Drowned River: The Death and Rebirth of Glen Canyon on the Colorado

In 1963 the waters began rising behind Glen Canyon Dam and 170 miles of the Colorado River slowly disappeared as the riverbed and surrounding canyons filled with water. Those who supported and those who opposed the dam considered it a long-term transformation; environmentalists mourned Glen Canyon as dead and gone forever. But it’s coming back, in a victory that is also the pervasive disaster of climate change.

BYRON WOLFE, MARK KLETT, and REBECCA SOLNIT spent half a decade exploring Glen Canyon as expectations and possibilities changed and the river reemerged at the upper end of the reservoir. Their starting point was Eliot Porter’s landmark book of color photography, The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon the Colorado, published by the Sierra Club in 1963 as a political statement about what had been lost under the dam’s waters and why it should never happen again. Their ending point is the reemergence of the river and the rise of questions about climate, the fate of the southwest, the folly of human endeavors to control nature, and the possibility of seeing these places and problems in new ways. 

Drowned River is a book about climate change, but also about how photography can describe beauty and trouble simultaneously, about depth and shallowness, about what it takes to understand a place and to come to terms with the enormous scale of the changes we have set in motion.