Into the Great Unknown: Living in a Thomas Moran Painting, and Through a Canyon Storm

Others may have differing opinions, but this may be my favorite picture from the entire trip.

There are, of course, many Grand Canyons. The one you will see depends on the time of day, the location of the sun and clouds, the presence or absence of storms, and your location, whether deep in the canyon, or somewhere on the rim. It also depends on the rocks you are passing through. I saw a different canyon every day, and almost every hour. It was never boring, not once. Pete, whose raft I traveled in, would probably agree that I spent every moment on the river gazing up at the canyon walls (or transfixed in horror at the lip of big rapids!).

Our fifth day ended at Carbon Creek under gathering clouds. We hadn't experienced any rain since the first day, but storms had always been lurking in the distance. We set up camp and I decided to explore a little bit. I grabbed the camera and a canteen and headed up the gorge behind the camp. The personality of the canyon had changed into one of brooding and gloom. It was partly the clouds, but it was the rocks too. We had reached the Dox Formation, part of the Grand Canyon Supergroup, the billion year old rocks that lay exposed beneath the Tapeats Sandstone.

The Dox is composed of layers of silt, shale and sandstone deposited in a variety of environments, including river floodplains, coast complexes, and deltas. In some places the formation is brightly colored, but here in Carbon Creek on this day, brown and gray seemed to predominate.

I had hoped to go far enough up the canyon to see the Great Unconformity between the Dox and the overlying Tapeats Sandstone, but I found the way to be choked with gigantic boulders that had rolled down the adjacent slopes.

Some of them displayed cavernous weathering, with deep pits and hollows that brought to mind certain horror movies...

 One boulder of Tapeats Sandstone really stood out...it was 15 or 20 feet tall.

People have hiked some distance up the canyon, and have added slabs of rock to produce a makeshift stairway up the layered shale. I worked my way upward.

I would have explored farther up the canyon, but a sudden flash of light and peal of thunder told me that the storm had arrived. I had no rain gear, but I was not overly concerned since I was no more than 200-300 yards from camp. The giant boulders that impeded my progress up the canyon now provided handy shelter from the storm.

The rain came, not in torrents like the first day of our trip, but certainly enough to get wet. I gave some thought to the possibility of a flash flood, and from where I hunkered down, I made sure I had a direct line of escape onto the slopes above.

The thunder crashed and echoed through the canyons. I didn't worry; I had no place I needed to be, so I settled in and enjoyed the experience of a desert rainstorm for the next hour or so. It was even exhilarating, as I recalled the writings of John Muir when he climbed to the top of a pine tree to better observe a wild thunderstorm (I guess we're lucky he survived the experience!).

I had the sense that I wasn't alone. I looked around and realized that two of us were enjoying this storm. The lizard was enjoying it in a different way. He/she was luxuriating in the moisture, just laying there getting wet from head to toe. You can see a little droplet hanging off its tail.

Thomas Moran (1837-1926) was a painter who did much to bring about the existence of our national park system. His dreamlike images of Yellowstone and Grand Canyon popularized both regions, especially two gigantic paintings of the parks that hang in the halls of the Smithsonian. I've always enjoyed his work, even as I recognized the somewhat romanticized views of the scenes that he set on canvas. Such vistas couldn't exist in the real world, of course.

Except that they do. As the storm briefly cleared I realized I was living in a world that had previously existed only in the imagination of the long deceased painter. The clouds opened up holes that briefly let sunlight flash across the cliffs, and in other moments there was only the indirect glow of sunlight reflected off the clouds.

 I took advantage of the lull in the storm and wandered back to camp.

As we ate our dinner the storm returned, and the cliffs across the canyon changed color by the moment, and appeared and disappeared as the squalls moved across our line of sight. The storms continued until the setting sun removed the energy in the air masses, and a few stars began to twinkle in the sky above us. For only the third time in the entire trip I set up my tent, but no more rain fell that night.

Looking at the picture below, the joker in me wants to say "this campsite was just plain rocky", but in reality we were simply drying off the base of the tent prior to packing it up for the day.

 A stream had indeed flowed through Carbon Creek in the night, but it was no flashflood. The water did carve a small channel in the sand near the confluence with the river.

In the morning we saw the one and only scorpion of the trip. I was astounded at the small size. I've seen many of them in my travels, but never one that was barely bigger than a red ant. It was nice of the ant to wander by and provide scale for the picture. They say the smaller ones pack the biggest wallop, but according to the records no one has died in Grand Canyon from getting stung. I wasn't in any mood to experience such a thing, so we let the little guy scurry off under a rock. I shook my shoes every morning after that!

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...

Into the Great Unknown: We Interrupt This Scenery For a Very Recent Flash Flood and a Biological Disaster

After our fourth day on the Colorado River, we pulled into camp at Little Nankoweap Creek. The camp was in a beautiful location (as nearly all of our camps were), but as I selected a campsite, my attention was captured by an oddity. There was a huge splash of reddish brown mud laid across the sandy campsite like the edge of a lava flow. What was going on?

I realized I was looking at some of the very real results of the monsoon storms of the last five days. While Page was getting pounded and nearby Antelope Canyon getting flooded (events we didn't hear about until much later), numerous tributary canyons to the Colorado River were also being flooded. We were the first to see what happened at Little Nankoweap, as there were no footprints anywhere on the new flood deposits. It was no disaster in the big picture of things, but it was a marvelous small scale example of how the Grand Canyon got grand.

Flash floods and debris flows are the tools that erosion uses to deepen tributary canyons and widen the big canyon as a whole. Rock falls and avalanches choke the bottoms of gulches, and every decade or two a cloudburst sends torrents of water down the creeks, forming a slurry mix of mud and rock capable of transporting gigantic boulders. These masses of boulders get dumped in the Colorado and end up blocking parts of the channel, forming the characteristic pools and rapids. The spring floods that once surged through the big canyon would ferry the boulders downstream or grind them into sand and silt, and in this way, the Grand Canyon took shape.

 I had to take a closer look, knowing that the small mud deposit in camp was simply an overflow from the main channel. At the height of the storm, the mud was flowing over a wide area. The main channel (below) was being scoured, and rocky debris was flowing into the Colorado.

In the aftermath, a small rocky delta had formed, and the course of the river slightly changed. This particular event would soon be erased by the normal flow of the Colorado, as it was composed mostly of easily moved pebbles. I imagined the same event magnified several times, as in a once-in-a-century storm, and could see in my mind gigantic boulders changing the river on a larger scale. One of these events happened in 1966 at Crystal Rapids, turning a former riffle into the most terrifying rapid on the river (aside from Lava Falls).

We explored the channel for some distance, and found the Nankoweap Trail where it crossed the streambed. It wasn't there anymore.

The rocky steps the trail utilized to climb out of the channel had been removed by the flood (the trail is a bit left of center in the picture below).

We headed back to camp for a delicious meal of fish tacos, and hit the sack.

In the morning, I was covered with bugs. Or more properly, bug larvae. There were hundreds of them on my tarp. They were crawling all over the tamarisk tree I had camped under, and wriggling in the sand at my feet. I asked what they were, and our trip botanist pointed out that they were tamarisk beetles, and I immediately understood what was going on.

Tamarisk trees (also called salt cedar) are found all over the American southwest along river courses, but they aren't a native species. They come out of Eurasia, and having no natural enemies in their American environments, they have proliferated to the detriment of practically all competing species. They concentrate salt on their leaves which ends up in the soil, preventing the growth of other plants. They tend to form impenetrable thickets on river floodplains. They don't offer much in the way of food or shelter to most native species, and with deep taproots, they tend to transpirate vast amounts of precious groundwater into the atmosphere (some estimates put the water loss at 2 to 4.5 million acre feet per year across the southwest, enough to meet the needs of 20 million people, or to irrigate 1,000,000 acres). Some desert rivers stopped flowing on the surface after being invaded by the tree.

What's worse is that they are hard to kill. Cut them down and the taproot sprouts vigorously. Apply herbicides and many times they will sprout again anyway. A single plant might produce 500,000 seeds a year, and they can travel down the river, sprouting as they come to rest in wet sand.

I had noticed when we left Lee's Ferry that some of the tamarisks were looking a bit yellow (below), but didn't give much thought to it. It turns out that the Tamarisk Beetle loves tamarisk leaves and nothing else. After years of testing, the (also non-native) beetles were released into the wild, and they began an effective campaign of slowing the growth and spread of the tamarisk in the wild. And unlike some other such experiments, the bugs didn't start eating other native species. It is a reasonable hope that the bugs might one day lead to control (but probably never eradication) of the tree.

The trees actually provide some welcome shade in many of the river camps, but so would willows, cottonwoods, and mesquite trees if they weren't getting crowded out.

On the way back to camp, I spied an orange-breasted bird in the catsclaw acacia. I snapped a picture, and thought it might be a nice way to end a post that might seem a little depressing. But then...

 ...a rather majestic buck wandered through the edge of camp. So I will end with him instead.

In the next post, I get to see one of the incredible iconic sights of a Colorado River trip.

Into the Great Unknown: Looking for the Rivers Within the Rivers of Marble Canyon

The Grand Canyon has many moods. So many of my pictures show a canyon bathed in bright sunlight and vivid colors, but twilight often revealed softer tones. The picture above is the view from my campsite at Buck Farm Creek at dusk on the third night of the trip.

We continued our journey into the Great Unknown of the Colorado River. On day four we were expecting to make for Nankoweap Creek about 11 miles downstream. For me it was the chance to find the "river" within the river. That's not some kind of philosophical quest. It was a geological thing, to be explained shortly. But before that, we did some exploring with the extra time afforded by a short distance on the river.

As we often did, we explored the area around our camp while taking advantage of the shade. We headed up Buck Farm Canyon just to see what could be seen. There were a lot of large fallen boulders of Redwall Limestone littering the lower slopes.

Buck Farm quickly narrowed as we climbed up the canyon. We had reached deeper into the crust and were now walking on ledges of Muav Limestone, which in most places underlies the Redwall Limestone. It seems simple to say that one layer sits on top of another, but there is just a bit of time difference between the two layers: the Muav dates from the late Cambrian Period, while the Redwall is Mississippian in age. More than 150 million years elapsed between the deposition of the two layers. That's the same time period that separates the Jurassic (and her many dinosaurs) and our own current era. What happened here?

We climbed over the dry talus slopes and eventually discovered a verdant canyon and even a small clear trickling stream. It was a nice little explore, but now the sun was shining down on us, furiously hot. We headed back to the river.

It was another day remarkably free of large rapids, with only President Harding Rapid (4) standing in our way. As we drifted down the river, more gigantic caverns could be seen in the Redwall cliffs. I think the alcove below is called the Royal Arches.

We also continued to see evidence of recent mass wasting activity along the river. The rockfall seen in the picture below shows a truer color of the Redwall Limestone. It's gray on fresh surfaces, but is often stained by iron oxides leaching out of the overlying Supai Group.

Mile 43 revealed an odd sight. A thousand years ago, the Ancestral Puebloans constructed a foot bridge across ledges of Muav Limestone. From river level we could see no sign of a trail or possible route on either side of the bridge, but there it was. We joked that it was a ruse designed to catch their enemies. They would climb up there to see where it went, where they could be picked off at random.

Some of the Cambrian layers in the Grand Canyon are greenish in color, especially the Bright Angel Shale. The color comes from a mineral called glauconite. The Bright Angel is composed of what used to be ocean-floor muds, and generally forms slopes. Where freshly carved by the river, it formed the ledges seen below.

At Mile 47, we reached Saddle Canyon. I kind of awoke from my entrancement and prepared to stroll up the gentle tributary valley. I asked about the cut in talus slopes to the left of the canyon. "Oh, that's the trail" they said, "the canyon itself is far too steep to go climbing in". Oh geesh, this wasn't going to be at all that easy! We started climbing the incredibly steep talus slope, up through several hundred feet of Bright Angel and Muav layers. It...was...hot.

 As always, though, the view of the river was wonderful.

 The "trail" leveled briefly. It was wonderful not stepping up and over the large boulders.

The stream valley rose to meet the trail, and suddenly we were in a merry little paradise. It's amazing what a little bit of water in the desert can do. Life was everywhere.

We reached the small waterfall and the lusciously cool pool at the base. My picture doesn't have people in it, but I can assure you that every one of us submerged ourselves under the water.

At this time of year I didn't expect to find many flowers, but in the cool moist micro-climate of Saddle Canyon there were some beautiful columbines, one of my favorite flowers.

 I spoke of a river within a river in the title. I was looking for something I had never seen before: the Temple Butte Formation. The Temple Butte is Devonian in age, around 400 million years, which puts the formation between the overlying Redwall and the underlying Muav Limestone. But it isn't a continuous layer. The Muav Limestone was exposed to erosion and eventually developed a series of river channels that ultimately filled with limestone as sea level rose in Devonian time. In other areas, the limestone covered the whole landscape, but after its deposition, the Temple Butte in eastern Grand Canyon was eroded again, leaving only lenses of the formation in the 400 million year old river channels. There are ancient rivers in the depths of the modern river canyon.

Walking out of Saddle Canyon, I spied a really nice example of the purplish Temple Butte between the Redwall and the Muav. If you can't quite visualize what I've been describing, I annotated the picture below. I missed the formation on my previous trips in the canyon, but once I saw it and knew what I was seeing, I began seeing it everywhere!

We continued to float down the river for four miles to our camp at Little Nankoweap Creek. The canyon was beautiful beyond words. Pete let me row again, and I even traversed two gigantic rapids. Okay, they were riffles. Okay, they weren't even that...they were piffles. But I did manage to navigate the raft into camp!