Rugged Hike to Sipapu

CENTER OF CREATION

It takes a hike, a swim and a risky canyon bushwhack to find the Hopi It's funny. Sometimes you start a hike but wind up on a pilgrimage. In May, Lou Hock and I took off for Blue Spring on the Lit-tle Colorado River below Gold Hills with four of our friends. We planned to swim and scramble about 15 miles downriver to the confluence with the Colorado and hike out of Grand Canyon on the Tanner Trail.

We had heard the Hopi center of cre-ation, or place where humans emerged, lay somewhere along our route down the Little Colorado. The Hopi's traditional creation story tells how the first people crawled through Sipapu, a tiny hole in the sky of the underworld, sometimes called the navel of the universe. Geologists define Sipapu as a geyser covered with a thick layer of pearly limestone. Steady mineral accretion under the influence of gravity makes its rounded bulk look like a distended navel. But as we contemplated our journey into myth and geology, it seemed most important that all our packs felt way too heavy and Hock couldn't get his loaded quite right.

It's never been easy to reach Sipapu. Emerging from it-as the first people did -trumps every other approach, but that's not an option. You can hike 7 miles up from the confluence of the Little Colorado and the Colorado as boatmen and their clients sometimes do when they're rafting the Grand Canyon. Or you can reverse part of our trip and descend the Tanner Trail to the confluence, then follow the boaters' trail. That should take two days and a bit, excluding siestas. You could come down Salt Trail Canyon from the north, as a few locals do when they're on a ritual quest for salt. Or you can descend the walls of the narrow gorge of the Little Colorado to Blue Spring, then blunder 15 miles downriver until you nearly fall into it, as we did.

No signs mark the way to Blue Spring, not even warning signs. All the same, you can't miss it if you get anywhere near the jumping-off point on the rim of the gorge of the Little Colorado. Because the gorge slopes steeply, its bottom remains clearly visible 3,000 feet below the rim. And the blue of Blue Spring glints unmistakably when the river isn't in flood. A heavy load of copper and other mineral salts (absorbed by the spring water as it percolates through the regional limestone aquifer) turns the spring's outlet a gaudy shade of turquoise.

You can get to Blue Spring from the rim by repeating this formula a few hundred times: Start down a steep gully choked with loose rock; thick brush proves a plus because it slows you when you start sliding out of control; traverse a ledge to another gully; scoot down that to another ledge; free your pack-it's stuck on a branch or a horn of rock, or it's wedged in a chimney - then dangle your body over a short cliff and drop onto a ledge; squeeze into a chimney; curse your pack; curse your partners; curse yourself, your luck and the bad judg-ment that led you to this sorry situation. You'll roll out at the bottom eventually. Unless you're cliffed out. In that case, you climb back up to start down another way.

A few hundred feet below the rim, we reached our first such set of ledges leading nowhere. Cliffed out. In the waning afternoon, the narrow draw-bordered on all sides by towering ridges-had the look of a Chinese scroll painting which, by grotesquely exaggerating the vertical, leaves the insignificant viewer suspended midway down a cliff, stranded between an unseen top and an unfathomable bottom. The price of admission to Blue Spring seemed high as we peered into the gloomy void. The price went up when Hock found the way.

Hock had stopped about a hundred feet above the rest of us to fix his pack once and for all. Knowing we were stuck, he let his eye run over the rocks between him and us.

Hock rates as a fearless but sometimes reckless route-finder, so we tried to ignore him when he pointed to a narrow ledge we had passed earlier without a second glance. The ledge disappeared into a line of thin footholds before reappearing 20 feet away. Nevertheless, Hock had a point. The footholds seemed to be matched by handholds, and the ledge on the other side clearly led to a draw, which itself promised to come out at the bottom of the cliff that had us stopped.

Soon we were queued up at the edge of the void to watch Hock tiptoe across. The huge handholds combined with just enough footholds to make the traverse feasible. Still the jolt of lugging a heavy pack across theabyss left us breathless and thrilled at reaching the other side.

Toward evening, the easy slopes of shale and mudstone petered out a few dozen feet above the river. A last line of cliffs separated us from Blue Spring, shimmering in the twilight below. Anxious to finish our descent before dark, we searched for a way to the bottom that did not involve diving into the darkening pool. At last we found a line of bare roots hanging over the steepest part of the rock. We swung on them like apes to easier sandstone slopes below, then slid on our tails to the welcome ground and rest.

Our voyage down the Little Colorado began the next morning. The river filled all the space between the inner canyon walls within a quarter mile of the beach where we had camped, so there was nothing to do but swim. We inflated our rafts, piled our rucksacks onto them and launched into the current. You can spend a lot of money on backpackers' rafts, which are specially made for this purpose, or you can use an inflatable swimming pool raft. Backpackers' rafts come in drab colors, are heavy and take a heck of a beating. Pool rafts are light, bright and inexpensive, but dainty. They demand care. We opted for three pool rafts because we're cheap, not careful.

within a quarter mile of the beach where we had camped, so there was nothing to do but swim. We inflated our rafts, piled our rucksacks onto them and launched into the current. You can spend a lot of money on backpackers' rafts, which are specially made for this purpose, or you can use an inflatable swimming pool raft. Backpackers' rafts come in drab colors, are heavy and take a heck of a beating. Pool rafts are light, bright and inexpensive, but dainty. They demand care. We opted for three pool rafts because we're cheap, not careful.

Yellow, blue and pink, our rafts made a cheerful fleet. You can come to the Little Colorado later in the year and find it nearly dry, or you can come earlier and run a Class 5 kayak stream. But in the middle of May, we swam and drifted all that day. Between the long pools we carried our packs and rafts. We protected the rafts from spikes of travertine rock in the water and thorns on

for Sipapu

land; we didn't need many portages, and the rocks were mostly submerged.

Although you don't cover much distance floating down a slow-moving stream-a downside with consequences we initially underestimated-at least it's painless. For the first time recently in the vicinity of Grand Canyon, my feet weren't killing me, and if I felt mildly sickened by the mineralized water even after filtering it, at least I wasn't thirsty.

We came to reaches of the river on the next day where it made more sense to walk than to float. Increasingly, travertine waterfalls blocked the river. Small at first, but eventually as high as 15 feet, they rivaled the more famous falls in Havasu Canyon far downriver. We wrestled our packs over the sides of the falls while waves, roaring through the main sections, fell in tumult to the pools below. Soon we gave up the river entirely and tried to bushwhack, but thick brush forced us onto sand flats concealing quicksand.

The Little Colorado makes real quicksand in spring, the kind that swallows the large and the small, sucks down the innocent with the guilty and turns the whole lot into undifferentiated peat over the course of millennia.

A simple step in the wrong direction agitated unstable quicksand into a calf-high quagmire. A bad hole sank its victim up to the hips. The worst kind demanded an awkward dog paddle to dry ground while dragging a muddy rucksack behind. Covered with greasy mud, we looked like amphibious fish crawling onto dry land for the first time.

On the third night we worried. The swimming had taken more time than we had expected, the travertine falls had held us up more and the quicksand had been worthy of a bad jungle movie. We had made 9 miles in three days when we'd hoped for 15 miles or more. We had plenty of food -for that matter, it wouldn't have hurt any of us to fast-but food and time were not the worst of it all. We were whipped.

Another couple of days like this and we would be lucky if we were able to crawl to the confluence. And from there the South Rim rose still more than a dozen miles away. We went to bed feeling tired and discouraged. In the morning our way downriver seemed difficult at first. We crossed travertine dikes to reach the other bank, but it also was lined with quicksand and impenetrable brush.

Unexpectedly, we crossed the tracks of a deer, also going downstream. We hadn't seen sign of another large animal since we'd left the paved road four days before. We followed the deer's tracks as carefully as we had followed our leaders' yesterday, but the deer proved much savvier. It led us around quicksand bogs onto rocks where we could safely stand, then took us down game trails through thickets, then back to the beach past more quicksand.

We had almost given up when the tracks disappeared at the river's edge after a couple of miles. Lacking a better alternative, we went across the stream but couldn't find tracks on that side either. The deer had vanished. We entered the brush and then forged the stream again when the brush got too thick.

No doubt, ours weren't the only spirits in those canyons. Many other spirits-animal, vegetable and mineralhaunt them. Boulders give way under your feet, while roots hide by the smoothest parts of the trail to trip you up. A cactus wren flies down the correct fork in a faint trail when you couldn't choose it alone. A deer makes a pilgrimage to Sipapu. We found the deer tracks within a hundred yards of our second ford. For the rest of the morning we followed the unseen deer over an easy trail all the way to Sipapu.

It turns out the center of the world really is at the bottom of that canyon. Without knowing what to expect, we instantly recognized Sipapu when we rounded the last bend in the river above it. Its limestone shell-rounded like a beehive, a smooth contrast to the sharp edges of surrounding ridges and draws, unnaturally architectural in its roundnessgleamed in the nooning sun. It seemed a fitting memorial to the strange event of our ancestors' emergence from the boiling underworld.

By then the afternoon had closed in. As the gorge turned into an oven, completely exposed to the sun, we took our siesta in the shade of Sipapu. Before drifting off, we thanked the spirits that are everywhere in these canyons for delivering us to Sipapu.

The hike out took three more days (we rested one day), but that part of the trail is routine for the Grand Canyon.

The last night a storm forced us to huddle in bivouac bags on a rocky ridge partway up the Tanner Trail. From our airy perches we watched lightning flash throughout Grand Canyon. Somewhere among the cliffs of the Granite Gorge, boaters scrambled to tighten their camp. And somewhere else the spirit-deer danced to the rhythm of thunder. AH

BOUNTIFUL VALLEY Avian Paradise An abundance of birds congregates along the Verde River

First light, Friday morning, late April. Pine scent rouses our nostrils and bird sounds float on the breeze as our bird-watching group pauses at Elks Well, a little pond on 7,815-foot Mingus Mountain above Jerome in central Arizona. “Hope we see an olive warbler,” a birder from Wyoming murmurs to field trip leader Gary Romig, a member of the Northern Arizona Audubon Society. Tomorrow, I'll lead a birding field trip, but today, I'm tagging along on Romig's trip, one of many such events during the annual Verde Valley Birding and Nature Festival in central Arizona. “Grace's warbler!” A woman points, and 12 pairs of binoculars rise as one. High in a pine tree, the little bird forages, its topsides a formal gray above a yellow face, bib and speckled white belly. “Good, it must have a nest nearby,” Romig says. “Now look below the Grace's about 2 feet toward the trunk. That bird with the yellow head is the hermit warbler. He's migrating north, using these Black Hills, which form the west side of the Verde Valley, as his interstate highway.” “You mean the Grace's warbler comes here and nests, but the hermit warbler keeps going?” a boy asks. Romig nods. “Some birds, like the Grace's warbler and hepatic tanager, migrate this far north and set up house; some birds like the hermit and Townsend's warblers pause to refuel before continuing north; and some birds like the mountain chickadee and the Stellar's jay live here all year.” “So Mingus Mountain is a truck stop, a summer cabin or a home, depending,” the boy's mother muses. Romig grins. “Good analogy. And each species uses the habitat differently. That