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# Ken Sleight never forgave a dam
- URL: https://livesinnature.org/ken-sleight-never-forgave-a-dam/
- Published: 2026-11-07T15:56:17.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-07T16:17:53.000Z
- Description: Ken Sleight, a Utah river guide who led trips through Glen Canyon before Lake Powell flooded it, spent six decades fighting the dam. He inspired Edward Abbey’s Seldom Seen Smith, helped launch river trips for people with disabilities, and advocated for wild places. He died at 97.
- Author: Lives in Nature
- Tags: United States, activism, 2026, Men

In the late 1950s, Ken Sleight took paying customers down the Colorado River through Glen Canyon, in southern Utah. They traveled between towering sandstone walls, stopping to explore side canyons and beaches that few people had visited. A dam was under construction downstream. Sleight knew that in a few years much of the country he was showing his customers would be underwater.

Sleight was born in Idaho in 1929\. He served in the Korean War, studied business at the University of Utah and went to work selling Firestone tires. In 1957 he bought eight surplus military rafts and quit his job.

Sleight and other river guides opposed the dam, but construction continued. In 1963 its gates closed and Lake Powell began to fill. Much of the canyon country he had explored disappeared beneath the reservoir. Sleight spent the next six decades campaigning to have it drained. 

Sleight had not always been an environmentalist. As a young man he attended meetings of the fiercely conservative John Birch Society, though he never joined, and supported Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign.

"It was Glen Canyon that changed my whole life," [he told the Salt Lake Tribune](https://www.sltrib.com/news/2026/10/03/ken-sleight-inspiration-monkey/?ref=livesinnature.org) in 2018\. "It made an environmentalist out of me."

In 1967 he met Edward Abbey at Lees Ferry, where the writer was working as a National Park Service ranger. Abbey helped him prepare his boats for a Grand Canyon trip. They spent much of the night discussing Glen Canyon Dam.

[Abbey drew on Sleight for Seldom Seen Smith](https://www.salon.com/2006/10/21/sleight/?ref=livesinnature.org), the Mormon river guide in his 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. Smith hated Glen Canyon Dam and dreamed of destroying it. Smith was based substantially on Sleight, though the fictional character's enthusiasm for sabotage went further than Sleight's documented activities. [The novel helped inspire Earth First!](https://ralphehanson.com/west/docs/abbey%5Ftranscript.html?ref=livesinnature.org), the radical environmental group founded in 1980\. The following year, its activists unfurled a 300-foot strip of black plastic down the face of Glen Canyon Dam, making it appear cracked. Abbey came to watch and speak.

When bulldozers began clearing mature pinyon and juniper trees on public land near his home, Sleight rode his horse, Knothead, into their path. He also fought a proposed nuclear waste dump near Canyonlands National Park and opposed the White Mesa uranium mill. 

He worked through the courts as well. In 1973 his commercial river trips helped give conservation groups standing to sue over the flooding of Rainbow Bridge National Monument. They won. [An appeals court reversed it](https://moabsunnews.com/2026/10/03/ken-sleight-dies-seldom-seen-smith-river-guide/?ref=livesinnature.org).

In 1977 Martha Ham, then 23, was trying to organize wilderness river trips for people with disabilities. She had trouble finding a commercial outfitter willing to take participants with developmental disabilities onto whitewater rivers. Eventually she approached Sleight. He agreed almost immediately.

SPLORE, incorporated in 1979, more than a decade before the Americans with Disabilities Act, went on to offer outdoor recreation to people with disabilities. Ham later credited Sleight with helping make accessible commercial river trips possible in Utah.

In 2021, nearly 60 years after the dam's gates closed, he was still calling for Lake Powell to be drained and its water stored farther downstream in Lake Mead. Declining water levels were already exposing stretches of canyon that had been submerged for decades.

That June, the Pack Creek Fire swept through the ranch near Moab where he lived. His house survived, but the fire destroyed his office and around 100 boxes of records: correspondence, river-trip lists, documents from environmental campaigns and material he had collected over much of his life. He had hoped to use some of it for a book and eventually give it to a university archive. "All those memories," [he told the *Salt Lake Tribune*](https://www.sltrib.com/news/2021/06/16/ken-sleight-an/?ref=livesinnature.org), "went up in smoke."

[Ken Sleight died on October 2nd](https://www.sltrib.com/news/2026/10/03/ken-sleight-inspiration-monkey/?ref=livesinnature.org), aged 97.