The story of the final free-flowing run of Glen Canyon before Lake Powell filled the canyon, capturing a vanished landscape and the culture it held.
Todd Balf's book is about the last free-flowing trip through Glen Canyon before the dam closed and the canyon filled with reservoir water. Balf reconstructs that trip from interviews, journals, and the surviving photographs, and the book is, in its cumulative effect, one of the most specific elegies anybody has written about a landscape that was deliberately erased. It is not a long book. It does not need to be. The subject is small and precise — a canyon, a river, a handful of people on boats, a moment — and Balf lets the specificity do the work.
The trip itself took place in 1963. The Bureau of Reclamation had closed the diversion tunnel. The reservoir was starting to fill. A group of boaters, some of them commercial operators, some private, most aware that they were running a piece of river that had months or at most a year or two of existence left, pushed through the canyon to document it. Balf's book is the story of that last float, told with the people who were on it and with the benefit of everything we now know about what was lost.
I bring this book up when somebody asks me what Glen Canyon actually was. This is one of the best-sourced attempts to answer that question. The canyon as the boaters found it in 1963 — the side canyons, the Music Temple, the specific petroglyph panels, the swimming holes, the cottonwood camps — comes through with a level of detail the photographs alone cannot deliver. You come out of the book knowing, as much as anyone reading a book can know, what we chose to drown. That knowledge is useful, if painful, and it should inform every subsequent conversation about Lake Powell and the Colorado Compact.
Balf's prose is careful. He is not trying to be Abbey. He is not writing a polemic. What he is doing is documentary reconstruction, and the restraint is what makes the book effective. The anger about the dam, if you arrive at the book with anger, is not in the prose — it is in the facts. Every page describes something that no longer exists. You accumulate the loss reading. By the end you are carrying it.
Read it before your next trip on Lake Powell. The book changes the experience of the reservoir completely. Every bay you motor into has a specific set of lost features underneath. Every alcove had a specific shape before the water filled it. The surface of the reservoir stops being a lake and becomes a ceiling, and underneath that ceiling is the canyon Balf is describing. It is a hard book to read on the water. That is part of why it is the right book to read on the water.
