The Arizona Strip of Clarence Dutton

BY: Page Stegner

Isolated, remote, austere-and spectacular . . . THE ARIZONA STRIP OF CLARENCE DUTTON

How many times have we driven this road? How many river trips over the last 10 years have washed us out somewhere in the vicinity of Four Corners, only to be confronted once again with the realization that the quickest way west and home starts out southward? South out of Utah to Page, Arizona, and on toward the Arizona Strip through a slot in the Echo Cliffs; across Navajo Bridge at Marble Canyon and along the foot of the Vermilion Cliffs, then over the Kaibab Plateau to the little town of Fredonia; over the northern extension of the Kanab and Uinkaret plateaus toward the valley of the Virgin River. Off the Arizona Strip to accelerate madly on to St. George, Utah, Littlefield, Arizona, and Mesquite, Nevada. On to Las Vegas and a different sort of strip. Out across the great Mojave Desert to Quivira, Cibola, El Dorado. What, we always wonder afterward, was the hurry? This time it's going to be different, my wife, Lynn, insists. We are going to stop. We are going to wander. We are going to peer into the "great arroyo" (as the first Spanish explorers called the Grand Canyon) from vantage points heretofore unvisited. Or at least less visited. Except for the highway route described above, and a spur road across the Kaibab Plateau from Jacob Lake to the Grand Canyon's North Rim, there isn't much pavement on the Arizona Strip-that part of the state lying north of the Colorado River. Bounded on the east by the Echo Cliffs and on the west by the Virgin Mountains, the area is in great part roadless, or traversed by dirt tracks that often resemble goat trails and are only sporadically marked. You guess where you want to go by the direction in which tracks disappear through the scrub and by a general understanding that the sun travels east to west. If you turn north, you regain the highway. If you go south, you eventually fall into that "horrid abyss."

of the Grand Wash Cliffs, 84,700 acres in the Paiute Wilderness, 7,900 acres around Mount Trumbull, 14,600 acres around Mount Logan, 110,000 acres of the Paria Canyon and Vermilion Cliffs, 6,500 acres in the Cottonwood Point section, 77,100 acres of Kanab Creek, 40,600 acres around Saddle Mountain. Included in the National Wilderness Preservation System by the Arizona Wilderness Act of 1984, the total comprises about 397,300 acres. That's a drop in the bucket, actually; but fortunately-or perhaps unfortunately-it is hard to tell where the protected lands end and the unprotected begin. You can fool yourself into ignoring the threat to more than 600,000 acres of this roadless region by proposed uranium mining. And there's nobody out there directing traffic.

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That is one of the reasons I'm amenable to a leisurely crossing. Another is that I have been browsing in Clarence Dutton's Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District, and for the first time since John McPhee's Basin and Range I have actually enjoyed reading something about geomorphology. Published in 1882, Dutton's study-despite its austere title and the fact that it is a U.S. Geological Survey reportis an extraordinarily entertaining book. Dutton takes his reader along. As he examines the Canyon district, he enter tains; he gives his science lessons without forgetting that most of us are poor students and easily distracted; he commands our attention with a power of descriptive narration that so exceeds our own meager scribblings we forget all this is about drainage and erosion, faulting and flexing, rainfall and declivity rate.

"I have taken the liberty," Dutton writes, "...of attacking the reader through his imagination, and while trying to amuse his fancy with pictures of travel, have sought to thrust upon him unawares certain facts which I regard of importance...." He has made me want to go look at it all again, now that I have viewed it through his eyes and better learned how to see.The five elongated plateaus that lie between the Virgin Mountains along the Nevada border and the Echo Cliffs near the western boundary of the Navajo Indian Reservation make up much of the territory Dutton's survey concentrated on during the summers of 1879 and 1880-territory through which we now travel as we turn off U.S. Route 89 onto 89A and head across the Marble Canyon platform. The road winds down toward the river over a sloping desert of sage, rabbit brush, and Indian rice grass, and crosses the gorge a few miles below the confluence of the Paria and Colorado rivers at Lees Ferry. The parking lot just across Navajo Bridge is empty, except for a motor home and a pickup with a "cramper" on the back. The proprietor of the latter is having his picture taken in front of a monument to the fugitive and ferryboat operator John D. Lee-"frontiersman, trailblazer, builder, a man of great faith, sound judgment, and indomitable courage." I have to wonder about the "sound judgment," since John D. was the only Mormon ever tried and executed for his part in the Mountain Meadows massacre near Cedar City, Utah. His judgment might have proved sounder had he blazed a trail somewhat farther south of the crossing where he was eventually caught and which bears his name. (See Arizona Highways, January 1988.)We stop to tie down a flapping tarp near the Hatch River Expeditions warehouse at Cliff Dwellers Lodge. Behind us to the south, in the direction of Flagstaff and the San Francisco Peaks, House Rock Valley spreads out in a vast, undifferentiated plain of rocky washes and low, barren hillocks. Bracketed by the blue rim of the Kaibab Plateau on the west and the sheer wall of the Echo Cliffs monocline on the east, it appears less than inviting-though it seems to have served well enough as winter range for cooperative livestock (OPPOSITE PAGE) A summer bailstorm in the Kaibab National Forest. In winter, snow limits access to the forest, which abuts Grand Canyon National Park. Ponderosa pine, fir, spruce, and aspen groves shelter a variety of wild creatures, including bison, mule deer, and the rare Kaibab squirrel.

(ABOVE) Sunset at Bright Angel Point, on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. The visitors' lodge here offers a view strikingly different from those on the South Rim. Quiet forests, rolling meadows, and, in season, fields of wildflowers await the traveler who drives 215 miles from the south side.

(FOLLOWING PANEL, PAGES 20 AND 21) Kanab Canyon, looking north from Kanab Point. The view includes part of Grand Canyon National Park, with the Kanab Creek Wilderness in the distance.

companies during the late 19th century, and still is home for one of Arizona's two buffalo herds. One pioneer spoke eloquently of its hospitality when, on a rock at the spring near the head of the valley, he carved his name, "Joseph Adams," and the inscription, "To Arizona and Busted on June 6 A.D. 1873."

In front of us, the Paria Plateau terminates in the farthest extension of the Vermilion Cliffs, a 1,000 to 2,000-foot escarpment that stretches more than 100 miles from the southwestern end of the Markagunt Plateau in Utah to the Paria Valley. Powell named these walls for the color they turn at sunset, but in the cloudless heat of this midday they seem washed out, the folds of their vertical surfaces flattened, and the distinctions between horizontal strata blurred to a uniform hue of pale rose. Dutton observed the phenomenon more than a century ago. Without the middle tones of light and shade, "the cliffs seem to wilt and drop as if retracting their grandeur to hide it from the merciless radiance of the sun whose very effulgence flouts them."

I join them in retraction when we pull over for lunch at a former campsite of the Dominguez-Escalante party, now a historical marker near the foot of the monoclinal flexure comprising the eastern front of the Kaibab Plateau. Lynn does what she can with limp lettuce, peanut butter, and a loaf of bread that resembles in color and texture the carboniferous rock on which we are parked. I sit muttering in the shade of the truck, pouring sweat, idly wondering what the good friars had for their lunch when, returning to Santa Fe after a fivemonth counterclockwise circumnaviga-

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Observation of Utah's high plateaus, they were the first Europeans to see the valley of the Virgin, the first to climb the Hurricane Cliffs and cross the Arizona Strip, the first to ford the Colorado above the Grand Canyon, the first to map this country in detail and with remarkable accuracy.

The sage, rabbit brush, and cactus of the Marble platform give way to juniper and piñon, mountain mahogany, and finally ponderosa pine, Engelmann spruce, and aspen as our map leads us 4,000 feet up into the green forest of the Kaibab. Then we make our first grave mistake (for it is Memorial Day weekend) when we turn south from the junction at Jacob Lake toward the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. In a few miles, we begin to flank a long series of grassy meadows where wildflowers spot the terrace with color, and afternoon thunderheads are reflected in shallow mirrors of standing water. In less than an hour, we have been transported from slickrock desert to alpine retreat. Indeed, by the time we reach the national park boundary a few miles below Deer Lake, we are caught in a freak spring snowstorm that forces us to the side of the road. Two hours ago, I was hyperthermic; now I'm hypothermic.

Four out of the 12 chapters in the Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District are written about the Kaibab and its unceremonious southern termination in what Major Powell alternately referred to as the "black depths" or "the most sublime spectacle on earth." Some of Dutton's most elegant prose is reserved for that particular moment on the densely forested plateau when, as he rides sedately across a meadow and through the pines, leaning from his saddle to pluck a wildflower from a shaded bank beside a stream, "the earth suddenly sinks at our feet to illimitable depths. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, the awful scene is before us."

There are two awful scenes, actually. The first (as in awe plus full) derives from the incomprehensible chasm itself, from the power of one's emotional reverence for the majestic, from wonderment inspired by the ensemble of terraces, buttes, walls, amphitheaters, pilasters, A winter storm over Toroweap, on the Grand Canyon's North Rim. At the end of a dirt road 3,000 feet above the Colorado River, the seldom-visited Toroweap Overlook provides some of the Canyon's most remote and spectacular views.

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gorges within gorges, that constitute the vision before one's eyes. One's ecstasy, it has often been noted, is tinged with a little fear. A little dread. There is nothing to say about all this, no way to articulate it, except to echo Dutton's own disclaimer: "Surely no imagination can construct out of its own material any picture having the remotest resemblance to the Grand Cañon." It is, as J. B. Priestley once remarked, a kind of landscape Judgment Day, "not a show place, a beauty spot, but a revelation."

The second "awful" derives from a spectacle unavailable to Messrs. Powell, Dutton, Priestley, et al. to wit, what appear to be 10,000 tourists at Grand Canyon Lodge (presumably one per vehicle) staring at the void with cocktails in hand, gawking from the terrace, the dining room, the bar, the cafeteria; some hobbling down the Transept Trail, the Bright Angel Trail, the North Kaibab Trail, neoprene coolers in one hand, cameras in the other. It is humanity in such appalling, achromatic, featureless number that the moment we are reminded of our membership in this assembly, we flee the scene, screaming out the truck window our paraphrase of Captain Dutton's words: "Surely no imagination can construct out of its own material any picture having the remotest resemblance to Grand Canyon Lodge on Memorial Day weekend." It is not the fault of the National Park Service (except for allowing these accommodations in the first place). We cast two votes for a national program of euthanasia.

It is long after sunset when we reach Pipe Spring at the northern end of the Kanab Plateau. Once the headquarters for various pioneer cattle cooperatives (whose wards had overgrazed most of the Arizona Strip even by Dutton's time), later established (in 1924) as a national monument, the site lies within the Kaibab Indian Reservation. On this holiday, the parking area is stuffed with motor homes, all running generators to keep airconditioners humming.

No matter. We are on our way, headed down a dirt road that leads southwest across Antelope Valley and eventually into the Toroweap Valley, the lower end of which drops in several abrupt descents nearly 5,000 feet into the inner gorge of the Grand Canyon.

I assure Lynn that we are not missing anything by crossing this part of the Kanab Plateau at night. She can take Dutton's word for it when he describes the Kanab as "a simple monotonous expanse, without a salient point to fix the attention, save one [Kanab Creek]." The Toroweap Valley, however, is a different box of rocks. I have seen the valley's canyonside edge from the top and from the bottom-in fact, from the bottom of a capsized raft at Lava Fallsand I would like to take this opportunity to stand on Vulcans Throne, the volcanic cinder cone so representative of the basaltic nature of this region, and hurl a few selected insults at that treacherous rapid down below.

But somewhere in the dark, ignoring the carping voice in the adjacent seat reminding me that this is a leisure trip, that we could stop, that we don't have to do this marathon thing again, I make a wrong turn. "Just around the next bend," I continue to insist. "We're almost there." But it isn't; and we aren't.

Eventually I relinquish the helm, and we throw down in a sandy area strewn with prickly pear and agave. When we waken at 6:00 A.M. after a brief and sullen sleep, it appears that we have somehow tacked

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quite far to windward of the Toroweap Valley. In fact, judging from the position of the volcanic heights of Mount Trumbull and Mount Logan, the entire Uinkaret Plateau seems to have drifted to the east of us, and we are lying in our sleeping bags looking back at the Hurricane Cliffs. To the best of my knowledge, which is admittedly negligible and utterly unassisted by any of the maps in my possession (no topographic maps included, of course; it's too easy to find one's way with topo maps), we are somewhere in the middle of a 2,500-square-mile section of the northwestern corner of Arizona and about 20 miles from Wolf Hole. Maybe. Wolf Hole is an address occasionally used by writer Edward Abbey (quite possibly as a joke); otherwise it is indistinguishable from the rest of the Shivwits Plateau, a broad, gullied plain of desert scrub rimmed by flattopped hills, a nursery of great silence. Even the literature specializing in the Arizona Strip and the Grand Canyon district is quiet on the subject of the Shivwits. Dutton sidesteps a description of its geophysical features on the grounds that it resembles the Uinkaret, the facts about which he feels are more "compact, A rare snow blankets Diamond Butte. Explorer Frank Dellenbaugh, an artist and topographer with Major Powell's second Grand Canyon expedition, gave the name to this 6,250foot formation when his party found an anthill covered with quartz crystals that glittered like diamonds.

Intelligible, and, on the whole, more complete." Other observers offer a line or two about its geological history ("the Shivwits Plateau is crowned by scattered volcanic cones") or about its one bit of human history that has captured attention: the killing of three members of the Powell expedition who had left the party at Separation Rapid, climbed out of the Canyon, and presumably were discovered by a hostile band of Indians a few miles north of Mount Dellenbaugh. Powell's narrative itself devotes only about 10 pages to that part of the river canyon that cuts through the Shivwits, and on the subject of the plateau above he has nothing to say other than to note evidence of its volcanic origins and to remark, "I know enough of the country to be certain that it is a desert of rock and sand...." There is, to be sure, a lot of rock and sand. But there is more. There is unequaled solitude. We have not encountered a single soul since we turned off the pavement at Pipe Spring. There is magnif icent early light on the eastern face of the Virgin Mountains, in stark contrast to the dark and illegible slope across the valley from our camp. There is a pungent smell of sage and piñon and damp dust that triggers the memory of other wakings in other deserts. There is a walk I take down the wash (while Lynn works her magic on instant coffee, rye crackers, and a wizened apple) discovering the astonishing colors and multiplicity of wildflowers-yellow ragleaf, purple phlox, orange globemallow, red verbena, and prickly poppy with its white petals and egg-yolk center. And there is the strong, sweet perfume of the lavender snapdragons called Palmer penstemon that I pick in a groveling gesture of atonement for last night's forced march. But the bella dona, I find, has already provided her own bouquet of white trumpet flowers of the sacred datura, or nightshade, nicely displayed in an empty mayonnaise jar. At a crossroad somewhere in Wolf Hole Valley, we turn west into the afternoon sun and bump along toward Jacobs Well. The route descends a long gulch spotted with cholla and grizzly bear cactus, both in flower, then begins to climb through Lime Kiln Canyon toward the crest of the Virgin Mountains along the Nevada border. This is clearly not a habitat to visit in one's BMW. Rocks that have fallen from the palisades above threaten to block the narrow, precipitous passage, and the old truck bed, burdened with its load of rafts and oar frames, bangs on the axle at every pothole and ledge. We pull over for a moment near the top of our ascent to look back across the canyon in the direction of the Grand Wash Cliffs. A congregation of turkey vultures drifts in a clockwise eddy below us. The meridian sun shimmers off chocolate rocks, bleaches cross-bedded sandstones to the palest pink, washes the entire plateau in bluish haze. Distant buttes dance on mercurial vapors. Again the text is Dutton's: "There are no concrete notions founded in experience upon which a conception of these color effects and optical delusions can be constructed and made intelligible. A perpetual glamour envelops the landscape." Again it is a scene that inspires awe-and a little dread. Onward. At a turn just over the summit I encounter a cow, who stares at me in stupefaction before commencing a suicidal dash down the trail and out of sight around the next hairpin turn. Following, I encounter two cows. Then three. Soon I have collected a small herd, all of them bawling, stiff-tailed, befouling the roadbed in a beef-witted dash for sanctuary. Can't get distracted here. Must press on. Hope the rancher who owns this stampede doesn't see the dust cloud down there in Mesquite. Where again the quickest way west is southward, through that other strip and out across the great Mojave to Quivira, Cibola, and El Dorado. I am now less sure than ever there is any cause for hurry.