Canyon Country [antikvár]

VOICES FROM THE SIX DIRECTIONS The sun rises. Navajo people pray to the white dawn, to Grandfather Talking God. They thank the Holy People for life, for placing them in this land bounded by sacred mountains, this land of rivers and deserts and canyons. They offer a pinch of sacred cornmeal to each of the six directions: to the east, to the south, to the west, and to the north; to that point in the heavens most distant above, the zenith; and to the point in the earth most distant below, the nadir. From these six directions they hear the voices of their Holy People, the land, the plants, and the animals. The voices tell the stories of this place called Canyon Country. To learn the stories of Canyon Country, I traveled to each of the six directions. I listened to the land and I listened to its people. The voices of the Canyon Country speak to us all. They come first at dawn, from the east. FROM THE EAST The glitter of stars in a blue-black sky dims. The palest of daylight begins to color the rim of rock below Delicate Arch. At first the rock is tan and shadowy, but slowly, softly, long after first light, the sun meets the horizon and brushes the stone landscape with a wash of orange-red. The arch, a bold strut of sandstone, breaks the sky in two. Beyond the Colorado River, the highest peaks in Canyon Country — the La Sal Mountains, snow-capped well into summer—rise toward the flaring sun. Here In Arches National Park, in southeastern Utah, this single view captures the essences of the Canyon Country: red rock, river, island mountain, and the squared-off angles of mesas and plateaus everywhere between. This is the Colorado Plateau. It begins where the Colorado River spills out of the Rocky Mountains in western Colorado and ends where the river leaves the Grand Canyon and enters the Mojave Desert in western Arizona. Between these points, the Colorado and its network of tributaries carve through 130,000 square miles of flat-lying rocks in the Four Corners states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona. Open basins, tabletop mesas, and arid badlands contribute to this plateau landscape. Green forests and blue mountains provide counterpoint and respite from the ocean of red rock. But at the heart of the Colorado Plateau are the canyons—carved deep by the Colorado, the Green, and the San Juan rivers and smaller tributaries like the Gunnison, Fremont, and Paria—and the great amphitheaters and gorges of Bryce and Zlon, etched into the High Plateaus marking the region's western boundary. A veil of water from Weeping Rock in Zion National Park lightly shields a view of the Great White Throne. Zion owes its lushness to the Virgin River, which bisects it, and to the porous Navajo Sandstone, which forms most of its great monoliths. Canyon Country begins with the greatest of its rivers, the Colorado, flowing from Rocky Mountain National Park to the east. Confluences punctuate the course of the big river as it moves south and west across Canyon Country. It meets first with the Gunnison River at Grand junction, Colorado. "Grand" refers to the old name for this upper stretch of the Colorado, which joins the Green River in Utah. Not until 1921 did the Colorado State Legislature secure the right to call the whole river stretching from the mountains to the sea by one name. The Gunnison River first leaves the Rocky Mountains southeast of Grand Junction, near Montrose. Here it has carved a gorge through dark and ancient Precambrian gneiss. The Painted Wall, tapestried by light-colored volcanic dikes, rises 2,300 feet above the river in shadowed Black Canyon. The Gunnison ground through the resistant gneiss because it had no alternative: checked by growing volcanic mountains both to the north and south, the river cut down through the tough rock more than two thousand feet. Tributaries could not keep pace, so the Black Canyon today is both deep and narrow, measuring only 1,300 feet from rim to rim at the Narrows. The Colorado flows on past its confluence with the Gunnison and passes around the north end of the Uncompahgre Plateau. Here, small red-rock canyons slice through the tip of the Uncompahgre. Colorado National Monument protects these canyons primarily because of the single-minded efforts of "crazy" john Otto, "the hermit of Monument Canyon." Otto came to the cliffs above the green fields and orchards of Grand Valley in 1907 and quickly became obsessed with the place. He lived among the sandstone monoliths and canyons for thirty years, building trails and promoting in a stream of letters to editors and politicians what he called, "the highest class Park Project in all Creation." On the Fourth of july, 1910, he climbed 530-foot-tall Independence Monument and unfurled an American flag from its summit. A year later, he was married at its base, but his wife left after just two months, explaining: "I could not live with a man to whom even a cabin was an encumbrance. He wanted to live in tents or without tents, outdoors." That year, Otto may have lost his new wife, but his primary obsession meshed with the interests of local boosters and legislators, and the land he loved became a national monument, protected by law. Otto had endless enthusiasm for his home. He feltsure that the Grand Canyon would have to "split honors with Colorado National Monument from now on." Describing the canyons as "the heart of the world," he called the area surrounding them "without doubt the most interesting part of the earth's crust that's known." Not a man to back off from superlatives, he once wrote: It's in Colorado where one finds: the sunniest of sunshine, the bluest of s/cy, the grandest of scenery, the coolest of mountains, the prettiest of soil, the choicest of fruit, the sweetest of melons, the finest of gardens, the truest of homes, the gayest of youngsters, the cutest and the sweetest of faces, and the HAPPIEST OF PEOPLE.