As the Colorado River shrinks, it’s revealing an iconic canyon that’s been underwater for decades

We’ve been hearing a lot about the Colorado River lately, as Western leaders failed yet again to meet a consequential deadline to come to a deal about who will take less water from the drying river.

But there are other stories about the mighty Colorado. This one is something of a silver lining.

As the Colorado River shrinks, it’s revealing an iconic canyon that’s been underwater for decades since it was dammed up in the 1960s: Glen Canyon.

”What the River Knows,” a new documentary being screened Wednesday in Phoenix, tells its story.

“I went down into Glen Canyon thinking we were all screwed. I came away actually being hopeful,” says scholar and advocate Len Necefer in the film.

“It’s pretty remarkable the rate of restoration that we’re seeing,” adds Mike Dehoff, a longtime river runner and principal investigator for the Returning Rapids Project.

Diego Riley co-directed and co-produced the documentary alongside Will Buckley. Riley spoke with The Show about ”What the River Knows” — and why he wanted to make the film to begin with.

Full conversation

DIEGO RILEY: Yeah, there was something that felt very faded about the way that it all came together. I spent a good chunk of my childhood in southwest Colorado on rivers, skiing, and kind of grew up around this mythology of Glen Canyon. But there's so many things that are going for this story. I mean, visually, there's few places more stunning that I've ever seen in my life.

There's this added layer of meaning to that beauty, given the fact that this was underwater for 60 years. And that's just drenched in a certain kind of poetry that's ripe for a film.

LAUREN GILGER: So let me back you up and talk about the history of this a little bit, because you document it in the film so well. But take us back for a moment, Diego, to the time when this dam was built and why. Like, this was not the only dam being built in the West at the time.

And it was sort of almost a manifest destiny-thing going on with people trying to tame the West.

RILEY: Definitely, I think that we make the case for that in the film that Glen Canyon was lost as much as anything to a certain kind of mindset. And it was a mindset that characterized so much of the overdevelopment of the 20th century. There was the obvious need for hydropower. There was this rapid expansion throughout the West.

There's the Colorado River Compact that was drawn up in 1922, and the legal obligations between the Upper Basin, Lower Basin and Mexico water entitlements. And, you know, all of the engineering of the dam and the building of the dam itself were based on a very different pre-climate-change mentality, a post-war, war on nature mentality of how can we use this river and maximize its use for the expansion of the West.

It came from a hubristic mindset. And ultimately there were oversights both in the dam's construction and in its engineering. And those are very real issues that we're living with today.

GILGER: Yeah, yeah. Talk a little bit about what happened when the river was dammed up through Glen Canyon. I mean, there were people who had lived there. There were, you know, animals ... it's like the water rose so fast that it couldn't even be documented fast enough, right?

RILEY: Definitely. As I mentioned before, the mindset that Glen Canyon Dam emerged from was one of looking at the river as nothing more than a resource for development and for use.

The angle that we wanted to take with the film was to — between river runners, Native voices, environmentalists, historians, tell a story of this river to where it emerges as a character. The conversation around what rights a river has unto itself beyond the use that we have for it.

And you hear a lot of these perspectives in the film. You hear about how, just how devastating the environmental loss was. On one hand, it became known as the place that no one knew. And as it was being flooded, it was the first time that a generation of environmentalists really went in to see it, because it was just so remote.

And it's been rightfully mourned as the loss of the biological heart of the Colorado River system, some of the most stunning riparian ecosystem in the United States. But the truth is also that this was a place that people had known for thousands and thousands of years. And the archeologists that went in to Glen Canyon to document whatever archaeological findings were about to be put under hundreds of feet of water literally could not write down their findings fast enough before the water rose. ... A urban density of human presence over thousands and thousands of years.

Diego Riley

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Handout

GILGER: So what's it been like to go back and see this canyon emerge and kind of see it through the eyes of the people that you interviewed in this film who are so closely tied to the river and to this canyon in particular?

It's a little bit bittersweet, right? Like, the reason the canyon is reemerging is because the river's drying up and because of climate change and all of these tough environmental realities. But it's pretty beautiful to see, it seems.

RILEY: Definitely. I mean, there's a paradox at the heart of this. It was a dream on one hand. I mean, I — talking about what drew us, my co-director, Will, and I, to making the film, initially, on the most basic level, it was just the chance to hang out in Glen Canyon. Which was a place that we heard about and thought throughout our lives we were never gonna have the chance to see.

So there's something about it that is really deeply — it's almost a deep relief being there in the sense that so many of the climate change stories that we hear about are doom and gloom, unsalvageable. And this is a story of really nature's power to restore itself when it's given a chance.

GILGER: Is there a moment in the filming of this, a place, an animal, you know, a shot that, that really stands out to you, that encapsulated this kind of beauty of this place?

RILEY: My goodness, there were so many. I mean, the beauty of the, of the place in part, and also just the beauty of the community that we stepped into, of river runners and environmentalists and people who have really dedicated their, their lives to seeing this canyon restored. It's a real, you know — plant trees whose shade you'll never sit in, or however that old saying goes that, that kept us inspired with a lot of the people we worked with.

In terms of a place, we spent the night in Cathedral in the Desert a couple times. And that was something that I never thought that I would have the chance to do in my life. A lot of people that documented — we talk a great deal about Katie Lee in the film, who became Glen Canyon's champion after its flooding.

Tad Nichols was someone that documented it really well, and he has the most stunning photography of Cathedral in the Desert, where you see people in the distance looking like ants in the scope of massive canyon walls. And I think that was probably talking about how I first came across Glen Canyon, seeing Cathedral specifically. And just how surreal it felt to not only to be there, but also to be capturing it, knowing that because it had been underwater for so long, so few people alive have seen it at this point.

Something so special about getting to reintroduce the world to Glen Canyon.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Due to an editing error, this story has been updated to correct attribution on quotes from the film.