In an excerpt from his book River Notes, leading anthropologist Wade Davis recalls how the taming of the Colorado River in the 1960s — ‘nature serves man’ went the thinking — helped shape the nation. But now facing a historic drought, all that could be lost in a generation.

I first visited the Grand Canyon in 1967 with two school friends and an elderly teacher who filled his summers by taking young students on long road trips, camping across the country. I mostly remember the color of the sky and the immensity of the chasm, with the Colorado River as seen from the canyon rim just a dirt thread lying across the bottom of the world. The nearest we got to the river was a mule ride down the Bright Angel Trail, three hours that left us sunburnt and swarming with ticks. Of the greater forces at play that summer, we were as oblivious as our teacher.

In retrospect, 1967 was an auspicious year for the army of engineers, planners, and developers whose confidence in their ability to tame the Colorado, transform the desert, and reimagine the hydrology of the American West had taken on a religious dimension, secured as if an article of faith.

The Glen Canyon Dam, built over a decade, had been formally dedicated by the president’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson, on September 22, 1966. In scale, it was an astonishing feat of construction, a concrete arch surpassed in height only by its elegant sibling downstream, the Hoover Dam, an art deco masterpiece of engineering completed in 1935. Lake Mead above the Hoover Dam would remain the largest reservoir in the United States, but as the waters of the Colorado began to spread across the catchment of the Glen Canyon Dam in the first months of 1963, a vision emerged of a body of blue water in volume only slightly smaller than Lake Mead, but in scale and aspect incomparably more beautiful and dramatic.

To Floyd Dominy, the man ultimately responsible for the building of the Glen Canyon Dam—and its greatest champion—the reservoir that became Lake Powell was a thing of pure beauty, a miracle in the desert. “There is a natural order in our universe,” Dominy famously wrote.

“God created both Nature and Man. Man serves God, but Nature serves Man. To have a deep blue lake, where no lake was before, seems to bring Man a little closer to God.”

Even his archrival, David Brower of the Sierra Club, haunted all his life by the loss of Glen Canyon, agreed that Dominy was a good man, even a great American, though very much a product of his times. Like so many of his generation, including my own father, Dominy believed that any natural resource not used was wealth wasted. He had been raised as a boy on a dying farm in Nebraska during the Dust Bowl. His first job as county agent in rural Wyoming was helping ranchers build earthen dams to secure water for their livestock. By his own account, he became a crusader for the development of water. As Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, singularly responsible for water policy in the American West, Dominy was not just an advocate of massive water projects, dams, and canals designed to tame every river and divert water to the cities, farms, and settlements of the desert southwest; he was, in his own words, “the messiah.”

As Lake Powell slowly came into being, with the flow of the Colorado shut down as if by a tap, there was little concern for the downstream consequences. In later years, conservation would sometimes trump engineering, but in 1963 ecological considerations hardly entered the conversation. The environmental movement was embryonic; as an organized political force it would only emerge in the wake of the dam’s construction, catalyzed by the outrage provoked as the reservoir above the dam deepened and spread, flooding Glen Canyon, famously eulogized by photographer Eliot Porter as “the place no one knew.”

The overwhelming national consensus in 1967 called for growth. Albuquerque’s population had doubled in a decade. Las Vegas that year had a population of 181,000; Tucson, 274,000; Phoenix, 763,000. Each of these cities would grow at least five-fold in a generation, with Las Vegas increasing to 2.8 million, and Phoenix by 2022 achieving a population of 4.6 million. If few in 1967 anticipated such figures, it was evident to all, as Dominy never ceased to say, that if there was to be any growth at all, it would be dependent on water, stored in Lake Powell.

Thus, over twenty years, as the reservoir expanded, reaching in 1983 a maximum depth of 583 feet, extending in length 186 miles, with a width of 25 miles and 1,900 miles of shoreline, Lake Powell—celebrated as a recreational wonderland — became a symbol of human triumph, capacity, and resolve. It stored 20 million acre-feet of water — enough to fill 10 million Olympic-sized swimming pools — a vital repository that made possible the transformation of desert lands that would, in time, be home to 40 million Americans.

In 1973, construction began on the Central Arizona Project, a 336-mile diversion canal conceived to bring water from the Colorado — 456 billion gallons altogether — to Phoenix and Tucson, even while providing irrigation for more than a million acres, allowing farmers to grow cotton, hay, and alfalfa in the desert. To secure federal funds to cover construction costs, Arizona cut a deal with California that was certain to haunt the state should the flow of the Colorado ever be compromised or reduced. But with water in abundance, there was little concern. That the open canal lost over five billion gallons of water each year to evaporation, and another three billion to leakage, was considered tolerable wastage, given the scale and benefits of the project.

As Lake Powell reached its maximum capacity in 1980, water levels five times what they are today, the future seemed exceedingly bright. The only threat to the dam came in 1983 when a surge of snowmelt into the reservoir raised lake levels to a dangerous extent, forcing the engineers to open the spillways for the first time since the initial construction. Abundance of water, not a shortage, marked the 1980s, a decade now recognized as having been unusually wet.
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