Harvey Butchart’s Hiking Log, Volume 2
August 6, 1964 - September 20, 1969
Table of contents | Volume 1 | Volume 2 | Volume 3 | Volume 4 | Index
To conduct a full-text search of this volume, use the Find in Page Command (Control-F or under "Edit" in your browser's menu). For a complete chronological listing of trails and locations, please see Table of contents. For alphabetical listing of trails and locations, please see Index.
Butchart annotated a series of hiking maps, including western and eastern half of the Grand Canyon and others from throughout the Grand Canyon region that are also available.
Wayne Tomasi, a Grand Canyon hiking enthusiast, prepared the following version of Dr. Harvey Butchart's hiking log. Wayne spent hundreds of hours reading, typing, and editing the hiking logs housed at the Northern Arizona University Cline Library. This edited version of the Butchart hiking logs includes only hikes in the area that Harvey and Wayne mutually agreed to call Grand Canyon Country. This Country includes the Grand Canyon, Marble Canyon, the Little Colorado River Gorge, the Pria River Gorge and Plateau, Lake Powell, and Lake Mead. Wayne notes that his transcription of Butchart’s logs begins with Harvey’s brief introduction of backpacking. Harvey's description of Little Colorado River exploration has been moved to the beginning. Finally, a section of Butchart’s earliest logs, written by Harvey from memory, are segregated under a heading of 'Protologs.'
Use of the Butchart logs is restricted to non-commercial use only. Any reproduction and/or distribution of the logs (either the original Butchart logs or Wayne Tomasi's edited version) requires permission of the NAU Cline Library.
Copyright Arizona Board of Regents. All rights reserved.
Hermit Basin to Bass Canyon, Dragon and Crystal Creeks
[August 6, 1964 to August 11, 1964]
After some good chit chat at the Visitor's Center with the Chief Ranger (Lynn Coffin), I got started down the Hermit Trail carrying about the heaviest pack I have tried, 37 pounds. My objective was Supai in 11 days with some interesting side trips along the way. The stage of water was not too much different from what it had been for my trip through Marble Canyon and I thought that 12 to 15 miles a day was quite feasible.
In Hermit Basin I met seasonal ranger Marge Goff on her way back from a nature hike to Santa Maria Spring.In our short conversation, she assured me that several of the rangers were now waging a war of extermination against the burros and that they would soon all be gone. I didn't express my views on that subject very forcibly, but from what I have read about previous attempts, I would say that about all they can hope to do is to keep the numbers in check. Unless they would have a regular military campaign, enough burros would escape to bring back the race. It would take a lot of men willing to go down into a lot of exhausting terrain simultaneously to get the job done. I am not even sure I favor the project anyway. No doubt it is more thrilling to observe deer or bighorn sheep, but I got quite excited in seeing my first wild burro. Also, the trails are much more distinct in those areas of the canyon where there are burros.
With my heavy pack, I used six hours to get to the river instead of the three and a half which would be possible with only a lunch and canteen. My Kelty pack is rather bad in the prone position on an air mattress since it holds my head down. I need two mattresses to hold my nose out of the water and I have ten inches of the lower mattress projecting in front of the one which supports my face. If all the river were like the stretches from Hermit to Boucher Creek and from there to Crystal Creek, and if all rapids were as easy to walk around as Boucher, my schedule would have been feasible. You can walk the boulder bar almost as easily as a trail. I covered the three miles From Hermit to Crystal Creek at two miles an hour. Unfortunately, this was the exception. For the rest of the way to Serpentine Canyon, the rapids were closer together and the way around them was over big angular blocks of schist. Getting out of the water had to be done in soft mud, and then the mud on the sneakers made the footing precarious. I soon learned another thing. The rule that the portage should be made on the side of the tributary stream had about as many exceptions as not. I ended by playing it safe. I would land on whichever side would give me a view of the rapid ahead from farthest upstream. If the opposite side offered the better chance to walk to the foot of the rapid, I could still cross over.
Just once this portaging had to be modified. At Mile 99.6, the nameless ravine from the north downstream from Tuna Creek, blocks have fallen that break the low stage of the river into three channels. A land bypass would have to go quite high on the south wall and with a 35 pound pack, I decided that this would be more hazardous than taking the fast water. It was getting late Saturday evening when I landed on the south side, so I decided to camp and think it over until morning. From most places I could have gone upriver by paddling in the slack water next to the cliffs and walking the talus slopes between, but the current had been strong right to the Wall below Tuna Creek Rapid. Over at the right, the channel was visibly rough while the water looked smooth between two big rocks on the left. In the morning, I put one mattress in my pack and draped myself transversely across the other. I had time enough to kick myself into any chosen channel. When I found myself going over the one with the smooth appearance, I saw why it was so smooth. It dropped abruptly two or three feet on a number of rocks that were hidden from my viewpoint, necessarily a distance upstream. I stayed right side up on the mattress, but the water spun me so fast that I didn't have time to fend away. I bruised my elbow on one rock and scraped the mattress stiffly on both sides before I was out in the clear. The deep water was eddying every which way, and I had to climb on the mattress in paddling position before I could drive it out of that pocket. This was rather difficult with my heavy pack, and I may have stuck a finger nail through the rubberized nylon. At any rate I soon realized that my raft was sinking slowly. I soon found the small tear and fixed it with adhesive tape, but the mattress continued to leak somewhere else. My other mattress had a slow leak before the trip began. I could still navigate for an hour or so between rapids and then give them some more air before pushing off again. But this experience sobered me to the extent that I deided to leave the river at the Bass Trail. Furthermore, below Crystal Creek, I had averaged less than one mile per hour. I might have taken a chance on improving this speed, but my wet socks chafed through the outer skin, and I was convinced. I also decided that shorter trips are more to my liking than the lonesomeness of 11 days by myself.
So much for the navigation. On Thursday night I camped on the sand just east of the mouth of Crystal Creek.The only drawback was the large red ants. In the morning, I wrapped all but two days' supply of food in a plastic sheet and left it in the shade of a large rock and started up the creekbed. But first I found the Indian ruins Dock had told me about, up on the high terrace to the west of the mouth. In about 40 minutes I came to a place where chockstones had formed a fall, but there was a neat bypass formed by deer and bighorn. Incidentally, I saw bighorn tracks on the sand near Boucher Rapids as well as up Crystal and Dragon Canyons. They seem to be as common as the deer in this area. In 75 minutes I came to the tributary from the west which comes from the bay below Mencius Temple. Some water was flowing. I had maps for all the areas I hoped to encounter during the trip except for Crystal and Dragon. Now I mistook this for Crystal itself and left my blanket and mattress above the creek on a bench. After walking about two and a half hours from the river, I came to the real junction of Crystal and Dragon. About half as much water comes from Crystal as from Dragon Creek, which might let us conjecture that Harry McDonald would have continued up Dragon.
As you get into the lower Tapeats, the bed suddenly goes dry. I had to back up a few yards to fill my canteen. The tributary coming from the bay west of Shiva looks just as impressive at the junction as the main bed which is somewhat choked with willows here. I went up the tributary and when I had seen my error, I decided to climb out and get a view of the country. Progress north over the detrital ridges was laborious, but I could see that the main canyon was getting very narrow in the Tapeats so I concluded that I should stay above the Tapeats rim. From here a break in the Redwall was evident, about due north of the west end of Shiva. There has been a lot of breakage of the Redwall, and a slump of Supai Sandstone as well as limestone forms a ramp over the Bright Angel Shale to the base of the Redwall. I continued along the top of the Redwall until I could see into the bay north of Shiva. One could probably get through all the higher formations clear around to the north side of this bay, but it was already 1:30 p.m., so I turned back. This may have been McDonald's route to the rim, but I would rather expect him to go up the creekbed much farther before climbing out. Miles away in the west arm of Dragon, the bed seemed to penetrate quite a bit of the Redwall. Possibly the Stanton climbing party used this break in the Redwall. At least there seemed to be no other break farther south. On the return, I went to the bed of the creek and almost went to the lip of the dry fall into the Tapeats gorge. A well developed deer and sheep trail goes east around this barrier and descends by a break a quarter of a mile downstream. There is a permanent spring in this upper portion of the Tapeats gorge, but when I got to the bottom, it was supplemented by a stiff rain which I sat out under an overhang with my magazine to pass the time. When I reached my blanket, it was dripping wet, but by hanging it on a mesquite near a fire, it got dry enough to use by midnight, the earliest that I ever wanted cover during this warm season.
There were two ideas for the next day, to look at the bases of the Tower of Ra and Osiris Temple, and if there was time, to go up Crystal Creek far enough to see the valley above the Tapeats. The first chance to get out of the lower gorge of Crystal is by the canyon draining the bay between Ra and Osiris (wrong). I was able to get through the Tapeats at a break on the south side about a half mile up from the main stream. Here I found a piece of float copper ore that weighed considerably more than ordinary sandstone. Perhaps I should have gone close to the Redwall ravine north of Ra, but from my viewpoint, there didn't seem to be any chance of climbing it. I started the return down the bottom of the bed, but a fall halfway through the Tapeats forced me back out to the north where I had seen that one could go to the bottom through the Hakatai Shale which shows well here. The deeper rocks of this amphitheater seem pretty complicated. It would take a real geologist to diagram all the outcroppings of Base Limestone, Shinumo Quartzite, etc. For instance, on the west side of Crystal, the Tapeats seems quite a bit higher than it does on the east side.
The trip up Crystal was easy. The grade seemed a bit steeper and I got into the Tapeats sooner than I had in Dragon. The inner gorge through this sandstone is particularly striking for being narrow and deep. One wall supported quite a growth of maidenhair fern. There were deer tracks here which led me to think that one might get through without a block. Just as the rims were getting low, there was a 20 foot fall which could not be bypassed. The place had been so pretty and shady that I didn't begrudge the time I had been there although I had to back up some distance to get around the Tapeats. I went up on the west side, but I could see from there that the easier way, marked by a deer trail, was on the east. After going several hundred feet above the bed to get pictures of the upper valley, I went back to the river in time to paddle down to camp at the nameless ravine just west of Tuna. From the Tonto Trail south of the river, I had seen a place where it seemed easy to get through the Tapeats, but from below I couldn't locate it. I knew by now that river travel would be slow, so I decided to call off the side trips and concentrate on getting to Supai.
I have already described the rough ride through the barrier rocks just below my camp. Another rapid that impressed me was the one about one third mile upstream from Ruby, which seems to drop about four feet in only 20 yards. At the low stage there seemed to be no channel. The rocks appeared to be covered with not more than a foot of water in many places. I wonder what the Sport Yak Party did here? The Sunday night camp was at Serpentine and was early enough to relax. There had been no ants at all on the sand on the south side of the river at Mile 99.4 and only a few at the mouth of Serpentine.
In starting on the next morning, I thought I might see what Colin Fletcher had done in going from Bass to Serpentine mostly on land. Even when I tried the south slope to get below the lower part of the rapid, I found it so slow that I got back in the water to reach the tail end of the fast water. After a few more yards of walking, I got back into the river for the next hour that brought me to Bass Rapids and the abandoned metal boat. By steady paddling, I could make about a mile an hour. It was still early in the day, but I knew it would be a long haul to get from there to Hermit Rest so I decided to use Monday mostly to rest.
First I carried my pack to Bedrock Tank. I had never seen water here before, but this time there was some dripping over the fall, and there were small pools in the gravel below. There are still some tools cached here from the days when Bass was alive. Something I hadn't noticed before was a three inch pipe driven back into a crevice with a regular valve fitting at the end. After stowing my gear where I thought it would be safe both from rain and a flood, I found the trail up to the west and visited the old copper mine in Copper Canyon. First I checked the trail, still well preserved, that goes along the east wall above the mine. After going north high in the schist, it starts down. When Cureton and Finicum had been with me, we had left this trail when it started down. This time I followed it down, but it soon ended.
There was less water in the vertical mine shaft than I had expected, but there were rain pools in the creekbed. Instead of going on to the Hakatai Cable as I had thought I might, I decided instead to loaf with my magazine on the old cot in the mine shaft.
On Tuesday I reached the rim in four hours and 37 minutes and then reached the car by 9:30 p.m. Mostly on the Bass Trail I just plodded along expecting no surprises after the number of times I had covered it, but once I stopped for a breather about where the west half map has the name BASS for Bass Canyon, between the two bench marks. For the first time, I saw a neat hole through the Supai rim at the top of the wall to the east. I would estimate the hole to be about 10 feet across with nearly 100 feet of solid rock above it. I wonder how well known this window is?
Another observation that broke the monotony was a rattlesnake sunning itself on the trail in the Supai. It didn't rattle but casually moved out of my way when I would have stepped on it in two more strides.
After scoring with that new to me window, I got careless and missed seeing the Indian ruins near where the trail comes to the top of the Coconino. Another thing that I missed this time were the dams in the creekbed at the top of the Coconino which Bass had built to catch water. If they are going to conduct nature hikes part way down the Bass Trail, as Marge Goff had said, the guide might do well to locate these interesting old structures. The authorities might also have to worry about the state of the road near the last part on the way to Bass Camp. It is in much worse condition now than it was a year and a half ago and I would think an ordinary car might have trouble on it.
The burro situation seems about the same as I have known it. I saw tracks near the mouth of Boucher and there were two burros browsing below the Redwall along the Hermit Trail. There were no signs in the Crystal Dragon Basin. There were signs at the mouth of Serpentine, and plenty of tracks in Bass and Copper Canyons. I heard them bray in both of these canyons.
North Rim trip off Cape Royal and to the Indian ruins
near Point Sublime
[August 22, 1964 to August 26, 1964]
The first thing I did was to drive to Kanab where I finally connected with Preston Swapp. I am a little skeptical when old timers are glib with all details concerning some exploit that happened 20 or 30 years before. Preston was realistically vague and confused about many points. First he thought they had followed the top of the wall connecting Cape Royal to Wotan's Throne, 500 feet below their tops. When I pointed out the deep notch, he agreed that they must have gone along the shale on the east side of the wall. He didn't remember much about where they came back up the Coconino, but he agreed with my suggestion that it was at the southwest end right under Wotan. He reread the Andrews' article and studied the pictures before he pointed to the ridge that he thought they had climbed, the one directly above the end of the wall. He disagreed with the idea that they had left several fixed ropes for the return. He thought there was only one, whereas Wood, in the American Alpine Journal, lists about six. Swapp remembers very clearly that they did get on top, but agrees that they stayed on top only a short time, just long enough for him to go over to the south rim and get water. He also remembers distinctly that he found a very old and rusty tin can on top near where he found the water. He says they slept another night at the base of the Coconino below Cape Royal. He has no recollection of Andrews' narrow escape, but figures that George stepped on some loose gravel and sat down once. He thought that he himself showed up better on that kind of climbing than the others, and he says he was opposed all the time to being tied to the rest on the final climb to the top. He didn't like the idea of one man pulling all the rest with him. My impression was that he honestly didn't remember much about the trip except that they did get to the top. I don't think that he was covering up for the others who claimed the ascent, but I would have preferred an informant who could remember a few more details about how they did things. He didn't know about climbing a rope by the Prusik method. His impression was that he had gone up about everything without a rope at all.
By the time I had visited with some of the rangers and secured a permit to climb Wotan on Monday, there was not much left of Sunday. I did go down along the top of the Coconino from the campground north to the ranger village but couldn't see anything that looked like a passage. Maybe there is a break farther to the south. I should check this before I say that it takes an awfully good climber to make it through here. One of the fire fighting maintenance men, Jim Fain, said that a man he knows came up out of the Transept and surprised a couple girls who were taking sun baths in the nude.
Sunday night, after seeing the movie on the upriver trip in the jet boats, I drove out to the Walhalla Glades parking and slept just above where I wanted to go down Monday morning. By 6:30 a.m., I was on my way with eight quarts of water and a 120 foot rope. The way down to the rappel was just as I had remembered it, a little brushy, plenty of loose rocks, and a couple places that require a short chimney climb. The place I tied the rope must have been the same as it was two years ago, a clump of pale hoptrees. (Identification due to Ed Rothfuss who came down on Tuesday to help me retrieve the rope.) It seemed solid enough, but I had a qualm or two when I was in mid air halfway down. Another thing I should remember is that the new rope, one half inch in diameter went through the carabineer more easily with the same three turns around the metal than did the old rope which was five eighths inch in diameter. When I was about 15 feet from the bottom hanging free of the wall, the rope began to slide through the ring faster than I wanted it to. I suppose I could have gripped the rope with my left hand hard enough to stop it, but I let it slide at an accelerating pace and was a little surprised that my hand wasn't burned by the time I hit the bottom. I was glad this hadn't happened on the rappel that seemed a lot higher below Cape Royal. I should have had a practice session with the new rope.
At the bottom of the rappel, I filled my two quart canteen from the Purex bottle and left that behind. I thought that six quarts from here on would be plenty when I would find plenty at the foot of the rope to get me up on the return. This trip from the rim to the Hermit Shale had taken two hours compared to the one and a quarter hours I had logged on my trip with Allyn Cureton two years ago. Walking the shale slope seemed rather discouraging this time, and I wanted to change my view that it had seemed safer than traveling the Nankoweap Trail near the top of the Supai. I reached the base of the wall connecting Cape Royal to Wotan in only five minutes more than I had taken with Allyn, but I felt weak and lacking ambition. At the time I thought that it was my age finally getting to me, but later I decided it was probably my head cold. Anyway, the water went so fast during an early lunch that I decided to turn back. The return to the rope was made at a very leisurely speed, and I saw some good fossil footprints in a loose block of Coconino just before I reached the ravine. After a slow and sloppy job of Prusiking, I got up the rope and pulled my pack up, this operation taking an hour and a quarter. I was so sure I never wanted to do anything like this again that I left the rope where it was.
After cleaning up, eating, and sleeping; I was ready to reconsider. Ed Rothfuss was off duty, and I got him to go back with me to see the ravine and encourage me while I brought the rope out. He was following me about 80 and 60 feet below the rim when he spotted two sets of pictographs. They were in red clay on light parts of the Kaibab under overhangs. Some of the designs were quite familiar, but there were a number of odd drawings like a grid of city streets. Rothfuss then took me to the southwest corner of the campground and showed me the way down to a small platform ruin that I think our family visited 18 years ago. A good many girls who work at the lodge had known all about this ruin, but none of the rangers knew where it was until Rothfuss looked for it a few days before.
Before we parted, Ed told me how to find the ruin I had heard was out near Point Sublime. Quite a number of the rangers had visited it just this summer. About two and a half miles north of Point Sublime are several cairns on the east side of the road. Since you have to walk about ten minutes to get to the rim, they can all be regarded as correct. To get an idea of what you are trying to do, it is well to study the rim from the Point Sublime picnic area. About a mile and a half to the north, the rim turns east. There are a couple ravines or breaks where one can go down through the Kaibab here, and the southwesterly one is the place. A cairn marks the immediate spot on the rim where you should start down. On Wednesday morning, I drove out to Point Sublime and then found the ruins within 40 minutes of leaving the car. I did foul up a little and went down one dead end ravine. The next one south went down through the Kaibab nicely with a good deer trail. Near its head, I found two sherds and brought the best one away for identification. Since the ruin was not around the corner to the south, I went across the next ravine and found it, a row of neat granaries and a small chamber on the ledge below. Some daredevils have climbed from the top of a juniper on a couple boards to a higher ledge. (Lex Lindsay identified the sherd as Dogoszhi black on white, 1050 ad.)
My cold kept me from wanting to do any real hiking, so I went home Wednesday afternoon.
Point Sublime, Dragon, Shiva Saddle, and
Salt Water Wash
[August 31, 1964 to September 3, 1964]
Dirk Springorum the German geology student who went with me on several trips last year, was back at the Museum and he accepted my invitation to go with me back to the north rim.
We got our permit at the ranger station announcing as the principal objective to find the location of the route from Point Sublime to Tuna Creek. I had studied the route from the map and from distant views from the south rim and thought it would be easy to go down a mile north and west to the rim. From there we thought we could proceed to the saddle between Flint and Tuna Creeks and walk down easily into Tuna. On Monday afternoon we spent several hours looking at the area. We could get down to the top of the Coconino at the place I had picked. In a couple places the Coconino was partially broken or covered by a talus, but we decided that it wasn't safe without a rope, and I wanted a ropeless route. Below Point Sublime the Coconino and Supai would be easy, and one could get below the Kaibab by way of the big ravine to the west (farther west than the one through which the road runs). We could not be a bit sure of the route through the Redwall. The drop from the Flint Tuna saddle is much steeper than I had thought from the road on the way out, we left after a good night at the picnic area.
The route we wanted to look at came down on the west side of the Dragon. The morning light made the Redwall seem more difficult than it had in the afternoon. There would be a lot of manzanita on the way down. While studying it from the viewpoint where the road nicks the rim of Crystal, we changed our minds again. We decided to walk on the Dragon and possibly attempt an ascent of the Dragon's Head. I told Dirk that I wouldn't set my heart on that one since I had been getting frustrated so often lately. We found the fire road to the basin in good shape. About the time I thought we might be getting into position for a take off to the Dragon, we found red paint blazes marking a trail this way, so it was safe to conclude that we had found the right route. It is quite hard to identify the various ravines shown on the map so we were quite grateful to have the paint and later yellow plastic ribbons to follow. The route goes south from the road at Crystal Ridge, then veers west across Milk Creek rather near the rim. You dip rather low through the scrub oak on the east side of the first spine of rock outcrops. At the south end of this spine there are no more trail markers, but it seems sure that you are supposed to go to the west of the next spine. We kept high here which put us into locust thickets. On the way back, we found a fair deer trail below the thickets, except that we had to fight our way through scrub oak at the saddle to get back on the marked trail. Before we got to the steep climb up on the Dragon, we found the deer trail. It took 105 minutes to get from the car to the top of the Dragon.
Once on the Dragon, we soon found supplies for fire fighters hanging from a tree, some of which were wrapped in a couple parachutes. One red parachute was still high up where it had caught in a tree. The smoothest walking south along the Dragon is first to the west rim and then to the east rim. The walk takes about 45 minutes. You get down from the south end of the Dragon on the east side just before you reach the tip. The deer trail then switches over to the west side of the ridge south to Dragon's Head. We lost the trail as we approached the rock ledges below the Head. To climb the Head, you go where most of the green shows from a distance, but there are still some ledges. We may have found the only climbable break at one place. You seem to have to go up, turn left, up again, and then right to a debris filled ravine leading to the top. I have done harder climbs, but I was glad Dirk was along to bolster my morale. It took four hours to get back from the top of the Head to the car. There seemed to be no cairns on top, but we built two small ones, the first where we topped out and the other at what we considered to be the highest point, near the north end. It didn't take long to walk the rim and get some pictures.
From the top of Dragon's Head, we had a fine view of the Redwall route I had ascended north of Shiva Temple on the east side of Dragon Creek. We could also see a very probable route down into Dragon Creek from the saddle between Shiva and the north rim. We decided to inspect this on Wednesday. After getting the view from Tiyo Point, we first parked about a mile to the north. Then I thought we could drive closer if we used the fork marked Shiva Xp Pt. This was harder to follow than it had been in 1957 and I thought that we would certainly have trouble finding the car at its end. We went back and parked on the Tiyo Point road. It took 40 minutes to cross the various ravines and reach the point of departure which is just east of the ravine that is east of the promontory reaching toward Shiva Temple. Getting down and crossing this ravine to the ridge is the rough part, but there is a good deer trail along the east side of the ridge. We lost the trail and fumbled in getting started down the Coconino. You have to get below the top cliff at the end, but don't start down through the lowest part of the Toroweap into the Coconino until you are over to the west. There is a fair trail through the top of the Coconino down to the talus where no trail is needed.
We first checked the draw at the north end of the saddle. After going below the top cliff of Supai, we were baffled by the second. Then we went to the south end and found that the way down is easy at the north edge of this bay. The whole Supai is broken down and covered with a talus below this place, and the Redwall even looks very fair. However, if there is any difficulty in the ravine itself, one could go along the top and reach the place where I had come up before. If McDonald was using his eyes, he would have come up this way. Dirk found a couple pieces of very poorly preserved pottery on the saddle nearby, and on our way back I showed him the first mescal pit that is just to the north of the red rocks which are at the south end of the saddle.
We also saw a very probable alternate route into Dragon Creek. It is from the tip of Little Dragon down into the west of Dragon Creek. There is a lot of manzanita on this route.
On Thursday we broke up our trip home with a walk to the Colorado River down Salt Water Wash as described by Pat Reilly. I had neglected to bring his instructions and we made about all the mistakes in the approach that he did. We didn't climb the point and see the row of monuments until we were out of the canyon. We drove the Jeep too far along the top toward the river and tried one side wash that didn't lead to the bottom. Then we drove across country around to the south of this drainage and found the trail going down. Dirk was leading most of the time and he went so fast down the bed of the wash that we didn't locate the trail along the talus to the west until we were coming out. At the drop near where the shale begins, he climbed down past the chockstones while I found the trail around to the west. On the wide slope to the river, I found a few cairns high on the west side, but the old trail was so eroded that I could make better time by joining Dirk in the bed. We got down from the car to the Colorado River in 62 minutes, and using more of the trail, from the river to the car in 100 minutes. On the way out, Dirk spotted three sticks placed near the ceiling of a shallow cave. Together they formed a sort of shelf, and Indians may have tried to keep food away from rodents up here. It was similar to the device near the driftwood platform in Marble Canyon. We enjoyed a swim, rather cold, and a rest at the river which was running clear. We found a board which had been painted and nailed to a shovel handle and propped up by rocks. We wondered whether this was the memorial to Brown, the president of D.G.C. and P. Railroad.
It was a good four days, and it left me with a desire to go back for more.
Tanner Wash
[September 19, 1964]
I stopped at Bitter Springs gas station and had a chat with Leroy Arnold, the manager. He had never been to the sinkhole, Ah Hol Sa, but he suggested leaving the highway about a quarter of a mile to the north. The side road appears to be headed for a couple of hogans, but just before it reaches the first, there is a branch turning north. It goes right to Ah Hol Sa without a fork and it ends there. Arnold said that he understood the sinkhole to be a half mile across and 500 feet deep. It took me eight minutes to make the circuit about 30 feet away from the rim, so I figure that it is about 500 feet across and about 150 feet deep. The place to climb down is at a break on the west side. It looked bad enough to scare me away when I was by myself without a rope. The bottom is generally covered with clay and rather smooth except for a hole in the clay over to the west and several big blocks of limestone near the northeast. There are a couple of drainage channels toward these blocks.
The next part of my plan was to head for the river along the right rim of Tanner Wash to get the picture of what the lower portion of the bed is like. I could see where the narrow part of the wash ended abruptly at cliffs near the top of the Hermit Shale. A steep talus goes along the base of the Kaibab and appears to connect with the creekbed farther south. I could see a definite place where a broad talus connected this upper bench with the bed of the wash below all obstructions. I knew that one cannot go down the bed through the Supai to the river, but from the rim I could see that one can go upstream along the top of the Supai about a half mile to a break where you can make it through to the river (false, two and a half miles to Salt Water Wash). Thus the entire route down Tanner Wash to the river depended on one's chance of getting down the bed far enough to reach the bench below the Kaibab. It took less than an hour to walk back from the point overlooking the river to the end of the road at Ah Hol Sa.
I drove the Jeep back heading several drainages until I could see the Bitter Springs settlement and parked again. Heading west, I soon came to a large cairn and went down into this streambed. In about 20 minutes from the car, I came to the main bed of Tanner Wash. Near the junction is a stretch of improved trail for sheep.The attraction isn't hard to find. As soon as the Kaibab Formation is passed, there are abundant pools of water. These continue at frequent intervals and many of them are quite deep. I saw no fish and not even a tadpole. The summer floods must have cleaned them out. I had even seen pools in the lower valley deep in the shale. There were very few places where one couldn't have scrambled up one side or the other in case a flood started to come down from above. I have been in many worse places for being trapped by a flood. I continued until I was well down in the Coconino, but I was finally stopped by some climbing that might have been possible for a very agile person who could count on a companion going for a rope in case of difficulty. You can't see out into the broad part of the canyon below at this point, and I felt that there were other difficulties ahead before one would reach the place where the broad view is possible.
Retracing my steps about 200 yards, I was able to climb to the bench at the base of the Kaibab Limestone. The walking here was without any signs of a deer trail, but one could go about as easily as along the Hermit Shale below Cape Royal or many other steep rock strewn slopes in the Grand Canyon. In less than half an hour, I was around the bend looking down on the broad lower canyon. If the Glanton Party left the bed and did this, they could have felt that they were looking down on the Grand Canyon, but still they couldn't see water. If they were eager to see the canyon, it would have been much easier to keep on top of the plateau where there are many viewpoints for seeing the river itself. From where I turned back, one can't see the talus that leads on to the bed below. This route may be possible on both sides, but the one I am sure of is on the west side. Thus Jackass, Salt Water, and Tanner all furnish routes away from the river, but the length of the walk gets longer each time you go farther west. I would estimate that you could walk from the water a half mile upstream from Sheerwall Rapid to the plateau by way of Tanner Wash in about four hours.
To the Colorado River below President Harding Rapid
and the pole platform
[September 20, 1964]
Tibbetts and Grua went up beyond the bridge and were stopped. Then they came out from Buck Spring Canyon and climbed down to where only 20 feet separated them from completion of the route. (Finally, they climbed all the way up.)
After sleeping in the Jeep where Eminence Break meets the rim, I got an early start Sunday morning. Care must be exercised constantly on the loose footing, but I reached the fossil footprints on the huge blocks of Coconino in 35 minutes. I was a little surprised to find a solitary woodpecker down here drilling on a dead stalk of agave. In 20 more minutes I reached my inconspicuous cairn that marks where you can turn out of the bed below the top cliffs of Supai on the east and find better walking. I couldn't make up my mind whether to stay high and head the small canyon in the Redwall or whether to go on down into the bed of the wash and go below this Redwall cleft. Finally, I compromised and kept going down but farther to the south than I had before. This took me along the base of the Redwall on my left. The route turned out to be the best yet. Not far from where this route brought me back to the bed of the main wash from where I had started down, I found a mescal pit. It was unlike most in that there were very few stones in a pile, but there was a distinct circle with a good bit of charcoal lying around.
After I had gone to the bottom and gotten out above the Redwall on the other side of the converging drainages, I found some tracks of men's boots. There seemed to be more than one person. They were coming away from the river. I didn't follow them far, and I saw no more tracks except from deer all day. I don't see how my own tracks could have lasted from a year ago through the winter frosts and all the storms. The route down the final pitch into the inner canyon was quite perceptible most of the time and there were places where men had lined up rocks beside the trail and had built several cairns. (It took me 127 minutes to go down and 165 minutes to come back up.)
After getting the word from several people that the Platform of Poles was in plain sight from the river, I studied the wall in the general region where I knew it must be until I could see it from the left bank. It was as high as I had thought, about 250 feet above the water, but it was farther to the west than I had been looking last year. The impression, obtained from Gordon Denipah, that one goes right by the cave with the stick fitted below the ceiling, was erroneous. The separation of the routes is quite a bit below the cave and to the west. It was just a steep scramble to the crack where Euler must have turned back. No boost was necessary, just routine wriggling to get up through this crack. I had left my knapsack and even my canteen at the river after making the crossing on the air mattress. Footing above the crack was sometimes precarious and the exposure was a bit nerve racking. As one approached the platform, there was only an 18 inch wide ledge at one point. Knowing that Denipah had done this, I was encouraged to continue.
There was one discrepancy between Denipah's account and my experience. Gordon said that he got a plain view of the platform from about 15 feet away but was unable to get any closer. I don't understand his difficulty. When you get that close, you can continue to the brink right above the platform. I didn't do it, but I feel that I could have lain on my stomach and allowed my feet to slide down until they touched the poles. I was strong in my impression that these poles were driftwood from the river. They were all rather straight and were juniper if I am a judge (Grua and Ellen Tibbetts crossed and climbed beyond). The main supporting poles had been cut to the right lengths to fit the natural nitches in the rock. The largest one was farthest out and was about five inches in diameter. A number of these had been blown out of place. Extra poles were clustered towards the east side, leaving a big gap on the outside to the west. I could see one small pole lying on the rocks 80 feet below. When I was through taking about five pictures from the ledge to the east and above the platform, I retraced the route down and went below for another picture. Lying here was a pole of the same material from which I sawed a foot long sample for further study. (A Ph.D in forestry says the wood is cottonwood.)
This platform could be quite ancient (770 ad using Carbon 14 dating at the University of Michigan) because it is protected from all but the most oblique rain by a large projecting slab of rock. It can hardly be called a bridge since one can't go a yard past it on the west side and the surface of the rock gives no sign of any recent fall. My conjecture is that it might have been a place for meditation. (Grua and Tibbetts crossed and climbed out.)
Salt Trail Canyon
[October 10, 1964 to October 11, 1964]
The most unusual thing about this trip was the personnel: Marshall Demick from New York City, Dirk Springorum from Germany, John O'Brian from England, and Bodil Helt from Denmark. We reached the head of the trail about 11:00 a.m. but first we walked along the rim to look directly into Salt Trail Canyon from above. I had the idea that the trace of a road would lead us to a point between Salt Trail Canyon and Big Canyon from which we could take pictures directly down the Little Colorado River, but we stopped the car too soon for that.
We soon saw that Miss Helt was going to slow us down a little, but she kept up a fair speed until we got to the Supai Sandstone. Here Marshall went to the west side of the wash to skirt a small cliff. I took the rest along the marked trail up under the cliff along the east side. At one place the trail seemed to be gone and since Marshall seemed to be making better time than the rest of us along the bottom of the wash, I led the rest down to join him. This was a mistake as we found on the return. The trail below the top Supai cliff down to the cross over at the start of the Redwall is mostly rather good. We found plenty of water in pools in the bed although it hadn't rained for several weeks. Bodil became quite tired about the time we reached the beginning of the Redwall and crossed to the west rim and Marshall carried her pack in addition to his own.
I had just read the paper by Titiev in the 1937 American Anthropologist, but I couldn't make any more positive identification of landmarks than I had before. We found three places where pilgrims had piled small rocks on the top of big ones, quite close together, a little north of the place where the trail starts down the Redwall. These small stones are mostly chert, but they come from the vicinity and not from the rim as I once had thought. We noticed the name J. D. Baumgartner, USGS, 6/8/52. Another date without a name was scratched on a rock higher up the trail, 5/7/58. We appreciated the frequent cairns all along the trail especially for the Redwall descent. The Little Colorado was flowing a light tan on Saturday, but before we left on Sunday, it was a milky blue.
A mouse chewed pile of prospector's supplies was just above the high watermark at the east edge of the delta. There were cans of tomatoes, many cans of Vienna sausages, a pan or two, two sleeping bags looking quite new, and farther upstream a stout nylon rope tied around a clump of willows. The rope was buried under sand and mud in several places. We had a good time swimming and swapping stories around the fire. In the morning Dirk and John went on down river to the Colorado for a week of geologizing. I walked upstream to take some pictures, and Bodil and Marshall started out about 75 minutes ahead of me. We all got out in good shape.
Something that interested me was the travertine. Some of the wood that had been cemented into the travertine was still there. Perhaps it had once been entirely sealed in, and only recently been exposed by further erosion. The level of this travertine was at least 15 feet above the present river level. It would be interesting to know how old the wood could be without rotting away. (Travertine dams were cut by the flood of 1923.)
Steamboat Mountain
[October 17, 1964]
A student, Marshall Demick, went with me to Swamp Point Friday evening and we slept next to the car. Both of us were wide awake by 5:30 on Saturday morning and we were going down the trail to the saddle by 6:00 a.m. The cabin just west of the saddle had one broken window and two were swinging open. We were able to follow the old trail to Powell Spring, but it is getting rather overgrown with maples. The scarlet leaves were mostly on the ground and past their prime, but there were streaks on the hillsides, especially below the Coconino, that were a deep pink for a half mile at a time.
At the end of the trail, the best walking was along the bed of the wash, but there were places where it was a fight to make any progress. There are several drops in the bed after one gets into the Supai. The upper ones are minor and can be detoured by only a short scramble through the brush to the side. The lower half of the Supai is something else. You can detour to either side, but you have to walk along the steep benches through rather bad brush occasionally for 25 minutes until you can get down. We went to the south this time instead of to the north as I had with Jerry Bortle in 1962. We doubled back to a slide near the head of a canyon tributary to the south but we later saw that we could have continued west and descended the point where the two arms come together.
We went down the bed of this southern arm and continued down Saddle Canyon bypassing an upper fall in the Redwall where it becomes the bed. After we looked at the narrows where the stream has cut into the high Redwall on the north side of the fault, we went back and up to the top of the ridge to the south where the deer get by the barrier falls in the Redwall narrows. From the top of this bypass, we continued up the slope to the south and broke through the brush into the pinyon pine and juniper forest that covers the Hermit Shale. It was tiring but not difficult to climb the talus that reaches up on the Coconino at the northeast corner of the mountain. At the place where the Coconino looked possible, we found that we were not mistaken. I left my extra jug of water and Marshall left, against my advice, all his food and water at the base of the Coconino. As I had predicted, he was drinking from my canteen before we returned. The break in the Coconino was so obvious from below that I neglected to build a cairn at the top of the break. On the return I walked right by the place and had to go out on a point to look before I learned about the mistake.
To get up the Toroweap cliff, we went southeast. We were able to get up by an obscure crack before we had gone as far as a place that was obviously broken down. On the return I was glad to find the cairn I built at the top of this route. From a distance, going up the Kaibab cliff had seemed sure if we got close in this direction. We found trees growing quite high on the slope, but in most of the ravines along here, there is an impassible 30 foot wall at the top. I picked one that I thought might have a crack out of sight at the top and Marshall went to inspect the next one to the west. I should have put my canteen in the pack and then worn the pack in front. Instead, I put both at the base of the crack and chimney climbed past a chockstone and got up only to find that Marshall was stopped at the top of this ravine. I told him to come up mine while I proceeded to explore the top of the mountain. The valley that separated the north rim from the main part of the summit goes down to the west right through the Kaibab. One can walk around to the west side and simply walk up into this valley. When I went back to met Marshall who should have been on top by then, I found that he had gone past my break to the next ravine east and was stopped again. He is from New York City. He has plenty of stamina but he showed on numerous occasions that he has little sense of orientation and routes. I told him about the easy way to the west and I climbed down to retrieve my pack and water while he waited at the bottom of my ravine. We walked west past the first ravine he had tried.The very next one looked interesting to me. First I thought it would be possible, and then I became skeptical. When I got near the top, I found that there was a break filled with big rocks. We could climb through a hole behind a chockstone. Marshall handed me my pack and canteen and I could put them ahead of me through the hole. By this time it was getting later than we liked and we just built a cairn and took some pictures from the highest point.
As I had guessed I would, I liked the views from the top of Steamboat Mountain as well as any in the entire park. Stone Creek and the Middle Granite Gorge were especially fine. The Redwall overhang in the Tapeats tributary containing the main spring was impressive. In Stina Canyon and also in Saddle Canyon we could see streaks of bright green foliage coming down from the base of the Coconino, probably indicating springs. There were numerous creases in the slopes lined with the color of the maples.
I had marked the rim above my chimney climb with a cairn, but we walked down the open valley to the west through the woods to the top of the Toroweap and kept to this level as we went north and then southeast. The walking was relatively easy but it was further and we lost time compared to our approach route. It began to rain on us here and for the next hour we became increasingly wetter. We found the cairns marking the top of our route through the Toroweap, but I overshot the place where we were to descend the Coconino by a few yards. We went down the formation and came to the talus 20 yards southeast of my jacket and Marshall's water and pack. We considered staying on the Esplanade in the junipers leading to Powell Plateau, and I now feel sure we would have made better time if we had done so. We actually went down to the bed of Saddle Canyon over the same route we had used on the approach. Instead of going up the short canyon to the south and climbing out above the Supai, I led the way a short distance into the canyon toward Fire Point and then up above a couple of the Supai walls. I leveled off above a cliff that I thought was above all the barriers in the bed of Saddle Canyon. When we reached the bed, we found that there was one major fall above us, and the only way out was to retrace the route we had been following for 20 minutes. It was just getting dark and both of us were tired and wet. I had thought that we would keep on going after dark, but breaking through the wet brush for several hours didn't appeal. Instead, we located a dry overhang and gathered firewood for the night. Marshall had plenty of dry matches in a can and we stayed rather snug with a small fire warming the one who was lying right in front of it. We took shifts stoking the fire and sleeping. I slept about four half hour stretches, but Marshall made much better use of his hour shifts on our dusty bed.
We still had some of the six quarts of water I had carried from the car, and we also had rain pockets in the bedrock. Food was no problem either since both of us were carrying enough for breakfast. On Sunday morning we backtracked for 20 minutes and climbed to the right height to pass the barrier before going back to the bed. It was routine slogging to get to the car by 10:00 a.m. It was a fine climb and I believe it could be done in a day with the improvements I could now make in our route. As it was, we left the car at six and I was on top by twelve, but I could cut an hour from that time by turning out of Saddle Canyon to the south when we first encountered falls in the Supai. One could head the arm that comes down from Powell Plateau and stay on the saddle from Powell over to Steamboat. We could thus avoid the climb back up from the top of the Redwall and also avoid the brush by staying in the junipers.
Phantom Canyon
[November 25, 1964 to November 26, 1964]
Dick Jacobson and I walked down the Kaibab Trail to Bright Angel Campground in two hours even and took the usual 45 minute lunch stop. He had done the rim to rim to rim hike with considerable walking at night in fine shape, but before long I could see that he wasn't too enthusiastic with the scree slope walking up to the break in the Tapeats northwest of the campground. In walking over to the saddle east of Cheops, we refreshed my memory of the most dense and broadest spread of all sorts of small cacti I know of. Jake got a spike into his shoe. On the Phantom side of the divide, we didn't drop down soon enough and I didn't hit the deer trail as soon as I should have. It comes down to the streambed only a little way upstream from the waterfall, just as soon as there is a passage through the Tapeats cliff. The horse trail from the northeast, from Bright Angel Creek upstream from the granite narrows, comes down to the bed of Phantom at least a quarter of a mile upstream from here. I didn't go up here to check the old campsite under the overhang, but I am sure that this is where it is. We took two and a half hours to reach Phantom Creek from Bright Angel Campground and another half hour to go from here to the bedroll cache a few hundred yards up Haunted Canyon. It was only four o'clock, but we stopped for the night here and enjoyed an early supper.
As usual, my young companion could sleep much later than I and we got an eight o'clock start. Half in the water, we found a rather recently killed deer eaten down to the skeleton, possibly the work of a mountain lion assisted in the clean up by coyotes. There was no water in the bed above the region of seep springs about halfway from the end of Haunted and the fork in upper Phantom. In the shale above the fork, a little water was flowing.
We could see the place where we wanted to try the ascent of the Redwall, about 100 yards to the southeast of the notch which drains the east side of Shiva. I started up the talus too soon and discovered my mistake when it would have meant a long downward detour unless we kept on up to a ledge which led across to the right place. Soon the climbing began and it was about as steep and exposed as I have ever done, and I might have turned back if Jack had expressed concern or if I had been by myself. However, the rock was rough and offered good finger holds when we took our time and looked for them. Good ledges broke the serious climbing about every 12 feet during the steep 60 feet that put us on the easy ledge going over to the notch. When I had looked down from above on my way from the Isis saddle to the Shiva saddle, I couldn't see how one could get up from the lowest part of the notch to the wooded broken level. When we came around the corner now, we were above the difficult part and had a choice of routes out to the top of the Redwall.
As was to be expected, I had more trouble descending. At one place I let myself down holding only by my hands and had to pull up again when I couldn't find a foothold. A foot had a half to the north there was a good step below. On the return we went directly down the talus to the shale bed of the west arm of Phantom. This arm ends in a high fall a few hundred yards to the north.
Dick had stabbed his leg on an agave during our climb and this affected his ambition. When we were in the drainage below Buddha Temple on our way back to Bright Angel Creek by the old horse trail, he wanted to leave me and return to Phantom Ranch right down the draw to Phantom Creek. He wanted to wait at the Ranch for me to get through with my trip up the Transept. I had to tell him that I was rather sure he could not reach the bed of Phantom by that route and that the closest way was to continue. He was a bit discouraged Thursday afternoon, especially when he slipped and landed in a small cactus and most of all when he lost his glasses as we were fording Bright Angel Creek. I turned south with him and we slept at the campground two creek crossings north of the Ranch.
On the way out, I met Dewey Wildoner and Donald Davis with whom I had been corresponding. Jacobson got back his pep on Friday and we made it to the rim in good time under a beautiful clear sky. I had met some interesting people and had learned that one can go over to Dragon Creek via the Shiva Saddle.
Down Peach Springs Wash to the Colorado River
[December 30, 1964 to December 31, 1964]
Instead of asking directions to the road down Peach Springs Wash, I just drove off the highway in the general direction and found the good road past the pumping station which ends (at this time) at a gravel pit. When I was ten minutes away from the car, I found the narrow road that goes to the corral. At first I began to go after the car but I changed my mind again and proceeded on foot. It was not my four wheel drive Jeep, and I thought that the extra time for driving back and starting over might not be warranted. At the end of the trip, I watched for the fork where I should have turned off the wide road. It is up on the plateau about one and a half miles from the highway (false now). I noticed that where I parked was 6.1 miles from the highway and 1200 feet lower. If I had taken the right road, I could have driven about two miles farther than I did, but beyond that, the road has rough places that would be better in a power wagon. The best way to get to the corral would be along the bottom of the wash. A road has been bladed along the flats east of the wash, but floods have cut it. Walking time from the gravel pit to the corral was two hours and from there to the river about four and a half. It takes about a half hour along Diamond Creek itself.
Peach Springs Wash was a remarkable contrast to all other approaches to the bottom of the canyon I had ever seen. The route can be described as consisting of four parts and a broad upper bowl where the good road ends. On the road down the wash, you soon come to a fence with a wire strand gate. Here the road goes over a low ridge while the wash detours through a narrow canyon to the west. In a quarter of a mile, you come out into a broad valley surrounded by easy slopes and some exposed cliffs. After a couple miles through this valley, you turn slightly to the right and enter the section that goes nearly straight for mile after mile. This seems to be determined by a great fault.The disparity of the formations seems to indicate that the east wall is several hundred feet higher than the west. I would like to know more about the geology of this area. Igneous rocks on the east seem to overlie more limestone, but before you get to the bed of Diamond Creek, both sides show granite. There are several side canyons which might offer access to the bottom, but mostly the walls are formed by tiers of sheer cliffs. The Redwall near the top has the usual Grand Canyon coloration, but most of the walls are nondescript desert drab. The bed of the wash is as broad as though a big river had been here and the slope is uncanningly uniform for the 17 estimated miles I walked to the river. If any great blocks ever fell from these cliffs, they have either weathered away or have been buried under gravel and small boulders. The final section, the bed of Diamond Creek, was also an evenly graded slope of gravel and small boulders, but it is much narrower, and I believe that floods occasionally cover it from wall to wall.
I could orient myself on the Williams Quad map when I came to the opposed side canyons, Halls to the east and Lost Man to the west. The corral and spring are about three fourths of a mile up canyon from this place. I was looking for cottonwoods to show where the spring is, but there is nothing more luxuriant than a thick grove of mesquite. The spring is just below a small shale ledge and is quite easy to locate since burro trails go right to it from both gates of the corral. At present the gates are wide open, but I could tell that they had been built to allow burros or other stock to go toward the water but the poles would come together and trap the animals in the corral. I saw numerous burros on both days.
On the terrace near the junction of Diamond Creek and Peach Springs Wash, there are mortar free walls of water smoothed boulders. They are placed along the rim of the terrace and appear to be barricades to protect a camp from possible flood waters rather than the foundations for buildings. Lying nearby are a few old weathered two by fours, about three old steel mesh cots, and a very large pile of rusty cans. I recognized a part of a stove. I wonder whether the Farley Hotel was just a tent camp. (I found out later that the hotel was a frame building.) On the return I noticed a better built wall coming out from the cliff about ten minutes walk upstream from this junk at the junction. It is about two and a half feet high and comes out about 30 feet from the wall and ends where the stream has cut into the terrace.
Near the campsite at the east side of Peach Springs Wash, just where it reaches Diamond Creek, I could see where men had cut through the edge of the terrace to get a wagon down to the water in Diamond, but for the rest of the way to the river, I couldn't recognize anything like a trail. One just walks the bed and hops the water numerous times. I watched for Leo Brown's rock pile but I didn't see it.
On the sand dune near the river, there are more signs of former occupation: old two by fours, part of a stove, part of a heavy mining machine, and a lot of pieces of granite core where someone was investigating the rock. There were some very old tin cans and, closer to the river, some charcoal from the camps of river runners.
I reached the river in time to snap a few pictures and get an early supper. They must be trying to replenish Lake Mead because the river was flowing well and was as dirty as it ever was. Tamarisks were growing out of a foot or more of water, and the rapid was kicking up quite a noise.
About the most impressive view of this trip is the sight of Diamond Peak standing at the end of the straight stretch of Peach Spring Wash. It looks like something from Glacier National Park. I wonder whether it has ever been climbed. It is relatively accessible and Diamond Creek supplies plenty of water for camping.
The other thing that impressed me about this route is that with good footing and a straight course, one can cover surprisingly large amounts of territory on foot. Landmarks ahead looked discouragingly far away, but within two or three hours I would pass them.
On the return, I was glad that the road was there for a guide into the correct side canyon and that I could see my own footprints where I needed to leave the road to go to my car. I hadn't remembered the landmarks here as well as I should have.
** On a later trip, we climbed Diamond Peak, but Green found an old bottle at the top with names.
Thunder River
[dates unknown]
When you look west from any of the observation points near the village of Grand Canyon, you see a series of major promontories jutting out alternately from the north and south rims: Point Sublime, Havasupai Point (not to be confused with the Indian Reservation), Powell Plateau, and farthest of all, the Great Thumb Mesa. Beyond the latter lies the interesting Havasupai Indian Reservation with its stream of blue green water and three majestic falls. North, across the Colorado River from the Great Thumb, is a wilder area of great interest.
This is the region drained by Thunder River, a stream just as large as Havasu Creek and a lot swifter and colder. Other tributaries from the north bank such as Kanab Creek carry more water during floods, but for permanent flow, Thunder River, or Tapeats as Powell called it, is the largest stream coming in from the right between the Escalante and the Gulf of California. This is remarkable when one considers that Thunder River flows above ground for only about five miles.
Strange and contradictory reports have been circulated about this stream and the area in general. C. E. Dutton explored the north rim country for the government in 1880. His report devoted over a page to his trip down through the Tapeats Amphitheater to the river. He followed a trail built by gold miners four years before. The only way to make his description conform to the terrain is to conclude that he missed Thunder River entirely and went to the mouth of Deer Creek, three miles farther west. He was very specific about the last few hundred yards where one must dismount and follow a narrow ledge with the creek out of sight below in its crevasse like channel. He even mentions the place where the path is so narrow you have to stoop to get past the overhang in the cliff on the right. It is a precise account of the route from Surprise Valley, through which runs Little Deer Creek, to the bank of the Colorado. The mystery is that he didn't mention striking Deer Creek Falls whose clear water sometimes drops directly into the brown flood of the Colorado.
The present trail to Thunder River goes to the east when one has come down the Redwall. One no longer sees the old trace of a trail to the west into Deer Creek Canyon, or Surprise Valley. This name must arise from the fact that the lower end of the valley seems to be blocked by a ridge which the creek pierces by its strange slit. The fame of Thunder River rests on two things: the fishing and the falls at Thunder Spring. It was stocked sometime in the twenties, and after World War II, fishermen were coming out with tales of 23 inch trout. The spring is near the trail. A considerable volume of water gushes out of a small opening in the cliff at the foot of the great Redwall formation and fans out over a short half cone to drop sheer for a hundred feet. It is more dramatic than the falls in Havasu Creek, for the observer has had no warning. The most water he has seen along the 15 mile trail has been a few stagnant rain pools full of dead bugs. There is a slightly smaller fall 50 yards below the first, but the whole of Thunder Creek from here to its junction with Tapeats is one long chain of cascades. The trail switchbacks down this thousand feet of altitude alternating between catclaw and cactus away from the stream and monkey flowers where the water comes to the edge of the path. The trail was first developed by prospectors, but from its present state of preservation one would guess that it was improved during the depression by the CCC workers.
In 1948 Philip Ferry and Al Schmitz asked Park Superintendent H. C. Bryant whether there was any part of the national park that needed investigation. Doctor Bryant referred them to Thunder River as a place where reliable observers could clear up some conflicting reports. Park Ranger R.E. Lawes and two companions had been on the rim of a side canyon about a half mile away from the source of Tapeats Creek and had come back with the report that it began with a high fall. Jonreed Lauritzen, a writer and contributor to Arizona Highways, had been up the stream, often hip deep in the cold water, and had come back with the story of nothing more exciting than a lot of small springs in the streambed. The names Thunder River and Tapeats Creek are often used synonymously, but the Forest Service map draws a distinction. Below the junction with the tributary from Thunder Spring at the end of the horse trail, it is called Thunder River, and above this point is referred to as Tapeats Creek. Ferry and Schmitz hired a guide and some horses and went in to explore Thunder River without realizing that the argument was over the source of Tapeats Creek and had nothing to do with Thunder Spring. The large scale topographic map of the park is not helpful here. This map, drawn by Matthes and Evans between 1902 and 1923, is a marvelous piece of work up to the park boundaries everywhere except north of Tapeats Creek, where it is completely blank. Thunder Spring is shown, but the larger source, which supplies three fourths of the water in Thunder River, is in the blank area. Forest Service maps of various dates show this spring about two miles east and a mile north of Thunder Spring.
Ferry and Schmitz measured the accessible falls below Thunder Spring and noted the width of Thunder River. They went along the bank toward the Colorado until the creek entered its final narrow gorge. They reported their conclusion in an article published by Natural History in 1949 that Lawes was right about there being a good fall at the source. Lauritzen was understandably irked at being regarded as practically blind by men who had not even understood the problem. He replied in Arizona Highways for April, 1950, that the falls at Thunder Spring had been well known since 1905. Ferry and Schmitz hadn't even taken the usual hike to the river along the top of the final gorge and then down a talus from the right to the mouth of the creek, while Lauritzen had struggled all day through deep water to see the source of Tapeats Creek. Lawes had seen a cavern mouth which Lauritzen had missed.
These inconsistencies were finally explained by some Fredonia high school boys in the summer of 1956. Without realizing that there was any argument to settle, they made their way upstream to the source. In climbing around the big springs to the east, Don Finicum, the leader, came on a large cavern mouth about 30 feet wide by 10 feet high. No water was coming out, but there was plenty standing in the corridor farther back. It was now clear that Lawes had seen this cave mouth when it was acting as a spillway at a high stage of the late spring melt. The rush of white water down the steep talus gave the impression of a high fall.
Both Ferry and Lauritzen gave the impression that there is something sinister about this region. Lauritzen passed on a story of a miner who found too much gold in a bar at the mouth of Thunder River to pan by hand. When he returned from Kanab with planking for a sluice box, the river had risen over the bar. In his desperation, he walked out into the river and drowned. Lauritzen fancied something unnatural about this creek, perhaps basing his impression on the great difficulty one has in following it any distance. Ferry passed along his guide's remark that he couldn't see why anyone would want to visit such a gloomy place. Coming back to specific events, we can note that one guide for a fishing party lost several horses that were poisoned by some kind of forage here in the fall of the year. The horse Al Schmitz was riding to cross the creek lost his footing and almost drowned Al. All his color film was lost. When Lauritzen was going up the creek to the source, he lost his footing and his picture record also was ruined.
Ferry's and Lauritzen's articles inspired me to try to reach the source too, but when I got to the end of the trail in 1952 and again in 1956, the water chilled my ardor. I settled for trips to the river and to Deer Creek. As I was leaving the second time, I noted the possibility of following the talus above the gorge. In the fall of 1956, I met Don Finicum at the Flagstaff State College and learned about the cavern near the source. In the summer of 1957 and again at Thanksgiving, I was able to reach the cavern at the source by way of the bench above the creek and had the pleasure of getting the first close pictures of the source.
The two students, Don Finicum and Allyn Cureton, who were with me on the fall trip, found the way back through the dry part of the cave to the large corridor containing the main stream before it finds the cracks down to the surface springs. No one knows how far back under the Kaibab Plateau one could follow this 15 by 20 foot channel. (Now known, 3000 feet.)
Just a week or two earlier a cave explorer from Pittsburgh, George Beck, climbed into Thunder Spring and followed it back, using a rubber boat, without finding the passage becoming any smaller.
This area should continue to grow in popularity. There are two interesting trails down from the rim in the neighborhood of Big Saddle Deer Camp, which is about 50 miles southeast of Fredonia, Arizona. They meet on the Esplanade, the great plateau of fantastic red rocks about a thousand feet below the rim. Consulting a map of the North Kaibab Forest is a must for one who is going in without a guide, and one should carry a gallon of water in the hot season. The falls, the dramatic change from desert to oasis, the fishing, and the caverns all measureless to man will draw more people than the flour gold in the river ever did.
Mile 24.6 and Hot Na Na Wash
[January 22, 1965 to January 23, 1965]
My guest for this trip, Norvel Johnson, thought we were going for just the day. When I told him it was a two day trip, he brought in his sleeping bag, but since he had no knapsack, we decided to sleep at the Jeep. The idea was to see Hot Na Na from the rim on Friday and then go down it as far as possible on Saturday.
We thought we were following the Tanner Wash Quad map carefully when we left the highway a little to the north of the middle of the bay formed by Curve Wash in the Echo Cliffs. What we didn't realize is that there is another turnoff only a quarter of a mile north of the one we used. This is the way we came out of the hinterland on Saturday. Our exit is marked by a large pile of rocks and it gives a more direct access to all the country we were interested in seeing. The way we went in goes west, south, and north and we got thoroughly confused before we headed toward the rim of Marble Canyon. The track we followed goes considerably past the end of the road which we finally identified as the one that is one and a half miles north of Pine Reservoir. It ended near a dam. We entered the draw beyond the dam and after looking down at the Colorado River, decided that we were on the north side of the bay at Mile 24.6. I could recognize Stanton's Marble Pier although it is not as clear from the east rim as it is from the west.
After a lunch where this draw comes to the rim, we proceeded southeast along the rim of the main canyon. We could see that there was a sheer drop below the bed of the main canyon, but I wanted to see whether we could get down to this point, far below the rim at the top of the Coconino Sandstone. About a half mile back from the sheer drop, where the channel turns due south, we were able to climb down through the Kaibab Limestone. The bed soon became red and pitted with water pockets. My geology student companion wanted to call this Hermit Shale, but I convinced him that the regular Hermit Shale had to be much lower. He was convinced when we came to the top of what was clearly Coconino Sandstone. There were a couple of steep drops in the bed before this, but we could get down safely. We came out to the notch formed by the bed with a sheer drop of about 100 feet to the bottom of the Coconino. Below this it would have been simple to go to the river except that I couldn't see a place quite close to the beach. This wash has one advantage over the Tanner Wash as a candidate for the one the Glanton Party used. One can see the river where one is stopped. It must be about 800 feet up to the rim and 1300 or 1400 feet down to the river. There are no deep pools, however, and the walls hem one in for only a short distance near the end. Furthermore, travelers coming north would stay in the valley next to the Echo Cliffs and would very naturally start down the Tanner Wash drainage rather than any over the cut up country to the west.
When we got back to the car, it was still early so we drove back and then north to the road that goes between the Hot Na Na draw and the one that ends at Mile 22. We missed the way again and followed the track farther than it is shown on the Tanner Quad.The Jeep reached another dam about a mile from the rim. When we walked to the brink, I could see that we were two miles south of the mouth of Rider Canyon. We went north along the rim until we got a good view of the barrier rock at Boulder Narrows and then returned to the car. We thought there would be a closer approach to Hot Na Na if we drove back up on the plateau, so we did that before we camped. Just north of a fork I stopped for the night although I could have driven farther north either down a draw or out along the higher land which would have put us closer to Hot Na Na.
We managed to keep warm with two sleeping bags apiece although the night was a little below freezing. The sky was crystal clear and Venus and Mercury, I believe, were impressively closed in the morning sky over the Echo Cliffs. When we got up it was so cold that we just threw some groceries into my pack and started to walk with the intention of eating breakfast when the sun came up.
I thought incorrectly as it turned out, that the next drainage to the east was the beginning of Hot Na Na. I had the idea that we should go out to the rim and look down at the mouth of Hot Na Na before we tried to get down along the bottom. When we came to the first draw, we stayed on the plateau to the west and found a car track which we followed until it gave out. Since this draw was not deepening, we figured that Hot Na Na must be farther east and crossed another draw without finding anything deep enough. We followed the bed of this one clear to the rim of Marble Canyon and found ourselves still downstream from the mouth of Rider Canyon. We were only about a half mile from where we had been on Friday afternoon. We now walked up past the mouth of Rider Canyon and looked down at the mouth of Hot Na Na. We saw that if we could get through the Coconino Sandstone, it would be simple to reach the cliff right above the river. It ought to be easy to walk to the rim of the Supai above the river and return up Tanner or even Salt Water Wash. Since I had promised to get home by 5:30 p.m., at the latest, we knew we would be doing well this time if we could get to the bottom of Hot Na Na and follow it to the Coconino.
We were able to get to the bottom opposite where the dotted blue line comes in from the east below the high point marked 5063 on the map. Progress along the bottom was easy. There were a lot of sheep tracks and rather surprisingly a man's shoe prints looking quite fresh. There were probably two men, because we came to four, half grapefruit rinds, a food that we thought unlikely for Navaho sheepherders to be carrying. The only water was very shallow mostly on flat rocks from the recent snow, but we finally came to a real drop in the Coconino Sandstone. It seems to be about 60 feet thick here, and about halfway down there is a deep pool. We assumed that we had to bypass this place along a shelf to the east, but on the return we found a shorter way still to the east. We also saw that we could have walked up the bed and passed the pool on the west side. I had set 11:00 a.m. as my deadline for turning back. About three minutes before that time we came out to where we could see into the wide open canyon. It is quicker and easier to go down Hot Na Na to the Supai rim above the river than it is to do this in Tanner Wash.
On the return to the Jeep, we lost our bearings somewhat and expected to see it quite a while before we actually did. We really didn't get off the most direct route and came back to the car using the same track we had followed in the morning. I got home with a half hour to spare.
On the return around the pool in the Coconino, I found some very clear fossil footprints about the size of a half dollar.
Hot Na Na doesn't rival Tanner as a candidate for the Glanton Party canyon. It lacks the series of pools and doesn't give one a hemmed in feeling. Besides, there is no place along the bed where a person has to stop and just look ahead.
Marble Canyon at Mile 15.5
[March 7, 1965]
Of the tributary canyons that might have been followed by the Glanton Party, Tanner Wash seemed to meet the description of Chamberlain the best, since it has a narrow bed with pools of water and a channel that would be hazardous during a flash flood. However, the man would have been stopped by a fall in the bed at a place where there is no view of the main canyon of the Colorado. If they had backed up and gone along a steep talus on the east side of the wash, they would have come out where they could see the sweep of Marble Canyon although they would not see the water of the river. If they went to the right along this upper talus, they probably could not get down to the last small cliff above the water. If they had gone along this level to the left (west), they might also conclude that there would be no way down whereas there is a way around a bend further north. Hot Na Na Wash also seemed not to be right since one can proceed smoothly right down to the edge of the cliff immediately above the water. Marston wanted me to check the minor side canyons that come to the river at Mile 15.3 between these two major tributaries.
Gordon Denipah, the finder of the pole platform at Mile 43.3, and his survey crew boss, R.V. Tramall, went with me. We left the car at the end of the road just west of the service station at Bitter Springs and went down the arm that soon reaches the main bed of Tanner Wash where it starts to be steep walled and narrow. One can get out of it to the right farther down where I entered it on the other occasion, but it is a climbing stunt to leave it to the left and this is only possible at one or two places. The Glanton Party would have thought that this deepening canyon would be a logical approach to the river, and their horses would have found the going easy for a couple of miles more. Then there would be no exit without returning to this point, or the lower trail to the east. It would not be easy or natural to switch over into the relatively shallow draw that we proposed to inspect.
A trail leads from the bottom of Tanner Wash to the top of the plateau to the west. We got to the top and then paralleled Tanner. After crossing a swale or two that drained into Tanner, we got to the drainage that goes to the river at Mile 15.5. As we were about to follow it, we met a young Navaho man, Bill Tunney, who was reading a comic book as he watched some sheep. He supposed that we were prospectors, but when he heard that we were just interested in seeing the country, he volunteered the information that if we could go down a 100 foot rope to the bottom of a pit near the start of Hot Na Na Wash, and had flashlights, we could follow a tunnel three miles long to the bank of the Colorado River. At least he said he could show us the pit, but he had just been told that there was a tunnel. His other information wasn't very reliable, because he said that we could not go to the river down Tanner, but we could get down the one we were beginning just now. He did understand our questions, however, and he pointed to the place on the Tanner Wash Quad that was our correct present location. He may have meant that we could get down the cliff with a rope.
In about two hours of walking from the car, we came to the end of the valley. We were about two thirds of the way through the Kaibab Limestone, and there was only about a 40 foot drop to a ledge that could be followed to the west where one could get on down by a talus clear to the rim of the Supai immediately above the river. After lunch at this notch, we had no difficulty in climbing to the plateau to the west only a few yards back from this drop off. In fact, one can leave this valley at will, and there would be no hazard from floods. We followed the rim west to the view into the mouth of Hot Na Na and Rider across the river. It took about two hours to walk back to the car. I was slightly amused that the engineer and surveyor thought we were in Tanner when I knew we were just in the upper end of the draw where we had lunch, above Mile 15.3. He also missed two or three other identifications that day, but he and Gordon were both fine walkers and interesting companions.
Cremation Canyon
[March 13, 1965]
I was slow making up my mind to go because the paper promised more storm. Highway 66 was so hazardous that some drivers were doing less than 35 mph. The road north to the canyon was much better and I reached the Visitor's Center by 10:20 a.m. After a visit during which I learned that Cureton had recently made a solo trip to the river down the Grandview Trail, I started down the Kaibab Trail at 10:40 a.m. right behind three teenage boys from Durango who were going to sleep at Bright Angel Campground. They had to break trail through the drifts. I wish I had taken a picture of the peculiar knife edge cornices along the outside trail.
The first snow and the cloud effect in the canyon made the views fantastic. Across the canyon, the west side of numerous buttes would be in clear sunshine while dense fog clung to the east sides. The updraft from the west would leave a sharp edge of cloud inclined upwards at 45 degree angles for a thousand feet above the tip of the butte. The day was generally sunny, but there were several short snow flurries and the constant shifting of the clouds made the experience unforgettably scenic.
The original plan was to go along the rim of the Redwall east from the South Kaibab Trail, go down through this formation east of Cremation Canyon, and return along the Kaibab Trail. Since the Redwall rim was still snowy, I decided to reverse the order. It was not hard to go down the muddy trail and I was enjoying the trip to the full. It took from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. to get from the trail to the end of the east arm of Cremation with about a half hour of that time for lunch. I noticed three caves high in the Redwall on the west wall. The one farthest south is the one we climbed into in 1957 after it had been explored and furnished split twig figurines. I believe Art Lange has also explored the one farthest north, but the middle one seems inaccessible. There were other seemingly inaccessible holes on both walls of this canyon.
There are parallel streambeds in the upper part of this east arm of Cremation separated only by a clay and gravel ridge. I followed the eastern one, and this does continue farther than the other. At one place in this shale streambed, there was a short flowing stream. The streambed came out of the shale just east of the bed. As there was no snow on the slope above, this may be a seep that runs most of the year.
About 100 yards short of the end of this wash below the Redwall, I started up. I had seen deer and burro signs ever since I had left the Kaibab Trail, and I continued noting them up the talus immediately below the Redwall here. There was a place at the top of the talus where I could go almost straight up by using my hands to milder slopes that led without further chance taking to the level of the figurine caves across the canyon. If I had been more daring or skillful, I might have gone on across a steeply sloping part of the Redwall. There were many little nubbins of projecting rock and a few bushes growing in the cracks. Since I have resolved not to press my luck and get in a fix that might induce the shakes, I decided to turn back. Scholing and Todd (?) came down somewhere near here, but perhaps they used the ravine that opens to the north on the other side of the promontory. I knew I was taking too long so I couldn't scout more places. For over 20 minutes, I had to look for the place to get down from this upper talus or rather I was trying to find an easier spot for the descent. Finally, I went down six feet from where I had come up.
The mud and snow made the trail back rather hard. I needed two and a half hours for the last three and a half miles. Eight years ago this would have seemed much easier. (March 8, 1969: 1 hour and 55 minutes for this three and a half mile leg, also mud and snow.)
Black Water Canyon (Oak Canyon on the
Navaho Mountain Quad)
[March 20, 1965]
The occasion was the third trip of the college hiking club to Rainbow Bridge under the management of Jay Hunt and my sixth trip. Some of the students went in from Rainbow Lodge, some over the top of the mountain with Hunt, and others came in by boat from Wahweap. Those that walked in got to go out by boat. Everything worked out all right although I had predicted that the party would have to retreat the way they had gone up and then would be quite late in arriving at the bridge by one of the two regular trails. They were two hours slower this year than they had been last year with two girls along, but apparently their feet were stopped by a buried crust in the snow just about as deep below the surface as we stepped last year. Cureton kicked his foot down through this crust and still hadn't found the bottom at four and a half feet.
Since I was more eager to see something I hadn't seen before than I was to see whether I could defy good sense and make my way through the deep snow, I took the north trail around the base of the mountain. We had left Flagstaff about 6:00 p.m. Friday evening and reached Navaho Mountain Trading Post about 9:30 p.m. After some palaver, two students went with me by car four and a half miles farther north to the brow of the hill. They drove the car back to Rainbow Lodge where the non mountain climbers spent a cold night out. I walked down the road by moonlight toward the beginning of the trail for an hour and turned in. It was a surprisingly cold, clear night and by three I was wide awake and cold on the underside where my down bag was compressed. After due consideration, I exercised my freedom as a solo hiker and got up and walked for over an hour. The moonlight on the snowfields of upper Navaho Mountain and the bare sandstone below was unforgettably beautiful. Some features of the route seemed unfamiliar and there was a little difficulty in keeping to the trail. About 4:00 a.m. I inflated the air mattress and stopped to sleep again, but by 5:30 a.m. I was wide awake once again.
Soon after I started on at 5:40 a.m. I came to Balk Rock Canyon and had the assurance of the distinctive route down the east side that I was still on the regular route. The mountains out to the northeast were unusually clear in the early sunlight. I was still not sure of the identification. The two domes on the left had steep sides, but the range a little farther to the left seemed higher, farther away and more snowy. From the shape of the summits, I decided that this range must be the La Sals and that the two on the right were two sections of the Abaho Mountains. This doesn't account for the Henrys, so I am not sure about this geography yet.
The north side of Navaho Mountain was covered solidly with snow, except for cliffs, to within a few hundred feet above the trail. The creeks were running less water than they had last year in February and even in November if I could remember correctly.
After only about two and a half hours of sleep Friday night, I tried sacking out in the sun at 9:00 a.m., but my habits were too strong and after a ten minute nap I was wide awake. I reached Black Water Creek by 10:30 a.m. and turned down it for a short way before an early lunch. The water that is flowing at the trail crossing soon disappears. The arm of the creek that comes in about 15 minutes walk down from the trail crossing had a nice flow of water that kept the creek flowing above ground for over a mile. For the rest of the bed I covered, possibly about two miles, there was water only in infrequent standing pools.
The canyon is a beauty. First there are views out to the prominences and back to Navaho itself. Then there are short stretches of narrows that open again on open areas where the walls slope back at a gentle angle. Then the walls close in again and finally form the narrowest of narrows. In a place or two, I lacked only a foot in being able to touch both vertical walls with my finger tips. I was hoping to have time before my 1:30 p.m. deadline to either reach the lake or the spot that had stopped Hunt, Cureton, and Earl in November, 1965, when they had gone down this canyon by mistake. At 1:15 p.m. I came to the place. A couple of chockstones had formed an eight foot step in the bed. Perhaps I could have climbed up the slope to the shelf on the left, but after going along it for 40 yards, I would have had to jump down a six foot wall which would have stopped me from returning. This was the objective and I returned feeling that I had seen a most interesting canyon. It would be absolutely insane to go through this lower narrow part in flash flood weather, but it seemed about as interesting as Anasazi Canyon. If one dropped a short log over the chockstone, he could go around the next bend, but Cureton found more obstructions below when they let him down the six foot wall with a rope. I got back up to the trail crossing in about two and a half hours, so I figured I had been down canyon about four miles.
There were signs of a horse trail in the first mile below the main trail and I noted an old ramada about five minutes walk north. There were several fault cracks that came down to the bed before the real narrows began, and I wondered how many places there were where a man could enter this canyon.
There were no signs of sheep, horses, or man yet this season to the west of Black Water Canyon. I wasted no time entering the right crack where the straight drainage begins that finally drops into the east arm of Bridge Canyon. At the end of this fault crack, I wasn't positive which route was right, but after following my hunch for a little while, I came to the trail construction with the switchbacks down to the brook in the east arm of Bridge Canyon.
About ten minutes after reaching the brook, I noted a triangular mouthed cave in the sandstone across the creek on the right. It went back about 35 feet, but there was a sand terrace at the very back caused by floods, so there was no chance that it was ever occupied.
The park people have improved the trail from the boat landing up the canyon to Rainbow Bridge and there was not a scrap of trash to be seen. Boats now moor about 100 yards above the narrows. They even have a house trailer parked on the terrace, and a foot bridge takes you from the west side across to the trail on the east.
I thought I was thoroughly familiar with the scenery along the lake back to Wahweap, but I got a greater impression of its grandeur from the boat than I had when I had floated down the river two or three hundred feet lower beneath the rims or had flown a couple of thousand feet above the rim. Lake Powell is a much more scenic than Lake Mead as the Alps are more scenic than the Sahara.
Clear Creek
[April 15, 1965 to April 16, 1965]
The most unusual thing about Clear Creek at this time was the number of visitors. It seems to be coming into its own after all those years of solitude. I met two family groups and 31 Sierra Clubbers. I had known John Ricker and I became acquainted with Bill Poston, Marshall Eaton, and especially Tom Pillsbury, another college teacher but one who has independent means and still teaches chemistry. Several of them made the effort to get up early and be ready to go with me up to Cheyava Falls even though they weren't supposed to be ready to leave the area until 5:00 p.m., while I intended to start back for Bright Angel Campground quite a bit sooner.
I was rather disappointed in the small flow out of the cave at Cheyava Falls. At this time of year I had hoped for a picture such as the Kolbs had taken. Tom and Marshall went with me on up the long arm of Clear Creek to see how it ended in the Redwall. One of the visitors, Francis Smith, had been up the day before, but we finally passed his last tracks just below some large rocks in the bed. A more serious block at a fall in the lower Redwall was passed on the east side up a talus filled crack where we had to crawl under a chockstone. Here Marshall decided that he could use a rest, but Tom and I kept on. About ten minutes farther we came to a couple of chockstones effectively barring the passage. They were only about seven feet in diameter, but the cracks between them were harder to start up because they were wider at the bottom and the rocks themselves were smooth. I wedged my body into the likeliest of the three cracks. Although there were almost no rough spots to push against, I kept on trying and made it up an inch at a time. Tom decided he was not that agile and waited and watched while I went around a corner and up a wet slope. (Tom has done climbs that have baffled me.) I then came back into sight from below as I climbed up a steep pitch that had a lot of good holds. Above was a worse slope, gentle but rather smooth. Using a few small holes for toes and heels, I was soon up and could walk ahead above the Redwall. There was no time to investigate the upper formations for a route to the rim. (Bob Dye has been down there from the rim.)
Ranger Bailey had seen something in the side canyon to the west a little south of Cheyava that he thought was a natural bridge like Goldwater's or Hartman's. I looked up here in the forenoon without seeing anything. After climbing up over halfway from the bed of Clear Creek to the base of the Redwall in this side canyon, I saw that there was a large block, convex both above and below, lying across the vertical walled ravine. There seemed to be less space beneath the block than the thickness of the block. It would take time and care to negotiate the cliff below this place and I didn't get a close picture. (Later I went up and there isn't even a block with a hole beneath.)
Redwall rim south of Shiva Temple
[April 18, 1965]
Allyn Cureton joined me at Bright Angel Campground. We proceeded along the river near the telephone lines and then started up the granite. A number of people along the trail on the south side of the river were quite interested in our progress, steady at first and then slow and careful towards the top. We had done this years ago, but we still don't feel sure we have the best route, high on the right until we were just below a cliff and then across. We had previously gone ahead to the west on the shale, but this time I preferred to go up on the large blocks and talus of quartzite to minimize the shale. Beyond Cheops Pyramid, we went down the north side of the island of Tapeats and got into the draw that Kolb used as a route up from the river into Trinity drainage. We turned up to the northwest and finally got above the Tapeats and reached the rather deep wash that goes into Trinity. On my former trip up between Shiva and Isis, I had gone down into this and across, but Allyn had followed it to its junction with Trinity. He was pretty sure we would find water near the junction. There were several nice pools connected by a tiny stream. We filled the canteens and even took a bath.We then proceeded upstream to the place where I had formerly camped, at the very top of the Tapeats. Here we found the two small rainpools I had found in August, a good 45 minutes walk upstream from the next water. We stopped here by 5:30 p.m.
In the morning it took us almost two hours to walk to the top of the saddle between Isis and Shiva Temples. I remembered correctly that the very top needed some use of the hands. After putting both lunches in my almost empty pack with Allyn taking water for both of us, we started the tedious process of walking the top of the Redwall. About half the time we could find a deer or bighorn sheep trail, for we saw some droppings and tracks that indicated bighorn as well as deer. In three of the bays at the rim of the Redwall, there were rain pockets holding less than a quart of water apiece, and in the bay below the middle of Shiva, we found a very slow seep running. None of these could be trusted during a dry season. After three hours of careful stepping, we reached the saddle between Shiva and Osiris. At the hollow just before we reached this divide, we could have gone up the Supai and probably the Coconino towards Shiva. I believe this is the uphill route used by the deer to reach the top of Shiva.
After a late lunch at the saddle, we went out to the angle projecting northwest from Osiris Temple and took pictures lining up objects rather well with those in Stanton's view. We also went farther south until I got a good look at the Redwall leading to the notch between the Tower of Ra and Osiris Temple. The Stanton Party couldn't have gone up here. They could have gone up all the Supai except the last cliff forming the top of Ra and they probably could have done that well on Osiris also. I think the picture shows the Redwall rim considerably lower than the camera. From the line up with the knolls below at the Tonto level, they were probably on Osiris. (SHK went down here, also Don Davis.) Starting from the last water up Dragon Creek would give us a better chance for repeating Stanton's hike on Osiris.
On the way back to our packs, we drank all the water we could get out of the midget rainpools. We had thought that we would have time to get our packs down the Redwall into Phantom Creek before dark, but dusk was descending when we arrived at the break I had checked last Thanksgiving. We were careful not to drink copiously but we found that we had enough for light meals both at night and in the morning. It took us two hours to get down the risky part. Allyn led and he practiced without his pack before proceeding. At one place I handed the packs to him, but the rest of the time they were on our backs. At two places I threw down my unrolled sleeping bag before coming down with the lighter pack.
We now had some extra time so we spent it going up two arms of Phantom Canyon. It becomes more spectacular as it closes in. At one place, two room sized blocks are leaning against each other across the streambed. At another, there is a 20 foot fall with a huge boulder wedged into the narrow slot above. A deer trail bypasses this, but you finally come to a dead end in a peculiar chamber about 30 feet wide at the bottom. The curving walls above seemed to be no more than ten feet apart and thus almost shut out the sky. A series of falls bring the snow melt and storm waters down from the basin, but on the present occasion, there was almost no flow. There are also several caves high in the walls of this most interesting gorge.
We returned to the Bright Angel Campground by the high trail east of Cheops Pyramid but not before locating the overhang at the beginning of the trail to upper Bright Angel Creek. There are still some cow chips here so many years after the cattle have left. Long parts of the trail out are covered by slides and I think it is harder to find them than it was several years ago.
A few cacti were in bloom and we saw several Mariposa tulips, but the best flowering is still to come. We noticed more birds than usual.
Down the South Kaibab Trail then above the
Redwall to Cremation Canyon
[May 9, 1965]
Norvel Johnson and Allyn Cureton came with me and after checking in at the Visitor's Center, we were starting down the South Kaibab Trail by 8:30 a.m. We left the South Kaibab Trail in the Supai east of O'Neil Butte below the continuous cliffs but far enough south so that we had to choose a route to get through to the rim of the Redwall below. I noticed that it took the three of us two hours to go along the rim to the head of the east arm of Cremation Canyon. On checking with my report of the trip on February 2nd, 1963, I see that this time wasn't too much slower than the two and a half hours I needed to go by myself from the South Kaibab Trail around the end of Cremation. On the present occasion, Allyn and I had time for a few pictures while waiting for Norvel to catch up. We were able to find the deer trail about one quarter of the way.
The day was cool and bracing. We sat down in the shade of a pinyon at the top of the Redwall for lunch, but before I was through, I wanted to move into the sun. This time I was sure where we should try to go down, the notch where the Cremation Fault meets the Redwall. At my suggestion, Jerry Rassner and Dick Jacobs had done this last week. We found that it is a simple walk down. If one didn't move from the main bed to the broken region to the left, it might be somewhat difficult.
At the bottom, I led the others up the wash to the place where I had found the seep earlier this spring. It was now completely dry even after our wet April. We had found several rain pools and a seep active along the rim of the Redwall on our way over from the South Kaibab Trail. There was even a very slow seep in the lower Redwall in the fault ravine we had descended. I believe there had been some rain here only two days before.
After our detour up the wash, we left the base of the Redwall descent at 1:00 p.m., an hour and a half sooner than the party the week before. I predicted that we would be on the South Kaibab Trail near the lower end of the white switchbacks by 2:30 p.m. and to the rim by 4:30. We left the wash in Cremation before we came to the Tapeats bluff on the west. There were acres of Mariposa tulips along here although some were beginning to fade. In fact, the notable part of the trip was the profusion of wild flowers. A certain shrub above the Redwall was covered with white blossoms, and many other flowers were blooming along the Tonto Platform.
When we were leaving the wash, Allyn decided that he would like to see the Colorado River at close range in its high stage. He left us about 1:30 p.m. and I predicted that he could reach the rim by 5:30. With all of his records in mind, he thought he could do quite a bit better. He crossed the river to go to the bank at Bright Angel Creek, and on the way back up the white switchbacks, he encountered two bighorn sheep, a ram and an ewe. They were in no hurry to get away and he had time to get his camera out of his pack and take some rather close views. He reached the car just five minutes before my predicted time. The day was cool and the trail was free of dust and mud, and I reached the car by 4:05 p.m. My conclusion is that it is a little faster to reach the caves in the east arm of Cremation by way of the South Kaibab Trail than to go along the Redwall rim. I would still like to go over to Lyell Butte, and the route would be along the rim of the Redwall and over the saddle south of Newton Butte It would take more than one day (false) and you would have to carry water for the full time unless it had rained recently.
The Transept and Ribbon Falls Creek
(Upper Ribbon Falls)
[May 29, 1965 to May 31, 1965]
Doug Shough and I went down to Bright Angel Campground between 5:45 and 7:45 p.m. and had a good evening that was enlivened by some scouts whose leaders were staying at Phantom Ranch while the boys were running loose beside the river and anywhere else. In fact, for the entire weekend, the place was alive with scouts, most of whom couldn't resist jumping on the suspension bridge even though they could see that something was breaking the bolts out of the boards.
Doug and I were on our way by 6:00 a.m. Saturday morning. The air was bracing and we made good progress until we came to the heliport, 1.5 miles south of Ribbon Falls. Doug thought there might be something wrong with his feet. When we looked, he had about the most extensive assortment of blisters I have seen on one person at one time, but fortunately they weren't deep. I was short of tape, but the chopper pilot gave us quite a bit. I took some for possible future use.
I went on while Doug made up his mind whether to proceed or not. He caught up with me while I was eating a snack at Ribbon Falls. Then he went back south while I went on past Cottonwood Camp to the Transept. Crossing Bright Angel Creek in its high stage was a bit of a problem. I kept my shoes on since I have learned that bare feet in the swift water are no good. I picked a shallow place and made it all right.
The Transept is a beautiful canyon with a lot of verdure, but at most places there is a clear terrace for better walking on one side or the other. I found these improvements more consistently coming back than I did going in. The walking time to the fork at the upper end was two hours going in and one hour and 40 minutes coming out. About 15 minutes from the mouth, I was surprised to find a horseshoe. The little stream was flowing well, especially from a spring two thirds of the way from the mouth to the upper forks. There were wet places on the cliffs where snow was still melting, but about three fourths of the way to the upper end there was a nice pair of falls coming down big jumps in the Redwall. Both of the main forks also had neat falls. Water ouzels and canyon wrens added charm to grandeur.
Donald Davis had climbed the Redwall at the ends of both forks, but he had warned me that I might find the west fork a little severe. As I bypassed a couple of small drops in the bed, I muttered to myself, "Purely routine." Then I came to a broken angle in a wall to the east of a waterfall. As I carefully found my way up here, I thought that this must be the hard part. At the top of this, I really saw the trouble. I picked the place where I thought I could go the highest, to the east of a travertine lined fall. I got to a shelf above a fir tree, but here the handholds seemed more precarious. Since I value my remaining years more than my rock climbing reputation, I went back down and figured that Donald Davis had just joined a not too select club, the climbers who are out of my class.
The longer, east branch was a good deal easier, but not too easy to be dull. There is a minor forking at its end and the easiest way is on a projecting angle between the forks. The Supai Formation above didn't give me any encouragement. I rather think that there would be a way through it somewhere out of my sight to the west.
There is a fresh rock slide near the angle between the main forks. I went from the west to the east branch fifty feet above the bottom and had seen what might be deer trails going up. It was getting late in the day, but I tried getting up the Redwall here. Again I could get up to within 30 feet of the top by testing all holds, but finally there was a place where a projection stopped me. A good climber could have gone on, but I don't take chances. I got back through the fir and maples of the upper end of the Transept and crossed the creek to the North Kaibab Trail eight hours after I had started in and had time to get down to the Ribbon Falls Campground by 7:00 p.m. Here I met Bob Bell and Bill Burkhardt of Phoenix and learned that the Sierra Club had passed that way about five.
With an early start at 5:30 a.m. on Sunday, I thought I could see what I wanted above Ribbon Falls and still catch the Sierra Club at Phantom Ranch since Jerry Foote had said that they would eat lunch there at one. I began by allowing three hours for this side trip, but when I finally saw that I might hope to reach the source of the water by a slight extension, I ended by making it three and a half. The valley above Ribbon Falls impressed me more than it had 13 years ago. The trail is still in fair shape. I noted the Indian ruins to the south of the falls under the overhang before I started up the juniper covered slope that takes you above the cliff to the south. There is a fair deer trail here and I could follow it around toward the stream. The valley above Upper Ribbon Falls is one of the most interesting in the whole Grand Canyon. There doesn't seem to be a prayer of a chance to climb the Redwall anywhere. To the north of the upper falls, I noted an interesting looking overhang above the lowest fifth of the Redwall, just where some caves are found. This one has a feasible approach and I first thought I would use my time to inspect it, but when the light got better, I concluded that it is probably nothing more than an overhang.
The bed of the creek and the level ground on both sides are more densely overgrown in this valley below the Redwall than they are anywhere else I have been in the whole canyon. Travel is impassible in or near the creek so I went up on the south facing slope. This was more open but it was steep and covered with shale, so my progress was slow. First I thought I would turn back when I had determined which of the upper arms carried the water, but after I had seen that it was the one from the west, I went on until I found the bed dry. The highest spring is very minor, just a small pool in the middle of the boulder bed. The dense cottonwoods below for some distance seem to mark additional small springs. I went back on the north facing slope and found the travel among the junipers much easier. This upper upper valley is a fine place to get the feeling of being in a remote area while you can actually be down to the main trail in an hour.
Two thirds of the way from the mouth of the Transept to the upper forks, I noted an area on the northeast side that might give a good climber another route to the top of the Redwall.
I got back to Phantom Ranch by 11:15 a.m. and met a couple of the Sierra Club group, but Jerry Foote and most of them had already taken off for Indian Gardens. I had kept to my schedule much better than he had to his, but I didn't blame him because the day was getting warm and I could see the point of getting out of the inner gorge before two. Allyn Cureton found me eating at the campground and we walked out together. He had missed me up at Ribbon Falls. He had come halfway down on Saturday evening and was looking for me on Sunday. In addition, he was going to spend Monday and Tuesday going through Sycamore Canyon with Dr. Hunt and some scouters.
Coconino west of Cape Royal and the rim
above Clear Creek
[June 2, 1965]
When Norvel Johnson and I reached the north rim on June 1st, we stopped in and paid our respects at the Ranger Headquarters. We got acquainted with Robert L. Peterson, the ranger in charge, and also Jim Richardson and Ranger Timmons. We further visited with Timmons and a seasonal ranger, Jim Dyer, who knew me slightly since he is a Flagstaff College student. Peterson and Richardson told us that they had sighted a natural bridge or arch right on the rim of Clear Creek in the area above Cheyava Falls when they were observing the falls from an airplane. They were going to walk the rim sometime and photograph it and get a better location. We got permits for the one day effort to see about going down from the rim above Clear Creek to the top of the Redwall and also for a five day trip from the rim west of Point Atoka into the Chuar Basin.
Since this was Norvel's first visit to the north rim, we stopped at the viewpoints starting at Point Imperial. There was no snow left around the campground, but it almost covered the ground on the north slopes in the woods around Point Imperial. There were still some snowbanks below the Coconino in the shade. I tried to locate the Powell inscription on a tree at Point Imperial but without success. Perhaps it was on a tree that was removed to make way for the widened parking pavement a few years ago. At Vista Encantada, it was very simple to see the window through the south buttress of Alsap Butte. In the morning the bright surface beyond contrasts with the dark cliff.
At the next viewpoint, formerly called Two Rivers Junction, we observed the place to come down through the Coconino west of Point Atoko. After taking in the sights at Cape Royal, I got the urge to see what sort of descent Donald Davis had made through the Coconino west of Cape Royal. It was easy to follow his directions and go to the bottom of the ravine below Cliff Spring. A short distance east of the mouth it is quite easy to scramble down through the Toroweap and most of the Coconino. About the middle of the Coconino, there is a ledge where one can have three choices: a possible friction descent with no good holds for several yards, a climb down a narrow crack, or a route distinctly separated from the first two to the west. On the way down, I left my pack above the crack and used it, but on the return, Norvel and I went up west of here and I had to come back down a short way to pick up the pack. There is no further difficulty until one reaches the very bottom of the Coconino. The only way here involves trusting to friction alone to get on a steeply sloping step possibly four feet above the good step below. With a rope it would be easy and safe. Davis warned me about this spot, but I couldn't see myself getting back up, and Norvel had shown himself a poorer climber than I the night before at the little ruin just below the rim at the southeast corner of the north rim campground. We gave this place up and returned to the car. I wish now that I had looked around for a loose tree trunk or had considered the possibility of building a step from loose rocks. Except for this one place of about eight feet, this descent is routinely simple.
We returned to the main project, try to get down to the top of the Redwall at the end of the long arm of Clear Creek. In order to intercept the bridge that Peterson had seen from the air, we parked at the lot 1.4 miles north of Cape Royal and headed west until we hit the rim. As luck would have it, within a couple hundred yards we came to the bridge or window. It has a good shape, but the hole is only about 35 feet in width.
There is no deep valley leading to the drop off into Clear Creek. We did succeed in getting down through the upper cliff a bit southeast of the end of the gorge. A deer trail seemed to lead down to the south, but we soon found that there is no chance to get through the Coconino, and the Supai also looked formidable. (Bob Dye succeeded one and a half miles South of the head of the canyon on the east side.) We had to give up. Since there was still quite a bit of time left, we went out to visit the Indian ruin on the promontory northeast of the parking. This time I used the little tree.
Ascent of Bridger's Knoll and Tapeats,
Stone, and Deer Creeks
[June 3, 1965 to June 7, 1965]
I had been intending to spend these five days in the Chuar Creek area, but after Norvel and I had spent 15 minutes going down the steep hillside toward the break in the Coconino through the wind felled aspens and other impediments, it occurred to me that Norvel and I might both have a better time going to Thunder River where there is a good trail. He accepted the change of plans with alacrity. I had the feeling that fighting brush and making our way from ledge to ledge on Gunther Castle would not be a fair initiation for a person who was just getting the feel of Grand Canyon exploration. We notified the rangers of our change of plans and headed for the beginning of the Thunder River Trail at the Indian Hollow Campground.
We left the rim at 1:00 p.m. and by three we had arrived at the good campsite under the overhang near the wash that comes from between Monument Point and Bridger's Knoll. It has been used considerably since there is even a small heating stove there with quite a bit of stovepipe. Someone even left a bottle of detergent. It was looking more and more like rain, so we decided to hole up under such good protection. The immediate threat passed and we deposited our packs under shelter and took a side tour down the ravine. There had been a little water in a couple of pockets near the trail, but lower in the bed there was water running. This water from a ravine to the east could not be trusted after a drought. We bypassed one big drop in the bed and finally came to another. The Redwall was still out of sight below when we managed to scramble to the top of the Esplanade. It was now after five o'clock so we went back to camp.
On our way the next morning, Friday, we took time out to climb Bridger's Knoll. The Coconino was no problem when we went to the obvious place, a ramp about in the middle of the west side, but the Toroweap called for hands as well as feet. There were two or three closely associated routes near the north end. We left the first cairn on top and got some impressive views.
In reworking the trail recently, they have shortened it by taking it from the Esplanade almost directly down to the place where the switchbacks into Surprise Valley begin. When we were below the main Redwall down the switchbacks, I suggested to Norvel that we test the route above the two big slump blocks of Redwall. He followed the trail and I cut across to a place on the trail where it climbs some to get down to Thunder Spring. I needed about 20 minutes to do this and then waited about five for him to arrive. A trail across this route would save another five. We were as thrilled as ever by the sight of Thunder Spring, and it seemed to be flowing at least half again as much water as I have ever seen on my other four trips. The trail, about a third of the way from the bottom of the inner gorge of Tapeats Canyon where it used to be slightly moist, was now under several inches of water.
Almost directly above this place, high in the Bright Angel Shale, there is a spur trail that I once thought to be the way to the Colorado River. In 1951, when I tried to use it as an approach to the Colorado, I soon lost it. On the recent trip, I finally saw its meaning. After the first fine view of the falls, the former trail went to the south away from the creek and reappeared where the spur is still seen. The present trail seems more precarious in places, but it gives finer views of the cascades. We met three men from a Bus Hatch river party coming up to see the falls. They told us that there was a safe way to cross Thunder Creek near the bottom where it broke into three channels with trees lying across the two larger ones. They said that Tapeats Creek could be crossed with a little difficulty just above where Thunder River joins it.
Tapeats Creek was so high that part of the trail was under eight inches of water. We took off our packs and pushed them ahead of us over a rock under an overhang.
We had eaten an early lunch up near Thunder Spring in the shade at the end of a spur trail leading to the improved sleeping platform under the overhanging rock. It was only noon when we got down near Tapeats Creek. Almost on the impulse of the moment, I suggested going over to see the cave at the source of Tapeats with the hope of getting the first close up pictures of water coming out of the cave itself. Norvel and I crossed on the logs and scrambled up the north bank intending to climb to the top of the Tapeats at the break I had used in 1957 with Dale Hall. Before we got there, we saw another inviting ravine that led up quite a distance. About halfway up, this stopped cold and we had to climb back down. At this point, Norvel decided to forgo this part of the expedition. I didn't have to descend clear to the creek to reach the right break, the ravine opposite the place where the trail comes down to the water about two thirds of the way down the inner gorge. In 1957 I didn't regard this as anything out of the ordinary rock scramble, but Dale Hall was rather impressed when we came out on top. This time, I seemed slower and more intent on finding the easier way. Towards the top, I went into a crack and braced against the wall. I am rather sure I marked the approach above with a small cairn before, but I couldn't see it and put a rock on top of a barrel cactus and also stood a slender rock upright in a crack of a larger rock a little higher on the slope above. It now took me an hour and a quarter to walk, keeping fairly low, to the angle into the source canyon. In another hour, I was taking pictures at the cave. On the return, I avoided the tangle along the creek and the steep ravines that bar progress along the lower west slope by going high up near the base of the Redwall. Progress is better here.
At the campground, we met two Flagstaff men and a high school boy; Father Turner, Earl Sanders, and David Fronske. After a late supper that was slowed by quite a rain storm, we had a pleasant evening visit with the other party.
On Saturday we were ready for the main event, a visit to Stone Creek. Norvel had scouted part of the way to the river Friday afternoon and he knew how to lead me to the one tree bridge across Tapeats Creek. We had to go away from the creek twice along the shale ledges where the footing called for great care before we got to the bridge. On the east side, the trail goes over some old rock slides as well as furnishing level walking along the terrace where Indians used to farm. When you come to the place where the creek enters the final gorge to the Colorado River, you would almost surely lose the trail. I couldn't see how a trail could stay below next to the creek, so I led Norvel up higher with no trail at all. When we got near the river, we saw a good trail below and found that it had been down there all the time. On the return, we followed it and had to do a couple climbs up ledges. In low water, you would just wade through the water to pick up this part of the trail.
Unfortunately, I hadn't intended to include Thunder River in our trip at this period and hadn't brought along Beck's sketch map locating the Wayside Inn and the other ruins. We should have slowed down to look at things as well as the cavers had. We took some pictures and I thought we were using our eyes to spot Indian ruins, but we missed them all. It took us about an hour and 35 minutes to get from Tapeats to Stone Creek and only an hour and 10 minutes for the return when we were intent on getting back