What Wonder Lies Silent
I've written about how the Colorado River is miraculously restoring itself as Lake Powell drops. This is the rest of the story, about what was - perhaps irreparably - lost.
Just a short one this week. I’m busy cooking up a monthly column for this space, a little value-add with the inside stories on the barriers successful people in mountain culture have had to overcome, how they did it, and their advice to us in walking our own paths. More on that later.
For now, I’m sharing a piece I wrote for NRS’s Duct Tape Diaries. It’s the untold portion of a recent trip down the Colorado River to witness the miracle of the river restoring itself, without human help, as Lake Powell drops. This is the story of how much work is still left to do on this greatest river in the West. Work that the river, however powerful it might be, and however mystical it might seem in its own resurrection, cannot do itself, and the cultural decision point at which we find ourselves. Here’s an excerpt:
“I had never seen Glen Canyon, which some thought more beautiful than the Grand. I’d never recreated on Lake Powell. In the fall, the Returning Rapids team attached motors to our rafts to head past North Wash and witness these high reaches of the reservoir that few people see. The river slowed, turned from a thick sepia to melancholy green and then to the shocking blue of a deep lake as we passed the mouth of White Canyon. I had my head down, reading a book from Returning Rapids’ river library on the history of what was lost at White when the reservoir flooded it. When I looked up from the pages, we had entered Glen.
The walls here were different than upriver. This was a hall of soft colors, shimmering sandstone, lovely in its dignified reach above the unnatural clarity of water. Below the unsightly bathtub ring left by the dropping lake level, the stone, though, was crumbling. There was a hard-to-name feeling of what wonder lay, silent now, in the cold subsurface dark. These water-stained walls held the story of what we’d done, what we drowned. And perhaps it was only because I’d come from the free-running river above that the loss hit so hard, but I suddenly found myself crying, awash in grief that threatened to drown me, too.”
Powerful writing!