Running Dry by Jonathan Waterman

Author:Jonathan Waterman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Travel
ISBN: 9781426205057
Publisher: National Geographic
Published: 2010-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

The next day, bobbing in a boat next to the “Keep Out” signs 200 yards upstream of the dam, I’m talking with the director of the Glen Canyon Institute (GCI), Dr. Richard Ingebretsen. Reclamationists perceive his organization as the radical fringe.

“Rich,” 50, is a devout Mormon and soft-spoken boatman. In between practicing emergency room medicine and running a staff of four at the GCI, with 1,500 active members, he teaches physics and medicine at the University of Utah. Unlike civil disobedience protestors or nonprofits filing lawsuits to save the river below the dam, GCI focuses on restoring Glen Canyon and draining Lake Powell.

The year after Lady Bird’s dedication, Rich came to Glen Canyon as a ten-year-old Boy Scout. The infant reservoir had begun flooding the Colorado River banks. They rode a boat from a put-in at the unfinished Wahweap Marina to the entrance of Forbidding Canyon, and began hiking several miles to Rainbow Bridge. The scoutmaster said that the pools they were drinking from and splashing through would be flooded the following year, but Rich couldn’t process that information. Finally, in what seemed an eternity to a young boy hiking through rugged canyons, they caught their first sight of the enormous natural sandstone bridge, framing Navajo Mountain in the background.

The experience stirred Ingebretsen’s soul. They had been worried about getting lost in the little-traveled canyon country. They were thirsty. But the impossibly high bridge—built by God, they were told—made their difficult journey worth all the hard work.

He came back a half dozen years later on a high school field trip, and because Forbidding Canyon had been flooded, he didn’t recognize the stilled, shrunken canyons from his speeding motorboat. The pools and walls that had enchanted him in 1967 were gone. They, along with hordes of other tourists, quickly visited Rainbow Bridge and left. The students were unimpressed. Their destination had become merely another goal to be checked off a list. “It was painfully hard to see,” Rich says. “The smell of gas, the crowds.” When Rich tried to describe the pools he’d played in as a boy, his classmates seemed apathetic. They all wanted to go waterskiing. “It hurt my heart that it was all underwater,” he says.

In 1989, his fiancée died, and Ingebretsen, heartbroken again, plunged himself into work. But saving patients from septic shock and teaching physics wasn’t enough. In 1995, he formed the GCI. That fall, he staged a debate at the university in Salt Lake City between former Reclamation Commissioner Floyd Dominy and David Brower. Seven hundred people attended, mostly cheering for Brower.

The following year, Reclamation announced that Lake Powell annually evaporated one maf of water. This news came as the final straw of resource depletion, spurring Western conservation groups to action. GCI sponsored another rally that drew 1,500 people to see Brower’s photographs of an undammed Glen Canyon. The science was reviewed for several years, while the Sierra Club and conservation groups protested. All to no avail. The dam’s tangible benefits outweighed the hard-to-gauge detriments of losing canyons that no one really knew or appreciated.

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