The Dammed

The Dream

John Weisheit was supposed to love dams. When he was a kid growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, his dad worked for General Electric, where one of his biggest clients was the Bureau of Reclamation—the agency that built thousands of dams in the western United States. The Weisheits owned land near a reservoir in Arizona, and every year they’d leave their homes in smog-choked cities to vacation there. On the way, they’d stop and tour coal-fired power plants, just for fun. The reservoirs and power plants made it possible for millions of families to live beneath the sunny skies of the Southwest, and for that the Weisheits were grateful.

The family’s first trip to Lake Powell took place in 1972, shortly after John graduated from high school. Just nine years earlier, the Bureau of Reclamation had put the finishing touches on a seven-hundred-ten-foot concrete wall called Glen Canyon Dam, choking the thunderous Colorado River and creating the desert oasis