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/

I'm Glad Movies Like "Avatar" Aren't Metaphors or Anything: Exploring Black Mesa in America's Never Never

It's the stuff of science fiction movies. A pastoral peaceful society is overwhelmed by a technologically superior and more numerous invader because they were unlucky to be living on top of something valuable to the invader. Movies like Independence Day, Avatar, Cowboys and Aliens, War of the Worlds and so many others. In these movies the plucky group of survivors usually manage to fight back and somehow destroy or beat back the offending culture, because, well,  that's the way these stories are supposed to end.

This is a continuation of our exploration of America's Never Never, the vast desert lands of the Colorado Plateau that we explored last summer. Our previous entry was a trip into the world of the Ancestral Puebloans at Navajo National Monument. A few minutes after leaving the quiet serenity of a park preserving a part of the past we were thrust very much into the present at Black Mesa.

So how is this for a plot line for a movie?

A high plateau in the wilds of the American west. The escarpment rises dramatically out of the desert floor, with an extensive forest of Pinyon Pine and Juniper across the summit. A pair of ancient cultures calls the mesa home,  They've had their differences over the centuries but by and large they get along with each other. They make their homes on this beautiful mesa, subsisting on corn, squash, beans, and herding sheep. A few scattered springs provide life-giving water, enough to meet their modest needs.

Cue the darkened boardroom. Camera pans back to reveal a group of wizened old white men. They're discussing their plan.

"We are here to discuss the vast coal resource that underlies the mesa. There are billions of dollars just waiting to be dug up, and we must have that money..."

A voice from the back of the room: "But the mesa is in the middle of nowhere. There's no infrastructure. Where can we burn the coal?"

"But that's the wonder of our plan. There is a coal burning plant on the Colorado River 270 miles away, and another just 70 miles away. A railroad will suffice for the closer power plant, but for the more distant plant we have devised an ingenious plan. A pipeline!"

"A what? Pipelines carry liquids, not rocks! What madness is this?

"That's just it. We'll grind the coal into little bits, pump a bunch of water from the ground, and make a slurry mix! We'll be able to mine all the coal we want!"

The intern spoke up: "But sir, that's an arid environment. The water resources are limited. And people live there! They've lived there for hundreds of years! You'll be destroying a way of life". His voice wavered as he realized the mistake he had just made. A few eyes rolled, but mostly there was a quiet agreement throughout the room that this young man would not be in the organization for much longer.

The CEO spoke, and all eyes turned his way: "Forgive the young man's innocence. I'm sure we've all experienced moments of empathy, but luckily we've moved on from that. But he speaks to an important issue. Those people do technically own the land above our coal, and they need to be dealt with. What plans do we have?"

"The usual payoffs, sir. Offers of money and jobs. But here's the best part: the lawyer negotiating on behalf of those people? He's on our payroll! You may be assured that the royalties we pay will be a fraction of the usual rate!"

And the gigantic digging machines bit into the earth and rock....

This is of course a simplistic description of a very complex series of events that led to the development of two major strip mines on the northern end of Black Mesa. But the railroad is real (that's the storage silo that loads the railroad cars at the top of the post). And the slurry pipeline, the first and only of its kind was built and was used for several decades (one of the mines was shut down in 2005). The royalties paid for both coal and water were indeed far less than those paid at other mines, and the lawyer negotiating on behalf of the Hopi people, John Sterling Boyden, was indeed on the payroll of Peabody Coal. I've written on the issue previously; you can read it here.

The scale of the mining is hard to take in. You can watch the beautiful pictures and videos published by Peabody Coal (like this one) that tout the benefits of the coal mine, the jobs, and the reclamation of the landscape after the coal has been removed. I certainly can't speak to the feelings and thoughts of the Navajo and Hopi people whose land was exploited for the purpose of producing electrical power for the likes of Los Angeles, Phoenix and Las Vegas. There was certainly fierce opposition at all stages of mine development. I can't help but notice that the air pollution produced by the burning of coal did not foul the air of the three urban regions listed above, but instead contributed to smog across the Colorado Plateau, including the obscuring of the views from the rims of Grand Canyon and Bryce Canyon. And the real profits did not accrue to the people who were the stewards and owners of the land, they went instead to Peabody Coal.

Every time I see these mines, I hear the voice of John Prine and his immortal words in "Paradise":

"Then the coal company came with the world's largest shovel

And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land

Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken

Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man."

Out in America's Never Never: A Corner of the Navajo Nation Where the Ancient Ones Dwelt

One thing I love about blogging is the total freedom be distracted and leave projects unfinished. This is something I inadvertently did six months ago. I got distracted by a river trip down the Grand Canyon and four field trip classes to the Cascades, the Sierra, and the California Coast. But I'm back to try and finish a series on my other incredible trip this last year: a journey through America's Never Never with a group of my geology students. You can catch up with the earlier posts by clicking here.

As I said in the original post, the Never Never is a remote and largely inaccessible part of the Northern Territory and Queensland of Australia's Outback. To some, it is a place that one would "never, never" want to go (despite this neat-sounding trip). To some of those who live there, it is a place one would never, never want to leave.

There are many parallels between Australia's Outback and the American Southwest, especially the Colorado Plateau. Most of the local populations live on the margins of the region, and until recent decades many parts remained unexplored by people of European descent. To others it has been home for thousands of years. The lands are ancient, each part revealing a fascinating geological story. And so it is that I refer to the Colorado Plateau as America's Never Never.

When we last left off the story we had explored Antelope Canyon, a deep slot canyon near Page Arizona. It was late by the time we finished our tour so the sun had set long before we arrived at our next campsite at Navajo National Monument on the lands of the Navajo people.

It was hard to get a sense of the country we had reached in the dark of the night, but when the sun rose I set out across the plateau to get a view of the countryside. Navajo National Monument is actually composed of three different units several miles apart: Inscription House, Keet Seel, and our location, Betatakin. Each of the units protects the ruins of an ancient people, the Ancestral Puebloans (once called the Anasazi). They were the "ancient ones" who lived on this land before the Navajo arrived hundreds of years ago. They abandoned the region 700 years ago; Their descendents live on the Hopi Reservation and the pueblos of New Mexico.

The land is unique. It is a high plateau called the Shonto that reaches elevations of more than 7,000 feet, which is high enough to support a forest of juniper and pinyon pines. The cooler forested highland is a stark contrast to the mostly barren deserts that surround the uplift. The plateau exposes Triassic and Jurassic aged sedimentary rocks, primarily the Navajo Sandstone. The Navajo is a major scenery maker in the region, responsible for the incredible cliffs in such places as Zion and Capitol Reef National Parks. The main drainage of this part of the Shonto Plateau is Tsegi Canyon, a deep gorge with an intricate maze of side canyons. Alcoves in the deep canyons protect some of the most perfectly preserved cliff dwellings to be found anywhere.

The alcoves are especially striking. There are impermeable layers of shale and siltstone within the Kayenta formation which underlies the Navajo Sandstone. Groundwater seeps downward through the Navajo and then encounters an impermeable layer. The water is forced to flow sideways until it breaches the surface at the base of a Navajo cliff. The cement holding the sandstone together dissolves and an alcove begins to form. It gets larger as slabs fall from the arch-shaped cavern. The alcoves turned out to be ideal spots for constructing villages. They are dry, protected from the worst of the weather, often have seeps or springs as a secure water supply, and offer superb defensive positions.

Defense? From what or whom? The Ancestral Puebloans lived in the region for well over a thousand years, but did not build the defensible cliff dwellings until very close to the time of regional abandonment. It's ironic that the most iconic remains of their culture represented not the pinnacle of their success, but the harbinger of their doom. It has long been the subject of speculation as to why the Ancestral Puebloans left the Four Corners area (except for the Hopi who continue to live in the general area). The speculation centers on a horrific drought that gripped the region in the late 1200s. Persistent drought would have led to ongoing crop failures and soil loss (as wind blew away dry topsoil). Starvation would presumably have led in turn to raiding and warfare.

Anthropologists, archaeologists, and the descendants of the Ancestral Puebloans have differences of opinion as to the reasons for the abandonment, but drought and resource depletion must have played a role. The villages at Keet Seel and Betatakin (in the pictures above and below) look like their inhabitants simply walked away, and the buildings have persisted in their protective alcoves through the intervening centuries.

We like to think in our technological bubble that we are somehow immune from such problems, but the need for water and food is still fundamental, and we are once again seeing the story unfold in the Colorado Plateau region of persistent decades-long drought. The present drought has now lasted 14 years, not far off from the 25 year drought that forced the Ancestral Puebloans to leave. The big difference is that the population that depends on water from the Colorado River now numbers in the millions, not the thousands. We can draw water from elsewhere, but drought is gripping California as well. It is a worrisome time.

One cannot explore the villages of Navajo National Monument without taking a stiff hike and the presence of a ranger/guide (Inscription House is closed to all visitation), but a short trail winds across the plateau surface from the visitor center to an overlook hundreds of feet above Betatakin. The preservation of the village is truly astounding, given our sorry penchant for destruction of all things ancient. It's a fascinating place to visit.

What to do? Playing the Slots (Canyons, that is)

One of the most beautiful sights you will ever see is a slot canyon on the Colorado Plateau. Formations like the Navajo Sandstone are good cliff-forming rock layers, and yet they are easily eroded under the right circumstances. Flash floods carry a lot of abrasive sediment, and they work quickly to turn the slightest crevice into an intricately winding maze that can be dozens, even hundreds of feet deep and only a few feet wide.

Add to the maze-like labyrinth the glow of the fierce desert sun, and the rock seems to glow. Exploring a slot canyon can be an exercise in spiritual awareness.

Antelope Canyon near Page, Arizona on the lands of the Navajo Nation is regarded by many to be one of the finest slot canyons in existence. The gulch that formed it drains a region of many square miles, and flash floods can deliver tons of sand in a matter of minutes in water/mud twenty feet deep.

 We traveled through it yesterday, and I wanted to share some of the photographic results....

Antelope Canyon embodies a sort of perfection of form and light...the crossbedding structure of the ancient sand dunes adds wonderfully to the texture.

 And the darkness contrasting with the light presents a wonderful challenge to the photographer.

As our visit continued, the sun rose higher, casting more beams of light in the greatest depths of the gorge.

It was just as perfect a moment of spiritual peace and recognition of the paradox of chaos and order in the Universe that one can imagine. Except for one thing. One really important thing...we had to pay a pretty penny for the privilege, and we were conducted through the canyon like cows being herded onto a cattle train...and thus comes the paradoxical question: What to do about it? How to find some way of centering the spirit and finding the peace and solitude so many of us covet?

Well, I suppose you seek out the ragged little sibling canyon that isn't so perfect. Maybe a part of the Navajo Sandstone that has been broken and jointed by the compression of the Earth's crust. Maybe a canyon carved not by mushes of sand and mud, but battered by boulders of solid chunks of rock. A canyon with unstable walls that can collapse and fall without warning.

Maybe you seek out a canyon like Cottonwood Wash in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument...no admission fee, no guides, no people, just quiet.

 And a different kind of beauty: a hard edged beauty. Not as colorful, but full of character.

So, really: how do you choose? Perfection, but with crowds and cattle prods? Or a roughhewn rugged beauty with intense solitude and serenity?

 For me it is no contest...solitude wins out every time. But there is the other solution to the quandary...

 You do both! And that is why yesterday was a great day....

I know of lots of other slot canyons out there. What are your favorites?

Antelope Canyon - A Magical Place

Just a mini-blog today, a sort of picture sequence from the road. I'm sitting in a Subway in Kanab on the way to Kodachrome Basin for our next camp. I'm investigating a trip we are conducting through the educational division of AAPG. If you want to see what we will explore, check these pictures out...Antelope Canyon on the Navajo Nation outside Page, Arizona.

The pictures almost have an almost spiritual feeling. I have to admit, however, that I did not photograph the many dozens of fellow photographers with whom we were standing shoulder to shoulder. The canyon was stunning, but crowded. Still, I love this place.



Until next time...connections are tricky to find out here!

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the Black Mesa story

The leaf broke loose from the branch, and fluttered slowly to the forest floor, a forest alive with hoots, howls and whistles from the myriad animal species that dwelt there. In the distance the crashing surf of a wide sandy beach could be heard . The constant rain of leaves and twigs on the forest floor accumulated over the millenia, never quite decaying away because of the moist, swampy oxygen-poor conditions that retarded the activity of bacteria. The carbon-rich layer persisted as the region was covered first by a brief advance of the seashore, than by later forests and swamps, then seas again, and then the world changed. The seas disappeared forever, and the land started to rise. And rise. Eventually the layer containing the leaf was pushed thousands of feet upward, erosion ate away at the rocks, and the sediment was left as part of a vast mesa, covering some 4,000 square miles. After being buried in total darkness for unmeasured eons, something happened; there was the sound of hammering, the rock split open, reflecting sunlight for the first time in 70 million years, and there it was: a fossil in the hands of a geology student.

The huge bear-claw shaped plateau is called by the Navajo people Dziłíjiin, but is known to English-speakers as Black Mesa. The carbon-rich sediments, which are part of the Menefee Formation, are coal beds. And therein lies the source of generations worth of controversy and injustice. The coal is in seams that range from 3 to 18 feet thick, and the amounts are vast. At least one source I ran across suggests that 20 billion tons are present with a potential recovery value of at least 100 billion dollars. It is one of the largest coal deposits in the country.

The coal has been mined since the 1970's. Some of the coal is carried by rail to a huge coal-burning power plant at Page, Arizona, next to Lake Powell. The remainder was ground into pebble sized chunks, and was transported in a slurry mix for 273 miles to a coal-burning power plant on the Colorado River in Laughlin, Nevada. It took something like a billion gallons of water every year to move the coal, water that could come only from underground in this semiarid country. This plant closed in 2005, pending negotiations for a renewal of the mining terms. The company that mines the coal frankly swindled the Navajo and Hopi people. The negotiations ended up providing a fraction of the usual royalties paid to landowners, and the groundwater was sold at rates far less than any farmer would ever pay. One of the more shameful aspects of the whole sordid affair emerged years later when it was revealed the lawyer representing the Hopi people in their negotiations with the coal companies turned out to be on the payroll of the coal company.

The coal company is quick to note the wonderful benefits they provide to the Navajo and Hopi people. You can read their story here. By law, they must return the land to the original configuration, and they seem to be doing so. But the groundwater is not being replaced, and numerous springs on the mesa have already dried up. And the power plants are two of the biggest single sources of air pollution in the southwest.

Some things never seem to change. It appears that Black Mesa was one of the final environmental victims of the Bush administration. A controversial environmental impact statement (EIS) was approved by the federal Office of Surface Mining on December 22, 2008 that helps clear the way for the company to expand by nearly 19,000 acres (roughly 30 square miles), displacing more Navajo families, and continuing to use up scarce groundwater resources.

Black Mesa is not a park like many of the other sites I have been writing about for the last six months in my "short" history of the Colorado Plateau. It is instead the home of two nations of people, and an important part of their spiritual universe. Perhaps something more significant than a park...

"Then the coal company came with the world's largest shovel

And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land

Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken

Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man."

John Prine, Paradise

Update (1/27): As usual, I was writing fast and made an error in the post; the formations of the Mesa Verde Group go by different names in different areas (I knew that, darn it). At Black Mesa, they are called the Toreva Formation, the Wepo Formation, and the Yale Point Sandstone. The coal is mined from the Wepo, not the Menefee, although the units are broadly correlated. Thank you to Stephen for the heads up, and for an additional point of view (see comments).

Antelope Canyon, A Real Jurassic Park

Following up on the previous post, I am adding a few close-ups of the Navajo Sandstone in Antelope Canyon near Page, Arizona. The beautiful slot canyon lies within the Navajo Nation, and is a tribal park. The upper canyon is known by the Navajo name Tse' bighanilini, which means "the place where water runs through rocks", while the lower canyon is referred to as Hasdestwazi, or "spiral rock arches."

Crossbedding occurs in dunes as sand is carried up and over the crest and cascades down the lee slope (the "slipface"). The layers form with a distinct slope, at variance with the usual horizontal nature of sediments. The size of the sand grains varies with windspeed, and erosion brings out the those variations, as seen in the pictures above.

The Navajo Sandstone is a beautiful rock...

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: This Yellow is NOT Mellow

The Triassic-aged Chinle Formation is well known for a particular resource, and the heritage of the extraction of that resource is a story of tragedy and appalling governmental indifference to the safety and health of its citizens. It is known to the Diné (the Navajo people) as Leetso, the Yellow Monster.

The base layer of the Chinle in many places is a conglomerate/sandstone unit called the Shinarump Member. It was laid down in streams and channels cut into a surface of the underlying Moenkopi Formation. Groundwater could flow freely through the unit, and it carried dissolved metals. When the metals encountered carbon rich fragments like wood and plant fossils, the metals precipitated out, forming a yellow powdery mineral called carnotite, or a dark oxide mineral called pitchblende. These minerals are the primary ores for uranium.

Uranium has had a long and spotty history. It has the familiar and well-known uses as a source of energy, and in bombs. It has been used as a color source in glazing and glass-making, producing intense green and orange hues, and was even touted many years ago as a health aid. To geologists, uranium is an incredibly useful tool; because it is radioactive, it decays at an extremely regular rate, giving us an accurate method to date the formation of many kinds of igneous rocks (the more familiar term carbon-dating refers to a method of dating archaeological artifacts composed of wood, shell or bone; uranium age dating is far more versatile and useful for geological research).

Uranium had been found on the Colorado Plateau prior to World War I, mostly as a by-product of vanadium mining and the search for radium. Today's pictures are of the Oyler Mine in Capitol Reef National Park, which was active in the early 1900's with little recorded production. It is a real attention-getter with my students, because we carry a geiger counter when we approach the mine, and it starts beeping within 30 feet or so of the mine openings.

The discovery of atomic fission and the development of the atomic bomb in World War II drove the renewed search for uranium on the plateau. The United States was importing something like 90% from foreign sources, and the government deemed it to be a critical resource. In the aftermath of the war, the Atomic Energy Commission sponsored a uranium rush, providing maps, roads, and financial incentives to anyone willing to explore the wildlands of plateau to find the ores. It was a hard and dangerous existence, but several thousand people heeded the call and fanned out over the countryside looking for the elusive yellow powder.

One of those involved with the search was Charles Steen. A geologist with a "problem with authority", he arrived in Utah in 1949 with a wife and three small children after a truncated career in the oil industry. Dirt poor, he couldn't even afford a geiger counter. He mortgaged his mother's house to purchase a drilling rig, and using his geological training, he determined that ores might exist in the Lisbon Valley near the Colorado/Utah border just a few dozen feet below the surface. As the story goes, he broke the drill rig short of his goal, but he later found that the drill chips stored in his jeep turned out to be nearly pure uranium ore. In the blink of an eye, he was a rich man and uranium mania swept across the plateau (I suggest the book Uranium Frenzy by Raye Ringholz for a great narrative on the boom).

Thousands of people flooded into the region, changing it forever. More than a thousand mines were drilled, uranium processing facilities were built, bombs were made and exploded, and a vast amount of money was made (and lost). America had entered the atomic age, with her bombs a hedge against the frightening communist threat (except they got the bomb too), and the promise of safe, clean atomic energy so cheap it wouldn't have to be metered.

But as always seems to be true, the dreams didn't exactly match the reality.

Tsoodzil, near Grants, New Mexico, is one of the four sacred mountains of the Navajo people. The Europeans called it Mt. Taylor. One of the biggest uranium discoveries took place on and around the mountain, and one of the largest underground mining operations plumbed the depths beneath the mountain. No one consulted with the Navajo or any other Indian nations over possible cultural objections, because, of course, national security overrode all other concerns. Thousands of miners labored under the ground in the poorly ventilated tunnels. But, there was money to be made after all. But an evil had been released, and few of the people involved would be aware of it until it was too late.

Representatives of the Navajo Nation have this to say about uranium:

When an evil act is done, many monsters are born of that act. Our traditions tell us that the monsters of the past were created when people transgressed, when they committed evil. The other monsters are a war industry built on disrespect for human life, and a modern international energy industry built on disrespect for both other humans and the environment. Those monsters feed on power, political power as well as nuclear power. Their nourishment comes from disrespect for the five-fingered People (i.e., humans) and for Mother Earth.