Goodbye Ken Sleight Seldom Seen
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Zak Podmore in the Salt Lake Tribune
https://www.sltrib.com/news/2026/10/03/ken-sleight-inspiration-monkey/
Ken Sleight may be most well known for something that he probably never did: kneeling on the bridge in front of the Glen Canyon Dam, his hands clasped and eyes closed, praying to the Almighty to produce a “precision-type earthquake” that would free the Colorado River from its imprisonment in Lake Powell.
The Sleight-inspired character Seldom Seen Smith acted out the scene in “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” Edward Abbey’s 1975 cult classic of ecosabotage. But although the character was fictional, Sleight’s lifelong hatred of the dam was very real, as was his love of Glen Canyon, the area drowned by Lake Powell.
“It was Glen Canyon that changed my whole life,” Sleight told The Salt Lake Tribune in 2018. “It made an environmentalist out of me.”
Sleight died Friday, Spanish Valley Mortuary in Moab confirmed. He was 97.
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Morgan Sjogren
Hiking the Escalante in Ken Sleight's Footsteps