Profile

High Country News -- October 18, 1993, Vol. 25, No. 19

'Seldom Seen Smith' mourns a lost canyon and dead foes

Ken Sleight

To Ken Sleight's way of thinking, water in the desert is not supposed to pool into a great blue lake. It is supposed to cut a deep, narrow canyon through land so vast and sun-baked that you would never suspect the water was there until you peered over the rim and saw a river shimmering far below.

Another way to see desert water is from a boat on the river, which is the way Sleight, a pioneer river guide, and his rat-race-weary customers saw Glen Canyon until 1963. That year the gates of Glen Canyon Dam closed and the Colorado River pooled to form Lake Powell. To Sleight and many others, the lake is not the jewel of the desert, as its creators boast, but a blue grave straddling the Arizona-Utah border.

"There was no other place on the desert and, for that matter, no place anywhere else like Glen Canyon, and it was buried in the backwash of man's arrogance," Sleight says.

Sleight so hated the dam that his friend, the late Edward Abbey, used him as a model for river guide Seldom Seen Smith in The Monkey Wrench Gang. The book chronicled a group of eco-avengers who plot to blow up the dam, free the river and resurrect the canyon. In real life, Sleight assumed the role of plaintiff in a frustrating legal battle to block the dam's construction.

Sleight is one of only an estimated few thousand modern-day souls who have seen Glen Canyon. "Glen Canyon Dam made an environmentalist of me," he says. Ever since, his has been a prominent voice in successful campaigns against building a high-level nuclear waste repository outside Canyonlands National Park; against the BLM's practice of "chaining" older trees and, most recently, against consideration of an above-ground "warehouse" for high-level nuclear waste in San Juan County, where Sleight makes his home.

Thirty years after Glen Canyon was dammed, Sleight is telling of another flood as he nurses a beer in the dining room of his and wife Jane's Pack Creek Ranch in the foothills south of Moab, Utah. Above, at 12,000 feet, patches of snow glisten on the peaks of the La Sal Mountains, but warm air blowing up from the desert floor has burned off the overnight chill. Sleight describes the great desert flood of the '90s as an inundation of troubling attitudes. He's given it a symbol, and that symbol is borne on the haunches of seemingly every biker, hiker, camper - you name it - who takes to the mountains above or the desert below.

That symbol is Lycra, the lightweight spandex material that fits like a coat of paint. Sleight considers the trendy material as ominous for the future of Utah's canyonlands as Glen Canyon Dam.

"They read in those slick magazines that this is what you wear out here, so they come dress-coordinated in it. They show absolutely no individuality. They're like sheep walking up and down the canyons in Lycra," he says.

Sleight acknowledges that many in this form-fitted crowd are environmental allies, but too often he finds them intolerant of the life that predates them.

"They come here and see the cattlemen, for example, and they think the cattlemen shouldn't be here. Why? Simply because they've been taught they shouldn't be here. They're right to point out the abuses of overgrazing and erosion and to fight for reform, but they ignore the historic place of the cattlemen. They're simply too rigid."

Now, out by a corral, Sleight's wranglers are fitting half a dozen tourists into saddles for a guided horseback ride around the ranch, which brings up a sticky, or some might say, smelly issue: horse droppings.

Sleight says some members of the Lycra crowd have made it an issue he fears could eventually threaten one of his longtime enterprises: horse pack trips, especially those that take tourists into a scenic, sage and piñon-juniper expanse of Utah's canyonlands known as Grand Gulch.

"They don't want me taking my horses into Grand Gulch, because they don't want to step over droppings on the trail. I don't know if I'd call this knee-jerk, but I do think they believe some things don't belong here simply because they've never seen them before."

Grand Gulch lies in a stretch of federal land Congress is considering for wilderness protection. But Scott Groene of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance says he doesn't know of any formal environmental protest against Sleight's pack trips. In fact, Groene says permanent wilderness status, should it come, would not interfere with commercial outfitters like Sleight.

Dale Davidson, an archaeologist with the BLM's Moab office, says hikers do complain about horses in Grand Gulch. But he says the complaints don't threaten Sleight's permit to use the area. But he also says that a proposed management plan to protect Grand Gulch from overuse will ban open campfires, close some areas to horses, and increase the number of permits issued for commercial use.

Sleight favors wilderness designation for Grand Gulch and 6 million other acres of federal land in Utah, a proposal supported by a coalition of environmental groups including the Sierra Club, Wilderness Society and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. The plan would provide wilderness protection for three times as much land as the Bureau of Land Management and former president George Bush have recommended to Congress.

Of Sleight's contribution to the environmental movement, Groene says, "Ken's a guy who was there long before the rest of us. He wears cowboy boots and the rest of us wear Tevas, but we've got a lot to learn from him. It's a statement in itself that Ken can look at the beauty around us here and tell us that the best of it is under water."

When he's not studying the latest environmental crisis, overseeing the care of ranch grounds or riding honcho on pack trips, Sleight finds time to run the Colorado and Green rivers, which join beyond the red rock cliffs to the west of Pack Creek. Shooting the rapids and drifting the flatwater is a fascination Sleight turned into a business back in 1955. His first rafts were military surplus, bought for $50 apiece.

"It used to be that customers wanted to take in the beauty of the river, always in wonder of what lay around the next bend. Entertainment was spontaneous and self-provided. The customers would sing and play harmonicas and guitars back in the grottoes. The food usually came from a can," he recalls.

"Nowadays, they want restaurants down on the river, fancy meals with French names, and everyone wants to stand around and watch you make it (like Benihana's in the desert). They've got dancing, opera singers, volleyball, even lawn chairs down on the river; hell, I wouldn't have been caught dead with a lawn chair on the river. The problem is that these people press for luxuries until they've brought with them the mess they were trying to get away from to begin with."

Sleight says many of those early clients, who came from the big cities of both coasts, went home filled with the value of nature. He finds the reverse true today. "There are a lot of yuppie types who simply come so they can boast that they ran the river; they make it a competition with their friends back in the cities. Most of them want to get down the river as quickly as they can, in as much comfort as they can."

Sleight tells of a recent day on the Colorado River: He lands his boats on a sandy canyon beach and beckons his river-running clients to follow him to a beautiful site. Some ask for a description, wanting to decide for themselves whether the short hike is worth it. Sleight, hoping to entice them, assures them that what they'll see is beyond description. Some go; some stay. When the group that goes returns chattering exuberantly about what they've seen, some of the others are mad - not at themselves but at Sleight.

"When you tell people, `Okay, folks, around the next bend you're going to see Rainbow Bridge,' well, that ruins the sense of self discovery. People just don't seem to want the adventure of it anymore."

Of course, traffic on the Colorado was much lighter in the days Sleight speaks of so fondly. Boats now are so plentiful that boatmen compete for favored campsites just as fans of spectator sports compete for prime parking spots at metropolitan arenas. That may mean leaving the river early, which means spending more time in camp, which means boatmen may have no choice but to provide the entertainment Sleight finds so out of place.

"I think it's obscene to bring them off the river just to set up camp, and I've been criticized for my long days and for setting up camp after dark," Sleight says. "But time's too damn valuable. You want to show them as many canyons as you can. Back before they buried Glen Canyon, people would come from New York with six days to see as much as they could. They didn't want to spend time in camp. They could have picnicked in Central Park if that's what they were looking for."

It's enough to make Sleight miss his good ol' boy antagonists: the diminishing pro-development crowd of miners left over from Moab's long-busted uranium boom, the road builders, the dam builders and the like. Ironically, the one he may miss most is Cal Black, the late San Juan County commissioner, uranium boom miner and model for Abbey's pro-development character Bishop Love in The Monkey Wrench Gang. In the book, Love was the night-and-day opposite of Sleight's character. In real life, Black was Cobra to Sleight's Mongoose, a man who wore a uranium pendant to persuade the world it held no harm, a man who ultimately died of cancer.

"The people I miss were individuals," Sleight says. "You can say what you want about them, and yes, I disagreed with them, but they were colorful and unique. They're being shoved out, and yes, I miss them. They had minds of their own; they had character."

And none of them wore Lycra.

Vaughn Roche writes in Salt Lake City, Utah.