We Checked What Lake Powell Hid For 60 Years - It's Surfacing

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]In the summer of 2022, boat captains on Lake Powell started seeing things in the water that should not have been there.

[00:00:08]Dark shapes against the cliff walls. A stone bridge rising out of the surface that nobody on the lake had ever seen with their own eyes.

[00:00:18]A doorway in the rock where there had never been a doorway.

[00:00:23]This was a reservoir that had [music] stayed full for 60 years. And now, foot by foot, it was handing back everything it had swallowed.

[00:00:33]And the further the water dropped, the closer it got to the one question people had argued about for half a century.

[00:00:42]What was really at the bottom of the canyon when they poured the dam?

[00:00:47]To understand what came back, we have to go down to where it started.

[00:00:53]1956. [music] Glen Canyon, on the border of Arizona and Utah, is a gorge 700 ft deep with a fast brown river at the bottom and no road in. The Bureau of Reclamation wants to plug it with one of the largest concrete dams in the country. And the first problem is simply getting men and machines down to the [music] river.

[00:01:15]So, they try the obvious thing. They run a barge across the Colorado loaded with equipment.

[00:01:21]>> [music] >> The current is faster than they planned for.

[00:01:24]The barge capsizes and tons of machinery go straight to the bottom of the river >> [music] >> and are never recovered.

[00:01:32]That accident is the real reason a legend started. But, it also changed the whole job. Because after the barge went down, they stopped trusting the water.

[00:01:42][music] Everything from then on would hang from cables strung across the sky.

[00:01:49]The contractor was Merritt Chapman and Scott, and they won the dam with a bid that made engineers blink.

[00:01:57]$107 million, about 30 million below what the government itself estimated. The largest non-defense contract the country had awarded up to that point.

[00:02:08]Their project manager was a man named A.R. Bacon and the construction had to be solved from the air because the canyon floor could not be reached any other [music] way at scale.

[00:02:21]They built two mobile cableways that spanned the entire gorge riding on towers mounted on eight-wheeled trucks that rolled on heavy rail.

[00:02:30]One could lift 25 tons, the other could lift 50 tons.

[00:02:36]And what those cables carried hour after hour was concrete.

[00:02:41]The buckets weighed 24 tons each when [music] full holding 12 cubic yards and they swung across 700 ft of open air before dropping their load into the forms below.

[00:02:54]By late 1962, the crews were placing up to 8,000 cubic yards of concrete a day.

[00:03:02]When it was finished, the dam held nearly 5 million cubic yards of concrete and almost 29 million pounds of steel.

[00:03:11]The workers rode down into the canyon in open cable cars they nicknamed the monkey slides.

[00:03:18]If you want to see what the falling water gave back 60 years later and the truth about [music] what people swore was buried in that concrete, hit the like button now and subscribe.

[00:03:30]These are the stories that disappear [music] if nobody watches them.

[00:03:35]Because building it almost [music] did not work.

[00:03:39]The rock itself was the enemy.

[00:03:42]Glen Canyon is Navajo sandstone and the diversion tunnels they drilled through it kept failing.

[00:03:48]The walls would slab off without warning.

[00:03:52]The worst collapse came in August of 1958 when 5,200 cubic yards of rock dropped onto the upper end of one tunnel.

[00:04:03]>> [music] >> So, they sent men called high scalers over the cliff edges on windlass cables hanging in the open air, drilling rock bolts up to 75 ft long into the sandstone to pin it in place before it could fall on the crews below.

[00:04:19]That was the danger every single day.

[00:04:22]And it is where the official number comes from.

[00:04:25]18 men died building Glen Canyon Dam.

[00:04:29]Most channels say that number and move on.

[00:04:32]>> [music] >> We are going to tell you who three of them were.

[00:04:36]The seventh man killed was Raymond D.

[00:04:39]White, >> [music] >> 37 years old, a heavy equipment operator.

[00:04:43]He was cleaning up on the blind side of a giant dragline bucket when it swung and struck him, knocking him off his machine.

[00:04:51]>> [music] >> He died at the Page Hospital of internal injuries and he was buried back home in Idaho.

[00:04:57]The 12th was Artist King, a welder everyone called Blue.

[00:05:03]In July of 1961, he was cutting a length of pipe to brace a concrete form.

[00:05:08]The pipe exploded and killed him instantly.

[00:05:12]The investigation found something almost impossible to believe.

[00:05:17]The supplier had mistakenly mixed a pipe packed with black blasting powder into the stock of ordinary bracing pipe.

[00:05:26]Working 2 hours away from the same blast, a 19-year-old rodman named Keith Walker died of his injuries at the hospital.

[00:05:35]He was the 13th.

[00:05:38]Now, here is where we have to be honest with you because the internet is not.

[00:05:43]There is no public list anywhere of all 18 names.

[00:05:48]The first man killed and the last man killed are not identified in any record we could find.

[00:05:56]The number is real and it is carved on a plaque at the dam, but anyone who tells you they have the full roster is guessing. [music] And that brings us to the legend itself.

[00:06:08]>> [music] >> For decades people have repeated that workers are buried inside the concrete of these big dams, sealed in forever.

[00:06:17]So we checked it against the Bureau of Reclamation's own records and the claim falls apart on the physics.

[00:06:24]The dam was not poured in one giant mass.

[00:06:28]It was built in shallow blocks and the fresh concrete where men worked was never more than about 1 ft deep.

[00:06:35]You cannot be buried standing in 12 in of concrete.

[00:06:39]Every one of the 18 bodies was recovered.

[00:06:42]Nobody is in the dam.

[00:06:45]So the legend is wrong about the concrete, but it is not wrong about everything.

[00:06:50]And this is the part that gives you chills.

[00:06:54]There really is lost machinery at the bottom of Glen Canyon.

[00:06:58]It is just not in the dam.

[00:07:01]It is the equipment from that capsized barge sitting in the riverbed where it sank in 1956, the moment that started the whole story.

[00:07:13]The legend pointed at the wrong grave.

[00:07:16]The dam was finished in 1966 and the gates closed and the water began to rise behind it.

[00:07:24]It took 17 years for Lake Powell to fill, all the way to 1980, partly because the thirsty sandstone soaked up enormous amounts of water as the lake climbed.

[00:07:36]And as it climbed, it drowned an entire world. A canyon that river runners had called one of the most beautiful places in America vanished under hundreds of feet of water.

[00:07:48]And there it stayed, out of sight, for two generations.

[00:07:52]Until the drought.

[00:07:54]Starting around 2022, the Colorado River simply stopped delivering enough water, and Lake Powell began falling faster than almost anyone expected.

[00:08:06]By the spring of 2026, it sat around 3,526 ft, roughly 170 ft below a full lake, only about a quarter full.

[00:08:18]And the canyon started coming back.

[00:08:22]The first thing to return was a place called Cathedral in the Desert, a sandstone chamber with a waterfall that people used to boat across nearly 100 ft above the floor.

[00:08:33]As the water dropped, the whole room reappeared. The waterfall ran again, and ferns and cottonwoods started growing back on ground that had been underwater for 50 years.

[00:08:45]Then came Gregory Natural Bridge, one of the largest natural stone bridges in the country, submerged since the 1960s, rising back into the air until a person could stand under it again.

[00:08:59]And then the water gave back a town.

[00:09:02]Hite was founded in 1883 by a prospector named Cass Hite at a spot on the river called Dandy Crossing.

[00:09:11]The lake swallowed it in 1964.

[00:09:14]As the water fell, the old landscape reemerged. The marina road closed because the ramp now ended more than 100 ft above usable water, and the free-flowing Colorado began carving back through its [music] own canyon.

[00:09:29]Cass Hite's grave is still down there, under what is left of the reservoir.

[00:09:35]The falling water revealed the modern wrecks, too.

[00:09:39]Boats that had sunk over the decades surfaced along the shrinking shoreline.

[00:09:44]The biggest was a 105-ft luxury houseboat called Knockers, with a helipad on its roof, that went down in a windstorm in 2022, in the deep main channel, and had to be surveyed by an underwater robot.

[00:10:00]By 2024, the Park Service was asking the public to send in the locations of sunken boats just to plan how to deal with them all.

[00:10:09]So, what did it all cost? And was it worth it?

[00:10:14]That argument comes down to two men.

[00:10:17]Floyd Dominy was the Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner who pushed Glen Canyon through, and he never apologized for a day of it.

[00:10:25]>> [music] >> He called Lake Powell the most wonderful lake in the world, and he called the dam his crowning jewel.

[00:10:33]He died on his farm in Virginia at the age of 100.

[00:10:37]The other man was David Brower of the Sierra Club, who had agreed not to fight Glen Canyon in a trade to stop other dams, and who spent the rest of his life calling that decision the greatest sin he ever committed.

[00:10:52]He died believing the lake should be drained so the canyon could come back.

[00:10:57]And now, foot by foot, the drought is doing exactly what Brower wanted, and showing the world the place Dominy was sure it was right to drown.

[00:11:09]The dam still stands.

[00:11:12]The machinery from that first barge is still on the riverbed, where it [music] sank 70 years ago.

[00:11:18]And the canyon underneath the lake is still [music] there, waiting every time the water drops.

[00:11:25]If you had been standing on the rim in 1956, would you have built it? Or would you have [music] left the canyon alone?

[00:11:34]Tell us in the comments where you are watching from.

[00:11:36]>> [music] >> And if you want more stories like this one, like and subscribe.