The Kaibab Plateau

THE MOUNTAIN LYING DOWN TRYSTING WITH THE ΚΑΙΒΑB PLATEAU

We sat in a dimly lit room. In the background, slot machines ratcheted and thumped and pinged. There were only three or four other people in the pint-size casino on the Kaibab-Paiute Indian Reservation. Ben Pikyavit and I moved away from the noisy machines to talk about a mountain 40 miles away.

Ben is a middle-aged KaibabPaiute. When he isn't working at the casino, he sometimes visits the mountain where his grandfather grew up. "There are spirits on that mountain," he said. "At timés you can see them through your peripheral vision. In the old days, the Paiute people used that mountain all the time; they lived up there in the summers." The mountain to which he referred is called Kaivavwi in the Paiute language, a term translated as "the mountain lying down." To the ear of nonIndians, Kaivavwi became Kaibab, and while the sound of the name may have changed, no one has yet come up with a more succinct or appropriate description of the magnificent Kaibab Plateau. For a moment, there was silence between us, then Ben continued in a soft voice, like someone remembering: "The food and medicine were up there, the pine nuts, berries, leaves, deer, and turkey. When the ancient people ate up there.

KAIBAB PLATEAU

The Paiute name for the plateau intrigued me. I liked the idea that a mountain would lie down and people would bring it gifts, but what does it mean to say "a mountain lies down"? It means simply that the Kaibab Plateau is a great slab of earth that is more horizontal than it is vertical. You can see it most clearly from a hill east of Kanab, Utah: a reclining giant in the distance, nearly 100 miles from north to south and 35 miles east to west at its widest point, yet vertically less than two miles above sea level and even less if you measure its height from the red-dirt desert that surrounds it.

The lower end of the plateau begins a few miles north of the Arizona border near the former village of Paria, 38 miles east of present-day Kanab and 13 miles west of the Paria River. From an elevation of about 4,000 feet, the plateau goes southward into Arizona, rising gradually to 9,280 feet near DeMotte Park before ending at the lip of the Grand Canyon. While the plateau is uninhabited most of the year, nearly half a million people visit it each summer, most without knowing precisely where they are. Anyone who has traveled to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon has ascended the Kaibab Plateau because State Route 67, the only paved road to the Rim, follows the spine of the mountain from U.S. Route 89A at Jacob Lake. The southern edge of the plateau extends to Cape Royal and the spectacular vista from Point Sublime on the North Rim of the Canyon. Understandably, visitors heading for the North Rim are preoccupied with what lies ahead and not with the terrain that gets them there.

As a result, most of them drive single-mindedly toward something in the distance they can't see. The Kaibab is so heavily forested, and the trees are so tall - the fire lookouts have been built between 100 and 120 feet high to afford a view over them that when travelers finally reach the North Rim, it is an incredible jolt: The tall trees abruptly end and the Earth drops away. Point Sublime was not named capriciously. The last time I was at Point Sublime, I thought about Clarence Dutton, the man who had named it. Dutton had been the geologist on Maj. John Wesley Powell's second expedition on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 1871. In the summer of 1880, Dutton went back to the plateau country to refresh his memory of various details because he had been commissionedby the U.S. Geological Survey to write a description of the lands adjacent to the Canyon. In 1882 the government published his monograph as Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District. The first printing of the book had a press run of just 3,000 copies. Not only was the rare book lavishly illustrated, it was beautifully written. Dutton, who had been a divinity student at Yale before becoming a geologist, sprinkled his dry scientific prose with a lyrical description of what he saw. The top of the plateau, he wrote "is a constant succession of parks and glades dreamy avenues of grass and flowers winding between sylvan walls, or spreading out in broad open meadows."

As I stood at Point Sublime and looked westward toward the Powell Plateau and Dutton Point, I wondered whether it was possible to experience the Kaibab Plateau and the North Rim the way Dutton had, as a wild and silent landscape. With this and other questions in mind, I had driven north 275 miles from my home in Tucson to Flagstaff, then north and west from Flagstaff another 165 miles to Jacob Lake, the most accessible point on the Kaibab Plateau. Jacob Lake in fact everything called a "lake" on the Kaibab Plateau is a misnomer. If you took a 20-foot boat to Jacob Lake, your boat would likely be larger than the so-called lake. Lakes on the Kaibab Plateau resemble ponds, but they aren't even that; they are sinkholes, which means that sometimes they hold a few feet of water, and often they're dry. Dutton had seen these sinkholes, butadmitted he wasn't sure what they were. He was intrigued by them because they were the only form of standing water to be found on the plateau. There are no rivers or running creeks on the Kaibab, and yet it is covered with stately forests and wide alpine meadows called parks. How could this be? Rainfall is one explanation; limestone is another. The lower end of the plateau receives only 10 inches of annual rainfall, but as the elevation increases, so too does the amount of rain, some of it falling as snow. In the aspen and spruce forests near DeMotte Park, annual precipitation averages around 28 inches. By Arizona standards, that's a deluge, but the water quickly vanishes. None of it remains to form live streams.

K A I B A B P L A T E A U

The Kaibab is different from the three other plateaus that extend to the North Rim not only because it's higher but because it's a limestone formation, a designation for rocks that are a combination of limestone and other soft sands. The limestone formation makes strange things happen on the Kaibab. One example: The place is thick with mule deer that have unusually large antlers, a result of limestone in the roots of the plants the deer eat.Limestone, which is very porous and very alkaline, also is responsible for the sinkholes. Pine needles are acidic, and, as Janet Travis, a watershed specialist with the Forest Service, observed, "When it rains, the water goes through the pine needles and increases its acid. The acid water goes through the limestone rock and tends to dissolve it. In areas where the limestone is less dense, it forms underground caverns. At some point, so much of the cavern has been eaten away that there's not enough rock to support the roof, so it collapses."

When an underground cavern collapses, a sinkhole forms, meaning a chunk of limestone has fallen away and left a depression on the surface. That's why "lakes" on the Kaibab Plateau measure less than an acre in size. Water filters through the top limestone layers of the plateau and doesn't stop until it gets down around 800 feet, where it encounters an impenetrable layer of Hermit Shale. At that level, a few springs are formed, but most of this precious water eventually drains into the Colorado River and feeds the rapids in the Grand Canyon.

Shortly after sunset one evening, I drove to one of those sinkholes, a place called Jolly Sink, about seven miles southeast of Jacob Lake. When I arrived, it was not quite dark. A Paiute Indian couple were there with their five sons. The kids ran through the grassy depression and climbed all over a 20-foot pile of limestone boulders. I must have had a perplexed look on my face because the man turned toward me and confirmed, "You're here."

"Jolly Sink, eh?" (There was no sign.) "Yeah," he said, anticipating my next comment, "been a dry year."

Jolly Sink was a delightful spot, but it contained about as much water as a couple of washing machines with full loads. The air was pleasantly cool, though, and the stars above the clearing were the only lights to be seen.

At sunrise the next day, I determined to duplicate at least part of Clarence Dutton's experience by seeing the North Rim from a spot on the plateau that was not overrun with visitors. I settled on Timp Point, a short distance west of Quaking Aspen Canyon. I started from Jacob Lake and headed south to DeMotte Park, a broad green meadow with a tiny sinkhole (Deer Lake) at its center. Dutton and his party had camped at DeMotte Park - where the Forest Service maintains a campground today because, being more or less centrally located, it was ideally suited as a base camp from which to explore the rest of the plateau.

Just beyond the campground, I turned west and south to a dirt road (Forest Service Road 422) and meandered through aspen forests to another odd clearing, a place where all the aspens were little more than saplings. All of the taller trees lay rotting in the hills that dropped off to the east.

What I saw was a rare timber "blowdown" site. In 1953 tornadolike winds cut a flat swath across the plateau. The winds were as strong as a twister, but they didn't spiral. All the trees fell flat in one direction.

Beyond the blowdown, the forest road turned east and eventually led to a narrow cutoff to the south into Timp Canyon. The forest became mostly well-spaced tall pines, an inviting wood dappled with shafts of sunlight. But there was no hint of what I would find eight miles down the narrow road.

What I found was the sudden end of a road in a pine forest fringed with twisted piñons. Beyond that, the incredible panorama of the Powell Plateau and Dutton Point and all of the Grand Canyon spread before me. There was not a soul in sight, and I didn't need to rely on peripheral vision to start thinking thoughts of the supernatural. I had no doubt about the emotions that made Ben Pikyavit and other Paiutes believe as they did: If spirits could choose a place to live, this was where they'd go.