Essay
Exploring a Primeval Landscape Replete with Stories By BOBBY MAGILL
Among the joys of trekking into the wilderness is telling the story of a wondrous adventure to friends and family at the end of the trip. In May, SEJ member and Arizona State University English professor Debra Schwartz wasn’t able to return home to tell the story of her canyon country explo- rations. After spending several days camping and hiking on her own, she fell to her death in an un- named slot canyon, a narrow stone crevasse within Oak Creek Canyon near Sedona, Ariz. I didn’t know Debra Schwartz, but I know well the wilds of the redrock canyon coun- try she was exploring — the 130,000 square-mile Colorado Plateau centered on the Four Cor- ners of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah. I and millions of others visit the Colorado Plateau each year not only to tell a story of our own ex- plorations of this most-complex of American landscapes, but in part to decipher the stories of the ages coded in the sandstone, shale, pet- roglyphs and pictographs that imbue this land with a sense of naked history and geology found in few other places in the United States.
Hoodoos, goosenecks, goblins
Indeed, the canyon country Schwartz was exploring when she died is a primeval landscape re- plete with stories as rich as the red rocks are colorful. There are the geologic stories of the ancient seas and dunes that built layer upon layer of the sand- stone and shale through which every canyon slices, and the mil- lennia of water and wind carving the rock into slots, hoodoos, natu- ral bridges, arches, goosenecks, goblins and countless other geo- logic formations decorating the desert.
There are Paleo-Indian stories of hunting mastodons and mam-
moths painted on canyon walls in pictographs nearly 10,000 years old, and ancestral Puebloan stories told in petroglyphs and cliff dwellings perched high in distant canyons.
The names on topographic maps suggest more stories: Bedrock and Paradox. Desolation Canyon. The Scorpion. Nipple Butte. Cobra Arch. The Wave. Ver- million Cliffs. Land of Standing Rocks. The Dollhouse. Water- pocket Fold. The Dirty Devil River. Klondike Bluffs. The Fiery Furnace.
How water shapes canyon country
In this land of naked rock and postcard-perfect scenery, each of those names suggests a place that is mysterious and extraordinary. Or, “where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you — beyond that next turning of the canyon walls,” as Edward Abbey, one of the region’s most famous authors, wrote in his memoir “Desert Solitaire.” For me, Mee Canyon in West- ern Colorado near the Utah border is such a place — one that tells a paradoxical story of how water shapes canyon country in surpris- ing ways.
After scrambling down a roughly-marked trail through the geologic layer cake — first the Morrison, then the Wanakah, En- trada and Kayenta formations, and finally the giant, sheer curtain of bright red Wingate Sandstone — you arrive on the canyon floor where you’re presented with some- thing that seems like it shouldn’t exist.
Perhaps the most famed slot canyon in the world, the short but spectac- ular Antelope Canyon on Navajo land near Page, Ariz., offers visitors other-worldly views, while simultaneously exposing them to potential dis- aster should they encounter a flash flood, the natural force that created these formations.
Photo: Kevin Eddy via Flickr 8 SEJournal Fall 2016
Most canyons are as you’d ex- pect: Millions of years of intermittent torrents of silty water flowing down- hill scored and scoured the rock, cre- ating a gorge at times straight and
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