MOUNTAIN LYING DOWN

MOUNTAIN

"The North Rim always teaches the same two lessons,” Charles Bowden wrote in 1991. "There is very little to say - witness the silence of people clustered on the rim, staring into the chasm. And there is nothing to fix." In the quarter-century since he penned that observation, the lessons have remained the same.

AN ESSAY BY CHARLES BOWDEN LYING DOWN EDITOR'S NOTE: If you're a longtime reader of Arizona Highways, you're familiar with Charles Bowden. For decades, his beautiful words appeared on the pages of our magazine. Sadly, on August 30, 2014, Chuck passed away unexpectedly. As a writer, teacher and friend, he left a void that cannot be filled. However, to mark the anniversary of his passing, we're resurrecting one of his many essays. In this piece, he writes about the Kaibab Plateau and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, which he first visited in 1960.

HE HAS BEEN WALKING BESIDE THE WAGON for a long time to spare the horses. Since an accident years ago, the woman moves with pain. Sharlot Hall stands in the huge pine, fir, spruce, and aspen forest of the Kaibab Plateau on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. It is August 1911, and she is just about the first tourist to reach this spot. She sees two things at once. “Here, almost unknown to Arizonans,” she realizes, “is a forest containing over 3 billion board feet of merchantable lumber, fine yellow pine, spruce, and fir ‘ripe,’ as lumbermen say, for the cutting.” She is enough of a child of the frontier not to scant such potential. In 1882, at the age of 11, she had ridden a gray mare for three months from Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) to Arizona as part of her family's wagon train to a new life. That was the trip on which she took a bad fall, the results of which would plague her until the day she died. For years, she helped grub out a living on the family place on Lynx Creek just outside of Prescott, living the hard life of a woman in a male world of dirt, muscle, and poverty. She now keeps memories of those times at bay by calling them “the frontier days.” A spur-of-the-moment poem written on the kitchen table had brought her to the attention of magazines and her fellow citizens, and now, in 1911, the year before the Territory becomes a state, she is on a 75-day wagon trip across largely roadless Northern Arizona in pursuit of facts, lore, and impressions for her position as Territorial historian.

But even the memories of hunger, of being a young woman branding cattle, splitting wood, toiling in the fields, even the cold reach of those bleak days cannot overwhelm what she is seeing. And oh, she knows hardship so well, once having written an essay titled Why Women Want to Leave the Farm. As the 41-year-old woman takes in the board-foot potential of the North Rim forest, she admits to her second thought: “The spruce alone would furnish a large supply of paper pulp, but one can wish that it may not soon be used, for these spruce forests, reaching like a great green cloak over the softly rounded mountaintops and along the open parks, are beautiful beyond telling.” I am standing at Point Imperial, where Sharlot Hall stood that late summer day, and we still tend to see this place through her eyes. People walk the pathway down to the edge of the Canyon, some speaking German, some Japanese, some that frisky English we call American, and when they reach the edge of the big drop, they all fall silent while that beauty Beyond telling caresses them. A storm system has slipped off the Pacific and rakes the entire Southwest, and the Canyon itself boils with fog. A few minutes before, I walked on a forest path as mule deer slipped in and out of the mists, disturbed by my presence but hardly frightened.

Since that day in 1906 when President Theodore Roosevelt set aside the first slab of the North Rim as the world's thenlargest game preserve, a gun has seldom been fired here. Through the decades, the ground has mutated into a Grand Canyon National Park and Kaibab National Forest and changed less than we may have feared.

The aspens this late September day are flaming into gold, and soon, in a few weeks, the snows will come and bury this place, bury the path, bury the highways, cloak the hotel perched on the edge, and silence will fall until late spring. Just as it has since Utes called this 8,000-foot plateau the Mountain Lying Down. Just as it has since tribesmen trading deerskins with Mormon colonists in the desert below prompted the immigrants to call this place Buckskin Mountain. For the North Rim has remained a singular place, getting 10 percent of the traffic that throngs to the South Rim, and being closed to vehicles from mid-October to mid-May when the snow comes and no one bestirs themselves to fire up a plow. We still, like Sharlot Hall, have moments when we look at this ground and see board-feet instead of trees, new hotels instead of mountain. But then sanity returns, and these thoughts drift away.

The vast deer herd is just entering the rutting season, and bucks move through the morning half-light like gods searching for potential worshippers. The wild turkeys clump on the edge of the long meadows, and, once in a great while, a black bear stumbles through. Below Point Imperial and Cape Royal in House Rock Valley, buffaloes graze, a legacy from the days of Jim Owens and C. J. “Buffalo” Jones. Owens is a man Sharlot Hall meets on her visit, the official warden of a place hardly any American had even seen or heard of. He and Jones had brought the buffaloes north of the Canyon in 1906 to breed them with cattle, and when this venture failed, the herd was left to graze, as its descendants do to this day on the desert below the park.

Owens enters Hall's life accompanied by the baying of his hounds as he rides up to her camp on the rim of the Canyon. She is staring at the South Rim “14 miles across on an airline but nearly 500 miles away by the wagon road which we had been obliged to follow [215 miles by modern highway].” He climbs off his horse and promptly takes over as guide. In his cabin, she discovers the walls are covered with the skulls, paws, and skins of mountain lions and wildcats. Killing them was not only Owens' job, but also his life. Under the gamemanagement theories of the time, Owens was paid to kill anything that ate deer. And so he slaughtered lions wholesale.

In 1913 he guided Roosevelt and his hunting party all over this place he had saved with a scratch of his presidential pen. And Owens once brought a young Eastern dentist up here, a man so bewitched by the land and the hunt that he first wrote a biography of Owens called The Last of the Plainsmen and then switched to penning novels. His name was Zane Grey.

Owens regales Hall with his experiences, telling her about the time "he found some lion pups in a cave here and was lying flat ... to twist them out like rabbits with a stick when the dogs scented the mother, and she made for the cave in such haste that she didn't see Mr. Owens at all but clawed his back as she went in. He managed to get both her and the pups but at closer quarters than was pleasant."

That night Hall and Owens dine on bobcat ("I didn't mind half as much as the first shrimp I ever ate"), which she rates not quite as good as lion meat. Like Owens, Hall has no doubts about killing predators. Today, game managers believe that lions and other killers are essential to the health of the deer herd in this place.

It is easy for us to scorn men like Owens, and, like most easy things, it is a mistake. In part because this cheats him of his humanity. When government museums ordered Owens to kill a dozen of the unique Kaibab squirrels for their collections, the old man did it grudgingly. "He hated mightily to obey that order," Hall scribbles in her diary, "for he talks to the shy little things as if they were children - but no one else is ever allowed to shoot them." More importantly, we must not scorn him because if we do we will be blind to our own acts. For surely our descendants will look at our years of caring for this ground and, in a world of inevitably shrinking free and wild land, question and regret some of our decisions.

When Theodore Roosevelt first glimpsed the Grand Canyon in 1903, he said: "Leave it as it is. You cannot improve upon it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it." And, since that day, his insight has been both a warning and burden for all of us. As Sharlot Hall scouts the North Rim, she constantly shifts from being stunned by the beauty to being seduced by the potential. The meadows, in her eyes, someday will be dotted with houses. The grass will sustain great herds of cattle; the trees, well, the trees will become boards. Of the Canyon itself, a sight which has strained the skills of generations of writers, she is wise enough to remain silent. "As we neared the rim," her diary records, "the Painted Desert came into view to the east ... I almost forgot the vast and gorgeously colored chasm at our feet, the distant view was so strange and bewildering and yet so beautiful."

The North Rim always teaches the same two lessons. There is very little to say - witness the silence of people clustered on the rim, staring out into the chasm. And there is nothing to fix. Roosevelt was right. This place cannot be improved. Because we are human, we never will cease to come up with ideas for enhancing this place: a road here, a building there, a new policy on this, second thoughts about that. But we always will be missing the point. Hall, child of the frontier, bone weary from a lifetime of hard work, is no different than we are with her dreams of towns, ranches and sawmills. But like us, she, too, could not keep the power of the North Rim at bay. On August 30, 1911, the woman with the injured back wrote in her diary: "I ran on ahead... the wind singing down over the trees like some great tide coming in. Asters of all shades of blue and lavender and yellow stood as tall as my head and bright penstemons gleamed crimson up in the rocks. Now and again I found fossil shells in the road, worn smooth with passing wheels ... Running down grade like some Atalanta [the fleet-footed hunters of mythology], to whom shells and flowers were only a moment's stay, I wheeled 'round a point of red hill, and the full glory of the country lay unrolled. No wonder the early Mormon explorers believed that God had revealed to them a land to be all their own."

On the first page of her diary of that 1911 trip by wagon, Hall wrote down a thought: "There is something better than making a living, making a life." All we have to do is remember that single sentence. When we go to the North Rim. We must. Always. AH