Katie Lee, the 98 year old Arizona activist whose favorite word was fuck, died in her sleep on Wednesday, November 1st. Katie had dedicated her life trying to take down the dam that had drowned the place she loved most — Glen Canyon — the contoured caverns and seductive streams that today lies beneath the 9 trillion gallon reservoir known as Lake Powell. Before the building of the dam, Glen Canyon was considered to be one of the most beautiful canyons in North American, if not the world. Then, from 1963 to 1980, it was submerged.
I did not know Katie Lee. I’ve never met her, have never seen her in anything but pictures and films. But I wanted to know her. More than that, I’ve wanted to be her.
I’ve wanted to be the woman who explored Glen Canyon before the blood flow of the Colorado was stanched by the tourniquet of a dam. I’ve wanted to be the one who wrote odes to that chasm, songs, poetry, I’ve wanted to author books about my desperate love for a place, and the raw anger that comes from seeing the sacred desecrated by those who feed on greed: white-faced savages willing to devour anyone or anything that may try to step between themselves and a buck. I’ve wanted to be the woman whose face was bronzed by desert sun and chiseled by desert wind. Eyes wide open to the vastness of desert skies. I’ve wanted to be the one with a passion so deep, so thorough, so complete, that it propelled my movement from one day to the next, fiercly fighting for all I know to be pure and right and beautiful.
In 1955, while civil engineers finalized their plans to choke the Colorado at Glen Canyon, Katie Lee and a few archeologists helped map the canyon’s soon to be lost heritage. They floated the Colorado, explored hundreds of side streams, climbed cliffs, and squeezed through slot canyons. They drank from fern-sweet springs, slept under the gauzy gaze of the Milky Way and howled and hooted and sang. They also sat in awe struck silence listening to the voices of ancestors susurrate with the wind.
Glen Canyon, when it wasn’t inundated, was very different in character from its neighbor, the Grand Canyon. The Grand is a steeply walled layer cake, one epoch set on top of another again and again and again. At its deepest, the layers are a hard black metamorphic causeway plunging the river into swift and narrow channels frothing with rapids. Glen Canyon is (was) the Grand’s quiet sister. The red walls (of which the upper layers can still be seen poking up from Lake Powell) are composed of Navajo Sandstone, a ruddy sedimentary deposit easily sculpted by water. It was a sensuous place where a water ouzels song could be heard above the soft murmur of the river. There, the Colorado drifted laconically between walls beveled as if in prayer to its master, the ever flowing river. But, despite the efforts of nascent environmental groups and the voices of people like Katie Lee and Edward Abby, Glen Canyon Dam was built. The concussion of its first dynamite blast set off by President Dwight D. Eisenhower from a telegraph line in Washington DC on October 15, 1956.
“You’d walk along and the next thing you’d see is this blue reflected from the sky, this beautiful, clear little pothole pool,” she said. “Every little grotto was full of frogs and birds and wildflowers. Plus, the incredible light was what nearly drove us all crazy. There was no light in the world like that. It isn’t the same in the Grand Canyon. I cannot tell you why. But when I finally saw Glen, it just captivated me.” Katie Lee
Katie Lee never got over the flooding of Glen Canyon. It haunted her like a murder.
No.
It haunted her like an execution. Murder can be impulsive, a dark turn of the heart which is often followed by guilt and remorse. Executions are not. Executions are plotted and planned, papers are signed, jobs delegated. They are clinical and capped with codes which make the unimaginable not just imaginable, but legal. And they are never accompanied with regret or apology.
Katie Lee’s preeminent love was lost when the waters backfilled Glen Canyon. Acre foot by acre foot, the place that held her passion was drowned. But from those slack waters bloomed a voice which was as hard as rock and as powerful as water. After losing her Canyon, the native Arizonan spent the rest of her life fighting for the places that needed to be fought for — the secret coves, the ancestral lands, the pinnacles, the cliffs, the bluffs and arroyos of the desert Southwest. And, of course, she fought until her very last day for the destruction of what her license plate labeled the DAMN DAM. Anger was her fuel. She wrote five books about the land she loved and the river she lost. She wrote songs, she had friends and lovers and a voice that never held back. Most people know Katie Lee from her cameo in the documentary, DamNation. In it, she shared photos taken of her during her final trip through Glen Canyon — her bare body pressed against its walls or straddling a crevasse. “It was the most natural thing in the world,” she said of posing “buck naked” for those photographs.
After the film came out, people began to reach out to the 90+ year old activist. “You should see the beautiful letters I get,” she told NPR reporter Renee Montagne in a 1999 interview about Lee’s book All My Rivers Are Gone. “Sometimes they’re a whole page and they say, ‘We saw you in ‘DamNation’ and how free you were and how this, and how that … and we want to know what to do! What can we do to help get this movement going?’ And I just keep thinking, God, you’ve gotta realize the world is not like it was then. But that doesn’t keep you from fighting. You’ve got to do it your way in this particular climate. I mean I didn’t have any of this ‘Tweeter, Bleeter, Flipper, FaceYourAss’ or whatever ‘Book’ it is. I mean, if they’re taking away things from you that you adore and love, it’s gonna make you mad. And it sure as hell made me mad. Made me mad enough to get off my ass and go to work,”
Fortunately, that’s happening. Last weekend I attended the Women’s Convention in Detroit, Michigan. This was a followup to the global march that took place the day after the inauguration of Donald Trump. Prior to going, I worried the turn out would be small and homogenous. A group of well heeled women overwhelmed by Trump’s onslaught on all they held dear: public lands, health care, clean air and water, reproductive rights, equity, education, a free and fair press, etc… What I found instead was one of the most diverse and powerful groups I have spent time with in a long while. Young, old, rich, poor, black, white, red, yellow, gay, straight, trans, muslim, jewish, wiccan, pentecostal preacher, X-con you name it and they were there and they were fighting mad. Their rights were being damned by the Trump Administration, and the hell if they were going to allow that to happen. These were women Katie Lee would have been proud of. Its leaders were well connected and exceptionally compelling 20-somethings, and they were filled with the ideas and the means and the passion and the power to make change happen. They spoke with audacity and authority and anger and love. But most of all they spoke with the determination of women who know they have work to do.
Katie Lee knew that the life-span of dams are fleeting when compared to the walls in which they encroach. One day, Glen Canyon Dam, like all dams everywhere, will blow out and its river will flow free. It’s inevitable. The force of water, the build up of silt, the relentless abrasions, they are no match for that man-made plug of sand and gravel. The same goes for Trump and his walls and the Tiki-torches that light his way. One day all of it, the man, the walls, the torches, the narrow fear-filled ideas he spews so carelessly will crumble, and the dreams and passion of the people he is trying to hold back, will break free.
All we have to do, according to Katie Lee, is get up off our asses and get to work.
Great film to watch — 7 minutes….Katie Lee: The River Woman
Katie Lee October 23, 1919 – November 1, 2017
That was a stunning tribute so well written and so compelling. I didn’t know about Katie but zone I will never forget her. Thank you for making me aware of this passionate life and what she stood for for all of us. Sadly she is gone now, but lets hope her vision and passion will live on with this generation. Thank you.
I was going to sat the same thing! Riveting article…so we’ll written. I had not heard of her either but at 61… I am going to investigate! Thanks for sharing!?
Absolutey agree with Patricia Clark’s Comment
How true are Katie Lee’s Words and may her dreams & causes live on & be fulfilled in the passing of time
X
Amen
I was young but I will never forget the few news clips or articles in the paper about Katie Lee in the beginning. I lived in Price Utah a community that would be impacted negatively. By the time I got old enough to take a stand the work was so far along it would be like fighting to stop an arrest at the moment the jail cell closed! It took forever to fill and so many Californians, And other people would benefit. I still resent that! So now the people who had constant water sources from the streams are allowed water shares but not until it is sure tha t California has enough water to take care of their needs! Not one of our best moves! The Native American villages, meccas, pictographs, petroglyphs all covered with water! That particular area could have been one of the wonders of the world!!!!
A great book about this travesty is Mark Reisner’s Cadillac Desert. I HIGHLY recommend it. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56140.Cadillac_Desert
Thank you for a GREAT read about my numero uno heroine! When face to face with Katie Lee at talks she gave in Tucson, I fell in love with her. Her advocacy to drain Lake Powell and tear down Glenn Canyon Dam elevated her above all others. She autographed a hard back copy of her book titled “Ten Thousand Goddam Cattle” on Fourth Avenue many years ago. At the time, Katie said, “I hear they’re getting $90 for autographed copies of this book.” My answer was, “I’m not selling it. They’ll put this book under my head as a pillow in my coffin.” Katie Lee will be missed.
I love that — “They’ll put this book under my head as a pillow in my coffin…” Perfect.
or perhaps forget the coffin and just moulder into the earth whence we came.
beautifully written tribute to Katie Lee, and a sweet little memory from Ricardo Small. thanks to both of you.
Thank you so much for this! I did not know most of it. What a fine article.
When I seen this story of this beautiful loving women of the earth. It gave me hope that we all must strive for the planet. Her face gave me the strength and conscious to take the route.
Thank you, Mary. Your words give me hope, too.
Thank you for this tribute to an amazing woman, whose legacy will live on through folks just like you met at the Women’s Convention. I had the pleasure of hearing Katie Lee perform her songs in Jerome during the 70’s. She was one of the people that inspired me to run the Colorado River in 1979. Rest In Peace Katie Lee—a fucking incredible woman!
My Mom was quite psychic. And she loved her fishing. My parents travelled to Lake Powell to fish from their boat. They got the boat into the water, and my Mom couldn’t stand the feelings she got, and insisted they get completely off the water. She always said, “there were people buried there and I don’t want to be in their water.” She then fished from shore, but never again went to Lake Powell.
Yes one can definitely feel how wrong Lake Powell is with crowds of boaters throwing garbage over its beaches. The beautiful scenes of nature long under water. The water line scarred walls. The damn cannot come down soon enough.
I had the now-understood pleasure of traveling down the river in 1963, just before the gates were closed. My memories of all that deep and wonderful canyon experience are now tempered by how dearly Katie must have absorbed those same canyon walls. (We spent a night on a tiny bit of beach under a very sheer wall, and our campfire generated a scream from a mountain lion peering over the clifftop above us. We actually saw it for a few seconds.) Honest.
Beautiful experience….
I personally think well healed is more appropriate in this context. Thank you for using this term….perhaps the spelling was perfect as you typed it. (And I used to teach English and creative writing.)
well healed?
The expression is “well-heeled”.
Thanks — grammar and spelling — I have trouble with both.
I think Michael has missed the point. The piece was stunningly well-written and I believe Sandra was making clever remark using word play. This is truly a beautiful tribute!
…thanks joan…
Thank you for sharing her in your marvelous tribute. She was some kind of wonderful. ♡
Great writing about a great warrior for good. Thanks for sharing part of her story. Amazing person. We need more Katie Lee.
One of David Brower’s saddest regrets was not fighting to stop Glen Canyon Dam. I told him that I would work to remove that dam. One day it will come down!
What can I do to help?
Friends of the River formed to save the Stanislaus River in the ’70s by Davis students. Mark Du Bois chained himself to rocks to prevent the Army Corps of Engineers from flooding the historical Gold Rush area. Check out their website to see how you can volunteer.
I will. Thank you.
Great book to read,
Glen Canyon
Images of a lost World
Photographs and Recollections
Tad Nichols
Museum of New Mexico press,
All about her trips down the river and Tad’s, one of a kind large format photography.
Thank you, I just ordered a used copy.
I wanted to tell you I purchased a used copy of the book you recommended. I am half way through — thank you. It is a gift to spend time in those pictures and words. I can see “we three” so much more clearly now.
Sooooo is this about a great woman trying to save a natural treasure or hating Trump? Asinine
Both
I don’t see where she mentioned Trump. But she does sound like an amazing woman!!
What was asinine about it, exactly?
Yeah, I appreciated the article until the Trump thing came up….
I think Katie would have been just fine with it….
Unfortunately we now live in a time where other Natural Wonders are under attack. Bear Ears, Grand Staircase/Escalante and others. We have an Administration who cares little about the places that truly make America great.
I couldn’t agree more. Everywhere I look, there is work to do.
Wow. Beautiful writing and passion. This essay gave me badly needed hope. Thank you so much.
It’s a constant question that is with me night and day- what can I do to help?
Quit using electricity.
reduce driving, flying, etc stop using plastic bags, eat organic, the list is endless….be mindful
Thank you Naseem for this inspirational writing. I like you would have liked to have known her. Rip Katie Lee….
She was a fiercely independent woman with a wicked sense of humor from Arizona. In the 1950s she made her mark in New York first as a singer of a mix of cowboy songs and racy songs, puncturing our pompous ideas about psychology as well. Burl Ives once said of her, “The best cowboy singer I know is Katie Lee.” Then came her love of Glen Canyon and the battle to save it. I did not meet her personally but exchanged emails and music with her for several years. She was very gracious to me.
Arizonan. There is no such thing as an Arizonian. California ends with an ‘ia’ whereas Arizona ends with an ‘a’.
Thanks…
Nice article, good read. Not to be the grammar police, but I have a problem with people who don’t know the difference between loosing and losing. It has become an all to common spelling error.
Thank you. I appreciate the grammar police.
I think that would be “all too common”. Those double o’s can be a real problem! ;^)
Loose as a noose on a goose! Lose, loser, losing lost!
Thanks for this. They are helpful to me.
All TOO common, not “to common”. What a hilarious correction, Now back to this lovely tribute with a few grammatical glitches and the vital work its amazing subject did.
Sigh. RIP Katie! You won’t be forgotten!
She had a wonderful mind, and an impressive, incredible ass. Fuck that, LOL! RIP
A woman of great passion and dedication. I like that.
I was there summer of ’64 in a friend’s boat. It was just starting to fill but was still river like – a labyrinth of fjords – a colossal sandstone maze. We camped overnight on a ledge then docked and hiked to Rainbow Bridge monument the next day swimming in both hot and cold pools. Have not been back so do not have any sense of how much was flooded, is the rainbow bridge still visible?
This is what I found on the NPS website: Encompassing just 160 square acres of land, Rainbow Bridge National Monument is one of the smallest units of the National Park Service. However, what it lacks in size it more than makes up for with an abundance of unique and interesting features. The primary feature is of course Rainbow Bridge itself, one of the largest natural bridges in the world. During the summer months rangers are on site daily at the Rainbow Bridge viewing area to provide interpretive programs and information on the geology and cultural history of Rainbow Bridge. Group programs can be arranged throughout the year with advance notice.
Wow, must love the intermittent mansplaining ? in this most beautiful and well-written tribute to a woman it sounds like we all want to be more like ❤️
Well done. Thank you for honoring Katie Lee. I wrote the song playing on her computer in the background. Obviously, she was an inspiration!
Amazing, two ways: 1. with “liberal” types, they can turn ANY SUBJECT into yet, another rant, on (guess who?) D. Trump…and 2. this woman gave her life of passion for the sake of rocks and frogs, yet, for little innocent human babies, she apparently didn’t give a Dam (n)? Oh, I apologize, not “MURDER”, not “ABORTION”, call it “reproductive rights” – so cowardly, that you butchers are so ashamed of your own “victory”, your “raison d-etat'” (i.e. your freedom to butcher the babies in your womb), that you have to disguise what it is by calling it something totally other than what it is, and hope no one notices….
Go troll elsewhere. I have no patience for idiots.
@james. You sir, unless you are a female should have nothing to say about a wonens right to manage her health and reproductive rights., period.
Just as a true friend will tell you when you have spinach in your teeth or egg on your face, a true friend will tell you when you are wrong. Unfortunately, I see way too many women making this argument that men have no right to say anything about abortion because they lack a womb. Can’t someone who cares about you, about the next generation have anything to offer? I certainly think they can. When has silencing debate ever helped anything? It doesn’t. It just does what they have done for so very long, tell us “don’t worry your pretty little head about this”. It’s not right when they do it, it isn’t right when you do it. Those who eschew the comments of someone who cares enough to tell you that you have spinach in your teeth, will take the risk of walking around looking and sounding the fool indefinitely.
Such an amazing woman.
Thank you for this article! The style and class is appreciated. I wish I had access to Ms Lee while she was alive and scourging.
Your tolerance for the grammar police is laudable and troll is laudable. They fit in with the arrogance that allows Glen Canyon dam and they other desecration to continue.
Write more!
Such a beautiful life of activism for Mother Earth. It is a sad time we live in when the destruction of our environment is the norm and most of us are disengaged and uninvolved in the fight to not disrupt the natureal balance for future generations. Thank you for sharing.
Wonderful eulogy and pictures. I want to be Katie Lee, too. I just visited Lake Powell, the Glen Canyon Dam and many of the parks in Utah and Arizona where the Colorado River flow so Katie Lee speaks to me.
Let’s wake up and honor Katie Lee by doing active battle for Bears Ears and the Escalante/Grand Staircase now under threat from Zincke’s army of greedy bastards ! I’ll be there, in Katie’s name . .
The fights we are having today over public lands are the fights Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot took on when they created so much of our protected lands. A good book on this is Timothy Egan’s The Big Burn. And yes, we have to get up off our asses and work damn hard if we are going to make a difference. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6452538-the-big-burn
Poignant and gorgeous tribute to an epic spirit. Thanks for sharing Kathie Lee’s life with us.
A really thoughtful and nice piece. Until you had to drag YOUR political feculence into it.
Not sure what feculence is, but since I wrote the “really thoughtful and nice piece,” and it’s on my blog, I’m thinking I can drag whatever I want into it. Personally, I prefer truth, and I think Katie would have been just fine with my rat-a-tat-tatting on Trump’s terrible ten-year.
Our Mother, Ginny McDavid, was a close lifelong of Katie’s. They grew up in Tucson. Of course they grew apart over the years with different lives and aging. But in 2010 my wife and I drove Ginny up to Jerome to visit with Katie. It was an interesting and fun experience. I wish people would remember Katie and her passions, and leave politics alone for once. All right thinking people, liberal or conservative love this land we live upon, wish to conserve it, and look at horror what happened to Glen Canyon.
I read while listening to some beautiful music. Try it. I cried when China flooded the 3-gorges too. I’m not guiltless—I plug in. The photos are gorgeous—nature is natural. Silly to say, but sometimes we may forget people are of the earth—hard to deny in these photos with their “contoured caverns and seductive streams.” Spelling, politics, idiomatic expressions? I don’t care (or should I say “I don’t give a fuk”?). No matter one’s politics we have the ability and choice to discern and do well to exercise it. Thank you for honoring this woman and sharing her deep passion. So much that is good and honest and beautiful and soulful in life and living has been submerged by ignorance and arrogance. Not forever.
This response is art.
What a great tribute. She definitely wore her tinfoil hat better than most.
I’m not sure what to think of the tin foil hat reference. I do not see Katie Lee as a conspiratorial theorist. Instead, I see her as one of those who shine a light on injustice.
All these years later:
Hayduke lives.
Thank you for a beautifully written tribute to an amazing woman! Thank you for bringing her into my sphere of consciousness.
You are very welcome. I am glad you found the essay.
Really nice piece Ms. Rakha. Thanks for writing it. I knew Katie for a long time. She’d have loved it.
That means a lot to me, Lew. Thank you.
Hi Lew, We meet again. I met you at Gail Gardner’s house back in the 70s when I visited there with Katie. Katie, 98 years old! she’s definitely on to the next assignment. much love, Kathleen Williamson
The fabric of the earth tore a bit this week as Katie passed on to the next adventure. Having known Katie Lee for many years and watching her keep the fires of Glen Canyon alive as all the forces of evil fought to keep the status quo should teach us all to never give up our spirit, our dreams and most of all the need to keep for fighting, no matter the odds, for the things we hold precious. Katie – thanks for keeping the fires burning and we look forward to crossing our paths again in another life. Thanks Ms. Rahka for your words. Katie is missed.
Thank you for your beautiful words, David.
Thank you for this; I was a close friend of Katie’s since 1975 and i believe she would have appreciated how much you understood her passion for Glen Canyon. You are a beautiful writer.
Thank you.
Thank you for introducing me to the late Katie Lee. Ms. Lee’s spirit will live on in many hearts. Yes, politics do play a major part in today’s national wonder’s issues! We know the enemies all too well. #45 and Zinke are in the pocket’s of those out to destroy incredible National Parks and public lands we thought were protected for eternity. I venture to guess Katie would be leading the fight to stop this unconscionable destruction. I will be researching more information on Katie Lee.
We need a loud army of Katie’s standing for our public lands. This is a fight that has gone on since the days of John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot. It is a struggle we have to be awake and aware of. The corporate hands of greed want our public lands, and they want to convince the public it is in their interest. Argh…..
If you want to pick up where Katie Lee left off, you could join the Glen Canyon Institute [https://www.glencanyon.org/] and work on their campaign to Fill Mead First. “Lake” Mead, a much more significant component of the Colorado River’s damn-controlled system, would work better to supply water and power if it weren’t so low. Empty Reservoir Powell, fill Mead, and free the river through that magical stretch of Glen Canyon. And lobby for a new ethic of river management that doesn’t assume the best thing to do with flowing water is to stop it behind a dam, destroying a living river not just upstream but downstream as well.
Thank you for this, Barbara. I just went to their web site, and intend to send a donation. I have rafted the Grand Canyon a few times, this latest one for a month in the winter. We ended at Pierce Ferry in lake Mead. It was tragic to slog through the slow backed up waters created by Lake Meed, but it is true, we do not need two dams, two reservoirs. Let’s free Glen Canyon….
What I find amusing, but not surprising, is that the majority of these posters espousing platitudes for “nature” and this activist, while denigrating the dam, are direct beneficiaries of the dam.
In addition to the powerplant, consisting of eight hydroelectric generating units with a combined capacity of 1,320 megawatts, which is a significant part of the CRSP power resources with 79 percent of the total CRSP capacity, it is also crucial flood control and is the principle water storage unit of the Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP).
The Glen Canyon Dam supplies water to several states in the Lower Colorado River Basin. These states, including California, Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico receive 8.23 million acre feet of water each year from the Glen Canyon Dam’s reservoir.
I love people that are so “enlightened” that they would slit their own throats. As well as their neighbor’s throats.
If you want things to remain in a “natural” state, try not living in a desert that requires air conditioning and water relocation for your survival or even your comfort.
Your anger is not part of a solution.