Glen Canyon Betrayed: A Sensuous Elegy

by Katie Lee

Book Overview

David Brower, who has always regretted the Sierra Club's failure to save the Glen Canyon, called it The Place No One Knew. But Katie Lee was among a handful of men and women who knew the 170 miles of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1892327066
• ISBN13: 9781892327062
• Release Date: August 2006
• Publisher: Fretwater Press
• Length: 276 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.7" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Looking to the Past

Katie Lee has given us a wonderful glimpse at a lost treasure. Her discriptions of the river and side canyons tell of her love of this lost world. My 2nd greatgrandfather went through Glen Canyon in 1872 with the second Powell Expedition and Katie has given me some feeling as to What he saw and the places he visited. I never understood what a treasure Glen Canyon was to Us till I read her book. Thank You Katie Lee

A delicious must read!

I really can't add to the other reviews other than to say this book moved me in ways few others have. You will want to savor and ration it, lest you reach the end. I was recently hiking in Coyote Gulch and while marveling at its incredible beauty, ran into a Park Ranger who said "...and just realize, this is but a remanent of what they destroyed with Lake Powell".Thank you, Katie Lee, for what you have given us.

Beautifully detailed - Glen Canyon before its burial

This book is a song to the Glen Canyon we all have lost and are poorer for its loss. It is a walls-down, all-doors-open writing that invites the reader to come along. It is herstory and history, nature at its best.

A paean to Glen Canyon: a paradise lost under Lake Powell.

Invoking the Colorado River GodsKatie Lee's book, All My Rivers Are Gone (Johnson Books, Boulder, CO) should be read by all wilderness lovers. It beautifully invokes what it is like to have the freedom to explore one's deepest values within the intimacy of nature's rapture. Sadly, this freedom is increasingly diminished by the commercial clutter of a river that is increasingly being managed as a theme park for the wealthy.In conjunction with the book, Katie has also released two CDs/cassettes: Colorado River Songs is a compendium of all the river songs Katie has written, collected and sung on river trips. Glen Canyon River Journeys features Katie reading excerpts from the book and singing river songs.Katie's works are paeans to the "wild, sacred heart" of a paradise lost. She was the third woman to run the rapids in the Grand Canyon. For more than a decade, she regularly ran Glen Canyon before it was buried under trillions of tons of water in 1962. Her book recreates the beauty of the Glen, describes the characters that lived there, and tells how it changed her life."My trips through Glen Canyon and the river that ran through it gave me an understanding of myself, my talent and its limitations; taught me about intimacy and the value of observation. Together they resurrected my spirit and melted my heart with their beauty; showed me time was not my enemy, and, with their power to entertain, mystify, and nearly kill me, diluted my ego to its proper consistency. The Glen gave me roots as tenacious as the willows along its banks." (Lee)Katie describes how river runners got to the put-in at what is now Hite Marina after driving for hundreds of miles on lonely roads, loaded supplies in their oar boats, and shoved off down river. No pay-for-play permits. No competition for camp sites. No helicopter racket. No buzzing of jet skis. No waterproof river maps. No nothing. Just the smell of a silt laden river, the lilt of the canyon wren, fern grottos, sandstone, and that incandescent canyon light which Katie so beautifully captures in prose."Light sets the stage for canyon mood changes. Forever ongoing. . . I enter a space of "quiet light" where no direct sunlight falls, yet is lambent-a liquid light that comes from all around and underfoot. Far out of sight overhead, it has ricocheted down and spread itself in ways that confuse the senses. It gets so weird in here sometimes I think I'm hearing the light, smelling the temperature and feeling the sound." (Lee)In All My Rivers Are Gone, Katie recreates the joy of going down river with only cherished friends: creating a schedule according to feelings; the private banter and jokes; the exuberance of walking and swimming naked; and the love of discovery and exploration of a wilderness largely unknown, since many of the canyons hadn't heard footfalls since the Anasazi. She and her friends snaked up steep walls on the narrow Moki steps; swam (and nearly drowned in a deep pot

For all who love rivers, deserts, nature and the Southwest

In All My Rivers Are Gone, Katie Lee, an aspiring, young Hollywood performer in the 1950s, falls suddenly, unexpectedly, passionately in love. Not with a man, nor even a woman, but with a place: Glen Canyon, on the Colorado River. When a childhood friend invites her on a Grand Canyon trip, she is smitten by the river. But it is another year before she meets her true love, as she floats the San Juan River and enters Glen Canyon.With a combination of contemporary narrative and journals of her many expeditions, Katie takes us through the initial flush of first love, to an infatuation overwhelming her mind and body, and on to the inevitable heartbreak as Glen Canyon is snuffed out before her eyes by Glen Canyon Dam. As she looks on helplessly, the reservoir rises, killing, canyon by sacred canyon, mile by irreplaceable mile, her beloved river. Curiosity, love, wonderment, and delight; foreboding, disbelief, horror, and fury; and finally sorrow, heartbreak, and a resolute conviction to neither forgive nor forget, keep this love story moving, much as it has kept Katie vibrantly alive when others her age have faded or passed on. In Glen Canyon, Katie Lee found her love requited, found a peace and perspective she had lost in her other life in the limelight. As its end approached, Katie vowed to memorize and keep the dying Canyon within her, resolutely returning to its deathbed again and again during its final days. She has remained to her love‹her rage has simmered for some forty years. In All My Rivers Are Gone, she has reconjured the heart of the canyon country, complete with its subtleties of light, its sensual forms, its erotic canyon sinuousities, down to the giggling, gurgling, sighing voice of the river itself. For those of us too young to have known the Glen, she paints a vivid and irresistible portrait of her lover. And it is only through this meticulous recreation of the Glen as a living, breathing entity that we are able to share her outrage and horror in its needless death ‹the deliberate drowning of an innocent Canyon, the pointless crucifixion of a gentle, loving and magical river. Now Katie, a devout Pagan, and her audience await, like Christians awaiting their entombed Christ, for the rolling back of the stone, the voiding of Glen Canyon Dam, and the resurrection of what was, and will once again be, the salvation of the human soul.