Confluence of the San Juan River and Colorado River,
1949.
Aerial view of Cottonwood Gulch, 1956.
Hidden Passage, 1959.
View of west third of Music Temple, 1959.
When “Old Shady” sings us a song at night we are pleased to find this hollow in the rock is filled with sweet sounds. It was doubtless made to an academy of music by its storm-born architect; so we name it Music Temple.
John Wesley Powell
Waterfall in Mystery (Anasazi) Canyon, circa 1958.
Forbidding Canyon (Aztec Creek), 1953.
Rainbow Bridge, circa 1960.
Rainbow Bridge
Standing 291 feet from creek bottom to crest and 275 feet across its base, Rainbow Bridge is the largest natural bridge in the world. It is formed from Navajo sandstone, a highly erosive member of the geologic Glen Canyon Group, laid down in the late Triassic period. This “scenic loadstone of the Glen Canyon region” was revealed to the outside world on August 14, 1909 by an expedition jointly led by William Douglass of the General Land Office and Byron Cummings of the University of Utah. They were guided to the bridge by a Navajo, Nasja Begay, and a Paiute, Mikes Boy, so it is obvious that this spectacle was known to the Indigenous people of the region for centuries before anyone of European descent ever set eyes on it. Douglas surveyed the site within a few days of its discovery, and a small rectangle of land surrounding it was proclaimed a national monument by President William Howard Taft on May 30, 1910. It was the third area on the Colorado Plateau to receive such a designation. Down through the years several proposals were advanced to expand the national monument and even to incorporate it into a much larger national park. None of these proposals ever bore fruit.
In the 1960’s and 1970’s Rainbow Bridge became the focal point of a furious battle over protecting this small national monument from the encroaching waters of Lake Powell. Given statutory protection by the Colorado River Storage Project Act in 1956, it remained unprotected when the west diversion tunnel at Glen Canyon Dam was closed in 1963. Conservationists led by David Brower fought hard to force Congress to live up to the statute it had created, but in the end the cause was lost. Lake Powell entered the monument on May 18, 1971. On September 3, 1974 the water stood fifteen feet deep under the Great Rock-Arch, and on July 14, 1983 the water there was fifty four feet deep. The case for protection reached the Supreme Court, but the court refused to hear the case, thus guaranteeing that Rainbow Bridge National Monument would be forever subject to the ebb and flow of a reservoir whose level is determined by forces unconcerned with the preservation of this scenic masterpiece.