At precisely 11:30 on the morning of October 15, President Eisenhower tapped a telegraph key from his desk in the Oval Office, sending an electronic signal from Washington, DC, to Arizona, where the message was relayed first by radio, then by a flagman, to Arthur Watkins, the Utah senator who had made the remark about “the abominable nature-lovers” two years earlier. When
Watkins rammed the plunger down, a massive explosion shook the bottom of the canyon. Boulders arced into the air, followed by a cloud of dust and grit that rose toward the rim. Within minutes,
crews were drilling into the cliff at the portal to the diversion tunnel, which would route the river around the dam site during construction.

The massive dam that began to rise from the dry section of riverbed at the bottom of the canyon the following spring was in many ways a mirror of and a companion piece to Hoover—but it was not a revolutionary structure. Unlike Hoover, Glen’s technology was already well established. Even its status as the third-highest dam in the world would last only a few months, until
the Swiss
finished a pair of even higher dams. Nevertheless, Glen possessed enormous symbolic significance because it signaled a remarkable act of transformation for the feature that lay at its feet, the Grand Canyon.

The canyon of Cárdenas, a place that was defined by its capacity to dwarf human endeavor, to instill humility in those who gazed into its depths and found themselves staring eternity in the face, would now be hog-tied between two of the largest and most impressive machines that had ever been built by human beings. They would frame it like a matched set of immense concrete bookends, and the water that coursed through the canyon’s heart would be controlled by a spigot and a set of tap handles above, while the discharge was collected by an immense bathtub below. The river of John Wesley Powell might still feel wild and dangerous and free, but every ripple and wave of that river would now be metered and gauged and rationed by bureaucrats and engineers.

At this point, however, Brower was far less concerned about the symbolic neutering of the canyon below the dam than about the real loss of the canyon
above
it. Because in the summer of 1962, while construction was still taking place but the river had not yet been dammed, Brower had set out on a series of river trips that granted him his first look at the mysterious place that had been traded away for Echo Park.

He was shocked by what he found.

I
f the
Grand Canyon is geology’s Götterdämmerung, a thunderous “Twilight of the Gods” composed in stone, then Glen was a tectonic version of the
Moonlight Sonata
—a canyon that was neither imperious nor magisterial, but lyrically finessed, elegantly sculpted, and ethereal. Unlike the Grand, Glen was defined neither by the violence of its white water nor by the grandiosity of its rock formations, but instead by gentleness and tranquillity. Here, the river and its tributaries had carved a trellis of intimate side canyons, many of them so narrow that they were bathed in shadow-cooled twilight at noon. Deep inside this sinuous and hidden world were countless springs and vaulted grottoes, where thin cascades of clear water dropped into pools surrounded by maidenhair fern. This exquisite labyrinth was what Powell had discovered as his boats drifted languorously through Glen’s curves and goosenecks during the final days of July 1869, just prior to their grueling “race for a dinner” through the Grand Canyon. And those same qualities—the honey-colored light, the polished walls, the vivid green cottonwood leaves fluttering softly in the morning air—seduced and saddened Brower when he floated through this haunted landscape during its twilight months in the golden summer of 1962.

As he recognized with a growing sense of remorse, Glen was much like Echo Park, only better in every way. The splendor of what had been sacrificed far surpassed the charms of what had been saved upstream. Within Glen’s side canyons alone, Brower would later declare, the place boasted
“the equivalent of several Dinosaur National Monuments.”

By the end of 1962, even as a team of workers prepared to start the process of filling Glen’s reservoir, Brower had resolved to make a last-ditch effort to stop the process that he had unwittingly sanctioned by petitioning the one person who had the power to apply the brakes. On the morning of January 21, 1963, he flew to Washington to see Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, the man whose job it was to reconcile and balance the competing interests of the National Park Service and the Bureau of Reclamation.

Upon arriving at Interior’s headquarters on C Street, Brower was informed that Udall had a packed schedule and would be unable to meet with him personally. However, the secretary was about to conduct an important press conference in which he and the commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation would make an important announcement regarding the Colorado River. If Brower wished, he was told, he was welcome to attend. And it was in this manner that he came to learn that the government was planning to flood yet another canyon and national park, perhaps the greatest of them all.

T
hat morning Udall unveiled a plan intended to complete and, in some ways, surpass the vision for the Colorado River that Reclamation’s engineers had been shaping and refining since the days of Arthur Powell Davis, more than sixty years earlier. Having already erected the cornerstone of their great scheme at Hoover, and having recently completed a whole smorgasbord of dams, power plants, and irrigation projects along the upper Colorado, the bureau had all but one remaining section of the river under its control.

Among dozens of marvelous things, the plan that Udall outlined would create a whole
new
set of dams, tunnels, and canals in Northern California that would deliver water south, to the residents of Los Angeles and the farmers of the San Joaquin Valley, replacing water that was currently being supplied to those areas from the Colorado. In turn, that Colorado water would be shunted east, through yet another system of pumps and canals, to the rapidly growing cities of Phoenix and Tucson. The only catch was that delivering this water would require enormous amounts of energy. But this, Udall explained, was the most elegant part of the whole scheme, because that energy would come from electricity generated by the deepest canyons and the steepest gradient on the
Colorado, thanks to a pair of giant new dams that would be built directly in the heart of the Grand Canyon.

These two additional dams would not only produce enough electricity to pump water to Phoenix and Tucson but would create a surplus that could be sold to private utilities, thereby generating income that would eventually reimburse the government for its investment in the entire system. The project would essentially pay for itself, which is why the Grand Canyon dams—known as Bridge Canyon Dam and Marble Canyon Dam—were dubbed “cash registers.”

As Udall sketched out these details, he could see Brower scowling in the back of the room. He knew that the conservationist was angry, but what he did not know was that this announcement was an epiphany for the executive director of the Sierra Club—a moment that neatly bridged the chasm that yawned between the hopes with which Brower had come to Udall’s office that morning and his sense of betrayal at what the secretary was revealing. The lesson that Brower decided he had been taught by Glen Canyon, something that Litton had repeatedly stressed, was that compromise was a vile and dangerous thing, an arrangement that destroyed a man’s principles while rendering him powerless.

If further proof of that conceit was needed, it was unfolding at that very moment at the head of the Grand Canyon, where the job of closing off Glen’s diversion tunnels was already in full swing. Earlier that morning, a crew of laborers had finished chipping winter ice out of the vertical tracks on a pair of
guillotine-shaped gates that were poised above the entrance to the tunnels. When they sent the steel gates slicing into the frigid, sugary-brown current coursing into the tunnels, the water purled and eddied as the river, robbed of any other path, made its way over an earthen barrier and slowly began to claw its way up the ten-million-ton edifice of the newly finished dam. The sound of a living river had been replaced by the silence of a reservoir.

It would take almost twenty years for that reservoir to fill to capacity. But Lake Powell, named in honor of the one-armed Civil War major who had braved the once-unstoppable river, had been born.

In that moment, perhaps the only thing that surpassed
Brower’s sense of contrition was his resolve. Having had the perils of compromise drummed into him so painfully, he would take the lesson to heart. Now there would be another battle—one far bigger and with far greater stakes than had already been fought over Dinosaur.
That struggle would be waged without negotiation or horse-trading, and the principle that would remain inviolable—subject neither to debate nor qualification—was that the Grand Canyon, the foremost of America’s natural wonders, should be left alone.

Before Brower could embark on his campaign, however, he faced the intensely irritating task of having to persuade his colleagues at the Sierra Club to give him the green light. This would not be easy.
The club’s old guard, the men who had helped nurture and sustain the organization through the first half of the twentieth century and now sat on the board of directors, valued decorum and dialogue. Many of those directors were on good terms with the government officials and bureaucrats who controlled the nation’s wild spaces, and they placed a premium on behaving honorably and refraining from personal attacks. The club’s purpose, as they saw it, was not to stand in the way of development but to argue, in a friendly and reasonable manner, for compromises that would enable progress to unfold while preserving places that were special.

One of the most powerful proponents of this approach was Bestor Robinson, a prominent lawyer from Oakland who had extensive business and social connections at almost every level of government. Robinson specialized in crafting evenhanded deals that were advantageous to everyone, and he was convinced that
it was unwise to declare war against Stewart Udall and the entire Interior Department. The rational course, therefore, was to negotiate.

Brower knew that if he wanted to defeat the entire Grand Canyon dams project, he was first going to have to defeat Robinson at the club’s annual board meeting, which was scheduled to take place in May 1963. The outcome of that debate would determine
whether Brower would be given license to deploy the club’s considerable resources in an all-out fight against both dams. And for assistance, Brower decided to turn to one of the few people who could be even more stubborn and irascible than he was.

In some ways, this was a dangerous gambit. The board was well aware that Martin Litton embodied some of the very worst qualities of the Colorado River. He was willful and tempestuous, ungovernable and downright mean—a force of nature that recognized no one’s authority and tended to go tearing off in bizarre directions. Brower, however, understood that when Litton’s energy was properly channeled, the weight of his influence could be enormous. He was also aware that Litton held an important trump card—because, unlike anyone else in the Sierra Club, he not only knew the Grand Canyon firsthand but had also developed a philosophy about the place that hinged on the allure of wooden boats.