little cool. Drove to the Lake Powell visitor center
to get info about kayaking. There are many narrow
canyons to explore, lots of good camping spots to
paddle to but no bathrooms. You can pee anywhere but
pooping must be done in an approved container. The
high tech bags are $4 each or 5 for $15. I went with
the big buy. Apparently, the people downstream have
not been excited when the lake level rose and water
quality decreased. I'll keep you all posted on how
portaholes work. There are eight floating
bathroom/dump stations on Lake Powell but they are not
open yet.
Biked into Page. There was nothing here except Indian
land before 1954 when the government started building
the dam. The Bureau of Land Reclamation traded the
Navajos some land in Utah for the area that is now
Page. There were 8000 people here until the dam was
finished in 1963 and then the population dropped to
almost nil. Now the village is mostly tourist
industry and the only good sized town on the north end
of the Navajo reservation.
In the afternoon I took a tour of the Glen Canyon dam,
Pretty cool. Enormous beyond words. The lake is
down over 100 below maximum level, supposed to rise up
to 40 feet in the spring with the great snow cover in
the Rockies. But there were displays at the visitor
center about how much lower the lake would need to
fall before they could no longer generate electricity.
It's not real far.
Just outside Page on the Navajo reservation is a huge
coal fired electric plant, very high tech supposedly,
fueled by coal from the reservation, that provides
lots of jobs and noncasino income for the tribe. It
looks so out of place. Four extremely tall
smokestacks and the thing plunked down on a gorgeous
mesa. A whole set of interesting tradeoffs and values
foreign to my middle class progressive,
environmentally and scenically aware upbringing.
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