Ep. 36: Down the West’s Grandest Canyon

00:00:01
Speaker 1: What John Wesley Powell accomplished first in the eighteen seventies. Float the length of the Grand Canyon. You can do today and it’s still the Western wild lands experience of a lifetime. I’m Dan Flores, and this is the American West, down the West’s grandest Canyon. Our personal motives for experiences in the American West have always been many. Some of us move west or relocate within the West for a new start in life. Some come to seek wealth and become rich. Some of us are lured westward because everything from scenery to wild animals is new and exciting. But in a region of America where the landscapes are supersized and grand eloquent, the river’s mysterious and even furious, The animals often large and occasionally dangerous. The human search for adventure has forever been a part of the West’s mystique. From hunting buffalo on yellow grasslands under a dome of blue to making an ascent of every one of Colorado’s fifty three official fourteen thousand foot mountain peaks, the possible interactions with the Western world are colored by the excitement of living large. It’s entirely possible to reside in the West, or come to the West and spend your days checking account balances, watching sports, sitting in front of a computer screen are endlessly scrolling on.

00:01:53
Speaker 2: Your phone, but you can.

00:01:55
Speaker 1: Still be your own personal version of Amelia Earhart are Bob Marshall Here, the West, wildlands and rivers offer adventures enough for several lifetimes. I’ve lived in the West and in different parts of it almost all my adult life, luckily with good health, a strong constitution, and since I’m a biped a propensity for seeing the world around me from on foot.

00:02:23
Speaker 2: So like a lot of us, I’ve hauled a pack.

00:02:25
Speaker 1: Into many of the remote corners of the West to be able to breathe the Champagne air of the heights of Ranges, like the winds, the Tetons, and the Sierra Nevadas are passing to sleep as a juniper fire pops and hisses while the Escalante River waxes lyrical feet away. I’m not quite as addicted to seeing the West by river as many Western adventurers I’ve known, but I have canoed the White cliffs of the Upper Missouri, shot through the rapids of Cataract Canyon and canyonlands National Park, descend to the canyons of the Rio Grande and Big Ben, soloed in inflatable kayaks through Idaho’s giant wildernesses on the Snake and the Salmon, and paddled a raft for twelve days down the Hula Hula River through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge at the top of Alaska. But with strong competition from the Hula Hula and anwar, no Wildlands trip I’ve done so far has been quite the equal of that top tier of all Western adventures, a two and a half week descent by rubber raft of the Colorado River through America’s grandest canyon. I’ve hiked the Grand Canyon on foot, and while nothing remotely like walking the park, writer Kevin Fadarco’s year long trek down the length of the canyon with a buddy, that Rim to Rim passage from South Rim to North Rim over the course of a day is an a bad taste. You get some twenty four miles of trail through spectacular canyon scenery and an ever changing ecology, plus a combined ten thousand plus feet of elevation change for your trouble. Even that, however, pales against the wild lands rhythms that come with descending the river through this magnificent canyon, day after day after day, knowing what’s looming ahead, but not knowing, because of course, every descent through a canyon like this is new and fresh. I’ve long been in the habit of taking a little notebook and a couple of pins with me to record immediate, first hand accounts of wild lands trips. Here, then, is what one Grand Canyon descent was like September, the twenty sixth. Rafting the Grand Canyon has to be high on the bucket list of half the people who live in the American West, and a good percentage of those who are from elsewhere. I’m not sure exactly when it climbed close to the top of mind, but I do know that my first readings of Rod Nash’s Wilderness in the American Mind and Ed Abbey’s Desert Solitaire had the idea teasing my consciousness way back in the nineteen seventies. I’ve been telling myself I would do this trip for a very long time, and with university life out of the way, the time has come. I’m at this very moment on the banks of the Colorado River, our party of fourteen, having launched into the Grand Canyon from Lee’s ferry mid morning today. Everyone on this adventure is connected in some way to Betsy Rogers, a New York patron of the arts and biographer of Central Park who’s had a lifelong dream of rafting the Grand Canyon. We’re all from Santa Fe, New York or London. This is no applying for a permit and waiting fifteen years kind of trip. We’re on the sort of guided rafting excursion most people get to do in the Grand Canyon these days. So in addition to our fourteen, there are river guides and boatman, starting with Christa Sadler of Flagstaff, a veteran of this trip, and many others in the West, who’s our guide. The boatmen include John originally from Kentucky but now Durango, who rose one of the ore rafts, Ali, who is a nurse in her day job, rose one of the passenger rafts and is also from Flagsaff. Greg a former National Park Service archaeologist from Los Cruses pilots the fourth raft gearboat rowers are Chris from California and Marcus, a Navajo from Bluff, Utah who’s rowing the canyon for the first time, so our whole party is twenty strong. The guests are a willing group, no question, a majority of whom have done wilderness river trips. But there are some folks among us who have barely ever camped, are done outdoor things of any sort. For them, this is a bit like never having left home to travel, been landing wide eyed in Paris for a first try in a new place. We’ve made camp on a high bank on the east side of the river well before sunset this afternoon, to give everyone a chance to sort through tents and gear and find their spots within a bankside grove of willows. Most of the people on this trip are couples. I’m traveling solo myself, and as is my inclination, camp.

00:08:01
Speaker 2: A bit apart from the rest.

00:08:03
Speaker 1: Dinner set up followed the plant of most river trips like this, with everyone helping fashion a public space so we could eat and drink and get to know one another, because even if you know someone in the city, you don’t yet know them on a long multi day river trip like this. September twenty seventh and twenty eighth, we made seventeen river miles down from Lee’s ferry two days ago on a first day on the river with fine sunshine accompanying us, but the normally turquoise Colorado was brown and muddy as we set out today, and soon enough we found out wine the first fall storms of the year often drop around the autumnal equinox, and sure enough today a weather system hit with much cooler temperatures, and not long after we’d pulled over for lunch then set out downstream again, rain began to fall that shortened the day’s float on a Colorado river that took us into a great many early trip rapids in what’s called the Roaring twenties, and finally to a camp at mile twenty eight. While we were dining in the river, road timelessly passed us. Big horned sheep worked carefully through the rocks nearby. Like Day two, today’s Day three started with sun obscuring cloudiness. It gradually became a lovely descent through narrowing canyon cliffs, although at Red Wall Cavern, where we stopped for lunch, light mists fell through the sunlight to produce a kind of gossamer magic of scores of tiny rainbows. I overheard this snippet of conversation nearby this morning, So it’s not just a tent, it’s a tent without National Public Radio. September twenty ninth. It’s daybreak of day four, and at the moment everyone is outside their tents to gaze on an arcing rainbow that’s formed over the canyon in the light morning rain. Today is beginning with overcast and light rain. It ought to clear up soon. I think by now the classic rhythms of a river trip have set in, and the first three days down the Colorado are already running together in my mind. I remember it being hot and sunny as we started down the river, although it hasn’t been like that since. But this system, which clearly dumped some significant rains up the tributaries to the west of us. By the looks of the river this morning, shows every sign of retreating now.

00:11:00
Speaker 2: As an indication of how.

00:11:02
Speaker 1: The days are already beginning to bleed one into the next. I forgot to mention here that soon after lunch on our first day, I spotted the gliding black form of a California condor circling through the intense blue higher up than the rim above us and ascending with each circle, but the forward cant of the wing set and the white stripes running from body to wing tips on their forward edge made us know this was a bird not seen before. A condor with its nearly ten foot wingspan is a worthy sighting and a canyon this grand.

00:11:46
Speaker 2: This trip entire.

00:11:47
Speaker 1: Will include sixteen days on the river, so we’re really just underway camping now at mile thirty nine, not yet out of Marble Canyon. Today we’re going to float past the opposed damn sight from plans back in the nineteen sixties, when uber engineer Floyd Dominie and the Bureau of Reclamation were designing a reservoir some forty miles long in this part of the Grand Canyon. I’ve had students at the University of Montana read about this almost incomprehensible attempt to compromise one of America’s grandest national parks, but I’ve not confronted Dominie’s plans in the flesh like this until now. This part of the National Park, Marble Canyon, is a gorgeous red rock marvel. A reservoir here is an even more horrifying thing to contemplate when you actually witness first hand the beauty of this canyon. It’s brick bread, multi layered, and deepening and narrowing by the mile. During slack moments in camps, I’m reading John Wesley Powell’s account his first descent of the Colorado River in the early eighteen seventies, but right now in my progression through his narrative, he’s still up in Echo Park, far upstream of where we are on the river. September thirtieth, it’s day five on the Colorado and we’re camped beneath the famous Granary View, an iconic scene looking down the winding river that’s so famous. It’s actually on the Arizona Quarter. It’s the southwestern version of the view of the Tetons, with the Snake River coiling below their jagged peaks up in the Northern Rockies. We hiked up fifteen hundred feet or so to the Granary ruin itself yesterday late, and I shot probably too many photos of this scene. But the setting sun reflecting onto the water from the last cliff face at the end of the view was mesmerizing, changing repeatedly as the sun dropped. We’re at mile fifty three now, about twenty percent through the two hundred and thirty total river miles of this trip. We had calm waters and lovely floating yesterday, but the river water is like chocolate sludge from the storm runoff out of side canyons like that.

00:14:24
Speaker 2: Of Pariah Creek.

00:14:26
Speaker 1: As we raft through rapids, the spray spatters every inch of us and the boats with latte colored spots that simply won’t wipe off. It’s impossible to bathe or wash your hair in the river lest you become a permanent mudhead. While we drifted in the current yesterday, though, a pair of coyotes hunting from ice along the right bank paid no attention whatsoever to a flotilla of colorful rubber rafts spiraling by. The skies having cleared, we’re getting glimpses through the cliffs of a waxing moon well up in the afternoons, and just now beginning to bathe the canyon in silver light before it sets. It’s going to be full in a few days, and no doubt still up in morning skies until we’re off the river. Throughout yesterday’s descent, we continued to pass the high boreholes of the Marble Canyon Dam, once proposed for this section of the park. Teddy Roosevelt’s line about how humans could in no way improve this canyon should thus leave it as the ages had fashioned it came to mind every time I saw one of these initial, very real attempts to transform this sandstone cathedral into something unrecognizable.

00:15:51
Speaker 2: It was significantly cooler on the river this morning.

00:15:54
Speaker 1: Everyone was bundled up against the instant chill of the icy river spray.

00:15:59
Speaker 2: But we’re we’re.

00:16:00
Speaker 1: Clearly in a warmer ecology, at least now, with mesquite trees and cat claws appearing along the banks. I rode in the raft with Ali yesterday. She’s a long distance runner and a climber, and waxes romantic about the climbers in Yosemite, who she refers to as dirt bag climbers. That would seem a slight In fact, it’s high praise. October first, I woke before daybreak this morning to see Venus and Jupiter in the dawn sky. On day six of our adventure, yesterday, we emerged from Marble Canyon and soon came to the mouth of the Little Colorado, which enters the main river on its left bank. Here we saw for forty five minutes to bask in the bright sunshine, and that gave me a chance to walk a mile or so up the bed of this famous tributary before we loaded up in the rafts and began swinging around to the west and into the big, soaring Grand Canyon proper. The little Colorado was not running its classic turquoise. In fact, was even redder and muddier than the main stream. Helicopter overflight tours now began appearing overhead as we approached the developed south rim of Grand Canyon National Park at lunch yesterday, Chrisa led about half the party on a canyon ascent back up into the Kaibab Formation’s Watermelon through which the Colorado long ago cut its present course. We passed the Tapeatz Formation and the bright Angel Shale via a steep handhole climb, saw one point seven billion year old fossilized sino bacteria boulder near a major fracture fault atop the divide, then descended a gradual stream bed down another canyon to our river camp, where the rest of the party had already set up for the night. This was another fine beach campsite beneath looming red walls with a nearby rapid, providing an oral background. I sleep deeply with river sand beneath me and the rising and ebbing of a nearby rapid. I can tell at breakfast that most of us are falling into that rhythm. The rapid near camp had another meaning too. On this sixth morning, in the first day of October, we face big rapids, including hants rapid, a Class ten, on a river that has redefined whitewater classification to include ten categories.

00:18:50
Speaker 2: Rather than five.

00:18:52
Speaker 1: Wild rides are in shore today as we drop into the deep gorge of the Grand Canyon.

00:18:59
Speaker 2: The weather’s now in.

00:19:00
Speaker 1: Entirely cleared, but it’s still cool and the rapids today require a full splash outfit to stay warm against these frigid waters. Out of Lake Powell, the Colorado is still too muddy to wash your hair in, although most of us bathed yesterday despite the swirling marl. My reading material now has John Wesley Powell below today’s Dinosaur National Monument. His party is traversing the canyons on the east side of the Yuena Mountains, bound for Desolation Canyon. We’ve planned twenty miles of river travel today from the river miles in the sixties to those in the eighties, as we have to be at Phantom Ranch on October the second, where two more members of our party are hiking from the South Rim down the South Kaibab Trail to join us at the ranch. As everyone has been suiting up for the rapids. I’ve continued reading Powell this morning, tracking him through what he calls the land of Standing Rocks present Canyonlands National Park, through Labyrinth Canyon to the Greens Junction with the Grand to create the full Colorado River. Down from there, they’re in Cataract Canyon, and Powell begins discussing whether they might encounter at some point a fall too violent to run, with walls too steep to land and portage. Their barometer shows they have thousands of feet left to descend the sea level alson. That’s quick reads of power for the rest of the trip. On numerous occasions, I’ve looked down canyon and wondered how much anxiety it must have created a run a river like this through canyons like this with absolutely no sense of what might lie ahead.

00:20:56
Speaker 2: October the second.

00:20:59
Speaker 1: Pants Wrap yesterday was a twisting, yanking, thunderous Class ten that got everyone’s pay attention or dialed up the full game, but accompanied by whoops of exultation. All the rafts got through unscathed. Then an early float this morning through the brown and black schists of the Grand Canyon Gorge got us to Phantom Ranch before nine point thirty. Here we picked up Betsy’s thirty something signs, lolled around picturesque little Phantom Ranch, where Bright Angel Creek bounces down from the north rim with its clear water and cottonwood canopy, and got ready for.

00:21:41
Speaker 2: More big rapids.

00:21:43
Speaker 1: Horn Creek, rapid with really big waves, looms just ahead. It’s now mid afternoon and we’re camped at about mile ninety three at the top of Granite Falls, Rapid whose thunder absolutely fills the oral space of this camp. From Phantom Ranch, I sent a car to Sarah, who’s buried in the fall semester teaching her university classes up in Utah, telling her all was well and I now know how this canyon became Grand. Mail is still haul out of Phantom by burrows, but Burrow mail is efficient enough that she should get my card within three or four days.

00:22:24
Speaker 2: I’m sitting on the beach with.

00:22:25
Speaker 1: A handful of others of our group this afternoon drinking beer and reading Powell, whose venture into the unknown one hundred and fifty years ago is catching up with our present location. Today is day seven on the river. Tomorrow we’re halfway through the Cayn. October third. It was a gorgeous clear night last night, and calm and lovely this morning, day eight of our journey, with cold air settled into the deep gorge. It was a little chilly in the tent last night. We’ve got a Category nine rapids soon after we start today, and another nine and our second ten, Crystal Rapid, in the first five miles.

00:23:11
Speaker 2: Today Crystal Rapid is.

00:23:13
Speaker 1: At mile ninety nine and we need to make about mile one thirteen for camp tonight to be halfway down the river in terms of distance.

00:23:23
Speaker 2: I’m well and.

00:23:24
Speaker 1: Healthy, happy, very alive, and present on this adventure, and an adventure is what it is. Ours may be without the mystery of Powell’s descent, but that one can still travel the length of the Grand Canyon means an enormous piece of high drama America is still there for the asking. One of our group I’ve struck up a friendship with is a quite famous actor named Mark Rylance. Who’s managed a sabbatical from a movie he’s filming with Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks working time Bridge of Spies, Mark’s prime director for the trip Don’t Get Sunburned. Mark, Marcus Buck, our Navajo Botman, and I spent much of the evening in.

00:24:11
Speaker 2: Conversation last night.

00:24:13
Speaker 1: Mark’s career has primarily been as a stage actor, which led us into a long discussion about the actual identity of William Shakespeare. In Mark’s opinion, Shakespeare’s plays weren’t written by an individual, but by a committee of writers directed by Francis Bacon. Somehow that topic veered into the Peote religion, I’m not quite sure how, which further digressed to Marcus’s account of the discovery of a skeleton and combe wash near his Utah home that some thought might be the remains of Everett Ruis, the young vagabond for beauty who disappeared into the Colorado Plateau country more than a century ago. And in joy both these guys and our long late night digressions. As the river murmurs by Christa once again wants me in the front of her league boat today to help provide an extra safety net or some of the group that’s riding with her. I’m concluding that this is one of the great experiences of my life. October fourth, on the morning of day nine, we’re at a terrific camp, my favorite one so far, in the sand of one hundred and ten mile rapid. Yesterday was another day of running big, daunting class nine and ten rapids, including Granite and Crystal, the latter a rapid famous for upsetting boats and sending swimmers downstream into a rock garden, and as we watch from shore, damned at the very first boat from another party didn’t end up capsized in the big waves of Crystal. Our boats, however, all got through safely, although Ali did lose an oar. The weather remains calm and sunny and gorgeous. This was a moon camp open to the sky, although we’re still in the upper Gorge with its black schists and narrow canyon and rapid water, but the canyon spread out here and the waxing moon bathed us and the spot in a beautiful moonlight. Last night, once again had a late night confab with Marcus Mark and David, one of the new additions to the group at Phantom Ranch, who lives in Manhattan and is also an actor. We have only one big rapid coming up today, but there’s a promised hike to one of the river’s fairyland alcoves, elves Chasm.

00:26:56
Speaker 2: October fifth.

00:26:59
Speaker 1: This is there’s day ten in the Grand Canyon, and it’s breaking at a splendid camp on the right bank at mile one eighteen, which means we made only eight miles yesterday. We stopped to caress shist polished smooth by water, then scouted Waltenburg rapid while the other party that flipped the boat yesterday, kids from Colorado and Bozeman, never bothered, just crashed through the rapid on every line imaginable and somehow stayed upright. By the time we got to elves Chasm at mile one point seventeen, we were out of the Upper Gorge and back into the tapite sandstone and the red wall formations. I must prefer this section esthetically to the black Granite Gorge that so lights up the geologists among us. The falls and pools at Elves were magnificent, and we all jumped into the cool clear water. Returning to camp, we saw five big horns and Marcus played his flute for them to their utter astonishment. Friends from Santa Fe who’ve been setting up a tent near me, Robert and Jackie, invited me to share a flask of twenty five year old scotch while we were fashioning our camp this afternoon. That whiskey was smooth, smoky, delicious.

00:28:24
Speaker 2: We had a.

00:28:24
Speaker 1: Fine dinner and camaraderie around the campsite in the twilight of the evening today while Marcus told us his skin walker story of a Navajo family attempting a cure with a peote ceremony when he was thirteen years old, during which the entire family, he said, grew.

00:28:44
Speaker 2: Sharp, pointy teeth.

00:28:47
Speaker 1: Whoever, isn’t mesmerized by a story like that, as the River of the West murmurs by and Redcliff’s sore overhead isn’t tuned into life. We have a big hike coming to day and there’s still one hundred and eight miles of river left to descend and only six and a half days to do it. October sixth This is day eleven and follows another silvery moonlit night, a perfect flawless sky morning is going. We’re just above Dubendorf rapid and the Abyss has yawned at us throughout the night. We’re camped at river mile one thirty two with five and a half days of travel left. There were two prize moments yesterday. One was getting to ascend the wonderful Slot Canyon and the tappite sandstone of black Tail Canyon. It was narrowed deep and ended in a pour off cascade into a small pool. I was the first end, so had it to myself for a couple of minutes. Then some of the women, including Chrisa, tried out the ringing acoustics of the place with song, some of them a song for the Colorado River film several of our group are working on. Moment number two took place in the moonlight last night, when several of us learned a peyote song. Marcus taught us. The song was quick to master, and singing it in the moonlight somehow made you feel remarkably fine. The flask full of premium El Tasos silver tequila I’d brought on the trip, no doubt contributed.

00:30:36
Speaker 2: The song went like.

00:30:37
Speaker 1: This, Yaha who way niini yoh nah, yaha who way nini who way yoh na. But now we’re donning splash gear in preparation for heading down the river again with a Class nine rapid for an immediate warm up to another day on this roaring river.

00:31:05
Speaker 2: October seventh. This is day twelve.

00:31:10
Speaker 1: Of life in the Grand Canyon, and we’re at mile one thirty eight, with nearly ninety miles to do over the next four days. But the river is running faster here and our hikes are growing fewer. Knowing I was writing a biography of one of the West’s most famous and maligned native animals, the coyote, some of the party prevailed on me to tell a few coyote stories after dinner last night, after which Marcus and Mark and I sat on a rock and sampled the weeds. Someone brought and drank the dregs of my tequila flask while coyotes howled most appropriately, we thought. Yesterday’s highlight was Deer Creek Falls, a straight plunge of eighty feet into a blue pool, the force of the water on impact so hard you couldn’t stand beneath it. Followed then by the climb some of us made up to the patio several hundred feet higher in the cliffs above. The patio features a winding creek pools and falls beneath cottonwoods and cliffs with eighteen rafts and a dory tied off on the river below this spot, though, there were too many people up there, and the climb featured one of those narrow ledges with two spots maybe twenty five feet long, where the cliff face bends over and wants to push you off and into certain expiration in the waters of the Roaring Defile fifty feet below. It was a dicey little passage. We have Havasu Creek with pools and falls of turquoise blue waters coming up today at mile one fifty seven. The main river, though, continues ruddy red. October the eighth, It’s day thirteen. We’ve been in the Grand Canyon almost two weeks, and we’re once again breaking into morning twilight with the roar of a rapid. This river has dominated our intake of sound so long now I can hardly imagine silence. Every act for two weeks has transpired enveloped in the sound of rushing waters. The sheer immensity of this canyon has also become a constant presence in the psychology of the trip. How long can these cliffs and rapids continue for Christ’s sake, This canyon is the biggest thing I’ve ever experienced, on some otherworldly Jupiter like scale. It’s almost impossible to hold in the mind as a single piece, as one landform. We’re camped on limestone ledges in the Mauve formation on the right bank at mile one point fifty nine, a couple of miles below the confluence.

00:33:59
Speaker 2: With have Asou Creek.

00:34:01
Speaker 1: The day was a little disappointing. The sky was overcast, obscuring both sun and moon and making the day too cool to ascend have Asu Creek by swimming up it, which was the general plan. The biggest rapid on the river, Lava Falls, now remains our only major obstacle to a safe and successful descent. We’ll get to it this afternoon and run it either today or in the morning. Christa has again asked for me in her boat for this rappid. She’s run lava more than anyone here, and we’ll go first to see how it goes. As we rafted downriver, there were asks that I tell more Coyote stories. I’d related the Orpheus like nez Perce story called Coyote and the Shadow People to the group the night before there’s an awful lot of pathos in that story.

00:35:06
Speaker 2: October ninth.

00:35:09
Speaker 1: It’s daybreak on day fourteen and a camp on the beach.

00:35:13
Speaker 2: Just below Lava Falls rapid.

00:35:17
Speaker 1: Huge matches of black lava protrude from the cliff behind my tent. We’re now at mile one point eighty with forty seven river miles to go to take out, so our biggest rapid and biggest tests is behind us. We floated twenty two miles under cool, overcast conditions yesterday with a lunch stop and a hike in National Canyon to set us up to run Lava Falls rapid as a last act before camping. Last night, I was in Christa’s lead boat, and I’m obliged to comment that I’ve never been in a rapid as big as lava. It’s quick and over in seconds, but it’s enormous, with trucks that can devour you and waves curling ten to twelve feet overhead.

00:36:05
Speaker 2: Hell of an adrenaline rush.

00:36:08
Speaker 1: All six of our rafts got through without mishap, though, so we ate steaks and broke out the bucket of stupid vodka and fruit juice to celebrate. Stupidity was rewarded as old Man America. Coyote smiled on us and yodeled, and a stunner of a double rainbow formed over.

00:36:29
Speaker 2: Lava falls as we drank.

00:36:32
Speaker 1: Clearer weather and a calm float await us today. Three decent rapids, two sevens and an eight come up tomorrow, but that’s about it till we get to take out on the morning of day sixteen, October tenth. It’s our fifteenth day in the Grand Canyon and our last full day. We’ll make our final camp at about mile two twenty two tonight to set us up for takeout the next day. Presently, we’re somewhere around mile two hundred.

00:37:09
Speaker 2: Yesterday I rode alone.

00:37:11
Speaker 1: With Marcus in the baggage boat all day, standing up behind him for much of it, a fine way to see the river in the canyon. Marcus and I had a splendid day hanging out and talking, during which he told me this story, which was as appropriate a way to bring this adventure to a close as I could imagine. Among the Indian and White homes of Bluff Utah, where Marcus lives, a particular coyote had been causing trouble, killing sheep, chasing pets, attracting attention to itself. Bluff is a town of about three hundred and fifty people, and, like towns big and small in America these days, it has resident coyotes. Occasionally one becomes a problem, so the DNA chapter leadership asked Marcus if he couldn’t hunt down this coyote and take it out. A few mornings later, Marcus was in his truck on the edge of town, bouncing slowly along a dirt road, his rifle in the gun rack behind his head, when out of the waist high sagebrush, a coyote steps into the road no more than twenty five feet away. Marcus breaked to a stop. The dust from the truck tires rose into the air, briefly obscured the coyote, then settled. The coyote was still there, standing broadside to the truck. Marcus reached behind him and grasped his rifle. At that moment, we were floating through a calm mojave desert looking stretch of the Grand Canyon on the way to our final camp. Cremulated black lava flows and irregular dikes and blobs of lava decorated both banks of the river.

00:38:59
Speaker 2: The rest of our group was.

00:39:01
Speaker 1: Bobbing along in five yellow craft downstream of us. I was sitting behind Marcus, so couldn’t see his face as he described what happened. Then this coyote walks nonchalantly right in front of me in the road, looks at me, sees the rifle.

00:39:22
Speaker 2: Then you know what he does. He yawns right in my face, kind of stretches.

00:39:29
Speaker 1: Then he turns to look back where he had come from, and I hear coyotes howl aways back. So he raises his nose, throws back his head and howls back at them. I’ve got my hand on the stock of the rifle, but I still haven’t pulled it down. Now he stops howling, turns back to me, looks straight as can be, right at me for probably half a minute. Then he strolls casually across the road in no hurry at all, as if he knew something about me. So you never shot. I’d known how this was gonna go. No, I never even got the gun down. He was just too damn nonchalant, too confident something. And I didn’t know for sure if it was the coyote. Everybody was looking for it. But you know, something even if it was, I wouldn’t have shot that coyote was so cool, looking, so perfect.

00:40:28
Speaker 2: He was way too pretty to shoot. I nodded.

00:40:34
Speaker 1: Marcus had obviously experienced one of those sympathetic moments with the world. It was a moment of animal to animal mutual understanding and identification. Moments like that can be unforgettable because the shared dialogue of body language isn’t getting filtered by the cultural thoughts in our heads. By loaded language, both see the other for who he is. It was exactly the kind of story you want to tell or here after more than two weeks in a place like the Grand Canyon of the American West.

00:41:23
Speaker 3: So Dan, in this episode, you took us down the Colorado River, and I want to begin where you did, which is you began this episode by discussing the endless possibilities of the Western landscape in terms of just getting lost and pure adventure. And what struck me is then as you embark on this trip, you’re describing the lottery system to get a permit to go down the Colorado, and I sort of wonder what your thoughts are in the tension between recreation management and the endless possibilities.

00:42:04
Speaker 2: I mean, I’m I’m in the camp that.

00:42:08
Speaker 3: There’s too much to do in too little time, and there’s endless opportunities out there. But obviously to live in the West today, with the crowds that some of these parks experience and the interest in them, there are more and more constraints on outdoor recreation just general exploration.

00:42:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, there are.

00:42:29
Speaker 1: I mean, there’s no question about it. That’s a consequence of a burgeoning population and excitement about all the things one can do in the West. You know, what I will say about Western experiences is that if you use some imagination, you can always figure out a way to experience something a little more and a little more solitary fact than than if you don’t use your imagination and you just kind of waltz up and stand in line and end up immersed in crowds. So you have to kind of do that today, you know, and you know this is a part of modern life in the West or in any part of the world. I think that’s in demand right and where people are excited to be there. This particular trip down the Colorado River, I mean, we did this trip in October, which is a little bit off the prime time for doing a trip like this. I mean, my friends who have done this trip at other times of the year like to go in April, same reason, because it’s not quite the prime time. So it wasn’t it wasn’t a it didn’t feel like you were competing for camping spots. The one time, which I did mention in the script that it seemed like there were too many people as we stopped at a particular spot where you climb up to these beautiful pools and waterfalls and cottonwood trees, and when we came down, I mean, there weren’t that many boats there when we went up, but when we came down from that, there were like fourteen rafts parked at the spot where you ascended to go up to this really delightful kind of alcove. Otherwise, we actually didn’t really have that much company on the river. I mean, when you’re a phantom ranch, obviously there are some other people coming through, and you see groups of people who are doing the rim to rim hike, or if you’re there for a couple of hours, there’ll be another trip maybe that comes in behind you to eat breakfast or something. But we didn’t really have much of an experience of feeling crowded, I would say on this particular trip, and I think it was because we waited until October to do it, which is a fantastic time to be in the Grand Canyon.

00:45:04
Speaker 2: I gotta say, yeah, the.

00:45:08
Speaker 3: Throughout this chapter you reference various proposals to dam the Grand Canyon, and I think it’s in some respects it might be overlooked by the general public just how crazy we were for dams at one point in our history. I don’t know that the average person recognizes the name Floyd Dominie, but when you think of hetch Hetchy and Echo Park, you know, dams have really been sort of pivotal moments in appreciation for public lands and these types of things. So I wonder if you can sort of contextualize dams within the broader story of American environmental history.

00:45:56
Speaker 1: Well, one of the ways to settle and in habit and live in the West has been to manipulate the waters of the West. And I mean those manipulations go a long way back. You know, John Wesley Powell and the United States Geological Survey. I mean, one of the big projects they undertook in the eighteen eighties was to canvass the West for potential dam sites. So I mean, we’ve been confronting the whole idea of damming up the West to the point where, you know, as we all know, virtually every river in the United States is damned. In the West, most rivers end up with multiple dams on them. You know, We’ve got a piece of the Yellowstone that we’re all proud of that is an undamned river, and everybody remains excited about that. But the Missouri in Montana, for example, is damned in multiple places, including within the state. And this is true pretty much everywhere. And we had a government bureau, the Bureau of Reclamation, that started in the early twentieth century that really endeavored to put Powell’s plans into action, and so we kind of designed dams on every running piece of water to the point where in the nineteen sixties, under the direction of Floyd Dominie, this fellow I referred to as an uber engineer, a guy who couldn’t see a river without planning some way to dam it up, had the idea that we were also going to damn the Grand Canyon. I mean, so we had, of course sacrificed a piece of a national park. Earlier in American history, when the city of San Francisco, following the earthquake and the Great Fire of nineteen o six, decided that it needed the waters of Yosemite National Park, and hetch Hetchy Canyon in Yosemite ended up being damned. John Muir fought it to the end. He was not able to stop that dam, and the O’Shaughnessy Dam is still there, still blocking up the waters of the Tuolomie River and Hetgeedgy Canyon. So we had that precedent where a National park, we assumed was for perpetuity, except if things you reach a really bad turn, we may just sacrifice a particular canyon in a national park. So Floyd Dominie, with that kind of precedent in his mind, decided that we were going to have to dam up the Grand Canyon, I mean, and this was a suite of a series of dams that included Lake Powell and Echo Park Dam that we were going to construct on the Colorado River. And fortunately, at the time when Dominie was doing this, this is another Stuart Udahl victory. As the Secretary of the Interior under Kennedy and Johnson Stewart, you’d all stepped up and said, no, we’re not going to damn the Grand Canyon National Park. But floating through it today, if you pay attention when you’re in Marble Canyon, which is one of the first big canyons you come into after you depart from Lee’s Ferry, you can see the boreholes where they were already where the engineers were already planning on putting their pylons in in order to start this project. And that sort of gives you a cold sweat to see that. I mean, it got that close.

00:49:35
Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s amazing. I one of the things that you talk about in this episode is just the sheer scale of the canyon and your inability to sort of comprehend how big this place is. One of the other things that came to mind for me is the scale of the Colorado River, because it’s someone who grew up in the Midwest, you know, and we learned all about the Mississippi, but I don’t think I fully appreciated the Green and Colorado River system until I moved out west and just sort of got a sense of where it comes from, where it goes and along the Grand Camp or along the Colorado not only have the Grand Canyon, but you mentioned in the in the episode Canyon Lands, Echo Park, Desolation Canyon.

00:50:25
Speaker 2: I mean it’s cataract. Yeah.

00:50:27
Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s sort of an unbelievable chain of these landscapes along a single river system. It is.

00:50:35
Speaker 1: And you know, I mean the waters. You can argue that the waters of the Colorado River. I mean, there are several sources high in the Colorado Rockies is one of them. But to me, the real start of the Colorado River is in the wind River Range on the west side of the Winds and Wyoming and so and down then through Flame Gorge another obviously reservoir now, but Flaming Gorge Canyon, and then into Echo Park and then as you mentioned all these and I was because I was reading John Wesley Powell’s account at the time we were doing this float, you know, I was sort of imagining in my mind all of his descents through all these places. And I mean it is a marvelous system of canyon country and deep gorges and rushing waters that starts all the way up in Wyoming and of course ends up in the Gulf of California, Baja California. The Colorado. What’s left of it flows into Mexico. So it’s a gigantic river system. It’s the river of the West, really, I mean, so is the Missouri, and so is the Columbia. But the Colorado tracks through more of the today’s existing West than any of the others. And it’s also the river that’s of course the most threatened in terms of continuing to provide water for a perpetuation of the West. I mean, the Colorado River Compact of nineteen twenty two that divided the waters of the Colorado up between the so called Upper Basin States and the Lower Basin States, had far too optimistic an assessment of what the actual flow of the river was, and it turns out dividing it up was like giving everybody a third again, too much water then was actually going to be in the Colorado. And so we’re confronting a situation now, of course, where I mean deadpool lurks for places like Lake Powell.

00:52:47
Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s one of one of the most endangered, consistently endangered rivers in the country.

00:52:54
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I think.

00:53:00
Speaker 3: Talk about Powell in this episode quite a bit because you’re obviously reading him, and I think one of the things that always fascinates me about the Grand Canyon and the Powell story is sort of what an eye opening moment it is for science in terms of geologic time and some of Powell’s observations. So I wonder if you can talk about that and just what it was that Powell experienced and what he brought back to the world, because his journey is one that really changed a lot of minds about what we think of the Western landscape.

00:53:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s one of the great epic journeys and the whole Western story, I mean, and he did it twice, but that first trip, in particular in the early eighteen seventies is I mean, it’s kind of chilling in a way to read it, particularly when you’re going through the Grand Canyon today and confronting some of these giant rapids, because you know, for one thing, they had no sense. Powell and his men had no sense about what was ahead. I mean, they just didn’t. They’re going down this stupendous river through this landscape. As I described in the script that in my experience of it, I mean I couldn’t comprehend the size of this. We were going day after day after day through this immense, gigantic canyon, and it just seemed to go on forever. And the whole chilling aspect of Powell confronting getting up every morning and having no idea really, and of course some of his men on that first trip bailed from the expedition they were so freaked.

00:54:53
Speaker 2: Out by it.

00:54:54
Speaker 1: But what he did do to speak to the question that you ask, is he gave a us a sense. I mean, geology obviously is still a science that’s discovering itself and discovering the world in the late nineteenth century, but he gave us a sense of unfathomable time. He began to realize that, particularly as you get to the bottom of the inner gorge of the Grand Canyon, in this black shist, this granite that you’re looking at, rock that is older than most of the rock that’s observable anywhere on the planet. And Powell was able to although he wasn’t able to come up with a precise dating of all these specific levels that he was seeing, he was able to make it known to the scientific community that this was a canyon that cut into really the enters of the Earth and was exposing a kind of a core geology and a core rock on ancient rock that conveyed I mean this is a century. Remember when only fifty years before people were saying, well, the Earth’s like six thousand years old. I mean the Bible says it’s six thousand years old, so it’s no older than that, probably and possibly even younger. What Powell, of course, is demonstrating with this voyage is that you don’t get rock like this and these kind of levels in a six thousand year old planet.

00:56:30
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, Dan, it’s always good to talk to you.

00:56:33
Speaker 2: Oh, enjoyed it, Appreciate it.