Caught Ken Sanders on Antiques Roadshow a couple times as of late. Last night, the show preceded the PBS special sure to get some attention from the local folk…
Anywhoo, the below is from his emailed newsletter.
Sadly, I’ll be out of town for this gig.
-Brian in SLC
LOVE SONG TO GLEN CANYON FILM PREMIER with Colorado River Legends KATIE LEE & KEN SLEIGHT
On Wednesday, May 9th at 7:00 p.m., at the Broadway Cinema Theater in Salt Lake City, Utah, Katie Lee will be premiering her new DVD “Love Song to Glen Canyon,” and speaking about her experiences in Glen Canyon before it was dammed. She will be joined by fellow Colorado River legend, Ken “Seldom Seen” Sleight, who will be on hand to tell stories about rafting the Glen and his advocacy work to prevent Rainbow Bridge from being flooded. Admission is $10 at the door; $8.00 in advance from Ken Sanders Rare Books, 268 South 200 East, Salt Lake City. The film premiere will be at the Broadway Cinema Theatres, which are located at 111 East, 300 South, just around the corner from Ken Sanders Rare Books. A reception and book signing for Katie’s new book, GLEN CANYON BETRAYED: A Sensuous Elegy will be held for Katie and Ken at the bookstore after the premier.Copies of both Katie Lee’s DVD, “Love Song to Glen Canyon” and her books and other music will be available for purchase.
“LOVE SONG TO GLEN CANYON”
This unique DVD is a rare historical documentary, not only of the 185 miles of Colorado River corridor that has been drowned, along with more than 125 of its side canyons, but also of a woman who has worked so unremittingly and eloquently to restore the flow of that river through Glen Canyon. Just as the Sierras were John Muir’s refuge, Glen Canyon was Katie’s. She knew the river guides and characters that roamed there; and named many of its side canyons. In 1953 she was the 175th person to run the Grand Canyon after John Wesley Powell’s first run in 1869, and the third woman to run all rapids in Grand Canyon.
Katie Lee’s new DVD takes you into the wild, secret heart of Utah’s Glen Canyon, the one she loved, photographed and explored for over ten years before the waters of the Colorado River were choked off behind the dam. The half-hour DVD features Katie reading excerpts from her books and singing songs she wrote against the background of 140 rare, unpublished photographs that she took in the fifties and sixties on her many river journeys through the canyon.
KATIE LEE
Today, Katie Lee is one of the Southwest’s most outspoken Environmental Activists. Her unwavering commitment to her principles and feisty eloquence are primarily directed toward draining Powell Reservoir and letting the Colorado River once again run wild. These efforts were given new impetus in 1996 when the Glen Canyon Institute was founded to help restore a healthy Colorado River through that Canyon. The cause has since received a great deal of international coverage.
Katie took up the torch Ed Abbey left burning when he died: she sings, writes and lectures about the importance of preserving and restoring wilderness refuge areas. Her anger over the “political damning of an Eden unequaled,” became the driving force that turned her into an environmental activist and agitator. Katie says of her early activist efforts: “Our efforts, with meager numbers and unschooled politics, were like trying to put out a wildfire with a teacup.”
Ken Sleight, who led river trips before the damming, agrees. “For a long time, I just didn’t think it would happen. I was young and it just didn’t sink in. A few of us organized against the dam and called ourselves Friends of Glen Canyon, but it was too late.” Since then, he has, according to Jim Stiles’ writing in Moab’s Canyon Zephyr, become a “vigilante, the sentinel on guard…the first to throw himself in front of any scheme or project that threatened the red rock wilderness.”
Katie’s new DVD, “Love Song To Glen Canyon” completes a trilogy of work about the Canyon. Lee’s book, Glen Canyon Betrayed (Fretwater Press 2006) describes her many river trips. The book’s foreword is by the award-winning author Terry Tempest Williams, who eloquently describes Katie’s activism as follows:
“In so many ways, this is a woman who embodies the power and tenacious beauty of the Colorado Plateau. Her spitfire intelligence and redrock resolve provides us with an individual conscience that we would do well to adopt. Katie Lee is a joyful raconteur, a woman with grit, grace and humor. She is not afraid to laugh and tease, cajole and flirt, cuss, rant, howl, sing and cry. Katie Lee is the desert’s lover. Her voice is a torch in the wilderness.”
A wide assortment of Katie Lee’s work is available for purchase at Ken Sanders Rare Books, including her booksGlen Canyon Betrayed: A Sensuous Elegy ($16.95), Sandstone Seduction ($17.50), Glen Canyon River Journeys ($10.00), Ten Thousand Goddam Cattle ($19.95), All My Rivers Are Gone ($18.00), and her recordings Glen Canyon River Journeys (CD $15.00, Cassette $10.00) and Colorado River Songs (CD $15.00, Cassette $10.00).
A special edition of the Ed Abbey/R. Crumb t-shirt featuring “Seldom Seen Sleight” will also be available for $15.