"Go and Highball!"

Seek ye not gold but water.

--Brigham Young

The land has a fierce and lonely beauty all its own--windswept plateaus, shifting seas of sand, canyons slashing down through layers of sandstone, and, always on the far horizon, mountains of barren granite. Beneath the ground is a fabulous treasure of coal, oil, sodium, magnesium, potassium, uranium. Coursing through the entire region--from Wyoming to Utah and Colorado, on to Arizona, New Mexico and California--is one of the greatest of U.S. river systems. Starting as a trickle in the Rocky Mountains, the Colorado River sweeps south and west to absorb such tributaries as the Gunnison River, the Roaring Fork and the Frying Pan, until, after a passage of 1,400 miles, it empties with a gout of reddish, mineral-stained water into the Gulf of California.

Yet throughout most of its upper vastness, the Colorado River Basin has long seemed to be dying of thirst. The Colorado has merely rushed through the landscape, unharnessed for use by man, leaving behind only magnificent wasteland. Last week, as Interior Secretary Stewart Udall inspected the giant dam rising across Glen Canyon in northwest Arizona, it was apparent that the Upper Colorado Basin was at last on its way to becoming a land of incomparable opportunity.

Just the Beginning. As spring of 1961 comes to the high country, work is forging ahead at half a dozen dusty sites on the Upper Colorado Basin Project, the most ambitious water-harnessing program in U.S. history. The effort now includes four huge dam complexes and eleven satellite projects, is budgeted at more than $1 billion. But the U.S. Reclamation Department engineers insist that this is just the beginning; they talk of an expanding network of dams, power stations, storage lakes and irrigation canals that will stir to life huge, drowsing areas of Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona. Industry is moving into the area. Texas Gulf Sulphur Co. is building the world's largest mine-and-mill potash project at Cane Creek, Utah; San Francisco Chemical Co. will dig and process phosphates near Vernal, Utah.

In northern Utah last week squads of workers were raising the level of the Flaming Gorge Dam by 7 1/2 ft. a week, planned to get its 108,000-kw. power plant in full operation by the summer of 1964. In northwest New Mexico, work was three-quarters done on the earth-and-rock Navajo Dam, which will be 480 ft. high and one-third of a mile thick at its base.

Men & Machines. But the key to the entire development of the Upper Colorado is Arizona's 700-ft. Glen Canyon Dam. When completed in 1964, the structure will have a capacity of 900,000 kw. of electricity, back up Lake Powell through 186 miles of some of the most dramatic scenery in the U.S. The job of building Glen Canyon compares in sheer size with the land itself. Workers erected from scratch the town of Page, which now has a population of 7,000. A giant refrigeration plant daily turns out 4,000 tons of ice to cool the concrete so that it hardens properly. Perched on the wall of the canyon, the concrete-mixing plant is as tall as a 21-story building.

Working in shifts around the clock, 2,200 men are half through the task of damming the Colorado at Glen Canyon. Suspended from cables, giant buckets containing concrete swing giddily down from the canyon wall to dump out their wet, grey-green loads at the rate of 16,000 tons a day. Standing on the dam one day last week, Rigger Johnny Vezzoso adjusted his throat mike, squinted into the sky and fed directions to a cable operator hundreds of feet above him. As the bucket emptied, Vezzoso sent the operator after more concrete with the cry: "Go and highball!" In the heartland of the Far West last week, men and machines were highballing ahead on the giant job of putting the Upper Colorado River to work.

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