Glen Canyon. - video recording reviews

Sierra, Sept-Oct, 1998 by Liza Gross

Glen Canyon Institute, $17; (520) 556-9311 While Let the River Run strikes a largely elegiac chord, Glen Canyon is likely to inspire outrage. This video, an adaptation of a slide show produced by Phil Pennington with David Brower for the Sierra Club in 1964, gives a blow-by-blow account of what was lost.

Determined to stop the Bureau of Reclamation's plans to build other dams along the Colorado, Pennington set out to show Americans the bureau's legacy. He painstakingly cataloged the hundreds of geologic and cultural monuments, and plant and animal life through the canyon that would soon be sacrificed, then returned after the flooding to document their fate. Along the Colorado, the landscape reveals a rich history: in Hanson Creek Canyon a towering wall looms overhead, undercut by centuries of water coursing through sandstone; large cottonwoods high atop canyon cliffs house great blue herons; Indian ruins and petroglyphs dot the cliff and canyon walls.

But the serene trip downriver is abruptly shattered: "Warning," the sign reads. "Lake Powell is being filled." The wonders of the canyon would now be more accessible, the National Park Service said, and the reservoir "would have little if any effect on the great recreational resources of the region." Jarring before-and-after shots of historic treasures drowned by the deluge lay bare the agency's hollow rhetoric. "No one else will ever again know what it was like," the narrator says. "The stream alcoves are gone, the inner canyons are gone. As the waters rose ... the animals fled to higher ground ... many drowned. Plant life is decimated."

The beauty of the canyon as it once was speaks for itself in the film's final moments, as a striking sequence of color, form, and light offers somber tribute. "The beautiful places of this planet can be saved by those who know them," the narrator says. "No one else."

For more information on restoring Glen Canyon, contact the Glen Canyon Institute at P.O. Box 1295, Flagstaff, AZ 86002.