The Place No One Knew

by Porter, Eliot; Brower, David Ross; Glen Canyon Institute

• ISBN13: 9780879059712
• ISBN10: 0879059710
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-07-01
• Publisher: Gibbs Smith

Table of Contents

"The Place No One Knew was published as a eulogy to a magical place," writes Daniel P. Beard, former commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation. Glen Canyon disappeared slowly and quietly as a hard-fought political compromise led to its flooding when the gates of the new Glen Canyon were closed in 1963 and water began to back up in the canyon. Glen Canyon was a place of extraordinary beauty. Foremost environmental activist David Brower touts Glen Canyon Dam as "a major mistake of our time." Two generations later, this commemorative edition of Eliot Porter's exquisite photographs of the canyon he loved and knew intimately is reprinted as a symbol of hope for the restoration of Glen Canyon. A Glen Canyon happens only once; there is no scenic climax anywhere that can quite approach it. Carved into a lonely provinceof Utah's desert country, the canyon's importance was not sensed by the public nor understood well enough by anyone. Yet few wilderness gorges have been easier to drift through and to live with, or so rewarding to those who reached even the threshold of its inner world of side canyons. Glen Canyon was a little too mysterious, too aloof. An never in the history of man's effort to preserve great scenic resources has his lack of knowledge been so costly. How much is gone now; how damaging man's exploitative urge can be, how little we see, sometimes, until it is too late--these questions find part of their answer in what Eliot Porter has assembled here.