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mysterious fata morgana (a mirage caused by layering of intensely cold or cool air against the water, sea ice, or land). His comprehensive 1955 report—A Recreation Program for Alaska—was aimed at widening tourists’ opportunities for bird-watching, hiking, cross-country skiing, river rafting, and mountain climbing. According to the historian Roger Kaye in Last Great Wilderness, Collins—a career officer in the National Park Service from 1927 to 1960—envisioned a “fuller range of wildland values” through “transcendental and romantic concepts and new perspectives” promoted by conservationists such as Bob Marshall, Aldo Leopold, and the Muries.13 Collins believed the postwar rush to over-timber, over-mine, and over-drill in Alaska had to be thwarted. Already the wildlife biologist Lowell Sumner was warning the Department of the Interior that spraying DDT would kill Alaskan lakes and forests as well as the insect hordes it was aimed at. Nature was under attack; there was an increased risk of species extinction and overexploitation of natural resources in Alaska.

Collins was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1903. Many of America’s most effective environmentalists came from the upper Midwest. Aldo Leopold and William Temple Hornaday were from Iowa. So, too, was Congressman John F. Lacey, who from 1892 to 1906 did more than any other U.S. politician except Theodore Roosevelt to protect wildlife by means of federal legislation. Besides the Muries, Sigurd Olson (a staunch wilderness advocate and biologist), Gaylord Nelson (a Democratic senator and founder of Earth Day), and Joseph Hickey (who served Wisconsin and the conservation cause as both state governor and senator), all came of age in Wisconsin. If you grew up in Wisconsin, you could explore Leopold’s shack in Sand County and Muir’s childhood home, Fountain Lake Farm, as historical landmarks of conservation. In photos of Collins as a young man growing up in Wisconsin, he has the look of Gene Autry, but with bushier sideburns. Usually Collins kept the top button of his checkered shirts fastened, as if he might want to attach a bolo tie at a moment’s notice. Collins was a master of surveying the public domain and offering plans for preservation. “George had a hilarious sense of humor,” Ginny Wood recalled. “And whatever he wrote about Alaskan lands was absolutely true, solid geography. He wasn’t a lot of hoey.”14

Encouraged by Horace Albright, head of the National Park Service, Collins had a conservationist résumé in the Lower Forty-Eight that helped make him highly effective in wild Alaska: serving as superintendent of Lassen Volcanic National Park in California; working as a ranger at the Grand Canyon from 1930 to 1935; running a CCC camp at Lake Mead (which had been created by Boulder Dam in 1936); establishing a district office for the National Park Service in Santa Fe; protecting the Channel Islands off the coast of Oxnard, California; and overseeing the survey that saved Point Reyes National Seashore. But Collins isn’t praised in college courses in environmental history, for a single reason: he supported the construction of Glen Canyon Dam.

Glen Canyon Dam was indeed folly. In 1956, the Upper Colorado River Storage Bill was introduced in Congress. For $756 million, a huge dam would be built near Page, Arizona. To environmentalists, damming the wild Colorado River was sacrilegious. The construction area—along the Arizona-Utah border—constituted some of the world’s most gorgeous canyon scenery. Governor J. Bracken Lee of Utah, however, declared that the Glen Canyon Dam was “just the beginning of a long range program that will build up the West.”15 Eventually the bill was passed, and construction began on one of the largest reclamation projects in American history. President Dwight D. Eisenhower announced the official construction of Glen Canyon Dam—which formed Lake Powell—on October 15, 1956, by pushing a remote control at the White House, triggering an immense explosion in the Southwest. Huge hunks of Glen Canyon’s west wall tumbled down thunderously.16

The Sierra Club,