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Show FIFTY MILE GULCH... March 18, 1983: (ABOVE) Glen Canyon Reservoir at beginning of the narrows in 50 Mile Gulch, looking downstream. The reservoir is down 16.51 feet. March 3, 1992: (RIGHT) The reservoir is now down 80 feet. The narrows had been filled in completely with mud, but ina very short time has been flushed out almost completely, except for some that no doubt remains in the bottom. but a vast mudflat covered everything, tallest vegetation was buried. Nothing of mud carried by the river in just that just how deep the silt was at the actual became quite clear just how the whole place was utterly ruined, all but the was left but a lifeless wasteland. The amount one season was staggering. It was hard to tell confluence, but upstream at the log ladder, it disastrous the over-fill had been, and I nearly came unglued. The outrage I felt was beyond description. I wanted to scream. The canyon was now a wall to wall mudflat, with all of the original features of the bottom gone, buried under the muck. The original log ladder was gone, floated away and lost, replaced by one that did not need to be nearly as high. I had already taken pictures of lower Coyote and the confluence with the river on each of the previous trips, and I took a few more of this disaster. Over the next two years I led four more Sierra Club trips, and although they were all different, we always visited the confluence of Coyote and the Escalante, and I took a few more pictures each time. By 1986 I had about given up on finding another engineering job, and couldn't stand the California rat race anymore. Besides I couldn’t get enough of the canyons, so I packed up and moved to Escalante and immediately signed up as a volunteer for Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. In 1988 I was hired as a seasonal ranger in the Escalante, a job I held until 1995. In 1987, after having endured the heartbreak of seeing one of the most special places I had ever known get ruined, I realized that most of the mud in lower Coyote was actually above the full pool level of the reservoir, and that theoretically it should someday flush out. So I went back and carefully duplicated some of my original slides from before the ruination. I then went back each year and did the same thing with the key locations for comparison and to see just how much progress was being made. It was painfully slow at first, because of high water in the reservoir and a series of mild winters that did not generate any significant runoff on the Escalante. But by February Photographs by Bill Wolverton 1993, after a series of dry years, the reservoir had dropped almost 88 feet, the lowest it had been since first reaching full pool in 1980. And the winter of 1992-93 left the biggest snowpack on Boulder Mountain in quite a few years, setting the stage for a major runoff on the Escalante that spring. Then in just one short season most of what was left of the river mudflat was cut down and flushed further down into the reservoir. Summer floods quickly flushed most of the remaining silt out of lower Coyote, and by the spring of 1997 it was beginning to look almost like it did before the overfill. I continued to document the progress by retaking the previous photos each year, motivated in part by my hatred of the reservoir. But seeing Coyote Gulch recover, I fantasized that if I ever had the chance, here might be some evidence that could be used against the reservoir. Now with the Glen Canyon Institute's efforts, there may be some hope. I discovered similar signs of recovery in both Willow and 50 Mile Gulches, where the results were equally dramatic: thorough flushing out of the mudflat, with minimal scarring of the walls, fading of the bathtub ring, and the beginnings of recovery of the wall striping. There is no doubt that Glen Canyon can recover if we give it a chance. Bill Wolverton lives in Escalante, Utah. WRITERS of the WEST Jared Farmer This book revisits some losses of the past--the loss of Glen Canyon, the loss of southern Utah’s isolation, and a little of my own loss of innocence. When it comes to losing places, I feel I know something, if only by virtue of being from Utah. I always thought it’d be great someday to be an Old Geezer, sitting in my chair, shaking my head: “Remember when this state was the best place to live? Well, I do!" It worries me, however, that by my late teens, I was feeling nostalgic for the way Utah was when I was born. There’s no satisfaction being a premature geezer. Jared Farmer Available at Back of Beyond Books, 83 North Main Street, 435.259.515 . —NINETEEN JOIN THE GLEN CANYON INSTITUTE Help Us Restore A Masterpiece P.O. Box 1925 Flagstaff. AZ 86002 www.glencanyon.org five Montielbe yyFig er _ |