Canyonlands: How a Dam Site Became a National Park
Near Moab, Utah
The creation of Canyonlands National Park in nineteen sixty-four was not inevitable. It required years of advocacy, a politically shrewd Interior Secretary, and one accidental plane flight that showed the right person the right view at the right moment. In the early nineteen fifties, Bates Wilson, superintendent of Arches National Monument near Moab, began exploring the canyon country to the south and west, country so remote that few non-Native people had ventured into it.
Wilson built his case by taking government officials on camping trips into the wilderness above the confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers, making the argument over campfires and Dutch oven meals. The turning point came in nineteen sixty-one. Floyd Dominy, the relentless head of the Bureau of Reclamation, flew Interior Secretary Stewart Udall over the canyon country to show him where he planned to build his next dam, just below where the two great rivers met.
Udall looked down and reportedly exclaimed that what he was seeing was a national park. He directed the Interior Department to plan a park of one million acres. Utah's congressional delegation fought the proposal for years.
When President Lyndon B. Johnson finally signed the bill on September twelfth, nineteen sixty-four, the park contained only two hundred fifty-seven thousand acres, a fraction of what Udall had proposed. Congress expanded it in nineteen seventy-one.
Canyonlands now covers three hundred thirty-seven thousand acres of mesa and canyon above the confluence of two rivers, one of the most remote and uncompromising landscapes in the contiguous United States.
