The Bureau’s dam would drown Devil’s Canyon, a remote stretch of almost unbelievable wildwater rapids about a hundred miles north of Anchorage. Even fish couldn’t navigate those rapids, and no sane person would try—although in the mid 1970s, a group of kayakers led by Dr. Walt Blackadar, a fifty-three-year-old surgeon from Salmon, Idaho, did, and succeeded, at least in the sense that none of them died. Devil’s Canyon’s value was mere spectacle, even if it was the greatest spectacle of whitewater on the North American continent.
