Dreams of Summer: If there's a Little Colorado River, is there a Little Grand Canyon?

In the last post, I noted that there is a lot more to the Colorado Plateau than the Grand Canyon. The Canyon (it just has to be capitalized) is more than 200 miles long, but it cuts through just a part of the Colorado Plateau Province, a vast region encompassing 130,000 square miles (337,000 sq km), and containing 27 national parks and monuments. The Grand Canyon is a starting point, a jumping-off place so to speak, for learning the complex geological story of the American West. Our field studies course would eventually include five states beyond California.

As we left Grand Canyon National Park, we followed Highway 64 east onto Navajo Reservation lands near Cameron. The geographic region is known as the Navajo Section, and is generally lower than the high plateau that contains the Grand Canyon. For the most part the section contains flat barren badlands, although parts are very colorful (this area is sometimes called the Painted Desert). There is an exception to the flatness, where the Little Colorado River approaches the Grand Canyon. That was our next stop.

The Little Colorado River is by watershed area one of the most important tributaries of the Colorado River, but the area it drains is so arid that the river contributes little overall to the discharge of the main river. The smaller river is actually dry along most sections for most of the year. The exceptions are during the spring runoff, and during the summer monsoons. Flash floods on the small river can be monstrous. Our local river back home, the Tuolumne, is considered a fair-sized river (by California standards). It reaches flood stage at a discharge of 9,000 cubic feet per second (cfs). The highest flow ever recorded on the Tuolumne was around 70,000 cfs. During a flood in 1923, the Little Colorado River recorded 120,000 cubic feet per second!

So, as I asked in the title, if there is a Little Colorado River, is there a little Grand Canyon? In a manner of speaking, the answer is certainly yes. The lower part of the Little Colorado where it approaches the main river is a stupendous gorge 3,000 feet deep. If the Grand Canyon didn't exist, the canyon of the Little Colorado River would probably be a national park all its own. That said, the gorge of the Little Colorado River wouldn't exist without the Grand Canyon nearby. It was the rapid downcutting of the Grand Canyon that caused the gradient of the Little Colorado River to increase and carve downwards. The nature of the river canyon tells us it once flowed over a relatively flat floodplain. The evidence lies in the presence of entrenched river meanders.

Goosenecks of the San Juan River in southern Utah

Meanders are the characteristic loops and bends of a river flowing over a relatively flat surface. They are very common on rivers like the Mississippi. If the land rises, the river speeds up and starts to erode the channel downward while maintaining the shape of the meander. Eventually the river erodes a deep canyon that has intricate loops. The lower reaches of the Little Colorado has a lot of them. The San Juan River in southern Utah has also done the same thing, and a spot called the Goosenecks provides a bird's-eye view. I've included a shot of the Goosenecks above.

A distant view of the canyon of the Little Colorado River from Highway 64

If the Grand Canyon is awesome by virtual of distance and open space (a yawning chasm a mile deep and 10-15 miles wide), the canyon of the Little Colorado River is awesome by intimacy, in an odd way. The canyon where we visited had vertical walls a thousand feet (~300 meters) high, but was almost narrow enough to fling a pebble across (it least it looks that way). When you stand at certain points, you are looking straight down on the the river, as can be seen in the picture below. There aren't a lot of places where one can do this sort of thing.
It had been years since I had seen water flowing in the Little Colorado River, but last summer was remarkable in terms of the monsoons. They began early and produced a number of flash floods throughout the region. When we arrived, the river was flowing, although the term "river" barely applied to the viscous mixture of mud and silt in the canyon below.

Mouth of the Little Colorado River in Grand Canyon

The mud certainly influences the Colorado River. The Little Colorado River may not provide prodigious amounts of water to the system, but it is one of only two major sources of sediment to the river now that Glen Canyon Dam prevents mud from flowing downstream of the reservoir. When we rafted to the mouth of the Little Colorado in 2013, the main river was almost clear, but silt was pouring from the tributary. For a short distance, the river was bi-colored, but within a mile or so the water and silt were thoroughly mixed and remained that way for the remainder of our trip, another nine days!

Two rivers in one, the green Colorado, and the brown Little Colorado

The Little Colorado River is a fascinating part of the plateau country. It gets lost in the broader scenery at times, but is well worth the bit of effort to explore a few of its secrets.

Are There No More Sacred Places? Desecration at the Grand Canyon

The Grand Canyon of the Colorado River, close to the proposed site of a desecration.

I encourage you to read a story in Smithsonian, found here:  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/who-can-save-the-grand-canyon-180954329/?no-ist. And remember the name of a corporation: Confluence Partners LLC, a Scottsdale, Arizona-based investment group. This is a company that feels it has the right to profit by desecrating our national treasure. The company proposes to build a billion dollar complex on the east rim of the Grand Canyon. But not just on the rim. They propose to build a tramway with the capacity to move 10,000 people a day to the bottom of the Grand Canyon to where they intend to build restaurants and curio shops on lands that are sacred to many people.

Truly a confluence: Muddy water from a flooding Little Colorado River mixes with the relatively clear green water of the Colorado River.

I am sadly reminded of the proposal in the 1970s to build a tramway from Glacier Point in Yosemite to the floor of Yosemite Valley. A tram that would have been visible from all over the valley. That proposal was eventually scrapped, but I am truly worried about this one.

I really wonder if anything is sacred anymore. After all, the Liberty Bell is just a piece of broken metal. Why don't we cordon off a corner of it and put in an electronic rolling ad? It would make lots of money for someone. Let's gently carve off a corner of the Declaration of Independence and put in a corporate logo, maybe where that egotist John Hancock signed in such big letters. No one will miss it. Let's dig up some of the dead bodies in Gettysburg and put in a fast-food joint so more people can be well-fed while learning their history (as far as I know that's maybe happened already; I haven't been there). Really, who are we to say whether a small group of investors should be able to profit from the destruction of something that is holy to a great many people?

The Nankoweap Ruins a few miles upstream of the proposed development.

For a century since the designation of Grand Canyon as one of the most important of our national treasures we have managed to keep the lands below the rim inviolate. We've turned away proposals to build dams and we've said no to roads (a single gravel road reaches into the western Grand Canyon where rafters can leave the river). There were a few mines, but those failed long ago. Today the Grand Canyon is under assault: besides this awful proposal, there is a bought-and-paid-for (by the home-building company) city council in Tusayan at the South Rim of the canyon attempting to allow the building of 2,500 homes. With no permanent water sources besides groundwater, which is in limited supply. There are proposals to mine uranium right up to the borders of the park. And what drives it all? Money. Money, and more money. Someone profits in a big way, and we all lose something precious. They can argue all they want, until they are blue in the face, about the merits of their projects, and how they will benefit so many people. If they are truly so altruistic about their motives, I am sure they'd be willing to build their projects at cost with no profit. Right?

The Hopi salt mines in the Grand Canyon

The Grand Canyon is a sacred place. It is the place from which many human beings entered into this world, including the Hopi and Zuni people. It is one of the precious places where Americans learned the value of something besides money when they established a national monument, later to become a park. As we enter into a enter a future in which the oligarchy can do whatever they please to increase their profit margin, we need to hold onto these precious places, and expand them, not shrink and defile them.

Joni Mitchell, bless her, wrote and sang Big Yellow Taxi:

They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique
And a swinging hot spot

They took all the trees
Put 'em in a tree museum
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half just to see 'em

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

The Colorado River a short distance upstream of the confluence with the Little Colorado River.

What can be done? I don't entirely know, but a good place to start is here: http://savetheconfluence.com/

Into the Great Unknown: Catching an Iconic Scene in the Grand Canyon, and a Bi-colored River

It was a busy summer. I'd like to say that I prepared extensively for my journey into the Great Unknown by getting to know the Colorado River by reading book after book, but I spent so much time organizing and conducting two other major southwest trips that when the dust settled, I only had a week to pack and read up on the river. Mostly I packed.

So it was that for the most part, the names of the rapids and the many side canyons in the Grand Canyon were new discoveries. But I knew a few of the places from reading I had done over the last forty years and I was anxious to see and photograph them. Two books that I reread this week included Down the Colorado, the Sierra Club pictorial including the words of John Wesley Powell and photos by Eliot Porter, and The Hidden Canyon, A River Journey by Edward Abbey and John Blaustein.

And that brings us to the morning in Little Nankoweap Creek. We spent the morning packing and preparing for the day, which I knew would include one of the iconic spots I had waited a long time to see: the granaries of Nankoweap.

 Granaries are small cliff "dwellings" that weren't really used for dwelling. They are small buildings set high in dry cliffs where food could be stored for extended periods, safe from molds, spoilage, or pests. Maize or beans could be sealed into large pots and be kept for years (a favorite exhibit of mine at Mesa Verde National Park is just such a pot and the forty pounds of 800 year-old corn).

It's not that I've never seen granaries in the past. I've seen many dozens of them over the years. It's more the dramatic setting, perched in a steep cliff six hundred feet above a long straight stretch of the Colorado River.

Then again, 600 feet is 600 feet. Vertically, 600 feet is imposing, and there was no easy trail to the ruins. There was a very steep trail-of-use. It was probably no more than 1/2 or 2/3 of a mile long, but it climbed unmercifully in the hot sun. I was instantly regretting those many months of missed gym sessions on the stair-climber!

Still, I huffed and puffed my way up the trail, and I made it to the top. The view, if anything, was more stunning than I had ever imagined.

The granaries look much the same as they did in the Abbey/Blaustein book, published in 1977. River travelers seem to have a lot more class and sense of responsibility than many roadside tourists; I shiver to think how these would look today if there were a paved highway below instead of a wild river. I recalled a story I learned on the San Juan River in the 1980s. I was visiting a small village perched in an alcove along the river, and I remarked how wonderful the ancient dwellings looked. Our guide pointed out that a jeep trail reached the area of the ruin, and that pothunters had more than once winched the walls down looking for antiquities. They had been rebuilt three or four times. I was sorely disappointed in humanity at that moment (and many times since, for that matter).

We were exploring a wilderness, but this slope and the Nankoweap delta 600 feet below us had been home to generations of people. They grew their crops, hunted, and planned for the future by constructing these rooms in the cliff. To them, this was their whole world, aside from the stories and messages carried by the occasional traveler who wandered by.

We made our way back down to the river.

The river was revealing more of the Paleozoic history of the rocks. We had reached the Cambrian-aged Muav Limestone the previous day, and now we were seeing more and more of the underlying Bright Angel Shale. The shale is often hard to actually see, because it is so easily eroded, and tends to be covered by debris and talus that has fallen from the cliffs above. We did pass a rather striking green tower of Bright Angel Shale which had presumably been protected from erosion by harder rock above. It's called the Gray Castle.

We rode down Kwagunt Rapid (5) without problems and stopped for lunch on the beach along the eddy below. We remarked that the river seemed to be clearing after days of red mud filling the channel. The oarsmen suspected that would not be the case for long because we were approaching the confluence with the Little Colorado River.

The play of clouds and sun in the afternoon made for beautiful vistas down the canyon towards the canyon of the Little Colorado River.

A new and distinctive layer made an appearance along the riverbanks, the brownish ledges and small cliffs of Tapeats Sandstone. The Tonto Group, composed of Tapeats, Bright Angel and Muav was now complete. The rocks tell a unique story from the time of dawn of complex life on the Earth.

The Tonto Group was deposited during the Cambrian Period, the earliest part of the Paleozoic Era. The rocks range in age from 541 to 485 million years ago. It was during this period of time that a supercontinent that we now call Rodinia was splitting up into a series of smaller continents that would persist as separate entities until they rejoined into Pangea around 300 million years later. As continents split apart, a narrow sea will fill the space between them, and as they pull further apart, they will subside, due to lesser heat in the underlying crust. The oceans slowly invade the land.

The Tonto Group is the visible record of the splitting and subsidence of the Rodinian supercontinent. As the beach transgresses onto the land, the waves grind up terrestrial sediments into sand and gravel, and that is what became the Tapeats Sandstone. As the shoreline moved eastward, the offshore mud and silt eventually became the shale of the Bright Angel. Because the continents at that time were at tropical latitudes, the far offshore shoals and shallows produced the thick layers of Muav Limestone. The rocks are full of traces of the earliest complex and hard-shelled creatures to be found on the planet. These fossils include a variety of trilobites, brachiopods, archaeocyathids, and other generally unfamiliar life forms.

Trilobites were perhaps the most intriguing. They were arthropods, in the same phylum as today's insects, crustaceans, and arachnids (the term arthropod refers to "jointed-foot"). The resembled today's horseshoe crabs, or more familiar in my backyard, pill-bugs (but often much larger). A vast number of barely known soft-bodied forms were present as well. They left few fossils, but did produce many trails, tracks and burrows.

We reached the confluence of the Colorado and Little Colorado Rivers. As predicted, the Little Colorado was running red and muddy instead of the usual striking turquoise color. The water did not quickly mix, and for some distance the Colorado had a green zone and a red one.

It wasn't long before the river was living up to its name, and the muddy red color stayed with us for the remainder of the trip.

We passed one more interesting feature a short distance downstream. A white mineral was emerging out of the cliffs by the river and coating the rock. These were the salt deposits that are an important part of Hopi life. A challenging ceremony involves a long journey on foot from the Hopi mesas to the Little Colorado River where mythology and tradition states that people emerged from the third world into the fourth. Young men come downstream and collect salt, carrying it back to their villages as part of the journey into adulthood

River travelers are asked not to stop here, and we didn't. We continued down the river, pulled into camp at Carbon Creek and unloaded the boats. We had covered about twelve miles. Clouds were gathering in the sky above us...

The Abandoned Lands...A Journey Through the Colorado Plateau: The Little Colorado River IS little but the canyon it's in isn't

How many times in your life have you been able to look straight down a thousand feet?

There aren't that many places where you can do such a thing, and even the Grand Canyon doesn't drop a thousand feet straight down in very many places (although there are a few, as visitors to Toroweap can attest). The Grand Canyon is vast almost beyond measure, but the cliffs intermingled with slopes has a way of separating the viewer from the full immensity of the depth the canyon. I think of it as much like looking down a set of stairs: You see the steps but not the risers.

There is a less known canyon that is intimately related to the Grand Canyon. It is the canyon of the Little Colorado River. The Little Colorado drains a vast region across central Arizona, but the drainage is mostly arid, and it has been a rare event for me to see water flowing down the canyon, though I know that flash floods can be spectacular events.

Leaving the Grand Canyon from the east end at Desert View, the traveler drops down the East Kaibab Monocline onto what first looks like a wide plain. Although the rocks are colorful (parts of the region are referred to as the Painted Desert), they don't seem to display much in the way of cliffs, except for a hint of deep precipices in the distance (above). We are now on the Navajo Reservation, and speeding down the highway, one can almost miss a pair of turnoffs pointing to some viewpoints of the Little Colorado River. Passing a gauntlet of jewelry sellers, one walks out to the point and finds a stunning canyon...

The Little Colorado River occupies a relatively shallow valley over most of its length, but when it approaches the Grand Canyon, the gradient steepens, and erosion has produced a thousand foot deep gorge cut through the cliff-forming layers of the Kaibab Limestone and Coconino Sandstone. The main Colorado River has cut a mile-deep canyon, but in doing so, it has re-energized legions of tributary streams, and they have also cut incredible canyons that in any other setting would be national parks of their own (the two viewpoints are designated as a Navajo Tribal Park)

Where the Grand Canyon is vast, the Little Colorado River Gorge is "intimate", if that is the right word. You are looking at a canyon that feels as if you could throw a rock across, but a thousand foot gulf lies between. The perspective is difficult to see in the picture below, but from the edge of the point, the drop is vertical to the canyon floor below.

Exploring the Grand Canyon? Don't miss this gem on your way to Flagstaff or Page!

Here is the explanation of my "abandonment" theme for this series: http://geotripper.blogspot.com/2012/06/abandoned-landsa-journey-through.html