Lake Powell: A History-rich Saga of High Adventure

ARIZONA HIGHWAYS APRIL 1982 VOL. 58, NO. 4

Mark Sanders, Publisher Gary Avey, Editor Wesley Holden, Managing Editor Richard G. Stahl, Copy Editor Gary Bennett, Edition Designer Lorna Holmes, Assistant Art Editor Robert J. Farrell, Assistant Copy Editor Shirley Mummaw, Circulation Manager Bruce Babbitt, Governor of Arizona Arizona Department of Transportation William A. Ordway, Director Thomas R. Lammers, State Engineer Board Members Robert R. Evans, Chairman, Mesa Lawrence M. Hecker, Vice Chairman, Tucson John W. McLaughlin, Member, Morenci Lynn Sheppard, Member, Globe Hal Butler, Member, Show Low Ted Valdez, Sr., Member, Phoenix Sondra Eisberg, Member, Prescott Arizona Highways Publication No. (ISSN 00041521) is published monthly by the Arizona Department of Transportation. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Arizona Highways, 2039 W. Lewis Ave., Phoenix, AZ 85009. $15.00 per year in U.S. and possessions; $18.00 elsewhere; single copies $1.50 each. Second Class Postage paid at Phoenix, Arizona, under Act of March 3, 1879. Copyright 1982 by the Arizona Department of Transportation. Arizona Highways is printed by W. A. Krueger Co., Phoenix, Arizona. Prices subject to change without notice. Allow six weeks for a change of address. Send in the old as well as the new address including ZIP code. Telephone (602) 258-6641. The editors will not be responsible for unsolicited manuscripts, photographs, artwork, or other materials sent for editorial consideration.

SPECIAL LAKE POWELL ISSUE

3 Powell in Perspective A history-rich saga of adventure.

14 Playground on the Colorado Here's how look at water sports on Arizona's own "Great Lake."

20 A Song of Silence A special Lake Powell portfolio.

31 Houseboating on Lake Powell 14 tips to make your cruise a terrific experience.

38 Merrill Mahaffey Profile of an artist who shares a different vision.

43 The Last Outposts Powell's 5 marinas are staging grounds for great family adventures. Plus short features on etiquette for boaters and campers, the little town that grew with Lake Powell, marvelous packaged tours of the Glen Canyon area, and a visual and textual tour of Glen Canyon Dam.

Getting there...physically and mentally

For most of its existence, this place... Glen Canyon, has been a barrier for man, a mandated stop on the way to somewhere else. Steep canyon walls and riverlet breaches choked with vegetation bordered the unpredictable tumbling waters of the Colorado. The Canyon's seemingly endless length overruled a flanking, so this obstacle was faced head on by migrating Indians, Jesuit Fathers, and Mormon settlers alike. Yet the beauty of this canyon must have glimmered through their receding exhaustion as they paused at the river's edge to slake their thirst in the muddy water. The sheer majesty of Glen Canyon greeted John Wesley Powell's surveying party in 1869, previewing for him the incredible domain he would document on his Colorado River voyage. Many others would follow this water course including young Barry Goldwater, whose photography and prose from Neville's second expedition displayed this natural wonder first to Arizona Highways readers back in December of 1941. Barry returned often, sharing this land with others, including a 1951 trip with 26 kids from the Phoenix Y.M.C.A. These kids have grown and so have the waters of Glen Canyon. In 1964, completion of the dam above Lees Ferry signaled the filling of the lake named in honor of the river's first explorer-Lake Powell was born within Glen Canyon. Now an enormous body of water with a 1900-mile shoreline, the lake attracts today's explorers in vast numbers. Driving up through Flagstaff, down through Salt Lake, or arriving at Page by air from Phoenix, the previous isolation is diminished...until you get out on the water. Then the rest of the world is left outside, crowded from your senses by the vastness of this spectacle. Five-hundredfoot amber cliffs double in rippling reflection within the azure waters, serpentine canyons unravel in every direction, immense grottos, hidden coves, sandy red beaches...it's another world.

History

Turn back. “We all accepted this decision, happily and willingly, thanks to the Lord,” wrote diarist Escalante, ever the blithe spirit, and they worked their way southeast, trekking along the Vermilion Cliffs until they found themselves at the Colorado where it picks up the Paria River. A century later, this spot would become milepost zero on the Colorado River - a ferry-crossed point from which distances upriver and down still are measured today. In October of 1776, though, it was anything but a crossing - as a couple of the porters found out the hard way when they tried swimming the cold, fast-flowing stream.

Now the traders were really disgusted. If only they'd struck west for California, they'd be there by now-not lost in a labyrinth with a couple of clerics who figured some kind of “Benign Punishment” was the reason they were cold, tired, hungry - foraging on cacti and killing off their packhorses - and scared.

When they couldn't get a raft across the river, the Fathers and their grouchy companeros took the tough way out of the canyon they'd eased their way into. They went straight up, clambering through broken shale, loose rocks, and patches of sand, searching desperately for a break in the sheer sandstone walls. Once onto the Paria Plateau, the footsore party crossed open land before dropping down to the Colorado again.

Finally they found a ford. By now it was November, and the water was low enough to cross without swimming. Hallelujah! “We praised the Lord our God,” said Escalante, “and fired off some shots as a sign of the great happiness which we all felt at having overcome such an enormous difficulty which had cost us so much trouble and delay.”

La Purisima Concepcion de la Virgen Santisima, they called their crossing in an outburst of religious fervor: the Most Pure Conception of the Holiest Virgin. But to later travelers it quickly became el Vado de los Padres -the Crossing of the Fathers. Today it lies beneath the waters of Lake Powell's Padre Bay, and the crossing itself is crossed by most everyone heading up-

Island, near Glen Canyon Dam.

They did get as far north as Spain would go in the New World, but the Spanish crown and its colonists who soon would gain their independence - mostly ignored the canyonlands.

The Colorado and its tributaries did serve as a conduit for trappers and traders, though, and the canyons sheltered slavers dealing in Indian children.

For legitimate traders, there were easier ways of getting from Santa Fe to the settlements of California.

Where there's a way there's a will, though, and hardly anybody had a stronger will than James Ohio Pattie, a trapper who became kind of a darling of Established America when an Eastern preacher published his tales of derring-do

during the 1820s.

Pattie killed bears: “All now fled from the furious animal, as he seemed intent on destroying them. In the general flight one of the men was caught. As he screamed out in his agony, I, happening to have reloaded my gun, ran up to relieve him. Reaching the spot in an instant, I placed the muzzle of my gun against the bear and discharging it, killed him. Our companion was literally torn in pieces.”

He fought with Indians: “At about 11 o'clock this night, they poured upon us a shower of arrows, by which they killed two men, and wounded two more; and what was most provoking, fled so rapidly that we could not even give them a round. One of the slain was in bed with me. My own hunting shirt had two arrows in it, and my blanket was pinned fast to the ground by arrows. There were sixteen arrows discharged into my bed. We extinguished our fires, and it may easily be imagined, slept no more that night.”

He even found time for romance with the Spanish maiden he saved from a tribe on his way west to Santa Fe, but mostly Pattie was out adventuring. He was one of the truly Great American Wanderers, finding his way well into Mexico before trapping down the Gila River and up the Colorado-all the way up the Colorado to the Green River and the Great Divide.

His tales of the Colorado are mostly Indian-fighting stories, though, and when it comes to his trip through-or alongthe canyonlands, he leaves little to guide later travelers.

In fact, geography, now worked out to such details as marker-buoys and marinas on Lake Powell, for years was left blank on maps. The broad-ranging survey parties of John C. Fremont kissed off the canyonlands as “unexplored” - stay away if you know what's good for you.

The east-west railroads would run north and south of the Colorado once the dreams of using its canyons came out as nightmares in the real-life adventures of railroad-survey teams. Hard as it may be for even today's canyonlands visitors to believe, there were those who pegged grandiose development plans to the possibility of using the Colorado as a highway. A New Yorker named James White