EDITOR'S LETTER

There’s an old theme in our new issue — it’s old, in the literal sense. We didn’t plan it that way, but all five of our feature stories focus on old subjects, including one of the last remaining one-room schoolhouses in Arizona, old aspens near Flagstaff, and even older ponderosas on the Kaibab National Forest. We have a couple of stories about the Grand Canyon, too.

Of all the subjects inside, the Canyon is the oldest. The rock layers at the bottom have been around for about 1.5 billion years, and the gorge itself is anywhere from 6 million to 70 million years old. There’s renewed debate about the exact timeline, but most everyone agrees that the Canyon was carved by the Colorado River, which has been the subject of many stories in this magazine over the years. This month, it’s the common denominator of two more.

The first is our cover story. Although we’ve been big fans of John Blaustein for decades, until now, we’d never featured his photography. We finally got it together when we learned that a new edition of John’s classic book, The Hidden Canyon, was in the works. It came up in a conversation John was having with our photo editor, Jeff Kida. After Jeff talked to John, John sent us his files, and a portfolio was born.

As you’ll see in Deep Down Inside, all of John’s images were made in the inner Canyon, as opposed to up on the rim. He wasn’t the first photographer to do that, but his catalog of river-level photography is among the most impressive we’ve ever seen. And there’s a reason for that: John’s been running the river and making great photographs since 1970. On one of his early trips, he was joined by Edward Abbey, who wrote the journal entries for
The Hidden Canyon. According to John, Mr. Abbey was lured by the promise of “a free river trip and all the beer he could drink.”

“He was fun on the river,” John says. “When I tried to see what he was writing, he’d swat me away like a fly — like, ‘Don’t worry; I’m doing your book just fine.’ If I’d known then what I know now, I would have gotten more pictures of him, but I only have two or three.” That said, John has many vivid memories of the irascible writer. And so does Katie Lee. She and Edward Abbey were longtime friends.

About a year ago, we ran a profile of Katie Lee, who is 96 now. This month, we’re featuring her again. She’s back because we needed something to complement John’s photography. But instead of commissioning a writer, we went to the archives and found a story that Ms. Lee had written for us in 1960. As I was reading through it, I tried to gauge how different it was to run the river back then. I’m not an expert, though, so I reached out to my buddy Mike Buchheit. He’s the director of the Grand Canyon Association Field Institute.

“Although a number of things have changed in the past five decades, from technical improvements in watercraft to layers of National Park Service regulations, the emotions, the camaraderie and the connection to a world seldom seen remain virtually the same,” he says. “As for the driftwood campfires and sporadic use of life jackets that Katie describes, that wouldn’t fly in today’s more environmentally conscious and safety-minded world.”

Here’s her line about life jackets: “Having jumped into a few rapids on purpose without a jacket as have many others, I can only say it’s necessary to know which rapid.” Like her friend Edward Abbey, Ms. Lee is a nonconformist. She has a lot to say, and over the years, she’s expressed herself in books, music, magazine stories and documentaries. She was multimedia before the term even existed. For Basque sheepherders, things were different. They lived off the grid on the San Francisco Peaks, where they had very few ways to communicate. Most of them just chiseled their thoughts into unsuspecting aspens.

“The trees gave voice to those who had no voice,” Terry Greene Sterling writes in Write and Wrong. “There’s one shepherd who carved a likeness of the same woman over and over again on different trees. Others carved smiling and ample-hipped nudes, people having sex, houses, random designs, political points of view, sheep, dogs, horses, shepherd names and the dates they passed through the forest.”

In Terry’s story, you’ll learn more about the sheepherders, and the old trees that served as their form of Facebook. It’s one of two stories in this issue about old trees. The other is focused on “lookout trees.”

“Long before the CCC began building permanent fire observation structures,” Matt Jaffe writes in Up for Hours, “the U.S. Forest Service established a network of tree lookouts on the Kaibab National Forest. Sometimes, rangers drove lag bolts into the trees to use as steps. They also improvised ladders, from wooden slats hammered into the trunks, for the long, dangerous climb to the top, where they could scan the surrounding landscape for smoke.”

Turns out, some of the lookout trees are still around, including a majestic ponderosa on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. It’s big, about 100 feet tall, and it’s old, too. Very old. Like most of the subjects in our new issue.