Arizona's Hurricane Cliffs

High, Wide, and Lonesome on

Text by Joseph Stocker Photographs by James Tallon It's the most open, spacious, and lonesome country in Arizona-that stretch of high desert and rangeland extending eastward and westward from the Hurricane Cliffs.

We're talking about the left-hand side of the fabled Arizona Strip as you look at the map the almost waterless, almost peopleless, eerily beautiful region north of the Grand Canyon. Bump and clatter down the face of the Hurricane Cliffs, along roads barely worthy of the name, and you're likely not to see a human soul in the course of an entire day's drive. The population here is estimated at one-fourth of a person for every 640 acres.

Dwellers in this outback region call the great tannish gray escarpment (actually the western edge of the Uinkaret Plateau) the Hurricane Fault. It thrusts up from an otherwise fairly serene if desolate landscape, looking as if a Brobdingnagian comb had been drawn down its flanks, leaving huge ridges and gullies.

Pioneers exploring a route for a wagon road named it after encountering what they later described as a "regular hurricane" of a windstorm. Amateur historian Roman Malach of Kingman, in a monograph on the Arizona Strip, called it "one of the largest and longest exposed faults in the world."

The cliffs start, appropriately, near Hurricane, in southern Utah. They cross the line into Arizona and then run almost due south, trailing off to the west near the 8028-foot-high forested eminence known as Mount Trumbull. There, a century ago, the redoubtable Mormons harvested logs to build a temple at St. George, Utah, hauling them down the face of the fault and across the desert. The path they followed, Temple Trail, is still visible today, set off by Bureau of Land Management markers.

There once was a community of several hundred people living in the hamlet of Mount Trumbull, near the south end of the cliffs. But today only an abandoned school building and a handful of nondescript houses remain, with a few families

The Hurricane Cliffs the Arizona Strip:

occupying them every now and again. The only other sign of civilization near the bottom of the Hurricane Cliffs is the ranger station at Tuweep. Malach says the name was bestowed by a member of Major John Wesley Powell's Colorado River exploration party. It's derived from an Indian term meaning straight canyon. Primary task of the station is resource protection and guarding against timber trespass. Its personnel are also available in case of emergency when river runners exit the Grand Canyon to rendezvous with aircraft at the nearby landing strip. For about thirty-five years, a remarkable man presided over Tuweep. He was John Riffey, tall, spare, friendly, a scientist of the out-of-doors with a degree from the University of Colorado. He flew his own plane, an old, spartan, fabric-covered Piper Cub with an altimeter, airspeed indicator, and not much else in the way of instruments. Riffey kept the plane tied down at the airstrip, with a barbed wire barrier around it so cows wouldn't rub against it and tear the fabric. He had names for things. He called the two generators at the station Arky and Sparky. The airplane was Pogo. He put up a sign at the field reading "Tuweep International Airport." In July, 1980, by then in his late sixties, John Riffey suffered a fatal heart attack while fetching water from a spring. He (OPPOSITE PAGE) The almost barren expanse of Main Street Valley spreads out below the long scarp line of the Hurricane Cliffs. (BELOW) Abandoned ranch buildings warp and shrivel away under the summer sun in the Arizona Strip. (BOTTOM) Desert creatures like the coyote eke out an existence on what little sustenance this austere land has to offer.

Was buried at his beloved Tuweep. A monument and bronze plaque mark the spot. A new ranger is at Tuweep now. Except for him, the occasional handful of durable folk at Mount Trumbull, and a squatter or two, few human beings are to be found in the lonesome country of the Hurricane Cliffs. Yet the Strip fairly teems with lifemost of it wild. And it comes alive toward evening in summer, when the heat has ebbed. Birds take flight, whirling up out of the sagebrush and creosote. Reptiles-the chuckwalla, desert iguana, Mohave rattlesnake-begin slowly to stir. Rodents-the ground squirrel, the gopher, the desert pocket mouse-begin their foraging. And once darkness has fallen, the baleful song of the coyote is heard.

There also are deer and antelope in the Strip. And cattle: not exactly wildlife, but life-and, indeed, the only business of the Strip other than some lumbering, ura-nium mining, and the inevitable, tenacious probing for oil when the price is high enough to warrant exploration.

The cattle spreads are enormous. Seventy-five to a hundred thousand acres is about average. Clayton Atkin runs cattle on 160,000 acres. Stan Esplin-Esplin Cat-tle Co.-grazes 200,000 acres on top of the fault. Anyone with less has to work at something else, perhaps teaching school or operating a gasoline station, to make ends meet.

What this implies, of course, is that there isn't all that much for cows to eat in the neighborhood of the Hurricane Cliffs. The Strip was overgrazed for many years. Now most of it is managed by the BLM and leased to the cowmen, with grazing restricted to what the land will bear. In dry spells, the ratio can be as severe as 100 acres to one cow. (When the weather is dry and the range is poor, the cattle people have a precise way of putting it. “It’s very drouthy,” they say. When small operators have to fold up for lack of moisture, what they do in the local parlance is “drouth out.”) “Nobody gets rich off cattle in the Strip,” says Clayton Atkin. “That’s just land nobody else wanted.” All but a few of the ranchers live in town-St. George, mostly. And their homes are modest. They drive out to their spreads in their pickups, with horse trail-ers, and work for a few days at branding or calving or rounding up, using a “line cabin” as base-a rustic house, sometimes little more than a shack, with perhaps a propane generator, a “fridge,” and not much else. Strip cowmen hire few hands. Mostly they do their own work, using sons, of which they tend to have quite a few. “But it’s been a good life for us, and it’s a good way to raise kids,” says Stan Esplin. (He has six youngsters-three boys and three girls.) Wives help, too. Joy Atkin, wife of Clayton, is the bookkeeper. Until recent years, she rode in the cattle trucks-which belonged to the buyers-when they went out at roundup time to haul the stock to market. “I showed them where to go,” she says. “They’d get lost and not be able to turn around on those roads.” When the four Atkin boys were small, she’d take them along when she went to help the men, and they’d nap in the pickup while she worked. The boys are grown now. One son, Brent, is part owner of the Atkin cattle operation. Another son, Doyle, has his own truck, and it’s often used to haul the family stock.

Water is a scarce commodity in the region of the Hurricane Cliffs. There are few wells. The gorges of the Colorado River have simply drained the earth dry. Hauling water is a lifelong occupation. On the relatively few occasions when it rains, the water is trapped in ponds, “pock-ets,” and “catchment basins.” “Pockets” are saucerlike depressions in rock, some blasted out by early settlers. The old-timers gave them names and made jokes about them. “We cleaned out Pa’s Pockets this week,” Cloe (Mrs. James B.) Bundy of Mount Trumbull would write in her weekly column in the Washington County News of St. George.

“Catchment basins,” on the other hand, are metal-rimmed reservoirs built jointly by the ranchers and the BIM, thirty-five feet across and ten feet deep, located against a slope to catch runoff and flash floods. To speed the runoff along, the ground above the basin may be surfaced with a mixture of tar and fiberglass or a waxy fluid sprayed on the soil. “It’s the flash floods that keep us in business,” says Clayton Atkin in some ways, is one of the loveliest. If you relish solitude and distance, or simply want to escape for a while, to see the stars at night in all their shining plenitude, the left-hand side of the Arizona Strip may be just your kind of country.

Selected Reading

A Harsh and Proud Land: Saga of the Arizona Strip, by Nellie Iverson Cox. Cox Printing Co., Las Vegas, Nevada, 1982.

Footprints on the Arizona Strip, with Accent on Bundyville, by Nellie Iverson Cox assisted by Helen Bundy Russell. Horizon, Bountiful, Utah, 1973.

The Arizona Strip in Mohave County, by Roman Malach. Graphicopy, New York, 1975.