Dominy Remapped Rivers Across West

With a cattleman's regard for water, Floyd Dominy ran some of the federal Bureau of Reclamation's biggest dam projects, including the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River. Mr. Dominy, who died April 20 at age 100, was reviled by environmentalists, who criticized his irrigation and power-generating projects for destroying pristine habitats and flooding scenic canyons. But Mr. Dominy, whose personality was as imposing and audacious as some of his projects, was proud of the dams his agency built. I'm a different kind of environmentalist," he told High Country News in 2000. "I believe that nature can be improved upon." Mr. Dominy said his critics, organizations like the Sierra Club, were elitist. At Glen Canyon in Arizona, Mr. Dominy oversaw construction of the second-largest dam on the Colorado. The dam, which opened in 1966, became a major source of power. It also created Lake Powell, a reservoir and tourist destination that attracts millions of boaters and hikers annually. He called Lake Powell "my crowning jewel" and had the Bureau of Reclamation publish a pamphlet celebrating how it made the wilderness accessible to tourists. "Dear God," he wrote in the pamphlet. "Did you cast down two hundred miles of canyon and mark: 'For poets only?' Multitudes hunger for a lake in the sun." Raised on a struggling Nebraska cattle farm that lacked electricity and running water, Mr. Dominy left home at age 17...more