Rediscovering Glen Canyon's Lost Wonders by Kayak | Short Film Showcase

So we're up early in the morning and we're heading across the bay to the Cathedral in the desert, which is a place we've all been looking forward to. It's this beautiful alcove back at the end of the high-water mark in the Escalante canyons, and it's been underwater for 50 or 60 years. But it's still beautiful, and we're excited to go back there and check it out. It'll be a little sad but also really cool.

Thank you, buddy, you hiker man. So I grew up in the desert Southwest and learned to walk in a lot of the desert canyons out in Utah and Arizona. One of the things I took to at a young age was kayaking, and that allowed me to experience the Colorado and its tributaries and really fall in love with these new rivers that we have in the West.

Growing up in the river-running community in the southwest, one of the things you hear about all the time is Glen Canyon, this extraordinary iconic canyon on the Colorado River that was lost when Glen Canyon Dam was built in 1963. Growing up, hearing all these stories about these incredible places like Cathedral, Madrid, and Music Temple, it was hard because I knew this was a place that was a lost world. It was a place that was underneath the waters of Lake Powell that I would probably never get to experience.

During the past few decades, as climate change has impacted the rivers of the West and populations have continued to grow, an interesting thing is actually happening: the waters of Lake Powell are dropping. So I called up a few river-maker friends of mine who were crazy enough to join me on this expedition I had planned. What we wanted to do was start in Moab, Utah, on the Colorado River and travel through Cataract Canyon down to the place where the river meets the lake. Then, paddle across the reservoir and explore side canyons along the way to see what might be coming back. I wanted to put together a trip that would allow me to maybe experience a bit of this lost world.

Cataract Canyon is a really unique stretch of river; it's totally free-flowing. There's not a dam for hundreds of miles upstream, and it has these incredibly powerful rapids. It’s really a chance to experience the Colorado River as it was before development. I kind of had this hope that I could run a lot of the rapids in this big long sea kayak, but everyone I talked to said, you know, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Among our group, there was a bit of a bet running about how many rapids it would last until I got flipped out of my boat and unveiled.

So this project was my first river trip ever, and I was so clueless going into it. I learned a lot really fast, and I was really intimidated. By the time I was around the river, within two hours, I was in love. We get to camp at night and set up the kitchen, which, you know, I'm used to backpacking or car camping, which is like cooking dinner as fast as you can so you can climb into your sleeping bag. On the river, we had these elaborate dinners—so delicious! I was eating like a queen. It was unlike anything I've ever experienced; it was truly amazing.

So yesterday, we hiked up to the Doll's House up behind us here. Basically, we got back and there was sand all in our tents. I still have some between my teeth! It was our first hardship. I'd say it was pretty fun. I was just part of the adventure; it was really good. There’s the hype the night before the big drops. You know, you're sitting at camp, having never been on a river trip, I had no idea what that meant. I was just like okay, these big rapids, we're gonna see what happens, and they were pretty intense.

I was pretty nervous about the rapids downstream, but desert rivers and desert rapids are kind of my favorite. My favorite whitewater there is because you get this big slow paddle up in the pool above the rapid, and you've got plenty of time to get nice and nervous. You're listening to the thundering of the rapid just downstream. Then you kind of break the horizon line and drop into this big glassy tongue, and then it's just payoff.

So when Lake Powell is at its highest extent, it actually reached all the way up Cataract Canyon to the base of the big drops. What we were traveling through after the big drops was a section of river that had once been underneath Lake Powell, and what you find is a very changed environment. There are massive piles of sediment along the riverbanks left there by the lake. There are all these invasive plant species. Gone are the beaches that line the upper stretch of the Colorado River, and now there are these cracked sediment banks. It's all very unwelcoming.

Every adventure comes with some trials and tribulations, and unfortunately for this adventure, I got the brunt of those tribulations. I stepped into the sand where the fire pan had been sitting, and I had gotten second-degree burns on the top and bottom of my foot. I found a broken oar at camp the next night and used it as a cane, hobbling along. Then when we got off the river, it was decided that I was going to go home, which was really hard. I was pretty devastated. You know, we'd been prepping for this trip for almost a year, and I was having the time of my life. So, I ended up going home for two and a half weeks.

When I rejoined them about 17 days later, I was counting. After we got off the river and before we began the reservoir portion of our expedition, there were a bunch of questions that we all really wanted answered. One of the things you hear a lot about when it comes to the Colorado River is just how overused and over-allocated it is. I mean, it's no exaggeration to say that the Colorado is probably the most heavily dammed and comprehensively controlled river system not only in the United States but in the world.

The river itself has been allocated and used to the point where there's not a single drop of water left. The river simply dies; it never even reaches the Sea of Cortez. That's how heavily we have used this thing, we've literally killed it. A lot of these dams that control the river—there's no way they would have been built today. They were all built in the 50s and 60s, and one of the questions I had was, you know, if they wouldn't be built today, why were they built 50 years ago?

So, the river is over-allocated for a lot of reasons, a lot of historical reasons that really have to do with the way the western United States developed. There was a huge expansion of the West in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Populations started to move from the eastern United States into the western US, and they brought with them their demand for water. Their demand for water took the form of agricultural demands for water, but also the communities that we developed were designed like eastern communities with big lawns and bigger urban household demands for water. All of those things put pressure on all of the water resources in the West at that time.

California was building these large infrastructure projects with canals and irrigating large swaths of land. The way that water rights work is whoever is the first to put water to a beneficial use will establish an indefinite right. The upper basin states of Utah and Colorado were looking at the growth and development that was happening in California, and they said to themselves, if we don't have a way to capture this water upstream, California is going to develop it all, and we'll never have a legal right to use it in the future.

We'll never have a chance to grow if we don't have a dam upstream. Glen Canyon Dam itself was constructed to serve as a holding tank for upper basin states to deliver their legal allotment of Colorado River water downstream and hold on to any excess water.

I wasn't really sure what to expect exactly. I come in from New England; I've spent most of my life in trees, you know, kind of claustrophobic in woods. When Taylor asked me to come on the expedition, I had been to the desert before, I'd spent a little time in Colorado, but I wasn't really sure what I was getting into. It's really hard to describe what it's actually like to be out there. The lake is a really different environment than anything I had explored before, and that brought with it a lot of challenges that I hadn't really expected.

One of those that I hadn't really thought would be much of an issue that became a very big issue was the wind. Along many stretches of the lake, there are just sheer sandstone walls rising straight out of the water, and it’s not really an easy place to get out of your boat if things get dicey. We had a few stretches of extreme wind where the wind would actually whip up these three to four-foot waves. We just got caught up in this really big windstorm, and I started taking on a bunch of water and had to get out of the lake fast.

So I came up to the shoreline, and it’s just covered in this slippery, slippery moss right at the waterline. I slid in, cut my hand all up trying to grip and stay on the shoreline, and luckily finally found a little bit of purchase and managed to get the boat out.

We're having a multi-course meal tonight. First course is mushrooms and rice with sun-dried tomatoes in hot sauce, and then we're having a small course of sardines to cleanse the palate. It's a slot canyon, man! I had never been in something like that in my entire life. You're walking through these canyons, which are fairly tall and skinny in the first place, but then you suddenly get this farce like trying to fit yourself and a camera bag through. It's a challenge, and you'd have to spin the wall to try and get through, you know, like push your bag through first, kind of monkey your way up the wall.

Then suddenly you just get to this place where it's just like a hundred-year-old cottonwood at the base of this blue pool. You can't believe it; it's like out of a movie! It's not even real. Pretty much, you look up on the side of the canyon wall, and you can just see the high-water mark. So, you know you're standing in a place that was once 20 or 30 feet underwater, and it was such a relief to be there and realize that life had returned to this portion of Glen Canyon.

When Glen Canyon Dam was built, one of the things that the dam builders said was how great this location was because there was nothing in the canyons that were going to be submerged. One of the things that was most shocking to me that we discovered on this expedition was the fact that that simply was not true. There were people living in Glen Canyon before the dam was built. Pipes are well known for our structured family lifestyles—small families taking care of what you guys do for Jesse Springs.

So there were many along the Colorado River, a lot of seat springs in areas to farming back in the days before the lake actually came up. You know, the elders used to say that there was a lot of basket materials that they used to harvest and gather in the fall along the San Juan River. A lot of them had their orchards; they had cornfields along the river. Then to top it all off, they had homes along the river. A lot of families that grew up in that area—it was very devastating to have to leave.

You know, when we're born, when our umbilical cord falls out, we buried that back in the place where we came to have. This place filled up with water, backed up with water, was sad because you could not go back there. You couldn't show your kid your history. I won't say that they lost a lot of farms, but they also lost a lot of the history with the people who they cared about the most.

When I got back from my hiatus for my foot burn, we started the next leg of the trip on the San Juan River, where we decided to put in so that we could paddle down to the lake. It was actually a place where I took out a lot on river trips as a kid. What you see at this put in is a massive sign that says "Warning: Do Not Go Downstream Waterfall!" This is what we plan to do. We're going along like, "Is that the waterfall? Is that the waterfall?" There are these tiny little riffles and small drops, like maybe this is it, and it's just changed. It's become eroded.

Have we already passed the waterfall? When we were actually near the waterfall, it became quite evident. So we're standing on top of Paiute Falls on the San Juan River, and this big waterfall that we're standing on top of is actually a result of the reservoir. When the lake was all the way up here, the San Juan brought in just tons and tons of sediments. All of that sediment actually diverted the river away from its original course, and it ended up now pouring off of this big beauty that we're standing on top of.

We've got to find a way to get our big fully loaded kayaks around this waterfall. Originally, we wanted to go to the left side of the waterfall, but there's a lot of current over there, and we don't really want to be swept over it. So what we're going to try to do is bring our boats up to the edge of this little cliff here on the side of the waterfall and kind of pass them down to a point where we can do some sort of a little seal slide into the eddy below the waterfall. That's kind of plan A. We don't have a plan B yet. Let's see if it works.

When I tell people that we did that, they're like, "No, you can't! There's a waterfall!" Oh, there's a way. So the section of the San Juan River directly below the waterfall had this really wild feeling to it, and a really special feeling to it, but really before we had the chance to enjoy it too much or take out our cameras, we were back into the realm of the reservoir.

There was lots and lots of mud, which I became quite intimately acquainted with. Probably got even muddier when we were back on the reservoir. After our short time on the San Juan River, it felt a lot harder to be out there. There aren’t really any sounds out on the reservoir; it's a place where very little can survive because there's nothing but rock and water. It's very unnatural.

And of course, this is a stretch of the lake where we're coming up on some of the most iconic places in Glen Canyon. I'm Kench Light, an old farm kid from Paris, Paris, Idaho—not the Paris, but Paris, Idaho. I went to college at the University of Utah. My start of that led me to decide to go into river running. I really loved river running; I love the canyons and the river itself and the rapids in them. But my favorite, of course, was Glen Canyon.

It had an impact on me that I knew exactly what I was gonna do with my later life and find critical jobs and call myself a river guide. I didn't look like a river guide. I know a lot of river guides look like, but I said, well, that's what I was going to do. I thought that was going to be a great salvation for the rest of my life, but I knew, even at that time, that powers would be destined to meet the reservoir.

When I first saw it, it was from a memory. It was coming down by horseback. We decided to stop at Mouse Camp. Then we hiked up to Clear Creek Canyon. When I first discovered it for myself, it was the most amazing thing because it was covered by a bunch of willows around it. I think I pushed those apart, and you walk in and there's just a big basement there. And of course, there was a great big camera there on the sand bottom, grass-covered type of thing—it was green. A lot of that was green when I first saw it, and there was a stream of water coming down a little waterfall from the rim.

I didn't see, at that time, anybody or any mark of civilization. It was the most beautiful thing I think I ever saw. Sitting in the Cathedral in the Desert that day and really floating on top of what was the Cathedral in the Desert was devastating. I was mourning the loss of this place as I kind of described it. I was also angry.

I was angry that our generation never got to see the Cathedral and see Glen Canyon as it was, as it should have been. I was angry that we never had the chance to speak for this place. At the time, the Cathedral felt like some sort of a metaphor for the loss of all of Glen Canyon. I felt like a metaphor for the ways in which we have destroyed and dominated the Colorado River—this river, this thing that I love so much.

You spend a year planning and talking about Glen Canyon Dam, and then you spend a month and a half paddling to get to Glen Canyon Dam, and then it's the day that you're actually getting to Glen Canyon Dam—this thing you've talked about for so long, and you come around this last bend, and it's just there.

The hard way what facing the dam reminded me of is the impermanence of our attempts to dam and divert and dominate the Colorado River. When I consider these canyons that we paddled through that were all carved over millions and millions of years by the power of the Colorado River, inch by inch into the Colorado Plateau, I feel a sense of hope for the future of this river if we, as a society, can rethink the way we manage water. If we can rethink and respect the rivers that give us so much, there is a future in which the Colorado River can thrive.