October 4, 2026 – Coyote Gulch

The Colorado River flows through Glen Canyon in 1958, before the dam was built. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

Here’s Zak Podmore’s and Brook Larsen’s tribute from The Salt Lake Tribune website. Here’s an excerpt:

October 3, 2026

Ken Sleight may be most well known for something that he probably never did: kneeling on the bridge in front of the Glen Canyon Dam, his hands clasped and eyes closed, praying to the Almighty to produce a “precision-type earthquake” that would free the Colorado River from its imprisonment in Lake Powell. The Sleight-inspired character Seldom Seen Smith acted out the scene in “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” Edward Abbey’s 1975 cult classic of ecosabotage. But although the character was fictional, Sleight’s lifelong hatred of the dam was very real, as was his love of Glen Canyon, the area drowned by Lake Powell.

“It was Glen Canyon that changed my whole life,” Sleight told The Salt Lake Tribune in 2018. “It made an environmentalist out of me.”

(Photo by H. Bennett. Courtesy of Ken Sleight.) Ken Sleight making breakfast along the river in Glen Canyon before the dam, circa June 1960.

[…]

In 1957, Sleight purchased eight Army surplus rafts, quit the tire business, and opened a river guiding company that would soon take the name Ken Sleight Expeditions. For the next six years, Sleight led river trips through Glen Canyon on the Colorado River where he showed artists, environmentalists, reporters and curious members of the public the labyrinthine sandstone canyon country that would soon be flooded by Lake Powell…He found common cause with the writer Edward Abbey when the two met in 1967 at the Lees Ferry boat ramp. Sleight was launching on a Grand Canyon trip, and Abbey, who was working as a ranger for the National Park Service, helped Sleight rig his boats.

“[We] sat on the edge of the raft talking and thinking, eating and drinking until the wee hours of the morning,” Sleight would later write, “making creative commentary on how best to eliminate the Glen Canyon Dam.”

The friendship lasted through Abbey’s death in 1989, and Sleight never seemed to mind being immortalized as the anarchist Seldom Seen Smith. Sleight often said that Abbey was able to put into words his anger and sorrow over seeing Glen Canyon flooded and so many other wild places transformed by development…Even though Sleight took on numerous environmental and political fights, he never forgot about Glen Canyon, which he often used religious terms to describe.

“I’d still like to see the water from the reservoir — what I call Lake Foul — I think it all ought to be drained and the water be flushed downstream to be stored in Lake Mead,” Sleight told The Tribune in 2021. “One thing is for sure: We’re still trying to resurrect Glen Canyon.”