27 actually contributing to the early development of industrial tourism of the American West and its wilderness. Tourism in the American West exploded following the end of World War II. There was a huge demand to see America, and the national economy cooperated with jobs in most industries. The GI Bill, signed in 1944, provided veterans and their families funds for housing, unemployment insurance, and college educa- tion opportunities. The National Park System likewise gained great attention as attendance increased from 21 million in 1946 to 49 million in 1955, putting pres- sure on fragile environments. This growth fueled greater interest in the conservation of wild lands, such as those along the Green River and the Colorado, including Dinosaur National Monument and Grand Canyon National Park. Concurrently, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation was recommending dam sites in these spectacular landscapes, which fueled the Sierra Club to expand its conservation movement beyond California and aggressively fight the dams, first in Dinosaur. Many Americans welcomed dams to control and improve nature, but just as many, led by the Sierra Club and other conservation organizations, damned the dams, feeling that they took away more than they gave back to society. David Brower, soon to be the club’s first executive director, hired Philip Hyde—a native Californian, member of the Sierra Club, and recent graduate of Ansel Adams’s photography program at the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute)—to travel in June 1951 to northeastern Utah to capture the beauty and geologic importance of the Dinosaur National Monument region. The resulting dramatic black-and-white photographs provided the Sierra Club board with evidence to fight the idea of a dam in Dinosaur National Monument that, if built, would create a reservoir covering 80% of its land, thus erasing the environmental diversity of this region. Sadly, today Hyde’s photographs are less well known than those of Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter because of the latter two’s art museum exposure. Hyde’s work, especially along the Green River, deserves a brighter light cast upon it. He worked on more books and articles than any other image maker for Sierra Club publications. As proven in his travel logs and accompanying photo logs (Collection of David Leland Hyde), he was a dedicated master of the zone system of black-and-white photography preached by Ansel Adams. Adams was a committed Sierra Club board member and supported his favored protégé to capture the beauty of a locale like Dinosaur National Monument. Hyde’s own writings are split into two approaches. One, typical of many modern photographers, is a photo log documenting technical aspects of each photograph (camera type, film type, light meter readings, zone number, exposure time, f-stop, etc.). The other reads more like a travel log and is generally descriptive in nature. Hyde’s wife, Ardis, who often accompanied him, recorded some of the travel log entries. Hyde made clear in his communication with the Sierra Club board his beliefs as to access, limited structural needs, and other attributes to protect the special isolated nature of the Monument. He bemoaned that planners who where inexperienced as outdoorsmen could be visioning how important natural settings should be protected and developed. Hyde’s trip and his photographs are credited as a significant aspect of the national campaign to halt the damming of the Green River in Echo Park. Brower, whose background was in publishing, convinced Alfred Knopf to rush to press with This Is Dinosaur, edited by Wallace Stegner, another champion for conservation of the most important lands in the West. The first section of the book contained over 40 photographs, half of them by Philip Hyde. His powerful image of Steamboat Rock (in Echo Park) became the icon of the Sierra Club’s campaign and is a photographic master- piece still remembered today. Importantly, This Is Dinosaur stands today as representing the start of modern environmental activism. Had the Sierra Club and others not emerged victorious in 1955 and beyond, the superb Philip Hyde photographs and other images would today be histor- ical visual documents of what lay beneath the Echo Park reservoir. Most likely, this essay and others in this publication would not have been written, and Foster’s wonderful artworks which comprise Tony Foster: Watercolour Diaries from the Green River would not have been painted. Foster’s 40-year career visually celebrating wilderness areas all over the world records dramatic geologic scenes, diverse land- forms, iconic locations, and often open rivers devoid of human presence. They leave the viewer with a true sense of the peril these fragile landscapes face. Given this formulary, a Green River interrupted by multiple dams and recreational reservoirs which erase prized natural areas would not have interested the artist enough to make the Green River journey, nor to make the immense personal commitment to paint there. Unlike Hyde, whose activist conservation agenda was apparent in his writing and in Sierra Club publica- tions for which he so often provided photographs over his 60-year photographic career, Foster has for the past 40 years created projects in which he held strong personal interest, and secondarily felt that a broader audience should share with him. His work has not been a part of the journalistic side of the art world; rather, he has exhibited in galleries and museums. Along the way, Foster’s belief and devotion to his craft confirm that by spending time on-site painting signifi- cant pictures depicting the headwaters of Green River
