Rivers and Dams

Recently I picked up the book "The Emerald Mile" by Kevin Fedarko, about running the Colorado River, the dams on the river (Glen Canyon Dam particularly), and the great storm in 1983 that almost destroyed the Glen Canyon Dam. I highly recommend it.

The hook of the book is the attempt to run the 277 miles from Lee's Ferry, just below the Glen Canyon Dam, to Pierce Ferry at the Grand Wash Cliffs near Lake Mead in a wooden dory named Emerald Mile. This was attempted several times, but the focus was on the attempt during the 1983 flood. But to tell that story he backs up and covers John Wesley Powell's initial excursion, the outfitting community that has grown up on the river, the dams that block the river, and intimate portraits of some of the river guides.

His writing is good, but sometimes a bit over the top. For example, "His face, which was ovular, was dominated by a hook-boned nose, at the top of which floated a pair of deeply skeptical brown eyeballs." I'm not quite sure how eyeballs can be skeptical. But its enjoyable, and for the most part he gets the technical parts correct. When discussing the river flow and the dam, there's a lot of technical parts, and it's especially interesting to read his discussion of cavitation - the effect of tiny bubbles on the flow of the water through the spillways at Glen Canyon Dam that ended up tearing them apart, and eating through the concrete liner and into the pink sandstone. However, he does make some mistakes. For example, when discussing the blocking of the river by a debris flow, he says, "The flood and the debris fan had narrowed the river to one-quarter its former width, doubled the drop, and increased the speed by a factor impossible to quantify." Of course, it's fairly simple to quantify, using fluid dynamics principles. But I guess the sentence sounds nice.

That book led me to watch the Patagonia documentary, DamNation. Another high recommendation.

This is a beautifully shot look at the history of dams in the US, mostly in the West, and it focuses on the removal of several dams in Washington state. I learned two important facts. First, how many dams there are in the US - over 60,000! And second, how many dams have already been removed. It makes sense that dams have a finite lifetime - for many reasons, not least of which is that the silt that usually flows downstream builds up in the reservoir behind the dam, lowering its utility - and that removal is a logical option. I had just never thought about removing a dam before. As David Montgomery, a geologist at U Washington said, 50 years ago, removing a dam was unthinkable.

One of the most powerful scenes was the description of Celilo Falls on the Columbia River, where native Americans have fished for salmon for (probably) the last 10,000 years [it's one of the oldest settlements in North America]. Those falls were submerged by the reservoir behind The Dalles Dam in 1957.

Addendum: My own river running experience is rather limited. I took a two-day trip down the Stanislaus River in the Sierras when I was a teenager. And I've done three day trips down the Chatooga River in NE Georgia in the past few years. I love the Chatooga because I can camp at Talulah Falls Park, and it's a short drive to the outfitters (SEE) headquarters.