"Little Colorado"

PORTRAIT OF A RIVER MEAN, MAD AND MUDDY: The Little Colorado

The Little Colorado starts out in life away up high in the White Mountains of Apache County, Arizona, getting its nourishment from cool mountain springs and the gentle thawing of snow banks on Mount Baldy in the spring and summer. Up there in those mountains it is an innocent mountain stream full of trout and polished pebbles, the most harmless looking stream eternally gossiping to the pines along its banks and to the stars twinkling down at night. The Little Colorado, high up in the White Mountain of Apache County, Arizona, is the kind of stream you've always wanted to camp along some summer and let the world stumble along the best it can without you. As a matter of fact, many people, those lucky ones, do just that As a stream, the Little Colorado loafs easily through mountain canyons making the journey from the higher elevations at a leisurely saunter. Near Springerville, it is still a stream, not even in the heaviest rainy season ever getting ugly.

The river drops off the east side of the White Mountains and in a northerly direction wanders by St. Johns. North of St. Johns it turns to the westward toward Woodruf in Navajo County, then northwesterly by Holbrook, Joe City, and Winslow. The little thin line on the map from Winslow is the river north into the Painted Desert, pass Leupp and then it chews its way north of Cameron where it loses itself in the Grand Canyon and is swallowed by the mighty Colorado, hurrying by on its way to the sea.

A lot of history has written itself along the Little Colorado since the days of the Spanish Conquest to the days of the hard-riding, fast-shooting gang of cowboys of the Hashknife outfit. Good men and bad men have forded it, some bound on peaceful missions, some riding like thunder to escape the law. A cattle and sheep industry has grown up along it; men have fought and died because of it; cursed it for its lack of water in times of drought; feared its snarling fullness in times of the flood.

The Little Colorado River is a social cuss in a way and picks up with friends on its trip from the pine-clad mountains to where it joins the Colorado. The Zuni River, Leroux Wash, Cottonwood Wash, Oraibi Wash, Polacca Creek, and Dinnebito Wash, are companions the Little Colorado picks up as it staggers along like a tough looking for a pool hall. All of the Navajo reservation, it seems, has truck with this river.

During the dry spells, the Little Colorado isn't much; dry in places, a listless path through the Painted Desert, marking its way with sand and sunbaked mud. But when it gets drunk on flood waters its a mean, mad, muddy river, with bad table-manners and a foul disposition. It claws into the good earth and under its dirty fingernails carries tons and tons of silt to the Grand Canyon, where it dumps its muddy load into the Colorado.

At Grand Falls, the show place on the Little Colorado to the north and west of Flagstaff, the river tumbles down a plateau in great steps, more mud than water. The fall here is swift and as it plunges down to Cameron and beyond the river has cut a great scar in the earth, the scar itself being a deep, narrow canyon, earth's bitter reminder that the Little Colorado has been about its business for ages. And the scar tells too how cruel and powerful the river can be in its short life span from the cool mountains to the depths of the Grand Canyon where it joins the Colorado on its way to the sea... R. C.