Show A. A 1 P m mt lake lakei friend friend- friendly i t One day a dozen years past a big raw-boned raw and friendly friendt friend friend- t ly cowboy named Glenn Dee Taft rode upon a wondrous sight in a land abundant in colorful sights 27 miles from the nearest dirt road and on a bluff overlooking a two mile wide canyon canyo with an intermittently running creek stood a red fire hydrant where none had ever stood before One can let their mind wander over the wonderment of it 0 all could he possibly have envisioned the thousands of boats and hundreds of thousands of people ople all primed waiting to tol l jump into a lake for which the dam was just then being built one hundred miles away Could he imagine what five million million million mil mil- lion cubis yards of concrete look like stacked against the Colorado Escalante San Juan and dozens of other rivers and streams Concrete which one day would hold back twenty- twenty seven million acre feet of water That's enough for every person in the US U.S. to drink one gallon per day for the next 83 years not counting evaporation or ground percolation or the dam breaking The lake is Powell and the place was once the haunt of dino dino- saurs Its It's one place where a water skier has to give up before reaching the other end of f its mile length Its It's the home of the last entry for American cartographers of a major river the Escalante Even Powell missed it on his monumental trip down the Colorado But who could fault him for surely his mind was tumbling with the contrast of it all after going a hundred miles through a river channel known to the native Indians as the river of no return I doubt Glenn Dee saw sawall all that was to transpire that day but the dawn of its beginning was there and since then he too has partaken of the pleasures pleasures pleasures plea plea- all that water has to offer camping along more than two-thousand two miles of shoreline twice Lake as much as the West Coast of US U.S. and skiing and fries fish-fries and exploring Indian ruins hundreds of thousands thousands thousands thou thou- sands of visitations later Lake Powell country exhibits and now beckons the traveler weary of the rush of motel freeway vacations Its It's camera country and sometimes one has difficulty discussing where red rock water heat waves and mirages delineate themselves for they are want to play with our imaginations and each other as the mind plays with your hair Its It's a land where the water temperature reaches 85 degrees in summer and the fishing is unexcelled for mouth large-mouth bass and trout to 10 10 Ibs lbs The crappie can be t. t in unlimited caught numbers just eat all you catch Its It's the home of big horn sheep deer beaver coyote cottontail and jack rabbits and only twenty miles from the Henry Mountains Mountains Mountains Moun Moun- a place of gold uranium mines and Americas America's last free roaming buffalo herd See it while youre you're able and the memories will help keep you young through countless winter nights |