Photographer Tad Nichols first ran the Colorado River through Utah and Arizona’s Glen Canyon in 1950, discovering a labyrinth world of twisting slot canyons, flowing streams, magnificent amphitheaters, and naked red rock. For the next thirteen years, until Glen Canyon Dam was completed and Lake Powell began to fill in 1963, Nichols explored what is often called America’s lost national park.
Working for the Sierra Club and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Nichols’ artistic and inspiring photographs provide one of the most extensive historical portraits of Glen Canyon before the dam. Nichols, born in 1911, passed away just after his book, Glen Canyon: Images of a Lost World, was published in 1999. The book is out of print but it contains the best photographic documentation of the most beautiful canyon system in the American Southwest.
Today, with global warming accelerating and a historic megadrought plaguing the region, Lake Powell water levels are dropping at incredible speed. Dawn Kish, a conservation photographer and filmmaker, was given Nichols’ four
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