Canoeing the Grand Canyon

UP THE DOWNRIVER Exploring the Lower Grand Canyon by Canoe

Throttling down the twin 200 horse-power motors of his jet boat, Separation Connection, Jim Rowland of Boulder City, Nevada, steered the long flat-bottomed craft sideways against a heap of glistening white sand at the mouth of Separation Creek, at mile 240 in the Grand Canyon. Leaping before looking, we landed ankle deep in a strip of mud composed of equal portions of ooze brought down Separation Canyon by a recent flash flood and of adhesive silt deposited along the shoreline by a slight drop in the level of Lake Mead.

Yelping a little as our movements churned us deeper into the slime, we unloaded our five canoes, camp gear, personal duffel, food for five days, and the water containers we had filled nearly forty miles downstream at sparkling Columbine Falls. The process completed, Row-land waved good luck, revved up the (OPPOSITE PAGE) With river currents almost constant in the lower Grand Canyon, canoe adventurers must first hitch a ride upriver then lazily drift back down, (INSET) Paddlers take in the sights where the western end of the Grand Canyon meets Lake Mead.

motors, and with a diminishing roar the Separation Connection vanished.

There we stood, feeling the thread of queaziness that comes from being suddenly abandoned in a strange and formidable spot. Three adults familiar, to some extent, with various kinds of unmechanized watercraft. Three teenage boys and four teenage girls, juniors and seniors, from the Thacher School in Ojai, California. All had learned, as part of the school's outdoor programs, to keep a clean camp, sleep on the ground, and put together respectable meals on small gasoline stoves. But not one of them had ever paddled a canoe or stood in the bottom of so overwhelming an abyss as the western end of the Grand Canyon.

So far as I know, there have been very few canoes in the lower Grand Canyon, or, if you prefer, in the uppermost part of Lake Mead. They cannot readily be paddled there, for the constant river current makes itself felt for miles after it reaches the reservoir. So the boats have to be freighted up, as Jim Rowland did ours, and only then does the fun begin-paddling downstream at leisure.

But why wait for the fun? Why not putt-putt up in a motorboat as far as is feasible, then streak back in a day? Cheaper, faster, easier.

Well, a day hardly seemed enough. We wanted the stupendousness of this last skyward leap of the Grand Canyon to sink in fully. To that end we had laid down arbitrary specifications for ourselves. One: no motors. The temptation to regard throttles rather than strata becomes distracting, especially among youngsters. Two: maneuverability. During the past two seasons of high water, silt bars had built up across the entry channels into tributary canyons, and long rows of dead brush clogged overflow inlets. To explore some of those tributaries, as we hoped to do, we would need shallow-draft craft capable of sharp turns and light enough to be portaged short distances.

Finally, a small party, like our crew of high school kids, would keep logistics under control and help maintain a commonality of interests. The obvious solution was to get canoes as far into the Canyon as we could without running into rougher water than we could handle. Like kayaks, the long, lean craft boasted an aboriginal ancestry. Unlike motorized boats, they could provide a feeling of adventure while maintaining a primeval sense of harmony with the air, rocks, and water around them. If esthetic and spiritual gleanings followed, they would be rich bonuses of the sort implied by W. Kenneth Hamblin and Joseph R. Murphy of Brigham Young University when they wrote in Grand Canyon Perspectives, "The western part of the Grand Canyon is strikingly different from the better known regions in the National Park to the east. It is nevertheless spectacular... and...more awe-inspiring."

Sweeping statements. Also subjective.

What features of the lower Canyon were especially striking-and from whose point of view? How do you measure awe? Well, maybe we would learn. Meanwhile, though, we were hungry, and the October sun, bearing down hard on white sand and black metamorphic stone, was hot.

Moving into a narrow band of shade cast by a bright green clump of tamarisk, we sliced cheese, bologna, and flaky-crusted French bread for lunch. The familiar smells and tastes helped restore flagging energy and reorient us.

"Neat," one of the girls said, looking up the pink-walled side canyon while a friend rubbed suntan lotion onto her already deeply bronzed back. "Why is it called Separation?"

The answer was closer to hand than she realized until it was pointed out. Bolted to a cliff a few dozen yards away was a bronze plaque commemorating Oramel Howland, his brother Seneca Howland, and their friend William Dunn, members of an exploring party that one-armed John Wesley Powell was leading down the canyons of the Colorado River from southern Wyoming to Mormon settlements he expected to find somewhere near the mouth of the Virgin River. (Powell's arm had been so badly shattered by a Minié ball during the Civil War that it had to be amputated.) Exhausted, hungry, and occasionally at odds with their peremptory leader, the three decided, on August 28, 1869, to separate from the main party and find safety by walking up this side canyon rather than running the rapids that still lay ahead. They were never seen again. The presumption is they were killed by Indians.

In a very real sense they were the casualties not of an Indian scuffle but of America's headlong determination to learn the nature of the West as a necessary first step toward mastering its resources. Powell's explorations were a part of that conquest, and if lives were lost, well, that's the way empires were built.

Fifty-seven years later, Hoover Dam, 710 feet tall, was completed in another canyon almost a hundred miles down stream from the end of the Grand. One hundred and ten lives were lost during the construction in order that floods could be controlled, water supplies regulated, and electric power transmitted to upwards of fifteen million people in the burgeoning agricultural, industrial, urban, and recreational empires of Southern California and Central Arizona-with a few eddies running off toward Las Vegas.

The surface of the lake impounded behind Hoover Dam eventually reached a maximum elevation of 1221.4 feet above sea level. At that point, attained in 1941, the lower Canyon held two percent of Lake Mead's volume and three percent of its surface area. Water backing into trib-utary gorges as far upstream as Separation Canyon created marvelous lagoons for waterfowl and playgrounds for boaters ...until 1961. That year the Bureau of Reclamation began holding back water to fill the reservoir, named Lake Powell after John Wesley Powell, that had been created by the building of Glen Canyon Dam fifteen miles above the head of Grand Canyon. For the next two decades, Lake Mead, deprived of its normal flow, shrank drastically. Vast beds and banks of silt replaced the lagoons, and pessimists took to wondering whether former levels would ever be restored.

Finally they were. Lake Powell filled in 1980. Then came the floods of 1983 and the high water of 1984. Lake Mead, brimful again, backed up into the side gulches we hoped to explore. Though it is possible at times of very high water for some powerboats to thrash a little higher than Separation Canyon, that famous landmark once more is considered head of upstream navigation. Separation Connection: the linkage of river and reservoir, of wilderness and civilization. Powell would have appreciated the paradox-his faith in the future of the West made visible at the very point where three of his men had given up their role in the furthering of that faith.

Churning back and forth through the mud, we loaded the canoes and took off. The river surged strongly into the lake, the young people caught on quickly to the basic paddle strokes, and soon we were riding the current at close to five miles an hour.

We were in the heart of the westernmost of the Canyon's three granite gorges, sections where the river has cut into basement rock well over a billion years old. "Wow!" said one of the boys withoutmuch concern. Seventeen years looking at a thousand million: how could there be any separation connection there? Snouts of hard Archean rock rose above the water, their hot, glistening blackness streaked with zigzags of red pegmatite. There was congealed lava, too, some in detrital chunks and some standing in fine, densely packed basaltic columns, and dark gray limestone boulders fallen from cliffs high above, their surfaces roughened with sharp-edged pocks.

Six miles below Separation we looked at and decided against tackling the big mud wall and parapets of water-killed willows and thorned mesquite that blocked the mouth of Spencer Canyon. Instead, we cut over toward the sheer cliffs bordering the right bank, looking for Surprise Canyon. Most of the tributary gorges in the lower Grand are statelybroad mouths and steep slopes rising to the base of ponderous cliffs. Not Surprise. Its gateway looks as if it had been hacked into the tawny cliffs by a giant cleaver.

The backwater that filled the narrow passage lured us on in high spirits, wondering what lay around the next bend. Gradually the water grew shallower. Scraping bottom, we pulled the canoes across gooey mudflats to a small bank high enough, we hoped, to avoid any rise caused by surges of water sent through the turbines at Glen Canyon Dam, far upstream, to meet peak demands for hydroelectric power in Phoenix and Tucson. We carried our camp gear another hundred yards from the canoes' damp refuge to a dry, delicious nook beside a small, bright stream. It sang softly throughout the night, while a full moon spread a silver mist across a giant square-topped tower that rose what must have been half a vertical mile higher than our beds.

We slept late, dawdled over breakfast -camping's truest joy at times-and then paddled back into the blinding sunburst that swept down the main river between giant walls. At least we persisted in calling the brown ribbon a river throughout the trip, although both geography and appearances declared it to be a canyon-cramped lake. Rivers twist, leap, splash. This light tan flood made not a sound as it moved almost indiscernibly ahead, surely a marked change from the madcap performance the Colorado puts on in the eastern part of the Canyon. Even so, I could not believe that the contrast was part of the striking difference Hamblin and Murphy had in mind when defining the western section of the abyss in Grand Canyon Perspectives. Surely they would not have dignified the results of meddling with so strong a phrase. Blue herons flapped up and away, their stilt legs trailing. Swifts and flycatchers darted; butterflies flickered along on the faintly drifting air. Where the greenish layers of Bright Angel shale had caved in and formed slopes, we watched sharply for bighorn sheep or feral burros (the latter the result of more human meddling) but saw none. It was a rich scene, nevertheless, a kind of pygmy forest amid piles of shattered rock. Light green clumps of brittlebush-they'd bloom brilliant with yellow flowers in the spring-alternated with dark green, pliant creosote bushes; plump thumbs of barrel cactus stood in strong contrast to the eerie wands of ocotillo. It was a wedge of the Mojave Desert of California thrusting deep into the high plateaus of Northern Arizona. Nothing like it exists in the Canyon's more popular eastern reaches. At the mouth of Burnt Spring Canyon we examined the remnants of a smallrock cabin once heated by an ancient iron stove. Adjoining it was a summer ramada roofed with sticks for shade. Cunningly placed in a notch in a little promontory, the dwelling was invisible from the river. Local lore ascribes it to a bootlegger-where did he get his ingre dients? How did he dispose of his product? A miner seems more likely, for there is hardly a foot of the Canyon from end to end and top to bottom that prospectors haven't prowled. We camped that afternoon at the mouth of Quartermaster Canyon, less than half a mile below Burnt Springs. As we were pulling the canoes onto a mudgirt sandbar thick with tamarisk, we made a dazzling discovery. Our sandspit was part of the long bar that separated the river from a big lagoon of clear, cold water. In we jumped. Shocked wide awake after the day's somnolent drift, we scrambled back out, put on life jackets, and swam up the lagoon a few hundred yards until we became enmeshed in the dead brush at its upper end. Later, we wormed over the bar in our canoes, overturned them, washed out their accumulated sheathing of mud, and then, as the rising moon sent a glimmering path across the water, just paddled in lazy curves, listening to choruses of frogs and what we supposed were ducks protesting this brief human intrusion on their seldom disturbed privacy.

After portaging around mud flats, churning through weed banks, and exploring dim side canyons and hidden streams, the canoeists (TOP, LEFT) take on water at Columbine Falls, five miles above Pearce Ferry. (ABOVE) Roughly hacked into the high cliffs lining the Colorado River, Surprise Canyon's inner sanctum serves as the first night's campsite for the voyagers. David Lavender photo A night for stories of Harry Aleson who, during most of the 1940s, lived in Quartermaster Canyon in a tent-cabin he designated, in capital letters in his writ ings, as MY HOME, ARIZONA. Of Harry, who tried with the help of enthusiastic volunteers pulling on ropes from the bank, to put a motorboat all the way up the Grand-and by reckless persistence did force a way well above Diamond Creek. Of Harry and Georgie Clark mak ing their crazy climbs out of the gorge and across the wastelands of the Shivwits Plateau. Of their jumping into the river at Diamond Creek, hands locked to wrists, to see if they could float to MY HOME. Rolled, tumbled, sucked under, spit out, bruised and battered-they did it, just as they also managed to reach the same goal from Parashont Wash sometimes in, but mostly out of, a three foot by six foot inflatable raft that the Colorado mauledas if it were a chip. Shortly afterwards Georgie became the first woman to row a Navy surplus neoprene raft completely through the Canyon, a step that led to her pioneering work in the development of mass recreation in the Grand.

UP THE DOWN-RIVER

In the miles below Quartermaster, where the current fades and the water spreads, the individuality of the western Canyon becomes unmistakable. Those tremendous cliffs! In the eastern sectionthe Bright Angel shale has eroded away to form the broad Tonto Platform. Above the Tonto rise a thousand or more feet of Muav and Redwall limestone topped by the red ledges and slopes of the Supai and Hermit shales, pale Coconino sandstone, and so on. There is little Temple Butte limestone in that fantastic geolog ical ladder.

In the western section there is no Tonto Platform. Muav limestone, TempleButte limestone-up to 1500 dark, purplish, perpendicular feet of it in places -smooth-faced Redwall and extra-hard Supai soar uninterrupted, except by occasional ledges. Massive tapestries of desert varnish streak the long flanks, especially those of the Temple Butte. Here and there, closer to the river, are hanging sheets of travertine that look like armor plate. The only platform, the Esplanade, lies atop the Supai and is seldom seen. In places it reaches back as much as five miles before the outer rim makes its final leap. Nowhere else in the Canyon is verticality so pronounced.

Late evening, adrift in Quartermaster Lagoon, (OPPOSITE PAGE), "listening to choruses of frogs and ducks protesting this intrusion on their seldom disturbed privacy. David Lavender photo (LEFT) Called Emery Falls in the early years, Columbine Falls at approximately river mile 275 owes its modern name to the yellow columbine which flowers luxuriantly nearby. Alan Benoit photo reservations for campgrounds that are similar to those that have long been in effect in the upper Grand Canyon. Rangers also urge houseboaters to remember channels in the smooth-looking lower river change frequently, and, when low water returns, as inevitably it will, any craft of that nature pushing upstream above Bat Cave is running the risk of being stranded uncomfortably on midstream sandbars. The Hualapai Indian Reservation, which extends along the river's left bank from a little below Havasu Creek almost to Columbine Falls, presents another problem in regulation. The Indians claim the ground to water's edge, wherever that may be at any given time, and state that persons camping anywhere on the left bank without tribal permission are trespassing. The National Park Service counters that its jurisdiction extends to the river's highest historic level and that riverside sandbars, which are deposited during high water, are open to use. Note, however, that the controversy applies only to campsites close to the river. Any hiking into the country back from the high-water mark is legally a trespass unless one has first obtained permission from the Hualapai, available generally for a relatively small fee.

For specific information, contact the Grand Canyon National Park, Grand Canyon Arizona, 86023, or the Hualapai Tribe at Peach Springs, Arizona, 86434.

The end of our own run was nearing now. We took on more water at Columbine Falls, which are really a hissing slide of white against a dark chute, reveled briefly in another icy swimming hole, and then paddled out through the Grand Wash Cliffs, where the Colorado Plateau comes to a spectacular end. For the first time we were bucking a headwind, taking on some cold splash water from the whitecaps, and gratefully ducking behind convenient points for a few moments of rest. Finally we called a halt on the lee side of Scorpion Island. We put up windbreaks and shelters thrown together out of canoes and plastic and spent the first part of the night listening to spatters of rain. Then the clouds broke, the storm dissipated, and the next morning we had glass-smooth water for the final mile and a half glide to road's end at Pierce Ferry. By the time we unloaded we were all prepared to believe that the western end of the Grand Canyon is indeed strikingly different from any other canyon anywhere. Awe inspiring, too, by almost anyone's definition.

Postscript: Early in 1985, the National Park Service unveiled a master plan for the lower Grand Canyon that imposes regulations about trash and human waste removal, fires, use permits, quotas, and David Lavender has written more than twenty-five books on the American West, among them The American Heritage History of the Great West, and River Runners of the Grand Canyon.

Selected Reading

A River Runner's Guide to the History of the Grand Canyon, by Kim Crumbo, Johnson Books, Boulder, 1981.

The Colorado River in the Grand Canyon: A Comprehensive Guide to Its Natural and Human History, by Larry Stevens, Red Lake Books, Flagstaff, 1983.

Grand Canyon Treks II, by J. Harvey Butchart, La Siesta Press, Glendale, 1975.

Broken Waters Sing, by Gaylord Staveley, Little, Brown and Co. Inc., Boston, 1971.