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By Root 1615 0

the bottomless dry wind-sculpted canyons, beginning suddenly and leading nowhere; the rainbow arches, overhangs, and huge stately monoliths (an expert rock climber, Brower had pioneered the route up the most impressive of them, Shiprock in New Mexico); the amphitheater basins ringed by great hanging rock walls; the chiaroscuro desert sky, with its promise of rain that rarely came. Above all, he loved the desert rivers. Brower’s favorite place in the Colorado Basin was Echo Park. Near the confluence of the Green and the Yampa rivers, Echo Park was a pure indulgence in the most austere of deserts. In autumn, its groves of cottonwood and yellowing willow gave it a New England air. In the spring, the swollen Green would flood the canyon bottom and leave lush meadows as it went. Echo Park was probably the most beautiful canyon flat in all of Utah, part of Dinosaur National Monument. It was also an ideal site for a dam.

Echo Park Dam was to have been a part of the Colorado River Storage Project—one of the first of the giant cash register dams. David Brower loathed it as he had never loathed something before. Brower had no training as an engineer, but he was the son of an engineer, and he led the fight against Echo Park Dam in the late 1950s, going after the Bureau with its own favorite weapon—statistics. Brower liked to quote Disraeli about the three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. The Bureau had confidently proclaimed that Echo Park would conserve 165,000 acre-feet of water over any alternative site; Brower demonstrated convincingly that it would conserve nineteen thousand acre-feet at most. The Bureau said it would add to the basin’s water supply; Brower argued, with evaporation figures, that the basin might well lose water if Glen Canyon, the other big cash register dam, was also built. He demonstrated that a coal-fired powerplant would produce power for less money. It would be a great mistake, he told an incredulous Congressional subcommittee composed mainly of westerners, to rely on the Bureau’s figures “when they cannot add, subtract, multiply, and divide.” The Bureau reacted to such challenges with a mixture of bafflement and contempt, especially after Brower admitted that he had only made it through the ninth grade. But he had been secretly coached by Walter Huber, then the president of the American Society of Civil Engineers—for someone who had limited skill with people, Brower had an amazing ability to marshal expertise—and his calculations were largely supported by General Ulysses S. Grant of the Corps of Engineers. (Sometime later, the Bureau’s regional director in Salt Lake City, Olie Larson, was presented with a rubber slide rule by a group of fellow engineers; it was his award for stretching the truth at Echo Park.)

In the end, Brower and a handful of conservationists managed to bring about the biggest defeat the western water lobby had suffered until then: a denial of funds to build Echo Park Dam. To pull it off, though, they had had to compromise; for the sake of victory at Echo Park, they had agreed to leave Glen Canyon Dam alone. Later, when the dam was already under construction, Brower floated this then almost inaccessible reach of the Colorado River in a dory much like Major Powell’s. He was astonished by the beauty of the place, as were most of the handful of people (a few thousand perhaps) who managed to see Glen Canyon before it was drowned. When the reservoir filled, Brower’s friends actually wondered whether he might shoot himself. In the forward to a Sierra Club book called The Place No One Knew, he flagellated himself over the loss. “Glen Canyon died in 1963,” he wrote, “and I was partly responsible for its needless death. So were you. Neither you nor I, nor anyone else, knew it well enough to insist that at all costs it should endure.” Never again, Brower vowed, was he going to compromise over such a dam.

The battle over the Grand Canyon dams was the conservation movement’s coming of age. Only the upper basin had wanted Echo Park built; the lower-basin states had either remained