Glen Canyon Betrayed

I just finished this book, new title "Glen Canyon Betrayed" by Katie Lee. It is the selection for January for the Boulder Book Club. It always amazes me that you find the right book at the right time, when you are ready for it. This book includes the journal entries, pictures, stories, and songs of Katie Lee when she made her numerous treks down the Colorado River through the Glen Canyon before Glen Canyon Dam was built. I better understand her descriptions of the canyons after exploring the canyons around the Escalante River and the "River" makes more sense to me after my own first trip down the Colorado through the Grand Canyon this year. On my own trip, I struggled with words that could describe the incredible beauty of what I was seeing and experiencing. Katie Lee finds those words and they are words of the healing power of the canyon and the river, the way both help in finding out who we really are, as well an incredible sensuality that I could never imagine would describe this place but does so well. Maybe because it takes us to such a core place of ourselves when we connect to the land in such a profound way, it removes the barriers between me and everything else. I am a part of everything else but I only understand that when my feet are in the water, my hands are in the sand, and I can stretch my body across warm sandstone. My eyes want to take everything I see and burn it some place deep in my soul for later when I need it again. I kept feeling like if I could just paint or sculpt, I might get closer to what the Grand Canyon looks like, what it feels like.

This book however, is a book of a lost canyon, The Glen, now beneath "Reservoir Powell" (her term). I think I've hidden from this issue, not wanting to place my own opinion here because I have spent many incredible days on the shores of Lake Powell. I say the shores because I'm not the water sports type. Cruising up the lake looking at the amazing canyon walls or hiking up to Rainbow Bridge are my extent of water sports. My best times have been sitting on the back of the houseboat as the sun is beginning to set or when everyone else has gone to the marina; just me, the beauty of Tower Butte or Navajo Canyon and a cold drink in my hands. But the part that I have loved most has been the part made of sandstone along with the back drop of the Kaiparowitz Plateau, Navajo Mountain, and all that amazing country that stretches from the lake to my home in Boulder. So through this book, I see what we lost. It's a loss you can't dwell too much on because there is no reconciling what has happened, no way to go back. But maybe it's helps us to think a little more about some of these other incredible places and try to find better ways not to love them to death. Katie even gives us hope, because in "river time" the river will reclaim what once was even if we won't be here to see it. Thank you Katie for sharing a Glen Canyon that began disappearing the year I was born. I will remember it every time I hike one of the canyons that once fed your beautiful canyon and river.