More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“My father’s mother was named Nakai Asdzaan, ‘Mexican Woman’. . . . She died over in the Bear’s Ears country, and is buried there. She did not go to Fort Sumner [Bosque Redondo], because she was with the group that hung out with Kaayelii in the Haahootso.” K’aayelii was Manuelito’s brother. Kigalia Point and Kigalia Canyon, high on Elk Ridge north of Cedar Mesa, are named after him.
On a couple of occasions, I challenged my Navajo guides with this paradox. In Canyon de Chelly in 2008, on a blissful hike down the White Sands trail with Kalvin Watchman in charge—a hike I could not have undertaken without a Navajo guide—I queried him out of the blue: “How long have the Diné lived in Canyon de Chelly?” Without missing a beat, Kalvin answered, “Since the 1300s.” I probed on: “Were the Anasazi still here when the Navajo arrived?” “No,” said Kalvin.
The object of our quest was a legend passed on in the pages of Ann Axtell Morris’s charming 1933 memoir, Digging in the Southwest. The wife of Earl Morris, one of the greatest hands-on archaeologists who ever toiled in the Southwest, Ann recounted the fable of “The Lost City of the Lukachukais,” a massive, lordly Anasazi ruin discovered by accident by a pair of Franciscan missionaries in 1909 but never conclusively identified thereafter.
We passed under a high cleft in the eastern wall that hid, I knew, a remarkable ruin called Scaffold House. On a previous hike, starting at the monument headquarters rather than Marsh Pass, a friend and I had spent rapt hours exploring the site, with its dazzling pictograph panels and the enigmatic wooden structure, wedged fifty feet up a flaring chimney, that gave the place its name. As a boy, Jimmy had lived beneath the ruin for several
At the end of the long day, one of the volunteers found Adams’s body five miles downstream. The man “had washed off to the side and was facedown,” Nielson remembered. “His Levis and his chaps were hanging down on his boots. Evidently he had tried to get his clothes off so he could swim.” Jacobs Chair, the striking butte that rises 1,700 feet from its base between Long and Gravel Canyons, is named after Adams.
Pushing their cows up to and beyond the buttes, the Scorups discovered a deep canyon running south to north. Seven miles beyond the buttes, it joined an even larger canyon running west, merging at last in a single torrent that dumped its flow into the Colorado River at the lower end of Cataract Canyon. The whole network of chasms carved between towering cliffs and forests ranging beyond piñon and juniper up into ponderosa pine and Douglas fir is known today as Woodenshoe and Dark Canyons. Still remote country, this outback was protected until 2016 as the Dark Canyon Wilderness. With Obama’s
...more
All his long life, Al Scorup would return to the Woodenshoe-Dark Canyon wilds. A cabin he built in the 1930s in Rig Canyon, a tributary of Dark, was later dismantled, moved piece-by-piece, and reassembled a few miles up Horse Pasture Canyon, another Dark Canyon branch. Still in a state of exquisite preservation, it serves today as an emergency shelter but also as a kind of museum of the cowboy life.
On three trips between 1994 and 2003, I backpacked into Surprise Valley and camped in a corner of that stronghold, making it my base for day trips to explore the short, technical canyons threading north toward Lake Powell. About that oasis in the slickrock, I feel as Zane Grey did: I know of no more enchanted place anywhere in the Southwest.
From 1995 to 2004, a team under the leadership of University of Colorado archaeologist Catherine Cameron excavated an Anasazi site on the bench just above town on the north, only a few paces from the cemetery containing the graves of Bluff pioneers such as Jens Nielson and Platte Lyman. The dig morphed into a major discovery: not only did the site contain fifty to sixty rooms, four regular kivas, and a great kiva, but it proved to be a Chacoan great house, linked by the enigmatic Chacoan road system to the greatest Anasazi center of all, Chaco Canyon in western New Mexico, the hub of a virtual
...more
During the eleven months between Trump’s taking office and his announcement of the vastly reduced Bears Ears monument, the president sent Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke on a tour of the area, as he ostensibly sought opinions about how much of Obama’s 1.35 million acres should be preserved. At the same time the department asked for citizens all over the country to express their views online in a massive poll set up by the government. Of the 1.3 million responses available for tally, a remarkable 99 percent voted in favor of retention of the full Obama monument.
he cited a strange ruin in Slickhorn Canyon that he had named Wooden Kiva. In the forty years he’d already toiled in the Southwest, he’d seen nothing like it. “On Cedar Mesa,” he told me, “the Anasazi were really going their own way. These people were escaping the confines of normative thought.”
Bears Ears: the places where I planned to go, and now never will. Bodie Canyon. The full west fork of Salt Creek. The summit of Bridger Jack Mesa. Youngs Canyon, and lower Dark. Mancos Mesa. Gravel, Hideout, and K and L Canyons. Harts Draw. Lockhart Basin. . . . Together those places make up, in Tennyson’s words, “that untraveled world whose margin fades/ Forever and forever when I move.”
