The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (15 page)

Incensed, he purchased a typewriter and began banging out articles for the
Times
on a long list of subjects that upset him. He criticized a plan to flood the Tehipite Valley, an enclave of unprotected land in the Sierras almost completely surrounded by Kings Canyon National Park. He put together an exposé about how overcrowded Yosemite had become. Another piece took Californians to task for flinging trash all over the state’s highways—a story that provoked snickers in the newsroom and earned him the nickname Mr. Litterbug.

None of this may sound especially radical now, but at the time, almost no one was talking about such things. Conservation had yet to develop as a powerful political force, and the word
environmentalism
had not even been coined. But what made Litton’s ideas even stranger—and so at odds with prevailing sentiment—was the depth of his rage. Without quite realizing it, he was emerging as a ferocious and rather prescient expositor of a white-hot, no-surrender brand of environmental purism: the unyielding, unapologetic (and, his critics would later charge, unreasonable) defense of wilderness. “People often tell me not to be extreme,” he would repeatedly declare. “ ‘Be reasonable!’ they say. But I’ve never felt it did any good to be reasonable about anything in conservation,
because what you give away will never come back—ever.
When it comes to saving wilderness, we cannot be extreme
enough.
”

In short, he had no compunction about being nasty, and he didn’t particularly care whom he might offend. No part of California was too small or too obscure to arouse his ire, and as his anger amplified, so too did the scope of his interests. The event that did more than anything else to trigger this expansion occurred in 1953, when his attention was pulled far beyond the borders of California to a remote corner of northeastern Utah. What was taking place there was about to connect Litton to the river of John Wesley Powell, eventually drawing him into the Grand Canyon itself.

S
hortly after emerging from Lodore Canyon, near the northeastern corner of Utah, the Green River enters a charmed little pocket where flooded meadows and thick groves of cottonwood and box elders are framed by smooth ramparts of white sandstone. In June 1869, this place had offered a much-needed respite to Powell and his battered crew after the hapless Billy Hawkins had set fire to their camp and pitched most of their mess kit into the river. Because the surrounding area, which was known as Echo Park, had been declared a national monument in 1938, the place was almost as pristine in Litton’s day as it had been in Powell’s. Unfortunately, however, Dinosaur National Monument lacked adequate funding for proper surveillance (
the budget was so tiny that the handful of rangers didn’t even have money to purchase a raft to conduct river patrols). As a result, no one had taken much notice when a team from the Bureau of Reclamation showed up just before World War II with transits, drills, and maps, looking for dam sites that could be included in the Blue Book, the bureau’s catalog of prospective hydro projects along the Colorado and its major tributaries.

After three years of survey work and geologic testing, the members of the team were pleased to report that they had located not one site, but two.
The reservoirs of these dams would flood the heart of the monument to depths as great as five hundred feet, and it was of no concern to the Bureau of Reclamation or its allies in Congress that the law required this area to be preserved in a manner that would leave it
“unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” In 1949,
when Reclamation formally unveiled a massive water-development package calling for
the construction of six major dams and twelve irrigation projects in the upper Colorado River basin, the most prominent part of the package included the pair of dams in the center of Dinosaur.

At the time, Litton knew almost nothing about the Colorado—its peculiar blend of violence and grace, or the otherworldly beauty that lay beneath the rims of the canyons that the river had carved. But having spent three years
fighting the Nazis in Europe, he was viscerally offended by the possibility that a lawfully protected wilderness area could be trampled at will by politicians and developers. So he began plastering stories all over the pages of the
L.A. Times
, accusing Reclamation of “a dictatorial plan for a gigantic boondoggle.” Among the readers who took note of those diatribes was an amateur butterfly collector and former rock-climbing bum from Berkeley named David Brower, who had just been appointed executive director of a conservation group known as the Sierra Club.

When Brower telephoned Litton to ask if he might be interested in joining the Sierra Club,
Litton was amused. As far as
he could see, the club was little more than a group of weekend hikers who were primarily interested in socializing and planning picnics. But
at Brower’s urging Litton enrolled and started attending gatherings, where he distinguished himself by lighting up cigars and disdainfully blowing smoke at those sitting around the table. He was disputatious and irreverent, and his presence was often resented. But gradually he and Brower formed an odd partnership.

In Litton, Brower found someone who possessed detailed knowledge about the wild places of California that needed protection, especially where the greatest stands of redwoods and sequoias and the most pristine pockets of coastline were located. Brower also valued Litton for his toughness, his refusal to compromise with corporate or government interests, and his willingness to needle Brower about the perils of compromise in matters of conservation. In turn, Litton saw that Brower commanded skills that he himself lacked—in organization, in leadership, in diplomacy. Litton also thought he saw a man who was beginning to show a willingness to take on powerful forces, an impression that was confirmed when Brower decided to take up the defense of Echo Park, a place he had never been, on a river he knew virtually nothing about, as a personal crusade.

As it turned out, that crusade would change the trajectory of Litton’s life and reshape the destiny of the Grand Canyon.

T
o battle against the Echo Park dams, the Sierra Club and a coalition of some seventeen other conservation groups pooled their resources and launched a publicity drive designed to build public opposition.
The decisive part of the fight took place in Washington, DC, at a venue that was normally the last place one would expect to find high drama: an offshoot of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs known as the Subcommittee on Irrigation and Reclamation. This was where the nuts and bolts of the project would be hammered out and debated, and a portion of the testimony would
be duly allotted for the opposition, a group that Utah senator Arthur Watkins dubbed
“the abominable nature-lovers.”

Though
Brower was a rookie lobbyist, having never before appeared in front of a congressional committee, he aggressively attacked the data that Reclamation had used to justify the Echo Park dams, arguing that there were several preferable alternative spots to build dams whose reservoirs would not invade Dinosaur. In particular, he pointed to a site on the Colorado River some 450 miles downstream from Echo Park, where the same volume of water could be stored with significantly less loss to evaporation. In driving this point home, Brower used a blackboard and a piece of chalk to demonstrate that the government’s engineers had committed a fundamental math error by neglecting to
subtract the Echo Park reservoirs’ evaporative loss from that of the downstream alternative. He concluded his presentation by declaring that it would be folly for members of the subcommittee to rely on the claims of an organization whose employees
“cannot add, subtract, multiply, and divide.”

It is difficult to overstate just how extraordinary this kind of criticism was. Since the 1930s, Reclamation’s administrators and engineers had been lauded as heroes who had helped the country weather the Great Depression and win the war that followed. But when Brower’s assertions were proved more or less valid, they punctured the myth of Reclamation’s infallibility in matters of hydrology and the science of dams. The testimony had a devastating effect—especially
when combined with the negative publicity generated by the conservationists’ media campaign—and by the autumn of 1955, several of the dams’ leading proponents were starting to reconsider their support for the Dinosaur dams.

Among those who took particular note of the mounting negative publicity was Wayne Aspinall, a congressman from Colorado who wielded enormous power over the development of the country’s natural resources. When 4,731 letters flooded the subcommittee following the hearings,
only 53 of which expressed anything remotely approaching support for the Dinosaur dams, Aspinall concluded that an all-out fight to defend those dams might result in the entire package going down in flames. Deciding to compromise—an art at which Aspinall excelled—he brokered a deal with Brower and his cohorts. In exchange for the conservationists’ assurance that they would not object to any other projects in the package, the Dinosaur dams were struck from the plan.

For Brower and his colleagues, this victory marked a seminal moment in the politics of conservation. For the first time ever, a powerful coalition of federal bureaucrats and their allies had been bested by a band of “punks,”
as one cabinet official had derisively dubbed the conservationists. But while all of this seemed to offer ample cause for celebration, the victory had come at a steep price.

At the center of the compromise to which Brower agreed was a dam that was
slated to be built on the Colorado River fifteen miles upstream from the Grand Canyon. This would be far larger than either of the two proposed structures inside Dinosaur—indeed, it would be
the biggest and most important feature of the package, second on the Colorado only to Hoover itself. Even though Litton and a handful of others had urged Brower to reject Aspinall’s compromise, Brower’s reasoning was not without merit.
The dam’s reservoir
would inundate a little-known river corridor called Glen Canyon, which was not part of any park or monument. Whatever wonders that obscure canyon might contain, it had never received federal protection of any kind—and that, after everything was said and done, was what the Dinosaur fight had been about.

Nevertheless, by agreeing to the compromise, Brower had, in effect, traded away something he had never seen on the assumption that it could not possibly match the value of what he was trying to save. This, as he was about to discover, was a terrible mistake.

T
he Glen Canyon Dam was authorized almost immediately, and its construction kicked off in the fall of 1956 with an unusual piece of theater. During the second week of October, a pair of high-scalers were lowered on ropes from the rim of the canyon almost down to the level of the river. Dangling from bosun’s chairs, the men wedged a pigtailed string of dynamite into a crack that ran behind a house-size rock positioned directly above the place where the first of two diversion tunnels would be drilled. When the explosives were set in place, they were tied to a long line of primer cord that was run back up the face of the cliff and connected to a plunger on the rim.