Interview: Ken Sleight
Ken Sleight originally started river running and wilderness outfitting in Utah in the 1950's. He presently owns and operates
the Pack Creek Ranch outside of Moab, Utah.
KEN VERDOIA:
Let's go back to the early 1950s, 1951, when you first started having some river experiences. Why don't you tell me about how you first got drawn into a river trip, where it was and what you experienced?
KEN SLEIGHT:
Well, I have to tell you, 1951 was quite a while ago, but I first started becoming interested in the river through a number of my friends running rivers at that time. Mulky Mack Ellington was runnin' rivers and so was Al Quist and others, but when I first started getting into it was when I took a trip with some college buddies from the University of Utah down here and it just happened that a number of them were quite persuasive; I enjoyed tripping with them. There were James Dean and Blaine
Busenbark, he was the nephew of Burt Loper, a famous old river runner, and Robert Wade. He ended up teaching college at Weber State and very influential later in environmental movement, and all of those, it was just a natural thing. And they invited me on a river trip, up in Dinosaur Natural Monument.
VERDOIA:
What was it like running the river? I mean we have these current images of sophisticated river expeditions that take place now in the huge rafts where you get all of the gourmet meals laid out for you, but what was it like running a river back in 1951?
SLEIGHT:
Well, what we had, we first went on those rafts, surface rafts come out the landing barges and that's what we used. Paddling when I first went, they give me a paddle and say paddle, and that's the way went through Ladore Canyon, the first trip I too took, that was 1951. But there was no sophisticated type of thing. There was very little regulation on the river.
We just went and put on, and that was the way it was for the first few years, very little regulation. You had the freedom of the river to yourself more or less and there were very few people on the river in those days when I first started, but since that time there's been so many that there's been a need for really tight regulation all the way. It used to feel very wilderness type to me because of the fact that there wasn't people there and
you had the freedom. You mix those two and the solitude and see the natural history and so forth along the way, that's true wilderness, and it's gone in my mind. The wilderness and the river's no more. Of course, Lake Powell is the crowning destruction of the river system.
VERDOIA:
Some would say the crown jewel.
SLEIGHT:
Crown destruction, because the crown jewel, they never tell you what's been destroyed, what's under that level of blue reservoir, I hate to call it a lake, because I picture a lake as a natural feature. But this reservoir, it destroyed so many things -- it was the heart of the whole canyon country. It took the heart out of the whole thing. So what happened after it filled up is left little vestiges of wilderness that we call wilderness now and they are fast now being destroyed because of ingresses, roads and everything else leading to what we call Lake Foul, you know.
VERDOIA:
In 1951 you ran the Green River, you're talking about the gates of Ladore and Ladore Canyon, and it wasn't too long after you ran that the Bureau of Reclamation started talking about a plan to put a dam up on that river at Echo Park.
SLEIGHT:
Echo park, yeah. I says, another dam? Of course, we were aghast that they'd even think about it. And so they kept talking about it and the Hatch Expeditions are very instrumental in taking a lot of the government people down, and the Sierra Club, and it got to be a real fight environmentally. One of the great environmental fights up to that time, and so all of the focus was on the Echo Park and the Flaming Gorge Dam that was going to be up there, and of course the environmental groups, especially the Sierra Club. Dave Brower, lost a big campaign against it. They were very effective
in seeing that Echo Park was not build. They did preserve the integrity of Dinosaur National Monument, but in so doing they forgot, not completely, but they forget to protect Glen Canyon from the dams, and that was to me a big mistake. Dave Brower admits that today, that we could have possibly included Glen Canyon in no dams along with Flaming Gorge and, that would have destroyed the whole project, and I think we could have done it today if we had to do it again, but you had to remember in those days we did not know just how to speak out. Some of the Sierra Club people did. Dave Brower, he learned that, but a lot of us here in Utah didn't. We had a little organization out of the Western River Guides Association that fought against the Glen Canyon Dam and out of that came Friends of Glen Canyon, but we
really didn't know how to speak out, we were tied. There was so much, it was a done deal, and everybody seemed to want it. Even some environmental groups, so-called environmental groups, said the dam would be okay. But after it was all done, then the Sierra Club, Dave Brower and others, they said, it was a big mistake. They put out that book, the Place No One Knew. Well, we knew it, and many of us knew it. I was running rivers down
through during that whole time and we all knew it. I was taking a lot of people, uh, each year, every year closer to 1963, I was taking more and more. I spent the whole '62 and '63 full-time down in Glen Canyon, taking people. And they all knew it. But how did we, how could we overcome that, uh, once they started, once they started building then it was impossible to stop.
VERDOIA:
There also was a sense that the construction of the dam represented progress and that if you were against the dam, you were against progress.
SLEIGHT:
Right. There was very much that. You felt like, well, you certainly felt in the minority because all, uh, all of the uh, the uh, political folk was for it. And they told everybody it was a great thing and everybody ate it up, and supported it. It was going to bring jobs, it was going to bring
progress, it was going to bring, and uh, so it was very hard, it was very hard to fight that type of thing, your own people.
VERDOIA:
Did you try to raise your voice and say, hey, wait a minute, no.
SLEIGHT:
I produced a little film of my own running Glen Canyon with scout groups and things like that and took it out and showed it to a number of groups and every time I showed it, of course, I brought up the environmental thing, we shouldn't have a dam here. But I didn't show it to too many groups and at that time, it was, uh, I just couldn't speak out. Very shy at that age and I didn't know how to do it. I couldn't myself accomplish what I wanted to do. I could, I could now, if they tried to say we're going to build Marble Canyon Dam down in the Grand Canyon, certainly I think that I've got far enough along that I could add my voice to it. In those days I couldn't. I was just a river runner and learning the ropes of that, you know, actually, and so ...
VERDOIA:
Why was Glen Canyon such a special place to you?
SLEIGHT:
It was, you know, Glen Canyon ... you know they talk about one of the things, one of the things they talk about all of the time, is a sense of place. Everybody is, in the sense of place, this is, makes you feel whole and this makes you a different person and it's a great community and all of that if you have a sense of place. I took a few trips and pretty soon,
after year, after year, after year, after year of going down there, I adopted it as my home and as a sense of place for me. The, uh, so many beautiful things. It wasn't a rushing river, uh, the uh, the river flowed in great big meanders, lots of sand bars along the way. It was, it was very heavenly, you look forward to not only that trip you're on, but the next trip and the next trip and I was sorry to see, always see the season end.
And we went way late into the season, early and late, and in those days I set up temporary headquarters at Richfield, Utah. Harry Ellison and George White did the same thing. And we made just a big circle from Richfield on over through Capitol Reef, on over to Hanksville and down North Wash, if you can get down there, if it wasn't flooded out, what-not. It was a really raw
experience. you didn't know if you'd get down there or not at times. Uh, and then just the idea of all -- and then you put off and you have your own world to you. That was the most gratifying feeling to me, is once you put off, take off from a sand bar, it's the greatest feeling in the world. You've got your own little group and you're it, and so, you stop at every little canyon, what-not. Pretty soon everybody wanted to see Rainbow
Bridge. We stopped there. Everybody wanted to see, they heard about these places, so they wanted to see Hidden Passage and Music Temple. 'Cause these were in the desert, in the arm of the Escalante and all of these places Along the way, they wanted to see. Pretty soon, well, I was going to the same places all the time and really got a, kind of a love affair with the canyon. I made it a point, every trip I want, that I would stop at
someplace that I'd never been and I'd tell the people, well, let's go on up. What's up there? I don't know, but let's go see. And that was a lot of fun, and ..., but then in addition to the beautiful canyons and the grottos and the temples and cathedrals and all these things, we got, we could, and then there was the Indian ruins, hundreds and hundreds of Indian ruins down
that intrigued you. You see the writings on the wall, their petroglyphs and the pictographs, all those things. Hundreds of them. And if you had time to go up all the canyons, you'd see thousands of them. So it was always, always different and yet it was much a beautiful thing, like coming home, a sense of place that we all talk about now that's so important. And the thing that I, uh I, I ramble on here, but the other thing that I, I
really I enjoyed was the history, seeing the artifacts along the way. What had done, the gold mine rush and the say, the disappearance of Everett Reuss and all of these things started adding up, so there always an intrigue. I didn't want to go to any other rivers, I was enticed to go down to Grand Canyon all the time while I was running Glen Canyon, but I was so satisfied
with Glen Canyon, that's where I stayed. I did take a few trips up into Dinosaur National Monument and up in Desolation, but I stayed pretty much to Glen Canyon during those years. It was only after Glen Canyon was dammed that I went down Grand Canyon a lot and also Cataract Canyon, and other rivers, I went up to Alaska and all that after the dam, but still, Glen Canyon was it, and uh, they came a day of reckoning though that it was
destroyed. But all those things fit together and it was a beautiful place.
VERDOIA:
Let's talk about that day of reckoning coming. Do you recall the first time when you were going down the river that you had the sense that this dam was actually happening?
SLEIGHT:
Right. When they started moving the earth down there. That was, that was the first inclination of things are happening. We knew it, even in the planning stage. You put it, there was going to be a dam there. It was approved. You know it's coming and then when you actual see them down there working and moving the area and even moving the road ways and them not
letting us through the old road that we wanted to go through, and we had a lot of repercussions about getting in and out, getting out, and that was the first inkling that all was not right. And when they put the Coffer Dam in, of course, you couldn't go on down to Lee's Ferry anymore and you had to go out of a canyon above there, or around the various cliffs there, and that's where we got out during the construction, so you knew it was imminent. It took them longer to get the dam done than they had anticipated and we had a couple of years there of continued running. Well I have to say that the day of reckoning in 1963 when that water started coming back was an eye opener to me. You know what happens is that you know it's coming, you know it's coming, and you know it hurts to know that it's coming. It's going to
destroy all these things, but not until that water comes up and you see it coming up and destroying or covering everything that you felt of great worth, even a sacredness about it, then it takes hold and that was the toughest thing for me, during the rise of that water in 1963 and 1964 that, uh, ... it was tough to take because you see. The various things that you treasure the most in the world is being taken away from you and there are
thousands and thousands of Indian dwellings you see just topple down and there was a history they were. They were going under more or less and it was just no longer there the they you wanted. You see the Music Temple going under. You see Cathedral in the Desert going under. And those were all sacred places. A lot, of the Indians felt the same way. Out of all this, well, when the water started going up into Rainbow Bridge National Monument, that was when we thought, will we finally be able to do something
about this, keep the water level down so it won't go up any more, and then about the 3,600 foot level, and I was determined I was just going to file suit against the government for putting it up in Rainbow Bridge National Monument because of the fact that it was in the law. It was in the law that the Rainbow Bridge would not be impaired, would be protected from the waters of Lake Foul, Lake Powell, but they kept bringing it up, and so, the Friends of the Earth and, members of Friends of the Earth and Dave Brower and myself got together. I entered the suit because we could stand in the suit. Because I was operating down there, and that was the way we got into the district court. We were, we did have standing in the suit, they said, and so we got into the courts. It was a long drawn-out thing for quite a while. Judge Ritter, Willis Ritter of the Federal Courts in Salt Lake, ruled with us and he ordered the waters out of Rainbow Bridge National Monument, and it was a delightful day for me, seeing that water go down and filled up the river down below the Grand Canyon Dam. And the river-runners liked it, seeing that water go down, of course, they took the case to the appeals court and it was reversed and they started coming back up and the waters went back up into Rainbow Bridge National Monument. It is under it now and
it is impaired tremendously the integrity of that whole area. The Indians and the Navaho people continue to demonstrate against both the water and the tourists that go up there and desecrate in their holy place. Because it did feel like a holy place, you know.
VERDOIA:
You've made that reference a couple of times, sacred place, holy place. . .but others who advocated building the dam felt their efforts were of service to God as well.
SLEIGHT:
Floyd Dominy and some of those people that had a vested interest in building the dam, they really waxed strong. And they did bring that divine destiny that the dam is just ... I guess to that point. And that's been one of the problems I've had breaking away from the mainstream, uh, that philosophy, of why not protect the very things we have. You don't destroy the very things that you're coming to see and enjoy, and that's what they did in this case. They destroyed the very things people wanted to see, that made them feel very one with the earth, and if they feel that way, why ... it's gets them a little closer to heaven by destroying things, I suppose that... but I, I've kinda strayed away from that philosophy. I was once the mainstream. The Glen Canyon Dam made an environmentalist out of me. You see
it for yourself. All this destruction of the things you held so dear and then it stays with you, you can't help it, and I see all this construction now is happening in the Canyon Country. Pretty soon they bring, they designate this is, this is a National Park, this is a National Monument, this is a wilderness area, conservation area, all these boundaries, all this stuff, and then they put roads through all these areas and that is what they're doing right now and along with it they build power plants and
pretty soon you've lost the whole. And it's always amazing to me, we get the reference all of the time from our adversaries, well you guys got to compromise. Come on, compromise a little, compromise. They're always saying compromise. Pretty soon you've compromised it all away and that's what's happening right now. So there is a stand and that's what Edward Ivy was trying to say, that there is a place that you say, no more, and that's
when you come out with this Epistle of the Monkey Wrench Gang. One, one of the great books of saying, no more. We can't handle it anymore. So there comes a time when you do say no, and you take up your own Monkey Wrench Gang, take up your own monkey wrench and see what you can do. At least it gets attention and that's what a lot of this is for is that. I think we've lost all the wilderness. I think it was a big mistake to create the
Escalante Grand Staircase, Escalante National Monument. What it does, the park service, or the BLM now, will bring in their graders and grade the roads and pretty soon they'll pave them and it's the beginning of the end. And the visitor's centers, campgrounds, and a road begets another road, begets another trail, begets another trail, and it's just covered with nothing but that stuff. For instance, back when we were really fighting,
when the water was coming up, in addition to the reservoir, they were building the power plant down there, but they wanted a road, it's called the Trans-Escalante Highway, that was going to go from Bullfrog Marina down to Hole-in-the-Rock, and then on around to hook onto Waweep Marina. One of the most devastating roads that would ever be built through a primitive area. One thing begets another, and that was a hard fight. A hard fight. They
were going to build, bring that road up and across the Escalante right downstream from beautiful Stephen's Arch and Coyote Gulch. Big beautiful, beautiful areas that they were going to destroy. They said that they would be beautiful for access, for all the people to see these things that never can be seen, but at the same time they destroy, and this had been the problem all the time.
VERDOIA:
It sounds like you're tying so many issues all back to this decision to build Glen Canyon, like it was in some respects the beginning of the end for Canyon Country.
SLEIGHT:
It was the, like I said, it took the heart out of the whole thing. The very center of it, and by doing that, well all these little vestiges of wilderness around it, canyon wilderness were open for the -- they were fair game for all the development. But it does lead back to the damming, the Glen Canyon Dam made lots of other problems, water-wise even. They
put a tremendous amount of water into that thing and then it's a waste of water because of the excessive evaporation. One of the big problems that Mexico is wanting water and the lower basin states are wanting water for their crops. Here we are, wasting it. It's going off and it could be used. The biggest problem, I think, that's a big problem, and by putting the dam in, it's of course, increased the salt content below the dam and it's been a
major problem. Not only that, now the silt is backing up behind the dam and increasing the level of the sand. It's made waterfalls in the arm of the San Juan, in the San Juan river arm. You can't run that anymore, of course, because there's great big waterfalls you have to go over when you're boating. And as years go on, that's going to increase. Maybe some day we won't be able to go down the Cataract Canyon because there might be waterfalls. Who knows? But it's just like this, one thing begets another
problem. They always have to Band-Aid from then on and this is what's happening. And then they always have to have more roads and that's the beginning of the end as far as solitude and wilderness. If you feel like, well, maybe wilderness, so what? What's the matter with what's going on? Well, there's a set of values here, I think, that we've forgotten. Sure, we can destroy all the wilderness in Utah and that what's happening. But yet I
think that coming back to that, you destroy the very thing that people are coming to see or want to see and value. People all over the world. Governor Matheson once proposed some of this down here. Much of the acreage that's now in this whole area is a big international preserve type of thing. It's ... people from other countries come here. They don't what in the hell's the matter with us, because they've destroyed it. They can't see it
anymore and this has happened all the way. And, uh, well they can make some overlooks here and there and I guess that's wilderness to some people. I don't know.
VERDOIA:
Why should anyone care about what's lost in Glen Canyon?
SLEIGHT:
Well, I can come back with why do I, why know? Abbey and I used to think, well, okay, they fouled it up. We'll go to another place and go another place, another place. In fact I tried to go to, after the dam came in, well, I went to Alaska up at the Yukon, going around the Yukon River. I went and took five trips down there and thinking, well, that's still running, still running river. But yet I got up there, and it was beautiful. I loved the history, I loved the river, I loved the people, I loved the natural scene, but there was still something about the canyons and the sense of place that I felt when I was down in Glen Canyon and I couldn't go up there. I just couldn't ... jump ship here and go up there. Because there, there's still these little things. I moved to Escalante. My roots are in
Southern Utah. Originally, Idaho, but had so much going on Southern Utah. The canyons were just so great that you had to make the most of it. And after a while, I guess, you become hardened. But why the people feel so akin to this country. It comes inside of you. Beauty, it's God's work of art, I suppose. It's God's creation, and you feel that sense of beauty for
beauty's sake. And, you do feel when you're down there, a religious kin to it. Why it is seeing all the beautiful things. The Sierra Club had this thing, this campaign, against the dams up in Dinosaur -- "would you flood the Sistine Chapel?" And that really hit home to a lot of people. Would you destroy this great work of art? Why would you do a natural work of art? God's own creation. Why would you deliberately go out to destroy it. It's
very inherent in us, I think, that we love beauty. But when they start disrupting it is when it's very difficult to understand why. Why do you fight for it so much? Yeah, we can move on. Abbey and I said, let's, we could move on. But here he stayed the same way, and it's worth fighting for. And so therefore you fight and Glen Canyon was a great lesson. I always look at it as the rape of Glen Canyon and lessons to be learned
from that.
VERDOIA:
What are the lessons you learned?
SLEIGHT:
The lesson I learned was that I came back. I didn't run and leave it to spoil, but yet I think that when you start getting a little more persuasive than you were once, that you can do some good. Abbey wrote his books and it made people come. But also it made people realize that it was worth saving
and people coming on this for the first time, they are flabbergasted that they allow this to happen and so this is one of the reasons to start fighting. And the restoration of Glen Canyon, that's the end result -- let's bring it back, so there is a flowing river, just like Grand Canyon. Nobody wants a dam down there anymore. They're not even thinking of damming it down there. In fact they're thinking of putting it under wilderness
designation which I've always tried to promote.
VERDOIA:
But they were thinking about it at one time?
SLEIGHT:
Oh, yes they were. The Marble Canyon dam. It's amazing the transformation once they got to Glen Canyon dam and they saw the destruction of what was happening, then a lot of the politicians decided that they could not afford to go through a Marble Canyon episode. Because they had it all on the planning boards. The Udall brothers, they decided they would change their stance and they came out very heavy after a while to campaign
against it, and a lot of other politicians and it snowballed to let's protect Grand Canyon and it worked. That's why we know that if we could have had Glen Canyon at that time all protected, it may be national park status or whatever. Harold Eckies way back in the Roosevelt administration wanted to put all that into a national park because it was so beautiful. Knowing that, knowing that it was so beautiful then and they knew what was
there, they still went ahead. And so it's a lesson. Glen Canyon is a lesson that we can't just wholesale put dams in the main streams and rivers. I was an old farmer once, I mean I wasn't old, I was a young farmer, and I used to know what water would do. I made my own little dams and things like this, and before Glen Canyon dam, I was one of all of us. I was for reclamation and so forth. But once you see it full force, you got to change
your way and that's what happened to me. I went from a very conservative type of life and went to very much more liberal and saying there are other values too that have got to be protected. That's where I'm at right now, it's made such a dent on me. You can't just look at something happening with not taking action about it. You see with the nuclear waste dumps, we're really confronted with pollution of our rivers. Radionucleides are
going down the Colorado River, coming out of the Dolores, over there in Colorado. We have the dumps there, or the tailings dump there at uh, just across the river, at, called Atlas, just across from Moab and then now they're trying to get a nuclear waste dump really, a de facto dump, at White Mesa down by Blanding and they're bringing Tanawana, New York waste, and the waste that they used on the Manhattan project, to build the first atomic
bomb. They're bringing that to San Juan County, and now they're
thinking about bringing Canadian waste to San Juan County. Where do you stop? And just to think that there's going to be a huge dump right in the midst of all of this beautiful canyon country just blows my mind. So therefore, you step out and say, hey, this shouldn't be. I was very pleased the Navaho people, the Utah Navaho commission came out very strongly against the nuclear waste dump. They feel the same way. They don't want their lands polluted. And this is exactly what it is.
VERDOIA:
You mentioned the Navaho people a couple of times now, and I look back on some of the materials the government put out in the late 1950s and the early 1960s, and they give the impression that the Navaho people are fully behind the construction of the Glen Canyon dam.
SLEIGHT:
Some of them are. Some of the Navaho people, now that it's up there, they're not so sure that they want to get rid of that, because they are employing a lot over like at the Page area. They've given them jobs and so forth and they've become dependent on it. You take that away and they feel like I did when they dammed, and I couldn't boat down there anymore, and
they feel the same way. What is the Navaho Nation, with all these projects coming in, is detrimental, actually detrimental to the environment, and what it does is pit Navaho versus Navaho and that's what's happened even, even in this instance on the waste dump at Blanding and, the proposed waste dump. And it's becoming that now because they're taking a lot of different ores. It'd be like EnviroCare in Northern Utah if we don't stop it. But the
proponents of the Navaho people were against it because they have had the experience of being taken down the blind path, putting them in uranium mines. They're sick. Many of them have died and they still feel the remnants of that and how the government lied to them, over and over the government lied to them. They don't believe at all anymore what the nuclear industry is telling them. and I don't blame them. I don't either. Right now, it's a very critical time because we did defeat the high nuclear waste dump that was going to be done on the outskirts of Canyonlands National Park a number of years ago. We beat that with Governor Leavitt's help we was able to defeat the MRS, that the Monitored Retrieval Storage, a temporary storage of waste, high-level waste, in San Juan County, which the White Commissioners okayed. They were promoting it as bringing it here. Why ourcommissioners in our own county wants that stuff. If it wasn't for Governor Leavitt, we'd have them today. Now, of course, they always go where the Indian tribes are because there are pockets of poverty everywhere, everybody wants a job and they'll take anything rather than starve, so to speak, and it's a travesty what they do to the poor people. Rather than try to get jobs from other ways, they bring all this stuff nobody else wants and
they feed it to them, no, this is not that dangerous. Why don't they keep the waste where it is, where it comes from you know? Why don't they keep Tanawana waste in Tanawana if it's so safe, you know, that type of thing.
VERDOIA:
I want to come back to the late 50s and the early 60s once again, while the dam is being constructed. Describe that for me.
SLEIGHT:
I saw it going up. It was always in the news. They showed different pictures at different times. I'd sometimes drive over. Most of the time I'd miss it because going down the river you didn't see it every time, you do see where they're taking the big gravel pits, I always saw that, and once in a while I'd go and check it out. And as I, it gives you a funny feeling. And it was also that activity there, you know it's just, it makes you just feel you have no power at all.
VERDOIA:
There were literally thousands of people that were brought in around this, weren't there?
SLEIGHT:
You saw them and the hive of activity was just everything. It's hard to get through that construction zone. They had gates different places and one time they shut us right out of our main route out. We'd have to go about 15 to 20 miles another direction over gravel roads to get out and that's when
the Kane County came and the sheriff and ordered them to open it. And so they did finally give us a route through the construction zone in order to get over to the highway in order for us to get out, but they hadn't foreseen the problems of the river traffic at that time, even though the reservoir was filling up, we had a problem of getting through.
VERDOIA:
How do you feel you were treated by the government? I mean here's one guy making his living on the river.
SLEIGHT:
Well, we didn't matter. It felt like you had no say-so. Harry Ellison and I, we talked at length about this. He was determined he was not going to be pushed off the river, of course there was the reservoir and we all thought we were going to lose our rights to continue operating and there was a big fear that we wouldn't be able to see all the little side canyons in
spite of the reservoir. I think Harry was a little more capable of running of reservoir than I was. He got a jet boat and zoom up and down while it was filling. All I had was the rubber boats, the old rubber rafts -- a whole different thing.
VERDOIA:
You've already said that you could see how the lake was changing. Once they closed the gates and the water starts to back up, you say this was a pretty quick process. Sometimes you could see it on a daily basis, sometimes, and you would really notice it from trip to trip. Describe for me this notion of taking one trip down and then coming back a few weeks later with the next trip. You could actually see changes?
SLEIGHT:
Oh, sure. You know ... like for instance, you'd go up into the Escalante arm and go up to Gregory Natural Bridge in a little side canyon of Escalante, and it was starting to fill into the hole of the bridge. And each trip, you'd look at it. Pretty soon, I took the register out that we always signed in that we were there, and took that out. Next time, well, where the register sat, it was covered over, and pretty soon, maybe it got to where it was only about six to eight foot from the top of the arch, of the hole, and the next trip, it was all filled in. You couldn't go up the canyon anymore because it was filled in. You see, the Gregory Natural Bridge spanned the whole canyon and it was ...It was gone. It's underneath the water right now. It was gone and other places like up in Davis Gulch, there used to be a good, great place, I took all my guests up there and we-- that was where Everett Russ had his little burrows and got lost, not lost,
but he died down there somewhere, and there's where the big search party was, back in 1934, 1935, and the inscriptions of Nemo 1934, it's another big long story, big historical thing, but all of those are covered. A great big panel of petroglyphs there was all covered and you could just see it. I found a cradle board washed out of the sands right, there at the Nemo
inscription. But you see all these things, and over in Music Temple, saw the water covering over the Powell expedition inscriptions, and when I brought my other party the next time, well, I said the inscriptions are right there, and ...Ken VERDOIA - You were putting your hand in the water?
SLEIGHT:
And you reached down, you reached down to feel the carvings of the Powell inscriptions and all you could see is the upper part of Music Temple. Things like that, little things like that, meant a lot, you know feeling those inscriptions and people felt it instead of looking at it.
VERDOIA:
Then they were gone?
SLEIGHT:
They were gone. We used to go from the river, carry our bedrolls up and sleep in Music Temple, some of them, at night, because it was, it's very cathedral-like, big beautiful grotto, maiden-hair fern, and a little pool of water, and people just loved the, the great feeling. And, of course, pretty soon they couldn't do that. And the pools going up in Aztec Canyon,
Forbidden Canyon I should say, Forbidden, that was all those pools gone that you have a whole day of nothing but swimming and ducking at the pools on the way up to Rainbow Bridge. And pretty soon, you get up ... it's always intrigued me. When the water's going up into, to Rainbow Bridge area, the Park Service had a little sign that says, in a little grotto off to the side, this was God's thing and be careful and don't disturb, and all that
stuff that you see on a lot of signs when you go to Park Service areas, don't, don't uh, just look, it's all you do is leave tracks. They had that beautiful sign and beautiful grotto protecting it, but then the next trip, it was over that. The government is one of the greatest destroying agents. The government, we talk about protecting these areas, and yet they come around and destroy the very thing they're trying to protect, and that was always a tough one. That's why I have an aversion to the Park Service, just there was a time when we wanted to preserve something, we got to put it in a National Park. As soon as you put it in a National Park, then here come the visitor's centers and everything. Look at Needles National Park, I mean,
Canyonlands National Park. The Needles section. A tremendous amount of visitor's centers and homes and everything in there. It destroyed the heart of Canyonlands National Park in my mind. Rather than putting the developments in small towns where they could do it and then go on in and come on back out, they wanted to put their little cities and little towns out there. That's what I fear about the Escalante National Monument. But, the whole thing is better planned than we need, we need real expert people to get a handle on this, rather than feeling we have to destroy. And it's hard in Utah. It's hard in Utah because of the prevailing culture. I've had big fight all these years with the local people, starting with Calvin Black who was the county commissioner chairman who the, the San Juan County Commission. And he was a hard person to overcome. He wanted to build roads
and he did build roads and it was very hard. U-95, right after Lake Powell, well, after the filling, here comes roads, roads and off those roads come more roads, hooking up all the various concession sites that they decided on. And now they're, they still want to make more roads.
VERDOIA:
Ken, you're just trying to be a road block in the way of progress.
SLEIGHT:
This is an obstacle we have. Everybody has a right to see it. Well, if everybody, you take that to the nth degree. Everybody has the right to see it. I was talking to Sam Taylor, a good friend of mine, is the uh, local editor of the Times Independent down in Moab, he says, "Ken, I ought to pave
everything and they would start taking out the roads." Uh. How much do you pave this in order for everybody to see it. Pretty soon you have nothing but pavement everywhere so that everybody can see it, but by doing that, you've ruined it. You can't see it anymore. There comes a time when the diminishing returns. It's no longer there. And I can go on and on and on of these places that are no longer there to be seen. Glen Canyon was a
great example. It's a great example of what we're up against. And roads is a tough thing. Right now, the San Juan County, we had an episode a year ago when we tried to stop the machines, and uh, because they were putting, they were blazing roads where roads had never been. Just to blade roads so that they couldn't designate wilderness in those areas. And we had a confrontation with the San Juan County Commission about that and it's still
now, still in the court system, but that was, that's what they're doing. They want roads everywhere. Well it's, it brings in lots of more things. I remember a place over in Escalante, they had a big petrified forest, big logs. Old petrified logs, just oodles of it. Then they put a road in it. Pretty soon, here comes all the vehicles, and they couldn't load those great big stumps and so forth in their trucks, so they blew them up. If they couldn't throw them in the trucks, they'd blow them up. Now there's no
forest over there. They're all gone. Because of a road. And the mining roads, a lot of them has been responsible. We've seen the influx of adverse activity just because of the roads and it's going to continue. We had an instance over in Escalante where the local folks wanted a road to the top of the Kaparowitz and that was a big fight way back, remember? And they wanted a road up there, and so they went out on the desert and they staked a
roadway to the top where they were going to gouge out a road right in the face of the Kaparowitz. Of their 50-mile mountain. It had been devastating. I'd lived in Escalante at that time and I was head of the Escalante Chamber of Commence and a number of us, I guess it was the most environmentally-oriented Chamber of Commence in America, right in the depths of Canyon Country. But it was eminent and the BLM was just going right along with it. But we got a hold of Secretary Udall, he came and looked at it and says, no way. That road never got built. But the argument was, was that if that road had been built, those cattle people would be eventually gone, because they have to take the available springs for their campgrounds and things like this for tourism. And I tried to explain that and some of the cattlemen finally came around and says, well, you're right. We don't need that. It'd be easier to line the cattle up there than having a roadway
for everybody.
VERDOIA:
You know the Federal Government, afer approving the dam, decides that they're going to fund studies. One to document, if you will, the geology of the canyon before it's covered with water, and also to make note of the historical sites. Do you recall those studies?
SLEIGHT:
Yeah, down in the canyon, well, the University of Utah and others stated that they desperately needed to research some of the ruins and the archeological sites and things like this, so they had a crash program. All of the sudden, it was like, a sudden that they forgot something along the way. And so they did, they had a lot of studies. Quite a few. There wasn't, I would say, not extensive, but it was needed and Professor
Jennings at the University and others, and likewise in history, Dr., Professor Crampton, he says that he desperately needed to get down there and do historical work. He had to work to get a contract out of that. It was really tough to get funding for preservation orb even the studies, it was hard to get it. And they were so, they wouldn't give it to them, very little of it, and so it was not completely done and Gregory Crampton, he admits to that. I wrote a critique once criticizing the government of not putting more effort into historical, archeological studies. I was right. They didn't do enough, and uh, uh, since that time, less in the Glen Canyon, when they have a reclamation project like the dams over in Colorado, oodles. Dolores Project, hundreds and hundreds of studies and monographs coming out, just tremendous. Road projects have to have environment, archeological studies and out of it shows us that we've got to look at those things before we go into these things. And at that time the archeological studies and all these other studies were not done prior to the decision to build the dam. It came after, rather ... Rather than before.
VERDOIA:
You say it was a crash program. They were really racing against time, weren't they?
SLEIGHT:
Yes they were. It was a delight to see them down there, because it was interesting to the river people to stop in and talk to them. But they didn't have that much time either to stop and really show the people what they were doing. They'd go from here and there and spot check here and a trench here and uh, uh ...
VERDOIA:
And the river kept rising?
SLEIGHT:
The river kept rising. And covering all those things. We used to stop ... it's not only archeological, really the ancients, but the historic, the Navaho had tremendous amount of habitations down there and they did a lot less in the historic period than they did the ancients even then. But, they could do it now if they put the money to it. There needs to be a lot more
research done. Of course, once the reservoir goes down, then a lot of that's all destroyed. You will never be able to -- I always want to know what happened to the metal cradle board that I found in Davis Gulch when the waters took the cradle board out. I put it back in just to be destroyed by the waters. And so, they will find a lot of artifacts when the reservoir goes down, but piecing it together's going to be a tough one.
VERDOIA:
Is there such a thing for you as a favorite spot in the former Glen Canyon when you were river running? Is there one place that you'd say, oh, if I could be in one place for one time once again, I wish I could be back in that spot.
SLEIGHT:
Well, broaden the spot out a little bit, because right there where the Escalante comes into the, Escalante River comes into the Colorado, that area for some reason is so magnificent. I suppose there's more water to make more grottos. Uh, right there was Music Temple, in that area, Cathedral in the Desert, Hidden Passage, a lot of little serpentine canyons where you can touch both shoulders to each wall as you're walking up, and wading through water and things like this, and then just below there was Rainbow Bridge, and all that one little area there, and Mystery Canyon and those, that was my favorite. We spent about three days there, two to three days usually, and on my trips to see that area because it was so magnificent. And it
takes, you could take six days, that's what I did when I lived, after the reservoir started coming up, I moved to Escalante and I did a lot of that, spent the whole time, nearly six days of a trip right in that area, and trying to make the most of the reservoir, but it was very tough, so I started doing more of the Escalante that hadn't, the upper reaches of Davis and Soda and some of those that hadn't yet, the reservoir hadn't come up, but that area for, I, it's because of the springs coming out, they formed those great big alcoves and when John Wesley Powell went down there, no wonder he thought the same thing. That's where he got the name Glen Canyon, all the glens along the way, and in Powell's biography, or autobiography, his papers, he writes how he used to took, he took his bedroll right up into Music Temple. It's all right there, right in a little spot, and there's a
temptation to just stay right there, and it'd be very easy. Burt Loper had a little cabin in Red Canyon upstream from there and Cass High just across the way from that. They both had cabins, and I envied them very much, having cabins down there. And I always thought maybe that'd be a great thing. If I was the only one that could make a cabin and not everybody else and then it would be great. But one cabin begets another cabin, right? But
that to me was, and it's right down there, also, a little ways above, there's a great indentation in the cliff so to speak, that looked like a heart, so we always used to say that that was the heart of Glen Canyon, in that same area that we just talked about. It's, it was a tremendous area, now. Now you go down there and you zip by in a motorboat and you never know that that beautiful area was there and all those beautiful canyons.
VERDOIA:
Let me ask you, and this goes further back, you give me the impression that so much attention was focused on Echo Park, that Glen Canyon was forgotten. Is that basically what you feel happened?
SLEIGHT:
I think that that's right. Everything was up there. It was, and Sierra Club was feeling their oats. They felt the power, they felt this, and the whole thing was to protect the integrity of Dinosaur National Monument at that time. That took precedence over anything downstream. Even though they
knew, I think, that the environmental community knew how beautiful it was, but all they knew was the Rainbow Bridge, so they put it in the law that would be protected. Little did they know that when the time actually came, that Rainbow Bridge would not be protected, and that's the problem. You know. Even though it's in the laws, that ... they just disregarded the law
completely because of so much money into it. The judicial system really failed. That's why we brought the suits for justice to be done and they didn't, and they didn't uphold the law. It's right in there, you can read it. "Shall preserve Rainbow Bridge and not be impaired", that type of thing and they did it anyway. It's a sad, a sad state of affairs that what the judge said, Judge Lewis of the appeals court said, this is one of the worst
decisions we ever made. In overruling Judge Ritter's ruling that, he said, what should have been done is this remanded back to Congress. If the American people through Congress want to flood their national parks, so be it. But, it shouldn't be by, well, it was legislated matter, not a judicial one. But we lost, but that preponderance of--we had saved Dinosaur, and I hang my head. This is one of the few places I look back, I was so heated
up on trying to preserve Glen Canyon and I wrote Congressman William Dawson a letter. A big long... I used to write long letters, very emotional, all that kind of stuff, telling him that if, had one or the other, I would rather see Glen Canyon preserved. I take back those words. I mean, we could have had them all, all these canyons preserved. But if I had to choose because I was so intimate with Glen Canyon, I would have given
up, I would have given up Echo Park Dam. I feel sorry about that now, because it puts you in a place that you didn't have as a hypothetical thing. We didn't need to do it. What we should have done was put all of our forces on the whole project and try to defeat that, and I think we could have done it. I really think we could have done it if we had known the power of the
environmental, or the public, can really, really ... It wasn't the Utahns that fought against this. Very few Utahns really fought against the dam, it was people from the East and those who read the New York Times, or, don't flood the Sistine Chapel. There were tremendous ads, to be framed for all time. It was a great ad.
VERDOIA:
The building of the dam had som many supporters. Did you ever take heat for being opposed to construction?
SLEIGHT:
Sure. We had these friends, not the friends, but we had the Western River Guides Association. We used to meet in Salt Lake City in the Red Feather building. Al Quist was employed there as a director or something, but we, that was our first meetings there at the Red Feather Building where he worked. Bus Hatch was there and Dawn and the whole Hatch family. They
were very instrumental in this whole thing of protecting up there, and they knew first-hand, of course, the beauties of the country up there. So we fought very hard to keep it out up there. But Bus was very, very instrumental in seeing that that wasn't done. Without them and without others..., uhh without Dave Brower we would have a dam up there now.
VERDOIA:
In the 1950's the Bureau of Reclamation said "taming a rogue river" or "making a national treasure out of a natural menace" were primary reasons for building the Glen Canyon Dam and the Colorado River Storage project. How do you respond to this notion of the Colorado being an outlaw river when it ran free?
SLEIGHT:
Well, I think that you have to take a perspective of control. Everybody wanted a piece of it. And they put it out, well, here's a river that's got to be controlled, just like all the rivers in the East. They couldn't figure out why there's no dam on it, except down below Grand Canyon. It just had to be done. And there's a few of us that were making use of the river. A lot of people lived along the river. A lot of the Navajos
lived down there along the river. And Floyd Domini, he's very powerful. He put out these words. He put out a little thing. Jewel of the Colorado. A little publication. You're closer to God, you're doing this, doing that. It's got to be harnessed for the general good. And Senator Bennett and Moss and everybody grabbed on to it. A good political issue. Then they kept saying those things, that it's got to be developed and pretty soon, they
convinced the people that it ought to be done.
VERDOIA:
As a man who ran the river, was it an outlaw river?
SLEIGHT:
No, no, I could, uh, I could get on anywhere. I mean, I could run every part of the river, and I did. All the way from about from Green River, Wyoming clear on down through Grand Canyon. You could run the river. It was easy. I mean, sure there was a tremendous amount of rapids in Grand Canyon and Cataract Canyon, but it was a challenge, and yet, we ran it. And
it's not only that, but they had a lot of mining, prospecting all the time on that river. My good friend Arthur Chaffin had a number of claims down there is it was home to him. There's, there's Chaffin Ferry. There's certain places there were little trails up and down the river. It wasn't so far out as people thought. It wasn't a rogue river in our mind, but they made it out to be that. But I think that they did that because everybody
wanted a piece of it. Utah's upper basin and lower basin, they divided the waters and this is it. While we're depriving Mexico of water, good water, clean water, and fresh water, we're giving them all salt, the lower basin, they got the big populations and they're clamoring for water. Now they want to bring water from Northern California down there if they could do it. And there's a problem now around Las Vegas. Where are they going to get the
water? So they bring big aqueducts down from various places, so it's impacting other areas that want the water, too. I once wrote, let them have the water. Maybe it's a higher use for water, but Utah wants, they act as a very sovereign nation themselves. Boundary means we keep the water. Utah keeps the water. Colorado got the water. So they built these dams and
they make money off these dams to build other dams and where do we stop? It was the biggest mistake in the world to build Glen Canyon dam because of that. They could have altered the compact to retain the rights if they had made the division of the waters at Lake Mead at Boulder Dam, Hoover Dam. If they'd make the compact there, then we wouldn't have needed the Glen Canyon.
They could still do it, but Utah wanted to control the water and the ... and it's been a big mistake, because it's been very costly, but just because of that need to control, it's been a hard one. They want to, to keep the rights. They're very adamant that they don't want to open the compact because it's going to, even for one little part of it, because it's going to
open the hole and we go back to square one that we have to have whole new negotiations. They don't want to do that. And just simply, and I told them a long time ago, just put the division down Lake Mead, Boulder Dam and a lot of the problem would be solved, but they haven't done it. Of course they haven't done it. There's too much money involved. You follow the dollar.
Where is the big money? And the corporations and so forth that's been involved. They have their fingers with the political regimes and everything. We were thinking that we might have had an impact, but under that situation, money controlled. There's no doubt about it. And I think money controlled the judicial system. And that's we have to watch today is who's putting the money in it. Who's garnering the dollars for these nuclear waste dumps and why are so many of the politicians going right along
with them. It brings up a lot of fears and a lot of the, we wouldn't do that, surely, in America we couldn't do that, but yet, we know different. Thank God for the environmental community and a lot of the organizations that's fighting. It's kind of slowed down, but I don't know that we could ever keep a wilderness like we would like it. I don't think that that's
possible anymore.
VERDOIA:
This whole issue about the dams that were proposed and some that were built and the one that wasn't built in Echo Park, gives birth to the notion of an environmental movement after World War II in this nation, doesn't it?
SLEIGHT:
Yeah, I think, out of all this, is, I think, we've slowed down on the dam building. We see what's happened. We're taking a closer look at all projects on the river. That's a great thing. But still, it comes to, at what point do you take the dams out? And Glen Canyon Dam is certainly right for taking out. What are you going to do with the ... and this is the way
it is in a lot of the other participating projects. Instead of Glen Canyon, maybe get, all of these other projects are getting the silt too, but Glen Canyon is getting the most. What happens when that sand and the silt comes way up so that you have less power generation. Some day, we're going to have a reckoning. What are we going to do? Do we do it now when it's cheaper to do it, or are we going to do it later when it's much more expensive and now we can revert back and bring back the river, bring back
all of the beautiful canyons just like Grand Canyon, and now's the time to do it, and we've got to take a look at all the participating projects, all the dams that's done. A lot of the dams were filled up with silt and they need to be looked at. It's a whole different ball game from when Floyd Dominy was pushing his projects through.
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