THE WITCHES' WATER POCKET MYSTERY

A CAULDRON OF CATACLYSM, DESTRUCTION, AND MYSTERY THE WITCHES' WATER РОСКЕТ

KEEP THINKING OF MAJ. JOHN WESLEY POWELL AND THE END OF THE WORLD. OR MAYBE IT'S THE BEGINNING OF THE world. Or maybe it's the aftermath of the explosion of creation that left us with everything we know to be the Earth and this stark and serene corner of it called the Unikaret Plateau.

It looks like a place of both cataclysm and peace, destruction and invention.

Black basalt boulders the size of automobiles lie in golden fields bordered by rock ridges that tower to 1,500 feet. Vast plains of lava stretch for miles to volcanic cinder cones that are ace-of-spades black and obsessive in the perfection of their shapes.

A smattering of piñon and juniper trees juts out of ground thick with turquoise-colored sage. The ponderosa-covered hulk of Mount Trumbull dominates the horizon.

And hovering above it all, the eternal, humbling, blue-sky silence of the great Grand Canyon. Its North Rim at Toroweap is still some 30 miles south of us. But I can feel its dominating presence over this land.

I'm here because of Major Powell, the brave and brilliant explorer of Arizona's canyon country. He led an expedition through here from 1871 to 1873 and wrote about it in Canyons of the Colorado, published 24 years later.

An entry in that book captured me. It spoke of his decision to spend the night at a place of reliable water called the Witches' Water Pocket.

I stopped cold at that passage and that phrase, the Witches' Water Pocket. What was it? What did it mean? What on earth did it look like?

For that last question I had a vivid, if fantastic, answer, an illustration found in Powell's book.

The drawing depicted flames jumping above the water of the pool, its boundary within the rock enclosure populated by dancing Indians, and over the semicircle of rocks forming the pool's back wall, a moon hanging so

SOME BELIEVE IT [THE CROSS] WAS PUT THERE AS FAR BACK AS 1776, BY FRANCISCO DOMINGUEZ AND SILVESTRE VELIZ DE ESCALANTE, SPANISH PRIESTS WHO TREKKED THROUGH THE REGION LOOKING FOR A ROUTE BETWEEN SANTA FE AND MONTEREY, IN WHAT'S NOW CALIFORNIA.

white and full that its intentions could hardly be pure. My imagination won out, and I began to research. An old magazine article alerted me to a book, published in 1882, called Tertiary History of the Grand Canyon District, in which geologist Clarence Dutton described the Pocket as a "weird place, the abode of witches": "Around it are the desolate Phlegraean fields, where jagged masses of black lava still protrude through rusty, decaying cinders. Patches of soil, thin and coarse, sustain groves of cedar and piñon. Beyond and above are groups of cones, looking as if they might at any day break forth in renewed eruption." How could a place of such evident natural drama remain lost, except to the most experienced backcountry hands? The Pocket isn't listed on any modern tourist map, and I could find no mention of it in any guidebook. The best I could do was the official 1880 map of Arizona Territory, by Eckhoff and Riecker, on which it's called the Witches' Pool. But that was enough. With the help of guide Tom Folks of the Bureau of Land Management office in St. George, Utah, I was able to rediscover this storied gorge, 125 years and 24 days after Powell.

Early October and the lingering summer heat assaults us as we cross the Arizona Strip on State Route 389. We turn south onto Mohave County Road 5 and ride alongside the boulders and the wind-battered cliffs that begin to define this landscape of tumult. Seeing this parched plateau for the first time, I remark to Folks that it hardly seems possible that it could hold any water at all - or that a place of such profound seclusion could exist here. But we have a copy of Powell's book in the truck and his description of the Pocket to assure us as we press on toward the base of Mount Trumbull: "It is a deep gorge on the flank of this great mountain. During the rainy season the water rolls down the mountain side, plunging over precipices, and excavates a deep basin in the solid rock below. This basin, hidden from the sun, holds the water year round." On the morning of their trip to the Pocket, Powell and his party arose from their resting place at Pipe Spring, in northernmost Arizona between the present-day towns of Colorado City and Fredonia, and marched south into this same valley over what was then described as a "sea of grass." They were led by Chuar'ruumpeak, a Kaibab-Paiute Indian chief, and a guide named Shuts. It was something of a forced march, a brutally long day. Powell described Shuts as a "one-eyed, bare-legged, merryfaced pygmy," actually running on foot in front of Chuar'ruumpeak, the major, and his men, all of whom were mounted. Shuts pointed the way with a slender cane, bounding ahead over the shortest route he could find, then sitting on a rock to wait for the mounted party to catch up, "always meeting us with a jest, his face a rich mine of sunny smiles." Throughout the day, the guide urged the party forward to reach its destination by nightfall. They made it. Shuts walked and ran more than 40 miles that day.

We turn onto an unmarked two-track dirt road, 42 miles down from State 389. The only landmark is a ramshackle farmhouse a half mile west. From the farmhouse, we drive .8 of a mile before passing through a gate, then turn north and continue another half mile over jagged boulders and deep ruts, tree limbs scratching at the truck windows. When it's no longer possible to drive, we get out and hike the final quarter-mile stretch into the Pocket. As we walk, my mind fixes again on Powell. The major was a Civil War veteran, tough as bad jerky, and my best guess was that as he entered this lava-rock hideaway for the first time, he wasn't the least bit afraid. He didn't know what he'd find, or what might find him. But after leaving part of one of his arms on the ground at Shiloh, I doubt there was much left for him to fear. The harshness of the sun diminishes when we enter the gorge. It's narrow and walled on one side by a steep slope studded with oak trees and on the other by sheer cliffs, the height of which has the effect of closing off the world outside. The sky becomes a mere sliver overhead, and the silence drops like a hammer. This is a fine place for pondering mysteries, and the Pocket presents two of them. The flat rock on the gorge's cliff side is

THE WITCHES' WATER POCKET

We walk through the cool oak shadows to the far end of the gorge and the pool. It's a depression in the basalt, a meager holding of perhaps 20 feet in width and the same in length, filled with mud, jumping with bugs, and in my imagination at least, alive with evil spirits.

Chief Chuar'ruumpeak called them innupin. (Oonupits was singular.) They appeared in dust devils and made a whistling sound. At times they inhabited nearby cliffs and would seize Indian children and toss them down to their deaths.

But mostly the witches lived at the pool. The chief said they were active at night and had to be driven away to keep them from causing harm.

Writer and artist Frederick Dellenbaugh, a member of Powell's party at age 17, told of Chuar'ruumpeak's encounter with the witches in his 1908 book, A Canyon Voyage. He described Chuar'ruumpeak in camp at the pool.

After one of his obliging men pulled off his shoes, the chief smoked a cigarette, reclining "in a princely way" beside the fire. Suddenly, he jumped to his feet and listened intently as he peered through the night gloom.

Dellenbaugh asked what he'd heard. "Oonupits," the chief whispered solemnly, never breaking his stare. Then Chuar'ruumpeak aimed his long muzzle-loading rifle in the direction of the sound and squeezed the trigger. The blast satisfied him that the unseen intruder was destroyed or driven off.

Dellenbaugh also said Chuar'ruumpeak and his men often woke up in the middle of the night and sang. One Indian would begin very low, and the others would join in one by one, increasing the volume until all were singing in full voice.

"This woke us up," Dellenbaugh wrote. "We threw things at them, but with no effect. 'What do you do it for?' I said to Chuar'ruumpeak.

"To drive away the oonupits,' he answered."

I see no oonupits. But the muck at the pool's edge is clawed by the paws of a coyote come to drink. It occurs to me that in the mythology of some Indian tribes, witches are believed to take different forms at night, sometimes occupying the bodies of animals, especially coyotes.

The thought makes me chuckle. But my bravery, unlike Powell's, is easy. I experience the Pocket in the full flush of daylight, not at night, when darkness falls over this gorge with such awesome finality.

Maybe then, when the wind rides down the mountain and whistles through the cracks in the rocks, it's possible to see what Chuar'ruumpeak saw.

Hiking out into the sun, we depart the abode of the witches. As we climb into the truck, Folks says, "What's really neat about this place is that except for this truck and the road we came in on, nothing has changed since Powell was here."

The drive home takes us over Trumbull's summit. In the quiet of the pines, I keep thinking about the Witches' Water Pocket, and vow next time to spend the night. We'll see if these legendary innupin let me live to hear the singing of the canyon wrens at dawn.