LOWER GORGE OF THE LITTLE COLORADO

Zuñis, this strenuous pilgrimage brought honor to the participants, and the special salt so secured was supposed to bring success to the entire clan.

Mr. Marston told me where to find a published account of the Hopi expedition of 1912. In 1937 a Yale University scientist, Mischa Titiev, interviewed Sun Chief, who at the age of seventeen had been one of the three participants in this final Hopi salt trek, and obtained his firsthand story of the undertaking.

Sun Chief related that before starting out, the pilgrims had to purify themselves according to certain rules. Along the way they performed ceremonies at special landmarks. The Hopis had a feeling of superstitious awe for the region near the mouth of the Little Colorado. There was even a tabu against gazing idly at the scenery.

About four and a half miles from the mouth of the tributary is a large mound of travertine built up by a gascharged mineral spring, which forms a pool at the top. The Hopis believed that the ancestors of the human race had come from the underworld through this spring. They called it the original sipapu, thus explaining the basis for the sipapus or ventilators in the floors of their kivas.

Another reason for their awe here was that they believed the spirits of their deceased kinsmen lingered in the area.

The exact place where the three Hopis hobbled their burros in 1912 and started their descent into the canyon is clear. The 1926 U. S. Geological Survey map shows Salt Trail Canyon reaching the river six and a half miles from its mouth. The trail is accurately marked on the map. On the rim of the canyon itself a pair of large cairns, or rock piles, marks the trailhead, and smaller cairns are frequent along the route.

In his account Sun Chief mentioned the sipapu, but on this point his story does not agree with nature. He reported that the spring was quiet when the pilgrims arrived but suddenly began to boil. Every time I have visited this site, the gas has bubbled hour after hour.

Near the sipapu was a wet spot where one of the three took off some of his clothing and pulled out handfuls of the sacred clay. A feeling of weakness which later affected all three men was attributed to the fact that the clay digger should have removed all of his clothing.

Sun Chief related that when they came to the junction of the two rivers they followed the Colorado, but he failed to specify whether they went upstream or down. Since he was a boy of seventeen when he went on the famed pilgrimage and it was twenty-five years later when he gave his verbal account, it is hardly to be wondered at if he was sometimes a bit unclear about minor landmarks along the trail. He did, however, recall that at the end of the trail it was necessary to use a rope to get down to the river. He was also definite in remembering a peculiar rock where they fastened the rope. This rock, shaped "like a man's chest," was where a demigod had changed himself into a stone.

Using Sun Chief's account as a guide, Marston had been trying for some time to identify the location of the source of Hopi salt. On one of his river trips he had seen a deposit of salt on the east side of the river five miles upstream from the mouth of the Little Colorado, and he thought this might be the location. It was "around the bend in the river," and this agreed with Sun Chief's account.

Accepting Marston's choice of this location for the salt site, I was eager to cover the trail from Salt Trail Canyon to the spot. At the end of May, 1956, two months after my first sortie, I started off. Since I was not familiar with the reservation roads, I went to the mouth by the same route as before. Two months had made a great change in both rivers. The red flow from the upper Little Colorado had ceased weeks earlier, and the only water had been coming from Blue Springs and smaller sources in the last twenty-one miles of the riverbed. This mineralized water had covered the red silt with a filmy white mud as smooth as cold cream. The Colorado was pouring past in the spring flood, and the brown water held back the tributary in a deep blue lagoon. Above this long pool the bed of the Little Colorado rises an average of twenty-eight feet per mile, more than three times the grade of the Colorado. The permanent flow from the springs is more than three times the flow of Havasu Creek, and the flavor of the water is a disagreeable mixture of table salt and Epsom salt. The tincture is weak, and a doctor had pronounced it safe to drink indefinitely. I have used it for thirty-six hours, but the flavor becomes increasingly repugnant, and I was glad to dip my canteen again into the muddy Colorado.

The minerals in the brackish water almost make it unfit for drinking, but they make it a treat for the eye. Over the talcum powder mud, the pools are pale blue, and the cascades break into sparkling spray. The view from Cape Solitude, 3400 feet above the junction of the rivers, shows the contrast of the pale blue of the shallow upper stream, the indigo of the deep and quiet lagoon, and the brown of the irresistible main stream.

After a night near a rock cabin I was off to an early start. Going up the riverbed is relatively easy. Sometimes you may fight a bit of brush, but mainly you walk on sand and gravel, fording the stream occasionally. The coolness of the water is pleasant, but you may have to brace against the current. Cameras should be kept in waterproof bags.

Each bend in the canyon presents another terrific vista of upsurging walls cut by ravines into towers and ramparts. My senses could appreciate only a limited amount of this overpowering grandeur, and I began to notice the little things a deer track or a water ouzel doing its dip ping curtsy between dives. I noticed a shallow cave at the base of the wall on the north side and found smoke stains on its ceiling. A few men have come and gone here, but the wilderness remains as it has been for a million years. You wonder whether this Eden is still safe or whether dam builders will harness the spring and summer floods. You hope that a careful calculation will convince them that hydroelectric development here would be a financial loss. Improvements should be made on the trails so that more people could enjoy these glistening cataracts and turquoise pools, but there the "improvements" should stop.Up a side ravine I saw a salt spring, and my scramble to reach it was rewarded by a fine view down the river. Around the next bend I came upon the original sipapu. It is a chocolate-colored-cone about twenty-five yards wide at the base and ten yards across the flat top. A pool ten feet across occupies the center, and the bilious yellow water hides the bottom. By the cupful the water is clear, and the taste is no worse than that of the mineralized river water. More gas than water is coming from the stem of this morning glory pool where, according to the Hopis, the ancestors of the human race emerged. Mr. McCormick of Flagstaff, who was here in his teens when his father and uncle were working the mines, tells how they would jump into the center of the pool. The gas would pop them to the surface for an unintended re-enactment of the Hopi myth.

When I had picked my way through the tamarisks, over rocks, and along gravel bars for another two miles, I came to the first side canyon. It had to be Salt Trail Canyon, but for the first hundred yards I could see no trail. After I had scrambled up the shale to the east, I saw a trace of a trail on the other side. Numerous cairns guided me, but it is a rugged route, especially through the Redwall and again in the limestone at the top. It occurred to me that the discoverer of this route must have been a hunter in hot pursuit of a Bighorn sheep. I could see why the Hopis felt the need of supernatural help for this pilgrimage. I sampled water from a pothole near the top of the Redwall and was surprised to find it just as salty as the springs below. At one or two places piles of bright chert fragments decorate the top of flat rocks. They must have been carried down from the rim and left as calling cards. I realized how much more this trip would mean to a Hopi believer than to a vacationing mathematics professor. It satisfied my craving for natural beauty and my curiosity, about a little known part of Arizona. To a Hopi it would be linked with prosperity and status and even have a bearing on the afterlife.When I hike away from my bedroll and food supply, I usually turn back soon after noon, but this trip was an exception. It was nearly three o'clock when I passed the large cairns marking the head of the trail and continued on to the ridge where I could see the Echo Cliffs beyond U.S. 89. Car tracks showed that one can drive a car to within a quarter of a mile from the trailhead. While hurrying back I was careless at the top of the Redwall and lost twenty minutes by overshooting the right place for a safe descent. Darkness caught me more than an hour's walk from my camp, but as it was too cool to sleep without my bedroll I stumbled on through rocks and brush. until I reached it.

I had planned to go to Marston's salt site in the morn ing, but after thinking it over I decided that it did not fit Sun Chief's description of the location he had visited. True, it was "around the bend in the river," but it did not fit in a more important detail. The site could be reached without the need for using a rope. One can walk the bank upstream to the spot. I thought Sun Chief could hardly have been wrong in remembering the need for a rope to scale the cliff at the site of the salt he had visited. I had previously walked the west bank past Marston's location. So I decided to return to the car without visiting it at that time. Less than a month after this trip up Salt Trail Canyon, two airliners collided twenty thousand feet above the mouth of the Little Colorado. Most of the grisly debris fell on the west side of the river, but the park authorities closed the area to all except investigators of the disaster. By the time I was free to go there again, I had read in the August, 1914, issue of National Geographic Magazine an account by Emery and Ellsworth Kolb, photographers at Grand Canyon Village, of a trip they took with a loaded burro down the Tanner Trail and along the east bank of the Colorado to the mouth of the Little Colorado. They photographed and described things which seem to have been fairly well known at the time, including the rock cabin where I had camped on my first trek into the area. The Kolbs not only found tools and a plough left by the man who built the cabin (supposedly a man named Beamer) but they saw the clearing for his garden. River runners can still note the swinging door, the neat window, and the bed made of driftwood with plaited rope springs. One can only wonder what sort of man wanted to live here, how he thought he could make a living, and when he came and left. If I had read the Kolbs' article before my first trip into this region, I would have followed their route above the river cliff on my first attempt and would not have observed the driftwood ladder which I had noticed lean-ing against the cliff where I was forced to turn back. About this time I read another account of Sun Chief's 1912 salt expedition, this time in his biography, "Sun Chief," by Simmons. His story of the trip was essentially the same as what he told Titiev, but with one very im-portant addition. To Simmons he stated that about thirty feet from the spot where the pilgrims had to use a rope to get down the cliff to the river, they saw a ladder of driftwood poles made by a white man. As soon as I read this I knew that Marston had been wrong and that I had already been to the Hopi salt source. The ladder was a positive identification. There could be no mistake.

However, I still wanted to find a way down from the trail above, and I was also eager to see the Blue Spring Trail. My desire to see the latter was increased by reading the account in Desert Magazine of a trip taken by Kit Wing and Les Womack, two park rangers. They had used most of two days carrying two hundred pounds of equipment from the rim to the river. To get down they considered a climbing rope an absolute necessity. Their heaviest load contained a sixty-pound rubber boat, and they also carried forty pounds of drinking water. Just after Christmas of 1957 I tried to find the Blue Spring Trail. Leaving my car at Desert View, I followed an old wagon road north to the vicinity of Comanche Point. This is the prominent peak along the rim four miles north of Desert View. Acting on impulse, I detoured to climb it. About once a year I reach another "finest viewpoint in the park," but my vote for Comanche Point still holds. The nearest point on the horizon is four and a half miles away, behind Desert View. You can swing through 360 degrees of striking scenery, from the pastel colors of the Painted Desert to the needle-sharp summit of Vishnu Temple. After climbing this peak I returned to my project of attempting to find the Blue Spring Trail. I went east into the valley which begins at the very rim of the Grand Canyon and drains into the Little Colorado north of Gold Hill, the northern of two buttes rising above this plateau. Navajo sheep corrals and abandoned hogans are common in this area, but near the dry streambed I came upon a structure which aroused my curiosity, a straight wall built of fieldstone, about three feet high, forty feet long, and two feet thick. The absence of any other walls here made me think it may have been a hunting blind. After reaching the end of this valley above a sheer precipice, I made camp. Among the numerous water pockets in the limestone I found one with several inches of water beneath two inches of ice. Winter camping is rugged, but at least there are no bugs. No frost formed on my bag because I slept under a cozy ledge. In the morning I picked the most likely looking ravine for my descent. On the north side of the bay, the position of this ravine agreed with my recollection of the position of the Blue Spring Trail as shown on the map. No car tracks were to be seen, and there was no cairn at the top, but I started down anyhow. It was difficult enough to challenge a man without a rope, but I finally reached the rim of the Redwall directly above the river. Here, about ten miles up from the mouth, the vertical walls often come right into the quiet pools. The spring water stays above freezing, but I had no desire to go swimming. It was just as well that I had missed the Blue Spring Trail and couldn't get down the last cliff into the river. My return to the car that night was different in that I improvised a more direct cross-country route, but I still had to walk two and a half hours after dark. Further study of the map showed me where I had missed the trail. It was in the next bay to the south. On a morning in late May, 1958, I walked from Desert View to the north of Gold Hill so early that I decided I had time to visit Cape Solitude above the junction of the rivers. Ranger Dan Davis has nominated this for the finest viewpoint, and I can see why. The sky island called Chuar Butte is just a mile to the northwest, Marble Canyon opens to the north, and to the west the pinnacles of Walhalla Plateau loom above you. The morbid note was the debris of the double plane wreck still exposed below. The detour to Cape Solitude was longer than I had anticipated, and it was almost six o'clock before I neared the head of the Blue Spring Trail. My gallon canteen was nearly empty, and I faced a situation which could have become embarrassing. Where would I get water? There was one frog croaking several hundred yards away at an apparently empty stock tank. If I stopped long enough to investigate, I could lose my bare chance of reaching the river by daylight. But from what I had heard of the need for ropes and ladders, could I hope to reach the bottom that night anyhow? Brashly I started down.There is something odd about this "trail." For the first fifty yards it is a well constructed horse trail. This ends abruptly above a hand-and-toe scramble down rough ledges. Quite soon I came to a place which really made me wonder. Twenty feet ahead was a cairn, but to reach it I had to sidestep along a mere crack, holding to another at shoulder height. This is above a forty-foot sheer drop, and I was not too much surprised on a later occasion when some friends who wanted to see the Blue Springs changed their minds right here. Luck was with me that evening, and I never lost the route for more than a few yards. I reached the springs by 8:30, only twenty-five minutes after dark. Incidentally, some of the arrows do not locate the trail. I think geologists used them to indicate locations of fossils.After the difficult upper part of this trail is past, you are due for a surprise. There is a well built horse trail the rest of the way to the top of the Redwall. In 1921 surveyors were here locating dam sites. Perhaps they brought supplies down the hard part of the trail on their backs and then used horses. I wondered how they could bring horses down these cliffs, but recently found the answer. Five miles upstream, the Horse Trail comes down from the opposite rim. Don't ask me why they didn't just bring their supplies down that trail in the first place!Since I only wanted to reach the mouth the next night, I spent my extra time reconnoitering upstream. The mud and quicksand were so bad that I carried a stick to jab down and make sure that there was a bottom. At one place a spring in the bed keeps some black sand dancing. Another spring up on the wall forms a fan of travertine covered with ferns and moss. I had hoped to reach the last of the spring water, but later learned that this is twenty-one miles above the mouth, five miles farther than I had time to go on this occasion. I did go three miles upstream from Blue Springs until the Redwall formation was out of sight below ground. These big springs at the foot of the trail issue from fissures less than a foot above pool level. To collect so much water from the desert, there must be quite a system of underground plumbing.Back from my six mile side trip, I started downriver with my pack at 8:30. Quite soon I had to cross deep pools with no bank except the wall. Wing and Womack chose the hard way to do it, with their sixty-pound boat. I simply lay on my air mattress and paddled with my hands. Getting wet every fifteen minutes was a pleasant relief from the hundred-plus heat. The deepening Redwall trench forms the most spectacular part of the entire gorge. White cascades over the travertine barriers lured me into using the last of my color film. A mishap occurred when I caught my inflated air mattress on a catclaw. For the next two nights I would go to sleep in comfort, only to wake up with a rock in my ribs.

Below the Redwall I stowed the mattress and forded the river at will. I missed seeing the Coleman gold mine, but I noted the mouths of Big Canyon and Salt Trail Canyon. There was time to examine the sipapu. I had been drinking the spring water for twenty-four hours, and the muddy Colorado was a welcome relief.

The next day as I started down the Colorado along the Beamer Trail above the steadily rising cliff, I watched for a ravine where I could go down to the ladder and the Hopi salt. After an hour of rough walking I came to one with a ruined cairn at the angle where the rim turns away from the river. Across the way most of the descent was in sight. This obvious slope ends at a small cliff above the bed of the wash. Before giving up, I looked over the edge and saw a cairn on a shelf eight feet down. A large block of sandstone furnished a safe anchorage for my rope, and I got down by using knots to assist my grip. (This is not the rope descent the Hopis remembered. In fact, when I brought my friend Allyn Cureton here in 1959, he was able to climb down without a rope.) The shelf I had now reached led to an easy scramble down to the flat bed, which soon ended at a thirty-foot drop.

This was the right place - I could now see the ladder. I crawled under an overhang to a pocket directly above the ladder, but I was afraid to test the crumbling wind-eroded ledges below. I even had some bad moments while getting back. I must have been a bit shaken, for I forgot to look for the fabulous rope-support rock shaped like a man's chest. Halfway to the Beamer Trail above, I remembered it and went back to look. It is in plain sight, the most peculiar example of erosion of bedrock I have ever seen in the bed of a wash. It stands out like a saddlehorn a foot in diameter, and it is located exactly where you need to fasten a rope for the shortest rappel. (When I was back here with Cureton, we doubled a seventy-five foot rope around this projection, and it was more than adequate.) Although I had left my one short rope above, I could have followed the Beamer Trail to the south end of the cliff and returned along the river. But since pictures would be needed for a full report, I went home instead and wrote letters to "Dock" Marston and Dan Davis, telling them how to find the place. I said that I would return later and take definitive pictures in cooler weather if they didn't do this before I got back to it.

Dan passed the word to Fred B. Eiseman, Jr., who is now teaching in Phoenix. Fred had been interested in repeating the Hopi expedition before I had even heard of it, and his wife had glimpsed the ladder while they were coming down the river. With two companions he now went down Salt Trail Canyon, rappelled to the river, and found the shallow salt caves. He identified most of Sun Chief's landmarks, recorded the trek on film, had the salt analyzed, and published a full account in Plateau, the journal of the Museum of Northern Arizona.

I heard that some young Hopis tried to renew the salt tradition a few years ago but were unable to locate the place.

My next visit to the Little Colorado was by far the easiest, but nevertheless it was a real thrill. One of my students, Alan Osbon, had a Saturday job tending an automatic river flow gauge eleven and a half miles downstream from Cameron. The U.S.G.S. engineers have constructed a most interesting means for reaching their gauge. You cross from the south rim to the north by a handpowered cable car. It accommodates two, and there is no railing above the seat level. As you gather speed in your coast to the middle of the canyon, the one-inch cable seems very inconspicuous above the thousand feet of empty space. We "let the old cat die" so that I could take a couple of pictures, and then Alan pumped us up to the north rim. From there we walked a half mile to the head of Sheep Trail, the only well built and maintained trail into the gorge. Another cable can get you across the bottom during floods, but Alan led me over the rapidly drying bed on stepping stones. An ingeniously constructed trail goes along the cliff to the gauge.

For several years after this I did not visit the Little Colorado, but in January, 1963, my daughter flew me over the gorge. The views changed so fast that I lost track of details. I was unable to identify some of my own pictures. A few weeks later I took several students, and we located the Hopi Crossing seven miles below Cameron at the beginning of the final gorge. We also inspected the dam site a mile and a half downstream. Steel rods and cut wires show that a ladder had been anchored here. The main canyon at this point is about three hundred feet deep, but a vertical walled inner gorge forms a sluice gate about thirty-five feet wide and seventy feet deep. The Bureau of Reclamation engineers built a footbridge that still spans this chasm. What a place this would be to stand during a flood! The bed is wide and not steep above this gate, and seventy-foot dam would back water under the Cameron bridge.

located the Hopi Crossing seven miles below Cameron at the beginning of the final gorge. We also inspected the dam site a mile and a half downstream. Steel rods and cut wires show that a ladder had been anchored here. The main canyon at this point is about three hundred feet deep, but a vertical walled inner gorge forms a sluice gate about thirty-five feet wide and seventy feet deep. The Bureau of Reclamation engineers built a footbridge that still spans this chasm. What a place this would be to stand during a flood! The bed is wide and not steep above this gate, and seventy-foot dam would back water under the Cameron bridge.

The topographical survey map of 1926 shows the general profile of the bed, but it does not locate the relatively abrupt slopes such as a drop of twenty feet in a hundred yards. This seems to indicate that the surveyors did not run a line along the entire bed but rather took spot checks from the rim. The profile map shows a steeper grade for the lowest twenty-eight miles, an easily remembered average of twenty-eight feet per mile. For the next twenty-two miles the average is twenty-one feet per mile. To interpret these figures one might recall that the grade of the Virgin River in Zion National Park is thirty feet per mile and that the Colorado in the Grand Canyon drops nine feet per mile. The steepest mile of the Little Colorado is the part just upstream from Salt Trail Canyon, where the drop is seventy feet.

After seeing the Hopi Crossing and the dam site, our group tried to locate the Dam Site Trail. The difficulty in using the map is that since nothing is shown back from the rim, it is impossible to distinguish between a mere notch in the rim and a major drainage. We went down a big wash which ended at a precipice. A search on another occasion showed how we could get halfway to the bottom just west of the ravine, and on the third attempt we found, still farther west, the cairn-marked trailhead. The top thirty feet of this trail seem steeper than the Blue Spring Trail and may require a rope.

Another trail shown on the map a few miles north of the tourist viewpoint is the Moody. It is also well hidden, and a Navajo whom we met in the area told us that there was no way to get to the bottom. He spoke English well and certainly understood our question. He did point out Hell Hole Bend and thus confirmed our location. We were ready to agree with the Indian about the impossibility of getting to the bottom of the canyon when we decided to examine the end of the valley just north of Hell Hole Bend. During rains it would produce a 1200-foot fall, but now I could follow a bench north to an almost vertical crack. When I had descended as far as I dared, I found a heavy wire looped around a boulder. The wire had kinks in it for better gripping. We had run out of time, and I preferred to bring my own rope rather than try the wire.

A year later I was back. Numerous ledges made rappelling unnecessary, and a strong climber could have come down without a rope. Below the top cliff the route was still confusing, and I wasted a half hour investigating a dead end. The discovery of some fossil footprints compensated for this effort. I finally began to find cairnsOn the return these markers led me to an easier slot in the rim. A crude bridge of three juniper logs is at the bottom of this break, and higher is a fixed cable. Near the top a huge limestone slab has fallen across, forming a roof. Large cairns mark the trailhead, but it is easy to miss since it is about a third of the way from the plateau to the bed of the wash.

Cascades and Travertine dams on the Little Colorado

The Moody Trail reaches the riverbed at Mile 33, twelve miles upstream from the fourth trail going down from the left rim, the Piute Trail. The best approach to Piute Trail is by jeep from Desert View past Cedar Mountain. When I undertook the investigation of this trail with some students, we would have appreciated having a map showing the region back from the rim. We walked for fifteen minutes in the wrong direction before we could locate ourselves on the river map. The route goes down a geologic fault where the strata to the east are sixty feet higher than the same rocks to the west. There is considerable danger of rolling rocks on the person below you on the trail, but in only one place is it necessary to use one's hands for climbing.

This route is direct and easy compared to the Blue Spring and Moody Trails. The first permanent spring is here at Mile 21, but the water tastes just as bad as at Blue Springs. We dunked in a pool to cool off on this July 4, 1963, and then walked three miles down the bed to where the map shows the Horse Trail. I climbed the talus to look for this east rim trail, but I came away thinking that no ordinary horse could negotiate the lowest two hundred feet.

There were only two trails left for me to investigate. To find the head of the Horse Trail, I used the map of the Blue Springs Quadrangle. After a day of scouting the reservation roads, I was ready for another major project. I wanted to walk the rest of the bed, from Mile 16 to Cameron at Mile 57. There was no record that this had ever been done.

A Navajo had told Womack that a waterfall would make boating through the upper gorge impossible even if the river contained enough water. I was willing to bet that I could find a way past any obstruction in the bed of such a silt-choked stream. Mud would be a greater threat to steady progress than would a fall. During early summer, heat would be a problem. In April, July, and August floods would present another hazard. Drinking water might be scarce in the autumn. Christmas vacation seemed the best time to undertake the long walk.

On January 1, 1964, my wife and another faculty couple, the Gibsons, drove out with me to a point on the right rim at Mile 9. We ate our lunch and then climbed a knoll for a better view of the blue water in the Redwall trench and of Salt Trail Canyon to the north. Then we drove, after one bad guess, to a draw that led to the Horse Trail. When Ellery and I began to find signs of a trail, he turned back, wishing me success in my venture, and I was on my own for the next two and a half days. He was to park my jeep for me at Cameron. If I couldn't get to the bottom of the gorge or if I came to an impasse in the bed, I would be in a difficult situation. I hoped that my two-quart canteen would be adequate.

The Horse Trail soon reached the usual dropoff at the top of the Coconino sandstone. After a short search I found the bypass to the right. A ledge carries the trail to a scree-filled ravine. The only other problem was the 200foot descent to the riverbed. I wasted fifteen or twenty minutes before I noticed a ledge on the other side of a dry fall. A huge slab had fallen on this shelf, but even a horse could walk through the tunnel formed by this leaning rock. On reaching the bottom I walked downstream until I found the Redwall formation, which proved that I had overlapped my previous trek. Ice covered the pools but the riffles were open water. The weather was relatively mild, and my down bag was warm enough.

The geological formations in the Little Colorado are not as colorful as those in the Grand Canyon. The transition is gradual until the nondescript brown of desert varnish covers all but the scars of fresh rock falls. The charm here depends not on color but on form. There are towers cut off from the rim, great pyramids of shattered rock, and then smooth walls sheer for a thousand feet. To keep my bearings among these miles of confusingly similar walls, I noted the time on my map at each right turn in the canyon. I thus avoided the lack of orientation I had felt on solo trips down the San Juan and Marble Canyons. The cold had frozen the mud, on my January trip, and I could walk over the waterholes on safe ice. Still there were places where I could fill my canteen. At Mile 40.5 a hip-deep pool crosses from wall to wall. The ice was a fine bridge.

The bed is mostly sand and gravel interspersed with fields of boulders. Near Mile 40 is a "Hell's Half Mile," a jumble of rocks, some of which are as big as a house. The bed must drop twenty feet within a hundred yards. The Little Colorado has been known to flow seventy

thousand cubic feet per second, more than the usual spring flood in the Colorado itself.

If I had been prospecting for ore, I would have been disappointed. Still, there was plenty to notice. Eight miles upstream from where the Redwall went under, it showed again, and here at Mile 24 was the best cave shelter I saw. The floor had been cleaned by a flood, but there was still one burnt stick, the only sign, besides the trails, that people had ever been down here. A geologist would find this trip rewarding. I found fossil footprints and noted that the Hermit shale is missing. A more startling discovery was a rockfall crater. A block of sandstone seven by seven by five feet had fallen 950 feet into wet sand. The shock wave had stopped in a circle twenty-three feet in diameter, forming a hole five feet deep. The rock must have fallen recently, for a flood would have washed away the sandy rim of the crater. going up to the east rim directly opposite the Moody Trail. Several men went with me to trace the Indian Maid Trail to the opposite rim. Allyn Cureton found some pottery fragments of a rare type, which an expert at Window Rock has identified as early Navajo. Jay Hunt, sponsor of the college hiking club, found two cairns and wanted to continue up the main ravine. I insisted, however, that we follow the route shown on the map over to a parellel ravine farther west. Here Allyn and I did some interesting rock climbing before we had to admit that this ravine is impassable. By this time it was too late to check the main ravine that day. On another weekend I took some men down the Horse Trail to see Blue Springs. We returned to our car on Sunday early enough to look for the head of the Indian Maid Trail. There are no road signs, and we were lucky to hit the rim within a quarter of a mile of the right ravine.

This rockfall was in Hell Hole Bend, and I still had twenty-three miles of walking and another night in the open before I would reach Cameron, my destination. For the second campsite, I found a brushy terrace with a concentration of driftwood. An all-night fire dispelled the cold. On the home stretch I came once more to the cable crossing. Farther east the walls drop fast, but this narrow part of the canyon is still breathtakingly deep. I believe the view was even more impressive from below than when we were hanging from that spider line in the sky. The monotony of the last weary miles was broken by finding a ringtail cat dead from unknown causes and a live porcupine far from the nearest pine. The trek was a great experience, but I was glad to see the Cameron bridge. The map gave me one last challenge, and it was a first rate puzzle. The map shows the Indian Maid TrailThe prospect was not encouraging. Behind a promontory, where I had hoped to find the trail, there was no sign of it. We passed three cracks in the rim as we walked to the ravine where the map showed the trail. The top of this ravine was a smooth-walled well, more obviously impassable than where Allyn and I had turned back on the previous trip. I returned to the most likely looking of the three slots in the rim near the main ravine and started down. Within a few yards I came to the severest test, a block wedged in the crack. I had to let myself down and feel for footing beneath. The rest of the descent was steep, but care in route selection brought me to a series of cairns. The way was clear to reach the part of the Indian Maid Trail which we had found on our earlier trip. Map study and many systematic sorties over a period of several years had brought me to my goal, an intimate knowledge of this fascinating gorge.

LYMAN DAM Monument to Mormon Pioneer Courage And Industry

The Southwest has created for itself an adventurous and fabled past. It founded a history on an abundance of land and a scarcity of water. In this way it was a kindred spirit with another land from whence comes the Song of Solomon. Both were ancient lands accommodating a desert people and both were made luxuriant by the miracle of water. The Biblical history of man is woven against a background of the waters of Israel, the rivers of Damascus, the streams of Lebanon, the wide and gift-giving Nile and the river that went out of Eden. Irrigation is as old as history, has been called a miracle worker, a life-giver.

It was not strange that the first modern irrigators of the West were a people whose traditions were tied to olden, patriarchal ways. They were the Mormons who held labor with the hands as basic, fundamental and one with God.

People who had for a time wielded a pick, built a sluice box or dealt a game of faro helped settle the states of California, Colorado, Nevada, Idaho, Montana; Wyoming was the homeland of the stock raisers, but the Mormons settled Utah and the Great Basin. Their success was to be linked closely to the life-giver: irrigation. The advance party who pioneered the way from the Missouri River brought with them a few bushels of potatoes and on the very first day they came to the valley, they opened a sun baked field, planted their treasure and soaked the soil with water diverted from a canyon stream.

Thus it was that the people who went out from Utah to other areas of the west were steeped in the ways and words of irrigation. Newspapers of their time are filled with advertisements of the "Wonder Pump - Wonders Will Never Cease," of Land and Irrigation Companies bearing the names of "Snake Valley," "Mount Nebo," "Bear River," and "Beaver Land." Column advertisements of water wheels called the Pelton, the Cascade, the Samson were placed side by side with Auerbach & Bros. notices of winter cloaks, dress goods, flannels and comforts.

Wherever their leader sent them, the Mormons sought out water; to have it with ease and in sufficient quantity was of prime importance, surpassing the beauty of location and the fertility of the soil. And their leader sent them outward far distant from the stream that came out of the place they now called Emmigration Canyon; the stream which gave sustenance to their first effort of survival in the desert.

They went to California, to the San Juan, to places they named Callville and Cedar City. Early in the 1860's they settled the fertile areas of Mesa and Safford, Arizona. They knew the valley of the Gila and the Salt. They mingled with the Hopi at Moenave and pushed southward to the Little Colorado and into its lateral valleys where some said wild flax had once grown abundantly.

They came to this dramatic, untamed little river with their sheep and their cattle and their wagons and their women and children and they stayed; wherever they went they stayed. They set their church stakes, they cleared their land and made ditches and poured water upon their plots of squash and potatoes and they watered the young fruit trees they brought with them.

The Mormons were held by their faith to deriving their sustenance from the soil... and no man was to take more than he could industriously cultivate and care for. It offered less adventure than mining, there was no elusive prospect of great financial gain, but it held the people to the church in a way no other occupation could have done.

Always in the Southwest they sought water first. If others were there before them they bargained for their share, with or without justice, for they knew it was necessary for their survival.

Thus it was they came in 1879 to a little crossing on the Chiquito Colorado and found there a small Spanish community with a Spanish name, San Juan. The leader of this group of Mormons was Ammon M. Tenney. They bought 1200 acres of land from Solomon Barth, one of the earliest, most colorful and least written about of Southwestern traders, whose descendants still live in St. Johns and carry on the family tradition with their mercantile store. Cattle was the common medium of exchange for the time so Barth was paid 750 cows for the land. In addition, the church was to supply "goods" in the amount of $2000.00. At first things went well. The name of San Juan was anglicized to St. Johns and a post office established under that name in April of 1880.

The first years were blessed with good rainfall and deep winter snows but there followed a cycle of scant moisture. With more and more people coming to the valley there were more and more demands made on the seasonal runs of the river. The Little Colorado was unharnessed and free, rising high in the spring and running from bank to bank, slipping into nothingness during the summer months while the edges of the corn leaves turned brown and withered in the sun. Too, there was controversy over the water rights. Some of the Spanish settlers considered these rights were no part of the original purchase from Solomon Barth. The controversy was eventually compromised on a basis of 3/5 for the Mormon farmers and 2/5 for the Spanish populace.

Now began their first effort to build a reservoir on the Little Colorado. They selected a place about six miles south of St. Johns just above Salado Springs, springs of the Salt Grass. To this place they took their teams and homemade scoops and their heavy slips and they ditched and scraped and packed and over the years they built a reservoir. a reservoir to insure water for their scattered fields, young orchards and new gardens.

For a few years this dam kept the waters of the Little Colorado impounded in sufficient quantity to meet the needs of the people. St. Johns became a community of thriving importance with prosperous farms spread round about it. The water from the Little Colorado had been plentiful, controlled and crops from the land were good even though a drouth cycle was in evidence. A wet year followed the drouth break-up of 1904-05 and in May, 1905, disaster struck. Some said it was an inadequate spillway which caused the destruction, some said the reservoir was without proper foundation. Regardless of reason, their Salado dam washed out and now, as before, they were subjected to the unruly Little Colorado whose silty flood waters were uncontrolled in the rains of late summer.

The people were dispirited and began to leave their farms and orchards to find their livelihood in places which looked more kindly on human countenance. The church did not want to lose so likely a location, one it had acquired with so much diligent effort on the part of its people. Shortly thereafter was promoted the idea of building a dam further upstream with the church contributing toward its construction. Again there was the formation of an irrigation company to which was attached the name of Apostle Francis M. Lyman who had taken a personal interest in the Little Colorado community and its struggle for survival. A Colorado investment company provided one-half of the necessary capital and the people of the community committed themselves for the balance. Ambitious plans were made to reclaim additional farmland. A site was chosen twelve miles upstream, creating a new reservoir and the community took heart again.

At the peak of construction there were about one hundred men working on the project. Out at the site there was a tent city, an adobe dining hall was built where the men took their meals and a commissary was established. For the time and place, and the benefits it would bring, it was considered a big project. It brought joy to people who saw little hope of sustaining themselves on a land which had been harsh, but which they had come to love because it demanded the most they had to offer in order to survive. The roads leading to the site were rutted and dusty. Some men brought their families and lived in tents. Remembered still among the people of St. Johns is a John Bunyan-like man with a hearty laugh by the name of John Martin. His job was to load dirt into the dump wagons. The dump wagons were pulled by eight horses