Clandestine Canyon

CANYON

Few humans travel the pristine creek-filled chasm, reachable only by boat lay with only my face above water in the clear creek that flows down Surprise Canyon, soaking up the coolness. Minnows nibbled at the hard blood that rimmed the crisscross scratches on my shins from bushwhacking through catclaw acacia.

Except for my companions who camped upstream, I'd seen no other humans in this huge side canyon of the Grand Canyon. All three of us agreed this ranked among the most unspoiled places we'd visited anywhere.

Not wanting to frighten the fish, I looked about by shifting my eyes like a frog, as the creek gurgled musically past my ears. High above me, red-rock limestone walls, stained dark here and there with unimaginable age, soared 1,500 feet to a flawless sky that only three days before drizzled rain on my new bivy tent.

To get there, we'd motored 33 miles up the Colorado River from Lake Mead north of Kingman in a 25-foot aluminum powerboat, and were dropped off at a horseshoe-shaped sandbar built up by the flash floods that periodically roar out of Surprise Canyon. Kenneth Morrow, a Queen Creek nurseryman, postal worker Michael Hallen, also of Queen Creek, and I would explore for four days before the boat returned to pick us up.

A 200-yard-long slough with a quicksand bottom guarded the mouth of Surprise Canyon, but we crossed in an 8-foot inflatable raft. For so wide a canyon farther upstream, the mouth measures just 40 feet across where it meets the Colorado River. Located two canyons below Separation Canyon and about 248 miles downstream from Lee's Ferry, Surprise Canyon's narrow mouth proved hard to locate. For our hike goal we chose the confluence of Twin Springs and Green Spring canyons, which merge to create Surprise Canyon about 10 miles upstream. I knew for certain of only two other people who had explored so far up - George Billingsley of Flagstaff, a U.S. Geological Survey geologist studying the Grand Canyon, and Dr. J. Harvey Butchart of Sun City, a retired university mathematician and author of a series of books titled Grand Canyon Treks. Both led groups into the Canyon in the 1970s.

Billingsley bushwhacked from the Shivwits Plateau down Green Spring Canyon, swam across deep pools and, after multiple trips through the western Grand Canyon, eventually discovered in the 250 million-year-old Mississippian strata a previously uncharted geologic zone he named the Surprise Canyon Formation. Deposited by an ancient marine estuary, the formation can be seen from Lake Mead to Mile 23 below Lee's Ferry in Marble Canyon.

Butchart arrived later following maps annotated by Billingsley. “Some of the things Billingsley did make you wonder if you would come out alive,” Butchart said. “Billingsley has dropped down into places [from a helicopter] you wouldn't be able to get out of.” Butchart explored up Twin Springs Canyon, where sheer walls close in around you like a prison, until, he said, he “found a way to get past the redwall and head up.” Butchart noted that high up in Twin Springs Canyon “bits of charcoal on the floor suggested that others had preceded us.” Soon after leaving the river, Surprise Canyon becomes broader, mimicking the changing nature of the creek that comforted me with its gentle flow. Yet after a big rain it can suddenly become a wide, violent, 12-foot-deep floodwall erasing everything in its path. When you're inside Surprise Canyon you make sure to keep your eye on the weather and peg your tent well above the high-water mark.

Two hours of good light remained as we started up canyon after caching the inflatable and emergency water in a willow thicket. We set up camp near a spot where the blossoms of a magnificent yucca whipplei-also called “Our Lord's Candle”-blazed white in the declining inner-canyon light. A half-hour later, light rain came sweeping yucca petals to my backpacker's salad. The next day, thick clouds with dark, threatening underbellies collected along the canyon rim marking the boundary between Grand Canyon National Park and the new Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument. Our gear was only half-dry when we set out past brilliant red monkeyflowers growing where the creek works at undercutting a cliff. Now and then, the creek disappeared, only to reappear farther on. In summer it dries up. The canyon walls rose steeply, and we saw few safe places to camp. Everyone seemed aware that egress would be impossible except by the way we came in.

Six miles farther another sandy acacia bluff became campsite number two. Just across the creek from a natural bridge formed by a collapsed cave, the spot served as a base for a quick push up the last 4 miles of the hike. With only a few cookies and a canteen of water, I set out alone, traveling fast and light. My companions had other plans.

Three miles later, the red cliffs began to close in again, creating dark places sunlight reaches for only a few hours a day. Huge water-polished rocks choked the creek in two places, forcing me up the canyon wall to get around them. Newly leafed cotton-wood trees provided vivid brush-strokes of green against a background

of liver-red canyon walls. Black phoebes launched from blooming Western redbud trees to gobble the few mosquitoes rising from pools.

I arrived in three hours at the Twin Springs Canyon confluence, a point 1,000 feet higher than the Colorado River. Most of the creek flow comes out of Green Spring Canyon. I learned from Billingsley you can get out that way, but a deep pool bars the way. I decided to stay dry for the return to camp.

I turned up Twin Springs Canyon from which just a trickle flows, and found the going easy. Butchart believed he'd found a route from Twin Springs Canyon to the rim, but along the stretch I walked, the 400-foot-high redwall looked smooth, dangerous and unassailable.

Morrow and Hallen left camp after me to explore an unnamed side canyon 2 miles away. A gravel bar that spills into Surprise Canyon showed that the side-canyons flood, too. At a water hole inside the canyon, they discovered the bones of a desert bighorn ram with halfcurl horns.

"We saw pug marks, so maybe the ram was killed by a lion," Morrow speculated when we met back at camp. Or maybe it was the victim of a fall. We could only guess.

Bighorn sheep, cougar, bobcat and coyote tracks beside the creek served as proof of Butchart's dry routes down from the arid Shivwits Plateau, but they would all be dangerous.

All of us are strong hikers, yet we managed only 1.5 miles an hour as our best time carrying backpacks over the jumble of boulders that pave the creek bottom. We also knew the risks. A broken bone or food poisoning in this canyon would prove disastrous. Help was a long way off, and our boat wasn't due back at the sandbar for two more days.

Morrow described the area as a unique canyon because you need a boat to reach it. "The difficult access eliminates a large number of people going there."

In camp he told us his first knowledge of the canyon came from reading hiking books about 12 years earlier. "When I bought a boat several months ago, I began to think more seriously about doing the trip," he said.

As we told stories, birdsong down by the creek lamented the approach of night, an event that arrives earlier in the canyon than on its rim. Well after dusk, sun-baked rocks still felt warm to the touch.

Morrow asked, "How many places can you go these days, especially in a national park, where there are no signs of humans, no litter?" He pledged to come back-but from the top next time.

He will find the way down challenging. Billingsley told me that coming in from the rim, his party had to negotiate deep pools and drop-offs. "We lowered our packs with ropes and were able to climb around barriers," he explained.

On the third day, after breakfast and coffee cooked on a propane stove, I left camp ahead of the others, intending to return to our first campsite and hoping the downhill tack would be easier. An unfamiliar plant with pinkish-white hooded blossoms filled the canyon with its jasminelike fragrance.

I made good time despite frequent fords over wet, polished boulders-so good, in fact, that four hours later I breezed past the campsite and didn't realize my mistake until I was a half-mile beyond.

My companions found the right spot, while I settled for an alternate campsite below the floodline - the place where I lay in the cool water.

A few clouds drifted past, but didn't threaten. I drifted off, dreaming of endless boulders stretching out before me.

Ka-BOOOM, boom, boomety BOOM.

The next morning the clamor made my head snap around as a rockfall that began near the rim shattered on the canyon floor.

Camp broke easily and my backpack seemed lighter as I set out, only to have another rockfall break loose above and 100 yards behind me, and crash into the creek bottom. A lively place, this Surprise Canyon.

Butchart considered this place among his favorite haunts before he stopped hiking the Grand Canyon at age 80. Billingsley, who first hiked Surprise Canyon in 1971, wasn't keen on publicizing it.

"I would kind of like to see it preserved as it is," he explained. He added a warning: "It floods a lot in spring." When that happens, he said, it sends the rats and mice to high ground where backpackers would want to camp, increasing the danger of spreading hantavirus, a microbe killer of people spread by rodents.

If ever you want to hike Surprise Canyon, at least now you know the risks. Surprise Canyon is litterless because it's a far and difficult place. To go there requires careful planning and no chance-taking.

You will be out of range of help, and a long way from a store if you forget your toothbrush. AH

Apache May A Little Girl Stole Lawman John Slaughter's Heart

DURING HIS YEARS IN THE ARIZONA TERRITORY, famed lawman and rancher John Slaughter led numerous manhunts in search of outlaws and renegade Indians. But none would so profoundly change his life as the one that began on May 6, 1896.

At sunup that morning, he rode south from his San Bernardino Ranch, on the Mexican border near present-day Douglas, accompanied by a small detachment of soldiers.

When he returned a few days later, Slaughter was holding a new baby daughter, an Apache girl.

The story of this unlikely adoption, one of frontier Arizona's most unforgettable episodes, began in the waning months of 1895. On December 3, a small group of Chiricahua Apaches killed H.H. Merrill and his 13-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, as they traveled in a wagon from Pima to Clifton in eastern Arizona.

Lawmen found the moccasin prints of five or six Indians and the family's empty provision box. Gone were several items of Elizabeth's clothing.

The same band struck again in late March, killing Alfred Hand, a rancher living along an old Apache raiding route in the San Simon Valley. The Tombstone Prospector reported that Hand was shot through the heart and his body mutilated, although another account says he was clubbed to death while checking on his sheep. Before fleeing into Mexico, the Chiricahuas stole from the wall of Hand's cabin a silken Cochise County election poster bearing the names of Republican candidates in the campaign of 1888. John Slaughter had suffered stock losses from these renegades and was eager to stop them. When his foreman, Jesse Fisher, reported finding a "warm Indian camp" in northern Mexico, Slaughter wasted no time requesting help from Second Lt. Nathan K. Averill, whose command was camped nearby.

The chase into Mexico and subsequent events are described in a report about the San Bernardino Ranch, also known as Slaughter Ranch, compiled by historian and author Reba Wells Grandrud. The site currently operates as the Johnson Historical Museum of the Southwest, Arizona's 13th National Historic Landmark.

John Slaughter's wife, Viola, and Frankie Howell Stillman, who lived at San Bernardino for many years, provided additional information, as did Harriet Hankin, who described the episode in the Douglas Daily Dispatch on October 3, 1926. In a few areas, these reports conflict but together they provide a detailed picture of what happened.

On the morning of May 6, the posse rode into the Guadalupe Mountains in Sonora, Mexico, to the camp Fisher had found. The scouts determined it had been occupied by three or four men, seven women, a child and 10 ponies. They picked up the Indians' trail and followed it several miles to a second camp on a rocky hilltop circled by four deep canyons.

At daybreak on May 7, the 13 men-Averill, four troopers, five