TUCSON'S TOHONO CHUL PARK

River of the Ancients Archaeologists Float the Colorado to Save Prehistoric Sites

In a warm February afternoon, we pushed away in oared rubber rafts from the Colorado River put-in at Lees Ferry and entered the off-season gloom of Marble Canyon. We passed graffiti painted by 19th-century pioneers, but our clocks were set on an earlier time, and we were on a rescue mission. Our National Park Service expedition of archaeologists, surveyors, soil scientists, photographers, a botanist, and two experts on erosion controls will try to save early American Indian sites in Grand Canyon National Park from being lost because of the Glen Canyon hydroelectric dam. In all, 336 sites are considered endangered, some dating to 500 B.C. This would be my first oar-powered trip through the Grand Canyon's treacherous gorge, and the first boat trip of any kind in winter. Before pushing off, I bathed in the icy river and dried in sunshine. Like the others, I wore a full set of slickers and a life vest. But with daytime temperatures in the 80s, the rain gear soon became a sweatsack, and a downfilled jacket stowed in a rubberized bag seemed like excess baggage.I felt like a tourist as I mopped sunblock on my face. I had packed a fishing rod with three sets of spare clothes and my backpack. After eight days, I expected to leave the expedition at a warm-sounding place called Cremation Canyon and hike out.

From October to May, the river seems strangely depopulated. The summer boatloads of tourists are gone. In winter the gorge becomes quiet except for river sounds and wintering flocks of ducks.

Our rafts rode sluggishly in flat water at four miles per hour. As we drifted near shore, I watched sugar sand trickle down an undercut bank into the river with the steadiness of sand grains through an hourglass. Time-lapse photography has revealed whole beaches disappear this way.

By choking off seasonal floods and raising and lowering the water for hydroelectric generation, Glen Canyon Dam was blamed for setting in motion forces that strip protective sand covering from archaeological sites inside the park.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the dam, agreed in 1992 to pay for archaeological monitoring and erosion control downstream from the dam with power revenue and other monies. And that's how our expedition came to be.

Badger Rapids called my thoughts back. Curl waves fell across our bow, filling the forward well and forcing us to bail.

The first site hove into view, an uninteresting spot, just blackened rock from an old fire on a sand dune kindled by an early nomad.

"The sites were selected not only because of their significance but for the danger they face from erosion," explained expedition leader Lisa Leap, an archaeologist. "Before the dam, the river would flood and cover the sites with protecting silt."

Gabriel Yuselew, a specialist in native farming methods, and Quincy Seowtewa, employees of the Zuni Conservation Project at Zuni, New Mexico, twined sticks, grass, and stones into check dams where erosion nibbles at the bonfire site.

The Zunis, Yuselew told me, consider the Grand Canyon a spiritual place. "This is where the Zunis originated," he said. "We have many sites down here."

Other tribes made similar claims. They include the Southern Consortium of Paiutes, Hopis, Navajos, Hualapais, San Juan South-ern Paiutes, and the Havasupais, whose reservation is in the Canyon.

The sites were selected not only because of their significance but for the danger they face from erosion.

Before the dam, the river would flood and cover the sites with protecting silt.' "The Indians have a big stake in ongoing studies," said Bureau of Reclamation archaeologist Warren Hurley of Durango, Colorado, an expedition member. "The public interest also is huge. There are many constituents such as rafters, hikers, campers, sightseers, anglers, and photographers." Their combined voices, he said, persuaded the bureau to finance the studies.

Supai, Hermit, and Coconino sandstone walls slipped past. Ahead lay muscular rapids, tricky gravel bars, snags, and "suck holes" powerful eddies that can grip a raft.

At Martha's Camp at mile 37, we crowded our tents onto a dune. I fell asleep listening to Seowtewa in the next tent singing Shalako songs in the Zuni language. Shalako are spiritual kachinas, and Seowtewa practiced for a performance for his kiva.

The next morning dawned damp and chilly. Wet-looking clouds hovered in the west. A cold sun barely found us. I pulled my slicker tighter, glad now for the extra layer.

At President Harding Rapids, mile 43.5, a hummock of water boiled over a submerged rock in midstream, creating a huge suck hole. Head boatman Deborah R. Petersen of Olympia, Washington, pulled well away.

"You'd never get out!" she shouted.

(PRECEDING PANEL, PAGE 18) Members of the National Park Service expedition cataloging the Grand Canyon's ruins include, left to right, Northern Arizona University photo archivist Duane Hubbard, boatman Deborah Petersen, and Park Service photographer Michael Quinn. TOM KUHN (PAGES 18 AND 19) The Colorado River courses through Marble Canyon. GARY LADD (ABOVE) Broken pottery litters many of the Canyon's archaeological sites. BOB RINK (LEFT) Quinn photographs petroglyphs at one of the sites while Hubbard assists. TOM KUHN (RIGHT) The Colorado roars through Badger Rapids. BOB RINK

I got a turn at the oars. Canoes are what I know, but the stretch ran calm, and I settled into a dip-and-pull rhythm. Freed from the oars, Petersen became more vocal.

"I dread the bubblies," she said. "Those are the hydraulics and eddies below the big rapids. You don't want to put an oar in. You can dislocate a shoulder. You just have to ride it out."

The raft climbed the back of an eddy. I could feel through the oars how the river becomes stronger on one side of the raft than the other. When we accelerated into a riffle, I leaned into the 12-foot fiberglass oars, centering the raft so I could look at the oncoming curl waves small ones compared to the giants downstream.

Our conversation turned to Glen Canyon releases. Leap argued that more floods, and bigger ones of up to 90,000 cfs twice as big as the bureau's "spike" flood in 1996 must be released from the dam to churn sand from the bottom and redeposit it along the banks and as a protective cover over the archaeological sites. Before the dam, she said, floods typically reached 120,000 cfs.She was convinced bigger floods lasting two to three days would have the same effect as a flash flood in the desert in rearranging the real estate.

The bail pail danced a jig in the front well as the current passed below. Sandstone crosshatched with marine deposits rose higher around us.

Storm clouds held off as we pulled in for lunch and a prowl at Nankoweap Creek, where trout were spawning in the clear stream, and where long-ago peoples farmed and left behind well-preserved granaries.

At mile 56, we camped below Kwagunt Rapids. One of our five rafts arrived with a three-inch hole from a sharp rock. Repairs continued into the night.

Since I could not help, I went fishing in Kwagunt's tailwaters, and in no time I hooked one trout after another. We added fish to dinner.

We bedded down, and woke up, this time to hoarfrost on the tent. Thick clouds pressed closer beyond a veil of thin overcast that denied us the morning sun. Coffee A call came early, and a two-gallon pot didn't last long.

When I climbed aboard, this time I was wearing gloves. The Colorado now meandered so much it was difficult to tell direction without a compass. The shoreline became "boat-right" or "boat-left."

We pulled in on boat-right to investigate a site on a ledge 50 feet above the river that contained potsherds and a stonecutting tool. Then we continued past Tapeats sandstone cliffs that leak sheets of salt into the Colorado.

At Site 360, our next stop, archaeologists discovered a stone tool not recorded

by earlier expeditions. Trained eyes spotted an assortment of sherds.

"We see different kinds of ceramics," Leap said. "There was a lot of trading and moving going on. No elaborate buildings. They probably knew the floods were coming, so they didn't spend a lot of time on them. They were intended for seasonal use.

"Different cultures," she added, "came down [to the river] just to get the salt, which they used for ceremonies and other things."

Leap led us to where a broken mano and a metate stuck half out of a bank. Rock piles nearby marked room sites. The place goes unpublicized, and tourists are not taken there.

"This was all protected until the dam was built," Leap complained. "Alternate levels uncovered all these things, ripped them out of the banks. They're going downstream, and we're losing all this data."

We camped on a white-sand beach at an intersection of Paleolithic cultures and near some petroglyphs that marked a trace leading to room sites higher up.

Around us, locoweed bloomed bravely with clusters of purple flowers as a forceful evening wind sandblasted the camp. Something metal tinkled over pebbles past my tent in the night.

I now wore the down jacket and slicker over two layers of clothing. My respect grew for these scientists who warm themselves with good humor.

We enjoyed suspense as NPS archaeologist Tim Burchette of Page and Mike Yeatts, an archaeologist for the Hopi tribe, dug into a 500-year-old roasting pit thought to be Paiute. It was a salvage operation. Half the pit had already been washed away.

They made a discovery. "At the bottom, stones were stuck upright, something we've never seen before," Yeatts reported. "The coals would fall between the stones and they could cook on top of them."

Cold-weather breakfasts were quick, and we as quickly reloaded the rafts for a go at Tanner Rapids. The oared rafts got through unscathed, but curl waves snatched cargo from the surveyor's motorized raft.

At Tanner the canyon broadened. "This is an area of major Paleolithic activity, with rooms, farms, roasting pits, pictographs, and lithics [tools]," Leap said.

I'd enjoyed successful fishing and wondered whether the Indians did, but Leap said, "There's no evidence of a fish-eating society. Their petroglyphs all depict animals or people, snakes and lizards. But no fish."

The corner of a miner's soddy jutted from a sand dune next to a gully where the archaeologists experienced disappointment upon discovering that a metate recorded by another expedition two years before had disappeared into the river.

A brutal wind lashed us all day. My last night, it was my luck to pull KP at our camp above Unkar Rapids, just upstream from the Unkar ruins. Here we encountered another expedition that included NPS archaeologist Helen Fairley, camped across the river at Cardenas Creek.

Fairley, now working for NPS parks and monuments in the Flagstaff area, led a team of 12 archaeologists who walked both banks of the Colorado from Glen Canyon Dam to Separation Canyon in 1990. They found 140 sites not previously recorded.

"It was a slow process," she recounted. "We usually made about two to three miles a day.

"We found more earlier occupation than we anticipated. We found lots of sites that dated to when the Paiutes, Hualapais, and Havasupais first came into the Canyon. It was exciting to discover there was an extensive occupation that had been invisible because it had been buried by previous floods."

Rain began after dishes and poured all night. Water infiltrated my one-man tent. By morning everything inside was wet. Snow had fallen almost to the canyon bottom.

On my last day with the expedition, I layered on the last of my dry clothing. More than ever, I needed to stay dry for the hike out, so I elected to ride the motor raft.

Unfortunately Unkar Rapids made our way difficult with six-foot waves. The oared rafts emerged relatively dry, but the heavier motor raft flung back a bow wave that drenched us. So much for staying dry.

We slammed through the big rapids in quick succession: Nevills, Hance, Sockdolager, and Zoroaster, the motor raft taking water in each one. My teeth chattered with hypothermia.

By the time we pulled into Cremation Creek, there was no chance of a warm ending. I was soaked, without dry clothes or sleeping gear, and running out of daylight, with a nine-mile hike still to go.

Small mercies came my way: a boat ride across the river to Bright Angel Landing and an offer to dry my clothes at Phantom Ranch. I climbed with a headlamp up Bright Angel Trail, through four inches of snow near the top, wearing everything I had.

I made it out at 2 A.M. as another storm approached. On the Colorado, winter can overtake you suddenly. For the people I left on the river, I knew the ordeal wasn't over.