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When Progress Is No Progress

Echo Park and the Environmental Movement

By Andrew Gulliford

Found in: | Inside | Politics |

This is a story about wisdom and courage that took place half a century ago when there was no rafting industry in the West and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation could put its dams any place it wanted. It's a story about two rivers, the Green and the Yampa, that no one had ever heard of much less rafted, and it's a story about environmental principles and the need to stand by them in the face of intense political opposition. Sound familiar? How do people actually thwart the political-industrial-developmental juggernaut in the Rocky Mountain West? In the early 1950s, conservation associations found out.

In 1950, the word "environment" was not in the American vocabulary. The Sierra Club had never dealt with issues outside California, and groups like the Audobon Society and the Issac Walton League had members who watched birds and fished. Green was the color of grass and it had nothing to do with politics. We had just finished World War II, the Cold War was upon us, "commies" were everywhere, and it was time to ratchet up development. Everyone needed water for agriculture, and smooth, flat reservoirs for speedboats so that pretty water skiers could wear those dangerous new swimming suits called bikinis. The baby boom had begun and it seemed logical, even patriotic, to continue damming every free-flowing river in the American West. But sometimes progress means leaving things alone.

Dinosaur National Monument on the edge of the Colorado Plateau in northwest Colorado and northeast Utah contains two ancient rivers. Over millions of years in the monument's heart, swirling waters of the Green River have met darker waters of the Yampa to carve canyons at the confluence. The Yampa meets the Green beside a huge sandstone cliff named Steamboat Rock. Where the rivers merge was christened Echo Park by one-armed Major John Wesley Powell, who descended the Green in 1869 through the Gates of Lodore. He affectionately named the rapids Disaster Falls, Hell's Half Mile and Triplet. Though Powell went down the Green to the Colorado River and all the way through the Grand Canyon, it was on the Green, soon after entering the Canyon of Lodore, that he lost the only boat on his trip.

Eager-beaver dam builders from the Bureau of Reclamation sought to destroy the rapids that had terrorized Powell's men in the huge spring runoff of May 1869. The Bureau's boys sought to submerge some of the finest whitewater, and biggest drops, of any Western river. In 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt expanded the 80-acre dinosaur quarry site at Dinosaur National Monument to include 259,000 acres and both of the spectacular river canyons. The next year, the Bureau showed up, maps in hand.

The Bureau of Reclamation took the first action toward erecting Echo Dam by building a road. In A Symbol of Wilderness: Echo Park and the American Conservation Movement, Mark Harvey writes, "In 1939, along with its surveys, the Bureau of Reclamation constructed a primitive road thirteen miles long which ran from the Iron Springs bench - the high plateau far above the rivers - down into Echo Park, and managed to do so without obtaining clearance from the National Park Service."

In the 1930s we had also begun massive projects to dam the Columbia River. No one worried about the salmon or Native American fishing rights. Even the left-leaning, Okie folksinger Woody Guthrie wrote about the big dams on the Columbia in songs paid for by the Bonneville Power Authority, which stressed the value of dams, hydroelectricity, and "turning our darkness into dawn." Dams were great, proof of American technological know-how. Electricity generated along the Columbia had won World War II by providing the juice that created aluminum to build the ships and planes essential for the war effort.

So why not put a dam on the Green River in the far northwest corner of Colorado in a place no one had ever heard of? Why not put a dam in Echo Park? Why not pour a concrete wedge between 500-million-year-old walls of red Uinta quartzite, which would back up water into both the Green and Yampa river canyons?

Why not? Because Echo Park was in the middle of Dinosaur National Monument, a unit of the National Park System, and symbolically it was in the geographical center of the West.

Yes, Americans wanted plenty of water for irrigation and recreation. The baby boom was in full swing, and by 1957 an American baby would be born every seven seconds. The Colorado River Storage Project was smoothly moving through Congressional committees under the stewardship of West Slope Congressman Wayne Aspinall from Grand Junction, who never met a dam he didn't like. Aspinall was from the old school: the multiple use, use it or lose it, conservation-at-any-cost philosophy. Rivers were for irrigation, not for running whitewater.

So you can imagine the surprise in the halls of Congress and in the offices of Brown and Root and other major construction companies when opposition began to swell against a dam in Echo Park, Colorado, only a stone's throw from the Utah state line. The tiny Sierra Club and the even tinier Wilderness Society decided that this was a big deal. Conservation groups (remember, the word environment is not yet in the lexicon) had lost a bitter fight in Yosemite National Park in 1913 to prevent building a dam to provide water for San Francisco, which was still recovering from the 1906 earthquake and fire. By 1917 the National Park Service had been officially created with the mantra to leave its lands "unimpaired for future generations." Conservationists took that phrase seriously. Contractors and Congress thought they were nuts.

Thus began one of the two pivotal flashpoints in the 20th century that created the modern environmental movement. The other turning point was Rachel Carson's 1963 book Silent Spring, which revealed the deadly effects of the pesticide DDT. But 10 years earlier, in 1953, no one knew enough to care about dying songbirds. The public did know, however, that developers planned a major dam in a minor unit of the National Park System. And the public responded.

World War II veterans returned home to their wives and began the baby boom, and they also returned with new technologies that would change the West forever, like Jeeps. Surplus rubber rafts made Class IV rapids like Warm Springs on the Yampa and all the Class III rapids on the Green runnable. Over the years, a variety of intrepid whitewater fans had made their way down the Green after Major Powell. Some of the finest wooden river boats had been built by Nathaniel Galloway in Vernal, and the enigmatic Buzz Holmstrom had come down the Green on his incredible solo voyage all the way through the Grand Canyon in a wooden boat of his own design. But rubber rafts reduced dangers, could accommodate friends, and, as Bus Hatch learned, could be enjoyed by paying customers. After World War II a new industry was slowly being born: river running. Combine Americans' love for camping and the outdoors with the thrills, spills, and chills of whitewater, and a new industry was bobbing and bouncing its way into the future.

The Hatch family of Utah understood that, but their neighbors did not. The Hatch family opposed the dam and so they were shunned, shut out, their kids beaten up in school, and ostracized in Vernal, the closest town to the dam site. They wanted free-flowing, sparkling rivers and they paid a painful, personal price. It was the age of Cold War conformity and in Mormon Utah no one was to stand out. Except the Hatches. They believed in wild rivers and they believed that no damn dam should go in a place as stunningly beautiful as Echo Park.

The Echo Park Dam, and a second dam downstream at Split Mountain, promised to supply water to thirsty Salt Lake City and Wasatch Valley farmers. Brigham Young had ignored northeast Utah and urged President Lincoln to re-settle Ute Indians there, which he did. Now folks on the Wasatch Front coveted Ute water, which could come from the Uinta Mountains and Echo Park Dam to help the state achieve its share of the Colorado River Compact. Mark Harvey described the plan: "The Green River water only had to be pumped as far as the nearby Uinta Basin. Streams from the Uinta Mountains could be channeled into a large canal, and this water could then flow to the Strawberry Reservoir, one of the first federal Reclamation projects in the West, near Duchesne, Utah. The Bureau planned to enlarge Strawberry Reservoir, send its water southeast to the Spanish Fork River, and there utilize its flow in power plants. From there electricity would be allocated to the populous Salt Lake Basin, and additional lands in the Bonneville Basin placed under irrigation."

Motorboats would spin in circles on huge reservoirs stocked with fish. Mark Harvey explained, "In the narrow neck of Whirlpool Canyon, about a mile below Echo Park in the heart of Dinosaur National Monument, was a superb site for a dam. Here between high walls of Uinta Mountain Quartzite, Green River water could be stored in a huge quantity. The reservoir would capture water of both the Yampa and Green, since the site lay just below their confluence. The narrow, winding canyons upstream had the added advantage of minimizing water evaporation within a slim, ribbon-like reservoir. The Echo Park dam site seemed an excellent place to store Utah's water."

In the 1950s there was no environmental movement and there certainly was no National Environmental Policy Act. No public meetings. No local hearings. Just Washington bureaucrat fat cats going about their business with the blessings of pro-growth, pro-business politicians. For the first time local legislators met their constituents - river runners. And it was a collision of cultures, a clash between the past and the future. Despite the enormous odds, the river runners did what they could. They took on the Establishment. They argued that the Green and Yampa rivers needed to flow free past Steamboat Rock and other locations first named by Major Powell. Bus Hatch took tourists down the Green in surplus rafts (including members of the Sierra Club). For the first time, Sierra Club mountain enthusiasts came to see a new kind of wilderness; they came to see and appreciate western rivers, and they realized that damming the Green would destroy the Canyon of Lodore.

Not since 1913 and the fight over a dam in Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park had the Sierra Club and other organizations taken on such a massive project to stop a federally endorsed dam in a national monument. Never before had the Sierra Club attempted a vast campaign outside of California, and never had the legal question of building a dam in a national monument come up. Under the leadership of their new director, David Brower, when this conflict was over the Sierra Club would emerge as a national organization.

Thousands rallied to the cause including many Americans who had never been to Dinosaur. The dean of Western writers, Wallace Stegner, wrote This is Dinosaur, published by Alfred Knopf in New York. Bernard de Voto railed against the dam in Harper's, Reader's Digest and The Saturday Evening Post. Photographs by William Henry Jackson convinced Congress to save Yellowstone, and now for the first time, Super 8 movie film helped convince Congress to leave Dinosaur's rivers alone. Stopping the dam at Echo Park began a sea of change to create the 20th century environmental movement from an older 19th century conservation movement.

David Brower of the Sierra Club, Howard Zahniser of the Wilderness Society, and other conservationists tried to save the breathtaking river canyons, where the Green and Yampa rivers merge, from destruction. Letter writers appealed to Congress to protect the spirit of the national park system, even though the NPS director had a secret, under the table agreement not to oppose the dam. For his chicanery, he would lose his position.

Ray Wheeler wrote in an essay, "The Drive for Protection," that "environmentalists succeeded in killing the Echo Park dam by holding hostage, in the U.S. Congress, the Colorado River Storage Project Act [which was a] budget-busting pork barrelful of dam and diversion projects. Given the tensions between Arizona and California and the indifference or outright hostility of the forty-three states that would not benefit from the legislation, the bill would be highly vulnerable to adverse publicity and would require every possible vote in order to pass. A well-organized environmental campaign could turn just enough votes to kill the bill. Without really knowing it, environmentalists held the balance of power."

The dam was defeated after a hard battle between the entrenched Bureau of Reclamation and American citizens. David Brower worked side by side with groups like the Izaak Walton League, the National Parks Conservation Association, and the Wilderness Society to stop the Bureau. That was nationally, but locally . . . .

Hatch family members in Vernal were the only ones opposed to the dam. Everyone else basked in potential economic development because "a playground for millions" was promised.

The Hatch family became avid river runners, and the first commercial permittees on the Green. The Hatches took writers and filmmakers through rapids to show what would be flooded. They were the only local family opposed to the dam, especially Bus's son, Don Hatch, a schoolteacher rejected by the Vernal community and forced to move to Salt Lake City to find work.

The Echo Park controversy sparked the biggest conservation crusade to date in the 20th century, and it shifted arguments from conservation and multiple use to environmentalism and the environmental movement. Letters flowed in to congressmen and senators. The writer John McPee notes, "Conservationists say the Dinosaur Victory was the birth of the modern conservation movement - the turning point at which conservation became something more than contour plowing." Finally, in April 1956, the dam was deleted from the Colorado River Storage Project, though few Americans had yet to visit Dinosaur National Monument or float the Green and Yampa rivers. Howard Zahniser stated, "We're not fighting progress, we're making it."

The beautiful canyons of the Green and Yampa had been preserved because of concerned citizens, many of whom had never rafted a Western river. Half a century ago the canyons were saved by the slimmest of margins. Echo Park remains, but there was a cost. Flaming Gorge dam was built upstream forever changing the Green River, but leaving the Yampa the last free-flowing river on the Upper Colorado River System. And irony of ironies, Congress did not kill the Echo Park Dam and its role in the Colorado River Storage Project; they just moved it to another place off the public radar, Glen Canyon.

Instead of backing up the Green and Yampa rivers in Colorado, Congress authorized the dam in Arizona. The new town of Page was built and hundreds of archaeological sites flooded under the waters of Lake Powell. Glen Canyon Dam became David Brower's cross to bear and Ed Abbey's perpetual nemesis. Someday the dam will silt up and become a magnificent waterfall, but for now, houseboats skim blue waters and an ugly white bathtub ring along the canyon walls goes up and down depending upon years of drought.

So, yes, river runners should mourn the loss of Glen Canyon, but let's not forget our upstream victory on the Colorado-Utah border. Half a century ago we organized against the industrial-developmental forces that plague the Rockies. The fight continues against two competitive visions of the West: leaving it alone and adjusting ourselves and our society to a land of limited water and irreplaceable riparian habitat or damming every river, creek and stream for massive hydro projects that will in the end fail. The human perspective is always the short view. The canyons know river time, geologic time and swirling whitewater dancing beside dark stones.

Historian Andrew Gulliford has led Green and Yampa river tours for the Smithsonian Institution, the Colorado Historical Society, and the Durango organizations Seniors Outdoors! and the San Juan Basin Archaeological Society. He works with Adrift Adventures in Jensen, Utah. He is a professor of Southwest Studies and History at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado.