The Great Gallery in Horseshoe Canyon in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park — roughly 40 miles off the nearest paved highway — is the location of some of the oldest known pictographs in North America, more than 10,000 years old. Discovering such firsthand remnants of ancient civilizations literally painted on the canyon walls is one of the main reasons the author and others are drawn to canyon country.


Photo: © Bobby Magill


other times meandering, but mostly cutting through the layers of stone deeper and deeper as time passes. At each meander, there is often a “gooseneck,” a high promontory of harder rock around which the water flows. In Mee Canyon, the torrents had different ideas. The creek’s meander and the accompanying gooseneck cut themselves hun- dreds of feet into the canyon wall, curve sharply and exit again, creating the largest known canyon alcove on the Colorado Plateau — a cavern so large a 747 jumbo jet could fit inside.


Expeditions, disappearances, environmental battles There are few other places in which Abbey’s words ring more


true to me. The search for more of the paradoxical geologic stories keeps me slinking about the canyons, slots, hoodoos and grabens of the Colorado Plateau whenever I can get there. The deeply personal stories scattered across canyon country keep me coming back, too.


They are stories of loss, mystery and triumph, self discovery and mythical environmental battles. They are the stories of John Wesley Powell whose harrowing expeditions down the Colorado River in the 1860s helped to open the West to development. They are the stories of young explorer Everett Ruess, who in 1934 at the age of 20, wandered into canyon country never to be seen again. It is also the story of the battle between the Sierra Club’s David Brower and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, from which came the


preservation of the Grand Canyon and the Yampa River in Dinosaur National Monument, but also the damming of Glen Canyon and the construction of Lake Powell. Exploring canyon country involves my own personal stories: The story of my first experience guiding summer-camp kids into the depths of Utah’s Dark Canyon, hiking for days in the heat of June unsure where we’d find water. The story of descending into Horseshoe Canyon in Canyonlands National Park and sitting in si- lence beneath the 10,000-year-old pictographs, wondering how they’ve survived the millennia so vividly displayed on the sand- stone walls. And, it’s my story of joining my partner on a trek to an impos- sibly remote corner of Arizona to scatter his late father’s ashes above the rim of an unspeakably beautiful redrock gorge.


You arrive on the canyon floor where you’re presented with something that seems like it shouldn’t exist.


Though we know how her story ends, we’ll never know the tale of what it was exactly that drew Debra Schwartz into an anonymous slot canyon on her last trip into the wilderness. She was


trekking alone the day she fell, but in spirit, she was among those of us whose love of canyon country and the wondrous stories it tells runs deeper than the grandest gorge in Arizona and more passionate than the raging Colorado River in spring.


Bobby Magill is senior science and energy writer at Climate Central in New York, and serves on the SEJ Board of Directors. A longtime environmental journalist, he’s a Charleston, S.C. native with roots in Colorado and New Mexico.


9 SEJournal Fall 2016


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