Glen Canyon Dam Faces Deadpool

In 1998, when I was in fourth grade, I joined a class field trip to Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. But when we got to Cortez, the road was barricaded. Hours earlier, three men had stolen a water-tanker truck and killed a police officer before fleeing into the desert.

In his book Dead Run, writer Dan Schultz makes the case that the criminals were inspired by Edward Abbey's 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang. The men were survivalists planning to turn the water truck into a mobile bomb, Schultz says. Their probable goal: To pack the tanker truck with explosives and blowup Glen Canyon Dam....