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What's in a name? Controversy, as I learned about 25
years ago when I began editing a newspaper in Breckenridge,
Colo. I called one local attraction what I'd always called
it -- Dillon Reservoir.
The nearby Dillon Chamber of Commerce told me that it
was scenic Lake Dillon.
I argued that it was not a
natural alpine lake, but just a manmade supply facility for
Denver. We compromised; thereafter the Summit County
Journal called it Lake Dillon Reservoir.
Something similar, though on a bigger and more serious scale, could be happening to the name of the water stored upstream of Glen Canyon Dam, commonly known as Lake Powell.
According to Russell Martin's fine history of the
project, A Story That Stands Like a Dam: Glen Canyon and
the Struggle for the Soul of the West,
it was
christened in the spring of 1959 by Floyd Dominy, just
before he was promoted to director of the U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation.
Republicans wanted to name it for President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Democrats pushed for Sen. Carl Hayden of Arizona, who had long championed his state's water projects against Republican opposition.
John Wesley Powell was too far in the past to be
partisan, and Powell Reservoir
and Powell
Lake
didn't sound quite right, so Dominy settled on
Lake Powell,
Martin wrote. Powell, a one-armed Civil
War veteran, floated and explored the canyons of the
Colorado River in 1869 and 1871, and on those trips he
named Glen Canyon.
The Powell name angered Edward Abbey, who wrote in
Desert Solitaire
that The impounded waters form
an artificial lake named Powell, supposed to honor but
actually to dishonor the memory, spirit, and vision of
Major John Wesley Powell ... Where he and his brave men
once lined the rapids and glided through silent canyons
2,000 feet deep the motorboats now smoke and whine
...
However, even Powell believed in impounding water throughout the West, although he later became the patron saint of whitewater river rafting guides.
Now there's a Coalition to Rename Lake Powell, headed by
Nancy Jacques of Durango, Colo. She points out that
lake
is usually applied to a natural body of water,
and reservoir
to an artificial site. Further, the
U.S. Board on Geographic Names does not like duplicates,
and long before the dam at Glen Canyon, there was a Lake
Powell -- in Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park, up at
the start of the Colorado River.
Its name most likely comes from an 1868 Powell trip, when he and four other men made the first recorded climb of 14,255-foot Long's Peak. They came in from the west, on a route that passed this little lake.
On that basis, and the use of lake
for a
reservoir,
Jacques petitioned the Board on
Geographic Names last March. Unlike Lake Powell, Glen
Canyon Reservoir is not a duplicate,
she said. It's
accurate because it calls a reservoir a reservoir, and it
reminds us of what is under the water. Place names should
tell us where we stand.
Page, Ariz., sits next to the dam, and it's easy to tell
where people there stand, according to Chris Sheid, editor
of the weekly Lake Powell Chronicle. In a recent editorial,
he wrote that the proposal comes from a group of people,
many of whom don't even live in Arizona ...(who)want to
come in and change something that local people and agencies
decided on a long time ago.
The newspaper's Website found 92 percent of those
surveyed opposed. Some of the groups supporting the name
change are groups that want to drain the lake,
he said,
and of course that's not going to be popular in Page
--that lake is our livelihood.
The proposed name
change, though, might aid those people who want to drain
it, since it might be easier to get support for draining a
reservoir instead of a lake.
Jacques said that's not the case, even though many
supporters would prefer the canyon to the lake. And it
shouldn't be up to just the people of Page, since this
was a federal project for the whole country.
She's urging people to just start calling it Glen Canyon Reservoir, no matter what the Geographic Board rules when it gets around to holding hearings and announcing a decision.
Anybody willing to try my old compromise with a chamber
of commerce, and use some mouthful like Lake Powell Glen
Canyon Reservoir?
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