The Submerged Cathedral: Reflections on Glen Canyon Before the Waters Came
A palimpsest of stone and water, where ancient stories shimmer beneath the surface
By Bob Hembree
"Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war." - Loren Eiseley
The light bends differently through water. It refracts, separates into component colors, then reunites in patterns that never quite match what came before. Perhaps this is why memories of drowned places seem to shimmer with a particular quality of loss. They exist now in a medium that transforms them, distorts them, preserves them in an altered state.
Glen Canyon sleeps beneath Lake Powell's surface, dreaming of wind and time.
The River's Vocabulary
The Colorado once spoke in many voices through Glen Canyon. In spring, it roared with snowmelt urgency, chocolate-brown with sediment, carrying entire forests as driftwood. By late summer, it whispered around sandbars, exposing stones polished to the smoothness of eggs. Winter brought a crystalline clarity to its flow, water so cold it burned the skin.
"The Colorado River through Glen Canyon was a wild, sediment-rich, and seasonally variable river," report the official documents, but such clinical language fails to capture how the river communicated with the land.
The river carried one of the heaviest silt loads in the world, tens of millions of tons of sediment annually. Each grain told a story of mountains eroding, of plateaus surrendering to gravity, of time itself rendered visible. The water ran red or brown or gold depending on which tributary had recently flooded, which cliff had recently collapsed, which storm had scoured which distant watershed.
If you stood beside it, the river sang constantly. Its vocabulary changed with the seasons:
- Spring: booming, thunderous, relentless
- Summer: diminishing, exposing, revealing
- Fall: steady, clear-eyed, contemplative
- Winter: quiet, essential, skeletal
In the side canyons, water spoke differently still. Clear streams trickled over travertine dams, their musical notes unchanging for centuries until human ears arrived to notice them. Springs emerged from sandstone walls, their water filtered through a thousand feet of stone, emerging prehistoric and pure.
A Topography of Time
When Ancestral Puebloan people pressed their hands against sandstone walls and blew ochre pigment to create negative handprints, they were reaching across time. The hand remains though the person has vanished. The gesture persists though the intention has grown obscure.
Before the dam, Glen Canyon contained an unusually dense concentration of human history. Archaeologists documented some 2,000 sites before the waters came. Each represented not a "site" but a moment when humans dwelled intentionally in relationship with that particular landscape.
In one alcove, a granary built a thousand years earlier still held corn cobs, their genetic material carrying information about drought adaptation and careful cultivation. Surely the builders never imagined that distant descendants would learn from their agricultural achievements, that their careful work would speak across millennia.
The archaeological surveys before the dam move across my imagination like mourners conducting a hurried funeral. They worked feverishly, these men and women, trying to document what would soon disappear. They moved with the particular grief of witnesses to inevitable loss.
In Forgotten Canyon, they found cliff dwellings where families had lived seasonally for generations. Inside one room, a child's sandal remained where it had been left eight hundred years earlier. In another alcove, a turkey pen still contained feathers and droppings preserved in the desert air. At Moki Canyon, pictographs of bighorn sheep still leapt across the stone, their red pigment vibrant as the day they were painted.
The canyon walls themselves formed a library of stories. Here, Ancestral Puebloan artists carved spirals marking the equinox light patterns. There, Navajo sheep herders left evidence of their seasonal camps. Later still, early Mormon pioneers scratched their names and the year. All these inscriptions shared the same rock canvas, a palimpsest of human presence spanning thousands of years.
When Major John Wesley Powell first navigated Glen Canyon in 1869, he recognized he was traveling through not just space but time. He named it "Glen" Canyon for its elegant side canyons, its "carved walls, royal arches, glens, alcove gulches, mounds, and monuments." He wrote of a "land of beauty and glory," his words attempting to translate into language what his eyes could scarcely comprehend.
The Living Cathedral
Before the dam, Glen Canyon breathed. Its ecosystem inhaled and exhaled with the rhythm of seasons, floods, and droughts. The riparian corridors along the river and its tributaries supported cottonwoods and willows, their roots drawing life from the fluctuating water table. These trees in turn created habitat for countless birds.
The National Park Service catalogued 875 plant species and over 300 bird species in the area. Each existed in delicate relationship with the others, adaptations refined over millennia to this particular place with its unique patterns of water, sun, and stone.
In the river itself, native fish species had evolved precisely for these conditions. The humpback chub, with its distinctive humped back and small eyes, navigated the turbulent, sediment-laden waters using sensors along its body to detect changes in pressure and current. The razorback sucker, with its sharp-edged ridge, could hold position in the fastest flows. The Colorado pikeminnow, growing sometimes to six feet long, migrated hundreds of miles through the canyon system to spawn in particular gravel beds, returning to the exact location where it had hatched years earlier.
These fish moved through the waters like monks in a cathedral, their existence a form of prayer specific to this place. They had no concept of the world beyond the canyon, no knowledge of the decisions being made in distant cities that would transform their universe.
In hanging gardens where springs emerged from canyon walls, rare plants found their only suitable habitat. Ferns unfurled fronds beneath desert skies, creating impossible contrasts. Orchids bloomed in secret alcoves. Each garden formed a microclimate where species could persist that would otherwise never survive in the harsh desert beyond.
The gardens existed at the intersection of geology and time. Water that fell as rain centuries earlier had percolated through sandstone layers, emerging where impermeable shale forced it outward. Each droplet carried dissolved minerals that nourished plants found nowhere else on earth.
The People of Memory
For the Indigenous peoples of the region, Glen Canyon was never empty wilderness. It was home, sacred space, the setting for their most important stories.
"Those were sacred, important lands," an archaeologist explained to me. "Rivers have genders and meanings and a certain personage."
A Navajo medicine man once described how male and female rivers have different characters. Male rivers act violently through flash floods, unpredictable in their comings and goings. Female rivers move slowly, nurturing life along their banks with steady presence. The dam, he said, neutered the gender of the rivers, manipulating the character of these places and their meaning.
The Hopi knew plants as relatives, not resources. Each species had a role in their cosmology, a purpose beyond human use. When Lake Powell drowned these plants, it didn't merely cover vegetation. It submerged family members.
Rainbow Bridge, the massive stone arch now accessible by boat on Lake Powell, was known to local Navajo and Paiute long before Anglo explorers "discovered" it in 1909. For them, it was not a scenic wonder but a sacred site integrated into their understanding of the world's creation.
When the lake waters rose around Rainbow Bridge in the 1960s, Navajo plaintiffs sought legal protection for their religious sites. The courts ruled that water storage needs prevailed over preserving Indigenous sacred places. This legal decision contains volumes about whose stories we value, whose practices we protect, whose memories we consider worth preserving.
The Time Before
I try to imagine Glen Canyon in the quiet centuries before the dam. Before motorboats and houseboats. Before the Park Service and tourism infrastructure. Before Powell's expedition. Before trappers and traders.
In that long before-time, the canyon experienced periods of intensive human use followed by relative quiet. Ancestral Puebloan peoples built communities, farmed, raised families, created art, and eventually moved on around 1200 CE. Later, Paiute and Navajo people hunted, gathered plants, and grazed sheep seasonally in the canyon's embrace.
The rhythms of human presence ebbed and flowed like the river itself. During some periods, children's laughter echoed from cliff dwellings and smoke rose from cooking fires. During others, only the occasional hunter moved through, leaving footprints that washed away with the next rain.
Through it all, the canyon itself remained. Wind shaped the sandstone into arches and windows. Water carved side canyons and amphitheaters. The play of light across stone walls tracked the turning seasons, the passing years, the slow march of constellations across the night sky.
Wallace Stegner later called Glen Canyon "the most serenely beautiful of all the canyons of the Colorado River," noting it was "potentially a superb national park." He wrote these words only after it was too late, after the decision to flood the canyon had already been made.
As humans, we seem to recognize the magnificence of places most clearly once they slip beyond our reach. Glen Canyon became "the place no one knew" only after it was lost beneath the reservoir.
The Submersion
When the gates of Glen Canyon Dam closed in 1963, the transformation began. The change was gradual at first. The river slowed, ponded, began to back up behind the concrete wall. Day by day, the water rose higher.
In Music Temple, a cathedral-like side canyon where Powell's expedition had marveled at the acoustics, the last notes faded as water filled the space. In Hidden Passage, pictographs disappeared beneath the rising pool. At the Crossing of the Fathers, where Spanish friars had found a rare place to ford the Colorado in 1776, the waters erased the landmark completely.
For seventeen years, the reservoir slowly filled, reaching full capacity in 1980. During those years, Lake Powell became what its planners had envisioned: a water bank for the arid Southwest, a hydroelectric power source, a recreation destination.
But beneath the surface, Glen Canyon dreamed of wind and time.
The Revealing
Water is never as permanent as concrete suggests. The Colorado River Basin has experienced its worst drought in recorded history over the past two decades. Lake Powell's surface has fallen dramatically, reaching historic lows.
As the water recedes, portions of Glen Canyon emerge again into sunlight. Skeletal cottonwoods, preserved in the cold depths, stand as monuments to what was lost. Cathedral in the Desert, a spectacular amphitheater of stone, has reemerged from the waters. Its waterfall flows once more.
Plants reclaim newly exposed shorelines with surprising speed. Ancient footpaths, submerged for decades, become visible again. The canyon begins to breathe, to live.
This revealing is temporary, contingent on climate patterns and water management decisions. But it offers a glimpse of resilience, a reminder that even concrete intrusions into natural systems remain subject to larger forces.
The archaeologist told me: "We have to deal with it as it is, not as it could have been."
His words contain both pragmatism and grief. They acknowledge the reality of the dam while honoring what lies beneath the surface. They remind us that memory itself forms a kind of archaeology, layers of experience that we sift through, attempting to understand what came before.
The Memory of Water
Water remembers its ancient pathways. When released, it returns to the courses it carved over millennia. Perhaps memory works this way too, finding channels through time, connecting us to places we have never physically visited.
I have never seen Glen Canyon as it was before the dam. I know it only through photographs, through accounts written by those who traveled there, through the research of archaeologists and botanists who documented what would be lost.
Yet I can close my eyes and imagine standing in Music Temple, listening to the wind create tones no human instrument could replicate. I can picture Hidden Passage with its pictographs, generations of hands reaching toward meaning. I can feel the cottonwood shade along the river, hear the call of canyon wrens echoing from stone walls.
These imaginings are not the place itself, just as Lake Powell is not the canyon. But they form a kind of parallel conservation, a memory-space where the submerged cathedral still stands, where the river still speaks its many languages, where time flows not in a straight line but in spirals like those carved by ancient hands on canyon walls.
The light bends differently through water, and through time. It refracts, separates, reunites in patterns that never quite match what came before. In these distortions, we might find new ways of seeing what has been lost, what remains, what might yet be recovered.
Glen Canyon sleeps beneath Lake Powell's surface, dreaming of wind and time. And somewhere in our collective memory, it remains as it was: wild, magnificent, alive with the breath of centuries.