Page Four

The Miracle of Lake Mead

BLUE waters under a desert sun. White sails against barren cliffs. Sleek launches awakening echoes in lonely canyons. Outboard motors among the cactus. That is Lake Mead the new Arizona playground Behind Boulder Dam the waters of the Colorado River have slowly backed up into the largest man-made lake in the world. Over one hundred miles long, it winds through the heart of a rugged desert country of colorful buttes, mesas and sandstone temples, to its head buried in the stupendous gorge of the Grand Canyon.

Before the building of the dam few had braved this strange, silent land lying along the border between Arizona and Nevada; a handful of miners had prospected its inhospitable hills and occasional canyons. But they seldom stayed and they left no mark.

Now all is changed. A smooth highway of water penetrates to the innermost recesses of the region, inviting everyone to explore by boat one of the continent's last frontiers.

After seeing Lake Mead from the great rampart of Boulder Dam we could not ignore its invitation, so it was not long before we were backing away from the boat landing in a shiny motor cruiser and cutting across the blue water toward some chocolate-colored mountains on the farther shore.

The passengers on board were a miner and an engineer bound for a gold claim, a naturalist going out to take motion pictures for the National Park Service, several tourists and an old prospector who had a cabin far up the lake.

It took some time to accustom ourselves to the novelty of cruising on the desert. Islands and reefs flashed by, fantastic rock formations in riotous colors rose above the water and danced crazily in their own reflection, the long snowy ridges of Mount Charleston followed us far to the west, while over all was the bluest of desert skies.

The friendliness of the open spaces prevailed on board. It was not long before each passenger was showing his special sights to everyone else. Just before reaching Boulder Canyon the old prospector pointed far up a high cliff.

"See that white dot yonder?" he asked.

"Oh, it's a mountain goat!" shrilled a lady tourist.

"No ma'am. That there is a wild burro."

"Burro!" we said, incredulously, not believing anything but a fly or a rock climber could stick to that cliff.

"Yep," said the prospector. "There's a bunch of 'em 'round here, this white critter plays a lone hand. He's been up on that mountain off and on for two weeks now. Thinks he owns it, I reckon. I saw him and a brown one havin' a set-to a few days ago down by the lake. What a fight! They bit and chawed each other, then rolled over'n over, slashin' and kickin' like devils, 'til the white one drove the brown one off. Yes, sir. That white one is poison! He's meaner'n than a stack of black wildcats."

We had quitted the lower lake basin and were threading our way through Boulder Canyon. Steep walls of dark gray rock rose above us in forbidding capes and pinnacles. Deep ravines sloped back to the jagged skyline. It was utterly wild and desolate, like some frozen, lifeless fjord of the far north. Here the original Boulder Dam was to have been built, a thousand feet high, and for some reason the name "Boulder" stuck to the present structure in Black Canyon, twenty miles downstream.

It was almost a relief to emerge from the dark gorge into the broad, sun-filled reaches of the Virgin Basin. This is the largest part of Lake Mead, stretching for miles up the Virgin River to the Lost City of prehistoric men and the Valley of Fire. It is a place of wide vistas, the bluest water, and multicolored mountains etched with purple shadows. To the north are hills, burned, seared and twisted as if by tremendous heat. Among them lie light green beds of gypsum.

"Landed a man, his wife and their kid over there

"My claim averages about fifty dollars to the ton," said the miner, "but it might just as well have been on the moon for all the good it did me. Seventy miles out by road if you'd call it a road and grades that took the heart out of a truck the first time in. But now the water comes within twenty-five feet of my shack, when she's high," he ended happily.

We edged into a narrow cove in Iceberg Canyon and dropped him and the engineer.

"We'll put a flag up on the point when we want to come out," they called to the pilot.

"Good luck!" we shouted as the cruiser backed away, leaving them to shoulder their packs for the climb over the hill to the canyon. On we went, twisting and turning, past the sheer white cliffs of Temple Bar, by Napoleon's Tomb, under mountains standing on edge with strata shelving down into the water like shingles on a giant roof, past distorted formations of brilliant red travertine traversed with bands of green and yellow, until at last we turned a corner and entered the upper basin backed by the mile-high walls of Grand Wash Cliffs. Here on a peninsula overlooking the most spectacular part of the lake is Pierce Ferry Camp; a community of tents lost in the immensity of its surroundings.

As we approached the dock C. C. C. boys from a fly camp nearby were burning great piles of driftwood on the shore. Thousands of logs of juniper, piñon and cottonwood are brought down by the river each year, and during the spring floods, become a serious hazard to navigation on the upper lake. Several years ago miles of densely packed logs closed the canyon, taking two months of work to clear. Stranded along the lake shore is enough wood to heat a city for a month. It is unfortunate that yesterday," said the pilot. "They own all that and they're figuring to take out the gypsum with power shovels and load it into barges before the water covers any more of their claim."

The coming of the lake has given renewed energy to mining in this section. Signs of activity are evident everywhere: white tents far up the mountainsides, miners' boats tied to the shore, while every other man we met has plans for wresting a fortune from this forbidding land.

Page Six It is destined to waste its warmth in the desert air.

After we had lunched at Pierce Ferry, the cruiser left us to hurry the other passengers up the Grand Canyon and back to Boulder City, for it had a schedule to maintain, while we followed at a more leisurely pace in an open boat.

The canyon section is the climax of Lake Mead. It is one of the most spectacular waterways in the world, rivaling the fjords of Norway, the inlets of Alaska, or even the river trenches of Asia.

The Grand Canyon is but one of nineteen similar gorges on the Colorado River between Wyoming and the Gulf of Mexico, but it is by far the largest of them all. More than five thousand feet deep, it is cut into the high plateaus of Arizona for two hundred and seventeen miles. The building of Boulder Dam has backed up the waters of Lake Mead into the lower twenty miles of the canyon, permitting tourists to visit with ease one of nature's last strongholds; to view in comfort a part of the world seen formerly by a few adventurers after weeks of hardship. Although this is perhaps the most impressive part of the entire canyon, “a single, deep, narrow slash in the face of the earth,” it is so remote that at the head of navigation one is still more than a hundred miles from the world-famous Grand Canyon viewpoints of the South and North Rims.

The introduction to the canyon is dramatically sudden. Passing between mile-high portals, we instantly plunged into mid-afternoon twilight. Above us soared rock castles, towers, square bastions, turrets and pointed spires bathed in brilliant sunshine. Deep blue shadows slanted across vast amphitheatres and threw fantastic outlines on the canyon walls. The intense contrast between light and shade was startling as if night and day were struggling for possession of each cliff and slope. We had been transported to a world of titanic forces in which time and man meant nothing.

At every turn the gorge grew narrower and the walls rose higher, the peaks and crags on such a gigantic scale that the half-mile strip of water wound beneath them like a ribbon. Around a bend gleamed Emory Falls, a streak of silver against the (Turn to Page 41)